Pax Romana to the Pax Mundi: Perception Collusion of Post-Hellenistic Civilizations

The year 27 C.E. saw to the end of the renowned and glorious Roman Republic after the mutual suicides of Mark Antony and Cleopatra and Octavian’s ascension to Roman rule in 29 B.C.E. Despite its dissolution into the tomes of history, Roman Republicanism became a mentality and personality of those living beneath it. Rome had its influence draped all across the Mediterranean world, stretching from Hadrian’s Wall in upper Britannia to the shores of southern Egypt, from the coast of the Black sea to the Strait of Gibraltar (Tignor et al. 263). Interestingly enough, the collusion of cultures already smacked of Hellenism by the time of Roman Empirical expansion so marginal civilizations, notably a newly-reformed Judaic one, were not nearly as overwhelmed as expectation would have it. Judaism/Christianity contextualized and supplanted many of the cultural vestiges floating around the Levant with its own set of moral and social laws outlined in the Torah and Pentateuch. And though these laws stood apart from Roman law, Jews adored Hellenism where it could convenience them; the similarities of Hellenism to stoicism would prove amicable to the transition between ruling bodies. Standing at its polar opposite is the paternalism of Rome which commoditized human life for the sake of commerce and privatizing land. By virtue (or vice) of distance and circumstance, regard to the Roman Empire in the first century B.C.E. would vary wildly between a Roman patrician and a Palestinian Jew: the former with disdain for its collectivist practices, the latter with felicity for the more rational ideologies they espoused.

After the revolt of the Maccabees brothers in 166 B.C.E and the subsequent introduction of Hellenism by Alexander the Great, paradoxicall...

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...tisfaction with the forced subservience and seizure of their land. And yet, despite their differences, both groups exemplify the scarred survivors, the worthy laurel bearers, of their own battles. Both represent a people who triumphed in the face of adversity to protect what they had, to protect the fundamental atoms, the irreducible identity which made them constellations amongst the stars of history. Where they stood, as either the twins Gemini or the combative Orion, they stood enmeshed under the Empire and the collusion of their perspectives would nurse the continuing cosmopolitan body that was Hellenism.

Works Cited

Perry, Marvin, Joseph R. Peden, and Theodore H. Von Laue. Sources of the Western Tradition. 6th ed. Vol. 1. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.

Tignor, Robert L. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart. New York, N.Y., [etc.: Norton, 2011. Print.