It is within the immediate hinterland of the city, the region with the best access to the urban market, that we may expect to find the most significant and visible changes in agricultural practice; a greater degree of orientation towards the market, with specialisation in a particular set of crops and more intensive cultivation. An examination of the history of this region is therefore the obvious starting point for this study.

The definition of this ‘immediate hinterland’ is inevitably somewhat arbitrary, and depends above all on the particular questions that are being considered. It could be defined as the area characterised by a particular set of activities – the intensive horticulture which von Thünen's model predicts for land close to the urban centre – so that its expansion or contraction over time can be charted. Alternatively, a region could be defined on the basis of territorial homogeneity. The advantages of this latter approach are that it emphasises the variety of activities that may take place within the same geographical area, interacting and competing for resources. Production is not considered in isolation from consumption or from social and demographic change.

The Roman lowlands, bounded by the Monti Sabatini, Sabini and Tiburtini, the Colli Albani and the sea, can conveniently be considered as a territorial unit (Map 2). Most of this area lies within 30 km of Rome, extending a little further up the valley of the Tiber; it can fairly be described as the immediate hinterland of the city.

In one sense, all cities are consumers. The existence of urban centres depends on the ability of farmers to produce a regular agricultural surplus, and on the efficiency of economic, social and political institutions in mobilising this surplus for the use of a population which is not involved in primary production. Of course, this broad statement covers a wide variety of possibilities; in the modern industrialised world only a tiny proportion of the population is involved in agriculture, whereas in a pre-industrial, agrarian economy the figure may be 90 per cent or more. Chemical fertilisers and a mineral-based energy economy have transformed modern agriculture, and coal, oil and electricity have revolutionised the distribution of foodstuffs. In a pre-industrial society, surpluses are small and precarious, and transport is slow and expensive; cities are therefore wholly dependent on the performance of agriculture and the vagaries of the climate, and endemically vulnerable to food crisis.

However, the notion of the ‘consumer city’ implies much more than this basic dependence on agriculture. In part, it and its sibling concept (the ‘producer city’) are concerned with the economic aspects of the relationship between city and countryside: the means by which the agricultural surplus is mobilised for the use of the urban population. The producer city pays for its keep through trade, manufacture and providing services to the countryside; the consumer city takes what it needs in the form of taxes and rents, offering little in return besides indifferently administered justice and government.

The urban population

The city of Rome was, by pre-modern standards, an exceptionally large city. The views of contemporaries, the sheer scale of its buildings and a large quantity of incidental anecdotal evidence make this plain; as Hermansen notes: ‘A city which absorbs 3,000 foreign chorus girls has a considerable population.’ However, it is difficult to move beyond such vague impressions to make more detailed statements about the city's size or the dynamics of its growth. Upon close examination, the concept of ‘the population of Rome’ becomes increasingly elusive. The city's inhabitants were always changing; at any one time they could include tourists, merchants on a regular visit, farmers in for market, immigrants who were likely to die there and natives who still hoped to get out. ‘Rome’ itself was ill-defined enough. According to the Digest, ‘Urbis relates to the area within the walls; Romae, however, also includes the adjoining buildings, which is a larger area’; and Dionysius of Halicarnassus observed how difficult it was to decide where the buildings ended and the countryside began.

For many purposes it is unnecessary to offer a more precise definition or quantification of the urban population; it is enough that Rome was the greatest city of the ancient Mediterranean. This is insufficient for the present argument. The impact of large cities on their hinterlands depends to a very great extent on the growth of their populations and hence their demands for resources.

Defining the task

Among the second-century critics of early Christianity, Celsus was the most prolific. Unfortunately, we possess very little information about his life. His book The True Doctrine, written about 170 CE, no longer exists, and it is known to us only from a rebuttal composed by Origen some seventy years later, Contra Celsum. Luckily Origen quotes Celsus at length, and we are thus in a good position to recover much of what Celsus originally said. Of particular importance for this study is Celsus' remarkable interest in the presence of women among Jesus' followers, and in their role in the development of Christianity. In fact, Celsus describes the Christian resurrection belief as having been created by a ‘hysterical woman’ who was deluded by sorcery:

In recent years many scholars have suggested that women's attraction to early Christianity was related to the freedoms offered in celibacy. Dennis R. MacDonald, for example, estimates that groups of widows, which in some early Christian circles may have included virgins who had never been married (cf. Ign. Smyrn. 13.1), were a counter-cultural force within their patriarchal society: ‘Perhaps we should interpret this virginity as a rebellion – conscious or unconscious – against male domination. Perhaps it symbolized not only moral purity, but also independence, dedication to a calling, and criticism of conjugal society.’ The criticism of society that MacDonald and others associate with celibate early church life is of particular importance for this book because it implies confrontation between early Christians and public opinion about the proper behaviour of women. When scholars address the situation of married women in the church, they often come to very different conclusions about the role these women played in church relations with the world. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza contrasts the liberation from social constraints offered to celibate women by early Christianity, with the fate of the married early Christian women. Unmarried women acquire an independence which produces conflict with society; but married women remain, in conformity to society, confined within the patriarchal family:

The following constitutes an examination of the comments of second-century pagan authors who refer specifically to early Christian women. While many Christian works from the first and second centuries CE (including the New Testament) offer general indications of public opinion of the early church, the authors examined in this section explicitly characterize early Christians as outsiders to mainstream society. In concentrating on these earliest reactions, we are able to witness a new religious group gaining public attention for the first time. In studying these texts, we obtain a greater understanding of that fascinating period before Christianity became a recognizable force in the Roman Empire, when it was still a little-known movement, fiercely setting out to forge an identity.

Obviously, we cannot grasp fully how women figured in public opinion of early Christianity without taking into account how other religious groups in the Greco-Roman world were judged for the effect they had on women. Fortunately, David L. Balch provides a thorough investigation of how women featured in Greco-Roman criticism of various Eastern religions. Balch's analysis has led him to conclude that, ‘Roman ideals resulted in certain stereotyped criticisms of the Dionysus cult, the Egyptian Isis cult, and Judaism: they produced immorality (especially among Roman women) and sedition.’

My main goal in writing this book has been to illustrate that the history of early Christian women includes the public reaction to their lives. I have shown that an understanding of how women figured in public opinion about the church furthers our knowledge of early Christian women in several important ways. Most obviously, the collection of references to church women by second-century critics highlights the presence of women in public impressions of Christianity. Previous treatments of pagan reaction to early Christianity have stressed that an outsider's perspective should be valued as an alternative source of information about church groups to that available from Christian sources. I have argued a similar case with respect to what can be known about Christian women from non-Christian sources. The pagan critics convey information about such important matters as the evangelical efforts of women, the nature of their leadership roles, and the general shape of their daily lives as celibate and married women.

Beyond offering us interesting information about women's lives which complements and, at times, even challenges conclusions about the history of Christian women based on Christian texts, the comments of the second-century pagan critics analysed in Part 1 contribute to our comprehension of the interaction between church groups and Greco-Roman society.

The main goal of Part 1 of this book was to illustrate that women figured prominently in descriptions of Christianity by non-Christians in the second century CE. New Testament evidence indicates, moreover, that outsiders also critiqued the early church in the first century. The challenge involved in studying such evidence is that the comments of outsiders are only available to us as they are communicated through early church voices. These Christian writings express public opinion indirectly, frequently couching it in language which is intended to exhort community members towards appropriate behaviour for life in the church. As we move on in Part 2 to look at the impact of public opinion on the lives of early Christian women, non-Christian reactions to the church will be compared to indirect expressions of public opinion found in several early Christian texts. Unlike the remarks of the observers examined in the previous section, the indirect expressions of public opinion cannot be analysed on their own terms; they must be studied in light of early church concerns for social respectability and the desire to respond to public opinion.

Some New Testament texts explicitly discuss church communities having been burdened by slanderous rumours (e.g. 1 Pet. 2.12; 3.15–16; 1 Tim. 3.6–7, 5.14). Even if the public reactions which triggered these early church responses lack the depth of the challenging questions posed to Christianity by an intellectual like Celsus, we must not underestimate their importance in the establishment of community values of prestige and failure.

Although I have been working intensively on this book for about five years, many of its themes have occupied my thoughts for much longer. In preparing The Pauline Churches (Cambridge University Press, 1988) I became fascinated with the question of how the reaction of non-believers to early Christian groups may have affected life in the early church. Early Christian women and pagan opinion considers this question with a specific focus on early Christian women.

In conducting this study I was frequently required to venture outside my own field of Early Christian Studies to consider the work of anthropologists of Mediterranean societies and the work of scholars in the area of women and religion. Given the interdisciplinary nature of my study, I set out deliberately to write a book which I hope will interest specialists, but will also engage more general readers. I have made extensive use of footnotes throughout which will offer scholars of early Christianity further information about textual backgrounds and related studies.

My investigation has been enriched by many conversations with graduate students. In addition, I have received assistance from students working in conjunction with the Canadian Centre for Research on Women and Religion at the University of Ottawa. Steven Muir, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, deserves special mention for editing, bibliographical work, and proof-reading.

Having looked in detail at the text of Pausanias and particularly at his words concerning the leading figures of the later Republic and early Empire, I wish here to stand back from the details in order to look at the overall picture, at what Pausanias actually thought of Rome and all that it had brought to Greece. Also to bring together his approaches to past and present, to assess whether he regards the latter as lesser than the former, whether he denigrates the present better to promote the past; how far he seeks to glorify the past, and how far he ignores the present, following the archaizing tendency in the culture of his age which has repeatedly been stressed in the preceding pages.

Pausanias does not feel negatively towards Rome per se – he had visited Rome and wondered at its sights (8.17.4, 9.21.1), as well as at those of other parts of Italy. In saying that Pausanias does not feel negatively towards Rome, I follow Palm (and others) in supporting Clavier's emendation of the text at 8.27.1, to include epi, with the meaning that the inhabitants were overtaken by ‘disaster under the Roman Empire’ (i.e. as a chronological statement) rather than meaning the ‘disaster of the Roman Empire’. This is an important point for present purposes since, as Palm observes, it has been the key element in any view of Pausanias as anti-Roman.

The very fact that Pausanias wrote at such length about the sites and monuments of Greece is itself indicative of his most important attitude towards antiquities. That is, that he thought them of sufficient value to be worth recording and, in recording them, he thought it worth travelling extensively in mainland Greece over a period of many years to see them for himself.

Although the context of Pausanias' writings, in the tradition of the periegesis and against the cultural and political background of his day, has been stressed in the previous chapter, analysis of his attitude to antiquities involves greater complexities and subtleties than are accounted for simply by the historical context into which he was born.

J.J. Pollitt has observed that Pausanias ‘almost never expressed personal preferences or values beyond pointing out that certain work was “worth seeing”’. Similarly Habicht, although he argues that Pausanias has been unjustly neglected, gives little space to consideration of the shades of presentation reflected in Pausanias' writings, that is, to how his narrative reflects differing attitudes to specific works and types of works. In contrast, I suggest that Pausanias had strong personal preferences and values in his attitudes to the objects and sites he describes, and that they are reflected in the subtleties of presentation of the objects described in his narrative. It is those attitudes that I hope to define more closely in this chapter.

The bracketing of Caesar and Augustus in this chapter derives from Pausanias' own view of them as, effectively, the founders of the Roman Empire. He refers to both as basileus (e.g. 5.25.1, 2.17.3 respectively), a use of terminology which is discussed in the following pages, and which clearly places Caesar at the head of the line of sole rulers, the rest of whom belong to the Imperial period, rather than associating him with the earlier, Republican, rulers. Such categorization is more appropriate to the history of Roman Greece than would be a conventional Republican/imperial divide.

JULIUS CAESAR

Unlike Mummius and Sulla, Caesar appears to have been widely regarded as a cultured man: Pliny says that he ‘gave outstanding public importance to pictures by dedicating paintings of Ajax and Medea in front of the temple of Venus Genetrix’, the implication being that he was the first to do so and that he thereby set a fashion (NH 35.26, 7.126). The paintings referred to are by Timomachos of Byzantium, a contemporary of Caesar's (NH 35.136), so this does not represent a pursuit of antiquity. Suetonius refers to him as ‘a most enthusiastic collector of gems, carvings, statues, and pictures by early artists’ (Julius 47), the latter phrase indicating a discriminating preference for antiques. His practice of taking with him on campaign ‘tessellata et sectilia pavimenta’ (Suet. Julius 46) implies interest in art per se, although not necessarily the art of a previous era.