A point, unfortunately, entirely lost on the majority of their audience. Nothing quite like the relish of Christians for dying in the cause of their God had ever been witnessed before. When martyrs were made “to run the gauntlet of whips, or to be savaged by wild beasts, or to be roasted in iron chairs, so that they were suffocated by the reek of their own flesh as it cooked,”90 the watching crowds were rarely impressed. Why should they be? A god best displayed his power by protecting those who worshipped him, not by demanding their deaths. The Romans knew this better than anyone. Because they had known how to bind themselves—religare, in Latin—to the gods, by offering them their due of sacrifices and respect, the gods had in turn bound themselves to the Roman people, and granted them all their greatness. It was this same bond—this “religio,” as the Romans termed it—that the superstition of the Christians appeared so grievously to threaten.91 The martyrs’ obduracy in the face of death struck the vast majority of their contemporaries as neither admirable nor heroic but as a sickness—the mark of deviant minds. It was also why, amid the agonies of Rome’s near collapse in the third century, the imperial authorities turned on the Christians with an escalating ferocity, in an attempt to appease the self-evidently angry gods, and purge the empire once and for all of the enemy within. “For it was our aim,” as one emperor put it, “to set everything right in accordance with the ancient laws and public discipline of the Roman people, and to ensure that the Christians too, who had abandoned the way of life of their ancestors, be returned to sanity.”92
As wave after wave of persecution broke across the cities of the Roman Empire, both sides alike knew that much was at stake. War was being waged for control of the heavens themselves. It was not the fortitude of individual Christians, as their limbs were broken, as their flesh was made to melt, as their bodies were torn to pieces by wild beasts, that was being put to the test. Rather, it was the might and the potency of their god. By their deaths, so the martyrs believed, they were serving as the shock troops of the Holy Spirit. More and more, across the entire span of the fallen world, it was the breath of the divine that was being felt. In the bones and bloodied remains of the martyrs themselves—relics endowed with a terrifying holiness. In the miserable fates of those emperors who had presumed to persecute them: Decius, cut down by the Goths; Valerian, serving as a Persian king’s mounting block. In the routing, in their mightiest strongholds, of even the most ancient and powerful demonic spirits. Any Christian martyred in Ephesus, for instance, within sight of the great temple of Artemis, won a particularly glorious victory. Every drop of Christian blood spilled in the arena served as a fresh exorcism. The filth and stench of idolatry was being purged by the cleansing power of Christ. Inexorably, the claws of Artemis, that malignant demon, were being prised from the city.
There were some Christians in Ephesus, however, who were not called to die for their faith. For them, God had other plans. In 250, when the Emperor Decius launched the first full-scale persecution of the Church, seven young Christians sought to escape arrest by hiding in a cave near the city.d There, so we are told, they were cornered, and sentenced to a living death. The entrance to the cave was bricked up. The seven young Ephesians, huddling together in their misery, fell asleep. Their slumbers, despite the wretchedness of their circumstances, proved deep and untroubled. Then, abruptly, the stones blocking off the mouth of the cave began to be moved. A shaft of light pierced the darkness. The seven sleepers awoke. Stumbling to the mouth of the cave, they found that labourers, seemingly oblivious to the wall’s original purpose, were shifting the stones. Even more strangely, the stones themselves were covered with bushes and weeds. Deeply puzzled, the seven young Christians decided to send one of their number down into the city to reconnoitre the situation. As the young man approached the outskirts, his perplexity deepened into utter bewilderment. The city appeared utterly transformed. No sacrificial smoke, no clouds of incense, rose from its walls; in the market place, temples had vanished, as though into thin air; on public buildings, all mentions of Artemis had been systematically chiselled out, while on a statue of Augustus, carved into the emperor’s forehead, was a cross. Rubbing his eyes in disbelief, the young man continued to the crossroads right in the centre of town, where a colossal idol of Artemis had always stood, as witness to her guardianship over the city. But even that was gone. In its place there now towered a giant cross, set there, according to an inscription, as “a sign of truth.”93 Self-evidently, something awesome, something quite beyond comprehension, had taken place.
Only when the young man tried to buy bread with a coin bearing the head of Decius did he learn the full, astounding truth of what had happened. He and his six companions had been asleep for rather longer than the few hours they had initially presumed. A good deal longer, in fact. Two centuries in all the young men had been walled up inside the cave. The Almighty, observing “the faith of the blessed lambs,” had stationed an angel at the entrance, “a watcher, to be the guardian of their limbs.”94 But not even the discovery that they were over two hundred years old could compare for impact with the sheer jaw-dropping scale of the transformation that had overtaken Ephesus, and the world beyond the city’s walls. Back in the time of Decius, fleeing the agents of persecution, they would all of them, no doubt, have recalled the terrifying vision of Danieclass="underline" of how four beasts, which were the four great empires of the world, ruling in succession over mankind, had emerged from a raging sea. And they would have remembered as well that the fourth beast was the deadliest of alclass="underline" “terrible and dreadful and exceedingly strong; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet.”95 Sitting in the darkness of the cave before falling asleep, the seven young Christians would surely have had no doubt as to the identity of this beast; nor that what Daniel had been shown, in the vision of its terrifying depredations, was a prophecy of the persecution of the Church. After all, they themselves had witnessed the full horror of its savagery: “its teeth of iron and claws of bronze.”96
Yet, Daniel had seen as well that the beast would ultimately be destroyed. And so it had proved. An empire once filthy with the pollution of idolatry, and beslathered with the blood of saints, had been transformed into something that no Christian back in the time of Decius would ever have imagined it becoming: the very mirror-image of the City of God. In AD 312—sixty-two years after the entombment of the seven sleepers and less than a decade after Rome’s persecution of the Church had attained a veritable peak of savagery—the miracle of miracles had occurred: Constantine, midway through his project of uniting the empire under his sole rule, had been granted a vision of a cross in the sky. A mysterious voice had commanded, “By this sign, conquer.”97 Constantine, convinced that it was Christ Himself who had spoken to him, had done as instructed—and duly conquered. A century and a half later, the promise of victory in Daniel’s vision had been spectacularly fulfilled: “And as I looked, the beast was slain, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire.”98 Proof of this, should the seven sleepers need it, was provided by what had once been the greatest building in the Greek world. Long since abandoned to rising swamps, the temple of Artemis was now nothing but a carcass: its blackened columns had toppled into the mud; its shattered silhouette was barely visible through marsh-fumes and clouds of insects; its body, if not yet destroyed, was certainly decayed beyond redemption. The fires that Daniel had predicted would consume the beast blazed now directly on its steps, as lime-burners fed the temple’s shattered marble into their kilns. Aside from these labourers’ huts, crudely erected on the margins of the colossal wreck, there were few other marks of human habitation. People rarely visited a place so accursed. Now, in Ephesus, it was churches which dominated the commanding heights, and Christians who held the reins of power. Only occasionally would the few men and women who remained true to the worship of the ancient goddess approach her ruined temple, scrape the silt from its toppled altars, and offer a clandestine sacrifice.