What we say here interrelates.

I discussed the weakness of the polis. The unity of Rome and the old gods were not destroyed by the Christians. By the end of the first century, few in Rome took the old gods seriously. As more and more people outside Rome were given Roman citizenship, the polis went the way of the old gods.

The polis was replaced by the Wordist “salvation cults.”

By the second century, there was no Rome. Into the vacuum came the salvation cults, from Isis to Hellenic Judaism. For a century, Emperors died off like flies. From the long rule of Augustus the Empire fell into a straight battle for power.

MONEY, the coins that had been the basis of the Classical economy, fell into disuse. If MONEY disappeared as a medium of exchange in America and presidents started living a few years or a few months we would consider that it had become a different society. Not so the history of Rome.

What we call “Rome” is considered the same thing until the city was actually conquered and burned. Only THEN do we see a problem in this smooth continuity.

Then Constantine appears. He establishes the Christian religion, but he makes Sunday, the Mithraian Sabbath, into the Christian Sabbath. This doesn’t fit so it is ignored.

So the Da Vinci Code declares that a collapse of true Christianity by the unilateral action of Constantine. Expanding on Brown, what I see here is a straight set of political compromises.

History concentrates entirely on the only two forces we see today, because their memory is still with us. Those two forces are the unified entity we call the Roman Empire and a unified and pacifistic Christianity.

The enormous power Mithraism, dominant in the Roan Army, becomes just another little bump that true Christianity overcame. The overpowering Persian Empire, which towered over Roman politics at the time, is totally ignored. The three priests of Mithras become a Black, an oriental, and a white man who are “Wise Men.”

What I see is a succession of men taking on the title of Emperor. I also see a parallel to this title in the Holy Roman Empire, where the title of Emperor meant something when the guy elected was sixteenth century Charles who also ruled Spain and other vast powers independently.

In other words, the title Emperor didn’t mean much in itself. It meant a lot to a Constantine who also had enormous REAL forces OF HIS OWN. If you wrote a history of the Holy Roman Empire declaring Europe was actually ruled by whoever held that title, you would be laughed at. But that is our history of Rome.

No one notices that the power of this so-called Rome died with the old religion and the polis. So what WAS the loyalty that replaced it? The powers that really replaced it became what we call, with the sole exception of Christianity, the “cults.”

Our picture of this time totally ignores the “cults.” But to Constantine the “cults,” like the giant Persian Empire, were the power realities of his day. They are all ignored by our “History of Rome.”

The situation was not all that different from what we face today. The old Constitution is gone, replaced by Marxists, Moral Majorities, race-mixers, Environmentalists, all sort of propositional groups, each of which is a cult. Politics today has nothing to do with the American unity based on blood, it is simply a balancing of different cults.

That was what Augustus saw when he made laws requiring the Roman upper class to have children. He probably didn’t see it so clearly, but he was trying to save the polis. Three centuries later, Julian the Apostate tried, by a weird revival of what he saw as the Old Religion, to revive the polis and overthrow Christianity.

Brown, in The Might of the West, 1963, gets part of this. Brown details the fact that, in the new society called Rome, what we would call nations existed in the form of cults. These were the political realities with which Constantine dealt. They were the realities real Roman politics had dealt with for a century or more.

Nothing that was taken for granted by Constantine has any place in our history of “Rome.” It is a moot question whether he would have laughed harder at our idea of “Roman politics” or our idea of Roman statues.