Seeing Rome through a Christian Lens, or, Morality and History

Interview with British historian and podcaster Tom Holland:

Though Rome still stirs the passions of history fans in the West, Holland is reluctant to say that our civilisation is still shaped by their legacy. “I think you can say that China today is recognisably the heir of the empire that existed 2,000 years ago,” he says, as we drink tea. “I don’t think that you can say that about modern Europe.”

Holland stresses Rome’s unique position as the empire that “ruled the entirety of the Mediterranean seaboard”, an achievement that has never been replicated before or since. “So I think that purely in geopolitical terms Rome is alien to us in a way that China, the Chinese empire, is not to the contemporary Chinese,” he says.

At Rome’s height the empire spanned from Hadrian’s wall to the pyramids in Egypt, its success partly explained by its ability to conquer vast territories and convert its new subjects into good Roman citizens.

With debates raging about “decolonising” schools and museums, activists tend to focus on another great empire: Britain’s. Holland is insistent these arguments should not be applied to his book, contending that the Romans wouldn’t have even understood the term.

His previous book, Dominion, delves into how the West is moulded by a Christian tradition, which has provided the moral lens through which we observe both current and past events.

Holland says we cannot use this lens to examine the Romans, who operated on an entirely different set of beliefs and philosophies. He says Christianity “has transformed our understanding so utterly that when we look back at the pre-Christian world, it’s as though we’re looking at a glass darkly”.

“The Roman attitudes to empire, which are complex, ambivalent, sophisticated, but are not shaped by the Christian assumptions that I think determine how we see empire.”

Holland views contemporary debates around rewriting history through a moral gaze, with good guys to be celebrated and bad guys to be cancelled, as a thoroughly Christian discourse. . . .

When pushed on his own views on so-called “woke” history, his answer is nuanced yet firm. “I personally don’t think that the arc of history bends toward justice,” he says.

“I don’t think that there are right sides of history. But it’s important for our age because it’s a very moral age and it needs moral lessons that history be made to teach those lessons, I mean, I think that’s a fool’s errand myself, but I can see why people do it.”

I don’t see why people can't apply moral judgments to people in the past, if that’s what they want to do. But I certainly agree that you will not achieve any understanding of the past if you start from modern moral assumptions.

To think hard about the past, even the past of 100 years ago, is to understand that it was a different world where people saw the world differently than we do. If you have no interest in understanding the past, in trying to see things as other have, then to me you are not doing history and should just think about something else.