The Long Waves of Time
Rise of Christianity
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Roman Emperor Aurelianus (r.
270-275) was the last Roman emperor who ruled the strong and united empire with
the Sun God as the principal deity. After his assassination in 275, the rise of
Christianity gained momentum and accelerated. In 313
participation in pagan services is punishable by death.
 Emperor Julian (361-363). |
About 50 years later, Emperor Julian, called by his friends the Philosopher and by the Christians the Apostate, attempted to restore the classic Roman heritage. Julian shared with Celsus the major objections of the Romans against the Christians of which the central was that by transferring their primary allegiance from the ancestors to the God,
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Christians are weakening the most sacred of all social bonds, the bond between parents and their children. |
Emperor Julian is the protagonist of Gore Vidal's book Julian (1964) describing his life and times. Emperor Julian's books, beautifully written, include the Hymn to the King Helios, Letter to a Priest where Julian outlines a strategy for restoration of classic Roman religion, and Against the Galileans, describing many of the appalling aspects of Christianity. Emperor Julian was assassinated in 363 by a fanatic Christian.
 Agorius Praetextatus (320-384) |
During this epoch, Agorius Praetextatus
was one of the leaders of the Gentile intellectual movement in an
increasingly Christian late imperial Rome. In the face of the Christian
juggernaut, Praetextatus, his wife Pauline, and a circle of friends
including writers Symmachus and Macrobius, fought the battle for the Roman
classic religion and ideals.
After Praetextatus death
in 384, St. Jerome rejoiced that Praetextatus is now in hell.
In 476, Germanic warrior and king of
Why did Rome Fall?
The author’s personality is often reflected in his or her narrative. As an example, consider reasons given by historians for the Fall of the Roman Empire. According to tradition, Rome was founded on April 21, 9247 HE (753 BCE) and April 21 is still a national holiday in Italy.
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Romulus and Remus The mother of Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, was a vestal virgin who got pregnant by Mars, the God of war. Abandoned, they were found by a she-wolf who suckled them and brought them up. Romulus and Remus grew up into strong young men and decided to found their own city. They chose different sites, quarreled which site is better; and during this quarrel Romulus killed Remus.
After Romulus built the city, he held games in honor of the god Consus, and invited people from the Sabine communities to attend the games. While they were watching the games, Romulus and his friends seized the young Sabine women who were attending the games and kidnapped them. The Sabines tried to get the women back, but by this time they had married their abductors and some of them had become pregnant. The women pleaded their relatives and their husbands not to fight and Romulus and Tatius, the king of the Sabines, were made joint monarchs. After Tatius died, Romulus reigned alone for about forty years. Afterwards Romulus has ascended to heaven and continued to look after Rome's destiny as the god Quirinus.
The Roman historian Titus Livius (59 BCE - 17 CE.) wrote history, starting
from the founding of Rome, giving dates as AUC (ab urbe condita, i.e., from the
founding of the city). Plutarch (46 - 120) retold the story of founding of Rome,
changing the she-wolf into a prostitute and Mars to someone dressed up as Mars
in an attempt to make love to the mother of Romulus and Remus.
 Hypothetical Profile on the Study of Values Questionnaire |
Typology of Values
The author’s personality is often reflected in his or her narrative. As an
example, consider reasons given by historians for the Fall of the Roman Empire.
According to tradition, Rome was founded on April 21, 9247 HE (753 BCE) and
April 21 is still a national holiday in Italy. According to a legend,
Romulus and Remus, twin brothers abandoned at
birth and raised by wolves, founded Rome. The brothers eventually quarreled, and
Romulus killed Remus, becoming the sole ruler of Rome, a town that was to be the
capital of the empire that left a lasting impression on the history of Western
people. For about a thousand years, the Roman Empire was the Western
Civilization. On August 28, 10476 HE (476 CE), Germanic warrior, Odoacer,
dethroned the last Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, bringing the Roman Empire to an
end. Why did the Roman Empire fall? Answering this question has occupied
historians for centuries. After reading extensively about this subject I started
to wonder whether the reasons given do not reflect personal values of their
authors that could be captured by the Study of Values questionnaire.
In the 1930’s, Spranger wrote his seminal Menschentypen, made famous
later by Allport, Vernon and Lindzey who based their Study of Values
questionnaire on the typology used in Spranger’s book. An instance of results
from the Study of Values questionnaire, shown above, displays a person’s profile
on six clusters of values: Theoretical, Economic, Political, Social, Aesthetic,
and Religious using the L scores with mean of 50 and standard deviation of 10.
It may be hypothesized that a person scoring high on the religious scale of
values would likely subscribe to Saint Augustine’s reasons given for the fall of
Rome and a person scoring low on this scale would likely subscribe to Gibbon’s
explanation of the same event. This correspondence can be found also for the
other scales of the questionnaire.
I Theoretical Toward its end, the Roman Empire suffered debilitating epidemics of plague, the most severe of which was the plague of 166-180 CE. Ellsworth Huntington, one of the pioneers of the ecology movement, stressed as early as 1917 the role of deforestation of Italy in the decline of Roman civilization. Deforestation caused land erosion, not only ruining the farmers, but also silting the rivers. The gradual deposition of silt filled the rivers’ channels, altering their course. This, in turn, contributed to flooding and the creation of swamps, breeding grounds of malarial mosquitoes. However, the most intriguing factor in the Decline of Rome was hypothesized by Kobert in his Chronische Bleivergiftung im klassischen Altertume. Kobert claims that toward the end of the empire Romans started to convey drinking water in lead pipes and that the resulting chronic lead poisoning played a role in this historical process.
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II Economic H. G. Wells reminisces that
"When I wrote the Outline of History I slowly gained
the conviction which crystallized itself later on into a positive idea, that the
great Roman Empire was ruined not only from outside by the storming barbarians;
but also by the internal financial difficulties, by the indebtedness of all
social classes, and by the heavy burden of taxation, until, under these
financial burdens, the whole scaffolding of imperialism broke down."
Max Weber in his General Economic History analyzes economic factors as
reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Other historians joined
Weber in stressing the economic causes of this historical event, notably
Westermann in his Economic Basis of the Decline of Ancient Culture, West
in his Economic Collapse of the Roman Empire, and Bratianu in his
Raisons Economiques de la Division de l’Empire Romain.
 Emperor Nero "played the fiddle" while Rome was burning. |
III Political
Most historic books, describing the successions of emperors, events and
intrigues preceding their ascension and eventual abdication or assassination,
concentrate on this factor. A good example in this respect is the story of the
Emperor Nero who "played the fiddle while Rome was burning." Morris
Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins comments on this phrase:
"The notion that Nero fiddled while Rome burned is nonsense because the
fiddle wasn't invented until many centuries after he ruled Rome, from 54 to 68
CE."
When the big fire broke out in 64 A.D. (it burned nine days and destroyed two
thirds of the city), Christians blamed the fire on Nero while the Emperor
suspected that the fire was started by the Christians, as they hailed it as the
sign of the second coming of Christ."
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IV Social Factors According to Walbank (1946), the main reason behind Rome’s decline and fall was that the late Roman Empire was governed by an oppressive bureaucracy, resulting in the predominance of the State over the individual interests. Rome started out as a society that valued discipline and social cohesion. Roman society originally featured strong families bonded by duty. Conferring honor rather than disgrace upon the family name, was more important than fulfilling personal desires. However, after centuries of success the empire started to decline. Advanced militarism attracted men looking for spoils of victory. The character of the soldiers changed from armed men fighting to defend their homes and families to men signing up to fight as mercenaries. As demand increased for foreign goods, currency flowed out of Rome to foreign countries. Vast numbers of people from the conquered territories, attracted by the wealth of Roman society, migrated to the cities only to become dependent on welfare. Huge outlays went to support panem et circensem, feasts and gladiatorial conquests. A giant bureaucracy installed to administer the taxation and requisition of materials and labor gradually came to dominate Roman society, crushing the middle class. Eventually, the Roman people began to abdicate their social leadership.
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V Aesthetic The Welsh's Figure Preference Test (1949) is a classic instrument to measure personal aesthetic preferences. The factor analysis of this questionnaire indicates, that its main factor differentiates between preferences for ruled, simple, geometric figures, as contrasted with preferences for convoluted, complicated figures. There are several studies by the associates of David McClelland which indicate that art or architecture, stressing straight geometric figures, tends to be predominant during the ascent phase of a civilization, while the convoluted designs predominate during its decline, as in the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian architectural orders.
 Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) Enhanced Reality Portrait. |
VI Religious Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) provides a panoramic picture of the Roman civilization and gives the reasons for its decline and fall. Based on an exhaustive analysis of the factors leading to its demise, Gibbon concluded that the fall of the Roman Empire was due to the supplanting of the classical tradition of the Roman community with Christian beliefs. He closes his discussion of the fall of the Roman Empire and subsequent history of Saeculum Obscurum and Middle Ages with the words:
| "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion." |
The ‘Decline and Fall’ was banned in several countries for his critique of religion and is often published in abbreviated editions where many of Gibbon's opinions regarding Christianity are deleted. Apologists of religion objected to Gibbon's treatment of Christianity as a historical phenomenon and not as a special case admitting supernatural explanations and disallowing criticism of its adherents. With respect to the Judaic branch of the monotheistic religions Gibbon described its followers as
| "fanatics, whose dire superstition
earned them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but also of humankind." |
Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a prototype of Isaac Asimov's The Foundation Trilogy.
Factor analysis of the Study of Values The Study of values was factor analyzed by Lurie (1937) who found four factors. The theoretical, social, and religious factors loaded on their corresponding Study of Values scales. The economic, political, and aesthetic scales loaded on the mundane bipolar factor with the economic and political scales loading on one pole and aesthetic scales on the opposite pole. Eysenck (1954) describes this personality type as aggressive, go-getter, utilitarian, anti-cultural and fits these four factors into his circumplex as shown below.
 The factor analytic structure of the Study of Values scales. |
The vertical axis in the above figure is the tough minded - tender minded dimension. The horizontal axis is the left - right, radical - conservative dimension.