Streams of History: Ancient Rome (Yesterday's Classics) (10 page)

The Romans did not like the Christians, because they would not worship the emperors as gods, and several efforts were made to kill all of them. One very wicked emperor, named Nero, gave great games at night and lighted his grounds with burning Christians, who had been wrapped in tar and pitch and raised on long poles. If anything went wrong in Rome, as the occurrence of a plague or great fire, the Christians were sure to be blamed for it, and many would be put to death.

Once, when they were having gladiatorial fights, a Christian named Telemachus jumped into the arena and separated the fighters. But Telemachus was stoned to death at once by the people for spoiling their sport. The emperor, however, ordered the gladiatorial shows to be stopped; there were growing to be so many Christians now that he did not dare oppose them.

The Christians were growing in numbers for two chief reasons:—first, the old religion of Rome, because the people had lost confidence in their gods, had ceased to give them peace of mind, while Christianity gave them hope and filled the longings and aspirations of the soul as no other religion could; and, second, the government all around the Mediterranean Sea with fine roads leading to every part of the empire made traveling so easy that people could readily pass from place to place and carry the new doctrine.

Finally, about 325 A.D., a Roman emperor named Constantine adopted the Christian religion and proclaimed it the religion of the whole empire. From that time on all the Roman empire rapidly became Christian.

During the first three centuries after Christ was born, Rome was able to keep back the strong German tribes who wandered through the woods of the North; but as Rome turned more to pleasure and vice, the Roman army was filled largely with German soldiers, who, living for a time in Rome, saw some of the new life there and often took it back to their German homes. Trade gradually sprang up between the Germans and Romans, and whole tribes of rude warriors were hired by Rome to protect her borders; but finally in 476 A.D., a German barbarian chief, Odoacer, captured the Eternal City, compelled the boy-Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, to give up the Crown, made himself king, and, with the force and ignorance of a barbarian, began to rule in the seat which had been occupied by Roman Kings, Consuls and Emperors for more than a thousand years. But what the Germans, or Teutons, as they are often called, found at Rome, and how the Romans finally educated the Germans, just as the Greeks educated the Romans, we shall see in the next volume of this series.

Now let us look back over the great stream of Roman history and briefly review what we have seen.

First we saw infant Rome, nourished, as it were, on wolf-milk, grow to be as strong and brave as a wolf itself. We saw Rome creep slowly out from her seven hills till she had conquered the people near by on the plains, then up to the mountains and conquer the rough, half-civilized, mountaineers. All these people she bound tightly to herself by building permanent roads through their territory, settling colonies among them, and teaching them the laws, manners and customs of Rome.

All of this time there was going on at Rome the fierce struggle between the rich patrician and the poor plebeian. After two hundred years of struggle, the ple beians became equal to the patricians. Rome then felt strong, and with a senate, composed of brave, virtuous, unselfish men, began the fierce struggle with Carthage and her great general, Hannibal. With Carthage conquered, we saw Rome, like a mighty fisherman firmly draw her net of law around the Mediterranean and catch and hold securely in its meshes all the peoples studied earlier,—Egypt, Judea, Mesopotamia, Phœnicia and Greece. All these she finally bound into one immense government, having one ruler, one law, one mighty system of roads reaching to every corner of the immense empire. Then we saw Greek literature and Greek philosophy spread throughout the west. Finally, as Rome was growing old and losing her power to rule, we saw the rise of the King whose kingdom was not to be of this world, and whose law was to be the law of love. As men came to understand this law, slowly, quietly and almost unnoticed, Christianity took root and, amid much opposition, continued to grow till it burst the bounds of the old empire and spread throughout Europe. Rome had lived for more than a thousand years and had taught the world as no other nation had been able to do the great lesson of how to build a mighty nation with a single center from which to rule. In doing so, she had become the great western reservoir which gathered into this center the streams of wealth, culture, art, law, philosophy, literature, religion and learning which had been slowly flowing westward from Memphis, Babylon, Tyre, Jerusalem, Athens and Alexandria through the thousands of years which had gone before.

When Rome died as a government she did not die in the hearts and minds of men, for, as already said, a mightier power than she arose to carry all this thought and culture forward into the north and west of Europe and finally on to America,—this was the great power of Christianity and the Christian Church.

Thus we more and more see, as we go on with our study of the stream of history, how the great things worked out by one nation are not lost to the world when that nation dies, but are caught up and carried on to future peoples and nations by the great institutions of religion, government, industry, education and social life which all people help to work out and which, being continually nourished with new thought, always remain young.