God's Gold (27 page)

Something strange hovered in the air. Downtown Tunis was gasping for breath amid dense smog. Ghostly outlines of cars weaved in and out of traffic; people and buildings were swallowed by a vile, thick pea soup of pollution and swirling Saharan sand boiled to a sticky 80 percent humidity. Whatever Tunisians claim to pour in their gas tanks, it surely wasn't entirely lead-free fuel. With manic policemen frantically waving their hands and blowing whistles in a vain attempt to control the lawless traffic from red-and-white-striped patrol booths—looking for all the world as if they were orchestrating a Punch and Judy show—I couldn't help but wonder whether I'd landed in the aftermath of some kind of chemical meltdown.

The surreal feeling was exacerbated by the blurred image of an oversize Super Mouse waving from the side of a street. Was I dreaming? My taxi driver laughed and explained in lyrical French laced with a local Arabic patois that this cartoon figure is the national symbol of government initiatives to protect the environment. The politicians may be seriously tackling local pollution, but when the mighty Sahara stirs and takes to the skies like a biblical swarm of locust, nature beats civilization with a stick every time. I would lose count of the number of Tunisians I met with a permanent frog in their throat, endlessly clearing grains of sand from their mouths.

Arriving in Tunisia in early October 2005, and observing this proud ancient country on an off day, suited the purpose of my visit—chasing
Armageddon. Over the weeks the smog would lift to reveal glorious azure skies and beaches confirming why this most democratic of North African countries is such a popular package holiday destination.

Ancient Tunisia, or rather its capital, Carthage, was where the final death toll of classical antiquity sounded. For two hundred years after the epic triumph of the Jewish Temple treasure in AD 71, Rome basked in its magnificent superiority, successfully commanding a labyrinthine globalized empire. Of all the satellite provinces great and small, far and wide, economically Tunisia dazzled most brightly within the imperial crown jewels. A guide to the glory of Rome written in the mid-fourth century AD, the
Expositio Totius Mundi et Gentium,
described the region as “rich in all things. It is adorned with all goods, grains as well as beasts, and almost all alone it supplies to all peoples the oil they needed.”

Tunisia was Rome's breadbasket par excellence. Not only did its wealthy estates and endless wheat fields, vine trellises, and olive groves yield by far the largest taxes for the imperial treasury, but its corn and oil were staple forms of welfare doled out to Rome's city poor on a daily basis. Bottom line: the imperial government needed Tunisia desperately. She was irreplaceable.

However, in AD 429 Rome's love affair with its favorite mistress was brutally shattered—the barbarians were on the move. In May of that year a wave of 80,000 migrants, soldiers, children, and slaves sailed across the Strait of Gibraltar, having marched through Italy from the Danube, and swept east along the North African coast. Although this motley crew included various barbarian tribes, including Goths, Alans, and even Hispano-Romans, at its core was an east Germanic tribe whose bloody worldview conjures up extremely dark images to this day: the Vandals.

For generations, the Vandals had heard tales about the luxuries of the Mediterranean lands from their frozen Germanic heartland. Across the icy Danube they envied the lifestyle of Roman soldiers manning their frontier and enjoying wine and oil imported from exotic shores, including the finest Tunisian produce. Toward the end of the fourth century AD Rome was rocked by internal civil war, which left the im
perial infrastructure stretched and vulnerable. The time was ripe for the Vandals to introduce themselves to the high life. In
The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization,
Dr. Bryan Ward-Perkins of Oxford University explains: “The new arrival had not been invited, and he brought with him a large family; they ignored the bread and butter, and headed straight for the cake stand.”

Following the Gothic raid of Rome in AD 408–409, and with imperial rule now divided between the west and an eastern capital at Constantinople, the empire's resources were emaciated. Rome despaired as the barbarians, “pressed by hunger” according to the Byzantine court historian Procopius, helped themselves to the best cakes in the land. Vast tracts of North Africa were conceded to the
rex Wandalorum et Alanorum,
as Rome knew the Vandals, by a treaty of AD 435. Four years later the barbarians seized the icing on the cake, Carthage, the second-greatest city of antiquity after Rome and, by AD 477, controlled an enormous swathe of the Mediterranean including the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Corsica, and parts of Sicily. The Roman Empire had relied on Tunisia for food and sustenance for so long that it had no alternative but to swallow its pride and trade with the new masters of Africa. It was the only way to maintain a way of life to which it had grown accustomed for over four hundred years.

Less than a generation after leaving behind their life as barbarian giants, the Vandals had shed their animal furs, taken over the empire's old aristocratic estates, and were mimicking the dolce vita. For decades they had watched the masters of decadence and oppression—and waited. Now they wasted little time in replicating Rome's extravagant ways. Only one final action remained, to seize the cake shop itself—Rome.

 

M
y taxi sped across the endless flatlands of suburban Tunis, a blend of 1970s France and Middle Eastern immaterialism. Few people were at large. Unfinished low-rise housing drifted endlessly across the sandy soils. Most of it sat empty, like a makeshift refugee camp, awaiting more dinars for completion. Much of the typically single-story housing seemed ill at ease in the landscape, as unwelcome as the Vandals. This
was not the result of poor city planning, but because the flat terrain is not terra firma at all but the ancient seabed, long silted up.

A few miles east of Tunis the flatlands were interrupted by a lush, wooded hill straddling the sea of suburbia. Its summit is dominated by an enormous cathedral that announces the site to be the acropolis of ancient Carthage. The Cathedral of Saint Louis was built in 1890 in dedication to King Louis IX who, in 1270, died of the plague while besieging Carthage in an attempt to convert the Muslim king to Christianity. An ignoble end and a grand memorial have sliced away and destroyed the heart of this once great city.

We drove past this imposing island of civilization set amid sea and sand, and the mighty power of the place struck home. From here the Vandals planned the sack of Rome; from its military port the fleet sailed directly to the Eternal City in AD 455. Opinion is divided as to why the barbarians ravaged Rome: Was this act driven by greed, expansionist policies, or a will for sheer retribution? The historian Procopius offers a pretty elementary explanation: “And Gaiseric, for no other reason than that he suspected that much money would come to him, set sail for Italy with a great fleet. And going up to Rome, since no one stood in his way, he took possession of the palace” (
Wars
3.5.1).

Delving a little deeper, however, Rome was simply too large a prize for the Vandals to ignore, especially since petty palace intrigue pretty much handed the city to Gaiseric on a plate. The roots of the sack of the Eternal City involved a cruel love triangle and the wantonness of the emperor Valentinian III, who was infatuated with a woman described by Procopius as “discreet in her ways and exceedingly famous for her beauty.” The only obstacle stopping Valentinian from seducing her was the woman's inconvenient marriage to Petronius Maximus, an aristocratic Roman senator.

After scheming for some time, the lustful Valentinian invited Maximus to the palace for a relaxing game of draughts. On winning, the emperor lightheartedly accused the senator of never making good his debts, and forced the senator's ring from his hand as a temporary pledge of payment. Valentinian now had his leverage and duped Maximus's wife
by sending her the ring. Assuming her husband had summoned her, she sped to the palace, where the emperor had his way with her.

Racked with rage and guilt, Maximus relentlessly plotted against Valentinian, finally killing him to seize the throne in AD 455. With his own wife now dead, Maximus sealed the ring of fate by forcefully marrying Valentinian's own wife, the empress Eudoxia. With nothing left to lose, Eudoxia responded by writing to the Vandal king, Gaiseric, and entreating him to come to Rome and avenge the death of the emperor. The Vandal king needed no second invitation. Eudoxia has gone down in history as the empress who personally handed the barbarians the keys to Eternal Rome. No surprise, then, that one of the greatest historians of Late Antiquity, Theophanes Confessor, immortalized her in his
Chronographia
as an immoral witch who “cohabited with other women in demonic fashion and continually conversed even with those who practiced magic.”

The Vandals adopted a conflicted approach to Roman culture. On the one hand they torched, raped, and pillaged property. On the other, they mimicked aristocratic Roman lifestyles, minting imitation coins and keeping traditional forms of architecture. With no indigenous ideology to promote, the barbarians seized a ready-made culture as their own.

So with time-honored Roman flair the Vandals set Italy alight as they marched on Rome in AD 455. History has largely spared Rome detailed accounts of its ignoble fall under the barbarian ax. But there can be no denying the true objectives of the sacking of the city: first, it aimed to create chaos at the heart of the imperial political infrastructure; second, it was designed to fill the Vandal coffers. To this end, Procopius of Caesarea recorded how King Gaiseric's troops plundered the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, where almost four centuries earlier the emperor Vespasian and his son Titus celebrated the end of the triumph in honor of the subjugation of the First Jewish Revolt. Now, Gaiseric tore down the gilt bronze roof that had cost Vespasian's second son, Domitian, 12,000 talents—the modern equivalent of over $4.7 million.

Moreover, the official Byzantine court historian went on to give an
overview of the massive scale of fourteen days' looting from June 15 to June 29, AD 455:

This passage has long intrigued me. So few words, such great implications. Reading between these lines of history, did the Temple treasure of Jerusalem possibly accompany these shipments back to Carthage? We left the treasure on public display in the Temple of Peace, opened in the heart of imperial Rome at its peak in AD 75. But just how long did it survive there? Did it still exist to be hauled to Carthage in AD 455?

It is a source of great regret that very little of the physical infrastructure of this temple survives to answer this key question. As I write, Italian archaeologists are currently unraveling these secrets in the Roman Forum. Yet other than the odd column, floor, and wall foundation, the Temple of Peace has been largely despoiled by Renaissance shops superimposed over its walls. So we are forced to return to the written word.

What we do know from Cassius Dio's contemporary
Roman History
is that the temple was apparently partly burned just before the death of the emperor Commodus around AD 191:

Whatever the extent of the damage—evidently exaggerated by the historian's fertile imagination—the temple must have been subsequently restored, probably under the emperor Severus, because Ammianus Marcellinus mentions the Forum of Peace as one of the most magnificent spectacles in the city that most impressed Constantius II, the Roman emperor of the east, during his first ever state visit in AD 357. The district was still intact in AD 408, when Rome was rocked by seismic disturbances for seven successive days. However, by the time Procopius of Caesarea wrote his history of the barbarian wars, the Temple of Peace had succumbed to lightning. Crucially, however, some original works of art were still displayed in its vicinity, including a bronze statue of a bull and a calf crafted by Myron. The implication is that the major works of art in the Temple of Peace survived on display in a nearby structure.

By the fifth century AD, Rome's glory days were over. Masterly wall paintings were peeling off palace walls, and temples were abandoned to the ravages of time. Yet as the Eternal City strove to keep up appearances, her ideology lived on. If the years of global domination were a thing of the past, the Eternal City still traded on those past splendors, and the Temple treasures of Jerusalem remained in or around the Temple of Peace into the mid-fifth century. The sack of Rome in AD 455, however, was the beginning of the end. Tunisia was lost to the Vandals, and now the barbarian king had seized the finest imperial art from the Eternal City as a new birthright. As Victor of Vita, a priest writing in Carthage in AD 484, confirmed, “At that time he took into captivity the wealth of many kings, as well as people.”

Did this wealth include the Temple treasure? The reply must be a resounding yes. Not only do historical circumstances point to this conclusion, but Theophanes Confessor confirms the theory. This grand seigneur was no mere bookworm, but a man of high culture. Even though a Christian monk, Theophanes loved sport and enjoyed taking the waters in the fashionable spas of Constantinople and Bithynia, where he lived and wrote. His twelve-hundred-page
Chronographia,
an epic history of the period AD 284–813, is the most ambitious and systematic
account of the ancient past ever written by a Byzantine historiographer. His words carry serious weight.