Dear Friends,

In this second part of three on the decline and fall of Rome, based on a reading of the Penguin Classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged Edition, by Edward Gibbon, ed. David Womersley, 764 pages), we're talking primitive Christianity and Gibbon's take on how the pagan Roman faith with its idolatrous statues and temples was eroded, attacked and at last brought down by the followers of Jesus. Gibbon also stumbled upon an apocryphal history of a faith called the Ebionites that combined the ancient Jewish Mosaic tradition with the Gospel teachings. In fact, the first fifteen bishops of Jerusalem espoused such a faith but public sentiment finally rose against it and it "melted away," Gibbon says.

The Gnostics were an important force at this time because they rejected the Mosaic bible's creation story, wrote and circulated many different gospels, and insisted on the eternal life of matter and the reality of the invisible world. But rank-and-file Christians stuck to their four gospels and refused contact with all customs and ceremonies of the pagan world, including the circus and theater. They also boycotted pagan funerals -- even of loved ones -- and refused to say "Jupiter bless you!" when someone sneezed. The great failure of paganism, Gibbon argues, was in never making any promise of "rewards or punishments of a future state" like the rest. Gibbon's Christian friends warned him not to touch these precious cornerstones of the church as he would always be viewed with suspicion. But Gibbon is frank and unsentimental about all faiths, noting how Christians were marked from the start by a contempt for their present lives, a belief the world was ending, and a conviction, voiced by the prophet Elijah, that Christ would return -- but not for four to six thousand years. Gibbon is honestly stumped by the stubborn endurance of both bible-based faiths, Christian and Mosaic, and doubts that most followers truly believed in tales of a lush garden, a giant seagoing ark, a burning bush, the parting of a sea, or commandments etched in stone by God's own hand.

The Christians proliferated, Gibbon says, in part by attracting criminals who were ready to wash away their sins through baptism. But the faithful remained outsiders, unable to share in governance or national defense because of their doctrine of forgiveness and a strange inclination to "invite the repetition of fresh insults." Instead, primitive Christians put their energy into the creation of a fully separate society devoted to their new church. Prophets began to appear and "poured forth the effusions of the spirit." But they proved so unruly and disruptive to church business, they were replaced by persons called "minister" or "bishop" or “presbyter.” Synods or provincial councils formed and church bishops began to gather and meet twice each year in the capitals of each province. Of all these, the bishop of Rome claimed highest authority as head of the most ancient church, one able to claim not one but two apostles -- St. Paul and St. Peter – who each resided within the city's limits for a time.

The practice of exposure or leaving an unwanted infant to die in the open was apparently reduced by the Christians who rescued, baptized, and raised the orphans at church expense. Though the new church could not have grown in the leaps it did without miracles or its doctrine of rigid virtue, Gibbon insists, adding that superstitious beliefs are always “congenial to the multitude.” Hermits or those utterly withdrawn from life out of religious conviction became numerous, too. Though much of the rapid spread was because of who was converting to Christianity and that was beggars, peasants, and slaves who made up the majority of society. Of course a number of heresies or controversial beliefs about Jesus were a problem from the start and only proliferated with time.

Gibbon shows special interest in Julian, a reluctant emperor with uprisings to quell in Britain on the part of the Scots and Picts. In some cases, as with Julian, a statesman could suddenly find himself emperor by popular mandate of a crowd moved by his oratory powers, and was left no choice but to accept the job or die at their hands. But first Julian had to dispatch his predecessor, Constantius, by cornering and besieging him and his forces at Aquilea. Julian had a chance at that juncture to adopt the Christian faith of Constantius but chose to go his own way. A political problem regarding the date December 25th -- a date the pagans used for celebrating the return of the Sun – was solved when the State secured it to also serve as the Christian epiphany, killing two birds with one stone.

Gibbon praises Julian for never giving in to the two most “dangerous temptations” of a ruler, compassion and equity, and for being a leader for whom duty and pleasure were the same thing. Jerusalem was a constant political problem of many emperors and attempts to address it ranged from attempts to rebuild the Hebrew temple to the construction of a temple to Venus on the site. Among accounts of this period, Gibbon finds one of the earliest edicts against allowing Christians to teach in the schools. Julian also tried to root Christians out of government, but that almost threw the empire into chaos. Of course, it should be recalled that a young Julian watched his family murdered by the Christian forces of Constantius and was then forced to grow up among them as an orphan.

Persian conquest was next on Julian’s agenda -- though in three centuries of wars, no legion had ever taken even a single province. His army on the march, stretching ten miles from end to end, went into Aleppo. To his horror, Julian found there a senate almost entirely Christian. Pressing on, they met the ruins of a wall erected by the ancient Assyrians against the Medes. Anticipating attack, the Assyrians broke every levee along the river, flooding and ruining each crop and settlement and laying utter waste to their own country. The revenge the legions exacted on the next city was horrific, but Gibbon thinks we’re wrong if we’re “more deeply affected by the ruin of a palace than the conflagration of a cottage.” In the subsequent march against Sapor, Julian found empty villages, no cattle, and the corn and even the grass destroyed by fire, leaving his army stranded without provisions just east of Baghdad. To make matters worse, the Persian cavalry next appeared to harry and confuse the retreat. So Julian led a charge against the foe, but learned the Persian horsemen were more dangerous when retreating than attacking. Persian archers and javelin-throwers could launch missiles any direction from horseback and Julian was struck and killed. Gibbon suggests that Persia next called out the Immortals, a force whose motto was “never retreat,” and in order to reach safety sixty thousand Roman soldiers covered a purported 100 miles on foot in just four days.

It’s under Valentinian that the empire at last divides into Western and Eastern and is ruled by two emperors. Inroads by the Huns under Attila from the east had so overwhelmed the Goths, these historic enemies of Rome at last joined with the legions for mutual defense. The conversion to Christianity from Paganism was at last accomplished in 388 A.D. by Theodosius, but much Christian progress occurred under Gratian, too, who reduced the number of pagan temples to just over four hundred across the whole empire. One of the enormities of this period was the pillage of the library at Alexandria by Christians routing a force of Pagans. Now, too, the bodies of St Andrew, St Luke, and St Timothy, dead three centuries, were dug up and moved to Constantinople. Gibbon explains this by saying polytheism was too soon extinguished, before the world was ready, and so that led to a gradual proliferation of holy relics and saints and martyrs and other objects and places of veneration.

“There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times,” Gibbon says. Sadly, the Goths at last managed to sack Rome in the year 410. A fable called the Seven Sleepers about some youths imprisoned in a cave arose at this time, a story featuring young men locked away by a tyrant who fall sleep and then awaken two centuries later, thinking it was only a brief nap. In time, this tale will be adopted into the Koran as scripture, but the story may actually go back to ancient Scandinavia. The Huns under Attila and Zingis (Ghengis) were able to field an army of seven hundred thousand that at last penetrated to Italy and exacted a ransom that multiplied each year, starting at three-hundred-fifty pounds of gold and rising in the third year to two tons. Zingis’ birth was said to have been immaculate and, when he took a city, he forced everyone into the open plain and impressed every man into his army, killing any who resisted, received ransoms from all parents of lovely daughters, and allowed the rest back into the now looted town. Of Attila, it was said no man could return his gaze with a steady eye.

Emperor Theodosius died soon after and a woman -- his sister Pulcheria -- suddenly ruled Rome for the first time, though only for a month before she gave her hand to Marcian. The Huns, having next set sights on invading Gaul went about besieging Orleans, but were met there by an unexpected alliance of the armies of an upstart Roman general, Aetius, and the Visigoth king Theodoric. In command of the high ground, the combined forces of a dozen tribes swept down and wiped out somewhere between one-hundred-sixty and three-hundred thousand barbarian – which caused Attila to light his funeral pyre so he might leap onto it were his camp overrun. Bad feeling over the Hun’s cruelties against the Franks during this invasion ran so deep that, four generations later, a Frank-leaning general ordered the massacre of two hundred captive Thuringian maidens simply because Thuringia had fought on the Hun side. “Such were those savage ancestors,” Gibbon says, “whose imaginary virtues have sometimes excited the praise and envy of civilized ages!”

Attacking on into Italy, the Huns next leveled Aquileia so utterly, the site is hard to locate today. Attila lay waste to Milan and at least fifty Venetian cities, forcing the inhabitants to flee southward and outward onto a cluster of islands and live like “water-fowl who had fixed their nests on the bosom of the waves.” Attila would at last be subdued by massive ransom, or dowry, and the hand of the princess Honoria, sister of Valentinian, and then not long after he would die of a ruptured gastric artery. Instead of offering his heartfelt thanks to General Aetius for his heroic delivery of Rome and vanquishing of the Huns, Emperor Valentinian, and assorted courtiers and eunuchs, later surprised him in the palace and stabbed him to death. The emperor then made the mistake of admitting several soldiers loyal to Aetius to his guard and they rushed him in the midst of a military sporting event and put a knife in his heart.

Gibbon points to the rise of monasticism and the conversion of the barbarians as the next wave of enormous change. Pagan belief was rooted out by haranguing the faithful, asking “At what time, by what means, from what cause were the eldest of the gods or goddesses produced? Do they still continue, or have they ceased, to propagate?” If the gods had suddenly ceased to propagate, wasn’t that strange? If the gods were continuing to propagate, wouldn’t their number eventually be infinite? Those unwilling to even entertain the argument were steadily pushed out of society, forced northward by the converted, out into the most frozen, forbidding wastes. It was then that the Western empire faltered and the headquarters of the Roman state shifted eastward to Constantinople. For upwards of sixty years, the barbarians occupied Rome. Gibbon says “the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest . . . instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.”

Thanks for reading! Keep an eye out for Part 3 of 3: the Fall of Rome.

A movie I can definitely recommend is Small Things Like These (2025) with Cillian Murphy whose performance as an unlikely rebel taking on the Catholic Church is simply astonishing.

For any new readers: My novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.

The Fall of the Roman Empire Pt 2

Thanks for reading! Keep an eye out for Part 3 of 3: the Fall of Rome.

The Fall of the Roman Empire Pt 1