The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

by Charles Freeman

  Alexander asked the fellow, “What is your idea in infesting the sea?” And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, “The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it in a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate: because you have a mighty navy, you are called an emperor.”

  De Republica 3.14.24.

  8. Translation by P. Green from Apollonios Rhodios, The Argonautika (Berkeley and London, 1997), book 3, lines 760–65.

  9. An introduction to Archimedes can be found in M. Bragg, On Giants’ Shoulders (London, 1998), chap. 1, a discussion of Archimedes’ achievements that includes a contribution by Geoffrey Lloyd. See also M. Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, vol. 1 (New York and Oxford, 1972), chap. 5, which, besides discussing Archimedes, considers the work of Alexandrian mathematicians in general.

  10. See, as an introduction to Epicureanism and Stoicism, A. A. Long, “Hellenistic Philosophy,” in R. Popkin, ed., The Pimlico History of Western Philosophy (New York, 1998; London, 1999), and C. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge, 1995), chap. 5. Another excellent, and lively, survey of Stoicism is to be found in “Stoicism” by J. Brunschwig, in J. Brunschwig and G. E. R. Lloyd, eds., Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000), pp. 977–96. A much fuller and demanding study is M. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, 1994). A recent, well-received book on the difficult but important subject of Stoicism and free will is S. Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford, 2000), while there is much on the relationship between the Stoics and emotion in R. Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford, 2000).

  11. Much of the old way of life remained undisturbed, and it was only in the stable Roman centuries that followed that Greek culture penetrated “to the most remote of rural contexts.” See F. Millar, The Roman Near East 31 B.C.–A.D. 337 (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1993), especially the summing-up, pp. 523–32.

  5

  1. For the origins of Rome, see T. J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome (London, 1995), which takes the story up to 264 B.C. Essential for an understanding of Rome’s expansion is W. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome (Oxford, 1979).

  2. In one early layer of the Roman forum, dating from the second quarter of the sixth century B.C., a sanctuary to the god Volcanus, an ancient Roman god of destructive, devouring fire (as, for instance, in volcanoes), has been uncovered. Among the votive deposits found in the sanctuary was a black-figure vase from Athens with a representation of the Greek god of fire and blacksmiths, Hephaestus. This shows at how early a date Greek and Roman mythology interacted. In later Roman mythology Volcanus and Hephaestus were merged. See M. Beard, J. North and S. Price, Religions of Rome (Cambridge, 1998), p. 12.

  3. E. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca, 1992), is the essential introduction to the relationship between the Romans and Greek culture.

  4. On Cicero, E. Rawson, Cicero: A Portrait (London, 1995), is a good starting point. There has been renewed interest in Cicero’s philosophy in recent years. See J. G. F. Powell, ed., Cicero the Philosopher (Oxford, 1995). The introductory essay by the editor covers the main issues.

  5. A concise overview of these years can be found in D. Shotter, The Fall of the Roman Republic (London and New York, 1994).

  6. C. Meier, Caesar (London, 1995), is a thorough and thoughtful biography of Julius Caesar.

  7. The Philippics were called after the famous speeches made in fourth-century Athens by the orator Demosthenes in response to the growing power of Philip of Macedon.

  8. For a general survey of these years see M. Goodman, The Roman World, 44 B.C.–A.D. 180 (London, 1997).

  9. Among the manifestations of Augustus’ pietas was a return to a sterner sexual morality after the undoubted decadence of the late republic. While Greek sculptures of the god Priapus show him as phallic and randy, the Augustan equivalent is decently clothed and his energies are diverted towards a mass of children clambering over him. See K. Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton, 1996), p. 345. This is an essential book for those who wish to study the cultural effects of Augustus’ rule, as is P. Zanker’s The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, 1988).

  10. Galinsky, Augustan Culture, p. 197 with plan.

  11. Paraphrase of the original by D. Ross, quoted ibid., p. 354. Sappho (seventh century B.C.) is, of course, the great Greek lyric poet from Lesbos; Alcaeus, her contemporary, another lyric poet from Lesbos. Callimachus was the highly erudite Hellenistic poet from Alexandria, probably the most influential of his period.

  12. The translation is by Robert Fitzgerald.

  13. Tacitus, the most astute of the Roman historians, had no illusions about the process that he describes in his account of his father-in-law Agricola’s period as governor in Britain.

  Agricola had to deal with people living in isolation and ignorance, and therefore prone to fight: and his object was to accustom them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities. He therefore gave private encouragement and official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and good houses. He praised the energetic and scolded the slack; and competition for honour proved as effective as compulsion. Furthermore he educated the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts . . . The result was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the population was led into the demoralising temptations of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as “civilization,” when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.

  Translation from Agricola, S. A. Handford, Penguin Classics.

  14. These themes can be followed up in Janet Huskinson, ed., Experiencing Rome: Culture, Identity and Power in the Roman Empire (London, 2000). The process by which a particular family could be integrated into the administration of the empire can be seen through the descendants of a Gallic aristocrat, Epotsorovidius. After Caesar’s conquest of Gaul in the 50s B.C., Epotsorovidius’ son appears as a Roman citizen with the name Gaius Julius Agedomopas, an indication that his citizenship was granted by Caesar himself. Two generations later the family has become completely Romanized, and Latin may have become their first language. Gaius Julius Rufus, of the fourth generation, was a priest of the cult of Rome and Augustus at Lyons and a praefectus fabrorum, an army official concerned with building works. His wealth was such that he was able to choose from among the traditional repertoire of Roman buildings to donate an amphitheatre to Lyons and a triumphal arch to his native town, Mediolanum Santomum (the modern Saintes). Over time the conquered had become the patrons of the regime that had conquered them, and herein lay the reasons for the empire’s success.

  15. The relatively detached approach taken by the Romans to Judaism can be sensed from this assessment by the historian Dio Cassius writing in the early third century A.D.:

  They [the Jews] are distinguished from the rest of mankind in practically every detail of their lives, and especially in that they honour none of the other gods, but show extreme reverence for one particular deity. They have never had a statue of him even in Jerusalem itself, but believing him to be so unnameable and invisible, they worship him in the most extravagant way among humans. They built him a large and splendid temple . . . and dedicated to him the day of Saturn, on which, among other peculiar observances, they undertake no serious occupation.

  Dio Cassius’s History 39, xvii. Compare this assessment with the frenzied outbursts of John Chrysostom quoted in chap. 17.

  16. Censuses and assessments for tax were made when a province was first incorporated into the empire. There is no record of any empire-wide census. The assessment was made on land and property so taxpayers were assessed in the area where they held land, not in the town in which t
hey or their forebears originated. At the time of Jesus’ birth (before the death of Herod the Great and therefore c. 4 B.C.), Nazareth in Galilee was not under direct Roman control and so was not subject to Roman taxation. There was certainly a census by Quirinius in Judaea in A.D. 6, and doubtless Luke had heard of this. However, whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem or not—and Matthew relates separately (without any mention of the census) that he was born there—it would not have been a census that required Mary and Joseph to travel there.

  17. Compared to the wealthy provinces of Asia Minor to the north and Egypt to the south, Judaea was not a major contributor of taxes. In fact, it has even been suggested that it failed to provide enough taxes to cover the costs of its own administration. The main objective of the Romans was stability in the region, and they knew that this came from supporting local elites, not provoking them. Nevertheless, in Judaea, as elsewhere, the imposition of a new tax system when Rome took control in A.D. 6 was met with opposition. What really offended the Jews, however, was religious provocation, above all any intrusion in the sacred areas of Jerusalem. For the interaction of Judaism and Rome, The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 3, ed. W. Horbury, W. D. Davies and J. Sturdy (Cambridge, 1999), provides the essential background.

  18. Philo, Embassy to Gaius, trans. F. A. Colson (Loeb Classical Library), 302.

  19. The Romans were so disillusioned by the problems of governing Judaea that in 41 they even handed back the province to a grandson of Herod, Agrippa. Agrippa was popular, but he died in 44 and direct Roman rule was restored. By now heavy taxation (Jews had to pay both Roman and Jewish taxes) and tensions between the rich, who benefited from the wealth coming into Jerusalem for the Temple, and the poor were fuelling resentments that could not be contained. In A.D. 66 a massive if uncoordinated revolt broke out. Roman retaliation was thorough and brutal. Perhaps a million died in the repression, and the Temple itself was sacked by Titus, the son of the emperor Vespasian. Some of his plunder can be seen on reliefs on the triumphal arch in the Forum in Rome erected to celebrate the victory. Another revolt in 132–35 (under the emperor Hadrian) led to Jews being excluded from Jerusalem and the refounding of the city as a Roman colony. Judaea then remained a subdued province of the empire, its priests turning inwards to intensive study of sacred texts of the Torah (the Law), until the Arab invasion of A.D. 640 that brought the loss of the province to the empire.

  6

  1. From Plutarch, “On the Face of the Orb of the Moon,” translated in the Loeb edition of the Moralia, vol. 12, by H. Cherniss. Discussed in T. Rihill, Greek Science (Oxford, 1999), pp. 76–80.

  2. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. 2, Penguin Classics.

  3. See S. Swain, Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World, A.D. 50–250 (Oxford, 1996), for a full survey of the movement and its main practitioners. Plutarch is covered in chap. 5. For the second sophistic from an art historian’s point of view, see J. Elsner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire, A.D. 100–450 (Oxford, 1998), chap. 7.

  4. See G. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton, 1994), pp. 233–37, for Dio Chrysostom and this speech, which is translated in the Loeb edition of his works.

  5. On Nero, a fine biography is M. Griffin, Nero: The End of a Dynasty (London, 1984).

  6. Hadrian had certainly been very close to the emperor Trajan, his predecessor, serving as a governor in two provinces, including Syria, and on the imperial staff as a speech writer, but his proclamation as emperor immediately after Trajan’s death smacked of opportunism, and many believed that he had usurped the post. When he surrendered some of Trajan’s conquests, there was even more antagonism, and four former consuls had to be executed for plotting to overthrow him. Many among the Roman elite refused to forgive him for the executions. Hadrian was never at ease in Rome, the centre of hostility to him, but in any case he was a wanderer by nature. Twelve of his twenty-one years of rule were spent in the provinces.

  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.