God Against the Gods (15 page)

“It would have been an easy task . . . to collect a long series of horrid and disgustful pictures, and to fill many pages with racks and scourges, with iron hooks, and red-hot beds, and with all the variety of tortures which fire and steel, savage beasts and more savage executioners, could inflict on the human body,” writes Gibbon. “But I cannot determine what I ought to transcribe till I am satisfied how much I ought to believe.”
³⁵

A rather less frightful picture of the persecution of Christians can be pieced together from the ancient sources. Here and there across the vast empire, a few especially hateful magistrates carried out the imperial decrees with real sadism. Elsewhere, the same harsh decrees were enforced only halfheartedly or not at all. A Christian might be permitted to prevail upon a pagan friend or neighbor to make a sacrifice in his place, and an officer who came to seize a forbidden copy of the Christian scriptures might be willing to take a bribe and leave the Bible behind. Some magistrates literally begged the Christians who were brought into their courts to go through the motions of pagan sacrifice in order to provide an excuse for sparing them. “In these relatively favoured circumstances,” observes Robin Lane Fox, “it takes two to make a martyr.”
³⁶
And so, on the occasion when a Christian was actually put to torture and death, his or her own zeal was a necessary element of martyrdom.

“Unhappy men!” cried one frustrated Roman proconsul to the defiant Christians. “If you are thus weary of your lives, is it so difficult for you to find ropes and precipices?”
³⁷

Confessors and Traitors

Among all the Christians who lived through the ten persecutions by the authorities of pagan Rome, only a modest number were martyred; Gibbon, for example, speculates that the victims of the so-called Great Persecution amounted to only two thousand or so, and Will Durant insists that fewer Christians died at the hands of pagans during
all
ten pagan persecutions than at the hands of fellow Christians during the two hottest years of the theological civil war that would later be fought within Christianity over various beliefs condemned as heresies and apostasies.

We do not know the number of Christians who saved their lives by abjectly surrendering their Bibles for burning and sacrificing to the pagan gods. Surely the vast majority of Christians were neither zealots nor cowards, and they managed to survive with their bodies and their souls intact. But, as we shall see, it was the example of the heroes and villains, the contrast between zealotry and cowardice, that shaped the revolution that Christianity was ready to work in pagan Rome.

The persecution provided a new vocabulary to describe the heroes and the villains. A Christian who served the faith by proudly confessing to the crime of Christianity and suffering the consequences, willingly and even joyously, was called a “confessor.” A Christian who betrayed the faith was called a
“traditor”
—the Latin word literally means “one who hands over” and refers to those who handed over Christian writings and artifacts to the Roman soldiers who enforced the imperial decrees that criminalized the practice of Christianity. From the word
traditor
comes a more familiar English word: “traitor.”

A confessor who endured and survived the persecutions of pagan Rome was lionized by his fellow Christians—he was regarded as a veteran of the holy war against paganism, a living example of what it meant to be a Soldier of Christ, and his wounds and scars were seen as badges of honor. A
traditor
, by contrast, was the object of contempt and disgust among the uncompromising Christians—the polytheist saw nothing unusual and nothing wrong in offering sacrifice to more than one god, but the monotheist was taught that nothing was a greater “abomination” in the eyes of the Only True God.

By the opening years of the fourth century, when the greatest of the persecutions was in progress, the war of the Only True God against the many gods and goddesses of paganism seemed to be a lost cause. The apostle Paul, as we have seen, believed his destiny—and the destiny of Christianity—lay in the imperial seat of the Roman empire, but history seemed to prove him wrong. So far, Rome had served only as a place of torture, death and burial for Christian confessors for nearly 300 years. “They have shed the blood of saints and prophets,” writes the author of Revelation, who likens Rome to a woman on whose forehead is written “mother of harlots and abominations of the earth,” a woman who is “drunken with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.”
³⁸

Yet Paul turned out to be right, although for reasons and under circumstances that he never predicted and could not have imagined. Christianity was about to be elevated from a despised and persecuted cult to the state religion of the greatest superpower of the ancient world. A single man was responsible for the revolution in pagan Rome, but he was neither a confessor nor even a Christian during the Great Persecution. By a strange irony, the “Soldier of Christ” who was single-handedly responsible for the triumph of monotheism in Rome was born and raised a pagan, and the argument can be made that he remained one until the day of his death.

BOOK TWO

THE WAR OF GOD AGAINST THE GODS

For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”—yet for us there is one God.

—Paul, 1 Corinthians 8:5-6

CHAPTER FIVE

“IN THIS SIGN, CONQUER”

The Curious Encounter of Christ and Constantine in the Struggle for the Roman Crown

What god was it that made you feel that the time had come for the liberation of the city against the advice of men and even against the warning of the auspices?

—Panegyric to Constantine after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge

The remarkable saga of how Christianity rose from a persecuted cult to the state religion of imperial Rome begins with a slightly bawdy tale about a general and an innkeeper’s daughter.

Inns, as it happens, were a feature of the famous system of roads that was one of the greatest achievements of ancient Rome. First constructed to permit the speedy movement of the Roman legions across the vast stretches of the empire, the network of roads was also used by imperial agents, diplomatic couriers and travelers of all kinds—“All roads lead to Rome” is the old aphorism that describes its essential function, and stretches of the ancient roadway can still be seen all over Europe. To serve the needs of those who traveled over the roads by foot or horseback, cart or carriage, a service industry was established in the form of way stations called
stabula
, where the travelers refreshed themselves with food and drink, spent the night and set out again with fresh mounts.

Innkeepers, then as now, always seek to keep the customers satisfied, and the
stabula
offered all of the services that a weary traveler demanded—the young women who poured the wine and filled the trenchers surely provided other services, too. And the Roman legionnaires who were the principal users of the roads were their best customers. For that reason, some pagan chroniclers have charged that a Roman soldier by the name of Flavius Valerius Constantius (c. 250-306) availed himself of something more than food and drink when he stopped at a way station on the Roman road and first encountered the publican’s daughter who is known to history as Helena.

The commander’s striking visage, pale and drawn, earned him the nickname Constantius Chlorus—“Constantius the Pale”—and his complexion has been explained by the ancient sources as “a symptom of the intense energy which he put into the struggle for survival and self-advancement,” according to historian John Holland Smith.
¹
Constantius demonstrated these qualities in combat against the so-called barbarian tribes that continually threatened the frontiers of the Roman empire, the Franks and the Alemanni, ancestors of the Germans. Although a genealogy was later invented to link him to the oldest and most aristocratic families of old Rome, Constantius is reputed to have been the son of a peasant, born in some Balkan backwater of the Roman empire. Ultimately, it was his exploits in battle, rather than his imaginary family history, that brought him the political clout that sometimes turns common soldiers into emperors.

The lowborn but combat-hardened soldier, in fact, rose to the highest circles of power in the Roman empire, but not before he had taken up with the innkeeper’s daughter, and she had given him a son—the baby boy was named Constantine. Pious historians insist on referring to their union as a marriage, and one overenthusiastic medieval historian even claimed that Helena was the daughter of the British king who is immortalized in the nursery rhyme “Old King Cole.” The fact is, however, that Helena was a commoner, and the ancient chronicler Eutropius hints at the real state of affairs when he characterizes her relationship with Constantius as “a marriage of the more obscure kind.”
²
Ancient pagan sources boldly call Helena a concubine, and some of them even claim that she served as a prostitute in her father’s inn before she met Constantine’s father.
³

Helena’s questionable origins and the dubious nature of her relationship with Constantius apparently rendered her unsuitable to her husband’s upwardly mobile career in public service. The ruling class of pagan Rome was, contrary to twenty centuries of Christian moral censure, rather fussy and even puritanical on the subject of sex, especially in outward appearances. Once he was raised to imperial rank, Constantius separated from the innkeeper’s daughter—“dismissing” her, as befits a concubine, rather than divorcing her—and made an advantageous marriage with the stepdaughter of the emperor Maximian (c. 240-310), a woman of noble birth called Theodora.

Son of the God

When Constantius the Pale was “raised to the purple”—the phrase refers to the color that was reserved for use in the apparel of royalty and worn as a badge of high office by kings and emperors throughout the ancient world—he was only one of four men who ruled the Roman empire. Thanks to an elaborate system of power sharing invented by Diocletian, no single one of them could claim to be
the
emperor of Rome. Indeed, just as pagan Rome recognized the divine authority of a great many gods and goddesses, the Romans submitted to the political authority of a great many men.

Here we encounter another core value of polytheism, one that is expressed in politics rather than religion. Some of the oldest and most revered political traditions of Rome, like those of Greece, were based on the simple idea that no single man was entitled to rule as an autocrat. Greece was the birthplace of a primitive form of democracy, and Rome deposed its last reigning king in favor of a republican government in 509 B.C.E. Of course, neither of these early forms of democracy were very democratic in the modern sense—political power was shared only by wealthy and highborn males who enjoyed the privilege of sitting in the assemblies and making decisions that were binding on everyone else, including the women, the poor and the slaves who made up the majority of the population. But the proto-democracies of the ancient world embodied one of the fundamental assumptions of paganism—just as the pagans of Greece and Rome did not worship a single all-powerful god, they did not submit to a single all-powerful king.

But, significantly, the old assumptions began to change shortly before the radical new idea of Christian monotheism first appeared. Octavian, a grandnephew of Julius Caesar, prevailed over Marc Antony in the civil war that followed his great-uncle’s assassination and elevated himself to the rank of emperor in 27 B.C.E. The newly minted emperor began to call himself Augustus (“Sacred One”), a term that would later be used as a title of office by his successors on the imperial throne. He followed the example of Alexander the Great in accepting an honor previously afforded only to deities and dead emperors—statues were fashioned in his image, and worship was offered to him as a living deity.

Even so, Octavian dared not abolish the Senate, which retained much of its old prestige and many of its old privileges, and he never repudiated the republican traditions of Rome. The very first Roman emperor, according to law, ruled not as an all-powerful autocrat but as the
Princeps
—that is, the “first man” but not the
only
man to exercise political authority in Rome. Octavian accepted worship as “son of [the] god,” a reference to the fact that his great uncle (and adoptive father) had been deified after death, but it never occurred to him or anyone else to suggest that the newly divinized emperor—or
any
of the many other gods and goddesses—was the
only
deity worthy of worship.
⁴

Indeed, it was under Octavian that an altar to the Goddess of Victory was installed in the chambers of the Senate, a neglected temple of the Magna Mater, the Great Mother of the Gods, was restored and the Greek god Apollo, long worshipped in Rome, was formally added to the Roman pantheon with the construction of a temple in his honor on the Capitoline. Not until the victory of monotheism did the notion of the Only True God find its political equivalent in the Roman empire in the notion of a single and all-powerful monarch.

Lord and Master

By the reign of Diocletian, Rome had been ruled (or misruled) by a long succession of men who claimed the rank of “Augustus.” Few of them, however, enjoyed the success in war and diplomacy that had been achieved by Octavian. The Roman empire reached its high watermark during the first century C.E., when the
Pax Romana
stretched from Mesopotamia to Britain, from Gaul to Carthage. But the zenith of imperial Rome passed quickly, and the next three centuries were memorably characterized by Gibbon as its “decline and fall.” The emperors who followed Octavian to the throne were forced to contend with a series of seemingly apocalyptic woes—famine and drought, plague and pestilence, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, wars and rumors of wars, the threat of both “barbarian” hordes and Persian armies on the frontiers of the far-flung empire, not to mention such thoroughly modern problems as consumer price inflation and currency devaluation.

A few of the emperors who presided over the decline of the Roman empire were men of accomplishment and even brilliance—Marcus Aurelius (121-180) distinguished himself as a philosopher as well as a statesman—but most of them ranged down the scale from mediocrity to outright incompetence or abject madness. Nero for example, is recalled as a demonic sadist who was believed to have engaged in incest with his own mother during the riotous days of the Saturnalia, the festival in honor of the god Saturn, and reputedly kicked to death his pregnant wife. But not even the worst of them ruled over the Roman empire as an absolute monarch. Nero declined an offer from the Senate to be officially deified and worshipped: “The Princeps does not receive the honour of a god,” he demurred, “until he has ceased to be among men.”
⁵

Diocletian was markedly less modest than Nero on the question of his own divinity. A commoner from one of the Balkan provinces, reputedly the son of an emancipated slave, he rose through the ranks of the Roman legions and was boosted onto the imperial throne in a coup d’état carried out by his fellow officers. Once enthroned, he did not hesitate to put his new wealth and authority on lavish display. He was not content with a mantle of imperial purple; his garment was hemmed in gold and even his slippers were bejeweled. He crowned himself with a diadem, a circlet of gold and gemstones that prefigured the more elaborate headgear of future kings. On the rare occasion when he granted an audience to one of his subjects, the petitioner was required to prostrate himself. He was the first Roman emperor to adopt the titles of Lord and King, which created something of a scandal among those who still honored the republican traditions of ancient Rome and disdained such exalted titles for the “first man” of the empire.

“Two hundred and fifty years earlier,” writes historian John Holland Smith, “when Tiberius had once been called ‘Lord and Master’ he had claimed that he was being deliberately insulted.”
⁶

Still, Diocletian did not repudiate all of the stately traditions of pagan Rome. Tellingly, he renounced the newfangled cult of
Sol Invictus
, the Unconquered Sun, which dressed up the idea of monotheism in the garb of paganism, and he sought to polish up the Roman pantheon and restore the old gods and goddesses to their primacy in the official rituals of worship. Indeed, the anxieties that prompted Diocletian to order the torture and mutilation of Christians who refused to join in the pagan rituals of worship—and, along with them, the followers of the Persian mystic called Mani—were stoked by his conviction that the various imported cults posed a distinct and growing threat to the empire itself.

Thus, while Diocletian still offered worship to Mithra—the Persian god especially favored by the Roman legions from which Diocletian had risen to power—he reserved the greatest honors for the old pantheon of Greco-Roman gods, Jupiter and Hercules among them. He may have been an
arriviste
and a self-made man, a reformer who tinkered with the old institutions of the Roman empire and invented entirely new ones, but he regarded himself as the savior and protector of the
Pax Deorum
—the “peace of the gods”—on which the empire was believed to depend for its very survival. Indeed, as if to replicate the rule of the many gods, Diocletian devised a new system of imperial rule that came to be called the Tetrarchy, a kind of imperial civil service that divided the office of emperor among four men.

Two members of the Tetrarchy held the higher rank of Augustus, and two held the lower rank of Caesar, both titles derived from names used by the very first Roman emperor, Octavian. One pair of emperors—an Augustus and a Caesar—ruled over the western provinces of the Roman empire, and the other ruled over the eastern provinces. Although Diocletian was still the first among the coemperors, the edicts and decrees now carried the names of all four. Diocletian envisioned that the officeholders would gather seniority based on their years of service, the junior Augustus replacing the senior Augustus when he died or retired, thus providing an orderly succession in place of the intrigue and violence that had long characterized the imperial politics of Rome.

The theological underpinnings of the Tetrarchy were specifically polytheistic. Diocletian, as the senior Augustus, claimed the high god Jupiter as his tutelary deity; the junior Augustus, Maximian, claimed the demigod Hercules; and the two divinities symbolized the power sharing that was so characteristic of paganism. And so, when Constantius the Pale was first raised to the purple in the western half of the Roman empire in 293, his title was Caesar, and he was second in rank to Maximian. Their counterparts in the east were Diocletian and Galerius, who served as his Caesar.

The Fortunate Son

When Constantius put away Helena, the innkeeper’s daughter, and took Theodora, the emperor’s stepdaughter, as his wife—all at the urging of the senior Augustus, Diocletian—he was engaging in the ancient and enduring act of self-promotion known as marrying the boss’s daughter. Helena is suddenly eclipsed by Theodora in the ancient chronicles, although she will ultimately reappear as the single most powerful woman in the life of her son, Constantine. But Constantius did not distance himself from his firstborn. While three more sons and three daughters were born to Constantius and his new wife, Theodora, it was Constantine whom he regarded as his favorite son and future heir, even though he may have been, strictly speaking, a bastard.