Edwd. Weller
Edwd. Weller
THE ROMAN EMPIRE
AT THE CLOSE OF THE REPUBLIC
London Longmans & Co.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE BREAK-UP OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE:
SOME OF ITS CONSEQUENCES.
1. Political Changes.—Theodosius, who died in 395, was the last of the Roman Emperors who held undivided sway over those vast dominions. After his death the ancient empire of Rome was split up into two great states, and styled the Empire of the East and the Empire of the West. The Northern barbarians found their opportunity in this division, and, in 410, and again in 455, great hordes of Goths and Vandals swooped down on beautiful, debased Rome, and plundered it. Within a century of the death of Theodosius the Roman Empire of the West had ceased to exist. The Emperors of the Eastern division—the Byzantine Emperors, as they were by-and-by called—fixed their court at Constantinople, and kept up their title and much of their power for over one thousand years—till the year 1453, in fact, when Constantinople was sacked by the Saracens.The general shifting of boundaries which ensued on the break-up of a great power like Rome brought about various changes in government, which are easier to recognise than changes in sentiment and circumstance. We will look at the political changes first, and the map will be a help to the understanding of them. The conquests of the barbarians resulted in new names and new masters to the old historic sites. Goths and Vandals, Lombards and Franks, rose on the ruins of the great Roman state. From the latter half of the fourth century to the end of the fifth there was general storm and upheaval throughout those dominions, in almost every province of which Jews were to be found. Not to speak for a moment of the Eastern division of the empire, there were Jews in Italy, in Greece, in the Archipelago, in such parts of Germany as were civilised, in Gaul, and in Spain. By the beginning of the sixth century, things had settled down a little, and we can see some order, and find some well-known names and landmarks. Justinian was at that date Emperor of the Eastern remains of the great Roman state; Recared, the first Christian king of the Goths, ruled in Spain; Chilperic, who has been called the Nero of France, was his contemporary; and towards the end of that same century Pope Gregory I. was the head of the Church.
2. Social Changes.—At this period of stress and storm, Jews were scattered in all the places where it was felt. But the legislation of the age forbade them to take the part of Roman citizens in the struggle. They were not regarded as Roman citizens either byChurch council or by State code. In the eye of the law they were heretics, to be compelled or converted into Christianity, but to stand distinctly outside of it meanwhile. War was the all but universal profession. Jews might not hold military rank. They might not even be civil guardians of the peace, since ‘no Jew in any cause could be witness against a Christian.’ They might neither aspire to be owners of land, nor leaders of men. There were difficulties put in the way of their holding property, and difficulties in the way of their bequeathing it. By the time of Justinian (530–560) the ‘must nots’ and the ‘shall nots,’ of which the Jews were the occasion, amounted to quite a considerable portion of the famous Roman code. This sort of legislation, and the warfare consequent on the break-up of the Roman Empire, together produced one very noteworthy effect. With the fall of Jerusalem the people of the Land became in a sense the people of the Book. With the fall of Rome they seem to gradually become, and for many centuries to remain, the people of the ledger. It was another and a narrower change, and one for which the Jews themselves must be held wholly free from blame. Cruel legislation turned a people with the strongest home instincts into an almost willing community of wanderers. It reduced men who, through generations, had loved to live by the work of their hands, to the necessity of living by the exercise of their wits. There was no leisure to train workers of the Bezaleel and Aholiab type into ‘skilfulness in all manner of cunning workmanship,’ for rough weapons were the chief demand of the age. There was no longer a chancefor the old to sit, in peaceful sense of proprietorship, under their own vine and fig tree, whilst young tillers of the soil vigorously ‘gathered in their corn and their wine and their oil.’ The oliveyards and the vineyards and the corn-fields were often battle-fields, or sometimes pleasant adjuncts to the monasteries which were beginning to be built. In any case they were not for Jews, who might not be landowners, save in the sense that ‘six feet of English soil’ were offered in perpetuity by our English Harold to the invader.
3. Monks and Saints.—In the practical occupation of their lives, Jews and Christians were distinctly divided by legislation, and through religious sentiment they were drifting further and further apart. About this period, the end of the fifth century, the Church hero of the day was a certain Simon Stylites, afterwards canonised as saint, and added to that long roll of deified beings, to be prayed to and protected by, which was making the Christian heaven something of a heathen Olympus. Saint Simon Stylites’s claim to saintship and to hero-worship lay in the fact that he was living on the top of a pillar, and that ‘living’ meant to him not the common round of daily duties and daily cares, but a miserable and useless existence, persevered in from the purest motives. Saint Simon Stylites may serve as an extreme example of what was then, and for centuries after, the highest Christian ideal. There came to be a whole class of men called monks, and of women who were called nuns, who of their own free will gave up all the innocent pleasures and happinesses of life. They prayed, and fasted, and scourged themselves at regular intervals,and chose to live in bareness and discomfort, and often in actual dirt. They put peas in their shoes, and hair shirts on their backs; and the kindnesses they did—and they did many—were done from duty to God rather than from love of man. In the intervals of their set prayings and fastings they doctored the sick, but they seldom remembered that ‘a cheerful heart doeth good like a medicine.’There was once a small sect among the Jews[7] who thought they could best serve God by selfishly withdrawing from the world in which He had placed them, who chose to suffer rather than to do, and who made an especial study and an especial care of their own souls. This sect, the Essenes, which was scanty and short-lived, was never in sympathy with the body of the Jewish nation. It was a system altogether repugnant to Jewish notions of what is pleasing to God. Cleanliness, in the Jewish code, is not even next to godliness, but is a detailed and indispensable part of it. Wilful dirt, and discomfort, and dismalness, are, all alike, considered immoral, and the whole teaching of the Bible is on the lines that ‘the servants of the Lord shall rejoice before Him,’ and ‘serve Him with gladness.’ The monks of Christianity were an exaggerated outcome of that outlived error, the Essenes of Judaism; and we can understand how the silent, cowled, and barefooted monks, and the multitude of the readily worshipped ‘saints,’ made the principles of Christianity distasteful to the Jew, in like manner as the persecuting, blundering populace rendered the practice of it disgraceful. More and more the Jewslived a distinct and separate life from the peoples among whom they dwelt, separated by religious thought as well as by so-called religious legislation.