Roman Empire, Civilization, Christianity, Church History, Greco-Roman Civilization 

The Story of Civilization 

In this massive book, whose scope and wit recall the golden days of historical writing, Dr. Durant recounts the flaming pageant of the rise of Rome from a crossroads town to world mastery. He tells of its achievements through two centuries of security and peace, from the Crimea to Gibraltar and from the Euphrates to Hadrian's Wall,m 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 surrounding sea of barbarism and of its long, slow crumbling and final catastrophic collapse into darkness and chaos.

Primarily a cultural history, 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, Cataline, 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, and Marcus Aurelius. We watch the rise of temples, basilicas, and forums, pass a day of games and spectacles 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 on his missionary labors. The colors darken, Palmyra rises and falls. The Empire attains a new - and spurious - invincibility under Aurelian, declines, and finally stiffens into a bureaucratic mode.

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 power that typify Roman history 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 resorted to more than a century before Christ and that the first Roman labor union was established about 600 BC. We hear of bank failures, pork barrels, depressions, government 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.

Caesar and Christ is Part III of Will Durant's monumental survey of world history. This work on The Story of Civilization originated in 1914 when Dr. Durant first began to collect material. Fame - with The Story of Philosophy - lay a dozen years ahead. More than twenty years later, in 1935, Part I, Our Oriental Heritage, was offered to the public. This was followed in 1939 by the second part, The Life of Greece. In 1944 came Caesar and Christ, the result of twenty-five years' preparation and five years' writing. Like the earlier parts, this volume is an independent self-contained segment of a ten-volume cultural history of civilization. Part IV, The Age of Faith, was published in 1950; Part V, The Renaissance, was published in 1953; Part VI, The Reformation, was published in 1957. In 1961, The Age of Reason Begins was published, as Part VII; it is being followed by The Age of Louis XIV (Part VIII) in 1963, and later by The Age of Voltaire (Part IX) and by Rousseau and Revolution, the concluding volume of this vast and epic panorama.