‘I am speaking Greek to you now, but I speak my gospel to my people in Aramaic,’ the Nazarene said. ‘You must help me to find the words in Greek for what I have to say.’
‘I am ready.’
An hour later the two men sat motionless opposite each other in the boat, a silhouette that was growing darker in the moonless sky, and would soon be no more. The lamps spluttered between them, then one went out. The Nazarene shifted along the plank he was sitting on towards one side of the boat, then put his hand on the space beside him.
‘We must pull the oars together.’
Claudius looked up from the paper, and smiled. ‘I should like nothing better.’ He looked down one last time, scarcely able to see now, and read the final words the Nazarene had spoken, that Claudius had translated: The kingdom of heaven is on earth. Men shall not stand in the way of the word of God. And the kingdom of heaven shall be the house of the Lord. There shall be no priests. And there shall be no temples…
Author’s Note
A ccording to the ancient sources, the Roman emperor Claudius died in AD 54, probably by poison. He was succeeded by Nero, who ruled until AD 68, and then by Vespasian, who ruled until AD 79, the year that Vesuvius erupted and buried the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii. The idea that Claudius should have faked his own death, disappeared with his freedman Narcissus and survived in secret for all those years is fictitious, though in keeping with what can be surmised of his character. Claudius had been a famously reluctant emperor, sidelined for years because of a crippling condition, probably a form of palsy, and then dragged from behind a curtain to assume the royal purple in AD 41 when he was already well into middle age. He learned to accommodate himself to the role, and achieved much as emperor – public reforms, practical building projects, the invasion of Britain – but by the end had been worn down by corruption and a succession of scheming wives. He may have looked back wistfully to his earlier life as a scholar, to his histories of Rome, of the Etruscans, of Carthage – all now lost – and yearned for the same again, perhaps with a plan to write a history of Britain; he himself had visited Britain in the aftermath of the invasion, in AD 43. Had he survived, he would have mourned Calpurnia, his mistress probably also poisoned in AD 54, but he could have been driven on by the need to complete his account of his British triumph and maintain the family honour of his revered brother Germanicus and father Drusus – a reverence seen in the commemorative inscription on the coin in this book, a genuine issue of Claudius from the beginning of his reign.
Narcissus was Claudius’ freedman secretary, his ab epistulis. He reputedly amassed a huge personal fortune as only Imperial freedmen could do, with dealings in Gaul and Britain. He appears to have served his own interests, and sometimes Claudius’ wives’ interests, more so than he did those of his master, yet there was evidently a transcending bond that kept Narcissus in Claudius’ employ after the emperor must have been aware of his nefarious activities. It is not known whether Narcissus was a eunuch, though Claudius had several eunuchs at his court – one was his taster – or whether Narcissus had Christian affiliations, though it is possible. According to the sources, Narcissus’ reputation was such that he was forced to commit suicide after Claudius’ death, so my fictitious escape route would have been an attractive lifeline.
Pliny the Elder – the most famous encyclopedist from antiquity – was a young army officer on the German frontier when Claudius was emperor, and it is quite likely that the two men met. Before the end of Claudius’ reign Pliny had already written a history of the wars against the Germans, the lost Bella Germaniae, the result, his nephew claimed, of a vision his uncle had of Claudius’ father Drusus (Pliny the Younger, Letters iii, 5, 4). As a veteran Pliny would have cherished the memory of Drusus and Germanicus, and his mentions of Claudius in the Natural History are respectful, almost familiar, and rarely refer to him by the official designation Divus, which Claudius would have scorned. The Natural History was dedicated to the Emperor Titus, who had succeeded his father Vespasian on 23 June AD 79, so was completed only a short time before Pliny’s own death in the eruption of Vesuvius on 24 August that year. It is entirely consistent with Pliny that he should already have been at work on additions to his great work; Pliny the Younger inherited 160 notebooks from his uncle, ‘written in a minute hand on both sides of the page’. He had watched from Misenum as his uncle departed by galley towards Herculaneum on that fateful day of the eruption, and was told of his final hours ( Letters vi, 16).
Herod Agrippa, grandson of King Herod the Great of Judaea, is the King Herod of Acts of the Apostles; his formal name was Marcus Julius Agrippa, and his coins refer to him as Agrippa. He and Claudius were the same age, born in 10 BC, and were brought up in the same household after Herod Agrippa was adopted by Claudius’ mother Antonia. Whether or not Claudius visited Judaea and the Sea of Galilee as a young man is unknown, though little is certain about his life at this time, just as little is known of Jesus of Nazareth during his years in Galilee. What is recorded is that Herod Agrippa was appointed agoranomos at Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities xviii, 147-50). The appointment was on the instigation of his wife Cypros, and occurred after the sudden death in AD 23 of his companion Drusus, the dissolute son of the emperor Tiberius. Years later, as King of the Jews, Herod Agrippa appears in Acts as the man who allowed the execution of James, son of Zebedee and brother of John the Apostle, yet his attitude towards Christianity is far from clear. The idea that his new walls around Jerusalem may have included building at the site of the Holy Sepulchre is speculation. As for Claudius, he knew what it was to be an outcast, he may have felt let down by his own gods, and he may have been attracted by the Stoic philosophy later associated with Christianity; he would certainly have known of Christians by the time he was emperor in Rome, but there can be no certainty of his thoughts on the matter.
The archaeology of Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples – buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 – has advanced greatly in recent decades, not least with discoveries along the shorefront that have included an ancient boat and the skeletons of many of the town’s occupants, huddled together in their last refuge in the cellars by the sea. Nevertheless, our picture still largely derives from the excavations of the eighteenth century, and large areas have seen little exploration since. One exception is the House of the Bicentenary, investigated in 1938; the discovery of a possible household ‘chapel’ led some to speculate on an early Christian presence. The room was extraordinarily well preserved, showing how the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius in AD 79 could bypass some places, leaving them miraculously intact.
Much attention has focused on the Villa of the Papyri, a palatial structure which was tunnelled into during the eighteenth century but remains largely unexcavated. A wonderful sense of it can be gained in California at the Getty Villa, based on plans made by Carl Weber when he oversaw the eighteenth-century tunnelling. The finds included bronze statues as well as carbonized papyrus scrolls, many of them by the little-known Greek philosopher Philodemus. Work continues on reading those scrolls, with remarkable advances being made through multispectral imaging, but scholars yearn for more excavation to search for additional Greek scrolls and a possible Latin library which many believe must exist. The excavation in this novel is fictitious, though the finds are plausible and suggest the extraordinary revelations that could await archaeologists in the villa.