‘The one who wrote about the eruption of Vesuvius,’ Costas said slowly. ‘And the Vestal Virgins.’
Jack nodded. ‘The account of Vesuvius was in a letter to the historian Tacitus, written about twenty-five years after the event. Well, here’s the younger Pliny again, in a letter written shortly before he died in AD 113. By that time he was Roman governor of Pontus and Bithynia, the area of Turkey beside the Black Sea, and he’s writing to the emperor Trajan about the activities of Christians in his province. Pliny wasn’t exactly a fan of Christianity, but then he was echoing the official line. What had started out at the time of Claudius as an obscure cult, yet another mystery religion from the east, fifty years on had become a real concern to the emperors. Unlike the other big eastern cults, Mithraism or Isis worship, the Christians had become political. That was what really put Christianity at centre stage. Far-sighted Romans could see the Church becoming a focus for dissent, especially as Christianity attracted slaves, the great underclass in Roman society. The Romans were always frightened of another slave uprising, ever since Spartacus. They were also thrown off balance by the fanaticism of the Christians, the willingness to die for their beliefs. You just didn’t see that in any of the other cults. And there was something else that really terrified them.’
‘These Romans you’re talking about,’ Costas said, sneezing. ‘They’re all men. We were talking about women.’
Jack nodded, and opened the book. ‘Listen to this. A letter from Pliny the Younger to the emperor Trajan. Pliny’s seeking advice on how to prosecute Christians, as he’s never done it before. He calls it a degenerate cult, carried to extravagant lengths. He tells Trajan he has unrepentant Christians executed, though he generously spares those who make offerings of wine and incense to the statue of the emperor, the living god. But then listen to this. In order to extract the truth about their political activities, he orders the torture of “ duabus ancillis, quae ministrae dicebantur ”. Both the words ancillis and ministrae mean female attendants, but ministra is often equated with the Greek word diakonos. ’
‘Deaconesses,’ Costas mused. ‘Priestesses?’
‘That’s what really terrified the Romans,’ Jack said. ‘It’s what terrified them about the British, too, about Boudica. She fascinated them, excited them, but also terrified them. Women could be the true power behind the scenes in Rome, women like the emperor Augustus’ wife Livia, or Claudius’ scheming wives, but it was a male-dominated system. The cursus honorum, the rite of passage through military and public offices followed by upper-class Romans like Pliny the Younger and his uncle, would never have admitted a woman. Just like the image of the wild barbarian warrior queen, the idea of this new cult having priestesses on a par with men would have been horrifying, worse still if they were slaves.’
‘But I thought the Christian Church was male dominated.’
‘That’s the really fascinating thing about Pliny the Younger’s letter. That one word, deaconesses. It implies the Church didn’t start out male dominated. Somewhere along the line, perhaps soon after the time of Pliny the Younger, the more politically minded leaders among the Christians must have realized they’d never defeat Rome head-on, that they stood a good chance of being extinguished completely. Instead, you confront the system from within. You make converts of Roman men who can see how the Church fits with their own personal ambitions, with their political careers. Ultimately you catch the emperor himself, as happened two hundred years after Pliny with Constantine the Great. The power of the Roman Church, its political power, was all about men. But in the earliest period of Christianity, before the Church developed as a political force, the word of Jesus was carried equally by men and women.’
‘Talk me through the Sibyl again, Jack. The link to early Christianity.’
‘Okay.’ Jack closed the book, looked up again at the dome, then narrowed his eyes. ‘Speculation, and a few facts.’
‘Fire away.’ Costas sneezed violently.
‘By the end of the first century BC, at the beginning of the Roman Empire, the power of the Sibyls was on the wane,’ Jack said. ‘To the Sibyl at Cumae, the Romans who had come to occupy the old Greek settlements of the Bay of Naples, places like Pompeii, Herculaneum, Neapolis, were a double-sided coin. On the one hand, they kept her in business. Romans came to the Phlegraean Fields seeking cures and prophecies, or as tourists, gawping at the fire and spectacle at the entrance to the underworld. On the other hand, to many Romans the music of the Sibyl had become ersatz, a contrivance, a Greek embellishment like those statues in the Villa of the Papyri or those phoney philosophers kept for after-dinner entertainment. And, as we now suspect, the Sibyl began to depend more and more for her livelihood on dishing out narcotics than selling divine prophecies that people took at all seriously.’
‘But surely the poet Virgil believed in her,’ Costas said. ‘The Sybilline prophecy in his poem, about the coming Golden Age.’
‘It’s hard to know whether he took her seriously, or just fancied embellishing his poetry with a Sybilline utterance,’ Jack said. ‘But the Sibyl may have seen a man whose word would outlast him, a man destined for supreme achievement, just as she saw Claudius a generation later. She may have given Virgil words she wanted to see survive, immortalized in his writing. The Sibyls were shrewd operators. Like most successful mystics, she would always have tried to keep one step ahead of her clients, profess to know more about them than could seem plausible. The Sibyls probably had an extensive network of spies and informants, keeping them abreast of everything going on. Remember the cave of the Vestal Virgins we found under the Palatine, right under the heart of Rome. And remember Claudius’ extraordinary statement about the priestesses in Britain, chosen from the families of tribal chieftains, of kings. Maybe the Sibyls at Cumae were also chosen from the wealthiest families of Rome, like the Vestals, even from the imperial family. Maybe the cave under the Palatine was where they were nurtured. And the schooling of a Sibyl was probably all about how to tease private information out of people, without them realizing it.’
‘Easy if your client’s all drugged up,’ Costas said.
‘That may be how Claudius revealed his secret to her,’ Jack murmured.
‘And the Christianity connection?’
‘That’s where speculation takes over,’ Jack said intently. ‘But try this. By the time Virgil visits Cumae, by the time of the first emperor, Augustus, the Sibyls already know their days are numbered. Rome has come to rule the world, and the Sibyls see the pantheon of Roman gods solidifying around them like the temples and palaces of the great city itself, built to last a thousand years. But the Sibyls also look east, beyond Greece, and they see new forces which could engulf the Roman world, forces kept at bay while Rome fought within itself and then strove to conquer the ancient lands once ruled by Alexander the Great. The Sibyls foresee the eastern cult of the divine ruler coming to Rome, the emperor becoming a living god. And they see something else. They see it in the slaves and outcasts who hide in the Phlegraean Fields near the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl. They see it in the easterners who flock to the Bay of Naples after the Augustan peace, just as Pliny the Elder must have seen it in his sailors at Misenum. New religious ideas from the east, new prophets, a Messiah. A world where the Sibyls will no longer be able to hold sway, where people need no longer be enslaved to oracles and priests in order to know the word of God.’