Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [175]
Certainly many of the old senatorial families of Rome supported the ancient religion. The Christians, they had always claimed, put loyalty to their God before loyalty to Rome: but had not the great orator Cicero centuries earlier declared that the good patriot is promised a reward in heaven? What had become of the old values – the stoicism of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius, the solid virtues of the Roman gentlemen who read the classics, consulted the haruspices and built shrines for their ancestors? All this the Christians claimed to despise. Was it not Christian emperors who had removed the most sacred symbol of the old pagan order, the altar of victory, from the senate house? And now Rome had fallen: it was hardly surprising.
“The empire is ruled by upstart emperors, by Christians and barbarians,” the conservatives said. “And look at the chaos that has resulted.”
This attitude was not only the prejudice of a few diehard Roman aristocrats. Petrus remembered well the attitude of his schoolmaster in Venta Belgarum, who had been a scholarly man and a discreet pagan all his life.
“Christianity was a cult for slaves,” he exclaimed. “They say that of all the gods, only theirs is the true one: what arrogance! What proof have they for such a claim?”
It was an argument which, when he brought it up at home, made his father explode; but the fact was that the blustering Constantius was never able to answer to his satisfaction.
With his schoolmaster, however, he had enjoyed many arguments. Even now, he could hear the old man’s voice, demanding rhetorically: “Are we wiser than Plato and the other great philosophers of antiquity? Was Socrates, that seeker after truth, too proud to sacrifice a cock to Aesculapius before he died?”
“But the Christians teach that there is a single all-powerful God behind the universe and that man has an immortal soul,” Petrus had challenged him. ‘Do you deny that?’
“Why should we?” the scholar replied. “No one who has read and understood Plato would deny that there is a divine idea, an unknowable God behind the universe. As for immortality: each man has a soul which apprehends, though dimly, the divine intelligence: in that sense we may say that the soul reflects the divine and is immortal.”
“And how should we act? The Christians say their morals are better.”
“Virtue and contemplation purify the body and the mind and direct it towards the divine soul,” the old man replied calmly. “The pagan philosophers have taught this for centuries before the Christians existed.”
“And the gods?” Petrus asked eagerly: “Apollo, Minerva, Mars . . .”
“They are divine agents – attributes of the divine, which is infinite and includes all creation. When we worship the gods, we worship in them the divine idea. Why should we deny them?”
“The Christians do.”
“The Christians are fools,” the old man retorted angrily. “First they say that their God is the only god; then they claim that he became a man; then they dispute with one another endlessly about the interpretation of God’s nature – as if a man could comprehend such a mystery – and each party calls the other heretics: Arians, Catholics, Donatists, Manichees, Pelagians . . .” He shrugged contemptuously. “Argue with a Christian and you find a fanatic; read the classical philosophers and you will find reason, enlightenment . . .” He smiled wearily. “But don’t say I said so or I’ll lose my job.”
It was an attractive philosophy: later ages would describe this abstract system as neo-Platonism. To Petrus it seemed to encompass everything: the civilisation of Greece, the virtue and grandeur of Rome; and as he thought of his Christian father’s morose inaction, he decided to rebel. Courage, stern patriotism, the old Roman code of honour – it seemed to him that these were the only qualities he admired; so he became a pagan convert.
Now, as he looked back at the town where the old pagan had taught him, as he saw the roofs