Savage Miracles

Carlin Barton closes a brilliant article comparing concepts of honor, sacrifice, and sacramentum found among martyrs and gladiators with some observations on the wider cultural import of her work. One of her main aims is to overcome the perception that Christians and Romans were working in completely separate symbolic universes, a perception that fundamentally shapes the historical work of Gibbon and Nietzsche’s genealogy:

“For Edward Gibbon, like Friedrich Nietzsche, the Romans were the strong and the noble. Both saw a sanguine, virile, joyfully predatory Rome attacked and infested by a mode of being foreign and alien to the Roman spirit that subverted the valuation of the proud and noble with the positive valuation of the humble and base . . . .

“Caesar and Christ are, for us, the archetypical heroes of two antithetical cosmologies. We might, like Nietzsche and Gibbon before him, marvel or lament at the subversion of the victor by the victim, the masters by the martyrs, a mightly and worldly Rome mysteriously undermined by, or radically converted to, a view of the universal fundamentally at odds with that inhabited by the conquerors of Corinth and Carthage. If so, we fail to see the degree to which the proud Roman animus was already turned against itself, nor how deeply in love with victory and glory was the humble Christian.”

Classicists gravitate to Scipio and Caesar, Cicero and Virgil, but “in the late Republic and early Empire, the most popular heroes and heroines represented in their persons and responded to what seem to us far less sanguine and sober strains in the Roman psyche. Lucretia, Mucius, Regulus, Decius, and the gladiator were only the most conspicuous of the humiliated and defeated heroes who attempted to wring glory from their own bowels.” What Barson wants to stress is that these are precisely the Roman heroes that Christians (like Augustine) pointed to as precursors to Christian martyrdom. Caesar and Virgil join Christ only in the Renaissance, with Dante; but “other Romans were there from the beginning.”

In short, many Romans identified with the position of Christians, “defeated and humiliated – without necessarily finding salvation in the burning flesh of a mucius or a Peregrinus or a Laurence, without recognizing the criminal crucified on the cross as their redeemer . . . . For many Romans there was simply no redemption.”