Prof: Religion can't be
divorced from social, political, and historical
contexts and issues. And so what we're going to do
today is do, one, the first of two lectures.
Now these are going to be sort
of dreary, boring, typical Martin lectures;
dreary and boring historical surveys.
And I just have to do this
today on the Greco-Roman world, tell you everything you need to
know about the Greco-Roman world,
at least for this semester. And then next time,
next Wednesday-- because remember we're not
meeting on Monday-- next Wednesday,
I'll do a similar kind of lecture for everything you need
to know about Ancient Judaism, to put the New Testament into
its historical context. So you'll just have to survive
these two very historical survey lectures, because it's material
that you need to know. I'll try to make it as
interesting as I humanly can do. We now find the New Testament
in the same book as the Old Testament, as Christians call
it; and as Jews call it,
the Hebrew Bible or theTanakh.
Clearly early Christianity has
got to be studied in the context of Ancient Judaism,
and so we'll do so next time. We'll look at the Jewish
context, for example, for the development of the New
Testament and early Christianity.
But, to understand Judaism,
of the time of Jesus and Paul, which is centuries after the
chronological end of the Hebrew Bible,
we need to understand Judaism as a Greco-Roman cult;
it is a Greco-Roman religion. And that means we need to
understand at least a little bit about the Greco-Roman world.
For us, we can start not so all
the way back at Classical Greece, but with Alexander the
Great, and the beginning of Hellenization;
that is, the Grecization of the eastern part of the Ancient
Mediterranean. That's all Hellenization means,
making it Greek. Alexander the Great's father
was Philip II, King of Macedonia,
King of Macedon, and he conquered different
Greek city-states by defeating Athens and its allies at
Chaeronea in 338 BC. And I've got some of these
names and some of these dates on the handout that you have before
you. Alexander himself was born in
356, BCE of course. He was educated by Aristotle,
beginning in 343. He was made king after the
assassination of his father in 336 BCE.
As your textbook points out,
as Ehrman points out-- and you probably already know,
but for some of you this may sound like odd lingo--
I'm using CE for the Common Era, which is exactly the same
thing as AD, and I'm using BCE for Before
the Common Era, which is the same dates as
Before Christ. We in religious studies tend to
like these terms, rather than BC,
Before Christ, and AD,
because AD actually stands for Anno Domini,
in the year of our Lord. And because we in religious
studies include people in our departments who are in Judaic
studies, Islam, Hinduism,
all kinds of religions-- you can imagine that people who
are in other religions might not want to call things "in the
year of our Lord," since Jesus is not their Lord.
So in simply the interests of
reflecting the plurality of our own departments,
we tend to use these terms, rather than BC and AD.
But it means the same thing.
Alexander defeated the Persian
Army, which at that time controlled all of Asia Minor,
Modern Turkey, and had even threatened to
control Greece. He defeated the Persian Army in
Asia Minor at Granicus, the Battle of Granicus,
in 334. That put Alexander and his
Macedonian Army in charge of both Greece and Asia Minor.
When Darius II died,
who was the king of the Persians, Alexander himself took
on Darius's title, which was Great King.
After defeating the Persians
again, he pushed his army all the way
to the Indus River in India, to the western part of what's
now India, and what was then called India
also by Greeks. He wanted to go all the way to
the Ganges River, but his army forced him to turn
back. He died in 323,
when he was not yet 33-years-old,
and he died in Babylon of a fever, that is,
of course, modern day Iraq. After his death,
his empire was divided up among his generals,
and after some fighting and maneuvering and negotiations,
four successors to Alexander the Great finally ended up
splitting up his large empire into four smaller empires.
And we call these four
successors simply the Diadochi. And I think that's actually not
on your handout, so I'll write it out for you.
This is a Greek word that
simply means the successors. So the Diadokhoi,
the Greek plural of Diadochi, as we often refer to it,
ended up splitting his army into four parts and four
dynasties descending from the four successors.
They were four generals of
Alexander. Now next time,
in my lecture on introducing you to Judaism,
I'll talk about the importance of at least two of these
empires, because they're very important
for the history of Palestine and Israel at this time.
But for now all you need to
know is that these four different kingdoms--
one was where we now have Greece, another one was where
Syria is, another was Egypt,
and then there was another further north,
but that's not as important for us.
The Syrian-Greek Empire and the
Egyptian-Greek Empire will become very important for the
history of Judaism, and Jesus himself also.
But for right now,
all you need to know is that all of these generals,
although they were Macedonians and spoke Macedonian and not
themselves Greek, but they had,
just like Alexander, they had adopted Greek
language, Greek culture.
They educated their children in
Greek ways. Alexander, of course,
had been educated by Aristotle, when he was young,
and so he had adopted Greek language and Greek literature
and a lot of other Greek ways. What Alexander had wanted to do
was to take all these different peoples,
who spoke different languages and had different customs,
and use a Greek layer to sort of unite his empire overall.
Now he didn't really care about
the lower class people so much. So they could just still live
in their villages and out in the country and do their farming and
speak their own local language. But if you were going to be
elite--he wanted to establish cities throughout his empire
that would be actually Greek cities,
and he wanted to have the elite people all be able,
at least, to speak Greek. You have therefore one world,
and in fact this whole dream of Alexander--
and it was a very self-conscious,
propaganda campaign and a cultural campaign on Alexander's
part. He wanted to make one world.
You really have,
therefore, for in some way the first time in history,
a dream of making all of his empire basically universal,
a dream of a universal vision, for one world,
under one kind of culture, one kind of language.
This really hadn't been
attempted. You see, in the previous
empires, like the Assyrian Empire,
or these kinds of--the Egyptian Empire,
when people conquered other peoples,
often all they wanted was tribute.
They just wanted taxes and food
and money and that sort of thing.
They didn't really care about
turning those people into Egyptians or into Assyrians.
And Alexander didn't really
care that much about the lower classes doing that,
but he still wanted the elites. And so he would plant Greek
cities and settle his veterans in different parts of his empire
in Egypt, in Syria, all the way over,
and sometimes in the western part of India,
and he would take his veterans of his army,
and he would drum them out of the army,
when they retired, and he would give them land and
they'd build a city there, and that city would be just
like a Greek city back home. And they all would speak what
developed to be a common form of Greek, slightly different from
Classical Greek, and we call that Koine Greek;
and koine is just a Greek word that means common,
or shared. So the Bible is actually
written in Koine Greek, because this was the form of
Greek that had become spread around the eastern Mediterranean
by the time the Hebrew Scriptures were translated
themselves, and by the time the New
Testament writings were themselves written.
The Greek polis,
which is simply the Greek word for city,
had several institutions that are very important,
and they'll become important for early Christianity and for
Judaism. So you need to know what some
of those are. The polis itself is just
a Greek word for city. But you can't think of this as
in huge cities like we have now. What they would call a polis
might only be 1000 citizens or 5000.
So it wasn't like millions of
people. It wasn't nearly as big as
Rome, which would consist of a million inhabitants fairly
quickly around this time. The poleis--that's
plural for a Greek city-- the poleis or the
polises, they were much smaller than that,
but they would have several things.
The city center,
the town, would be the center of this,
and that's where the institutions would be,
that's where the government would be,
that's where the different buildings would be that I'm
going to explain later. But the polis also included the
surrounding farmland, and the villages.
So Athens was the polis
for Attica, but it was also the polis
for all of Attica, all that region around Athens,
including villages and farms and other small towns too.
So there was a rural dependency
on these Greek cities. They all practiced a certain
kind of Greek education. The Greek word paideia,
which is right there on your handout,
means education, but it also means more than
simply rote learning or memorization or learning to
read, like we think. Paideia is the Greek
word that means the formation of the young man.
And I say young man because
throughout all this it was mainly young men and boys who
were educated. Girls could be given some
education, if their families were wealthy
enough, but the cities didn't really
concern themselves so much with girls' education.
Their family might,
but the cities concerned themselves with the education of
their boys. So paideia referred to
the education of the young man, both mentally,
but militarily--so you were taught to fight--and culturally;
you might be taught other things about culture.
You might even have some music
training or something like that. The place where this took place
was the gymnasium. Now a gymnasium doesn't
mean what it means to in English, the gymnasium,
like Payne Whitney over there. It actually comes from the
Greek word for naked, gymnos.
And the reason it was called
'the naked place' is because, of course, young Greek men
always exercised in the nude and played sports in the nude.
And so this is where you did it.
So where did you do this?
That came to be called
"the naked place," the gymnasium.
But this also became the place
where you would do other kinds of learning.
So if you were learning
rhetoric, for example, you might practice giving
speeches at the gymnasium.
But also men in town would just
kind of gather there. It was kind of a place where
men gathered, and they had gone to school at
the same place. You would meet your friends.
You might play some games,
you might play like checkers and these kinds of--bones,
bone knuckle bones games, that you can still see.
If you travel around in Greek
cities throughout the Ancient Mediterranean,
you can see where they've carved little game boards into
flagstones of different temples or buildings,
in Greek cities. So this would all take place in
the gymnasium. You also had what they called
the ephebeia. When you were a young boy,
you would've studied just reading and writing Homer.
When you got to be about the
age of what you guys are here, you might enter the
ephebate; you'd become an ephebe,
and that just meant that you were past your sort of early
secondary training and now you were being really in training to
be a warrior and a citizen. So the ephebes were
those boys who were between the age of maybe 16 or 17 and 20 or
22. You would march together in a
parade in town. You would go on military
training perhaps together. You would also engage in sports
together, and you would develop a
camaraderie because you were expected then to be the fighting
force for your city, your city-state.
So the ephebate,
or the ephebeia, was this institution that every
boy had to go through in order then to be a full citizen of a
city. You also had these political
structures that are in your handout.
The first political structure
is the demos. Demos just means the
"people," it's just a Greek word for
"the people." But it actually referred more
politically to all of the male citizens, and in Greek cities,
by tradition, only men were citizens of a
city. This will change in Rome,
because in Rome women were citizens also,
although that didn't mean they were equal to men.
But in Greek cities men were
citizens and women weren't citizens.
But with the revolution of
democracy in Athens, which also spread then to other
Greek cities, partly because Athens did what
George Bush tried to do in Iraq, they tried to force democracy
on other Greek cities around the Eastern Mediterranean also.
So democracies of some sort
existed in different places. And a democracy--the demos
meant all the men of adult citizenship;
that is, it excluded men who lived there who came from
elsewhere. It excluded foreigners,
it excluded some laborers, it excluded slaves,
and it excluded women. But all the men who were
citizens had a vote, and the demos referred
to that political body of voting men.
Now democracies collapsed,
obviously, later, and Philip of Macedon,
and Alexander, did not promote democracies.
But they kept this idea that
the demos--that is, the adult citizen males of a
city--were a political body. And that's when,
if you had everybody come to the theater for a big debate
about something, you could still have people
voting on certain things that the city might decide to do,
although they couldn't rule themselves completely by
themselves. Then you had a smaller council
that might be 50 people. It varied, the size,
according to the city. The council was called the
boule, which is also in your handout,
and that referred to a smaller council of older men,
usually, who made decisions that they then would put before
the whole, the demos, the whole voting
population. And then you had the term
called the ekklesia, which is on your handout.
That really did refer to the
voting body of the citizens, or the gathered citizens
together. Ekklesia is a Greek
word, it just means "the calling out."
Ekklesia therefore is
what you would call the assembly,
the Athenian Assembly, who would debate things and
vote on things that the boule,
the council, would put forward for a debate
or a vote. That was called the
ekklesia. This is very important because
ekklesia, then, in our bible,
gets translated as-- Student: Ecclesiastes.
Prof: Ecclesiastes does,
but it's called Ecclesiastes because that means "the
preacher," that's the translation from the
Hebrew word, "the preacher,"
qoheleth, for the book.
So Ecclesiastes means the
preacher. But ekklesia is a term
for the church. So this'll be odd,
when we get to early Christian groups.
Why did these early Christian
groups decide to call themselves the town assembly?
Because by that time it's the
basic meaning of this term, ekklesia.
And then you have other social
structures of any city-state. For example, you have a theater.
The theater was a place where
you had performances. By the first century,
when Christianity was coming around,
it was not so much the place where you'd go to see
necessarily high theater, like Sophocles or Euripides or
something like that. What you'd often do is go to
see farces or comedies. Or sometimes the Romans liked
to take a big theater and fill the central part of the theater,
the cavea, with water and then stage naval
battles and that kind of thing. So people have all kinds of
entertainments in the theater. But it was also where often the
demos or the ekklesia would meet to have meetings
and holler at each other and have big debates.
So the ekklesia was the
city place, and it would often meet in a theater.
You also had games.
So you had the gymnasium where
games would take place, but also you had the
hippodrome, which is in Greek, which basically just means
"the horse running place."
This was when you had this big
track, and if you have wandered around
different Greek cities that are dug up,
some of them will have the hippodrome there,
and you can see how huge they were.
They had these huge stands,
and it was sort of like a football stadium,
except it was longer and narrower than what our football
stadium would be. But it had rows of seats like
that, usually made over a hill or dug into the ground in some
way. And the hippodrome,
which becomes the circus in Latin--
that's just the Latin translation of hippodrome,
because as you'll see, Romans started adopting a lot
of these, which were originally Greek
institutions, into their society also.
So the hippodrome is the
circus in Latin. And eventually,
for the Romans, this would be very popular for
big chariot races. That's the big thing for the
Romans later. And you'd also have baths;
that is, public places, sometimes where only men could
go, or sometimes women could go, or sometimes they would be
mixed in some places. Or sometimes they might have
men one day, women another time, and mixed at other times.
So different cities had their
baths differently. But the bath would be a place
where at least especially the men would go,
after they'd been working out in the gymnasium,
and you go and--this is where the public toilets were too.
You can't wander around any
Greek city, or Roman city of the Ancient World,
without seeing the latrine. You can always find the latrine.
And they always had latrines
and baths, and you'd have the cold room
where you'd have cold water, you'd have the tepid room where
you'd have kind of lukewarm water,
and you'd have the hot room where you'd have hot water.
So this is where you'd go to
relax, to make a business deal, to meet your friends,
to chat, to try to have sex, try to meet somebody.
All kinds of things go on in
these baths. But those basic structures are
part of any kind of Greek city in the Ancient World.
And what Alexander and his
successors did was they took that basic Greek structure,
and they transplanted it all over the Eastern Mediterranean,
whether they were in Egypt or Syria or Asia Minor or anyplace
else. Which is why you can travel
right now to Turkey or Syria or Israel or Jordan or Egypt,
and you can see excavations of towns,
and it's remarkable how they all look so much alike,
because they're all inspired by this originally Greek model of
the city. So that's one of the most
important things about Alexander and his successors is they
Hellenized the entire eastern Mediterranean,
and that meant every major city would have a certain commonality
to it. It would have a certain
koine to it; that is, a Greek overlay,
over what may be also be there, the original indigenous kind of
cultures and languages. The other thing you have is
religious syncretism. I didn't put that down,
so just in case. The Greek word synkresis
means "a mixing together."
When Alexander gets to Persia,
or let's say when he gets to Egypt, he knows that there is
this god Isis, this female god Isis,
that's very important. You see statues of her all over
the place. Well, Alexander just followed a
custom that had been taught by philosophy and other kinds of
things that, "Oh well,
they worship Isis." But Isis is sort of like
Artemis. So sometimes you'd see they'd
make statues of Isis look like statues of Artemis back home.
Artemis is the Greek goddess
of--anybody know? Student: The hunt.
Prof: The hunt.
See all you guys really know
your Greek and Roman mythology. That shows that you did well on
your SATs I bet, didn't you?
So, we'll talk a bit about what
that means, with the different gods and
goddesses, and how you learned all this in
mythological courses and English in high school.
But we'll get back to that.
But Artemis is the Goddess of
the Hunt. So these Greeks would say,
"Well, we have another Goddess of the Hunt,"
and you'd find other Goddesses of the Hunt.
Or when they'd get to
Jerusalem, they'd see, "Oh, these people worship
Yahweh. Well that's just Zeus,
that's just another name for Zeus.
It's the same god,
they just have a different name for it."
Alexander took this tendency of
syncretism, of mixing together different
religious traditions from different places,
and he used it as a self-conscious propaganda
technique. He even identified himself,
because he started claiming divine status for himself.
He went around passing out
rumors that his mother had actually been impregnated by the
god Apollo, when he appeared as a snake in her bed.
So, Alexander is putting
himself forward as divine. Why?
This is not a Greek tradition,
but it's very much a tradition in the East for kings to be
considered by their people to be gods.
Alexander says,
"Well, if they can be gods, I can be a god."
So he starts spreading rumors
that he is divine himself. He probably even believed it.
I don't think he necessarily
lied about it, he probably believed that he
was divine. And so he had a god father,
he had a human mother, and so then he would identify
himself with whoever was a god in the different places.
So he would identify himself as
a Greek god with a Persian god. He would identify the goddess
Isis with some Greek goddess. And so all the time these
different gods from different places were basically all said
to be simply different cultural representations,
different names, for what were generally the
same gods all over the place. Also, though,
what they would do is sometimes they wouldn't try to simply say
these gods are the same. What they would just do is add
on more gods. They'd just say,
"Oh well, we got to Egypt and we found
out there are a whole lot more gods than we knew about."
Or they'd get to Syria,
"Look at all these god that the Syrians worship.
Well, we'll just add those into
our pantheon of gods too." And this is part of what
ancient religion was like, is that people were not
exclusive. You didn't have to worry.
Just because you worshiped one
god doesn't mean you couldn't worship another god or several
gods or five gods or a hundred gods.
Gods knew that everybody
was--they weren't particularly jealous, in that sense.
So this is the way people did
it. But what Alexander and his
successors did was they made sort of a conscious,
propagandistic decision to use religious syncretism to bind
together their kingdoms. Now this will become a problem
obviously when we talk about Judaism,
because Jews--the Greek rulers, were trying to do the same
thing with Jewish gods and Jewish figures,
as they had elsewhere. And some Jews would go along
with this and some Jews would resist it.
The Romans, when they came on
the scene, in the East,
and they gradually became more and more powerful,
they destroyed Corinth in a big battle in 144 BCE.
Pompey was the Roman general
who took over Jerusalem in 63 BCE.
So the Romans were in charge of
Judea from 63 BCE on. And this is very important,
because the Romans, as their power grew in the
East, they simply moved increasingly into the eastern
Mediterranean and they adopted the whole Greek system,
the Greek world, and they didn't even try to
make it non-Greek. So Romans didn't go around
trying to get people in the East to speak Latin.
They might put up an official
inscription in an Eastern city in Latin,
but they'd almost always, if it was an official
inscription, it would also be listed in
Greek. So Romans who ruled in the East
were expected to speak Greek. And by this time all educated
Roman men were expected to be able to speak Greek,
well if possible. So the Romans didn't try to
make the East Roman, in that sense,
culturally, nor did they try to change the language.
Greek language,
culture, and religions, different religions and the
syncretism, Greek education,
the polis structure-- all of these things remained in
the East throughout the Roman rule of the East,
all the way up until the time you had a Christian emperor with
Constantine, and later. But there's one thing that the
Romans made even more of, than the Greeks had made of,
and this is the patron-client structure.
This is a bit more of a
distinctly Roman institution, even a legal institution.
But it's important for
understanding both the Roman Empire, as well as early
Christianity and its patron-client relations.
The household structure of a
Roman household was this-- and I say
"household," because our word
"family," which we usually take to mean
the biological family: the father,
the mother, the children, maybe the grandchildren,
maybe the extended family. But we usually mean by it the
immediate, the nuclear family, with some extension.
That use of the English word
"family," although it comes from the
Latin, familia,
means something totally different in Latin.
The Latin word familia
didn't mean that biological kin group.
It actually was originally used
for the slaves of a household. The slaves and the freed
persons of a Roman household were legally the ones who were
the familia. But so when I say
"family"-- we try to avoid even talking
about "the Roman family,"
because it means something so different to them than what it
means to us. So I'll tend to talk about
"the Roman household," because that's what's more
meaningful sociologically when we talk about this.
The Roman household was
constructed like a pyramid. Imagine this as a pyramid and
not a triangle. At the top of it is the head of
the household, the man, the
paterfamilias. And increasingly you'll
actually see this written in the New York Times or used in
politics. But it comes from the Latin,
and it referred to the head of the household;
pater, father, familias is the
household, the family. The paterfamilias is the
oldest man of the household. Under him is his sons,
his daughters, and then at the bottom are his
slaves, and here are his freedmen, freed persons.
And then also you consider,
in some ways, free people who may exist as
clients. But legally the word
client in Latin refers to the freed slaves of
apaterfamilias. Now where's the wife in this
picture? Notice, I didn't put the wife
and the mother in there. Why is that?
Because legally she's actually
not part of this man's household.
She remains part of the
household of her father, and she's legally under the
control of her father probably, or her brothers,
if her father is dead; or her grandfather if her
grandfather is still alive. But since life expectancy in
the Ancient World was much less than ours,
you didn't have usually several generations in these households,
because older people just died. The wife though is legally a
part of her own household over here.
Why did the Romans do that?
That's very different from the
Greeks, very different from other people in the Ancient
Mediterranean. Why did they want to make sure
that the daughters stayed in the households of their fathers?
They did this because they
didn't want the upper-class in Rome,
who were the elite, they didn't want any one
household, or any small group of
households, to become too powerful.
And if you have women marrying
off into other families, and then they leave the
household of their fathers, and they are officially and
legally in a household with somebody else,
that may end up increasing those households that have
intermarriage coming in and not so much intermarriage going out.
By keeping women under the
household of the men of their original family,
the upper-class Romans tried to balance these different
households in size and importance.
They didn't care about the
lower-class really. The lower-class didn't really
count much. What they cared about--because
the Roman Republic by this time was basically a bunch of very
important households, wealthy men and their
households, and they were the members of the Senate,
they were the knight class, they were the people who ran
Rome. So they didn't want one king to
arise, and they didn't want a small coterie of leaders to
arise. They wanted there to be some
kind of balance of power among the several major households of
Rome, the families of Rome. Now slaves obviously are in
the paterfamilias. When a slave is freed--and in
the Ancient World, in the Roman Empire,
most slaves were eventually freed,
unless they just died before long--they became a freed man.
They didn't become a free man,
they became a freed man, and that was legally different.
So the status of slave was
lowest, freed persons was next highest in Roman Law;,
and free people were next. But even though they became
freed, they were still considered a member of this
guy's household, as his client and his freedman.
And they owed certain duties to
him. For example,
they might--paterfamilias
would often put a slave up in business, give a slave enough
money to run a business. And the slave could keep a lot
of the income from that business for himself, and the slave could
actually gather together a bit of money for himself.
He couldn't legally own the
money; his master legally owned
everything the slave owned. But, practically,
and in some legal contexts, what they would do is they'd
allow the slave the use of that money,
and that's called the peculium.
Now when this slave is freed,
by the owner, the slave could take the
peculium with him, and then he could set up his
own business, but he'd still be a client of
the owner, because he's still officially
part of his household. So this maintained,
even when--why would a person free a slave?
Well if you have a slave,
that slave can't actually sign contracts.
The slave might be your
business manager, but all the slave could do is
the paperwork. But if you need a slave
representing your business, and you live in Rome and you
need somebody in Ostia, the port city of Rome,
to be able to be there and watch your imports and your
exports of your business, you need someone who can sign
contracts, who can lend money,
who can borrow money, who can do things like that.
Slaves can't do that legally,
but freedmen can. So rich Romans were often
freeing slaves for their own purposes.
It was not like they were
giving them a great deal, this was part of constructing
their own business expansion. Sons and daughters,
though, were still part of the household, as long as the
paterfamilias was alive. So sons legally were still
under their paterfamilias.
Now this is all legally and
officially what's the case. You wouldn't really see this
working all like this. For example,
I said wives were not really part of their husband's
household. Legally, that's correct,
but you see cases in letters and all kinds of stuff from the
Ancient World that women actually were more unofficially
part of their husband's house. They ran it when he was away,
for example. They told his slave--she might
have her own slaves and her own property, the wife had her own
property that was separate from the husband's property.
But in practical purposes most
of the time, they didn't--they just mixed these together and
they might use different things. So the legal situation was set
up to try to keep the wife's ownership as part of a different
family, and so her money didn't go to
her husband, and his money didn't go to her.
But this was a legal situation
to try to keep this balance of power among households.
Practically,
sons didn't all live in the same place with their father.
They would get married and move
off to an apartment or someplace down the street,
or to another city. But this is the legal situation.
Now when you go to jail--I mean
when you go to court, slaves of course can't
represent themselves in court at all,
they don't have any legal standing.
But if you're a freedman
you're--the other thing I should tell you is that in Roman law if
you're manumitted as a slave, you're made free,
if you're manumitted in the normal way they did it,
that makes you a Roman citizen, if your owner was a Roman
citizen. Notice what this means.
Only in the Roman Empire could
slavery actually start being a way that you can move up in
society, because you could--if you were
a talented slave, your owner might free you,
probably would free you. When he freed you,
if he was a Roman citizen, you would automatically become
a Roman citizen also, and your children would be
Roman citizens. And although you were a
freedman, which was lower in status than a free person--
there were some privileges you couldn't have--
your children would be, if they were born after you'd
been freed, would be free people, not freed.
So within a couple of
generations people could move up from being the lowest slaves to
two generations of being free Roman citizens.
So Roman slavery and the
freedom of that was actually one way that a few people in the
Ancient World recognized some kind of social mobility,
which was very rare in the Roman Empire.
Any questions about any of that?
Now why is this important for
the rest of this stuff? This will be very important
because Christians started out as house churches,
and their house churches fit sometimes the model of a
Greek ekklesia, an assembly,
but sometimes the model of the Roman household.
And so this household structure
becomes very important for the growth and structure and even
the theology of Christianity eventually.
This is also important though
for Roman politics, because if you're if a
freedman, or even if you're a free person--
sometimes see freemen would connect themselves to a powerful
Roman who was higher status than them,
because they could use him for important things.
For example,
say you want to take your neighbor to court,
because your neighbor is starting impinging on your land.
Well if you're of lower status,
lower social status, the judge is going to look at
you and say, "Come on, you're poor,
your neighbor's rich, I'm going to side for the
neighbor." Because Roman legal
structures--and they even said this in Roman laws--
if you're a judge and you have a rich man and a poor man in
your court, of course you're going to
decide for the rich man, because the poor man has
incentive to cheat; he's poor.
But the rich man already has
money, he doesn't have any incentive to cheat.
That's their logic.
>
But so Roman legal system was
really geared toward the wealthy and the people of high status.
For that reason,
if you wanted to win a court case,
it helped--or have somebody represent you in politics or all
kinds of things-- it helped to have strong
patrons. So you'd have a patron who
would be higher class, richer, more powerful,
have some political power, and you would be loyal to your
patron, and your patron would then
represent you in court, try to get you jobs,
try to get you more business, do all the kinds of things that
patrons do for their clients. Also, if your patron wanted to
run for a city office, your patron would expect you to
be loyal and vote for him. So lower-class people--now what
happens, though, when you have--see your
clients, your freedmen,
your sons, your daughters, all these are part of this
pyramid structure, and they all benefit from a
strong paterfamilias, and he benefits by having a
strong household and a large household.
But most of the free citizens
of the Roman Empire, of Rome, were poor
people--free, and even citizens,
but they were poor people who weren't part of any rich
household. So what do you have with all
these other people, these other Romans around here,
who don't have a powerful patron,
who don't have a powerful paterfamilias to help
them out? This is where Julius Caesar was
quite the genius. Julius Caesar came from a
patrician family-- that is, a family,
an aristocratic family-- but he started siding with a
party in Rome called the populares.
And I think this is on your
handout; correct? The Roman Senate,
in the late part of the Republic--yes--started dividing
itself into two sort of parties; not official parties,
but factions. The optimates,
meaning "the best," tended to support the interests
of the wealthy senators and the few wealthiest families.
The populares started
representing the interests of everybody else in Rome.
Populares just comes
from the word for "the people."
Julius Caesar was from one of
these aristocratic, patrician families,
although his family didn't have a lot of money,
they weren't really, really wealthy.
But he had great birth,
and so he started getting more power politically and
financially by setting himself up as the patron of the
patronless. Also, generals ran their armies
this way. So Julius Caesar--if you were
really going to be important in Rome, you had to serve as a
general at some point. Julius Caesar capitalized on
his role as a general of a large army that was at the time
winning battles in Gaul, modern France.
One example about this is
how--Julius Caesar was the patron,
the paterfamilias, in a sense,
of his army, his soldiers--is that one time
the Senate, who got nervous about Julius's
growth in popularity and power, they wanted to take some
legions, some Roman legions, away from Julius Caesar in
Gaul, and send them to another general in Syria.
The reason they did this was
because they wanted to take some of Julius's power away.
They were afraid he was going
to set himself as dictator, which of course he did.
So they took these Roman
legions away, and they sent them to Syria.
When they left,
Julius Caesar, out of his own pocket,
gave every soldier in those legions a year's pay.
This is what patrons do,
you see. He bought the loyalty of his
soldiers, when they were being taken out of his control.
This is the patron-client
structure at work in the Roman army.
Julius also,
then, set himself up in the city, when he started gaining
more power in Rome. Actually he gained power in
Rome mainly by military might, by kind of making the Senate
nervous and winning a few battles,
and that was against the law. It was against the law for
Julius Caesar to do that, but he did it anyway.
He tried to consolidate his
power, though, by putting forth policies that
moderately helped the lower classes.
He didn't cancel debts,
but he mitigated debts. He eased some of the strains on
the poor. He was assassinated by
conservative Senate forces-- you know, Brutus and Cassius
and others-- on the Ides of March,
as you all know, March 15^(th), 44 BCE.
He had adopted another Roman,
Octavian, and Julius Caesar's adopted
son, Octavian, then formed an alliance with
Mark Antony, who had been Julius Caesar's
friend, and a lesser known figure named
Lepidus, whom you don't really need to
remember. Because at the end it turned
out that Mark Antony and Octavian fought a civil war.
Octavian won,
and Octavian defeated Mark Antony.
And by this time Mark Antony
had palled up with Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt,
and Octavian beat both of them, and he became the sole ruler of
the empire in 27 BCE. He refused the title of king,
and he took the traditional Republican titles.
One of his propagandists said
this about him: "The pristine form of the
Republic was recalled as of old."
Or Augustus--he had taken the
title Augustus by this time, which means "the
great"-- he himself said,
"I transferred the Republic from my power to the
dominion of the Senate and the people of Rome."
In other words,
in his propaganda, Augustus basically said,
"I'm not a king, I'm just another senator,
and I'm giving the Senate and the people all their power
back." A lie, all lies.
See, lying in government didn't
start with our government. So Augustus actually
reconstituted the Senate, and it was just that,
a Senate reconstituted by the emperor.
He became more and more the
patron of all the people. And this is the way the emperor
would forever then try to present himself.
He and his family,
the emperor's family, was, in a sense,
the patron for the whole people of the Roman Empire--
at least for all the Romans--the paterfamilias
of the entire empire. This led to what we famously
call the Pax Romana, "the Roman Peace,"
because you had the end of long,
hundreds of years of civil wars and other wars,
at least within Rome itself. There were always battles and
wars going on, on the boundaries,
the frontiers of the Roman Empire,
but within the center of the empire there was an amazing
period of peace. Most people saw this
peace--many people in history say it is good.
It's debatable whether it was
good for everybody. Non-Romans and poor people may
have seen the Pax Romana as more oppressive than a
liberation, just like people saw the Pax
Americana that way, after the collapse of the
Soviet Union and before the beginning of the Iraq War.
The Romans maintained peace,
for one thing, by leaving local populations
pretty much alone when it came to local customs,
religions, and living arrangements.
When they thought it was
necessary, they maintained peace by destroying communities and
forcibly moving populations. But they tried to do that only
when they needed to do so to keep their absolute control.
The Romans prospered by
taxation. They did hold censuses,
not universal ones as mentioned in the Bible,
but local censuses, in order to keep taxes high and
fully paid. But they didn't--the Romans
themselves didn't want to be bothered with collecting taxes.
So they would have local,
sort of higher class, local elites,
would bid for the right to collect local taxes,
and so the Romans would take the highest bid.
In other words,
if I'm a rich, wealthy person in Corinth,
I would say, "I'll be the local tax
collector, and I'll guarantee you I'll
send to Rome this amount of money for a year."
Of course, the Romans didn't
care then how much I charged you, the people of Corinth in
its area. Actually the City of Corinth
wouldn't have been taxed because it was a Roman colony,
and one of the benefits of being a Roman colony is that you
didn't have to pay taxes, or at least the citizens didn't
have to pay taxes. But the people in the outlying
villages and towns and farms and everything would pay taxes.
And if I'm the tax collector,
the way I make a profit is by charging you a lot more than I
need just to send to Rome. The Romans didn't care about
this. They just knew it was going to
happen. This was the way they collected
their taxes. This is why the word "tax
collector" is such a bad word,
for everybody but the Romans; why you'll see in the gospels
the term "tax collectors and sinners."
Why?
Because the Jews didn't like
the tax collectors because they were being ripped off by them.
Is your hand up?
Student: Did Matthew
come from a rich background then?
Prof: Well,
number one, we'll talk about who the historical Matthew is.
The figure in Matthew,
in the Gospel of Matthew, we don't know much about his
actual history. He just appears.
But when it calls him a
"tax collector," it doesn't necessarily mean
that he was the one who owned the right for that whole area.
It just means he was--he
could've been hired by somebody to sit at a roadside and collect
taxes and tolls and stuff. So the word "tax
collector" didn't necessarily mean that
the person themselves were wealthy,
but whoever had the tax--what's the thing I'm looking for?--
franchise, whoever had the tax franchise for that area would be
someone from a wealthy background.
But then you'd hire out other
people to do the taxes. So these people,
of course, were very unpopular. The Romans maintained peace to
a great extent by keeping the poor poor.
So the Pax Romana may
have sounded great, if you were an elite,
but if you were not in the elite,
it may have seemed more oppressive than anything.
There were some other benefits,
though, that the Romans did. They made travel much easier.
Pompey had cleared the
Mediterranean of pirates, which is something that our
governments can't seem to do. They built roads,
maintained some communication. They had a mail service,
although it was for official use only.
But this meant that you could
get--at least the Roman officials could get mail
delivered fairly quickly. They used even a horseback
relay that could go a hundred kilometers a day.
Soldiers were expected to be
able travel thirty kilometers per day, in full pack.
And that was only possible
because, besides using the sea,
the shipping lanes for travel, which was much faster than
overland travel, the Romans maintained roads.
They didn't really care about
roads for everybody else. They wanted the roads for their
Army, just like the US Interstate
system was originally created in case the Army needed to be moved
across the country very quickly if the Soviets attacked.
So this is the same way with
the Romans. They built roads for the army,
but of course other people used the roads too.
This was why Christianity and
other things were able to spread so easily, why Paul was able to
travel around the empire. He would prefer to go by sea,
if possible, because it's much quicker,
but at least he could travel on the roads that the Romans built
and maintained. As far as religion--Ehrman
talks about this in your textbook,
so I won't go into a lot of detail--
but the common Hollywood idea that the Romans were kind of
oppressive of other religions, or the Christians,
is just that, a Hollywood idea.
The Romans actually were very
tolerant of local religions. They didn't care what gods you
worshipped. The Romans actually were very
pious in the sense that they believed that whatever land they
were in, they should provide sacrifices
and honors for the local gods, especially the important ones.
So the Romans would honor local
gods, other people's gods. Every people was allowed to use
their own gods. Jews, for example,
since the time of Julius Caesar,
who befriended the Jews because they helped him out politically
a lot, he gave them certain privileges.
Jews didn't have to--they could
observe the Sabbath, they didn't have to do things
on the Sabbath that they didn't want to.
They didn't have to serve in
the army. They got to observe their own
religions. They weren't expected to
sacrifice, either to the emperor or to other gods.
So the Romans,
basically, were very tolerant. When they weren't tolerant was
when some religious group or club started looking like they
might be rebellious. If they started looking like
insurrection would happen, the Romans didn't do it.
So the Romans,
for example, outlawed volunteer fire
departments, in local places,
because they were afraid that volunteer fire departments could
be a place where locals, especially maybe lower-class
locals, could get together and then
start gossiping about what they could do to cause trouble for
the Romans. So the Romans were only
concerned about religions when it looked like those religions
were going to cause political problems.
As we'll see next time,
Jews fell into the system in many different ways.
Sometimes they were relatively
happy clients of the Romans. Sometimes they were subversive
enemies of the Roman order. As I said, they were officially
recognized by the Romans, but this caused problems for
Jews sometimes. In Alexandria,
the local Egyptian population resented the Jews because they
were recognized as a legal ethnicity in Alexandria,
and they weren't given complete privileges of the Greeks in--
Alexandria was a Greek city. So they were Greek speaking,
maybe people of Greek descent. But if they had fully adopted
Greek customs, they were considered Greeks.
The Jews were not considered
Greeks, but at least they were higher in status in Alexandrian
law than local Egyptians. The Egyptians were the lowest
in the city. So the local Egyptians resented
the Jews, because the Jews were recognized as their own
ethnicity and given some privileges.
So this is why you sometimes
had Jews getting in trouble with local groups and had violence
with Jews in different places. And sure enough,
pogroms arise in places. Local people would attack the
Jews, or the Jews would try to set up an extra big meeting
house for themselves, and it would cause local
problems. But these were not problems
brought on by the Romans, these were local problems,
and part of it was precisely because the Jews had been
recognized by the Romans as having a special status in some
places, and this caused some kind of
local resentment. As we'll see,
though, the very fact that the Romans had allowed this one
universal empire, that had been created by
Alexander originally, and with a Greek veneer,
and they allowed the West to stay Latin and the East to stay
Greek, and they melded these two
different things-- all of this was one of the
reasons that Christianity was able to spread at this time in
the way it did. In fact, you might even think
that had Jesus come and had Paul lived,
had they tried to spread this new group,
this new movement, at a time 500 years before
this, or 500 years afterwards,
it may have never happened. Because it was precisely
because of this one world, run by the Romans and
maintained by the Romans, that allowed the spread of
Christianity, to a great extent,
both ideologically and thought-wise,
as well as simply physically. Any questions?
Okay, time's up.
See you, not on Monday,
but on Wednesday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecpn3bkVvv0 https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=Ecpn3bkVvv0