Cristian Tolsa, an Osnabrück postdoc fellow, wrote a brief review of my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire that inspires me to clarify some things that I wonder at their getting wrong, getting wrong what’s actually in the book and what it actually says. Particularly as these mistakes parallel commonplace misunderstandings in the history of science altogether, affording a useful opportunity to educate the public on persistent errors academics keep making in this field.
Oblivious to the Popularity of Christian Apologetics?
In “Richard Carrier, The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire,” published in Isis 110.3 (September 2019), pp. 585-86, a journal that is predominately composed of brief reviews of books and articles in the field much like this, Cristian Tolsa does note what they liked about the book. Though even there they show some strange lack of awareness and inconsistency, as when they claim “few historians would have doubts about the general Christian hostility toward science” that I demonstrate in Scientist, then notes my apt refutation of a very well-known—and very widely cited—historian (David Lindberg) who has those very doubts, indeed who even argues for them with the usual tools of Christian apologetics.
In fact Lindberg’s camp is well populated with deniers of what Tolsa seems to think is rarely denied. I quote several, in my chapter in The Christian Delusion, on the whole trend toward arguing Christianity was never hostile but in fact even necessary for modern science. Admittedly many are only posing as historians (like Stark, Jaki, and D’Souza), and some are what we would otherwise call cranks but for their being “prestigious” scholars within a Christian echochamber (like Hutchinson and Schmidt), but many are bona fide historians (like White, Grant, Hannam, and Lindberg) and others popularize propaganda they claim comes from mainstream historians (like Pearcey, Thaxton, and Woods).
Thus Tolsa does not seem aware of the importance of my book in extensively laying this trend to rest; that in fact there is an entire faction of historians and popularizers pulling the Lindberg stunt, who are in fact more widely known and cited in the lay world, thus necessitating books like mine that expose the fallacies and factual errors that these (usually Christian) historians rely on to push their false, revisionist narrative. To an unwary public. And job one of historians is to combat that.
Nevertheless, Tolsa admits that “Carrier is to be praised for his analysis of the relevant passages from Clement, Tertullian, Lactantius, and Eusebius” that demonstrate this Christian hostility that is commonly denied. Tolsa likewise notes that Carrier “also challenges the position, defended by David C. Lindberg, that Christianity did not represent an impediment to science during the Middle Ages,” as indeed that’s the most overt part of the project undertaken throughout Scientist, every chapter of which debunks one or another myth promoted by the Lindgerg camp. Which camp has included false claims to the stagnation of ancient science, the marginalization of scientists or disinterest in science in antiquity, or the supposed lack of experimental or mathematical methodologies, to each of which Scientist devotes an entire section or chapter to refuting—with extensive evidence.
Oblivious to Distinguishing Fact from Explanation?
At this point Tolsa duly complains that “it remains unclear what circumstances changed in the early Renaissance to make the Scientific Revolution possible,” echoing the very point I make in Scientist (repeating the same point thoroughly made and demonstrated by H. Floris Cohen, whom I cite here), that all the attempts to explain this don’t survive analysis: all fail on either facts or logic—leaving the fact unexplained at this point in history. “Faced with this question,” Tolsa continues, “Carrier ends up admitting that the disparity of methods coexisting in ancient scientific inquiry could have been a major difference with early modern science,” but that is actually not an explanation; it’s a mere description of what needs to be explained. Even though I carefully explain this distinction in Scientist, Tolsa seems somehow to have missed that point.
For example, on pp. 10-11 of Scientist, where in the midst of a survey of attempts at explaining that fact, finding they all fail, I discuss the claim that the Scientific Revolution was caused by the rise of the “scientist” as a respected and distinct social category, noting that that, too, doesn’t work:
Certainly in antiquity there was no distinct social category of the ‘scientist’ per se, but neither had there been in the 16th or early 17th centuries—the creation of a distinct and recognized role for science and scientists was clearly a consequence and not a cause of the Scientific Revolution, for it seems only to have followed the conceptual separation of speculative from ‘experimental’ philosophy. Cohen recognizes that this is a serious problem with the theory.
And so on. The point throughout being, that to date all attempts to explain what caused the Scientific Revolution are really just descriptions of the Scientific Revolution (or its effects), and thus cannot causally explain it.
I similarly discuss the “toolbox” argument in my conclusion (pp. 551-52), the idea Tolsa is referring to, that what defined that Revolution was finally trimming the toolbox of methods down to the objectively reliable. But I explicitly point out this is just a description, not an explanation. Because:
The question that remains is why this trimming of the toolbox took place only when it did, and I suspect the answer has something to do with relative numbers (as suggested above), or recent earth-shattering discoveries (the ‘impact’ thesis explored earlier), or both.
Here you might wonder why Tolsa confused my description of what historians need to explain, with what I actually proposed might explain it. Which here I allude to, the two theories I settled on earlier in the book as the most promising to investigate (although I make very clear neither theory has been proved, and more research is needed to test them): that the Renaissance saw the production of a greater number of scientists (pp. 550-51, a premise, I note, that is actually not established, and even if true, may be just another consequence and not a cause), or experienced such a critical mass of largely accidental discoveries (like the compass, the cannon, the telescope, and the New World) and incubating developments (like the printing press, the fracturing of religious control by the Reformation, and a theatre of intensely competing naval empires) as to inspire concerted efforts to make progress in methodology—efforts I actually document were occurring already in the 2nd century, but were abandoned before coming to fruition, during the collapse of the 3rd century, never to be resumed again until the rediscovery of those efforts occurred…in the Renaissance!
Hence as I continue (on p 552), here the final words of my book:
Whatever the cause of the slow pace of ancient science, could such a pace ever have arrived at the same destination, eventually producing its own Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey, Boyle, Newton, or Lavoisier? Would there ever have been anything like an Imperial Society of Rome for Improving Natural Knowledge? We may never know. But it’s not unreasonable. By the 2nd century A.D. everything seemed to be heading in the required direction. Numerous lay and scientific authors were calling for something like that very transformation. Apart from the historically trivial, or the entirely accidental (like the preceding invention of the compass or cannon or telescope), there is nothing in the writings of Gilbert or Harvey or Galileo that would appear at all out of character had it been written in the early Roman empire. If many generations had continued to test and challenge Galen, Ptolemy, and Hero using the very methods they promoted, progress would seem inevitable, and there is no obvious barrier to how far that progress could go—unless rapidity of development is essential to the effect. For it may have taken longer, their scientific revolution spanning perhaps four centuries rather than two. But apart from time or disaster, what else could have stopped it?
In other words, it all seems more likely to be blind luck: the conjunction of a restored civilization with adequate wealth and education (the Renaissance finally returning to the state of the 2nd century academically and economically) with a rediscovery of lost treatises advocating for methodological reform in the pursuit of science, which inspired more personnel to take up that banner—possibly in conjunction with other happenstance inspiring events all accidentally converging around a mere few centuries, such as I just enumerated. An outcome that appears would have happened a thousand years earlier—but for the collapse of the civilization and ideology needed for it. Those two things had to be recovered, to continue the march. Which is why that march was only continued when those two things were recovered.
Tolsa seems oblivious to this being the actual thesis of Scientist, despite numerous pages explicitly devoted to explaining it.
Oblivious to What the Book Actually Said?
Tolsa complains that:
[It’s] puzzling to read in the first chapter of Richard Carrier’s book that what Greeks and Romans called natural philosophy was ‘essentially identical’ to our concept of science (p. 24), only to learn a few pages later that, in fact, ancient science would correspond to natural philosophy employing empiricist methods, a category that Carrier rightly admits was ‘not yet’ defined (p. 26). This reductionist view is not always maintained, but the book’s major flaw—namely, that it considers science as an activity essentially unaltered since Aristotle.
I never say any of this (in Scientist or anywhere whatever). So evidently, what Tolsa claims is “the book’s major flaw,” isn’t anywhere in the book. That’s a relief. But readers of this review will be misled by its false assertion that it is there.
Here is what I actually wrote on page 25 (not, as Tolsa erroneously claims, page 24) of Scientist (emphasis in bold now added):
[W]e now narrow the range of methods appropriately designated “science” to what is strictly and soundly empirical, and narrow the range of conclusions appropriately designated “scientific” to what has actually been demonstrated by those methods. Accordingly, a modern “scientist” is someone who employs those kinds of methods to demonstrate those kinds of conclusions. But apart from this narrowing of focus, the ancient words physika, as “natural philosophy,” and physikos, as “natural philosopher,” were essentially identical to our words “science” and “scientist,” at least in aims, interests, and subject matter.
Note how this paragraph explicitly demarcates the matter of methodological differences that Tolsa falsely claims I did not demarcate, and only says the words for science and scientist were identical (not “science was identical”), and only identical in respect to what they referred to as the subject of study, not identical in “methods.”
Moreover, I never say anything about modern science being “identical” to Aristotle’s. In fact, in Chapter 3 I extensively make clear Aristotle only started the formalization of the sciences, and was refuted, corrected, and improved on by subsequent scientists for centuries even in antiquity, much less modernity. Including in respect to methodologies. In fact, I show that it is Christian apologists (and Medievalists in general) who falsely claim ancient science was unchanged since Aristotle (as that is what Medieval scholars themselves mistakenly thought—until all those subsequent works were rediscovered in the Renaissance). See, just for example, pages 11, 100, 157, 246, and 264. In other words, The Scientist extensively argues the opposite of the conclusion that “science [is] an activity essentially unaltered since Aristotle.” How Tolsa screwed this one up I cannot fathom.
Oblivious to What We Are Trying to Explain?
I can only suppose Tolsa did not read the book carefully, and then confused these false claims about what the book says with a somewhat similar but different complaint, that of doing supposed “Whig history.” This was voiced by Michiel Meeusen of King’s College London in his review of my companion book, Science Education in the Early Roman Empire, in History of Education 47:4 (2018, pp. 578-580). Meeusen agrees Education “may have its use in light of the history of ancient education,” and that for “experts in ancient education and science the book may serve as a useful reference work,” since it’s “well documented and includes a bibliography that is up-to-date” and shows “a good grasp of the secondary literature” and “collects a large amount of useful evidence about the educational system of the Imperial period” and helpfully surveys numerous facts about ancient education necessary to understanding the subject (some of which Meeusen summarizes), but then he complains that “what will cause much dislike” in Education “is the whiggism employed in dealing with ancient science and scientists.” And this may be what Tolsa was inaccurately complaining about in Scientist.
Outsiders might not know what Meeusen means by “Whig history” (you can follow the link for Wikipedia’s apt summary). But basically, he is promoting cultural relativism, the view that all science is the same, whether right or wrong, sound or silly, and there is no such thing as progress, only what we happen to decide to call progress in any given historical era. Which is bullshit. There actually is a difference between real and fake science, reliable and unreliable methodologies, true and false conclusions in science—and our ability to make these distinctions is definitive of the Scientific Revolution, and a crucial explanatory factor in the entire rise of modern civilization. If you want to explain how that happened you have to focus on who was doing it right. Simply to explain how we got where we are. Which is the historian’s job.
In short, you cannot explain the modern world without explaining how we made progress in the sciences, both as to the factual truth of the conclusions promoted by the sciences and the effectiveness of the methods used to reach them. This is not Whiggish. It’s simply explaining a causal feature of reality. How did we land a man on the moon and harness the transistor and the power of the atom? How did we discover the real nature of the solar system? Or the actual laws of physics governing it? You can’t claim it’s all just random, a mixed bag, or anything would have done. Because that’s not true. Something changed in the way we demarcate true from false claims that became extremely successful in landing on the true. How did that happen?
That’s the very question Scientist explicitly identifies as what it is contributing to answering (just read Chapter 1). And so does Education, by the way—it says so, right on the first two pages (pp. 5-6). The only way to explain how we got modern science, an actually successful science, is to look for its roots and causes. It does not help to study failed and bogus science in antiquity because that did not lead to the Scientific Revolution and is therefore not the cause of it. You can, to be sure, study any of the failed science in antiquity (or in any era); that’s an interesting historical subject in its own right. But it’s not what we need to be doing if our goal is to explain the Scientific Revolution, to explain how humanity landed on a successful system of science.
This complaint from Meeusen (and from Tolsa, if such is what they meant) is thus completely malformed, ignoring the entire project and purpose of historical research aiming at explaining how modern science came about and why it changed the world. In writing about my book Science Education, Meeusen says its “author makes a good case, showing that there was no actual scientific decline in the early Imperial era,” but then complains that any reference to “progress” and “decline” is “Whiggish” (so, like Tolsa, contradicting himself in the very same sentence). Meeusen asks irrelevant questions like “how important is getting ‘facts right’” or “what is meant by ‘good scientific knowledge’” and “who are ‘actual scientists’” and claims “issues like these are proof of an ill-defined and outdated concept of ancient science and its history.” Wrong. We already know today what the difference is between actual and fake scientists, good and bad science, and the importance of getting “facts right.” That we as a civilization now know these things is what we are trying to explain.
As such, the likes of Meeusen and Tolsa just don’t understand the primary function and value of the history of science—particularly when framed as an exploration of how we came to be where we are today (and not as a collection of trivial antiquarian explorations of past events unconnected with that outcome; which studies are fine, but not what most of us are doing, and not what’s of the greatest interest and importance to the public). Any attempt to explain why science today works, and works so well—and why we value its doing so—must look at the past history of humanity doing that and valuing that. We must look at what it was that we eventually sorted out and valued, and why we did that. And that requires what Meeusen anachronistically calls “Whig history.” Because when the subject being explored and explained is our ability to discover the truth about the world, that’s simply correct history.
Oblivious to Living in the 21st Century?
Less momentously, Tolsa complains of Scientist that “the text contains innumerable colloquialisms,” even though that’s on purpose: I am of the camp that history should be written to be read by non-historians, otherwise we are wasting our time and not serving our social purpose as historians. We must speak the vernacular. Everything else is just a quaint elitism designed to make knowledge less accessible to the people. As just one example, note that as my Columbia University dissertation I was told Scientist would not be approved lest I remove every contraction. As I loathe such disdainful elitism, I promptly put them all back in for the Pitchstone edition. And Tolsa humorously complains about it.
Tolsa also claims there are “some serious anachronisms” and “mistakes” but they don’t identify a single example. And it’s not at all clear what they mean by there being “too many repetitions.” Again, not a single example is mentioned. They are also annoyed that Scientist “fails to acknowledge the authors of [its] borrowed translations” and “there is no index of cited passages,” but those are expensive and page-consuming tools of little use to lay readers—and not really of much use even to historians, as passage indexes are no longer needed in the 21st century (ever heard of searchable text?), and knowing who authored a translation is, honestly, useless (either you can vet the translation in the original language, or you cannot—and I did, as can anyone else able, going straight to the original language). Here I think Tolsa is simply stuck in the past, expecting things that traditionally we’ve done but that actually have little utility anymore.
Oblivious to Usefulness Being the Point?
Tolsa goes on to concede that Scientist “can, however, prove useful in many respects,” giving Chapter 3 as an example, which is “devoted to showing that progress occurred in Roman science,” which I should note means both scientifically and technologically (a distinction a reader might not note from Tolsa’s review), including “a long list of technological artifacts and techniques, accompanying a sound rebuttal of the technological stagnation thesis.” Tolsa also says “Carrier is particularly good at countering once-common opinions of this sort, such as those taking at face value Roman claims or anecdotes apparently implying decline,” which is actually an astute observation, as the need of this is usually overlooked—too many standard works on ancient science misinterpret passages from ancient literature (like mistaking a comedy as a history, or confusing exactly what Vespasian’s labor policy was), and no one has really corrected those errors, necessitating whole sections devoted to doing so in Scientist.
“Equally welcome,” Tolsa says, “is the evidence brought out in Chapter 4, where Carrier reviews a broad spectrum of Roman sources expressing praise for the scientist,” which was necessitated by modern Christian scholars claiming there was none. Which is, again, the whole point of the book. Every chapter serves this end, of debunking some still-oft-promulgated claim about ancient science that is simply false. Which means Tolsa’s praise here should apply to the entire work, as every chapter is “welcome” for the same reasons they list for Chapters 3 and 4, and 6 (the chapter on Christian evidence Tolsa praised earlier). Note Scientist only has six chapters—and two of those are simply the Introduction and the Conclusion. So that’s basically all the chapters. The one remaining chapter is merely linguistic, extensively surveying the meaning-in-use of the words for science and scientist in antiquity, which Tolsa never comments on, despite the fact that it is the only chapter like it in the literature on ancient science, and thus of substantial importance to anyone who wishes to continue writing on that subject.
In short, the whole book is useful, even by Tolsa’s own statements and standards. It’s thus strange to preface this declaration with a “however.” As if Tolsa overlooked the fact that the point of the whole book is its utility.
Conclusion
Tolsa concludes that “in general, Carrier demonstrates a superb knowledge of the ancient texts and of modern bibliography, and it seems unfortunate that he is one-sidedly focused on proving his initial assumption,” but “proving one’s initial assumption” is called a thesis. The whole book was written to defend a thesis. Complaining that the book “unfortunately” defends the thesis it was entirely written for is a strange complaint to make in a book review, and I honestly don’t get it. Particularly as the opening sections of the book make painstakingly clear that that is indeed the thesis and purpose of the book and all of its contents.
Nevertheless, hopefully you have a better idea now of what’s in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, its utility, its scholarly quality and erudition, and its usefulness even to lay readers as a reference and guide to debunking common Christian propaganda about the history of science today. All the while fascinating and educating every reader about a world and its thoughts and achievements that you likely won’t have been told or were even told the opposite of.
First, I would say that the multiple popes crisis of the late Middle Ages shattered the faith that the Catholic Church was an infallible and divine emanation from the Holy Spirit. This led to the rise of Protestantism and religious wars which further discredited the Christian dogma. Scholasticism devolved into petty arguments. Intellectuals then kept clear from what was perceived righteously as increasingly sterile theology and became curious in more concrete fields, spurred by the paradigm shift caused by the magnifying glass and telescope. The ability to factually see beyond the human limits of our perception decreased the interest in speculative metaphysics for actual physics.
More important was the loss of power and rise of intellectual competition, which replaced the stiffling intellectual monopoly that had existed for a thousand years. The Reformation ended the Church’s monopoly on control of thought, and thus the Church could no longer control what was taught at every university or what was published in every country, or who could be punished for what. That freed up intellectual resources to buck tradition and advance.
This is no more starkly illustrated than by how the Vatican shutting down Galileo essentially ended the Scientific Revolution in Italy (you will struggle in vain to find any significant advance made there for another hundred years or more), a fatal mistake the by-then-Protestant British Empire seized on almost immediately to outdo Catholic empires like Spain and dominate the world, by moving happily in the opposite direction (e.g. instead of punishing Newton, founding a Royal Society for advancing sciences instead). France did likewise. Though officially Catholic, the Reformation emboldened the Crown to greatly limit Catholic influence and control there, and fracturing of ideology occurred even within Catholic ranks, as heterodoxy was legally protected, and so the forward-thinking Jansenist wing, who would otherwise have been shut down by the Vatican, could pursue their ideas freely.
France and England accordingly left Spain and Italy in the dust, neither contributing anything significant to the rise of modern science after the 17th century, and their economic and military fortunes suffered in proportion. All due to the Reformation breaking the Vatican’s stranglehold on ideology.
In the section Oblivious to What the Book Actually Said, last paragraph, line 3, “a” should be deleted.
In the section Oblivious to What We Are Trying to Explain, last paragraph, line 6, “past history” seems redundant and can be made non-redundant by deleting “past.”
Thank you. Fixing.
But advice: these are always helpful so continue at it, but note it’s far easier to find what needs correcting if instead of describing where the error is, you simply copy and past the erroneous text here. I can do a page search for that text string and find it immediately. Anything else entails much more work and labor, not just for me, but for you as well.
Note “past history” is an amphibole-breaker. As just “history” it sounds like I am referring to a specific history somewhere, an account. Since I am referring to the whole historical record and the reconstructive process of analyzing it to produce a history, “past history” is a necessary clarifier, making clear which thing I’m talking about.
The ancient view of progress is an interesting one. In works like Seneca’s Natural Questions, progress is accumulating knowledge for its own sake, but never for the betterment of mankind. Today, we see progress differently, as the moral and social betterment of humanity through application of scientific technique. Why are ancient and modern views of progress so different? I suspect modern progress is of Christian origin. It appears to have been shaped by the Christian humanitarianism of nineteenth century social reform movements. The Greeks, Romans had an aristocratic view of progress, that it should only benefit a small number of initiates. They would have despised our mass democratic, universalist approach, so there’s no way our modern view of progress can be directly traced back to the ancient world.
The same goes for human or universal rights. The Greeks, like Plato and Aristotle, had no concept of rights. The Romans had a concept known as “jus,” the equivalent of our right, but it wasn’t universal and it depended on having citizenship. The Greeks, Romans were aristocratic, even when they were being democratic (since democracy was only for the few), so it does not seem they would have had anything to do with human or universal rights. This is a modern idea introduced by John Locke, who developed the concept of universal rights within a Christian context.
That’s actually false. I extensively refute that claim in the corresponding chapter of Scientist.
In fact, Christians were against the idea of progress, as it represented deviation from tradition, and grasping at what God in his greater wisdom chose not to give us, and choosing worldly things over godly things. That I demonstrate in the corresponding chapter on Christian attitudes in the same volume.
Also false. There is no evidence of this, and plenty of the contrary.
They invented democracy. And universalist law and ethics and human rights. So what are you talking about?
Get up to speed.
So where did the Greeks and Romans call for progress, in the sense of the social and material uplift of humanity? Do you have any specific quotes I can go over? My understanding was that ancient and modern views of progress were different, but I could be wrong.
Were the Greeks and Romans against slavery, child labor, exploitation of workers or for universal suffrage, including women’s suffrage, prison reform and so on? Can you show me where? I’m not saying the ancient church was progressive, they weren’t progressive at all, compared to the Greeks and Romans, but modern evangelical Christianity was all for the social and material uplift of humanity. The biggest social reform movements of the 19th century were inspired by evangelical Christianity. This is from Wikipedia:
“The Radical movement campaigned for electoral reform, against child labour, for a reform of the Poor Laws, free trade, educational reform, prison reform, and public sanitation.[3] Originally this movement sought to replace the exclusive political power of the aristocracy with a more democratic system empowering urban areas and the middle and working classes. The energy of reform emerged from the religious fervor of the evangelical element in the established Church of England, and Evangelical workers in the Nonconformist churches, especially the Methodists.[4]”
It was evangelical Christians like William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury and Christian organizations like the Christian Womens’ Temperance Union during the 19th century who fought against slavery, child labor, exploitation of factory workers. They also fought for suffrage, including women’s suffrage. Many were some of the earliest feminists.
The Greeks and Romans had our concept of human rights and democracy? Can you show me where they said all human beings have equal rights and that all people, including women, slaves and foreigners, should participate equally in democracy? From what I remember, they were pretty elitist, even though they did have some version of rights and democracy, but it wasn’t egalitarian because they still excluded people.
1 Timothy 1:9-11 says: “We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. 9 We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, 10 for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine 11 that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.”
Antislavery advocates argued that this could be interpreted as an early condemnation of the slave trade? What do you think based on your knowledge of the underlying Greek text?
Yes. I just told you. I have an entire chapter on this in Scientist. With extensive citations of passages and scholarship. You will be most interested in section 9 of Ch. 3, pp. 307-35. Indeed, the earliest attestation is in Aristotle, who averred that societies make inexorable progress in knowledge, morals, technologies, crafts, and political institutions, so surely that the fact that his society had not reached the pinnacle of these advances entailed that society must go through cycles of collapse or else not extend infinitely into the past.
This is a fallacy called “moving the goal posts.” Recognizing and valuing the possibility of social and moral progress is not the same thing as concluding specific individual things are progress.
Nevertheless, Aristotle assumed technological progress would render slavery obsolete, and Roman authors recognized advances in humanitarian legislation regarding the treatment of slaves and children and the rights of women. They merely did not see as far into the future on these things as we began to in the Enlightenment (when specific ideas like abolition and women having the vote entered on the intellectual radar, though still would not be realized anywhere for well over a century or more).
Follow the link I gave you for the rest, particularly the invention and implementation of democracy in antiquity, and human rights as a concept, and further in (through links there) on things like civic welfare (e.g. subsidies for the poor, medical and educational charities, public sanitation and fire safety investment, etc.).
No. It’s against stealing slaves (probably most particularly, stealing free children and enslaving them, a more common practice). Not legitimately buying, selling, or owning them. The NT is uniformly pro-slavery and never imagines it being wrong or ever even suggests much less commands Christians to free their slaves or not have them.
I thought the real claim for moral progress due to Christianity was the notion of sexual immorality, the repudiation of infanticide by exposing children and the rejection of gladiatorial games. The thing is of course, there isn’t any evidence that exposing children wasn’t a custom dying out with the abundance of food. Gladiatorial games seem to have historically been a form of human sacrifice as part of civic and funeral rites, where the gods “chose” which was to be sacrificed by giving the victory to the triumphant fighter. Most of all, of course, the notion that outrage at sexual impurity is characteristic of many societies (to different degrees in different eras and social strata, by the way.)
If you really want to argue that Christianity may have at some point advocated progressive change, you need to confront treatments of Christianity as a religious/revolutionary movement. Most people avoid this like the plague, especially people like Ehrman and Aslan and I think Schweitzer who even say the early Christians were apocalyptic! In the academy, S.G.F. Brandon takes the Gospels and Acts as reliable sources, purging them of the supernatural in the most approved fashion. But he ends up with a very crankish view (though Eisenman beats him there.
Karl Kautsky’s Foundations of Christianity is a study by someone who actually knows something about revolutionary politics, thus enormously useful for asking the right questions. Except that everyone would rather invoke an apocalyptic movement that is purely a literary genre than real people with real political hopes.
Note that exposure actually often meant enslavement rather than death—exposed babies were frequently simply taken and raised and passed off as slaves; which isn’t really that much worse a fate than Christian orphanages, if you’ve followed their dismal history.
And it’s not clear the law even changed any of this. Just because Christians outlawed exposure doesn’t mean it didn’t just keep happening (just as with laws against, well, pretty much anything else, like adultery or heresy); and in fact precisely after those laws were passed the population precipitously declined, which means more babies were starving to death after the law was passed than before it (though that’s not a causal relation, it illustrates food supply declined, not rose). If anything Christians made the risk of de facto exposure worse by outlawing abortion and birth control, which were both legal and decently well developed previously. One’s only remaining recourse was to just starve your baby in your home and claim God’s will. Not exactly a change of fate.
Likewise Christians replaced gladiatorial fights with hideous public torturing executions of sinners and heretics. So it’s not clear there was really any net improvement on these measures. Especially since, overall, gladiatorial sports were somewhat less fatal than modern myth presumes; gladiators were capital assets their owners preferred to keep alive when they could, and Christian tales of torments in the arena were largely made up. Vastly more suffering attended criminals sold to the mines or agricultural press gangs, because that’s where most slaves and convicts ended up by far, and the Christians did nothing to abate these realities. They still needed mine and field labor, and even increased the quantity of slaves to do it, by continuing to relegate criminals who now included vice and thought crimes, and converting free farmers into “peasants” whose legal status did not differ much in any meaningful way from slaves.
On sexuality, Christianity did indeed make everything worse. But for nuance on that see my article on the pagan situation.
Finally, Christianity followed a standard worldwide anthropological pattern: it started out revolutionary and soon became institutionalized, oppressive, and regressive; basically, becoming the very thing it had started out rebelling against. See Element 29 in Ch. 5 of On the Historicity of Jesus for the anthropology; and Not the Impossible Faith, Chs. 3, 4, 6, 8, and 10 for Christianity’s rapid shift from egalitarian socialism to restoring every established social hierarchy, including by gender, wealth, and status, backing the very corrupt, oppressive capitalist system it had once opposed, in exactly the same way modern Christianity still does (behind its veneer of claiming to be about charity; which lie is exposed simply by counting where the money actually is and goes and who church communities actually back socially and politically).
I’ve always been perplexed when it comes to historians learning some languages. I understand why you would need to learn a language from the century and place of the history to which you’re looking, such as learning Latin or Greek when studying first century text, but I’ve heard some historians talk about learning a language that has nothing to do with that. An example would be when Bart Erhman said he learned German so he could translate from the earlier historians who started studying new testament history. Is there legitimacy in this or is this just sticking to traditions to feel important?
Oh definitely legitimate. A ton of scholarship I needed for The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (and its prequel, Science Education) for instance was only available in German and French. Some even in Spanish and Italian, which, knowing enough of the other languages, I can sort of pick through; not competently, but enough to fathom a gist.
This is true in most fields in history: a lot of work, sometimes even crucial work, is in other languages, particularly German and French (Germany and France still and long major centers of scholarship). Fortunately not much in Asian languages yet, as they are so different (none of my languages would help me one whit with that); but there are peer reviewed journals now on ancient history in Japanese, for example, so eventually that will become a language of study for standard history students, too.
A prominent example is that still to this day the leading reference index for all ancient history and classics (a catalog, with descriptions, of every book and article published on the subject worldwide each year) is the L’Année Philologique. I still subscribe, and have to use it often. Knowledge of French is not essential for it, but handy; and sometimes necessary (as the abstracts are not always in English, but vary across several languages, as it’s an international project).
So graduate studies in history usually mandates multi-language study; it’s a requirement of almost any Ph.D. In my case I had to learn two ancient and two modern languages in addition to English. I chose Greek and Latin (of course), and German and French. Which does not mean I gained fluency in these languages, however. To be able to read and translate competently, you fast-track your way through “translation competency” courses instead of the usual speaking-hearing courses you might think of as “learning a language.” So I can’t just “read German” but I can translate German competently. Likewise French, Latin, and Greek.
I just went over your link on Roman sexuality:
Underage marriages, and the underage sexual intercourse that took place within these unions, seem to be the great exception to this. They certainly took place, were apparently socially acceptable, and the parties to the practice were not penalized for it. The evidence is discussed by M. K. Hopkins (1965):
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According to McGinn (2015), the parties to an underage marriage were not guilty of stuprum, even if there was underage sexual intercourse:
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The evidence for underage marriage is found in funerary inscriptions. Girls were sometimes married as young as 6 or 7 years old. For example, Venturia got married at age 11:
Roman jurists recognized the existence of underage marriage, but did not condemn it, although they did not legally equate it with regular marriage. This is from Ulpian:
Based on your understanding of Roman sexual practices, was sex with someone under the age of 12 acceptable in a marital context? If pre-pubertal marriage was acceptable, wouldn’t it make sense that marital pre-pubertal sex was also an acceptable practice? My impression is that if you wanted to avoid stuprum for underage sex or “fornication with a virgin,” the best way to do so was to get married. Is this correct?
You are referring to an article in 1965 that contains inaccuracies. For example, Octavia was betrothed, not married; she only actually married at 13 or 14. Likewise, many of the things Hopkins counts as marriages were likely betrothals not marriages (e.g. that’s what “as though she were a wife, although she is not yet a wife” means). And we now know numbers and year counts in epitaphs are not strictly reliable. So his data are not usable this way. (They also span too long a period; laws may have changed under Christian dominance—I only wrote of the pre-Christian era; I didn’t look into what may have changed regarding ages of marriage in Christian law.)
But assuming there was no change, I haven’t seen any evidence against the law being as it was stated: sex with the underaged was a sex crime. It probably still occurred (as all crimes do), but, for example, anyone who wanted to avenge themselves on you could haul you into court for underage sex (or even any sex with a betrothed before formal marriage) if they could prove it (this ability to be rewarded for outing sex criminals started under Augustus and is actually one of the most notable features of the new Roman sex law regime he created and that mostly is what I described in my talk).
I understand that marital rape was perfectly legal in the Roman world, as you said in your talk. But what about raping a prostitute? For instance, Cato the Elder said (in a fragment):
“But except for a man who openly peddled his body or had hired himself out to a pimp, even if he had been disreputable [famosus] and of suspicious character, they ruled that it was not just for rape to be committed against a free body.”
Was it perfectly legal to rape a man (or woman) if they were prostitutes, as Cato the Elder indicates?
I understand slaves could be raped with impunity. Was it perfectly legal to rape foreigners?
Another question is: If a free Roman girl or woman dressed like a whore or wore really slutty clothes and she was raped, would this have been considered perfectly legal? Would anyone have been legally prosecuted for this?
Was there any difference between a prostitute and a promiscuous woman in the Roman world? Or were they the same?
Lucretia was the ideal Roman woman. She killed herself after being raped, as you know. Was there an expectation that victims of rape kill themselves, because that was what a good Roman woman with a sense of honor would do? What about women who dressed and acted like sluts or were promiscuous?
I don’t know the answer to that one; I would assume it would be theft of services, and thus a civil tort. But would there also be a criminal action for rape? I don’t know. Cato belongs to the Republic, long predating imperial legislation. One would have to check the Digest of Justinian for all of its Imperial-era rape statutes to reconstruct the answer. Scholars might already have done this; you’d have to search the scholarship to see.
Legally, yes. Until you were convicted of promiscuity. A woman convicted of promiscuity would be legally declared a prostitute (including requirement to dress as one, which actually meant, dress as a man); and any loopholes would be moot, I assume, since any woman thus convicted who did not get that registration would register themselves, because they have more rights as a prostitute than a woman declared infamia without registration as a prostitute. Even the later legislation that forbade elite women registering would no longer apply, because conviction would remove your elite status.
The latter would register as prostitutes, or else undertake a similarly classified profession (like actress), because it freed them from all sex crime laws (surrendering any higher status they may have had). As to the former, I don’t know if anyone has done a study of what was usual. One would have to research the literature to find out.
Richard,
I asked a Classics professor about whether raping prostitutes was legal in ancient Rome and whether rape victims were expected to kill themselves, following the example of Lucretia.
This was the response I got:
“Hi! I can provide some semblance of an answer for you. First, about whether rape of a prostitute was a crime. Prostitutes were infames, meaning that they lacked civil rights, just like slaves and actors. So short answer no: they didn’t have the right of consent any more than a slave did, so there was no sense that they could be raped. Catharine Edwards, Unspeakable Professions, is good on this for the social side of things. For the legal side, while I don’t know the Digest really at all, I DO know Berger’s Dictionary of Roman Law! There we learn that “Relations with meretrices [prostitutes] were not punished as stuprum [sex crime]”. This means that laws about sex crimes did not apply to prostitutes.
For the second question no, there was not an expectation that women who were raped (so we’re talking citizen women here) should commit suicide. If the woman was raped, she was free from the punishments that could attach to adultery, and the punishment just fell on the man (Berger again). Lucretia is an almost mythic exemplum, showing an extreme standard of feminine perfection. We might note that in that story, the men present tell her that she is not guilty and does not deserve punishment, but she kills herself anyway. So even in that story there is no expectation of suicide, at least from the men present.”
Thought you would find this interesting.
I would only add that prostitutes, if fortunate, could be protected by civil actions initiated against their rapists by their owners, pimps, family, or even clients (if a client had a contract with her and chose to enforce it against her rapist), essentially for injury or theft of services. And we know of at least one case where a prostitute’s right of refusal was upheld under the law, although she fought off her would-be-rapist and was facing a charge of assault (the charge was dismissed); it’s not known what would have been available to her if she had not succeeded in fighting him off (other than actions brought against a rapist by third parties per above; though possibly she could bring her own action for theft of services, there isn’t any surviving case law on it).
You may also find this paper on point for your query; and for more detail, this book.
According to this respondent, rape was the “default mode of prostitution in ancient Rome.” What are your thoughts on that? Or are we dealing with an overly broad definition of rape?
If there were legal remedies, they would have been available only to elite courtesans. Non-elite prostitutes were defenseless. Even in court, clients were found not criminally liable in cases where they had kicked down doors to rape prostitutes. This is an actual case from the Digest, discussed below. What was the legal reasoning behind that? Even court action, if there was any, wasn’t all that effective.
Here’s the response, it’s very thoughtful:
“Buckle up, this is not going to be a happy answer.
First, although unenslaved prostitutes suffered legal infamy that restricted their access to the courts and protection under the law in a fashion similar to actual slaves, practically, actual slave prostitutes were very common, and slave trafficking seems likely to have supplied a majority of Roman prostitutes throughout the classical period. Possibly a vast majority, although there is debate about that (there were certainly some unenslaved prostitutes), but in any case, there was a basic link, in Roman thought and practice, between slavery and prostitution that should be specifically addressed.
From a modern, correct, perspective, due to this outsize role of slavery in supplying prostitutes, coerced sex – rape – might be said not only to be licit but to be the default mode of prostitution in ancient Rome. Whether or not force was used in the moment, it was in the background. Even in ancient mindsets this could be recognized in special circumstances that prompted slavery and prostitution to be viewed in a different light – such as when considering illegal enslavement and sale into the sex trade. Flip the light-switch of social status that prompted the Romans to see rape as rape, and suddenly they saw it all along the road to prostitution – to the point that the idea that a formally respectable woman could have been illegally enslaved and wound up in a brothel without having been raped at many points along the prostitute-trafficking pipeline was scoffed at as ludicrous nonsense.
(Or, at absolute best, in ancient fantasy-romance literature, portrayed as a fantastical, extraordinary feat. Brothel-peril is a feature of some surviving Roman novels, and possibly a stock plot of the genre, in which it’s an opportunity for the heroine to affirm her superhuman devotion to her chosen man by somehow avoiding what happens to everybody else in such circumstances.)
Quoting McGinn (see sources section):
Rape was a very real prospect for a brothel prostitute […] Her vulnerability is illustrated by the sarcastic comments of the speakers in the rhetorical exercise recorded by the Elder Seneca about the brothel-inmate who kills her rapist. They question the woman’s ability to avoid rape by the pirates who captured and sold her, the pimp who acquired and installed her in a brothel, and the various customers who confronted her, including drunks, gladiators, and hot-blooded young men bearing arms. The visitors she could expect to receive amounted to “a low and hurtful mob” (“sordida iniuriosaque turba”). In other words, rape was the fate of a woman in a brothel: the place raped her, if no man did.
But returning to the formalist legal view of such things, and thus to the ordinary ancient perspective on “legitimately” prostituted prostitutes…
Broadly, as said above, it is quite clear that the laws of sex crimes (most relevantly, stuprum, and also adulteria) specifically define away the possibility of slaves and unenslaved but legally infamous persons being the victims of such sex crimes. What made criminal sex criminal was transgression against the sexual honor that helped define what it meant to be a respectable person. However, in the eyes of Roman law, there was no way to criminally transgress the sexual honor of an infamous person because they had none.
Enslaved people, as well as people subject to legal infamy such as unenslaved prostitutes, had very limited access to courts and the law in general. They had limited ability to bring cases or, under many circumstances, even testify. The exclusion from civil rights affected access to all sorts of justice: not just the specific case of stuprum.
At least one jurist is indulgent of the man in a scenario that’s nonconsensual beyond the level of general background coercion. Ulpian states that there is no liability for a lust-crazed customer who, locked out by a prostitute, breaks down her door to get to her. The legal question involves other opportunists taking advantage of the broken door to rob the prostitute – and that’s the loss for which Ulpian opines there is no action in court – but the original encounter, which involves her trying to lock the man out, doesn’t involve even what agreement an unfree person can give.
However, we can contemplate whether there might be other relevant offenses besides stuprum, and there is some, doubtful, possibility that these alternatives might not be completely denied. Besides law on sex crimes, law on violence could conceivably apply, although there’s a lack of evidence of its being applied in practice and evidence that brothels were viewed as naturally rowdy and violent places, so it’s not clear whether that avenue may also have been closed. Laws on breach of agreement (in case of a transaction gone bad) might have had some application – the law did at least recognize that prostitutes should receive their fees. These avenues might have been theoretically possible but even if so probably would have relied on obtaining the help of a respectable person in handling the case, which adds another layer of dubiousness. We might imagine that a few prostitutes catering to the elite may have had the connections to make something happen, but many more prostitutes occupied a very low place in society and could not likely form such connections.
Lastly, there is the possibility of self-defense in the moment, which might go beyond the locked door and other passive measures to include active violence against the assailant. Even this was not certainly a legally (to say nothing of bodily) safe route – raising the prospect of being charged for wounding or killing an attempted rapist in self-defence – but there are some stories of a prostitute’s (probably a nonslave prostitute’s) use of violence in self‑defence being upheld. How usual this was is not very clear, and there would almost certainly have been greater legal risk in attempting self-defence against someone themselves respectable and powerful than against someone themselves infamous, or just socially marginal.
Overall, the fact that the application of these other laws to prostitutes can only be discussed vaguely is an indication that the Romans largely kept the problems of prostitutes and the formally disgraced out of court and preferred that respectable venues of the law have as little to do with them as possible. With some potential, but probably not very reliable caveats, Roman law shielded the honorable and not the disgraced.
Sources
The best scholarly source here is McGinn, Prostitution, Sex, and the Law in Ancient Rome, which discusses this particular question pp. 326-328. McGinn’s conclusion, that the legal position on the liability for raping a prostitute is not clear, is a main informant for my post.
Other relevant scholarship includes McGinn (again), The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman Empire: Social History and the Brothel, which provides the above quote on p. 89, and Perry, Sexual Damage to Slaves in Roman Law (but this one mainly concerns “sexual damage” to slaves outside the context of prostitution).
Assembling a list of relevant primary sources would take some work. Information is fairly widely scattered, with bits of information in various legal writings and scattered impressionistic or allusive evidence in other literature, such as the aforementioned romance novels.”
Oh no, that’s all quite true: rape was routine in the ancient world. As I note in my speech on Sex and Sexism in Ancient Rome, it is very, very hard to find any consensual sex in the Roman Empire.
I’m more curious about who’s in your “faction” so to speak. I see a lot of “historians don’t believe in the dark ages,” I know that you obviously do, but who else does, because it seems that your perspective is being a little drowned out on the internet.
I cite several peer reviewed scholars on that point, actual experts in the subject, even in this article. And more in the chapters I cite, and those scholars do likewise. That’s your bread crumb if you want to pursue that line of investigation.
The internet is not academia. Even when it filters academia, the filter often distorts what an academic actually said. Better to go to the source: read the actual peer reviewed literature on this, particularly the latest, and don’t just selectively choose books and articles that argue one position, but seek out the best arguments for both positions, and compare the quality of their arguments—including their semantics (i.e. what they are actually saying, vs. what the internet claims they said).