The censorious gaze of God’s enforcers now went far beyond personal appearance. Theater was abhorred as a repository of blasphemous filth. The Roman Empire had never been wholly sure of the theater itself—plays were seen as sufficiently immoral that it was only in the first century BC that a stone theater had been built in the capital, allowing this dubious art form a permanent home.
But equally it had been acceptable for intellectuals to praise drama with sincere admiration—and for ordinary citizens to enjoy it. The orator Libanius celebrated, with unashamed delight, the fact that his hometown of Antioch resounded with “contests of pipes, lyre, and voice and the manifold delights of the stage.”6 The beauty of the dancers, he argued, in a work that defended them against long-standing slurs, even improved the soul: a man would be “more gentle both to his wife and his slaves when he takes his dinner after such a sight.”7 Pliny the Younger had disliked actors, particularly those who popped up and started to bore him with recitations after dinner parties; nevertheless, he counseled moderation when someone else complained about them. “Let us then be tolerant of other people’s pleasures so as to win indulgence for our own.” Please, he wrote, “don’t be for ever frowning.”8
Zealous and controlling Christian preachers begged to differ. Frowning was one of the few things that the new rhetoric did allow in excess. The theater, they hectored their congregations, was filth. Sinful, demonic filth. What the Greeks had considered civilized—even civilizing—the Christian preachers reviled as “depravity,” a “deformity,” a “disease” and a “wanton madness.”9
Certainly there was much to trouble the chaste on the Roman stage. Farces were rich in sexual innuendo; while during the Roman festival of the goddess Flora real courtesans came on stage and performed in the nude—much to the delight of the audience.10 In the fourth century, a new fashion for water theaters arrived in Antioch. In sparkling pools beneath the eastern sun, people gathered to watch the gleaming naked bodies of “nymphs” as they splashed and—the word is almost impossible to avoid—frolicked in pools before the eager eyes of the audience.
Christian preachers professed themselves horrified. Everything about the theater was, they said, from the Devil: the whole thing a foul idolatry contrived by demons “in order to turn the human race from the Lord and bind it to their glorification.” The theater itself was a place of lust and drunkenness, a “citadel of all vile practices.”11 The abominations that happened on stage, meanwhile, were a “lawless corruption” designed to pollute the ears and eyes of the audience.12 Theater stood between oneself and the divine. How could one worship God with the same hands with which one had just applauded an actor? One could not. One might not, if the Lord was watching, even get the chance. In one instructive little parable, a Christian writer noted that one woman who had dared to attend the theater dropped dead five days later.
Alas the theater did not have such a bracing effect on all viewers and Christian apologists were obliged to step in. Churches across the empire resounded with disapproval of the dramatic: tragedies were bloody, comedies were wanton; both would spawn impious behavior. Actors were little better than whores—no, they actually were whores: Christians regularly substituted the words “actor” and “dancer” with the word “prostitute”; the theater itself was “the temple of lust for prostitution.”13 The dangers of attending a performance were outlined in another vivid sermon by John Chrysostom that, like so many of them, revealed rather more about the speaker than the listener. “If someone puts coals in his lap, won’t he burn his clothes?” Well, it is just the same with the man who goes to the theater. “Even if you aren’t intimate with the prostitute, you’ve copulated with her by desire and have committed the sin in your thoughts.”14 Actual thunderbolts were threatened and oratorical ones delivered to those who went to watch the naked women in the water theaters. Spectators here were going, Chrysostom warned, “unto the fountain of the Devil, to see a harlot swim, and to suffer shipwreck of the soul. For that water is a sea of lasciviousness . . . And whereas she swims with naked body, thou beholding, are sunk into the deep of lasciviousness.”15 The stain of such visions would remain in one’s eyes long after the performance had ended for who, as another asked, “can bathe in mud without being soiled?”16
Almost every kind of display was, Christian preachers argued, stained with satanism. Acrobats who contorted their bodies were in the Devil’s service, as too were those who juggled with knives and cartwheeled. The music that these people danced to was considered perilous, for music might take away men’s senses and mesmerize them, whipping them into a frenzy of lust and ungodliness. Was it for this, asked another preacher, rising in a disapproving crescendo, that God had created humans? So that they could “practise singing and piping; that they should swell out their cheeks in blowing the flute; that they should take the lead in singing impure songs, and . . . abandon themselves to clumsy motions, to dance and sing, form rings of dancers, and finally, raising their haunches and hips, float along with a tremulous motion of the loins?”17
In anxious, threatening sermons, other pastimes came under attack. Public shows were feared as much for the public as for the entertainment. What might go on in the anonymous hurly-burly of a crowd? The Roman erotic poets had known perfectly well what might happen—indeed they had celebrated it. As Ovid had gleefully explained, when one goes to watch the races, “the spacious Circus offers / Chances galore.” A trip to the Roman hippodrome was rich in possibilities for the ardent and not-too-scrupulous suitor. “Often it happens that dust may fall on the blouse of the lady,” Ovid advised in his seduction manual:
If such dust should fall, carefully brush it away.
Even if there’s no dust, brush off whatever there isn’t.
Any excuse will do: why do you think you have hands?18
“Not for that,” declared the new generation of clerics. Going to the races was frittering away your time “idly and in evil.” God had not given us lives so that we could have fun.19
The bathhouses were also deplored as sinks of immorality. To Roman emperors and their subjects, bathing had been a mark of civilization. The irretrievably barbarian Britons had, it was felt, only finally begun to become civilized when they started to embrace bathing and banquets. Even the Roman philosopher and orator Cicero, in one of his more man-of-the-people moments, had said that the noise of the gong that opened the baths was a sweeter sound than the voices of the philosophers in their schools. The buildings themselves were astonishing: the cathedrals of paganism as they have been called. It is not an excessive analogy. Often the most imposing buildings in any city, they were wonders of architectural genius, soaking up vast amounts of money and nudging innovation forwards to meet their demands. The citizens of the empire went to the baths as regularly as churchgoers—indeed far more so, as most went every day. Once inside the great hallways of these grand edifices, they passed through the marbled rooms in a routine as ancient as any liturgy: apodyterium, tepidarium, caldarium, frigidarium . . .
Going to the baths was not merely a functional event of cleansing—which was just as well, given that the baths lacked chlorination, filtration or regular changing of the water. Modern research has concluded that they must have been absolutely filthy—something that ancient poets knew long ago. “Zoilus,” Martial wrote, “you spoil the bathtub washing your arse. To make it filthier, Zoilus, stick your head in it.”20
Zoilus aside, a trip to the baths was a sensuous delight: writers wax lyrical about the light that fell through the windows into the gleaming marble halls. As one famous proverb advised: “Bathing, wine and Venus wear out the body but are the real stuff of life.”21 On fortunate occasions, if the frescoes are to be believed, all the pleasures might be celebrated in one go.
Bathhouses were crammed with art: jewel-bright mosaics, statues of nymphs and Nereids, and countless statues of Aphrodite, her cool marble skin perspiring slightly in the steam. These buildings were less like modern swimming pools—machines for exercising i
n as Iris Murdoch disparagingly called them—and more like town squares with water. Everything—business, pleasure, eating, drinking, pissing and, in the darker rooms, sex—went on in them. The philosopher Seneca lived above some baths for a while and described (not entirely contentedly) how they resounded with the noises of “the cake-seller with his varied cries, the sausageman, the confectioner, and all the vendors of food hawking their wares, each with his own distinctive intonation.” These sounds competed with the grunting gym obsessives, the slap of a masseur and the shriek of the skinny armpit-hair plucker, advertising his business, a man who never stops shouting “except when he is plucking the armpits and making his victim yell instead.”22
In Seneca’s day, at the height of the empire, bathing was done naked and not usually segregated by sex. People went to the baths to see—and be seen—all over by men and women alike. The reliably smutty Martial describes how men would gather round and applaud whenever they saw one particularly well-endowed bather. Occasionally this caused embarrassment. Young men didn’t go to the baths with their fathers for fear of the unexpected erection; even for liberal Romans, it seems that seeing one’s son’s hard-on was felt to be a bit much. Shyness struck elsewhere: one woman was so embarrassed about her body odor that she covered her nakedness in depilatory creams and layers of bean unguent. She still smelled anyway. Or so the scurrilous Martial said.23
Christian moralists professed themselves scandalized. In the writings of the early Christian clerics, the baths were reviled as the haunts of demons and of those who lead a “soft, effeminate, and dissolute life.”24 Their very structure was to be abhorred: those statues, wrote another Christian moralist, were nothing more than demonic idols—proof that “Satan and his angels have filled the whole world.”25 Even the exercises done outside the baths were suspect: wrestling was deplored as “the Devil’s trade . . . the very movements of the wrestler have a snakelike quality.”26 What went on in them was far worse. The water seemed to wash away what little modesty these sinners had left. Christian preachers pronounced it intolerable that men and women alike stripped naked—and that women then allowed every inch of their bodies to be manhandled by a “crouching menial.” Dangerous behavior, all this nudity, “for from looking, men get to loving.”27 Statues in bathhouses suffered particularly vicious attacks as these buildings were targeted by mobs of Christians keener on the cleansing of the soul than the body.
Christians could, their preachers told them, wash for simple utility as long as they didn’t enjoy it too much. The good Christian should certainly not wallow in the sensual pleasures of the baths. Some defied such pious grubbiness: Augustine openly claimed bathing to be one of the pleasures of life. Others took a more robust approach to washing. Ascetics celebrated the ideal of being “alousia”—unwashed. As one writer asked, what need did a Christian have to wash at all? Even if one’s skin becomes rough and scaly from lack of cleaning, he had no need, since “he that is once washed in Christ need not to wash again.”28 An intellectual change had taken place. Filth was moving from something that was found outside a man to something that stained his soul. A clean body was no longer one that was free from dirt: it was one that was unsoiled by sexual activity—and particularly by “deviant” sexual activity, which started to be precisely defined then deplored in newly fierce and censorious terms.
Male homosexuality was denounced, and then outlawed. By the sixth century, those who were, as one chronicler put it, “afflicted with homosexual lust” started to live in fear. And with good reason. When a bishop called Alexander was accused of having a homosexual relationship, he and his partner were “in accordance with a sacred ordinance . . . brought to Constantinople and were examined and condemned by Victor the city prefect, who punished them: he tortured Isaiah severely and exiled him and he amputated Alexander’s genitals and paraded him around on a litter. The emperor immediately decreed that those detected in pederasty should have their genitals amputated. At that time many homosexuals were arrested and died after having their genitals amputated.”29
Sex between a husband and wife was allowed but it should not, preachers said, be enjoyed. The old merry marriage ceremonies, in which people had eaten, drunk and sung profane songs about sex, were bluntly deplored as the Devil’s dungheap. Admiring stories of married couples who never slept with each other but spent their nights wearing hair shirts proliferated.
What difference did Christianity make? In some ways none. The people of empire, resistant to the clerics’ diatribes, continued going to the baths and the theater, still enjoyed the horse races. They still had sex; one might even dare to say that they enjoyed it. The theater still opened; plays were still shown. The fervently Christian emperor Theodosius, for one, supplied players during a theater festival. Ovid’s racy manuals were copied and read—presumably with enthusiasm—throughout the medieval period.
But some things did change. In the glare of Christian disapproval the once-loved art of pantomime dance withered and died. Sexually explicit—and sexually joyful—poetry stopped being openly written. There were no new Ovids. There were certainly no more Catulluses.30 Desire started to be called “lust”—and it became something shameful that was to be feared, despised, smothered and—if homosexual—punished, horribly. What was celebrated at holy days and festivals also underwent a transformation. On March 17, Roman citizens had celebrated the Liberalia. On March 17, the Christian Church celebrated instead the saint’s day of Ambrose of Alexandria—a pupil of Origen, the man who (allegedly) had castrated himself for the sake of heaven. What was acceptable in terms of sexuality narrowed. It would be well over a thousand years before Western civilization could come to see homosexuality as anything other than a perversion and a crime. Throughout the empire, statues were brought out of the bathhouses, their bodies mutilated, and burned as jeering crowds looked on in delight. Nipples were smashed from one naked figure of Aphrodite; Aphrodite herself was beheaded and left in the dirt.
Something more was lost, too. Many of those who disobeyed the furiously moralizing preachers and went to the races, or to the theater, or to look at “nymphs” cavorting in the sun, now did so in the knowledge that they were sinners. And they would, too, have known what awaited sinners in the kingdom that was to come. As the Christian writer Tertullian joyfully explained, when that moment came, all of these miscreants would be consumed in the avenging fires of the Lord—and he and his fellow obedient Christians would be there, enjoying the sight. What need for the theater or the hippodrome now? he asked. Because for the Christian faithful there are “other spectacles to come—that day of the Last Judgement, when the hoary age of the world and all its generations will be consumed in one fire.”31
SAINT APOLLONIA DESTROYS a PAGAN IDOL, c. 1442-45 The saint calmly ascends to the idol, hammer in hand. Hagiographies frequently praised the flair with which saints smashed ancient temples and centuries-old statues.
CULT STATUE OF THE DEIFIED AUGUSTUS, EPHESUS Augustus, who was considered divine by polytheistic Romans, would have been considered demonic by Christians. He too has been disfigured by a crude carved cross.
THEOPHILUS STANDING ON THE SERAPEION In this manuscript, the bishop Theophilus stands triumphant over what had been widely considered to be the most beautiful temple in the world. Theophilus razed the temple in AD 392.
BYZANTINE CHAPEL IN A ROMAN AMPHITHEATER, DURESI, ALBANIA Laws encouraged Christians to use the remnants of old temples to build and repair roads and bridges. The well-cut stone suited those purposes well, and was an added insult to the old gods. Everywhere, Christians used the remnants of Roman infrastructure to construct churches.
HYPATIA, 1885 The great mathematician and philosopher Hypatia, improbably underdressed. Hypatia was renowned for her chastity and wore an austere philosopher’s cloak. When one of her pupils fell in love with her, she showed him her sanitary towel to discourage him.
ARCHIMEDES PALIMPSEST, C. 10TH-13TH CENTURY A tenth-century copy of Archimedes’s Method of Mechanical Theorems.
In it, Archimedes had ingeniously applied mechanical laws, such as the law of the lever, to find the volume and area of geometric shapes. Two thousand years before Newton, he had come tantalizingly close to deriving calculus. However, in the thirteenth century this work was scraped off and overwritten with a prayer book.
THEOLOGICAL DEBATE BETWEEN CATHOLIC AND NESTORIAN CHRISTIANS AT ACRE, 1290 In 388, it was ruled that arguing about or even discussing religious matters in public was a “damnable audacity.” Nestorius and his teachings were declared heretical.
SATYR AND MAENAD, FRESCO, POMPEII, 1ST CENTURY BC Later observers were shocked by the liberty with which pre-Christian Roman artists had depicted sex. “Lascivious frescoes and lewd sculptures,” wrote one nineteenth-century American, “such as would be seized in any modern country by the police, filled the halls of the most virtuous Roman citizens and nobles.”
PRIAPUS, C. 50-79 The modern world was shocked—or professed itself to be—by the bawdiness of many of the works of art that were uncovered from Pompeii. The city’s eventual burial in ash was widely said to be the just deserts of an impious people.
HELL, 16TH CENTURY Early Christian texts described in precise detail the punishments meted out to sinners in hell. According to the Apocalypse of Peter, blasphemers would be hung up by their tongues, adulterers by their testicles, and women “who adorned themselves for adultery” would be strung up by their hair above the boiling mire.
The Darkening Age Page 20