History Of Ancient Civilization Part 28

THE REVOLUTIONS OF THE THIRD CENTURY

=Military Anarchy.=--After the reigns of the Antonines the civil wars commenced. There were in the empire, beside the praetorian guard in Rome, several great armies on the Rhine, on the Danube, in the East, and in England. Each aimed to make its general emperor. Ordinarily the rivals fought it out until there was but one left; this one then governed for a few years, after which he was a.s.sa.s.sinated,[168] or if, by chance, he could transmit his power to his son, the soldiers revolted against the son and the war recommenced. The following, for example, is what occurred in 193. The praetorians had ma.s.sacred the emperor Pertinax, and the army conceived the notion of putting up the empire at auction; two purchasers presented themselves, Sulpicius offering each soldier $1,000 and Didius more than $1,200. The praetorians brought the latter to the Senate and had him named emperor; later, when he did not pay them, they murdered him. At the same time the great armies of Britain, Illyric.u.m, and Syria proclaimed each its own general as emperor and the three rivals marched on Rome. The Illyrian legions arrived first, and their general Septimius Severus was named emperor by the Senate. Then commenced two sanguinary wars, the one against the legions of Syria, and the other against the legions of Britain. At the end of two years the emperor was victorious. It is he who states his policy as follows, "My son, content the soldiers and you may despise the rest." For a century there was no other form of government than the will of the soldiers.

They killed the emperors who displeased them and replaced them by their favorites.

Strange emperors, therefore, occupied the throne: Elagabalus, a Syrian priest, who garbed himself as a woman and had his mother a.s.semble a senate of women; Maximin, a soldier of fortune, a rough and bloodthirsty giant, who ate, it was said, thirty pounds of food and drank twenty-one quarts of wine a day. Once there were twenty emperors at the same time, each in a corner of the empire (260-278). These have been called the Thirty Tyrants.

The Cult of Mithra.--This century of wars is also a century of superst.i.tions. The deities of the Orient, Isis, Osiris, the Great Mother, have their devotees everywhere. But, more than all the others, Mithra, a Persian G.o.d, becomes the universal G.o.d of the empire. Mithra is no other than the sun. The monuments in his honor that are found in all parts of the empire represent him slaughtering a bull, with this inscription: "To the unconquerable sun, to the G.o.d Mithra." His cult is complicated, sometimes similar to the Christian wors.h.i.+p; there are a baptism, sacred feasts, an anointing, penances, and chapels. To be admitted to this one must pa.s.s through an initiatory ceremony, through fasting and certain fearful tests.

At the end of the third century the religion of Mithra was the official religion of the empire. The Invincible G.o.d was the G.o.d of the emperors; he had his chapels everywhere in the form of grottoes with altars and bas-reliefs; in Rome, even, he had a magnificent temple erected by the emperor Aurelian.

=The Taurobolia.=--One of the most urgent needs of this time was reconciliation with the deity; and so ceremonies of purification were invented.

The most striking of these was the Taurobolia. The devotee, clad in a white robe with ornaments of gold, takes his place in the bottom of a ditch which is covered by a platform pierced with holes. A bull is led over this platform, the priest kills him and his blood runs through the holes of the platform upon the garments, the face, and the hair of the wors.h.i.+pper. It was believed that this "baptism of blood" purified one of all sins. He who had received it was born to a new life; he came forth from the ditch hideous to look upon, but happy and envied.

=Confusion of Religions.=--In the century that preceded the victory of Christianity, all religions fell into confusion. The sun was adored at once under many names (Sol, Helios, Baal, Elagabal, and Mithra). All the cults imitated one another and sometimes copied Christian forms.

Even the life of Christ was copied. The Asiatic philosopher, Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in the first century (3-96), became in legend a kind of prophet, son of a G.o.d, who went about surrounded by his disciples, expelling demons, curing sicknesses, raising the dead.

He had come, it was said, to reform the doctrine of Pythagoras and Plato. In the third century an empress had the life of Apollonius of Tyana written, to be, as it were, a Pythagorean gospel opposed to the gospel of Christ. The most remarkable example of this confusion in religion was given by Alexander Severus, a devout emperor, mild and conscientious: he had in his palace a chapel where he adored the benefactors of humanity--Abraham, Orpheus, Jesus, and Apollonius of Tyana.

THE GOVERNMENT OF THE LATER EMPIRE

=Reforms of Diocletian and Constantine.=--After a century of civil wars emperors were found who were able to stop the anarchy. They were men of the people, rude and active, soldiers of fortune rising from one grade to another to become generals-in-chief, and then emperors.

Almost all arose in the semi-barbarous provinces of the Danube and of Illyria; some in their infancy had been shepherds or peasants. They had the simple manners of the old Roman generals. When the envoys of the king of Persia asked to see the emperor Probus, they found a bald old man clad in a linen ca.s.sock, lying on the ground, who ate peas and bacon. It was the story of Curius Dentatus repeated after five centuries.

Severe with their soldiers, these emperors reestablished discipline in the army, and then order in the empire. But a change had become necessary. A single man was no longer adequate to the government and defence of this immense territory; and so from this time each emperor took from among his relatives or his friends two or three collaborators, each charged with a part of the empire. Usually their t.i.tle was that of Caesar, but sometimes there were two equal emperors, and both had the t.i.tle of Augustus. When the emperor died, one of the Caesars succeeded him; it was no longer possible for the army to create emperors. The provinces were too great, and Diocletian divided them.

The praetorians of Rome being dangerous, Diocletian replaced them with two legions. The Occident was in ruins and depopulated and hence the Orient had become the important part of the empire; Diocletian, therefore, abandoned Rome and established his capital at Nicomedia in Asia Minor.[169] Constantine did more and founded a new Rome in the East--Constantinople.

=Constantinople.=--On a promontory where Europe is separated from Asia only by the narrow channel of the Bosporus, in a country of vineyards and rich harvests, under a beautiful sky, Greek colonists had founded the town of Byzantium. The hills of the vicinity made the place easily defensible; its port, the Golden Horn, one of the best in the world, could shelter 1,200 s.h.i.+ps, and a chain of 820 feet in length was all that was necessary to exclude a hostile fleet. This was the site of Constantine's new city, Constantinople (the city of Constantine).

Around the city were strong walls; two public squares surrounded with porticos were constructed; a palace was erected, a circus, theatres, aqueducts, baths, temples, and a Christian church. To ornament his city Constantine transferred from other cities the most celebrated statues and bas-reliefs. To furnish it with population he forced the people of the neighboring towns to remove to it, and offered rewards and honors to the great families who would come hither to make their home. He established, as in Rome, distributions of grain, of wine, of oil, and provided a continuous round of shows. This was one of those rapid transformations, almost fantastic, in which the Orient delights.

The task began the 4th of November, 326; on the 11th of May, 330, the city was dedicated. But it was a permanent creation. For ten centuries Constantinople resisted invasions, preserving always in the ruins of the empire its rank of capital. Today it is still the first city of the East.

=The Palace.=--The emperors who dwelt in the East[170] adopted the customs of the Orient, wearing delicate garments of silk and gold and for a head-dress a diadem of pearls. They secluded themselves in the depths of their palace where they sat on a throne of gold, surrounded by their ministers, separated from the world by a crowd of courtiers, servants, functionaries and military guards. One must prostrate one's self before them with face to the earth in token of adoration; they were called Lord and Majesty; they were treated as G.o.ds. Everything that touched their person was sacred, and so men spoke of the sacred palace, the sacred bed-chamber, the sacred Council of State, even the sacred treasury.

The regime of this period has been termed that of the Later Empire as distinguished from that of the three preceding centuries, which we call the Early Empire.

The life of an emperor of the Early Empire (from the first to the third century) was still that of a magistrate and a general; the palace of an emperor of the Later Empire became similar to the court of the Persian king.

=The Officials.=--The officials often became very numerous. Diocletian found the provinces too large and so made several divisions of them.

In Gaul, for example, Lugdunensis (the province about Lyons) was part.i.tioned into four, Aquitaine into three. In place of forty-six governors there were from this time 117.[171]

At the same time the duties of the officials were divided. Besides the governors and the deputies in the provinces there were in the border provinces military commanders--the dukes and the counts. The emperor had about him a small picked force to guard the palace, body-guards, chamberlains, a.s.sistants, domestics, a council of state, bailiffs, messengers, and a whole body of secretaries organized in four bureaus.

All these officials did not now receive their orders directly from the emperor; they communicated with him only through their superior officers. The governors were subordinate to the two praetorian prefects, the officials of public works to the two prefects of the city, the collectors of taxes to the Count of the Sacred Largesses, the deputies to the Count of the Domains, all the officers of the palace to the Master of the Offices, the domestics of the court to the Chamberlain. These heads of departments had the character of ministers.

This system is not very difficult for us to comprehend. We are accustomed to see officials, judges, generals, collectors, and engineers, organized in distinct departments, each with his special duty, and subordinated to the commands of a chief of the service. We even have more ministers than there were in Constantinople; but this administrative machine which has become so familiar to us because we have been acquainted with it from our infancy, is none the less complicated and unnatural. It is the Later Empire that gave us the first model of this; the Byzantine empire preserved it and since that time all absolute governments have been forced to imitate it because it has made the work of government easier for those who have it to do.

=Society in the Later Empire.=--The Later Empire is a decisive moment in the history of civilization. The absolute power of the Roman magistrate is united to the pompous ceremonial of the eastern kings to create a power unknown before in history. This new imperial majesty crushes everything beneath it; the inhabitants of the empire cease to be citizens and from the fourth century are called in Latin "subjects"

and in Greek "slaves." In reality all are slaves of the emperor, but there are different grades of servitude. There are various degrees of n.o.bility which the master confers on them and which they transmit to their posterity. The following is the series:[172]

1. The _n.o.bilissimi_ (the very n.o.ble); these are the imperial family;

2. The _Ill.u.s.tres_ (the notable)--the chief ministers of departments;

3. The _Spectabiles_ (the eminent)--the high dignitaries;

4. The _Clarissimi_ (most renowned)--the great officials, also sometimes called senators;

5. The _Perfectissimi_ (very perfect).[173]

Every important man has his rank, his t.i.tle, and his functions.[174]

The only men who are of consequence are the courtiers and officials; it is the regime of t.i.tles and of etiquette. A clearer instance has never been given of the issue of absolute power united with the mania for t.i.tles and with the purpose to regulate everything. The Later Empire exhibits the completed type of a society reduced to a machine and of a government absorbed by a court. It realized the ideal that is proposed today by the partisans of absolute power; and for a long time the friends of liberty must fight against the traditions which the Later Empire has left to us.

THE CHURCH AND THE STATE

=Triumph of Christianity.=--During the first two centuries of our era the Christians occupied but a small place in the empire. Almost all of them were of the lower cla.s.ses, workmen, freedmen, slaves, who lived obscure lives in the mult.i.tude of the great cities. For a long time the aristocracy ignored the Christians; even in the second century Suetonius in his "Lives of the Twelve Caesars" speaks of a certain Chrestus who agitated the populace of Rome. When the religion first concerned the world of the rich and cultivated people, they were interested simply to deride it as one only for the poor and ignorant.

It was precisely because it addressed the poor of this world in providing a compensation in the life to come that Christianity made so many proselytes. Persecution, far from suppressing it, gave it more force. "The blood of the martyrs," said the faithful, "is the seed of the church." During the whole of the third century conversions continued, not only among the poor, but among the aristocracy as well.

At the first of the fourth century all the East had become Christian.

Helena, the mother of Constantine, was a Christian and has been canonized by the church. When Constantine marched against his rival, he took for his ensign a standard (the labarum), which bore the cross and the monogram of Christ. His victory was the victory of the Christians. He allowed them now to perform their religious rites freely (by the edict of 313), and later he favored them openly. Yet he did not break with the ancient religion: while he presided at the great a.s.sembly of the Christian bishops, he continued to hold the t.i.tle of Pontifex Maximus; he carried in his helmet a nail of the true cross and on his coins he still had the sun-G.o.d represented. In his city of Constantinople he had a Christian church built, but also a temple to Victory. For a half-century it was difficult to know what was the official religion of the empire.

=Organization of the Church.=--The Christians even under persecution had never dreamed of overthrowing the empire. As soon as persecution ceased, the bishops became the allies of the emperors. Then the Christian church was organized definitively, and it was organized on the model of the Later Empire, in the form that it preserves to this day. Each city had a bishop who resided in the city proper and governed the people of the territory; this territory subject to the bishop was termed a Diocese. In any country in the Later Empire, there were as many bishops and dioceses as there were cities. This is why the bishops were so numerous and dioceses so many in the East and in Italy where the country was covered with cities. In Gaul, on the contrary, there were but 120 dioceses between the Rhine and the Pyrenees, and the most of these, save in the south, were of the size of a modern French department. Each province became an ecclesiastical province; the bishop of the capital (metropolis) became the metropolitan, or as he was later termed, the archbishop.

=The Councils.=--In this century began the councils, the great a.s.semblies of the church. There had already been some local councils at which the bishops and priests of a single province had been present. For the first time, in 324,[175] Constantine convoked a General a.s.sembly of the World (an ec.u.menical council) at Nicaea, in Asia Minor; 318 ecclesiastics were in attendance. They discussed questions of theology and drew up the Nicene Creed, the Catholic confession of faith. Then the emperor wrote to all the churches, bidding them "conform to the will of G.o.d as expressed by the council."

This was the first ec.u.menical council, and there were three others[176] of these before the arrival of the barbarians made an a.s.sembly of the whole church impossible. The decisions reached by these councils had the force of law for all Christians: the decisions are called Canons[177] (rules). The collection of these regulations const.i.tutes the Canon Law.

=The Heretics.=--From the second century there were among the Christians heretics who professed opinions contrary to those of the majority of the church. Often the bishops of a country a.s.sembled to p.r.o.nounce the new teaching as false, to compel the author to abjure, and, if he refused, to separate him from the communion of Christians.

But frequently the author of the heresy had partisans convinced of the truth of his teaching who would not submit and continued to profess the condemned opinions. This was the cause of hatred and violent strife between them and the faithful who were attached to the creed of the church (the orthodox). As long as the Christians were weak and persecuted by the state, they fought among themselves only with words and with books; but when all society was Christian, the contests against the heretics turned into persecutions, and sometimes into civil wars.

Almost all of the heresies of this time arose among the Greeks of Asia or Egypt, peoples who were subtle, sophistical, and disputatious. The heresies were usually attempts to explain the mysteries of the Trinity and of the Incarnation. The most significant of these heresies was that of Arius; he taught that Christ was created by G.o.d the Father and was not equal to him. The Council of Nicaea condemned this view, but his doctrine, called Arianism, spread throughout the East. From that time for two centuries Catholics and Arians fought to see who should have the supremacy in the church; the stronger party anathematized, exiled, imprisoned, and sometimes killed the chiefs of the opposition.

For a long time the Arians had the advantage; several emperors took sides with them; then, too, as the barbarians entered the empire, they were converted to Arianism and received Arian bishops. More than two centuries had pa.s.sed before the Catholics had overcome this heresy.

=Paganism.=--The ancient religion of the Gentiles did not disappear at a single stroke. The Orient was quickly converted; but in the Occident there were few Christians outside the cities, and even there many continued to wors.h.i.+p idols. The first Christian emperors did not wish to break with the ancient imperial religion; they simultaneously protected the bishops of the Christians and the priests of the G.o.ds; they presided over councils and yet remained pontifex maximus. One of them, Julian (surnamed the Apostate), openly returned to the ancient religion. The emperor Gratian in 384[178] was the first to refuse the insignia of the pontifex maximus. But as intolerance was general in this century, as soon as the Roman religion ceased to be official, men began to persecute it. The sacred fire of Rome that had burned for eleven centuries was extinguished, the Vestals were removed, the Olympian games were celebrated for the last time in 394. Then the monks of Egypt issued from their deserts to destroy the altars of the false G.o.ds and to establish relics in the temples of Anubis and Serapis. Marcellus, a bishop of Syria, at the head of a band of soldiers and gladiators sacked the temple of Jupiter at Aparnaea and set himself to scour the country for the destruction of the sanctuaries; he was killed by the peasants and raised by the church to the honor of a saint.

Soon idolatry persisted only in the rural districts where it escaped detection; the idolaters were peasants who continued to adore sacred trees and fountains and to a.s.semble in proscribed sanctuaries.[179]

The Christians commenced to call "pagans" (the peasants) those whom up to this time they had called Gentiles. And this name has still clung to them. Paganism thus led an obscure existence in Italy, in Gaul, and in Spain down to the end of the sixth century.

=Theodosius.=--The incursions of the Germanic peoples into the empire continued for two centuries until the Huns, a people of Tartar hors.e.m.e.n, came from the steppes of Asia, and threw themselves on the Germans, who occupied the country to the north of the Danube. In that country there was already a great German kingdom, that of the Goths, who had been converted to Christianity by Ulfilas, an Arian. To escape the Huns, a part of this people, the West Goths (Visigoths), fled into Roman territory, defeated the Roman armies, and overspread the country even to Greece. Valens, the emperor of the East, had perished in the defeat of Adrianople (378); Gratian, the emperor of the West, took as colleague a n.o.ble Spaniard, Theodosius by name, and gave him the t.i.tle of Augustus of the East (379). Theodosius was able to rehabilitate his army by avoiding a great battle with the Visigoths and by making a war of skirmishes against them; this decided them to conclude a treaty.

They accepted service under the empire, land was given them in the country to the south of the Danube, and they were charged with preventing the enemies of the empire from crossing the river.

Theodosius, having reestablished peace in the East, came to the West where Gratian had been killed by order of the usurper Maximus (383).

This Maximus was the commander of the Roman army of Britain; he had crossed into Gaul with his army, abandoning the Roman provinces of Britain to the ravages of the highland Scotch, had defeated Gratian, and invaded Italy. He was master of the West, Theodosius of the East.

The contest between them was not only one between persons; it was a battle between two religions: Theodosius was Catholic and had a.s.sembled a council at Constantinople to condemn the heresy of Arius (381); Maximus was ill-disposed toward the church. The engagement occurred on the banks of the Save; Maximus was defeated, taken, and executed.

Theodosius established Valentinian II, the son of Gratian, in the West and then returned to the East. But Arbogast, a barbarian Frank, the general of the troops of Valentinian, had the latter killed, and without venturing to proclaim himself emperor since he was not a Roman, had his Roman secretary Eugenius made emperor. This was a religious war: Arbogast had taken the side of the pagans; Theodosius, the victor, had Eugenius executed and himself remained the sole emperor. His victory was that of the Catholic church.

In 391 the emperor Theodosius promulgated the Edict of Milan. It prohibited the practice of the ancient religion; whoever offered a sacrifice, adored an idol, or entered a temple should be condemned to death as a state criminal, and his goods should be confiscated to the profit of the informer. All the pagan temples were razed to the ground or converted into Christian churches. And so Theodosius was extolled by ecclesiastical writers as the model for emperors.