The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Roman Empire (56 page)

There were, however, some religions or religious orders that Rome did not tolerate—namely those that did not recognize the Roman state's authority or legitimacy and who (in the Romans' view) undermined stability and fostered discord. These cults were called
religiones non lictae
(unsanctioned religious cults). Over the period of the Empire, three major groups were persecuted at various times: Druids, Jews, and Christians.

The Druids were a combination of Celtic judge, sage, doctor, historian, and scholar. They made up the intelligentsia of Celtic tribes, learning their craft and history through an arduous and lengthy oral education (it was forbidden to write down Druidic lore). Greeks and Romans admired their intellectual and scientific knowledge, but abhorred their practice of human sacrifice.

Both Julius Caesar and Augustus had trouble with the Druids in trying to suppress the Gauls. Caesar, one of our sources about them, portrays them as a noble, powerful, and yet savage caste that fostered Celtic resistance and unity. Caesar's conquests in Britain were short lived, but Claudius returned to the island in
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. 43, aided by the invitation of British chieftains afraid of the power of Caratacus, the king of Camulodunum (Colchester), who championed the Druids as a force against Roman occupation of Celtic territories.

Claudius's armies defeated Caratacus, but problems with Druids persisted. The emperor declared Druidism illegal in 54, and in 61, the Romans drove most of them to their sacred island of Anglesey in Wales, and exterminated them.

The Jews in Hellenistic times had established large settlements all over the east, especially in Alexandria. The Romans' relationship with them, and with Judaism, went far back. The senate had offered the Hasmoneans support against the Seleucids in 161
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. (renewed in 141
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.). At Rome, however, the senate banned Jews and Jewish preachers in 139
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. and refused to recognize synagogues as places of worship.

Pompey the Great, however, who had helped to settle affairs in Palestine in 68
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., allowed Jewish refugees to come to Rome. Julius Caesar, as compensation for the Alexandrian Jews' assistance to him in Egypt and for the support in Judaea of Antipater, King Herod's father, allowed Jews to worship freely and established Judae as a client-state. Augustus proclaimed synagogues to be sacred places and exempted Jews from appearing in court on the Sabbath (Saturday). The Jewish presence in Rome over this time grew in numbers and in stature, and many Romans were attracted to Hellenistic Judaism's thought and elegant monotheism.

 
Great Caesar's Ghost!
The Celts and Romans believed that mistletoe was a sacred plant that fostered peace and love. Combatants who found themselves under the sacred plant were to lay down arms and maintain the peace for the day. The plant was also a part of cultural rituals intended to foster peace and friendship. We, of course, use the plant at Christmas to foster a similar kind of good cheer.

 
Veto!
Jewish “persecution” is kind of a misleading term. The roots of anti-Semitism are more in Christian than pagan Rome. Pagan Rome did not persecute Judaism or Jews (in fact, Rome exempted Jews from emperor worship, military service, and certain court obligations in order to allow their beliefs). The Jews ran into problems with Caligula—but didn't everybody—and Jewish
nationalism
became problematic in Palestine in the early Empire. Hostility to Jews started to become official Roman policy under Constantine.

But troubles between Jews and other ethnic groups abroad, and between Jews and Romans in Rome, caused problems in the early Empire. Judaea was put under direct Roman control as a province in 6 until the rule of Herod Agrippa I in 41. Tensions with the urban population caused Tiberius to ship 4,000 of them to Sardinia in 19. More trouble came under Caligula, who attempted to set up an image of himself in the Temple of Jerusalem despite pleas to the contrary from Jewish delegations from around the world. He also allowed those hostile to the Jews in Alexandria to ransack and desecrate their holy places. A rebellion in Palestine was barely avoided by his assassination. Claudius, who was in the process of stamping out Druidism, made Judaea into a province again on the death of Herod Agrippa in 44, which set the stage for the Jewish rebellion under Nero (see Chapter 15, “The [Mostly] Good Emperors: The Flavians to Marcus Aurelius”).

The Flavians conquered Jerusalem and the rebels and attempted to stamp out Jewish nationalism once and for all. They abolished the Jewish high council (Sanhedrin) and high priest, forbade Jewish proselytizing, and destroyed the Temple. Jews were still allowed to practice their faith and were exempt from Emperor worship in the Empire, but they paid a yearly head tax to compensate for the former revenues generated by the Temple for Rome. Later, the emperor Antonius Pius (138–161) allowed them the right of circumcision as a part of his tolerant approach to religious sects of all kinds.

 
When in Rome
Diaspora
means “dispersal.” At times it refers to groups of people living outside of the homeland; at others it refers to the forced displacement of people from their lands. Here I am referring to the period after 135 when Rome banned the Jews from living in Jerusalem or Judaea.

Christians, who had begun as a Jewish sect, held an ambiguous relationship with Jews and Judaism in the early Empire. Christianity was broken off from Judaism both by Roman policy (such as the prosecutions under Nero), by Jewish and Christian antagonism, and by the Jewish
Diaspora
following the Bar-Kochba revolt (132–134).

After the second century, Christian writers and theologians took an increasingly harsh stance against the Jews, and when the Roman Empire became Christian, the Empire took an increasingly hostile stance to them. There was a brief reprieve when Julian the Apostate, in his attempt to revive paganism and strengthen Christianity, made provisions for the Temple of Jerusalem to be rebuilt, but this was abandoned after his death. The emperor Justinian, in particular, persecuted both Jews and Monophysite Christians; both these groups were happy to see the Muslims take control of the Holy Land from Constantinople.

We first hear of Christians as a troublesome sect of a troublesome Jewish people during the rule of Claudius. Jesus' opposition to the Jewish hierarchy favored by Rome and the community chaos that followed preachers like Paul probably contributed to this impression. Whether this trouble had something to do with Nero's blaming Christians for the fire in 64 isn't clear. Distinguished from Judaism, especially after the destruction of Jerusalem, Christians were viewed as suspicious because of their secretive and strange practices. Their refusal to acknowledge the Roman gods of state or the Emperor resulted in their being branded “atheists” in the larger Roman world, a charge that fueled many of the persecutions by state and local authorities.

And yet Christianity, especially that which Paul brought to cities around the Roman world between about 30 and 60, spread to all levels of Roman urban society. It offered a benevolent savior, personal salvation and the promise of eternal blessings, a strong moral and social code, and an organized community of believers. This organization was developed at the congregation level, at the city level under the bishops, and between the bishops and a growing number of Christian thinkers and writers. This organization gave Christianity a foothold from which neither persecutions nor doctrinal controversy could shake it.

Early Christian communities were popular refuges for the poor, but relatively well-off converts provided their leadership and patronage. Early Christian writers also came from this class of people. The whole was held together by a theoretical breaking down of barriers, or in Paul's words, a lack of distinction between “Jew and Gentile, slave and free man, Greek and barbarian, male and female.” This last pair was particularly important, because the development and maintenance of early Christian communities depended in large part upon the leadership and money of women. It also gave Christianity an important social and cultural inroad that Mithraism lacked. This mixing of classes and sexes, however, offended the sensibilities of many prudish pagans, who refused to associate or even speak with people who conducted themselves in such inappropriate ways.

 
Lend Me Your Ears
“In the meantime, I have followed the following procedure for defendants who were brought before me as Christians. First, I asked them if they were Christian. If they admitted it I asked them a second time and then, having warned them of the punishment, a third time. I ordered those who still persisted to be hauled off: I had no doubt that—whatever it was that they were admitting—such pigheadedness and rigid obstinacy should be punished.”

—Pliny the Younger (
Letters,
10.96)

In parts of the Empire, people brought charges against Christians for a variety of motives. Roman magistrates and emperors of the early Empire were not, for the most part, overly concerned with pursuing or protecting them. Domitian went so far as to send representatives to interrogate Jesus' family,
but when all they found was a few poor farmers who included a great-nephew, he apparently decided that Christ represented no real threat. The emperor Trajan made it a policy that Christians, even though they were participating in an unsanctioned secret society, were not to be hunted down or prosecuted on anonymous evidence. This comes to us in correspondence between Pliny the Younger, the governor of Bithynia in
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. 113, and the emperor. Pliny, who had no previous experience with Christians, decided to make it illegal to charge Christians anonymously, and gave those brought before him every opportunity to get off the hook. Those who persisted, he figured, deserved what they got—whatever it was that they believed—simply for being so obstinate. Trajan, in a reply, confirmed Pliny's approach.