The Darkening Age Page 10

  History supports this reading. In the Decian persecution, Christians who refused to sacrifice were given repeated opportunities to comply and pre-announced dates gave ample opportunities to flee. In 303, Emperor Diocletian had allowed that clergy who sacrificed could be released. Other officials commuted sentences to avoid execution, condemning would-be martyrs not to death but to a spell in the mines, or banishment instead. It is likely that almost all Christians in times of persecution simply sacrificed and escaped death. In Africa, for example, no governor is known to have executed Christians until the year 180. The Christian martyrs number “hundreds, not thousands,” according to the scholar W.H.C. Frend.32

  The officials in the martyr tales were rarely thanked for their efforts to save or dissuade. The Christian who was advised to look at the sunny weather rebuffed his tempter by declaring: “The death which is coming to me is more pleasant than the life which you would give me.”33 The prefect—or, as the narrative has it, “tyrant”—who tells the Christian to cheer up and cease his foolishness is bluntly informed that he is the “most impious of all men.”34 When Eulalia’s governor offers her a compromise, she spits in his eye. The prefect Maximus, who had alternately attempted to bribe and then reason the veteran Julius into living, was told that the money he was offering was “the money of Satan” and that “neither it nor your crafty talk can deprive me of the eternal light.” It is not without some sympathy that one reads the prefect’s terse response: “If you do not respect the imperial decrees and offer sacrifice, I am going to cut your head off.” Julius replies boldly but somewhat ungraciously that “to live with you would be death for me.” He is beheaded.35

  Non-Christians were alternately baffled and repelled by such excess. Pliny himself describes Christianity as nothing more than a “degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths.”36 For a long time, Romans struggled to understand why Christians couldn’t simply add the worship of this new Christian god to the old ones. It was known that Christianity had sprung from Judaism and that even the Jews had offered prayer and sacrifice to Augustus and later emperors in their temple. If they had done so—and theirs was the more ancient religion—then why couldn’t the Christians? Monotheism in the rigid Christian sense was all but unthinkable to polytheists. “If you have recognized Christ,” as one official put it, “then recognize our gods too.”37 Not just unthinkable but, to many, unnecessary to the point of histrionic. As another prefect in another trial pithily put it: “What is so serious about offering some incense and going away?”38 The emperor Marcus Aurelius disparaged martyrdom as mere “stage heroics.”39 Others saw it as simply deluded: Lucian scornfully described the Christians as those “poor wretches [who] have convinced themselves, first and foremost, that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, in consequence of which they despise death and even willingly give themselves into custody.”40

  What appears to irritate Pliny the Younger in those who remain firm is less the implicit disrespect to his gods than their actual disrespect to his authority. He has been explicitly sent to Bithynia to sort the province out. Now, because of Christianity, he is faced with a town teeming with informers and bristling with discontent—and with some rigidly intransigent witnesses who are refusing to honor the emperor. When Pliny puts them on trial, some recant while others remain firm. Those who do remain firm are, if Roman citizens, sent to Rome—at astonishing expense and bureaucratic bother—for trial. If they are not, they are executed. For, as Pliny put it, “whatever the nature of their admission, I am convinced that their stubbornness and unshakeable obstinacy ought not to go unpunished.” To show contumacia—contempt or “obstinacy” before a magistrate—was in itself a punishable crime, and one that Christians frequently either committed explicitly or teetered upon the edge of.41

  Romans often found the Christians offensively irritating in court—not without reason, if the acts of the martyrs are to be believed. The Christians spat, metaphorically and literally, in the face of Roman legal process. In one famous trial, a martyr named Sanctus responded to every question with “I am a Christian.” A Christian author records the event with great approbation. “With such determination did he stand up to their onslaughts that he would not tell them his own name, race, and birthplace, or whether he was a slave or free; to every question he replied in Latin, ‘I am a Christian.’ This he proclaimed over and over again, instead of name, birthplace, nationality and everything else, and not another word did the heathen hear from him.”42 The “heathen” were less approving of this behavior and the presiding governor promptly had him tortured some more.

  What should Pliny do with these odd people? Trajan’s reply is brief and to the point. He doesn’t get into theological or legal debates about the legal status of Christianity (to the disappointment of later scholars); nor does he (thus confounding the martyrdom tropes) fulminate against the Christians. He does agree with Pliny that those who are proved to be Christian “must be punished”—though for precisely what charge is unclear. He also adds that “in the case of anyone who denies that he is a Christian, and makes it clear that he is not by offering prayers to our gods, he is to be pardoned as a result of his repentance however suspect his past conduct may be.” Roman emperors wanted obedience, not martyrs. They had absolutely no wish to open windows into men’s souls or to control what went on there. That would be a Christian innovation.

  Despite declaring bluntly that those who are Christian should be punished, Trajan then goes on to add a clause that would give considerable legal protection to all Christians in his empire for well over a century. For Trajan is absolutely adamant that those unpleasant denunciations that started all this off should not happen again. “Pamphlets circulated anonymously must play no part in any accusation,” he writes. “They create the worst sort of precedent and are quite out of keeping with the spirit of our age.” And nor should Pliny take it upon himself to root out Christians. In a line that should be far better known than it is, Trajan adds three simple but powerful words. “Conquirendi non sunt”—“These people must not be hunted out.”43

  Many Romans didn’t like the Christians. They found their reclusive behavior offensive, their teachings foolish, their fervor irritating and their refusal to sacrifice to the emperor insulting. But for the first 250 years after the birth of Christ, the imperial policy towards them was first to ignore them and then to declare that they must not be hounded.44

  In the encounter between the Christians and the Romans it is the former who are almost without fail remembered as the oppressed and the latter as the oppressors. Yet, apart from Nero, it was almost two and a half centuries before emperors became involved in prosecutions of Christians—and even then, as we have seen, these prosecutions were brief.

  This was a grace and liberty that the Christians would decline to show to other religions when they finally gained control. A little over ten years after the newly Christian Constantine took power, it is said that laws began to be passed restricting “the pollutions of idolatry.”45 During Constantine’s own reign it seems to have been decreed that “no one should presume to set up cult-objects, or practise divination or other occult arts, or even to sacrifice at all.”46 Less than fifty years after Constantine, the death penalty was announced for any who dared to sacrifice.47 A little over a century later, in AD 423, the Christian government announced that any pagans who still survived were to be suppressed. Though, it added confidently—and ominously: “We now believe that there are none.”48

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  The Most Magnificent Building in the World

  He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed.

  —Exodus 22:20

  AT THE END OF the first century of Christian rule, the Colosseum still dominated Rome and the Parthenon towered above Athens. Yet when writers of this period discuss architecture, these aren’t the buildings that impress them. Instead, their admiration is drawn by another structure in Egypt.
This building was so fabulous that writers in the ancient world struggled to find ways to convey its beauty. “Its splendour is such that mere words can only do it an injustice,” wrote the historian Ammianus Marcellinus.1 It was, another writer thought, “one of the most unique and uncommon sights in the world. For nowhere else on earth can one find such a building.”2 Its great halls, its columns, its astonishing statues and its art all made it, outside Rome, “the most magnificent building in the whole world.”3 Everyone had heard of it.

  No one has heard of it now. While tourists still toil up to the Parthenon, or look in awe at the Colosseum, outside academia few people know of the temple of Serapis. That is because in AD 392 a bishop, supported by a band of fanatical Christians, reduced it to rubble.

  It is easy to see why this temple would have attracted the Christians’ attention. Standing at the top of a hundred or more marble steps, it had once towered over the startling white marble streets below, an object to incite not only wonder but envy. While Christians of the time crammed into insufficient numbers of small, cramped churches, this was a vast—and vastly superior—monument to the old gods. It was one of the first buildings you noticed as you sailed towards Alexandria, its roof looming above the others, and one that you were unlikely to forget. No mean feat. One of several “Alexandrias” founded by Alexander the Great (a man rarely accused of modesty) this Alexandria was an admirably elegant city. Under the scorching Egyptian sun, its wide boulevards were laid out on an elegant grid designed to allow the fresh sea breeze to pass through them, cooling them. Its landmarks have become landmarks in the history of culture and architecture: the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the wonders of the ancient world, was here; as too was the Musaeum, most literally a shrine to the Muses but also, with its walkways, lecture hall, dining room and resident academics, a forerunner of the modern university; here too was the Great Library of Alexandria. It has been said that Julius Caesar was so impressed by the city that he had returned home determined to improve Rome. And above all of these buildings, and more beautiful than any, was the temple of Serapis.

  By AD 392, some of what Caesar had admired had gone—done for by war and fire—but Serapis still stood, and still awed all who came. To reach it a visitor would have to climb up that grand flight of steps to the shrine’s citadel-like walls. Once inside, you would have found yourself in a generous courtyard, edged about by shady porticoes. Your eye might have been caught by the much-admired statues—so realistic, it was said, that it looked as though they might at any moment take a breath. And beyond them, dazzling in the bright Mediterranean sunlight, rose the marble columns of the temple itself.

  Walk on and, just behind the porticoes of the inner court, you would have found yourself in a vast library—the remnants of the Great Library of Alexandria itself. The library’s collection was now stored here, within the temple precinct, for safekeeping. This had been the world’s first public library, and its holdings had, at its height, been staggering, running into hundreds of thousands of volumes. Like the city itself, the collection had taken several knocks over the years, but extensive collections remained. The spirit of the original institution remained here too and anyone in the city who wished to could come and read these books. Excavations in the 1940s uncovered nineteen uniform rooms where, it is thought, the books were shelved: thousands of volumes, on every topic from religion to mathematics, were sitting on those shelves as the year 392 opened.

  So Serapis was rich, then, in intellectual wealth. But go on, past the library, past the lecture rooms that surrounded it and into the temple itself, then you would have seen a more literal sort of richness. Enter through its great doors and, once your eyes adjusted to the frankincense-heavy dimness within, you would have seen a room of almost brash opulence, in which oil lamps glimmered on walls plated with gold and overlaid with silver. And in the center was the most brilliant object of all: a vast statue of the god Serapis. Like the Greco-Egyptian city he sat above, this god was an international hybrid. Look at his handsome bearded profile and you might think you were looking at Jupiter himself, though he was Egyptian enough that others called him “Osiris.” An immortal amalgam that, some said, had been intentionally created to bring harmony to the mixed races in the city below, causing them to pray rather than fight together. Nonsense, maybe—but Serapis had nonetheless acted as an extremely effective divine diplomat, helping to unite this famously argumentative people. In a city that, at night, glowed with countless flames in a thousand temples, this god was one of the most eagerly worshipped of all.

  Like all statues this size, Serapis was made of a wooden structure overlaid with precious materials: the god’s profile was made of glowing white ivory; his enormous limbs were draped in robes of metal—very probably with real gold. The statue was so huge that his great hands almost touched either side of the room in which he sat; if he’d stood up, he would have taken the roof off. Even the sun adored him: the temple had been built with a tiny window carefully positioned in its east wall so that once a year on the appointed day the dawn rays would come in and kiss the lips of the god.

  To the new generation of Christian clerics, however, Serapis was not a wonder of art or a much-loved local god. Serapis was a demon. And, in AD 392, the city’s bishop decided to act against this demon once and for all. Theophilus, the new Bishop of Alexandria, had been preparing for this moment for months—from birth, if one is to believe his biographer. When he was a mere child, it was said, the boy’s nurse had taken him to a temple of Artemis and Apollo to pray. As she had entered the temple with Theophilus in her arms the statues of the gods had spontaneously crashed to the ground and broken into pieces. This, then, was a man destined for destruction. As an adult Theophilus was little more compromising. “The cross,” he said in one less than milk-and-honey homily, “is that which closed the temples of the idols and opened the churches and crowns them. The cross is that which has confounded the demons and made them flee in terror.”4

  Fierce words—but Christians had been fulminating in this way for decades and polytheists had been able to ignore them. But the world was changing. It was now eighty years since a Christian had first sat on the throne of Rome and in the intervening decades the religion of the Lamb had taken an increasingly bullish attitude to all those who refused it. Since taking control in Alexandria, Theophilus had lived up to his early promise as a statue-smashing scourge. A little earlier, he had stolen the most sacred objects from two temples and paraded them through the streets for Christians to mock. The worshippers of the old gods were shocked and enraged: this was a gross and unprompted act of sacrilege and Christians afterwards were attacked and even killed by outraged worshippers. Upsetting and unedifying though the incident was, it would be utterly eclipsed by what was about to follow.

  One day, early in AD 392, a large crowd of Christians started to mass outside the temple, with Theophilus at its head. And then, to the distress of watching Alexandrians, this crowd had surged up the steps, into the sacred precinct, and burst into the most beautiful building in the world.

  And then they began to destroy it.

  Theophilus’s righteous followers began to tear at those famous artworks, the lifelike statues and the gold-plated walls. There was a moment’s hesitation when they came to the massive statue of the god: rumor had it that if Serapis was harmed then the sky would fall in. Theophilus ordered a soldier to take his axe and hit it. The soldier struck Serapis’s face with a double-headed axe. The god’s great ivory profile, blackened by centuries of smoke, shattered.

  The watching Christians roared with delight and then, emboldened, surged round to complete the job. Serapis’s head was wrenched from its neck; the feet and hands were chopped off with axes, dragged apart with ropes, then, for good measure, burned.

  As one delighted Christian chronicler put it, the “decrepit dotard” Serapis “was burned to ashes before the eyes of the Alexandria which had worshipped him.”5 The giant torso of the god was saved for a more public humiliati
on: it was taken into the amphitheater and burned in front of a great crowd. “And that,” as our chronicler notes with satisfaction, “was the end of the vain superstition and ancient error of Serapis.”6

  A little later, a church housing the relics of St. John the Baptist was built on the temple’s ruins, a final insult to the god—and to architecture. It was, naturally, an inferior structure.

  According to later Christian chronicles, this was a victory. According to a non-Christian account, it was a tragedy—and a farce. The Greek writer Eunapius felt the destruction was done less from reverence for the Lord than out of pure greed. In his account the Christians weren’t virtuous warriors: they were hoodlums and thieves. The only thing that they didn’t steal, he observed acidly, was the floor—and that was left “simply because of the weight of the stones which were not easy to move from their place.” As he wrote with scorn, “these warlike and honourable men” had destroyed this beautiful temple out of “greed,” yet once they had finished their vandalism they “boasted that they had overcome the gods, and reckoned their sacrilege and impiety a thing to glory in.”7 Nothing was left. Christians took apart the temple’s very stones, toppling the immense marble columns, causing the walls themselves to collapse. The entire sanctuary was demolished with astonishing rapidity; the greatest building in the world was “scattered to the winds.”8