Ancient & modern
SIMON HEFFER has been arguing that Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood" speech was warning against the dangers not of racism but of multiculturalism. But what does multiculturalism mean? If its opposite is rnonoculturalism, no Westerner has lived in a monoculture for a very long time.
In about AD 58, Paul was arrested by the Roman authorities in Jerusalem for causing a riot. Claudius Lysias, garrison commander, ordered him to be flogged. As he was being tied up, Paul revealed that he was a Roman citizen, who had been found guilty on no charge. Claudius was summoned, and in the ensuing exchange revealed that he (Claudius) had bought his citizenship. Paul replied, 'It was mine by birth.'
Paul was a Jew. He had been born in Tarsus, an important city in the province of Cilicia (south-east Turkey) which had become part of the Roman empire from 102 BC, and he had inherited his status as a citizen from his father, by birth, We have to reconstruct Claudius Lysias' history, but he was probably a Greek, from the eastern Mediterranean, who had been a slave under the emperor Claudius. He must have done well in that position, bought his freedom and thus inherited the status of his master, as was normal in such cases. He had continued to prosper — freed slaves who had flourished in the emperor's service usually did — and had been appointed to the garrison in Jerusalem.
The exchange is a fascinating one. Here were two Roman citizens. One, born or made a slave and so denied any legal status, had eventually bought his citizenship and been given a position of some authority in the Roman imperial system. The other, from one of Rome's rougher, bandit-infested provinces, a strict Pharisee and tent-maker by profession — Jewish teachers were expected to be able to support themselves — was a Roman citizen by birth but had never been near Rome in his life. One wonders what they both thought it meant to be Roman, and what they would have replied if they had been asked who they were — and what that reply would have indicated. The language of the majority in Rome, incidentally, was probably Greek.
If Enoch Powell really was arguing that we should all be monoculturalists now, in a world where an Indian, living in Newcastle, wearing Nike trainers, can study Homer when she is not searching the World Wide Web on her Sony computer, he was being even more monophthalmic than usual.
Peter Jones
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