The evidence from surviving manuscripts is clear: at some point, a hundred or so years after Christianity comes to power, the transcription of the classical texts collapses. From AD 550 to 750 the numbers copied plummeted. This is not, to be clear, an absolute collapse in copying: monasteries are still producing reams and reams of religious books. Bible after Bible, copy after copy of Augustine is made. And these works are vast. This was not about an absolute shortage of parchment; it was about a lack of interest verging on outright disgust for the ideas of a now-despised canon. The texts that suffer in this period are the texts of the wicked and sinful pagans. From the entirety of the sixth century only “scraps” of two manuscripts by the satirical Roman poet Juvenal survive and mere “remnants” of two others, one by the Elder and one by the Younger Pliny. From the next century there survives nothing save a single fragment of the poet Lucan.29 From the start of the next century: nothing at all.
Far from mourning the loss, Christians delighted in it. As John Chrysostom crowed, the writings “of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated.”30 He warmed to the theme in another sermon: “Where is Plato? Nowhere! Where Paul? In the mouths of all!”31 The fifth-century writer Theodoret of Cyrrhus observed the decline of Greek literature with similar enthusiasm. “Those elaborately decorated fables have been utterly banned,” he gloated. “Who is today’s head of the Stoic heresy? Who is safeguarding the teachings of the Peripatetics?”32 No one, evidently, for Theodoret concludes this homily with the observation that “the whole earth under the sun has been filled with sermons.” Augustine contentedly observed the rapid decline of the atomist philosophy in the first century of Christian rule. By his time, he recorded, Epicurean and Stoic philosophy had been “suppressed”—the word is his. The opinions of such philosophers “have been so completely eradicated and suppressed . . . that if any school of error now emerged against the truth, that is, against the Church of Christ, it would not dare to step forth for battle if it were not covered under the Christian name.”33
A slow but devastating edit of classical literature was taking place. It is true that the appalling losses of knowledge that followed were not usually the result of dramatic, discrete actions—the burning of this library, the fury of that particular abbot—though these played their part. Instead, what ensured the near-total destruction of all Latin and Greek literature was a combination of ignorance, fear and idiocy. These weapons have less narrative heft, perhaps, but when left unchecked they can achieve a great deal.
Much was preserved. Much, much more was destroyed. It has been estimated that less than ten percent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era.34 For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains.35 If this was “preservation”—as it is often claimed to be—then it was astonishingly incompetent. If it was censorship, it was brilliantly effective.
The ebullient, argumentative classical world was, quite literally, being erased.
Chapter Twelve
* * *
Carpe Diem
Let the girl with a pretty face lie supine, let the lady
Who boasts a good back be viewed
From behind . . . The petite should ride horse.
—the Roman poet Ovid advises on positions for lovemaking, Ars Amatoria, 3
“Imperium sine fine.” Empire without end.1 That, so the poet had said, had been Rome’s aim as it had sought to push itself forwards, outwards, onwards into new countries, new continents and new worlds. But the Christianity that had taken it over was, according to its preachers, no less ambitious. As the world’s first century of Christian rule drew to a close and the fifth century opened, the effects of this conquest were everywhere to be seen. In Italy, Gaul, Greece, Spain, Syria and Egypt, temples that had stood for centuries were falling, shutting, crumbling. Brambles began to grow across disused ruins, as the mutilated faces of gods looked on silently.
An entire way of life was dying. Writers in the ancient world who had held out against the Christian religion struggled to put their feelings into words. In a bleak epigram Palladas asked, “Is it not true that we are dead and only seem to live, we Greeks . . . Or are we alive and is life dead?”2 Their old society was being swept away. The banner of the cross, in Gibbon’s resonant phrase, was being erected on the ruins of the Capitol in Rome.3
But, according to some of the most famous preachers of the time, even this was not enough to satisfy the Christian God. Christians may have taken control of the empire’s landmarks and temples but their God, they told their congregations, wanted more. He was not satisfied by mere buildings. Nor was He content with the appearance of piety only. The old Roman gods might have been fooled by a mere show of obedience to their rites—just touch the incense, as Roman governors had pleaded with Christians—but this god would not be so easily duped. He didn’t want ritual observance or temples or stones; He wanted souls. He wanted—He demanded—the hearts and minds of every single person within the empire.
And, these clerics threatened, He would know if He didn’t get them. As preachers in the fourth century started to warn their congregations, God’s all-seeing gaze followed you everywhere. He didn’t only see you in church; you were also watched by Him as you went out through the church doors; as you went out into the streets and as you walked round the marketplace or sat in the hippodrome or the theater. His gaze also followed you into your home and even into your bedroom—and you should be in no doubt that He watched what you did there, too. That was not the least of it. This new god saw into your very soul. “Man looketh on the face, but God on the heart,” thundered Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage. “Nothing that is done is hidden from God.”4 There was, congregations across the empire were warned, no escape: “Nothing, whether actually done or only intended, can escape the knowledge of God”—or His “everlasting punishment of fire.”5
Many Roman and Greek intellectuals had shown profound distaste for such an involved deity. The idea that a divine being was watching every move of every human being was, to these observers, not a sign of great love but a “monstrous” absurdity. The Christian God in their writings was frequently described as a prurient busybody, a peculiar “nuisance” who was “restless, shamelessly curious, being present at man’s every act.”6 Why was He so interested in the every doing of mere mortals? Even before Christianity, sophisticated Roman thinkers had poured scorn on such an idea. As Pliny the Elder had put it: “that [a] supreme being, whate’er it be, pays heed to man’s affairs is a ridiculous notion. Can we believe that it would not be defied by so gloomy and so multifarious a duty?”7 Didn’t a god have better things to do?
No, declared the Christian clerics. He did not. His attention was a sign of His great love for man. As too was His punishment. For make no mistake, God was not merely a disinterested observer of men’s souls; He would judge them—and He would punish them. Horribly. A very particular kind of fear starts to appear. As Peter Brown has pointed out, this is the perpetual anxiety of people who believed that not only their every deed, nor even their every word, but their every thought was now being watched. One Christian had a vision in which he could, quite literally, see stains upon his heart. They were there, he realized, because he had not made up “at once” a quarrel that he had had with another Christian.8
Such were the words and the threats of the bishops and the Christian elite. But did the people listen to these diatribes? Did most of them even hear them? The words of preachers such as John Chrysostom and Augustine may have resounded in the ears of their listeners and in the literature of the age, but the vast majority of the empire—perhaps eighty to ninety percent of men, and a higher percentage of women—was illiterate.9 Did such people also absorb the message that they were now Fallen and had to be redeemed? In short, in the pithy words of the academic E. A. Judge: “what difference [did it make] to Rome to have been converted?”10
The short answer is: we cannot know for certain. Late antiquity offers a frust
ratingly thin web of texts with which to answer this question. Of the tiny percentage of the empire who were literate, far fewer would have been confident writers. The vast majority of the empire lived and died leaving almost no traces for future historians to analyze.
Faced with such uncertainty, scholars have had the freedom to offer widely differing responses—and have done so. For centuries, their obedient answer was to say that the spread of Christianity had made all the difference in the world—or rather, in heaven. Before Christianity, Europe was damned, its religions and much of its behavior primitive and damnable. After Christianity, it was saved. In the modern era, scholars—less likely to be quite so obedient to ecclesiastical authority—have taken a more robust, even iconoclastic approach. What difference did Christianity make? No difference at all, came the provoking reply from the twentieth-century scholar A.H.M. Jones. None. He instead argued that “Christian belief, if anything, led to a lowering of moral standards in the community.”11
The truth, as always, lies somewhere between these extremes. For without a doubt, something, certainly, did change.
In the mid-eighteenth century, some workmen happened to be digging in an Italian hillside known tantalizingly as “la Cività”—the city. These Neapolitan laborers started to clear the pumice and ash that Pliny the Younger had watched falling seventeen centuries before. The effect was a cultural cataclysm. Figures of unimaginable sexual frankness started to be unearthed. Even to modern eyes, Pompeii offers a bracing spectacle. Whether it is the image of Priapus, in which the god is weighing his enormous phallus in some scales; or the frescoes of couples having sex; or the infamous statue of the god Pan, his lip jutting forward as he enters a goat, the erotic is everywhere.
The phallus is a staple of home decoration: it appears on walls, on statues and in frescoes, and is carved into the very paving stones of the city. One bar was lit by a pretty bronze lamp in the form of a small figure with a vast penis, bells hanging down from its enormous shaft. Some images were astonishingly vivid. On the walls of a brothel there was a fresco that now survives only in a nineteenth-century reproduction. It depicts a man and a woman; he stands behind her and they are drinking what must be wine from what looks like two pint glasses. The man is holding his glass up, as if for inspection. They might, to judge from their serene expressions, be discussing the provenance of their drinks. However their minds are evidently on other things: the man is pushing his large erection into her.
Pompeii was a revelation. In some ways, it shouldn’t have been. For those willing and able to read it, Latin literature had contained numerous hints that all in the pre-Christian world was not as chaste as St. Basil might have liked. The infamous “Carmen 16” of Catullus was an obvious one. Few could read the line “I will bugger you and I will fuck your mouths” and think that the author was being chastely pure—but then few could read it.12 By the time Pompeii was rediscovered, Latin had become an increasingly rare accomplishment.
By contrast, anyone with eyes could see the images that were being pulled from the Pompeian soil. No one could begin to pretend that the god Pan was doing anything other than entering the goat; or that the people in those frescoes were doing anything other than having enthusiastic sex. Even more disquieting, these paintings couldn’t be dismissed as the reprehensible habits of the poor, the immoral or the uneducated, as these images were not just found in brothels; they were found everywhere, even—especially—in some of the most opulent villas in the town. The Pompeians had not simply put up images of naked people; they had done so openly and without shame. No one in these images was struggling to hide their modesty with their hands or with fig leaves.
For centuries, Christian Europe had, as effective as any Vesuvius, been carefully obscuring the sexuality of the classical world, scraping nipples from statues, suppressing lewd frescoes and obscene poems. Now, a world untouched by the hand of Christianity was coming to light. It is just conceivable that there had been Christians in Pompeii when Vesuvius had erupted in AD 79, but if there were they would not have been in a position of power, and would not have been able to do anything to its art. No zealous Christians had attacked the Pompeian frescoes with hammers; no squads of the godly had chiseled away at the herms that stood on almost every street corner. The people in these images in Pompeii were not just naked; they were unashamedly naked. This was a world that had, quite literally, seen no Fall.
The site’s excavators, who knew not only the Fall but also the Catholic Church, were appalled. Some excavators simply reburied works that were considered too lewd. Others buried these objects in silence, and early guidebooks glided over the racier objects. There was no illustration of the penis lamp in the first published collection of the finds. The first English guide by Sir William Gell, published in 1824, neglected to mention a single object that might raise the polite eyebrows of his readers. As the scholar Walter Kendrick put it, “Gell managed to get through two thick, heavily illustrated volumes without once letting on that anything untoward was to be found.”13
Nevertheless, word eventually got out and the world was shocked—or at any rate professed itself to be—and remained so for decades. One nineteenth-century author described the frescoes as being the sort of thing that would “be seized in any modern country by the police.”14 Those Pompeian guidebooks that did mention sexual objects strenuously draped them in disapproval. One visitor was pained by their “moral degradation.”15 One privately printed guide to some of the ruder objects was typically prim. “The customs to which the women of antiquity devoted themselves were dissolute and scandalous,” wrote its author. “The nudities of that epoch, and the impure writings of its authors, are unchallengeable witnesses to the libertinism which then prevailed in all classes. It was a time when men did not blush to make known to the world that they had obtained the favours of a fair youth, when women honoured themselves with the name of [lesbians].” The force of its disapproval was somewhat undermined by its lip-smacking title (The Royal Museum at Naples, Being Some Account of the Erotic Paintings, Bronzes and Statues Contained in that Famous “Cabinet Secret”) and the fact that its front page advertised that it came with “Sixty Full Page Illustrations.”16
Lewder objects were smothered—the goat was considered “not lawful to show” and put in a cellar.17 Such objects were eventually gathered together in a single collection and the “Secret Cabinet,” as the museum became known, was created in 1819. Access to it was limited and monitored. The precise population of this collection varied over time; fascination with it remained constant.18 As one 1871 guide recalled, entrance was “forbidden to women and children [and] only granted to men of mature age by means of special permission from the minister of the king’s household.”19 One can only begin to imagine the embarrassment of making this request. The famous art historian Johann Winckelmann visited Naples at a time when a special license was needed that was “signed by his majesty” to see such objects. He decided not to bother: “I thought it did not become me to be the first to apply.”20 Women were not allowed access to the Secret Cabinet until the 1980s.21
It wasn’t just in Pompeii. In museums all over Europe, classical statues that had been harvested during so many Grand Tours were shut away. Lacking the confidence of their early Christian forebears, later museum curators did with editing and discreet storage what earlier centuries had done with chisels. The result was the same: sexually explicit objects vanished, once again, from view. Other statues found their sexual organs disappearing under a new lush canopy of fig leaves that were fashioned by chaste curators then applied to the shamefully naked classical statues. The vivid images on Greek pots were tamped down. An exuberant satyr who had balanced a cup on his huge erection found his phallus painted out by an appalled curator, leaving the cup balancing in mid-air. Even classicizing statues were covered up. In 1857, Queen Victoria was given a cast of Michelangelo’s David as a present. It is said that when the queen saw the massive statue for the first time in the Victoria and Albert Museum, she was
so shocked by David’s nakedness that a fig leaf was commissioned. A half-meter-high plaster cast of the leaf was thereafter kept at the ready for royal visits, whereupon it would be hung on the offending area with two hooks, saving the blushes of her Britannic majesty.
Eve’s shame was being applied to the classical world. The eruption of Vesuvius was seen by pious Victorians as the just deserts of a wanton people. As that 1871 guide to the erotic paintings and statues of Pompeii piously concluded, “Eternal glory to the religion which, overturning these impure idols into the mire, and unrolling the code of chastity before our eyes, has made our sensations purer and our pleasures keener.”22 Then, perhaps less conscious of the code of chastity than it might have been, it printed one of those “Full Page Illustrations” of the satyr and the goat.
To say that the Roman world was pre-Fall is not to say that it had been without shame. It had not. There existed intricate and keenly felt distinctions between what was and what was not acceptable sexual practice. As the academic Paul Veyne has put it, “Actually, the pagans were paralysed by prohibitions.”23 Veyne is exaggerating: there were rules, but this was not paralysis. Sex was accepted, and expected to be enjoyable. That was a great difference. There were limits—and as always the main one was one of privilege. What was acceptable for a rich man was unacceptable for a poor one; what was acceptable for men was unacceptable for women; slaves had almost no rights at all and were de facto prostitutes peopling the houses of the free. Within the Roman Empire the atmosphere in the east was, as a general rule, more conservative than in the west.
Even wealthy men had to comply with certain rules: homosexuality was considered unremarkable, so long as one was not in the passive, “effeminate” role of being penetrated. An accusation that a man might have been could be enough to end a political career. As always there were exceptions: Julius Caesar was mockingly called “the Queen of Bithynia” for his alleged relationship with King Nicomedes. He survived, though it was, the biographer Suetonius writes, “always a dark stain on his reputation, and frequently quoted by his enemies.”24 Making love with the lights on was another, rather teenage-sounding, prohibition. To do so was considered dissolute. Roman poets, as poets tend to, liked to play with these rules: in one memorable poem, Ovid describes making love in the afternoon as light filtered into the bedroom through a half-open shutter—more than enough light for him to be able to see and describe every part of his lover’s body in one of the most erotic poems he ever wrote.25
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