Posted on 02/29/2004 4:36:28 PM PST by blam
How about four?
When all my uncles were coming home from WWII, we went through a spell of about 5/6 years where my great-grandfather, grandfather, parents, sister, three uncles (two unmarried, one married with a little girl) and an unmarried aunt all lived in the old family homestead.
They were the best years of my childhood.
This is one of the things that is perenially misunderstood about both Southern and Roman families! You didn't have to be wealthy (vide Cicero, thanks Burkeman) to have extended family in the house. For one thing, there were no "labor saving devices" and even poor households had a servant or two (just look at Victorian England. Even the very poor family, living on a pension, that took Kipling in as a child boarder had a maid.) For another, the pater familias (as part of his authority) was expected to provide for all the poor relations (you can see the same thing in Victorian England with the maiden aunts and the "gentlewomen in distressed circumstances".)
Sometimes we forget how our technology has changed civilization in very basic ways. As C.S. Lewis said in The Discarded Image (about this very issue - the difference between the medieval worldview and our own), it's the assumptions that everyone makes that tend to be overlooked when reading about another era.
Of course it was a police state - rebellion and anti-Roman sentiment was "put down" very ruthlessly and efficiently (How would you expect a military state to be?). It wasn't worth it to fight against the powers that be. The "mob" was given food and entertainment - panem et circences - why would anyone rebel when pleasures were everywhere and rebellion only ended badly. Emperors had a vested interesting in keeping the people "entertained" outside of this, the ruling class didn't care about the "common man".
Again, this view of the ruling classes in Rome is based on the decadent excess of a very few. Scandalous behavior by a few at the top of a society is not an accurate gauge of the morals of a society. If you only judged the morality of American society by looking at rich NY socialites, corrupt DC politicians and libertine Hollywood celebrities, you'd conclude that America was rapidly sliding into moral collapse, too.
Once again - the decadence of those in power is the ONLY important factor. It doesn't matter how "moral" I am in my beliefs, it has no bearing on the powers that be because they can tell me to take a flying leap. America is sliding into moral collapse, and redefining marrige will be another nail in the coffin.
Hmmm?! Christ was IMMEDIATELY relevant to the Roman Empire - He claimed to be a King. In fact, all religions were tolerated by the empire except Christianity because Christians would not ascribed deified status to the Emperor. Paul and Peter were both killed by Rome specifically because they were Christian - Nero liked to set Christians on fire and eat by the light of the flames. Christianity was always important to Rome, and it evetually even took over the empire.
Could you please explain how replacing AD (Anno Domini) with CE (Christian Era) is part of the attempt to eliminate all Christian references from our daily lives?
His religious views were not important to Rome from the outset. He was encouraging sedition within the Empire, but that is relevant independent of his religious views.
Christianity was always important to Rome, and it evetually even took over the empire
In its early years, Christianity was nothing more than a minor sect of Judaism, which was a minor sect within the Empire. Mithraism, for example, was a much more important religion (Christianity got many of its ideas from Mithraism- a crucified and resurrected deity, borne of a virgin) during the time period.
No one can deny that Christianity became the dominant religion in the Empire and used that dominance to repress and snuff out all other religions. However, to say that Jesus was important to the Roman Empire at the time of his death is not true. To the Romans, he was nothing more than a provincial hick preacher who got mixed up in colonial politics and ended up paying the price.
LOL
Yep, I was just casually reading Suetonius the other night...
Suetonius is the "Page Six" of Imperial Rome. He is very entertaining if you like your scandal highly scandalous.
I never mentioned Jesus Christ's religious veiws - He was immediately important because he claimed to be king, and His followers had the annoying habit of not following the rules of Rome. The Christian sect was thus important because Christianity did not aknowledge the ultimate authority of Rome, but rather the ultimate authority of God's kingdom. This kind of "free-thinking" was a threat to the empire, especially in light of how fast the Faith spread throughout the empire.
FYI - mithraism, while being a rather ancient Assyrian mystery cult, borrowed the "virgin birth and crucifixtion" from the story of Christ, and this particular cult did not become popular in the empire until after the death of Christ. It was contemporary with Christianity - both were "new religions" to the empire at the same time, so to say one way more important and another more obscure just doesn't stand up to the historical facts.
That's one of Suetonius's stories (he also reports a joke making the rounds that the world would have been better off had Nero's father followed that course).
Carolyn
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