Also by Tom Holland
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 peacetime, 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.