‘How do you know we’ll be safe in Pompeii, wherever that is?’
‘Because my uncle will make sure we’re safe. Respected, discreet, a reader of books, kind, lonely – I owe him a visit. The story will be I incurred Nero’s displeasure for something trivial. He’ll be glad to shelter us. He believes in the old republic.’
‘Disaster, nothing but disaster. God makes the fire, God makes the wind blow. Blessed be the name of the Lord. All through our history. Escape, exile, wandering in the desert.’
‘For once the Jews are nobody’s enemy. It’s the Christians this time. You know, preachers of love and tolerance. We’re the enemy.’
Aquila had an urgent order for tents to be pitched in the Campus Martius and had to take on more help. Nobody thought of him as a Christian. Luke, leaving copies of his ‘Pauliad’ with his patient Gaius Petronius, left for the Adriatic coast. Linus was just discreetly no more around. But Peter, beard stirring in the wet wind, staff in hand, went weeping round the corpses of those he must think of as his butchered flock. Linus could postpone his paternity, papa of Rome to be, but Peter owed God a death and defied the morning cockcrow as he went about the city blessing and mourning. He was taken at first for an old foreign madman and left alone.
Tigellinus said: ‘If Caesar would care to read the report. Here is a list of some of the more unexpected members of the ah sect.’
They were seated on that north-western segment of the Palatine which had missed the fire. Here were living quarters enough, though not for an emperor. The work of reconstruction had started: engineers consulted their plans and foremen bellowed at sweating slaves. ‘I’d no idea,’ Nero said, ‘there were so many of our pureborn aristocrats. Lucius Popidius Secundus – he was one, and I never knew. A fine eater and drinker.’
‘Well, of course – some of the enemies of the state have been listed as Chrestians. That makes things a lot easier. But most of them are the real thing.’
‘The term is Christians, Tigellinus. And I’m rather sick of these allegations of anthropophagy and so on. I can’t bear ignorance. I learnt a lot, you know, from that man.’
‘And that man, unfortunately, has left Italy. But I’m assured that he’ll be back. These people talk very freely. They don’t lie, or they don’t seem to. They seem rather pleased at being arrested, some of them. They’re mad, even the Romans have lost their Roman qualities. It’s a debilitating sort of superstition.’
‘You don’t understand, do you, Tigellinus? They don’t mind dying. To them death is the gate to eternal life, if they’ve done right. If they’ve done wrong they go to a place where the fire burns without consuming. And that goes on for ever. But if they’re executed because of their faith, then that turns them into witnesses for the faith, and all the wrong things they’ve done are cancelled out.’
‘You speak, Caesar, with a certain wistfulness. Not a pleasant thought, is it – eternal fire for having murdered and raped and tried to castrate a boy to turn him into a woman and turned yourself into a bride losing her maidenhood and thrust at the Vestal Virgins? Not a pleasant religion to have about the place. We’re better without them. And the dear Roman people are having the time of their lives burning and robbing. Ah, policy, policy. We’ll get them all, including the bald Jew who took your fancy.’
‘It won’t do, though,’ Nero frowned, ‘all this burning. I’m sick of the stench of fire. It’s not aesthetic. It’s disordered. Gaius Petronius thinks so too. His sense of beauty and order is deeply offended.’
‘I thought you’d banished that waterlily.’
‘That waterlily, as you so rudely term him, has more sense of beauty in his little toes than you have in all your burly fishfed carcase. You’re a coarse man, Tigellinus.’
‘Caesar, of course, knows all about coarseness.’
‘Caesar knows a lot of things, Tigellinus. That’s why he’s Caesar.’
One thing Caesar knew was a little book written by a Greek physician which described the early struggles and triumphs of the Christian faith. Gaius Petronius had been enthusiastic about the strength of the narrative line, the almost Homeric terseness of the phraseology, though he regretted what the Greek language had lost since the time of the great ancients: it had, as the second language of the Empire, become a medium tending to the utilitarian, commercial, political, sentimental. It lacked the old marble and fire. The book was addressed, see, to a certain Theophilus, lover of God. Gaius Petronius had it on the word of the author himself that it was assumed some day Caesar would be Theophilus: what man better endowed with the insight to be washed in the pure light of the emergent truth? Nero knew Gaius Petronius was about his old game of extravagant flattery, but he was complaisant. Nero the darling of the ultimate god of truth and beauty and goodness: it was a pleasant idea. Unfortunately there was this doctrine of eternal fire. Given time, he might repent of his dastardly acts, acts thrust upon him by the destiny of the imperiate, but there was no guarantee of that. It was best to have the una nox dormienda, after all, and this meant having no Christianity in his realm. He burnt the little book with his own hands, not knowing there were other copies. He would kill the upstart faith and all its adherents, so that none could prate to him of eternal fire, yet he would enable those adherents to believe they were going to eternal bliss. It would cost him nothing. But the whole business had to be carried out aesthetically. He conferred with Gaius Petronius as to how this might best be done.
‘You’re so right, Caesar. It offends one’s senses to see and smell all those corpses along the Appian Way and, indeed, the streets of the city.’ Nero was with Petronius on a garden seat in an arbour of Petronius’s leafy estate, whither the stench of smouldering Rome had never travelled. ‘Refine the taste of the people – has not that always been our aim? Confine the deaths of these fanatics to the arena but in no brutal manner. Let them be drawn into representations of Roman myth and history. Greek too. It’s a marvellous opportunity. Will you leave it to your humble friend and coadjutor to sketch a programme?’
When the Roman people filed in from their temporary shelters to sit with their garlic sausages and children and wives, twenty thousand strong under awnings to hold off the sun, having become most sensitive to burning, they did not quite know what they were going to be given. The hydraulis boomed at them the usual purple music which conveyed vague emotions of death and glory, but then it abruptly ceased as a hundredfold of men and women marched proudly into the arena singing. The auditors were prepared to applaud the chorus, which resounded with what sounded like the poetic expression of the good old Roman virtues, but when the name Christus came into it the crowd reacted very unfavourably. Indeed, the brains of the less intelligent whirled with the terrible notion that things had become inverted, that the Emperor had gone suddenly mad and wished to present the Christians not as Rome-hating fireraisers but as a sect to be admired for their fireraising courage (always said the bastard wanted the city burnt, didn’t I, but he won’t get away with this). But everything came right when a portcullis whizzed up and a pride of starved lions was thrust into the arena by men in Etruscan masks with five-thonged whips. The lions snarled back at their keepers, but then the portcullis clashed down and the lions began to show a vague interest in the Christian chorus. They were very hungry and they sniffed human sweat. They crept forward on their furry bellies, expecting resistance from their prey. All that happened was that the Christians, at a signal from a brawny young man who seemed to be their leader, went down on their knees with total unanimity and began to recite what sounded like a poem in Latin to their father in the skies. The phrase panem quotidianum raised some laughs among the vulgar; no more daily bread for this lot. When a lioness, with the instinct of a mother needing flesh for her cubs, made a leap on the Amen, a fighting spirit arose among the Christians, some of whom leapt on the lioness, to her apparent surprise, and rolled on top of her, pinning her to the sand with her paws up, roaring. Some of the lions looked languidly at this, but then one of them seemed to
resent this human attack on one of the pride and walked, not too quickly, towards an old woman still on her knees. She screamed but remained immobile while the lion licked her left arm with his rough tongue. He clawed off the sleeve to get at the flesh and then blood started. It was enough. He had that old woman down on her back, lay on her and began to tear her throat out. A couple of young men who might have been her sons beat at the lion’s rump and pulled his mane, but he kept to his meal, impervious.
And now a number of the predestined victims ran away from the knot of feeding lions, rebuked by the crowd for poor sportsmanship and a failure of solidarity. But, clearly, the lions could not eat everybody. They were doing well enough with their concentrated bone crushing and limb tearing, though most had the wit to get at the softer parts first – a good clawing of the belly and the spilling of the guts and an easy meal of bloody puddings. The limbs could come later. But this was not art. This was no gladiatorial display. It was only butchery. Gaius Petronius in the imperial box shook his head: the overture had gone on too long; it was time for the aesthetic part to begin. The master of the games must have thought so too, for the masked keepers with their whips reappeared, lashing the beasts back to their enclosure. Most of them objected, being engaged still in heavy feeding, and they snarled, raising one paw while the other held down their meat. At length they were persuaded, having tasted the whip, to go to their den, some of them carrying chunks of Christian in their jaws, while the rest of the mess, blood, bones, skin, flesh, sand, was pushed with them by men handling wooden pushers on long poles. The uneaten Christians were lashed towards the gate opposite. They had no need of the whip, for they marched firmly, singing as before, some of them waving to the sausage-chewers. The cheers they got were not all ironic. Things were not going quite as they should.
Gaius Petronius had found little useful Roman myth or history to dramatise: it was all conquering people or betraying them, and to dress up Christians as Etruscans or Carthaginians and to put swords and spears into their grips was not necessarily to make them fight. Very clear round yawns were to be heard from some of the gristlefed mob. There was wheeled on a catapult, of the massive kind for hurling stones at enemy fortifications, and male Christians were shot into the air, it having been explained to the four corners of the arena by a bullvoiced announcer that Christians expected to fly to heaven: well, see them fly. So the steel bow was bent by means of a windlass, the cord was released by a spring, and Christians went flying into the audience without the permission of the audience having been obtained. This resulted in the grave injury of certain good Roman plebeians, who rightly grumbled that they had been hurt enough by the damned Christians without having to be hurt more. The Greek myths would perhaps go down better.
Caleb, very sour and vindictive, explained to a young Christian what was now to happen to him. ‘You know the story, do you? Daedalus was the first man to make wings and fly. He made wings for his son, too. His son’s name was Icarus. But Icarus flew too near the sun and the wax on his wings melted. So he fell. You’re Icarus. You’re going to fall. You’re going to have your skull split open. And that goes for the rest of you,’ he said, raising his voice to a group of other potential Icaruses.
‘You’re a Jew, aren’t you? You speak to a fellow Jew.’
‘No, you’re a Christian. A killer. You killed my son. Blast you to hell.’
‘So you believe what you’re told?’
‘As you do. Get out there, blast you.’
In the centre of the arena a very high wooden tower had been placed, eight strutted feet holding it firm to the ground. There was a ladder to the top, and at the top was a platform on which Daedalus stood, having, by an acceptable fiction, flown there by means of his wooden and sackcloth wings. His task was to grasp each Icarus as he arrived at the top of the ladder and then hurl him off. To ensure that the skullcracking would be effectual, a scree of rocks lay at the bottom. The game did not go well. Some of the Icaruses refused to mount: if they were going to die anyway, why should they have to suffer physical exhaustion and humiliation first? When they had their heads clubbed at the foot of the ladder, Gaius Petronius wrung his hands: these Christians had no sense of art; how could their god be a god of beauty? But it was with relief that he saw a muscular Christian Jew, heavily bearded and bullnecked, gladly climb the ladder in his thin wings of wire and cloth. On the high platform he nodded at the sight of a skin of water to relieve the thirst of the circus performer who played Daedalus, took it, grabbed Daedalus by the neck, then solemnly baptised him. With one hand on nape and the other on fat arse, he sent the father of flight yelling into the air and to a messy, though presumably holy, death below. Gaius Petronius chewed his nails: that was a lie, that was not the ancient legend, it was a perversion, no sense of art – Circus hands mounted the ladder to get at unfallen Icarus, but he kicked them easily down or hit them with the club Daedalus had intended to launch the more reluctant fliers. Eventually the tower itself was, through the combined muscles of a dozen circus hands, toppled into the dust, and the young Jewish Christian, having blessed the populace, spilt his brains for its delectation. A spectacular ending to the act, but, even the dullest could tell, it had not quite followed the devisers’ intention: a lack of sportive justice in it, somehow.
Various naked Christian women were made, successively, to ride a vigorous white bull. If that bull was meant to be Zeus, then this was a blasphemous parody. When the Europas fell into the dust screaming and were duly tossed and gored, the blasphemy was somewhat mitigated. ‘Watch. Watch,’ Nero ordered Poppea. She had been hiding her eyes in her veil. She dropped it now only to bunch her lovely face in nausea. Then she left the imperial box, vomiting on Tigellinus as she went. Some noticed this and a faint wave of approval arose from, it was supposed, the plebeians of her sex. Nero was angry and spat viciously at Gaius Petronius.
As an amythic interlude, several Christians were brought on dressed in animal skins. Then wild dogs, their jaws adrip with hydrophobia, were loosed on to them. These creatures were frightened by the sudden unleashing of a confident Christian hymn, and they were confused when some of the Christians tore off their skins and threw them at the snarling teeth. The dogs assumed that it was these skins they were intended to devour, and they did so for a time despite the crowd’s remonstrance. Then, finding no nourishment in the aromatic pelts, they leapt at the Christian throats, of which there were enough to go round. Finally there came a carefully organised set piece, in which Roman troops were dressed as barbarous Britons, complete with stuck-on yellow moustaches and yellow wigs. The male Christians were comically dressed as Roman troops, armed with wooden swords and spears. The pseudobarbarians had bows and arrows and, with fine style and accurate aim, they transfixed at their leisure the pseudoromans. Now the crowd was placed in something of a dilemma. It appreciated that the show was intended to remind them of the recent British revolt against well-meaning Roman colonialism; it understood that the Christians were, in a sense, being butchered for mocking stalwart Roman troops; it knew that the arrow-aiming display demonstrated Roman skill even with barbaric weapons; but they were confused because the final image – warwhooping of bowmen with moustaches coming unstuck and wigs awry under the dying sun – was not really one creditable to the Roman Empire. Gaius Petronius’s patriotism, it seemed to Nero, was of a highly qualified kind: it let art, and mediocre art at that, get in the way. It was to be hoped that the second day of the games would go better than this.
The duty officer at the city council offices, which stood at the junction of the Via Tiburtina and the Vicus Longus, was puzzled that evening when an old man who spoke neither Greek nor Latin seemed to demand to be arrested. The officer searched for an interpreter, having at least established that the old man was Jewish, and found a wounded soldier who had served in Palestine, now working for the municipality as a limping messenger between departments, who understood the old man well enough.
‘He says he’s Petrus, sir, and that he’s not only a Chri
stian but the head of the Christians. He says he got that appointment from the man himself, Christus that is.’
‘What does he want?’
‘He says he doesn’t see why he should go on living while so many of his friends are being seen off, so to speak.’
‘He wants to die, you mean?’
‘Well, it’s reasonable, sir. He’s a Christian, he says.’
‘This isn’t a military headquarters, Crassus. It’s nothing to do with us. He’d better be sent to the Castra Praetoria. They’re in charge of rounding up Christians. Strange, though. Wants it, does he?’
‘You can see his point in a way, sir. He’s had his time, he says. When mere children are getting the knife stuck in, he says, why should the father of the whatdoyoucallit go free. He’s done his best to attract attention, he says, shouting the odds in the street, but nobody’s taken a blind bit of notice.’
‘He seems harmless enough. Take him there. You don’t need any help, do you?’
‘Well, it’s not really in the way of duty, is it? And me with this bad leg. We could get somebody from the Vigiles to take him. That’s only round the corner.’
‘All right, get somebody.’
There was no shortage of speakers of bad Aramaic at the Castra Praetoria. The interrogating officer was as puzzled as the functionary at the municipal offices by what sounded like a calm acceptance of a sort of collective guilt on the part of the old man. But guilty of exactly what? Of burning Rome or of belonging to a superstitious sect which had been declared illegal? All the old man would speak of was two outlandish places called Sodom and Gomorrah, which had been burnt by the Lord God for their sins, and he said that Rome was worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. That sounded very much like an admission of Christian responsibility for massive incendiarism, and the old man was asked if he would sign a statement to that effect. No, he would sign nothing. He had never signed anything in his life. Crucify me and get it all over with. Crucify? Who are you to specify your mode of dispatch? I’ve given myself up, haven’t I? I have certain rights, don’t I? I want to be crucified, but not in the usual way. I want it to be done upside down. The old man was clearly crazy. Perhaps they ought to discharge him with a caution. Upside down, indeed. That made the whole thing vaguely comic. Well, they could wash their hands of the business by sending him to the master of the games. Christians had become material for popular entertainment. Undignified, somehow. Rome was losing its reputation for punitive dignity.