by Sarah Ruden
c This Roman spring festival was notoriously lewd.
d The queen of Crete, consort of King Minos, fell in love with a bull. In a cow suit made by Daedalus, she consummated her passion and gave birth to the Minotaur (“Bull of Minos”), a human with a bull’s head who was to live in the labyrinth beneath the palace and devour prisoners sent as tribute.
e An ecstatic follower of the wine god Bacchus or Dionysus (see this page–this page).
f Two women of mythology, the first of whom was transformed into a cow by Jupiter to hide her from his wife Juno, the second kidnapped by him after he’d assumed the form of a tame bull: she climbed onto his back, and he swam across the sea with her.
g Since most girls first married at around fourteen, and men as late as their early thirties, many men would find themselves free to choose their spouses, but only because their fathers were dead before the occasion arose. Even then, they seem never to have made choices that would have appalled their fathers but to have married within their own classes and on a sound business footing. Their duties to their clans did not change.
CHAPTER 5: JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS? PAUL AND THE STATE
Paul’s famous passage on obedience to government officials, Romans 13:1–7, creates almost unanimous discomfort for Christians, and outright hostility in some others.
1 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities: for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of the authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive its approval; 4 for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but because of conscience. 6 For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, busy with this very thing. 7 Pay to all what is due to them—taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.
Paul’s command to Christians simply to obey anyone set over them seems to take away all checks on the state doing evil. Here, for example, is a way Saint Augustine (late fourth–early fifth century A.D.) used the passage, setting out ideas that would prop up the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. The Latin words for “lawful authority” and “placed under” look as if they come from Paul’s Greek:
For when a soldier has been lawfully placed under any authority, and obeys it in killing someone, he does not have to answer to a charge of murder under any law of his government. In fact, unless he goes through with the killing, he will have to answer to a charge of treason—deliberate treason. But if he did it on his own impulse and by his own authority, he would be accused of spilling human blood. So it is for the same reason [defiance of lawful authority] that he is punished both if he kills without an order and if he ignores an order and does not kill.
Later thinkers just ran amok. I found, for example, a pamphlet from 1647 entitled The Magistrates Authority, in Matters of Religion; And the Souls Immortality, Vindicated in two SERMONS Preach’d at York, By Christopher Cartvvright, B.D. and Minister of Gods Word there.
The first [sermon] was occasioned by the contrary tenet of some which had relation to the Army, who being in the City of York (where this worthy Minister Mr Cartwright resides) there indeavored to maintain, that the Magistrate hath no power to punish or restrain any that shal vent never so false doctrines & heretical opinions; which stirred up the zeal of this Reverend Divine to choose that Text, Rom 13.4. of purpose, and to handle the point ex professo [avowedly], as thou mayst perceive by the ensuing Sermon,…
Mr. Coleman preaching before the Parliament said, none but they had to do in the government of the Church; M. Dell told them, they had nothing at all to do in reforming the Church; M. Arrowsmith said before them, some took the middle way between the two extreams; I have declared my opinion elsewhere concerning the power of the Civil Magistrate in these things; I shal only here add the determination of two reverend Divines, who cannot but be Authentick with the opposers of this truth. The first is Dr Ames who propounding this question, An Haeretici sint a civili Magistratu puniendi, whether Hereticks be to be punisht by the civil Magistrate; thus answers, 1. That Hereticks are to be suppressed by all godly men according to that calling & power which they have received from God. 2. That the place and office of the Magistrate requires that he suppress wicked disturbers with the sword or the puplick and external power, if need be; quoting those two places Rom 13.4. 1 Tim. 2.2 [a letter no longer attributed to Paul by the majority of scholars].
3. If the Hereticks be manifest and publickly noxious, they ought by the Magistrate publickly to be punished. 4. If they be manifestly blasphemous and obstinate in those blasphemies, they may also be capitally punisht.
Had enough? So how do we pry such opinions apart from Paul? One crowbar is, of course, Christ’s command (which Paul echoes even while stressing obedience to the state) to give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but to God the things that are God’s (Matthew 22:21). State authorities should get only what is due to them, the apostle writes.
On what other principle than this could Paul have explained his own public conduct? Would he have stated that he had gone under interrogation and into prison and before magistrates again and again and received multiple authoritative beatings—three with the official “rods” of the Roman state (2 Corinthians 11:24–25)—because he couldn’t stop doing wrong? “Martyr” is Greek for “witness in court”; early Christian martyrs’ defining act was to defy authorities formally and face-to-face. Paul must have allowed for this exception. It was his experience that it was not always possible for a Christian to please those placed over him.
But his view of government in the form of the Roman Empire may not have been bad on the whole. While he grew up, Tarsus was thriving as a peaceful provincial capital. If anyone persecuted Jews there, we don’t know about it. He lived his entire life, in fact, in an era of relative order and safety following the Roman civil wars: crime was not allowed to grow chaotic enough to embarrass Rome; there were no local potentates doing whatever they wanted; and no wars were being fought except on the edges of the empire. Paul could walk into a town on a well-maintained road and buy a snack at the marketplace and not be reflexively mugged or swindled because he was a stranger: Roman or Roman-type officers ensured that the place was minimally hospitable, that the scales and measuring cups were standard, and that anyone who was aggrieved had some recourse. (If trade didn’t work, Rome got no taxes. Trade therefore worked, and this made for an easier life for everyone but the menial slaves producing the goods.) Even more important, it was local Roman officials who, time after time, rescued Paul from fanatical mobs.
Most important of all, in the late fifties, when the epistle to the Romans was written, the teenage emperor Nero was under tutelage and quite well behaved. It was not until 64 A.D. that he connived to start the great fire, for which he blamed and persecuted Christians, making human torches out of them, among other tortures. This was the first of the systematic Roman persecutions. Had I been Paul at this earlier period I would also have thought, “People should just obey, unless they really can’t.”
But he was addressing himself to people who had a much more vexed view of these matters. First of all, there wasn’t any realism or moderation in their feelings about the state. It wasn’t useful-but-not-God; it was divine (involving the worship of state gods in state temples, often on behalf of the state) but pretty useless. The state hadn’t stopped the civil wars; it had started them and kept them going. It couldn’t make anyone obey when it wasn’t looking, and sometimes not then. It was like a weak parent of immature children who could not get beyond their fantasies of an all-powerful parent som
eday solving their problems, and in particular stopping them from hammering one another at every opportunity.*
Like such children, they didn’t take any responsibility for their own rescue. I love them to death—did they ever write entertaining books. But were they born in barns? Would they have jumped off cliffs if somebody had told them not to? True, many of their leaders did not deserve their trust, but where was the chance for improvement when hardly any leaders, no matter how brilliant or conscientious, got any cooperation except in exchange for bribes?
Political satire is just about the most fun among all Greco-Roman literary creations, because it matches our own political satire in wildness and loopiness. The only thing that checks my enjoyment of it is the realization of how serious it was underneath. It was not for people who didn’t litter but were skeptical about politicians and liked to blow off steam (like most of us). It was about people like the Athenians, who, when they were supposed to be gathering for the citizens’ assembly in the morning, ran around gossiping and goofing off and had to be herded together with a rope, like frisky goats.
I could cite many scenes in Aristophanes, but I’ve chosen this one from Lysistrata because I have my own translation at hand. A magistrate and his attendants are trying to oust rebel women from the Acropolis, where they have seized the national shrine and the state treasury.
COUNCILOR: I AM A COUNCILOR. It is my JOB
To find the wood for oars and PAY FOR IT.
And now these WOMEN shut the gates on me!
It’s no good standing here. Those crowbars, quick!
I’ll separate these women from their gall.
(A slave is indecisive.)
Hey, slack-jaw, move! What are you waiting for?
You’re looking for a pub where you can hide?
Both of you, put these levers in the gates
From that side, and from here I’ll stick mine in
And help you shove.
(Lysistrata emerges from the stage building.)
LYSISTRATA: Right, you can shove those bars.
It doesn’t take a tool to bring me out.
You don’t need siege equipment here. Just brains.
COUNCILOR: Really, you walking poo? Where is that guard?
Grab her and tie her hands behind her back.
LYSISTRATA: By Artemis, if that state property’s
Fingertip touches me, I’ll make him wail.
(Guard backs away.)
COUNCILOR: You’re scared of her? Grab her around the waist,
And you—look sharp and help him tie her hands.
(Old Woman #1 enters from door.)
OLD WOMAN #1: Pandrosus help me. Lay one cuticle
On her, and I shall beat you till you shit.
(The two guards slink off.)
COUNCILOR: Such language! Where’d the other archer go?
Get this one first. Just hear that potty mouth!
OLD WOMAN #2: By Phosphorus, one hangnail grazes her,
And you’ll be nursing eyes as black as tar.
(Third guard retreats.)
COUNCILOR: What is this? Where’s a guard? Get hold of her!
One little expedition’s at an end.
(Old Woman #3 enters from door.)
OLD WOMAN #3: Go near her, by Tauropolus, and I
Will give you screaming lessons on your hair.
(Fourth guard makes himself scarce.)
COUNCILOR: Now I’m in deep. I’ve got no archers left.
We can’t let women have the final stomp!
On the Roman side, the repressions of the early empire couldn’t impose silence. Stroppy voices rose at the slightest chance. After Claudius’s death, the philosopher Seneca, tutor of the new young emperor, Nero, wrote a cruel skit called The Pumpkinification of the Divine Claudius, making fun at the same time of the deification of all dead emperors and of this particular emperor, with whom there seems to have been little wrong besides procedural highhandedness, pedantic abstraction, and disabilities, including a limp and a stutter:
His last words on earth were heard after a noise blared out of that organ from which he spoke more easily. “Alas, I emit the opinion that I have shat myself.” I don’t actually know whether he did do it. He certainly did it to the rest of the world.
Claudius makes his way to heaven, where he gets a nasty reception from the divine senate. Finally,
Gaius Caesar† appeared and proceeded to claim him as a slave, producing witnesses who had seen him getting beaten silly by said claimant with the scourge, rods and fists. He was made over to Gaius Caesar, who gave him to Aeacus.‡ Aeacus gave him to Menander his freedman, to work up prosecutions.
Nero got his in turn, while still alive, from the poet Lucan, who under cover of a flattering epic dedication taunted the squinty and overweight ruler: When you take your place in heaven, don’t make it where you have to look at us with “oblique eye/star,” or where you’ll unbalance the universe. Versus quadratus (square verse) and other barely extant popular genres suggest that irreverence went right down the social scale, as it plainly had in the Greek world with the populist satires of Old Comedy—though the Roman Empire was not going to pay for its own skewering, as the Athenian government had done through the dramatic festivals.
Again, modern readers need to imagine the Greeks and Romans living these attitudes. It was fun to send up officials because it was also fun to walk over them whenever you could get away with it.
How on earth was Paul going to talk to his Romans about authority? He did need to talk to them, or they would never form orderly communities, let alone work out a conscientious relationship with the state, let alone conceive of a God who, in asking for obedience, wanted nothing but their good. An ordinary man would have gone back to Tarsus and opened a tent bargain warehouse. Paul emphasized the single part of the state, the army, that nearly everyone respected, though he himself had never been a soldier.§
The strongest thematic word in this passage, its instances forming a kind of rough frame, is tass-. The stem’s basic image is the lining up of armies for battle,‖ and in this passage the stem occurs in the verbs translated as “be subject” (twice; literally, “be deployed under”), “have been instituted” (“have been deployed through”), “resists” (“is deployed against”), and “has appointed” (“has deployed through”).
Greco-Roman literature about the military shows how much reverence Paul was able to tap into with this vocabulary. Whereas we usually think of armies from the outside, in terms of the damage they do, the mainstream Greco-Roman reader evidently thought of them from the inside, as his community’s chief tool for survival and prosperity. And whereas our minds jump from military service to dying, the Greeks and Romans would merely have shrugged: you would not be able to refuse military service and the chance of an honored death without choosing a shameful living death. As far as I have read, in many types of accounts, there was no such thing as conscientious objection. Certainly not all free males ended up serving, but for men of any standing, training to serve was unavoidable.a More important for most of Paul’s male followers, joining the Roman army was the best deal in the empire, a way for fit, tough, and disciplined provincials to get what they were not born to: Roman citizenship (often just through joining up), careers and status (through promotion), and wealth (through plunder).
Civilians certainly made fun of soldiers. Plautus’s Roman comedy The Bragging Soldier, from the late third or early second century B.C., depicts an ego-blinded, thickheaded bruiser. But Americans make fun of athletes in the same way, without taking anything away from most boys’ fantasies of athletic glory. Athletes are targets of humor in the first place because they are culture heroes. Satire directed at them is of a very different order from political satire.b
By this period, soldierly duty was far from identical to respect for the state. Soldiers were more loyal to their commanders than to the polity, which is just one reason that, say, a U.S. marine in World War II or the Korean War would not have
admired them. But for most of a millennium Greeks and Romans in battle formation had been disciplined, self-sacrificing, brilliant in their bravery and energy, unstoppable. A superior battle line was the main reason Alexander had left behind far-flung empires, and the main reason the Roman Empire existed now. The battle line is an extremely important idea in Romans 13, where Paul draws on old ideas of military service for common benefit and on lasting esteem for the military, putting forward a new ethic of shared, responsible authority.
He uses the same image of battle order for the whole hierarchy and any defiance of it: for God setting in place state authorities, who in turn set in place the populace, some of whom set themselves wrongly against the state. This is in fact a lot like warfare on the part of a Greek city-state in the iconic period of Greece’s ascendancy: the general elected or appointed not from within the military but from outside and above, by civil authorities, who had as much control over the army as they practically could; and the general sending the army onto the field with the just expectation of 100 percent obedience. In a typical Greek engagement, not only disloyalty or cowardice but excess of zeal or an insistence on showing off could do as much damage as an enemy could, putting comrades—or the whole city—at risk of captivity, enslavement, or death. On this occasion, the Greeks put ego and competition wholly aside.
They had to. The hoplite (probably meaning “heavily armed”) line, several men thick, with a wall of shields in front of each rank, moving together to a loud war song and often engaging in a shoving match with the enemy, was the engine of the army. The general depended on soldiers’ being aware of their common vulnerability and keeping in the assigned formation as far as they could. Technologically, strategically, and politically he could not have effected a modern type of strict discipline and tight chain of command, even if he had wanted to. He had to trust his men, and they had to trust him.