Quotes About Early Empire

Revelation as prophecy should probably be understood as anti-assimilationist, or anti-accommodationist, literature. It is also in this sense that Revelation is resistance literature—"a thorough-going prophetic critique of the system of Roman power" and "the most powerful piece of political resistance literature from the period of the early Empire.

At this point, a social flaw that always existed with regard to the [Roman] aristocrats in their townhouses became more evident. No longer finding urban life as secure and amenable as in the early empire, the landed rich gave primacy not to their urban mansions but to their country estates, making the latter their principal residences. The dominant forces in urban life increasingly became the bishops and cathedral clergy.