Alps and Americas: Rome and Their Enemies
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek.
Last week we talked about the founding of Rome. I say last week. Last time. I don’t know when you’re listening to this. I also don’t know when we’re releasing this because I don’t do that anymore.
Actually, I’m going to interrupt myself and say thank you so much to everyone who has reached out to us to tell us that you’re listening to the podcast and enjoying it. We can’t tell you how encouraging it is to hear from you and to hear that what we’re doing here is a blessing to you. Thank you for bearing with us through weird scheduling things.
I regret to inform you that weird scheduling things will continue to occur. We’re doing our best to accommodate the three different schedules of the three of us. And as you know, if you’ve been listening for a while, there are babies coming so we’re not sure what the next few months are going to look like, but thank you so much for your encouragement and for sticking with us.
Today we will continue our narrative through ancient Rome. I think we left off with Romulus and Remus, is that right?
More or less. We kind of skipped ahead and I’m just going to do that again. From Romulus on there are ten kings, more or less historical. Rome wasn’t picky about where a particular king came from, so some were Etruscan or of some other nearby varieties, as long as they were the kind of guy they were looking for. They ended up, though, with some guys on the throne they didn’t like and finally said, “You know, part of the problem here is the whole political system. Let’s change that and that’ll fix everything,” so the kingdom gave way to the republic.
Republic is from two Latin words, res publica, which means “the things public.” Traditionally the things that make a republic a republic are representative government and written laws. The written laws came later. We’ll get to that in a second. Mostly it was representation by people who were elected somehow, directly or indirectly, by the older males of the existing tribes that already made up Rome.
In time the kings splintered those tribes into other tribes, as governments are wont to do. We may remember that Solomon turned Israel into 12 federal districts, which did not correspond to the tribes, because when you’ve got a federal government versus state government, oddly enough there’s this tug and pull back and forth and sometimes you want to downplay state boundaries. So that’s something with the history.
The thing that you’re going to run into with any discussion of Roman history is its class system, so we should say a few things about that. First of all, there were three classes. “No, there were two.” No, there were three. There were patricians, plebians, and slaves.
It’s amazing how the slaves get regularly overlooked, as they do when you talk about ancient Greece, but they were a large percentage of the population and a decided factor in everything that happened. They just get like zero play in the history books because we want to respect Rome, as we want to respect Greece, because they’re the alternatives to actually turning around and looking at what God was doing with Israel and telling them how they should live. We didn’t want that, so let’s just kind of re-create Greece and then Rome in our image, to how we would’ve done it, how we imagine them, so forget slaves. Obviously they’re not important. What becomes important then, in the standard books, are the other two classes.
First, patricians. The Latin word pater means father, so these were the fathers of the tribes, the people that were looked up to, the older better-educated more sophisticated men with more land, more property.
Yesh, the bigwigs. The others were the plebians. The word plebians or plebe still shows up today in the military academies. First-year students are called plebes and are treated horribly, because why not. The Roman patricians, at least as far as their patrician historians are willing to tell us, treated the plebeians okay-ish.
A patrician would sort of adopt a plebian family and look after his interests and encourage him and maybe loan him some money (at high interest) and the plebeian in turn would turn to the patrician and have his back and help him in any way he could, and borrow money from him (at interest), so these two groups sort of got along most of the time. But once the republic becomes a thing, the plebians begin to realize that they have the possibility to have a say in things.
We should note that the plebians are the more artisan class, the people who are doing the work in the city.
Often the word is associated with more like serf peasantry or something like that, and it’s not. That’s actually more of what the slaves were. Sometimes that connotation is lost.
In fact, the kinds of services the plebians rendered were so important that on a couple of occasions when the plebians pushed for political reforms that would give them more freedom and more protection under the law, and the patricians weren’t inclined to go along, the plebians just walked out of the city. They went up on the hillside and just watched Rome for a while.
They realized, “If we’re not there to fix your horseshoes and sell you wine and flip your burgers, you’re going to be kind of stuck real fast,” and they were. Every time the plebians tried this it worked. The patricians would eventually say, “Okay, come on back. We’ll give you kind of what you want.” There was a little negotiating, but largely the plebians were able to push things forward after a semi-republican semi-democratic approach of, “If you’re not going to be what I want, I’m going to take my ball and leave home.” For those who study such things, this is an interesting thing to look at.
The main thing that we should at least note in passing is that one thing the plebians wanted was written secular laws. I mentioned earlier that normally we think of a republic as something that has written laws. Rome had them, except they were interpreted by the priests, and the priests were the ones who could read them and have copies of them, and ordinary people didn’t.
When a plebian went to the priest to get a law interpreted to see if it could help him, somehow it always didn’t. The priest always seemed to side with the patricians rather than the plebians.
Yeah, that. What the plebians wanted was laws written – that is, written in the sense that it was in words they could understand and have access to – and secular in the sense that they would not be interpreted by the priest. Anybody could read them. This is a huge step forward in a lot of ways.
We looked last time at the so-called 12 tables, the written laws that were set up in the marketplace, in the Forum where everybody could have access to them, so this was a good thing. We’ve seen before that God’s common grace is displayed early on in Rome in a number of productive ways. It doesn’t last very long, but it’s a thing and we should note wherever God is good to a people it’s worth saying, “Yeah, he did something good.” Our Founding Fathers would look at that and say, “Written laws, what a concept.”
Of course, the Bible already was that, and it’s more than possible that the idea came from Moses, but we don’t know for sure. We don’t know what the channels of common grace were that made Rome initially a city concerned about ethics and morality and how exactly their laws reflected some of the language of the case laws in Exodus 21 and 22. That’s an interesting study for future historians.
Once that’s on its way, what begins to happen is that Rome, now being a significant presence on the Italian peninsula, begins to come into contact with other cities there that are not Roman. There are sometimes some ethnic relationships because everybody goes everywhere and intermarries with everybody and the languages are not all that different, and they’re all Japhetic in any case, descended from Japheth.
It’s not my intention or desire to talk through all of Rome’s Italian campaigns. There were a number. It will be said at the end of all of this that Rome lost battles but never lost a war, and this is largely true. Sometimes she lost a lot of battles. Sometimes she came really close to losing wars, but she just kept slogging until eventually something cracked.
As we look at her wars on the peninsula and then afterwards her wars abroad, one of the things, or maybe the thing besides her dedicated soldier/farmer/army that really gave her an edge was her incredible ability to write peace treaties. Rome was able to look at every conquered city and say, “What do you want? What are we willing to give you? How can we make this work?”
Besides the vague idea of, “Well, we’ve tried something like that before,” it was, “We’re not doing cookie cutter treaties with anybody. You people? You’re going to be our slaves. You people? We’re giving you full citizenship. You people? You have citizenship but you can’t vote, but you do need to give us money and armies. You people? You can go on doing what you were doing, but with mutual self-defense things going on.”
In each case Rome had the political genius to see what would work, what that conquered people would accept and live with that would still leave Rome in the driver’s seat. She did this for the next 300-400 years. That’s pretty impressive. If only our State Department had come up with that kind of wisdom. So that’s what we begin to see, even as Rome faces city after city on the Italian peninsula and in turn defeats each of them.
I’m just going to mention titles here: The First Samnite War, The Second or Great Samnite War, The Third Samnite War, the Battle of Tarentum, and there’s more. If you’re a historian these mean something to you. If you’re a military historian these mean something. They’re beyond the scope of what we want to do. None of us is a military historian, not to say this isn’t interesting. It’s just not the thing that we’ve been focusing on, so with your permission, ladies, I’m just moving on.
Rome is now in control of all of Italy south of the Po Valley, which is a lot. She has not yet lost a battle, although some of these things were difficult.
It’s at this point that she gets involved with Sicily. Sicily is being messed with by her neighbor, Syracuse. These are kingdoms just off the boot.
As a side note, I did find pulling up a map of the expansion of the Roman Empire to be very helpful when you’re going to try to go through all of these wars and back and forth. I kept going, “Where? Who? What is this name?” I don’t know Italian geography well enough, so if you want to go through all these things, pull up a map, which I always recommend, by the way.
Yes, get a map, those antiquated ancient devices whereby people used to find their ways from one place to another before the voice out of thin air would tell you, “Stop at the next stop sign and turn right.” It’s amazing how many students do not know how to use a road map, and not just students but how many people don’t know how to use a map at all, or knowing how to use a map, don’t.
I was just looking up some maps for my wife. There’s a website that has a whole lot of maps of the United States and the world that show you all kinds of weird statistics. How many countries drive on the left-hand side of the road? How many countries has England not invaded? It’s amazing how few. When some rubber ducks fell off a boat in the middle of the Pacific, which direction did the currents carry them? Most of them, oddly enough, went up into the Bering Strait, around the Arctic Sea, and ended up in New York and United Kingdom. Some ended up in Australia.
Something else you could click on was maps of the United States that Brits were invited to fill out. In other words, “Here are the shapes of the states. Do you know their names? If so, which name goes with each blank here on this map?” It was pretty bad.
It’s always surprising when you hear British people talking about visiting the United States, because they have no sense of the scale of the United States. This is a huge country. Even as we’re talking about the expansion of the Roman empire, Italy was a lot to govern. So when we talk about how insane it is that the United States is governing basically coast-to-coast this continent, the parts that are temperate in climate, shall we say – there’s the cold north and the hot south and we just live in the sweet spot here – but it’s an insane project historically.
It really is. The other thing is that, in revenge, Americans were given a map of Europe.
I will add my one other map thing. Every time I taught my Middle East Studies class I would first ask the students to list the countries that are in the Middle East. I think the most they could get was five, out of the 16 I was looking for, and the majority would forget Israel. Then when I gave them the 16 and a map, I think the highest score of labeling if they’d never been in the class before was 3 or 4 out of 16.
Europe is no better when you start talking about who’s going where. Constant maps are needed.
Usually I turn this to give Americans some credit, as most of us can actually put most of the states in place, and that’s like the size of Europe. So when people say Americans aren’t well-traveled and they don’t know geography, well, we are well-traveled, just in this country. It’s just weird that our country is so big.
Although I would say Californians travel a bit less because we can travel far and stay in California. Those on the east coast or even Midwest have a bit more sense of where more states are.
Yes, because they travel through three or four of them in the time it takes us to get to LA. I’ve experienced that with my friends at college. I don’t remember where we were going with this.
We were talking about looking at maps when we were talking about all the wars that they’re going to fight, and which city they’re dealing with.
If you want to understand what’s going on, look up maps. They’re all over the internet. Google it.
So we were in Sicily and Syracuse. After some initial swapping of sides, what it comes down to is that Rome and Carthage both have an interest in Sicily and so begin to fight. Carthage is across the Mediterranean in north Africa. It’s a Phoenician colony. We’ve talked about it.
I think so. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. It’s somewhere very close to there in any case.
We’ve seen the story of the Aeneid and that Rome’s historical conflict goes back to when Aeneas made love to Dido and then dropped her cold at the word of the gods and left her and she killed herself, so obviously these two cities can never get along.
Yes. Something else in passing I completely forgot to mention before. There is a blood relationship between Dido queen of Carthage and Jezebel.
Okay, dropping that, but it does give some sense of proximity in time. So these two powers are now displeased with each other.
Advantages: Carthage has a really great navy. Rome has a really great army. As long as you’re on some fixed standing place Rome is going to win because its army is so cool, but when it comes to trying to pilot a ship across the Mediterranean, Rome doesn’t know the first thing about ships; in fact, she barely has any, until she actually captures a Phoenician ship and tries to copy it.
This is Rome’s attempt to actually create a ship, but she doesn’t have any real clue about strategy and tactics on the ocean, so Rome’s solution is a boarding plank, which is to say, “We’re going to pull our ship up alongside a Phoenician ship, we’re going to drop this long plank that has spikey things on the end, it’s going to fall onto their deck and stick and create a bridge, and then we’re going to send all our marines over and we’re going to go hand-to-hand with swords and we’re going to win because we have really cool soldiers.”
It worked usually, although in the process of perfecting this Rome lost fleet after fleet after fleet because their admirals had no clue what they were doing. They finally got down to, “We have enough money for one more fleet. Please make this work,” and it did and they were able to defeat Carthage.
Rome annexed Sicily and so Rome had her first overseas province, although overseas was like a stone’s throw from the tip of the Italian boot to the soccer ball off her coast. And then for a time things settled down, but the bad blood is there. They both hate each other’s guts. And of course beyond this is the question of political and economic rivalry on the Mediterranean.
At this point Phoenician ships went all over the place inside the Mediterranean and outside. This is still in the wake of Solomon and all of that, and ships are going places we know not whither, because the merchant princes of Phoenicia were under very solemn oath never to tell anybody where they were going, what was there, how to get there or how to get back.
Yes. There’s a story of one Phoenician prince who set sail beyond the Pillars of Heracles…
…and saw that he was being followed by a ship of another nation. He tried to shake it and couldn’t, and so he took his ship to the coast of Gaul (France) and wrecked it. Then he and his men made their way home by foot, because where he was going was Britain and the British tin mines, and nobody got to know about that. So the prince went home, told what he had done, and all of his prince friends bought him a new ship in thanks for keeping the trade secrets.
This is not to say that no one else wandered out there, and in this context the three books written by Barry Fell while he was still alive are valuable, although you need to read carefully. Barry Fell I believe was a marine biologist at Harvard, but his hobby was pursuing ancient inscriptions on both sides of the Atlantic. His books argue not only that the Phoenicians made it past the Straits of Gibraltar and as far as everywhere, including the New World, but that the Romans seem to have done so as well, with evidence in the form of inscriptions and artifacts and coins and things.
It’s amazing how many people lost foreign coin collections in farmers’ fields, only to be discovered years later, and somehow they all dated from ancient Judea, ancient Rome, ancient you-name-it. “Oh yeah, that’s just somebody’s coin collection,” or people who used the coins actually were here once upon a time.
America BC is his most famous book and I recommend it to you, though understanding that it does have some limitations and certainly has been challenged. But the whole thing of “Did Columbus really discover America?” has been a challenge ever since someone said, “There’s this guy named Leif Erikson.”
But he didn’t get as far as the United States so does it really count? Of course, neither did Columbus, as far as that goes.
Something that may be going on here is that they were fighting for control of not only trade in the Mediterranean, and thus will the Mediterranean be a Carthaginian lake or a Roman lake, but also with trade beyond. At this point Rome seems to be able to acquire a lot of lumber and gold. Both may have come from the New World, or Carthage may have been picking it up. I forget Berry Fell’s exact order. Let me check my notes. Dr. Fell argues that the timber to build the Carthaginian fleet (I got it backwards) and gold to pay her mercenary soldiers had both come from the Americas, so when Carthage fell it was goodbye to America.
Be that as it may, eventually these two powers decide they need to go to war again. A gentleman named Hannibal from Carthage decides that rather take a fleet directly across – and of course they have fleets. By this point they were also moving into Spain, which they were allowed to do under treaty. “You can go this far with weapons but no further.” They honored the treaty for a time, but they were restless and they wanted to go further, and Hannibal finally says, “What if I just take, you know, elephants.” Rachel, you have something to say about Hannibal and the elephants.
Part of it is that it’s very unusual so it sticks in your mind. I did look up a little bit of why in the world would he choose elephants, of all things, especially because his plan is to cross the Alps in the midst of snow, ice, and blizzarding weather.
No, that’s not where I would put elephants. A lot of it was that they are a symbol of power in North Africa, and they think the particular kind of elephant he used was actually a species that we don’t have anymore that came from the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, so they were particularly associated with their culture and army. Also elephants are extremely intimidating and unexpected, if you can actually get them over the mountain. So they do play a certain psychological part in their warfare once they actually can get over.
But unfortunately they did lose a lot of them, along with a lot of their men as they went across the mountains, because not only did they have all the weather of the Alps to deal with and basic issues like falling off cliffs and freezing to death, but also the tribes that lived in those areas didn’t like them so would purposefully harass and attack and kill them, although they did work with local people as guides and things like that.
It’s just a really interesting moment in history. Hannibal does something very unexpected, which helps, but the unexpected also means there’s a reason people don’t expect it. It’s like, “Would you like to sacrifice almost 50% of your men and lots of your transportation so you can get to the other side?” He counted the cost and said it was worth it, and he is really successful when he gets to the other side.
And we still remember it today. As we were looking at the Alps when we were in Switzerland earlier this year we were like, “Huh. It makes sense that Hannibal was remembered for getting elephants over those things.” We’ve heard it so many times, “Hannibal took elephants over the Alps. Hannibal took elephants over the Alps,” and then you see the Alps and you’re like, “How did he get elephants over the Alps?”
So having gotten the elephants over the Alps, he was able to ravage the Italian peninsula, going up and down with his elephants. Everybody said, “Wow, those are elephants. We can’t possibly stand up against them. Let’s go hide in our cities.”
The elephants did not make great battering rams apparently, so once everyone was locked up in their city, in theory you were besieging a whole bunch of cities but not really because you are limited. You’re constantly chasing people back into their cities, and anytime you go away they come out, then you go back and chase them some more. It was not an ideal situation for Romans or allies at all, but it wasn’t great for Hannibal because he wanted people to come out and fight him so his elephants could step on them, so there was that.
And this is just a passing thing because the name means something. There was a Roman general named Fabius Maximus who, when Hannibal left with his elephants, he would follow and harass his flanks. Then Hannibal would turn around and go after him and he’d run away, which of course seems an unmanly and un-Roman sort of thing to do, but it was really annoying and effective on one level, and thus the idea of slowly wearing people down became associated with the name Fabius.
1500 years later or so this little society in England will call themselves the Fabian Society because they don’t want to impose socialism through violent war. They just want to slowly wear everybody down by writing cool things for the London Times. So Fabian socialism or slow creeping socialism – this is where it gets its name, for whatever little that’s worth.
Eventually a man arises from Rome. His name is Scipio and he goes before the Roman Senate and says, “Look, we’ve got to do something about this guy. Give me some room here.” Having arranged for Hannibal’s brother to be dispatched – and Hannibal found out when his brother’s head was thrown into his camp – Scipio then decides the obvious thing is to go for the jugular. “Forget fighting elephants. Let me take the battle to Carthage.”
The Senate is not keen on this, but they have no better idea. So Scipio is able to gather the ships and an army and go to Carthage, at which point Carthage screams to Hannibal, “Help! The Romans are coming. Get back here!” so he has to leave and then do whatever he has done, and the two generals meet at a battlefield called Zama in North Africa and Scipio wins.
What we’re rarely told is that Hannibal ran away. He ran east and he’s later going to end up in the court of one of the Seleucid kings, one of the Antiochus’s, so he’s not gone. He’s not out of the picture. He’s going to cause trouble for Rome later, but as far as defending Carthage it’s over. So that ends that war.
Carthage is thoroughly smacked down and is handed a peace treaty that says, “We’re going to let you survive and trade, with some restraints, but you may never re-arm yourself ever ever again.” It sounds like some of the treaties the United States has imposed on people. So that’s the end of the second war. At this point if Carthage was in contact with the New World and getting supplies there, that dies. And whatever contact the ancient world may have had with the Americas is gone.
There’s still a third war because there are still old guys in Rome that fear Carthage and figure, “If we don’t kill it, if we don’t stamp it into the ground, if we don’t eliminate it thoroughly it’s going to come back, because it always does.”
Anybody who’s studied history has run into Cato the Elder who was a Roman Senator and made many speeches about many things, but every time he ended any speech about anything, didn’t matter what it was, he ended with the words in Latin, “Carthago delenda est,” which is “Carthage must be destroyed.”
“We should improve the harbor of the Tiber, and Carthage must be destroyed.”
It was just constant. It just kept it in front of people. In itself it didn’t do anything, but it just kept reminding people, “They’re the bad guys, aren’t they.”
When I grew up as a child and watched TV far more than I should have, prime time TV consisted of doctor shows, police/lawyer shows, and World War 2 shows, a lot of World War 2 shows, which is to say I grew up believing that the Germans and the Japanese were our enemies, because in every TV show they were.
I remember once playing war with a neighbor kid and we were debating who would be the American and who would be the German bad guy. My dad, who was very sensitive to propaganda, stepped in and said, “The Germans are not the bad guys. We’re not fighting the Germans.”
“The who?” That shows how much we watched the news or paid attention to anything real. We knew Germans. We knew Japanese. We didn’t know Vietnamese. This is why when people we knew were being drafted to go serve in Vietnam, we were oblivious at the age of 7, 8, and 9. Propaganda matters. Who you keep pointing fingers at matters. Given enough time it’s a seedbed. It may not in and of itself produce the war you’re looking for, but it sure enough helps when the time comes.
In this case Carthage eventually gets attacked by the Numidians from further down in Africa, and when a nation attacks you, you think maybe you should pull out your swords and respond, at least to defend yourself, but they weren’t supposed to use weapons or have an army or anything.
They figured, “Well, the alternative is we can either try to talk Rome down off of this later and fight and save ourselves now, or we can just throw up our hands and all be killed, or run away or whatever.” So they do fight and Rome steps in and says, “Ah ah ah! We told you not to do that,” so Rome lands an army in Africa, attacks Carthage, destroys it, plows it up, sows it with salt and lays a curse upon it.
You would think, until later Rome will come back – I believe it was Julius Caesar – and rebuild the city. It’s like the Assyrians rebuilding Babylon, because there needs to be something there.
Yes. Things that make this significant – first of all, the Carthaginians were Phoenicians. By the way, Phoenician/Punic – Greeks invented the name Phoenicia for the Canaanites, and Rome did them the favor of mispronouncing their invention, so Punic/Phoenician/Canaanite – it’s an obvious connection, right?
Noah, in his prophecy after the flood, had said that Canaan, the son of Ham, his descendants would be servants of servants unto both the children of Shem and the children of Japheth. The Canaanites who stayed in Canaan were either exterminated or didn’t stay, they were driven out, or in some rare cases became temple servants. You can think of the Gibeonites here – servants of servants, the best of servants.
So here was a prophecy that was deliberately ambiguous. “You’re going to be servants, but you can be the coolest servants that ever were,” and some took that, “or you can be slaves and worse.” And it will be true in Israel, but it will also be true in the larger Japhetic world. So we have here the sons of Japheth (Rome and her allies) and Carthage (descended from Canaan) fighting out this last battle and Noah’s prophecy is fulfilled.
The other thing – and Chesterton, and he’s not alone, makes a big deal about this. Being Canaanites, the Carthaginians were Baal worshipers. More specifically they worshiped Baal under the name Moloch.
That one. An interesting thing there, it is amazing how many archeologists and historians in recent decades, if not years, have insisted that that was all propaganda, that no one would ever do that, and the archeological finds of lots of dead babies – those were probably babies who died in a plague or something, because nobody would actually do that. That was just enemy propaganda. The only real evidence we have is the Bible says that’s what Moloch worshipers did, but you know, how reliable is the Bible as a historical source?
It’s ignoring that our own generation has, in a sense, sacrificed millions of our own babies, so clearly we’re capable. It’s not that far-fetched. Cultures around the world have always had certain undesirable babies that they’ve been willing to leave out in the elements and other things.
It’s amazing how quickly “humans can not possibly commit such atrocities” goes along with historical revisionism. As soon as you draw a line of what you’re willing to believe human beings will not do, you’re in really dicey territory.
This is a complete side issue but I’m going to mention it anyway just because. Isaac Asimov wrote a short story about a man who is obsessed with this idea that the Carthaginians didn’t really kill their babies, and he sets about trying to create a time-viewer that will allow him to see into the past to exonerate this ancient honorable culture.
He keeps running into government roadblock after government roadblock. No one will give him the financing, the licenses, the permits or anything. Everything is no, no, no, no. Finally he says, “Look, I can do it. I know I can do it. It will tell me what I need to know,” and the final word is, “No, you can’t.”
Then the government officials reveal, either to us the readers or possibly to him, the real reason. “We do not want you to see the past,” and here’s the real reason. “The past ended one second ago. If you can view the past, you can look into the private lives of every person on the planet without them knowing. We don’t want to give that to anybody.” Something to think about there. I wish I could remember the name of the short story. I read it a few times.
Moving on – now Carthage is down and Rome has no other huge challenge in the Mediterranean and is now a sea power. Moloch worship has gone down the tubes. God has finished Baal worship.
Back to Chesterton. Chesterton looks at this in one of the chapters in The Everlasting Man and he says, “And we should be glad of this because Moloch was a horrible demon, a horrible god. Yes, the Romans worshiped pagan gods, but they were kinder gentler gods. By this time they weren’t that big a deal. I mean it’s not like the Romans ever practiced human sacrifice or anything, so we can sympathize with the simple Roman farmer/soldier who, having won his battle, goes home to his little Roman farm and his little Roman wife and his little Roman gods and kicks back and just enjoys life. We have something to share with such a man and we can thank Rome for saving us from this greater evil.”
In Romans 13, Rome is personified as a beast of terrible horrible proportions that makes war upon the saints.
Oh well. Romans 13 says “…and obey Rome for now.” Revelation 13 says, “However, it’s going to get real hard because Rome is going to try to kill you all.” The Bible does not have a great deal of respect for Rome. The Roman officials sometimes protected the church in the book of Acts. The main persecutors of the church in the book of Acts is apostate Israel and all the herods who were all Idumean (Edomites), adopted Israelites, but in bed with Rome. So they were Roman officials, just not Roman by descent, but then who was Roman by descent at that point?
So you have the herods, who are sort of the little horn of Rome thrusting itself at the church, while other officials were like, “Okay, no, you can’t tear them in pieces on my watch. No, we’re not going to have a riot today. Paul, we’re not going to kill you. We’re just going to keep you in prison until you give us a bribe.” Things like that are going on. There’s a certain amount of respect for Rome’s accomplishments and its rather even-handedness in dispensing justice. They didn’t care who you were. You got the same treatment because they despised everybody.
But the idea that we should sympathize with the Roman demons, which is what their gods were, simply because they weren’t demanding child sacrifice at that point – Chesterton is really reaching for it, but the reason he’s reaching for it, as far as I can see, is he goes on to say, “And it was that Rome that gave birth to the papacy.” So what he’s really doing as a Roman Catholic is saying, “Rome has always been the obvious place for the good guys to be.”
That’s a Roman Catholic convert move, which Chesterton was. I didn’t realize this until I read a biography of his wife a few years ago. He didn’t become a Roman Catholic until later in life, and whenever you encounter someone who becomes Roman Catholic after not being Roman Catholic, you know that they’re way too enthusiastic about everything about Rome.
He was quite enthusiastic about Rome. I recommend the book The Everlasting Man. I even recommend that chapter, but read it just to see where this kind of thinking can lead if you’re not really, really, really careful.
Let’s kind of wrap up with this. What happens next? There are no more major challenges. The remaining powers that are left are those farther east, and this is the remnants of Alexander’s kingdom. We have Macedonian descendants of Alexander (or of his generals, more accurately). We have the Seleucids in Syria and Babylon. We have the Ptolemies in Egypt and Asia Minor. All of these powers are there but none of them is that big a deal as far as the whole Mediterranean is concerned anymore. This is not a great kingdom. It’s a very splintered kingdom.
Rome encounters one of these after another and is annoyed by them, and they’re frightened by Rome. As I said, Hannibal shows up in the background and says, “Hey guys! These Romans are really dangerous. You should take them over.” That didn’t work at all. So Rome is constantly attacking because she’s threatened, sometimes by real armies, sometimes just by, “Hey, he’s looking at me. We better go beat him up.”
By the time we’re done, Rome is kind of doing this pincer move. She has interests in Egypt that we’ll come back to. She’s moving down through Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor towards Syria, and there’s Israel still being harassed by the Seleucids, Antiochus Epiphanes and his descendants. As they fight to gain their freedom, the Roman armies are just next door. When we get to the New Testament and ask, “Hey, how did Rome get in charge?” that’s the story I guess for next time.
We do have to stop there for the sake of time, and we’re even going to skip recommendations this week for the sake of time. We will see you next week with further adventures in ancient Rome.
A few things to tell you as we head out, per usual. We’d love to hear from you. If you want to send us an email, that’s [email protected].
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