Ancient Rome

Long ago, on the banks of the Tiber River in Italy, shepherds and farmers built huts on a group of low hills. The Romans later told a story about how their city began: twin boys, Romulus and Remus, were left by the river, cared for by a she-wolf, and raised by a shepherd. When they grew up they quarrelled over where to build a city, and Romulus became its first king. The Romans dated their city from 753 B.C. No one can check every part of that story, and the Romans themselves knew it was half legend, but it tells us what they admired: courage, toughness and loyalty to the city.

Rome had seven kings, the Romans said. The kings gave the city laws, temples, a meeting place called the Forum and a great drain that turned marsh into dry ground. But the last king, Tarquin the Proud, ruled by fear. Around 509 B.C. the leading families drove him out and swore that Rome would never again have a king. From then on the Romans hated the very word rex, ‘king’.

Rome stood where a road crossed the river, between the hill country and the sea, with farmland all around. From that spot it would one day rule every land around the Mediterranean. Yet the Psalmist reminds us who really builds and keeps a city.

Without a king, the Romans shared power. Each year the citizens elected two consuls to lead the city and its army, and each consul could stop the other. A Senate of experienced men gave advice. Later the ordinary citizens, the plebeians, won leaders of their own called tribunes, and around 450 B.C. Rome’s laws were written on twelve tablets so that everyone could know them. The Romans called their state the res publica, ‘the public thing’, and stamped SPQR, ‘the Senate and People of Rome’, on their buildings and standards.

Romans loved stories of plain, honest leaders. When an enemy trapped a Roman army, the Senate sent for Cincinnatus, who was ploughing his small farm. He took command, won the war, and gave up his power after about two weeks to go back to his plough. Two thousand years later Americans compared George Washington to him.

Rome grew until it ruled most of Italy, and then it met Carthage, a rich trading city in North Africa. They fought three Punic Wars. In the second, the Carthaginian general Hannibal marched an army with war elephants over the Alps in 218 B.C. and destroyed a Roman army at Cannae in 216 B.C. Rome did not give up. It raised new armies, and in 202 B.C. Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama. In 146 B.C. Rome destroyed Carthage completely. By then Rome was the strongest power in the Mediterranean world.

Victory brought Rome riches, slaves and new provinces, and it brought trouble too. Small farmers lost their land while a few families grew very rich. In 133 B.C. a tribune named Tiberius Gracchus tried to give land back to poor citizens and was killed by angry senators, and his brother Gaius met the same end a few years later. For the first time Romans settled a political quarrel with clubs and swords in their own city. Generals such as Marius and Sulla began to lead armies loyal to themselves rather than to the Republic.

Julius Caesar was the greatest of these generals. He conquered Gaul (modern France), winning at Alesia in 52 B.C., and in 49 B.C. he led his army across the little river Rubicon into Italy, which the law forbade. He won the civil war that followed and made himself dictator for life. On the Ides of March, 44 B.C., senators who feared he would become a king stabbed him to death. The orator Cicero, who had spent his life defending the Republic with words, was killed the next year.

While politicians fought, Roman builders were changing the world. They laid paved roads straight across hills and marshes, carried water into cities on aqueducts, and built bridges and halls with the round arch, held up by a wedge-shaped keystone at the top. Many Roman roads and bridges are still used today.

After more civil war, Caesar’s adopted son Octavian defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 B.C. In 27 B.C. the Senate gave him the name Augustus, ‘the revered one’. He kept the old offices of the Republic, but in truth he ruled alone; he was the first Roman emperor. He rebuilt temples and streets, and the Roman writer Suetonius tells us he boasted that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. Augustus ended the civil wars, and a long ‘Roman Peace’ began, the Pax Romana, with safe roads and seas from Spain to Syria.

Into that world Jesus Christ was born. Luke’s Gospel begins the Christmas story with a decree from Caesar Augustus himself, so the birth in Bethlehem happened at a real time, under a real emperor. The apostle Paul later wrote that God sent His Son ‘when the fulness of the time was come’. Christians have long noticed how Roman roads, Roman peace and the common Greek language would soon help the Gospel travel quickly.

Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, in the reign of Augustus’s successor Tiberius, about A.D. 30–33. The sign over the cross was written in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The Roman historian Tacitus, who was no friend of Christians, recorded that Christus suffered the extreme penalty under Tiberius at the hands of Pontius Pilate. On the third day He rose again, and His followers began to tell the whole empire.

The disciples were first called Christians at Antioch, a great city of the Roman East. The apostle Paul was a Jew and also a Roman citizen by birth, and he used Roman roads and ships to carry the Gospel from city to city. When he was arrested in Jerusalem he appealed to Caesar, as a citizen could, and was sent to Rome under guard about A.D. 60. Before he ever saw the city he wrote his letter to the Romans: ‘For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.’ He even sent greetings from believers in Caesar’s own household.

In A.D. 64 a great fire burned much of Rome. Tacitus wrote that the emperor Nero, to stop the rumour that he had ordered it, blamed the Christians and put many to death cruelly. Early Christian writers record that the apostles Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome under Nero. In A.D. 70 Roman armies destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple, and in A.D. 79 Mount Vesuvius buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The empire reached its greatest size under Trajan, about A.D. 116. One of his governors, Pliny, wrote to ask what to do about Christians. He reported that they met before dawn and sang to Christ ‘as to a divinity’, and promised not to steal, cheat or break their word. For two centuries Christians lived under the threat of sudden persecution. Some, like the young mother Perpetua and her servant Felicity in A.D. 203, chose to die rather than deny Christ. Yet the Church kept growing, by the faith of the martyrs and the kindness of ordinary believers, who cared for the sick and the poor.

In the third century the empire nearly fell apart: emperors were murdered one after another, prices soared and enemies broke through the frontiers. The emperor Diocletian (A.D. 284–305) restored order by dividing the empire among several rulers. In 303 he began the last and worst persecution, ordering churches destroyed and Scriptures burned.

Then everything changed. In A.D. 312 Constantine defeated a rival at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome after, Christian writers tell us, he was told to mark his soldiers’ shields with the sign of Christ. In 313 he and his fellow emperor Licinius granted Christians and all others the freedom to follow their religion, and gave back the churches’ property. In 325 Constantine called the bishops to Nicaea, where they confessed that the Son is ‘of one substance with the Father’, the faith of the Nicene Creed. His mother Helena built churches in the Holy Land, and in 330 he dedicated a new capital in the East, Constantinople.

The western half of the empire grew weaker. In A.D. 410 the Goths under Alaric sacked Rome itself, and people asked whether Rome fell because it had turned Christian. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, answered with a great book, The City of God: every earthly city passes away, but the city of God endures for ever. In 476 the last western emperor, a boy named Romulus Augustulus, was removed by Odoacer. The eastern Roman Empire lasted almost a thousand years more, until 1453, and the Church, the Latin language and Roman law carried Rome’s best gifts into the Middle Ages.