Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul | Page 4

quarters. If a few examples are
met with in the present book, they may be taken as made with all
deference, but with deliberation.
It is perhaps well to say this with some emphasis, in view of the
blunders often innocently committed by those who happen to be
speaking of this period. There are those who know it almost only
through the medium of the _Acts of the Apostles_, and who entertain
the most erroneous notions concerning Gallio or Festus, concerning
Roman justice, Roman taxation, or Roman moral and religious attitudes.
There are those, again, who know it almost only through the manuals of
history; that is to say, they know the dates and facts of the reigns of the
emperors, but have never realised, not to say visualised, the
contemporary Roman as a human being. There exist denunciations of
the morals of the Roman world of this date which would lead one to
believe that every man was a Nero and every woman a Messalina:
denunciations so lurid that, if they were a third part true, the
continuance of the Roman Empire, or even of the Roman race, for a
single century would be simply incomprehensible. On the other hand
there have been accounts of the material glory of Rome which have
conjured up visions of splendour worthy only of the _Arabian Nights_;
and sometimes the comment is added that it was all won from the blood
and sweat heartlessly wrung from a world of miserable slaves. It is not
too much to say that none of these descriptions could come from a
writer or speaker who knew the period at first hand.
The most dangerous form of falsehood is that which contains some
portion of truth. The life of many a Roman was deplorably dissolute;
the splendour of Rome was beyond doubt astonishing; of oppression
there were too many scattered instances; but we do not judge the
civilisation of the British Empire by the choicest scandals of London,
nor the good sense of the United States by the freak follies of New
York. We do not take it that the modern satirist who vents his spleen on
an individual or a class is describing each and all of his contemporaries,
nor even that what he says is necessarily true of such individual or class.

Nor is the professional moralist himself immune from jaundice or from
the disease of exaggeration.
The endeavour here will be to realise more veraciously what life in the
Roman world was like. For those who are familiar with the political
history and the escapades of Nero there may be some filling in of gaps
and adjusting of perspective. For those who are familiar with the
journeyings and experiences of St. Paul there may be some correction
of errors and misconceptions. For those who have any thought of
visiting the ruins of Rome and Pompeii, it may prove helpful to have
secured some comprehension of this period. Pompeii was destroyed
only fifteen years after our date, and all those houses, large and small,
were occupied in the year 64 by their unsuspecting inhabitants.
Meanwhile mansions, temples, and halls stood in splendour above
those platforms and foundations over which we tread amid the broken
columns in the Roman Forum or on the Palatine Hill.

CHAPTER I
EXTENT AND SECURITY OF THE EMPIRE
The best means of realising the extent of the Roman Empire in or about
the year 64 is to glance at the map. It will be found to reach from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates, from the middle of
England--approximately the river Trent--to the south of Egypt, from the
Rhine and the Danube to the Desert of Sahara. The Mediterranean Sea
is a Roman lake, and there is not a spot upon its shores which is not
under Roman rule. In round numbers the empire is three thousand miles
in length and two thousand in breadth. Its population, which, at least in
the western parts, was much thinner then than it is over the same area at
present, cannot be calculated with any accuracy, but an estimate of one
hundred millions would perhaps be not very far from the mark.
Beyond its borders--sometimes too dangerously near to them and apt to
overstep them--lay various peoples concerning whom Roman
knowledge was for the most part incomplete and indefinite. Within its
own boundaries the Roman government carefully collected every kind
of information. Such precision was indispensable for the carrying out

of those Roman principles of administration which will be described
later. But of the nations or tribes beyond the frontiers only so much was
known as had been gathered from a number of more or less futile
campaigns, from occasional embassies sent to Rome by such peoples,
from the writings of a few venturous travellers bent