Books, Arts & Manners: Through Pagan Eyes

The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, by Robert L. Wilken (Yale, 214 pp., $17.95)

How did Christianity first seem to the established society of the Roman Empire? Pliny, the urbane governor of Bithynia, considered it ‘ “a depraved superstition carried to extravagant lengths.” The same disparaging term was used by Tacitus and Suetonius. Christianity first appeared in the Roman Empire as a religion of the dispossessed, scornful of the established pagan worship. In Pliny’s day (63-113 a.d.) there were fewer than fifty thousand Christians in an empire of sixty million. Christianity, like all religions at their beginnings—whatever their metaphysical value—was a cult apart, most Christians being uneducated and illiterate, and all too easily exploited by hucksters like the second-century charismatic con man, Peregrinus, who, mutatis mutandis, bears an unhappy resemblance to present-day television evangelists. “If any charlatan or trickster, able to profit by the occasion, comes among them,” Lucian wrote, “he acquires sudden wealth by imposing on simple folk.”

FR

About the Author

Francis Russell

Featured Tags

The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, by Robert L. Wilken (Yale, 214 pp., $17.95)

How did Christianity first seem to the established society of the Roman Empire? Pliny, the urbane governor of Bithynia, considered it ‘ “a depraved superstition carried to extravagant lengths.” The same disparaging term was used by Tacitus and Suetonius. Christianity first appeared in the Roman Empire as a religion of the dispossessed, scornful of the established pagan worship. In Pliny’s day (63-113 a.d.) there were fewer than fifty thousand Christians in an empire of sixty million. Christianity, like all religions at their beginnings—whatever their metaphysical value—was a cult apart, most Christians being uneducated and illiterate, and all too easily exploited by hucksters like the second-century charismatic con man, Peregrinus, who, mutatis mutandis, bears an unhappy resemblance to present-day television evangelists. “If any charlatan or trickster, able to profit by the occasion, comes among them,” Lucian wrote, “he acquires sudden wealth by imposing on simple folk.”