“The Story of Civilization. Volume 3: Caesar and Christ”, by Will Durant

 

 

768 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-0671548001

 

The Story of Civilization is an 11-volume set of books by the American writer, historian and philosopher Will Durant that focuses on a philosophical understanding of Western history that was intended for the general reader. Written over a period of more than fifty years, Volume 3: Caesar and Christ was originally published in 1944, and covers the history of Rome and Christianity until the time of Constantine the Great. I mentioned in a previous review of this series that, while the language and attitudes expressed by Durant in those books may offend the easily offended (get over it, snowflake), that language is also rather novelistic in its descriptions of these long dead civilizations. This is history written by a man who loved history, and it shows in every word and syllable. As stated above, this is principally a philosophical history of the West, written before academics learned to hate the very subject they are studying (we are reaping what our betters have sown). As with Volumes 2 & 3 of The Story of Civilization (and, indeed, all of the Volumes in this series), the length and breadth of this book is both a strength and a weakness: a strength in that we get a whole lot of history in a relatively brief amount of space; a weakness because when you cram that whole lot of history into 700-or-so pages, a lot of stuff is going to be left out. But if you just keep in mind that this whole series is meant to whet your appetite and not send you away stuffed to the gills, then you'll be alright, like this bit on Roman road-building:

The consular roads were among their simpler achievements. They were from sixteen to twenty-four feet wide, but near Rome part of this width was taken up by sidewalks (margines) paved with rectangular stone slabs. They went straight to their goal in brave sacrifice of initial economy to permanent savings; they overleaped countless streams with costly bridges, crossed marshes with long, arched viaducts of brick and stone, climbed up and down steep hills with no use of cut and fill, and crept along mountaintops or high embankments secured by powerful retaining walls. Their pavement varied with locally available material. Usually the bottom layer (pavimentum) was a four- to six-inch bed of sand, or one inch of mortar. Upon this were imposed four strata of masonry: the statumen, a foot deep, consisting of stones bound with cement or clay; the rudens, ten inches of rammed concrete; the nucleus, twelve to eighteen inches of successively laid and rolled layers of concrete; and the summa crusta of silex or lava polygonal slabs, one to three feet in diameter, eight to twelve inches thick. The upper surface of slabs was smoothed, and the joints so well fitted as to be hardly discernible.

(I should send this passage to the Michigan legislature; they could learn a thing or two – or a thousand – about road-building from the Romans).

What Durant provides is an overview as to how this City on Seven Hills spread throughout the whole of the Mediterranean before falling into ruin, all while this peculiar Jewish cult from Palestine spread its influence throughout the same (and then the world). And what an overview it is, too, told in a manner more inclined towards a novelist than an historian. It was also invaluable in describing just how revolutionary Jesus and his teachings were and how the Apostles and the Church expanded while Rome collapsed under its own weight in the background. Will Durant was not a concise historian; he didn’t see the history of humanity as a series of scattered conquests of monarchs or states with stagnation and dullness in between great wars. Rather, he saw historical eras for what they were: epochs in which human beings lived their entire lives. History is the history of people, not the reigns of monarchs (unless the reigns of said monarchs impact the lives of the people), and so he paints as comprehensive a portrait of history as is possible. But as with Volume 2, Caesar and Christ shows itself to be still relevant in that the Romans knew all too well the dangers of too-much government and not-enough virtue:

 

The best form of government is a mixed constitution, like that of pre-Gracchan Rome: the democratic power of the assemblies, the aristocratic power of the Senate, the almost royal power of the consuls for a year. Without checks and balances monarchy becomes despotism, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes mob rule, chaos, and dictatorship.

 

Caesar and Christ, then, is the interweaving histories of Rome and Christianity, the lives of the people who lived in those times and how the rise and fall of the Roman Empire altered the way people lived, and how all of these lessons on how great empires rise and fall are there to be learned – if we would but take the time to do so.