Caesar and ChristCaesar and Christ
a History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity From Their Beginnings to A.D. 325
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Book, 1972
Current format, Book, 1972, c1944, All copies in use.Book, 1972
Current format, Book, 1972, c1944, All copies in use. Offered in 0 more formatsIn this massive book. whose scope and wit recall the golden days of historical writing, Dr.Durant recounts the flaming pagent of the rise if Rome from a crossroads town to world mastery. He tells of its achievenemnts through two senturies of security and peace from the Crimea to Gibraltar and from the Eurphates to Hadrians Wall, of its spread of classic civilization over the Mediterranean and western European world. He tells of Rome's struggle to preserve its ordered realm from a surronding sea of barbarism and of its long, slow crumbling and final catastrophic collapse into darkness and chaos. Primarily a cultural histroy "Caesar and Christ" lavishly discusses government, industry, manners, morals, the status of women, law, philosophy, science, literature, religion, and art. Besides the varied pageant of the Catos, the Scipios, and the Gracchi, of Hannibal, Marius, Sulla, Catiline, Pompey, Caesar, Antony, Cleopatra, and the Emperors, good, bad, and indifferent, we view Cicero (busy in all departments of life). Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tacitus, Juvenal, and such cultivators of latterday Hellenism as Plutarch, Lucian, Marcus Aurelius. We watch the rise of temples, bascilicas, and forums, pass a day of games and spectcales at the Flavian amphitheater (correctly nicknamed the Colosseum). Turning to the Eastern Mediterranean, we accompany Christ on his ministry, witness the tragic scenes of the Passion, and sail and walk with Paul in his missionary labours. The colors darken, Palmyra rises and falls. The Empire attains a new -and spurious - invincibility under Aurelian, declines, and finally stiffens into a bureaucractic mold. "Caesar and Christ" contains many parallels to modern history, and Dr. Durant presents them with lucid authority. He believes that a reading of past events should illuminate the present. In the class struggles and jockeying for the power that typify Roman histroy from the Gracchi to Caesar, he finds an analogue to the development of Europe and America from the French Revolution to the present time. He reminds us that dictators have ever used the same methods. He tells us that the dole was restored to more than a century before Christ and that first Roman labor union was established about 600 B.C. We hear of bank failures, pork barrels, depressions, governmental projects and regulations, State Socialism, war-time priority plans, electoral corruption, pressure groups, trade associations, and other phenomena of ancient Rome that might easily fit into front-page headlines of our own era.
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- New York : Simon and Schuster, c1972.
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