Constantine’s city is conventionally depicted as a purely Christian enterprise. Like Akhenaton, we are invited to believe, he set out to build a pristine new capital on virgin soil. Just as the young pharaoh sought to distance himself from the old gods and goddesses of Egypt, the emperor aspired to create a place that would be wholly free of pagan shrines and statuary that adorned the streets of Rome.
In the Roman period, Julius Caesar’s soldiers discovered many tombs of great antiquity when they were founding colonies in Italy and Greece; they rifled them for pots and bronzes, which were sold for high prices in Rome, an early example of grave-robbing and a trade in antiquities.
The Christian church now functioned as “the Christian ‘state-within a state.’ ”
The word “vicar,” for example, is derived from vicarius , a title that was first used by the arch-persecutor Diocletian to identify the deputies whom he placed in charge of various provinces, and “diocese” is derived from the term that described the area under their administration. “Basilica” originally described a public building that housed the royal courts and other government offices—the word comes from “ basileus ,” the Greek word for “king”—but, significantly, it came to be associated with church architecture after Constantine deeded a basilica to the bishop of Rome for use as a church.
Diocletian ultimately seemed to lose the will to rule at all. He abandoned the city of Rome, traditional capital of the empire, and moved his seat of government to Milan and later to Ravenna. He abruptly called off the games that were held to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his reign, an act of lassitude that was regarded as an insult to Rome itself and the tutelary gods of the Roman empire.
The ruling power, of course, was pagan Rome, which had just inflicted upon Judaism its cruelest defeat and greatest humiliation.
The land of the Jews was reduced to the status of an occupied territory, and its name was changed from Judea to Palaestina, a reference to one of the traditional enemies of the Jewish people, the Philistines. Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina, a tribute to the family name of the reigning emperor, and a shrine to Jupiter was erected on the site where the altar of Yahweh once stood.
A golden eagle, the symbol of Rome, was mounted on the gateway to the Temple, but—quite unlike Antiochus—the Romans declined to defile the inner chambers of the Temple itself with pagan imagery. So deferential were the Romans to Jewish sensibilities, in fact, that a Roman legionnaire who defied the Jewish prohibition against entering the inner courtyards of the Temple in Jerusalem could be put to death for the offense.
By 97 B.C.E., when the Roman Senate formally adopted a law that criminalized the offering of human victims, animal sacrifice had long before replaced the offering of human flesh and blood to the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome.
"That's what monasticism is. Deceit, idolatry, greed, and secret loyalty to the bishop of Rome".
Sayfa 13Kitabı okudu
Rome Empire
Roma İmparatorluğu emperyalist bir imparatorluktu. Savaşarak aldığı tüm ülkeleri sömürür, halklarını köleleştirir, mağlup olan askerlerinden sağ kalanları arena da oyunlar için gladyatör yapardı. Roma İmparatorluğunun esas sınırlarında doğan ( İtalya) kişiler sadece Roma Yurttaşı olabilirdi. Sömürdüğü ülkelerdeki insanlar sadece kölelik statüsü kazanabilirdi. İmparatorluk hüviyeti kazanan devletlerin hemen hemen birçoğu bu şekilde hareket etmiştir.
"Servius Tullius divided the people in this way to ensure that voting power was under the control not of the rabble but of the wealthy, and he saw to it that the greatest number did not have the greatest power – a principle that we should always stand by in politics."
Cicero
Hüzünlü bir barış sabah ın getirdiği
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Kimi bagışlanacak,cezalancak kimi.
Daha acıklı bir öykü yoktur,bunu böyle bilin,
Bu öyküsnden talihsiz rome ve julıet in...
