by VorJack
Over at the Accidental Historian, Geds is starting a series on the Byzantine Empire. Like all good historians, he realizes that to talk about a period of history, he has to go back to well before that period actually began. Back to, say, when the universe cooled enough for protons to form.
Geds splits the difference and goes back to before Constantine, to the appearance of Christianity. In his discussion of religion in the Greco-Roman world, he throws out this:
There was absolutely nothing special about the persecution of Christians.
The Roman authorities saw Christianity as a potentially destabilizing force in exactly the same way it saw criminals and revolutionaries as a destabilizing force. The only reason we’re lead to believe the stories of the Christian martyrs are special is because we have a lot of them.
That reminded me of a quote from a Roman text dated to the early fourth century:
The guilty thief is produced, is interrogated as he deserves; he is tortured, the torturer strikes, his breast is injured, he is hung up … he is beaten with sticks, he is flogged, he runs through the sequence of tortures, and he denies. He is to be punished; he is led to the sword. Then another is produced, innocent, who has a large patronage network with him; well-spoken men are present with him. This one has good fortune; he is absolved. (quoted from The Inheritance of Rome. p.21)
Note the assumptions here. Do you see the casual acceptance of what Chris Wickham calls “judicial violence”? Do you notice the implicit class assumptions?
Does it change your perceptions at all to know that this text was a Greek-Latin primer for school children?
This is the world that early Christianity found itself in.
Great article. It reminded me a quote from “Rome”:
“All citizens be aware that the vassal prince Herod, tetrarch of Galilee, has come to the City. By order of the triumvirate, during his residence here, all mockery of the Jews and their one god shall be kept to an appropriate minimum.”
Lol. Great quote.
I don’t think the Romans had any qualms about persecuting any group that wouldn’t put a statue of the Emperor in their temple, or that wasn’t producing some useful product.
Not only was Christianity not special in having been persecuted by the Romans, the Roman persecution was not even as bad as it was later portrayed. To be sure, there WERE Christians who were punished, even executed, merely because they were Christians, and for no other reason. But there weren’t as many of them as Christianity itself has claimed since then.
It was perhaps Edward Gibbon who first began to question the severity of the Roman persecutions — and in his time this provoked no small amount of outrage. Since Gibbon a lot of ink has been spilt on the matter, and truth — an uncomfortable truth for many Christians — is that not only were the persecutions not as bad as was thought, there were places in the Empire where they never took place at all, or — like Antioch — where there were a lot of Christians, and what authorities did was to pick a couple of them as “tokens” to punish, in order to appear to be following Roman dictates, but left the rest to do what they wanted.
The use of “tokens to punish”, to which PsiCop refers, is the origin of the term “decimate”. It was common for the Romans to take every tenth person (decem) and publicly punish him as an example to the others. This was efficient and effective, especially when crucifixion was the penalty. Decimation was not a wholesale slaughter, as is thought today.
Actually decimation wasn’t used on the public, it was a punishment for the Legions – every tenth man, selected by ballot, was put to death.
The fun bit was that generally the nine who weren’t chosen got to kill the tenth. The Romans had brutality down to an art form, really.
Thanks for the link, VorJack. Mind if I use the protons quote? It’s a much handier shorthand explanation of my theory of history than I’ve ever been able to formulate…
I mean, within a modern-day context, it’s pretty gruesome, but it’s not really that surprising. Humans have always been terrible towards each other and the Roman empire just happened to fall into that “sweet spot” where we had gotten really good at inventing ways to hurt each other, but hadn’t yet gotten very good at coming up with reasons why we shouldn’t hurt each other.
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