Please note that due to software, not everything recorded in this transcript is accurate.

Moral Classics

Teresa Morgan:
When I look at my own religious sources, as a classicist, as a historian, I see them in a whole new light. And this is another of the reasons why it’s intrinsically interesting to study the classical world, because many of the productions of the classical world, for instance the religious texts of Judaism and Christianity, you know, are still with us, but we read them now through a lens of the last 2, 000 odd years, um, of, of history and interpretation. When I put my classicist hat on, um, and I go back to those texts, I suddenly see how extraordinary they were in their world. Well, it’s

John Dickson:
Well its an absolutely gorgeous day in Oxford, and I’m walking down Oriel Street, down to Oriel College to interview Theresa Morgan, um, this building to my left, look it up on the net, it’s a 700 year old building, uh, 1326 this college was founded. Theresa Morgan is the professor of ancient history here, she’s in the classics department, about to enter the old wooden doors of Oriel College. Hello, I’m here to see, uh, Theresa Morgan. She said just to go up the tower. Yeah, just go straight up the tower. Yeah, lovely. Thanks so much. She lives in a tower.

Studio – John Dickson: 

I’m John Dickson, and this is Underceptions.

Undeceptions theme

Every week, we’ll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture, or ethics that is either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they’re talking about, we’ll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. This week. We’re taking a closer look at the moral lives of the ancient world. What was life like for a typical peasant on the outskirts of Rome? What did they value? What did they place their trust in? We’re looking at it through the lens of the classics, the study of ancient Greek and Roman literature and history. We’re giving a context for the arrival of Christianity and reminding ourselves of an often forgotten truth.

Teresa Morgan:
The biggest myth about the classical world is that it’s not relevant. It is so relevant. You know, if you think democracy is relevant, if you think modern religion is relevant, if you think imperialism is relevant, if the way, you know, if you think rhetoric is relevant, the way that we communicate, the way that so many of the things that, you know, so many of the ways that we think about the modern world, so many of the things we do in the modern world, so much of the material culture we live among in the modern world, so much of the material culture we live among in the modern world comes directly from the classical world. Understanding that world is about understanding ourselves. That the biggest myth about the classical world is that it’s not relevant to us. It’s all around us, it’s so relevant.

Studio – John Dickson: 

Classics and ancient history often focus on the elites, the victors. History from above. But not so for Teresa Morgan. She’s focused her efforts on a history from below, getting at ancient life from the popular mindset. But what are her sources? How do we get to know those people at the bottom?

Teresa Morgan:
Yes, it’s a fascinating question. Um, and I’m always, as a historian, I’m interested in how societies work. And A society is not just the elite, it’s not just the ruling classes, it is also vitally the slaves, the poor agricultural workers, the craftspeople, you know, the great mass of ordinary people who make the wheels turn of any society. So I’m always interested in how they live, And how they think, because I’m a historian of ideas and a historian of mentality, I’m crucially interested in how people think. And they have left us more traces than you might expect. So, for instance, I’ve done a lot of work over the years on popular morality, on popular moral thinking. And there are two genres of popular moral thinking which have Um, very good claim to come up from the working classes and then the lowest classes and then to get embedded in higher level literature. And those are proverbs and fables.

Studio – John Dickson: 

We don’t really do proverbs and fables today, but they were everywhere in the ancient world. Perhaps the closest equivalent today are popular jokes. You know, an Irishman, an Englishman, an Australian walked into a bar. Or knock knock, who’s there? Or how many Anglicans does it take to change a light globe?Change? Proverbs and fables were as popular as our jokes. They were retold at meals and parties and at the workplace. And they had a serious function. They were about how to live the good life. Or at least how to extract a bit of good out of life’s harsh realities.

Teresa Morgan:
Both proverbs and fables seem to tend to come up from the lowest classes of society. But, um, so they, we tend to find them either because they have got into educational texts they use to teach children to read and write. Now that might still only be the top 10 15 percent of society, but at least it’s a bit more than the absolute elite. But also things like proverbs and fables, they get into the writings of the elite. The elite are very interested in them. Aristotle made the first ever collection of Greek proverbs and he called proverbs the original philosophy. So actually these are very interested in popular stuff, but also there are things like, um, gnomic sayings from the poets, or exemplary stories about great men and women from history which get detached from their original context and kind of filter down the social scale and meet and mingle with proverbs and fables to create what I’ve suggested is the popular moral thinking of the great mass of Greeks and Romans.

Studio – John Dickson: 

In her work as a classicist, Teresa is essentially painting a picture of what life was like for the Greeks and Romans in the ancient world. What did they care about? What did they value most? And so I asked her to tell me about the concerns of a simple family living on the outskirts of Rome in the first century.

Teresa Morgan:
I think the key thing must simply be survival. This is a world of vast economic and social inequality. And for the great mass of people, enormous economic insecurity. Most people are living on the breadline or very close to the breadline, which means that one bad harvest will mean your family go hungry, two bad harvest will probably mean you lose your land and you starve. And it’s a world without, um, social safety nets. You know, there is, there’s no old age pension, there’s no free healthcare, there’s no free social support of any kind. If you lose your livelihood, if you lose your land, uh, you’re on the streets. It’s that simple. It’s absolutely brutal. So sheer survival from day to day must have been the dominant factor in the thinking. It must have steered the thinking of almost everybody all the time.

Studio – John Dickson: 

Teresa’s book is called Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire. Cambridge University Press. It won’t be on everyone’s bedside table, but it’s basically the most important book yet written about how the average person in the Roman world, not the philosophical elites, the average person, viewed the good life, the moral life, how we ought to live in this precarious world. It’s one of the most learned things I have ever read. And as you can probably tell, I’m a little in awe of Professor Morgan. There’s quite a bit in the book about friendship. That is, how people socially contracted with each other to look after each other. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. In technical terms, friendship was social reciprocity. In a time when survival was paramount, friendship was how you looked after yourself and your family. In fact, Teresa says the flip side of being a good friend is harming your enemies. And that is equally praiseworthy. It doesn’t sound terribly friendly.

Teresa Morgan:
Well, I don’t know, it depends what your value system is. Um, don’t you think that’s, um, uncomfortably close to the values of much of social media nowadays? Help your friends and harm your enemies seems to me pretty much how a lot of people are operating these days, actually. So it, yes, um, harming your enemies, I suppose, again, it is an ethic of survival. It’s, um, it’s about, it’s a dog eat dog world, this world, for many people. And Um, if my survival comes at the cost of doing you down, then that’s what I’m going to do.

John Dickson:
Because you don’t throw your sort of extra friendship around, because there isn’t, there isn’t extra.

Teresa Morgan:
There isn’t extra. There isn’t extra of anything for anybody.

Studio – John Dickson: 

Talk of morality leads to talk about gods. That’s gods in the plural. And that’s where our conversation turns.

Teresa Morgan:
When we think about the gods in the ancient world, we usually either think about the gods as they’re portrayed by philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca. Um, or we think about the gods as they’re portrayed in high literature, Homer or Greek tragedy, or Vigilian epic, say. And there’s an interesting split here, because for philosophers, the divine is good, is good and creative, and, um, and very reliable. But! non-HR anthropomorphic on the whole, um, in populous doses, God might have some, a few anthropomorphic features, but on the whole, the God is the divine is impersonal in philosophical thinking, it’s the ideal of the good In, um, the thinking in as it were, highly literature. Uh, gods are highly personified, the highly anthropomorphic, uh, but they’re also at best, fairly amoral. Their interests are not the interests of human beings on the whole. They don’t act. consistently in favor of human beings, or they’re positively immoral. They simply toy with human beings for their own entertainment. But in popular thinking, we find a slightly different picture again. Um, ordinary people really seem to have been quite invested in the gods. They quite like the idea that the gods are reliably just. So the justice of Zeus or the justice of Olympus is good justice, reliable justice. Um, Demeter and Corad, mother and daughter, um, are Uh, proverbial of, of family love, of good family relationships on the whole. They don’t act.

Studio – John Dickson: 

Zeus. He’s the supreme god, the protector and ruler of humankind. Demeter is married to Zeus. She’s the god of agriculture, specifically corn.

Teresa Morgan:
They seem to want to have a positive view of the gods. And I strongly suspect that again, that is to do with their vulnerability. You know, when you are in a society where you are, life is very fragile and you are chronically vulnerable. A higher power, an alternative higher power to the people who were ruling you, which might just help you out if you are good enough at your cult, is a pretty attractive proposition.

Studio – John Dickson: 

So the ancient Greek and Roman gods did play some role in shaping the moral values in ancient times. Teresa tells me that about A quarter of these classical proverbs, these pithy moral sayings from pagan Greece and Rome, are about intelligence versus foolishness. What we might call street smarts. Here’s producer Kaley.

Producer Kaley:

Many are soothsayers, fewer prophets. The dice of Zeus always fall well. It is best for mortals not to be born. The old age of the eagle beats the youth of the lark. However many men, so many opinions.

Studio – John Dickson: 

I don’t agree with that.

Producer Kaley:

If you can’t hurt your enemy openly, do it secretly. The middle is best. Nothing in excess. The head of an old man is a raisin.

Teresa Morgan:
This is one of the decisive. moral values of this world. And again, it is to do with the fragility of life and the importance of sheer survival. Practical intelligence, um, you, sometimes we might translate it wisdom, but it’s not the wisdom of the sage or the wisdom of the guru. Um, this is the kind of street smarts that will get you successfully to the end of the day. And, um, actually, There are quite a lot of proverbs and fables about intelligence, but there are even more about foolishness. If you’re trying to catch the wind in a net, or plough the water, or cut a lentil in half, um, uh, or scrub yourself, um, white, um, if you’re a kind of average Mediterranean brown, but you want to be whiter and, and, and look more upper class, um, Those are all things which are stupid. Fables are full of stories of people who aspire to be bigger or better than they’re ever realistically going to be and become a horrible cropper. And quite often they die and the last thing they say is, I deserve this because I was stupid. You know, think about the famous fable of the lizard who wanted to be a snake, so it stretched itself.

Studio – John Dickson: 

This is one of the fables of Aesop, the legendary ancient slave who collected moral stories. Well, apparently. One tells how a lizard Once tried to match the length of a snake passing by and he burst himself into bits. The point of course, is that we shouldn’t attempt to be the equal of our superior.

Teresa Morgan:
His last words are, I deserve this. I was stupid. You know, it’s a really, it’s a powerful idea and it’s really the measure of how different this moral thinking is from ours, because that, I think to us, the idea that sheer street smarts is the one of the most important virtues you can have. It’s pretty foreign. It’s surprising.

Studio – John Dickson: 

The point is the Roman world was brutal by our standards, and a huge part of navigating life, including the moral life, was just about surviving. Now it might feel a stretch to go from the Homeric gods and Aesop’s fables to the New Testament, but Teresa says the historian finds something remarkable in those first Christian documents. It’s a whole set of texts, not just random proverbs and fables, but entire letters and biographies from non elites.

Teresa Morgan:
One of the fascinating things about early Christian texts in general, the New Testament texts, but also the other very early non canonical texts, is that Um, they are exactly the kind of evidence for the ancient world that we have very little of, and I find particularly fascinating because these are not the productions of, um, the elite, you know, very few early Christians were probably wealthy or highly educated. This is very subaltern literature, this is the literature of sort of the middle classes mostly, probably the people who were actually writing the stuff. This is the literature of

Studio – John Dickson: 

You often hear that the New Testament was an elite political document. Think of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and his Vatican conspiracies. People sometimes get the impression That these texts were produced by powerful figures, chosen for political purposes, and then forced on the common folk. Nothing could be further from the truth. The New Testament provides us with history from below.

Teresa Morgan:
A lot of the people who would have been listening to early Christian writings would have been much poorer than that. So this really is the community literature of very ordinary people, and as such it’s actually a priceless community. I mean, aside from its religious value, it’s a priceless document in social history of the lives of a very, a community of really pretty, ordinary people in the early Roman Empire, of a kind that we have almost no parallel for. I mean, it’s a very rare corpus of documents just for a social historian.

Studio – John Dickson: 

Why rare? We’ll talk about it after the break.

*Break 1*

Studio – John Dickson: 

Okay, here’s what we know so far. Life for a person in the ancient world was rough. Morality revolves around getting ahead, or just surviving. The gods are either distant or fickle, often picking favorites. Street smarts are central. It’s eat or be eaten, and whatever you do, don’t be stupid. And it’s a world where old man’s heads look like raisins. But now we’ve got these 27 little texts entering the scene, the books of the New Testament, and they transform the Roman world, and then our world.

Teresa Morgan:
Three things which classically go together for early Christians, faith, hope, love, and I would probably add to those, justice, and you might also talk a bit about peace, you might talk about, uh, grace and gratitude, but faith, hope, love, justice. Those are four key things which Christians radically rethink. in the world of the Empire. Uh, so, um, love, for instance, friendship, love. We’ve already talked a little bit about how difficult ordinary people found friendship, um, in the world of the early Roman Empire. But Christians, um, are taught that God loves them absolutely, unshakable. And that on that basis, they can trust in God, they can love God, and because they have, they are given such an abundance of love, they can afford to love one another with enormous, unreserved generosity. That’s a completely different model of relations with your fellow human beings and how your relationship with God affects your relationship with human beings from anything in ancient religious thinking in general, actually. I think, apart from Judaism, we talk about mainstream Greek and Roman thinking. It’s certainly completely different from anything that is in kind of popular moral consciousness, which would have been the background of most early Christians. So that’s. A completely new idea, and with that idea of love goes, um, uh, something like, you know, care of the vulnerable, for instance. I’ve already said this is a world with no social safety nets, but Christians create social safety nets. They are the people who are notorious for looking after the widows, the poor, the orphans, the people who, in most of society, just sling out onto the street.

John Dickson:
Not everyone liked this new way of thinking.

Teresa Morgan:
Certainly some commentators who are hostile to early Christians do, um, attack them as being nature’s leftovers, as being low, um, unimportant people who have, um, of course they also had a, a leader, um, uh, a founding figure, uh, in Jesus Christ who was crucified and, and crucifixion is, um, is the form of execution for the lowest of the low. So Christians were certainly attacked as being the lowest of the low. And they were attacked for being naive. They were also attacked for being hypocritical. I mean, when their detractors couldn’t get them on anything else, they said, well, you know, when they say they love each other, they’re lying.

Studio – John Dickson: 

Christians had an uphill battle from the beginning. They had no political clout, little social status, and they had a message and an ethic focused on a shameful cross. But they persisted, and it kind of worked out ok.

Teresa Morgan:
There are also traces that they were, um, admired. I mean, Tertullian says that people go around saying

Studio – John Dickson: 

Tertullian, by the way, was one of the first Christian theologians and a public advocate for the faith. He was from Carthage in North Africa. Yep, one of the first theologians in Christian history was very probably a person of color.

Teresa Morgan:
I mean, Tertullian says that people go around saying, See how these Christians love one another. You know, he He thinks that that’s something which, in the late second century, makes an impression on people and it has often been suggested and I think it’s very true.

Studio – John Dickson: 

Let’s press pause. I’ve got a five minute, Jesus. What was the heart? of Jesus ethical teaching. Was he a theologian? A moralist? A philosopher? Or something else? And what would it matter anyway? One of Australia’s best selling authors I won’t name him, recently declared that we don’t need religion. In order to maintain our ethic of love.In fact, he went so far as to say that even Jesus didn’t give any theological reasons for love. He apparently just declared what was already universally known. Jesus never told anyone what to believe in, this writer said. He only spoke about how to treat each other. He then relativizes one of Jesus most famous teachings, the so called Golden Rule. Do to others as you would have them do to you. In an effort to distance such ethical insights from any religious outlook, this author tells us that the Golden Rule is pretty much a universal human principle. To quote him, there’s nothing remarkable in this. Virtually every religious and philosophical tradition on earth promotes the same idea. He offers for comparison the well known saying of Confucius, the great Chinese intellectual and moralist of the fifth century BC, who taught, quote, do not inflict on others what you yourself would not wish done to you. For the nerds, Analects 15 verse 24. Grammatically, there is a great resonance between the saying of Jesus and this teaching of Confucius. But the parallel is more in form than substance. What Jesus states positively Confucius frames negatively. One is about doing the good to others, that you would like to experience yourself, and the other is about refraining from doing the harm you don’t want to endure yourself. Both are excellent pieces of advice. Confucius proverb probably deserves the accolade, The Silver Rule. It’s the principle of non harm. The demand of the Golden Rule goes further. It’s the principle of active service, even of those who hate you. Here’s the original context of Jesus teaching. It’s arguably the most sublime ethical teaching ever uttered, and I admit, I’m biased. Here it is. If someone slaps you on one cheek, Turn to them the other also. Do to others as you would have them do to you. Love your enemies. Do good to them. And lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great and you will be children of the Most High because He is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful. Just as your father is merciful. The difference between the silver rule and the golden rule is significant. It’s the difference between choosing not to punch my enemy in the nose and deciding to build my enemy a hospital. But what of the suggestion that Jesus didn’t teach people to believe in any doctrines that ground this idea? He only was interested in how we treat each other. It seems to me that throughout Jesus parables and this famous Sermon on the Mount, he nearly always bases his statements about ethical action on specific doctrines about God, specifically God’s love and mercy. Because the creator of the universe is loving and merciful, all of his creatures should reflect reality in the way they treat one another. What we think lies at the heart of reality inevitably shapes what we think is an authentic human life. For example, if like the famous atheist Friedrich Nietzsche, we believe that survival of the fittest is the heart of nature’s reality, then just like Nietzsche, we’re going to view turning the other cheek and loving your enemies as neither logical nor moral. But on the other hand, if we think that God’s love and mercy are the heartbeat of the universe, then suddenly everything in Jesus famous Sermon on the Mount becomes both logically compelling and life enhancing. It’s the authentic life. This is precisely how Jesus framed his message in the passage I just quoted. Why does it make sense to love our enemies? Because God himself is kind to the ungrateful and wicked, he said. Why would we be merciful even to those who don’t deserve it? Because, as Jesus puts it, your father is merciful. You could almost say that Jesus never taught people how to treat each other without also emphasizing the ideas that make ethical action logical. Love of neighbor, and even of our enemy, is grounded in the most basic reality of all. The Creator’s love for us. You can press play now.

Teresa Morgan:
And it has often been suggested, and I think it’s very credible, that the fact that Christians looked after each other, looked after their own, in a very exceptional way, um, actually may have been one of their great attractions for ordinary people. One of the reasons why the movement grew, and actually grew quite quickly, as, you know, as new religious movements go in the early Roman Empire, there are an awful lot of them. None of the rest of them grew to anything like the size of Christianity all so quickly. Christianity was highly unusual in its social commitment.

Studio – John Dickson: 

The rapid expansion of Christianity from Galilee and Judea to Syria, Greece, Rome, and across North Africa remains one of the mysteries of the ancient world. My own PhD was on mission and propaganda in the ancient Greco Roman and Jewish world, and I have no clear explanation of why Christianity, and only Christianity, spread like it did. Teresa’s explanation is as good as any other.

Teresa Morgan:
It is, in some ways, a great mystery, because I say, as I said, this is a world, um, with a great many new religious movements in it. The Remnant Empire, in some ways, seems to have been very hospitable to new religious movements and religious thinking. None of the rest of them grew in the way that Christianity did. Um, and it’s been a puzzle for scholars for generations, um, Quite, what was the key reason? One reason, as I’ve suggested, is often thought to be their care for each other, that, you know, this is a group of people that people might have wanted to join because actually they’re a very strong and a very caring social group and in a world where that’s vanishingly rare, really. So the social side of it may have been very important. There’s a big argument about whether Christians make a at least a handful of quite high profile politically and socially high profile converts quite early on. Some people think there may have been, um, converts in the imperial court even as early as the end of the first century, though it is very controversial and we can’t prove it. Uh, so, um, uh, we do have quite a lot of evidence that Judaism was fashionable in some quite, um, uh, socially high up circles. In the early Roman empire and Christianity. Similarly, you know, it may just have been, there may have been an element of fashion about it in some circles. Um, the, but, but even so how many Christians there were by the beginning of the fourth century, how much the movement had grown by the fourth, beginning of the fourth century is very much contested still. We really don’t know, uh, because we don’t have a lot of material remains apart from anything else. Um, so they may have been. really quite a small and scattered but quite prominent and visible body. They made themselves visible by refusing to sacrifice to the emperor and therefore getting persecuted periodically in different parts of the empire. So they may have been very small by high profile or they may have been actually quite large. And I approve what we really don’t know. But the tipping point is clearly, um, the conversion, or at least the conversion to sympathy with Christianity of the Emperor Constantine.

Studio – John Dickson: 

On the outskirts of Rome at the Milvian Bridge in the year 312, the emerging Emperor Constantine won a stunning victory against his rival Maxentius. Weirdly, Constantine attributed it to The sources offer different accounts. Some say Constantine simply had a dream ordering him to fight under the banner of a Christian cross. Others say he saw a vision of the cross in the sky, complete with the words, In hoc signo vinces, in this sign conquer. Whatever really happened, it was a turning point in world history. The lowly, persecuted Christians suddenly had the backing. of the most powerful man in the world. It was both good and bad.

Teresa Morgan:
So he buys into Christianity, quite on what level he is converted to Christianity is a big question, but he buys into it. It becomes then, um, a legal cult, a legitimized cult. Um, a generation or two later, it becomes the official, the sole cult of the empire. Another couple of centuries after that, in the mid sixth century, all the other temples and cults are shut down. So, the tipping point is undoubtedly imperial patronage, really, for Christians.

Studio – John Dickson: 

The ethic of love at the heart of the New Testament sounds like common sense to many of us today. It’s what any rational person would think about the good life. But it certainly wasn’t rational in the Roman world, and it hasn’t been for most of world history. Be smart, make friends, deal with enemies. These are the rational ethics of the ancient world. Then along comes Jesus, whose Jewish tradition already insisted on love your neighbor. And he intensified it. Now, love is to be shown to everyone, even enemies. It’s something he embodied in his own sacrificial death. It took a while to catch on, and there’s no doubt Christians through the centuries haven’t always lived up to their own ethic. That’s for another episode, or three. But the idea that God is love, and that in response to that, we too are to love, That was transformational, Professor Morgan says, and is perhaps Christianity’s single greatest contribution to Western culture.

Undeceptions theme