The Darkening Age

by Catherine Nixey

  Above all, it was said that a man—and these texts were written by and largely for men—should govern his sexual urges rather than being governed by them. To fall abjectly in love with a woman was unacceptable. Poets who wrote that they were the “slave” of their woman set traditionalist teeth on edge. One should keep within certain limits: Ovid would be exiled for “carmen et error”—for a sexually rude poem and for personally overstepping the bounds of Augustus’s crackdown on immorality.26 In sex, as in everything else, the words carved into the temple at Delphi were to be followed: nothing in excess. Too much sex and you were boorish; but equally, to have too little—or rather, to go on about how little you had—was to be boring. “Do not,” advised one writer, “make yourself offensive or censorious to those who so indulge, and do not make frequent mentions of the fact that you yourself do not indulge.”27

  Sex then ought to be contained—but it was not denied. In the writings of the Roman elite, like any other appetite it was, as Peter Brown has observed, something to be admitted and managed rather than something to be ashamed of. The feast of the Liberalia was on March 17, a now sadly forgotten festival at which Roman citizens celebrated a boy’s first ejaculation. In Roman medical manuals, ejaculation had been readily and openly discussed by classical doctors who advised it for health and getting rid of the seed that might otherwise cause headaches. It was thought that if athletes could abstain from sex they would be stronger. Orgasms and sex were even recommended for women’s health.28

  Sex, sexual desire and the consequences of sex were frankly discussed. Poets chastised their lovers when they had abortions, less for the abortion than for endangering their own health. Ovid professed himself furious with his lover Corinna for rashly attempting one—but less because she had committed this act than because she had taken “that risk, and she never told me!”29 Others followed more laborious methods of avoiding pregnancy. When Julia, the famously racy and beautiful daughter of the emperor Augustus, was asked how, given her many lovers, her children all resembled her husband, she replied that she would “take on a passenger only when the ship’s hold is full.”30

  Why not have sex? Life was short and one didn’t know what was coming next. Live now, proclaimed countless mosaics, paintings and poems in the old Roman world. For who knows what tomorrow might bring? In a recently discovered mosaic in Antioch, a skeleton reclines, a cup in his hand, and an amphora of wine nearby. Over his head, in clear Greek lettering, the mosaic gave an instruction to those diners above: “Be cheerful,” it reads. “Enjoy your life.”31 The injunction to enjoy yourself is written in stone. One of the most famous of all classical poems had put this ideal into rather more elegant lines. “Quam minimum credula postero”—trust as little as possible in tomorrow—advised the poet Horace, and instead “carpe diem.” Seize the day.32

  One of the most famous of all Roman poems had been a version of the ancient self-help book by the poet Ovid on the art of seduction. “Should anyone here in Rome lack finesse at love-making,” Ovid announced in its opening lines, “let him / Try me—read my book, and results are guaranteed!”33 Witty, erudite and egotistical, Ovid became one of the most famous poets in Rome which, one suspects, was no less than he felt he deserved. “Wherever Rome’s power extends over the conquered world,” he gloated in another poem, “I shall have mention on men’s lips, and . . . through all the ages shall I live in fame.”34 Somewhat infuriatingly, he has so far been proved correct, and part of what assured him of this fame was the Art of Love—a poem that, after it had advised on almost everything else, also found time to advise on particular sexual positions. “If you’re built like a fashion model, with willowy figure, / Then kneel on the bed, your neck / A little arched . . .”35 And so on.

  But then something, slowly, had changed. A little over two centuries after Pompeii experienced its cataclysm, the Roman elite experienced a convulsion of their own when Constantine converted. The effects reverberated throughout the fourth century as temples were torn down, statues smashed and laws passed outlawing the old “pagan” ways. The number of Christian converts—willing or otherwise—increased rapidly during this period. And as they did so, literature started to change, too. The old bawdy ways started to fade from the pages of poetry. The sermon and the homily—stern, judgmental and often aggressive—bloomed in their stead. This literature alternately threatened and instructed readers in minute detail on how to behave in almost every aspect of life. Christianity was not the sole cause of this—an increasingly moralizing tone had been noticeable in literature already. Indeed, the rise in Christianity might even have in part been a symptom of such moralizing. But Christianity nevertheless embraced, amplified and promulgated this hectoring to a far greater extent than ever before.

  Christian authors of this period were not charmed by the sexual frankness that had been expressed by Roman authors and paintings. They were repelled by it. St. Paul had set the tone early. He had felt that the “pagans” were so far gone as to be all but beyond redemption. Due in part to their idol worship, God had “abandoned them to do whatever shameful things their hearts desired. As a result, they did vile and degrading things with each other’s bodies.”36 Not only did they have sex, worse still they had homosexual sex. “Even the women turned against the natural way to have sex and instead indulged in sex with each other. And the men, instead of having normal sexual relations with women, burned with lust for each other. Men did shameful things with other men.”37 Still, Paul reassured his readers, these sinners would have their comeuppance. “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men.”38 Later centuries would follow suit. In the sixth century, during the reign of the repressive emperor Justinian, laws started to outlaw homosexuality with a viciousness never seen before.

  For St. Paul and other Christian preachers, the body and its urges were not to be celebrated but smothered. In tortuous and embarrassed circumlocutions, Paul raged at “this body of death.”39 The rewards of a virgin in heaven were said to be sixty times greater. Christian writers in this period recorded the stirrings of their sexuality with great distaste—perhaps none more influentially than Augustine. Sex was, he felt, permissible if children resulted from the union but even then the action itself was lustful, evil and “bestial,” while erections were “unseemly.” The West would reap a bitter harvest of sexual shame from the disgusted writings of these two men. In the earliest days of the religion, some Christians went further, arguing that there was no need for sex anymore at all. A new form of creation, in the form of a great conflagration and rebirth of the godly, was imminent. What need for awkward, messy, inexact human reproduction? Eternal life rendered reproduction redundant.

  If the most famous non-Christian manual had been Ovid’s, then one of the most famous manuals by a Christian writer was a third-century tract by the theologian Clement of Alexandria. It is called the Paedagogus—the instructor—and its stated aim was to “compendiously describe what the man who is called a Christian ought to be during the whole of his life.”40 Clement then added some frank reminders of what lay in wait for those who strayed from his precepts and God’s, namely the teeth of wild beasts and the rage of serpents. As Clement wrote, the Lord himself had said that “I will sharpen my sword . . . and I will render justice to mine enemies, and requite those who hate me. I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh from the blood of the wounded.” This was not a mark of God’s cruelty but of love. “Censure,” the author reassured his reader, “is a mark of good-will, not of ill-will.”41

  Clement, in precise and authoritative paragraphs, peppered with frequent quotations and not infrequent threats from the scriptures, advised the faithful on every aspect of their day, from what they were allowed to eat and drink to what they could wear and put on their feet; from how they could style their hair to even what they were allowed to do in bed. In the three volumes of h
is guide he censured almost every human activity. “Unblushing pleasure,” he wrote, “must be cut out by the roots.”42 He began with eating, opening with the reminder that we are all ultimately dust, before turning his attention on particular dishes. In starchy and unforgiving sentences, unseasoned by even a dash of humor, the extravagant dinner was deplored. As too was almost everything eaten at it. Overuse of the pestle and mortar was frowned upon. Condiments were considered unacceptable, as too were white bread (“emasculated”) and sweetmeats, honey cakes, sugar plums, dried figs . . . One should not, Clement warned, be like the gourmands who source their lampreys from Sicily, their turbots in Attica, their thrushes in Daphnis . . .43 The list went on.

  Though, like those post–Second World War novels, the Bonds and Bridesheads, that were written in a period of austerity yet salivate over detailed descriptions of food, Clement’s abstemious pen seemed to linger a little too long over these forbidden fruits.* Clement himself would have rejected the thought: people who enjoyed fine dining were, he wrote, nothing less than “beasts in human shape after the image of their father, the voracious beast.”44 Satan lurked among the sweetmeats. Then there was the wine—which in Clement’s eyes was even more pernicious than food. This warming liquid, he wrote, would heat up the overheated bodies of the young adding “fire to fire. For hence wild impulses and burning lusts and fiery habits are kindled . . . and shameless pulsations follow abundance.” Clement fulminated furiously against those “miserable wretches” whose life was nothing but “revel, debauchery, baths, excess . . . idleness, drink” and, intriguingly, “urinals.”45

  In the writings of preacher after Christian preacher, it was made clear that almost everything about a dinner was suspect. If one went out to dinner one might find oneself smitten with pernicious envy for another man’s house and come home more discontented than when setting out. John Chrysostom advised avoiding them altogether in favor of funerals. “Is it better,” he thundered at his congregation, “to go where there is weeping, lamentation, and groans, and anguish, and so much sadness, than where there is the dance, the cymbals, and laughter, and luxury, and full eating and drinking?”46 One doesn’t need to be too familiar with Chrysostom’s oeuvre to know that the expected answer to this rhetorical question was a hearty “Yea, verily!” In a house of happiness one might envy a neighbor’s well-appointed atrium, or his charming dining room. In a house of mourning one would, said Chrysostom, be more likely to declare: “We are nothing, and our wickedness is inexpressible!”47

  The breadth of Clement’s self-help manual wasn’t entirely new. Centuries before God’s enforcers had started to prod at every corner of life, Ovid had bossily advised his gentle reader in similar detail to Clement how one should behave at dinner, though his aims were rather different. As he explained:

  Banquets, too, give you an entrée, offer

  More to the palate than wine:

  There flushed Love has often clasped the horns of reclining

  Bacchus in a seductive embrace.48

  Ovid, like Clement, spent some time on the topic of wine which, he agreed, should be drunk in moderation. Though once again, for different reasons: get too drunk and, Ovid warned, you’d lose your man: “The girl / Who’s passed out drunk is the most disgusting object.”49

  He had also issued lengthy instructions on appearance and personal grooming. He advised men, for example, to take care of their appearance; to be fragrant; to ensure that their nails were clean and pared; and to monitor their nose hair:

  Don’t let those long hairs sprout

  In your nostrils, make sure your breath is never offensive,

  Avoid the rank male stench

  That wrinkles noses.50

  One should not, he added, go much further than this: “Don’t torture your hair, though, with curling-irons,” he warned men. “Don’t pumice / Your legs into smoothness.” To do this was, he said, the behavior of “wanton women—or any half-man who wants to attract men.”51

  Women had received stringent instruction from Ovid too. Their hair should not be neglected; those with a plump face should pile their hair up; those with a long face should go for a plain central parting. Though he also recommended a careful dishevelment: “the Neglected Look suits many girls: quite often / You’d think it untouched since yesterday, though in fact it’s fresh-combed.”52

  White clothes, he wrote, suited dark-skinned women; the pale looked becoming in gray; everyone should avoid purple and flounces. Personal hygiene should be attended to in women too: teeth should be clean and unstained; “rank goatish armpits” were, fairly enough, warned against.53 Make-up, in moderation, was advised: “with powder, add rouge to a bloodless face, / Skilfully block in the crude outline of an eyebrow,” and so on. The effect should be natural, since “the best / Make-up remains unobtrusive.” On a similar note, Ovid was uncharacteristically strict on one point: you should not let your partner see you applying cosmetics:

  Leave us to imagine

  You’re asleep while you’re at your toilet: only emerge

  When the public picture’s complete. I don’t want to know how

  That complexion’s built up.

  And, above all, Ovid advised: never let your partner see you cleaning your teeth: “The result may be attractive, but the process is sickening.”54

  Christian tracts took a similar stance to Ovid on many topics—Clement also disliked done-up women and over-groomed men—but the tone here was very different. Everything was laid down, from how to treat the hairs on the top of the head (which should not be dyed, plucked, or falsely curled—all “wicked arts”) to the soles of the feet (which should be shod in plain sandals). Makeup was abhorred as a sign of a diseased soul.55 Golden, silver and jeweled cups were inveighed against, as too were purple bedsheets—“proofs of tasteless luxury, cunning devices of envy and effeminacy.”56 The wearing of gold jewelry was deplored as a terrible habit through which women would “disfigure God’s gifts, emulating the art of the evil one.” So too was the wearing of diaphanous fabrics (“proof of a weak mind”).57 The odium heaped on women was, however, mild when compared to the disapproval reserved for men who depilated. Had not the Lord said that “the very hairs of your head are all numbered”? Well, then, said Clement, with nimble scriptural footwork, that settled it. “There must be therefore no plucking out, contrary to God’s appointment, which has counted them in according to His will.”58

  Ovid had offered his opinion in the spirit of a connoisseur advising a novice. In Ovid’s writings, if you get your dress wrong or drink too much at dinner, you will suffer the consequences in this life: you won’t get your man, or people will think you uncouth. In the writings of the new Christian texts, it was not the taste of any man—even an expert—that mattered. It was the taste of God. “Man is the measure of all things,” Protagoras had said. No longer. Now God was, and He was not only weighing and measuring man, He would, if he was found wanting, punish him.

  Christian preachers expressed none of Horace’s uncertainty about what tomorrow might bring. On the contrary, they knew precisely what was coming: death and judgment. Followed by heaven for the fortunate few—and hell for everyone else. One should therefore be perpetually mindful of the dangers threatened by the next life—and constantly watchful of one’s behavior in this one. Eating, drinking and making love were, they warned, the last things that one must do. Merrymaking in this life would not win eternal bliss in the next. “You are too greedy of enjoyment, my brother,” warned the Christian scholar Jerome, “if you wish to rejoice with the world here, and to reign with Christ hereafter.”59

  Chapter Thirteen

  * * *

  They That Forsake the Way of God

  Then will the tragic actors be worth hearing, more vocal in their own catastrophe; then the comic actors will be worth watching, much lither of limb in the fire; then the charioteer will be worth seeing, red all over on his fiery wheel; then the athletes will be worth observing, not in their gymnasiums, but thrown about b
y fire.

  —Tertullian reflects on the pleasures of Judgment Day, De Spectaculis, 30.5

  THE FLAMES OF DAMNATION began to lick at Roman daily life. In literature of a newly sadistic strain, Christian writers outlined in graphic detail what awaited those who did not comply with the edicts of this all-seeing God.1 The punishments for sinners were, according to Christian texts, atrocious. Now regarded as apocryphal, but for a time widely read in Rome, the Apocalypse of Peter reveled in verse after stomach-churning verse on what happened in hell. In it, the reader is taken on an infernal safari in which the retributions for various misdeeds are pointed out with relish. This hell is a terrible place; its punishments are grimly apposite. Blasphemers, for example, are found hanging suspended by their tongues, or “gnawing their lips.”2 Adulterers are hung by their “feet”—a punishment that doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that in these texts “feet” was a euphemism for “testicles.”3 Those who trusted in their riches are turned on a spit over a fire.4 Even children don’t escape. At the edge of a lake filled with the “discharge and the stench” of those who were tortured are babies that are “born before time”—a blameless crime one might have thought, but not so here. These babies will cry for eternity, alone.5