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 Durant treats the Gospels as historical documents to be sifted, sets miracles outside the historian's competence, and yet argues that the figure of Jesus is too original and too consistent to have been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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.