The Eternal Destiny of Rome

‘When Rome falls, the whole world shall fall.’

-St. Bede (672-735 AD)

If there is any city worthy of being considered the capital of the West (if not the world), it is the Eternal City of Rome. Since at least the first century before Christ, when the poet Tibullus dubbed it ‘Urbs Aeterna’, Rome has unquestionably lived up to her name throughout the millennia. The Eternal City in essence embodied the ancient Roman belief in the idea that no matter what happened, Rome would forever endure. It was not a difficult notion in the days of antiquity when the city was the capital of the known world.  Even after the Empire inevitably fell, every subsequent empire, kingdom and republic modeled itself after Rome’s laws, customs, and ideas. Where the political state fell, Rome remained as the spiritual capital of Christendom under the Papal Holy See.

For GK Chesterton, Rome of antiquity represented the furthest Mankind could go without the truth and sanctification of the One True God. As he wrote in his book, The Everlasting Man; Rome was the closest a pagan civilisation had ever come to pre-Christian chivalry. By merit of her natural virtue and vigour, Rome was both a product of her time and yet thoroughly a contradiction of it. Whether it be driven by Trojan legacy, military ambition, or the honour of their own household gods was inconsequential. Rome had successfully defended herself against the depravities of surrounding civilisations which transcended historical era.

The contrast of Rome’s Christian destiny has a no more fitting icon of rivalry than Carthage itself. Throughout the Punic wars, Rome and Carthage would lead bloody campaigns against one another for the supremacy of the Mediterranean Sea. During this time, Rome was forced to innovate and push itself to every physical, economic, and military limit. In doing so, Rome began to expand outside of Italy for the first time. By the Third Punic war, Rome had robbed the Carthaginians of all Punic territories in surrounding Italian islands, Sicily and Hispania. But in the greater context of history, Carthage was more than a military rival of early Rome.

The English term Punic/Punes derives from the Greek ‘Phoinix/ Phoinikes,’ or known today as the Phoenicians, a Levantine Bronze Age naval civilisation from primarily modern-day Lebanon. In turn, biblically inclined readers may better know the Phoenicians as the Canaanites of the Old Testament. Both Greco Roman sources and the Biblical narrative paint the same morbid picture of the Phoenician/Canaanite culture.

For the Biblical Hebrews who left Egypt in Exodus, the Canaanites were a cursed people who worshiped and sacrificed children to Satanic idols and practiced atrocious sexual practices. Roman and Greek sources also both mention similar practices, such as the people of Carthage sacrificing their children to Baal, a well-known demonic entity within the Christian religion.

Young Carthaginian women would also be sent to temples in honour of their fertility goddess, Astarte, to partake in sacred prostitution. Sacred prostitution was a common practice amongst Mesopotamian religions where female priestesses and initiates would have intercourse with any male visitor who came and wished it. Often it was considered an important rite of passage to have intercourse with at least one stranger who visited in their lifetimes. The practice was a popular way for lower class men to sleep with women from the upper class. Similarly, the Greek historian Herodotus centuries earlier had written of an identical practice by the Babylonians, where every woman had to offer herself to a stranger at least once in her life at the temple. A practice which Herodotus considered to be the ‘foulest’ of Babylonian customs.

Unbeknownst to those fighting it, the Punic wars could therefore be considered a proto-holy war for a God not yet revealed. In 2008, archaeologists discovered warships from the first Punic war off the coast of Sicily. One Punic ram had a prayer inscribed onto it invoking Baal’s intercession in destroying Roman ships; the same demonic deity which the Carthaginians would sacrifice infants to.

The victors of the Punic wars would do more than determine the dominant Mediterranean power, but also ultimately determine the eventual spiritual outcome of the world. Rome’s destruction of Carthage in 146BC was auspiciously reminiscent of the destruction of their Canaanite ancestors at the hands of God and the Hebrews centuries earlier. Perhaps more fittingly, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah earlier still. Carthage was completely razed to the ground in fire and their lands salted.

Yet, as Chesterton would further, by the time of Christ Rome’s enthroned position as the conquerors of the world had become one of skeptic unsureness and their best quality had become their worst. When confronted with the choice of the Living God on that dark Good Friday, the power and responsibility of Rome could only deign to ask the question ‘What is truth?’

Against his better judgment, Pilate chose the practical untruth of the mob rather than the impractical truth before him. Thus, the Roman governor washed his hands of the responsibility he held. The power and responsibility of Rome betrayed itself to worldly practical conformity.

It was not until the reign of Nero, the third emperor (54-68 AD) since the birth of Christ that systemic persecutions began at the hands of the Roman government. Apostles Peter and Paul themselves would face martyrdom at Nero’s circus upon Vatican Hill, in Rome. For all the greatness Roman had shown of her own accord, the fact remained that the Roman state had become the consistent primary source of persecution for the Early Church particularly at the hands of local governors.

In his second century apologetic work Apologeticum, Early Church writer Tertullian went as far to argue that the Romans of his time ignored their own societal foundations, ancestral forefathers and laws which had once historically aligned closer to Christian virtue than displayed at his own time. In doing so, the Roman state was betraying the natural good Rome had. Tertullian furthered those cults and deities which the Roman Republic of old had once banished from Italy for moral decadence were now being held in places of acceptability and honour. Olden Roman ideals of modesty, sobriety and sexual morality were no longer apparent in the society which now persecuted Christians for the very values once considered Roman. Yet even in these dark years of Roman history, the inherent goodness still shone.

Under the Pax Romana, the Empire served as the highway for the Apostles to spread and establish the Early Church across the known world. During his 180 AD work, Against Heresies, St. Irenaeus of Lyons (who himself was a martyr) praised the Roman Empire for bringing ‘world peace’ and security for Christian travel. Tertullian himself distinguished the consistency between good and bad emperors in conjunction to Christian treatment.

Even before Christ’s Ascension, already there was a duality amongst the Romans. It was a Roman centurion in Capernaum [Matthew 8:5-13] whom Christ deemed had greater faith than any in Israel, and whose words are recited at every Catholic Mass. In the book of Acts, the first Gentile convert was the Roman centurion, Cornellius of the Cohors II Italica and his household in Caesarea. Indeed, most of the persecuted Early Church were Christian Romans and Greeks themselves. As leader of the Church, Peter himself had established his bishopric in Rome prior to his martyrdom, and most of his Papal successors were Roman. Thus even following the fall of the Empire itself, all of Christendom would remain in spiritual submission to the light of Rome.

As Christ promised St. Peter [Matt 16:18], Peter became not only the figurative rock upon which the Church would be built upon but, as a consequence of his martyrdom, also the literal rock upon which the leadership of the Church would be built. Under the reign of the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine the Great and Pope Sylvester I, the first St. Peter’s Basilica was constructed upon the site where Peter was martyred and buried, where the Papal throne has remained to this day.

According to local Roman legend, Emperor Constantine implored the help of St. Pope Sylvester I regarding a black dragon which had resided within a cave near the Roman Forum. Through a prayer of exorcism given to him by an apparition of St. Peter, Sylvester slayed (or in some versions had merely driven out) the dragon. In doing so, Sylvester emerged from the cave with new converts who had been captured by the dragon. The black dragon had come to symbolise the paganism which was now driven from the heart of Rome. Consequently, the insignia of the Campitelli Rione of Rome, where the Roman Forum resides, to this day remains the black dragon in commemoration.

With the black dragon of paganism driven from the city, Rome was exorcised. Through the holy blood of martyrs, the soil of Rome was sanctified. Beneath the Papal Chair of St. Peter, Rome’s authority over the world became legitimised. Like Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam fresco upon the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Rome had her arm out to the Divine, and the Divine reached back; transforming her into truly becoming the Eternal City.

Author: SC. Aetius Caesar Australis