Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, The
Michael Grant
Number of quotes: 36
Book ID: 206 Page: 10
Section: 3B1
Decius’s death at Abrittus, at the hand of the Goths, was a unique feature, as this was the one and only occasion when a Roman emperor was slain by an enemy.Pastor John notes: What about Emperor Valerianus (pp.12-13)
Quote ID: 5013
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 206 Page: 17
Section: 3B1
By 260 the Goths had split into two groups: the Ostrogoths (East Goths) and the Visigoths (West Goths). the Goths were Germanic
Quote ID: 5014
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 206 Page: 19
Section: 3B,4B
Indeed, between 226 and 379 only nine kings ruled Persia; during the same period there were some 35 Emperors at Rome.
Quote ID: 5015
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 206 Page: 23
Section: 3B
However, the emperor Gallienus has been very variously estimated (see Figure 11). He has been considered to have ‘ruled’, if that is the right word, at the lowest time of the Roman empire.
Quote ID: 5016
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 206 Page: 41
Section: 3B
This must not be forgotten: for those who lived in it, the revived empire, under a ruler who seemed more a godlike Pharaoh than a Roman magistrate, was intolerably worse than it had been, partly because of the much increased and stabilised taxation, which the relatively few curiales enforced rather than controlled.
Quote ID: 5017
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 206 Page: 41
Section: 3B
The reign of Diocletian is one of the last great milestones in the history of Rome. For there was hardly one speck of imperial civilisation that the reforming hand of Diocletian left untouched.
Quote ID: 5018
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 206 Page: 46
Section: 3C
It must be concluded that Constantine’s arrangements for taxation, although partly inherited and no doubt urgently required by the costly policies on which he had embarked, contributed largely to the future of trade and agriculture, and caused widespread hostility to the State. It was a crushing tax system, which ultimately defeated its own purpose, because it destroyed the very people who had to pay the taxes. {6}[Footnote 6] M.Grant, The Emperor Constantine (1993), p. 225
Quote ID: 5019
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 206 Page: 49
Section: 2B
The Roman imperial public was becoming more and more monotheistic at this time. {1} Aurelian decided to revive the cult of the Sun, and to make it the hub of the whole of Roman religion. It was already honoured and revered by a number of disparate temples. Septimius Severus and his successors (as well as usurpers) had honoured it; Maximinis I Thrax had put up a monument to the god; and he had been glorified as ‘Invictus’ by Victorinus (268-279) and Probus (276-282).[Footnote 1] For example the tendency was turned to good advantage by the State: the series of coins with the heads of long deified emperors, usually attributed to Trajanus Decius, but possibly issued by Trebonianus Gallus.
In this determined effort to revivify and concentrate paganism, Aurelian was not overturning the Roman cults; he was adding to them, and thereby changing their emphasis and balance of power, so that Sol now stood at the head of the pantheon.
This was not only an integration, it was a creative, novel deed of religious statecraft. Aurelian’s decision . . . sought to weave the main religious strands of east and west into a united, cosmopolitan, universal faith . . . Since Aurelian reconquered Gaul as well as the east, his cult of Sun-Apollo may also have echoed the Gallic worship of gods of light and healing identified with Apollo. {2}
[Footnote 2] M. Grant, The Climax of Rome (1968), pp. 175ff., 283. Aurelian honoured Sol Invictus, and saw himself as his vice regent. This remained the chief imperial cult until Christianity. But Jupiter was not neglected: Diocletian called himself ’Jovius’, and Maximian ’Herculius’. An effort was also made -as numerous coins show- to exalt the GENIVS POPVLI ROMANI.
Quote ID: 5020
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 206 Page: 50
Section: 2B
It is said that Aurelian...roundly told his troops that it was not they, but the god, who assigned the imperial power. Herein may be seen one of the springs of that religious policy which Aurelian followed throughout his reign and crowned in 274 by the erection in Rome of a magnificent temple to the Sun-god and the establishment of a new college of senators as pontifices dei Solis. Sol dominus imperii Romani was to be the centre of revived and unified paganism and the guarantor of loyalty to the emperor, whose companion and preserver he was.....
Quote ID: 5021
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 206 Page: 51
Section: 2B
The strongest part of Aurelian’s army came, like himself, from Sun-worshipping Pannonia. . . The cult was now officially prescribed for the army, and its symbols were added to military insignia.
Quote ID: 5022
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 206 Page: 51
Section: 2B
Gallienus proposed to dominate the city, from the highest point of the Esquiline Hill, with a chariot group including a colossal statue of himself as the Sun. His successor Claudius II Gothicus (268 - 70) was devoted to the same deity, and then the logical, conclusive move was taken soon afterwards by the next emperor Aurelian. For he established, as the central and focal point of Roman religion, a massive and strongly subsidised cult of Sol Invictus (274), endowing him with a resplendent Roman temple, and instituting on the model of the ancient priestly colleges, and as their equal in rank, a new college of Priest of the Sun....PJ Note: This second para I used separately.
. . . .
. . . official religion had long been moving in this direction.
Aurelian now restored the temple of Malachbel (Baal) [the Sun-god] at Palmyra, and interpreting its deity as a form of Sol Invictus, adorned his own Roman temple of the Sun with statues not only of Helios-Sol but also of Belos or Baal....Sol now stood at the head of the Pantheon.
Quote ID: 8169
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 206 Page: 52
Section: 2B2
Constantine’s attitude to Sun worship was significant, but ambiguous. Underneath St. Peter’s, as we have seen, there is a mosaic on which Jesus is represented as the Sun-god.
Quote ID: 5027
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 206 Page: 52
Section: 3C
Constantine felt a strong need for a divine companion and sponsor, and for a time the Sun, whose worship had been ancestral in his family, was his choice . . . It was athwart the Sun that he claimed to have seen the Cross, and on the sculptures of the Arch of Constantine at Rome the old gods have gone but the sun still remains: the emperor is represented between the rising Sun and the moon, and the victory-giving figure is the Sun-god, whose statuettes are carried by the army’s standard-bearers. An inscription describes Constantine himself as the Sun who sees all. It was not until 318-319, when the Christianization of the empire had gathered force, that the Sun disappeared from the coinage . . .
Quote ID: 5028
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 206 Page: 52
Section: 2B2,3C
Christians in the east and west, in their public and private prayers, turned to Oriens, the rising sun, in order to glorify its resurrection from the prison of the dark, which they identified with the Resurrection of Christ...Some people confused the two deities...That is partly why devotees of the Sun . . .were among the fiercest enemies of the Christians . . . St. Leo the Great (d. 461) complained that Christians still worshipped the Sun. {8}[Footnote 8] Ibid., pp. 180ff. It has lately been argued that much of the Arch of Constantine is of considerably earlier date.
Quote ID: 5029
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 206 Page: 53
Section: 3C
Constantine was a Christian of a very peculiar type that would hardly be recognized as Christian today. For the God he believed in was a God of power, who had given him victory, and would have had little sympathy with the idea that Christianity meant love, or charity, or humility, of which his ’middle-brow’ view of religion would not have the slightest comprehension.
Quote ID: 5030
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 206 Page: 57
Section: 4A
Political (and military) life at this period 200 A.D. was so intolerable (and, let us face it, boring) that many turned to quite other matters . . .But one of the most widely read writers of the period seems to have come from Egypt. This was the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (AD 205-269/70) (See Figure 2).
Quote ID: 5033
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 206 Page: 59
Section: 2B
He is the pioneer of psychedelic experience for the west, but he achieved his end by purely cerebral, intellectual discipline – not by schizophrenia and not by drugs, and not by religion....The moral and social implications of his doctrine have sometimes inspired repugnance. . . Plotinus’ world was no ivory tower but reality at its highest level, raised to its most exalted plane by the intensest concentration on what seemed to him the most real...Union with the One is to tackle life with a daring and dedicated brand of realism . . .
Quote ID: 5034
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 206 Page: 59
Section: 2B
The One, as he Plotinus conceived it, is beyond thought for definition of language: it inhabits summits where reason . . .
Quote ID: 5035
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 206 Page: 60
Section: 3B
In c.240 . . . the young Mani started to preach at the Persian (Sassanian) capital Ctesiphon (Kut), and Seleucia which lay opposite it across the Tigris.
Quote ID: 5036
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 206 Page: 60
Section: 3B
Nevertheless during the century after Mani’s death his doctrines became a world religion; nearly the world religion. {3}[Footnote 3] Ibid., pp. 200ff. cf. P. 203. Mani was believed to have been born in c.177 and to have died in 216. He was a friend of Sapor I, but Mazdaean (Sun) influence under a later king, Bahram I, led to his death. Mani encouraged asceticism, and found room for Jesus.
Quote ID: 5037
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 206 Page: 60
Section: 4B
Manichaeanism – in the sense that there is believed to be a continual fight between God and the Devil – is still today the faith of millions of ordinary people, if they only knew it.
Quote ID: 5038
Time Periods: 237
Book ID: 206 Page: 60
Section: 3B
Diocletian . . . introduced savage sanctions against the Manichaeans . . . apparently regarding them as potential instruments of Rome’s Persian foes. {4}[Footnote 4] M. Grant Constantine the Great (1993), p. 166. For Gnosticism, see M. Seymour-Smith, Gnosticism: The Role of Inner Knowledge (1996).
PJ: Diocletian was not just anti-Christian.
Quote ID: 5039
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 206 Page: 60
Section: 3A3A
They were too anti-social to create a National Church...
Quote ID: 5040
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 206 Page: 60
Section: 2B
So Christianity defeated and outlived both Manichaeanism and Sun-worship.
Quote ID: 5041
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 206 Page: 67
Section: 3B2
In actual fact, the survival of the empire, in the face of intolerable odds, is something of a miracle, and one of the most remarkable phenomena in human history. Here was a ruined unit, and out of the ruins came another, different but equally formidable, empire.Pastor John’s note: Christianity rescued it?
Quote ID: 5043
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 206 Page: 68
Section: 3B,4B
Nevertheless, the Roman imperial phenomenon does ring a bell, because it does contain points of relevance to what is happening today, or rather to what will be happening before long. For what is likely to be happening, although not all of us will be alive to see it, is a confrontation between the western world and those outside it. It is not for me, now, to go into further details about this confrontation, but I do maintain that it is likely to occur. It also attacked the Roman empire, which was nearly destroyed 200 A.D.: but not quite. It was saved because of its superior organisation.Pastor John’s note: written in 1999
Quote ID: 5044
Time Periods: 237
Book ID: 206 Page: 75
Section: 1A,4B
We are entitled, and rightly so, to speak of a single Greco-Roman civilisation, . . .
Quote ID: 5048
Time Periods: 123456
Book ID: 206 Page: 76
Section: 1A
To forget the value of the inheritance which Rome preserved for us....is merely a passing phase of feeling: it is really quite inconsistent with the character of an age which recognises the doctrine of evolution as its great discovery.
Quote ID: 5050
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 206 Page: 77
Section: 1A
Our modern world is in many ways a continuation of the world of Greece and Rome. Not in all ways – particularly not in medicine, music, industry and applied science. But in most of our intellectual and spiritual activities we are the great-grandsons of the Romans, and the great-grandsons of the Greeks. Other influences joined to make us what we are; but Greco-Roman strain was one of the strongest and richest.
Quote ID: 5051
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 206 Page: 77
Section: 1A
In other words, everything goes back to the Greeks.
Quote ID: 5052
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 206 Page: 78
Section: 1A
We ourselves, whether we like it or not, are the heirs of the Greeks and Romans . . . Without that massive contribution we should not be what we are.
Quote ID: 5054
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 206 Page: 79
Section: 1A
As regards the law, most of us are not solicitors or barristers. Yet even if we are not, it is worth remembering that the entire world of order, in which we live, is the creation of the ancients, and in particular of the Romans. It is true that the law of our land, as we know it today, is not Roman law. Nevertheless, it was the Romans, after various more or less localised Greek efforts, who concluded that we ought to live within a legal framework. And that is what we do. In other words, we live our lives through the grace of Roman Law. So we owe it to the Roman lawyers – and to Cicero who interpreted so much of what they said – that we live in comparative peace and orderliness. Without Roman Law, we should merely be in a jungle.
Quote ID: 5055
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 206 Page: 81
Section: 1A
And now, as we know, there is a great move to establish a united Europe. It will not have quite the same boundaries as the ancient Roman empire, but it is impossible not to see that empire as a sort of forerunner.
Quote ID: 5056
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 206 Page: 82
Section: 4B,5A
Geographically, the Roman empire stretched, at its peak, three thousand miles from southern Scotland to southern Egypt; on the east, Roman frontiers lay in the sun-baked upper plains along the Euphrates River, and on the west stopped only by the Atlantic Ocean. This huge block was larger than the whole earth today, if measured in terms of ancient communications and transportation. . .
Quote ID: 5057
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 206 Page: 83
Section: 2B
Christians, Jews, agnostics and atheists must be equally concerned with the rise of monotheism in the Greek and Roman world, where it gradually replaced polytheism: as certain examples quoted in this book have shown. That is to say, it was a development from paganism, and how it developed is a matter of absorbing interest.
Quote ID: 5058
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 206 Page: xvii
Section: 3B2
The fact that the Roman empire did not collapse in the 260s or 270s AD is one of the miracles of history, {1}[Footnote 1] These fifty years have been described as the lowest point in the Roman empire, when it barely escaped complete disruption. There was a political, military, financial crisis. But there is an extraordinary lack of good contemporary literary sources, or of any ancient literary sources at all. See, in particular, A. Alfoldi, Geschichte der Weltkrise des dritten Jabrhunderts (1967), J.N. Claster, The Medieval Experience: AD 300-400 (1982), J.B. Griard, Gordianus III – Quintillus, G.C. Brower, The Decadent Emperors: Power and Depravity in Third Century Rome (1995), and, above all, E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1766-1788; and recent editions, notably by the Readers’ Subscription, and Folio Society, 1997).
Quote ID: 5012
Time Periods: 3
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