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How Christianity came to dominate the Roman world
00:43:52
Alice Roberts explains how Christianity took over all aspects of Roman life – and helped perpetuate the empire
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Danny Bird
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. What if the fall of Rome wasn't a collapse, but a rebrand? Well, in today's episode, Alice Roberts delves into the dramatic transformation of the Roman world and the rise of Christianity from cliffside burials in Wales to imperial politics in Constantinople. Speaking to Danny Bird, she reveals how early Christianity wasn't a grassroots movement of the poor, but a strategic shift in embraced by elites, bishops and emperors.
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Interviewer
Alice, what drew you to this particular moment in history? The collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity.
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Alice Roberts
This is a particular period in history that I've been interested in for a long time. I think the main attraction for me is that particularly in Britain, it's a period where we don't have much history. Sounds like an odd choice to write a history book about a period where you don't have much history, but it means that archaeology really comes the fore, and it kind of forces us to look at that archaeology, the material culture of the 4th, 5th, 6th centuries, and try to understand what's going on. And really, this book came out of a fascination with burial archaeology, which has been something that I've been researching and writing about for many years. And it takes me back to particular burials that I was excavating on a cliff in Wales 20 years ago. And we were excavating these burials because there were bones eroding out of a cliff, falling onto the beach below. And we wanted to establish how big the cemetery was. There wasn't a church associated with it, it was just on its own. And we wanted to establish the age of it as well. And we excavated down to one of the graves up on the top of the cliff, and these graves were kissed graves. That means they have a stone lining. It's almost like building a coffin into the ground. So. So somebody would have dug the grave and then lined it with stone slabs, put the body in it, and then put a lid on the top. And as we lifted one of the slabs that formed the lid of one of these graves, it had a cross on it, a roughly hewn cross. And there were very early graves going back to the seventh century. And there are even earlier Christian burials in West Wales going back to the fifth century. And that really started my fascination with, you know, how did Christianity reach Wales quite so early? And then last summer, I was visiting Tim Young's excavation, Atlantic Major, with all the Cardiff University students, and there they were, looking for a very, very early monastery. So there's a known medieval monastery at Clantrit Major. There's a huge church at Clantrit Major, far too big for the size of the town today, but there are documents going back to the 7th century which suggests that there was a monastery there as early as the fifth century. If that's true, that's the earliest monastery in Britain. And again, that got me thinking, what's going on? Why is this happening? Why is Christianity spreading to Britain quite so early? Who is spreading it all the way through the book? I've tried to get away from abstractions. Rather than saying Christianity spread across Europe, it's all about people. So who was spreading it and why? And. And that then takes me off on this investigation. So starting in Wales, I end up traveling right across the Roman Empire and right to the heart of the empire in the 4th century, in Constantinople and also to ancient Alexandria in Egypt as well. In search of these questions, trying to understand how Christianity spread quite so widely and quite so quickly and what that's got to do with the end of the Western Roman Empire.
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Interviewer
And just to zone in a little bit on that geographical aspect, but also that people aspect of the story of Christianity. You highlight that early Christianity wasn't so much a grassroots movement of the oppressed, but a religion that was quickly adopted by urban elites in cities like Alexandria. As you mentioned, cosmopolitan ancient cities. How does that challenge the way we typically mythologise its beginnings as a movement of, by and for the disenfranchised?
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Alice Roberts
I think it just stands in stark contrast to that. It's tricky, isn't it, because the people that were writing about Christianity were necessarily literate. So you're looking at the elite. But what you're getting an impression of is that fairly quickly it does seem to be a cult to begin with. You know, a movement before it's known as Christianity that is spreading amongst relatively well healed people. So by the 4th century, certainly it has really spread amongst the very highest echelons of Roman society. And obviously the Emperor Constantine is starting to take notice of it and call a meeting of the bishops, or at least attend a meeting of the bishops in 325. But actually going right back to the, you know, the very, very early years of this movement, it is about very important people. So if we look at St. Paul, for instance, or Saul as he was known originally, one of the, one of the first things he does is go to meet the Governor of Cyprus. He's not going out preaching to people who have no means. He's going straight to people who have very high up jobs within the, in the Roman Empire and the means to support him as well. So the Governor of Cyprus then, you know, sets him off and, you know, sends him back to what's now effectively Turkey to meet the rest of his family. And it looks as though Paul kind of accepts that patronage by taking on the name of the governor Paulus. So that's when he changes his name from Saul to Paul, which is a very Roman thing to do when somebody offers you their patronage.
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Interviewer
Could you tell me a little bit about the process behind writing this book and researching it?
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Alice Roberts
It was a hard book to write and it was hard because of the way that I wanted to write it. So when I started researching it, I had an idea of chapters and then it was becoming too much like a textbook and so I tore up all my ideas and I started Writing it much more as a journey of investigation. I'm very visual as well, and I'm almost thinking of it in terms of a film, you know, in terms of television, I suppose. So the visual side of it for me is really important. And the journey from South Wales to France to Alexandria in Egypt to Constantinople, I wanted that journey to be real. And I wanted, rather than to just be plucking abstract ideas out and joining them together, to be actually looking at things in their locations, to root it in geography as well, because the geography is so important and the archaeology, the, you know, the physical, material culture is really important as well. But it's hard. And it's especially hard, I think, because I'm trying to range across such a vast area of material and lots of disciplines too. So I'm looking at coins and then I'm looking at the symbolism in sculpture, and then I'm reading letters from the 5th century and trying to understand those. And so I'm trying to bring a lot of material together. And one thing which is absolutely fundamental to this is engaging with other academics. So I am drilling down and doing that research and going back to original sources, and that's so important, to go back to those primary sources. And I am trying to kind of pull that all together, but constantly engaging with academic colleagues to help me do that. Because I'm ranging across such a large area and such a wide range of material, I sometimes feel as though I'm stepping on a hypocaust. And I love a hypocaust. They're amazing. I mean, you know, what do the Romans give us? Underfloor heating. And in those hypocaust, what you've got is very often piles of thick terracotta tiles which form the peely that the floor is suspended on. But sometimes I think when I was writing this book, it felt as though the floor wasn't there, and I'm stepping from peelum to peel them. So I've drilled down, I've got. I know I've got a good foundation underneath me in that moment, but I can step off it and fall in the hole. And that's when I really need my colleagues to help me and go, oh, I think you're just heading for a hole over there. I suppose what I'm trying to say is I'm really, really grateful to all the colleagues that I reached out to while I was writing the book who helped me immeasurably not to fall in the holes. If I still have stepped in some holes, it's entirely my Fault, but helped me to kind of see the bigger picture, to see different perspectives and pull.
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Interviewer
It all together, just to focus on Constantine a little bit there, because you focus very much on his conversion within the book. Do you think we're still invested, perhaps culturally or maybe even institutionally, in this idea of him as the Christian emperor, even when the evidence suggests something far more complex?
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Alice Roberts
Well, I was really interested in this question because that is what is popularly known about Constantine, that he was a Christian emperor, and it's much more complex than that. So I looked at what he wrote to lots of different people. I looked at what he did and the monuments that were created during his lifetime, the coins that were minted during his lifetime, and it's really not as simple as it sounds. So we have a biography that was written after his death by Eusebius of Caesarea, where he's very explicit that Constantine is Christian and that Constantine has this conversion on the way to the battle of Milvian Bridge. And he describes how Constantine has a vision and how he carries a chi rho, so that the combination of those Greek letters, chi and rho, into battle and that, you know, Christ is supporting him. It's very interesting, isn't it? Because at this point, you know, it's very military, very martial. Christ is somebody you want on your side as you go to basically kill the emperor in Rome because you're trying to be the only emperor. This is what Constantine was doing. She'd never been emperor. He wasn't destined to become emperor. He basically killed the other three tetrarchs until he was the last man standing. And Eusebius tells us that, you know, he becomes Christian on the way to this battle. And then later on, Constantine creates a victorious arch in Rome. So his victory arch in Rome. And you would have thought if at that Battle of Milvian Bridge, he'd had this vision and become a Christian, there might have been something Christian on that architecture. There's not a shred of it. There's not a shred of Christianity at all. There's just lots and lots of very kind of standard and traditional Roman iconography. So it's very strange. And. And then you look at, of course, what you've got to do is none of this history comes to us without having some kind of agenda. Whenever you're reading somebody's words in the present as well as in the past, you've got to think about who it is that's writing those words. You know, those words don't just appear. Those words are being written by a Person who has their own ideas about the world, who has their own information, their own perspectives and their own agenda. Eusebius is a bishop, of course he wants to claim Constantine for Christianity. Of course he wants to tell us and everybody, you know at the time that Constantine was a deeply committed Christian. But as I say, when you look at Constantine's wider communications and coins are a really important way in which emperors communicated with an empire that was largely illiterate. Their coins are really, really important. And when you look at the symbols on his coins, then he carries on minting coins with all sorts of Roman gods on, including Sol, who we seem to be quite attracted to way after when he was meant to be converted to Christianity. And then that led me into an investigation into the Cairo because there's more than a thousand coins that were minted, different designs during Constantine's reign, and there's just a handful of that do have a Cairo on. And so I thought, oh, okay, so in these coins he must be telling us that he's Christian. Then there are these little tiny Cairos. One of them's on a standard, a Roman standard, One of them's on a helmet. Again, very martial, very martial indeed. And then I was absolutely gobsmacked to find out that the Cairo has a pre Christian origin and a pre Christian life as a symbol. I had no idea. I was talking to lots of classicists and I was saying, did you know that the Cairo has this kind of pre Christian meaning? And they didn't. And so I've dug that out. It's out there. It's out there in the academic literature, but it's not very well known. So it's not very well known that you get coins with a Cairo on which are clearly not Christian, that you get the chi rho, this combination of the chi, the Greek letter chi and the Greek letter rho, which is an R effectively in pre Christian literature, in papyri, and there's even one on a Greek bust going back into the centuries bce. So clearly nothing to do with Christ. And it seems most likely from the papyri, at least that what it is is an abbreviation for not chi rho, as Eusebius tells us. So Eusebius says, so the chi rho means chi rho, the first two Greek letters of Christ's name. And that's why Constantine carries it into battle. Well, up until that point, it had meant rho chi and it had been archon or leader. So even if Constantine did carry it into battle, does it mean Christos? Because that would be the first time it ever did, or does it mean what it always had meant before that which is archon? And even though if he did carry it into battle, because, you know, a more contemporary account says he didn't carry a Cairo, he carried a cross into battle. But even if he did, was Eusebius laying on this interpretation as a Christian symbol? I thought that was absolutely fascinating.
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Interviewer
That leads me on to my next question, which do you think that Christianity succeeded in part because it was pre adapted for imperial integration with structures, language and values closely aligned with that of Rome?
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Alice Roberts
I would turn that question straight back around and say to you, were people ready to adopt this new schema, this new ideology, because it fitted well with what they did already. In which case I would say yes, it was very Roman and it became more Roman as it developed, of course, because it's spreading in the Roman Empire. I mean, it's a meme, a successful meme has to mean something in the culture it emerges in. And absolutely. And you know, it becomes more and more Roman. There's a lot of Greek philosophy which the Romans love, which is imported into, into Christianity, a lot of those kind of ideas. And very, very early on you've got writers saying this is a Roman phenomenon. You've got to Tullian in the very early third century saying we are Romans and we're all among you. We're in, you know, we're in the forts, we're in the cities. It's very, it's very urban phenomenon. And he even goes as far as to say, and I'm paraphrasing him now, that there's an argument that Christians are more Roman than any other Romans because their God appointed the emperor. So, you know, there's this Romanitas is Christianitas. We get, you know, Bishop Ambrose is very clear about this. He's very clear about the fact that there's nothing antithetical between being Roman and being Christian. And not just that actually being Roman is to be Christian and to be Christian is to be Roman. And in this particular period, middle of the first millennium, that was very well understood. And again, I think something which perhaps has become slightly mythologized, the idea that somehow Christians were battling against Romans, but they were all Roman. So it's, you know, it is a Roman phenomenon. It emerges within the Roman Empire, it spreads within the Roman Empire. It is promulgated by people who are literate, who are steeped in the education system of the Roman Empire, the philosophy that's part of that education system. It is nothing if not Roman.
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Interviewer
Your book also presents the early church as a kind of proto multinational, which is organised, land rich and politically savvy. It's in what ways did it operate like an empire in waiting, and how did that help it to step into Rome's shoes?
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Alice Roberts
I think the best answer to that question is to look at who was spreading it again, and to examine what they were doing and how they were creating, I suppose, the fabric of the church. And very early on it seems to be operating as very much a guild, a collegium, which were part of the way that Roman society worked. If you were in any kind of profession, you'd belong to a professional collegium or professional guild. And those guilds were clubs where people paid in money, they looked after each other, there was patronage there, so there'd be more experienced people who would help you with your career. Whatever it was, you know, whether whether it's kind of being a merchant or a craftsperson or, you know, whatever it is, and then also because you're paying in money, if you fall on bad times, then the guild will help you too, and might help widows and orphans. So the church is very much operating as a collegium. Again, it's not a new thing, it's part of the way that Roman society worked. So there's that. And that very much is kind of among what you might call the middle classes in the Roman Empire. But then when it starts to be taken up by the elites, it very quickly becomes tied up with what they do and what they do as the elites, and it is the men, the elite mental in the Roman Empire. They run the empire and they expect to run it. They have careers where they go off as boys to school, they get educated in the seven liberal arts, as Cicero describes them, and they then expect to go on into glittering careers, running bits of the Roman Empire, running Gaul or going back to be prefect of Rome and running Rome, and there's this curse of Sonorum, so this kind of very elite careers that these rich, incredibly rich men would expect to go into. And the Church is just completely fused with that. So to begin with, these rich young men are going to the Rhetoricians and the Grammaticians to do their learning. But as time goes on, they're going to monasteries like Iltuds monastery in South Wales, and Iltuds Monastery in South Wales, we know from the Life of Saint Sampson, offered the Roman curriculum. So it's described in the Vita Sampsonis, the Roman curriculum, with philosophies and arithmetic and geometry, everything you'd expect from a proper Roman education. And the Scriptures, it's just bolted on. So Christianity just is Roman kind of elite education and careers. And by the 5th century, the city administrators are bishops, so it's kind of setting itself up alongside the existing Roman administration and gradually taking more and more of it on, even doing things like dispersing the grain dole. So the grain dole, which the emperors, you know, dispersed out of the goodness of their hearts to people in cities, was originally distributed by secular magistrates, although nobody's really secular in the Roman Empire. They've all got kind of honorary priesthoods when they've. When they've got these positions of power. So, again, the Church isn't really doing a different thing, or the people who are within the Church are not really doing anything different. What I think is really fascinating is that you're looking at a system where the Roman administration is basically fused with Christianity, or maybe infused with Christianity is a better way of describing it. And what that actually ends up being is a very robust and resilient system. So when the Western Roman Empire is fragmenting, the way of running the empire and the way of running cities, because this is very much about urbanization, bigger cities, and the way that you run your cities is basically happening under a Christian aegis. It's the bishops that are running the cities. When the empire starts to fragment, that system can continue operating. What I absolutely loved about researching Gaul was that you see that very, very clearly with the amazing documentation that we've got in Gaul, which is missing in Britain, so in Gaul we've got genealogies where we can see rich Roman families holding onto their power and wealth. As the Roman Empire crumbles and the Visigothic kingdoms and then Frankish kingdoms take over, the same families are still in their elite positions running the cities as they always were. And you can trace that all the way through. And then you've got individuals, and that's for me, when it really comes to life. So you've got people like Sid sidonius, who was 5th century bishop, and he is operating within the Roman system. And then eventually the Visigoths surge out of Aquitaine and he's horrified by this and he fights against them, but eventually realizes that that's it. Now, basically southern France is turning into a Visigothic kingdom and he asks if he can come back as bishop and he does. So he's retaining his position, running that city effectively all the way through. So it's wonderful when we can actually find individuals that are doing that. So I don't know whether anybody at the time was really aware that they were doing that. I think that's why it's really useful to get away from abstractions. I don't think anybody at the time was really thinking, hang on a minute, if we create a kind of an administrative system which has an ideology which ties it together, then this can survive the fragmentation of the empire. I don't think they're being that forward thinking. I undoubtedly, they were thinking about preserving their own careers and you can imagine elite families doing that and thinking, oh, hang on a minute, things are looking a bit sketchy here. As a wealthy Roman mum, how do I make sure my son is still going to have good career prospects? So you can see how people would have been invested in that. You know, if I couch it in entirely economic terms, that suggests that that's all that people are interested in. And of course, what this is is a system of ideas, which was also attractive as well. You know, it is a religion as well. And I think that one of the things I say frequently in the book is that people are diverse. There would have been people who were invested in Christianity early on because it appealed to them and because they were devout and pious and saintly and not thinking about worldly things at all. And there would have been other people who were very worldly and mostly thinking about the worldly aspects of it, and they're all working together. And there isn't one way of being a Roman Christian.
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Interviewer
That leads me on to a question about today's church. The modern church. Is any of that Roman ness still visible, do you think, today?
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Alice Roberts
The purple, you know, imperial purple, this is a symbol of empire and yeah, the way that anybody who's high up in the church gets turned into a saint and, you know, becomes honored in that way, has an echo, doesn't it, of the way the emperors were deified. And then you, you know, in the basilica, in every city there'd be the statues to the imperial cult. In the basilica, which is the town hall before it is a church, it's a town hall with the imperial cult in it. Christianity becomes the imperial cult. So, yes, in the church today. I mean, I. And I've been tracing some of these persisting rituals through some of my earlier books, actually. And I remember when I was writing Buried and I was looking at the Roman rituals of graveside feasting, and in particular in relation to a pipe burial from Caerleon in South Wales, which is a burial literally with a pipe that comes up to the surface. So you can do your graveside feasting and you can pour a little libation, a little drink down the tube to the departed. And graveside feasts were a big part of Roman life, not just on the day of the funeral, but on days that would follow the funeral, sort of nine days after, 50 days after. And then there were set days of the dead as well, where you would go to the cemeteries, sometimes take flowers, do feasting at the cemetery. And I remember talking to my Russian friend Natasha about this when I was writing Buried, and I said, yeah, so there were all these graveside feasts that went on. And I was telling her about the pipe burial and Kalian, and she said, we did that. I said, what, Natasha? And she said, yeah, we did that. So she grew up in Siberia. And she said, yeah, but there used to be a day, a couple of days actually. But there was one day in particular where we used to go to the cemetery and everyone would take a lot of food, nice food, and all the adults had to drink vodka. And you know, that was that. And that was in the Russian Orthodox Church. And I said, what was it called? And she said, I think it was called Parents Day. That was the translation of it. Then I went back and carried on researching and there it was, parentalia in the pre Christian Roman calendar. So it just slid straight over into the Christian calendar. People's rituals carry on. It's very interesting. I'm writing another book about that. But yes, so that parentalia is in the. Both the Greek and the Russian Orthodox calendars today. There are Roman Days of the Dead and celebrations that are in the, both the Catholic Church and in the Church of England as well. So there's a movable feast that happens 50 days after Easter, 50 days after somebody's died. You see, you have a feast and it is sometimes known as Pentecost and it is sometimes known as Pacta Rose in France. In Romania it's known as Rosalia. And in ancient Rome it was called Rosalia. And it was this summer Day of the Dead where you took roses and, and decorated the graves. So again, you know, evidence of that kind of Roman tradition passing into the Christian tradition coming all the way to the present day. And two weeks ago I was in Orvieto in Italy and I actually just happened to be there on the day of Pentecost, which I hadn't actually realized was the day of Pentecost. But a friend of mine said, oh, you're in Orvieto, I've got a friend in Orvieto. And they said, you must see the medieval procession. So I hung around to see the medieval procession, which was fantastic. And there were all these people dressed up in wonderful medieval finery walking the streets of Orvieto to the cathedral and all these women carrying great big armfuls of flowers. So they're still doing it.
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Interviewer
I just want to zone in on Christian theology itself because it's often portrayed as radically different from the, and I know this is a very loaded term, pagan traditions that existed before it. Yet many of its moral and philosophical ideas are embedded in Roman, Jewish and even Hellenistic thought. Do you think its appeal was rooted in an originality or was it something else entirely?
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Alice Roberts
That's a really hard question. Again, the people that were the early Christians, of course, were Jewish. So all the early Christians were Jewish. Paul was a Jew. And it is very much an idea within the Jewish tradition, but it's also an idea that emerges within the Jewish tradition in the Greek speaking Hellenistic world, which is then part of the Roman Empire. So there's no separation between these things. And there's more and more Greek philosophy that that sort of enters into Christianity. And there's also, there's not one theology. So it very quickly starts branching out in all sorts of directions. And of course, one thing that the early church has to do is, is make sure that everybody is singing from the same hymn sheet. You can't have splitters. If you have splitters, then you've lost your power. If you've got a group which is going away going, oh, actually we've got a different idea about the relationship between God and Jesus than you. And they're going to go off with all their followers and you're splitting the political power at that point. So I have a big focus in my book on the Council of Nicaea and what that's about. And you know, that is basically about a meeting to decide the Church's aims and visions and for everyone to agree on that and not to have splitters. And it, you know, it, it will just keep happening. And then of course, over time, of course it keeps happening. There's splits between the east and West Roman Empire, there's splits between Protestantism and Catholicism. People will endlessly bring their own interpretations to those ideas. In terms of it being very, very different. You can make a claim that it is and you can marshal lots of evidence for that and you can find examples of people saying this is radically different. But then you can also see lots and lots of similarities. So you can see similarities with other cults like Mithraism. You can see similarities between the way that the emperors tended to have a kind of focus on one particular God in the pantheon, which is kind of veering towards monotheism, whether that's Jupiter or Sol or Apollo, that kind of identification with one particular God. I talk a little bit about the word paganism at the beginning of the book because it's such a, as you say, it's such a loaded term and such a difficult term. And it's basically a deprecating term that Christians use for anybody that's not Christian. And it has connotations of being a bit rustic and countryside and, and potentially kind of not soldiers as well, not soldiers of Christ. But we kind of fail to come up with another term really. So I think it's still a nice term than just non Christian, which is also weird because you're, you're characterizing something by an absence of something else. But sometimes I think the, the differences can be overplayed. And you know, I've certainly read people saying that Christianity invented charity, and that's absolutely nonsense. It's patent nonsense. The, the idea of Euergetism was baked into Roman society. You couldn't have a position of power, a high level administrative job, without actually doing good works. Eurojetism, I suppose we'd call it philanthropy today. And we can see lots and lots of examples of that happening at more humble levels as well. And, and for looking after the poorer and the more vulnerable people in society as being something that was very valued and considered to be worthy. Before Christianity comes along, society wouldn't have worked if it hadn't been. I think what's interesting is the need for charity within cities and that Christianity is spreading within cities as basically a phenomenon of Roman cities. It's spreading within those cities as those cities are growing. And as cities grow, what you get is more and more people flocking to them, and you have the problem of the urban poor. So if Christianity is about administering those cities, one of the things it really has to do with is work out how to look after the urban poor, never to solve the problem of poverty, never to eradicate it, because it's very useful to have poor people to help you extract money from rich people. So the aim is never to solve it, but to alleviate it.
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Interviewer
Yes. I want to return a little bit to this idea of the banning of factions and this rigidity within Christianity, because do you think that gave it a sort of critical advantage when the Roman Empire was beginning to disintegrate?
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Alice Roberts
I think that rigidity had been there before in terms of the imperial cult. And of course, that's where some Christians fell foul of the Roman Empire quite early on. So there were persecutions of Christians within the empire, particularly under Diocletian, and some of those were absolutely brutal. But very often that came down to Roman administrators saying to Christians, you have actually still got to swear allegiance to the emperor. And in Roman society, that meant worshiping the emperor. And so those Christians, there were plenty of Christians who would do that and accept that, but there were some that wouldn't, and that led to persecutions. But that rigidity that need to adhere to, to 1. There's one particular thing we need you to do. You know, whether it's to swear allegiance to a flag or to worship an emperor or to profess Christianity, that's the one thing we need you to do, and that is binding people together. It's very political.
- [36:53]
Interviewer
I also just want to touch a little bit on, because we have discussed them already, the importance of bishops and saints and missionaries during this period of history, not so much as religious figures, but as political actors. And I think in your book you mention that they are almost like the spearhead of this kind of push towards soft imperialism. Could you expand a little bit on that?
- [37:15]
Alice Roberts
Yeah, it's very evident, I think, in the Celtic west, where Christianity is spreading as the empire is disintegrating and reaching places the empire never reached, or at least didn't reach fully. So places like Ireland. And you've got the, you know, sort of very early Christianity spread by people who have very Roman names like Patricius Sounds much more Roman if you say it in the Latin way. And then you have this, you know, wonderful tales of voyaging saints, and they're always voyaging in tiny little coracles and sometimes traveling with stone coffins and all of that kind of thing. These voyages, again, just part and parcel of what the elites were always doing. They're really well connected. And when you read the hagiographies, the lives of the saints, and you. You look at the voyages that are being undertaken, they're very rarely going to people who've never seen a Christian before. By the time we learn about voyaging saints, who are often cast as being missionaries, they're going to meet other Christians and they're also going to meet kings. So they're usually voyaging off to somewhere and then being welcomed into the court of a king. And I. I think it's all been there in plain sight. It's all about nobility, it's all about the connectedness of these, of these very, very noble families. And some of them are bishops and some of them are kings, some of them are bishops and then kings, some of them are generals and then bishops. Jamanus of Auxerre is an interesting bishop who carries on being quite kind of military and travels over to Britain at the behest of the Bishop of Rome to go and sort the British out, because they're starting to split. So they're. They're following a version of Christianity and there's obviously a worry that they're going to go off and do their own thing and they have to be brought to heel. But he turns up with a load of troops and then helps them with some battles of their own. So, yeah, there's a. It's really interesting that the idea of these people being particularly humble and ascetic, traveling in coracles, going and setting themselves up a long way from anyone else, because that's what Christians do. They don't. They go and set themselves up really close to seats of power, like going and setting yourself up within sight of Bamborough.
- [39:33]
Interviewer
Do you think, Alice, it's time we stop talking about the fall of Rome and start seeing it more as a rebrand?
- [39:40]
Alice Roberts
I absolutely do. I mean, this. Yeah, you've. You've absolutely hit the nail on the head. And this really is the thesis of my book, that the Roman Empire, and of course, the Roman Empire in the east carries on for another thousand years until the Ottomans walk into Constantinople and that's the end of it. But when the Ottomans do that, they say, we are now the Kaiser of Rome. So we are the Caesars of Rome, by the way, now. So they see themselves as the inheritors of all of that. In the west officially is disintegrating in the fifth century, the connection with, with the empire, if the empire is the emperor, is severed. The connection with the empire, if the empire is the whole system of administration and education and the hierarchy of Roman society is there all the way through.
- [40:31]
Interviewer
Finally, Alice, given your role as former President of Humanists UK and your status as one of Britain's best known atheists, readers might wonder how that perspective influenced the writing and research of this book. How did that shape your approach to researching it and this foundational era of Christian history?
- [40:50]
Alice Roberts
I hope it didn't because I'm trying to approach this history as objectively as possible and I'm trying to meet people on their own terms and trying to understand why people were spreading this particular set of ideas. And as I said, I'm mostly focusing on the political and the, the economic media and perspective in the book. But I suppose in some ways it means I'm not approaching it as somebody who's invested in a set of ideas. I'm fascinated by them and I know quite a lot about them. Having been brought up as a Christian, so having been kind of immersed in that tradition, I'm really interested to know where those traditions come from and, you know, fascinated by the fact that there are still festivals that are celebrated in the church today which go all the way back to pre Christian times. So, I mean, I think it's fascinating. It's an important part of our culture. So as we become more secular as a society and we don't know as much about Bible stories and we've kind of, I suppose we lose sight of some of that Christian history, I still feel that there's been an effort to draw a bit of a veil over the history of early Christianity and to treat it as though it just kind of emerged into the world fully formed. And I think for me, looking at it from a. I suppose it's cultural evolution, looking at the evolution of that culture is, is absolutely fascinating where it came from to begin with and then who was taking it up and. And who was spreading it. So I hope that I've done that as objectively as possible.
- [42:31]
Danny Bird
That was Alice Roberts, an anatomist and biological anthropologist, author and broadcaster. Alice's latest book, the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity, is out now, published by Simon and Schuster uk. You can read more from Alice in the September issue of BBC History magazine. And on the History Extra website historyextra.com she was speaking to Danny Bird.
- [43:02]
Ryan Reynolds
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