by Andrew Marr
Yet Zheng also had a second and subtler idea about immortality. He called himself ‘the First Emperor’ because he intended to be followed by the second emperor, the third, and so on, for thousands of generations. He did not expect his Ch’in dynasty to collapse as rapidly as it did, and the numbering stopped almost immediately. But the notion of an unbroken succession of emperors held the Chinese imagination right up to the Nationalist and Communist insurrections of the twentieth century; and the idea kept Zheng’s memory as its originator for ever alive, in itself a kind of life-in-death. With a common script and a common language, secure communications, and a sense of themselves as one people under one ruler, the Chinese would produce the longest-lasting and most unified of the ancient civilizations. The price they paid for this was that they were not exposed to the liberating, unsettling, destabilizing idea of monotheism – those personal, universal, mobile religions that would rip apart the only real rival the Ch’in and Han empires had, far away to the West.
The Maccabees’ Sting
Of all the nations to the west of the Chinese, none would have puzzled them more than the people of Judah. We last met the Israelites after their Babylonian exile, while they were refining their unusual religion. Judah, a small blob of a country centred on Jerusalem and Jericho, was squeezed between two of the Greek states that Alexander had spawned, that of the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria. By around 200 BC Judah had fallen under the control of the Seleucid Greeks, and a culture war now began between the Greeks, with their sophisticated, pleasure-loving, philosophical traditions, and the intense, inward-looking Israelites under their high priests.
Greek, or Hellenistic, culture was by now the common property of much of the Western world, providing access to a single set of stories, heroes, ways of thinking, eating and behaving. In cities all over the eastern Mediterranean, statues, paintings and buildings – including theatres and gymnasia – gave Greek culture great allure. It can be fairly compared to the magnetism of the film, the music and the food of twentieth-century America. To reject it required great strength of purpose. Inevitably many Jews, particularly richer ones, ‘Greeked’ themselves, competing in athletic games, dressing like Hellenes and even – apparently – managing to reverse their circumcisions. The Greek Seleucid kings wanted Jerusalem’s high priest to serve as their colonial governor. An unseemly series of dodges, bribes and even a murder degraded the holy office, as the Greeks tried to turn Judah into a normal Greek society. From 167 BC the Seleucid king Antiochus IV banned many Jewish rites, outlawing circumcision, Jewish feasts and sacrifices. Worst of all, Zeus was brought, in statue form, into the Temple itself.
At this point one of the books of the Old Testament that Protestant Christians are rarely familiar with, that of the Maccabees, continues the heroic story of the Israelites’ resistance to the would-be modernizers. The accounts start with Alexander the Great, whom the Israelites rightly saw as the initial cause of the trouble: ‘And he subdued countries of nations and princes, and they became tributaries to him. And after these things, he fell down upon his bed, and knew that he should die.’ A long line of horrors committed by Antiochus is then enumerated, including the slaughter of mothers who circumcised their children (the children too were hanged). But then a priest, Mattathias, appeared who refused to bow to the Greeks. When ‘a certain Jew’ who had clearly become semi-Greek arrived in the Temple to sacrifice to a pagan idol, as Antiochus had ordered, Mattathias killed him – and the king’s messenger too – then fled into the mountains.
There, a resistance army was formed. To start with, religion trumped military common sense and a thousand Jews died because they had refused to fight on the Sabbath. The no-fighting-on-the-Sabbath rule was quickly suspended. When old Mattathias died at the ripe old age (apparently) of 146, his son Judas Maccabeus took over as commander. Much of the rest of the narrative, written soon after the event, recounted the guerrilla war waged by the Jews against the Greek armies, which, armed with their elephants, seemed terrifyingly powerful. Jewish militants seized and forcibly circumcised children, pagan altars were overthrown; and eventually Jerusalem itself was recaptured by the Jewish insurgency. Compared with many parts of the conventional Bible, it is an exciting war story.
Mattathias’s other sons, Jonathan and Simon, became kings in their new – Hasmonean – kingdom. They expanded Judah’s territory, smiting unfortunate and weaker neighbours in their path, and made a powerful if dangerous friend by allying with a rising city of which they knew little, Rome. The Maccabees’ war of independence had been a new thing for the Jews, a great political triumph. It had, however, come at a fearful price in terms of deaths. It seems to be around now that Jewish theology started to grapple properly with the notion of an afterlife, something earlier Judaism had said little about. Presumably there was a feeling that these martyrs must have died for something.8
The Book of Daniel, written at around this time, says that ‘many who sleep in the dust of the earth will awaken – these for eternal life, and those for disgrace, for eternal abhorrence’. This was a new idea that would leave a heavy imprint on two thousand years of Christian teaching; and it seems to have emerged out of a guerrilla war.
Strikingly, though, the success of the revolt did not push back Greek influence. Under the Hasmonean kings the Greek language became widely used, alongside Hebrew and Aramaic. Jewish communities began to trade and spread throughout the Greek world, until it was said that there were around a million Jews living in Alexandria alone. This must be an exaggeration, but it shows how large Jewish communities loomed. Damascus became another big Jewish centre. Most large ports had Jewish communities, with their meeting-houses known by the Greek word ‘synagogue’, in which their sacred books were edited and codified and taught. The books were translated into Greek, and many believers seem to have spoken languages other than Hebrew and Aramaic. Non-Jews who supported synagogues and adopted the religion had a special name of their own, ‘God-fearers’.
The short life of the independent Jewish kingdom came to an end in 63 BC thanks to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (‘Magnus’ in homage to Alexander the Great), a bull-faced superstar general whose glitter was blinding the late Roman republic. Pompey, as we know him, was a charismatic career soldier with a brutal edge. He could be sentimental, not least about Julia, Julius Caesar’s daughter, but he notched up five wives, and a mistress who boasted that he liked to bite her, leaving marks, when they made love. He had won his first big victories in North Africa as a young man, and had put down first a Spanish rebellion, then pirates in the Mediterranean. In his latest campaign he had swept through Pontus and Asia Minor, almost reached the Caspian Sea and then turned on Syria, where he had snuffed out the kingdom of Antiochus XIII, descendant of the man who had provoked the Maccabee revolt.
Unfortunately for the Jews, they were busily engaged in a civil war of their own between two brothers, the princely sons of Queen Salome, each supported by one of the main sects, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. One brother, Aristobulus, bribed the Romans for help while he was being besieged in the Temple at Jerusalem, which was by now a massive fortified structure. Pompey’s general arrived, and took large amounts of gold and silver. Pompey himself now became suspicious of his new ally: arriving in Jerusalem, he sided with the other brother, Hyrcanus, and besieged the Temple himself. His troops used catapults, siege towers and battering rams to break their way through. They then marched into the ‘holy of holies’, the sanctuary in the centre of the Temple restricted to the high priest, and sacked it. Some of the Jewish defenders were so appalled that they killed themselves. As part of his vast train of loot, Pompey took many Jewish prisoners back to Rome, where some were freed and settled, living near what is now St Peter’s Basilica.
Judah was now merely another Roman possession, which would soon have a puppet king called Herod imposed on it. Oddly, though, Jewish influence on other people continued to grow. De-kinged, pushed out of their own little world, Jews continued to thrive elsewhere in
the Mediterranean. An argument rages between Jewish historians about the extent to which Jews now went out to convert others. The conventional wisdom is that they do not, and never did, proselytize – but if so, how can one account for the huge expansion of Judaism in this period? The great Jewish historian Salo Baron points out that, having been a people of around only 150,000 in the fifth century BC, they accounted for around 10 per cent of the Roman Empire by the first century AD. Norman Cantor, another US-based Jewish historian, reckons: ‘At the time Jesus of Nazareth lived and died and Herod’s Temple was destroyed, some six million Jews lived in the Roman empire . . . Of these, two-thirds were living in the Diaspora.’9 This seems too large a proportion to be accounted for by birth rate or journeys made.
Because Jews themselves were later on the sharp end of Christian and Muslim missions, there is a reluctance to accept that Judaism was itself a missionary religion. Yet as early as 139 BC, Jews were being expelled from Rome for trying to convert Roman citizens. A little later the great lawyer-politician Cicero complained about proselytizing Jews. Two emperors, Tiberius and Claudius, transported Jews from Rome for the crime of trying to convert Romans.10 Roman writers such as Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus all discuss the issue. Later, the emperor Theodosius published ferocious decrees in the Christian era against anyone who attempted to make converts to Judaism.
Judaism, and then Christianity (initially seen by Romans as a version of the same), were disruptive creeds because of their emphasis on equality before God, and their denial of the divinity of emperors. They argued for a reality outside the reality of daily life in the empire. They became popular beliefs among the literate middle classes of the Roman world, the traders and small landowners remote from real power; Jews (though not, to start with, Christians) served as soldiers too. They represented a restless, ceaseless force. The Jewish historian Shlomo Sand makes the point that ‘every monotheism contains a potential element of mission. Unlike the tolerant polytheisms, which accept the existence of other deities, the very belief in the existence of a single god . . . impels the believers to spread the idea of divine singularity . . . The acceptance by others of the worship of the single god proves his might and his power over the world.’11
This is such an important story to the West, and such a complicated one, that it is worth trying to summarize it so far.
The Hebrew people had first separated themselves from what had been common in the Mediterranean, the worship of many gods. Very slowly and with much argument they had narrowed their focus to a single god, Yahweh. Many Jews had disagreed over this, but with time their one-god prophets won the argument. When their first kingdoms were destroyed and their leaders exiled to Babylon, the priests developed this thinking further. God was both the only god and the potentially universal god, unconfined to a single area. Instead of walking only his own land, he was everywhere and nowhere. This god had a relationship with every believer, and his laws were written down; they could be carried around and easily disseminated.
The later Judean kingdom fought a vicious war of liberation, as we have seen, and in contemplating its many martyrs it developed another powerful idea, that there might be an individual, personal life after death. Because of the military politics of the ancient world – Greek conquest, then Roman Empire – the people who held these beliefs became widely scattered around the Mediterranean, as traders and merchants with their own communities and buildings. Believing themselves to be in possession of a vital truth, they spread the word and tried to convert others. Conventional Jews were later elbowed aside as the main monotheistic influence, by radical breakaways who believed everyone should convert to their faith – the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, of whom more later.
This is a story of the endless human search for meaning, belonging and consolation. And it came about because of the geography of the Middle East, its ancient wars and trade routes, and finally the awesome power of Rome. Christianity, then Islam, would destroy any chance the classical world might have had to develop a single, unified civilization on the Chinese model. But without its imperial conquerors, those materialistic, this-worldly generals, monotheism would not have got going; nor have spread until it conquered the conqueror.
The Rise and Fall of the Romans
The conquerors of the Jews had been polytheists. Like the early Jewish kingdoms, early Rome was an obscure place on the fringes of the Greek world. It has also been compared to the kingdom of Ch’in, another austere, ruthless state on the edges, which had to toughen up to survive. At about the same time as Judah was defeated by the Babylonians, the small kingdom of Rome was defeated by its neighbouring power, the Etruscans. Like the Jews, the Romans told stories about their earliest origins. Instead of the exile in Egypt, they had the tale of Aeneas leading them from Troy to their promised land, a group of small hills by a marsh. Or – another story – they had been founded by a wanderer called Romulus, who had been suckled by a wolf and later murdered his brother.
So, from the first, Roman stories involved swagger (Troy was about as good an origin as the ancient world could imagine), migration and violence. Rome turned out to be well placed. It was far enough from the centre of the Greek world to be mostly left alone. It was on a river, the Tiber, which sea-going ships could navigate at least part of the way, yet its fortified hilltops offered protection from seaborne raiders. Finally, it was on the southern edge of a part of Italy that was under the domination of the Etruscans. The Etruscans were traders as well as warriors, with a Phoenician-derived alphabet and strong links with the Greek states. They would give the Romans many of their customs, including the grouping of citizens by hundreds, or ‘centuries’, and would ensure that this small city was connected from early on with the wider Mediterranean culture. For a period the Romans were ruled directly by Etruscan kings, though they eventually rebelled and threw them out.
The essence of the Roman story is politics and war, not religion. Traditional Roman religion involved a complicated array of gods, which they would later try to align with the famous Greek pantheon; the Romans were always incorporators, or as the historian Mary Beard puts it, ‘intellectual sponges’. Their priests tried to read the future by watching how birds flew, or how sacred chickens ate.12 Offerings of slaughtered animals, omens, libations poured on the ground, naked men leaping around whipping passers-by – this is all the fairly routine business of primitive worship, characterized by its practitioners’ credulity and in no way charming. Paying homage to local gods and worshipping, or merely revering, one’s ancestors were common in China or Japan. But societies that allow ideas to immigrate change faster. And not even the Vestal Virgins were as interesting as they sound. It is no great surprise that later on, the Romans did indeed become the ultimate soakers-up of everything from Greek philosophy to African cults, Egyptian rites to Judaism. Religion, Roman-style, only becomes properly interesting when Roman emperors declare themselves to be gods; and that was about politics, not really about religion at all.
And the politics was always interesting. One of the last Roman kings, an Etruscan warrior said to be the son of a slave, introduced a code of laws and organized regular meetings of all citizens. Once the kings had been deposed, Rome had aristocratic rulers, as did most Greek communities; but the Roman plebs, the poor, managed to establish basic rights of their own, defended by tribunes. From very early on, there was a rough balance of power in a city which – unlike most others – positively welcomed all comers. The Romulus story suggested the city had been founded by runaways: migrants and freed slaves could become Roman citizens and eventually work and fight for the republic. This was a hierarchical and macho society, however, in which fathers wielded almost untrammelled power over the family and women were excluded from public life. And because Rome was hemmed around by hostile rivals, jostling for space in a fertile part of Italy, it was a military society.
At the top of republican Roman society were the aristocratic families who traced their influence back to the time of the kings and
who formed the Senate. Relatively early, this immigrant society also developed elections for key posts. In 367 BC a major change took place when it was agreed that all classes, not only patricians, could be elected as consuls, so long as they were wealthy enough. A complicated, lengthy system of elections plus experience accumulated in office resulted in the Senate evolving into a tough and effective ruling body. Serving as its executives was a double-act of consuls, with a kind of super-magistrate elected each year. Then came the rest, the ordinary citizens organized into tribes and able, in their own assembly, to vote for new laws by simple majority.
If this sounds remarkably democratic, it was not. A Roman form of jerrymandering, involving block votes and the intimidation of voters, kept the well off, mostly, in control. A republic meant a ruling system without kings, not a representative one. But the Senate was able to draw in a constant supply of new talent and to balance factions among the richer citizens. The voting system and the tension between different bodies kept absolute power, the folk memory of tyrant kings, at bay. Most impressively, the Senate was able to balance its own traditional authority with rights for incomers and poorer citizens, both those living inside the walls and those farming beyond.
There was always tension, and later on, at times of food shortage or military failure, an almost revolutionary spirit could flare up. When it came to arguments about land and justice, Roman citizens had louder voices than their counterparts in most other regions of the Mediterranean world. They may have been more Philistine and more provincial than the Athenians, but the Romans had evolved a clever political equilibrium, which generally warded off any possibility of internal chaos. Their system threw up a regular supply of good administrators and law-makers, and they managed to absorb large numbers of new ‘citizens’ from far outside the city itself. Priding themselves on their austerity and plainness, the Romans of the early republic developed no literature or philosophy of their own that we know of. Their buildings were mere mimicry. But they went to war like nobody else.