Catacombs and distinguished persecutors

© THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND THE DEPT OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGING

© THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND THE DEPT OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGING

Left: Trusting in the gods: an ivory leaf from a diptych apparently commissioned by the Symmachi family in Rome to com­memorate Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (c.340-402), a pagan orator who opposed Christianity. He is being taken up to heaven (two eagles represent his soul flying up from the pyre), watched by the god Sol and five ancestors. One of the many items from the British Museum collection used to illustrate AD 410: The year that shook Rome, a lively, read-on account, by Sam Moorhead and David Stuttard, of the Sack of Rome (The British Museum Press, £9.99 (£9); 978-0-7141-2269-4)

Christianity in Ancient Rome: The first three centuries
Bernard Green
T & T Clark £19.99
(978-0-567-03250-8)
Church Times Bookshop £18

WHAT was it that attracted first the ordinary people and then the élite to Christianity in a powerful, cosmopolitan, and intermittently oppressive city such as Rome? Green goes literally underground, to the catacombs, to find some interesting evidence to answer this question.

He paints a picture of the Roman equivalent of Gehenna, the stinking public rubbish pits, where the dead bodies of ordinary people, not just slaves, were unceremoniously dumped as carrion. In contrast, the ordered, communal, decorous arrangements of the many miles of catacombs along the main roads of Rome pointed not only to the lasting value of the individuals there interred, and often commemorated in inscriptions and with funerary meals, but also to the power of one of the central doctrines of the faith, the resurrection of the dead.

When the Emperor Valerian took his turn in persecuting the Church in 257-58, he focused on closing the cemeteries for this reason. It was not only the dead who were dumped: the name of a man recorded in a catacomb inscription, Stercorius “found on a dung heap”, is plausibly to be interpreted as that of a one-time dumped baby, and this points to the care of the church community for the barely living.

This book is full of such vivid details. It starts with the separation of Christianity from Judaism in Rome, influenced as much by the expulsion of Jewish Christians from the city in 49 as by doctrinal matters. In chapter two, it traces the doctrinal thought of leaders such as Marcion and Valentinus and the defence of what became orthodoxy. A third chapter focuses on the persecutions and the conditions in the empire that prompted them. The fourth chapter casts light into the dark corners of the catacombs; and a final chapter steers the reader through the ambiguities of Con­stantine’s reign. There is a more than ordinarily useful index.

In what appears to be an unguarded moment, Green refers to the “insufferably sycophantic” biography of Constantine by Eusebius, and it is easy to see why the latter’s black-and-white picture is irritating to Green. Green’s is church history as it seldom appears: nuanced, sympathetic, and even-handed. He points out, for example, where orthodox polemic misunderstood or misrepresented the thought of its opponents. Half a sentence, such as “Valerian was in his sixties, a man of great distinction, a member of the old aristocracy,” simply erases the neat distinctions that Christian history has sometimes created, and gives the reader a person and a background to consider rather than a label, “persecuting emperor”.

Green’s chapters are long, but his readings of the characters that populate his history, and the literature they created, are subtle; his writing is precise and elegant. In all, this is a fascinating and compelling study of the origins of the church in Rome.

Dr Paul Cavill is a Reader in the diocese of Leicester and is Principal Research Fellow for the English Place-Name Society in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham.