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IT is not possible to understand the early history of the Church
without some knowledge of the political and cultural world into which
the Church came, of the Roman Empire, that is to say, as it was in the
century which followed the Battle of Actium (31 B.C.), of Hellenism, of
the older pre-Hellenistic civilisation still alive below the surface,
and of the rich diversity of the Empire's religions. The Empire in
which the first Christian propagandists worked was a vast state whose
forty provinces took in roughly all Europe west of the Rhine and south
of the Danube, with the island of Britain, Asia Minor, Syria,
Palestine, Arabia and Egypt and the north coast of Africa thence to the
Atlantic. Rome, its central capital city, had begun its history as a
city-state. Then, as the head of a league of similar local states, as
the chief state of an Italian federation, it had acquired, in little
more than a century and a half, in a variety of ways, province by
province, the greatest of antique Empires. Spain, Sicily, Sardinia and
Corsica were the spoil of the wars with Carthage. The best part of Asia
Minor came through the will of the last of its native kings. Gaul was
the product of Julius Caesar's military genius. Syria, Palestine and
the rest of Asia Minor of that of his rivaI, Pompey. Egypt was the
conquest of Augustus himself. Much of the East came with little native
resistance: Gaul, on the other hand, cost nine years of Caesar's
campaigns; Italy was only reconciled to Roman hegemony after the bloody
Social War (90-88 B.C.), while in Spain two centuries elapsed between
the first occupation and the final definitive victories.
The provinces differed as much in the character of their pre-Roman
civilisation as they differed in the circumstances which had subdued
them to the Roman power; and hence they differed no less greatly in the
degree to which the Roman power "romanised" them. In Greece and Asia,
Rome subdued politically peoples who were, culturally, her superiors.
In Syria, and especially in Egypt, there was a civilisation older still
than that of Greece, "hellenised" now for several centuries; in Gaul a
native Celtic civilisation, of yet another type; in Spain a population
of fierce local clans where each separate valley was a new, separate
people. Greece and Asia were politically organised, famous for their
cities, centuries before Roman history began; while in the West it was
Rome who introduced the "city," and, in many western provinces, cities
were rare even centuries after the Roman occupation.
From the days when she was merely the head of a league of Italian
city-states, Rome had shown unique capacity for combining diversity in
union, a political flexibility always ready to find new relationships
on which to build alliances. Hence in the Empire, where no part was
less firmly bound to Rome than another, and every part as firmly as
possible, each part was yet bound by special links forged by the
special circumstances of its conquest. All were equally subject; but in
the manner of the subjection and in its implications there was
diversity. To the immense population of this vast state the empire gave
two hundred years of internal peace -- an achievement that has had few
parallels in history. It developed the Hellenistic civilisation it
found in possession, and brought that civilisation -- the best material
civilisation the world had ever known -- to countries which otherwise,
in East and West alike, would never have known it. It was through the
Roman town -- the civitas, the city, that is, and the surrounding
countryside attached to it -- that this work of civilisation was
accomplished. For the city was no mere agglomeration of buildings, its
population nothing more than the association of a few thousand or a
hundred thousand individuals. The Roman towns were, as far as the thing
was possible within the structure of the Empire, city-states, conscious
of their existence as such, each with its own personality, centres of
strong local patriotism and self- confidence [ ] In varying degrees the
towns were all of them self-governing, independent of the central
government's bureaucracy except for certain taxes and the provision of
recruits for the army. From this point of view the Empire was a vast
federation of self-governing cities. The constitution of this local
state varied according to its charter. There was provision always for
magistrates who acted as judges, settled the local taxes and collected
them, saw to the upkeep of roads and the post. The magistrates were
elected, as was also the city's senate; and the elections were
realities. There was, finally, in the city, the popular assembly; year
by year representatives of all the cities of a province met at the
provincial capital for the solemn rites with which the Emperor and the
Genius of Rome were worshipped.
This Provincial Assembly also came in time to have a political
importance. It became, for example, the organ through which complaints
were made to the emperor. For the centre of the empire, its ruler, was
the city of Rome, still in theory a republic of which the emperor was
but the chief magistrate. When after a century of terrible civil wars
-- Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Antony -- the victory of
Actium (31 B.C.) left Caesar's nephew, Octavian, sole master of the
Roman world, he was able to build on the ruins of the old republic,
where an aristocratic senate had been omnipotent, a new state. The form
of the old he carefully preserved, but the reality was the rule of a
military chief, an autocrat obeyed by virtue of personal oath of
allegiance. The basis of his power was his victorious army, and thence
derived one of the empire's great problems: how to keep this army of
professional long-service volunteers, who yet were citizens, from
interfering in political life for its own profit. Here the personality
of the reigning emperor mattered enormously, and while Augustus' first
successor Tiberius (14-37) succeeded as Augustus himself had done, five
emperors, within sixty years of the death of Augustus, had died
violently at the hands of the troops and civil war had revived again
(68-69). There followed a century of capable rulers -- Vespasian to
Marcus Aurelius (69-180), and then in 192 the army, increasingly out of
hand, brought about another century of civil wars and finally a
reorganisation of the Imperium, under Diocletian and Constantine, that
made it a new thing. It is this Empire of the Antonines, either
functioning (98-180), or in dissolution (180-284), that is the
political background of primitive Christianity.
But the emperor was much more than the chief magistrate of the
republic, omnipotent because he commanded an army that was bound to him
by personal ties. He was the direct ruler of many of the provinces --
Egypt, one of the wealthiest, was practically a vast imperial estate.
There had thus grown up inevitably a great corps of the emperor's
personal servants, paid to watch over his personal and imperial
interests throughout the provinces -- to gather monies due to him, to
administer his properties, to safeguard his interests in the multitude
of cities against distant local rapacity or indifference, to execute
his decrees and to see that others observed his laws. Here was a whole
superstructure of offices and officials, concerned principally with
Finance and Law, and of this, as well as of the army, the emperor was
the absolute chief. The chief authors of this system were Claudius
(41-54), Vespasian (69-78), and Hadrian (117-138). Inevitably, with the
passing years, the importance of this imperial bureaucracy grew. Duties
of supervising local government were laid upon it, and in the end the
local elective governments came to be of secondary importance beside
the paid, Rome-appointed official. In somewhat similar fashion the Law
too developed, the emperor being omni-competent and his decisions
becoming a source of law, judicial and administrative. When to this is
added the development of the religious cultus of the emperor it will be
easily understood how by the fourth century the Roman Emperor had
become an absolute monarch of the pre-classical, oriental type.
The Roman Empire was not merely one politically, it was one also in
culture; and this second unity outlasted the first, survived indeed to
be a main foundation of all subsequent culture, to influence the Church
in no small degree, sometimes aiding, sometimes hindering the
development of her institutions, her expansion and her very doctrines.
Politically the Empire was Roman; culturally it was, not Greek, but
Hellenistic.
This Hellenistic Culture was the product of the political conquest of
the East by the Macedonian king, Alexander the Great (336-323 B.C.).
The Macedonians, though the language they spoke was undoubtedly a Greek
dialect, and though they were probably Greeks by blood, were none the
less reckoned barbarians by the Greeks of the classic culture. The
Macedonian conquest of the East was therefore, from its beginning, a
victory for a "Grecianism" that had never been purely classical, for a
culture almost entirely Greek but a culture already mixed, and ready
therefore to adapt itself to other cultures. The opportunity came with
Alexander's conquest of the Persian Empire.
Persia had menaced the Greek civilisation -- that is, roughly, all that
we know as "the East," had seemed bound inevitably to replace in the
West all that we know as "the West" -- for a century and a half already
when Alexander became king, 336 B.C. The lack of unity among the Greek
city-states, the wars between them -- the long Peloponnesian War
431-403 B.C. -- were an eternal invitation to Persian aggression. To
defend the West against this, unity was essential; and to unite Greece
in a league directed by himself was the aim of Philip of Macedon
(360-336). By 337 he had accomplished it. The following year, however,
he was assassinated, and it was Philip's son, Alexander, who led the
alliance to victory. The story of his conquests reads like a fairy
tale, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia and Persia itself,
and even beyond the Indus -- in thirteen years he was master of the
world from the Himalayas to the Adriatic. Then, unexpectedly, he died,
thirty-three years of age.
That his Empire should descend intact to his baby son was not to be
expected. It became, naturally, the much-disputed spoil of his leading
generals, and thus Macedonian dynasties were established in Asia Minor,
Syria and Egypt -- the only parts of the conquest that concern this
story. These original dynasties vanished, the kingdoms were divided
still further. From Syria were formed Armenia, Cappadocia, Pontus and
Bithynia within a hundred and fifty years. The Celts came in (278 B.C.)
and established themselves in Galatia, while the impotent Seleucid
kings looked on from Antioch, and in self-defence against the invaders
the natives established the Kingdom of Pergamum. Finally into Persia
itself came the Parthians, "the Turks of Antiquity," destined to harass
and wear down the Roman Empire for centuries. Thus, with Greek or
Macedonian dynasties ruling, the hellenising of the East was only a
matter of time. By the time of the Roman Conquest it was largely
accomplished, and thenceforward Rome is the agent of Hellenism's
expansion in the West.
Alexander had dreamed of a real union of all the races he conquered,
their fusion into one new people. He had planned the administration of
his Empire on this principle and had himself married a Persian. This
fusion of Europe and Asia on a basis of Greek culture, Hellenism did
not achieve; nor did it ever make Greeks of the Orientals. Nevertheless
it transformed the East for centuries, and for this transformation the
chief credit once more is Alexander's. He promised to be as great a
ruler as he had been a general in the field. His conquests he welcomed
as enlarging the scope and opportunity for the development of the Greek
mind, the spread of Greek ideas and ideals of life, of the Greek
scientific achievement. Aristotle had been his tutor and the cultural
sequel to his conquest was natural. He was the world's great city
founder, and the seventy which claim him as their founder were all of
them Greek in form and spirit, so many active centres whence diffused
Greek thought and life. Alexander's successors were, in this respect,
his enthusiastic imitators. A vast scheme of colonisation went with the
foundations, and soon the East was filled with Greek traders, Greek
artisans, Greeks to organise and exploit native talent, native
industry, and especially land. The superiority of Greek methods and
policies whether in diplomacy, in politics, or in the exploitation of
natural resources, brought a new age of prosperity and peace to the
East -- to the profit indeed principally of the Greeks. The East --
Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt -- became one vast market, Greek controlled.
At the head of this new hellenised world were the Greek rulers, secure
because conquerors, and more stable still because they inherited, for
their native subjects, the divinity acknowledged in the native kings
they had dispossessed. Between these Greek rulers and their native
subjects there grew up a new, extensive and wealthy middle class of
commercials, industrials and middle men of all kinds. This class again
was almost entirely Greek. The centres of its wealth were the
hellenised towns; and the natives, dispossessed, were bound to the
soil, a despised and impoverished class. Between the town and the
country, drained for its advantage, here was inevitably a chronic
hostility, and an allied hostility between natives and foreigners. The
new social and political strain gave to the old native religions a new
importance -- they were the one means left for the corporate expression
of "national" feeling. Of all these countries Egypt affords the best
example of this oppression, for in Egypt the government owned and
controlled everything -- agriculture, industry, trade. The country was
one vast royal estate, its people the ruler's slaves or serfs.
Hellenism, then, was but a veneer, its cities a superstructure. There
was never any real fusion between Greeks and natives, although the
higher classes of the natives were almost always Greek in thought,
speech and habits of life. Nevertheless, although the older life still
ran on, below the surface and beyond the attention of this
Greek-educated world, the hellenistic veneer was universal and the
unity it gave, through the centuries before the political unity was
achieved and for long after that political unity was lost, was very
real. Such is the value of Greek thought even when it exists, as in
Hellenism, in combination with non-Greek elements. All through this
cultural Empire all who were educated -- and indeed the whole
population of the towns -- were Greek in speech; they read the same
classical poets, saw the same classical plays, listened to the same
classical oratory, studied the same classical thinkers. Their schools,
their gymnasia, their temples, their theatres, their very cities were
of the one type. They shared the one common, cultural ideal, what the
Romans were to call humanitas, the gift proper to this culture, for
lack of which the rest of the world was "barbarian," and with this they
shared the complementary notion of the "civilised world." This culture
had the same attraction for those outside it as, in later centuries,
the material order and prosperity of the Roman Empire had for the
Germanic tribes beyond the frontier. The powerful ideas latent in it
travelled far beyond the limits of the material expansion of the race
-- and, much later, they were to assist in that re-birth of the East
which characterised the late Empire and early Middle Ages, Sassanian
Persia for example, and the Arabia of Mohammed.
In religion Hellenism helped to spread the new idea of a connection
between religion and morality -- the result partly of contact with
eastern religions -- and the idea also of a relation between present
conduct and the life after death. It assisted the development and
spread of Greek mystery religions from Italy to Egypt and the Caucasus.
It favoured the gradual introduction of Eastern cults into the Greek
world. In Art and Letters the Hellenistic Age adds the Comedy of
Manners, the Mime, a satirical, topical "revue", and the first of the
Idylls, those idealisations of country life by the products of town
civilisation in which every sophisticated culture delights. We can
note, too, a new intelligent, scientific interest in the non- Greek
peoples, no longer dismissed, undiscussed, as "barbarians;" and the
appearance in history of another characteristic product of
sophistication, the myth of the "noble savage." Hellenism produced,
also, romances and fairy tales, influenced here by the East. One
feature all these forms of literary activity share -- they are the
product of careful attention to literary form. The history of the
"writer by profession" has begun, of the study of language, of letters,
of the History of Letters, of the first public libraries. The use of
books spreads; to possess books becomes the mark of a gentleman and the
book trade develops. Historians especially flourish, are in demand
even, and each monarchy, each city has' its official historiographer.
Translations are popular and translators busy. One subject that
occupies them is the Sacred Books of the Eastern Religions. The Bible
is now for the first time translated into Greek -- the Septuagint.
Of the hellenistic achievement in Architecture, Sculpture, Painting,
its systematic and scientific town-planning -- which gives to the West
its first well-ordered towns -- we can only make a mention. It is an
age also of scientific discovery, and of amazing inventions through the
application of the natural sciences-especially is there progress in
Anatomy, in Physiology, in Astronomy, Mathematics and Mechanics. It is
an age of learning, and an age where learning becomes the concern of
the State. Schools, libraries, learned societies even -- at Alexandria
the Museum-arc maintained at the State's expense. All this is, in the
main, the product of Greek culture working in an immensely wider field,
and in that field influencing, slowly and never completely, but
influencing none the less, the ancient East. In one respect only does
the East in return seriously influence the Greek culture, in the point
where that culture was so poor in thought as to be childish -- its
religion. Here Hellenism truly is debtor to the East.
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