15.3 Europe: 0 to a.d. 100  (Page 2/5)

He was followed by Nero who began his reign well under the guidance of Seneca, but in spirit he was an actor and had to play the monarch in the grand manner. He was recklessly cruel to the aristocrats, but generous to the poor, with the possible exception of the new Christians who were first persecuted about A.D. 64, when Rome was burned.

Thereafter followed the Flavian Dynasty. Vespasian was a man of sense, ability and honor who directed the war against Judea and established the first system of state education. The last of this line was Domitian (A.D. 81 - 96) who managed the flourishing empire well during a great age of construction. At the end, however, like many others, he became very cruel, deified himself, indulged in sexual discrepancies and became paranoid about possible conspiracies against him. Throughout this age there was a decay of the native religion in Rome and the multiple gods of Jove, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and others began to give way to the Stoic philosophy. (See GREECE, above)

We should mention some of the non-political figures of this century. Seneca was born in Spain in 4 B.C. and became a copious writer, tutor to and later financial backer to Nero. Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23 - 79) was a great mind of the day, but his book Natural History with dissertations on humans, animals, metals, chemistry, medicine and astronomy, was actually a monument to Roman ignorance. He also compiled an encyclopedia citing 150 Roman and 400 Greek scholars, before he was killed in the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Of interest also is De Materia Medica by a-Greek botanist, Pedanios Dioscorides, who had served as a military surgeon in Nero's army. He detailed the properties of some 600 medicinal plants in this text, which remained an authoritative guide for 1,500 years. (Ref. 222 ) At about the same time a patrician layman, Celsus, tried to summarize all knowledge. Only eight of his many books have survived, the De Medicina, and even these were lost for centuries. (Ref. 125 )

As noted above it was in the year 79 that Mt. Vesuvius on the Bay of Naples erupted after 16 years of violent surrounding earthquakes. The cities of Heraculaneum and Pompeii were buried and thousands were killed. At 95 a severe form of malaria appeared in the farming areas surrounding Rome and became endemic there for the next 500 years. At that time ten aqueducts supplied Rome with 250 million gallons of water per day. (Ref. 125 , 222 )

Throughout this century Roman legions continued to probe the frontiers in Gaul and in the east, gradually extending the empire boundaries. Comments about some of the battles will be found in the paragraphs concerning the regions involved. The population of the Roman Empire at this time was about 54 million, while that of Han China was an estimated 57,600,000. Rome now began to break the Arab monopoly on spices from the east by building ships large enough to sail from the Egyptian Sea to India. The journey was still hazardous and at one time pepper cost $125,000 per 12 ounces. As the secret of the changing monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean was solved, however, pepper became cheaper. Gold was taken to Malabar to be exchanged for pepper. Pliny wrote that Roman ships of this period sailed from the mouth of the Ganges to Ceylon in seven days. The sailing ships were up to 420 feet long with 50 foot beams. One commercial ship had room for 200 sailors, 1,300 passengers and 93,000 bushels of wheat. Wines made from the very prolific Italian vines were now generally preferred to the Greek product. (Ref. 48 , 28 , 211 , 95 , 185 )