The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (55 page)

Hadrian’s surrender of territory was, in fact, a brave move. He grasped the important fact that expansion for its own sake was self-defeating. Trajan had become preoccupied with the ambition of emulating Alexander—shortly before he died he had broken down in tears at the mouth of the Euphrates when it became clear that an unsettled empire behind him forced him to give up a campaign to the east. Hadrian not only surrendered the newly conquered provinces, he also put in place a policy of consolidating the frontiers of the existing empire. Along the northern borders, always vulnerable to raiding Germanic tribes, he strengthened the
limes,
a military road overlooked by watchtowers joined by palisades. In Britain he created an even more formidable barrier between Roman and barbarian, Hadrian’s Wall, somewhat south of what is now the border between England and Scotland. As if this was not enough, he appreciated that legionaries stationed behind defensible frontiers would soon become unfit and demoralized. He visited the legions regularly, and insisted that they keep up their training. A hundred years after his death he was still remembered for his “training and disciplining of the whole army.” Anthony Birley,
Hadrian, the Restless Emperor
(London and New York, 1997), p. 303, quoting Cassius Dio.

7. Quoted, along with other assessments, ibid.

8. For Hadrian’s villa, see W. MacDonald and J. Pinto, Hadrian’s Villa and Its
Legacy
(New Haven and London, 1995). For Hadrian and the cities, see M. T. Boatwright,
Hadrian and the Cities of the Roman Empire
(Princeton and Chichester, Eng., 2000).

9. For the Antonine Altar, see S. Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman
Imperial Cult in Asia Minor
(Cambridge, 1984), pp. 158–59 (complete with illustration of a reconstruction). Most of the remaining fragments are now in the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna.

10. The gratitude that members of the Greek elite felt toward the Romans was memorably expressed by one of the leaders of the second sophistic, Aelius Aristides, in his famous panegyric to Rome delivered in the city in A.D. 150. Aristides talks of the cities of the empire relaxing in contentment now that all their ancient quarrels with each other are over.

You continue to care for the Greeks as for foster parents. You protect them; you raise them up as though prostrate . . . Their energies are now focused in a frenzy of rebuilding. While all other competition between cities has ceased, but a single rivalry obsesses every one of them—to appear as beautiful and attractive as possible. Every place is full of
gymnasia,
fountains, gateways, temples, shops and schools . . . All the monuments, works of art and adornments in them mean glory for you . . .

A long quotation from this speech, from which this extract is taken, can be found in N. Lewis and M. Reinhold,
Roman Civilization, Sourcebook II: The Empire
(New York, 1995), pp. 135–38.

11. For a mathematician’s assessment of Diophantus’ achievement, see M. Kline,
Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times,
vol. 1 (New York and Oxford, 1972), pp. 138–44.

12. For Galen, see Roy Porter,
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical
History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present
(London, 1997), pp. 73–77; G. E. R. Lloyd,
Greek Science After Aristotle
(London, 1973), and chap. 6 of Rihill,
Greek Science.
The quotation on Galen as both logician and physician comes from G. E. R. Lloyd, “Demonstration in Galen,” in M. Frede and G. Striker, eds.,
Rationality in Greek Thought
(Oxford, 1996), p. 256.

13. The translation is by Peter Green. Compare Einstein’s words from his
Ideas
and Opinions:
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true science.” For Ptolemy, see Lloyd,
Greek Science After Aristotle,
the source of his comment, as well as an introductory history of astronomy such as M. Hoskin, ed.,
The Cambridge Concise
History of Astronomy
(Cambridge, 1999). The major contribution that Ptolemy made to geography is also being recognized. The review quoted here of
Ptolemy’s
Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters,
ed. and trans. J. Lennert Berggren and Alexander Jones (Princeton, 2002), is by Peter Green, from
London Review of Books,
Feb. 21, 2002, vol. 24, no. 4, p. 35.

14. An essential book on Roman religion is M. Beard, J. North and S. Price,
Religions of Rome
(Cambridge, 1998). For a briefer introduction, see James Rives, “Religion in the Roman Empire,” in Janet Huskinson, ed.,
Experiencing Rome:
Culture, Identity and Power in the Roman Empire
(London, 2000).

15. Available in Penguin Classics, trans. E. J. Kenny.

16. For
theos hypsistos,
see Stephen Mitchell, “The Cult of
Theos Hypsistos,
” in P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1999), pp. 81–148. There is an early-fourth-century gravestone from Laodicea Catacecaumena which reads, “First I shall sing a hymn of praise for God, the one who sees all, second I shall sing a hymn for the first angel, Jesus Christ.” Stephen Mitchell,
Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor,
vol. 2 (Oxford, 1993), p. 46.

17. The quotation, which comes from Origen’s
Contra Celsum
5:41, is to be found in the introduction to Athanassiadi and Frede, eds.,
Pagan Monotheism,
p. 8. See also the quotation from the so-called
Theosophy of Tubingen
in Mitchell,
Anatolia,
vol. 2, p. 44:

There is one god in the whole universe, who has set boundaries to the wheels of heavenly rotation with divine ordinances, who has distributed measures of equal weight to the hours and the moments, and has set bonds which link and balance the turnings of the heavens with one another, whom we call Zeus, from whom comes the living eternity, and Zeus bearer of all things, life-providing steward of breath, himself, proceeding from the one into the one.

18. Athanassiadi and Frede, eds.,
Pagan Monotheism,
pp. 185–86 for the quote of Maximus and p. 20 for the quotation from the editors’ introduction. See further chap. 11 of this book for how the concept of the supreme deity was used by Constantine.

19. For Mithraism, see chap. 6 of Beard, North and Price,
Religions of Rome.

20. “Middle Platonism” and “Neoplatonism” are terms that were developed in the nineteenth century. Their practitioners would have simply seen themselves as Platonists. Introduction can be found in R. Popkin, ed.,
The Pimlico History of
Western Philosophy
(New York, 1998; London, 1999), “Middle Platonism” by H. Tarrant and “Plotinus and Neoplatonism” by L. Gerson. There is a wealth of useful material in C. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge, 1994). An important passage for Middle Platonists was the following from
The Republic
509 B.

The sun . . . not only makes the things we see visible, but causes the processes of generation, growth and nourishment, without itself being such a process . . . The Good therefore may be said to be the source not only of the intelligibility of the objects of knowledge, but also of their existence and reality; yet it is not itself identical with reality, but is beyond reality, and superior to it in dignity and power.

Translation H. D. P. Lee. Note the analogy between the sun and “the Good,” the definition of the sun/Good as an active, nurturing force, which is, however, independent from the process of nurturing, and the definition of “the Good” as “beyond reality.” These were all important concepts in Middle Platonism.

21. The point is made by Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in
the Fourth to Eight Centuries
(New Haven and London, 1997), p. 78. Looking at oracles from the third century, Stephen Mitchell (
Anatolia,
vol. 2, p. 44) stresses:

One notion that these oracles should dispel at once is that there was any dichotomy in the middle and later empire between rational thinkers, who based their religious and philosophical ideas on the exercise of a logical critique, and devotees of the god or of the gods, who relied for their religious intuitions on a form of divine inspiration which was denied to others . . . There is no evidence for any conflict between those who adhered to intellectual reasoning and those who simply turned to the god for instruction.

The tradition of trying to reconcile Neoplatonist principles with empirical evidence was carried on in the works of Proclus, the fifth-century Athenian philosopher, the last of the “great” Greek thinkers. See L. Siorvanes, Proclus: Neo-Platonic Philosophy
and Science
(Edinburgh, 1996), especially chaps. 4 and 5.

22. See Athanassiadi and Frede, eds.,
Pagan Monotheism,
p. 15, for examples.

23. For instance, one can trace the career of one Quintus Lollius Urbicus, son of a Berber landowner in the province of Africa. He served first in Asia, then in Judaea, where he was involved in putting down the revolt of 132–35, then along the Rhine and Danube before being made governor in Britain. He ended his career as prefect of the city of Rome. Many of these themes can be traced in M. Goodman, The Roman World, 44 B.C.–A.D. 180 (London, 1997), and J. Huskinson, ed.,
Experiencing Rome
(London, 2000).

24. Beard, North and Price,
Religions of Rome,
p. 225.

25. It is interesting in this context that one of the most important Stoic philosophers of the early second century A.D., Epictetus, was a freed slave, yet he may have been consulted by one emperor, Hadrian, and was certainly an influence on another, Marcus Aurelius.

7

1. In instructions to Julianus, proconsul of Africa, concerning the Manicheans. Quoted in S. Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (London, 1985), p. 153.

2. The third-century crisis tends to get neglected in accounts of the Roman empire as it is too late for many general books on the empire and too early for those on late antiquity. The
Cambridge Ancient History
volume on the period is still unpublished. See my
Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean
(Oxford, 1996), chap. 26, for a short overview (which draws, with his permission, on the chapter by John Drinkwater which will eventually appear in the
Cambridge Ancient History
).

3. Williams,
Diocletian,
is a thorough treatment of Diocletian and is drawn on heavily for this chapter. See also Averil Cameron,
The Later Roman Empire
(London, 1993).

4. See S. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London, 1981), p. 107 and plate 10. This is an essential book for the study of the imperial ceremonies and creation of the emperor as a semi-divine figure.

5. The point is made by J. W. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change in Roman
Religion
(Oxford, 1979), p. 243.

6. M. Beard, J. North, S. Price, Religions of Rome, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 243. See also J. Rives,
Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage from Augustus
to Constantine
(Oxford, 1995), in which he states (p. 259) that

[Decius’] motive seems to have been a desire to join together, by force if necessary, all the inhabitants of the empire in one religious act. This was no doubt on one level an attempt to win back the favour of the gods in a time of crisis, but on another to establish among the inhabitants of the empire some sense of a shared religious identity.

7. Quoted in Williams,
Diocletian,
p. 198.

8. Without anticipating the argument, the following quotation from Rives,
Religion and Authority,
p. 251, is helpful.

The fact that the great persecution of the Tetrarchs and the conversion of Constantine took place within a decade of each other was no coincidence, but a reflection of the ambivalence of the imperial elite. For their part, the leaders of the Christian community were increasingly ambivalent in their own attitudes towards the imperial government. To a large extent they viewed it as a source of oppression, but as their own concern with authority grew, they began to appreciate its exercise of a sort of authority that they lacked. As a result, Constantine discovered after his conversion that he shared many concerns with the leaders of the church.

8

1. There have been many scholars involved in reconstructing the life and teachings of Jesus within his Jewish heritage. The three I have drawn on here are Geza Vermes, W. D. Davies and E. P. Sanders. See, for instance, E. P. Sanders and W. D. Davies, “Jesus; From the Jewish Point of View,” in William Horbury, W. D. Davies and John Sturdy,
The Cambridge History of Judaism,
vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1999). One result of a deeper understanding of the Jewish roots of Christianity has been to defuse the anti-Semitism that has scarred the Christian experience so deeply. In 1999 the Catholic Church recognized “the weaknesses” shown “by so many of her sons and daughters” in this respect (
Memory and Reconciliation: The Church
and the Faults of the Past,
issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Vatican, December 1999), although the Church fell short of assuming any responsibility as an institution for teaching anti-Semitism. Jews themselves increasingly feel able to reclaim Jesus as part of their own inheritance. (It is always instructive, however, to read the entry “Jesus” in a dictionary of Judaism.) Here is a rare example where long years of patient academic study of ancient documents have proved able to dissolve deep-rooted prejudices (although no one, Christian or not, with a knowledge of European history can have failed to reflect on the underlying long-term causes of the Holocaust, which took part deep in a predominantly Christian Europe).

2. G. Vermes,
The Changing Faces of Jesus
(London, 2000), p. 258.

3. There is, of course, a mass of material on the Gospels. A useful starting point for contemporary thinking is the relevant entries in F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds.,
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church,
3rd ed. (Oxford, 1997), and M. Coogan and B. Metzger, eds.,
The Oxford Companion to the Bible
(Oxford and New York, 1993). See also, for an overview, J. Court and K. Court, The
New Testament World
(Cambridge, 1999).