It is 1512 and we are in Rome and we are in the area of the Vatican or St. Peter's Basilica. They are on the outskirts of Rome just over the river. And we are witnessing the completion of the Sistine Chapel, the fresco that Michelangelo has painted there on the ceiling in this elaborate, almost impossible task to cover the ceiling with so many frescoes.
And part of the challenge of painting the Sistine Chapel was the fact that it was not a flat roof. It actually has an arch to it. And so one of the brilliant things that Michelangelo was able to do over the four years that he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
was he was able to foreshorten the images so that even when looking up, despite the fact that the roof is curved, it appears flat from down below. And Michelangelo had been brought to Rome by the Pope in 1505 in the hopes of carving an elaborate tomb, a tomb we can still see today when we go and look at the tomb of Julius II, which was eventually uncompleted. And in 1505, Michelangelo was just 30. And yet he had sculpted two of the most impressive pieces of art ever created, the Pietà and the David. But the Sistine Chapel, the fresco on the ceiling, has long stood as Michelangelo's greatest achievement. And let's focus on just one piece, the creation of Adam.
Now this is a famous picture, but it's often unconsidered in terms of the importance of what Michelangelo is saying in this painting. First notice Adam. He lays back passively. Being created, not participating in his creation, laying back while God does all of the action.
The color around Adam, notice, is muddy. It's brown. It's hearkening back to the concept that God formed and fashioned Adam out of the mud on the ground. And Adam's outstretched hand itself lies quite passive.
It's sort of limp. It's waiting to be acted upon. It's not acting in any way on its own. And when we move over to see God, very often we only look at God's hand, or at most we look at his beard. But there's a lot going on in this picture.
Notice how God is in control, how he's flying. Now this is something that had not been done in the story of the creation of Adam in any other picture or portrait or fresco before. But Michelangelo has chosen instead to make God a flying being. He has God twisted in this almost impossible shape where he is reaching.
powerfully, actively towards Adam as he creates him. The garments around him and his beard and his hair are all flowing through just the sheer activity of the spirit as he is reaching out to create the first image of himself. And not a few commentators have pointed out that this two-stage image of a passive Adam being created and an active God, a powerful God, creating him.
is symbolized even when we just look at the hands. Now, we see this picture a lot, but again, notice, just in the hands, God's hand is powerful. It's active. It's the creator. His hand is reaching with might and strength, where Adam's hand is simply passive.
It is being acted upon. One other element that is often overlooked, given the way modern photography depicts the creation of Adam, is what is going on behind God. Notice God's left arm as it wraps around a woman. And that woman looks longingly, we might say, to Adam.
Many have seen in this the idea that in God's mind, he already has the creation of Eve. He knows that Adam alone is not going to be a good thing. And in this image, with God's left hand wrapped around this woman, and as this woman looks to Adam, there is depicted that God knows what is to come even after Adam. And follow God's hand. Where is it going?
It goes down around this woman, and it points very explicitly to a child. And that child is looking not at Adam, not at God, but is looking at us. That child, many say, is Christ, the infant Jesus, after having been born, the second Adam.
Again, he is there. God's hand is pointing to him. The second Adam is already in God's mind, even as he creates the first Adam.
Theologically, Michelangelo is saying, even with the creation of the first Adam, despite the glory of God's work in the image of God, He already knows that the second Adam will be needed. And we could spend a lot of time on the art of the Sistine Chapel or the Renaissance itself, but the reason I'm telling you this story is because the Pope who commissioned this is a very interesting man, Pope Julius. Pope Julius, in many ways, was responsible for patronizing and paying for much of the flourishing of the Italian Renaissance. And the Italian Renaissance was a period of time in which Italian artists and authors and scholars attempted to recreate the glories of ancient Rome.
And one of the things that's overlooked is the fact that Julius, as the pope, when he took his name after his election, took the name of Julius, Julius Caesar, hearkening himself in some ways back to the idea that Julius wants to be a Christian version of the man who established the glories of Rome. And so in many ways, the Renaissance is capitalizing on the romance of the Roman world all those centuries ago around the time of Christ. And so in this lecture, we're going to look at the Roman world, and we're going to ask the question, what was it like?
What was the Roman Empire? What did it mean to be Roman? We'll look at the formation of the Caesarian line from Caesar to Octavian and on down.
We'll take a look at the Roman army. And then we'll ask the question, what was Roman culture? What was the Romanitas? The idea of Rome as this powerful entity that is to be emulated throughout the centuries long after the Roman Empire has gone away.
Now we begin with the Roman world by noticing the most important factor of the Roman Empire and that is simply the conquest that the Roman armies conducted over the span of several hundred years. When it was all said and done, Rome owned and controlled Nearly 1 million square miles in a pre-industrial age for one nation, one empire, to take all of the known world from Britain to Gaul, the Italian peninsula, North Africa, Spain, and then moving out east into Asia Minor to take Greece and modern-day Turkey and much of the Holy Land and down into Egypt is simply staggering. Again, few nations prior to the age of empires with France and Napoleon and with the British empires and its expansions just several hundred years ago, nothing compares to what Rome was able to accomplish during its time as an empire.
Now, the two most important factors that the conquest brings are the syncretism of pagan worship, which we'll look at in explicit detail in our next lecture. as well as the issue of the oppression of the peoples that they conquer. Rome had a real task on its hands in order to not only bring these tribes and these nations under their orbit, but also to guarantee that future rebellions would not occur. In addition, there were always, during the Roman Empire, extensive issues on the frontiers. When it was towards the interior part of the Roman world, Gaul, for example, Rome would have a great deal of success in maintaining authority and order.
They would impose martial ethos in places that were hotbeds for sedition. Whenever there was peace, they would conduct an engineering campaign in these regions that would improve the lives of their subjects, thus guaranteeing their loyalty over the years. Things like aqueducts and roads and all kinds of public works that were conducted by the Roman peoples. in general by the armies whenever they were not marching off to war, were the thing of legend.
The locals couldn't even compare to creating some of these things. These kinds of things very often were preferred to the original way of life before the Roman world had conquered these lands. Out on the margins, however, there were significant issues. Out in the east, Rome always had to worry about the Persian Empire. It was always rising up.
It was always seeking to challenge the Roman hegemony in these areas. Many of the Persian shahs believed that the areas that were under Roman control should have been under their control. They often wanted Turkey back, or many of the areas of Egypt, or even Israel and the Holy Land itself. Up to the north, with the barbarian kingdoms, Rome always had a problem on its hands with maintaining stability and order on the frontiers.
And it's important to notice this now, because eventually, when we get to the third century crisis in a later lecture, one of the most important things for the Romans is that they will have so much cost and so much manpower devoted to maintaining the borders of their large empire, that eventually... a number of losses in battle, a number of decimations of their armies, would eventually lead to a calamitous event where Rome simply did not have the manpower to maintain their borders, at least not with any great deal of success. And so they had to start taking in barbarian mercenaries into the armies.
And so the discipline of the army begins to wane, and as a result, the empire looks weak. Certain emperors are assassinated, often by the armies themselves. out of frustration that the empire has begun to collapse and begun to weaken. But a lot of this was there right from the beginning.
Maintaining one's strength on the borders was a nearly impossible task for any nation, even one as strong as Rome. Now, let's say something briefly about the formation of the Roman Empire. Now, Rome has a long lineage that goes back to roughly 509 BC, when the Roman Republic was formed. Too often people begin only with Caesar, but we have to remember that for a little over 400 years, Rome was a dominant empire, but it was a republic.
The republic meant that there were no single rulers that ran the government. There were no tyrants or dictators over Rome. Rome was run by the Senate, and even the Senate, despite having a fair number of nobles associated with it, was really a voice of the people. Rome repeatedly resisted single rulers, single charismatic leaders who sought to make Rome their plaything or sought to rise in rank or power beyond their station as just one of the citizens.
But all of that changed with the coming of Julius Caesar. And Caesar was one of the most successful Roman generals of his generation. He had gone up into Britain at one point and established order.
He had done a number of marvels in the realm of... Gaul. And so as he began to develop his might and his prowess, he began to take on rivals. Now, this rivalry with Julius Caesar and a number of his colleagues in the army did not have to spill over in the Civil War, but eventually they did. And it all came to a head in 49 BC when Caesar, as is famously said, crossed the Rubicon into the heart of the Italian peninsula, making his way to come after Pompey.
his most supreme and important rival. And crossing the Rubicon is, we use it euphemistically now, to mean that you've crossed a line, you've gone too far, the point of no return has been crossed. And that really is what it was for Caesar as well.
As a general, to bring his armies down and to cross the Rubicon was illegal. It was an act of hostility, of war. And Caesar knew what he was doing. And so he came after Pompey. And eventually, after a series of events, he wins.
And the Senate eventually gives Caesar the title of Imperator. And there are a number of examples that shows that Caesar is doing something new, though he is attempting to disguise it as something he is not intending to do. At one point, the Senate grants Caesar the right to sit on a golden throne, something that would offend his colleagues, because it meant that Caesar was now elevated above those of the state. He was also at one point, as he sat on this golden throne, offered laurels, that is something like a crown. And the story says that Caesar repeatedly refused them.
Now, that is a strange thing to do because, by all accounts, Caesar had the crown. He was imperator. He was in charge of Rome. But Caesar knew that he was being baited.
To take a crown, to take hold of the emblems of being a dictator or a tyrant, would not end well for Caesar. And so he attempted to push this concept off, that he was somehow the new king of Rome, because he knew that the Republic simply wouldn't stand for it. Still, Caesar had power.
He was in charge. He was perpetually in charge, according to the Senate. He was not to step down after a term of office. And so, on the 15th of March, 44 BC, on the Ides of March, Brutus and a number of others assassinate Caesar, just outside the theater of Pompeii.
And you shouldn't see in this necessarily jealousy. In Shakespeare's famous play, Julius Caesar, there is this sort of tense buildup of how Caesar is assassinated, according to Shakespeare, by many of his friends and colleagues, by those who had betrayed him. And that one of the serious problems here is that Caesar was backstabbed, almost literally, by those who were his colleagues.
And Brutus and others who had planned the assassination of Caesar run out into the city. and begin to yell that we are free, finally this tyrant is gone, and the republic can be restored. But Caesar had the will of the people.
The firsthand accounts that we have tell us that the crowd was simply somber, that they didn't cheer the assassination of Caesar, and some went to their homes and locked their doors, knowing that a civil war was about to erupt. And the masterstroke for Caesar to keep the will of the people was that after his death, his will was conducted. And it was found out that Caesar had left to all the citizens of Rome a sizable amount of money, a gift of some amount of gold to all the citizens there, and that his will was for the good of the empire as a whole, that he had not simply amassed wealth and then distributed it to his own family.
And so, over time, the crowd began to turn against those who were part of the assassination. And in his will, Caesar had named as his heir Octavian. Now, Octavian is often known as Augustus.
Now, we should clarify here. His name is Octavian, but at a later date, after he himself becomes emperor, Octavian is granted the title Augustus, or the Great One, the August person, the August leader. And so, for many people, he is Augustus Octavius. And so, you'll notice in my lectures, I freely use both titles.
I'll call him Augustus, or I'll call him Octavian. Now, if I were being persnickety, As an historian, I would simply refer to him as Octavian because that is his name. Nevertheless, he is Caesar's heir, and he is only 18 at the time he is named to be the heir of Caesar.
And Octavian plays his hand slowly. Now, there is one tense issue already because Caesar's right-hand man and the more established and seasoned veteran was Mark Antony. And immediately, Octavian and Mark Antony come to a very tense negotiation point.
Mark Antony seems to speak down to Octavian in their first meeting together. And the two, while at times partners against those who had assassinated Caesar, eventually they churn on each other. And in the end, Antony flees to Egypt, where he unites with Cleopatra.
Again, another great Shakespearean play, Antony and Cleopatra. And the two become united, and they unite against Octavian. And it all comes to a head in the end at the Battle of A- when Octavian finally, in a great sea battle, defeats and ends the rivalry of Mark Antony.
And so Octavian becomes the sole ruler of Rome. Now there is something important here, and that is that Octavian does not choose to go with Caesar's model of holding himself as the emperor or as somehow elevated above his other senators. Rather, Octavian initiates the Principate, the idea that he, even as Augustus, is the princeps, that he is the first citizen. He is still a citizen.
He is on equal grounds with all of the citizens of Rome, in particular the senators. And so therefore, he is a first among equals. He is the principal, the princeps.
And Augustus was actually quite good at mingling with senators and of treating them as equals and not giving the impression that he was somehow elevated above them. And thus we have established the Roman Empire, the Principate. Now, we'll cover in later lectures some of the evolution of this, because the Principate will eventually move into the Dominate, particularly in the 3rd century, when the Emperor moves away from even attempting to be the Princeps and moves more to being the Lord, the Dominus, the Lord of the Roman Empire.
But for now, Rome has been re-established, and this will be the Golden Age. This will be the classical age that establishes Rome. in the minds of all of the centuries of people that come after it. Still, there are two major issues here already built in, baked into the Roman Empire.
The first, of course, is the army. The foundation of the Roman Empire, both by Caesar and later by Octavian, was conducted by a military operation, in which a man based on his charisma, on his authority, on his ability to galvanize the troops, led in battle to conquer his enemies and therefore took the laurels for himself. That's a problem to begin with. Whenever you have a revolutionary state, it doesn't take much for the next person in line to say, well, I'll just do the same thing. I will rebel, and if I conquer and win, then I will take the laurels myself.
And so for a period of time, for centuries, on down until the time of Constantine, and frankly, even after Constantine, there is always the threat of civil war, of usurpation of the emperor of Rome. Now, this doesn't bring to an end the Roman Empire. It just brings an end to certain emperors.
But it does bring instability. And instability for any kingdom, for any government, is a bad thing. Tied in with that, with the power of the army to usurp those in command, is the issue of succession. The succession from Caesar to Octavian was relatively smooth, but even Octavian had to win the crown for himself.
He had to win the empire. Even though he was the heir to Caesar, he was not heir to Caesar's throne. And this is a theme that will recur throughout the empire age. There is no clear succession necessarily. Now there's always the ideal that a son or an adopted son of the emperor will become the one who takes over the throne, but that is not a foregone conclusion.
And at times, the transition from one ruler to the next becomes something for making war. Now let's look at the Roman army itself, since it is the driving force to both the expansion and to the stability of the Roman Empire. Now the army was pretty sophisticated. All citizens of the Roman Empire were expected to serve in the army at some point, and they could be drafted at any point should there be a need. And a citizen was responsible for equipping himself.
He was to come up with the armor and the shield and the javelin, as well as the swords. And all of the operational costs were on his shoulders. And there's a lot of variety in the way the army was arranged and how it worked, but there was essentially a...
pretty standard way that it was supposed to operate. An army in general was about 4,500 men, broken down into various ranks according to age and class. The biggest group, of course, would be the centurion, which is a collection of groups headed up by a centurion officer, someone of a specific rank that is very elevated, that could go up to the rank of captain. And a centurion army could be anywhere from 200 to ideally 1,000 men. And the Cingerian was further broken down into a number of different ranks, the most basic of which was the Manipal.
And generally there would be 30 Manipals per legion, and the army would march in formation. It would then set up camp, and the camps were really a thing of engineering wonder. They would always be set up in the same way, so that wherever you landed you knew exactly where your tent and your operation was, the roads were very precisely laid out, and you were never...
to wonder where your location was for sleeping and eating and these kinds of things, making it very simple. And when it came to the battle itself, there would be three lines of formations. And it would be very flexible, but in general, you'd have three lines.
On the front line is you would have the common foot soldier, the histati. And the common foot soldier was a shock troop, usually of the lower classes. And they would rush in and they would toss their javelin, their pila.
And the javelin... was designed to pierce a shield of an opponent and stick and lodge within it, and therefore making the shield too heavy to be carried. And once one javelin volley had come, sometimes there'd be a second, and at this point the shock troops would draw their swords, the gladius it was called, and they would engage in close combat hand-to-hand battle.
Should there be a need for a second line, the next group would come up, the principal line it was sometimes called, and these were a slightly elevated rank of social status. They too would have javelins and they too would have gladii that they could use to back up their first line of defense. On the back lines were the older soldiers, the more elevated ranks, the people of more superior noble birth. Very often in a battle, this back line, this third line, would not need to engage in battle itself.
They would be ready and willing to do so should it come to it. But very often, the first two lines would break the other army or they would defeat them entirely. And this formation of the lower classes up front ascending all the way back to the higher classes guaranteed that whenever there were significant losses, very often you would not be depleting the rich, the wealthy, and those who had aims and aspirations to go home to be an elite or even a senator at some point in their lifetime.
And the discipline of the Roman army is something to be respected. The soldier was supposed to be brave. He was supposed to be vicious in battle.
Any show of cowardice or of quelling during battle was often met by two specific punishments. The first is the Fustiarium, and the Fustiarium is whenever an individual has shown cowardice, or even more specifically, if he's fallen asleep while on watch, or if in a battle they have not displayed bravery, perhaps they ran away from the battle. And the Fustiarium was when the offending soldier was brought to the center of camp, and his immediate army as maniple, the line that he was affiliated with, would beat him to death with clubs or cudgels.
If a maniple or if a unit has showed cowardice, if they have not lived up to what is required of a Roman soldier, there is also something called a decimation. Now, it's important to note here, just in terms of English vocabulary, we often use the word decimate to say that something was annihilated, that if your army is decimated, we mean that it is destroyed. But the etymology of the word literally means ten, the killing of ten, deci.
And a decimation is whenever the army has displayed cowardice, the punishment would be that they would count down the line and every tenth man would be put to death. And this is what a decimation is. You would lose one out of every ten of your unit. And so order was very well maintained very often in the Roman army.
And people wanted to be a part of the army, not only for the glory, but... For those who wanted to gain citizenship, if you were not a citizen, if you joined the army and then were eventually honorably discharged, you would be discharged as a Roman citizen. And so the army is a force. It is almost impregnable in terms of a defensive structure. Whenever armies would come against it, they would be very flexible, they would be very resilient, and their tactics and their discipline were supreme.
If they were on the attack, in the same way, they were... profoundly effective at defeating armies. And so, as the Roman armies went marching off, and as they conquered all these lands, the last thing we need to say about the Roman world is the Roman culture that would be established.
And the Romans had a specific word for this, Romanitas, the Roman-ness that they wanted to establish in all of their empire. This would very often be conducted by the conquering armies. As we've said before, if the army is not at war or if they're not in active defensive maneuvers, well, suddenly, in these newly conquered regions, you would have a pretty sizable workforce and a pretty established and brilliant engineering corps that could conduct all kinds of public works on behalf of the Roman Empire. To this day, you can still see evidences of some of these things.
There are still aqueducts that are standing. Many have noticed that if you go to the city of London and... rent a car and go driving down any of the major highways that lead out from London to other parts of Britain, that very often while you're driving on a modern road, you might very well be driving on the layout originally of an earlier Roman road.
The design, the planning of these roads was so sufficient and the clearing of the ground was so effective that they're still used today. But little Manitas, the Roman-ness that was the ideal of the Roman culture, had a number of virtues associated with it. Now, first and foremost, we've made a comment that the Roman army was arranged according to social class, but don't hear in that that the Roman world really cared first and foremost for class distinction. In fact, by and large, the most important thing for the Roman culture was the legal status of being a Roman citizen. To be a Roman citizen means that you have attained all that is essential to have Romanitas.
You could have more wealth. You could be more part of the elite. You could be more Roman because your linguistic skills are original. You could be ethnically from the Italian peninsula. For the Roman, though, for the Roman Empire, that did not matter as much as the legal status of being a Roman citizen.
We can notice, for example, the Apostle Paul very effectively uses his Roman citizenship during his missionary journeys as a way of ensuring that certain doors would not be closed to him. But But Romanitas had at its core three general virtues. The first was self-control. A Roman was someone who had self-control.
They were very austere. They were not enslaved to their base of desires. Again, even the Roman citizen has sort of a martial army ethos built into what it means to be Roman. A Roman citizen was supposed to be virtuous and honest as well. their oaths and their vows and their conducting of business was supposed to be on the up and up.
And this brings home the point that Romans in general were very conservative. That is to say, they had this love of antiquity, of being Roman, of being part of a virtuous society that they believed was part of the mos maiorum, part of the way of the ancestors. To be very much part of the ancient world was to be virtuous, to have self-control. And in fact, in the early centuries of the church, this is one of the big points of contention for the apologetics of the church fathers.
Take, for example, Augustine's City of God, which is a very thick book. very often challenging for anyone to read, even if you're a scholar. And one of the things that Augustine does in that book repeatedly, especially in the early chapters, is he points out how contradictory the Roman way of conducting life in their empire was against the backdrop of their supposed love of virtue and honesty and self-control. Augustine spares no expense at saying that the Romans don't even live up to their own values. For example, The Romans love self-control and virtue and honesty.
But if you just look at the slave trade during the Roman times as the engine that is driving the economics of the Roman Empire, you'll see that it's not quite as virtuous as it all makes out. For example, between the years 200 and 50 BC, there were as many as one million slaves in the Roman Empire. After 50 BC, however, that number skyrockets. And by the time you get into the early church world, you have as many as 6.5 million slaves. As many as one-third of the Roman populace, 30% at least, is part of the slave trade, part of the slave establishment.
Now, you could work your way out of slavery. It was not perpetual necessarily. Nevertheless, the Romans'desire for slave labor was one of the things that fueled the Roman expansion throughout the world. The more you conquered, the more you could take slaves. from the defeated armies.
And so in the end, the Roman world has always been this mixture of intriguing romantic cultivation of arts and economics and architecture and all of these wonderful things that you can still go to the city of Rome today and see the remains of. This is the world that in the Renaissance they're trying to emulate. The good elements of a Roman culture, of a pagan world that is... achieving great things on a world stage, and the Roman world ends up achieving more than any other nation prior to the Industrial Age, prior really until the 20th century. Still, Rome was not a happy place.
If you were a woman, if you were a child, if you were a slave, you were on the margins of society. You were not part of the establishment. You were ineligible of receiving the full benefits of citizenship in many cases. And so the Christian world ran across the grain of this basic Romanitas. Christians reached out to slaves, to women.
They incorporated a flat hierarchy in which you had pastors and bishops who were running the church, but even they were part of the flock of God. Everyone was considered part of the church if you were a Christian. Virtue was not elevating oneself of self-control, of virtue on one's own.
strength and power, but rather the Christian virtues of self-denial, of following our Lord, of sin and redemption, cut against the grain of this Romanitas, of this Roman world. And so, even despite the fact that even down until today, the Roman world is cherished in some ways, still for the early church, the Roman world was the world that needed to be redeemed and have a Lord that is different.