SPQR

From time to time in the first two centuries CE, Roman authorities punished the Christians. There was at this period no general or systematic persecution; there was no sign of that until the mid third century CE. In practice, most of the early generations of Christians lived untroubled by the intervention of the state. Yet they were occasionally sc

They create desolation and call it peace

Historians now often talk about ‘the crisis’ of the third century CE. What they mean is the process by which, after the assassination of Commodus in 192 CE, the Augustan template collapsed. The number of emperors is one obvious sign of that. In the nearly 180 years between 14 and 192 CE – apart from the single brief interlude of civil war after the

And so to end

So was Christianity really a Roman religion? Yes and no.

The same was true, in a sense, of Judaism. But to a remarkable and in some ways unexpected degree, the Jews managed to operate within Roman culture. For the Romans, Christianity was far worse. First, it had no ancestral home. In their ordered religious geography, Romans expected deities to be from somewhere: Isis from Egypt, Mithras from Persia, th

In practice, if not in the Roman imagination, the empire of the first two centuries CE became less a field of conquest and pacification and more a territory to be managed, policed and taxed.

The eastern half of the empire continued largely to operate in Greek, not Latin. Local calendars were not much adjusted, apart from occasionally realigning to the life cycle of the emperor or celebrating his achievements. Travelling around the empire meant not just crossing time zones in our sense but moving between entirely different ways of calcu

EPILOGUE · THE FIRST ROMAN MILLENNIUM