The Darkening Age Read online

  Augustine, despite being impressed by the harmony of his neighbors, was not willing to extend such tolerance himself. It was, he concluded, the duty of a good Christian to convert heretics—by force, if necessary. This was a theme to which he returned again and again.80 Far better a little compulsion in this life than eternal damnation in the next. People could not always be trusted to know what was good for them. The good and caring Christian would therefore remove the means of sinning from the uncertain reach of the sinner. “For in most cases we serve others best by not giving, and would injure them by giving, what they desire,” he explained. Do not put a sword in a child’s hand. “For the more we love any one, the more are we bound to avoid entrusting to him things which are the occasion of very dangerous faults.”81

  A few decades after Celsus wrote On the True Doctrine, an even more monumental assault was made on the Christian faith by another Greek philosopher. It shocked the Christian community with its depth, breadth and brilliance. Yet today this philosopher’s name, like Celsus’s, has been all but forgotten. He was, we know, called Porphyry. We know that his attack was immense—at least fifteen books; that it was highly erudite and that it was, to the Christians, deeply upsetting. We know that it targeted Old Testament history, and poured scorn on the prophets and on the blind faith of Christians. We know some parts in more detail: that Porphyry felt that most people thought the story of Jonah and the Whale to be nonsense, as it “is utterly improbable and incredible, that a man swallowed with his clothes on should have existed in the inside of a fish.”82 It is also clear that Porphyry, like Celsus and Galen, accused Christianity of being an “unreasoning faith.”83 We know that Porphyry too found himself baffled as to why God had waited so long to save mankind: “If Christ declares Himself to be the Way of salvation, the Grace and the Truth . . . what has become of men who lived in the many centuries before Christ came?” he asked. “What, then, has become of such an innumerable multitude of souls, who were in no wise blameworthy” who were born earlier? Why “did He who is called the Saviour withhold Himself for so many centuries of the world?”84

  This much, then, is known—but not much more. And the reason we don’t know is that Porphyry’s works were deemed so powerful and frightening that they were completely eradicated. Constantine, the first Christian emperor—now famed for his edict of “toleration”—started the attack. In a letter written in the early part of the fourth century, he heaped odium on the long-dead philosopher, describing him as “that enemy of piety,” an author of “licentious treatises against religion.” Constantine announced that he was henceforth “branded with infamy,” overwhelmed “with deserved reproach,” and that his “impious writings” had been destroyed. In the same letter Constantine also consigned the works of the heretic Arius to the flames and announced that anyone who was found hiding one of Arius’s books would be put to death. Constantine signed off this aggressive epistle with the instruction “May God preserve you!”85 Presumably unless you were an admirer of Porphyry or Arius. A century or so later, in AD 448, Porphyry’s books were burned again, this time on the orders of the Christian emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian III.86

  This, the new generation of Christian preachers would argue, was loving, not repressive. To force someone to change what they did, or what they believed, was to heal, not harm them. In one of Augustine’s many reassuring metaphors, he explained that to restrain a sinner from being able to sin was not a cruelty but a kindness. “If any one saw his enemy running headlong to destroy himself when he had become delirious through a dangerous fever, would he not in that case be much more truly rendering evil for evil if he permitted him to run on thus, than if he took measures to have him seized and bound?”87 He went on: “Not every one who is indulgent is a friend; nor is every one an enemy who smites. Better are the wounds of a friend than the proffered kisses of an enemy.”88

  A new era was opening. To worship another god was no longer to be merely different. It was to err. And those who erred were to be seized, struck and—if necessary—wounded. Above all, they were to be stopped.

  “There is nothing wrong,” Celsus had written, “if each nation observes its own laws of worship.”89 To many of the most powerful thinkers within the Christian Church, nothing could be more abhorrent.

  Chapter Four

  * * *

  “On the Small Number of Martyrs”

  Don’t you see the beauty of this pleasant weather? There will be no pleasure to come your way if you kill your own self.

  —a Roman official addresses a would-be martyr

  IN CHRISTIAN MYTH, the persecution began with Nero. He, it was said, was “the first of the emperors to be the declared enemy of the worship of Almighty God.”1

  Few people, Christian or otherwise, had expected Nero to be a good thing. His breeding alone augured against it. His father, Domitius, had once, while driving his chariot through a village, run over and killed a young boy for fun. When another nobleman reprimanded him, Domitius turned and gouged out the man’s eye. Nero’s mother, Agrippina, was little more promising: a society beauty, in AD 54 she had murdered her third husband, the emperor Claudius, by poisoning him with his favorite food of mushrooms at a family dinner. Not even Nero’s own father had high hopes for his offspring. When he was born, Domitius remarked sanguinely that “any child born to himself and Agrippina was bound to have a detestable nature and become a public danger.”2

  Nero did not disappoint. When he first came to power, his misdemeanors were mild. A little too much theater here, a little brawling there. But things soon deteriorated. Before long he was seducing freeborn boys and married women; had raped a Vestal Virgin; “married” a castrated young boy; and committed incest with his mother—it was said that whenever they rode together in the same litter they would seize the moment and “the stains on his clothes when he emerged proved it.”3 Like most of Nero’s passions, this one didn’t last and Nero soon had Agrippina murdered. Casting round for a new passion, he conceived a novel sexual entertainment. He ordered men and women to be tied to stakes then had himself released from a “den” and, dressed in wild animal skins, bounded forth and attacked the genitals of his trussed captives. Then, as his biographer Suetonius records with fastidiously phrased distaste (though not so fastidious that he doesn’t record it at all), “after working up sufficient excitement by this means, he was despatched—shall we say?—by his freedman.”4

  This, then—or so the scurrilous historians said—was the character of the man who ruled the greatest city on earth. And what a city it was. Around a million people lived on its seven hills and they walked among world-famous monuments of awesome beauty and size. Even its infrastructure impressed: towering aqueducts disgorged millions of gallons of water a day, filling the city’s drinking-water basins, its baths and even a massive fake lake on which mock naval battles could be staged. A million cubic meters of water flowed into the city every day—a thousand liters per head, double the amount available to those living in modern Rome. After Rome fell, no city in Europe would come close to matching its magnificence—and certainly not its plumbing—for well over a millennium.

  This is the picture of Rome that we know. However, under the marble exterior lay a far less glossy reality. It is true that the city’s sewers were, by the standard of the time, remarkable: as one Roman, with true Roman pragmatism, wrote, they were the city’s “most noteworthy achievement of all.” The tunnels were so massive that a man might ride a fully laden wagon along them.5 But they were far from perfect. Despite the roomy vastness of the Cloaca Maxima, most people didn’t have access to latrines and the streets of Rome provided de facto toilets for much of its population. Sometimes they used chamber pots; at other times they simply relieved themselves in streets, doorways and behind statues.

  And while wealthy Romans lived in grand villas—the emperor Domitian later lived in a palace of 40,000 square meters—most of the city’s population existed in cramped and teetering apartment blocks. These buildings,
many as high as seven stories, were jerry-built, poorly maintained by unscrupulous management agents and prone to falling down. “We inhabit a Rome for the most part supported by thin props,” wrote the poet Juvenal, bitterly. Housing agents responded to their tenants’ problems with minimal effort: after such an agent had “covered a gaping ancient crack, he tells us not to worry, as we sleep in a building on the point of collapse.”6

  Noise was an incessant problem. As well as thin walls there was no glass in the windows and most Romans—at least according to the grumbling of the city’s satirists—suffered from chronic insomnia. Any peace was quickly interrupted by the clanging of braziers’ hammers, or the clattering of carts as they rattled along the flagstones in the darkness. Daytime was little more serene: citizens were plagued by everything from the yells of salesmen to the floggings administered by shrill schoolmasters. No peace—and no peace of mind, either. For those who rented a home in those rickety apartment blocks, fire was a perpetual fear. Juvenal, evidently fed up with garret life, wrote: “if the alarm is raised at the bottom of the stairs, the person protected from the rain by only a little roof tile . . . will be the last to burn.”7

  One hot summer’s day in AD 64, that fear came true. By nightfall on July 18 a fire had taken hold in some shops near the Circus Maximus. These buildings, fronted with wooden shutters and filled with inflammable goods, provided the conflagration with a wonderful start. Soon, houses along the whole length of the Circus were ablaze; before long, the fire had spread to the hills. As the blaze spread overnight, the sound of flames became mingled with the wailing of women and children as they tried to flee—often in vain. The flames, it was said, were so hot and so rapid that those who turned to look behind them found their faces burned by the heat. Rome had a (relatively) sophisticated fire service—but either the inferno was too fierce to control or something more sinister was going on. It was later said that as it raged, threatening men had appeared, forbidding anyone to extinguish the flames and even hurling firebrands into buildings which hadn’t yet caught. Rome burned for almost a week. By the time the fire had finally gone out, three whole quarters of the city had been destroyed and thousands were homeless.

  Rome was wretched; one man alone—so the historians said—was delighted. As his people fled, Nero was said to have spent the entire six days and seven nights of the disaster watching it from a high tower, enraptured by “the beauty of the flames.”8 He passed the time by getting into costume and singing a composition of his own (“The Sack of Ilium”) about the burning of another famous city. He probably even played the cithara as he did so. Fiddling, as people later anachronistically described it, while Rome burned.

  Nero looked at the charred ruins of Rome and, instead of seeing disaster, saw—or so it was said—the opportunity he had wanted. Building works began almost immediately; not to create homes for the thousands of newly homeless, but for himself. Nero’s infamous Golden House rose, a palatial and tastelessly glitzy phoenix from the ashes. Where flames had once scorched the faces of the fleeing, now there was a bathhouse fed by sea water and sulfur water; where once the air had been so hot that buildings spontaneously burst into flame, there now lay a pond the size of a sea, surrounded by buildings made to look like miniature cities.

  Even by Nero’s standards this place was extravagant. The whole house glittered, so they said, like fire with overlaid gold, in which glowed jewels and mother-of-pearl. The roof of the dining room was fitted with ivory panels that could turn to release showers of petals upon the diners below, while pipes sprinkled a fine rain of perfume. Wild animals roamed through landscaped gardens. It was a rural idyll inside one of the largest cities on earth. When the palace was completed Nero was finally content. “Good,” he said. “Now I can at last begin to live like a human being!”9

  Listen carefully, however, and over the sound of splashing water and the roars of those wild beasts, you might have heard another noise: the murmurs of a deeply discontented populace. The citizens of Rome were angry, and they were suspicious. Nero, they whispered, had started the fire intentionally, to clear space for the palace that gleamed where the flames had glowed.

  Nero himself—perhaps aware of the bitterness—blamed a different group. A new cult had recently arrived in Rome. The historian Tacitus later described it as a “pernicious superstition.”10 The followers of this superstition were said to be the troublesome adherents of a man named “Christus” or possibly, according to the historian Suetonius, “Chrestus.”11 They were, Tacitus added, a group “popularly called Christians” and they were “hated for their perversions.” Tacitus added a little more: “The name’s source was one Christus,” he wrote, “executed by the governor Pontius Pilatus when Tiberius held power.” A significant sentence: this was the sole mention of this event in a non-Christian source from this period. Tacitus was little more enthusiastic about the Christians, adding the typically misanthropic, Tacitean conclusion that after Jesus’s execution, “the pernicious creed, suppressed at the time, was bursting forth again, not only in Judaea, where this evil originated, but even in Rome, into which from all directions everything appalling and shameful flows and foregathers.”12

  By the time of the Great Fire in AD 64, it seems that there were some Christians living in the capital. Certainly there were enough that when Nero was looking for scapegoats for the inferno, not only did they seem a plausible target but he was able to find a number of them (even if not quite the “huge multitude” that histories later said) to accuse. And to accuse, for Nero, was to convict; and to convict was to punish. The actual crime was not arson, oddly, but “hatred of humankind.”13 The Christians were sentenced to death.

  The mode of their execution showed, even by Nero’s standards, a lunatic creativity. Some were dressed in animal skins and then torn to pieces by wild dogs. Others, convicted of making fire, died by it. As dusk fell in Nero’s garden, Christians were nailed to crosses, then burned, serving as unusual nighttime illuminations. Nero threw open his gardens for the spectacle as a treat—or perhaps a warning—to others. As the killings were taking place, he wandered among his guests while dressed (for no clear reason other than perhaps that he liked chariot racing) as a charioteer. The display was so gruesome that even the Romans, not a people known to shirk the spectacle of painful death, were disconcerted. A feeling of pity started to grow among them since “the Christians’ annihilation seemed to arise not from public utility but from one man’s brutality.”14

  This, then, was where it began: the first imperial persecution of the Christians. According to Christian historians, it was very far from the last. Christian literature would go on to portray Roman emperors and their officials as demonically possessed servants of Satan who hungered insatiably for Christian blood.

  It is a very potent picture. But it is not true.

  Martyrs have always made good drama. When William Caxton introduced his printing press to London in the fifteenth century, one of the books he chose to print was the compilation of saints’ lives—or more precisely their deaths—known as The Golden Legend. This collection, by Jacobus de Voragine, dating from around 1260, had already been a huge hit on the Continent. Caxton, a talented translator as well as a shrewd businessman, knew an opportunity when he saw one. He promptly translated (or, as his book’s title page had it, “Englished”) these verses into vividly salty prose. The description of the death of St. Alban provides a taste of the whole: St. Alban’s torturer, this tale explains, “opened his navel and took out one end of his bowels, and fastened it to a stake which he pight in the ground, and made the holy man to go round about the stake, and drove him with whips, and beat him till that his bowels were wounden out of his body.”15 Caxton chose well: the book was a huge success, running to nine editions. A medieval bestseller.

  The persecutions of Christians under the Romans had been a terrible time—but in the memory of the later Church it also became glorified as a wonderful one. According to the popular narrative, still widely believed to this
day, all across the Roman Empire, Christians eagerly stepped forward to confess the risen Lord, whatever the cost. Stories hymned the thousands upon thousands of Christians who had died willingly, even joyfully, for their faith. “No sooner had the first batch been sentenced,” wrote the historian Eusebius, “than others from every side would jump onto the platform in front of the judge and proclaim themselves Christians. They paid no heed to torture.”16

  Indeed, far from putting off potential converts, the Christians liked to say that the sight of their fellows being tortured to death merely tempted others to join up. This, Christian writers claimed, was a useful recruitment tool. The apologist Tertullian summed it up with his usual brio. “We become more numerous every time we are hewn down by you,” he said. “The blood of the Christians is seed.”17 Another author saw the dead as playing a slightly different role in the garden of belief, explaining that “the blood of the martyrs water[ed] the churches.”18

  The martyrdoms also filled the inkwells of the later Church and martyr stories proliferated. These images exerted a powerful hold over European art for centuries. In the fourth century, poetic epics were written about the martyrs by the poet Prudentius, who lingered lovingly over details of torn flesh, consuming flames, and exposed and still throbbing organs. So influential were such tales that, as the academic Robin Lane Fox has pointed out, when a group of Christians were martyred by the Muslim authorities in Cordoba in the ninth century, the accounts of their trials set them before a “consul,” as if this was all taking place in ancient Rome.19 Walk around any great European art gallery today and the walls will be peopled by the most agonizing deaths depicted in lovingly—and often alarmingly—graphic detail.