Jonathan Trigell - The Tongues of Men or Angels

Considering the scale of destruction, the loss of life is not great. The Vigiles succeeded in the alarm, even if they were impotent against the flames. Most of the dead were either too infirm to flee or were crushed by the crowd or falling masonry in the attempt.

But now hundreds of thousands of people, fearful, filthy and destitute, are crammed into refugee camps, overcrowded and under-nourished.

And in the camps, though the coughings of encumbered lungs drown even the cries and moans of the injured, whispers can still be heard. The whispers say that Nero did this. The whispers say he has architects’ plans pre-drawn, models already made, of a new city: Neropolis. The whispers say the fires were lit deliberately on Nero’s orders by the Praetorian Guard.

The Praetorians, in their cloaks of black, are obvious villains. They are the only legion allowed near Rome. The emperor’s protectors and the kingmakers. They guarded even mad Caligula up to a point. But they can never indefinitely repress the mass of the Roman people. The mob will ultimately have its way. Not that the mob ever knows precisely what it wants. But it knows the kind of things it likes: bread and circuses; wine and blood. The mob doesn’t yet know the particulars of how this story will proceed. But it knows how stories should go. And if you do not present it with a traitor, the mob will choose one of its own. There must be a betrayer: literary completeness demands it.

Because someone started the fire, of that you can be sure. There is always agency behind evil. And who if not Nero? Nero is perhaps half-god, but the gods of Rome are many and various, quite capable of malevolence. Romans and Greeks face no confusion over how a loving God could allow such horrors. For their gods are not loving; at least not to all men, all the time. Their gods can be capricious and selfish; they have favourites and enemies. Their gods can be sly and fickle. Their gods can be lusting and self-serving. But, for all such faults, they are at least not jealous gods. They do not demand that adherents worship no other gods. They certainly don’t make the claim that other people’s gods do not even exist.

And yet this new cult of the Christianoi does. This new cult says exactly that. An action clearly certain to have enraged and outraged those gods who always protected Rome in the past. And these Christianoi, so it is said, believe in prophecies that the end of the world is imminent and may come through fire. How natural, then, that they should seek to start one.

So Nero’s people begin to disseminate this deflecting tale. The writer of the story chooses the ending. The teller decides the truth. Rome’s official handwritten newssheets — the Acta Diurna — are posted up city wide. And in the squalid camps and on such street corners as remain, the criers read fresh proclamations. They give the people what they need to hear.

For the mob must have its vengeance; the mob must have its blood.

Lydia knew little of love.

When she was thirteen, Lydia had still been a freckled child, with showers of auburn sunspots flocking over her shoulders and even down the gentle channel that was beginning to form on her chest. And when she was thirteen, Lydia was married off. And parts of her body that were barely budded, felt still new even to herself, became groped and opened and broken.

The man who bought her — or ‘wedded’ her, as her father referred to the transaction — was carelessly brutish. He treated Lydia as an object among his other objects, with her perceived value apparently lying not even at the upper end of those possessions. Sometimes he would have her in the way he would have a slave-boy and he didn’t care if afterwards she cried. He was vain and mannerless; full of sly gibes and cruel passions. But he did have two great virtues: he was rich and he died.

And so, while scarcely twenty, Lydia had become that rarest of things — in this world, at this time — a woman in charge of her own destiny. Lydia took over her husband’s slaves and his houses and even his business. Lydia became a dealer of purple, of dye and cloth. A seller of the secretions of predatory sea snails. Waxy juices discharged in such tiny amounts that ten thousand of the spiny-shelled snails barely suffice to dye the trim of a toga. But wealth flowed in the viscous form of this liquid. Freedom — the colour of blackish, brackish, clotted blood — pooled in Lydia’s vast vats of decomposing molluscs.

The mythology of the purple murex merchants was that their precious dye was first discovered by demi-god Herakles or, rather, by his dog, the mouth of which turned plum upon crunching the snails. But Lydia declined staid Herakles as her patron deity: she was a seeker after a more exotic religion.

She followed at first the cult of Attis: son of a virgin; sacrificed on a tree; resurrected from the tomb; whose body was eaten by celebrants in the form of bread. And Attis’s worship was entwined with that of his consort god: Cybele, the Great Mother — Magna Mater — Gaia, some called her. She was foreign and mysterious and alluring; bringer of dance, wine and misrule; rider of lions and ruler of emasculated men. Cybele was a fitting divinity for an independent woman like Lydia, pleased to be free of a virile tyrant of a husband.

The priests of Cybele and Attis were eunuchs, castrated that they might be chaste and celibate for a greater place in the heavenly banquet that was to come. But who nonetheless ran amok in celebration of the mysteries to which they were party, torchlight night-time ecstasies, which eventually became tiring and troublesome for Lydia, a woman with a business to run. And there was something more than a little untoward about the castrated priests with long bleached hair, cavorting in women’s clothing, with dangling earrings and flouncing pendants, made up like cheap flesh-peddlers, some with breasts of carved wood.

In gradually recoiling from the excesses of Attis and the Great Mother, but still on quest for spiritual meaning, Lydia fell into the embrace of the comforting conservatism of Judaism, which had much to commend it, with its rich and long history and its carefully codified morality.

But it was, for all that, a little bland. For those who travelled to the fiery splendour of the immense Temple at Jerusalem, covered with weighty plates of silver and gold; who saw the majesty of the high priest — in his mitre, breast-ornament of treasure stones and fringes of bells — attended by seven hundred lesser priests to make the ritual sacrifices; for those who marvelled at the Beautiful Gate of Corinthian brass, adorned with embroidered veils from India, interwoven pillars, and clusters of golden grapes larger than a man; who saw the altar awash, its gutters flowing, as if in summer flood, with the blood of countless thousands of slaughtered beasts; for those who smelled the pyre-sized piles of burning cinnamon, saffron and frankincense; who descended the steps to feel the cool, cleansing waters of the purifying baths and heard the linen-robed Levites sing; for those people it might be a different thing entirely. But in the humble, dusty little synagogue of Philippi, they read the sacred texts in Greek, prayed and debated, and Judaism was a rather plain affair.

Not that Lydia actually converted to Judaism, but she was a regular Sabbath visitor to the synagogue, outside the gates, next to the river. She was a ‘God-fearer’, as the Jews called them: fellow travellers, who recognized the God of Israel as an ancient and powerful deity, but were reticent of full conversion and unwilling to take on all the arduous dietary laws and proscriptions of Judaism. However, as Lydia was to discover, to her great pleasure, such things were no longer necessary for salvation.