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  Martyrs became art. And not always good art. While the earliest—and most reliable—martyr tales were often affecting in their simplicity and their honesty, many of the later and more fictional ones suffered from crass characterization, barely sublimated sexuality and lashings of gore. The Victorians, naturally, adored them. In the nineteenth century, hymns flowed from pious pens. “Bright the stones which bruise thee gleam,” ran one verse on St. Stephen, who had been stoned to death, “Sprinkled with thy life blood’s stream.” Another hymned the saints who “met the tyrant’s brandished steel / the lion’s gory mane.”20

  Four centuries after Caxton, these lurid stories could still sell copies. In 1895 the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz published a novel that became an international bestseller and contributed to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. This seventy-three-chapter behemoth told the story of the Christian martyrs who were put to death by the emperor Nero. It concluded with the observation that “Nero passed on, as a whirlwind, as a storm, as a fire, as war or death passes, but the Basilica of Peter still stands on the Vatican Hill and rules over the city and the world.”21 Today, the book has been all but forgotten but its title, Quo Vadis, has not. Hollywood went on to make numerous film and television series by this name. The most famous was the 1951 swords-and-sandals epic in which a rotund Peter Ustinov as Nero smirkingly looks on while Christians, wearing white and looking pious, are pursued by lions in the arena, managing to sing hymns up to the very moment of mauling.22

  But although martyr stories have often made for arresting and compelling drama, very few, if any, of these tales are based on historical fact. There were simply not that many years of imperially ordered persecution in the Roman Empire. Fewer than thirteen—in three whole centuries of Roman rule. These years may have loomed understandably large in Christian accounts but to allow them to dominate the narrative in the way that they have—and still do—is at best misleading and at worst a gross misrepresentation. During these first centuries of the new religion, local persecutions of Christians occurred. But we know of no government-led persecution for the first 250 years of Christianity with the exception of Nero’s—and Nero, with even-handed lunacy, persecuted everyone. For two and a half centuries the Roman imperial government left Christianity alone.

  The idea, therefore, of a line of satanically inspired emperors, panting for the blood of the faithful, is another Christian myth. As the modern historian Keith Hopkins wrote, “the traditional question: ‘Why were the Christians persecuted?’ with all its implications of unjust repression and eventual triumph, should be re-phrased: ‘Why were the Christians persecuted so little and so late?’”23

  Nevertheless, martyr tales have been hugely influential, not least on Christianity’s image of itself. The academic Candida Moss has argued that in the years that followed the persecutions, Christianity came to see itself, with great pride, as a persecuted Church. Its greatest heroes were not those who did good deeds but those who died in the most painful way. If you were willing to die an excruciating end in the arena then, whatever your previous holiness or lack thereof, you went straight to heaven: martyrdom wiped out all sins on the point of death. As well as getting there faster, martyrs enjoyed preferential terms in paradise, getting to wear the much-desired martyr’s crown. Tempting celestial terms were offered: it was said that the scripture promised “multiplication, even to a hundred times, of brothers, children, parents, land and homes.”24 Precisely how this celestial sum had been calculated is not clear but the general principle was: those who died early, publicly and painfully would be best rewarded.

  In many of the martyr tales the driving force is less that the Romans want to kill—and more that the Christians want to die. Why wouldn’t they? Paradoxically, martyrdom held considerable benefits for those willing to take it on. One was its egalitarian entry qualifications. As George Bernard Shaw acidly observed over a millennium later, martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability. More than that, in a socially and sexually unequal era it was a way in which women and even slaves might shine. Unlike most positions of power in the highly socially stratified late Roman Empire, this was a glory that was open to all, regardless of rank, education, wealth or sex. The sociologist Rodney Stark has pointed out that—provided you believe in its promised rewards—martyrdom is a perfectly rational choice. A martyr could begin the day of their death as one of the lowliest people in the empire and end it as one of the most exalted in heaven. So tempting were these rewards that pious Christians born outside times of persecution were wont to express disappointment at being denied the opportunity of an agonizing death. When the later emperor Julian pointedly avoided executing Christians in his reign, one Christian writer, far from being grateful, sourly recorded that Julian had “begrudged the honour of martyrdom to our combatants.”25

  There were incitements for Christians not only to die but to die as painful a death as possible. As one soon-to-be martyred Christian irritably explained, the greater the pain, the greater the gain: “Those whose victory is slower and with greater difficulty, these receive the more glorious crown.”26 As martyr literature developed, the descriptions of the deaths became graphic to the point of prurient. In one gruesome account by Prudentius, a judge orders a Christian to be put on the rack, “till the joints of his bones in every limb are rent asunder with a crack. Then with cleaving strokes lay bare his ribs of their covering, so that his organs shall be exposed as they throb in the recesses of the wounds.”27

  The early martyrdom accounts are far stranger than is often remembered. Several verge on the salacious. Breasts, slim, naked or dripping with milk, are a theme. In later tales, female martyrs are frequently (and not entirely necessarily) required to strip naked, whereupon the crowd will be struck by their beauty. Toothsome beauties are often dispatched by lecherous governors to the brothel before death. In the apocryphal but once-popular Acts of Paul and Thecla, repeated paeans to virginity sit uncomfortably alongside passages that border on the titillating. Thecla is a great beauty who is determined (naturally) to remain a virgin. And of course, she is more than once required to strip off her clothes in front of a crowd. One night, she goes to visit Paul in prison and “her faith also was increased as she kissed his chains,” a phrase to keep students of gender studies busy for decades.28

  In martyr poems, mothers watch the martyrdom of their children with eager relish. In one story, a mother rejoices that she has borne a son who will die a martyr and, embracing his body, congratulates herself on her offspring. In another, the sight of a young boy being whipped is so atrocious that the eyes of all those present at the execution—even those of the Roman court stenographers—grow wet with tears. The boy’s mother, by contrast, “showed none of this sorrowing, her brow alone was bright and clear with joy.” The mother willingly carries her son in her arms to the executioner. As the boy’s little head is severed from his neck she catches it and presses it joyfully “to her fond breast.”29

  Or did she? How many of these famous and emotive tales actually happened? As the early Christian author Origen admitted, the numbers of martyrs were few enough to be easily countable and Christians had died for their faith only “occasionally.”30 The stories might have proliferated but, as the Church realized when it started to analyze them properly, many were little more than stories. In the seventeenth century, one scholar wrote a radical paper entitled “De paucitate martyrum” (On the Small Number of Martyrs) that made just this point.31 For all the hyperbole, as Edward Gibbon crushingly put it, the average “annual consumption” of martyrs in Rome during the persecutions was no more than one hundred and fifty per year during years of persecution.32

  And there were few of those years. What state-sanctioned attacks there were fall into three main phases: the Decian; the Valerian, seven years later; and “the Great Persecution” fifty-odd years after that in AD 303. And not all of these “persecutions” were intended to explicitly target Christians. The Decian “persecution” began in AD
250 when Decius issued an edict requiring everyone in the empire to sacrifice to him. True Christians should refuse to sacrifice to anything. A request to sacrifice to the emperor or gods became a common courtroom test of someone’s Christianity (or more precisely, their obedience) and these later formed the climax of many a martyr tale. The intent of Decius’s edict was to ensure loyalty from his empire—but as Christians were not supposed to sacrifice to such a “demon,” some refused. But though Decius’s edict caught Christians, it almost certainly had not been aimed at them. And it was brief: little more than a year after the first persecution had been launched it had finished.

  Valerian’s persecution continued for approximately three years and resulted in few deaths. Valerian himself was then taken captive in Persia by the Persian king Shapur I.* It is true that the more substantial Great Persecution that followed was responsible for around half of all early Christian martyrdoms, but it petered out quickly in the West and officially ended after a decade. While it was going on, it was terrible. Scriptures were burned, Christians were tortured and executed and churches were destroyed. But it was limited. There were intermittent local persecutions too; but these were sporadic and had an inconsequential effect on the spread of the religion. The Romans did not seek to wipe Christianity out. If they had, they would almost certainly have succeeded.

  Ever since the paper on the small number of martyrs, the death toll cited for the Roman “persecutions” has been dropping steadily. Detailed analysis of the calendar of saints’ days revealed a picture that has been described as more romantic fiction than historical fact. Some saints appeared multiple times; other saints’ names had clearly been at best misrecorded, mixed with the names of the consuls for that year. Several saints appear never to have existed at all. It is now thought that fewer than ten martyrdom tales from the early Church can be considered reliable. The martyr stories, inspiring and entertaining though they may be, show what the scholar G.E.M. De Ste. Croix called “an increasing contempt for historicity.”33

  To understand what really happened between the Christians and the Romans you must begin instead not with the martyr tales but with one of the most accurate historical accounts we have: you must begin with the very first mention of Christians by a non-Christian writer.

  TRIUMPHAL ARCH, PALMYRA, 1ST—2ND CENTURY AD Palmyra, at the edge of the Syrian desert, took its name from the feathered palm trees that grew around it. Its wealth and air of glamour came largely from the diaphanous silks that were traded there.

  ATHENA, 2ND CENTURY AD In the fourth century this colossal statue was decapitated by Christians because it was considered idolatrous. The arms were also chopped off. This photo shows the statue after reconstruction by archaeologists. In 2016 photos were released showing that the stature had again been decapitated and mutilated, this time by ISIS.

  THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY, c. 1585 A god has been knocked from its pedestal by a triumphant cross and now lies broken. The bases of destroyed Greco-Roman statues were frequently used, once the old statues had been removed, to mount Christian crosses.

  TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY, c. 1512-16 It was said that demons might appear to humans in any form: as wicked thoughts or wild animals, as corpses or even as officious bureaucrats. According to his biographer, St. Anthony was attacked by demonic lions, wolves, serpents, leopards and bears.

  FUNERARY STELE, ROME, EARLY 3RD CENTURY AD One of the earliest Christian inscriptions. Above the fish symbols is a dedication to the “DM”—the Dis Manibus, Roman gods of the underworld.

  BELIAL AND THE DEMONS, MANUSCRIPT, 1450 According to early Christian texts, mankind was under perpetual attack by Satan and his fearsome foot soldiers, the demons. Their aim was to drag all humans to damnation.

  ALLEGORY OF THE DEADLY SINS, 1463 Evagrius Ponticus, a brilliant monk who fled to the Egyptian desert, categorized all evil thoughts into eight categories—predecessors of the seven deadly sins. Demons, it was said, used evil thoughts to incite mankind to sin.

  EPICURUS The Greek philosopher Epicurus argued that the world and everything in it was made not by God but by the collision and combination of atoms. Epicureans hoped this idea would free people from irrational fear of divine powers. Augustine disliked the theory for much the same reason, and celebrated the fact that, by his time, this philosophy had been successfully suppressed.

  LUCRETIUS In his great philosophical poem “On the Nature of Things,” Lucretius transformed Epicurus’s ideas into poetry—successfully, according to Virgil: “Fortunate was he who was able to know the causes of things and crushed beneath his feet all fears and inexorable fate and the gaping grave.”

  EMPEROR CONSTANTINE, THE COUNCIL OF NICAEA, AND THE BURNING OF ARIAN BOOKS, 9TH CENTURY AD In the fourth century Constantine announced that the works of Porphyry, a formidable critic of Christianity, had been destroyed. Not a single book by Porphyry has survived to the modern era.

  THE RAISING OF LAZARUS, 4TH CENTURY AD In early images Christ was sometimes portrayed with a sorcerer’s wand. Skeptical pagans said that what Christians saw as miracles were no different from the tricks performed by hucksters in Egyptian marketplaces.

  TRIUMPH OF FAITH—CHRISTIAN MARTYRS IN THE TIME OF NERO Historians now think that the actual number of Christians killed in persecutions should be numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands.

  COLOSSAL HEAD OF CONSTANTINE, 4TH CENTURY BC According to his biographer, Emperor Constantine converted after he saw a flaming cross in the sky, though at another time in his life Constantine was said to have seen a vision of the god Apollo.

  EMPEROR THEODOSIUS AT THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANTINOPLE, 9TH CENTURY Under the fiercely Christian Theodosius I, a series of formidable laws was issued against pagans.

  TEMPLE OF DIANA, 19TH CENTURY The temple of Artemis (Diana, in Latin) at Ephesus was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It had several incarnations, but according to the apocryphal Acts of John, its final end came when John the Apostle entered the temple and began praying. At that moment, the altar shattered to pieces and “half of the temple fell down, so that the priest was slain at one blow.”

  GERMANICUS CAESAR Germanicus’s nose has been mutilated and a cross has been carved in his forehead—perhaps an attempt to “baptize” Germanicus and so neutralize any possible demons within.

  Chapter Five

  * * *

  These Deranged Men

  Because they love the name martyr and because they desire human praise more than divine charity, they kill themselves.

  —Pseudo Jerome

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE baking August of AD 111, as his ship rounded the foot of the Peloponnese in suffocating heat, Pliny the Younger looked little like the diabolical Roman governor of legend. The statue of Pliny in his hometown of Como shows him as a man with matinee-idol charms: a sternly square jaw set off by a sensuous mouth, a sensitive faraway gaze and lustrous curls. If Pliny was so dashing (which, given that he was then a middle-aged bureaucrat, seems improbable) then on that day he was very unlikely to have been looking his best. He was hot, he was flustered, and he was very late.1

  The person for whom he was late was not a man one wanted to disappoint: the emperor Trajan himself had sent Pliny to Turkey to be its governor. Yet it was now late summer and Pliny was still nowhere near his destination. The intense heat had made land travel all but impossible; now unfavorable winds meant it was difficult to travel along the coast. Money could alleviate much in the Roman summer: it could buy you shady colonnades to walk in away from noonday sun; it could buy you fountains to play soothingly in the gardens beyond. It could even ensure your evening glass of wine was ice-cool. But it could not alter the weather nor make traveling enjoyable.

  Whether over land or sea a voyage was in these times something to be dreaded and if possible avoided entirely. At sea, there were storms, shipwrecks and pirates. Travel on land was little better. Wealthy men like Pliny could move with armed bodyguards as protection; however, given that slaves might not only des
ert their owners in a fight but turn on them themselves, their presence was often less than reassuring. The atmosphere on the roads was tense. The highways of empire were decorated by the corpses of executed bandits, left impaled on stakes in the places where they had plied their trade.

  To add to the other discomforts of his journey, Pliny had developed a fever and been forced to stay for a few days in the great city of Pergamum.* However, on September 17 he finally reached his destination, the province of Bithynia. He informed the emperor of this in a letter that, to modern eyes, looks more than slightly toadying: he had arrived, he wrote, “in time to celebrate your birthday in my province, and this should be a good omen.”2

  It seems unlikely that the citizens of Bithynia would have been as pleased to see Pliny as he was to get there. They appear to have been having a splendid time under their previous governor, embarking on expensive building projects that were then abandoned, diverting public funds into private hands and generally making merry. Pliny had been sent by Trajan with the express mission of whipping this errant eastern region into line—a task he would take on with zest and efficiency. Critical letters fly back to Rome, reporting some financial mismanagement here, some too-extravagant travel expenses there. A crumbling theater needs urgent attention; a canal is proposed to ease transport of raw materials to the sea; an aqueduct, begun at vast expense, has been left unfinished . . . The letters go on and on, a window onto Roman provincial life—and Roman imperial bureaucracy.