The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

This new version of Christianity appealed to gentiles as much as Jews. Anyone of any sensitivity only had to look at the Rome of Tiberius, Caligula and Nero to understand just what Paul meant about the fall of man. These sex-mad drunkards were a living proof that something had gone wrong. And the Roman matrons who took up prostitution for pleasure revealed that Eve had fallen just as far as Adam. The world was nauseated by Roman brutality, Roman materialism and Roman licentiousness. Christianity sounded a deeper note; it offered a vision of meaning and purpose, a vision of seriousness. For the strong, it was a promise of new heights of awareness. For the weak, it was a message of peace and reconciliation, of rest for the weary, of reward for the humble. And for everyone, it promised an end to the kingdom of Caesar, with its crucifixions, floggings and arbitrary executions. The Christians hoped it was a promise of the end of the world.

For a while, it looked as if that promise was about to be fulfilled, just as the god-man had foretold. Nero was indeed the last of the hereditary Caesars. And in the reign of his successor Titus – the man who besieged Jerusalem – there was a plague in Rome, followed by another great fire. In 79 A.D., Mount Vesuvius erupted, causing a darkness that lasted for days, and burying Pompeii and its sister town Herculaneum under many feet of muddy ash. Fortunately, most of the inhabitants escaped; but the curiosity of the naturalist Pliny cost him his life – he sailed across the bay to see what was happening and was asphyxiated.

Incredibly, Rome had still not learnt its lesson: that allowing a man to become Caesar merely because he is the ‘next in line’ is a sure formula for creating mad dictators. It happened again when the good-natured Titus died (after only two years in power). He was succeeded by his surly brother Domitian – who had been jealous of Titus – a man whose temperament resembled that of Tiberius. But he was soon behaving rather worse. After an attempted rebellion of the Rhine troops, he extracted confessions by a new form of torture -holding a blazing torch under the prisoners’ genitals (he seems to have been a homosexual sadist); after which he held mass executions. There followed the usual vicious circle of tyranny; as he became more suspicious of plots, he became a madman, having senators executed on trivial charges and courtiers crucified upside down for chance remarks. (One member of the audience in the newly-built Colosseum was dragged into the arena, tied up and torn to pieces by wild dogs for a mildly offensive joke.) The more violent he became, the more his subjects plotted against him. We know rather less about his crimes than about those of earlier Caesars, for by the time Suetonius reached Domitian (the last of his Twelve Caesars) he had grown tired of cataloguing horrors; but it seems clear that Domitian was as bad as the worst of the emperors. As with Caligula, his madness took the form of self-aggrandisement; he insisted on being addressed as ‘Lord God’ and had endless gold statues and triumphal arches erected to himself all over the empire. (To do him justice, he had remarkable successes as a general against Germans and Dacians.) And because he regarded himself as a god, he ordered violent persecution of the Christians, who had the temerity to refuse to pay homage to his divinity. (The followers of the religion of Mithras, which came from Persia and was equally popular at the time, had no such problem and so escaped persecution.)

The non-stop slaughter made Domitian’s assassination inevitable, and it finally happened in 96 A.D., the fifteenth year of his reign. Suetonius, who lived through Domitian’s reign, was able to procure a remarkable first-hand account of the killing. Soothsayers had prophesied the death, and Domitian was even told when to expect it – in the fifth hour of the day. At dawn, he condemned to death a German soothsayer who had prophesied bloodshed. Domitian scratched a pimple on his forehead and made it bleed, commenting: ‘I hope this is all the blood that needs to be shed.’ He asked his servant the time, and the man – who was in the plot – answered ‘Six o’clock.’ Domitian heaved a sigh of relief and went off to his bath. On the way there, he was told that a man had arrived with news of another plot and was now waiting in his bedroom; so Domitian hurried back. The assassin was waiting for him, holding a list of names of people supposed to be in the plot; as Domitian read it, the man stabbed him in the groin. Domitian grappled with him and fought like an animal. He shouted to his boy to hand him the dagger from under his pillow, then run for help. But the conspirators had removed the blade of the dagger and locked the door. Domitian tried lo wrestthe knife away from the assassin, and cut his fingers to the bone; then he tried to claw out the man’s eyes. The assassin managed to go on stabbing until Domitian collapsed and died. The news of his death brought universal rejoicing. His name was removed from all public monuments.

And at last, even Rome had learnt the lesson: that power can turn a despot into a homicidal maniac, and that the solution was not to leave the choice of emperor to chance or heredity but to select him with some care. The result was five excellent rulers – Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius – and almost a century of peace and prosperity. Nerva, selected by the senate, was seventy at the time and died two years later. But he had chosen as his successor a brilliant general, Trajan, who proved to be a second Julius Caesar. In his nineteen-year reign he conquered the Dacians to the north of the Danube and the Parthians to the east of the Euphrates, and pushed the bounds of the Roman Empire to its farthest limits. What he failed to see was that, in over-extending Rome’s manpower, he was leaving a considerable problem to most of his successors – a problem that would be solved only with the final collapse of the empire nearly four centuries later.

However, his successor – his cousin Hadrian – recognised the problem, and began his reign by contracting his eastern boundaries. This had the desired effect, and enabled Hadrian to spend most of his long reign making a leisurely tour of his empire. The roads were now safe, the seas free from pirates. As he wandered at large from Egypt to Scotland, Hadrian built roads, aqueducts, theatres, bridges, temples, even cities – the discovery of concrete enabled his engineers to build faster and more magnificently than ever before.

Hadrian had the interesting idea of choosing two emperors to reign jointly, like the consuls of old; they were called Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus; and since both were little more than children when Hadrian’s health began to fail, he appointed a caretaker emperor, Antoninus Pius. In the old days this would have been a certain formula for murder and despotism; but Hadrian had chosen well. Antoninus ruled peacefully for twenty-three years, and had Hadrian declared a god.

When the two consul-emperors came to the throne – in 161 A.D. – the age of peace had come to an end. For almost half a century, Rome had basked in a golden age; now the barbarians were again at the frontiers. The result was that Rome’s only philosopher-emperor, Marcus Aurelius (his fellow emperor died after eight years), had to spend most of his reign raising armies and marching to remote parts of his empire.

Marcus Aurelius was a stoic, and the stoics regarded life as a difficult voyage in which most men are shipwrecked; they felt that man’s only chance of escaping shipwreck was through reason and self-discipline. The emperor had good reason to take a stoical view of existence; he had to jot down his famous Meditations in his tent between battles. His wife Faustina was constantly unfaithful, and his son Commodus was a spoilt young man who became one of the worst emperors Rome had ever known. At one point, Marcus Aurelius even had to sell all the treasures in his palace to replenish the treasury. When he died at the age of fifty-nine, the task of shoring up the Roman Empire was still uncompleted. Yet the Meditations reveal that he had achieved the serenity of a man who knows that the key to the mystery of existence lies in the mind itself. In the murderous history of the Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius stands out like a beacon.

If he noticed that his son was a vicious ruffian, it was too late to prevent his becoming emperor. The moment his father died, Commodus abandoned the war against the northern tribesmen and rushed back to Rome to enjoy himself. He changed the name of Rome to Commodiana, voted himself the name ‘Hercules’ and behaved exactly like every bad emperor in Rome’s violent history. Nero had been an aesthete; Commodus liked to think of himself as an athlete. His greatest pleasure was to fight in the arena against carefully chosen opponents – whom he despatched with his sword – and to take part in the chariot races. He boasted that he had killed thousands of opponents with his left hand only. This homicidal maniac was probably insane. He would dress up as Hercules and then walk about hitting people with his club. An attempt on his life made him paranoid, and he proceeded to execute senators by the dozen. Finally, when it became clear that no one’s life was safe, his own mistress poisoned him, then a wrestler throttled him. In a mere twelve years, he undid all the good work of the previous four emperors and left Rome bankrupt.