Christianity
Greece and Rome—Hellenism and Christianity
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999; Sunday, 02 October 2005
Greece
The Greeks had hardly been civilized a few centuries when they discovered three great fundamental truths of science—the vastness of the universe, the existence of atoms, and the law of evolution. If the Christian Church bad not subsequently crushed all science, science would be a thousand years more advanced.
To the historians of all later time, this genius of the Greek intellect has always been a mystery. If the Hebrews had been Greeks, it would be a miracle, a product of God’s revelation and inspiration. The first European nation to become civilized reached the high water mark in nearly every branch of culture. One has only to reflect on the language we use today to realize the world’s debt to Greece. Philosophy, ethics, politics, aesthetics, democracy, gymnastics, athletics, music, theatre, chorus, comedy, tragedy—these and a thousand others are Greek words, because they stand for things which the Greeks invented or discovered.
To talk of the “genius” of the Greeks is mere mysticism. Words and phrases suffice as explanation. Nor can the explanation be given by reflecting on the glorious climate, the picturesque world, the blue sky and the blue sea and golden sun, of the Greeks. Greece is scorched much of the year and scratching a living from its rocky terrain was never easy. Though, a beautiful place with exceptional air and light, only arm-chair philosophers see any explanation in such qualities. In any case, the sun and sea and hills are the same now as they were two thousand years ago, and today they inspire no genius.
The Greeks, Romans, Teutons, Celts, and Slavs are one family, and the ancestral tribe lived somewhere in the Caucasus. It spread west and south. The earliest Greeks, powerful barbarians with iron weapons, destroyed Crete, a Semitic maritime empire that ruled the eastern Mediterranean. Half the Cretans fled to Asia Minor, where they had colonies, and the Greeks were passing through, or occupying. Contact spread aspects of Minoan civilization to the Greeks. Nearly all the early poets and scientists of Greek literature belong to Asia Minor.
Athens, in the Greek archipelago, was conveniently situated for communication with Asia Minor. Physical circumstances explain more than genius or religion does. But until the fifth century Athens had only a moderate civilization, with no outstanding achievements except the abolition of royalty and the creation of democracy—the first democracy in history. This does not puzzle us. Athens was a city-state—a single city with a moderate amount of the surrounding country. And it never had more than a population of about four hundred thousand, of whom three- fourths were slaves. Such a change was comparatively simple in a small community like that of the Athenians, but quite impossible in rigorously organized monarchies with millions of people and vast armies of mercenary soldiers. In effect, a city of one hundred thousand men and women produced the bases of the modern world.
In the fifth century, the Athenians learned the lesson of heavy defeat and avoided war for a century. The Persians completely destroyed the old Athens in 479 BC, and the Athenians, in rebuilding, were fortunate enough to secure a statesman who was also a thinker and an artist. Pericles proposed that they should raise on the ashes of the older Athens the most beautiful city in all the world, and that they succeeded will forever be told in the world’s literature while civilisation continues. Never again will such artistic and literary wonders be crowded into one century by so small a people.
Athens was a near perfect democracy. Not a bean could be used from the treasury, not a building designed or raised, without the consent of the twenty thousand male citizens and voters. Moreover, the theatre—also, in later years, the parliament house—seated thirty thousand spectators, to witness the superb tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander.
The Athenians were narrow-minded about religion—always a great retarding influence—but even here they rarely enforced their laws. Intellectuals simply paid it enough lip service to avoid trouble—the condemnation to death of Socrates having a political element. Common Athenians were bigoted, but they were proud of their unique city and its achievements.
Morals Of The Athenians
The even more bigoted Christian preacher will say:
We grant you a certain intellectual talent to the Greeks, but what of their moral level and spirituality?
Joseoph McCabe wonders, “Why lay so much stress on spirituality and virtue? Spirituality is a shibboleth.” The Christian is shocked. Believers do not expect to hear such things questioned. But they try to answer.
Without a high moral and spiritual level, society degenerates, intellect is paralyzed, energy and the great deeds of the strong are sapped.
McCabe responds:
Are you smiling? These Athenians, lacking the spirituality and morality of Christians, gave the world such brilliant intellectual achievements that no nation, even twenty times as large, will ever rival them. The Athenian state, little and corrupt as it was, produced “the most refined, brilliant civilization the world has yet seen”, the words of a clergyman.
Christian retorts:
Surely, all the authorities admit that the Athenians were brilliant in art and intellect and loose in morals.
If that were true, immorality is consistent with brilliant art and intellect, if it does not promote them. But it is not true. A clergyman will compare the Greeks of more than two thousand years ago with people of modern times. Modern civilisation is not Christian and, being two thousand years later than the Greeks, it ought to be wiser in its social life. To compare Greek morals with Christian, the twentieth and twenty first centuries can not properly be used as a yardstick. Ages when practically everybody was a Christian should be compared with the Greeks—the middle ages in Europe, known as the Dark Age.
Menander was the culmination of Greek manners. He was the second greatest comedian of Athens. Only fragments of his comedies remain but many of the works of the other great Greek comedian, Aristophanes have survived. Christians are fond of quoting the scurrilities of some of those comedies as “typical” of Athenian sentiment. Menander, was not scurrilous, writing in one fragment:
Prefer to be injured rather than to injure, for in so doing you will blame others, and you will escape censure.
Menander’s comedies reflected a state of moral and domestic sentiment like our own, and they were full of moral scenes and happy endings. But, only scholars read these. Aristophanes has more influence on our views of Athens. Pious monks of the Dark Ages, according to Christians, “preserved for us all that is best in classical literature” yet preserved the “scurrilous” plays of Aristophanes and ignored the almost Christian pleasantries of Menander!
A Christian theologion judges Æschylus, the Greek tragedian, thus:
No modern theology has taught higher and purer moral notions than those of Aeschylus and his school, developed afterwards by Socrates and Plato, but first attained by the genius of Aeschylus.
Not faint praise for an age preceding the preaching of Christ by five whole centuries, and before the “prophecies” and psalms of the Jewish scriptures were written! Aeschylus…
…shows the indelible nature of sin, and how it recoils upon the third and fourth generation, thus anticipating one of the most marked features in Christian theology.
The Christian drives the lesson home in these decisive words:
The agreement of Sophocles (in his Œdipus) shows that these deep moral ideas were no individual feature in Aeschylus, and that there must have been a sober earnestness at Athens very far apart from the ribaldry of Aristophanes. Such immorality as that of the modern French stage was never tolerated among the Greeks, in spite of all their license.
This “license” is at variance with every other word he says. It is an assumption based on the absurd Christian prejudice that no one could be moral without Christianity. The third great tragedian, Euripides, is also morally noble. His heroines…
…are the women who have so raised the ideal of the sex that, in looking upon them, the world has passed from neglect to courtesy, from courtesy to veneration.
Along with the three greatest dramatists of Greece, Menander was also full of a down to earth virtue which was truer to life. It must have been too dull for the Christian monks. But the worthy monks carefully preserved the ribald works of Aristophanes for us, either because they enjoyed it more, or because they wanted only to preserved evidence that suited their prejudices. His “Lysistrata” is a supremely funny and daring picture of a sexual strike by the women of Greece. Prostitutes walk on his stage, and talk freely. Sex jokes are as common as in a London comedy club or a high-class Chicago revue.
Athens was not divided into a score of refined people and a brutal mass:
We hear of no low music halls, or low dancing saloons. Even such vice as existed was chiefly refined and gentlemanly.
Aspasia, the friend of Pericles, is merely lampooned by the comedians.
There is no absolute proof of her want of dignity and morality.
She was a virtuous lady to whose house even Socrates and Xenophon, the great moralists, went for the purpose of serious mental improvement. Nor is here evidence that there were hetairai at Athens, though there were at Corinth, and or evidence that the hetairai were immoral. And as to the immorality of some of the legends about the gods, several chapters of the bible are utterly unsuitable for children because they represent a disgusting morality for a supposedly good god. Alcibiades described in Plutarch, is not an example of typical Athenian manners. No one doubts he was highlighted as in every way untypical. And, to conclude the list, the Greek love of boys was largely innocent, as Jowett had proved long ago, and Edward Carpenter has proved again in his beautiful Iolaus.
The Greeks were not morally inferior to modern nations. Some intensely Christian countries today accept quite as much looseness, and far more homosexuality than did the ancient Athenians. Athens was far superior to Europe when it was entirely Christian in the Middle Ages.
The Greeks, like the Babylonians and Egyptians, were much the same as ourselves. They seem to have observed the same ideals in the same ways. Admittedly women were not free, as they are today in the west. Most Greek women and girls were guarded in an oriental seclusion. They were treated more like Moslem women—and plenty of those prefer it to the western style—and they could hardly philander, even if they were so disposed. Consequently, there were prostitutes. Corinth had a lot of them. Human nature was just the same, then as now, human ideals were just the same, and the popularity of heterosexual brothels shows that most men were neither homosexual nor interested in children.
Sex is not the whole, or the main part, of morals—though Christians often think it the only part. Justice, honour, kindliness, truthfulness, generosity, temperance are the great principles, and Greek society was no less familiar with them than we are.
The Development Of Religion
The old gods of Greece, Zeus and his wife and daughter, Hephaestos and Aphrodite and all the rest, were brought down from the northeast into the peninsula by the early barbaric Greeks. They were nature gods. The Greeks bad no sacred books about them in the same sense as the Hebrews. The poets, Homer and Hesiod and others, give us their stories.
A critical study of the Greek writers in different ages shows that, since there was no “inspired” record—though Plato worked out a theory of inspiration of the poets like the Christian theory—to limit anyone’s imagination, the gods were understood differently by different writers at different times.
To the austere tragedians, Zeus was the moral ruler of the world. Few took moral principles more seriously than Athenians did. To lighter poets, the amours of the gods were light poetic material. Much, if not all, of the moral light-heartedness, attributed to the gods, was not original in Greek religion. Their amorous adventures fell from the lips of the bards at the courts of the petty and pleasure loving early kings who loved their legends embroidered with all sorts of baudiness.
The stories of the immorality of the gods had no concern with the morals of mortals. In the same manner, Christians must not be vindictive, and must suffer injury or insult without retaliating, but their God does nothing of the kind. He punishes with merciless vigour anyone who offends Him. “God’s ways are not the ways of mortals”.
The Greek maid would not willy nilly receive a lover because Zeus set a baudy example. A maid would sooner be a laurel tree than copulate with the sun god, Apollo. Doubtless, Greek maids admitted lovers in the same proportion as maidens have since civilization began. Aspasia loved Pericles but could not marry him because she was a Milesian and could not marry an Athenian. Like any true love, no doubt she ignored the proscription. The hetairai seemed more like Japanese geishas than Western prostitutes. They were female entertainers whose talent was far from simply offering sexual favours for money.
The religion of Greece was not the Greeks’ source of morality, and had no particular theology even. It taught no lies about a life after death because, if there was a life beyond, being beyond, it was not open to our scrutiny. Like the biblical Hebrews, they considered the dead slept. In Greek, the word “cemetery” means the place where people sleep. Yet for the Christian it is a gloomy and haunted place of dead spirits, even though it should be a light and happy place because of Christian expectation of a future life in a balmy place. In Athens, people accepted death and talked about it with serene recognition that it was a natural fact.
Unlike the Babylonian, the Greek had no belief in legions of devils whom the gods would permit to torment him. Greeks originally believed in as many spirits as any other nation but they almost allowed them to pass out of existence. The Greeks’ minor spirits were mainly nymphs, dryads, satyrs, and so on, playful nature sopirits generally doing what comes naturally in woods and waters.
The Greeks were the first people in the world to develop sport in the modern sense. For the youths there was as fine and healthy a system of athletics and gymnastics as exists anywhere in the world. Stadia were as important as theatres. Our modern stadia, our Olympic games, the words gymnastics and athletics, are Greek. Olympia, which gave the name to the Olympic games, was a special recreation city for all the Greeks. Modern Olympic games are degenerate imitations of these, for the Greeks had intellectual, poetic, and musical contests, as well as races and wrestling. Even the maidens, although they were carefully guarded in the home, had their sports.
Part of the reason for this, and undoubtedly a consequence was the Greek admiration of beauty, was their love of a clean and comely human form, male and female. The wonderful statues left us by the great Greek sculptors, chiefly Phidias and Praxiteles, which are from living models, show us the result. But Greek men thought the love of woman merely procreative, but the love of young men virtuous. Plato, as strict a moralist as any, explains this in his “Symposium” and shows that it was not the sordid vice that Christians imagine.
Greeks were not exhorted to be like the gods in the sense that Christians want to be like Jesus. The gods were not role models. Zeus was often seen as the supreme guardian of justice, but the Greeks thought mysterious beings called Fate or “The Fates” pursued the criminal and avenged injustice. Zeus was simply Father Zeus. His full name meaning, like Jupiter, the father in heaven. He sent the rain and the sunshine upon just and unjust alike and was seen in quite a general way.
The official religion never troubled about ethics. Sacrifices, ceremonies, and processions—artistic developments of ancient practices—were what it enjoined for cultural bonding. Retribution for seducing a man’s wife or daughter was not the business of Zeus but was the business of the husband or father, and he would pay close attention to it. Equally, justice was a social matter, a secular concern.
The educated tolerate this religion and practiced it in public as a public duty but laughed at it in private, as long as the mass of the people were ignorant enough to believe in it. The stories of the amours of Zeus were not dogmas. No one need believe them, and the educated did not. Educated Greeks thought Zeus the spirit of the universe and the other gods and goddesses aspects of the same principle.
The normal Greek religion was complicated by secret cults known as “mysteries”. The Eleusinian Mysteries, consisted of a nine days’ celebration at Eleusis, near Athens. Every freeborn Athenian had to be initiated, and had to take an oath never, under pain of death, to reveal what he or she saw.
Just as the secret gatherings of the early Christians were said to be for the purpose of orgies—and as late as the fourth century S Ambrose tells us that they sometimes were—so the Greek mysteries were said by early Christians to cover orgies of indecency. On the contrary, they concentrated the most austere and pious elements of the Greek people. Originally, long before, when the mysteries were a secret fertility cult, they no doubt involved the sexual rites of the fertility goddess Demeter or Ceres. The moral blandness of the official religion, for some, made them turn to the mysteries.
Some people, of a pious frame of mind, are not happy unless they can groan over their sins. The official Greek religion gave no hope of a resurrection and never bothered about a future life. About the middle of the sixth century, before the Golden Age of Pericles, probably triggered by the advance of the Persians and Zoroastrianism, a religious revival passed over the country and led to the extension of the mystery cults. (It also had an effect on philosophy.) The pious types found their expression in the Mysteries, which were to many Greeks what the Holy Week was to the Catholic. Some Greeks bemoaned their sins and were “baptized” at the Mysteries in the most pious manner.
The cult of Dionysos or Bacchus was another cult which attracted the religiously fervant. Dionysos was the Spirit of the vine. In his Mysteries there seems to have been a representation of the birth of the baby god Dionysus like that of Horus in Egypt or of Christ in Catholic churches today.
The preachers, who talk glibly about the pagan Greeks and their immoral gods, have no idea of the amount of spiritual life—equal to the Christian life—that there was in ancient Greece.
Rise Of Philosophy And Skepticism
Greek philosophy is as brilliant as every other creation of the Greek intellect. The line of thinkers which that little nation produced in three centuries has no parallel in the history of thought, and every conceivable variety or cast of speculation made its appearance. But Greek thought became distorted by religion. It turned away from science to “spiritual truths”. It has shown for all time how futile and mischievous is that high sounding appeal for us to turn from science to “spiritual truths”.
Greek civilization first reached a high development in the Mediterranean fringe of Asia Minor or on the islands off the coast, and this points to an influence of the conquering Persians. The early Greek philosophers nearly all belong to this region. Philosophy was born out of the inspiration of Persian religion, and the Greek desire to improve on the novelties of their enemies. But the most essential condition to bear in mind is the liberty the Greeks enjoyed in Asia Minor. They were in a colonial world. They were free to speculate.
This Greek fringe on the coast of Asia Minor was known as Ionia, and the first school of thinkers is known as the Ionic school. From the start it was more scientific than metaphysical. Its leaders studied Nature, and man as a part of Nature. They sought the first principles of things, not in abstract metaphysical formulae, and not at all in religion, but in physical realities. Thales, the father of philosophy, thought that water was the original element out of which all other things came. Then the religious revival took place, and the next Greek thinker said that “the infinite”—not God, but something hopelessly indefinite—was the first principle. The third, Anaximenes, took air—an infinite quantity of air—as the starting point. The fourth, Xenophanes, said that the primordial element was earth. The fifth chose fire.
This was the birth of speculation about Nature and guesses were bound to be crude. The world was being interpreted on natural principles, without the absurdities of the Babylonian creation. Xenophanes, a skeptic, noted the repulsiveness of the legends about gods. Heraclitus, denied that the world was created by gods, because it was an eternally changing substance. Empedocles of the Greek colony in Sicily, whose mind was a strange blend of mysticism and science, maintained that there was only one God, “a sacred and unutterable mind”. In the fifth century BC, God was conceived as people do today.
These speculations about the universe, besides showing men how to think without gods, led on to a belief in evolution. If there was no beginning, contrary to the Babylonians, if the universe was eternal, and there was one primordial element of all things, then there has been an eternal evolution of this element into the contents of the universe today. Every one of these early Greek thinkers believed that, and the doctrine was further developed by two of the boldest of them all, Leucippus and Democritus.
About the middle of the fifth century, Leucippus, another Ionian Greek, hit upon the idea that matter must be composed of atoms. The universe consisted of an infinite number of atoms, of different shapes and sizes, which have, without any directing mind, gradually come together in the bodies we see today. Democritus developed this idea with real scientific genius. All the contents of the universe, including man, were the result of an eternal, unguided, quite purposeless tossing and mingling of the atoms. Democritus, moreover, while completely rejecting all religion, worked out an elevated system of humanitarian morals.
Three very great principles had been fixed—the eternity of the world and its independence of gods, the existence of atoms, and the fact of evolution. At the same time these early thinkers observed much in astronomy, and they were good mathematicians. Many of them visited Egypt, and learned whatever the priests of Egypt could tell them. They obtained some idea of the immense size of the sun and of the vastness of the universe, and Pythagoras actually declared, for the first time in the history of thought, that the earth revolved round the sun.
Here was a promising foundation for science, but religion hampered its development and diverted thought to other channels. Anaxagoras took the speculations of the physicists to Athens, and the democracy made him fly for his life for uttering such impieties, although he judiciously blended his science with some theological mysticism.
Another train of thought, in Greece itself, had meanwhile led to skepticism. There arose a school of Sophists who took pleasure in contending that the mind could come to no valid conclusions whatever. Protagoras talked about the gods even less respectfully than Confucius.
I cannot say whether they exist or not. Life is too short for such difficult investigations.
Both this man and Anaxagoras were great friends of Pericles, and these skeptical ideas pervaded the whole group of artists and thinkers of the Golden Age. But—partly in political opposition to the aristocratic party, to which they belonged—the democracy raged against them, and Protagoras in turn had to hurry from the country.
In these circumstances Socrates, the leader of a different line of Greek thinkers, came upon the scene at Athens, in the second half of the fifth century BC. He was put to death in 399 BC. This great thinker and moralist, a man of the highest and most independent character, met death on the grotesque and false charge of corrupting the young men of Athens.
What did it matter whether the ultimate principle was air or water or fire? Or whether there were atoms? What did matter was that human conduct should be effectively guided and that men should understand the real nature of justice and “the good”. Socrates turned the brilliant race aside from the foundations of science which had been laid, and he provided instead the bases of philosophy and ethics. Pythagoras, the Greek who had first realized that the earth traveled round the sun, yet a strange mystic, had preceded him. Philosophy was to be profoundly religious. Religion was to become a philosophy.
Socrates wrote no works. His ideas are known only from his pupils, Plato especially, and Xenopbon. Plato has given them his own more mystical colour. Like Socrates, he believed in one God, an eternal spiritual being such as modernists now offer us. He believed intensely in the immortality of the soul, and provided feeble “proofs” of it, now laughable. He belittled matter and the flesh, and traced everything good, true and beautiful to “spirit”. Plato set a fashion which has not died. The verbiage that befogs the minds of people today is from this glorification of spirit and depreciation of matter. It begs the question whether the mind is or is not material. Plato shows that monotheism could be reached without a gleam of revelation, and anticipated the ethic of Christ centuries before he was born.
Greek experience shows anyone’s philosophy of life, materialist or spiritualist, religious or nonreligious, makes no difference to their moral ideal. The materialist Democritus had as lofty sentiments as the mystic Pythagoras or the spiritual Plato. The skeptical Alcidamas, a Sophist and atheist, was the first man to denounce slavery, thousands of years before Christianity did. The atheistic Epicurus had as sane and sober a conception of character as the theistic Aristotle. Morality is a human matter. Its roots are in human experience, not in religion.
Aristotle was far less mystic than Plato. His god, or Supreme Mind, was unconscious of sublunary matters, and therefore not a universal providence or a creator. Nor did he believe in personal immortality. His system of thought is one of the most learned and original ever given to the world. He summarized all the science of his time, and he made a science of ethics and politics. Unfortunately, he was also a metaphysician. He thought that besides our knowledge of Nature (“ta physica”) it was possible to get a knowledge of things beyond the physical (“ta meta ta physica”, or metaphysics), and these were more important and more worthy of the mind. In that sense Aristotle, though for his time a great scientific man, joined Plato in leading human thought astray.
Yet, all these thinkers were high moral idealists. Wicked Pagan Greece produced a line of unsurpassed moralists, a strange mystery to Christians for whom there is only one ethical route in the whole universe. Athens was not so much the city of vice as the greatest morality making center the world has ever known. It culminated in the Stoic School. The philosophers used to gather groups about them in their gardens or in public places, and one of them, Zeno, chose the Painted Colonnade (Stoa Poikile). Hence the Stoic philosophy.
It was not a religion. Zeno and the Stoics spoke of God but he was a material entity, and he was not the author and vindicator of the moral law. The law was an eternal part of Nature, and a man was urged to live in harmony with Nature. This philosophy inspired, in the Roman world, the greatest humanitarian movement ever known until modern times. It kept educated Romans at a high level of character, and it produced Christ-like austere moralists such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. This austere and, in its more sober Roman form, effective of moral systems was a dogmatic materialism! The Stoics ridiculed the idea of spirit and free will, which we are asked to regard as the indispensable bases of any moral conduct.
Passing over schools of Pantheists, Cynics, and Sophists, Greek philosophy ended in the system of Epicurus. He built upon science, gathering together all that the early scientists had said about the universe. He spoke of gods as beings somewhere out in the abysses of space with whom a sensible man need not concern himself. Like Buddha and Confucius, he was a practical atheist. If there were any gods, they had nothing to do with us. His ethics, one of the sanest systems given to the world, had nothing to do with religion. Moral law was social law. Epicurus was—contrary to the libelous, ridiculous idea of his philosophy which Christian writers put into circulation—one of the most abstemious of men. Tranquillity, the quiet life, was his idea. If he was wrong at all, it was in being too ascetic.
But Athens was now in full decay. The work of Greece was done. The republic, enfeebled by a long civil war, had fallen. The monarchy of the Macedonians overshadowed it. The philosophy of Epicurus reflects the time, the wish for a quiet, passionless life. The work of civilization passed on to Rome.
Morals In Ancient Rome
The ethical code of ancient Rome was mainly the Stoic philosophy of the Greeks. Ancient Rome is little understood except by scholars, and there is no other nation of antiquity except the Babylonian that is so often selected by preachers as an awful example of depravity before Christ, or apart from Christianity. Rome was the second Babylon.
Many of the misunderstandings about Rome arise from broad ideas that are false. The preachers never tire of speaking of its vices—of which they know nothing—but some social writers have calumniated Rome because to them it was an awful example of capitalism. They confirm the impression that the population of ancient Rome was a few wealthy and unscrupulous men and a vast army of exploited and vilely treated slaves.
The wealth of the Roman capitalists or rich men is much exaggerated. Scholars have been interested in calculating the actual wealth, in modern currency, of these Roman millionaires. The largest fortune amongst them definitely known to us is that of Crassus, who was nothing like as rich as Bill Gates. In America, Crassus would probably fall short of his first billion. The richest man of Juvenal’s day might have exceeded the billion mark. There are men in America who could have bought up any of the richest patricians Rome ever had!
In Rome, now and again a vulgar or half mad emperor came to the throne, and during his reign morals declined among a certain section of society. It is to the reigns of these men that the preacher turns for his material. Most societies have a jet set, and in Rome it grew larger under the bad emperors. These men gave, in their marble mansions with cedar ceilings, banquets which were orgies of choice wine and naked Syrian girls, while slaves in the roof poured perfume and flowers on the intoxicated guests. There is no reason whatever to think that this set was more numerous, proportionately, than the set which patronizes actresses and models today, or sets up mistresses in luxurious apartments.
The Christian propagandist will assure us that the main source of immorality in Rome was the wealthy class, one tenth, or less, of the population. Though the Empress Messalina was notorious in that she went, night after night, to a common brothel to prostitute herself and return to the palace, in the words of the poet, Juvenal, “tired, yet not sated, with men”, the Byzantine empresses, who were all Christians, led much more promiscuous lives as a group than the Pagan Roman emperesses.
Juvenal is generally the source of these scandals. Yet he is unreliable because he was a propagandist intent on denigrating the upper crust. He was a militant. Wild gossip was all grist to his mill. Some of it might have been true, but Juvenal meant to tarnish the whole aristocracy. Nor is he often giving contemporary news. He wrote his famous Satires about the year 90 AD, and the sins of Messalina had been perpetrated decades before!
These are the things that get into the papers. Virtue, though admirable, is uninteresting. Vice, though deplorable, is entertaining, and the more grotesque, the more absorbing. The Christian emphasis on sexual morality obscures the greater importance of justice and honour, but were the mass of Roman people more or less immoral than in a modern city?
There were plenty of brothels (“lupanaria”) in Rome. Walking along a street, a prostitute behind a curtain might try to attract your attention. The red light districts of modern Christian cities are no different. There are no statistics but all the evidence is consistent with the assumption that the mass of Roman men were just about as immoral as men now are, and rather less than men in the Middle Ages, when the clergy were nearly all immoral and some owned brothels.
Ammianus Marcellinus, an old and severe soldier, returned from his campaigns to Rome, and, in disgust, described what he saw. Vice has no great part in his account. In the same age, S Jerome says more about immorality, writing about the Christian priests and ladies of Rome whom he knew well. Particularly telling is Salvianus, a priest, writing in the next century, who writes to his flock that the virtues of the Pagans, who have disappeared, shame the vices of the Christians, who have taken their place.
In the small wealthy class at Rome, there was less adultery than there is now or was in the Middle Ages. Adultery was punishable by death in Roman law, and though this was rarely enforced, intrigue might get a man impeached at any time. The first emperor, Octavian, who ruled for forty years during the most luxurious period of Rome, sternly enforced the law, to the extent that he banished for life his own passionately loved but libidinous daughter, Julia. That was wicked Rome.
Really intimate and reliable pictures are best afforded by private letters, which reflect the character of the circle to which they belong—the letters of Cicero, Pliny, Seneca, and Symmachus. Every single letter could have been read without a blush by Mother Theresa. They reflect circles in which vice is a thing not done by gentlemen. Any real student of Roman literature will conclude that the great body of the men and women of Rome were as temperate and regular as we are.
The average Roman gentleman was a firm believer in the doctrines of the Stoics. Stoicism and Epicureanism were the philosophies of life of refined Romans. The Stoic philosophy had a wonderful influence in Rome. Crowds followed Stoic orators like Dion Chrysostom, or read Stoic moralists like Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Most of the famous Roman jurists, the creators of European law, were Stoics, humanitarians of the highest character. Their letters, and such works as the Saturnalia of Macrobius, a slave author who describes what is under his eyes in his master’s house, give us the true measure of Roman character. lt was generally fine.
Emperors were Stoics. For one hundred and fifty years, Rome had Stoic emperors whose ethical level exceeded any in the history of Christendom. Under them the world made a humanitarian progress that has no parallel except in these secular days. In the first century AD, under the Pagan emperors, more than three hundred thousand orphans were reared in public institutions in Italy alone. Of the twenty nine Pagan Roman emperors twenty one were admirable men of good character, and eight only were bad or insane.
This Roman world, like the Greek world, produced moralists as good as any Christian. Yet, the Asiatic religions which celebrated the birth of a saviour god in mid winter or the death and resurrection of a god in spring, became extremely popular in the Roman Empire and prepared the way for Christianity. The older Roman religions were eventually suppressed and Christianity substituted by force for them, and the world sank into barbarism within a hundred years.
In the cities of Babylon, Egypt, and Persia, in Athens and Rome, men lived, in spite of technological differences, much as they do today in Paris and London, New York and Chicago, and that is more decently than they did in Christian times. No shining sword of morality divides the world into BC and AD, consequential on the appearance of a Saviour! Old civilizations were not in darkness and the shadow of death. In ethic and religious belief, they provided the material for the Christian religion, which gratefully accepted them then pretended they were its own all along.
Further Reading
- More on Persia and Judaism, and Persian religion
- More on Alexander, Judaism, and Christianity, the Septuagint, and the Ptolemies
- More on Jews in the intertestament years
