Mary Beard evangelizes for the ancient Romans like no other.
A Cambridge classicist, BBC presenter, blogger, and engaging lecturer, Beard is eager to convert a wider audience to a love of antiquity. Her latest book, SPQR, offers a new look at the “Senate and the People of Rome” (SPQR, if your Latin is rusty) and tells of emperors, slaves, and everyone in between.
There’s a reason this book is enviably easy to read. Beard is an inviting, skeptical guide. With a flourish, she moves from set piece to set piece — the birth of the Republic, the crises of Cicero’s day, the salacious stories of Caligula — and insists time and again that reality is “messier” than we’ve been taught. In SPQR, she gives a virtuoso performance.
Beard has polished this routine over the past decade. In her 2007 book, The Roman Triumph, she criticized the “credulity” of scholars who had taken “a confection of exaggeration, misinformation, misunderstandings, and outright falsification” in the ancient sources and swallowed it as if it were history. In SPQR, she uses the same approach to topple even bigger historical traditions. April 21, 753 BC, the birthday of Romulus’ city? “There is every reason for us to see it, in our terms, as more or less pure myth,” she writes.
If only Beard had followed that same method when writing about “the troublesome Christians.” Whereas “the Romans” in SPQR get handled with intellectual complexity — each story excavated down to its foundations — the author paints “the Christians” with the broadest brush. The rise of this world religion, she suggests, was the product of “an irreconcilable clash between traditional Roman values and Christianity.” I don’t doubt that this approach plays to her classical base. Greeks and Romans have long been valorized as the cultural heroes of antiquity, enlightened pluralists who held out as long as they could until the “victory of Christianity,” as Beard terms it.
The fact that Beard uses Rome to double down on the idea of “culture clash,” however, exposes major fault lines in the humanities. For starters, her claims can be debated. Some of the earliest documents left behind by Jesus’ followers instruct women to obey their husbands, children to honor their parents, and slaves to submit to their masters. A generation after Jesus’ death, believers were being told to play up their connections to Roman society by valuing male power, deference to their elders, and slave-owning.
Beard does not engage with this evidence, and the sources she does rely on should have been handled with less credulity, especially those illustrative of Christian “persecution.” “The simple reason that … Saint Peter was crucified while Saint Paul enjoyed the privilege of being beheaded,” she explains, “was that Paul was a Roman citizen.” Let us set aside for the moment that there is no real evidence for how Peter died. As for Paul, whose letters sometimes landed unsolicited in the mailboxes of early Christians, some New Testament scholars now question whether he was a Roman citizen at all. (The detail, which appears only in the Acts of the Apostles, written after Paul’s death, may have been invented to bolster his mainstream credentials.)
In SPQR, unfortunately, points like those don’t matter. The history of Christianity is presented as if it were a straightforward case of telling Bible stories. And so Beard believes that Nero scapegoated Christians for Rome’s infamous fire because some Christians “were prophesying that the world would shortly end in flames.” However, only seven documents tell us anything about Christianity before Nero: the seven authentic letters of Paul, yet not one of them talks about an end-time fire. Revelation, the classic text of the apocalypse, was written later.
What are the broader implications of teaching readers about an “irreconcilable clash” in ancient Rome? Were “the troublesome Christians” really so unable to live in Rome’s version of a pluralistic society? Those questions, whether Beard intended to raise them or not, have an ugly resonance today.
Disturbing outbreaks of Islamophobia are being recorded across countries and continents right now as public figures like Donald Trump are shamelessly whipping up anti-Muslim hysteria. Admittedly, no writer could have predicted the Paris terror attacks or the Syrian refugee crisis, two events that have contributed to the rise of this rhetoric. But 14 years after September 11, 2001; 12 years after the questionable American-led invasion of Iraq; and 10 years after bombings in London, the despicable notion that we’re witnessing a clash between Islam and “traditional” Western values still won’t die.
Rome, model of a once-successful empire, plays an unavoidable role in these conversations. That explains why, in November, the historian Niall Ferguson used the Paris massacre to try to convince readers that “this is exactly how civilizations fall.” It’s why the prime minister of the Netherlands mentioned the Roman Empire’s demise while fretting publicly about Syrian refugees. For many commentators, Rome’s “cataclysmic” fate hides a cautionary tale.
What remains baffling in this continuing debate is the lack of serious talk about religion and religious ideas in history. I don’t mean just a rehash of Edward Gibbon’s 18th-century notions about Christianity’s “intolerant zeal.”
Christians in ancient Rome who rode through the rough period of political turbulence we now call Late Antiquity bloviated about it as if they were witnessing the end of days. St. Jerome, writing from Jerusalem after the Goths’ sack of Rome, in AD 410, provoked his Christian readers by comparing the conflagration to the moment when the head of the beast in Revelation would finally be “lopped off.” It’s a powerful idea, and Jerome’s use of it goes a long way toward explaining why the notion of the Roman Empire’s going down in flames has fixed itself in the popular imagination ever since.
Certainly there are those who would prefer to quarantine ancient Rome from the study of Christianity. This year an entry on “Jesus” was again left out of the authoritative reference guide to the classical world, the Oxford Classical Dictionary, now in its fourth edition. One Oxford don justified the decision on Twitter this way: “Jesus not classical!” But the explanation is not convincing. Jesus was executed in a Roman province by a prefect of the Roman government. No one needs to go on record to testify whether he actually existed or not for the guild to commission a 1,000-word entry on him in its standard reference work.
In SPQR, Beard herself sounds less sure when she discusses religious belief. “Romans knew the gods existed; they did not believe in them in the internalised sense familiar from most modern world religions,” she writes. As for Christians who chose to build cultural bridges by participating in Roman sacrifices, they are described as the sort of folk to simply “cross their fingers and ask for forgiveness later.”
Would scholars in any other discipline, outside classics, write so dismissively about important decisions shaping people’s faith and identity? A Muslim who chooses to drink alcohol, a practice which many believe is forbidden by the Quran, or a Catholic who chooses to support abortion rights, which many believe is forbidden by the Bible, can do so for culturally specific and intellectually sophisticated reasons, which are deserving of historical analysis. Classicists cannot reduce the creative performance of faith in society to a childish game of crossing one’s fingers and praying for the best.
It’s time to bring a different kind of historical imagination to the study of the past.
Douglas Boin is an assistant professor of history at Saint Louis University and the author, most recently, of Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar’s Empire (Bloomsbury, 2015).
