A History of the World (27 page)

Yet this experiment in empire had been a considerable political achievement. As with so many later regimes, ultimate power was with the army, which was why so many Roman legions were permanently stationed far from Rome, on the new frontiers in Germany, Britain and North Africa. Roman administrators spread the rule of law through elites who might have started out as British, Gaulish, Dacian or Jewish, but who came to think of themselves as at least partly Roman.

Inside the long walls of Roman imperial power, new ways of living thrived. Something akin to a Mediterranean-wide middle class emerged, city-dwellers who as craftsmen, traders, shopkeepers, legal experts, teachers and builders accumulated enough wealth to enjoy exotic foods, public entertainments and well appointed private homes. Below them, but above the huge slave class, were the workers whose lives, though precarious, were also enlivened by the fast-food stalls of Roman towns, cheap wine and distractions including lotteries,
gambling and circuses – lifestyles not so unlike those of millions of today’s city-dwellers. Even if most people, herding goats or ploughing clay in distant villages, would have known little of all this, Roman imperialism brought obvious material benefits.

What it did
not
bring was a coherent system of beliefs that bound people tightly together, or that provided them with satisfying ways of explaining their fate. Had it done so, then Gibbon’s bugbear, Christianity, could hardly have taken off with such vigour. Julius Caesar and Cleopatra had seen religion and politics as pretty nearly the same thing, as ways of veiling their power so as to obtain the fealty of the masses. Like the emperors who followed him, Caesar could offer booty and favours to a few, and hand-outs to appease the plebs. But he could not inspire faith. The world Caesar had been born into was already a fallen republic, cynical and greedy, which had already experienced the rule of a part-time military dictator, Sulla. Yet it still thought of itself as having a virtuous and stable republican future. Hitherto, reason, order and political compromise had been possible. After Caesar, they were not.

The Chinese Parallel

China’s first emperor and his warrior state of Ch’in had engulfed the central area of that part of the world in a succession of terrible wars. Like Caesar, Zheng had had a megalomaniac vision of personal power. And paralleling Julius Caesar’s fall, Zheng’s death catapulted his empire into civil war, as would-be successors fought for control. China’s civil war was worse even than Rome’s. Yet in both cases, from the horror emerged a centralized empire with a better chance of peace. Perhaps sheer exhaustion, the bloodletting cure, was part of the explanation. Though none of the Han Chinese rulers has the worldwide fame of Augustus, their achievements were on a similar level.

They reduced military service, partially dismantled their huge armies and got rid of the most vicious of the Ch’in laws. They created the first truly meritocratic and efficient bureaucracy that we know about, based on competitive examinations. Indeed, this was one of their great inventions, ahead of anything in the Roman world. So too were the Han troops’ semi-mechanized crossbows, fired by disciplined
ranks moving forward then loading, like later European musket-based armies. Had it ever come to a fight between the Roman legions and the Han armies, the Chinese would surely have won. Like the Romans, the Han recruited tribes from the borders of their empire into their own armies – thus ‘using barbarians to fight barbarians’ – and as with the Romans, this eventually proved a problem.

Because Han China’s buildings were mostly of carved and painted wood, and its art was painted on silk, very little of its physical glory survives – much less than of Rome’s. In general its writings are more clerkish than the most gossipy and scandalous of the writers of the great Roman imperial age, but it was a highly sophisticated society.

The historian Ian Morris has devised ingenious scales of human energy consumption to chart the rise and fall of societies, and on that basis the Roman and Han empires did similarly well, their people using up seven or eight times as much energy as their ice-age ancestors. The Han suffered from plagues passed along trade routes between themselves and the Mediterranean (so, at just the same time, did the Roman world, presumably catching Chinese bugs). They suffered droughts and barbarian invasions too; but because of Zheng’s centralization, the Chinese made progress. They had the peace and space to build new canals and roads, to spread fresh ideas about irrigation, to develop weights and measures, laws and money, that were all widely understood. With the Han empire they emerged into a world that would have been unimaginable during the long slaughter of the ‘warring states period’.

In a similar way, the grandeur and relative prosperity of the Roman Empire at its height remains awesome, and it might have been hoped that a perpetual new Western order had been established. From southern Scotland to North Africa and from Portugal to Syria, a network of superbly engineered and maintained roads allowed Roman citizens to travel faster overland than any previous people – and as fast as any to come, until the arrival of the railways. Aqueducts, sewers, bathhouses and hypocaust heating literally underpinned the Pax Romana. Adminstrators could be trusted, even if they were never as effective as their Chinese rivals. The legions became foreign legions, as outlying tribes were brought in and tamed.

Many others would follow Edward Gibbon in calling this the greatest period of civilized peace the world had known to that point,
despite the disappearance of anything like democracy, the slave revolts and the distant clash of war on the tribal margins. Yet as Gibbon’s work tried to explain, this disciplined world would fragment and collapse. Many theories have been offered as to why. One that was
not
discussed in the eighteenth century can be added: climate change. Now, our better knowledge of Chinese history of the time makes the argument for it more persuasive. The world grew considerably colder between
AD
200 and 500, after the so-called Roman warm period that had spread farming north and east through Europe and increased food production.

This climatic shift not only hit farmers and produced periodic famines, it forced the tribes of central Asia to move, or else die. They were highly mobile, and so they moved, shoving earlier migrants west until they broke into the empire. As noted, migration and trade spread unfamiliar viruses, and appalling plagues broke out across the Roman world, attacking every generation after the 180s. At the worst times, in the 250s, thousands were dying in Rome every day.
¹⁸
Hunger, disease and the challenge of armed and desperate migrants were factors that Roman Europe struggled to cope with. Han China suffered from the same perils – poor harvests, plagues and the consequent pressure of nomad tribes, in their case the Xiongnu. And although the Han had nothing like the disruptive impact of Christian zealots to cope with, they faced huge peasant rebellions and began to lose ground faster than did the Roman emperors.

Their empire would break apart, and a period of semi-anarchy and ferocious disputes between rival claimants for the Mandate of Heaven would ensue. Both the Western and the Chinese empires suffered severe inflation and a shrinkage of agriculture, and both suffered invasion and revolt. In China, the Han state broke into three kingdoms, those of the Wei, the Wu and the Shu Han. But this was only the beginning: the north collapsed, and small, unstable invader states replaced Chinese rule. The Jin dynasty, still claiming the Mandate of Heaven, retreated to the south and clung on, rather as the Byzantines clung on to Roman ways. The original promise of Zheng, the First Emperor, of an unchanging central state, which had been pursued with skill by the Han, now remained only a dream, an aspiration, as was the Holy Roman Empire. But unlike in the West, it was a dream Chinese rulers would re-establish.

Climate, living standards, economic development and politics cannot ultimately be disentangled. Measurements of historic pollution (and therefore of human activity) in ice cores and lake sediments show a sharp decline after
AD
200, as both the Mediterranean and the Chinese civilizations shrivelled. Ian Morris writes that in the Roman world ‘bones from cattle, pigs and sheep become smaller and scarcer after 200, suggesting declining standards of living, and by the 220s wealthy city-dwellers were putting up fewer grand buildings and inscriptions’.
¹⁹

In the West, the decline of the old gods of classical times led Roman citizens to turn to Egyptian cults, beliefs going back to Zoroaster in Persia and extreme versions of Greek philosophies, mixed with new faiths arriving from the Middle East. Augustan stability, all those roads and ports, spread these belief systems faster. Some seem to have mingled ancient beliefs with Buddhist and Hindu thinking – the ‘New Age’ faiths of two millennia ago. Public culture had become cold and brittle, empty of deep human meaning. In China, there had been uprisings by Daoist religious groups, such as the ‘Five Pecks of Rice’ movement, which declared that a deep corruption had infected the court. It called for equal distribution of land, and proclaimed the need for personal moral reformation.

That too may sound familiar. The urge to find a personal meaning produced an urge for confrontation and martyrdom in China, as well as the West. But ideas in the West and East were different enough to take them in different directions. One idea, above all others, was to shake the Roman world, leaving the Chinese world untouched.

We return to monotheism. Cleopatra, on her way home from visiting Antony, had stopped en route to meet a local king. He later boasted that she had tried it on with him. The king was Herod, whose rule would become notorious around the world, thanks to the story of a thinker about to be born in Judah.

The Agitator Triumphant

Not even great conquerors can always foresee the results of their actions. One of the Greek cities taken under Roman rule by Pompey was the bustling Asian settlement called Tarsus, now in Turkey. This
was where Antony had summoned Cleopatra and had been awed by her golden barge. Its people had been granted Roman citizenship; among them was a thriving industry of tent-makers, including Greek-speaking Jews, and to one of these families, of the tribe of Benjamin, a boy called Saul was born. Saul would become St Paul, declared by many theologians to be the real founder of Christianity as a world religion, and the transmitter of that religion to people all around the western Mediterranean, Jew and Gentile both.

Few have had as much influence on mankind as the Tarsus tent-maker, who was alive at the same time as Christ but who never met him. Paul had been, as he freely admits in one of his famous epistles, an outstandingly pious Jew, frequently in Jerusalem to study the Law of Moses. He tells the Galatians, who had just founded a church, how much damage he had done to early Christians and ‘how I stood out among other Jews of my generation, and how enthusiastic I was for the traditions of my ancestors’. He may have been present for the first Christian martyrdom, of Stephen, stoned to death for declaring Jesus to have been the Messiah, a few years after the Crucifixion.

A man with more than a touch of fanaticism, Paul was a member of the populist Pharisee sect, and had done his best to round up and crush this small but irritating local heresy. Partly because he was a Roman citizen, free to move around the imperial world, and a Greek-speaker who could easily converse with its educated people, Paul would do more than anyone else to turn the little local problem into a global faith, a global movement, one that would help bring an end to the old Roman world and transform the West.

His letters to the various Christian communities that he helped found are the earliest Christian writings to have survived; the seven epistles generally considered certainly to be by him date from no more than twenty years after Christ’s death. They tell us about Paul himself only in asides; much of our biographical knowledge comes from his friend Luke in The Acts of the Apostles, compiled perhaps fifty years later. Paul and Luke were both admirers of Rome, and writing in the aftermath of the tragic Jewish revolt against its rule. Though they were Jews, the thrust of their work was to take what had been Jesus’s message to fellow Jews and pass it out into the rest of the world – to Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and anyone else who would listen, a light to lighten the Gentiles. One biblical scholar argues that without Paul,
the Nazarenes – as the early Christians were called – would have remained ‘a Jewish sect which sought only to remain within Judaism and did not intend to found a new religion’.
²⁰

Famously, Paul was travelling to Damascus from Jerusalem to root out Nazarenes when ‘there came a light from heaven all round him. He fell to the ground and then he heard a voice saying, “Saul. Saul, Why are you persecuting me?” He asked who the voice was: “I am Jesus . . .” ’
²¹
Blinded, he was led into the city to await further instructions. Albeit reluctantly, a member of the Nazarene church in Damascus, Ananias, restored his sight and baptized him into the new faith. Paul says that then, chosen by God, he hurried off to Arabia to consider his new life. Luke, on the other hand, says that he stayed in Damascus and learned about Christianity from the believers there.

It has often been said that Saul suffered some kind of epileptic fit or hallucination, and that his moral extremism simply flipped sides from Judaism to Christ. Believers, of course, would say that Christ did appear to him. But the tent-maker and former persecutor was shaken enough to change his life and his name – to the Roman, Paul – and to spend twelve to fifteen years criss-crossing the Middle East in a furious eruption of energy that would only end when he was executed in Rome during one of Nero’s crackdowns on religious troublemakers. By his own account, he was at various times whipped nearly to death, stoned, shipwrecked; starving, thirsty, chilled to the bone; in danger from pagans and Jews, brigands and wild animals, ‘so-called brothers’ and natural perils. He had some mysterious but apparently disgusting illness and was frequently imprisoned.