A Criminal History of Mankind (38 page)

So in the Roman Empire in the fourth century A.D., the image of woman had become exciting, disturbing, voluptuous. She had still not become the ideal creature of Dante and Petrarch and the troubadours; but she had reached the halfway stage. Courtesans such as Thais of Alexandria could become wealthy because men had learned to dream about women instead of about pretty slave boys or handsome youths.

So the Christian rejection of sexual pleasure was more than a reaction against Roman sensuality. It was a recognition that when man idealises woman, he also creates a false image of her. This masculine distortion can be seen in any piece of cheap pornography; the seduction is described in minute physical detail, and the final coupling made to sound like the climax of a symphony. But missing from all this is the interaction of two
personalities
. It is two persons who find themselves in bed together when the excitement has died down, and their future relationship will depend on whether they
like
each other.

In woman, the sexual delusion usually takes a less impersonal form. Her instinct is directed at finding a husband and protector; so while the male sexual delusion tends towards promiscuity, the female tends towards monogamy. Her problem is that she may fall in love with a completely unsuitable male because she finds him ‘dashing’ and exciting, and find herself in conflict with his male instinct for promiscuity. In the sense that it is more personal, the female sexual delusion is more realistic than the male version.

The Christian attitude to sex was based upon a recognition of this element of unreality in the sexual relation, the ‘baited hook’. So the Christian view of sex is that it is primarily a personal relationship whose aim is monogamy and the raising of a family.

When we consider the mechanism of the sexual delusion, we can see that it depends on the tendency of the human imagination to exaggerate the importance of the ‘forbidden’. And this same obsession with the forbidden is - as we have seen - the basis of criminality. Which means that the ideals of these early Christians were basically an attempt to combat the sexual delusion and the criminal delusion. They saw man as a spirit who has become entangled in a prison of matter - light entangled in darkness. (Some even went so far as to accept the teaching of the Persian prophet Mani, who said that all matter is evil.) The great theologian Origen asserted that God originally created a realm of pure spirit inhabited by angels, but that because there was nothing to struggle against, the angels became bored and turned away from God. So God created matter to provide the fallen angels with something to struggle against - a kind of gymnasium in which man can be trained and educated. The ascetic is not really dedicated to self-torment, but to learning to use the gymnasium to struggle back towards the realm of pure spirit. And this is why, for all its drawbacks, Christianity was one of the most important milestones in human history. Paganism was a kind of lowest common multiple. If you were a citizen of Rome around 100 A.D., it made no real difference whether you worshipped Osiris or Tammuz, Mithras or the emperor; in fact, many pagan gods had conveniently amalgamated so that a Celt, an Egyptian or a Babylonian could go and make his sacrifice in a Roman temple. There were no great pagan scriptures to rival the dialogues of Plato or the New Testament. We have seen that, at its popular level, Christianity was no better than paganism. But it had its saints, its ascetics, its great thinkers; and these poured their insights into the repository of the Church. Plato said that the perfect state would be governed by a philosopher-king. Christianity was a state within a state, and if it was not governed by philosophers and saints at least the philosophers and saints played a vital role in its development. After the murderous chaos of the Roman Empire, it was one of the greatest steps mankind had so far taken.

Before we can complete the story of the downfall of Rome, it is necessary to look at the rest of the vast landmass that surrounded the Roman Empire. Most of the earth was still covered with forest, jungle and desert. The Mediterranean itself had once been an immense desert with a few lakes and pools until, around five and a half million years ago, the Atlantic ocean managed to burst through the wall of mountains that ran from present-day Spain to north Africa; the giant waterfall turned the area into the tideless sea that later nurtured the Greeks and Romans. At the time the Sumerians invented writing, the Sahara was covered with forests and grass; elephants and hippopotamuses cooled themselves in its lakes. But the climate had been slowly changing for the past seven thousand years, and by the time of Sargon the Great it was turning into a desert - aided by nomads whose flocks trampled and chewed the last of the grassland.

To the south there was the unknown land of Africa, still peopled by men of the stone age. To the north there was Germany, with its great dark forests, which continued on into Russia. To the south-east lay the unknown continent of India, with its religion of peace and contemplation. The Indians also civilised their neighbours in Burma, Malaya, Siam, as far as Indochina, but with missionaries and merchants, not armies and tax collectors.

To the east lay the vast and totally unknown continent of China. Although it had also had its share of local wars, that immense land had turned into an empire rather more peacefully than its western neighbour. The Chou dynasty had conquered around 1000 B.C.; they were barbarian warriors who absorbed the best of what their predecessors - the Shang dynasty - had to offer. After 500 B.C. great canals brought prosperity to the land; small farms were replaced by huge fields like the prairies of Canada and America. After seven hundred years, the Chou Empire was fragmented in a power struggle, and Shih Huang-ti, the ‘Great Lord of Ch’in’, finally became master.

Unlike the Roman Empire, this immense continent was not under constant stress from internal revolts and enemy nations. There were enemies along the northern boundaries - horse nomads of the steppes - but China itself (named after the province of Ch’in) was too vast for nomads to penetrate very far; besides, the men of these northern borders - like the Ch’in - were as tough and hardy as the nomads. So while the Roman Empire was convulsed with warfare, most of China - like its neighbour Japan - lay in a kind of sleep. With its canals and rice fields, the landowners grew rich. Of course, they squabbled among themselves, like medieval barons - in fact, before the coming of the Great Lord of Ch’in, China was very like England or France in the Middle Ages.

Shih Huang set out to forge a Chinese Empire; and he ordered the building of the Great Wall to keep out the nomads; it extended for nearly two thousand miles. He built roads and started a postal system. He decreed a standardised writing. He persuaded feudal barons to move to the capital. He was, in fact, a kind of Chinese Augustus or Constantine. And because he believed that the emperor’s will should prevail over all others, he objected to the Confucian classics, which insisted that the king rules by the will of heaven, and ordered the books to be burned. When he died in 207 B.C. there was a revolt, and the ruthless Ch’in were replaced by the milder and gentler Han dynasty. But for all their moderation as rulers, the Han emperors proved to be formidable conquerors. Instead of merely trying to keep out the wild horsemen of the northern steppes, Wu, the ‘Martial Emperor’ (140-87 A.D.) went out and attacked them. These barbarians were known to the Chinese as the Hsiung-nu. In the west, they became known as the Huns.

In earlier centuries, when these wild horsemen had been driven west by war or starvation, they had encountered the west’s own equivalent of Huns - the Scythians. These savages lived to the north of the Black Sea, between the Danube and the Don (in what is now the Ukraine), and Herodotus was so fascinated by tales of their cruelty and brutality that he made a special trip to find out all he could about them. He described a people who skinned their enemies and made coats of the skins; who sawed off the tops of their skulls and used them as drinking vessels, and who sometimes drank the blood of their enemies from these gruesome relics; who put out the eyes of their slaves to prevent their running away, and who regarded it as manly to take at least one human life every year. They terrorised the Persians, and an expedition against them by King Darius had no success whatever. In due course, the Scythians were driven south by an enemy from over the Danube, the Sarmatians, defeated by Philip of Macedon and finally crushed by Rome’s old enemy Mithridates. (But a closely related people, the Parthians, continued to give as much trouble as ever.) And with this race of fierce warriors finally out of the way, the slit-eyed Huns from Mongolia could move westward. So it was the more-or-less peaceful expansion of China that finally caused the break-up of the Roman Empire.

But it was not only from the east that Rome was threatened. All kinds of barbarian hordes were pouring across the west. Wild men from Gothland - in Sweden - had moved south to the Black Sea and become pirates; in 251 they had fought a battle against the ‘barrack emperor’ Decius and killed him. At about the same time, a German tribe called the Franks (who would later give their name to France) crossed the Rhine into Gaul, while another tribe, the Alemanni, invaded Alsace. In 376 the Visigoths, or West Goths, crossed the Danube, defeated the Roman army and killed the emperor Valens. But their aim was not conquest; they were fleeing from the Huns and only wanted to be allowed to settle in the relative security of the Roman Empire; they won their point, and many of them became defenders of the empire. So did many other barbarians, including members of a tribe called the Vandals. But in 406, the German branch of the Vandals also crossed into Gaul, then went down into Spain across the Pyrenees and set up a kingdom there. Twenty years later they had crossed the sea and taken Carthage. In 407, the Romans had been forced to summon their legions from Britain to try to stem the tide of invaders.

One of the most remarkable of these was a Goth named Alaric, who had applied to become a Roman commander and been turned down. The Roman Empire now had two emperors, the two sons of Theodosius the Great - Honorius (in Rome) and Arcadius (in Constantinople) - neither of them men of much force of character. Honorius was supported and defended by a Vandal general named Stilicho - he had even married Stilicho’s daughter. For a while, Alaric supported Arcadius. Then Alaric grew tired of the general untrustworthiness of these effete Romans and went raiding on his own account. He plundered Thrace and Dacia, and then crossed to Greece. He left a terrible trail of destruction behind him - one ancient historian compares the devastated Athens to the bleeding and empty skin of a slaughtered victim. Gibbon mentions that his men killed the males, burnt the villages, and made off with cattle and all the attractive females. Stilicho hurried to Greece, and finally trapped the Goths at the foot of a mountain. Their water supply was diverted and, as they began to suffer from thirst, Stilicho decided that he could afford to relax and went off to attend a public festival with games (‘and lascivious dances’ adds Gibbon - this bachelor historian seems to dwell on rapes and orgies with a certain morbid satisfaction). Stilicho’s soldiers wandered off to look for plunder, and the wily Alaric led his men through the Roman lines, across thirty miles of rough country and over the Gulf of Corinth. He had vanished before Stilicho had time to grasp what was happening.

Five years later, in 402, Stilicho frustrated an attempt of the Goths to land in Italy, and in 406 he defeated an invading army of barbarians at Florence. With a record like this, he should have been regarded as above suspicion. But Honorius’s court was the usual Roman hotbed of intrigue, and rumours went around that Stilicho was in league with the Goths. Honorius, who was a fool and a weakling, was willing to listen. He disliked his barbarian soldiers; and, being a religious bigot, objected to the fact that many of them were still pagans. Removing Stilicho and his barbarians would obviously be a complicated undertaking, but not beyond the enterprise - and treachery - of a Roman emperor. One day, at a signal from Honorius, Roman troops at Pavia grabbed many of Stilicho’s friends and murdered them. Stilicho, still failing to grasp the enormity of the betrayal, took refuge in a church in Ravenna. He was lured out on a promise of safety, and promptly executed. Like Nero’s general Corbulo, he probably muttered ‘Serves me right.’

At another signal, there was a massacre of barbarian families in cities all over Italy. The decision was stupid as well as criminal, for these barbarians had proved themselves loyal to Rome. Now there was nothing to stop Alaric, and he marched his Goths straight to the walls of Rome.

The Romans found it hard to believe they were not dreaming. It seemed incredible that this unwashed barbarian was threatening the imperial capital. But as Alaric prevented food and water from getting into the city, they began to realise that their situation was perilous. The Romans were furious, and their sense of outrage was directed at Stilicho’s widow, who was accused of corresponding with Alaric and strangled on the orders of the senate. Then outrage turned to depression as they began to starve. Five and a half centuries after the siege of Carthage, the Romans were tasting their own medicine. The rich managed to stay alive; the poor died by the thousand. They began to practise cannibalism. Inevitably, the rotting corpses caused disease, and as the plague swept the city, ambassadors went to ask Alaric what he would take to go away. Alaric finally agreed to a vast sum in gold and silver (and, oddly enough, pepper, used for preserving meat).

But there was no money in the treasury. Honorius and his court had moved to Ravenna - the emperor had decided it made a safer capital than Rome since it was surrounded by marshes. Negotiations dragged on; Alaric besieged Rome again, then marched on Ravenna. Honorius allowed some of his allies to slip out, make a surprise attack, and slip back before Alaric had time to recover his wits. This was the last straw. In a violent rage, Alaric marched again on Rome, once again besieged it, and this time succeeded in breaking in. It was mid-August, 410 A.D., and the first time invaders had been inside the city for more than six hundred years. Still smarting from the surprise attack, Alaric’s men raped and slaughtered with the abandonment of soldiers who had become bored, resentful and sex-starved. ‘The brutal soldiers,’ says Gibbon with a sigh of regret, ‘satisfied their sensual appetites without consulting either the inclination or the duties of their female captives,’ and he goes on to discuss the interesting question of whether a virgin who had been violated can still be regarded as ‘chaste’ and therefore still a virgin.