The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the greatest library in the world, were all lost, never to reappear. Perhaps they were burned. As the modern scholar Luciano Canfora observed: “the burning of books was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity.” A war against pagan temples was also a war against the books that had all too often been stored inside them for safekeeping—a concept that from now on could only be recalled with irony. If they were burned then this was a significant moment in what Canfora has called “the melancholy experiences of the war waged by Christianity against the old culture and its sanctuaries: which meant, against the libraries.”9 Over a thousand years later, Edward Gibbon raged at the waste: “The appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator, whose mind was not wholly darkened with religious prejudice.”10
Far more than a temple had gone. As the news of the destruction spread across the empire, something of the spirit of the old culture died too. It was said that many Alexandrians, seeing what had happened to the temple, converted to Christianity instantly. This was a terrifying act of aggression. Philosophers and poets fled the city in horror. The sky had not, as the old superstition had threatened, fallen in. But something had gone. A terrible melancholy settled among those intellectuals who dared to remain. As one Greek professor wrote in despair: “The dead used to leave the city alive behind them, but we living now carry the city to her grave.”11
Chapter Seven
* * *
To Despise the Temples
The weakness of paganism as a religion is manifest . . . it was bound in the end to give way to a higher creed.
—Gilbert Grindle, The Destruction of Paganism in the Roman Empire, 1892
THIS NEW CHRISTIAN ERA began with a vision, and a declaration of liberty.
In October AD 312, the emperor Constantine saw one of the most famous visions in the history of Europe. One day, so the story goes, not long before a forthcoming battle against his imperial rival Maxentius, Constantine happened to look up into the sky at noon while praying. What he claimed to see would blaze out across the centuries. For above the sun, Constantine saw a cross of light. And next to it were the words “Conquer by this.”1 Constantine and his army, aided by the religion of the Prince of Peace, went on to win the battle. Constantine’s conversion to the faith—so it was said—was now assured.
Constantine moved quickly to promote his new religion. The following year, he said that the persecution of the Christians was over. Indeed the Edict of Milan was said to have promised much more than that. It announced that “every man may have complete toleration in the practice of whatever worship he has chosen.”2 This was a wonderful time, wrote the historian Eusebius. “Men had now lost all fear of their former oppressors . . . light was everywhere . . . They danced and sang in city and country alike.”3
That wasn’t quite true. Not everyone danced and sang. Christian history might recall Constantine as “pre-eminent in every virtue that true religion can confer,” but non-Christians looked on him rather less fondly.4 Many treated his sudden conversion to Christianity with profound suspicion and more than a little distaste. This man of “evil disposition” and “vicious inclinations” had converted, wrote one non-Christian historian, not because of any burning heavenly crosses but because, having recently murdered his wife (he had—allegedly—boiled her in a bath because of a suspected affair with his son), he had been overcome by guilt. Yet the priests of the old gods were intransigent: Constantine was far too polluted, they said, to be purified of these crimes. No rites could cleanse him. At this moment of personal crisis Constantine happened to fall into conversation with a man who assured him that “the Christian doctrine would teach him how to cleanse himself from all his offences, and that they who received it were immediately absolved from all their sins.” Constantine, it was said, instantly believed.5
Or such was the story as told by the historian Zosimus—a starchy Roman traditionalist. The dates don’t really work—Constantine had embraced Christianity long before he killed his wife—but the tale hints at how ill-disposed the ancient patrician families of Rome felt towards their suddenly Christian emperor. Even without his ostentatiously flourished new faith, there was much about Constantine that grated on aristocratic Roman sensibilities. In the glory days of Rome, real men had scorned luxury in their dress: merely wearing one’s sleeves a little too long, as the infamously dapper Caesar had done, had been enough to raise eyebrows and suspicions. Proper Romans—or so the rhetoric ran—should wear simple tunics that were becomingly manly. Constantine, by contrast, favored such a profusion of jewels, diadems and silk robes that even his usually adoring biographer Eusebius was forced to defend him. Left to his own devices, Eusebius wrote, Constantine naturally preferred to clothe himself instead in the “knowledge of God” and the embroidery of “temperance, righteousness, piety, and all other virtues.”6 Alas, Constantine realized that his people, like children, enjoyed a bit of show and so he was forced to wear crasser threads, which often involved gold embroidery and flowers. Such are the sacrifices one makes for the glory of the faith.
It wasn’t only Constantine’s imperial person that was draped in gold. The Church, so recently persecuted, suddenly found itself the unexpected recipient of staggering amounts of money. One bishop was told that if he were to ask the emperor’s finance officer for “any sum, he is to arrange for its transfer to you without question.”7 Tax relief was given to Church lands, clerics were exempted from public duties, bishops were lavished with gifts and banquets; annual allowances were given to widows, virgins and nuns . . . The expensive list went on. The vast churches Constantine built were astonishing. “The decorations really are too marvellous for words,” wrote one awed pilgrim to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. “All you can see is gold and jewels and silk . . . the magnificent building itself . . . was decorated with gold, mosaic, and precious marble.” These buildings spoke volumes about where Constantine’s allegiances now lay; they were “sermons in stone” as the modern historian Peter Brown has beautifully described them. This was about architecture—but it was also about intent.8
The funds for all this had to be found from somewhere. Now, Constantine turned to “those accursed and foul people” who had chosen to stubbornly “hold themselves back” from Christianity and continue visiting their “sanctuaries of falsehood”—in other words, those people who would soon be called “pagans.”9
The means by which Constantine chose to take some of this wealth was simple—and humiliating: he demanded that the statues be taken from the temples. Christian officials, so it was said, traveled the empire, ordering the priests of the old religion to bring their statues out of the temples. From the 330s onwards some of the most sacred objects in the empire started to be removed. It is hard, today, to understand the enormity of Constantine’s order. If Michelangelo’s Pietà were taken from the Vatican and sold, it would be considered a terrible act of cultural vandalism—but it wouldn’t be sacrilege as the statue is not in itself sacred. Statues in Roman temples were. To remove them was a gross violation, and Constantine knew it.
Indeed, the insult was part of the attraction. Many of Constantine’s subjects still feared and venerated their “vain idols.” Why wouldn’t they? The history of Greco-Roman cult stretched back a millennium and more, long before the pages of Homer, into pre-history. The upstart Christianity had been around for a mere three centuries. Constantine had only taken up this “superstition” two decades before. The possibility that Jesus would triumph over all other gods would, at the time, have seemed almost preposterous. Constantine was faced with an intransigent population who insisted on worshipping idols at the expense of the risen Lord. He realized that conversion would be more “easily accomplished if he could get them to despise their temples and the images contained therein.”10 And what better way to teach wayward pagans the vanity of their gods than by cracking open their statues and showing that they were, quite literally, empty? Moreover, a rel
igious system in which sacrifice was central would struggle to survive if there was nothing to sacrifice to. There was good biblical precedent for his actions. In Deuteronomy, God had commanded that His chosen people should overthrow altars, burn sacred groves and hew down the graven images of the gods.11 If Constantine attacked the temples then he was not being a vandal. He was doing God’s good work.
And so it began. The great Roman and Greek temples were—or so Eusebius said—broken open and their statues brought out, then mutilated. Officials “scraped off the material which seemed to be usable, purifying it by smelting with fire,” then poured the precious metal into the public purse. The valueless remains were left for “the superstitious to keep as a souvenir of their shame.”12 The emperor, however, didn’t stop there. The temples themselves were attacked: their doors were removed at his order; others had their roofs stripped, “others were neglected, allowed to fall into ruin, or destroyed.”13 One shrine was demolished; a temple at Cilicia was razed to the ground. According to Eusebius, Constantine’s plan worked and “nations and citizens spontaneously renounced their former opinion.”14 The word “spontaneous” seems, in the context, a little tenuous.
Not all the temple statues were melted down. The “tyrant” Constantine also had an eye for art and many objects were shipped back as prize baubles for the emperor’s new city, Constantinople (Constantine, like Alexander the Great, was not one for self-effacement). The Pythian Apollo was put up as “a contemptible spectacle” in one square; the sacred tripods of Delphi turned up in Constantinople’s hippodrome, while the Muses of Helicon found themselves relocated to Constantine’s palace. The capital looked wonderful. The temples looked—were—desecrated. As his biographer wrote with satisfaction, Constantine “confuted the superstitious error of the heathen in all sorts of ways.”15
And yet despite the horror of what Constantine was asking his subjects to do there was little resistance. “To carry this project into execution he did not require military aid,” records the chronicler Sozomen. “The people were induced to remain passive from the fear that, if they resisted these edicts, they, their children, and their wives, would be exposed to evil.”16 Constantine, as his nephew the “apostate” emperor, Julian, would scornfully say, was a “tyrant with the mind of a banker.”17 His destruction emboldened other Christians and the attacks spread. In many cities, people “spontaneously, without any command of the emperor, destroyed the adjacent temples and statues, and erected houses of prayer.”18
Christianity could have been tolerant: it was not pre-ordained that it would take this path.19 There were Christians who voiced hopes for tolerance, even ecumenicalism. But those hopes were dashed. For those who wish to be intolerant, monotheism provides very powerful weapons. There was ample biblical justification for the persecution of non-believers. The Bible, as a generation of Christian authors declared, is very clear on the matter of idolatry. As the Christian author Firmicus Maternus reminded his rulers—perfectly correctly—there lay upon emperors an “imperative necessity to castigate and punish this evil.” Their “severity should be visited in every way on the crime.” And what precisely did God advise as a punishment for idolatry? Deuteronomy was clear: a person indulging in this should be stoned to death. And if an entire city fell into such sin? Again, the answer was clear: “destruction is decreed.”20
The desecration continued for centuries. In the fifth century AD, the colossal statue of Athena, the sacred centerpiece of the Acropolis in Athens, and one of the most famous works of art in the empire, was torn down from where she had stood guard for almost a thousand years, and shipped off to Constantinople—a great coup for the Christian city and a great insult to the “pagans.” This act of imperial defilement haunted the dreams of one Athenian philosopher: he had a nightmare in which Athena, now homeless, came to him seeking shelter. Other philosophers, who so loathed this aggressive new religion that they could not bring themselves even to say the word “Christian,” took to calling them the people “who move that which should not be moved.”21
A market in plundered art developed and Christians, braving demonic reprisals, took to levering out and selling statues that were particularly valuable. In their turn, polytheists, realizing that a good artistic pedigree might save a statue from mutilation, started chiseling false attributions into statues’ bases. Many an underwhelming statue suddenly found its pediment declaring, entirely untruthfully, that it was the work of one of the great Greek sculptors—Polyclitus or Praxiteles—to save it from Christian hammers. Some managed to joke about all this. As the Greek poet Palladas archly observed, as he looked at a fine array of gods in the house of one wealthy Christian, “the inhabitants of Olympus, having become Christians, live here undisturbed: for here, at least, they will escape the cauldron that melts them down for petty change.”22
Later, Christians liked to tell a story.23 Many years ago, they said, there had been seven good Christian men who lived in the great Christian city of Ephesus. Those were terrible days to be a Christian: the emperor Decius was on the throne and he had announced (so the story goes) that all Christians must sacrifice to the gods, or be killed. Hearing this, the seven brothers were filled with sorrow but, being good Christians, they refused to sacrifice and hid instead in a cave in a nearby mountain, where they began to pray.
Decius, hearing of this, grew angry. He decided to starve the Christians to death and so had the mouth of the cave walled up. And there the brothers would have stayed, their bodies entombed, were it not for an extraordinary chance—or rather, for the will of the merciful Lord. For 362 years later* a group of masons were working nearby and they opened the mouth of the cave. The seven sleepers within were raised from their sleep by the noise; they greeted each other as usual, assuming that they had slept for one night only. They then decided to send one of their number, Malchus, to the city, to buy some bread.
Malchus walked out of the cave and down the hill until he came to the gates of the city of Ephesus, from where they had fled all those years ago. But when he came to the city gate, Malchus was utterly astonished, for he saw above it a great cross. Marveling, he turned and hurried to another gate, and saw the same: a second great cross above the entrance to the city. Wondering whether he was dreaming, Malchus walked into the city and heard men around him speaking about God. What is this? he asked. This could not be the city of Ephesus. Yesterday no one had dared to utter the name of Christ and yet today every man confessed him. And yet Ephesus it was.
When historians come to tell how an entire empire had turned so swiftly from sacrificing to Serapis to worshipping Christ, their narratives often carry more than a shade of the Seven Sleepers. When Malchus walks into Ephesus, he doesn’t bump into any worshippers of Artemis disgruntled that Christian zealots have torn down her statues or erected crosses all over their city. No worshippers of Dionysus angrily complain that men now spend their time talking about Jesus. “Paganism” in this story has not so much been beaten as disappeared—and no one mourns its passing.
Later historians would go further and declare that the end of “paganism” was not suppression, but liberation. So far from being an imposition, so this narrative ran, the advent of Christianity was in fact a welcome relief. Polytheistic religion was so fundamentally foolish that even the polytheists were relieved to see it go. They had never really taken Zeus or Hera or Dionysus seriously anyway. Who could? “Human reason,” as Gibbon put it, “had already obtained an easy triumph over the folly of Paganism.”24 Well into the twentieth century, distinguished scholars would declare that the “pagans” and the “heathens” had already given up on their own religious systems long before Christianity even appeared. As another academic concluded: “the weakness of paganism as a religion is manifest . . . it was bound in the end to give way to a higher creed.” Any attempt to revive or preserve it was “foredoomed to failure.”25
Roman religion was already moribund long before that cross had appeared in the sky. These old religions, it was said, were neve
r going to work in a time of anxiety since the religious pluralism they involved had resulted in a “bewildering mass of alternatives.”26 Simply too many gods. The empire didn’t resist this new religion; it had been waiting for it—it welcomed it with open arms. As the twentieth-century French author Jacques Lacarrière put it, Constantine, in announcing Christian freedom, “merely proclaimed an actual fact: the final establishment of Christianity in the orbis romanus.”27 Constantine did no more than give official recognition to what had long been the case on the ground. The hugely influential German academic Johannes Geffcken wrote that “no scholar of ancient history who is to be taken seriously . . . will now believe the dogma of earlier days, that there is a direct connection between the coming into existence and spread of Christianity on the one hand and the decline of paganism on the other.”28
Other historians described—still do describe—the adoption of Christianity as a boon to a flagging empire. A recent popular book on manuscripts presents the transition to Christianity as a sort of pragmatic civic regeneration scheme, explaining that, under pressure from barbarian attack, Rome “saved its identity by reinventing itself as a Christian empire.”29 Christianity, in these accounts, was not a sudden imposition; it was a release, a relief, a salvation. Modern historians glibly refer to the moment of Constantine’s conversion as the “End of Persecution.” The phrase “triumph of Christianity” is used frequently, uncritically and with positive overtones.30
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