Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, October 06, 1999
Tuesday, 13 September 2005

Christianity’s Social Myths

In history, there have been two great periods of benevolence and social services. One was under the Pagan Roman Stoics, and the other in the secular and irreligious times of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries—what might be called modern Paganism. In between, for almost two millennia, free men were treated as if they were slaves, and Christianity dominated society.

Not a word in the bible, from cover to cover, condemns slavery. Christian apologists, despite their desperation, cannot find any condemnation of slavery or war in their gospels and sacred writings, though these wrongs must have been evident to the New Testament writers, if they were the egalitarian pacifists supposed. Nor, with all their ingenuity, can they find adequate defences of their treatment of women. They have even defended their god, Jesus, for not condemning slavery because he knew it would ruin the Roman empire! Moreover, Christianity had nothing to do with abolishing slavery, nor giving the world education. The conditions of the poor people have improved in spite of the Christian religion. Christians believe these absurd lies. It is because they know no honest history, and will believe anything at all if it is attributed to their God.

The myth that Christianity freed the slave is a modern invention, like the idea that Christianity emancipated woman. Only at the Council of Trent in 1543 AD did Catholic Christians finally agree women had souls, and then by a majority of three votes! And Christian leaders thought Christianity was to save souls not to hand out dole, and so they rarely thought they had any welfare or charitable function until the nineteenth century. Christianity in fifteen centuries failed to improve conditions on earth, and no priest or parson has been able to prove that, in compensation, it saved millions of souls from hell fire.

Admittedly, the monasteries, taking their cue via the eastern monasteries from the original Essenes, offered hospitality to travellers and the sick—the origin of the word “hospital”. Christian purveyors of God’s Truth claimed, when the call for better social services arose, that Christianity had enlightened the Dark Age that it had caused, and had forever been in the forefront of social change when it had succeeded for a thousand years in preventing any change to the status quo. They added to their social pioneering educating of the poor, righting moral turpitude, introducing general charitability, and emancipating slaves then women.

Some of the Christian emperors of the fourth century issued edicts about the condition of slaves. The pre-Christian Pagan emperors had started to take more positive measures that the Christian take-over prevented from being fulfilled. No prominent Christian, and no pope, ever denounced slavery until the ninth century, when the age of slavery was over. By then, in the Christian Middle Ages, the Christian masters of Europe, the land owners, the petty princes, abbots, and bishops, were exploiting a new form of slavery in the the feudal system.

Christianity not only did not emancipated the slaves, it set up the new slavery of serfdom. Serfs were worse off than slaves. Serfdom was slavery without the perks. Nor did Christianity lift its voice against the slavery of Africans, and the wage slavery of the nineteenth century. Its emancipation of serfs was to connive, as the greatest of European landowners, in the landowners slinging them off the land, to become human waste in squalid, overcrowded, disease ridden city cellars, compelled to work literally for crusts. Nineteenth century workers were brutalized and broken by excessive labour, excluded from knowledge and deprived of representation. Remind us, Christian, how Christianity emancipated us!

In the three centuries after the Reformation, the condition of the workers grew steadily worse, whether in Protestant or Catholic countries. Then Rationalism appeared and the world made more progress in a century than it had done in fifteen. The majority of social idealists were Rationalists, though Rationalists were only five or ten percent of the population.

Translation of the Christian holy writings from the Greek has been, as ever, helpful for Christian trickery over its approval of slavery. Wherever the reader of the New Testament comes across the word “servant”, such as in the parables of Jesus, it is in Greek the word “slave”. In those times, servants were slaves, so Christians dilute the real word, “slave”, to their preferred word, “servant”. Throughout the bible, slavery is assumed but seems not to be slavery because only servants are mentioned. In fact, the authors of the New Testament urge Christians to be slaves to others, actually making slavery noble. In the eastern religions people were considered to have been created as slaves to the gods. All human beings were slaves, and slavery was at the core of religion. Not surprisingly, the New Testament never suggests that slavery is wrong. Religious hypocrisy is denounced in strong language but not slavery.

The Roman Worker

All the work in Greece and Rome was not done by slaves. What were the social conditions of freedmen in classical times for comparison? In Athens, the Agora, the old cattle market, was the public square. It was lined with beautiful buildings and colonnades and adorned with statues, and on one side of it towered the Acropolis with its superb marble portico and exquisite temple.

At Rome, when its population reached one million, and there were between three and four hundred thousand free workers, they had a position of privilege and entertainment which even modern workers do not have. The civic center was the Forum, also the old cattle market, or center of the primitive village of Rome. It was a broad, oblong space, richly adorned with statues and lined with marble buildings from end to end. Citizens had in the city itself a superb public place with gardens, handsome little buildings and colonnades, for them to enjoy. Only since the nineteenth century have many of our great cities set out to copy these facilities for its ordinary people, and now many are falling into disuse through neglect, so that people dare not walk in them for fear of being mugged.

The Romans had not the artistic genius of the Greeks, but were excellent engineers and planners, so when they incorporated Greece in their possessions, thousands of Greek artists and scholars flocked to wealthy Rome and showed off their social skills. Temples, palaces, and public buildings, in the most beautiful marbles the world afforded, lined each side of the Forum. At one end stood the great amphitheater or Colosseum, at the other rose the sacred hill, the Capitol, with a gold roofed marble temple of Jupiter at the summit. Nearly every building had broad, cool colonnades to shelter the Roman workers from the sun. But this was not enough, and the Emperors built a new series of Fora—magnificent marble avenues and colonnades, of which we still find exquisite fragments—so that in the end the Romans had nearly a mile of these wonderful structures.

Every Roman worker lived within ten minutes’ walk of this beautiful center, though they were housed in crowded tenement blocks, four or five stories high, in narrow streets. But in Italy's glorious climate, one lives in the open air most of the year, and even today there are few civic centers approaching that which the Romans had to lounge and chatter in.

How much time had the Roman worker for lounging and chattering? Christians tell us, though nominally a free artisan, he was really ground and exploited to create the wealth of the patricians in their palaces on the hills? There was no Christian day of rest. Yet, the Roman artisan worked less than modern workers. The Pagan worker, at the height of the Roman Empire, worked only about one hundred and seventy days a year and the rest were free! Even modern workers work more, and their good conditions were won by secular movements like the trades unions, not by Christianity. Two hundred years ago, when England was still Christian, a man worked three hundred and ten days out of the three hundred and sixty five, and fourteen to sixteen hours a day for six full days a week!

The Church knows it cannot boast it gave modern workers the little power for social justice they have, trades unions. Even the boldest Christian cannot say it, but they do say Christianity gave the world the medieval craft guilds which inspired the unions. In fact, the craft guilds seem to have their roots in the heresies the Church tried murderously to expunge! The medieval guilds were, at their start, fiercely resisted and drastically condemned by the Church, precisely because they were heretical.

Moreover, both Greek and Roman workers had a system of trades unionism. All the tanners, builders, carpenters, etc, of any district were incorporated in what they called a school, or college. They had a clubroom, frequent suppers, and funds for burial and mutual aid. Imperial decrees also hint that unions had economic, if not political, objectives. Inscriptions show that slaves were admitted on equal terms in many of these colleges, and women were sometimes enrolled as members. The women of Rome were well on the way to winning, two thousand years ago, the rights they had to fight for in our own time.

What the Roman's wage was in modern coinage cannot adequately be determined. The whole economic structure and pricing were different. His rent was high, but apart from rent and his simple clothing, little more than a single robe or tunic, his expenses were few. He received for nothing the most solid part of his food—corn and at one time a little pork and oil—and all his entertainments. Three times a week the workers lined up on the “bread steps”, and received their corn. It was not a dole. It was a right. Even the Roman worker lived on the labour of slaves. Armies of badly treated slaves in Africa, Gaul, and Spain produced his free food. Slaves working in the galleys brought it to Rome.

Most princely of all were the free entertainments of the Roman worker. The bloody games of the amphitheater, where gladiators fought each other or wild beasts, were the great passion of the Roman people. The Colosseum, as we call it, was in its prime a magnificent marble lined building seating ninety thousand spectators. On fifty or more days a year rich officials or emperors provided free shows there for the Romans, and they were gala days, with gorgeous processions, for the whole of Rome.

But this brutal display, against which the Stoics sternly protested, was not the great passion of the Romans. The amphitheater seated ninety thousand spectators. But the Great Circus, the real pride and passion of the Romans, seated three hundred and eighty thousand, the entire body of the free workers of Rome. The chariot races in the Circus, the keen discussions for weeks in advance, the same intense excitement as there is in connexion with a baseball match today, the universal betting on the result—these were the great sports of the Romans. And no blood was shed, except by accident, in the Circus. The vast crowd—three times as large as the largest sports ground in the world can accommodate today—witnessed only chariot races, horse races, foot races, wrestling, juggling, and so on. Performers were brought from the ends of the world. The rival syndicates which ran the chariots spent enormous sums. A Roman charioteer earned as much as a good baseball player now does in America. And the Roman workers never paid for admission.

Then there were the theaters, also free, where the finest mimes in the world performed and the classical tragedies of Plautus and Terence were played. Beyond these were the baths, vast marble lined structures, including princely baths, libraries, gymnasia, and spacious colonnades, the only entertainment for which the Roman worker paid. When the bells rang the end of work at three in the afternoon, he could slip on his clean tunic and spend hours in these unique pleasure houses. And the price was pennies. These palaces were gifts of the emperors to the workers. The Roman had sold his democratic birthright but be got a good price for it.

Another part of the price was an abundant supply of pure water to every floor of every tenement in Rome. In the nineteenth century, the water was so contaminated in Italy that travellers had to avoid it. Two thousand years ago every worker had an ample supply of the purest water, brought by aqueducts from the hills many miles away.

Paganism and Slavery

Slavery is a blot on the civilizations of Greece and Rome but they were only a few centuries out of barbarism, whereas Christian America had armies of brutally exploited slaves only in the nineteenth century, and many are still enslaved by poverty. Greeks and Romans—and doubtless their slaves too—thought enslavement was a humane improvement upon the earlier practice of killing captives. Christians raided Africa expressly to enslave. The Christian Church did not abolish slavery. It made scarcely any protest against it for many centuries. A Greek moralist, Alcidamas, condemned slavery in the fourth century BC, and later Stoic moralist after Stoic moralist condemned it.

No one knows just what proportion the slaves bear to the general population in Greece and Rome. In Greece, the best authorities say, there were three to one, and they were humanely treated. In the Roman Empire, they are estimated at ten to one at the time when incessant warfare brought millions of captives into the Empire. The luxuries of the Romans, urban workers as well as patricians, depended on the exploitation of millions of rural slaves who were, indeed, badly treated. In the city of Rome they were not unduly ill treated, and from the first century onward they had the protection of the law.

In the early period of Roman expansion, the rich patricians of Rome had armies of slaves on their estates and mainly treated them like cattle. A callous remark Cato (234-149 BC) made about his slaves, and often quoted as an example of their treatment, was written down by a Pagan writer as an example of “a mean and ungenerous spirit”. In short, for the Pagan, it was untypical, and Greek and Roman moralists often denounced the injustice of slavery. Epicurus (342-270 BC) had come near to condemning it three centuries before Christ when he described the slave as “a friend in an inferior condition”. The Epicurean, Hegesias, pronounced slaves as the equals of free men. The Pagan writer and near contemporary of Jesus, Plutarch (46-120 AD), condemned slavery. The “golden mouthed” Dio Chrysostom, the Stoic orator and friend of Trajan, denounced slavery—it was unjust.

Florentinus and Ulpian (d 228 AD), the two famous Stoic jurists, declared that enslaving a man was against the law of Nature, the supreme standard of the Stoic. Seneca (3 BC-65 AD), who was contemporary with Jesus, insisted that the slaves were our “lowly friends”, and he pleaded repeatedly and nobly for them. Juvenal (60-140 AD) fiercely attacked inhumanity to slaves. By the first century, the Stoics openly condemned slavery and, by its end, slaves were protected by law. In the second century, Pliny (62-113 AD) shows, in his letters, that slaves were treated humanely, even on provincial estates.

Public feeling was profoundly affected by the Stoic principle, and the grant or sale of freedom to slaves—was a daily occurrence. Even before Christ, this liberation was proceeding on so large a scale that the Emperor Augustus checked it for a time, on political grounds. The Stoics urged freedom for slaves and facilitated it, and the movement was gaining the momentum to succeed. If the Roman Empire had continued free of barbarians and Christians, slavery would have been abolished. Abolition would have been a colossal task, far more difficult in the Roman empire than in the southern USA, because the economics of the whole empire depended on slave labour. The privileges even of the working class Roman free men were based upon the labour of slaves in the countryside and provinces.

Rome fell upon evil days just when the humanitarian message was being accepted. The empire had long frontiers, particularly the immensely long northern frontier along the Rhine and the Danube that was constantly being tested by the incursions of wave upon wave of people from the east. Trying to preserve this frontier eventually contributed to the downfall of Rome. Besides slaves Rome depended on conquest and exploitation, but Christianity gave many people of all classes an excuse not to serve in the army, which was therefore weakened. By degrees, the empire crumbled into poverty and confusion.

When, early in the fifth century, Rome fell, slaves found themselves free by default. They were not freed in any magnaniminious act by Roman Christians but as a by-product of the invasions of the empire by German Christians, called barbarians by the Roman Christians.

The whole economic system was shattered. The invasions ruined the great slave-owners, the imperial estates and wealthy Romans. The barbarians slew or sent into exile the owners, destroyed the connexion of the provinces with Rome, and wrecked the administration of the estates. Some slaves will have left the estates, but most had nowhere to go. They remained, earning a living by growing their own tiny plots. In Christendom, the slaves were nominally free but, in practice, were tied to the estates under new management, a system which evolved into feudalism

The Church and the Slave

The truth about Pagan slavery comes from Roman Pagan writers but not Christians. The only possible exception is that, around 370 AD, Gregory of Nyssa (c 335-c 395 AD), in a work not definitely his, condemns the holding of any property. Since slaves were property, they must have been included. Not that this was any advance on the first Christians in the Acts of the Apostles who held everything in common, so that they also did not own property. That is because they were Essenes who neither held property, nor owned slaves.

A Christian, particularly a Catholic might cite pope S Gregory the Great, who wrote in one of his letters that all men are “born free”, that slaves are only such by “the law of nations”, and that it is proper to free slaves. The letter was actually to two of his slaves, giving them their freedom. Noble? Pope Gregory was the greatest slave owner in the world in the sixth century, but these two had inherited money and pope Gregory hoped to swindle the money out of them. He did!

Enormous numbers of slaves tilled Church property, and when they had money he could persuade them to donate to God for their freedom, he freed them! That gave him a better idea. He announced that the end of the world would come in 600 AD, creating a panic of salvation fervour. He then advised land owners and slave owners to enter monasteries, first giving their property to the Church to be safe from the devil! This exceptionally brazen Christian scam of the gullible soon made the Church wealthy beyond imagination. The truth is Gregory never once condemned slavery and forbade any slave to become a cleric or marry a free Christian.

In the first flush of a new dawn upon the Dark Ages, the Moors of Spain had given Christendom a lesson in civilization. The sybarites of the Renaissance revived the long-buried civilizations of Greece and Rome. But, the Reformation had no effect on culture and social problems, seeking to re-concentrate people’s minds on the bible and their immortal souls. The more our Christian “teachers” care for our immortal souls, the less they care about our mortal bodies, though they are often fond of indulging their own.

To solve their problems, people had to rise up against the injustice and scare the landowners. Luther seemed concerned about exploitation, but knew that the bible ordered people to be “subject to all higher authorities” and he harshly condemned their actions. In July, 1624 AD, he wrote to the nobles of Saxony:

They must be crushed, strangled, and spitted, wherever it is possible, because a mad dog has to be killed.

Luther defended serfdom, saying that to abolish it would be “against the gospels, and robbery”. In later years, he wrote:

All their blood is on my head, but I leave it to the Lord God, who bade me speak thus.

Melanchthon, second only to Luther in the German protestant movement, was no better. He said:

The Germans are always such ill bred, perverse, blood thirsty folk that they must be kept down more stringently than ever.

The first proper reforms of European feudalism came with the French Revolution. Despite the horrors of the later revolutionaries—purposely overemphasised nowadays to deter people from such thoughts—the beginning of the French Revolution was a beneficent movement led mainly by the Rationalists or Encyclopaedists. Voltaire had been concerned mainly with superstition, though he has a fine record of humanitarian service, but the later and more radical unbelievers, just before the Revolution, were strong humanitarians, agnostics or materialists.

The peasants of France were in a lamentable plight. Twenty million people lived on the land, but owned only two-fifths of it, and bore an intolerable burden of taxes for Church and State. Two hundred thousand priests, monks, and nuns owned a fifth of the land, and paid no taxes. All these exponents of the gospel had ignored the condition of the people, and only a few joined in the Revolution. A Christian like the Abbe Henri Gregoire was rare amongst the revolutionaries. He was angrily disowned by the Church! Not Christians but a few skeptics, atheists, materialists and Voltaireans gave the world the Rights of Man[†]Rights of Man. By Thomas Paine. The Hammerton epitome of it is online at Adelphiasophism. It has been fashionable to decry materialism but our only sure life is this one in the material world. The godless people who accept this, rather than pie in the sky, have got us our material benefits of today, not the believers in some spiritual life that has to be imagined because no one has certainly experienced it.

In England, the men and women of most influence were Paine, Byron, Shelley, Priestley, Horne, Tooke, Erasmus, Darwin, Godwin, Hardy, Holcroft, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Hardy’s opinion about religion is not recorded. Priestley was a Unitarian, not then regarded as Christian. None of the others was a Christian. The education and science that they promoted gave us most of the means of improving conditions.

In Europe, Church and Royalty strangled the revolution. “The Holy Alliance”, or “White Terror” spread over the whole of Europe, workers returned to the slummy conditions from which they hoped for liberation, and no priest or minister of the gospel saw any reason to speak for them. In America, another almost simultaneous revolution with similarly motivated leaders and similar objectives succeeded in throwing off the imperial yoke of Great Britain under their German royal family, now renamed the Windsors.

The Churches and the Workers

In reaction against the French Revolution, the Churches hardened in their attitude toward reform. The bishops of the English Church opposed all reform. Lord Brougham, noticing that the Anglican bishops in the House of Lords avoided supporting even a temperance bill, said angrily:

Only two out of six-and-twenty right reverend prelates will sacrifice their dinner, and their regard for their belly, to attend and vote.

Lord Shaftesbury, a bigoted Christian himself, also angrily said of the clergy, they were:

Timid, time-serving, and great worshipers of wealth and power… I can scarcely remember an instance in which a clergyman has been found to maintain the cause of labourers in the face of pew-holders.

Yet, Shaftesbury himself vigorously opposed every reform movement except his own, in favour of children, and he was so hated by the workers of London that he had to barricade his house against them. One Wesleyan clergyman, Stephens, and late in the nineteenth century one Anglican clergyman, Kingsley, worked for reform, and their Churches persecuted them.

In the year 1825 AD, when Christianity had ruled Europe for 1500 years, nine-tenths of the men of Europe, and a lot of the women, worked ninety hours a week, in filthy conditions, under brutal masters, for weekly wages of less than the price of a hardback book in present terms. Families lived mainly on bread, potatoes and water. Meat, milk, sugar, tea and fruit they rarely tasted. Less than 5 per cent could read or write. They were worse off than in earlier centuries of the Christian Era when, though impoverished, at least people lived on the land, in the fresh air, and had plenty of Holy Days off work each year.

Only in the twentieth century did the conditions of the world’s workers improve after 1500 years of Christianity. That too was because of a revolution. The revolution in Russia is as much the reason of the improved conditions in Europe as the American revolution. Shaken to their boots, employers and landowners in Europe decided that discretion was the better part of valour and, rather than resisting every reform suggested for the workers, a policy of grudging concession was more likely to avoid a western revolution. In the British General Strike of 1927 AD, Churchill still ordered machine guns to the street corners, just in case.

So, the distribution of wealth and benefits remained in the hands of the owners, but the Churches lost members heavily, forcing a social welfare ideology on to Christian institutions. When reform was desperately needed but revolutionarily new, Christians stood four square against it, and the Papacy has the worst record of all. As Christianity had done from the first, it murdered anyone who fought for the rights of man. When reform succeeded and workers were deserting the churches in millions, the clergy discovered a wholely new interest in people’s conditions on earth rather than elsewhere.

In more recent times, reform having consolidated, a generation has arisen that takes the enlightened situation for granted. If this means people are no longer vigilant to defend their social gains, the danger is a return to a dark age. Pay no attention to the sweet words of present day preachers. Drag off their smiling masks by looking at the record of history, but be ready to be shocked. Christianity has not shown it is love incarnate, but that it is a monstrous homunculus of lies, exploitation, degradation, abuse and murder. Plenty of the Christian Right are already starting the reactionary movement under the guidance of supposed philosophers of elitism called Straussists, American neocons. Meretriciously Christian leaders like Bush and Blair are in their power. Take care!

Protecting the Infant

Christianity supposedly rendered to the child three services:

1. abolishing the practices of abortion
2. abolishing the exposure of children
3. abolishing infanticide

The Fathers of the Church put abortion on a level with murder because they thought that the foetus had an immortal soul. In the age of contraceptives, it ought not to be needed but, in the ancient world it was inevitable, and even in our world any theologian who condemned a woman unfortunate enough to have to resort to it is a moral pervert.

In its early years, the Church failed to reduce the practice. The Fathers condemned it—there was not much in connexion with sex they did not condemn. The Stoics also condemned it. Seneca, Juvenal and others condemned it. Neither Christian nor Pagan ever succeeded in putting a stop to it. Even in the days before the abortion laws, doctors organised in groups to offer abortion on demand to those who could pay, with no interference from the police. Only the poor had to risk the back street abortionist—but there were a lot of poor women.

The exposure of children and infanticide were accepted in the Pagan world. The old Roman law did not reach across the threshold of a man’s house. The father had power of life and death over his wife, his children and his slaves. The new-born child was brought to him, and be decided whether he would “receive it into the family”. If he refused to take the baby-girl in his arms, she was taken out of the house and hid in a public place, where slave-dealers or baby-farmers found and reared it. Legally the father could have her suffocated but the “moral obligations of parents toward their children were fully and deeply felt by the Roman nation”—they eventually drew the line at murdering them, though once exposure was common to prevent families from starving through having too many children to feed!

When the Roman Empire began, infanticide was still law but then legislators condemned it. A Victorian authority, Lecky, who was always sensitive not to offend Christians, wrote:

The power of life and death, which in Rome was originally conceded to the father over his children, would appear to involve an unlimited permission of infanticide, but an old law, popularly ascribed to Romulus, restricted the parental rights, enjoining the father to bring up all his male children, and at least his eldest female child, forbidding him to destroy any well-formed child till it had completed its third year, when the affection of the parent might be supposed to be developed, but permitting the exposition of deformed or maimed children with the consent of their five nearest relations.

Terence (184-159 BC) and Apuleius (fl 2nd century AD) each have a character tell his wife to kill a new-born baby girl, and the wife is depicted as too humane to do it! Seneca approved the idea of murdering “weak and monstrous” new-born children.

If the Christians of the modern world want to condemn parents to a lifetime of endless difficulty bringing up deformed or deficient children, then they must take on the burden of support themselves as a charitable service. Many parents take on this duty out of love and a sense of guilt, but none should be obliged to. Nature is not sentimental about foetal abnormalities, humans might be, but parents should have the choice!

Under Augustus, a father used his legal right to execute a delinquent son, and provoked the indignation of Rome. The Emperor Hadrian banished a man who had killed his son for adultery with his step-mother. The Stoic lawyer Marcianus praised the emperor, saying:

The power of a father should be displayed in affection, not atrocity.

A cause of Pagan riots against Christians was that the Christians had accused them of infanticide, but apart from the maimed, deformed or feeble children, who could not be cured, and would be a burden on poor families, no evidence of the alleged prevalence of infanticide exists, unlike in Carthage and Canaan, including Judah. New-born female babies were certainly exposed, just as they still are in some eastern countries, because they too were thought of as burdensome, but Pagan moralists even condemned that practice.

The Pagan lawyer, Paulus, three centuries before the Church had any influence, condemned smothering casting away, denying food and exposing newly born children. The Church also condemned it but did not stop it. The Pagan Emperor, Trajan, decreed that an exposed child could not be made a slave, but the Christian Emperor, Constantine, repealed this law. Pagan Emperors, Caracalla and Diocletian, tried to stop traffic in children.

Then we had Christianity. From the fifth to the nineteenth century, half of all people born died as children, robbed of the only life we are sure they had. The Christian middle classes assuaged their guilt by laying them to rest in “God’s little acre”, and praying that they went to heaven—a happier place, they said truly, because their greed and selfishness had made life hell.

Education in the Roman Empire

The children of the wealthy were always educated privately by tutors, but Roman municipalities gave the children of all workers free elementary instruction. Just as Christianity took it over, the empire had started elementary schools for the children of the workers, where, at public expense, freedmen taught them the three Rs. Anywhere you went, in a suburb of Rome or a small Italian town, you would see the teacher with his pupils. By the second half of the fourth century, a network of primary schools had spread over the empire. Practically every Roman worker could read and write by the year 380  AD, when Christianity began to have real power. By 480 AD nearly every school in the Empire was closed. By 580, and until 1780 at least, from ninety to ninety five percent of the people of Europe were illiterate and densely ignorant. That is the undisputed historical record of Christianity as regards education.

S Augustine was born in 354 AD in the small Roman town of Thogaste, in what is now Algeria. He attended a free elementary school in his native town, to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. When he had mastered these elementary accomplishments, he graduated to the “grammar” or high school in the same small Romano-African town. His parents intended him for the bar, and at the age of sixteen, he graduated again to a still higher school, the school of rhetoric. Even for this he did not need to go to Carthage. After a few further years he was sent to the school at Carthage, which was effectively a university.

Augustine tells us that nothing was paid for his education. The decrees of the emperors fixed the salaries of teachers that the municipality paid. So, small towns like Thogaste had a free grammar school as well as free elementary schools. Literacy must have been the general condition, and ancient Pompeii, with its names cut in marble slabs at every street corner, shows that the people were literate.

The primary school taught writing on tablets coated with wax marked with a stylus, pointed at one end for writing, and broad and flat at the other end for erasing. It was held in the porch of a house, with sheets of canvas at each end, and the teacher, being a freed slave, received an admittedly miserable payment. Roman school teachers were proverbially poor, even though they supplemented their teaching pay with other work. Horace spoke of “wretched schoolmasters” living on reheated cabbage. They were so poor that Romans had no trouble funding an elementary school wherever there were a few score children to teach. Children caused annoyance in residential areas chanting their times tables.

The Roman Empire provided higher as well as elementary education, and for the children of the workers this also was free. Even shorthand was as well known to the Romans as it is to us. Few people except scholars realize how the development of civilization was broken off when Greece and Rome fell and how it was suspended during the long domination of Christianity. In the year 400 AD, when the triumph of Christianity was complete, the Church came to power in a world where the mass of the workers had learned to read and write. The leaders of the Church had a complete government system of schools set up under the Pagan system radiating from Rome over the entire empire. High schools were provided in all important Roman centers, and there were a few still higher schools of the type we now call universities (for law, medicine, etc). The son of a worker paid nothing.

The Church destroyed it all in the fifth century. Christianity was, by imperial decree, the only religion of the western world. By the year 500 AD, no Pagan schools remained. No writer on education can prove the existence of a single school in Europe at that date. To say that Christianity gave the world schools, when its triumph saw the annihilation of the finest and most widespread system of education the world ever had, until the second half of the nineteenth century, is a monumental lie. The Pagan Romans of the fourth century had a educational system with free schools at different levels—it all disappeared in the fifth century.

The Christian Disregard for Education

The Ages of Faith were ages of crime, of gross and scandalous depravity, of cruelty and of immorality. A progressive improvement has taken place in conduct, both public and private, as faith has diminished. While the ages of faith—notably the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages but even into the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—were ages of gross ignorance, ours is the best educated age in history.

Ignorant men and women can have high character, and cultured people can have low character, but these people are exceptions. Ignorance and culture are incompatible, for even primitive cultures require knowledge, however parochial it is. Conduct and civilization rises with literacy and education. Christians claim that the Church knew and acted upon this—Christianity gave the world schools. It is a partial or semi-truth that forgets Christianity first destroyed schools! The Pagans in Europe, whom Christianity succeeded, had a developing system of education, but the Christians did not like it.

1. Christianity supervised the ruin of the Pagan schools without a murmur, indeed applauded its disappearance, and made no effort to replace it.
2. So little was done in the way of education during the thousand years of absolute Christian domination that more than ninety percent of the people in every Christian nation were illiterate and densely ignorant.
3. The modern school systems that have educated the Victorian masses and given us a technological workforce are due entirely to secular needs, and were mainly held back by the Churches.

What Christian will admit the suffering of humanity through ignorance since Greek and Latin schoolmasters were thrown into the dust and trampled on by priests? Christians had the words of Christ, they say, but the children of our Christian nation of Britain suffered hell 1800 years after Christ uttered his words about children. The haunted and apprehensive look of vacancy and the unhealthy pallor of the slave was on the face of children at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and in some places today, it is returning. At the age of six or seven, if they had survived birth, their filthy, drainless homes and the fetid streets, they were sent to work. After twelve hours in a suffocating atmosphere was too much for their enfeebled bodies, where were the Christians who restrained the cane of their overseers? To use the words of George Eliot, when faced with such truths, Christians argued:

Indeed, indeed, two and two certainly make four, but it does not do to press these things too far.

Medical service was also free in the city of Rome for the poorer workers. Every temple of Aesculapius, the god of healing, gave free medical treatment, and the municipality of Rome paid a number of doctors to give free service to the poor. It is another vain and ignorant boast of the Christian that Christianity first founded hospitals and helped the sick poor. It is rubbish. Rome did what it could for them in the then state of medical science, and one has only to read what the “hospital” service was until modern times to measure what the world owes to the Church in this respect—nothing that can count against the previous destruction it caused. It shattered Roman science and education, and it fought and hampered the men who, like Vesalius, tried in the Middle Ages to resume the development of medical science.

The Christian propagandist had repeated hundreds of times the shibboleth that Christianity had bettered the lot of woman and the worker. It did precisely the opposite.

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