11 - Babylon

Paul’s words to Antonius that, because he saved a soul Jesus would reward him by conferring on him the privilege of sharing his own suffering, sank deep into the new believer’s heart. From that day on he lost all fear of physical pain. He didn’t go out of his way to incur punishment, of course, but neither did he seek to avoid it by dereliction of his faith. And since he was determined to make no secret of his faith, he soon began to be singled out among the slaves of Tigellinus by his odd behavior.

One day a fellow slave, much older than Antonius and a worker in the same stable, incurred the displeasure of his master. An overseer saw that Gloria, one of the master’s favorite horses, had been too closely tied by the tail so that it became restless and unmanageable. The offender, Colon, a Corinthian slave, was led out to be punished.

Now there was a certain system of punishing slaves. The younger ones, capable of many years of service, were handled with care. They suffered, but not in a way that would make them unfit for service. With an old slave, it didn’t matter if his bones were broken and he was crippled for the few remaining years of his life. So Colon was stripped of his sackcloth shirt, the iron collar was closed around his neck, and the powerful slave with the flagrum, the massive, bone-breaking whip, was summoned.

Then something happened that was never heard of before. Antonius, trembling and covered with sweat, came running, and threw himself at the overseer’s feet. He was the guilty one, he declared. It was he who tied the knot too tightly and too high on Gloria’s tail. He was the one who ought to be punished.

It didn’t quite work out the way he’d hoped, for the puzzled overseer decided to punish both slaves, so Colon’s bones were broken and Antonius’ flesh was cut with the light lash. But this was the queer behavior that attracted attention to Antonius.


Antonius was not only young, and a willing worker, he was also well-built, with a powerful chest, narrow hips and powerful thighs. So he was often coupled with healthy slave women to bear a strong, new generation of slaves. He’d obeyed without question with no concern over who the woman was and without the slightest interest in the result of the coupling. Slaves weren’t allowed to have “families.”

But now it began to be noticed that Antonius was failing in his duty as a breeder and that he wouldn’t couple when admitted to a slave woman. But this wasn’t the worst of it. After being punished several times for his dereliction, Antonius did attach himself to a certain slave woman, but only to her. He expressed his determination to know who his children were and he acted as if he had a right to create a family of his own. When the woman gave birth, Antonius asserted that he was the father, and on several occasions he was caught in secret meetings with his mate, who brought the child out for him to see.

Not that this was the first time some slave had shown this tendency to exclusive preference and had made the attempt to build up a family relationship. But the application of the whip, or even the threat of it, had been enough to cure them of such notions. The child would also be taken away from the offending woman and given to another for nursing. Thus most mothers forgot who their offspring were and didn’t even know who they were nursing in the general confusion of the slave quarters.

Antonius’ obstinacy in the face of the lash was a direct and dangerous threat to the whole system. It started to affect other slaves and their breeding partners. The privilege of family was only for freedmen, and for slaves to attempt such a thing was nothing short of rebellion.

After a while it was noticed that the slaves taking part in this conspiracy had other practices in common. They seemed to have created a sort of brotherhood with a system of secret signs used to reveal themselves to each other. They might make certain gestures, or they might draw a rough symbol of a fish or an anchor on the ground.

This, then, was no accident. It was the manifestation of a cult.

Furthermore, it became known that many of the suspected slaves met together in the evenings, either in the courtyard or in the slave quarters, sang strange songs and uttered strange names. Most amazing, they were sometimes caught exchanging a kiss of greeting. Along with these bewildering and irritating manifestations of secrecy, there was a perceptible downturn in the number of pregnancies. Sometimes a couple that had been thrown together for breeding purposes was caught kneeling side by side and murmuring the name of a secret god by the name of Christ.

Inevitably these things were found to be connected with the Jews, those people who were the butt of Roman satire for wasting one day in seven by closing their shops and assembling in their synagogues. But now, “the day of the Jews” seemed to have crept into Tigellinus’ household in some incomprehensible manner. Every week on that day certain slaves were missing, and many of those who were in their quarters evaded their tasks and went about murmuring the name of Christ under their breath.

The attempt to put down this unprecedented form of revolt began with a series of scourgings. This had no affect. The punishment was received without complaint, and the slaves went on working quite faithfully at their daily tasks. But on the seventh day the same laziness manifested itself, the same disappearances took place, and throughout the week there was the same avoidance of the indiscriminate couplings.

This infection wasn’t peculiar to the slaves of Tigellinus’ household, nor even to just the slave class. Rome suddenly woke up to the fact that “the day of the Jews” had taken hold of great numbers of slaves and soldiers. Every seventh day there was a general movement toward the Jewish quarter in the Trans-Tiber, where slaves and soldiers were seen loitering around the synagogues.

It was one thing for freedmen and women to visit the synagogues; this had always gone on. But these were whole groups of slaves slipping away from their work on “the day of the Jews” and mingling with soldiers on the bridges leading to the Jewish quarter.

Upon investigation, it was discovered that this new, more earnest, and more malevolent form of Oriental fanaticism was a particular sect called “Christians,” who derived their name from a certain Jew criminal, Chrestus, who was put to death by Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem. According to the sect’s superstitions, this Chrestus had risen from the dead and become the liberator of the Jews. Anyone who joined the sect, Jew or non-Jew, accepted the unclean practices and base beliefs of the Jews as their own.

Even though legal, the Jewish religion had never enjoyed the respect of the Roman world. The masses made it the butt of a special type of humor, and aristocrats and philosophers despised it. Even their “clients”, who spent their days gossiping in the baths or in the porticoes of the Campus Martius, aped their employers and toadied to the plebs by their attacks on the Jews. Pamphleteers, taking their cue from Apion the Egyptian slanderer, invented the most fantastic stories regarding the nature and appearance of the Jewish God. Whatever was repulsive and degrading in the minds of the mockers they attributed to the Jewish religion. They were incapable of forming even the faintest conception of the ethical contents of Judaism.

And now that this “Christian” sect had come out of the Jewish religion, all the ignorant spitefulness and obscenity was transferred to them. But there was a tone of malevolence in the new attack that had previously been absent. As long as the Jewish religion was confined to the Jewish quarter, it was simply derided as a grotesque curiosity. But as soon as it stepped across the threshold of the synagogue and into the “households” in its new “Christian” form, it ceased to be merely grotesque and became sinister. It mattered little in Rome if an occasional freedman chose to make himself absurd by sneaking into a synagogue to hear a Jewish preacher, or even imitate the observance of the seventh day. But it was intolerable that the indulgence of Roman law should be exploited by the Jews to spread a theory of equality and liberation among the slaves in the name of this Chrestus. What else could this be called but revolt?

The fact was that Christian agitation had penetrated to countless households, disturbing the relationship between slave and lord, encouraging a fantastic conceit among the former and limiting the authority of the latter. The very speed with which the agitation was spreading indicated, moreover, that in the case of Chrestus the Romans were confronted with a demonic manifestation of power that they interpreted according to their own hideous immorality. As the number of Christians grew, the slanders spread about them by the pamphleteers became correspondingly more horrible.

* * * * *

Vestian Suberus was a typical “client.” Born a slave in one of the provinces, he won the favor of his master with flattery and unnatural vice as a youth. He was set free, adopted, and then made the heir of his owner, who died of poisoning shortly afterwards. Suberus sold the estate and moved to Rome.

Driven by his ambition for a political career, he hid his servile origin with a set of false documents and sought to bribe his way into an official appointment. He kept a rich home, bought handsome slaves, entertained lavishly, and bought frequent gifts for Caesar’s favorites. He also hired a claque of clients and in every other way conducted himself like a patrician. But he underestimated the ferocious competition of the capital. He not only spent his fortune in the hunt for office but went into debt and almost became a slave again. Somehow he managed to avoid that and was left with two hungry, half naked slaves. Finally he lost even these two at dice.

He moved with his wife, whom he treated like a slave, into the top floor of a foul half-ruined apartment house in the Suburra. He had no children to burden him, for he threw any that were borne to him into the gutter or into the Cloaca Maxima.

He did, however, mange to save his “toga,” the emblem of his status as a freedman, and used it to find employment as a client with a rich patrician. Early each morning he put on his toga, which his wife kept carefully in repair, and hurried to his lord’s house to wait with the other clients to form part of the procession that accompanied him through the streets. For this he received six to ten sesterces a day, depending on the employer’s mood, and an occasional length of cloth for a toga. He was also entitled to the baths and spectacles as a freedman and to the daily quota of bread and wine distributed occasionally by Caesar or by some patrician currying favor with the mob.

Suberus spent much of his time in the amphitheater, where fights between gladiators or between condemned criminals and wild beasts often went on for days at a stretch. It wasn’t the sight of disemboweled men that drew him there; his eyes were fixed on the elderly women, matrons and widows who found a last thrill for their jaded nerves and shriveled flesh in the combats. Nor was he alone in this quest. A host of charlatans and ruffians frequented the arenas in the hope of attaching themselves to one of the wealthy female spectators. But even here, Suberus couldn’t sustain the competition. In vain did he whisper passionate words into unresponsive and sometimes literally deaf ears.

Vestian Suberus was no longer young. His eyes were rimmed with red, his cheeks puffed up, his limbs flaccid. He moved slowly, his belly sagging under his toga. All day long he watched younger men stalk the matron he was stalking and he knew he didn’t stand a chance. Late in the afternoon, weary with the fruitless vigil, he would go to a free bath. Then he would remember that there was a hungry wife waiting for him at home, a wife who was quite capable of emptying the chamber pot on his head if he came home too late. So he would turn toward the Suburra, spend a few sesterces on a piece of putrefying meat, and bring it home for supper.


One day Suberus sat before the great façade of the Baths of Agrippa in the Campus Martius in the company of a handful of “freedmen” like himself, the scourings of the city. The conversation turned, as it did so often, to the barbarous Oriental cult of the Christians that was making such inroads among the slaves.

“And do you know what they do at their mysterious meetings in the synagogues?” Suberus was saying, repeating what he’d heard in his employer’s domus the day before. “They bring in an infant, cover it with flour, make a gash on its body, and let the blood run into a beaker. Everyone sips the blood and smears their privates with it. It’s how they unify themselves with their god.”

“No, no,” said another idler. “That’s not the Christians. It’s the Jews who do that. They have a Temple in Jerusalem with a place that only their High Priest can enter once a year. For a whole year they keep a Greek in that room, and push food in there for him to eat. At the end of the year, the High Priest kills the Greek, then passes out the flesh to be eaten. I heard this from Apion when he was here in Rome.”

The speaker was a learned freedman who wrote pamphlets for his employer and painted posters that were put up at night on the walls of the Forum buildings.

“The Jews worship an ass’s head that they keep in the Temple,” added a third.

“The Christians do that too.”

Not to be outdone, Suberus said, “Christians, Jews, they’re all the same. They have all the same superstitions and some new ones besides, worse than the old. You know what they do at their secret meetings, men and women both? They strip themselves and –“ here Suberus leaned over and whispered in his neighbor’s ear, not because he was ashamed to say it aloud, but because he knew it would titillate the curiosity of the others.

His neighbor burst into laughter.

“You know what the worst thing is?” cried one. “I heard that neither Christians nor Jews ever reject a child, even a cripple! They raise them all. It’s one of the reasons they’re crowding us out of the city.”

“They’re not all like that,” said one. “I know some Jews who have businesses here on the Campus. They dress like Romans and talk like Romans, and even go to the amphitheaters and circuses. They wouldn’t do such things.”

“Oh sure, some of them are civilized; they’ve learned some of our manners. I have Jewish friends, and they’re just as good as we are. But the poor Jews over there,” he said as he jerked his thumb toward the Trans-Tiber region, “what they do in the secret synagogues, homes and courtyards! Have you ever been in the Jewish quarter when they observe their seventh day? What a smell! Nothing but onions, garlic, and sour wine. It’s enough to poison you. And who knows what goes on behind those curtains, by the light of their lamps and candles? I can believe just about anything of them.

“And mark this. The Christians are always among the poorest Jews, fanatical foreigners who keep their Asian ritual as if they were still at home in Judea.”

“It’s a wonder Caesar’s tolerated this evil danger so long,” said the pamphleteer, earnestly. “You know what? I’m going to write a new pamphlet on this very subject, and read it out in the Forum and in the baths, for anyone to hear. I tell you, Rome must be saved from the Jews, and soon, or it’ll be too late.”

* * * * *

Spring was approaching on light, fresh wings. First a mild wind blew from the south, dissolving the veil of gray from the face of heaven. Then the earth became young with a green blossoming. Willows shook in the little garden of the house of Hermas, out on the Via Appia, among the mausoleums of the great, not far from the Jewish quarter. Paul’s congregation assembled there now that he, Aquila and Priscilla were gone, and Hermas had been placed in charge.

Old Simon Peter was there standing in a ring of the faithful to tell them, as he always did, stories of the time he served Messiah. His heart was heavy for whenever spring came he remembered the sufferings of the lord. But this spring he was even sadder than normal, for he was troubled with deep forebodings, as if his spirit was warning him of dread trials about to descend on the congregation of Rome.

This morning he told them about the time he and his brother Andrew were mending their fishing net by the bright shore of Kineret in the homeland when they saw their savior approaching. He beckoned to them with his right hand, saying, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” They followed him from that moment on. And here was old Simon, still a fisherman, and they of the congregation were God’s fish.

He also told them of that spring day when out of fear he watched the lord from behind a wall in that narrow little street bearing the cross on which he was to die. The lord’s white robe was blood-spattered and streaked with the sweat of his anguish.

“Jesus did not put the cup away from his lips, and so every believer must be prepared to drain it again and to bear his cross and to let his blood be shed.”

Then he spoke of the frightful day approaching that would herald the second coming.

“The day of the lord will come like a thief in the night. The heavens will dissolve with fire, and the foundations of the earth will melt! Beloved brothers! Prepare for that day, and be diligent to be found faultless, that peace may be with you. Be ready for the time of the great witnessing, when you will testify for the lord!”

Evening came, and the shadows fell on the breathless group of men, women and children clustered under the hanging willow branches. When Simon’s voice ceased, his listeners were afraid to move. It was as though the dread day was about to dawn and even a whispered word would hasten its coming.