The Darkening Age

by Catherine Nixey

  Augustine evidently assumed his congregants would be taking part in the violence—and implied that they were right to do so: throwing down temples, idols and groves was, he said, no less than “clear proof of our not honouring, but rather abhorring, these things.”26 Such destruction, he reminded his flock, was the express commandment of God. In AD 401, Augustine told Christians in Carthage to smash pagan objects because, he said, that was what God wanted and commanded. It has been said that sixty died in riots inflamed by this burst of oratorical fire.27 A little earlier a congregation of Augustine’s, eager to sack the temples of Carthage, had started reciting Psalm 83. “Let them be humiliated and be downcast forever,” they chanted with grim significance. “Let them perish in disgrace.”28

  It is obvious that this violence was not only one’s Christian duty; it was also, for many, a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. Those carrying out the attacks sang as they smashed the ancient marble and roared with laughter as they destroyed statues. In Alexandria, “idolatrous” images were taken from private houses and baths, then burned and mutilated in a jubilant public demonstration. Once the assault was complete, the Christians “all went off, praising God for the destruction of such error of demons and idolatry.”29 Broken statues themselves were another cause for hilarity, their fragmented remains an occasion for “laughter and scorn.”30 Chants appeared celebrating these attacks. Coptic pilgrims who visited the city of Hermopolis in Egypt could join with fellow faithful as they sang a local hymn to the destruction.31 The humorously apposite insult was much enjoyed by God’s warriors. In Carthage, there was an annual religious ceremony in which the beard of a statue of Hercules was ceremonially gilded; at the beginning of the fifth century some Christians mockingly “shaved” the statue’s beard off. It was, for them, a moment of much hilarity. For the watching polytheists it was a desecration.

  Statues, the very seat of the demons themselves, suffered some of the most vicious attacks. It was not enough merely to take a statue down; the demon within it had to be humiliated, disgraced, tortured, dismembered and thus neutralized. A Jewish tractate known as the Avodah Zarah provided detailed instructions on how to properly mistreat a statue. One can desecrate a statue, it advised, by “cutting off the tip of its ear or nose or finger, by battering it—even although its bulk be not diminished—it is desecrated.” Merely taking the statue down, or spitting at it, or dragging it about, or throwing dirt upon it, was not, the treatise warned, sufficient—though the resourceful Christian might indulge in all of these as an added humiliation to the demon within.32

  Sometimes, as was the case with the bust of Aphrodite in Athens, the statues appear to have been “baptized,” with deep crosses gouged on their foreheads. If this was a “baptism” then it may have helped not only to neutralize the devil within, but also to vanquish any more personal demons that could arise when looking at such beautiful naked figures. A naked statue of Aphrodite was, wrote one Christian historian in disgust, “more shameless than that of any prostitute standing in front of a brothel”33—and, like a prostitute, Aphrodite and her plump bottom and naked breasts might incite the demon of lust in the viewer. Far less easy to feel desire for a statue who has had a cross gouged in her head, her eyes blinded and her nose sliced from her face. Erotically appealing statues suffered more than chastely clothed ones. We can still see the consequences of this rhetoric. Today, a once-handsome Apollo missing a nose stands in a museum; a statue of Venus that stood in a bathhouse has had her nipples and mons pubis chiseled win martyrdom in theaway; a statue of Dionysus has had his nose mutilated and his genitalia removed.

  These attacks may have been beneficial for God—but they were not unhelpful to local Christians, either. People built themselves houses from the stones of the demolished temples. Look closely at the buildings in the east of the Roman Empire and you can see the remains of the classical tradition in the new Christian architecture: a pair of cut-off legs here, the top of a handsome Grecian column there. One law announced that the stones from demolished temples should be used to repair roads, bridges and aqueducts.34 In Constantinople, a former temple of Aphrodite was used to store a bureaucrat’s chariots.35 Christian writers reveled in such little humiliations. As one exulted, “your statues, your busts, the instruments of your cult have all been overturned—they lie on the ground and everyone laughs at your deceptions.”36

  “Sinful” pagans who suddenly found themselves beset by raging mobs of Christians often felt themselves to be more sinned against than sinning and, objecting to the destruction of their sacred monuments, fought back. The violent, temple-destroying Bishop Marcellus was seized and burned alive by outraged polytheists.37 In the 420s, in Carthage, the temple of the Roman goddess Caelestis and all nearby sanctuaries were leveled. This was no mean feat: the shrine of Caelestis was a mile long. Pagans protested vocally—and impotently. “No craftsman will ever again make the idols that Christ has smashed,” gloated Augustine. “Consider what power this Caelestis used to enjoy here at Carthage. But where is the kingdom of this Caelestis now?”38 Fights could ensue during destruction and, in the process, Christians were sometimes killed—not necessarily a bad thing to some Christian minds, of course: a martyr’s crown awaited those who died in this way. Encouraged by this tempting incentive, some went further and intentionally provocative attacks were launched by Christians wishing less to destroy than to be destroyed—and win martyrdom in the process. It was a process that seems to have gotten out of hand. As early as the start of the fourth century some Spanish bishops were moved to declare that “if anyone breaks idols and is killed on the spot” they would not after all be awarded the martyr’s crown.39

  The destruction did not stop at public property. Later, bands of Christians began to enter houses and bathhouses, and remove suspect statues from them which, when found, would be publicly burned. Sometimes, according to the Christian chronicles, such vandalism happened without the need for human hand: the mere presence of godliness was enough to cause statues to autodestruct. As the (somewhat dubious) hagiography of a bishop in Gaza records, when he approached a statue with a cross “the demon that dwelt in the statue . . . came forth out of the marble with great confusion and cast down the statue itself and brake it into many pieces.” Miraculous enough in itself, but this good deed also had some advantageous collateral damage. As our hagiographer records with satisfaction, “two men of the idolators were standing beside the base on which the statue stood, and when it fell, it clave the head of the one in twain, and of the other it brake the shoulder and the wrist. For they were both standing and mocking at the holy multitude.”40

  Christian accounts revel in such fortuitous accidents. The apocryphal (and similarly dubious) Acts of John tells what happened when the apostle John traveled to Ephesus and to the famous temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. John arrived on a feast day, so while all the locals were wearing white and celebrating, John, dressed in black, entered the temple and started to preach against their godless ways. Then, with divine help, he caused the altar to splinter into many pieces, all dedications in the temple to fall and the images of the gods to topple. As if that weren’t enough, then “half of the temple fell down so that the priest was slain at one blow by the falling of the [roof].” After this satisfactory display the Ephesians, with due rending of garments and weeping, the attacks are rarelypromptly came to heel and started worshipping the one true God.41

  Like martyrdom, this holy and important work required no special knowledge or skills. While it might take months of effort, years of training and centuries of accumulated knowledge to build a Greek temple, it took little more than zeal and patience to destroy one. At the end of the fourth century, as the laws against pagans were building to an aggressive crescendo, the bishop Marcellus was said to have destroyed the vast and still hugely popular temple of Zeus at Apamea with prayers and the help of a man who was “no builder, or mason, or artificer of any kind.” Today, Marcellus is worshipped as a sai
nt in the Orthodox Church.42

  Though even Christian accounts often present these divine destroyers as incompetent bunglers: Marcellus launched numerous failed attempts on that ancient temple before finally getting it to collapse (it transpired that a “black demon” had been thwarting his purpose).43 The efforts of St. Martin in France also teetered on disaster. While burning down one ancient temple his triumph nearly rebounded on him when, mid-conflagration, the flames flared out of control and almost set alight a nearby house; Martin just managed to prevent this PR disaster by climbing “up on to the roof of the house, throwing himself in the path of the flames as they came towards him.”44 The idea of such incompetence fits with some of the archaeological evidence. Some of the Parthenon frieze, for example, may well have been saved because it was so high and the slope beneath the temple was so steep that its offensive figures were hard to see.

  Today, histories of this period, if they mention such destruction at all, hesitate to condemn it outright. The 1965 edition of The Penguin Dictionary of Saints records with little more than amused indulgence that Martin of Tours “was not averse to the forcible destruction of heathen shrines.”45 In modern histories those carrying out and encouraging the attacks are rarely described as violent, or vicious, or thuggish: they are merely “zealous,” “pious,” “enthusiastic” or, at worst, “over-zealous.” As the academic John Pollini puts it: “modern scholarship, influenced by a Judeo-Christian cultural bias,” has frequently overlooked or downplayed such attacks and even at times “sought to present Christian desecration in a positive light.”46 The attacks themselves are diminished in importance, both implicitly by the lack of attention they are given, and at times even explicitly. We should not make too much of these events, one influential academic has argued; we should not “amplify them unduly” as such desecrations “may have been the work of a determined few, briskly performed.”47

  The events may have been briskly performed. But the effects of such acts were deep and long-lasting. As indeed the Christians intended them to be: that was the point. Again and again, it is recorded that the violent destruction of a temple resulted in almost instantaneous conversion among locals. In Alexandria, after the destruction of the temple of Serapis, many, “having condemned this error and realised its wickedness, embraced the faith of Christ and the true religion.” According to this Christian source, the Alexandrians converted merely because their eyes had been opened. It is easy to see another reading of their conversion: they were terrified. In Gaza, after watching a statue smash into pieces at the appearance of the cross, it was said that thirty-two men and seven women converted instantly.48 When Marcellus destroyed the great temple of Zeus in Apamea, it fell with a crash that was loud enough to bring all the townspeople running. Sure enough, “no sooner did the multitude hear of the flight of the hostile demon than they broke out into a hymn of praise to God.”49

  Educated non-Christians balked at the violence. Libanius, who would go down in history as the last of the great “pagan” orators, protested vividly. The Church might declare that it was winning converts through these attacks but this, said Libanius, was bunk: “they speak of conversions apparent, not real. Their ‘converts’ have not really been changed—they only say they have.” In which case, he went on, “what advantage have they won when adherence to their doctrine is a matter of words and the reality is absent? Persuasion is required in such matters, not constraint.”50 Some of the greatest orators in the ancient world stepped forward to defend the empire’s long tradition of religious pluralism—and, yes, tolerance.*51 Another orator named Themistius echoed Libanius’s arguments closely in a speech delivered in AD 364. People had always, he said, worshipped different gods and there was nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, the divine law sets “free each person’s soul for the path of religious devotion which they think best. No confiscation of property, no punishment, no burning has ever overcome this law; it may happen that the body is broken and dead, but the soul will depart carrying with it the knowledge of the law of freedom, even if its expression has been constrained.”52

  Christians disagreed and took pride in conversions made after a show of force. In Carthage, two imperial officials destroyed the temples of the “false gods” and broke their statues. This little burst of thuggishness had, in Christian eyes, a pleasingly invigorating effect on the locals. As Augustine observed contentedly, “almost thirty years have gone by since that day and anyone can see how Christianity has grown, especially by the conversion of those who were held back from the faith.”53 In Gaul, after watching St. Martin pulverize their ancient temple in silence, it is said that the local villagers “realised that the divine will had rendered them speechless and panic-stricken to stop them resisting the bishop, and as a result almost all of them converted to the Lord Jesus.” St. Martin, encouraged, set off to destroy yet another temple in yet another village. Martin’s good efforts exerted a doubly beneficial effect on the unbelievers of Gaul “for in those places where he had destroyed the pagan shrines, he immediately built either churches or monasteries.”54 Quite probably using the same stones. One might dismiss the hagiography of Martin as mere fiction—but archaeology supports its general theme: Gaul started to become ever more Christianized at around the time of Martin’s episcopate.

  The destruction of temples, the vandalizing of statues, the terrorizing of citizens. It is all a long way from the peaceful fiction of the Seven Sleepers story. To understand what really went on in this period, imagine for a moment a parallel tale—a tale to which the archaeology of Ephesus can even add a little hard fact. Imagine for a moment that there was another sleeper, an eighth man who, like the Christians, slipped into a divine stupor on that day in AD 250. Imagine that he, too, wakes, perhaps a century later, and that he too walks into the city that he had once known.

  Almost immediately, this worshipper of the old gods would, like Malchus, have known that something fundamental had changed. Had he walked through one of the city’s great gates he would not merely have noticed the triumphant cross. He would almost certainly have also noticed that the handsome relief on the side of the gate had been violently mutilated. As he walked on, he would have seen more to make him feel uneasy: that the doors of the temples, some of which had been founded almost a thousand years before, had been stripped and vandalized; that many of the statues which had once stood in the temples’ niches were missing. Had our sleeper then paid a visit to the town’s bathhouse in the harbor, he would have noticed even more desecration: in one street an image of Artemis had been defaced; in the baths Artemis’s very name had been erased from a plinth where she had once stood. Everywhere, he would have seen numerous figures that had been viciously attacked. Even a statue of the emperor Augustus himself had not escaped: Augustus, his nose sliced off, now wore a Christian cross on his forehead.

  And if our imaginary sleeper had walked on, he would have been confronted with a final image which would have pointed to the source of all of this destruction. For there, right in the center of the city of Ephesus, was a large wooden cross. If he had peered at its base, he would have seen large, crudely gouged Greek letters. There, beneath the cross, was an inscription made by a local man named Demeas. “Having destroyed a deceitful image of demonic Artemis,” it announced in emphatic capitals, “Demeas set up this sign of truth, honouring both God the driver-away of idols, and the cross, that victory-bringing, immortal symbol of Christ.”55

  At the end of the fourth century, the orator Libanius looked out and described in despair what he observed. He and other worshippers of the old gods saw, he said, their temples “in ruins, their ritual banned, their altars overturned, their sacrifices suppressed, their priests sent packing and their property divided up between a crew of rascals.”56

  They are powerful words, and it is a powerful image. Yet in the Christian histories, men like Libanius barely exist. The voices of the worshippers of the old gods are rarely, if ever, recorded. But they were there. Some voices, such as his, have come
down to us. Far more must have expressed such feelings. It is thought that when Constantine had come to the throne, ten percent of the empire, at most, were Christian. That is not to say that the rest were fervent worshippers of Isis or Jupiter—the popularity of different gods waxed and waned over time and the spectrum of classical belief ran from firm believer to utter skeptic. But what is more certain is that probably around ninety percent were not Christian. By the end of that first, tumultuous century of Christian rule, estimates suggest that this figure had been reversed: between seventy and ninety percent of the empire were now Christian.57 One law from around that time declared, entirely untruthfully, that there were no more “pagans.” None. The aggression of the claim is remarkable. Christians were writing the wicked “pagans” out of existence. In the crowing words of one triumphalist account: “The pagan faith, made dominant for so many years, by such pains, such expenditure of wealth, such feats of arms, has vanished from the earth.”58

  It had not. Nevertheless, it is clear that a staggering reversal had taken place. Tens of millions of people had converted—or were said to have converted—to a new and alien religion, in under a century. Religions that had lasted for centuries were dying with remarkable rapidity. And if some of these millions were converting not out of love of Christ but out of fear of his enforcers? No matter, argued Christian preachers. Better to be scared in this life than burn in the next.