The Last Gospel (36 page)

‘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.’

‘Virgil’s coming Golden Age,’ Costas murmured.

‘By the time of Virgil, the Sibyl at Cumae must have guessed it would come to pass. By the time of Claudius, she knew it. Christianity had arrived.’

‘And she heard the rumblings underground,’ Costas said. ‘Literally.’

‘There was a huge earthquake in the Bay of Naples in AD 62,’ Jack said. ‘You can see the damaged buildings at Pompeii today, still under repair seventeen years later when Vesuvius erupted. And dangling in her cave in the Phlegraean Fields, the Sibyl must have had her ear to the ground in more ways than one, guessed that something catastrophic was imminent. We’re talking empirical observations here, not mysticism. Everything was hotting up. The sulphurous smell was getting worse. And maybe the memory of past volcanic catastrophe was part of the ancient lore passed down to the Sibyls, the eruption of Thera in the Aegean in the Bronze Age, earlier eruptions at the dawn of civilization. And perhaps she truly did believe in some divine power behind it all, behind her utterances. She saw signs, auguries, that her age was ended. With the eruption of Vesuvius, her god Apollo would be gone, extinguished for ever.’

‘Time for a fast exit left,’ Costas murmured.

‘Time for the final ingredient, the biggest twist,’ Jack said. ‘Several decades earlier, in the time of Claudius the emperor, the Sibyl would have seen her prophecy to Virgil come true. The birth of a boy, the imminent Golden Age. She would have seen Christians appearing in the Phlegraean Fields. She would have heard of Jesus, and of Mary Magdalene. She would have known that the Christians included both men and women. She would have seen that there were no priests.’

‘We’re talking women here again, aren’t we, Jack? That’s what you’re driving at. Girl power.’

‘Girl power.’ Jack grinned. ‘Not goddesses, but real flesh-and-blood women. That’s what the Sibyl saw. In Rome, the power of women was on the wane. The Vestal Virgins were virtually imprisoned within the palace walls, almost a despotic male fantasy of female submission. The imperial cult, the cult of the emperor, was male dominated, with an exclusively male priesthood. To the Sibyls, their own vocation was perhaps not really about Apollo or any earlier gods they might have served. It was about matriarchy, about continuation of the female line that extended far back to the Stone Age, to the time when women ruled the family and the clan. In Christianity, the Sibyl may have seen hope for the future, for the continuation of the matriarchy.’

‘Why the focus on Britain?’ Costas asked.

‘Because it’s often at the periphery that the biggest changes take place,’ Jack said. ‘In Rome itself, civilization had become corrupt, decayed. Christianity had come from the periphery, from the eastern boundary of the empire, and it was at the other periphery, far to the north-west, that some saw greatest hope for its success. Britain would have seemed like the New World did to the religious dissenters of seventeenth-century Europe, a place where they could pursue their beliefs without persecution. The Britons themselves, the natives, were fiercely independent, truculent, with a mysterious religion that would never be fully captured and manipulated by the Romans, where the Roman gods would never truly hold sway. The tribes of Britain had been ruled by great warrior queens, by Boudica and those before her. And as we now know from Claudius, their own priesthood, the druids, was ruled by a high priestess. If the druids were dominated by women, then it was women who knit together the warrior tribes of the Celtic world, just as women had done for thousands of years before that, back through prehistory.’

‘And how much would Boudica have known about Christianity?’

‘Claudius himself may even have talked to her about it, when she was brought before him as a teenager on his first visit to Britain, after the Roman invasion. Something about her, about what he saw and felt in Britain, may even have influenced him to tell her his best story, of his visit to Judaea as a young man. Then remember the reference in Gildas, the monk writing after the Roman period. The memory of a Roman emperor himself secretly bringing Christianity to Britain may have become part of the folklore of the first Christians in Britain. And Claudius may have known about the connection of the Sibyl with the druids, as he was already under the sway of the Sibyl at Cumae. The Sibyl herself may have influenced his decision to invade in the first place, perhaps a way of knitting Britain more closely within her world. She may have given him a message in the leaves.’

‘Amazing what people will do for their drug-dealers,’ Costas murmured.

‘In the years that followed Claudius’ visit, Boudica would have learned more about Christianity,’ Jack continued. ‘Like the children of most vanquished princes, she would have been brought up in the Roman way, learning Latin and perhaps even travelling to Rome, maybe even to the Bay of Naples and the cave at Cumae. Back home in London, she would have heard of sailors and soldiers bringing ideas from the east, Mithraism, Isis worship, Christianity. Then, as she was inducted into the priesthood, preparing for her role as high priestess, as the British Sibyl, she would have become part of the secret network of knowledge that tied together all the Sibyls across the Roman world, the thirteen. And she may have seen the same thing that the Sibyl at Cumae saw in Christianity, something that drew her even closer to its followers after she rebelled against the Romans. A religion on a collision course with Rome, with the Rome which had abused her and raped her daughters, a religion of defiance. And the ideas she heard, the quest for a heaven on earth, may have come easily to the Britons, people whose beliefs were attuned to the natural world and not fossilized in temples and priests. She may not have shown any outward signs of it, but she may have decided that those ideas could work for her, and for the survival of the matriarchy.’

‘You’re talking about Christianity before the Roman Church,’ Costas murmured. ‘What you and Jeremy were telling me about in the amphitheatre. The Celtic Church, the Church of the Britons. The Pelagian heresy.’

‘I believe that’s the reason why the Sibyl at Cumae made Claudius bring his precious document here,’ Jack said. ‘To provide a secret gift for the early Christians in Britain, something which might strengthen them against what she saw happening before her eyes in the Phlegraean Fields, in the years after St Paul’s arrival there.’

‘You mean the beginnings of what would become the Roman state religion,’ Costas said, blowing his nose.

‘There was something in Claudius’ document from Judaea, something we can only guess at, that gave the Sibyl hope. Something Claudius must have said when he was in a stupor before her cave. Something that made her realize that what he had was extraordinarily precious, and needed to be secreted away in a place where it might survive, and further her cause. And something she knew some of those around Claudius would do anything to get their hands on, to destroy.’

‘She saw the first priests among the Christians. Male priests. And it frightened her. She saw Christianity going the same way as all the other cults in Rome.’

‘You’ve got it.’

‘So she threatens to withdraw Claudius’ drugs unless he does her bidding.’

Jack grinned. ‘She knew exactly why he kept coming back for more, what it was that dulled his pain. Claudius himself might not have been so sure. All he knew was that if he did her bidding, every time he stood in that smoky cavern he felt good again. Probably she offered him something tangible, something else that drew him back to that place at the entrance to the underworld. Maybe like Aeneas in Virgil’s story she offered to take him down below, to see his father and brother again. That’s what he would have yearned for most. Like any good fortune-teller, she knew her client’s psychology.’

‘And she knew he loved a good riddle.’

Jack nodded. ‘She gives him a prophecy. A message in the leaves. Claudius laps it up, relishes the challenge. It was the one we found in Rome, the Dies Irae. A prophecy of doom, but also of hope. Claudius knows who Andraste was, and knows where to find her tomb. The Sibyl knows that he knows. He writes it down, seals it in that stone cylinder, the one he gave Pliny to take to Rome. All Claudius had to do was fulfil the prophecy, take the manuscript and put it with Andraste, and he would get what he had begged the Sibyl for, his visit to the underworld.’

‘Big time,’ Costas murmured.

‘When it came down to it, in those last moments of hell in front of the crack of doom in the Phlegraean Fields, it may have felt right. Claudius may have shut his eyes, and in his mind seen only those statues we found in his room in the villa in Herculaneum, those images of his father and brother which must have been seared into his mind.’