Rome became less barbaric under Christianity but was not restored; some things got worse

Gladiator Maximus has just stabbed a fellow gladiator with two swords in his chest.

I see the later French-built houses in this Roman amphitheater of Arles (in Latin “Aurelia”)

 

Better that than continuing the horrific gladiator games, or seeing people being eaten by lions, or crucified, set on fire and burned alive.

For all its flaws, such as the judeophilia — the “God’s-Chosen-People” malarkey — which the “Apostle” Paul injected into it AFTER Jesus was gone, it was in fact Christianity and the first Christian emperor, Constantine, that banned this atrocity of killing-for-entertainment, and also banned cruelty toward slaves, such as branding them on the forehead, or working them to death in mines and galleys.

It was the pagan Romans who had no issue with mind-bending atrocities. Watch the HBO series “Rome.”

And it was also pagan Rome that taught the ROMAN Catholic Church how to torture and burn people alive, which became huge later on in the Inquisition.

To entertain the masses, Constantine did allow harmless but exciting chariot racing at the hippodromes all over the empire, and he had a magnificent hippodrome built at his new city of Constantinople. But he ordered that no colosseum be built there.

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…..The rise of the Bagaudae 

 

Wiki:

Bagaudae (also spelled bacaudae) were groups of peasant insurgents in the western parts of the later Roman Empire, who arose during the Crisis of the Third Century and persisted until the very end of the Western Empire, particularly in the less-Romanised areas of Gallia and Hispania. They were affected by the depredations of the late Roman state, wealthy landowners, and clerics.^[1]

The invasions, military anarchy, and disorders of the third century provided a chaotic and ongoing degradation of the regional power structure within a declining Empire. During the chaos, the bagaudae achieved some temporary and scattered successes under the leadership of members of the underclass as well as former members of local ruling elites.

The name probably means “fighters” in Gaulish.^[2] [The French, to this day, have a word “bagarre” for a fistfight.]

C. E. V. Nixon^[3] assesses the bagaudae, from the official Imperial viewpoint, as “bands of brigands who roamed the countryside, looting and pillaging”.

J. C. S. Léon interprets the most completely assembled documentation and identifies the bagaudae as impoverished local free peasants, reinforced by brigands, runaway slaves and deserters from the legions, who were trying to resist the ruthless labor exploitation of the late Roman proto-feudal colonus manorial and military systems, and all manner of punitive laws and levies in the marginal areas of the Empire.^[4]

After the bagaudae came to the full attention of the central authorities around 284 AD, the re-establishment of the settled social order was swift and severe: the peasant insurgents were crushed in 286 AD by the Caesar Maximian and his subordinate Carausius under the aegis of the Augustus Diocletian. Their leaders are mentioned as Amandus and Aelianus, although E.M. Wightman, in her Gallia Belgica^[5] proposes that the two belonged to the local Gallo-Roman landowning class who then became “tyrants“^[6] and most likely rebelled against the grinding taxation and garnishing of their lands, harvests, and manpower by the predatory agents of the late Roman state (see frumentarii, publicani).

The Panegyric of Maximian, dating to 289 AD and attributed to Claudius Mamertinus, relates that during the bagaudae uprisings of 284–285 AD in the districts around Lugdunum (Lyon), “simple farmers sought military garb; the plowman imitated the infantryman, the shepherd the cavalryman, the rustic harvester of his own crops the barbarian enemy”.

In fact they shared several similar characteristics with the Germanic Heruli people. Mamertinus also called them “two-shaped monsters” (monstrorum biformium), emphasising that while they were technically Imperial farmers and citizens, they were also marauding rogues who had become foes to the Empire.

The phenomenon recurred in the mid-fourth century in the reign of Constantius, in conjunction with an invasion of the germanic Alemanni. Although Imperial control was re-established by the Frankish general Silvanus, his subsequent betrayal by court rivals forced him into rebellion and his work was undone. In around 360 AD the historian Aurelius Victor^[7] is the sole writer to note the attacks of bagaudae in the peripheries of the larger towns and walled cities.

In the fifth century Bagaudae are noted initially in the Loire valley and Brittany, circa 409–417 AD,^[8] fighting various armies sent against them by the last seriously effective Western Roman general, Flavius Aëtius. Aetius used federates such as the Alans under their king Goar to try and suppress a Bacaudic revolt in Armorica. St Germanus got mercy for the Bagaudae but they later revolted again under a leader called Tibatto. They are also mentioned around the same time in the province of Macedonia, the only time they emerge in the Eastern Empire, which may be connected with economic hardships under Arcadius.

By the middle of the fifth century they started to appear in Hispania too, and are mentioned in control of parts of central Gaul and the Ebro valley. In Hispania, the king of the Suevi, Rechiar (died 456 AD), took up as allies the local bagaudae in ravaging the remaining Roman municipia, a unique alliance between Germanic ruler and rebel peasant.^[9]

That the depredations of the ruling classes were mostly responsible for the uprising of the bagaudae was not lost on the fifth-century writer of historicised polemics, Salvian; setting himself in the treatise De gubernatione Dei the task of proving God’s constant guidance, he declares in book iii that the misery of the Roman world is all due to the neglect of God’s commandments and the terrible sins of every class of society. It is not merely that slaves and servants are thieves and runaways, wine-bibbers and gluttons – the rich are much worse (iv. 3); it is their harshness and greed that drive the poor to join the bagaudae and flee for shelter to the barbarian invaders (v. 5 and 6).

The reputation of the bagaudae has varied with the uses made of them in historicised narratives of the Late Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. There has been some speculation that theirs was a Christian revolt, but the sparsity of information in the texts gives that little substance although there may well have been many Christians among them. In general, they seem to have been equal parts of brigands and insurgents.

In the second half of the 19th century, interest in the bagaudae revived, resonating with contemporary social unrest. The French historian Jean Trithemié was famous for a nationalist view of the “Bagaudae” by arguing that they were an expression of national identity among the Gallic peasants, who sought to overthrow oppressive Roman rule and realize the eternal “French” values of liberty, equality and brotherhood.^[10]

E. A. Thompson in Past and Present (1952) portrayed this rural discontent within the context of Marxist class warfare.

[end]

So the gradual Christianization of the Roman Empire had not improved morality very much. The reason was that the people had not really changed, just the god they worshipped. It had once been Zeus/Jupiter; now it was Jesus. This is because it was not the religion of Jesus, but Saul/Paul’s cooked-up and pro-jewish religion about Jesus, the god who sacrificed Himself to God.

Jesus by contrast was preaching love thy neighbor, be kind, honest, and merciful toward others. THAT was the salvation that Jesus preached, NOT Saul’s doctrine that if you believed that Jesus was somehow God and that His crucifixion and resurrection cleansed you of your sins, then it did.

Only a jew could come up with such a mental concoction, or “diversity is our strength,” or a man can become a woman, or a face mask meant for bacteria can keep out a virus that is 1/100th its size

Could you walk through a door that is 600 feet high? The Covid jews said no.

…. or how a Hitler who could not invade England was somehow going to invade America, 4,000 miles away.

As long as earthlings have egoic minds and bad karma, no religion will transform them much, whatever god they venerate.

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