Hadrian
Stewart Perowne
Number of quotes: 15
Book ID: 103 Page: 15
Section: 2A3,2B2
It was Hadrian who made the triumph of Christianity inevitable. He did not intend this result; but by elevating a young favourite into godhead he reduced polytheism to absurdity, and so turned men’s minds increasingly to monotheism. By obliterating Jerusalem of the Jews, he ensured that when monotheism prevailed it would prevail in its Christian form.
Quote ID: 2568
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 103 Page: 31
Section: 2C,3G
The position of the senate under the empire resembled in some way that of the College of Cardinals under the modern papacy, in that while it has little corporate power in normal times, to belong to it is a coveted honour, and, when a Pope dies, it is the College which elects a successor.
Quote ID: 2569
Time Periods: 147
Book ID: 103 Page: 58
Section: 1A,2C,3A1
The great organization which is in so many ways the successor of the Caesars, the Roman Catholic Church, insists that complete obedience is the natural condition of the Christian soul, and in this view of human destiny millions throughout the world ardently concur. They submit to a pontiff as sovereign, and they, like their secular predecessors, address that sovereign as father, he them as his children.
Quote ID: 2570
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 103 Page: 62
Section: 2B2,2C
There were still, in the second century, simple folk who worshipped the antique deities of Etruria or Latium, who still sought the protection of Priapus for their flocks and gardens, the succour of Lucina in childbed, the bounty of Vertumnus for their harvests; just as today their descendants solicit the benevolence of the saints who have succeeded to their shrines.It is perplexing, for instance, to read that the emperors, or still more an Antinous, were deified, that ordinary men were to be regarded as gods, and that they were then to be qualified by the same adjective, divus, as in Renaissance Latin was applied by the Catholic Church to saints.
Quote ID: 2571
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 103 Page: 65
Section: 4B
It was the startling discovery that these two religions were wholly different from all others that caused such consternation: in the easy-going eclecticism of Roman religion, it was the exclusiveness of Judaism and Christianity which shocked, not their doctrine.
Quote ID: 2572
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 103 Page: 67
Section: 2E3,4B
The last two chapters have shewn, it is hoped, that Hadrian was an innovator, that he had conceived a new form of polity, namely the empire as a family of provinces, the happy and prosperous children of the Mother City, and that he intended that the veneration of that city, and of himself as its lord, should be the spiritual bond of empire.
Quote ID: 2573
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 103 Page: 70
Section: 2C
To this day, the College of Cardinals is officially styled, in canon law, the senate of the Roman pontiff.
Quote ID: 2574
Time Periods: 46
Book ID: 103 Page: 101
Section: 4B
Europe owes its faith, arts and civilization to three cities, Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. Hadrian influenced all three in a manner and to a degree that no other man has ever done, before or since. Jerusalem he disliked, Rome he mistrusted, Athens he adored.
Quote ID: 2575
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 103 Page: 138
Section: 4A
Alexandria, ever since its foundation by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., had been the hearth and home of Hellenism. It was also the centre of a large Jewish community, who had become so imbued with the Greek atmosphere of the city that they even used a Greek version of their scriptures. Some of their teachers, such as the eminent Philo, went farther, and tried to evolve a system which should reconcile the law of Moses with Greek philosophy.
Quote ID: 2576
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 103 Page: 142
Section: 4B
Many Jews, even, who wished to move among Gentiles as one of them, concealed their origin by means of plastic surgery.
Quote ID: 2577
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 103 Page: 142
Section: 3B
The Christian apologist Tertullian, writing about 197, says, in a passage of his apology to which too little attention has been paid (but see Sordi, cited in Sources and Acknowledgements), that Tiberius, when he received Pontius Pilate’s report on the trial and execution of Jesus, wanted to enroll him among the gods of Rome, but that the senate objected on the ground that they knew too little about him. In an apology, a man does not write what is demonstrably false, for one proved error invalidates the whole.
Quote ID: 2578
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 103 Page: 148
Section: 3B,3C
Hadrian forbade circumcision.For the rest, it was a nuisance: only for the Jews a sacrilege. The command can never have been carried out with anything like general obedience. Why did Hadrian try to impose it? There were two reasons. First, with all his liberality of mind, all his longing to see the empire as a company of equal provinces, he envisaged them as a Roman society, a coherent society. There was no room, in his theory, for any “opting-out”, any separatism, and what could be more separatist than this bodily mark? In an age when physical exercise and washing were habitually carried out naked and in company, nothing could be more blatant. Secondly, Hadrian was a Hellenist. To the Greek, man was the measure of all things, mind and body. To dare to modify that body, in any detail at all, even though its results, in the case of the Jews, only served to make a bad state of affairs worse.
Quote ID: 2579
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 103 Page: 152
Section: 5D
“It is hard to believe,” says Mr. R. D. Barnett, “when one is standing in this earthly paradise that one is standing in Africa at all.” If ever, for a Greek, there was a home from Hellas, it is Cyrene.
Quote ID: 2580
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 103 Page: 155
Section: 3B
Then, on the 30th October, Antinous was drowned. The inquest on his death, the longest and least conclusive inquest in history, is still going on. There are three possible causes of death, misadventure, murder or suicide. The first, for anyone occupying Antinous’ favoured position is very unlikely. Wherever he went he would be accompanied by servants and guards. Murder is just possible. “A favourite has no friend”, and yet what little we know about Antinous, apart from his overpowering beauty, leads us to suppose that he was a modest and intelligent lad. This leaves suicide as the most probable cause. Suicide was, in fact, the answer which men gave in antiquity: what divided opinions was the reason for the suicide. Antinous’ beauty, taken in conjunction with Hadrian’s known liking for males, was made the basis for the foul suggestion that Antinous had committed suicide out of shame for a sullied life.
Quote ID: 2581
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 103 Page: 163
Section: 3B,4B
Bar Kokhba. He also did something else, which was to prove a disaster to his nation. He persecuted the Christians. In his role of Messiah, he found particularly obnoxious those who not only refused to acknowledge his Messianic quality, but went further and worshipped One whom they knew to have been the only true Messiah. It is from this act that the final separation of Jews and Christians is to be dated (though some Jewish apologists would place the responsibility on the later Christian Councils). Between the year 70 and the year 132 there had been a period of polemic between Jews and Christians, without a complete break. But Bar Kokhba’s execution of Christians caused the Christian attitude to harden into the tragic hostility which has ended only in our own day, when the Judaeo-Christian ethic has been assailed by a paganism more terrible than any of old,
Quote ID: 2582
Time Periods: 12
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