Texts in Context:
The Long Dusk of Antiquity
By Gabriel Blanchard
The ancient world—from the morning glow on the Bronze Age, through the high noon of Periclean Athens and the Roman Republic—was sinking into its evening.
Flavians and Antonines and Severans, Mehercule1
Last week, we discussed the First Jewish War; others followed.2 In 132-136, another full-scale rebellion took place in the Holy Land: the Bar Kochba Revolt, led by Simon Bar Kochba, the last important claimant to be the Messiah for several centuries. It was brutally put down; one of the most revered rabbis of his day, R. Akiva, who believed in Bar Kochba, was martyred in Cæsarea-by-the-Sea in 135 (coincidentally, the same city in which St. Paul had been imprisoned for two years before being sent to Rome for trial). Jerusalem as such was demolished and replaced by a Roman colony, Ælia Capitolina. The Pharisees had never been quite comfortable with Zealotry in the first place, and after this decisive extermination of the Zealots, the post-Pharisees were now the only important Judaic “party” left.3 They concentrated on keeping their flocks safe and cared for, a key element of which was henceforth to be discouraging messianic speculation.
As for the Flavians, who ascended the throne as Jerusalem fell, it turned out their dynasty didn’t last long: just three emperors (Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian), of whom the second and third were not father and son but elder and younger brother. Like their father, Titus (during whose reign Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum) was competent and benevolent, but he died of an illness after less than three years. His brother Domitian was vain, autocratic, and increasingly paranoid, and got himself so generally disliked that in 96, a fed-up Rome threw itself another “guess who just assassinated a head of state” party—the exact mess the Flavians had got Rome out of thirty years earlier.
However, at this point, the Empire had a stroke of good fortune. An elderly statesman named Nerva was named Domitian’s successor: the first of what are known as the Adoptive Emperors, the Nerva-Antonine dynasty, or the “Five Good Emperors.” After him, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius all enjoyed orderly transitions of power via adoption,4 and ruled wisely and well on the whole. Trajan brought the Empire to its territorial maximum, and also revised the anti-Christian laws of Nero and Domitian into more of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Hadrian and Antoninus both had predominantly peaceful reigns, during which they took up building walls on the Empire’s Scottish frontier (though this imperial habit petered out rather quickly, as putting up more than two frontier walls just starts to look desperate). Marcus Aurelius retains fame to this day for his Meditations, a book of short, characteristically Stoic maxims that went on to be widely read and imitated.
Obviously it was high time somebody got back to ruining things. Perhaps thinking he’d run up such a good credit score with those Meditations that he could afford to indulge a little in the way of common monarchic vices, Marcus Aurelius also obliged in this department by making his son Commodus heir to the throne. Those who have seen the film Gladiator may have suspected the film of some inaccuracies, and rightly so—for instance, the real Commodus wasn’t played by Joaquin Phoenix (a classic blunder)—but its portrayal of Commodus as vicious, incompetent, and murdered was fairly true-to-life. Handily enough, the murder took place on 31 December of 192, which pleasingly allows 193 sole billing as the Year of the Five Emperors (none of that awkward-looking “68-69” business the Year of the Four Emperors had to get by on).
The long-term victor this time was one Septimius Severus, who founded the Severan dynasty. This was one of Rome’s more unusual, incompetent, and interesting imperial houses; the family had ties to Syria, and the Severan ladies were as formidable as their lords, often acting as power-brokers both in Rome and the provinces—two tendencies which, in most Romans’ views, brought the realm to a cultural nadir. Emperor Elagabalus (who reigned from 218-222) was widely agreed to be the worst of the bunch—a teenage boy reputed to be effeminate and with a passionate devotion to the Syrian solar deity, Elagabal, for whom he was named and whose high priest he was. (Caracalla, Elagabalus’ predecessor, is generally believed to have had his own brother murdered in their mother’s presence and made it a capital offense even to speak his name; though the attitudes of contemporary Romans are informative, still, considering Elagabalus the nadir of the Severans may strike modern readers as a bit much.) Still, the Severans were just good enough at empery5 that, in most historians’ view, they staved off the Crisis of the Third Century—of which more in a moment.
The Gnostic Problem
If there’s anything people love calling things, it’s “a modern form of Gnosticism,” and if there’s anything most people are (ironically) quite ignorant about, it’s Gnosticism. A brief word on the subject belongs here—partly because Gnosticism was a phenomenon more or less confined to the second and third centuries. A few later groups did have an affinity with Gnostic ideas,6 but most things so accused have nothing to do with Gnosticism and never did.
The reasons for the confusion are manifold. For one thing, gnōsis, from which the term “Gnostic” comes, is just a Greek word for “knowledge”—meaning it’d get talked about by non-Gnostics too. For another, Gnosticism wasn’t really a singular thing; it was a group of sects, united more by an identifiable “vibe” than by an agreed doctrine or mutual recognition.
Every morning, to say to oneself: those I will meet today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, unreliable, gossipy, antisocial; all these things have befallen them, because they do not know good from evil.
To the extent they did have a theological identity, it was usually—not always—vaguely Christian. However, many Gnostic groups believed matter was evil and were therefore hostile to the idea that Jesus had been a real human, subject to the disgusting indignities of birth and death: the so-called Gnostic Gospels, all of which are much later in date than the canonical Gospels, often contain explanations of how Jesus escaped the Passion—or of how the Christ-nature that had, in a way, possessed Jesus departed from him as the Passion was beginning. Their central concern was with secret gnōsis Jesus had supposedly passed on, allowing the elect to escape the material world—often, this consisted in magical passwords that could be used after death to force the angels of the planets, understood to be hostile to mankind, to stand aside and allow the Gnostic’s soul to ascend out of the universe. (Honestly, it’d make a great video game.) But after the third century, they mostly petered out. And speaking of the third century …
The Crisis of the Third Century (235-284)
In justice to this period, it is great fun to read about. Who can resist names and phrases like “Maximinus Thrax, first of the Barracks Emperors,” “the Plague of Cyprian,” “the capture of Valerian by the Sassanids,” or “Queen Zenobia of the Palmyrene Empire”? Zenobia especially—that’s the sort of name one hears and just immediately assumes there is an opera about her.
But living through it, though duly had by all, was not a good time. The expression “Barracks Emperors,” for instance, denotes a pseudo-dynasty, composed of emperors with no relation to each other (familial or legal) but who had to be put into some kind of box to keep track of everything: all the ones labeled “Barracks Emperors” were elevated from and by the army. This was not unprecedented, of course; but doing it with men who didn’t also have prior political experience was new, as was the embarrassing casualness with which the army started offing Barracks Emperors who didn’t bribe them well enough. Which was how the thirty-three years from 235 to 268 saw fourteen emperors. The Plague of Cyprian also proved to be a real downer, despite its callback in both name and symptoms to the Antonine Plague, which had been all the rage in its day.7
The capture of Valerian was a joke unfunny-er yet. During this period, invasions of Roman turf by barbarian groups, mostly the thirty-one flavors of Goth, became commonplace, but their impact was limited; Emperor Claudius II even earned himself the cognōmen “Gothicus” by routing some at the Battle of Naissus in the Balkans. But the Goths were not Rome’s only, or strongest, foes. Not every monarchy has even one sitting monarch get captured in a war with an upstart rival power, and then die in that captivity; the Romans, if we measure from Augustus, had made it nearly three hundred years with neither. In 260, Valerian became the first Roman Emperor to suffer both. The Sassanids, in whose hands he died, were the contemporary incarnation of the Persian Empire; they would remain a thorn in Rome’s side until they were swept away by Islam in the seventh century.
As for Queen Zenobia of the Palmyrene Empire—she was real, and so was her empire, made up of Egypt and the Levant. There was a similar state of things in the west: the Gallic Empire consisted of Gaul, Britain, and for a while even Spain. These two breakaway states did not last long: fourteen years for the Gallic, and only about three for the Palmyrene. Both were forcibly brought back under the central government by Emperor Aurelian; but it was becoming clear that an empire this size, with this many enemies and problems, and communications that were no faster than anything else in the ancient world, could not realistically be ruled by a single man.
Diocletian and the Renovation of the Empire
Ironically enough, the Crisis of the Third Century was ended by a Barracks Emperor who reunited the Empire under his single control. Diocletian was a low-born soldier from Dalmatia (now known as the coast of Croatia), and took power in 284. He reorganized the whole Empire, dividing it into two administrative halves: one in the east, centered on the city of Nicomedia in Anatolia, not far from where Constantinople would soon be built; and one in the west, its principal capital not now at Rome, but Milan, closer to the border. This was part of his effort to stabilize the succession by means of a tetrarchy of emperors (two Augusti or senior emperors, east and west, each with an “understudy” called a Cæsar); that particular structure proved unsuccessful, but the idea that the Empire could exist in double form and still be, in some sense, one, would survive.
Diocletian also initiated the last and worst persecution of Christianity, at the instigation of his Cæsar and successor, Galerius. Many saints commemorated in the famous Roman canon were martyred at this time: Chrysogonus, Marcellinus, Peter the Exorcist, Lucy of Syracuse, and Anastasia are all examples. It began in 303; Diocletian himself abdicated due to severe ill health in 305, but the persecution continued until 311, when Galerius, himself stricken with illness, reluctantly issued an Edict of Toleration and begged even the Christians of the realm to pray for his health. Nevertheless, he died that year—and in the next, Christianity would see a reversal no one had anticipated.
1This was a shortened form of mē Herculēs juvet, “may Hercules aid me”; it came to mean little more than “oh my goodness” in Latin.
2Most historians accept three Jewish Wars in Roman times, some, only two:
I. 66-73: The First Jewish War, the Great Revolt, or occasionally “the Jewish War.” 73 is its end date because a few holdouts in the south kept fighting after Jerusalem fell.
II. 115-117: The Diaspora Revolt. This is the one that’s disputed by a handful of academics; some historians fold it into Trajan’s war with Parthia. As a result, the phrase “the Second Jewish War” applies ambiguously to either this war or the next.
III. 132-136: The Bar Kochba Revolt (spellings vary). “The Second Jewish War,” as stated, often refers to this revolt; however, “the Third Jewish War” always and only means this revolt.
3The Essenes and Sadducees had been wiped out in the First Jewish War, and the destruction of the Temple removed the Sadducees’ raison d’être. Jewish Christianity still existed (notably the dubiously-orthodox Nazarenes—descendants, maybe, of the “Judaizing” party that opposed Paul— and the heretical Ebionites, who reputedly rejected Jesus’ deity while venerating him as a prophet), but other Jews dismissed Jewish Christians of any type as apostate, not a possible new party within Judaism.
4This had been common under the Julio-Claudians too: technically speaking, all of them (except Claudius) came to power by being their adoptive fathers’ sons; moreover, there were natural family ties among the Antonines. However, the kinship among the Julio-Claudians had been far closer (Augustus and Caligula were great-nephews of their new fathers, while Tiberius and Nero were their predecessor’s stepsons). For a contrasting example, Hadrian, in making Antoninus his heir, was adopting his wife’s cousin once removed by marriage—not a degree of affinity that screams nepotism.
5“Emperoring” is clearly unpronounceable. “Empering”? “Empiry”?
6Mostly this means the Manichees, followers of a Persian religion that throve for centuries in Central Asia, and the Cathars, a Gnostic-like sect of the High Middle Ages located mainly in southern France.
7Neither disease can now be identified with certainty. The Antonine Plague is widely thought to have been smallpox or possibly measles, and the same explanation has been put forward for that of Cyprian (though several scholars think the Cyprianic symptoms better match a viral hemorrhagic fever, something of the Ebola family).
Gabriel Blanchard, a proud uncle to seven nephews (none of whom have yet been made Roman emperors, but time will tell), has a degree in Classics from the University of Maryland, College Park. He serves as CLT’s editor at large, and lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might be interested in our profile of the third-century Christian biblical scholar Origen, or our series on the nature of wisdom. And don’t miss the official CLT podcast, Anchored.
Published on 7th October, 2024. Page image of Roman retaining walls used to extend the available building area on the Palatine Hill, the centermost of the Seven Hills of Rome (the other six being the Esquiline to its northeast, the Cælian to its east, the Aventine to its southwest, the Capitoline to its northwest, and the Quirinal and Viminal to its north); photo taken by Wikimedia contributor antmoose, used under a CC BY 2.0 license (source).
