Consider now these various states of mind—that of the people, ready to add almost any deity to the large and vague number already recognised; that of the poet, who finds the deities such useful literary material; that of the magistrate or public man, who, without enthusiasm or necessary belief, regards religion as a thing useful to society; and that of the philosopher, who thinks all the current religious conceptions unsound, if not absurd, and morally almost useless.
Manifestly a society so composed will be one of unusual tolerance. The Romans had no disposition to force their religion on the subject provinces of the empire. Their religion was the Roman religion; the religion of the Greeks might be left Greek, the Jewish religion Jewish, and the Egyptian religion Egyptian. Any nation had a right to the religion of its fathers. Nay, the Jews had such peculiar notions about a Sabbath day and other matters that a Jew was exempted from the military service which would have compelled him to break his national laws. All religions were permitted, so long as they were national religions. Also all religious views were permitted to the individual, so long as they were not considered dangerous to the empire or imperial rule, or so long as they threatened no appreciable harm to the social order. If a Jew came to Rome and practised Judaism well and good. It was, in the eyes of the Romans, a narrow-minded and uncharitable religion, marked by many strange and absurd practices and superstitions, but if a misguided oriental people liked to indulge in it, well and good. Even if a Roman became a proselyte to Judaism, well and good, so long as he did not flout the official religion of his own country. If the Egyptians chose to worship cats, ibises, and crocodiles, that was their affair, so long as they let other people alone. In Gaul, it is true, the emperor Claudius, predecessor of Nero, had put down the Druids. Earlier still the Druids had already been interfered with; but that was because the Druids—those weird old white-sheeted men with their long beards and strange magic—were performing human sacrifices—burning men alive in wicker frames—and such conduct was not only contrary to the secular law of Rome, but even to natural law. And when Claudius finally suppressed them, or drove the remnant out of Gaul into Britain, it was not simply because they worshipped non-Roman gods and performed non-Roman rites, but because they were, as they had always notoriously been, a dangerous political influence interfering with the proper carrying out of the Roman government.
And when we come to Christianity it must be remarked that, so long as that nascent religion was regarded as merely a variety of Judaism, it was actually protected by the Roman power, and owes no little of its original progress to the fact. In the Acts of the Apostles it is always from the Roman governor that St. Paul receives, not only the fairest, but the most courteous treatment. It is the Jews who persecute him and work up difficulties against him, because to them he is a renegade and is weaning away their people. To the philosophers at Athens he appears as the preacher of a new philosophy, and they think him a "smatterer" in such subjects. To the Roman he is a man charged by a certain community with being dangerous to social order, to wit, causing factious disturbances and profaning the temple; and since he refuses to let the local authorities judge his case, and has exercised his citizen privilege by appealing to Caesar, to Caesar he is sent. And, when a prisoner in somewhat free custody at Rome, note that he is permitted to speak "with all freedom," and that in the first instance he is acquitted.
True, but the fact remains that Nero burnt Christians in his gardens after the great fire of Rome, and that certain later emperors are found punishing Christians merely for avowing themselves such. Why was Christianity thus singled out? It was not through what can be reasonably called "religious intolerance," for, as has been said, the Romans did not seek to force Roman religion on other peoples nor did they make any inquisition into the beliefs of Romans themselves. The reasons for singling out Christianity for special treatment are obvious enough. The question is not whether the reasons were sound, whether the Romans properly understood or tried to understand, whether they could be as wise before the event as we are after it, but whether the motive was what we should call a "religious" one. To allow Epicureans to deny the existence of gods at all, and to make scornful concessions to the peculiar tenets of Jews, could not be the action of a people which was bigoted. If there was bigotry and intolerance, it was political or social bigotry and intolerance, not religious. To prevent any possible misconception let the present writer say here that he considers the principles of Christianity, as laid down by its Founder and as spread by St. Paul, to have been the most humanizing and civilising influence ever brought to bear upon society. But that is not the point. The early Christians were treated as they were, not because they held non-Roman views, but because they held anti-Roman views; not because they did not believe in Jupiter and Venus, but because they refused to let any one else believe in them; not because they threatened to weaken Roman faith, but because they threatened to weaken and even to wreck the whole fabric of Roman society; not because they were known to be heretics, but because they were supposed to be disloyal; not because they converted men, but because they appeared to convert them into dangerous characters. As it has been put, the Christians were regarded as the "Nihilists" of the period. We are apt to judge the Romans from the standpoint of Christianity dominant and understood; it is fairer to judge them from the standpoint of a dominant pagan empire looking on at a strange new phenomenon altogether misunderstood and often deliberately misrepresented. Moreover—and the point is worth more attention than it commonly receives—we have only to read the Epistles to the Corinthians, to perceive that the early Christian gatherings were by no means always such meek, pure, and model assemblages as they are almost always assumed to have been. Some of the members, for instance, quarrelled and "were drunken." There were evidently many unworthy members of the new communion, and of course there were also many manifestations of insulting bigotry on their part. The class of society to which the Christians belonged was closely associated in the Roman mind with the rabble and the slave, if not with criminals. What the pagan observer saw in the new religion was "a pestilent superstition," "hatred of the human race," "a malevolent superstition." He thought its practices to be connected with magic. The intransigeant Christian refused to take the customary oath in the law courts, and therefore appeared to menace a trustworthy administration of the law. He took no interest in the affairs of the empire, but talked of another king and his coming kingdom, and he appeared to be an enemy to the Roman power. He held what appeared to be secret meetings, although the empire rigidly suppressed all secret societies. He weakened the martial spirit of the soldier. He divided families—the basis of Roman society—against themselves. He was a socialist leveller. He threatened with ruin all the trades connected with either the established worship—as amongst the silversmiths at Ephesus—or with the luxuries and amusements of life. Those amusements in circus or amphitheatre he hated, and therefore appeared misanthropic. He not only stood aloof from the religious observances of the state and the household, but treated them with contempt or abhorrence.
Moreover, at this date, he refused to acknowledge the one great symbol of the imperial authority. This was the statue of the emperor. When that statue was set up in every town it was not understood by any intelligent man that the emperor was actually a god, or that, when incense was burnt before the statue, it was being burned to the emperor himself as deity. But just as every householder had his attendant "Genius"—the power determining his vital functions and well-being—which was often represented as a bust with the man's own features, so the statue of the Augustus, "His Highness," represented the Genius of that Head of the State, and the offering of incense was meant as an appeal to the Genius to keep the emperor and the imperial power "in health and wealth long to live." The man who refused to make such an offering was necessarily considered to be ill-disposed to the majesty and welfare of the Head of the State, and therefore of the state itself. The Roman attitude towards the early Christians was partly that of a modern government towards Nihilists, and partly that of a generation or two ago to a blend of extreme Radical with extreme atheist.
We are not here concerned with the whole story of the persecution of the Christians, but only with the situation at and immediately after the date we have chosen. It is at least quite certain that when Nero burned the Christians in the year 64 he was treating them, not as the adherents of a religion, but as social criminals or nuisances. How far his notions of Christianity may have been influenced by Poppaea we do not know. At least he believed he was pleasing the populace.
CHAPTER XX
STUDY AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AMONG THE ROMANS
In describing the education of a Roman youth, and also in setting forth the various religious attitudes of the time, mention has been made of the pursuit of philosophy. Religion supplied no real guide to moral conduct, and education provided little exercise for the cultivation of the higher intellectual faculties. It was left for philosophy to fill these blanks as best it could. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans, great as they were in law-making and administration, had little natural gift or taste for abstract thought. All the philosophic sects had been founded and continued by Greeks, and it was still to the Greek half of the empire that the contemporary world looked for the best schools and teachers of philosophy. The genuine Roman spirit at all times felt some mistrust of such studies, especially if they tended to carry the student away from practical life into the "shade" and the "corner," or if they tended to subvert the traditional notions of "duty" as inculcated by Roman law, Roman custom, and the religion of the state. Nevertheless, not only did many Romans, even of mature years, resort to the philosophic "Universities" of the time, but wealthy houses often maintained a domestic philosopher, whose business it was to supply moral teaching and intellectual companionship to his employer. Some, indeed, preferred merely a savant, who might "post" them with information concerning Greek writers, explain difficulties, and act in general as a literary vade mecum. In many cases, if not in most, the Roman aristocrat or plutocrat treated such a retainer as a social inferior.
The Roman attitude towards thought and learning too often reminds one of a certain modern type which has been irreverently described as being "death on culture." While the Greek and graecized oriental loved research, discussion, dialectics, ethical and scientific conversation, and literary coteries for their own sake, the Roman more commonly regarded such things as means for sharpening his abilities and for imparting distinction in social intercourse. Doubtless there were, and had been, exceptions. No Greek philosopher could be more in earnest than Lucretius, the Roman poet of the later republic, and doubtless there were no few Romans unknown to fame who both grappled seriously with Greek philosophy and also endeavoured to carry it religiously into practice. Yet for the most part the Roman, even when he is a writer upon such subjects, carries with him the unmistakable air of the amateur or the dilettante. In reading Seneca, as in reading Cicero, we feel that we are dealing with an able man possessed of an excellent gift for popular exposition or essay-writing, but hardly with a man of original philosophic endeavour or of strong practical conviction. And when we read the letters of the younger Pliny, we perceive a genuine admiration for men of thought and a genuine liking for "things of the mind," but we also discern that his dealing with philosophers and philosophy is strictly such as he deems "fit for a gentleman."