The Kingdom of the Wicked (59 page)

       And now a number of the predestined victims ran away from the knot of feeding lions, rebuked by the crowd for poor sportsmanship and a failure of solidarity. But, clearly, the lions could not eat everybody. They were doing well enough with their concentrated bone crushing and limb tearing, though most had the wit to get at the softer parts first — a good clawing of the belly and the spilling of the guts and an easy meal of bloody puddings. The limbs could come later. But this was not art. This was no gladiatorial display. It was only butchery. Gaius Petronius in the imperial box shook his head: the overture had gone on too long; it was time for the aesthetic part to begin. The master of the games must have thought so too, for the masked keepers with their whips reappeared, lashing the beasts back to their enclosure. Most of them objected, being engaged still in heavy feeding, and they snarled, raising one paw while the other held down their meat. At length they were persuaded, having tasted the whip, to go to their den, some of them carrying chunks of Christian in their jaws, while the rest of the mess, blood, bones, skin, flesh, sand, was pushed with them by men handling wooden pushers on long poles. The uneaten Christians were lashed towards the gate opposite. They had no need of the whip, for they marched firmly, singing as before, some of them waving to the sausagechewers. The cheers they got were not all ironic. Things were not going quite as they should.

       Gaius Petronius had found little useful Roman myth or history to dramatize: it was all conquering people or betraying them, and to dress up Christians as Etruscans or Carthaginians and to put swords and spears into their grips was not necessarily to make them fight. Very clear round yawns were to be heard from some of the gristlefed mob. There was wheeled on a catapult, of the massive kind for hurling stones at enemy fortifications, and male Christians were shot into the air, it having been explained to the four corners of the arena by a bullvoiced announcer that Christians expected to fly to heaven: well, see them fly. So the steel bow was bent by means of a windlass, the cord was released by a spring, and Christians went flying into the audience without the permission of the audience having been obtained. This resulted in the grave injury of certain good Roman plebeians, who rightly grumbled that they had been hurt enough by the damned Christians without having to be hurt more. The Greek myths would perhaps go down better.

       Caleb, very sour and vindictive, explained to a young Christian what was now to happen to him. 'You know the story, do you? Ddalus was the first man to make wings and fly. He made wings for his son, too. His son's name was Icarus. But Icarus flew too near the sun and the wax on his wings melted. So he fell. You're Icarus. You're going to fall. You're going to have your skull split open. And that goes for the rest of you,' he said, raising his voice to a group of other potential Icaruses.

       'You're a Jew, aren't you? You speak to a fellow Jew.'

       'No, you're a Christian. A killer. You killed my son. Blast you to hell.’

       ‘So you believe what you're told?'

       'As you do. Get out there, blast you.'

       In the centre of the arena a very high wooden tower had been placed, eight strutted feet holding it firm to the ground. There was a ladder to the top, and at the top was a platform on which Dxdalus stood, having, by an acceptable fiction, flown there by means of his wooden and sackcloth wings. His task was to grasp each Icarus as he arrived at the top of the ladder and then hurl him off. To ensure that the skullcracking would be effectual, a scree of rocks lay at the bottom. The game did not go well. Some of the Icaruses refused to mount: if they were going to die anyway, why should they have to suffer physical exhaustion and humiliation first? When they had their heads clubbed at the foot of the ladder, Gaius Petronius wrung his hands: these Christians had no sense of art; how could their god be a god of beauty? But it was with relief that he saw a muscular Christian Jew, heavily bearded and bullnecked, gladly climb the ladder in his thin wings of wire and cloth. On the high platform he nodded at the sight of a skin of water to relieve the thirst of the circus performer who played Daedalus, took it, grabbed Dxdalus by the neck, then solemnly baptized him. With one hand on nape and the other on fat arse, he sent the father of flight yelling into the air and to a messy, though presumably holy, death below. Gaius Petronius chewed his nails: that was a lie, that was not the ancient legend, it was a perversion, no sense of art — Circus hands mounted the ladder to get at unfallen Icarus, but he kicked them easily down or hit them with the club Dxdalus had intended to launch the more reluctant fliers. Eventually the tower itself was, through the combined muscles of a dozen circus hands, toppled into the dust, and the young Jewish Christian, having blessed the populace, spilt his brains for its delectation. A spectacular ending to the act, but, even the dullest could tell, it had not quite followed the devisers' intention: a lack of sportive justice in it, somehow.

       Various naked Christian women were made, successively, to ride a vigorous white bull. If that bull was meant to be Zeus, then this was a blasphemous parody. When the Europas fell into the dust screaming and were duly tossed and gored, the blasphemy was somewhat mitigated. 'Watch. Watch,' Nero ordered Poppea. She had been hiding her eyes in her veil. She dropped it now only to bunch her lovely face in nausea. Then she left the imperial box, vomiting on Tigellinus as she went. Some noticed this and a faint wave of approval arose from, it was supposed, the plebeians of her sex. Nero was angry and spat viciously at Gaius Petronius.

       As an amythic interlude, several Christians were brought on dressed in animal skins. Then wild dogs, their jaws adrip with hydro-phobia, were loosed on to them. These creatures were frightened by the sudden unleashing of a confident Christian hymn, and they were confused when some of the Christians tore off their skins and threw them at the snarling teeth. The dogs assumed that it was these skins they were intended to devour, and they did so for a time despite the crowd's remonstrance. Then, finding no nourishment in the aromatic pelts, they leapt at the Christian throats, of which there were enough to go round. Finally there came a carefully organized setpiece, in which Roman troops were dressed as barbarous Britons, complete with stuck-on yellow moustaches and yellow wigs. The male Christians were comically dressed as Roman troops, armed with wooden swords and spears. The pseudobarbarians had bows and arrows and, with fine style and accurate aim, they transfixed at their leisure the pseudoromans. Now the crowd was placed in something of a dilemma. It appreciated that the show was intended to remind them of the recent British revolt against well-meaning Roman colonialism; it understood that the Christians were, in a sense, being butchered for mocking stalwart Roman troops; it knew that the arrow-aiming display demonstrated Roman skill even with barbaric weapons; but they were confused because the final image — warwhooping of bowmen with moustaches coming unstuck and wigs awry under the dying sun — was not really one creditable to the Roman Empire. Gaius Petronius's patriotism, it seemed to Nero, was of a highly qualified kind: it let art, and mediocre art at that, get in the way. It was to be hoped that the second day of the games would go better than this.

       The duty officer at the city council offices, which stood at the junction of the Via Tiburtina and the Vicus Longus, was puzzled that evening when an old man who spoke neither Greek nor Latin seemed to demand to be arrested. The officer searched for an interpreter, having at least established that the old man was Jewish, and found a wounded soldier who had served in Palestine, now working for the municipality as a limping messenger between departments, who understood the old man well enough.

       'He says he's Petrus, sir, and that he's not only a Christian but the head of the Christians. He says he got that appointment from the man himself, Christus that is.'

       'What does he want?'

       'He says he doesn't see why he should go on living while so many of his friends are being seen off, so to speak.'

       'He wants to die, you mean?'

       'Well, it's reasonable, sir. He's a Christian, he says.'

       'This isn't a military headquarters, Crassus. It's nothing to do with us. He'd better be sent to the Castra Praetoria. They're in charge of rounding up Christians. Strange, though. Wants it, does he?'

       'You can see his point in a way, sir. He's had his time, he says. When mere children are getting the knife stuck in, he says, why should the father of the whatdoyoucallit go free. He's done his best to attract  attention, he says, shouting the odds in the street, but nobody's taken a blind bit of notice.'

       'He seems harmless enough. Take him there. You don't need any help, do you?'

       'Well, it's not really in the way of duty, is it? And me with this bad leg. We could get somebody from the Vigiles to take him. That's only round the corner.'

       All right, get somebody.'

       There was no shortage of speakers of bad Aramaic at the Castra Praetoria. The interrogating officer was as puzzled as the functionary at the municipal offices by what sounded like a calm acceptance of a sort of collective guilt on the part of the old man. But guilty of exactly what? Of burning Rome or of belonging to a superstitious sect which had been declared illegal? All the old man would speak of was two outlandish places called Sodom and Gomorrah, which had been burnt by the Lord God for their sins, and he said that Rome was worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. That sounded very much like an admission of Christian responsibility for massive incendiarism, and the old man was asked if he would sign a statement to that effect. No, he would sign nothing. He had never signed anything in his life. Crucify me and get it all over with. Crucify? Who are you to specify your mode of dispatch? I've given myself up, haven't I? I have certain rights, don't I? I want to be crucified, but not in the usual way. I want it to be done upside down. The old man was clearly crazy. Perhaps they ought to discharge him with a caution. Upside down, indeed. That made the whole thing vaguely comic. Well, they could wash their hands of the business by sending him to the master of the games. Christians had become material for popular entertainment. Undignified, somehow. Rome was losing its reputation for punitive dignity.

       Peter was locked in a cell for the night and taken to the games master early next day. The games master saw possibilities in the inverted crucifixion. It was comic, yes, but that was in order. The carpenters had better start work right away on a gallows that could be affixed inverted to a kind of cart. The remaining Christians at the end of the day's sport could drag the cart in, with this old fellow upside down on the cross, they could sing a hymn, and then they could meet, as planned, the gladiators and be mown down. Meanwhile the old fellow could be set alight and the announcer could announce that the burning of Rome had finally been avenged. And that that was the end of the Christians.

       Gaius Petronius had contrived very complicated setpieces for the day's entertainment. But, again, the Christians did not seem to recognize their duty to art. A ship on wheels was dragged on to confront an artificial island of singing sirens — men, or properly half-men, in fair long wigs with melon breasts stuck on their chests. They wore gloves with honed razor talons, and they were to tear to pieces the naked seamen who were really Christians, these to be thrust off the boat to their doom with very sharp spears. The siren music was provided by a chorus of genuine women hidden beneath the wooden rocks. Some of the Christians preferred the spears to the claws, and others fought the sirens very viciously with their fists until, their eyes mostly torn out, they could fight no more. But many of the spectators objected strongly to seeing men dressed up as sirens. There was enough effeminacy in the city without making a public glorification of it. The Cretan labyrinth went down rather better, with the more massive gladiators in Minotaur disguise clubbing the Christian wanderers through the wooden maze. And the Trojan horse, into whose door in the flank two hundred Christians were impelled, there to be burnt alive, was considered ingenious. But the penultimate item of the day was thought to be in very bad taste.

       All the Christian children that were left, some hundred of them, were clothed in lambskins. The very young ones thought this a fine sport and gambolled gleefully into the arena among others, less young, more doubtful, led by a prancing shepherd. This shepherd was quick to make his comic exit when the wild dogs, their heavy meal of the previous day long digested, leapt out and savaged the lambs. There were murmurs from the more reasonable of the audience: these youngsters had committed neither cannibalism nor incest and it was doubtful if they had had any part in the burning of the city. This was, not to mince matters, gratuitous cruelty. Many left. It was to a half-empty arena that the final show of Christians sang their song of faith and courage, dragging on the cart which displayed the nailed and bleeding old man who looked like anybody's grandfather, absurdly inverted, seeing, if he could still see, the world fading as the world was not. This man, the announcer bellowed, had ordered the burning of the city. Few believed it. When burning pitch was applied to the poor old devil he was clearly already dead. The Christians had not responded with any zest to the swordsmen: they let themselves be cut down. No sport and a weak ending to two days of entertainment which could not properly be called games at all. The audience left murmuring.

       That night Nero, in his lonely bed as big as a barge, dreamed of hell. He woke screaming and spent the rest of the night awake, gloomily drinking warm wine without water. He was in a foul temper when he met his Empress at the breakfast table, and she herself inflamed and concentrated his diffused rage by inveighing against the brutality of the games, a brutality, she would point out, which would have an effect the reverse of the imperial intention. 'You and the Roman people. Spasming under your togas to see men and women and children torn to shreds. So easy, is it not, to give way to the beast inside us. History is supposed to record the taming of the beast. The Roman Empire takes over history and trumpets the victory of reason. But it's the trumpeting of a rogue elephant. The beasts are with us, and they have names, but mine shall not be among them.'