Institute for Travesty

The themes of early Greek philosophy are, by definition, heady stuff. And at the start of the Silent Years, the Jews were establishing a heady tradition of their own which by the end of the Silent Years was needing codification in what has since been called the Mishnah, the collection of commentary on the Torah, the five books of Moses. That compilation would not come about until around 200 A.D. with the efforts of Judah the Prince (135 – 217 A.D.) Judah’s work would become the foundation for the Jerusalem Talmud only to be overshadowed by the much larger collection a century or so later now called the Babylonian Talmud. All of it heady stuff.

Heady Direction for Religion

East and West, Jew and Greek were moving in convergent directions. The Greek and Roman upper classes had moved away from pagan religious roots and were thoroughly prepared to think of God as One rather than as many, though as Gibbon notes, they were solidly entrenched in pagan hierarchies and rather nonchalantly participated in all the right pagan practices and rituals. That was certainly heady, if perhaps somewhat double-minded of them.

For their part, the Jews appreciated being considered philosophical in as much as they took one in every seven days for meditation and contemplation. They were people “of the Book,” and were urged to put their minds to it continually. And in recent centuries, the book had been added unto by a great deal of what was beyond the Written Law, extensions of thinking about the meaning and requirements of the Torah, the five books of the Law.

For both Greeks and Jews, then, religious thinking was changing, and changing in the direction of formal inquiry and education.

In that context, a consideration of Love after Deity as a potential Jewish influence throughout the Silent Years may seem surprising, even out of the blue. Love doesn’t seem like a heady topic. Nor does it seem to have been a favored topic before the Silent Years among the new cultures of Europe. In fact, a valuing of love—whether of country, of family, of friend, of a romantic partner--had to grow out of cultures known for ruthlessness.

Rapacious, Not-Loving Greek Ideals

Consider what we think of as the character of Mediterranean civilization in the period.

Organized history for the Silent Years is centered almost entirely on opportunistically ruthless individuals. Alexander the Great conquered the known world in record time and evidently without much more justification than that it was there to conquer. Alexander’s empire was torn to pieces immediately after his death by his closely associated military commanders. Antiochus Epiphanes, the descendant of one of those commanders and a hundred or so years later would make himself perpetually known as the man who wanted to be God and set himself up as such in the Jews’ Second Temple. He can also be remembered by the names of towns, since he established 18 cities all of which he named after himself. Megalomania rather than love seems to be the dominant descriptor.

In the West, petty wars among petty Italian states had led to a dominant Rome. The middle Silent Years found Rome on a bigger stage in a lifelong life-and-death struggle with Carthage on the north shore of Africa.

The formal history, in short, is savage. Women’s roles were few, and fewer still were roles based in love. Near the end of the period, Cleopatra, direct descendant of another one of the military commanders, showed that masculinity was not a necessary prerequisite for the scheming, world-dominating role.

As role models, such people were heavily imbued with Greek culture, particularly the Homeric classics. The Iliad let them dwell on the haughty, proud, and ruthless Achilles, a man strong enough to bring the united power of Greece to a standstill in his pique over losing a slave girl who shouldn’t have been enslaved.

The Odyssey allowed them to dwell on a second, and perhaps greater cultural model, Odysseus, or as he was also known, “crafty Odysseus,” a man who could travel the world and always find the way to win, even over giants and minor gods. There were people who were loyal to Odysseus: his wife Penelope, his son Telemachus, the servant who recognized him by his scar, even an old dog. Loyalty was a thing of high value, especially for those who were on top. Love, separate from loyalty, seems to have been an unnecessary extravagance.

The Homeric epics themselves look back on an older tradition of mythological tales, particularly of the twelve Olympian gods, but entirely tolerant of a much wider pantheon. And this folktale tradition seems equally ignorant of love or its demands. For a mortal, getting involved romantically with an immortal is the quick formula for devastation, note Europa with Zeus. Gods getting involved with humans, always carried with it a sense that the gods are inviolable and the humans are throwaways.

Greek religion is fundamentally a matter of propitiation, man’s attempt to keep on the gods’ right side or to get off their wrong side. By and large, the folktale tradition emphasizes the nightmare of being on the wrong side of fickle, capricious, and fundamentally unconcerned deities.

There simply isn’t room for love as a central theme in such literature.

Romans as Different

Half way through the Silent Years even in the Eastern Mediterranean, we have to start taking decisive account of the Romans. And by their own admission, the Romans were something else. They routinely bowed to Greek thought, but they also looked down on the Greeks as unable to accomplish the most basic civic virtues—too crafty by half. And they looked back on their own cultural heroes, who routinely put Rome before self.

Consider the story of Cincinnatus, for example, a man who had served Rome as a triumphant general. Yet he found himself relegated to obscurity, tending his own meager plot of land on the far side of the Tiber, but doing so without demur or complaint, only to find one day a delegation from Rome calling him back to service as imperator. Cincinnatus leaves his plow as easily as he found it, saves Rome, and just as easily relinquishes power back to Rome, its Senate and its people.

For Romans, the words fides (“faithful”) and fidelitas (“faithfulness”) are central. They both obviously have strong relationship to any ancient concept of loyalty. But in stories like that of Cincinnatus, isn’t there something a good deal more than loyalty involved, much more a subjugation of self to something higher and much more valuable, a willingness to endure hardship and even humiliation for that higher object. And isn’t that deeper sense of Cincinnatus something of a definition of love?

It would be one thing if Cincinnatus were the only example. But in fact, it can easily seem that the Romans were interested in revering only such character. There were, for example, Horatius Cocles and two companions, three young men of the Roman upper class who had got rid of kingship and Tarquin somewhere before 500 B.C. The going got tough, the enemy was at the gates, or rather just on the other side of the river at the other side of the bridge. Horatius took a firm position on the bridge (thus becoming Horatio at the Bridge) while lesser men undertook to destroy the bridge under them. That, of course, left the three against an entire army.

The Greeks had a similar story in the 300 at Thermopylae. The difference in accounts, again, is that the Spartans at Thermopylae were loyal to the last man, wonderful examples of Spartan discipline and self-negation. Horatius and friends somehow managed to be different, joying in what they were able to give to their evidently beloved Rome.

By the end of the Silent Years, Rome, not Greece, was in charge of the world. And Rome had started to notice and to wonder at itself. in Latin, Rome was Roma. Roma spelt backward, was amor, Love, in Latin.

Gibbon notes something strange and wonderful in the outworking of a growing love of country in the imperial period following the Silent Year. Roman achievements in public works which even after almost two millennia and in ruins were among the most impressive structures in Europe. The most remarkable thing about them, however, was how many of them were built by private donation of one or a very few aristocrats. In the Empire, love of the Empire and Rome, if not of man for woman or woman for man, was extravagantly demonstrated for centuries.

Continued Background of Cruelty, Hatred, Contention. And Revenge

It is all considerably more complicated than an overview of culturally central narratives suggests. We have not. for example, started to consider crucifixion or gladiatorial combats, symbols of ancients’ cruelty and indifference, evidently without a hint of mitigating love. Nor have we even mentioned endemic and extreme class hatreds, routine practices of slavery, and the like.

Love at the Roots in Hebrew Scripture

But what have the Jews to do with all this, the consistent cruelty or the growing sense of love at least Roman-style love, as a central value?

By the time of Ezra and the formative documents of the Talmud, it is easy to feel that the central concepts of Judaism became Written Law, Oral Law, and Tradition. A return to the original Hebrew scriptures, however, allows Love centrality, and it can early be assumed that pious, God-fearing and scripture-reading Jews never forgot these older emphases. Thus the prologue to this chapter’s reference to King David, circa 1000 B.C., “I will love you, O LORD, my strength.”

Long before David, there is the centrally important Joseph within the dysfunctional family of Jacob. He is sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers. In Egypt, he endures hardship and imprisonment, but God is with him, gives him a spirit of prophesy in the interpretation of dreams, presents him before Pharaoh, and providentially makes him second ruler of the kingdom, saving the Egyptians from starvation but leaving them slave-tenants of Pharaoh.

Along the way, in the starving years, Joseph’s brothers come from Canaan begging for grain. It is obviously time for revenge, a perennial and crucial topic. But Joseph instead does his brothers good and ultimately settles his whole family of some 70 souls in Egypt down by the sea where there is good pasture for their livestock. His love of family is the precursor by 400 years of a Jewish people, enormously enlarged, leaving Egypt under Moses and Aaron.

Later literary role models most emphatically acting out of love for their families include Ruth and Esther.

But the key moment is God’s communications with Moses and his greatest of commandments, “thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart. . .” (Deut. 6: 5). And then there is a second commandment like unto it, “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” Lev. 19: 18). Jesus of Nazareth recognized the two as separate and superior to all the rest of the law, for Moses and all the prophets depended on it.

The prophetic tradition in Scripture also underlined the personal, loving centralities of the faith. Ironically, it was God who loved, as a husband should love his cherished bride, and Israel which routinely deserted the covenant relationship. The prophets chastised in God’s name the unfaithfulness of Israel, but they also almost without exception ended by asserting that God’s promises are irrevocable and that his love for Israel would ultimately prevail in the final Day of the Lord. The Apostle Paul, as Saul, one of the most thoroughly versed scholars of Israel before his conversion, could sum it up, “Love never fails.”

Love in a Three-Way Competition

We then have very good and very ancient documentation of approaches toward or away from love in the three major contestant cultures for ideological supremacy in the ancient world in the later Silent Years: the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans. Of the three, the Romans at the end of the Silent Years were unequivocally the most powerful militarily and politically. The Greeks were the acknowledged leaders of intellectualism and thought, the whole “World” either speaking koine Greek or being considered barbarians for not doing so. The Jews seemed to be the has-beens of the Old Mideastern, Semitic World that came to a political end in the 6^th century B.C. The Jews were also possibly the most numerous as an ethnic group and almost certainly the most widely dispersed throughout the Roman empire.

A Dominantly Cruel World

But all three of the ethnic contestants were internally divided on the issue of love as the years of silence progressed. Cruelty and humanitarian indifference along with class conflict and hatred, if anything, can be argued to have increased throughout these centuries. Crucifixions and, in fact, mass crucifixions seem to have proliferated and become utterly ghastly by the time Jerusalem fell in 70 A.D., so ghastly, in fact, that the horror was somewhat mitigated only by the Romans running out of trees for crosses.

As for gladiatorial combats, we have all heard and through the movies seen the film “reality” of the Roman aristocracy’s idea of entertaining the voting population. Most of us don’t notice that in the film versions, we also are expecting to be entertained. Generations of film have generally allowed us to contemplate the spectacle of gore to our hearts’ content. (Love always has a tough row to hoe.)

We tend to be shocked when we notice amphitheater remains in France that show that the Gauls were equally amused. But most of us are entirely unaware that with Roman victories in the eastern Mediterranean, gladiatorial shows became all the rage everywhere in the non-Jewish world.

So an argument that Europeans learned to love from the Jews of the inter-Testamental period is obviously tenuous at very best. Taking a longer-term perspective that includes 21^st century realities, whether gore in movies or cataclysmic destruction in Ukraine, perhaps isn’t particularly more hopeful of a world taught to love.

Making Love, Not War as a New Theme

What might be possible to prove would be that the world has come to think about love more and war less, and that it has come to think so from origins in the Silent Years. In fact, we do have very substantial documentary evidence for just such origins virtually at the exact center of the Silent Years, documents which collectively are known as the New Comedy plays of Plautus, a Roman playwright.

The Greeks loved to claim that they had invented comedy, and certainly comedy and love are common bedfellows. But the comedy the Greeks invented was Old Comedy. It was played as a fourth play against a trilogy of tragedies. If Aristotle was right about tragedy, the tragedies of a century before him had already wrung the audience out of pity and fear. And then came the burlesque, something like a stand-up comedy skit, normally entirely outside the real world with minimal plot, maximized sexual gags, and, evidently, young bucks running through the aisles yelling, “Get it up! Get it up!” Not exactly family friendly entertainment and not even reasonable plot. We are told that the Old Comedy conclusion had some relation to the tragedies preceding it. If the relationship was one of cathartic effect on the audience, it would seem to be a return to mundane and smutty daydream, perhaps to relief that the wringing out process had done its worst and retired.

About a hundred years later, the Greeks claimed to have invented “New Comedy,” something having at least some reasonable plot. It is hard to say because we don’t have these new comedies to look at. We do have normally random references to new comedies, including quotations of lines and passages. New Comedy is associated with the dramatist, Menander, who evidently came from a family of dramatists. In comedy criticism, New Comedy gets renamed Middle Comedy.

Flatfoot, Titus Maccius Plautus

Really New Comedy, that is comedy that is recognizably the same genre as much modern comedy, is evidenced by complete plays only with Titus Maccius Plautus, not himself a Roman but rather a man from Umbria come to Rome to make his fortune. His name as we have it looks like a convenient stage name, Titus Clownish Flatfoot.

And with Flatfoot, we have a good many extent plays. He is definitely not a Greek. And in contrast to Greek Old and Middle Comedy, his plays are the foundation stone of New Comedy which is still being developed today with, of course, an enormous emphasis on love. And Flatfoot definitely developed real plots---typically said to have originated with Greek Middle Comedy. Flatfoot adopted plots that were centrally concerned not with the sexual titillation of Old Comedy but with love, at least the teenage kind of infatuation that often ends in marriage.

Flatfoot made love comedy by inventing difficulties for love to overcome. The teenager had fallen in love with a courtesan or with a slave or the like. Flatfoot even developed love complication in a particular figure—the senex, the older man with power and wealth opposed to the teenager or the young adult male. Maybe the senex was in love with the girl herself and had all the money to offer her lifetime security. Or maybe the senex was the father of the young man and wanted to sell his beloved, who turned out to be a slave, for the high price a body like hers could command.

In Flatfoot, love made the world go round, as it has ever since in comedy. And true love never did run smooth, as it has always been in comedy. Clownish Flatfoot is the seminal New Comedian, and beyond that, he seems to have been the first musical comedian, with whole sections of the play designed to be sung to music of the flute.

There will, no doub, be some scholars who feel that Greek drama has been short-changed in all this. Maybe Menander had already invented what Plautus borrowed. One of Plautus’ favorite devices, the imaginative design of impossibly intricate Greek names (like Thesaurochrysonicochrysides) may simply recreate an Old Comedy technique. With or without such quibbles, Plautus is the extant; Menander is the supposed. Plautine comedy probably had more prurient elements than the summary above admits. But it is the new emphasis on the everyman with everyman feelings and everyman goals of the right girl for life, not for sexual encounter, that is the enduring box office victor in every period of dramatic and cinematic history.

Quibbles acknowledged, they are a family argument among critics who all accept the basic line: the Greeks invented Old Comedy and may have made substantial progress in Middle Comedy. By Plautus, we are definitely on a firm footing of New Comedy, and we can move directly from Plautus’ Menaechmi to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, noting only how much more robust and fully centered in love relationships Shakespeare’s version turned out to be.

And the Winner Is. . .

One way or the other, the prize, the invention of comedy as the dominant dramatic genre through at least all drama after Shakespeare has been thought by most scholars to be either Greek or Roman. The present study, however, questions this orthodoxy not only in drama but also in all other areas of Classical civilization between 400 B.C. and the reign of Tiberius Caesar.

Traditional Classicism recognizes Greeks and Romans, combines them as Greco-Roman civilization, and when pressed, recognizes that there were two different civilizations involved and that the two, despite efforts to cover over discrepancies were, in fact, competing with each other. In the end—that is in the reign of Constantine the Great some 300 years later than the Silent Years—that competition resulted in the building of a second eastern Capital for the empire at Constantinople on the Black Sea and eventually a division of the Roman world into an Eastern and Western Empire.

It is a nice, neat organization for recounting history. But is it essentially wrong? Wasn’t there really a third contestant, the dispersed Jews? And didn’t both the Greeks and the Romans bend under the pressures of that third-way competition?

In the first three and last three chapters of this work, we have presented the evidence for six major ideational topics largely determinate of the Mediterranean culture at the end of the Silent Years and all showing evidences of Jewish influence consistent with their long-historical, nationally authoritative scriptures.

Before Presenting the Oscar

If Judaism did have such decisive influence, the Greeks and Romans may have started feeling those Jewish influences over hundreds of years, perhaps back to the eighth century—that is, essentially from the founding of Rome on. We’ve already seen that the Jewish religious documents were centrally concerned with love issues, primarily love issues between God and humanity, but extending over to love within family and love between man and woman—after all, for the Jews, the relations between a man and woman had started the sin thing and the fallen nature of the race!

In other places, we have argued that the Jews, who didn’t go in for theatre, nevertheless, knew a comedic story when they saw it, which was ages before the Greeks and Romans. Along with Ruth, The Exodus, after all, is a very grand comedy, but also a very dark comedy because the Hebrews were never committed to the love relationship with God enough to follow through to the rewards. And 400 years or so later, the Hebrews had another chance under David, a man of God’s own heart. The career of David (primarily as related in I and II Samuel) is one of the greatest comedies of all times, but again it becomes one of its greatest dark comedies as well when David’s love affair with God is interrupted by his love affair with Bathsheba.

The Golf Swing of Stories to Live By

Humanity does not live by bread alone. Largely it lives in and through seminal or symbolically central stories. And Plautus has the honor of foundational association with the formal dramatic genre we call comedy. That said, a consideration of two stories separated by about 3000 years allows us to place Plautus more accurately somewhere in the mid-arc of history. Like a golf swing, the story of three stories starts high, moves to a powerful but low swing center, and then follows through higher on its own momentum.

First, the Book of Ruth. What do you know—a senex comedy! The woman born in Moab, and thus a foreigner to the one true God, nevertheless marries into the family of God. But then, her husband dies. The woman, Ruth, however, refuses to forsake her mother-in-law and her new relationship to God.

Note the typical comedic tendencies already exhibited. Comedy is never comfortable ignoring women and easily concentrates on them as heroines. Comedy has a definite bent toward the just nobodies, who, after all, are just about all of us as human beings. Here Ruth is subservient first to a husband, then to a mother-in-law. She is a widow, evidently penniless, a looked-down upon foreigner in Israel, originally not of the Chosen People and outside the line of divine history and relationship.

Comedy never considers practical exigencies beneath contempt or consideration but rather gives them almost-star billing. Personal practical exigencies are the stuff of comedy, its life and breath as it is our life and breath as audience. Ruth has more than her share of practical exigencies, a burden of exigencies that suggest mere survival as the best comedic hope available.

Ruth and Naomi go back from Moab to Bethlehem in Judea. The Jews have a law that the closest kinsman must marry a widow to raise up offspring for the dead relative. This is a prominent duty within the brotherly love of Israel.

Boaz turns out to be a near kinsman. He outplays an even closer kinsman, marries Ruth, eventually has a son by her in his old age, and the son turns out to be the grandfather of King David.

The penniless Moabitess becomes the great-grandmother of the man after God’s own heart, the great king whose line would redeem the world and ultimately rule it in peace. The comedic form may never have narrated a greater human success.

3,000 Years’ Development of Comedy

Three thousand years later, consider South Pacific, one of the greatest box-office hits both of the legitimate theatre and of the screen. What do you know—another senex comedy!

But Emile de Bec is not a blocking figure any more than Boaz was. He is an all-too-human French planter, widower of a Tonkinese woman with two children by her to raise. The war has come to the South Pacific, his island has been taken over by Seabees and nurses, and he has attended a party for the officer corps. As he sings,

“Some enchanted evening,

You may see a stranger,

You may hear her laughing

Across a crowded room,

And night after night, as strange as it seems,

The sound of her laughter will sing in your dreams.”

It is one of the most lyric and profound statements of love-at-first-sight in the history not just of drama but of all literature.

In Ruth we have the top of the backswing. In South Pacific we have the high, fully unreserved and athletic follow-through. But Plautus is the bottom of the downswing, the moment of impact and compression as the seminal figure in the development of formal, dramatic comedic performance.

Plautus is a typical down-to-earth Roman. He isn’t much for love scenes or Cyrano de Bergerac lyrics. In Menaechmi, his comedic formula seems to be the quite prosaic. Know what you can get and what you can’t, and be satisfied with what you can.

So Plautus’ connection with love is fairly elementary. But it is also generically central.

Of the three stories—Ruth, Menaechmi (as representative of Plautus and represented to us moderns in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors), and South Pacific, it is possible to gauge their relative current importance in a simple popular-culture question: which is most remembered for a heroine’s name?

Plautus comes in a very dead last (Even Shakespeare’s much more recent female leads in Comedy of Errors, Adriana and Luciana, get easily forgotten.)

South Pacific’s love-comedy lyrics are wonderfully memorable:

“Once you have found her, never let he go,”

“I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair,”

“Younger men than I, officers and doctors,

probably pursue her, she could have her pick,”

“Younger than springtime am I, gayer than laughter. . . .”

But again, what was the heroine’s name?

Oh yes, Nellie. Probably short for Ellen, perhaps etymologically a reference to Helen of Troy. Of course, she can also be remembered as Miss Forbush.

And then there is Ruth.

The third chapter of the Book of Ruth is one of the most sophisticatedly gentle stories of love-at-first- sight in all literature.

For every Nellie, how many Ruths have been found in every age?

A Virtual Reality without a Shred of Documentary Evidence—Except the Whole History of Comedy

The argument here has been carefully constructed to give absolutely no evidence for a direct Jewish influence in Plautus’ life or in his comedies. We shouldn’t be surprised at lack of direct evidence. We know Plautus died in 184 B.C. We think we can infer that he was born sometime in the mid-250’s B.C. There is a small amount of basically random information that he was born outside of Rome itself in Umbria and came to Rome as a peregrinus early in life, made and lost money, and only in the last twenty years of a long life became a dramatist. With such skeletal evidence, anything like documented influence is almost impossible.

But indirectly, we know that Diasporan Jews lived in the area where Plautus lived. We know that the Jewish Scriptures were available in the international language of the day. And we know that those Scriptures were very centrally concerned with love as the central fact of human relationship.

During Plautus’ lifetime, falling toward the end of the long struggle between Rome and Carthage, there is little sense of love in the greater world of politics, military campaigns, clashes between civilizations, and profound social upheaval. And yet in the midst of all that, Plautus is given credit for establishing the central literary theme that transcends ages and cultures and enshrines love as the central secular concern of the race.

With All Ballots in and Counted

If we assume that Plautus had absolutely no direct connection at all with Judaism, it would still be difficult to argue that the birth of modern comedy did not represent a significant victory for Jewish values and sense of human life.

And that would, of course, make the triumph of love much like other major directions of the Silent Years.

In General, Was Judaism a Major Player along with the Greeks and Romans?

What would it take to assert, “Judaism is the Third Force of Classical Civilization?

In addition to the triumph of love, we have at various stages of this investigation presented evidence that the 7-day week as an organization of human activity was of obvious Hebrew origin and remains even today one of the most central of human organizational principles.

We recognized, as presumably almost everyone always has, that monotheism, always attributed to the Hebrews, was totally exceptional to the ancient world. The modern sense of religion as fundamentally related to a unitary God goes without saying.

Slaves, by Gibbon’s carefully considered estimate, accounted for at least 50% of the population of the Roman Empire. Gibbon argues for an increasingly scarce supply of slaves as the cause of better treatment of slaves. It probably helped that the Jewish worldview was anything but complaisant about the evils of slavery. Greeks were far more lenient to slaves than Romans. So, chalk up a victory perhaps for supply-side economics, but also for Jewish values somewhat supported for once by Greek opinion.

In Chapter 2, we considered how Pythagorean mathematical philosophy, long before the Silent Years began, nevertheless ended by agreeing with the Jewish insistence on One, not many gods. Later, we considered how materialistic philosophy from Thales on seems to have started from Jewish premises. Thales, like Pythagoras, is also much prior to the Silent Years, but we have made passing reference to philosophic trends after Socrates and Plato that indicate Greek philosophic interest in Jewish ideas throughout the Silent Years as well.

And we have considered in some preliminary detail how the Jewish idea of Deity, which is infinitely deeper than simply an idea of monotheism by itself, would be a series of shocks to pagan cultures around the Mediterranean, increasingly understood through the Septuagint, the Synagogue, and the Second Temple throughout the Silent Year centuries. By and large, these Hebraic scriptural ideas of Deity had totally dominated by the third or fourth century A.D. in a new Age of Theology rather than of Philosophy.

In all this, there is perhaps no document that absolutely proves any one of the contentions about Jewish influence on Greek and Roman thought and action. But if we assume a three-way competition for the direction of the world in the last four centuries B.C., there is substantial evidence for progress in all these areas in the Silent Year period, always progress for Jerusalem in its three-way contest with Athens and Rome.

As we have contended throughout, monotheism was the bomb that shattered the ancient Mediterranean mindset. And monotheism is still presented as clearly the undeniable gargantuan Jewish idea.

And a New Star is Born

In contrast, love is the small, new kid on the block by the time, certainly, of Plautus and even of Augustus and Tiberius Caesar. From a sophisticated and learned perspective, love is preposterous and unsupportable as worthy of philosophic consideration and understanding. Many centuries after classical civilization had been eclipsed, an English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham essentially showed that love was a figment of the imagination, that all human action had to be and always would be simply a matter of self-interest. Modern universities are long on Bentham and exceedingly short on ever mentioning love in a serious breath.

And yet, the Jewish documents had always centralized love. It was thus a very old topic equally at home in the story of Jacob’s special love for Rachel; equally at home in the story of Jacob’s special love for Rachel’s son, Joseph; equally at home in the story of Joseph’s love for the family that had sold him into slavery.

Amor omnia vincet, love conquers all, was an old Hebrew idea when Romulus and Remus founded a village next to the Tiber that became Rome. And it was an even older idea that a loving God had created the world and found it good.

By the end of the Silent Years, a great many people found the world nothing but evil. Seminal Gnostic thinkers were proclaiming matter itself to be essentially and eternally evil. People were turning away from having children at all in such a depraved world, while others threw infants in front of chariots without remorse. A good time was going to the amphitheater for free and getting to give thumbs up or thumbs down for the life or death of the gladiators who did or didn’t entertain sufficiently well. Sex as simply that and nothing to do with love was exalted to the extent that the Emperor Tiberius’ wife and the Emperor Claudius’ wife both presided at public orgies where their bodies could be used and perhaps even abused by an indiscriminate herd of courtiers. The best hope for the sophisticated and philosophical seemed to be to somehow stoically ignore it all and get to the end.

Except for the little seed of love for home and family and for Rome that seemed somehow anachronistically still to survive in Roman hearts and for its stage representation in that odd fellow, Titus Clownish Flatfoot, it looked like the old Hebrew idea had been thoroughly extirpated and could be thrown out onto the dung heap.

And then, within the living memory of Augustus and Tiberius, it turned out that monotheism had always been joined to love and, in fact, that God is Love. The world has not gotten over this final shock even today.

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