The Dark Ages: When Gods Clash

The most powerful and important of all the Roman gods was Jupiter, or in his Greek incarnation, Zeus, king of the gods. Zeus, or Jupiter, was grand and bearded. In the great temple of Zeus at Olympia, the most famous sculptor of the classical age, Phidias, has shown the King of the Gods enthroned in Majesty, an image the Christians were determined to match.

They took it all – the beard, the hair, the throne, that sense of omnipotent power. It was all borrowed from Zeus. And the curly-haired youth with the girlish body who’d buzzed around performing all those miracles was replaced by this manly, mature Jesus who sits in judgement on his flock, stern and unsmiling, wise and infallible.

Meanwhile, back down in the Roman catacombs, darker Christian forces were also stirring. When I said the persecution of the Christians has been exaggerated, I didn’t mean it never happened. Of course it did. Particularly under Constantine’s predecessor, Diocletian. Though not perhaps in the numbers we’ve been led to believe.

Some estimates say that only about 2,000 Christians were killed in the Roman persecutions. I think there must have been more than that. But the modern age is definitely better at killing Christians than the Romans ever were.

In the Spanish Civil War, 7,000 priests, monks and nuns were murdered. And you never hear about them.

But for the early Christians, death had a special significance. The idea took hold in their imaginations that suffering was a necessary part of redemption. It was crucial. And this belief in death had a profound influence on their art and their architecture.

These are the catacombs of St Agnes of Rome. She is the patron saint of chastity – of teenage girls, engaged couples, rape victims and virgins. Agnes was a 13-year-old girl murdered in the reign at Diocletian. The story goes that a Roman prefect wanted her to marry his son but Agnes was a Christian. She refused… so the Roman prefect… condemned her to death.

Roman law didn’t permit the execution of virgins, so Agnes was stripped, paraded naked through the streets, and dragged to a brothel. Afterwards they tried to burn her, but the flames wouldn’t touch her and everyone who looked at her naked body was blinded. In the end, a Roman soldier beheaded her, and her body – decapitated – was kept here in this church. But her skull… that’s in St Agnese in Piazza Navona, where the faithful come to kneel before it and worship it.

Martyrs like Agnes were believed to offer special protection for the early Christians. They were baptised in blood and sat next to God in the next world. If a martyr favoured you, you too were guaranteed a place in heaven.

To improve their chances of salvation every Christian wanted to be buried as close to a martyr as possible. And so the catacombs became a very desirable piece of real estate.

Constanza

Directly above Agnes’s tomb are the ruins of a giant funeral basilica. All this was once covered in Christian graves. But the building I really want to assure you is this one. The one next door to the basilica. This is Santa Constanza. It’s Christian church now. But, originally, this was a Roman mausoleum. It was built by Constantine’s own daughter, Constanza. This is where she was buried. In this big sarcophagus here.

The story goes that when Constanza was a little girl, she contracted leprosy. So she prayed to St Agnes, and Agnes saved her. That was the power that nartyrs had. Their miracles could change history. That’s why Constanza wanted to be buried here as close to St Agnes as she could be.

These Roman mausoleums, as you can see, where a completely different shape from the basilicas. Mausoleums were round. They weren’t places for the crowds to charge up and down, these were places of burial and contemplation. Sacred spaces that enfold you. And these around Roman mausoleums were to have a profound effect on the Christian church.