Jews and the Greeks do not mention each other at all until a surprisingly late period, and when they did meet
neither side was very favourably impressed with the other. In the early second century B.C. there was a time
when it seemed possible that Judaea would become altogether Hellenized: there was a high priest named
Menelaus, a gymnasium was constructed near the Temple, and young men started to wear the Greek dress. The
nationalistic rising of the Maccabees put a stop to this. At the time of St Paul there were plenty of Hellenized
Jews in the Mediterranean world, but the chance that Judaism would peter out had vanished.
Judaism and Christianity do not belong in a History of the Classical World because they were too separate, too
unclassical. The presuppositions of Jewish literature were essentially different from those of Greece and Rome,
and so were its characteristic forms. Rome could come to terms with Judaism, an ancestral cult, at least, if a
bizarre one, more easily than with Christianity, which was not even respectably ancient, and which in vital
respects contradicted the fundamental nature of the pagan state. Other-worldliness, celibacy, refusal to take an
oath or offer the regular sacrifices-all this was more than official Rome could stomach, while the uncouth literary
form of Christian writings and their outlandish message repelled the educated class: to the Greeks it seemed
foolishness, St Paul admits of the Gospel. Yet there was a perspective in which, at least later, the classical world
could be seen as necessary for the universal acceptance of the Christian revelation. The glorification of Socrates'
condemnation and death as being a martyrdom, a triumph, which was proclaimed with all the literary genius of
Plato and accepted by the educated of Greece and Rome alike, prepared the way for the understanding of the
Passion of Christ. The Roman Empire had pacified and united the world in time for the Gospel to be proclaimed
everywhere. Rome the Imperial City became Rome the Holy City, and her bishops took the old Roman title of
Supreme Pontiff. The universal claims of Rome assumed a sacerdotal form, but the continuity is obvious.
The classical tradition, a large fraction of the history of the West, is too vast a theme to be more than glanced at
here. Greece and Rome provided the languages of the Western and Eastern Churches, when the unity imposed on
the Mediterranean world finally broke in half with Rome's fall, and they continued to be the vehicle of
intellectual communication for many centuries. The Eastern Empire continued to call itself' 'Roman' to the end, in
1453, but it did so in Greek. Some of ancient literature survived, including many masterpieces, although much
more was lost. It proved to be highly important that in later antiquity so much scholarly work had been done,
establishing texts, commenting on them, compiling grammars and dictionaries. They helped to make the texts
intelligible. By contrast a literature like Old Irish, where there was very little scholarly apparatus of this kind, is
full of words whose meaning is now quite lost. After great struggles and doubts on the part of Fathers of the
Church it was widely, though never universally, accepted that the pagan classics could be read and taught by
Christians. Virgil and Terence continued for a thousand years to be fundamental texts at school in the West.
The idea of Rome haunted the imagination of Europe; Charlemagne went to the inconvenient Italian city to be
crowned Emperor, and the struggle for and against a Roman Empire with universal claims dominated the history
of Italy and Germany for hundreds of years. Napoleon revived it again, and Mussolini claimed to have 'restored
the fasces' (whence 'fascists') and reconstituted an Empire for Rome. Shakespeare explored the dilemmas of
power more deeply in his Roman tragedies than in his English history plays; Kipling, in some of his best poems
and stories, took the Roman Empire as a paradigm of the British Raj. In the sphere of political reality the same
idea can be seen. The trial of Warren Hastings for oppression and extortion in India was felt by all the
participants to be an echo of the celebrated trials of Roman governors like Verres, denounced by Cicero. The
word 'proconsul' was unselfconsciously applied to British colonial administrators.
The founders of new constitutions often took Roman models: thus there are Senates in France, Ireland, Italy, and
the United States. The radical political wing could also find Roman models. French Revolutionaries took names