roughly Roumania) and Pannonia (Hungary south of the Danube), where
there were no pre-existing great cities and temples and cultures, the
Roman empire did however “Latinize.” It civilized these countries for
the first time. It created cities and towns where Latin was from the
first the dominant speech, and where Roman gods were served and Roman
customs and fashions followed. The Roumanian, Italian, French and
Spanish languages, all variations and modifications of Latin, remain to
remind us of this extension of Latin speech and customs. North-west
Africa also became at last largely Latin-speaking. Egypt, Greece and
the rest of the empire to the east were never Latinized. They remained
Egyptian and Greek in culture and spirit. And even in Rome, among
educated men, Greek was learnt as the language of a gentleman and Greek
literature and learning were very, properly preferred to Latin.
In this miscellaneous empire the ways of doing work and business were
naturally also very miscellaneous. The chief industry of the settled
world was still largely agriculture. We have told how in Italy the
sturdy free farmers who were the backbone of the early Roman republic
were replaced by estates worked by slave labour after the Punic wars.
The Greek world had had very various methods of cultivation, from the
Arcadian plan, wherein every free citizen toiled with his own hands, to
Sparta, wherein it was a dishonour to work and where agricultural work
was done by a special slave class, the Helots. But that was ancient
history now, and over most of the Hellenized world the estate system
and slave-gangs had spread. The agricultural slaves were captives who
spoke many different languages so that they could not understand each
other, or they were born slaves; they had no solidarity to resist
oppression, no tradition of rights, no knowledge, for they could not
read nor write. Although they came to form a majority of the country
population they never made a successful insurrection. The insurrection
of Spartacus in the first century B.C. was an insurrection of the
special slaves who were trained for the gladiatorial combats. The
agricultural workers in Italy in the latter days of the Republic and
the early Empire suffered frightful indignities; they would be chained
at night to prevent escape or have half the head shaved to make it
difficult. They had no wives of their own; they could be outraged,
mutilated and killed by their masters. A master could sell his slave
to fight beasts in the arena. If a slave slew his master, all the
slaves in his household and not merely the murderer were crucified. In
some parts of Greece, in Athens notably, the lot of the slave was never
quite so frightful as this, but it was still detestable. To such a
population the barbarian invaders who presently broke through the
defensive line of the legions, came not as enemies but as liberators.
POMPEII
POMPEII
“Note the ruts in roadway worn by chariot wheels.”
The slave system had spread to most industries and to every sort of
work that could be done by gangs. Mines and metallurgical operations,
the rowing of galleys, road-making and big building operations were all
largely slave occupations. And almost all domestic service was
performed by slaves. There were poor free-men and there were freed-men
in the cities and upon the country side, working for themselves or even
working for wages. They were artizans, supervisors and so forth,
workers of a new money- paid class working in competition with slave
workers; but we do not know what proportion they made of the general
population. It probably varied widely in different places and at
different periods. And there were also many modifications of slavery,
from the slavery that was chained at night and driven with whips to the
farm or quarry, to the slave whose master found it advantageous to
leave him to cultivate his patch or work his craft and own his wife
like a free-man, provided he paid in a satisfactory quittance to his
owner.
There were armed slaves. At the opening of the period of the Punic
wars, in 264 B.C., the Etruscan sport of setting slaves to fight for
their lives was revived in Rome. It grew rapidly fashionable; and soon
every great Roman rich man kept a retinue of gladiators, who sometimes
fought in the arena but whose real business it was to act as his
bodyguard of bullies. And also there were learned slaves. The
conquests of the later Republic were among the highly civilized cities
of Greece, North Africa and Asia Minor; and they brought in many highly
educated captives. The tutor of a young Roman of good family was
usually a slave. A rich man would have a Greek slave as librarian, and
slave secretaries and learned men. He would keep his poet as he would
keep a performing dog. In this atmosphere of slavery the traditions of
modern literary criticism were evolved. The slaves still boast and
quarrel in our reviews. There were enterprising people who bought
intelligent boy slaves and had them educated for sale. Slaves were
trained as book copyists, as jewellers, and for endless skilled
callings.
THE COLISEUM, ROME
THE COLISEUM, ROME
_Photo: Underwood & Underwood_
INTERIOR OF THE COLISEUM AT IT APPEARS TO-DAY
INTERIOR OF THE COLISEUM AT IT APPEARS TO-DAY
But there were very considerable changes in the position of a slave
during the four hundred years between the opening days of conquest
under the republic of rich men and the days of disintegration that
followed the great pestilence. In the second century B.C. war-captives
were abundant, manners gross and brutal; the slave had no rights and
there was scarcely an outrage the reader can imagine that was not
practised upon slaves in those days. But already in the first century
A.D. there was a perceptible improvement in the attitude of the Roman
civilization towards slavery. Captives were not so abundant for one
thing, and slaves were dearer. And slave- owners began to realize that
the profit and comfort they got from their slaves increased with the
self-respect of these unfortunates. But also the moral tone of the
community was rising, and a sense of justice was becoming effective.
The higher mentality of Greece was qualifying the old Roman harshness.
Restrictions upon cruelty were made, a master might no longer sell his
slave to fight beasts, a slave was given property rights in what was
called his _peculium_, slaves were paid wages as an encouragement and
stimulus, a form of slave marriage was recognized. Very many forms of
agriculture do not lend themselves to gang working, or require gang
workers only at certain seasons. In regions where such conditions
prevailed the slave presently became a serf, paying his owner part of
his produce or working for him at certain seasons.
When we begin to realize how essentially this great Latin and
Greek-speaking Roman Empire of the first two centuries A.D. was a slave
state and how small was the minority who had any pride or freedom in
their lives, we lay our hands on the clues to its decay and collapse.
There was little of what we should call family life, few homes of
temperate living and active thought and study; schools and colleges
were few and far between. The free will and the free mind were nowhere
to be found. The great roads, the ruins of splendid buildings, the
tradition of law and power it left for the astonishment of succeeding
generations must not conceal from us that all its outer splendour was
built upon thwarted wills, stifled intelligence, and crippled and
perverted desires. And even the minority who lorded it over that wide
realm of subjugation and of restraint and forced labour were uneasy and
unhappy in their souls; art and literature, science and philosophy,
which are the fruits of free and happy minds, waned in that atmosphere.
There was much copying and imitation, an abundance of artistic
artificers, much slavish pedantry among the servile men of learning,
but the whole Roman empire in four centuries produced nothing to set
beside the bold and noble intellectual activities of the comparatively
little city of Athens during its one century of greatness. Athens
decayed under the Roman sceptre. The science of Alexandria decayed.
The spirit of man, it seemed, was decaying in those days.
XXXVI
RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE
The soul of man under that Latin and Greek empire of the first two
centuries of the Christian era was a worried and frustrated soul.
Compulsion and cruelty reigned; there were pride and display but little
honour; little serenity or steadfast happiness. The unfortunate were
despised and wretched; the fortunate were insecure and feverishly eager
for gratifications. In a great number of cities life centred on the red
excitement of the arena, where men and beasts fought and were tormented
and slain. Amphitheatres are the most characteristic of Roman ruins.
Life went on in that key. The uneasiness of men’s hearts manifested
itself in profound religious unrest.
From the days when the Aryan hordes first broke in upon the ancient
civilizations, it was inevitable that the old gods of the temples and
priesthoods should suffer great adaptations or disappear. In the
course of hundreds of generations the agricultural peoples of the
brunette civilizations had shaped their lives and thoughts to the
temple-centred life. Observances and the fear of disturbed routines,
sacrifices and mysteries, dominated their minds. Their gods seem
monstrous and illogical to our modern minds because we belong to an
Aryanized world, but to these older peoples these deities had the
immediate conviction and vividness of things seen in an intense dream.
The conquest of one city state by another in Sumeria or early Egypt
meant a change or a renaming of gods or goddesses, but left the shape
and spirit of the worship intact. There was no change in its general
character. The figures in the dream changed, but the dream went on and
it was the same sort of dream. And the early Semitic conquerors were
sufficiently akin in spirit to the Sumerians to take over the religion
of the Mesopotamian civilization they subjugated without any profound
alteration. Egypt was never indeed subjugated to the extent of a
religious revolution. Under the Ptolemies and under the Cæsars, her
temples and altars and priesthoods remained essentially Egyptian.
So long as conquests went on between people of similar social and
religious habits it was possible to get over the clash between the god
of this temple and region and the god of that by a process of grouping
or assimilation. If the two gods were alike in character they were
identified. It was really the same god under another name, said the
priests and the people. This fusion of gods is called theocrasia; and
the age of the great conquests of the thousand years B.C. was an age of
theocrasia. Over wide areas the local gods were displaced by, or
rather they were swallowed up in, a general god. So that when at last
Hebrew prophets in Babylon proclaimed one God of Righteousness in all
the earth men’s minds were fully prepared for that idea.
But often the gods were too dissimilar for such an assimilation, and
then they were grouped together in some plausible relationship. A
female god - and the Ægean world before the coming of the Greek was
much addicted to Mother Gods—would be married to a male god, and an
animal god or a star god would be humanized and the animal or
astronomical aspect, the serpent or the sun or the star, made into an
ornament or a symbol. Or the god of a defeated people would become a
malignant antagonist to the brighter gods. The history of theology is
full of such adaptations, compromises and rationalizations of once
local gods.
As Egypt developed from city states into one united kingdom there was
much of this theocrasia. The chief god so to speak was Osiris, a
sacrificial harvest god of whom Pharaoh was supposed to be the earthly
incarnation. Osiris was represented as repeatedly dying and rising
again; he was not only the seed and the harvest but also by a natural
extension of thought the means of human immortality. Among his symbols
was the wide-winged scarabeus beetle which buries its eggs to rise
again, and also the effulgent sun which sets to rise. Later on he was
to be identified with Apis, the sacred bull. Associated with him was
the goddess Isis. Isis was also Hathor, a cow-goddess, and the
crescent moon and the Star of the sea. Osiris dies and she bears a
child, Horus, who is also a hawk-god and the dawn, and who grows to
become Osiris again. The effigies of Isis represent her as bearing the
infant Horus in her arms and standing on the crescent moon. These are
not logical relationships, but they were devised by the human mind
before the development of hard and systematic thinking and they have a
dream-like coherence. Beneath this triple group there are other and
darker Egyptian gods, bad gods, the dog-headed Anubis, black night and
the like, devourers, tempters, enemies of god and man.
MITHRAS SACRIFICING A BULL, ROMAN
MITHRAS SACRIFICING A BULL, ROMAN
_(In the British Museum)_
Every religious system does in the course of time fit itself to the
shape of the human soul, and there can be no doubt that out of these
illogical and even uncouth symbols, Egyptian people were able to
fashion for themselves ways of genuine devotion and consolation. The
desire for immortality was very strong in the Egyptian mind, and the
religious life of Egypt turned on that desire. The Egyptian religion
was an immortality religion as no other religion had ever been. As
Egypt went down under foreign conquerors and the Egyptian gods ceased
to have any satisfactory political significance, this craving for a
life of compensations here-after, intensified.
ISIS AND HORUS
ISIS AND HORUS
After the Greek conquest, the new city of Alexandria became the centre
of Egyptian religious life, and indeed of the religious life of the
whole Hellenic world. A great temple, the Serapeum, was set up by
Ptolemy I at which a sort of trinity of gods was worshipped. These were
Serapis (who was Osiris-Apis rechristened), Isis and Horus. These were
not regarded as separate gods but as three aspects of one god, and
Serapis was identified with the Greek Zeus, the Roman Jupiter and the
Persian sun-god. This worship spread wherever the Hellenic influence
extended, even into North India and Western China. The idea of
immortality, an immortality of compensations and consolation, was
eagerly received by a world in which the common life was hopelessly
wretched. Serapis was called “the saviour of souls.” “After death,”
said the hymns of that time, “we are still in the care of his
providence.” Isis attracted many devotees. Her images stood in her
temples, as Queen of Heaven, bearing the infant Horus in her arms.
Candles were burnt before her, votive offerings were made to her,
shaven priests consecrated to celibacy waited on her altar.
The rise of the Roman empire opened the western European world to this
growing cult. The temples of Serapis-Isis, the chanting of the priests
and the hope of immortal life, followed the Roman standards to Scotland
and Holland. But there were many rivals to the Serapis-Isis religion.
Prominent among these was Mithraism. This was a religion of Persian
origin, and it centred upon some now forgotten mysteries about Mithras
sacrificing a sacred and benevolent bull. Here we seem to have
something more primordial than the complicated and sophisticated
Serapis-Isis beliefs. We are carried back directly to the blood
sacrifices of the heliolithic stage in human culture. The bull upon
the Mithraic monuments always bleeds copiously from a wound in its
side, and from this blood springs new life. The votary to Mithraism
actually bathed in the blood of the sacrificial bull. At his
initiation he went beneath a scaffolding upon which a bull was killed
so that the blood could actually run down on him.
Both these religions, and the same is true of many other of the
numerous parallel cults that sought the allegiance of the slaves and
citizens under the earlier Roman emperors, are personal religions.
They aim at personal salvation and personal immortality. The older
religions were not personal like that; they were social. The older
fashion of divinity was god or goddess of the city first or of the
state, and only secondarily of the individual. The sacrifices were a
public and not a private function. They concerned collective practical
needs in this world in which we live. But the Greeks first and now the
Romans had pushed religion out of politics. Guided by the Egyptian
tradition religion had retreated to the other world.
BUST OF THE EMPEROR COMMODUS, A.D. 180-192
BUST OF THE EMPEROR COMMODUS, A.D. 180-192
Represented as the God Mithras, Roman, Circa A.D. 190
_(In the British Museum)_
These new private immortality religions took all the heart and emotion
out of the old state religions, but they did not actually replace them.
A typical city under the earlier Roman emperors would have a number of
temples to all sorts of gods. There might be a temple to Jupiter of
the Capitol, the great god of Rome, and there would probably be one to
the reigning Cæsar. For the Cæsars had learnt from the Pharaohs the
possibility of being gods. In such temples a cold and stately
political worship went on; one would go and make an offering and burn a
pinch of incense to show one’s loyalty. But it would be to the temple
of Isis, the dear Queen of Heaven, one would go with the burthen of
one’s private troubles for advice and relief. There might be local and
eccentric gods. Seville, for example, long affected the worship of the
old Carthaginian Venus. In a cave or an underground temple there would
certainly be an altar to Mithras, attended by legionaries and slaves.
And probably also there would be a synagogue where the Jews gathered to
read their Bible and uphold their faith in the unseen God of all the
Earth.
Sometimes there would be trouble with the Jews about the political side
of the state religion. They held that their God was a jealous God
intolerant of idolatry, and they would refuse to take part in the
public sacrifices to Cæsar. They would not even salute the Roman
standards for fear of idolatry.
In the East long before the time of Buddha there had been ascetics, men
and women who gave up most of the delights of life, who repudiated
marriage and property and sought spiritual powers and an escape from
the stresses and mortifications of the world in abstinence, pain and
solitude. Buddha himself set his face against ascetic extravagances,
but many of his disciples followed a monkish life of great severity.
Obscure Greek cults practised similar disciplines even to the extent of
self-mutilation. Asceticism appeared in the Jewish communities of
Judea and Alexandria also in the first century B.C. Communities of men
abandoned the world and gave themselves to austerities and mystical
contemplation. Such was the sect of the Essenes. Throughout the first
and second centuries A.D. there was an almost world-wide resort to such
repudiations of life, a universal search for “salvation” from the
distresses of the time. The old sense of an established order, the old
confidence in priest and temple and law and custom, had gone. Amidst
the prevailing slavery, cruelty, fear, anxiety, waste, display and
hectic self-indulgence, went this epidemic of self- disgust and mental
insecurity, this agonized search for peace even at the price of
renunciation and voluntary suffering. This it was that filled the
Serapeum with weeping penitents and brought the converts into the gloom
and gore of the Mithraic cave.
XXXVII
THE TEACHING OF JESUS
It was while Augustus Cæsar, the first of the Emperors, was reigning in
Rome that Jesus who is the Christ of Christianity was born in Judea. In
his name a religion was to arise which was destined to become the
official religion of the entire Roman Empire.
Now it is on the whole more convenient to keep history and theology
apart. A large proportion of the Christian world believes that Jesus
was an incarnation of that God of all the Earth whom the Jews first
recognized. The historian, if he is to remain historian, can neither
accept nor deny that interpretation. Materially Jesus appeared in the
likeness of a man, and it is as a man that the historian must deal with
him.
He appeared in Judea in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar. He was a prophet.
He preached after the fashion of the preceding Jewish prophets. He
was a man of about thirty, and we are in the profoundest ignorance of
his manner of life before his preaching began.
Our only direct sources of information about the life and teaching of
Jesus are the four Gospels. All four agree in giving us a picture of a
very definite personality. One is obliged to say, “Here was a man.
This could not have been invented.”
But just as the personality of Gautama Buddha has been distorted and
obscured by the stiff squatting figure, the gilded idol of later
Buddhism, so one feels that the lean and strenuous personality of Jesus
is much wronged by the unreality and conventionality that a mistaken
reverence has imposed upon his figure in modern Christian art. Jesus
was a penniless teacher, who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country
of Judea, living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always
represented clean, combed and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect and
with something motionless about him as though he was gliding through
the air. This alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people
who cannot distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental and
unwise additions of the unintelligently devout.
We are left, if we do strip this record of these difficult accessories,
with the figure of a being, very human, very earnest and passionate,
capable of swift anger, and teaching a new and simple and profound
doctrine—namely, the universal loving Fatherhood of God and the coming
of the Kingdom of Heaven. He was clearly a person—to use a common
phrase—of intense personal magnetism. He attracted followers and
filled them with love and courage. Weak and ailing people were
heartened and healed by his presence. Yet he was probably of a
delicate physique, because of the swiftness with which he died under
the pains of crucifixion. There is a tradition that he fainted when,
according to the custom, he was made to bear his cross to the place of
execution. He went about the country for three years spreading his
doctrine and then he came to Jerusalem and was accused of trying to set
up a strange kingdom in Judea; he was tried upon this charge, and
crucified together with two thieves. Long before these two were dead
his sufferings were over.
The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of
Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever
stirred and changed human thought. It is small wonder if the world of
that time failed to grasp its full significance, and recoiled in dismay
from even a half apprehension of its tremendous challenges to the
established habits and institutions of mankind. For the doctrine of
the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus seems to have preached it, was no less
than a bold and uncompromising demand for a complete change and
cleansing of the life of our struggling race, an utter cleansing,
without and within. To the gospels the reader must go for all that is
preserved of this tremendous teaching; here we are only concerned with
the jar of its impact upon established ideas.