by Chris Harman
The result was that, while the luxury consumption of the rich and the cost of maintaining the empire remained as great as ever, the extra surplus which slavery had provided under the republic was no longer available. The ruling class could only continue as they had in the past if ever-greater pressure was applied to the peasantry, replicating across the empire the excessive exploitation which had already ruined the Italian peasants. Taxation, which had accounted for only about 10 per cent of the peasant family’s produce under the republic, accounted for a third by the sixth century 97 – and the peasants had to pay rent to the landowner on top of this.
Ste Croix points out that Roman records from the late second century AD onwards refer to ‘disturbances’ in various provinces of the empire – sometimes amounting to full-blown peasant uprisings, sometimes restricted to increased brigandage by deserters from the army, impoverished peasants and escaped slaves. From AD 284 through to the mid-fifth century there are periodic reports of bacaudae (peasant rebels) in Gaul and Spain.
We have no way of knowing how important such rebellions were. What is certain is that they were a symptom of growing impoverishment, discontent and insecurity, especially in the border areas of the empire. There were increasing instances in these regions of peasants abandoning land which provided them with no livelihood once they had paid rent and taxes. The state increasingly passed legislation binding peasants to the land or to particular landowners as coloni , effectively serfs. But such legal subjection gave them even less reason to support the empire against ‘barbarian’ incursions.
These incursions became increasingly prevalent and costly to deal with. The emperors became ever more reliant on massive and expensive mercenary armies – numbering 650,000 by the fourth century AD. 98 But the cost of this put an even greater burden on the cultivators, leading to further disaffection and flight from the soil. At the same time, successful military commanders were strongly tempted to use their legions to seize the crown. As civil wars weakened the empire, mutinous legionaries even pillaged Rome itself.
The empire entered into a cycle of decline in the west. The military seizures of power became ever more frequent, the barbarian invasions ever more daring. In AD 330 the centre of the empire moved from Italy to the Greek-speaking city of Byzantium, from where the rulers found it difficult to control the west, and soon rival emperors ruled each half. Meanwhile, the fringes of the empire, like Britain, passed out of Roman control. Emperors sought to hang on to the rest by bribing ‘barbarian’ (usually Germanic) peoples who settled inside the frontiers. But as the barbarian leaders became Romanised they aspired to the power of the Roman rulers and resorted to the traditional Roman means of achieving it – conquest. The Goth Alaric led his forces to sack Rome. The Frank Clovis took control of Gaul. The Ostrogoth Theodoric made himself emperor of Rome, and the Visigoths established a Romanised kingdom in Spain.
The vicious circle of decline fed back into the very means of obtaining a livelihood. The wars and civil wars wrought havoc on agriculture. Trade declined, as merchants feared to venture far from cities. Taxes and rents were increasingly taken in kind rather than in cash, with the state providing for its own needs and those of its numerous employees by direct levies on the producers. The result was a further decline in trade and in the position of the merchant and artisan classes. Cities began to encounter problems provisioning themselves, while towns and villages were driven back on their own resources. The peasant producers had no protection against the powerful landowners, who began to exercise direct political and military power over them. Paying tribute for ‘protection’ to a local bully was often the only way of warding off the attention of rapacious outsiders. It was a pattern copied by tribal peoples from the north and east who settled within the empire.
In short, the integrated economy of the empire, based on slavery, gave way in the west to a new economy of localised, almost self-contained rural units based on serfdom. Slavery did not pass away completely. The use of slave labour persisted until around the year AD 1000 on some of the larger landholdings, 99 where landowners, compelled by the decline of the towns to live on their estates, found it a very effective way to pump as much surplus as possible out of the cultivators. But it no longer provided the basis for sustaining a civilisation or an empire. The attempts to do so, with the brief reunification of the eastern and western empires under Justinian in the mid-sixth century and the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire by Charlemagne almost 250 years later, soon fell apart. The material base was just not strong enough to sustain such a superstructure.
Chapter 6
The rise of Christianity
There was one great survivor of the crisis of the western Roman Empire after AD 400. This was the religion which had arisen from very small beginnings over the previous centuries to become the official ideology of the empire – Christianity. By the time of the ‘barbarian’ invasions every town in the empire had its church and priests, every province its bishop, all organised into hierarchies centred on Rome and Byzantium, where church power and imperial power interacted, with emperors laying down the line on the finer points of church doctrine.
Christianity had not started off as the ideology of an empire. Virtually nothing is known about its supposed founder, Jesus of Nazareth. There is not even any definite proof he was a historical rather than a mythical figure. Certainly the proof is not to be found in the Christian New Testament. It claims his birth was in Bethlehem in the Roman province of Judaea, where his family had gone for a census during the time of Augustus. But there was no census at the time stated and Judaea was not a Roman province at the time. When a census was held in AD 7 it did not require anyone to leave their place of residence. Similarly, the New Testament locates Jesus’s birth as in the time of King Herod, who died in 4 BC. Roman and Greek writers of the time make no mention of Jesus and a supposed reference by the Jewish-Roman writer Josephus is almost certainly a result of the imagination of medieval monks. 100 Even the first authenticated reference to Christians, by Tacitus writing in about AD 100, does not mention Jesus by name but simply uses the Greek word christos , used for any supposed messiah.
We know as little about the beliefs of the early Christians as we do about the life of their supposed founder. The New Testament gospels are full of contradictory statements. In places, especially in Luke, there are powerful expressions of class hatred. For example, the rich man goes straight to hell, while the poor man, Lazarus, goes to the ‘bosom of Abraham’. 101 Jesus preaches, ‘It is easier for the camel to go through the eye of the needle than for the rich man to enter the Kingdom of God’. 102 And Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount declares, ‘Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger, for ye shall be filled … But woe unto you that are rich, for ye have received your consolation; woe unto ye that are full, for ye shall hunger’. 103 By contrast, elsewhere the message is one of reconciliation between rich and poor. So Matthew has Jesus preach, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven … Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness , for they shall be filled’. 104 The parable of the ‘talents’ (coins) suggests a rich man is praiseworthy for rewarding a servant who is given three talents and invests them profitably, while punishing a servant who has only one talent and fails to earn interest by lending it to a banker. It warns, ‘He that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away’. 105
Similarly, there are passages which seem to preach resistance to the existing rulers and passages which encourage subjection to them – as where Jesus tells people to pay their taxes to the Romans, saying, ‘Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, give unto God that which is God’s’. 106 Finally, there are contradictions between passages which call for obedience to the rules of the Jewish faith (‘the Law’) and passages which urge a breach with them.
Karl Kautsky’s classic Marxist work The Foundations of Christianity suggested almost 90 years ago that the contradiction arose from attemp
ts by later Christian writers to play down what he called the ‘communist’ ideas of a ‘proletarian’ group. Some of Kautsky’s arguments on this score are open to doubt. 107 Nevertheless, the tone of many passages in the earliest gospels, Mark and Luke, is one of rebellion against the empire which later adopted the religion.
To understand how this can be, it is necessary to look at the conditions in which Christianity emerged and spread.
Jerusalem in the first half of the 1st century was one of the larger cities of the Roman Empire – Pliny the Elder described it as ‘by far the most illustrious city of the Orient’. But it was also one of the most tumultuous. The city’s splendour had arisen from its position close to important trade routes and, later, as a religious centre attracting wealth from all over the empire. But the lands around it – Judaea, Samaria and Galilee – were far from rich. They suffered, as did all the Roman provinces, from the extortionate levels of taxation required to pay tribute to Rome and to provide Roman governors with their expected fortunes. There was ‘extensive … evidence of poverty’. 108
This led to considerable hostility to the Romans and to a Jewish upper class which collaborated with them. Jewish kings had, after all, invited in the Romans in the first place (in 139 BC) and since then had relied upon Roman help in their internecine wars with each other. 109
There were repeated riots in Jerusalem and recurrent outbreaks of ‘banditry’ in the country areas, especially Galilee. Sometimes these would take on a religious coloration. Thus there was a near uprising against King Herod as he was dying, and 3,000 Jews are said to have died when his son Archelaus put down a rising, with a further 2,000 crucified. There was guerrilla war in the countryside of Galilee led by a certain Judas who called himself ‘King of the Jews’, and at the time of the Roman census of AD 7 two men ‘aroused the people to rebellion … and general bloodshed ensued’, according to Josephus. 110 Again, 40 years later, the prophet Theudus roused support by proclaiming himself a messiah ( christos in Greek) and was beheaded. The Roman rulers dealt similarly with ‘a band of evil men who had godless thoughts and made the city restless and insecure’ as they ‘incited the people to insurrection … under the pretext of divine revelation’. Soon afterwards ‘a false prophet from Egypt … succeeded in having himself accepted as prophet because of his witchcraft. He led … 30,000 persons … out of the desert to the so called Mount of Olives in order to penetrate into Jerusalem’, and attempted to overthrow the Roman garrison. 111 ‘Hardly had this rebellion been put down when … a few wizards and murderers joined forces and gained many adherents … They passed through the entire Jewish land, plundered the houses of the rich, slaying them that dwelled therein, set fire to the villages and harried the land’. 112 In all these clashes, class hatred among the Jewish poor of the Jewish upper classes merged with hatred of the Roman forces of occupation.
Class differences found expression in different interpretations of the Jewish religion. The rich, who spoke Greek and collaborated with the Romans, tended to favour the Sadducee school associated with hereditary priests, said by Josephus to ‘deny that souls are immortal and that there is to be any reward or punishment after death’ and to be ‘cruel and severe both with regard to their fellow countrymen as well as towards strangers’. By contrast, the non-hereditary religious scholars, who came from a range of social backgrounds, 113 tended to favour the Pharisee school. This insisted on strict adherence to the Jewish ‘Law’ (the rituals and dietary rules of the Old Testament), objected to upper-class collaboration with the Romans, and held that ‘the soul … is immortal … the souls of the good will enter into new bodies, while those of the wicked will be tormented by eternal suffering’. 114 A third school, the Essenes, attempted to escape what they saw as the evils of society by establishing monastic-type communities in the countryside, where they lived without private property. They also rejected slavery as unjust – a position more radical than the Christians were to hold. Finally, the Zealots combined religious faith with political agitation against the Roman presence.
Jerusalem, then, was a cauldron in which competing religious notions gave expression to different class feelings and attitudes to Roman rule during the period in which Jesus was said to have preached. But that was not all. Its religion had adherents in every great city of the empire, so the doctrinal arguments had repercussions elsewhere. For the Jews had long since ceased to be a people living in just one small land. Assyrian and Babylonian conquerors had deported the ruling classes of the Jewish states of Israel and Judaea to Mesopotamia half a millennium before. Many had not returned when the Persian emperor Xerxes restored Jerusalem to them, but had been happy to prosper in new homes. Large numbers of other Jews had left Palestine to settle elsewhere in the Mediterranean region, for the same reason that so many Greeks had settled overseas – they wanted a better life than the not very fertile soil of their one-time homeland could provide. Still others were involuntary settlers – enslaved during the wars that beset the region, they ended up wherever their masters took them.
By the beginning of the first century AD there were large Jewish populations in virtually every Roman city, ‘ranging from 10 to 15 percent of the total population of a city’. 115 They made up a high proportion of the population of Alexandria, so that the Greek city in Egypt was also very much a Jewish city. They also had a noticeable enough presence in Rome for Julius Caesar to have sought their favour.
The Jews of this diaspora maintained an identity as a separate community through their religious belief in a single invisible god, their dietary rules and their observance of a day of rest. These customs stopped them simply melting into the populations around them. They were also expected to pay regular amounts for the upkeep of Jerusalem – which accounted for much of its wealth – and to visit the city when they could for the Passover festival. The rules about diet and the sabbath would have been slightly onerous, in the sense of making it more difficult to socialise and work with the wider non-Jewish population. But their communities survived, focused on their synagogue meeting places – probably for similar reasons that immigrant communities are focused on churches or mosques. The ties of a religion which bound a group together not only in prayer but also in diet and behaviour would have been a benefit to people seeking to stay afloat in the atomised world of the city, where life even for the prosperous trader or artisan was precarious and for the groups below them desperate.
However, the Jewish communities did not simply survive. They attracted others to them. ‘Proselytes’ – converts to Judaism – were very common in this period. The Alexandrian Jew Philo told, ‘All men are being conquered by Judaism … barbarians, Hellenes … the nations of the east and west, Europeans, Asiatics’. 116 So attractive was Judaism in the Greek and Roman cities that a special category of believers emerged, the ‘God fearers’ – non-Jews who attended synagogue but who were not prepared to undergo circumcision and to abide by all the biblical rules.
It was not just the sense of community that attracted them. The central religious idea of Judaism, monotheism – the belief in the one invisible god – fitted the situation of the urban dwellers. The pagan religions in which there were many gods, each associated with a particular locality or force of nature, made sense to the country dweller for whom the local village or clan was the centre of social existence. But the urban traders, artisans and beggars had repeated contact with a very large number of people from different localities and in different occupations. An anonymous, all-embracing deity could seem to provide support and protection in such multiple encounters. That is why there were trends towards monotheism in all the great civilisations of antiquity – the rise of Buddhism in India and China, and the worship of a single ‘good’ god (involved in an eternal battle with evil) in Persia. 117 Even Roman Paganism tended to worship a sun-god more powerful than the others. Furthermore, in its Pharisaical form, Judaism combined monotheism with the promise to its adherents that however hard their suffering in this life, they had something to look
forward to in the next.
Such was the popularity of Judaism that it bound together millions of believers in all the trading centres of the Roman Empire, providing a network of contacts and communication stretching across thousands of miles. 118 All the religious disputes and messianic speculations occasioned by the situation in Jerusalem were transmitted along this network. To people in each Roman city they would not have seemed distant arguments about the situation in Palestine, since the suffering of Palestine was just one example of the suffering of the lower classes and the conquered provinces right across the empire.
Judaism was thus on its way to becoming the universal religion of the urban masses of the empire. But it faced two obstacles. The first was its rules about diet and circumcision. The phenomenon of the God-fearers shows that many of those attracted to the religion were not prepared to go all the way in adopting its rules. The second was Judaism’s promise to its believers that they were ‘the chosen people’. This clearly clashed with the reality of Roman domination. Jews in Palestine might plan for some great uprising to overthrow Roman rule. But the Jews in the diaspora, everywhere a minority, were in no position to rebel and did little or nothing when the Jews of Palestine did rise up in AD 70. The defeat of that rising made it even harder for people to take literally Judaism’s promise that its adherents would take over the world. The religion could only prosper to the extent that it replaced promises of what would happen in this world with promises of what would happen in the next.