The Kingdom of the Wicked

by Anthony Burgess

  I tell the story that I was told, leaving it to my readers to reject or accept. Bohen in the street was a wonder of ferocity that set the dogs barking and then scurrying off yelping, while children and women rent the air with their yells of fright. He roared, stripped a poor old woman near naked, overturned a market stall full of gourds, and finally he lay exhausted in a puddle, whimpering and faintly howling. Paul at this time had been forbidden the use of the synagogue and was arguing a knotty point about the physical resurrection with some of his new plants or neophytes in the schoolroom lent to him by the teacher popularly known as Tyrannus (no relative of the father of the protomartyr). He was called out, saw poor Bohen, had him carried back to his mother’s house, and there induced a deep natural sleep from which the boy emerged cured. Or so I am told.

  Certainly some such thaumaturgy must be invoked to explain the amazing scene which ensued that evening in the marketplace, when books of magical cantrips, treatises on the perierga, crudely illustrated guides to the winning of love, amulets, ikons, beads, flasks of unwholesome decoctions (dogturds, wolfsbane, menses) were thrown on to a fire. There were attempts to throw on it also Sceva and his fellows, but this was, Paul said, going too far. Silas and Luke, both bookish men, were uneasy about the incineration of some very fine volumes bound in leather with gold locks, but Paul said: ‘Look at that obscenity. And that.’ Dog pedicating man. Man pedicating dog.

  ‘They could be sold.’

  ‘To other magical charlatans.’

  ‘But see the workmanship.’

  ‘On to the fire with it, Luke.’

  An old woman brought a small silver figurine to Paul. ‘What do I do about this, sir?’ Paul examined it squinting. It was an effigy of the goddess sprouting breasts like warts. ‘Me and my family – we don’t worship her any more.’ Paul said:

  ‘The effigy is evil. The silver is out of the rock that God made. Melt it down and give the silver to the poor.’ Then he raised his voice: ‘It is well know that this city of Ephesus is the shrine of the false goddess Artemis, whom some call Diana. You who give homage to her – repent. You silversmiths whose wealth is in the making of her image – change your business to the making of candlesticks. Have done with false idols.’ A silversmith named Demetrius heard these words and was very unhappy.

  Now this was the time in spring when night and day are about equal, the beginning of the month called Artemision, when the eunuch priests and their priestesses presided over rituals to Artemis or Diana in the Ephesian temple. This temple was, and still is, one of the wonders of the world, being some four hundred feet long and two hundred feet wide and beautifully embellished with images of copulation. There had been a previous temple destroyed through the incendiarism of a young man named Herostratus, who did the deed to make a reputation for himself, successfully, for he is still remembered. (He performed the act, we are told, on the night when Alexander the Great was born.) The image of the goddess in the temple was not destroyed and indeed was indestructible, being a thunderstone or chunk of a star fallen to earth. It was, by celestial chance, formed in the image of a many-breasted female, and even the educated and sceptical were easily persuaded that the gods had sent down a crude representation, perhaps hammered by Vulcan, of one of their own. Certainly, Ephesus gained a great reputation as a town highly favoured by the goddess and, indeed, became the centre of her cult. To hear this cult assailed by a bald-headed Jew with a taste for book-burning was too much for the silversmith Demetrius and others of his trade, who made much money out of making and selling figurines of Artemis or Diana. Especially at this season.

  So Demetrius and some of his fellow craftsmen held a meeting in Demetrius’s workshop the following morning. This was a large shed full of fires, where some men poured molten metal into moulds and others cracked cold moulds open to reveal the smirking godlingess. Demetrius said:

  ‘Look, friends, this is our trade. This is how we make our money.’

  ‘In your instance, a lot of money.’

  Demetrius ignored that. ‘We’re all involved in the worship of the goddess, blessed be her holy name and sacred influence. This man Paul is telling everybody that there’s no such thing as gods made by hand. Before we know where we are he’ll have the damned temple pulled down and the traffic stopped.’

  ‘Traffic?’

  ‘You know what I mean. The holy pilgrimages from all over Greece and Asia. This is our bread, friends.’

  ‘He’s blaspheming against precious metal. So we—?’

  ‘Stop him.’

  Thus it was that Paul and some of his fellow Christians were dragged to the Ephesian temple by the militant guild of silversmiths, aided by a rabble that did not need to be hired, for the gratuitous manhandling of foreigners is always both a virtue and a pleasure in provincial towns where, anyway, there is little to do in the evenings. Silas, fearful in the ruddy flare of the torches, seeing the mound of the goddess’s huge belly threatening twenty feet above his eyes, panicked in the belief that they were to be sacrificed to her, Christian blood to be smeared laboriously over her polymastic or multimammial rotundity. He began to hit out, and Paul hit out with him. The mob, always suggestible, hit out too in the same directions, and one brawny lad shouted to Paul: ‘That’s right, give it to these impietous Cretans or whatever they do be called.’ A surprising and very Greek instinct for a kind of civic regularity then took over, and what seemed to be the entire male population of Ephesus pushed two recent Christian converts, both foreigners, Gaius of Derbe and Aristarchus of Thessalonica, who had followed Paul hither, towards the huge open-air theatre. Paul and Silas and Luke shoved against the current without opposition, for everybody was absorbed in a rhythmical yell of ‘Long live Artemis of Ephesus!’ So while Gaius and Aristarchus and other, nameless, converts were driven up the hill towards Pion, the converters got down to the inner harbour and hid behind some corded bales, panting.

  It has to be noted that the chief citizens of Ephesus, known as Asiarchs, were not inimical to Paul’s activities. The decision of Gallio had established a precedent in the Roman provinces, and Paul had broken no law. When, a little later, he and his fellows sat, Silas still fearful, in the schoolroom of Tyrannus in the dark, a friendly Asiarch came to report on what was proceeding in the theatre. ‘Three quarters of them,’ he said, ‘have no idea why they’re there, but the notion has arisen that this is an anti-Jewish demonstration and there’s a Jew called Alexander telling them that the Jews love Artemis as much as anybody, a damned lie but you can’t blame him. Anything to quieten them down.’

  ‘As for quietening them down,’ Paul said, ‘I’d better go and address a few words myself. It’s not often we get the whole town assembled.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ Silas said. ‘Are you completely and irrevocably stark staring demented? They’ll tear you to pieces, man.’

  Luke said: ‘I’ll go and see what’s happening. On the fringe, so to speak, with my little notebook. After all, it’s a kind of literary duty.’ So they let Luke go. Luke stood at the back of the mob which had been transformed into an audience, marvelling at the thousands making their own entertainment with the monotonous choral chant of ‘Diana of Ephesus for ever!’ while an old man with a long beard whom he took to be Alexander mouthed and gesticulated inaudibly from the theatron. Then a man strode on to the stage whom Luke knew: he was the grammateus or city secretary, a functionary responsible for the publication of civic decrees and a link between the municipal council and the provincial government. Thus he was responsible to the Roman authorities for good order in the city, and when he spoke he spoke with an urgency that quietened the assembly and made them listen.

  ‘Men of Ephesus,’ he cried, ‘there is no need of your protestations. We all know Artemis is great. We all know that Ephesus is the keeper of her temple. We know that her image fell out of the skies from the hands of the god Jupiter himself. Why waste your breath on a truth too well known? Why not assume the dignity of quiet and the avoidance of rash acts? These m
en you have brought here are neither robbers of the temple nor blasphemers against the goddess. If Demetrius there, and others of his craft, have anything against these men who are called Christians – well, the law courts are open, the proconsuls ready to sit. Let everything be settled in the regular assemblies. Riot and civic pride do not sit well together. Go home.’

  If the grumbling assembly now broke up and went home, it was partly out of a Greek sense of dramatic form. They had been there two hours, long enough for a play, and the final speech had the capping quality of well-shaped dramaturgy. When Paul heard Luke’s report, he nodded in approval of the good sense of the grammateus, though naturally deploring his paganism, and he said: ‘No bigot. In him you see the great change coming. Men will not fight for the old gods unless there is profit in them. If there is good sense in holiness, there may well be holiness in good sense. You will live to see that silver melted down and the goddess become a memory. She is already no more than dead metal.’

  Dead metal, indeed. He had said that before but he would not say it again. What I have now to recount is extremely painful, but Paul should have known that everything has to be paid for. Demetrius and his fellows were not by nature men of violence, except against defenceless silver, and they were half content to wait to put their case to the proconsul (there was only one at that time, despite the town secretary’s habituated pluralising: Marcus Junius Silanus, proconsul for Asia, had been murdered on Agrippina’s orders, but that is another story). Nevertheless, they felt it was only just that Paul should have a taste of the goddess and that that would much modify his rantings about purity. They arranged for a temple prostitute to be introduced into the bedchamber where Paul, the due of his status, slept alone while Luke and Silas had to share a cell: this was in the house of the convert Pyrrhus, where they lodged free. The girl was ready enough for the game, and she was helped up to the ground floor casement by smirking Demetrius and a dwarfish colleague named Achilles. Paul slept heavily after a morning of stitching canvas and an afternoon and evening of shouting the word. She stripped herself naked and slid into the narrow bed, encountering bare hairiness and a flaccid rod which she swiftly whipped into life. Paul thought he was dreaming. Then he awoke shocked to find himself held in the posture of succubus by a smooth female body which knew every trick. He yelled, and the laughing girl leapt off and to the window, without which the two confederates were waiting. Paul, to his shame, found himself pumping seed on to his blanket. Dead metal indeed.

  The finger was much pointed at him the following day. He boiled, composing in his head eloquent letters to all the churches about the deadliness of the sin of fornication. For himself, he required ritual purification, and there was no provision for that in the new order. He needed Jerusalem, he needed the Temple of Solomon. As for the temple of Artemis, this stood solid and mocking, and the huge effigy of the goddess leered at him in a kind of triumph. She was going to be hard to melt away.

  You have heard something of Agrippina but you have not yet met her. She was a woman, at this point in our story, in the prime of her beauty, presenting the same philosophical problem as her predecessor Messalina, namely the apparent reconcilability of a celestial virtue, for beauty is that and always that and must always be that, and a capacity for unutterable vice. But whereas the vices of Messalina were in themselves venial, being mostly a passion for sensual gratification and only dangerous, as you have seen, in the lack of moral scruple which subordinated all things to its encompassing, Agrippina lived solely for power, frightening enough in a man but terrifying in a woman. She had countered the Senate’s opposition to her marriage to Claudius by personal threats to the more vociferous senators, and some of these threats were, with the aid of Pallas, the Emperor’s financial minister, whom she had efficiently seduced, very ruthlessly fulfilled. It was eventually decided that Claudius might be permitted to break the law which forbade incest, since (a) marriage with a niece was not much different from marriage to a cousin, which was lawful, and the degrees of marital prohibition properly applied only to immediate blood – maternal, sororal, filial, and (b) Claudius seemed beyond not merely the begetting of a child (who would, of course, be a monster) but too old and feeble for the marital act itself. As for Agrippina, she would sleep with anyone, though not for physical pleasure, only for political advantage. She was cursed or blessed with a certain sexual coldness, knowing as much as a temple prostitute about the arousing of male passion and the procurement of its ecstatic release but keeping herself aloof, despite an occasional simulation of desire and the odd false orgiastic shudder and scream of fulfilment, from a process she found distressingly bestial when it was not frankly comic. She had initiated her own son, L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, into the transports of physical love at a quite early age. It was a device for keeping him under. Even when married to Claudius she soft-footed in the night to the boy’s bedroom and lashed his pustular body to loud transports a waking servant would interpret as a nightmare. This son, by the way, had been adopted by Claudius and now bore the new name Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus.

  Let us now soft-foot into the imperial bedchamber, which is shaded against the intrusive sun of the late afternoon, for Claudius has a headache and wears a wet bandage over his eyes. Agrippina, gorgeous in her thin lawn, her bare arms a miracle of shapeliness, her hair the hue of an Egyptian midnight spread over her delicate shoulders, strokes his brow and says: ‘Better?’

  ‘Bbbbbetter. But only in the sense of not as bbbbbad as yesterday. And not as bbbbad as ttttomorrow.’

  ‘Nobody knows about tomorrow.’

  ‘An ageing man knows that ttttomorrow he will not be any younger.’

  ‘Oh, these shining platitudes. Gems of imperial wisdom. Golden rays of the obvious. I hope the book you’re dictating isn’t full of aphorisms like that.’

  ‘I write history. Moral ppppplatitudes I leave to Seneca.’

  ‘Get rid of that man.’

  ‘Eh?’ Claudius raised himself from the pillow an instant in surprise, then fell back. ‘It was I, as I seem to remember, who got rid of him some time bbbback. It was at your request that I released him from exile.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind about him. He teaches my son treason in the guise of philosophy.’

  ‘Ttttreason to the Emperor?’

  ‘The Empress.’

  ‘Meaning bbboth of us. I’ve heard of this. Morality is morality. There are no moral exceptions for Seneca. We are living in a state of incestuous ppppollution, whatever the Emperor and the Senate say. He has probably been telling your son that. Not to upset him or to ddddenigrate our imperial selves, but to remind him that there are no moral exceptions.’

  ‘I was taught as a girl that the whole point of power was to be able to break the rules.’

  ‘I’ve certainly bbbbroken one rule.’

  He spoke wistfully and she answered sharply: ‘You regret it?’

  ‘You taught me new raptures of the body. Raptures which not even Messalina—Ah no, I don’t regret it. But sometimes I feel – well, ccccculpable. Chiefly when I look at your son. There’s something wrong about having a grandnephew who calls me ffffffather. He calls me it rather more than Britannicus does. He seems to be trying to imppppplant an idea in my mind.’

  ‘The idea,’ Agrippina said frankly, ‘that he’s fitter for the purple than Britannicus. Britannicus is a fool.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d have ttttttolerated that from you when you were merely my niece. Britannicus may be the son of Messalina but he’s inherited surprisingly fffffew vices. He’s even something of a thinker. And he did well as a soldier in Britain. It was he who ccccaptured Ccccccaracttttacus.’

  ‘Which we’re not allowed to forget. But which I personally don’t believe. When you say Britannicus I feel we’re always expected to stop what we’re doing and drink his health.’

  ‘I shut from my mind, dear niece-wife,’ he said wearily, ‘a pppparticular thought – that you love your son more than you love me, that your love for him
is great enough to have surmounted various barriers, the least of which is incest. Now let me sleep. My head throbs.’

  ‘Marriage is a gateway to legitimate progeny, dear Claudius. That gateway is always open. You’re always too tired or too sick to—I say no more, fffffather of all the Romans.’ He sat up and looked at her without affection. He said:

  ‘That mockery is unseemly. It is also unseemly to pretend a situation that does not exist in the ppppresence of one who knows it does not exist. The physicians pronounced you barren shortly after the death of your revered second husband. Do not ppppretend to be more of a ffffool than you already are.’ He thought better of that. ‘No, no ffffool. But a liar, as she was. And, I begin to suspect, much more vicious.’

  ‘You have something particular in mind?’ she said in a voice that oozed Hybla honey.

  ‘Yes. What has happened to Sttttattttilius Ttttaurus?’

  ‘The old bull? You sometimes forget who you have and have not had put to silence, to use that delightful state euphemism. The old bull has been slaughtered.’

  Claudius nearly got out of bed. ‘Not on my orders.’

  ‘On the orders of Pallas. It’s the same thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘What was the charge against him? Pallas said nothing to me about this, gave me no pppppapers to to—’

  ‘He said,’ she said in a voice modulating to the innocently childish, ‘that he’d hand his gardens over to me. He knew I wanted them. Then he changed his mind.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wealthy Roman citizens should sometimes show their gratitude for being allowed to remain wealthy. And they certainly should not insult their Empress by reneging on their promises. The gardens are very beautiful. You must walk them with me sometime. The pine-scented air will be good for your weak chest.’