Roman Empire

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The Roman Empire was the imperial phase of the Roman state, conventionally dated from Augustus’s settlement of 27 BCE — when one man took permanent control of the republic’s machinery — to 476, when the last emperor in the West was deposed. At its height it ringed the Mediterranean and reached from Britain to the Euphrates, governing perhaps a fifth of the human race under a single law and a common currency.

For the religious and philosophical currents this site gathers, the empire was less a backdrop than a precondition. Its roads, its shared Greek and Latin, and its long stretches of internal peace let texts, teachers, and cults move across distances that had never been so open. The same century that saw the empire consolidate also saw an unprecedented mingling of Egyptian, Greek, Levantine, and Persian religion in its cities. Out of that mingling came the Hermetic writings — Greek philosophical-religious treatises ascribed to an Egyptian Hermes — along with the schools later called Gnostic, the revived Platonism of Plotinus and his successors, and the small Jewish sect that became Christianity. None of these would have taken the form they did outside the conditions the empire created.

Roman religion itself was capacious and largely tolerant in practice. The state required participation in the public cult and, from the first century, honors to the emperor; beyond that it absorbed foreign gods readily, identifying them with its own. The mystery cults — of Isis, of Mithras, of Cybele, the older rites at Eleusis — flourished within this frame, promising initiates a personal bond with a deity and, in several cases, a better fate beyond death. The persecution of Christians, intermittent rather than constant, turned on their refusal of that public cult rather than on their beliefs as such.

The fourth century reversed the relation. After Constantine’s conversion the empire moved from tolerating Christianity to favoring it, and by century’s end it was the official religion; the old cults and the philosophical schools that had sheltered the pagan inheritance were progressively closed. Historians have long debated whether the western empire “fell” in 476 or slowly transformed — the eastern half, governed from Constantinople, continued for another thousand years. What is not in dispute is that the religious landscape the empire had made outlasted its politics. The Hermetic corpus, the Neoplatonic texts, and the Gnostic writings recovered in the modern period are all, in their origins, the sediment of this world: documents of what people in a single vast and mixed polity reached for when they reached past the visible.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres · Terry — The Sibylline Oracles (1899)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Hermes Trismegistus · Dendera · Mesopotamia