Paul Among the People

by Sarah Ruden

  The fourth-century B.C. general Xenophon narrates how a Greek mercenary army of his own kept order despite the excitement of routing the enemy—notice that he makes no claim to having intervened or directed:

  The two battle lines were within two or three stadia of each other when the Greeks burst into an exultant song and began to close with the enemy. As they went forward, a part of the battle line curved backwards,c and those who were left behind broke into a run. And at the same time they gave the traditional battle cry to Ares, and now everyone was running. Some of them say that they pounded their spears against their shields and sent the enemy’s horses into a panic. In any case, before an arrow reached them, the barbarians turned and ran. The Greeks pursued with the greatest energy, but at the same time shouted to one another not to make it a stampede but to follow in proper battle rank.

  It was hoplite discipline that made Greek mercenary armies prized even after the heyday of the city-states with their citizen armies. This helped the prestige of the battlefield to endure for an extremely long time. And we should also not discount the power of the golden age of Greek warfare in memory. Perhaps the most revered heroes in the entire Greek world were the three hundred Spartans who were doomed from the start in facing off against outrageous numbers of Persians at the pass of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Their epitaph on the site was “Stranger, go and tell the Spartans that we lie here, obedient to their words.” Homeland. Obedience. And the chance to humiliate the god-king Xerxes and claim his glory for their own legacy.

  On the Athenian side of reverence for the military is Pericles’ oration in honor of the fallen in 431 B.C., probably studied and recited by generations of Greek and Roman schoolboys in the version conveyed by the contemporary historian Thucydides:

  Giving up their bodies for the common good, they as individuals won praise that never ages, and the most conspicuous burial monument there could be: not the one in which they lie, but the privilege of their glory being remembered forever on every fitting occasion for a word or act to honor it. For the whole earth is the tomb of valiant men. Not only an inscription on pillars in their own land commemorates them, but even in alien countries there lives in every man an unwritten memorial of them, in his heart rather than in material records. Copy them, then, and judge that happiness is freedom and freedom is courage, and pay no attention to the dangers of war.

  Here, on the other hand, was the treatment a coward got in a public forum. It is doubtful that Cleonymus actually deserted—he was still around and in public life afterward. But he did lose his shield, which was considered the act of a coward. Aristophanes would never let him forget it. In this scene, a pair of slaves doze and chat while on guard duty in front of a house (their attitude toward a security assignment being notoriously different from that of free men):

  XANTHIAS: Just now I had the most amazing dream … I thought I saw an eagle,

  A big one, swoop to the public square and grab

  A snake in its claws—no, wait, it was a shield—

  And haul it way up in the sky—but then

  He turned into Cleonymus and dropped it.

  SOSIAS: Cleonymus is that joke now—nothing’s missing.

  XANTHIAS: Whaddaya mean?

  SOSIAS: Somebody at a drinking party shouts,

  “What kind of animal is it on land

  And sea and sky—that throws its shield away?”

  To sum up the Greek experience, ever since they had real citizen armies (as opposed to pirate bands), they saw conformity and self-sacrifice in warfare as unequivocally good. And though the strategy or even the necessity of a given war might be (in fact, nearly always was) disputed as a matter of public policy, it went unquestioned that the army itself had to exist and be used somehow. Pacifism seems never to have gone further than the question “Why aren’t we fighting barbarians rather than our neighbors, who are fellow Greeks?” And though, in practice, the politics of a war could stretch out from the city and into the army on campaign in ways that would shock modern officers, no one ever excused anyone for betraying his comrades on the actual battlefield.

  THE ROMAN ARMY, that most important tool of a megalomaniac state, had its own development, but the differences, with their obvious advantages on the ground, would only have given Paul’s theme more force for a Roman audience. The Roman army was basically a hoplite one, but instead of one dense line, Romans had distinct layers that could advance and fall back through one another, and instead of one main type of foot soldier, they had four. It would have been impossible to maneuver without more officers, a longer chain of command, and standards to rally to, so Roman military discipline was no joke, much harsher than the discipline in Greek armies, and this difference extended beyond combat.d The Romans, though, placed similar stress on common responsibility and common enforcement. For example, Romans in Rome had neither stoning nor any other gang-up punishment for civilian crime, but Roman soldiers in the field sometimes had to ceremonially stone their derelict comrades.

  Not even paternal affection was supposed to overcome military discipline. A famous early general had his son executed for accepting a challenge to duel while he was on guard duty. The breach served to get rid of a leading enemy, but it put individual zeal and ambition above strict obedience. The boy died for being extra ordinem, literally “out of the line.” (Our word “order” is connected to the Roman battle rank.) Here is the end of the episode according to the historian Livy, and I am not making fun of the style—it really is this lofty.

  “Father,” he said, “so that all men may in truth know that you begot me, I bring to you these spoils won from a mounted warrior. The enemy challenged me and I killed him.” When the consul heard this, he instantly turned from his son and ordered that the assembly be called by a trumpet blast. When the crowd had gathered, he spoke: “Titus Manlius, since you showed no awe either for the consul’s position of command nor for the lofty dignity of a father, and against our command left your post to fight the enemy, and, as far as was in your power, dissolved the military discipline by which the Roman state has stood fast up to this day, and have drawn me into the necessity of forgetting either the Republic or myself, we must rather be punished for our crime than allow the Republic to pay so dear a price for our sins. ’Tis an austere precedent, but a wholesome one for the youth of the future. I am moved not only by the inborn love of my children but by this indication of bravery—off the mark though it was in its empty display of valor. But given that the authority of the consuls must be either sanctified by your death or revoked forever by your impunity, I would not judge that even you, if you are indeed of my loins, would refuse to restore the military discipline that has toppled through your fault. Guard, tie him to the post.”

  The army was horrified and protested the young man’s death—but Livy writes that the long-term results were just as intended.

  Horace revels in the image of the tough, disciplined, self-sacrificing young soldier. He is the professional athlete of the age, riveting spectators (in the poem that Wilfred Owen cites for the “old Lie” of the line about sacrificing life for the fatherland):

  Let hard war service make a young boy strong;

  Narrow privations ought to be his friend.

  Let him learn how to be a fearsome horseman,

  Harrying the wild Parthians with his spear.

  His life should run beneath the open sky,

  In risky action. From the enemy walls

  The warring tyrant’s wife should watch. Beside her

  The marriageable young girl ought to sigh,

  “The prince I’m promised to is new to warfare.

  I hope he won’t harass this touchy lion

  Whose bloody rage is hurrying him on,

  Whipping him through the center of the slaughter.”

  Death for the fatherland is sweet and proper,

  Since death runs down the runaway as well.

  It doesn’t spare the timid back and hamstrings

  Of any youth who’s ind
isposed to war.

  Did the Romans ever see someone who was marked out as a coward surviving in public life, if only for perpetual taunting, like the Athenian Cleonymus? Glad you asked. No.

  As I’ve indicated, by Paul’s time the Roman army had long since evolved from a body of native citizens to a mercenary force packed with foreigners. It is endlessly disputable whether the Roman citizen-soldier or the barbarian professional was better. But the late-republican or imperial soldier, sent on lengthy campaigns against astute insurgent savages on the frontiers, in appalling climates and terrains where the supply lines would often fail, had to be a machine, because that was how he was used; and the soldier’s new status as universal guardian and enforcer, with all of its perks, was probably worth certain sacrifices. Petronius’s antihero Encolpius, who doesn’t respect much, can accept that it is a good thing to be stopped by a real soldier from acting as a pretend one because of a private spat. Here the pompous language is, in effect, stolen from the military. Self-indulgent, criminal, and pretentious, Encolpius cannot be more than a parody of a soldier.

  “Now the lovers are lying entwined all night long, and maybe when the demands of their mutual lust leave them exhausted, they mock my solitude. But they won’t get away with it. Either I’m no man, or no free man, or else I’m going to offer guilty blood as a sacrifice to the wrong I’ve suffered.”

  This said, I girded on a sword and, lest bodily weakness hinder my soldiering, I enlivened my strength by food in large quantities. Then I leapt out into the street and dashed around every portico like a madman. My face was frenzied and savage, my mind full of nothing but blood and murder, and I kept bringing my hand to the pommel of the sword I had consecrated to revenge. A soldier—just an impostor, a hoodlum after dark, I’m sure—noticed me and said, “Hey, buddy, how is it? Which legion are you from? Whose century?”

  Very collectedly, I made up a number and a name, but he answered, “What army are you talking about, where soldiers go around in dancing shoes?” At this point the lie also began to show on my face and in my general air of fear. He ordered me to down arms and watch out or he’d give me a thrashing. Despoiled—even worse, my revenge cut short—I returned to my lodging, and as my impetuous mood sagged I began to give thanks for the thug’s arrogance.

  Even more important, at this period we get a lot of evidence from the horse’s mouth, confirming that even the rank and file honored the military. Leaders and their pet writers would report how good it was to be a soldier. But the dry climates of the Middle East preserve letters home of provincial recruits who were proud and content to serve. And why not? Where else could they get the opportunities they now had?

  To make a thousand-year story very short, the Greeks and Romans had a high regard for military service: it was for them a vital, prestigious duty. And they didn’t regard fighting as the big drawback in a military career: a battle was the best part, the chance to prove what they were made of and win a lifetime’s worth of benefits—or more: perhaps even a land allotment they could pass on to their children.

  So when Paul wrote about “subjection” in military language, the images his readers had were not of shoveling manure or being beaten into submission. They were of respected, rewarded functions. He was in effect urging his followers to become stakeholders, leaders themselves through their cooperation.

  SINCE THE ARMY was the part of government that could really work, protecting and enriching the people, many polytheistic authors show that in civic life, people should behave like good soldiers. “Staying where you were posted”—that is, in the assigned position in the line—was an apt metaphor for public responsibility. Plato’s Socrates boasts at his trial about his steadiness in battle, comparing it to his steadiness in serving the state through his philosophical inquiries. Ironically, he is now serving the state against its will, but he claims (and generations of readers admiringly accepted) that a god had assigned him to do this. (Compare Paul’s picture of God, the state, and good private individuals acting for a unanimous purpose.) In this passage, Plato has a little orgy with tasso, the archetypal verb for posting or deploying:

  So this is the truth of the matter, Athenian gentlemen. Wherever somebody chooses, after due consideration, to best deploy himself, or wherever he is deployed by a leader, it seems to me that he has to stay there and take his chances like anybody else, regarding neither death nor anything else as more important than the chance that he could disgrace himself. Men of Athens, when the leaders you chose to have charge of me deployed me at Potidea and Amphipolis and Delium, I stayed where they deployed me, like anybody else. It would be abominable if, when a god had deployed me, as I thought and believed, and made me spend my life seeking insight and examining myself and others, I should in that position get into a panic over death or anything else at all and leave my post.

  Government itself should be as much like the military as possible, many thought. Several Greek writers of the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. admired the barracks state Sparta, without having a marked desire to live there themselves. According to an outside account, Spartan men needed to sneak out of the common mess hall to consummate their marriages. They could not raise their own children—neither could the mothers, who had to surrender them to boot camp when they reached what would be grade school age these days. But they never saw anything as prissy as boots there, and like their sisters, they drilled semi-naked.

  Plato in his Republic, about the ideal state, does not cringe in arguing for a totalitarian military regime to address the conflicts with neighbors that must follow any full development of a civilized town. In his utopia, experts (“guardians,” compared to guard dogs) would employ people wherever they could serve best, with no regard to individual wants. Discipline and self-sacrifice must be perfect—even in following regulations for musical composition and performance. Plato imagined that a people trained and led in such a way would be undefeatable.

  For the Romans, republican government, with its strained, breaking efforts to keep the civil power separate, had meant a hundred years of civil wars. A military regime now meant peace at home. Once the army was in control there, it could turn its violent work outward. Yea!

  In the Aeneid, Vergil’s hero Aeneas, on his way to found Rome, visits the underworld, where his dead father points out the souls of great Romans to be born in the future, including the civil warriors Julius Caesar and Pompey; the father decries them and thrills at how much better the militant empire will be:

  “See those two in bright matched armor,

  Souls in accord while Night imprisons them.

  But once they reach the light, how great a war

  They’ll rouse, what ranks of slaughter, father-in-law

  Come down the bouldered Alps from high Monoecus,

  And son-in-law deploying all the East.

  Children, don’t lose your horror of such warfare.

  Don’t turn your massive strength against your country.

  You of the gods’ stock: take the lead, have mercy!

  My son, throw down your weapons!…

  Others, I know, will beat out softer-breathing

  Bronze shapes, or draw from marble living faces,

  Excel in pleading cases, chart the sky’s paths,

  Predict the rising of the constellations.

  But Romans, don’t forget that world dominion

  Is your great craft: peace, and then peaceful customs;

  Sparing the conquered, striking down the haughty.”

  Even in Paul’s time, under Nero, people deplored the civil wars and rejoiced in the empire. Lucan devoted an entire (and pretty terrible) epic poem to this, narrating the past conflicts with enflamed melodrama:

  I sing of civil wars sweeping Emathia’s plains—

  License given to crime—a powerful people

  Driving victorious weapons through their own guts—

  Kindred battle lines—a pact of sovereignty broken—

  All power in the battered world contesting


  In shared atrocity.…

  In summary, by using military words, Paul takes perhaps the only path there was to convincing Greeks and Romans that it would be useful to obey all state authorities. He draws on the firm and widespread belief that the military was where an individual got real standing and respect for serving the state. And Paul taps into actual experience that, as far as governance was good, it was military. And he concentrates on the most unambiguously respected part of the military: the conventional battle line, where mutual support and individual survival were the same project.

  In the passage quoted from Romans, other words besides the tass- compounds have military meanings, such as the words translated as “good” and “bad.” They weren’t usually so abstract in their connotations. The basic idea of agathos is “brave” or “noble,” and of kakos, “cowardly” or “worthless.” (There are other words than agathos for a slave or a tyrant’s subject who is behaving himself.)

  Even when using words for civil authority, Paul selects those that support the idea of willing, rational duty. There are plenty of words in Greek for power and position, but Paul chose (and used four times) exousia, a word for deserving authority. “Authorities” is from an abstract, feminine singular noun, as if the people in charge are just containers for a quality coming from God. The NRSV, which I quote here, rightly calls state authority “it.”

  The other names for leaders here are archontes, which is the ordinary word for “magistrates,” and diakonos, translated as “servant.” This is no mere slave or lowly servant but, among other functions, a messenger or the attendant at a religious ceremony. Paul applies this word to his special assistants—in modern terms, the church deacons.

  A more contextual translation of syneidesis (NRSV: “conscience”) would be better. Why is “conscience” as well as fear supposed to make us obey? We often think of conscience as the inner voice that urges us to stand up to authority. Actually, the Greek word is closer to “conscientiousness”—literally “knowing with,” originally about communication, and far more like a dutiful feeling for the common good than an inner voice different from what other people are saying.