Arriving in Rome, Irenaeus found himself moved by the witness that Christians there had for so long borne to Christ. Twelve men in succession, so he reported, had presided over ‘the venerable and universally renowned church founded by those two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul’.3 The state-sponsored persecution unleashed by Nero had long since petered out. Christians in the city had, by and large, been left to their own devices – and had become, in their own turn, just that little bit more Roman. The heady days when Paul had preached the imminent return of Christ were by now a century and more in the past. Christians might still hourly expect the parousia, but the original, unsettling radicalism of Paul’s own message had been diluted. Letters written in his name and that of Peter now sternly instructed women to submit to their husbands, and slaves to obey their ‘earthly masters in everything’.4 The Christians of Rome were advised not to court death at the hands of Caesar, but rather to ‘honour’ him.5 Irenaeus himself, that seasoned traveller, knew full well on what the order of the world depended, and did not hesitate to acknowledge it. ‘It is thanks to them,’ he wrote of the imperial authorities, ‘that the world is at peace. It is thanks to them that we are able to walk along well-kept roads without fear, and take ship wherever we wish.’6
Efficiently organised transport infrastructure might, however, come at a price. Irenaeus knew, even as he carried out his mission, that the churches he had left behind stood in mortal peril. The lack of any systematic persecution did not mean that Christians could afford to relax. Despite a legal obligation on governors not to disturb the order of their provinces by rooting them out, mobs were perfectly happy to take on the task themselves. Christians, who prided themselves on the distinctiveness of their worship, were – unsurprisingly – the objects of much prurient gossip. They committed incest; they worshipped the genitals of their elders and bishops; they staged ‘monstrous rituals involving a tethered dog’.7 No matter how indignantly Christians themselves might refute these calumnies, the conviction that there was no smoke without fire proved difficult to rebut. Nor did it help, in Lyon and Vienne, that the churches were largely peopled by immigrants. Hostility towards foreigners who refused to engage in the cities’ rituals of sacrifice, who scorned so much as to swear by ‘the fortune of Caesar’,8 who hailed a crucified criminal as Lord, was easily stoked. In the Rhône valley, the threat was particularly severe. In 177, when the storm finally broke, so capriciously did the violence spread, and so savagely did it manifest itself, that it seemed to its victims to have erupted from a realm of darkness beyond the merely human. Thugs roamed the streets, hunting out Christians wherever they could find them. Men and women of all ages and of all classes were dragged through a rain of fists and stones to the central square of Lyon, then flung into cells. There they were kept, to await the pleasure of the governor.
It was from gaol that the elders of the two Gallic churches had given Irenaeus his commission; and it was from gaol, once the bravest of the arrested Christians had refused the governor’s offer to spurn Christ, and thereby secure their freedom, that they were led to an amphitheatre. Cities the size of Lyon possessed one as a matter of course: for it was in the arena, where cheering crowds would gather to watch criminals thrown to wild animals, or fight one another to death, or endure cruelly inventive forms of torture, that the Roman genius for making a show out of death attained its quintessence. Yet that genius met its match in the Christians of Lyon. ‘We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe.’9 So Paul, comparing himself to a man condemned to death in the arena, had once written. Opposed to the brutally coercive power of the Roman state, Christians brought a conviction as potent as it was subversive: that they were actors in a cosmic drama. They did not shrink from the blast of the crowd’s breath, nor cower before the revolting humiliations visited on them. On the contrary: they fashioned out of their ordeals a public display of their devotion to Christ. Whether gored by bulls, or savaged by dogs, or roasted on red-hot chairs of iron, they cried out only ‘the words they had repeated all along – the declarations of their faith’. So, at any rate, it was reported to the churches of Asia Minor, in an account written quite possibly by Irenaeus himself.* With this letter, a momentous discovery was being put into effect: that to be a victim might be a source of strength. Turn on their heads the guiding assumptions of the Roman authorities, and submission might be redefined as triumph, degradation as glory, death as life. In Lyon, over the course of that terrible summer, the paradox of a crucified king held the most public stage in Gaul.
Not that the Christian concept of martyrdom – original though it certainly was – would have seemed altogether unfamiliar to spectators in the amphitheatre. Greeks and Romans were no strangers to tales of self-sacrifice. Their more edifying histories were rife with them. A philosopher might gnaw off his own tongue and spit it in a tyrant’s face; a warrior, captured by an enemy, might demonstrate his resolve by plunging his hand into a blazing fire. Exemplars such as these had always been a feature of the Roman schoolroom. The values that they instilled in the young were precisely what had enabled Rome to conquer the world. They served to illustrate the qualities of steel that had made the Roman people great. All the more grotesque, then, that criminals condemned to the arena, obliged to submit to the ministrations of torturers, penetrated by spears or swords, should have presumed to lay claim to them as well. Indeed, to the Roman authorities, the pretensions of martyrs were liable to seem so ludicrous, so utterly offensive, as to verge on the incomprehensible. Had the governor who sentenced to death the Christians of Lyon and Vienne read the account of his actions sent to the churches of Asia, he would only have been the more disgusted. ‘Those things reckoned by men low, and invisible, and contemptible,’ so the letter proclaimed, ‘are precisely what God ranks as deserving of great glory.’10 In illustration of this subversive message, it dwelt particularly on a slavegirl named Blandina. Every torture inflicted on her, every torment, she had fearlessly endured. The radiance of her heroism had put even her fellow martyrs in the shade. Blandina’s mistress, although sentenced to the arena as well, did not merit being named. Other Christians, those who had lost their nerve and renounced Christ, were dismissed as ‘flabby athletes who had failed to train’.11 It was Blandina who had won every bout, every contest – and thereby secured the crown.
That a slave, ‘a slight, frail, despised woman’,12 might be set among the elite of heaven, seated directly within the splendour of God’s radiant palace, ahead of those who in the fallen world had been her immeasurable superiors, was a potent illustration of the mystery that lay at the heart of the Christian faith. In the arena, so it was reported to the churches of Asia, Blandina’s broken body had seemed transfigured. Her fellow martyrs, in the midst of their own agonies, ‘had looked upon their sister, and seen in her person the One who was crucified for them’.13 Irenaeus had no doubt that a woman such as Blandina, when the lash bit her, felt pain just as Christ had done. This was the assurance that steeled a martyr for death. The willingness of Christians to embrace excruciating tortures – which to those who sentenced them could only appear as lunacy – was founded on an awesome conviction: that their Saviour was by their side. More than the temples and the fields for which the antique heroes of Rome had been willing to sacrifice themselves, Christ’s presence was something real. He was there in the arena, as once he had been nailed to the cross. To emulate his sufferings was to impose a meaning on the blankness and inscrutability of death.