Marcus Regulus

Hi all, I am a pastor of a small church in Michigan, USA. I am interested in Roman and Greek History because I love the time period. I am a particular fan of the Roman Republic. I am beginning a period of self education to prepare for a Ph. D. in this area so I began to look for a site that might discuss this area of history and found you guys. (Good info by the way and good references to different books.) looks like a great place to share information and discuss things. I am interested in all aspects of Roman history, society, culture, politics, religion and military so I may look for comment on a variety of things. Looking foward to it.

fatboy, I don't think that can be proven given Roman history itself. The Roman Republic and Empire justified all of its conquests with the gods. In fact every empire of the ancient world that was agressive was pagan. they absorbed many of the gods they conquered mostly for political reasons, not so much religious. It should be noted that they didn't absorb many from Carthage. Quite untrue. The Roman empire was tolerant of all religions except those that weren't tolerant of other religions. The issue with Christianity and Judism for that matter was the fact that their beleif system did not allow them to worship any other God. This came into contrast with worship of Caeser as a god. The Christians and Jews refused to worship Caeser and the 'tolerant' Romans killed them for it. It is no different than liberals in our society that preach toleration but oppose any viewpoint that is against their own that has religious conotations. The fact any people being tolerant, be they pagan or monotheist, is tolerant at all is false. Tolerance is the greatest myth of all. You said it yourself -- they couldn't tolerate a view different from their own. Guess they weren't so tolerant after all.

My compliments on your site! It is well connected and the information is great especially the lists of all the books, very helpful

There is one significant thing I can think of when it comes to the Empire and Christianity. When Constantine took over and started letting Christianity in, the one thing he did was get rid of the hole Roman legal system which was completely corrupt to the Christians which actually, at the time, was far better. It might be worth a thesis to find out more about this in some way, but by this time the Empire was on its last legs as it was known before. I think the whole idea that Christianity was the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire may be little overblown. It had a factor to be sure, but there does seem to be a new movement out there pointing to other factors such as slavery, the Empire being to dependent on foreign mercenaries rather than their legions for defence, the legions themselve being diminished in quality, etc. I think the fact that the Romans seemed to shift in their mentality from building an Empire to just enjoying their empire without considering external threats seems to be the largest factor to me. Empires by their nature make to many enemies from without and within -- The fact is that the Empire was built on the ashes of the Republic, which did more to build Rome than the Empire. I don't think some forgot that. I don't know about that, I think greed and desire for power has more to do with wars than religion. Religion often gets used by the power hungry to justify their cause, but the real motive for wars seems to be more along the lines of I want this peace of land these people's money. It goes something like this -- "I want to invade Egypt because I want to control the grain supply and make a fat profit, because I want to be the middle man -- Hmmmm. Which preist of Mars can I get to justify this religiously" Sorry the root cause of wars seems to be more the desire to have something that somebody else has than religion.