In its mystical or evolutionary form, the religious impulse may be seen as man’s attempt to escape the limitations of left-brain consciousness. Human beings, alone of all animals, developed this divided form of consciousness in order to be able to concentrate on the particular. We needed to learn to cope with problems and intricacies that would have given any other creature a nervous breakdown. This ability carries heavy penalties: tension, headache, exasperation, a sense of entrapment.
For various reasons, the people of Europe developed left-brain consciousness a great deal faster than the people of the east – of India and China, for example. This could simply be due to later development in the east; rice was not introduced into China until 2000 B.C., bringing about an agricultural revolution that made large communities possible. Even under the Shang dynasty, which began around 1500 B.C. – the time of the destruction of the Minoan Empire – China remained a country of small villages and farms. The sheer vastness of the country meant that the majority of its people lived in peace, far from the incursions of border raiders – it was not until the third century B.C. that Shih Huang ordered the building of the Great Wall. Similar reasons probably explain why India remained an essentially ‘right-brain’ culture, even after the incursion of the Aryans – who became an aristocratic warrior class – around 1500 B.C. (Again, we observe this odd coincidence of dates.) India’s first contact with the megalomaniac left-brain mentality occurred when Alexander the Great invaded in 327 B.C. (although the Persians had made north-western India a province two centuries earlier). And Alexander’s conquests hardly took him beyond the Indus. Significantly, the unrest that followed his death led to the founding of the first Indian Empire under Chandragupta. Asoka was his grandson; and we have seen that he gave a completely new meaning to the notion of empire.
It was probably the earlier rise of agriculture in the Mediterranean – the ability of its farmers to feed large conglomerations of people – that led to its accelerated development; so did the fact that it was so much more vulnerable to invasion. The Romans developed from simple agriculturalists to empire builders in a few centuries, while the same development in China and India took millennia. The Mediterranean was a Darwinian forcing house, where success was achieved at the cost of ruthlessness. The Greeks had been concerned with questions about the universe and the nature and destiny of man; but the miseries of the Peloponnesian war made the Athenians as cruel and ruthless as the Romans who later destroyed Carthage. When Melos expressed a desire for independence in 428 B.C. the Athenians killed all the males and sold the women and children into slavery. Thucydides said that the trouble with Athens was that it was unable to make up its mind; new leaders would be elected one day and executed the next. The philosophical temperament was unfitted for survival in the Mediterranean.
No one could accuse the Romans of being unable to make up their minds. When they made a decision, they stuck to it. And while Rome was fighting for its life against Etruscans and Gauls, this quality gave them greatness. The Etruscans were also philosophers; they had a touch of the eastern temperament; they vanished from history. Rome, with the magnificent simplicity of a healthy peasant, went on cutting down its enemies with the short sword. The riches of Carthage made the Romans greedy; and, like the Persians before them, they began to pay too much attention to the pleasures of the bed and the table. In this new situation of ‘conspicuous consumption’, the lack of imagination that had made them great now made them brutish and short sighted – neither of them qualities that conduce to survival. At the point when the Romans could afford to be influenced by the Greeks and think about larger questions, they were incapable of thinking beyond the needs of the present moment. So in spite of emperors like Augustus, Claudius, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, the decline of Rome was irreversible.
The rest of the story of Rome is mainly one of criminal violence. It began immediately after the death of Sulla in 78 B.C. The roads of Italy, and even of Rome itself, were overrun with robbers and murder became commonplace. The sea was suddenly full of pirates – Mommsen calls it ‘the golden age of buccaneers’. It became so bad that only about a third of the corn Rome imported from Africa and Egypt actually reached Roman ports. Pirate vessels were usually light craft with shallow draught and a formidable turn of speed. They could follow a merchantman at a distance, too low in the water to be seen, and attack by night – sometimes even following the merchantman into port, killing the man on watch and slipping out again before dawn loaded with plunder. Men and women were prized as much as other booty, for they could be sold as slaves. The Greek island of Delos became virtually a slave market, with tens of thousands changing hands every day. The pirates were soon strong enough and rich enough to demand ‘protection’ money from ports and to use them when they needed repairs. The province of Cilicia, in what is now southern Turkey, became a pirate stronghold. Rome was largely responsible for all these outlaws, for the destruction of cities like Corinth and Carthage had left large numbers of people with no other means of livelihood.
Five years after the death of Sulla, a gladiator named Spartacus – a deserter from the Roman army who had been caught and enslaved – escaped from the gladiator school at Capua and hid on Mount Vesuvius, together with a small band of slaves. As other slaves heard about the group, they came and joined them. Then, because they knew they would be tortured to death if they were recaptured, they fought like demons against the armies sent out against them and achieved a remarkable series of victories. The Romans were stunned – they had come to believe that their armies were invincible. Worse still, they had no competent general to send against the rebels – their best man, Pompey, was away in Spain fighting another rebel. Eventually, the Romans decided to appoint a millionaire called Crassus – an opportunist who had made his fortune buying up the land of proscribed senators and by setting up Rome’s first fire brigade.
Crassus was lucky. Their string of victories had turned the slaves into a murderous rabble whose only interests were murder and rape. On a small scale, Spartacus’s slaves were repeating the history of Rome: effort and determination leading to success, and success leading to degeneration and viciousness. Drunk with revenge and plunder, the slaves refused Spartacus’s pleas to leave Italy; they were enjoying themselves too much. Against Spartacus’s better judgement, they charged into battle against the well-trained Roman army, which hacked them to pieces. Spartacus was killed in battle and six thousand of his followers were crucified along the road to Rome.
Pompey came rushing back from Spain in time to cut down the fugitives. He then managed to arrive in Rome before Crassus and was awarded a full-scale triumph; Crassus had to be content with a more modest victory parade.
This Pompey – known as ‘the Great’ after an early triumph in Africa – was another soldier cast in the same mould as Marius and Sulla: a formidable general (with more than a touch of vainglory), an honest man, but a less than brilliant politician. Two years after his ‘victory’ over Spartacus, he stood for consul; when the patricians rejected him as too young (he was thirty-six) he changed sides and joined the people’s party, of which Crassus was a leading light. So was a younger man named Julius Caesar, a nephew of Marius, whose talents had been so obvious when he was in his early twenties that it was only with difficulty that the dictator Sulla was dissuaded from having him killed. Like his uncle Marius, Caesar dreamed of glory and triumph. This oddly assorted trio – the egotistical general, the good natured millionaire and the rather foppish young intellectual – entered into a partnership that would eventually make them masters of Rome.
During the war with Spartacus, the pirates had become bolder than ever and the Romans were desperate. Half their corn was being intercepted. Coastal towns had been raided and sacked so many times that the survivors had simply moved inland. The pirates landed where they pleased, and often roamed around until they found someone who was worth kidnapping for ransom. When they had raided a town or village, they relaxed on the sea shore to enjoy themselves; but – unlike Ulysses – they were seldom surprised by an avenging army. The Romans felt a terrible sense of helplessness: there were so many pirate vessels all over the Mediterranean, and the strongest army could do nothing against them.