• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2725 0

time it became accepted that Zoroastrianism should be tolerated, Islam never afforded it the measure of respect that it gave to Christians or to Jews. A further problem was that Christians – even those who had been conquered by Muslims – could look to independent Christian empires, independent Christian kingdoms, and know that there was such a thing as Christendom still in existence. Zoroastrians didn’t have that option – everywhere that had been Zoroastrian had been conquered by Islam. Today, even in the land of its birth, Iran, Zoroastrians are a tiny minority.

But if Zoroastrians today are relatively few in number, some of their faith’s core teachings about the eternal conflict of good and evil, and about the ending of the world, are still very powerful. The politics of the Middle East remain haunted and in some measure shaped by belief in an eventual apocalypse and the triumph of justice – an idea that Judaism, Christianity and Islam all derived from Zoroastrianism. And when politicians in Tehran talk of the Great Satan, and politicians in Washington denounce the Empire of Evil, one is tempted to point out that ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’.

44

Hinton St Mary Mosaic

Roman mosaic, from Hinton St Mary, Dorset, England

AD 300–400

In the gallery of the British Museum devoted to objects from the time when Britain was part of the Roman Empire, around 1,700 years ago, there is an array of gods. There is a diminutive Mars, Bacchus with his wine cup, Pan piping on a silver dish – and what looks like another pagan god, this time in mosaic. It’s a shoulder-length portrait, roughly life-size, of a clean-shaven man, with fair hair swept back. He’s wearing a tunic and a robe tightly wrapped around his shoulders. Behind his head are the two superimposed Greek letters chi and rho, and these tell us at once who he is: they are the first two letters of the word Christos, and this is one of the earliest images of Christ we have anywhere. It’s an astonishing survival – made not for a church in the eastern Mediterranean or in imperial Rome, but for the floor of a villa in Dorset sometime around AD 350.

The floor was mostly made of local Dorset materials – black, red and yellowish stones, all of them set in that greatest of Roman building inventions, cement. Entering the room, the first thing you would see on the floor was a roundel with the mythical hero Bellerophon riding the flying horse Pegasus and overcoming the Chimaera, a monster combining a lion, a goat and a serpent. It was a popular image in the Roman world, the hero zapping the forces of evil, rather as we saw in the Plate of Shapur II (Chapter 43). But at the far end of the room, facing in the other direction, was another roundel. In earlier times in this sort of position you would have expected to find either Orpheus charming the world with his music or the universally popular wine god, Bacchus. But here we find Christ.

For the first two or three Christian centuries the very idea of looking on the face of God, even of a god in human form, would have been inconceivable, first because there was no record of Christ’s appearance that artists could have based a likeness on, but even more because the Jewish inheritance was of a god to be worshipped in spirit and in truth but emphatically not to be represented in art. This inhibited the early Christians from any such attempt. Yet we live now in a world where the likeness of Christ is commonplace, a face that can be instantly recognized. How did we get here? The decision to try to depict the face of Christ – probably taken because the Roman elite were so used to seeing their gods in statues, paintings and mosaics – was both a major theological step and one of the decisive turning points in European visual culture.

This face of Christ from Dorset was made in the last century of Roman rule in Britain. In many ways this was a golden age. It was a lavish world in which the ruling class could spend enormous sums of money decorating their villas and putting their wealth on display in the form of spectacular tableware. In