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officer records that by the command of Quirinus, who as governor of Syria took the census of Palestine mentioned by St. Luke, he had ascertained the number of citizens in Apamea in Syria; and numbers of his comrades must in like manner have been employed on this troublesome business in every part of the empire.

According to these statistics the land-tax and the poll-tax, the chief sources of revenue in the empire, were assessed. The latter affected only those who did not possess full rights of citizenship and was always regarded as a mark of subjection in consequence; the burden of the former fell upon all land in the provinces unless by the jus Italicum, which was most sparingly conferred, it was placed on the same footing as the soil of Italy, which was exempted from the tax. But even Italian soil ultimately lost its immunity from taxation; and the introduction of the land tax into Italy, which formed part of Diocletian's reform in this department, marks the reduction of this country, privileged above all others in the constitution of Augustus, to the level of the provinces.

Unfortunately taxation in the early days of the empire is one of the most obscure of subjects, as our sources of information yield nothing much until the reign of Diocletian. But the great discoveries of papyri and quantities of receipt-shards (the so-called ostraca) recently made in Egypt have already thrown some light upon the widely extended and complicated administration of the country, and we may hope for further instruction from the land of the Ptolemies, which exercised a stronger influence than any other upon the administration of the Roman Empire.

We might say much more concerning the reforms by which Augustus and his successors transformed the character of the whole empire; of the organisation of the standing army practically created by Cæsar, which in manifold formations compassed about the motley population of the universal empire of Rome with a firm bond; of the imperial coinage which made the denarius and the Roman gold piece legal tender throughout the Roman world and either did away with local coinage or restricted it to private circulation in the place where it was struck (with the sole exception of Egypt, which occupied a peculiar position in this as in other respects); of the institution of an imperial post, which, though it served almost exclusively the purposes of the magistrates and was long a heavy burden on the provincials, is nevertheless a landmark in the history of international communication; of the opening up of remote provinces by the extended network of roads, on the milestones of which nearly all the emperors since Augustus inscribed their names, especially Trajan, Hadrian, Severus, and Caracalla; of the alimentary institutions originated by Nerva (one of the few government institutions for the public welfare in ancient times), which were intended to subserve both the maintenance of the citizen class and the furtherance of agriculture in Italy. We should gladly dwell upon the further development of Roman law by the council of state organised by Hadrian, after Augustus the greatest reformer on the imperial throne, and on the redaction of the edictum perpetuum carried out at his command by Salvius Julianus, whose full name and career we have but recently learned from an inscription found in Africa, which paved the way for a common law for the whole empire and prepared the great age of jurisprudence at the beginning of the third century, when the springs of creative power in art and literature were almost wholly dried up. But within the narrow limits of this brief survey we must refrain from this, as from a description of the prosperity and decline of the highly developed municipal life of the period, and a sketch of the history of

the empire at home and abroad, and of its intellectual life. One question, however, cannot be left altogether without answer-the question of the attitude of the imperial government towards alien religions, and, above all, towards Christianity. A detailed examination of the position of Christianity in the Roman Empire by the authority best qualified to speak on the subject1 will be found in another part of this work, and I can therefore confine myself in this place to a brief notice.

THE EMPIRE AND THE PAGAN CREED

Paganism is essentially tolerant, and the Romans always extended a full measure of this toleration to the religions of the nations they conquered. The early custom of transferring to Rome the tutelary divinity of any conquered city in the vicinity is a practical expression of the view that any addition to the Roman pantheon (which had begun to grow into a GræcoRoman pantheon by the admittance of Apollo and the Sibyls and had actually been such since the war with Hannibal) must be regarded simply as an addition to the divine patrons of Rome. In the main this view was adhered to under the empire, although Augustus formulated more definitely the idea of a Roman state religion and closed the circle of gods to whom worship was due on the part of the state. But we have evidence of the spirit of tolerance and the capacity for assimilation characteristic of the age in the wide dissemination of the Egyptian cults of Isis and Serapis, especially in the upper ranks of society, and still more in the worship-deep rooted among the masses and spread abroad over the greatest part of the earth-of the Persian Mithras, whom Diocletian and his co-regents praised in the great Danubian camp of Caruntum as the patron of their dominion. Even the Phoenician gods of Africa and the Celtic gods of Gaul and the Danube provinces were allowed to survive by identification with Roman divinities of a somewhat similar character, and in the outlandish surnames bestowed upon the latter; although the names of the great Celtic divinities disappear from the monuments—a matter in which the government undoubtedly had a hand. So many barbarians, says Lucian the scoffer, have made their way into Olympus that they have ousted the old gods from their places, and ambrosia and nectar have become scanty by reason of the crowd of topers; and he makes Zeus resolve upon a thorough clearance, in order unrelentingly to thrust forth from Olympus all who could not prove their title to that divine abode, even though they had a great temple on earth and there enjoyed divine honours.

In view of the lengths to which the Romans carried the principle of giving free course to every religion within the empire so long as its professors did not come into conflict with the government officials or tend to form hotbeds of political intrigue, such as were the schools of the Druids, how did it come to pass that the Christian religion, and to a less extent the Jewish religion also, were assailed as hostile and dangerous to the state?

It is the collision between monotheism and polytheism, between the worship of God and from the Jewish and Christian point of view — the worship of idols. The great crime which Tacitus lays to the charge of the Jews, that which brought upon the Christian the imputation of atheism, was contempt for the gods, i.e., the gods of the Roman state. And this denial was not only aimed at the gods of the Roman pantheon; it applied

[1 See Professor Harnack's article on Church and State on page 629.]

in equal measure to the emperor-god, to whom all subjects of the empire, whatever other religion they professed, were bound to erect altars and temples in the capitals of the provinces, and everywhere do sacrifice; who, conjointly with and above all other gods, in both East and West, demanded that supreme veneration which constituted the touch-stone of loyalty. To refuse this was necessarily regarded as high treason, as crimen læse majestatis, and prosecuted as such. It is true that the monotheistic Jews, after the destruction of their national independence, were allowed by law to exercise their own religion on condition of paying the temple dues in future to the Capitoline Jupiter, and

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penalties were attached only to conversion to the Jewish religion, especially in the case of Roman citizens. But it is evident that they very skilfully contrived to avoid an open rupture with the worship of the emperor no less than with the national religion of Rome; for history has no record of Jewish martyrs who suffered death for their faith under the empire.

THE EMPIRE AND CHRISTIANITY

It was otherwise with Christianity; from the outset, and more particularly after the ministry of Paul, the great Apostle of the Gentiles, which determined the whole course of its subsequent development, it had come forward as a universal religion, circumscribed by no limitations of nationality and gaining proselytes throughout the whole world, an ecclesia militans, resolved to break down all barriers set up by human power and the rulers of this world in order to bear the new faith to victory. Here no lasting compromise was possible. After the reign of Trajan he who did not deny the faith and adore the pagan gods and the image of the emperor had to pay the penalty of an obduracy incomprehensible to the Roman magistrates, by death as a traitor. Singularly enough, it was this emperor, so averse to persecution and self-deification, who outlawed Christianity in the Roman Empire by the verdict that the Christians should not be hunted out, but, when informed against and convicted, should be punished unless they renounced their faith; and most of his successors-though not without exceptions, among whom Hadrian, Severus Alexander, and Philip must be numbered - adopted the same line. It may be that even then they had a presage of the danger to the Roman state that would arise from this international religion which had originated in the East, which declared all men, even slaves, to be equal before God, and was in its essence socialistic; at least it is difficult to explain on any other grounds the profound hatred to which Tacitus, the greatest intellect of his time, gives vent in his description of the prosecution of Christians under Nero.

As a matter of fact the spread of Christianity in Asia had by that time attained considerable proportions, as is evident from the report sent by Pliny

to Trajan and from other records; and as early as the reign of Domitian it had made its way in Rome even to the steps of the throne. But there was certainly no man then living who would have thought it possible that this despised religion of the poor was destined to conquer the world-wide empire, and this disdain is the only explanation we can find for the fact that the first general persecution of the Christians - for the local outbreaks of persecution under Marcus Aurelius, Severus, and Maximinus, confined as they were to a narrow circle, cannot be so called-did not take place until about the middle of the third century. Tertullian may have described too grandiloquently the enormous advance of Christianity throughout the empire; it is nevertheless beyond controversy that by the beginning of the third century it had become a power which serious-minded rulers, solicitous for the maintenance of a national empire, might well imagine that their duty to their country required them to extirpate with fire and sword. In this spirit Decius waged war against Christianity, and so did Diocletian, who assumed the surname of Jovius, after the supreme divinity of Rome, as patron of the national paganism. But it was a hopeless struggle; only ten years later Constantine made his peace with the Christian church by the Milan edict of toleration, and shortly before his death he received baptism.

With Constantine the history of ancient Rome comes to an end; the transference of the capital to Byzantium was the outward visible sign that the Roman Empire was no more. The process of dissolution had long been at work; symptoms thereof come to light as early as the first century, and are frightfully apparent under the weak emperor Marcus, whose melancholy Contemplations breathe the utter hopelessness of a world scourged by war and pestilence. The real dissolution of the Roman world, however, did not take place until the middle of the third century. The empire, assailed by barbarians and rent asunder by internal feuds, became the sport of ambitious generals who in Gaul, Mosia, and Pannonia, placed themselves at the head of their barbarian troops; the time of the so-called Thirty Tyrants witnesses the speedy disintegration of the recently united West.

INEVITABLE DECAY

Nor could the strong emperors from the Danubian provinces check the process of decay. Poverty fell upon the cities of Italy and the provinces, whose material prosperity and patriotic devotion had been the most pleasing pictures offered by the good days of the Roman Empire; seats in the town council and municipal offices, once passionately striven after as the goal of civic ambition, as the election placards at Pompeii testify, now found no candidates because upon their occupants rested the responsibility of raising taxes it was impossible to pay; the way was paved for the compulsory hereditary tenure of posts and trades indispensable to the government. Agriculture was ruined, and documents dating from the third century and the end of the second, which have been recently brought to light in parts of the empire remote from one another, describe with affecting laments the want and hardships endured by colonists and small landholders in the vast imperial demesnes. The currency was debased, silver coins had depreciated to mere tokens, salaries had to be paid for the most part in kind, public credit was destroyed.

The desolation of the land, no longer tilled in consequence of the uncertainty of possession amidst disorders within and without; a steady decrease of the population of Italy and the provinces from the end of the second cen

tury onwards; famine, and a prodigious rise in the cost of all the necessaries of life, which it was a hopeless undertaking to check by any imperial regulation of prices, are the sign-manual of the time. The army, from which Italians had long since disappeared, liberally interspersed with barbarian elements and no longer held together by any interest in the empire and in an emperor who was never the same for long together, was no longer capable of coping with the Goths and Alamanni who ravaged the Roman provinces in all directions; the right bank of the Rhine and the Limes Germanicus and Limes Ræticus, laboriously erected and fortified with ramparts and castellae, fell a prey to the Germans in the middle of the third century. A Roman emperor meets a shameful death in captivity among the Parthians; Dacia, Trajan's hard-won conquest, has to be abandoned and its inhabitants, who were spared by the enemy, transplanted to the southern bank of the Danube.

Towards the end of the third century the cities in Gaul were surrounded with substantial walls, Rome itself had to be fortified against the attacks of the barbarians, and was once more provided with a circumvallation, as in the days of hoary antiquity, by one of the most vigorous of her rulers. Diocletian ceased to make the Eternal City his capital, and realised in practice the idea of division into an Oriental and Occidental world which had stirred the minds of men three centuries before. His successor put a final end to the Roman Empire; but all he had to do was to bury the dead.

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