The Sun Gods 4

Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999

• The Glory that was Greece
• Morals of the Athenians
• The Development of Religion
• The Rise of Philosophy and Skepticism
• The Splendour that was Rome
• Morals in Ancient Rome

The Glory That Was Greece

The Greeks had hardly been civilized a few centuries when they discovered three great fundamental truths of science: the vastness of the universe, the existence of atoms, and the law of evolution. If the Christian Church bad not subsequently crushed all science, we should be now a thousand years more advanced.

To the historians of all later time this genius of the Greek intellect has always been a mystery. If the Hebrews had been Greeks, it would be a miracle, an outcome of God’s revelation and inspiration. The first European nation to become civilized reach the high water mark in nearly every branch of culture. One has only to reflect on the language we use today to realize the world’s debt to little Greece. Philosophy, ethics, politics, aesthetics, democracy, gymnastics, athletics, music, theatre, chorus, comedy, tragedy—these and a thousand others are Greek words, because they stand for things which the Greeks invented or discovered.

To talk of the “genius” of the Greeks is mere mysticism; and it is only a new kind of mysticism. Words and phrases conceal the need for real explanation. Nor can the explanation be given by reflecting on the glorious climate, the picturesque world, the blue sky and the blue sea and golden sun, of the Greeks. Greece is scorched brown during most of the year and powdered thick with dust. It is arm-chair philosophers who imagine it a land of perpetual flowers and fresh green foliage. In any case, the sun and sea and hills are the same now as they were two thousand years ago, and they inspire no genius.

A “scientific” explanation simply means a real explanation instead of verbiage and mysticism. That is why it is deadly to old thought. We either point out the real agencies at work or we candidly confess that we have not yet discovered them.

Now, we have not yet discovered the whole secret of the Greeks, but a very little sketch of their history will show that we have made a considerable advance. The Greeks, Romans, Teutons, Celts, and Slavs are one family, and the ancestral tribe lived somewhere in the Caucasus. It spread west and south.

Here our discovery of the ancient civilization of Crete has greatly helped us. The earliest Greeks, powerful barbarians with iron weapons, destroyed Crete. Half the Cretan race fled to Asia Minor, where they had long ago founded colonies, and in time large numbers of the Greeks crossed the narrow sea to Asia Minor and learned civilization from them. Nearly all the early poets and scientists of Greek literature belong to Asia Minor.

That is part of the explanation. Athens, in the extreme east of Greece, was sheltered from the barbaric waves which continued to pour south, and it was also very conveniently situated for communication with Asia Minor. The physical circumstances, as usual, explain more than genius or religion does. But until the fifth century Athens had only a moderate civilization, with no outstanding achievements except the abolition of royalty and the creation of democracy—the first democracy in history. This does not puzzle us. Such a change was comparatively simple in a small community like that of the Athenians, but quite impossible in rigorously organized monarchies with millions of people and vast armies of mercenary soldiers.

Part of the wonder of Athens was that it was not an empire. Athens was a city-state—a single city with a moderate amount of the surrounding country. And it never had more than a population of about four hundred thousand, of whom three- fourths were slaves. In effect, a city of one hundred thousand men and women produced all the talent we have seen.

What was it that so ensnared Athens in the fifth century? It was the correct learning of the lesson of a terrific defeat and then the avoidance of war for a century. The Persians completely destroyed the old Athens in 479  BC, and the Athenians, in rebuilding, were fortunate enough to secure a statesman who was also a thinker and an artist.

Pericles proposed that they should raise on the ashes of the older Athens the most beautiful city in all the world, and that they succeeded will be told in the world’s literature until the end of time. Never again will such artistic and literary wonders be crowded into one century by so small a people.

Athens was a perfect democracy. Not a bean could be used from the treasury, not a building designed or raised, without the consent of the twenty thousand male citizens and voters. Moreover, the theatre (which was also, in later years, the parliament house) seated thirty thousand spectators, to witness the superb tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander.

Narrow-minded men the Athenians certainly were on the religious side—religion is always the great retarding influence—but even here they rarely enforced their laws. The condemnation to death of Socrates had a political element. They were, at all events, bigoted, but we have every reason to believe that they were proud of their unique city and its unique achievements.

Morals Of The Athenians

”We grant you all this greatness in the field of intellect,” the preacher says, “but what was the spirituality, the moral level, of the Athenians?”

Why lay so much stress on spirituality and virtue? The Christian is shocked, but spirituality is a shibboleth. Believers do not expect to hear such things questioned but they will try to give answers.

Without a high moral and spiritual level, society degenerates, intellect is paralyzed, energy and the great deeds of the strong early race are sapped.

Are you smiling? These Athenians, lacking the spirituality and morality of Christians, gave the world such brilliant intellectual achievements that no nation, even twenty times as large, will ever rival them. The Athenian state, little and corrupt as it was, produced “the most refined, brilliant civilization the world has yet seen,” the words of a clergyman.

”Surely,” Christian says, “all the authorities admit that the Athenians were very brilliant in art and intellect and very loose in morals”. If that were true, immorality is consistent with brilliant art and intellect, if it does not promote them. But it is not true.

A clergyman will compare the Greeks of more than two thousand years ago with people of modern times. Our generation is not Christian and, being two thousand years later than the Greeks, it ought to be wiser in its social life. To compare Greek morals with Christian, neither the twentieth century nor the end of the nineteenth can properly be used as a yardstick. Ages when practically everybody was a Christian should be compared with the Greeks.

Menander was the culmination of Greek manners. He was the second greatest comedian of Athens, though few but scholars ever heard of him. Only fragments of his comedies remain but we have a large number of complete works of the other great Greek comedian, Aristophanes. Christians are fond of quoting the scurrilities of some of those comedies as “typical” of Athenian sentiment. Menander, was not scurrilous, writing in one fragment:

Prefer to be injured rather than to injure, for in so doing you will blame others, and you will escape censure.

Menander’s comedies reflected a state of moral and domestic sentiment very like our own, and they were full of moral scenes and happy endings. But, since only scholars read these things, we take our opinion of the Athenian stage from Aristophanes.

Strange, isn't it, that those pious and industrious monks of the Middle Ages, who “preserved for us all that is best in classical literature”—you know the Catholic boast—should have so carefully preserved the “scurrilous” plays of Aristophanes and so completely ignored the almost Christian comedies of Menander!

A Christian theologion judges Aeschylus, the Greek tragedian, thus:

No modern theology has taught higher and purer moral notions than those of Aeschylus and his school, developed afterwards by Socrates and Plato, but first attained by the genius of Aeschylus.

Not feeble praise for an age preceding the preaching of Christ by five whole centuries, and before the best “prophecies” and psalms of the Old Testament were written! Aeschylus

shows the indelible nature of sin, and how it recoils upon the third and fourth generation, thus anticipating one of the most marked features in Christian theology.

Finally the Christian professor drives the lesson home in these decisive words:

The agreement of Sophocles (in his “Oedipus”) shows that these deep moral ideas were no individual feature in Aeschylus, and that there must have been a sober earnestness at Athens very far apart from the ribaldry of Aristophanes. Such immorality as that of the modern French stage was never tolerated among the Greeks, in spite of all their license.

The Christian scholar does not demonstrate anywhere this “license” and it is at variance with his every word.

The third great tragedian, Euripides, is put almost on an even higher level. His heroines:

are the women who have so raised the ideal of the sex that, in looking upon them, the world has passed from neglect to courtesy, from courtesy to veneration.

These were the three greatest dramatists of Greece. Next to these was Menander, full of virtue which was truer to life because it was more homely. Next was the great comedian Aristophanes who was unquestionably “licentious”; so the worthy monks have preserved all his works for us. His “Lysistrata” is a supremely funny and daring picture of a venereal strike on the part of the women of Greece. Prostitutes walk on his stage, and talk freely. Sex jokes are as common as in a London comedy club or a high-class Chicago theatre.

Athens was not divided into a score of refined people and a brutal mass:

We hear of no low music halls, or low dancing saloons. Even such vice as existed was chiefly refined and gentlemanly.

Aspasia, the friend of Pericles, is merely lampooned by the comedians.

There is no absolute proof of her want of dignity and morality.

She was a virtuous lady to whose house even Socrates and Xenophon, the great moralists, went for the purpose of serious mental improvement. Nor is here evidence that there were hetairai at Athens, though there were at Corinth, and or evidence that the hetairai were immoral. And as to the immorality of some of the legends about the gods, several chapters of the Bible are unsuitable for children because “manifest immoralities are read” out of it. The portrait of Alcibiades in Plutarch, is hardly a specimen of Athenian manners, for he was in every way exceptional. And, to conclude the list, the Greek love of boys was perfectly innocent, as Jowett had proved long before, and Edward Carpenter has proved again in his beautiful “Iolaus”.

The Greeks were not morally inferior to modren nations. Some intensely Christian countries today accept quite as much looseness, and far more unnatural vice than did the ancient Athenians. Athens was far superior to Europe when it was entirely Christian in the Middle Ages.

The Greeks, like the Babylonians and Egyptians, were much the same as ourselves. They seem to have observed the same ideals in the same ways. Most Greek women and girls were guarded in an almost oriental seclusion, and they could hardly philander much, if they were so disposed. Because of this, there were prostitutes. Corinth had a lot of them. Human nature was just the same, human ideals were just the same, then as now.

Sex is not the whole, or the main part, of morals—though Christians often think it the only part. Justice, honour, kindliness, truthfulness, generosity, temperance are the great principles, and the Greeks were no less familiar with them than we are.

The Development Of Religion

The old gods of Greece, Zeus and his wife and daughter, Hephaestos and Aphrodite and all the rest, were brought down from the northeast into the peninsula by the early barbaric Greeks. They were nature-gods. The Greeks bad no sacred books about them in the same sense as the Hebrews. The poets, Homer and Hesiod and others, give us their stories.

A critical study of the Greek writers in different ages shows that, since there was no “inspired” record—though Plato worked out a theory of inspiration of the poets like the Christian theory—to limit anyone’s imagination, the gods were understood quite differently by different writers at different times.

To the austere tragedians, Zeus was the moral ruler of the world. No one took moral principles more seriously than Athenians did. To lighter poets, the amours of the gods were light poetic material. Much, if not all, of the moral light-heartedness, attributed to the gods, was not original in Greek religion. Their amorous adventures fell from the lips of the bards at the courts of the petty and pleasure-loving early kings who loved their legends embroidered with all sorts of baudiness.

The stories of the immorality of the gods had no concern with the morals of mortals. The Christian likewise must not be vindictive, and must suffer injury or insult without retaliating, but God does nothing of the kind. He punishes with merciless vigour anyone who offends Him. The Christian pious nods: “God’s ways are not the ways of mortals”.

The Greek maid would not willy-nilly receive a lover because Zeus set a baudy example. Greek maids will have admitted lovers in the same proportion as maiden have since civilization began. Aspasia loved Pericles but could not marry him because she was a Milesian and could not marry an Athenian. Like any true love, she will have by-passed the ritual. The hetairai seemed more like Japanese geishas than Western prostitutes. They were female entertainers whose talent was far from simply offering sexual favours for money.

The religion of Greece was not the Greeks' source of morality, and had no particular theology even. It taught no lies about a life after death because, if there was a life beyond, being beyond, it was not open to our scrutiny. Like the ancient Hebrews, they considered the dead slept. In Greek, the word “cemetery” means the place where people sleep. Yet for the Christian it is a gloomy and haunted place of dead spirits, even though the Christian expectation is a future life in a balmy place. In Athens, people accepted death and talked about it with serene recognition that it was a natural fact.

Unlike the Babylonian, the Greek had no belief in legions of devils whom the gods would permit to torment him. Greeks originally believed in as many spirits as any other nation but they almost allowed them to pass out of existence. The Greeks' minor spirits were mainly nymphs, dryads, satyrs, and so on, playful and generally fair creatures living in the woods and waters.

The Greeks were the first people in the world to develop sport in the modern sense. Our modern stadia, our Olympic games, the very words gymnastics and athletics, are Greek. The Greek’s love of beauty was nowhere more conspicuous than in his love of a clean and comely human body. Even the maidens, although they were carefully guarded in the home, had their sports.

For the youths there was as fine and healthy a system of athletics and gymnastics as exists anywhere in the world. Stadia were as important as theatres. Olympia, which gave the name to the Olympic games, was a special recreation city for all the Greeks. Modern Olympic games are degenerate imitations of these, for the Greeks had intellectual, poetic, and musical contests, as well as races and wrestling.

Part of the reason for this and undoubtedly a consequence was the Greek admiration of the human form, male and female. The wonderful statues left us by the great Greek sculptors, chiefly Phidias and Praxiteles, which are from living models, show us the result. But Greek men thought the love of woman merely sensual, but the love of young men virtuous. Plato, as strict a moralist as any, explains this in his “Symposium” and shows that it was not the sordid vice that Christians imagine.

Greeks were not exhorted to be like the gods in the sense that Christians want to be like Jesus. The gods were not role models. Zeus was often seen as the supreme guardian of justice, but the Greeks thought mysterious beings called Fate or The Fates pursued the criminal and avenged injustice. Zeus was simply “Father Zeus”. His full name meaning, like Jupiter, “the father in heaven”. He sent the rain and the sunshine upon just and unjust alike and was seen in quite a general way.

The official religion never troubled about ethics. Sacrifices, ceremonies, and processions—artistic developments of ancient practices—were what it enjoined for cultural bonding. Retribution for seducing a man’s wife or daughter was not the business of Zeus but was the business of the husband or father, and he would pay close attention to it. Equally, justice was a social matter, a secular concern.

The educated tolerate this religion and practiced it in public as a public duty but laughed at it in private, as long as the mass of the people were ignorant enough to believe in it. The stories of the amours of Zeus were not dogmas. No one need believe them, and the educated did not. Educated Greeks thought Zeus the spirit of the universe and the other gods and goddesses aspects of the same principle.

The normal Greek religion was complicated by secret cults known as “mysteries,”. The Eleusinian Mysteries, consisted of a nine days' celebration at Eleusis, near Athens. Every freeborn Athenian had to be initiated, and had to take an oath never, under pain of death, to reveal what he or she saw.

Just as the secret gatherings of the early Christians were said to be for the purpose of orgies—and as late as the fourth century St Ambrose tells us that they sometimes were—so the Greek mysteries were said by early Christians to cover orgies of indecency. On the contrary, they concentrated the most austere and pious elements of the Greek nature. Originally, when the mysteries were a secret cult, possibly they involved the sexual rites of the fertility-goddess Demeter or Ceres. The blandness of the official religion for some made them turn to the mysteries.

Some people, of a pious frame of mind, are not happy unless they can groan over their sins. The official Greek religion gave no hope of a resurrection and never bothered about a future life. About the middle of the sixth century, before the Golden Age of Pericles, a religious revival passed over the country and led to the extension of the mystery cults. (It also had an effect on philosophy.) The pious types found their expression in the Mysteries, which were to many Greeks what the Holy Week was to the Catholic. Some Greeks bemoaned their sins and were “baptized” at the Mysteries in the most pious manner.

The cult of Dionysos or Bacchus was another cult which attracted the religiously fervant. Dionysos was the “Spirit of the vine”. In his Mysteries there might have been a representation of the birth of the baby-god Dionysus like that of Horus in Egypt or of Christ in Catholic churches today.

The preachers, who talk glibly about the pagan Greeks and their immoral gods, have no idea of the amount of spiritual life—equal to the Christian life—that there was in ancient Greece.

Rise Of Philosophy And Skepticism

Greek philosophy is as brilliant as every other creation of the Greek intellect. The line of thinkers which that little nation produced in three centuries has no parallel in the history of thought, and every conceivable variety or cast of speculation made its appearance.

But Greek thought was distorted by religion. It turned away from science to “spiritual truths,” and it has shown for all time how futile and mischievous is that high-sounding appeal to us to turn from science to spiritual truths.

Greek civilization first reached a high development in the Mediterranean fringe of Asia Minor or on the islands off the coast, and this points to a mingling with the refugees from Crete. The early Greek philosophers nearly all belong to this region. Philosophy was born out of ancient Cretan culture and the innovation of the newly arrived Greeks. But the most essential condition to bear in mind is the liberty the Greeks enjoyed in Asia Minor. They were in a colonial world. They were free to speculate.

This Greek fringe on the coast of Asia Minor was known as Ionia, and the first school of thinkers is known as the Ionic school. From the start it was more scientific than metaphysical. Its leaders studied nature, and man as a part of nature. They sought the first principles of things, not in abstract metaphysical formulae, and not at all in religion, but in physical realities. Thales, the father of philosophy and science, thought that water was the original element out of which all other things came. Then the religious revival took place, and the next Greek thinker said that “the infinite”—not God, but something hopelessly indefinite—was the first principle. The third, Anaximenes, took air—an infinite quantity of air—as the starting point. The fourth, Xenophanes, said that the primordial element was earth. The fifth chose fire.

This was the birth of speculation about nature—apart from the windy metaphysics of the Hindus—and guesses were bound to be crude. The world was being interpreted on natural principles, without the absurdities of the Babylonian and Hebrew creation. Xenophanes, the fourth thinker, emphatically called attention to the repulsiveness of the legends about gods. He seems to have been a skeptic. Heraclitus, expressly denied that the world was created by gods, and said that it was an eternally changing substance. Empedocles of the Greek colony in Sicily, whose mind was a strange blend of mysticism and science, maintained that there was only one God, “a sacred and unutterable mind”; in other words, he, in the fifth century BC, conceived God as the most advanced Modernists do today.

These speculations about the universe, besides showing men how to think without gods, led naturally to a belief in evolution. If there was no beginning, as Babylonians and Hebrews said, if the universe was eternal, and there was one primordial element of all things, then there has been an eternal evolution of this element into the contents of the universe today. Every one of these early Greek thinkers believed that, and the doctrine was further developed by two of the boldest of them all, Leucippus and Democritus, the real fathers of science.

About the middle of the fifth century, Leucippus, another Ionian Greek, hit upon the idea that matter must be composed of “atoms”. The universe consisted of an infinite number of atoms, of different shapes and sizes, which have, without any directing mind, gradually come together in the bodies we see today. Democritus developed this idea with real scientific genius. All the contents of the universe, including man, were the result of an eternal, unguided, quite purposeless tossing and mingling of the atoms. Democritus, moreover, while completely rejecting all religion, worked out an elevated system of humanitarian morals.

Three very great principles had been fixed: the eternity of the world and its independence of gods, the existence of atoms, and the fact of evolution. At the same time these early thinkers observed much in astronomy, and they were good mathematicians. Many of them visited Egypt, and learned whatever the priests of Egypt could tell them. They obtained some idea of the immense size of the sun and of the vastness of the universe, and Pythagoras actually declared, for the first time in the history of thought, that the earth revolved round the sun.

Here certainly was a most promising foundation for science but religion hampered its development and diverted thought to other channels. Anaxagoras took the speculations of the physicists to Athens and the democracy made him fly for his life for uttering such impieties, although he judiciously blended his science with some theological mysticism.

Another train of thought, in Greece itself, had meanwhile led to Skepticism. There arose a school of Sophists who took pleasure in contending that the mind could come to no valid conclusions whatever. Protagoras talked about the gods even less respectfully than Confucius.

I cannot say whether they exist or not. Life is too short for such difficult investigations.

Both this man and Anaxagoras were great friends of Pericles, and these skeptical ideas pervaded the whole group of artists and thinkers of the Golden Age. But—partly in political opposition to the aristocratic party, to which they belonged—the democracy raged against them, and Protagoras in turn had to hurry from the country.

In these circumstances Socrates, the leader of a very different line of Greek thinkers, came upon the scene at Athens, in the second half of the fifth century BC. He was put to death in 399 BC. This great thinker and moralist was a man of the highest and most independent character, and he met death on the grotesque and false charge of having corrupted the young men of Athens, with a smile on his lips.

What did it matter whether the ultimate principle was air or water or fire? Or whether there were atoms? What did matter was that human conduct should be effectively guided and that men should understand the real nature of justice and “the good”. Socrates turned the brilliant race aside from the foundations of science which had been laid, and he provided instead the bases of philosophy and ethics. Pythagoras, the Greek who had first realized that the earth traveled round the sun, yet a strange mystic, had preceded him. Philosophy was to be profoundly religious. Religion was to become a philosophy.

We have no works written by Socrates. His ideas are known only from his pupils, Plato especially and Xenopbon. Plato has given them his own more mystical colour. Like Socrates, he believed in one God, an eternal spiritual being such as Modernists now offer us. He believed intensely in the immortality of the soul, and provided proofs of it which we still read for the beauty of the language and laugh at for the feebleness of the argument. He was an austere moralist, belittling matter and the flesh, and tracing everything good and true and beautiful in the world to spirit.

Plato set a fashion which has not yet died out. Half the verbiage that befogs the minds of people today is due to this glorification of spirit and depreciation of matter. It begs the question whether the mind is or is not material. Plato shows that Monotheism could be reached without a gleam of revelation, and anticipated the ethic of Christ centuries before he was born.

Greek experience shows anyone’s philosophy of life, materialist or spiritualist, religious or non-religious, makes no difference to their moral ideal. The materialist Democritus had as lofty sentiments as the mystic Pythagoras or the spiritual Plato. The skeptical Alcidamas, a Sophist and Agnostic, was the first man to denounce slavery, hundreds of years before anybody discovered that it was condemned by Christian principles. The Agnostic Epicurus had as sane and sober a conception of character as the Theistic Aristotle. Morality is a human matter. Its roots are in human experience, not in religion.

Aristotle was far less mystic than Plato. His god, or Supreme Mind, was unconscious of sublunary matters, and therefore not a universal providence or a creator. Nor did he believe in personal immortality. His system of thought is one of the most learned and original ever given to the world. He summarized all the science of his time, and he made a science of ethics and politics. Unfortunately, he was also a metaphysician. He thought that besides our knowledge of nature (ta physica) it was possible to get a knowledge of things beyond the physical (ta meta ta physica, or metaphysics), and these were more important and more worthy of the mind. In that sense Aristotle, though for his time a great scientific man, joined Plato in leading human thought astray.

Yet, all these thinkers were high moral idealists. Wicked pagan Greece produced a line of unsurpassed moralists, a strange mystery to Chjristians for whom there is only one ethical route in the whole universe. Athens was not so much the city of vice as the greatest morality-making center the world has ever known.

This culminated in the Stoic School. The philosophers used to gather groups about them in their gardens or in public places, and one of them, Zeno, chose the Painted Colonnade (Stoa Poikile). Hence the Stoic philosophy.

It was not a religion, as it is so often called. Zeno and the Stoics spoke of God but he was a material entity, and he was not the author and vindicator of the moral law. The law was an eternal part of nature, and a man was urged to live in harmony with nature. This may seem to some a poor basis, but this philosophy inspired in the Roman world the greatest humanitarian movement ever known until modern times. It kept educated Romans at a high level of character, and it produced Christ-like austere moralists such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Let me repeat—let me emphasize—this most austere and, in its more sober Roman form, most effective of moral systems was a dogmatic Materialism! The Stoics ridiculed the very ideas of spirit and free will, which we are asked to regard as the indispensable bases of any moral conduct.

Passing over schools of Pantheists, Cynics, and Sophists, Greek philosophy ended in the system of Epicurus. He built upon science, gathering together all that the early scientists had said about the universe. He spoke of gods as beings somewhere out in the abysses of space with whom a sensible man need not concern himself. Like Confucius, he was really an Agnostic. His ethics, one of the sanest systems given to the world, had nothing whatever to do with religion. Moral law was social law. Epicurus was—contrary to the libelous, ridiculous idea of his philosophy which Christian writers put into circulation—one of the most abstemious of men. Tranquillity, the quiet life, was his idea. If he was wrong at all, it was in being too ascetic.

But Athens was now in full decay. The work of Greece was done. The republic, enfeebled by a long civil war, had fallen. The monarchy of the Macedonians overshadowed it. The philosophy of Epicurus reflects the time, the wish for a quiet, passionless life. The work of civilization passed on to Rome.

The Splendour That Was Rome

The ethical code of ancient Rome was mainly the Stoic philosophy of the Greeks. Ancient Rome is little understood except by scholars, and there is no other nation of antiquity except the Babylonian that is so often selected by preachers as an awful example of depravity before Christ, or apart from Christianity. Rome was the second Babylon.

Many of the misunderstandings about Rome arise from broad ideas that are false. The preachers never tire of speaking of its vices (of which they know nothing) but some social writers have calumniated Rome because to them it was an awful example of capitalism. They confirm the impression that the population of ancient Rome was a few wealthy and unscrupulous men and a vast army of exploited and vilely treated slaves.

The wealth of the Roman capitalists or rich men is much exaggerated. For more than half a century scholars have been interested in calculating the actual wealth, in modern currency, of these Roman millionaires. The largest fortune amongst them definitely known to us is that of Crassus, who was nothing like as rich as Bill Gates. In America, Crassus would probably fall short of his first billion. The richest man of Juvenal’s day might have exceeded the billion mark. There are men in America who could have bought up any of the richest patricians Rome ever had!

All the work in Greece and Rome was not done by slaves. Slavery is a blot on the old civilizations but Greece and Rome were only a few centuries out of barbarism whereas Christian America had hordes of slaves only a century or so ago. Greeks and Romans—and doubtless their slaves too—thought enslavement was a humane improvement upon the earlier practice of killing captives. Christians raided Africa expressly to enslave. The Christian Church did not abolish slavery. It made scarcely any protest against it for many centuries. A Greek moralist, Alcidamas, condemned slavery in the fourth century BC, and later Stoic moralist after Stoic moralist condemned it.

No one really knows what proportion the slaves bear to the general population in Greece and Rome. In Greece, the best authorities say, there were three to one, and they were humanely treated. In the Roman Empire, they are estimated at ten to one at the time when incessant warfare brought millions of captives into the Empire. The luxuries of the Romans, urban workers as well as patricians, depended on the exploitation of millions of rural slaves who were, indeed, badly treated. In the city of Rome they were not unduly ill-treated, and from the first century onward they had the protection of the law.

In Rome, when its population reached one million, there were between three and four hundred thousand free workers; and they had a position of privilege and entertainment which no modern body of workers remotely approaches.

To begin with, they had in the city itself a superb public home with gardens, handsome little buildings and colonnades, for the citizens to enjoy. Only in the last century have many of our great cities set out to copy these facilities.

In Athens, the Agora, the old cattle-market, was the public square. It was lined with beautiful buildings and colonnades and adorned with statues, and on one side of it towered the Acropolis with its superb marble portico and exquisite temple. At Rome, the civic center was the Forum, also the old cattle-market, or center of the primitive village of Rome. It was a very broad, oblong space, richly adorned with statues and lined with marble buildings from end to end.

The Romans had not the artistic genius of the Greeks, but when they incorporated Greece in their possessions, thousands of Greek artists and scholars flocked to wealthy Rome and educated it in the art of living. Temples, palaces, and public buildings, in the most beautiful marbles the world afforded, lined each side of the Forum. At one end stood the great Amphitheater or Colosseum; at the other rose the sacred hill, the Capitol, with a gold-roofed marble temple of Jupiter at the summit. And nearly every building had broad, cool colonnades to shelter the Roman workers from the sun. But this was not enough, and the Emperors built a new series of Fora—magnificent marble avenues and colonnades, of which we still find exquisite fragments—so that in the end the Romans had nearly a mile of these wonderful structures.

Every Roman worker lived within ten minutes' walk of this beautiful center. The workers were housed in crowded tenement-blocks, four or five stories high, with very narrow streets. But in their glorious climate one lives in the open air most of the year, and there is in the whole world today no civic center remotely approaching that which the Romans had to lounge and play in.

How much time had the Roman worker for lounging and playing? Was he not, though nominally a free artisan, really ground and exploited to create the wealth of the patricians in their palaces on the hills? Was there a Christian day of rest?

Here is the greatest surprise for the modern worker. The old Roman artisan worked far less than any worker of modern times. The British or American worker is employed on about two hundred and thirty days in the year. And this is what the secular civilization of modern times has done for him. Two hundred years ago, when England was still Christian, a man worked three hundred and ten days out of the three hundred and sixty-five. He worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day for six full days a week! Now the modern spirit, not the Christian religion, has won for him an eight-hour day and about a hundred and thrity days' rest. The pagan worker, at the height of the Roman Empire, worked only about one hundred and seventy days a year and played the rest!

What his wage was in modern coinage it would be useless to try to determine. Prices were totally different. His rent was high, but apart from rent and his simple clothing, little more than a single robe or tunic, his expenses were few.

This is the next great surprise. He received for nothing the most solid part of his food—corn and at one time a little pork and oil—and all his entertainments. Three times a week the workers lined up on the “bread steps,” and received their corn. It was not a “dole”. It was a right. Even the Roman worker lived on the labor of slaves. Armies of badly treated slaves in Africa, Gaul, and Spain produced his free food. Slaves working in the galleys brought it to Rome.

Most princely of all were the free entertainments of the Roman worker. The bloody games of the Amphitheater, where gladiators fought each other or wild beasts, were the great passion of the Roman people. The Colosseum, as we call it, was in its prime a magnificent marble-lined building seating ninety thousand spectators. On fifty or more days a year rich officials or emperors provided free shows there for the Romans, and they were gala days, with gorgeous processions, for the whole of Rome.

But this brutal display, against which the Stoics sternly protested, was not the great passion of the Romans. The Amphitheater seated ninety thousand spectators. But the Great Circus, the real pride and passion of the Romans, seated three hundred and eighty thousand, the entire body of the free workers of Rome. The chariot races in the Circus, the keen discussions for weeks in advance, the same intense excitement as there is in connection with a baseball match today, the universal betting on the result—these were the great sports of the Romans. And no blood was shed, except by accident, in the Circus. The vast crowd—three times as large as the largest sports ground in the world can accommodate today—witnessed only chariot races, horse races, foot races, wrestling, juggling, and so on. Performers were brought from the ends of the world. The rival syndicates which ran the chariots spent enormous sums. A Roman charioteer earned as much as a good baseball player now does in America. And the Roman workers never paid for admission.

Then there were the theaters, also free, where the finest mimes in the world performed and the classical tragedies of Plautus and Terence were played. Beyond these were the baths, vast marble-lined structures, including princely baths, libraries, gymnasia, and spacious colonnades, the only entertainment for which the Roman worker paid. When the bells rang the end of work at three in the afternoon, he could slip on his clean tunic and spend hours in these unique pleasure-houses. And the price was pennies. These palaces were gifts of the emperors to the workers. The Roman had sold his democratic birthright but be got a tremendous price for it.

Another part of the price was an abundant supply of pure water to every floor of every tenement in Rome. A hundred years ago, the water so contaminated in Italy that travellers had to avoid it. Two thousand years ago every worker had an ample supply of the purest water, brought by aqueducts from the hills many miles away.

Free schooling was the next gift. The Roman municipalities supplied free elementary instruction for the children of all workers. Anywhere you went, in a suburb of Rome or a small Italian town, you would see the teacher, in the porch of a house perhaps, teaching the children how to write on wax-faced tablets. Practically every Roman worker could read and write by the year 380  AD, when Christianity began to have real power. By 480 AD nearly every school in the Empire was destroyed. By 580, and until 1780 at least, from ninety to ninety-five percent of the people of Europe were illiterate and densely ignorant. That is the undisputed historical record of Christianity as regards education.

The Roman Empire provided higher as well as elementary education, and for the children of the workers this also was free. Even shorthand was as well known to the Romans as it is to us. Few people except scholars realize how the development of civilization was broken off when Greece and Rome fell and how it was suspended during the long domination of Roman Catholicism. High schools were provided in all important Roman centers, and there were a few still higher schools of the type we now call universities (for law, medicine, etc). The son of the worker paid nothing.

Medical service, again, was free in the city of Rome for the poorer workers. Every temple of Aesculapius, the god of healing, gave free medical treatment, and the municipality of Rome paid a number of doctors to give free service to the poor. It is another vain and ignorant boast of the preacher that Christianity first founded hospitals and helped the sick poor. It is rubbish. Rome did what it could for them in the then state of medical science, and one has only to read what the “hospital” service was until modern times to measure what the world owes to the Church in this respect. It shattered Roman science and education, and it fought and hampered the men who, like Vesalius, tried in the Middle Ages to resume the development of medical science.

Finally, there is the boast that if the Church did not give the worker his modern Unions—even the boldest preacher hesitates to say that—at least it gave the world the famous medieval guilds, which inspired the Unions.

And this is as empty a boast as the claim to have given the world schools! The medieval guilds were, at their start, fiercely resisted and drastically condemned by the Church, precisely because they were pagan.

The truth is that both Greek and Roman workers had a perfect system of Trades Unionism. All the tanners, builders, carpenters, etc., of any district were incorporated in what they called a School, or College in the original meaning of the word. They had a clubroom, frequent suppers, and funds for burial and mutual aid. Imperial decrees also plainly hint that they used their Unions for economic, if not political, purposes. Inscriptions show that slaves were admitted on equal terms in many of these colleges, and women were sometimes enrolled as members. The women of Rome were well on the way to winning, two thousand years ago, the rights they had to fight for in our own time.

The Christian propagandist had repeated hundreds of times the shibboleth that Christianity had bettered the lot of woman and the worker. It did precisely the opposite.

Morals In Ancient Rome

In Rome, now and again a very vulgar or half-mad emperor came to the throne, and during his reign morals declined among a certain section of society. It is to the reigns of these men that the preacher turns for his material.

Most societies have a fast set, and it grew larger under the bad emperors. These men gave, in their marble mansions with cedar ceilings, banquets which were orgies of choice wine and naked Syrian girls, while slaves in the roof poured perfume and flowers on the intoxicated guests. There is no reason whatever to think that this set was more numerous, proportionately, than the set which patronizes actresses and models today, or sets up mistresses in luxurious apartments.

The Christian propagandist will assure us that the main source of immorality in Rome was the wealthy class, one-tenth, or less, of the population. Though the Empress Messalina was notorious in that she went, night after night, to a common brothel to prostitute herself and return to the palace, in the words of the poet, Juvenal, “tired, yet not sated, with men,” the Byzantine empresses, who were all Christians, led much more promiscuous lives as a group than the pagan Roman emperesses.

Juvenal is generally the source of these scandals. Yet he is quite unreliable because he was a propagandist himself. Every Roman historian tells you that he was a fiery and rhetorical militant intent on denigrating the upper crust. Wild gossip was all grist to his mill. Some of it might have been true but Juvenal wanted to tarnish the whole aristocracy. Nor is he often giving contemporary news. He wrote his famous Satires about the year 90 AD, and the sins of Messalina had been perpetrated decades before!

These are the things that get into the papers. Virtue, which we so much admire, is uninteresting. Vice, which we deplore, fascinates us, and the more picturesque it is, the more readily we read about it. The Christian emphasis on sexual morality obscures the greater importance of justice and honour, but were the mass of Roman people more or less immoral than in a modern city?

There were plenty of brothels (lupanaria) in Rome. Walking along a street, a prostitute behind a curtain might try to attract your attention. The red light districts of modern Christian cities are no different. There are no statistics but all the evidence is consistent with the assumption that the mass of Roman men were just about as immoral as men now are, and rather less than men in the Middle Ages, when the clergy were nearly all immoral and some owned brothels.

Ammianus Marcellinus, an old and severe soldier, returned from his campaigns to Rome, and, in disgust, described what he saw. Vice has no great part in his account. In the same age, St Jerome says more about immorality, writing about the Christian priests and ladies of Rome whom he knew well. Particularly telling is Salvianus, a priest, writing in the next century, who writes to his flock that the virtues of the pagans, who have disappeared, shame the vices of the Christians, who have taken their place.

In the small wealthy class at Rome, there was less adultery than there is now or was in the Middle Ages. Adultery was punishable by death in Roman law, and though this was rarely enforced, intrigue might get a man impeached at any time. The first emperor, Octavian, who ruled for forty years during the most luxurious period of Rome, sternly enforced the law, to the extent that he banished for life his own passionately loved but libidinous daughter, Julia. That was wicked Rome.

Really intimate and reliable pictures are best afforded by private letters, which reflect the character of the circle to which they belong: the letters of Cicero, Pliny, Seneca, and Symmachus. Every single letter could have been read without a blush by Mother Theresa. They reflect circles in which vice is a thing not done by gentlemen. Any real student of Roman literature will conclude that the great body of the men and women of Rome were as temperate and regular as we are.

The average Roman gentleman was a firm believer in the doctrines of the Stoics. Stoicism and Epicureanism were the philosophies of life of refined Romans.

The Stoic philosophy had a wonderful influence in Rome. Crowds followed Stoic orators like Dion Chrysostom, or read Stoic moralists like Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Most of the famous Roman jurists, the creators of European law, were Stoics, humanitarians of the highest character. Their letters, and such works as the Saturnalia of Macrobius, a slave author who describes what is under his eyes in his master’s house, give us the true measure of Roman character. lt was generally fine.

Emperors were Stoics. For one hundred and fifty years, Rome had Stoic emperors whose ethical level exceeded any in the history of Christendom. Under them the world made a humanitarian progress that has no parallel except in these secular days. In the first century AD, under the pagan emperors, more than three hundred thousand orphans were reared in public institutions in Italy alone. Of the twenty- nine pagan Roman emperors twenty-one were admirable men of good character, and eight only were bad or insane.

This Roman world, like the Greek world, produced moralists whose sentiments were the same as those of Christ.

Yet, the Asiatic religions which celebrated the birth of a saviour-god in mid-winter or the death and resurrection of a god in spring, became extremely popular in the Roman Empire and prepared the way for Christianity. The older Roman religions was eventually suppressed and Christianity substituted by force for them, and the world sank into barbarism within a hundred years.

In the cities of Babylon, Egypt, and Persia, in Athens and Rome, men lived, in spite of technological differences, much as they do today in Paris and London, New York and Chicago, and that is more decently than they did in Christian times. No shining sword of marality divides the world into BC and AD, consequential on the appearance of a Saviour! Old civilizations were not in darkness and the shadow of death. In ethic and religious belief, they provided the material for the Christian religion, which gratefully accepted them then pretended they were its own all along.

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