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Article: Crimes against Christians. (Roman Empire)
- Article from:
- The Saturday Evening Post
- Article date:
- March 1, 1984
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1984 Saturday Evening Post Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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An American endeavoring to survice in an urban environment in 1980s may well ask what was the state of crime--and its corollary, punishment--at the height of the Roman Empire, say, in the years 97 or 197 or 297 of the Christian era. We hear, see and fell that the United States is, like Rome, at the apogee of her glory. And indeed, one can find many similarities between the criminal side of our civilization, reported in all our news media, and the manifestations of unruly human nature that concerned the Romans in their court journals, in their histories by eminent men and in the judicial proceedings arranged for the poorest trader or the smaller farmer (the legal papyri ...