The First Century: Emperors, Gods and Everyman

At the dawn of the first century, Rome was approaching the zenith of its power under Caesar Augustus. In Judea, Herod the Great had recently died and the Jewish people were in ferment, setting the stage for the prophetic ministry of John the Baptist. In China, the Confucian scholar Wang Mang had seized power from the decadent court of the Han Dynasty.

Augustus' successors ranged from the dour Tiberius and the unfortunate Claudius to the dissolute Nero and the violently unstable Caligula. These were the years in which Jesus of Nazareth lived and died; in the years following his crucifixion there was -- in the absence of any official orthodoxy -- an electrifying diversity of thought within the Christian movement that would never be duplicated. In Jerusalem, the collapse of the Jewish revolt and the destruction of the Temple led to the disappearance of the Jewish state for nearly nineteen hundred years. In the East, the rapidly spreading Indian religion of Buddhism made its first appearance at the Chinese imperial court. Within the Roman Empire, the traditions of classical Hellenism vied with mystical heritage of the East, creating an explosive mix of cults, zealots, and messiahs.

In The First Century , William Klingaman tells us what it was like to live during this time, quoting from first-person reports from around the world. He describes the diet of a Chinese peasant, the gruesome practices of Roman doctors, the military tactics of the semi-civilized Celtic warriors with their blue-painted faces, the sexual escapades of the Roman emperors' wives, the romantic advice of the exiled poet Ovid, the brutality of the games in the Colosseum, and the progress of a pilgrim's visit to the Temple.

From this examination of affairs around the world, some striking patterns emerge, including the parallels between the rebellions of Boudicca, the tribal queen in Britain, and the Trung sisters in Vietnam, and between the philosophies of the Christian missionary Paul and the Roman Stoic Seneca. Klingaman brings to life dozens of well-known characters as well as fascinating footnotes to history in the narrative of a crucial century.

Since American culture often hedges between Christian and Oriental spiritual thought, sometimes opting to combine the two for a personalized belief system, there is clearly a need to put these two spiritual forces into historical perspective. Klingaman has done just that in his engrossing narrative of the first century A.D. He brings together Augustus Caesar, the ascension of Wang Mang, the poet Ovid, the notorious glutton Claudius, Jesus and his deviation from conventional Judaic tradition, and the spread of Mahayana Buddhism to make an intriguing comparison between Asian and Mediterranean political, military, and spiritual development. The author's attempt to recreate the atmosphere of the era will certainly appeal to lay people, but the lack of annotation will disappoint more serious scholars and students. As a sweeping historical overview of the birth of Christianity and Buddhism, this volume is both engaging and enlightening.
- Gerald Large, California State Univ., Los Angeles
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.