Gods and Men The Grandeur That Was Rome

I've often tried to like those old Romans,

but to tell the truth, I've found it very difficult.

You see, they were so terribly practical,

so liable to be right in a rather bullet-headed way.

And yet, those same men managed to build an empire

which was itself a mighty creation of imaginative thinking.

The whole idea of Roman citizenship was a grand conception.

It was the proud boast of one of the greatest Romans

that he was a citizen of Rome,

and that boast might have been echoed by any veteran soldier

from the Scottish mists or the southern deserts.

If you were an accepted citizen of the Roman Empire,

you liked to think of yourself as a citizen of Rome,

for Rome was the heart and centre of half the civilised world.

WAS the civilised world.

Just look at that empire.

The first great experiment in unretarded circulation.

Today we invent more and more forms

for the wretched traveller to fill up.

Vast civil services are created in order to prevent free interchange.

It's something of a triumph

to spend a whole day at Dieppe without a passport,

but in the Roman world, you just packed up and went where you willed.

You might be robbed from time to time in the course of your journey,

but at least you didn't have to fill a form up first.

Only if you became a public nuisance,

as those newfangled Christians were rather liable to become,

did you cut across that freedom.

Otherwise you would go where you liked,

you could think what you liked and your colour didn't matter.

I haven't forgotten that the Roman Empire,

like other ancient civilisations, was based upon slavery.

Nor have I forgotten that in later Roman times,

when things are rapidly going downhill,

all sorts of shackles were contrived

in an attempt to stay the headlong rush.

In those latter days Rome was frightened,

and frightened nations, like frightened dogs and men,

lose sense and sensibility.

I'm speaking now of those earlier years of proud confidence

when Cicero, the great Roman advocate, could proclaim...

The good of the people is the chief law.

Yes, that august empire, in its large, hard heart,

was tolerant enough in a passive sort of way.

If, as a Roman citizen, you minded your own business,

it didn't much matter what that business was.

You were assumed to be a member of the conservative party

and Cicero's "comfort with honour" was a good enough motto

for the haves in an age when haves were numerous.

The defect of all this conservative contentment

was, of course, complacency.

Conservatism, amidst the perpetual flow of things,

bares always in itself a germ of death.

That was Cicero, not Mr Gaitskell, speaking.

And in his context, Cicero was right enough.

Complacency.

Yes, that pretty well explains, for example,

the Roman's attitude towards his official gods.

A complacency which eventually amounted to a cynical indifference.

No-one has put that better than Edward Gibbon

in his Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire.

Let's see, what did Gibbon say?

Gibbon said, "The various modes of worship

"which prevailed in the Roman world

"were all considered by the people as equally true,

"by the philosopher as equally false,

"and by the magistrate as equally useful."

Good old Gibbon.

Now, let us look at some of those gods.

How remote and unsympathetic

most of these Roman gods were to the man in the street.

Jupiter, chief god, vaguely ruled the skies,

a sort of impersonal permanent undersecretary.

Mars was the country bumpkin who became the gorgeous god of war

but remained a bumpkin.

Hercules, department of physical culture.

A little more personal.

All biceps, no brains,

and hence a universal object of hero worship.

Mercury slyly combined the duties of king's messenger

with an eye over the stock market.

Neptune, god of the sea, was perhaps a little more real.

Salt water frightened the Romans.

The whole divine gang was in effect a branch of the Roman civil service.

Its spiritual content was just about that of an office in Whitehall.

You know, "Your obedient servant Jupiter, signed in his absence."

Animal sacrifice supplied news forecasts.

Of intimate faith, there was none.

But this isn't the whole story.

In distant nooks and corners of the empire

were local gods of a more knowledgeable kind.

Your real friends in need.

If the River Po burst its banks...

..or if a sandstorm blew up in Libya,

or if you lost your sweetheart out on the Northumberland moors,

Jupiter's crowd weren't much use.

You would turn to the gods who were familiar

with your own part of the world.

In the Forest of Dean, if you wanted a good day's hunting

or if you had a pain in your little inside,

you went to your local holy man for quick and understanding service.

His name was Nodens.

He was real and handy.

He even had a good and faithful hunting dog.

The country round Hadrian's Wall was full of these rustic gods.

Their altars survive with their strange names upon them.

Even foreign gods and ideas could be acclimatised.

The famous Corbridge Lion, whatever its real meaning,

might serve as a symbol for a stout heart in a bad climate.

Hercules could acquire a Harry Lauder club.

Serapis could travel from Egypt with all manner of exotic remedies.

But there's an outer darkness of the human mind

where pills and quackery do not suffice.

Men were becoming aware of strange points of light,

gleaming, penetrating and vanishing like the eyes of wild beasts.

Out there was a mysterious something

you couldn't satisfy by knocking a sacrificial sheep on the head.

What was that something?

There were many answers to that question,

and most of them pointed to Asia.

Rome was busy in Asia,

and from Asia, in turn, came new and powerful ideas.

The Arch of Titus in Rome is a surviving witness to this.

The imperial hand grasping the East.

It grasped the seven-branched candlestick of Jerusalem

and sacked its temple.

It also grasped the ideas behind the candlestick

and brought them to Rome.

The reflective mind of western Asia began to conquer the conqueror.

Judaism and Christianity

whispered their beliefs into the spiritual emptiness of Rome.

At first, early Jews and Christians were lost in the crowd.

They talked of one god, of his wrath and his love.

They offered resurrection after death

in place of the gloomy underworld of the official religion.

Of this, the satirist Juvenal wrote,

"That there are souls and a subterranean kingdom

"and a ferry man armed with a pole?

"That's no longer believed, even by children."

Instead, the new priests from the East offered a new immortality.

Senator or slave, your soul was unique in the sight of God.

But with Judaism and Christianity came a third creed,

the cult of Mithras.

A few years ago,

a temple of Mithras was unearthed in the midst of London.

Mithras, a Persian god,

was at one-time the rival of Christ himself.

Wherever the Roman legions and traders went,

they carried their Persian god with them.

The flickering light of this creed burned only a few paces away

from the wall of Hadrian in Northumberland.

It has been said that if Christianity had been stopped

in its youth by some mortal malady,

the world would have adopted the worship of Mithras.

Mithras was a god of manliness, of light and enlightenment,

yet he was worshipped in semi-darkness.

To share his enlightenment,

you passed through ordeals by fire and sword

amidst vague shapes of roaring lions

and human ravens with flapping wings.

Strange mixture of personal trial and cosmic fairy tale,

but it was personal and intimate,

spiritually far removed from the banality of the older gods.

At San Clemente in Rome, one of the best temples of Mithras

is buried deep beneath the Christian church.

Impressive, this Mithraism, but too muddle-headed to make the grade.

Its spiritual ideas were tangled up with ancient ritual,

and its crowning silliness was the exclusion of women.

No, Mithras was too much of a medicine man.

He presided in the act of slaying a bull

from whose blood sprang the life of the earth.

Against the intelligence of Christianity,

he stood no real chance.

When the first Christian emperor decreed the peace of the Church,

Mithras was doomed.

The claim of Christianity was absolute.

It required undivided allegiance.

The early Christians were persecuted not for their doctrines or practices

but because they refused to pay lip service to the state religion,

which was a symbol of the state itself.

The early Christians went to earth.

They had their secret assemblies, their underground chapels

and burial places, their catacombs.

Half-lit picture galleries of faith,

memorials to the innocent and the martyred,

whose uncomplicated loyalty appeals across the ages

with a directness that is lacking

in the mysteries of Mithras and his kin.

Yes, the catacombs, with their simple message,

are no mean part of the grandeur that was Rome.

These hidden Christians were obstinate defenders of the faith,

their sustaining hope, even in the agony of a public death,

was everlasting life in peace "in pace".

The paganism of Rome collapsed under the weight of its emptiness.

The new Christian creed was confirmed by persecution.

The plain cross in the Colosseum is its fitting monument.

The year 306.

Constantine the Great proclaimed emperor by the army of Britain.

He marched on Rome with a symbol of Christ as his standard.

From the Milvian Bridge, he hurled his pagan rivals into the Tiber.

Christianity had triumphed.

The classical world was dead.

And Constantine the Great was one of its grave-diggers.

I wish we knew more about this Constantine.

The foremost witness of the birth of our modern world remains obscure.

The Middle Ages never put him among the Nine Worthies,

their Nobel prize-winners from antiquity.

Julius Caesar, the old cynic, they took him all right.

His personality shines through every portrait of him,

genuine or otherwise.

Even the Elizabethans took Caesar to their hearts.

Isn't he a poppet?

But Constantine the Great,

well, here he is on his own capital of Rome.

Is this a hand that lay on destiny?

Is this an emperor or just big business?

Yet he ushered in the modern world.

He understood the East and moved to Constantinople.

Before him rose the shape of modern man.

Below and behind him lay the dust of a dying world.

The hand of Constantine lay firmly on everything,

from Christian orthodoxy to income tax.

He steered a devious course

through tiresome and perilous Church heresies.

He ground the faces of the rich until they were poor,

and he ground the faces of the poor until they were destitute.

For all his Christianity,

his statue towered over Constantinople

in the guise of the sun god.

The tall column on which that statue stood

still stands in the midst of Istanbul,

blackened memorial to an age of old doubts and new certainties.

There, for a moment, Constantine almost becomes a living mind.

I like to think that a smile flickered across his solemn features

when, with his own hands, he sealed up in the base of his new column

a wooden juju of Athena

which Aeneas had carried from Troy to Rome.

Carrying, for good measure, the axe of Noah,

and the rock from which Moses had made the waters gush forth,

and a basket containing the remains of the seven loaves

with which Christ had fed the multitude.

Athena, Moses, Christ.

Could catholicity or... or hesitation go further?

The foundations of the modern world were well and truly laid.

But in an age of muddled, urgent thought,

there were often uncommonly clear outlines to Constantine's thinking,

just as there are strangely clear, hard outlines to the sculptures

which commemorate him on his monumental arch in Rome.

One quality of those Romans is common to their paganism,

their Christianity, their daily life.

Discipline. They worshipped discipline.

The stony discipline of the parade ground.

But above all, we owe to the Romans the discipline that became codified,

that became law.

Seven centuries before Constantine,

the laws of Rome had been cut on plates of brass

for all to read in the marketplace.

They were called the 12 tables, and every schoolboy learned them.

In those seven centuries, the law of a small peasant state

was transformed into the law of an international empire.

And it was public law, not police law.

"Formal contracts shall be binding.

"If you kill a man accidentally, you shall compensate his relations

"but only half as much for a slave.

"Don't spend too much on funerals.

"Keep your women under control.

"You may kill a thief by night, or by day if he is armed."

Law, "lex", was the recurrent theme of Roman life.

It became a part of the grammar of civilisation.

Roman law is everywhere.

Scrape away the verdigris,

and you have the legal system of the free world before you.

In the sixth century, Roman law entered the modern world

as codified by the Emperor Justinian.

His code has remained perhaps

the most powerful symbol of our civilisation,

its most potent unifying force.

Seneca, that wordy lawyer,

would be amazed, however green his law was.

And yet if I'm to be honest, I have to admit to an uncomfortable feeling

in the presence of so much stoical probity,

so much hook-nosed justice.

And what about you and me in the Roman world?

How did the ordinary man share in the grandeur that was Rome?

The wine shipper on the Moselle, for example,

bringing his wine casks laboriously into market.

Scattered over three continents lie remnants of Roman daily life.

Look at them brought together, perhaps for the first time.

A kind of Roman Diary Of A Nobody.

The tradesman down the street, how modern his shop.

The blacksmith who never changed his ways a nail's length

until the Industrial Revolution put him out of business

16 centuries later.

The banker in his counting house.

And, of course, your wife wants a dress length for the new fashion

and must have her hair permed.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of us all?

Whilst the children are off school,

and woe betide the young hopeful if he's late.

Then home to dinner. Ah, a goose this evening.

And a party and good drinks afterwards.

All this belongs

to the life of the great middle class of the Roman cities,

and it's altered surprisingly little.

The higher up you moved in the social scale,

the more you went in for country life.

You knew how to pick your country and to live the good life.

How is that for a country house,

thrusting into the azure lake of Garda?

No doubt a shipping millionaire or a successful company promoter

or, much the same thing, the ex-governor of a fat province

lived there in cautious retirement

if he escaped prosecution for extortion and corruption.

Here again, beneath the hills of Tivoli near Rome,

where the Emperor Hadrian, who planned our austere frontier wall,

built a huge, splendacious villa for himself

across a mile of countryside.

But cultivated country life was by no means a Mediterranean monopoly.

I have in mind a little Roman house,

tucked away in one of the lovely valleys of Kent at Lullingstone.

There knowledgeable country squires

lived for three of the centuries of Roman Britain.

Memories of the poet Virgil

went to the making of their mosaic floors.

Their tables were furnished with elegant simplicity.

They drank new wine in new bottles

and, bless them, were fond of dogs and therefore gentlemen.

They had their hunting and their table games.

A game of chequers went into a squire's grave,

close to where he'd lived and grumbled and gambled.

"'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days:

"Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays."

Towards the end of the empire, the proprietor was a Christian

who turned one of his rooms into a chapel.

Praying figures were painted on its walls.

And beside them was a sacred monogram of Christ.

The Roman Empire was full of these gracious establishments

of which Jane Austen would have approved fully.

Inside them, family life proceeded on a well-ordered pattern.

It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say

that the Romans invented home life in our sense of the term.

When we look at their serious faces, full of individual character,

full of that gravity and responsibility

of which they were inclined to boast a little,

we can think of these Roman family men

sitting on the next seat of a bus

or at a shareholders' meeting in the City.

And then there were those splendid Roman women.

Pursued by cynical historians, they've had a bad press

but, in truth, in a predominantly masculine society,

they show up remarkably well,

and much of the stability of ancient Roman life is owed to them.

It's perhaps something of a surprise to us

that these admirable women

were often engaged to their future husbands

as children by family contract.

But after all, the same custom prevails

in many parts of the world today.

I remember once asking a distinguished Indian friend of mine

how these contract marriages worked out in his country.

"Ah," he replied, "The answer's easy.

"The difference between us and you is this.

"With us, love begins with marriage.

"With you, love ends with marriage."

And a Roman satirist might have said very much the same thing.

Anyway, there's ample evidence

that these contract marriages turned out quite well very often.

There are many tombstones to faithful Roman wives,

baring the letters SVQ,

which stand for three Latin words meaning "no complaints".

And some of them run through a catalogue of domestic virtues

worthy of an espoused saint.

A butcher on the Viminal Hill in Rome carved this message

upon his wife's grave after 33 years of marriage.

"She whose chaste body went before me was my loving wife.

"She was one with me in mind and spirit.

"In life she was loyal to her husband, as I to her,

"and she never failed of her duty through any sort of selfishness.

"She was chaste, modest, retiring, faithful to her man."

Animosities are mortal, but the humanities live forever,

and humanity was a Roman virtue.

In Latin speech, it comprehended the finer things of life.

With it went piety,

by which the Romans meant loyalty to god, country and family.

Amidst the pomp and circumstance of empire,

the simple humanity and piety of Aurelius the butcher

have their honoured place.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd