Chapter 9: The Rise and Fall of Rome

Alexander the Great’s conquests spread Greek influence around the Eastern Mediterranean and South-west and Central Asia, as far as northern India, where his soldiers finally forced him to turn back. He died in Babylon, on his way home. After his death, his short-lived empire split into a number of large fragments, governed by his generals. Four hundred years later, these fragments were reunited in an even greater empire, based on Rome.

In the 8^th century BC, around the time when the Homeric epics were first written down and the Olympic Games were first held, Rome was just a little market town at the lowest crossing point on the River Tiber, 15 miles from the sea. By 500 BC, it had grown into a prosperous city-state of some 50,000 people, with a republican form of government.

Somewhere around 380 BC, the city suffered a severe setback when it was subjected to a seven-month siege by an invading army of Gauls from northern Italy. At one stage only the Capitoline Hill remained in Roman hands. The Gauls were eventually bought off, but only after they had reduced to entire city to ruins. When the attackers had dispersed, the Romans rebuilt their city behind new defensive walls.

Between 380 BC and 300 BC, the Romans were involved in a series of bloody wars with neighboring states that resulted in their gaining control of the whole of Italy.
This led to a confrontation with Carthage, the great Phoenician city on the north coast of Africa, starting in 264 BC.
The matter was settled in 146 BC, when a Roman army captured Carthage, slaughtered 200,000 of its inhabitants and sold the remaining 50,000 into slavery.
With Carthage out of the way, Rome was the undisputed ruler of Italy, Spain and North Africa.
War was by now a habit, and each conquest fed the appetite for more. By the end of the first century AD, the empire extended from southern Scotland to the Persian Gulf.

This was an empire built on war. But while wars continued to push its frontiers outwards, within those frontiers war became a thing of the past. The Pax Romana – the ‘Roman peace’ – provided an environment in which trade flourished and city life prospered. Thousands of miles of magnificent roads provided fast and safe movement between cities. Aqueducts brought water from the mountains, and household water meters recorded the quantity consumed. Splendid public buildings lined the city streets. Artificial harbours and lighthouses were built in great ports such as Ostia and Alexandria, where ships up to a thousand tons in weight could be built and repaired.

As far as civil engineering was concerned, it was the most inventive and creative civilization the world had seen. But in science it was one of the most sterile. A half a dozen centuries hardly added anything of note to the world’s stock of mathematical or scientific knowledge.
On the other side of the world, the Chinese were making breakthrough after breakthrough.
Up to the time of the Carthaginian Wars, Rome had been a fairly equal society. But long years of conscript war service, during which they were unable to care for their farms, left their families burdened with debt.

When they returned to civilian life, they discovered that they were the new poor, and that their city was run by, and for, a class of wealthy aristocrats who owned great estates worked by slave labour. During the course of the next two centuries, the resentment of this ground-down peasantry resulted in a series of unsuccessful uprisings, all of which were brutally put down.

In 73 BC, it was the turn of slaves to rise up against their masters. A former soldier named Spartacus, who had been sold into slavery, escaped with 70 other slaves and went into hiding. This was the beginning of a great revolt that ultimately involved 90,000 slaves, who fought a two-year campaign. When they were finally defeated, 6000 were crucified along the roads leading to Rome.

Between AD 100 and AD 200, the Roman empire reached a pinnacle of wealth and power.
Rome with more than half a million inhabitants, was the most populous city in the world.

But the empire was living on borrowed time. As well-to-do Romans reclined on their couches in their Chinese silks and their Arabian perfumes, playing with their pet monkeys while their slaves cooled them with fans made from the feathers of ostriches, a rising tide was lapping their walls. All along their northern frontiers, the barbarians they so despised – the Franks, the Goths and the rest – were increasing in numbers. Attracted by the wealth of the empire, but also driven by pressures generated by other tribes behind them in eastern Europe and Central Asia, they were demanding to be allowed to settle within the empire’s margins.

While the empire was struggling to repel these attacks from outside, it was beginning to disintegrate within, undermined by civil wars and rampant inflation.
At the same time, a split had begun to open up between the empire’s Greek-speaking eastern half and the Latin-speaking west.
The leading city of the eastern empire was the ancient Greek city of Byzantium in Asia Minor (modern Istanbul), which had grown in wealth and population until it rivaled Rome itself.
In 324, the Emperor Constantine I (Constantine the Great) made it his capital, calling it a ‘New Rome’ and renaming it Constantinople.
Being superstitious, like most Romans of his day, he attributed his success to divine intervention by the God of the Christian religion to which he had converted (although he was careful to mention the part played by his own genius).

At the time Constantine converted, Christianity was already more than two and a half centuries old. It had originated in the Roman province of Judea, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. It was rooted in the teachings of a wandering Jewish preacher named Jesus, who was born around 4-6 BC. Most of what we know about him is contained in records compiled at least 40 years after his death. In his early thirties, he spent two or three years preaching. Around the year 30, when he would have been in his mid-thirties, he incurred the wrath of the religious authorities in Jerusalem, who had him charged with blasphemy, in a trail that resulted in his crucifixion.

Jesus’s disciples, and a group of later converts of whom the most notable was a Hellenized Jew from Tarsus, in south-central Turkey, who was later canonized as St Paul, succeeded in perpetuating his memory beyond any reasonable expectation. Although Jesus was an orthodox Jew, his teaching – of personal salvation in an afterlife, as the reward of faith – was cast by his followers in inclusive terms that made it attractive to the hopeless and downtrodden of all beliefs and none. His message of universal love and disregard for the vanity of worldly goods and worldly power operated across class boundaries, to Jew and non-Jew alike. By the time Constantine himself became a convert, there were already hundreds of Christian congregations scattered throughout the empire.

The early Christians took from Judaism two fundamental ideas. The first was a belief in a single, all-powerful God. Jesus’s followers – Jew and non-Jew alike – adhered to this belief, and were quite clear in their minds that they were worshipping the Jewish Jehovah.

Where Christianity parted company with the religion from which it had sprung was in its second fundamental proposition, which, ironically, also ultimately derived from Judasim. Through centuries of exile and persecution, the Jews had clung to the belief that they were God’s chosen people, and that one day God would send them a redeemer – a messiah (‘anointed one’) – who would rescue His people from bondage. The early Christians persuaded themselves that this promise had been fulfilled, and that Jesus was the messiah. The word ‘Christian’ was derived from christos, the Greek form of messiah.

This more systematic expression of belief contained three major elements: that Jesus was not a mere mortal, but the ‘Son of God’; that he had risen from the dead, three days after his crucifixion, and now ‘reigned’ for ever in heaven; and the third – Paul’s own master-stroke – was, that by his death on the cross, Jesus had obtained forgiveness of sin and the promise of eternal life in heaven for all who believed in him.
It was a package of which any salesman would have been proud. Once it had been put together, Rome’s traditional gods were never in with a chance.
By the first century, there were some 7 million Jews within the empire’s boundaries, the vast majority of whom lived outside Palestine.
During the 2^nd century, the Jewish element in the Christian community was diluted into insignificance, as more and more non-Jews responded to missionary activity.
This was in spite of continuing persecution, which at times saw the feeding of Christians to lions, to provide holiday entertainment in the sports stadiums of the empire.
This fast growing religion was given a boost in 313, when Constantine issued a decree – the Edict of Milan – that granted toleration to all religions but made Christianity a favored state religion.
By his example, he turned Christianity into a fashion statement for the ruling class.
One thing that neither Constantine nor his successors could hope to turn was the tide lapping at the empire’s borders.
In 376, the Goths crossed the Danube. In December 406, the vandals and the Suevi crossed the frozen Rhine, overwhelming much of Gaul. In 410, the Visigoths penetrated to the heart of the empire, and sacked Rome itself.
Constantine’s Eastern empire lasted until its conquest by the Turks in 1453. but the bringing down of the curtain on the Western empire in 476 makes a convenient marker for the boundary between the classical age of Greece and Rome and the world of medieval Europe.

Chapter 10: The Birth of India

The Story of Man Part 4

Chapter 9: The Rise and Fall of Rome

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