Afterword
March 12, 2013, Vatican City and Rome
One hundred and fifteen cardinals from across the world, draped in crimson, locked themselves inside the Sistine Chapel. Their mission was to choose the new head of the Catholic Church. Five votes and one day later, the tiny chimney pipe in the roof of the chapel began to puff white smoke. To the crowds of pious and curious onlookers that had gathered in St. Peter’s Square, it was a welcome sign. The selection process—of secret paper ballots and incinerated results, all of which had taken place under the watchful eye of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s ceiling and his exuberant vision of the Last Judgment, behind the altar—had drawn to a close. A new pope had been chosen. Four months later, during his famous in-flight press conference in July, Francis would make news again, this time by wading into the issue of gay clergy. “Who am I to judge?” he said, to the gasps of many. Weren’t Christians supposed to be intolerant?
The great Renaissance artist Michelangelo can guide us here. His ceiling and Last Judgment have witnessed countless papal elections—eleven in a row since 1878 and many more in the centuries that preceded Italy’s birth, in 1870. Today, in the sweltering Roman summer, nearly twenty thousand people a day still line up to see his images of God creating Adam and of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Between forbidden camera flashes, they might see the Jewish prophets, too (Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, and others), enthroned like royalty because their words are thought to have predicted Jesus’s birth. Is it any wonder that so many people are still arrested by that ceiling? Michelangelo was telling a story about God’s plan for the world, but even he knew to add what we omit—usually out of embarrassment—when we retell that story to ourselves.
There, at the margins of the ceiling, are the women. Each of them is setting her words on paper. Some leaf through their books, others read or hold a scroll. Michelangelo has labeled them—from Erythraea, Delphi, Cumae, Libya, and Persia—borrowing from a list of ten names that dates back to a Roman antiquarian of the first century B.C., Varro.1 These are the Roman Sibyls (figure 16). Michelangelo is telling us that they “predicted” the rise of Christianity. How many of us have stood in the Sistine Chapel and pushed these women to the side? Michelangelo knew better. He has them holding history in their hands. He’s right, too. From Clement to Constantine to Lactantius, even Rufinus, many of Jesus’s followers had been entranced by them.
In the fourth century A.D., how many of Jesus’s followers feared they lived on the eve of Nero’s return? How many believed that Mediterranean “Sibyls” had foreordained Christianity’s triumph, overlooking the inconvenient truth that many of these poems had been written by Christians? Was anyone aware that still other texts had been intended for a Jewish audience during the fiercest moments of their own military conflict with Rome? The fact of the matter is that by the fourth century A.D., many of Jesus’s followers who subscribed to these views must have sounded no different to their Roman neighbors and government officials than Lentulus had sounded to Cicero in 63 B.C.—which is to say, they probably sounded like raving lunatics.2
Many early Christians themselves raised a puzzled eyebrow at the kinds of things other Christians were thinking and saying. To Lactantius, the wild notion about Nero’s return wasn’t rooted in reality. The ghastly emperor’s miraculous reappearance wasn’t going to herald “the arrival of the Antichrist,” he assured his Christian audiences. Nero was not “the precursor of the devil.” Fantastic ideas like these, including nervousness about the end of the world, were being tossed about by “crazies” (deliri), Lactantius said. (He, too, uses the adjective as a noun.) Where people had gotten them, he couldn’t really guess. It was likely they’d picked them up from some sketchy source—from some “Sibyl,” Lactantius sneered.3
If Lactantius was praying for relief from these embarrassingly unfulfilled Christian predictions of impending doom, very little had changed by the start of the fifth century A.D. Some of Jesus’s followers were still babbling on about an approaching cataclysm, and they were doing so with such “a stubborn assurance,” Augustine of Hippo said, that he marveled at their obstinacy.4 From Lactantius to Augustine, an entire century had passed, but two of the most prolific Christians of late antiquity were trying to push back against deranged ideas that had been festering among Jesus’s followers for generations. Even the bishop of Milan hadn’t hesitated to draw upon this rhetoric—“I detest the rites of all the ‘Neros,’” he said—because he must have thought the specter of “Nero” was a useful one to conjure. Yet Nero never did come back, the Antichrist never did arrive, and most important, the world never came to an end. We owe it to all the people of the Roman Empire to put this type of thinking under our microscope and study it.
Many of these people—Christians—fought against it, as silently, steadfastly, and passionately as they knew how. They went to popular Roman festivals with their friends and neighbors. They served alongside other Romans in the army. They enjoyed the theater, cheered on their favorite horses, delighted in a day at the baths, even signed up for membership in their local Roman social club. Cyprian and others may have marveled at their peculiar ability to do two things at once—“These things were predicted to happen at the end of times!” the bishop had shouted, in the third century A.D.—but after his death, the clock kept ticking, the world kept turning, and many of Jesus’s followers kept on living their hyphenated lives.
Many must have looked upon Cyprian’s prediction of an imminent end, with its accompanying terrifying idea of a Last Judgment, and found it wholly distasteful. Put simply, a large number of Jesus’s followers—I wish we did have hard data—had learned to see the Roman world in shades of gray, not in black-and-white. Of course, their peers could and did see matters differently. “I prefer to be a partner with you in Good rather than Evil [bonum and malum],” Ambrose confessed to Theodosius at the beginning of the Callinicum affair.5 Here was a man who did see the world as starkly divided. Just as Tertullian believed that angels were fighting demons, for Ambrose, there could never be any ethical or moral in-between.6
This world view will probably sound “Manichean,” to some.7 Mani was a visionary who lived in the third century Sasanian Empire, and he did profess a similar outlook. His teachings would eventually spread to Rome, where a series of fourth century laws tried to eradicate them. They also traveled east. By the mid eighth century, the Uighur kingdom, today an autonomous region in China, had adopted Manicheanism as its official worship practices, the first and only time in history a state has done so.8
Motifs of spiritual conflict predate Mani, however. They are not exclusively a Christian phenomenon, either.9 They appear in literature as early as the third millennium B.C. Much later, they inspired Daniel in the second century B.C., and after him, Revelation. In Egypt, they gave a Jewish poet the tools to spur on Jewish rebels in the second century A.D. Even the emperor Constantine incorporated them into his speech, depicted them on his palace door, and stamped them on the empire’s coinage. During times of crisis, real or perceived, many people drew upon these ideas: Jews, Christians, even disaffected Romans. Some did so in moderation. Others may have had no stomach for them.
That’s why Michelangelo’s Sibyl is such a powerful symbol. She embodies so many of the curious ideas we’ve encountered throughout this book. She is the writer who dwelled on the looming end-time, like Cyprian. She is the one who talked of spiritual war, like Ambrose. She is the voice of the person who saw history unfolding in discrete sequences, like the Jewish rebel in Egypt. She is the visionary who beheld a world of angels and demons, like Tertullian. She is someone who thought the present was in need of salvation and that a leader would come to protect it, like Constantine and Lentulus. And she is the one who believed that glory would come, soon, like the literal readers of Revelation. The Sibyl is the sign of all these people’s world views. She speaks to the role that their beliefs played in shaping Roman history.10 We cannot ignore them.
History, after all, is not just what we choose to see about the past. It also includes things we might wish were never there.
Our story spans six hundred years, from the Maccabees to Theodosius. During that time we’ve strolled streets in Carthage, Rome, and Constantinople. We’ve analyzed the splintered and fracturing politics of people in Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Milan. We’ve listened to the stories of men and women who lived vastly different lives, sometimes right next door to each other: bald initiates of Isis, Jews who campaigned for safe space in Ephesos, Jesus’s followers who found camaraderie in a house on the banks of the Euphrates River. Above all, we’ve eavesdropped as the people of this great ancient empire argued passionately with each other about their different visions for “Rome.” What was it? What had it been? What could it be?
After such a long time on the road and at sea, it’s about time that we took account of where we are. By the time Eugenius died, in the last decade of the fourth century A.D., the Roman world had reached a crucial turning point. How had it gotten there? Perhaps we can find guidance by looking down the road. The historian Richard Landes, who has studied the anxious beliefs that accompanied the arrival of the year A.D. 1000 in an essay drafted to reflect upon fears of A.D. 2000, has offered this helpful note:
Until historians become familiar with the nature of millennial hopes and the dynamics of apocalyptic excitation and disappointment, until their radar screens have been adjusted to pick up certain kinds of data and to follow its effects past the period when it is most visible, they may most resemble some hypothetical nuclear scientists who deny the existence of subatomic particles by dismissing the shady traces of their trails as smudges on paper.11
For me, that’s another way of capturing what I said at the beginning of this book and what I have tried to explore on each of its pages: what people believe—and what people are taught to believe—can and does inform the way they engage the world. It is essential that we find ways to talk about these people with nuance and complexity. The study of “religion,” then, as we call it, is indispensable for our understanding of the conflict that so profoundly shaped people’s lives during this divisive (and decisive) time in Roman history.12
Indeed, throughout Roman history, many looked the other way at this ugly, strange phenomenon on which we have tried to shine a light here. Those who chose to face it, Christians, Jews, and non-Christians, confronted it as best they could. I have tried to tell as many of their stories as I was able. I only hope I have done so empathetically and with justice to all sides—and that, in some small way, I have freed these people from a stigma imposed on them centuries ago, when many were charged with the crime of “intolerant zeal.” If I have erred, at least let it be said that I have stayed true to my discipline. For “if there’s an acceptable bias in the writing and teaching of history,” the historian John Lewis Gaddis has written, “let it tilt towards liberation.”13 And to my mind, the Christians have always deserved better than they got from Edward Gibbon.
I thought of all these ideas again on the evening in March 2012 when Francis left the Sistine Chapel and made his way to the loggia of St. Peter’s. Some people looking up that night at the spiritual successor of St. Peter saw, in the crimson-clad men gathered around him, the blood of all the martyrs of early Christian history. Others just saw red.
What do I see now when I look back at four hundred years of Jesus’s followers in Rome?
I don’t just see the red of the martyrs. I see a group waving a flag of many colors.