Jesus: A Biography From A Believer. - Plot & Excerpts
It was also materialistic and increasingly wealthy. The great fact of geopolitics was Rome and its possessions, in the process of transforming itself from a republic into an empire. It now occupied the shores of the entire Mediterranean, from which one of its great men, Pompey, had driven all the pirates which once infested it, using ruthless methods of brutality, torture, and large-scale public executions. As a result, trade was expanding fast and many cities and individuals doubled their riches in the generation before Jesus was born. Rome, pushing inland from the Mediterranean, now occupied all of Italy and Spain, as well as Greece and Egypt, and what we call Turkey. Between 50 and 60 million people now came under its laws. Fifty years before Jesus was born, Julius Caesar had added the whole of Gaul (modern France) to Roman territory, and he had even carried out two reconnaissances to Britain, though it was not conquered until fifteen years after Jesus’s death. The expanding empire was based upon muscle power rather than technology, thanks to about 15 million slaves, who constituted one-third of the population in the towns, and whose life was summed up by Aristotle in four words: “work, punishment, and food.”
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