The Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity
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     With control in the hands of Augustus by 27 B.C., the Augustan Age began. A variety of reforms transformed the Republic into the Empire. Rome entered a period of expansion, prosperity, cultural vigor, and relative political stability that would last until the end of the second century. This was particularly so under the long rule of Augustus (27 B.C.-A.D. 14) and the five "good emperors" (A.D. 96-180).
    During this same period Christianity arose. Initially, it seemed only one of many religious sects and was perceived as a version of Judaism. But through the missionary work of Paul and the internal organization of the Church, Christianity spread and became institutionalized. During the fourth century it was recognized as the state religion within the Roman Empire.
    By then enormous difficulties had been experienced within the Empire. Economic, political, and military problems were so great in the third century that the Empire shrank and nearly collapsed. A revival under the strong leadership of Diocletian and Constantine during the late third and early fourth centuries proved only temporary. By the end of the fourth century, the Empire was split into a Western and an Eastern half. The West was increasingly rural, subject to invasion, and generally in decline; the East evolved into the long-lasting Byzantine Empire. By the end of the fifth century, a unified, effective Western Empire was little more than a memory.
    The selections in this section deal with three topics. The first concerns the general nature of the Empire at its height. During this time those who predominated were the politically active Roman "gentlemen." What was their lifestyle? What were their interests? How did they relate to Classical culture? These same questions apply to some of the Roman emperors, like Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic philosopher. The documents also deal with broader questions. How was the transition from the Republic to the Empire made and what role did Augustus play in this transition? What were the connections between Roman society, culture, and religion?
    The second topic is Christianity. Why was Christianity so appealing, particularly to Roman women? What explains the success of this religious movement? How did Christianity relate to Roman civilization? How did Christian theology relate to Classical philosophy?
    The third topic is the decline and fall of Rome, a problem of continuing interest to historians. Some of the primary documents explore reactions to the fall. The secondary documents offer interpretations of the fall. Here the need to distinguish the Western from the Eastern Roman Empire during the decline and fall is stressed. This topic will take us up to the rise of new civilizations in lands once controlled by Rome; this will be covered in the next section.

The Roman Empire: The Place of Augustus 
Chester G. Starr

With the rise of power of Augustus, the Republic came to an end and the Empire began. Under the long rule of Augustus, patterns were established that would endure well beyond his death in A.D. 14. During his own time Augustus was a controversial person, and ever since scholars have tried to evaluate the man and his rule. In the following selection Chester Starr, a historian at the University of Michigan, analyzes some of the controversies over the place of Augustus in Roman history, here emphasizing his successes in the political and military fields. 

Consider: The ways in which Augustus might be considered a success; how other writers and scholars might disagree with this evaluation.

     The failure of Augustus' social reforms throws into more vivid light his remarkable success in the political and military fields. Working patiently decade after decade Augustus gave the Roman world a sense of internal security based on a consciously elaborated pattern of government which embodied two principles. First came his own preeminence, and as we have seen in regard to coinage and architecture he was not bashful in stressing his own merits and achievements; no less than 150 statues and busts of the first emperor also survive. The second was his emphasis on outward cooperation with the Roman aristocracy, clothed in old constitutional forms; one may also add that on the local level Augustus, to ensure urban peace, favored the dominance of the rich and wellborn as against democracy. In sum, Augustus' reforms were essentially conservative in character....
    Modern historians have evaluated Augustus in many divers ways, but until recently have tended to treat him with respect, partly because of the great triumphs of literature in the "Augustan Age." Of late, however, scholars affected by the overtly arbitrary character of government in some contemporary states have approached Augustus, as the founder of a covertly arbitrary system, with little admiration....
    Certainly he was revered with great and genuine enthusiasm by his contemporaries both in Rome and in the provinces. In rising to the foreground as a single, unique figure Augustus had concentrated upon himself the yearnings of men for order. To this leader, more as symbol than as living creature, the subjects turned for assurance and prosperity in the material world, for a sense of security and purpose on the spiritual level....
    In sum Augustus steered the Empire along lines which it was to follow for centuries to come, both in its strengths and in its weaknesses; the latter often the consequence of artful compromise with the Republican past. When men of later generations looked back on Augustus, they tended to have mixed emotions. His memory among common folk stood high, and the great events of his reign were long coin inmemorate-den-lorated by coins, calendars, and both public and court rites and festivals. Writers of aristocratic stamp from Seneca the Elder on accepted him as inevitable and necessary to stop the Roil-Ian revolution; yet these writers rejected almost unanimously his claim that he had restored the Republic. To them the Empire was an autocratic system, and Augustus was the first autocrat. If Augustus could have heard the voices of future generations as he lay on his deathbed and begged for the applause of the bystanders, his self-satisfaction might have been diminished.

Pagan and Christian: The Appeal of Christianity 
E. R. Dodds

The beginnings of Christianity coincided with the establishment of the Empire under Augustus and the early emperors who succeeded hint. Numerous attempts have been made to analyze Jesus and the rise of Christianity. In the following selection E. R. Dodds views early Christianity from a historical perspective. He focuses on the appeal of Christianity and how it compares with other religions of that period.

Consider: Typical traits Of' mystery religions and how Christianity differed from other mystery religions; other factors that might help explain the rise of Christianity iii this early period.

    In the first place, its very exclusiveness, its refusal to concede any value to alternative forms of worship, which nowadays is often felt to be a weakness, was in the circumstances of the time a source of strength. The religious tolerance which was the normal Greek and Roman practice had resulted by accumulation in a bewildering mass of alternatives. There were too many cults, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from: you could pile one religious insurance on another, yet not feel safe. Christianity made a clean sweep. It lifted the burden of freedom from the shoulders of the individual: one choice, one irrevocable choice, and the road to salvation was clear. . .  .
    Secondly, Christianity was open to all. In principle, it made no social distinctions; it accepted the manual worker, the slave, the outcast, the ex-criminal; and though in the course of our period it developed a strong hierarchic structure, its hierarchy offered an open career to talent. Above all, it did not, like Neoplatonism, demand education . . .  .
    Thirdly, in a period when earthly life was increasingly devalued and guilt-feelings were widely prevalent, Christianity held out to the disinherited the conditional promise of a better inheritance in another world. So did several of its pagan rivals. But Christianity wielded both a bigger stick and a juicier carrot. It was accused of being a religion of fear, and such it no doubt was in the hands of the rigorists. But it was also a religion of lively hope. . .  .
    But lastly, the benefits of becoming a Christian were not confined to the next world. A Christian congregation was from the first a community in a much fuller sense than any corresponding group of Isiac or Mithraist devotees. Its members were bound together not only by common rites but by a common way of life and, as Celsus shrewdly perceived, by their common danger. Their promptitude in bringing material help to brethren in captivity or other distress is attested not only by Christian writers but by Lucian, a far from sympathetic witness. Love of one's neighbour is not an exclusively Christian virtue, but in our period the Christians appear to have practised it much more effectively than any other group. The Church provided the essentials of social security: it cared for widows and orphans, the old, the unemployed, and the disabled; it provided a burial fund for the poor and a nursing service in time of plague. But even more important, I suspect, than these material benefits was the sense of belonging which the Christian community could give. Modern social studies have brought home to us the universality of the 'need to belong' and the unexpected ways in which it can influence human behaviour, particularly among the rootless inhabitants of great cities. I see no reason to think that it was otherwise in antiquity: Epictetus has described for us the dreadful loneliness that can beset a man in the midst of his fellows. Such loneliness must have been felt by millions-the urbanised tribesman, the peasant come to town in search of work, the demobilised soldier, the rentier ruined by inflation, and the manumitted slave. For people in that situation membership of a Christian community might be the only way of maintaining their self-respect and giving their life some semblance of meaning. Within the community there was human warmth: some one was interested in them, both here and hereafter. It is therefore not surprising that the earliest and the most striking advances of Christianity were made in the great cities-in Antioch, in Rome, in Alexandria. Christians were in a more than formal sense members one of another.  I think that was a major cause, perhaps the strongest single cause, of the spread of Christianity.

Women of the Roman Empire
Jo Ann McNamara

Roman women, like Greek women, were usually in a subordinate position to men. Rome was and would remain a patriarchy. However, during the Empire and particularly as Christianity grew in importance, women's roles evolved. In the following selection Jo Ann McNamara stresses how women were able to use their family roles and religion to gain new power and choices.

Consider: Why Christianity may have been so attractive to women; how Christianity played a role in improving women's power and status.

    The Roman Republic was a patriarchy in the strictest sense of the word. Private life rested upon patria potestas, paternal power over the subordinate women, children, slaves, and clients who formed the Roman Familia. The Roman matron was highly respected within limits established by a strong gender system that defined her role as the supporter of the patriarch's power. Public life was conducted in the name of the Senate and People of Rome, institutionally defined as exclusively male. In the last days of the Republic, the power of these institutions was destroyed by civil war at the same time that the army, led by its emperors (originally only a military title), carried the standards of Rome to victory over the many civilizations of the Mediterranean world and ultimately took power over the city of Rome itself. 
    Under the Empire, the boundaries between public and private lives became porous and women began to use their familial roles as instruments of public power. Religion, in particular, offered women a bridge across class and gender differences, from private to public life. Roman women experimented widely with a variety of pagan cults, but increasingly Christianity attracted women with a vision of a community where in Christ "There is neither Jew nor Greek, ... neither bond nor free, ... neither male nor female." (Galatians 3:28)
    Christianity was founded at about the same time as the Roman Empire was established, and for the next three centuries the imperial government and the Christian religion developed on separate but converging tracks. As an outlawed sect, the new religion was peculiarly susceptible to the influence of wealthy and noble women. Their participation was so energetic and prominent that critics often labeled Christianity a religion of women and slaves. In the fourth and fifth centuries, when the Empire had become Christian, it consolidated new political and religious hierarchies which reinforced one another. The synthesis was basically a restructured patriarchy with Christian men firmly in control of both government and church. But Roman Law and Roman Christianity contained a wider range of choices for women regarding marriage and property which passed into the hands of Rome's European successors.

The Later Roman Empire
A. H. M. Jones

Most historians who interpret the decline and fall of the Roman Empire focus on the Western half of the Empire. In fact, the Eastern half did not fall and would not, despite some ups and downs, for another thousand years. A. H. M. Jones, a distinguished British scholar of Greece and Rome, has emphasized the significance of the Eastern Empire's different fate for analyzing the decline and fall of the Western Empire. In the following selection Jones compares conditions in the two halves of the Empire, criticizing those who have theorized that the fall in the West stemmed from long-term internal weaknesses.

 Consider: The primary cause for the collapse in the West according to Jones; other possible causes for the collapse in the West.

    All the historians who have discussed the decline and fall of the Roman empire have been Westerners. Their eyes have been fixed on the collapse of Roman authority in the Western parts and the evolution of the medieval Western European world. They have tended to forget, or to brush aside, one very important fact, that the Roman empire, though it may have declined, did not fall in the fifth century nor indeed for another thousand years. During the fifth century, while the Western parts were being parceled out into a group of barbarian kingdoms, the empire of the East stood its ground. In the sixth it counter- attacked and reconquered Africa from the Vandals and Italy from the Ostrogoths, and part of Spain from the Visigoths. Before the end of the century, it is true, much of Italy and Spain had succumbed to renewed barbarian attacks, and in the seventh the onslaught of the Arabs robbed the empire of Syria, Egypt, and Africa, and the Slavs overran the Balkans. But in Asia Minor the empire lived on, and later, recovering its strength, reconquered much territory that it had lost in the dark days of the seventh century.
    These facts are important, for they demonstrate that the empire did not, as some modern historians have suggested, totter into its grave from senile decay, impelled by a gentle push from the barbarians. Most of the internal weaknesses which these historians stress were common to both halves of the empire. The East was even more Christian than the West, its theological disputes far more embittered. The East, like the West, was administered by a corrupt and extortionate bureaucracy. The Eastern government strove as hard to enforce a rigid caste system, tying the curiales to their cities and the coloni to the soil. Land fell out of cultivation and was deserted in the East as well as in the West. It may be that some of these weaknesses were more accentuated in the West than in the East, but this is a question which needs investigation. It may be also that the initial strength of the Eastern empire in wealth and population was greater, and that it could afford more wastage; but this again must be demonstrated....
    The East then probably possessed greater economic resources, and could thus support with less strain a larger number of idle mouths. A smaller part of its resources went, it would seem, to maintain its aristocracy, and more was thus available for the army and other essential services. It also was probably more populous, and since the economic pressure on the peasantry was perhaps less severe, may have suffered less from population decline. If there is any substance in these arguments, the Eastern government should have been able to raise a larger revenue without overstraining its resources, and to levy more troops without depleting its labour force....
    The Western empire was poorer and less populous, and its social and economic structure more unhealthy. It was thus less able to withstand the tremendous strains imposed by its defense effort, and the internal weaknesses which it developed undoubtedly contributed to its final collapse in the fifth century. But the major cause of its fall was that it was more exposed to barbarian onslaughts which in persistence and sheer weight of numbers far exceeded anything which the empire had previously had to face. The Eastern empire, owing to its greater wealth and population and sounder economy, was better able to carry the burden of defence, but its resources were overstrained and it developed the same weaknesses as the West, if perhaps in a less acute form. Despite these weaknesses it managed in the sixth century not only to hold its own against the Persians in the East but to re-conquer parts of the West, and even when, in the seventh century, it was overrun by the onslaughts of the Persians and the Arabs and the Slavs, it succeeded despite heavy territorial losses in rallying and holding its own. The internal weaknesses of the empire cannot have been a major factor in its decline.

Questions The Roman Empire and Christianity

1. What are the similarities and differences between Roman and Christian rules of conduct and ethics? 
2. What traits of Classical culture and civilization do you find most admirable? Are these also traits of Christianity?
3. In what ways were conditions of Roman civilization conducive to the growth of Christianity? In what ways was Christianity nevertheless contradictory to Roman civilization?
4. How might the very success of the Roman Empire be related to its decline?