until his Art of Love, a sort of poetic handbook on how to seduce a lover, earned him the wrath of Augustus. His works were banished, and he was exiled to a remote corner of the Empire on the Black Sea.
The Augustan Age was followed by the Silver Age, referring to a group of writers who wrote during the period between the death of Augustus and c. 130. Their works are considered “great,” but not of the caliber of the Augustan Age. Noteworthy in this group are the stoic philosopher, Senecca (4 BC–AD 65); Petronius (27–66), author of Satykricon; the historian Tacitus (56–117), who recorded the period 14–96, and tells us much of what we know about the Germanic tribes in his Histories, Annals, and Germania; Juvenal (c. 55–127 AD) who satirized the immoral lifestyle of the Roman aristocracy in Satires; Suetonius (70–130), whose sensational Lives of the Caesars portrays in tabloid fashion, the decadent lives of the Caesars from Julius to Domitian; and finally Plutarch (45–120), who provides parallel biographical sketches of famous Greeks and Romans in Parallel Lives.
In other areas of cultural expression, the Romans tended to copy the Greeks. Roman sculptures are mostly copies of Greek originals. Portrait sculpture was one area in which the Romans broke with the past. They turned away from the idealized portraiture of the Greeks and portrayed the subject as he or she really was, with all the warts, scars, wrinkles, and other defects faithfully presented. Mosaics found wherever Romans settled was another area in which the Romans excelled. Few examples of Roman painting have survived, mostly in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried in 79 by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Of Roman music, nothing remains. Those who have studied the references to it in Roman literature have concluded that we are not poorer for its loss.
The Rise of Christianity
The nearly two centuries of world peace known as the Pax Romana, or Peace of Rome, was one of Rome's greatest achievements. Though it was a period of unparalleled peace and prosperity, looking back from the present, we can see there were signs of trouble ahead. One that played an increasingly important role in Rome's long decline was what was happening to the “soul” of the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire was a multicultural, pluralistic, inclusive society. The benefits of Roman civilization – a unified world empire, paved roads that connected prosperous urban centers, a military force that assured peaceful movement of people and goods throughout the empire, a system of law and jurisprudence that was not limited by cultural prejudices, a common language through the adoption of Koiné Greek, and much more – eventually caused doubt about what it meant to be “Roman.” Strange and exotic foods and other products were not all that became common place in Rome, however.
The Mediterranean world was experiencing a spiritual crisis during the Pax Romana. The official state cults rooted in Greek mythology no longer provided answers to the perennial questions of meaning and purpose. Neither did Greek philosophy with its emphasis on reason. Stoicism, the most popular pseudo‐religion of the sophisticated classes, was fatalistic. Like the state cults, it did not provide any emotional satisfaction or hope for the individual. There was a widespread, unsatisfied spiritual longing among the masses who felt that their age was increasingly bankrupt, both morally and spiritually.
Many people turned to the mystery religions that provided mysticism, emotional experience, and contact with the divine. The mystery religions originated in the East. Included among them were the cults of Cybele (Asia Minor), Isis (Egypt), Mithras (Persia), and the Unconquered Sun (Syria). The mystery religions were secret societies with elaborate initiatory rites. Most featured a god who had died and was resurrected. Initiates into the cult of Cybele, for example, were baptized in a shower of blood as a bull was slaughtered above them. The mystery religions had certain things in common with Christianity, but there were profound differences.
A major difference between the mystery religions and Christianity was that Jesus of Nazareth (c. 4 BC–c. AD 30/33), the founder of Christianity, was an actual, historic figure, not a myth. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, an obscure corner of the empire, during the reign of Augustus and died during the reign of Tiberius. Virtually nothing is known of his youth, and what is known of his adult life and teaching is found in the Bible's New Testament.
When Jesus was about 30 years old, he began to proclaim the coming of the Kingdom of God, a messianic message derived from the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. He taught a revolutionary interpretation of the Mosaic Law that emphasized ethics rather than a slavish legalism. Justice and mercy were more important than fulfilling the letter of the Law. Asked what the greatest commandment was in the Law, he answered: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”4
Jesus gathered a following over a period of three years during which he traveled throughout Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, accompanied by 12 followers whom he chose to be his disciples. His teachings were a clear threat to the Jewish establishment, whose teaching was based on a strict adherence to tradition. On the eve of the Jewish Passover, probably in the year 33 or 34, Jesus was executed by order of Pontius Pilate, Roman procurator (actually prefect, or governor) of Judea.
The death of Jesus did not halt the spread of his teaching. Within days, rumors spread that Jesus had risen from the dead and was seen by his followers. The belief that Jesus was in fact the savior‐God who became human, lived, suffered, died, and rose from the dead on the third day after his death by crucifixion became the central doctrine of the new religion. The belief that the risen Jesus appeared before his followers and commanded them to take the news of what they saw and heard while he was with them to people everywhere became the central motivation for the spread of Christianity.
Christianity had an appeal like no other religion, cult, or philosophy of the time. It offered meaning and hope to all, of whatever class, ethnic identity, or level of education, through a personal relationship with God, and membership in a family in which all were equal and bound together by love for one another. “By this all people will know that you are my disciples,” Jesus told his followers, “if you have love for one another.”5 God was no respecter of persons. Rich and poor, free and slave, male and female, all were equal in his sight. It was a message of compassion for those who suffered. It bestowed a sense of dignity on the common person who was considered of little or no value in the ancient world.
Christianity may well have remained a minor sect within Judaism except for the conversion of Saul (c. 5–c. 67), a highly educated and devout Jew. Saul was a Roman citizen by virtue of being born a citizen of the city of Tarsus on the south‐central coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Initially a persecutor of the followers of Jesus, he was himself converted and spent the rest of his life teaching that Jesus was the promised Messiah of the Jewish Scriptures.
Saul of Tarsus became Paul the Apostle. His knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures and his extensive education enabled him to transform a sect within Judaism, a national religion, into a religion for all humanity. Paul's significance in the history of Christianity is evident in the fact that 14 of the 27 books of the New Testament are attributed to him.
Decline of the Empire
Dio Cassius (155–235), a Roman historian of the second to third centuries, said that after Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Five Good Emperors, the Roman Empire declined from “a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust.” The stresses that contributed to the decline and eventual fall of the Roman Empire in the West were already evident before the death of Marcus Aurelius and the reign of his insane son, Commodus (161–192).
The wealth and
