Caesar and Christ

Summary

Caesar and Christ is the third volume of Will Durant's Story of Civilization, subtitled A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from Their Beginnings to A.D. 325. Published in 1944, in the middle of the Second World War, it carries the story from the Etruscan cities that preceded Rome to the Council of Nicaea, and its title names the two forces whose meeting Durant regards as the great drama of the period. He opens with the Etruscans and the legends of the kings, then follows the early Republic's struggle between patricians and plebeians, the conquest of Italy, the long wars with Carthage and Hannibal, and expansion into the Greek East. The century of the Gracchi, Marius and Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar and Antony appears as a revolution in which the institutions of a city-state broke under the strain of empire, new wealth, slave labor and private armies. Augustus's settlement opens the long central portion of the book. Here Durant mixes political narrative with broad portraits of Roman literature (Virgil, Horace, Livy and Ovid, then Seneca, Lucan, Tacitus and Juvenal), of law, engineering, religion, commerce and daily life in the capital, and of the emperors from Tiberius and Nero to the Antonines, with Marcus Aurelius as the philosopher-ruler whose son Commodus closes a golden age. A tour of the provinces, from Gaul, Spain and Britain to Greece, Egypt, Syria and Judea, presents the empire as a federation of peoples rather than a single city. The final part turns to Christianity. Durant treats the Gospels as historical documents to be sifted, sets miracles outside the historian's competence, and yet argues that the figure of Jesus is too original and too consistent to have been invented by a few disciples within a generation. He follows Paul and the apostles, the persecutions, the growth of bishops, creeds and canon, and the third-century crisis of debased coinage, civil war and frontier collapse, ending with Diocletian's reorganization and Constantine's adoption of the Christian cause. In closing reflections on why Rome declined, he weighs economic, demographic, political and moral explanations and places the chief causes inside Roman society rather than in barbarian invasion or in the new faith, while presenting the Church as heir to much of Rome's order. Durant's admiration for Roman law and administration, for the Stoic emperors and for the endurance of the martyrs is plain, as is his distaste for the cruelty of the arena and for imperial excess. The book is a popular synthesis of the scholarship of its time rather than original research, and its account of early Christianity is a respectful naturalist's reading, neither a believer's confession nor a debunking. Students can use it to orient themselves before reading Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, Marcus Aurelius and Eusebius, testing Durant's portraits against those witnesses.

Plot or Argument

• Etruscan prelude and the early Republic

  Durant begins with Etruscan art, religion and city life, then narrates the expulsion of the kings, the struggle of the orders that won the plebeians tribunes and written law, and the gradual subjugation of Italy.

• Carthage, Hannibal and the turn eastward

  The Punic Wars, with Hannibal's invasion of Italy and Scipio's victory at Zama, lead to the destruction of Carthage and Corinth and to Rome's absorption of Greek art, philosophy and luxury, which Cato resists.

• The Roman revolution, from the Gracchi to Actium

  Land reform and its violent suppression, Marius's professional army, Sulla's proscriptions, Cicero's defense of the Republic, Caesar's conquest of Gaul and dictatorship, his assassination, and the civil wars that end with Octavian's victory over Antony and Cleopatra.

• Augustus and the Principate

  Durant describes the Augustan settlement, the moral and religious reforms of the new regime, and the literature of the age, with chapters on Virgil, Horace, Livy and Ovid.

• Emperors, writers and the life of the city

  From Tiberius through Nero, the Flavians and the Antonines, the narrative alternates imperial politics with Silver Age literature, Roman law, engineering, commerce, religion, games and the daily life of the capital, ending with Marcus Aurelius and Commodus.

• The provinces of the empire

  A survey of Italy beyond Rome, the western provinces, Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria and Judea shows Roman rule as a federation of cultures and prepares the ground for the Jewish background of Christianity.

• Jesus and the apostles

  Durant weighs the sources for Jesus, sketches his teaching on the Kingdom, the Father and love of enemies, recounts the Passion, and then follows Peter and Paul and the spread of the first Christian communities.

• Crisis of the empire and triumph of the Church

  The third-century collapse under soldier emperors, plague and inflation, the persecutions of Decius and Diocletian, the growth of Church organization and doctrine, Constantine's conversion and Nicaea, followed by Durant's reflections on the causes of Rome's decline.

Characters

• Will Durant, author and narrator-historian

  American popular historian whose admiring, epigrammatic and naturalistic voice shapes the whole narrative.

• Hannibal, Carthaginian general

  Invader of Italy in the Second Punic War, drawn by Durant as Rome's most dangerous enemy.

• Cato the Elder, Roman censor and orator

  Defender of old Roman austerity against Greek influence and advocate of Carthage's destruction.

• Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, tribunes of the plebs

  Reformers whose land laws and violent deaths open the revolutionary century.

• Cicero, orator, statesman and philosopher

  Constitutional republican whose letters and speeches Durant uses as a window on the Republic's last years.

• Julius Caesar, general and dictator

  Conqueror of Gaul whose dictatorship and murder Durant treats as the hinge of Roman history.

• Augustus, first emperor (27 B.C.-A.D. 14)

  Founder of the Principate whose settlement brings peace at the cost of republican liberty.

• Virgil, poet

  Author of the Aeneid, presented as the voice of Augustan Rome's hopes.

• Nero, emperor (54-68)

  Ruler whose cruelty and first persecution of Christians after the fire of Rome mark the dark side of the Principate.

• Seneca, Stoic philosopher and statesman

  Nero's tutor and minister, compelled to take his own life after the Pisonian conspiracy.

• Marcus Aurelius, emperor (161-180) and Stoic

  The philosopher-king of the Antonine age whose reign was burdened by frontier wars and plague.

• Jesus of Nazareth, founder of Christianity

  Subject of a chapter in which Durant weighs the sources and defends the historical reality of the figure.

• Paul of Tarsus, apostle to the Gentiles

  Missionary and letter writer whom Durant credits with shaping Christian theology for the Greco-Roman world.

• Diocletian, emperor (284-305)

  Reorganizer of the empire and author of the last great persecution.

• Constantine, emperor (306-337)

  Convert who favored the Church and summoned the Council of Nicaea, where the volume ends.

Lessons

• When a republic outgrows its constitution

  Durant presents the fall of the Republic as institutional failure: magistracies designed for a city could not govern a Mediterranean empire, and wealth, slavery and soldiers loyal to generals hollowed out the old virtues. Students can trace how each strongman exploited what the previous one had broken.

  • Which reform or crisis does Durant treat as the point of no return for the Republic, and do you agree?
  • How do Cicero and Caesar each understand what Rome needs, as Durant presents them?
  • What did Augustus give Romans, and what did he take away?

• A historian at the edge of the Gospels

  In the chapter on Jesus, Durant sets out the difficulties of the sources, declines to judge miracles, and still concludes that the Gospels preserve a real and astonishing person. The chapter is a case study in what historical method can and cannot settle, and in how an unbelieving historian may be pressed toward conclusions he did not set out to reach.

  • What reasons does Durant give for thinking the Gospel portrait of Jesus could not have been invented?
  • Which questions does Durant say lie beyond the historian, and is that boundary in the right place?
  • How does his treatment of the resurrection compare with the claims made in 1 Corinthians 15?

• Martyrs, bishops and the victory of the weak

  Durant explains Christianity's growth through its moral seriousness, mutual aid, organization under bishops, hope beyond death and the courage of its martyrs. Students should weigh this account of causes and ask whether a naturalistic explanation, however generous, is complete.

  • List the causes Durant gives for the spread of Christianity. Which seem strongest?
  • Why did Roman authorities persecute Christians, according to Durant, when they tolerated so many other cults?
  • Does Constantine's favor appear in the book as the Church's triumph, its danger, or both?

• Decay from within, not conquest from without

  Against explanations that blame barbarians or Christianity, Durant locates Rome's decline mainly in internal causes: economic exhaustion, depopulation, political violence and a loss of civic spirit. The argument invites comparison with Gibbon and with Augustine, who answered the same charge against Christians in 410.

  • How does Durant's explanation of Rome's decline differ from Gibbon's emphasis on religion and barbarism?
  • Which of Durant's causes could be tested against evidence, and which are moral judgments?

Context

Caesar and Christ appeared in 1944, while Allied armies were fighting their way up the Italian peninsula, and American readers met Durant's account of a republic turning into an empire and of a civilization's decline against the background of a world war and the rise and fall of modern dictatorships. Durant does not draw explicit contemporary parallels at length, but his interest in the moral foundations of civic life and in the causes of collapse reflects the anxieties of that decade. The volume also stands in a long line of English-language Roman histories after Gibbon, and it answers Gibbon's treatment of Christianity with a more sympathetic, though still naturalistic, account.

Composition

Written after The Life of Greece (1939) and published by Simon & Schuster in 1944 as Volume III of The Story of Civilization, with Will Durant as sole named author. Ariel Durant was first credited as co-author on Volume VII (1961). The book has stayed in print and was reissued as a Simon & Schuster ebook in 2011.

Reception

Like the other volumes, Caesar and Christ found a wide general audience and became a standard home-library introduction to Rome. Classicists and church historians have tended to regard it as a lively synthesis of older scholarship rather than research, and some of its judgments on Roman society and early Christianity have been revised by later work. Its chapter on Jesus, and especially its conclusion that the Gospel figure could not have been invented, has been widely quoted by Christian apologists as testimony from a skeptical historian.

Comparisons

• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Selections)

  Gibbon made Christianity a cause of Rome's fall and wrote of its rise with ironic detachment; Durant covers the same centuries but places decline mainly in economic and political decay and treats the early Church with greater sympathy.

• The Annals of Imperial Rome

  Durant's portraits of Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, and his account of the Neronian persecution, lean heavily on Tacitus; reading the Annals shows how much of the emperors' reputation comes from one senatorial witness.

• The History of the Church

  Eusebius wrote the first history of Christianity up to Constantine as a believer and Constantine's admirer; comparing his account of the persecutions and of Constantine with Durant's shows two very different frames for the same events.

• Meditations

  Durant presents Marcus Aurelius as the Stoic ideal on the throne; the Meditations let students judge that portrait from the emperor's own notebooks.

• The Twelve Caesars

  Suetonius supplies many of the anecdotes about Julius Caesar and the early emperors that enliven Durant's narrative; his gossip-heavy biographies help students see where Durant's color comes from.

• The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives

  Plutarch's lives of Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero cover the revolutionary century Durant narrates and supply the moral portraiture he often adapts.

• The Aeneid

  Durant reads Virgil's epic as the poetic charter of Augustan Rome; the poem itself complicates that reading with its sympathy for Dido and Turnus.

• The Age of Faith

  The next volume resumes at Constantine and follows the Christian empire, Islam and the medieval West, so Durant's closing judgments on the Church's inheritance of Rome are tested in the following volume.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The Etruscan opening. Notice what Durant thinks Rome borrowed from its neighbors before it conquered them, and how that sets up his view of Rome as a great adapter of other peoples' achievements.
• Durant's account of the Gracchi. Watch how he balances sympathy for land reform against the violence it unleashed on both sides, and how that pattern repeats with Marius, Sulla and Caesar.
• The chapter on Jesus. Note the objections to the sources that Durant lists, the ones he answers, and the conclusion he finally draws about whether the Gospel figure was invented.
• The persecutions under Nero, Decius and Diocletian. Ask what reasons Durant gives for Roman hostility and how he describes the martyrs' response.
• Durant's closing reflections on Rome's decline. List the causes he names and compare them with the reasons given by Gibbon and by Augustine.

Key terms and names

Patricians and plebeians

The hereditary aristocracy and the common citizens of early Rome, whose long political struggle produced the tribunate and the Twelve Tables.

Tribune of the plebs

An officer elected by the plebeians with power to veto acts of magistrates; the Gracchi used the office to push land reform.

Principate

The system founded by Augustus in which the emperor ruled as first citizen while preserving the outward forms of the Republic.

Pax Romana

The two centuries of relative peace within the empire from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius that Durant presents as Rome's great achievement.

Stoicism

The Greek philosophy of virtue, reason and acceptance of what cannot be controlled, adopted by many Romans from Cato and Seneca to Marcus Aurelius.

Council of Nicaea

The gathering of bishops summoned by Constantine in 325 to settle the Arian controversy, with which the volume ends.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What two subjects does the subtitle promise, and at what year does Durant end the volume?
2. Comprehension What did the Gracchi try to do, and how did their opponents respond?
3. Comprehension Which persecutions of Christians does Durant describe, and under which emperors?
4. Interpretation Durant admires Julius Caesar's genius while showing what his ambition cost the Republic. Does the book finally present Caesar as a savior or a destroyer of Rome?
5. Interpretation Why does Durant conclude that the Gospel portrait of Jesus is historical, and what does his method leave unanswered?
6. Interpretation According to Durant, what did Christianity offer ordinary people in the Roman world that the civic cults and philosophies did not?
7. Big Question The title sets Caesar against Christ. In what sense can a persecuted faith be said to defeat an empire, and what does that victory require of those who win it?

Faith Connections

• Matthew 22:15-22 (Scripture)

  Jesus's answer about the tribute coin, to render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's, is the clearest scriptural frame for the book's title and for the martyrs' refusal to offer sacrifice to the emperor.

• Luke 2:1-7 (Scripture)

  Luke sets the birth of Jesus under a decree of Caesar Augustus, the same emperor whose reign Durant treats as the summit of Roman order, so the two halves of the book meet in a single verse.

• Tertullian, Apology 50 (Church Fathers)

  Tertullian's argument that the blood of martyrs becomes seed for the Church is an early Christian explanation of the growth Durant tries to account for in historical terms, and students can compare the two.

• Augustine, City of God I (Great Conversation)

  Augustine answered pagans who blamed Christianity for the sack of Rome in 410; his reply anticipates the debate Durant joins in his closing reflections on why Rome declined.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Rome built a durable order of law, roads, administration and peace by absorbing the achievements of other peoples; the Republic collapsed because its city-state institutions could not govern an empire enriched by conquest and worked by slaves; the Principate restored order at the price of liberty and slowly exhausted its economy, population and civic spirit; meanwhile a movement founded by a historically real Jesus grew through moral seriousness, mutual care, organization and the courage of its martyrs; therefore Rome declined mainly from internal causes, and Christianity, rather than destroying it, inherited and preserved much of its order.

Rhetorical device: antithesis. The title pairs Caesar and Christ, and Durant builds the final part of the book around that contrast between imperial power and a persecuted faith, presenting the outcome as Christ's victory over the empire that tried to suppress his followers.

Debate: Resolved: Durant is right that Rome's decline came chiefly from internal causes rather than from barbarian invasion or the rise of Christianity.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Durant presents both the Roman Republic and the early Church as communities held together by shared virtue and threatened by wealth and power. Argue whether this parallel holds, using his account of the Gracchi or Caesar and his account of the Church under Constantine.

Comparison with The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Selections): Gibbon's fifteenth and sixteenth chapters explain the growth of Christianity and the persecutions with famous irony. Compare them with Durant's chapters on the same subjects and argue which historian better accounts for the evidence and why.

Medical Lens

A broad orientation to medicine and health in the Roman world rather than a medical history. Durant's chapters on Roman science and daily life describe Greek physicians practicing in Rome, encyclopedists such as Celsus and Pliny, and Galen's career, alongside aqueducts, sewers and public baths as works of public health. The Antonine and third-century plagues enter the narrative as part of the empire's crises. Stoic philosophy in Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius appears as a discipline for the passions that modern readers sometimes compare with cognitive therapy, and Roman attitudes toward suicide surface in the deaths of Cato and Seneca. The final chapters note Christian care for the sick and poor as one reason for the Church's growth. All of this is Durant's synthesis of 1940s scholarship; claims about mortality, sanitation and medical practice should be checked against Galen, Celsus and modern histories of ancient medicine before citation, and comparisons with modern therapy are interpretive.

• Chapters on Roman science, medicine and daily life in the Principate

  Greek physicians in Rome, the medical writing of Celsus and Pliny, surgical instruments and practice, and Galen of Pergamum at the court of Marcus Aurelius.

  Physicians Doctors Ancient Medicine Humoral Medicine Surgery
• Chapters on the city of Rome and its public works

  Aqueducts, the great sewer, public baths and the crowded tenements of the capital, as conditions of urban health and disease.

  Public Health Sanitation
• Account of Marcus Aurelius and the late Antonine age

  The epidemic carried back from the eastern campaigns in the 160s and its strain on army and population during the emperor's frontier wars.

  Plague Epidemic Death Dying
• Chapters on Stoicism and on Seneca under Nero

  Stoic teaching as a therapy of the passions in Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius; the deaths of Cato the Younger and of Seneca as Roman models of self-chosen death.

  Philosophy AS Therapy Suicide
• Final chapters on the growth of the Church and the third-century crisis

  Plague and depopulation in the third century, and Christian communities' organized care for widows, orphans and the sick as a factor in their growth.

  Plague Epidemic Nursing Caregiving

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Stage a conversation in A.D. 64, shortly after the fire of Rome, between Seneca and a Christian slave in his household, each defending a way of facing suffering and death.

• Essay

  Durant locates the causes of Rome's decline within Roman society. Choose one cause he names and argue whether the evidence he presents is sufficient, citing at least one primary source such as Tacitus or Eusebius.

• Classroom

  Build a parallel timeline with two rows, one for Roman political events and one for Christian events from the birth of Jesus to Nicaea, and mark where the two rows meet in persecution, toleration and conversion.

• Fiction

  Write the diary of a Greek physician who arrives in Rome in the age of Augustus, drawing on Durant's descriptions of Roman medicine, baths and the city's crowded streets.

Further Reading

• The Roman Revolution, Ronald Syme

  Influential 1939 study of the end of the Republic and the rise of Augustus.

• The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark

  Sociological account of early Christian growth, including Christian care for the sick during epidemics.

• Pagans and Christians, Robin Lane Fox

• The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown

• Ancient Medicine, Vivian Nutton

• The History of the Church, Eusebius