The Founding of Rome
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and as promised we are beginning to talk about Rome today and the legendary foundings (plural). Shall we just start there?
Well, Troy fell. That’s the most important thing to know. The Trojan horse was actually a Greek horse. It was full of Greeks. A fun fact about the Iliad, which is the story of the fall of Troy, is that, if you translate the title, it is the story of Troy. Ilium was the name of the city and Iliad means ‘the story of the city.’ So if we were to translate it properly it would be called Troy Story. You do not have a friend in horse. Horse is full of Greeks.
To remind ourselves of history, when do we say that the fall of Troy happened, because I don’t know, or is there a date?
There are multiple dates. The one that I remember seeing most recently is more or less in the time of the Judges. It might have been later, and I would have to go back and look at my notes on Greece to find the other alternate dates.
I don’t know about you, but growing up as a small kid I had the feeling that it happened in mythical times, which are not unlike Bible times. In fact, in a scene in Princess Warrior they often intersect. It was a long time ago when these kinds of things happened. Actually, it wasn’t that far back.
I always think that Homer wrote the story, so my brain kind of puts it with him, but I’m pretty sure he’s retelling.
This has been something that scholars have debated. Did he write after a long, long time collecting oral tales, or did he write it within the lifetime of the people who fought or at least of their children? That does move the date around a lot.
I believe archeologists have found evidence of the actual city of Troy and its destruction, correct?
Traditional chronology places the Trojan War about 1200 BC, which is about the time of Israel’s Judges. Cargill’s reconstruction places it much closer to the founding of Rome. Rome was founded in 753 BC.
A little before the people of Israel went into captivity with Assyria, roughly around that time.
Yes, so that’s the context. Do you want to continue with the story of the Iliad? Who is this Aeneas guy anyway, and what does he have to do with Troy and with Rome and all that?
Please continue, Emily. I interrupted you and got us on this little side thing.
Aeneas is a refugee from Troy essentially. The legend as Virgil tells it many centuries later is that Aeneas escaped from the ruins of Troy as it was falling, and he carried on his back his aged father and the idols that had failed to protect Troy, so already off to a great start.
He is known as Pious Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid, indicating that he is held in great reverence by all the Romans who followed. My memories of the Aeneid are not the most precise. It was never my favorite book. We also need to remember that what we have about Aeneas from the Aeneid is largely political propaganda because Virgil is writing to curry favor with the Caesar of the time, Augustus.
Pious Aeneas is the one credited with being the ancestor of the city of Rome, even the ancestor preceding Romulus and Remus, who we should get to next.
So a quick filling in of details – depending on who you believe and how pro-Roman you are, because you’re right, it’s a piece of political propaganda – Aeneas is looking at Greece and saying, “Hey, they have these two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. What if we had ours?” So using those two books as a template, and reversing the order, he comes up with Aeneas fleeing the ruins of fallen Troy. He is a prince of the city, a son of Venus/Aphrodite.
The first half of the story is him explaining how he got not to Rome. He was on his way to Rome, lots of things happened, just like they did to Odysseus in the Odyssey, but he gets blown off-course and ends up in Carthage, which is a Phoenician colony.
Yes. And the gods who oppose him make him fall in love with her, or her with him, trying to stall him because Juno, who is the great goddess behind all this, hates the Trojans. It goes all the way back to the judgment of Paris, when Paris wouldn’t vote for her as the most beautiful goddess in the world. So Jupiter has to prod him along by the hand of Mercury, and with great sadness and heartbreak he leaves Carthage.
Dido begs him to stay, and he won’t. “It’s me, isn’t it?” “No, honey, it’s me. I just have this destiny because I’m pious and the gods have told me I’ve got to go do this stuff.” So she commits suicide on a pier with Aeneas’ own sword and burns herself. In the distance Aeneas seems smoke rising and says, “That can’t be good.”
In the second half of the book he ends up in Italy. There’s a war that’s sort of like the Trojan War, but he wins and he marries the local king’s daughter and these local people are called Latins. The one thing that Juno gets out of this deal is, “But the Latins are my people. These newcomers have to take that name and use that language.” “Okay dear, whatever you say,” Jupiter says. Then depending upon timelines and interpretations and such, one of his descendants becomes the ancestor of the Roman people.
From Aeneas’ line come two children, Romulus and Remus, and here is the story. The uncle, Amulius, seized his brother’s throne and slew his sons, then to avoid the possibility of future offspring he forced his brother’s only daughter, Rea Silvia, to become a vestal virgin, a priestess to Vesta, a virgin with no children. But she is raped by a stranger, who she later claimed was the god Mars, because that makes it better, and she gives birth to two children, who she names Romulus and Remus.
But Amulius, the wicked uncle – because it’s always the wicked uncle, right? – throws the children into the Tiber River, but they survive and are rescued and suckled by guess what?
A she-wolf. According to this story by Livvy, it may be a shepherdess named Lupa, because that would explain that.
It would be another word for feminine wolf. The children grew up to avenge the family, and then they decide they’re going to start a new city because that’s their destiny and all that. They debate who the city should be named after, because you don’t name it after two people, you have to pick one.
As they’re thinking this over, Romulus begins to plow the sacred grid that will represent the walls and the moat, and Remus scoffs at this and jumps over and says, “See? That’s what I think of the walls of your holy city,” and Romulus kills him and says, “Thus shall it always be to those to defy my walls.” So the city will be called Rome, because the city of Remen…
This does bring us to a more serious note about Rome. We often hear about how important the family was to Rome, that it was one of the social blocks, one of the things that cemented society together to be sure. However, it was never primary.
Notice we’re starting with a man who, by the gods, is forced to abandon his land, his people, his family. He carries his father, but his father dies before they’ve hardly gone anywhere. He has a wife and son, but they get lost in the story and the whole goal is he marries somebody else. Then almost the whole family dies apparently along the way, and we have a wicked uncle to tries to do nasty things to his niece, and then we have a brother murdering a brother.
Remember that when you created a city it was a magical and religious act, something that our secular society really doesn’t get. We look at this and say, “It’s a city.” It’s a religion and it’s built on the blood of Remus, so this is all significant.
The next thing is that Romulus at this point does not seem to have a wife, nor does he have any citizens, so he opens the gates of his city, as it were, to shepherds and brigands and bandits and pirates and wanderers and vagabonds and whoever wants to come in. This is not a city in a Greek tradition where it’s all built around family and the worship of a common ancestor. Most of these people who are coming in are males, so they have a problem.
The Romans invite the residents of a local city to come and party with them, and they do, but all the men apparently get so drunk that they go home not realizing that half their people are missing, that is all of the women. They turn around the next day and come back and say, “Hey, we want our girls!” and the Romans say, “No,” and the girls say, “But Daddy, I love him,” and they agree to let the girls stay, and thus is peopled. The world must be peopled.
It’s interesting if you look up The Rape of the Sabine women how little actual information there is and how much art comes up. I was thinking, “I want to know more about these details and where they’re coming from.” I got one, I think Wikipedia, and everything else was, “Here’s a piece of art. Here’s a piece of art. Here’s a piece of art.” So I don’t know exactly why, but it’s been very popular to make art work about it.
There you go. I don’t know why such a small blip in history has made such an impression on artists.
The books that I’ve read over the years have suggested that rape in this context probably meant – the word itself meant capture. That does not however mean that once they captured them nothing happened. They sat back and watched anime all night or something. Other things were going on here, but somehow the men managed either to win the hearts of the women, which is the story that Rome put out, or to be a big enough military threat that dads and brothers backed off and said, “Well, we lost that one.” So that’s that.
Now shifting, Romulus becomes the first king and upon his death is deified, but we need to look for a moment at Roman religion.
Backing up, the Romans, like the Etruscans before them, and the Latins, and then going eastward like the Greeks, these were all sons/descendants of Japheth. Their religions were all very similar, and everything we’ve said about the Greeks pretty much applies to the Romans. You worship your ancestors and you worship the magical power inherent in common things and common natural operations. It’s animism, but it’s animism where everything has its god, its spirit.
We should not exactly think of personal gods. Thinking of Star Wars and the Force is probably more to the point. You can tap the power in anything. You can use the power in anything if you know the magic words, so homes and families had their gods, their spirits, their forces.
The greatest was the hearth fire. Generically it was called Vesta. Eventually Vesta became a feminine deity very powerful in the Roman pantheon. The lintels and the threshold would each have its spirit. The planting of the corn and the growing of the corn and the budding of the corn and the harvesting – every process, every act of nature was a divine act, and if you treated the gods/forces well they would be propitious. There were guardians of the storage cupboards, gods everywhere, gods galore.
We should talk just briefly about the hearth fire, because I think it’s easy to miss the significance of that in a day with central heating. The hearth fire is what causes a home to be functional. You have fire for heat, for cooking. Everything that you want a home to do requires a hearth.
It’s the same reason that the Amish don’t have central heating, because it forces them to gather as a family around the fire. It’s easy to dismiss that as a little thing like, “Oh, the Romans had a god for every little thing.” They did, but notice that this is something that’s very magical in that it causes a home to be.
Yes, and the father is the priest of the hearth fire and he knows the magic words that keep the fire doing what the fire is supposed to be doing. So as in Greece, the father and his direct lineal descendant become the root and the trunk that then leads on to the branches of this tree that is family. Interfering with that, like the wife committing adultery or not having sons or having sons rebelling, all that’s really really bad for the family, so it’s important that the father pass to the son the exact words and language of the incantations. They did not necessarily mean anything.
When we speak in English, even when a family has been out of true fellowship with the Lord for a long time, they will still oftentimes have their little prayers they will teach their children, because you teach your children to pray, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” “Father, thank you for this food,” and things like that. They’re still in English and we still know what the words mean.
Even in Harry Potter we distort the Latin to make it sound like it should mean something.
Yes. One of my joys in reading Harry Potter is that I know enough Latin to say, “That’s not Latin. I don’t know what you’re doing there but it’s obviously not even a spell.”
In Roman civilization they were worse. They were syllables and you had to pronounce them very carefully because the demonic forces behind these gods delight in wreaking havoc with the human mind and keeping men afraid that they’re going to screw up, making them walk the fine lines of insane detail just because it’s fun.
I had a friend in college who had a word. I don’t remember what the word is, which brings me grief, but it’s for when you accidentally misspeak while you’re singing a hymn in church and it makes it heretical.
We’ve all done that and guess what? The Lord knows what we meant because he’s a personal God.
Yes. It’s not about the mechanical movements of your mouth. The ancient demons were not so.
Speaking of our God’s mercies, far more common than misspeaking into heresy is not paying attention at all to what we just said. I’ve been guilty of this a lot and I’ve noticed it a lot lately. “I remember the first verse, and I think we’re on the fourth now. I will now quickly look at the screen and see what it is I just said because it’s probably important. All right, that’s good. I’m now mortified. I just really wasn’t paying attention to the Lord while I was talking to him. That’s not a good thing.”
There’s a couple things that come with this. First, a lot of these powers were seen not simply in individual operations, but in the operations of whole groups of people like the state or the family or the priesthood. We begin in Rome to get something that they called colleges, which meant collections. It’s from the Latin word that means to draw together, to collect, to speak together.
We have the colleges of priests, the college of the vestal virgins who represent Vesta, so religion is becoming institutionalized. It is moving from just what people do in the privacy of their home to shaping social institutions. That’s important. And of course the city of Rome again from the beginning had been a religious institution.
Something else that goes with this is the idea that modes of living are also representative of divine forces. You mentioned Aeneas’ piety. Piety is actually one of the classic virtues. It’s an expression of the magical or divine forces that work in the universe that humans should seek to pursue and embody and live out. There’s a list of them. I’ll just read some of these. They mostly speak for themselves:
Piety, gravity (which means seriousness), discipline, industry (hard work and diligence), clemency (forgiving people, giving up your rights for practicing mercy), virtue (manliness, strength, power), frugality (living a simple lifestyle). This was important as late as some of the Caesars who lived very simple lifestyles just to make a point of how virtuous or frugal they were.
This is important because as we pass through the kingdom, we pass through the republic and the republic begins to fade forever, we finally come to the empire. The writers are pointing back to ancient Rome, to semi-mythical times, and saying, “Oh, if only we only had the virtues of our fathers,” and these are good kinds of virtues they were talking about.
The question for us as Christians has got to be, alright, first of all we could admit that most of these things have some vague correspondence to Christian virtues. They’re not exactly the same, and each one has a precise definition that may catch us off-guard, but at least superficially we can say they’re “family values” as we would have said a generation ago.
But then the question becomes whether they simply value these things but never really live them, or whether in fact for a generation or two they did live them, the question becomes why?
Yes, and where did they get the ideas? This is fairly late in human history. This is a huge dose of common grace, any way you look at it, even simply to know this is how we should be living. We shouldn’t be killing people, we should be forgiving people, we should be working hard at our jobs, and those kinds of things.
You go into other parts of the world and there are whole civilizations that don’t believe this, but the Romans either did or pretended they did or wanted to believe that they did. Where did that come from? This would be the time to again consult chronology the best we can and ask is there a Hebrew influence at work here? Did these people for a short time have some kind of contact with the Bible?
Is there some reason we should expect that they would have some understanding of these things?
Short of God intervening, there’s no particular reason they should. Remember, we’re way after the Trojan War. We’re not far from Homer and Hesiod, and so we’re not far from the Greek philosophers. Why did the Romans value these things?
As we look at Israel’s history we can look backward and we can look forward. If we look backward we have Solomon and his navies sailing the world and probably interacting, and then the whole world coming to Solomon’s court to hear his wisdom, so there’s one huge explosion of common grace, of God’s word reaching out and having some sort of effect on the world around it.
Later on, going forward in Israel’s history we’re not apparently to the time of the fall of Israel and then later the fall of Judah, although we’re awfully close. Was there something there? Or as things got bad in Judah and Israel did people start leaving? How is it that this happened here? There has not been anything like enough serious historical work on the part of Christian historians to try to come up with answers like that. We do have books as early as the Church fathers asking, “Did Plato read Moses?” and this is earlier, so questions left unanswered.
When we get to the Roman laws, the Roman law was eventually written down at the insistence of the lower classes. Here are some of the things that are there:
If a man has broken or bruised a freeman’s bone with his hand or club he shall undergo a penalty of 300 pieces. If it’s a slave, 150 pieces.
If any person who destroys by burning any building or heap of corn deposited alongside a house, he shall be bound and scourged and put to death by burning at the stake, provided he’s committed the said misdeed with malice aforethought. But if he shall commit it by accident or negligence it is ordained that he repair the damage, or if he be too poor to be competent for such punishment he shall receive a lighter punishment.
If a theft has been done by night, if the owner kills the thief, the thief shall be held to be lawfully killed.
All of those – the last one especially – are almost verbatim from Moses. What’s the connecting link? Of course the liberal answer is, “Well, the redactors of the Old Testament who lived after Ezra no doubt had some intercourse with this, as they did with the Code of Hammurabi, and they just stole from the pagans because it sounds good.” That’s not the timeline, though. If there’s borrowing, the 12 tablets are borrowing from Moses. If so, how, why, when, and under what circumstances?
They’re marvelous questions that apparently the Church fathers didn’t know the answer to. Oddly enough, we probably have more access to more documents than they did, and ours are all computerized and we have search functions. We just need to start using them and seeing what we can come up with.
I’m wondering if this demonstrates some of our presuppositions in the modern Enlightenment thinking because they looked back to the Romans as a great source of what we would call kind of neutral reasoning, rationalism and those sorts of things, which as we’re describing them obviously they’re not, but there was a lot of looking back to Greek and Roman ideas in the 1700s, simultaneously elevating a lot of these virtues for their own sake because they rationally looked good and like the right way to live.
It's kind of an interesting thought that they looked back and saw the Romans upholding these things, and because of their presuppositions didn’t look for any Christian influence. They just assumed, “Oh, they rationally figured it out just like we’re rationally figuring it out, because we’re ignoring all influence of Christianity on us,” and they then ignore it on the Romans, too, or any more ancient civilization. It’s an interesting interplay.
I do want to put a little bit of a curb in that we do need to be cautious of doing history by deciding what happened, and then going back and looking for evidence. That’s not what we’re advocating here.
No, it’s more just an interesting similarity that I saw. I was like, “Oh, those are really similar virtues to what Enlightenment thinkers said, ‘Oh, we can figure these things out just by thinking in our own minds,’” and they ignored other influences from religious sources.
A couple things along those lines. Yes, we cannot create history through our questions, but we can have questions. Once we understand on a biblical basis that man is not naturally good, that he does not naturally create value or live out the precepts of scripture, we should raise the question then of what happened here? Are we misunderstanding it? Does it just look good? Is there a source of what theologians often call common grace, an overflowing of God’s goodness into the cultures because of the presence of his Word and of his servants? Or is it something else?
This is one of the reasons we study history, is to ask the questions, “Why did this happen? What can we learn from it?”
In this case we’re looking at something that is clearly in accordance with the words that God spoke to Moses and asking, “How did this get here?” It doesn’t spring up from nowhere. So that’s what we’re doing. We don’t want to be deciding the verdict before we start the trial, but when we look at something that exists somewhere else we can ask, “How did this get from A to B?”
You both know the story of Peace Child. It’s possible that that was a direct steal. It’s also possible that it wasn’t, that somehow human consciousness, imprinted as it is with the image of God, came to – we know that all those other cultures came up with the idea of child sacrifice as a way of maintaining peace with the gods and with one another. Was that all a remembrance of Genesis 3:15 and the sacrificed lamb, or was it just what is the human heart? God has set eternity in their hearts. Don Richardson has a book by that title that goes along with Peace Child.
Again this is where we begin asking questions, and that’s what I’m suggesting at some point. Probably not right now because we’ve got better things to do right now, but at some point along the line. Maybe historians in a couple hundred years, when computers are better and we have more things committed to databases, will start using their search functions to see if there are connections and maybe believe their ancestors, although certainly sinful as we are, were not therefore necessarily stupid about everything. Some of the things they said might actually bear some investigation. There are all kinds of things we can talk about with regard to the philosophy of history.
Another thing that Rachel mentioned, and I was just about to get there when she took what she thought was a tangent and isn’t – you spoke of discovering the virtues. Roman education was very limited. Fathers taught their sons. There weren’t generally schools. Formal education as we think of it was not something they prized. Fathers would teach their sons to read so they could read the law, but an awful lot of Roman education was fathers telling their sons stories about the great heroes of the past and how they behaved virtuously.
The man Cinncinnatus refused to receive the office of dictator until he was properly draped in his tunic, the robe of office, because you have to do these things right and officially…
The man Horatio holds the bridge against the invaders, and then cuts it and falls into the stream below in the ravine…
These kinds of stories were very common. I ran into them in my own education in two ways. First, McGuffey’s Readers. McGuffey’s Readers were America’s attempt to present a Christian education without Christ. They wanted to present virtues, but they didn’t want to appeal to scripture because if we talk about the Bible we all disagree and we’re from all different churches, or lack of churches as the case may be in the case of some of the Deists and Unitarians, but then the Unitarians had their churches – so we can’t go there because we all disagree about the Bible. So let’s find other sources of virtue – all the Roman stories. McGuffey’s Readers are rather full of those.
When I started learning Latin, which I think was the 5th grade, and we got past, “See the girl. The girl has a frog. The girl shows the frog to the sailor,” once we got past those stories and started actually reading something akin to Latin stories, they were the same stories of Roman heroes doing virtuous things because it was the right and noble thing to do. It was not even an appeal to the gods, just this is what’s right, this is what good boys and girls do.
I think Rachel hit it pretty squarely. If you read our Founding Fathers, they did not like the Greeks. They did not like Greek democracy. They thought it was horrible, but they loved the Romans so we have a Senate, which was a Roman form of government. We have a republic, res publica, the things that are public.
American history has made a big deal over the fact that we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic. That’s true as far as it goes and it’s a good thing to remind people of. Rachel, didn’t you write a paper once about when we started calling ourselves a democracy?
I think it was in high school and it therefore is very, very far back in my memory. I believe it was the 20th century before that became a common term in our country.
I think it was somewhere around that time where that became kind of a new buzzword that had not previously been in use much.
In a democracy, every voting citizen of age who’s a landholder and not a slave or outsider, who has citizenship, who’s a male, gets one vote, but to execute that one vote you have to be present where everybody is discussing the issue. It’s the rule of the majority, 50% + 1. And if you can’t get everybody together in the same room you don’t have a democracy. You have something else.
The creation of television, radio, and now the internet gives us the impression, “Oh, we can get around that now because we can all be in the room virtually.” It’s not the same thing, not remotely, but our generation has been brainwashed into thinking it is, that we’ve always been a democracy.
The problem going the other direction is with conservatives. I’m thinking here particularly of people like the John Birch Society and even some of our Christian friends in “isn’t America great?” circles. They’ve also gone down this path, that simply having a republic over democracy automatically guarantees us so much better government and so much better freedom.
The thing that makes a republic is that you can have representative government and therefore you can have a much bigger population and much larger territory, and you have fixed written laws that can’t be altered.
Those are slightly better than a democracy, but we need to understand that just as the Greek democracy came out of demonic society, the Roman republic came out of a demonic society. These are different versions of pagan governments, and although we can distinguish the one from the other, simply adopting some outward forms ain’t gonna do it. Wasting all our time trying to reassert America as a republic is not the solution here. What America needs is Christ, however Christ may choose to manifest political reign. There have been Christian monarchies and Christian village communities and Christian empires. And the weak link in all of them is this thing called man and sin.
Right. None of these forms of government are infallible, nor are they meant to be.
No. They’re all extremely limited, and to define America as Christian because of her form of government is to misunderstand a lot of things.
It is easier to appropriate Roman culture and virtues, shall we say, than Greek, because the Romans were so practical as a people and, like you say, the stories. A good story is a good story, man. I want to hear about Horatio at the gate, just like I want to hear Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. They’re not the gospel, but they sure are good stories and you can turn them to different purposes.
And often do. Along those lines, there’s a quote I have from Will Durant. He and his wife wrote a multivolume series, The History of Western Civilization, which I do recommend and I understand historians generally don’t because Durant’s a storyteller and therefore not a scholar, by their standards, but he says this of Rome –
“The typical educated Roman of this age was orderly, conservative, loyal, sober, reverent, tenacious, severe, practical. He enjoyed discipline and would have no nonsense about liberty. He obeyed as a training for command. He took it for granted that the government had a right to inquire into his morals as well as his income, and to value him purely according to his services to the state. He distrusted individuality and genius. He had none of the charm, vivacity, and unstable fluency of the Attic Greek. He admired character and will as the Greek admired freedom and intellect; and organization was his forte. He lacked imagination, even to make a mythology of his own. He could with some effort love beauty, but he could seldom create it. He had no use for pure science and was suspicious of philosophy as a devilish dissolvent of ancient beliefs and ways. He could not, for the life of him, understand Plato, or Archimedes, or Christ. He could only rule the world."
But thou, O Roman, learn with sovereign sway
To rule the nations. Thy great art shall be
To keep the world in lasting peace, to spare
humbled foe, and crush to earth the proud.
I think those are good samplings of what Roman character and thought and life were all about.
Yes, very much so, not prophetic or priestly in the biblical sense, even remotely.
One of the things that fits in with all of this, as Rome began to interact with other nations she realized fairly early that other nations had laws that weren’t hers. The great genius of Rome really, at least in terms of public relations and world conquest, was it treated each conquered nation differently.
It looked at the genius – and by the way, ‘genius’ is again a Roman concept, the spirit, the force, the magical power inherent in the institution – they looked at the genius of each nation and said, “What do you want? What deal can we cut with you? You can be our slaves, you can be our partners, you could be our brothers, you could be people who work for us, you could be people who get taxed, you could have Roman citizenship. What deal is going to cement our relationship here and cause us the least trouble, while guaranteeing us the power to come and go, get tax money, and have people for armies?”
In that respect, this was Roman genius. Again this was their way of looking at the world. Every other nation said, “Do it our way or that’s that.” Rome said, “We’ll work with you here.”
In the process, as they looked at other laws they realized that there’s going to be some disputes and differences. “We do things this way. To us it makes perfect sense, but you do it that way for reasons of your own weird culture. We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to mess with that, so we’re going to set up a judge whose sole function is to balance out, mix, and coordinate the laws of Rome with the laws of all of these individual nations. We want a common law of nations, as it were, a natural law common to all that we can access by practical trial and error and by reason that will fill out an empire.”
So we have the first practical glimmerings of what will become natural law, the simple realization that law is religious and we’ve got a lot of religions, so we’ve got to make this work somehow. We’re going to set up our guy just to do that, it’s such a big job.
This is a good place because we go through a bunch of kings and then we change to the republic, and at that point there are many other things to say. I suspect next time it will be the life of the republic to the coming of Caesar, and then we’ll see what we can do with that.
My recommendation is going to be the book Going Postal by Terry Pratchett. It’s a novel of Discworld. I forget what made me think of it in this context, but it seemed appropriate and I’m sure if you read it and enjoy it you will find out why.
Recommendation: Going PostalOh, you know what it was? It was the oddly-specific gods. In this fictional world there’s a shrine to the goddess of things that get stuck in drawers so that you can’t open them. It’s quite humorous and quite on the nose for Roman culture.
I’m going to say I’m not sure that was humorous where Rome is concerned. That’s exactly the kind of gods they had. I want to talk to the god of stolen pens, who lives right next to the goddess of stolen socks, and then the one of stolen spoons. Over the last ten years we have had a rash of each of these in turn, with no explanations.
I’m going to recommend a book, not because it’s the greatest book ever written but because it summarizes a lot of material about Rome really quickly. It’s a fairly short book and you can usually find it as a used paperback. It’s simply called The Romans and is by R.H. Barrow, published in 1949. As I say, it’s a small paperback, well-organized and easily readable.
Recommendation: The RomansMost Christians will not have a problem with it until they get to the section that involves Christianity, because the guy doesn’t like Christians, but if you get to the last couple chapters and just blow past him, his study of Roman culture and society is well-done, laid out, quick, and specific to the point.
Mine’s a little different. I am going to recommend meditating on Ecclesiastes 7, because you did it this past week in Bible study and David and I have brought it up to each other more than a dozen times just in the last few days. Even right after Bible study we had a very good discussion over the particular verses of “Be not overmuch righteous or overmuch wicked.”
Recommendation: Meditating on Ecclesiastes 7Most people tend to be more towards one or more towards the other. Are we always trying to get away with things, or are we always overly fastidious about things? And what silly things are we overly fastidious about, in our case? But also just the way that Solomon reminds us that God purposefully does not do things the way we expect, so that we will never feel that we have control and we can figure out what God is doing.
So even in, for example, the election that’s going on right now, it’s so easy to be like, “Oh, I can see exactly what God is doing, and he’s going to do this, this, and this.” We really have no idea. We don’t need to be trying to figure it all out. God knows what he’s doing.
We’ve just benefited so much from that chapter in the last few days so I’m going to recommend that to our listeners.
Praise God. One of my favorite chapters and in our house also much-referenced.
One verse of Ecclesiastes that comes into my mind is 12:12 where it says of learning and books there’s no end. It’s just stuff.
Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight and I look forward to digging into the Roman republic with you next time.
A big thank you to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. A big thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. And thank you to you for listening. If you’d like to get in touch with us – I was going to say you can visit our website, which I guess is a thing you can do. It’s at anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. It’s been a while since I said our website.
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