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Dominion- the Making of the Western Mind
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RUBICON:
The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic
PERSIAN FIRE:
The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
MILLENNIUM:
The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom
IN THE SHADOW OF THE SWORD:
The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World
DYNASTY:
The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar
LITTLE, BROWN
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Little, Brown
Copyright © Tom Holland 2019
The right of Tom Holland to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Lyrics from ‘All You Need is Love’ by John Lennon and Paul McCartney on p. ix © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-4087-0697-8
Little, Brown
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk
www.littlebrown.co.uk
In memory of Deborah Gillingham. Much loved, much missed.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Preface
ANTIQUITY
I
ATHENS
II
JERUSALEM
III
MISSION
IV
BELIEF
V
CHARITY
VI
HEAVEN
VII
EXODUS
CHRISTENDOM
VIII
CONVERSION
IX
REVOLUTION
X
PERSECUTION
XI
FLESH
XII
APOCALYPSE
XIII
REFORMATION
XIV
COSMOS
MODERNITAS
XV
SPIRIT
XVI
ENLIGHTENMENT
XVII
RELIGION
XVIII
SCIENCE
XIX
SHADOW
XX
LOVE
XXI
WOKE
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Love, and do as you will.
—SAINT AUGUSTINE
That you feel something to be right may have its cause in your never having thought much about yourself and having blindly accepted what has been labelled right since your childhood.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
All you need is love
—JOHN LENNON AND
PAUL MCCARTNEY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to many people for their help and encouragement with the writing of this book. To my wonderful editors, Richard Beswick, Lara Heimert and Zoe Gullen. To Susan de Soissons, for all her advice and patience. To Patrick Walsh, best of agents. To all the many people who read sections or the entirety of the book while it was still a draft on a computer screen, or helped with questions: Richard Beard, Nigel Biggar, Piers Brendon, Fergus Butler-Gallie, Paul Cartledge, Thony Christie, Caroline Dodds-Pennock, Charles Fernyhough, Dimitra Fimi, John Fitzpatrick, Peter Frankopan, Judith Gardiner, Michael Goldfarb, James Hannam, Damian Howard, Larry Hurtado, Christopher Insole, Julia Jordan, Frank McDonough, Anthony McGowan, Sean Oliver-Dee, Gabriel Said Reynolds, Alec Ryrie, Michael Snape, Guy Walters, Keith Ward, Tim Whitmarsh and Tom Wright. To Bob Moore, for writing the books which first helped to stimulate my interest in the themes explored in this book, for his immense generosity, and for his readiness to read the chapters as they were written. To Jamie Muir, for being – as he has ever been – the first to read the manuscript when it was completed, and the most stalwart of friends. To Kevin Sim, for indulging me, and never wearying of hearing me out. To Charlie Campbell and Nicholas Hogg, for their great feat of resurrection, without which the years I have spent writing this book would not have been half as enjoyable. To Sadie, my beloved wife, and Katy and Eliza, my equally beloved daughters. Their price is far above rubies.
Some three or four decades before the birth of Christ, Rome’s first heated swimming pool was built on the Esquiline Hill. The location, just outside the city’s ancient walls, was a prime one. In time, it would become a showcase for some of the wealthiest people in the world: an immense expanse of luxury villas and parks. But there was a reason why the land beyond the Esquiline Gate had been left undeveloped for so long. For many centuries, from the very earliest days of Rome, it had been a place of the dead. When labourers first began work on the swimming pool, a corpse-stench still hung in the air. A ditch, once part of the city’s venerable defensive system, was littered with the carcasses of those too poor to be laid to rest in tombs. Here was where dead slaves, ‘once they had been slung out from their narrow cells’,1 were dumped. Vultures, flocking in such numbers that they were known as ‘the birds of the Esquiline’,2 picked the bodies clean. Nowhere else in Rome was the process of gentrification quite so dramatic. The marble fittings, the tinkling fountains, the perfumed flower beds: all were raised on the backs of the dead.
The process of reclamation, though, took a long time. Decades on from the first development of the region beyond the Esquiline Gate, vultures were still to be seen there, wheeling over a site named the Sessorium. This remained what it had always been: ‘the place set aside for the execution of slaves’.3 It was not – unlike the arenas in which criminals were put to death for the delectation of cheering crowds – a place of glamour. Exposed to public view like slabs of meat hung from a market stall, troublesome slaves were nailed to crosses. Even as seedlings imported from exotic lands began to be planted across the emerging parkland of the Esquiline, these bare trees remained as a token of its sinister past. No death was more excruciating, more contemptible, than crucifixion. To be hung naked, ‘long in agony, swelling with ugly weals on shoulders and chest’,4 helpless to beat away the clamorous birds: such a fate, Roman intellectuals agreed, was the worst imaginable. This in turn was what rendered it so suitable a punishment for slaves. Lacking such a sanction, the entire order of the city might fall apart. Luxury and splendour such as Rome could boast were dependent, in the final reckoning, on keeping those who sustained it in their place. ‘After all, we have slaves drawn from every corner of the world in our households, practising strange customs, and foreign cults, or none – and it is only by means of terror that we can hope to coerce such scum.’5
Nevertheless, while the salutary effect of crucifixion on those who might otherwise threaten the order of the state was taken for granted, Roman attitudes to the punishment were shot through with ambivalence. Naturally, if it were to serve as a deterrent it needed to be public. Nothing spoke more eloquently of a failed revolt than the sight of hundreds upon hundreds of corpse-hung crosses, whether lining a highway or else massed before a rebellious city, the hills all around it stripped bare of their trees. Even in p
eacetime, executioners would make a spectacle of their victims by suspending them in a variety of inventive ways: ‘one, perhaps, upside down, with his head towards the ground, another with a stake driven through his genitals, another attached by his arms to a yoke’.6 Yet in the exposure of the crucified to the public gaze there lurked a paradox. So foul was the carrion-reek of their disgrace that many felt tainted even by viewing a crucifixion. The Romans, for all that they had adopted the punishment as the ‘supreme penalty’,7 refused to countenance the possibility that it might have originated with them. Only a people famed for their barbarousness and cruelty could ever have devised such a torture: the Persians, perhaps, or the Assyrians, or the Gauls. Everything about the practice of nailing a man to a cross – a ‘crux’ – was repellent. ‘Why, the very word is harsh on our ears.’8 It was this disgust that crucifixion uniquely inspired which explained why, when slaves were condemned to death, they were executed in the meanest, wretchedest stretch of land beyond the city walls; and why, when Rome burst its ancient limits, only the world’s most exotic and aromatic plants could serve to mask the taint. It was also why, despite the ubiquity of crucifixion across the Roman world, few cared to think much about it. Order, the order loved by the gods and upheld by magistrates vested with the full authority of the greatest power on earth, was what counted – not the elimination of such vermin as presumed to challenge it. Criminals broken on implements of torture: who were such filth to concern men of breeding and civility? Some deaths were so vile, so squalid, that it was best to draw a veil across them entirely.
The surprise, then, is less that we should have so few detailed descriptions in ancient literature of what a crucifixion might actually involve, than that we should have any at all.* The corpses of the crucified, once they had first provided pickings for hungry birds, tended to be flung into a common grave. In Italy, undertakers dressed in red, ringing bells as they went, would drag them there on hooks. Oblivion, like the loose earth scattered over their tortured bodies, would then entomb them. This was a part of their fate. Nevertheless, amid the general silence, there is one major exception which proves the rule. Four detailed accounts of the process by which a man might be sentenced to the cross, and then suffer his punishment, have survived from antiquity. Remarkably, they all describe the same execution: a crucifixion that took place some sixty or seventy years after the building of the first heated swimming pool in Rome. The location, though, was not the Esquiline, but another hill, outside the walls of Jerusalem: Golgotha, ‘which means the place of a skull’.9 The victim, a Jew by the name of Jesus, a wandering preacher from an obscure town named Nazareth, in a region north of Jerusalem named Galilee, had been convicted of a capital offence against Roman order. The four earliest accounts of his execution, written some decades after his death, specify what this meant in practice. The condemned man, after his sentencing, was handed over to soldiers to be flogged. Next, because he had claimed to be ‘the king of the Jews’, his guards mocked him, and spat on him, and set a crown of thorns on his head. Only then, bruised and bloodied, was he led out on his final journey. Hauling his cross as he went, he stumbled his way through Jerusalem, a spectacle and an admonition to all who saw him, and onwards, along the road to Golgotha.* There, nails were driven into his hands and feet, and he was crucified. After his death, a spear was jabbed into his side. There is no reason to doubt the essentials of this narrative. Even the most sceptical historians have tended to accept them. ‘The death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross is an established fact, arguably the only established fact about him.’10 Certainly, his sufferings were nothing exceptional. Pain and humiliation, and the protracted horror of ‘the most wretched of deaths’:11 these, over the course of Roman history, were the common lot of multitudes.
Decidedly not the common lot of multitudes, however, was the fate of Jesus’ corpse. Lowered from the cross, it was spared a common grave. Claimed by a wealthy admirer, it was prepared reverently for burial, laid in a tomb and left behind a heavy boulder. Such, at any rate, is the report of all four of the earliest narratives of Jesus’ death – narratives that in Greek were called euangelia, ‘good news’, and would come to be known in English as gospels.* The accounts are not implausible. Certainly, we know from archaeological evidence that the corpse of a crucified man might indeed, on occasion, be granted dignified burial in the ossuaries beyond the walls of Jerusalem. Altogether more startling, though – not to say unprecedented – were the stories of what happened next. That women, going to the tomb, had found the entrance stone rolled away. That Jesus, over the course of the next forty days, had appeared to his followers, not as a ghost or a reanimated corpse, but resurrected into a new and glorious form. That he had ascended into heaven, and was destined to come again. Time would see him hailed, not just as a man, but as a god. By enduring the most agonising fate imaginable, he had conquered death itself. ‘Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth . . . 12
The utter strangeness of all this, for the vast majority of people in the Roman world, did not lie in the notion that a mortal might become divine. The border between the heavenly and the earthly was widely held to be permeable. In Egypt, the oldest of monarchies, kings had been objects of worship for unfathomable aeons. In Greece, stories were told of a ‘hero god’13 by the name of Heracles, a muscle-bound monster-slayer who, after a lifetime of spectacular feats, had been swept up from the flames of his own pyre to join the immortals. Among the Romans, a similar tale was told of Romulus, the founder of their city. In the decades before the crucifixion of Jesus, the pace of such promotions into the ranks of the gods had begun to quicken. So vast had the scope of Roman power become that any man who succeeded in making himself its master was liable to seem less human than divine. The ascent into heaven of one of those, a warlord by the name of Julius Caesar, had been heralded by the blaze across the skies of a fiery-tailed star; that of a second, Caesar’s adopted son, who had won for himself the name of Augustus, by a spirit seen rising – just as Heracles had done – from a funeral pyre. Even sceptics who scorned the possibility that a fellow mortal might truly become a god were happy to concede its civic value. ‘For the human spirit that believes itself to be of divine origin will thereby be emboldened in the undertaking of mighty deeds, more energetic in accomplishing them, and by its freedom from care rendered more successful in carrying them out.’14
Divinity, then, was for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and kings. Its measure was the power to torture one’s enemies, not to suffer it oneself: to nail them to the rocks of a mountain, or to turn them into spiders, or to blind and crucify them after conquering the world. That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque. The ultimate offensiveness, though, was to one particular people: Jesus’ own. The Jews, unlike their rulers, did not believe that a man might become a god; they believed that there was only the one almighty, eternal deity. Creator of the heavens and the earth, he was worshipped by them as the Most High God, the Lord of Hosts, the Master of all the Earth. Empires were his to order; mountains to melt like wax. That such a god, of all gods, might have had a son, and that this son, suffering the fate of a slave, might have been tortured to death on a cross, were claims as stupefying as they were, to most Jews, repellent. No more shocking a reversal of their most devoutly held assumptions could possibly have been imagined. Not merely blasphemy, it was madness.
Even those who did come to acknowledge Jesus as ‘Christos’, the Anointed One of the Lord God, might flinch at staring the manner of his death full in the face. ‘Christians’, as they were called, were as wise to the connotations of crucifixion as anyone. ‘The mystery of the cross, which summons us to God, is something despised and dishonourable.’15 So wrote Justin, the foremost Christian apologist of his genera
tion, a century and a half after the birth of Jesus. The torture of the Son of the Most High God was a horror simply too shocking to be portrayed in visual form. Scribes copying the gospels might on occasion draw above the Greek word for ‘cross’ delicate pictograms that hinted at the crucified Christ, but otherwise it was left to sorcerers or satirists to illustrate his execution. Yet this, to many across the Roman world, was not as deep a paradox as perhaps it might have seemed. So profound were some mysteries that mortals had no choice but to keep them veiled. The naked radiance of the gods was far too dazzling for the human eye. No one, by contrast, had been blinded by the spectacle of the Son of the Most High God being tortured to death; but Christians, although accustomed to make the sign of the cross as a gesture of piety, and to contemplate with wide-eyed reverence the gospel accounts of their Saviour’s sufferings, seem to have shrunk from seeing them represented in physical form.
Only centuries after the death of Jesus – by which time, astonishingly, even the Caesars had been brought to acknowledge him as Christ – did his execution at last start to emerge as an acceptable theme for artists. By ad 400 the cross was ceasing to be viewed as something shameful. Banned as a punishment decades earlier by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, crucifixion had come to serve the Roman people as an emblem of triumph over sin and death. An artist, carving the scene out of ivory, might represent Jesus in the skimpy loincloth of an athlete, no less muscled than any of the ancient gods. Even as the western half of the empire began to slip away from the rule of the Caesars, and fall to barbarian invaders, so in the eastern half, where Roman power endured, the Cross provided assurance to an embattled people that victory would ultimately be theirs. In Christ’s agonies had been the index of his defeat of evil. This was why, triumphant even on the implement of his torture, he was never shown as suffering pain. His expression was one of serenity. It proclaimed him Lord of the Universe.