Keeping the Faith: Quintus Aurelius Symmachus

 

Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (340 – 405 AD.) was born into the 3rd generation of hereditary peers. His birth decided his station in life; he became a senator and orator.

The city of Rome was still the hub of the world, a metropolis like New York, but the empire’s top magistrates had moved to the imperial courts in Milan and Constantinople. The Roman Senate was a club of dynasts in which every member was required by law to own a certain amount of capital or landed property in order to maintain his status of an almost princely standing. Gradually the extinction of senatorial dynasties was leading to the concentration of more wealth in fewer hands. We know of a man in this assembly who boasted that he could travel from Rome to Sicily without ever setting a foot outside of his own estates. His dozens of villas and incredibly extended estates were staffed with whole armies of stewards, notaries, accountants, masons, girls for the master’s pleasure, oxcart drivers, sailors, boys for the master’s pleasure, well groomed eunuchs and messenger services, not to mention the sharecroppers working the fields. These farmhands populated entire villages and became the first soil bound serfs on record (Ep. VI:67; 79). Symmachus, too, owned several manor houses at the Via Appia and the Vatican, villas at Ostia, Praeneste and Lavinium, and, for shelter against the summer-heat, he retreated to an estate at Tibur. There was a farm at Formiae, a townhouse in Capua, and further estates in Samnia, Apulia and even Morocco. For the head of state this opulence and independence of the great landowners made them an object of constant suspicion and he burdened them with costly "honors" and ever more frequent billeting (Ep. I:5; 10; II:52; VII:66; IX:40; 48). In addition to the usual taxes a senator was obliged to pay into the imperial coffers four pounds of gold bullion annually. The price of gold was on a steep climb. In 305 AD., one pound of gold was worth 100,000 denarii. In 472 AD., the same pound of gold was on the market for 2,120,000,000 denarii (two billion and one hundred-twenty million) according to a calculation by the US treasury. Despite his enormous resources, Symmachus was often strapped of ready cash; money he needed to finance his political career.

As part of his election campaign for the position of Rome’s praefectus urbis – the chief of police – Symmachus entertained the Roman populace with circus games (Ep. IV:8; V:62). He hired artisans from Sicily and at enormous costs to his own purse imported rare animals from exotic countries – “Dalmatian bears, lions from Libya, dogs from Scotland, even crocodiles.” As the pièce de résistance he contracted a stable of gladiators, a bunch "worse than the band of Spartacus." Fighting in the arena was still as popular as ever, despite current legislation ruling against it (Ep. II:46; 76; 77; IV:12; 33; 42; 63; 8; 58; 59; 60; 62; V:56; 82; VI:42; 43; VII:59; 100; 121;122; IX:20; 24; 125; X:10; 13; 15; 19; 20; 26; 28; 29). The investment paid off. Symmachus won the election. As praefectus urbis he policed the streets and was accountable for the maintenance and construction of aqueducts and roads; and for the repair of the temples.

This turned out to be a dilemma. The Christian legislator was just about to prohibit any form of maintenance for Gentile shrines (Codex Theodosius XVI.10.10).

The Gentile cults of the period were heading towards a syncretistic monotheism, a system where the soul of the universe poured out into numerous manifestations. A complicated hierarchy of gods, stars, angelic beings, demons and heroes, with us lesser mortals crawling at the bottom. Hell was the infernal fortress “where trees and undergrowth duck under the horror of a great darkness" and demons, "whose hearts do not know how to be touched by human prayer," torment the souls "as if winter-storms chase myriads of birds into the twilight of greenwood boughs.” (Virgil, Georgics). In this system even the emperors held a kind of semi-demonic status. The virtuous Gentile hoped for a hereafter among the stars, somewhere in the constellation Cassiopeia. Beliefs of this kind were still widely popular and the satirical gripes of the Gentile publicist Lucian of Samosata (125 – 180 AD.) had done little to prevent the proliferation of humbug and superstition. Neither did the secular indifference of the educated. Already the Greek historian Polybius (200 – 118 BC.) saw an augur suddenly pause in front of the whole assembly and ask his colleague how he could possibly keep a straight face. Yet paganism did not go down on its own, nor in a polite exchange of arguments. Instead the deathblow came on a sudden and was dealt by the heavy hands of a bureaucrat. A circular to the provincial magistracies, decreed, “by pain of death,” to destroy all pagan groves, temples, and temple precincts, and to erect crosses in their place (Codex Theodosianus XVI.x.24). Imperial subsidies to the temples were annulled, cult objects exposed to systematic destruction (Codex Theodosius XVI.x.16). Bath houses and public places were ordered to remove the images (Codex Theodosius XVI.x.19). The mob was encouraged to topple nude statues and hack away noses and genitalia.

The empire’s Christian population – still barely half of the total – was split in two camps with uncounted “heresies” between them. The majority was non-Trinitarian. Most clerics anathematized as unbiblical the Nicean Creed that Jesus “was the son, but consubstantial and existing as the word of the father from eternity before he was made to incarnate in the flesh.” One of the participants at Nicea, Bishop Sabinus of Heraclea, even dismissed the assembly as a herd of yes-men, expected to merely make a show of “grave deportment on account of their grey hair.” These were the people who duly passed the articles of the new creed. The champion of the Holy Trinity, Athanasius of Alexandria (293 – 373 AD.), himself an absentee at the council, assisted deliberations with sending a mob of armed thugs recruited from the monasteries in the Theban desert. The incident is a studiously glossed over footnote to history, but back then the bishops weren’t willing to forget. Under Emperor Constantius II (337 – 361 AD.), no less than nine councils continued to rejected the creed of Nicea, maintaing the doctrine of the Presbyter Arius (249 – 336 AD.), that “the Son has a beginning and was made of things not yet existing and therefore we were not made for Him, but He for us, when it was the pleasure of God. Therefore the Father was as invisible to the Son and known as imperfectly by the Son, as God is to us.” Fifty years later Constantinople was still “full of mechanics and slaves,” said Bishop Gregory of Nazianzen (330 – 389 AD.), “who are all profound theologians and preach in the shops and in the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told, by way of reply, that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is, that the Son was made out of nothing.” Apparently all these “mechanics and slaves” were firm anti-Trinitarians; the slightest hint of a disagreement and you had a riot on your hands. The Trinitarians were losing.

Then the mighty Saint Ambrose of Milan (340 – 397 AD.) came to their rescue. Before he became Bishop he had been a man of the legal profession. He was the Prefect of Italy and the vicar of the imperial court in Milan. This made him one of the four most powerful civil servants in the empire, a seasoned politician, melancholy and aloof, a relentless anti-Semite, whose policy, under the mantle of unbending politeness, relied on acts of violence, calculated to look like caprices. If anybody, than Ambrose deserves the appellative of “Rock of the Church,” a man of more consequence for the course of history than Jesus Christ himself. Emperor Valentinian II was still an adolescent when Ambrose used his influence to effect a change in the Roman constitution.

The law from February 27, 380 AD., “according to the apostolic teaching and the doctrine of the Gospel,” decreed to “believe in the one deity of the father, Son and Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity. We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians.” Christians who had the temerity of begging to differ were to be branded “with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give their gatherings the name of churches, since they are foolish madmen” (Codex Theodosius XVI.1.2). February 27 was a minority coup like in Russia the Bolshevik’s October revolution. Against a majority vastly outnumbering the Catholics, Catholicism became state religion, and from now on it was an act of treason not to be a Catholic. Effectively rescinding basic civil rights, the legislator threatened that the heretic “will suffer the punishment which authority, in accordance with the will of heaven, shall decide to inflict.”

Emperor Gordian's law from 244 AD. was as close as Roman law ever came to an anticipation of habeas corpus. The decree prohibited the torture of any person, “whether free or slave,” without a conviction in a court of law. However in cases of suspected treason the legislator left a loophole. Now “heresy” branded you as a traitor. It opened the door to inquisitorial procedures against the dissenter, long before anybody thought of the Inquisition.

Not that the coup had passed unnoticed! In his autobiography, the Gentile publicist Libanius (314 – 394 AD.) called the motion an “evil law by a sacrilegious legislator.“ It opened the floodgates. In 391 AD. a legislative snowstorm bore down on the attendance to Gentile rituals. The legislator not only prohibited sacrifices, but the offering of candles, wine and devotional images. (Ironically these would soon become paraphernalia in the Catholic mass.) The law-abiding gentile was reduced to sitting “in silence on the temple-floor, clasping the knees and bending his head,” since he was not even permitted to look “upon the images or utter a single word of supplication” (Libanius). A provincial governor ignoring cases of clandestine entry into closed down shrines would face a fine. Decorating the doorway to your home with wreaths and pouring wine from libation bowls got you in serious trouble (Novellae Theodosiani III). Your own domestics were expected to inform on you to the authorities. For infractions, the penalty was loss of property. If of curial rank, the offender would face a fine of 1,800 solidi in gold (Codex Theodosianus XVI.x.12), the expenses for a sizable cavalry unit in full armor. The economical motive in much of the anti-pagan legislation is all too obvious, and while the financial resources of a senator could still keep the bailiff at bay, the have-nots had nowhere to hide.

The legislator continued to tighten the screw: “No person shall pollute himself with sacrificial animals; no person shall slaughter an innocent victim; no person shall approach the shrines, shall wander through the temples, or revere the images formed by mortal labor, lest he become guilty by divine and human laws" (Codex Theodosius XVI.10.10). In 396 AD. the ministers and hierophants of the mysteries lost all privileges, even in Eleusis, the most prestigious of the mystery cults (Codex Theodosianus XVI.x.14). The “Maiuma,” a water festival with fun and naked women, had long been a thorn in the eyes of the Christian clergy. The legislator demanded the observance of decorum and restricted the festivities to the rural areas (Codex Theodosianus XV.vi.1). (“Pagan” and “peasant” come from the same root-word.) Three festivals later this seemed not nearly enough and the “foul and obscene spectacle" was banned entirely (Codex Theodosianus XV.vi.2).

In the end the terror reached the privileged as well.

In Alexandria, in open daylight, the mob ambushed and stripped naked an elderly woman. The assailants dragged her on her back into a church and the churchwarden Peter the Reader struck her with his club until her mangled body showed no sign of life. The holy mob cut the corpse to pieces and scraped the flesh from the bones with shells and potshards, feeding it to the dogs. “This happened in the month of March during Lent, in the fourth year of Cyril’s episcopate, under the tenth consulate of Honorius, and the sixth of Theodosius II” (Socrates Scholasticus VII:15). The victim’s name was Hypathia (355 – 415 AD.). She was a mathematician and Gentile philosopher. She also was a woman. Unaware of Paul’s command not to “suffer a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man” (1 Timothy 2:12) she had had the temerity to instruct Christian clerics in the sciences. The admirable Synesius of Cyrene was one of her students. The whole affair was never prosecuted; the instigator of the crime, the notorious anti-Semite Bishop Cyril, still figures as a saint in the Greek Orthodox calendar.

 

II.

Although himself a Gentile, Symmachus, in his administrative function, had no choice but to enforce Christian legislation. In one of his speeches, Symmachus addressed the consequences of a law by Emperor Valentinian. The law was meant to repress the scandalous conduct of Christian clerics who routinely hunted the wealthy in their flock for legacies to the church. Clergy and monks were explicitly told to stay away from the houses of orphans and widows, and not to receive from them “any gift, legacy, or feoffment in trust.” It did not really stop the practice. “I do not complain of the law,” wrote Saint Jerome,“ but I grieve that we have deserved a statute so harsh. The law is strict and far-seeing, yet even so rapacity goes on unchecked. By a fiction of trusteeship we set the statute at defiance.” Yet the Valentinian statute turned out to be a piece of double-edged legislation that could be turned against the Gentile priesthood as well. Symmachus brought the matter before the imperial court. On an earlier occasion he already had exposed himself to recriminations when he extended his protection to a group of otherwise unknown “philosophers” (Ep. I:29; II:39; III:33-36; X:34), so this intercession on behalf of his Gentile clients was not to make him more popular.

“The treasury,” said Symmachus, “has lately retained the estates bequeathed on virgins and ministers in deeds and wills. What good does it do for Your Graces’ revenue if the privileges of the Vestal Virgins are diminished? Does the most bountiful emperors refuse what before even the most parsimonious of the emperors have granted? The virgins’ sole honor is their chastity. Like the ornaments they wear, it is this distinction that gives them the right to officiate to the sacrifice. In return they receive immunity, a small privilege for someone taking the vow of poverty and not being allowed to charge a fee. And so worshippers who contribute out of their substance increase their own prestige, inasmuch as virginity is dedicated to the public good as its own reward. I entreat you, priests of justice, let the lost right of inheritance be restored to the people of the cloth and the places of worship. Let men draw up their wills without anxiety, and let it be known that what has been written will be safe from the greed of the princes. Let this last happiness for a man in his dying hour give also pleasure to you.

“Is not the religion of Rome protected by the law and itself a protector of the law? How shall we name it then when property is taken away unlawfully without cause or reason? Freedmen accept legacies, slaves are in their rights to make a will; only noble virgins and the ministers of sacred rites are not allowed to inherit property? What would be the point to take the vows of chastity and commend the empire to heaven’s guardianship, and invoke the friendly powers to assist your war efforts, if the holy vows in the service of all deprive the priest of constitutional rights? And let no one think that I am defending the cause of religion only.

“Time and again, from deeds of this kind, have arisen all the misfortunes of the Roman race. The law of our ancestors honored the Vestal Virgins and the ministers of the gods with a moderate maintenance and sensible privileges. This grant remained un-assailed until some degenerate money-broker turned the fund into a collateral for loans to porters and sewage cleaners. Not surprising this did lead to a general famine which has affected all the provinces. No fault of Mother Earth, there was no evil influence from the stars. Blight did not ruin the crops, nor wild oats destroy the corn. The year failed because of the sacrilege, and what was refused to religion was denied to everybody else.

“A good prince should not suppose that the revenue has a claim on common property. A state is a corporation of individuals and what individuals pay from their property into the treasury becomes again the property of individuals when it leaves the revenue in the form of public expenditure. By the mandate to protect what is each individual’s own, Your Highnesses, is the ruler over all of us. With You, justice has more weight than arbitrary tyranny.”

Acute statements of constitutional import, but the regime in Milan, pressed by chronic insolvencies, preferred turning a deaf ear.

 

III.

In 384 AD. Symmachus served the empire as Proconsul of Africa. His biggest task was to prevent Christian sectarians – Catholics and Donatists, Montanists and Tertullianists – from coming to blows with each other. Christianity was state religion, but dying for one’s faith still seemed a shortcut to heaven. Armed bands of “Circumcellions,” roamed the province and cheerfully announced the hour and day when they would come to vandalize the local shrine or church, thus hoping to receive the “crown of martyrdom” by the hands of an outraged population.

On an inspection tour Symmachus encountered a dazzling young man from Madaura. Himself graced by the intellectual’s hemorrhoid, he was enchanted. The young man would later be known as Saint Augustine (354 – 430 AD.) and become a “doctor of the church.” At the time he was still not baptized and mingled with the Manichaeans. Symmachus found him an opening as professor of rhetoric in Milan. Right away the new arrival queued up for a personal interview with Bishop Ambrose.

The door to Ambrose was always open but the seat of the great man was surrounded by a zone of submissive hush. Ambrose was sitting there with the open Bible in front of him, the first man on record to read in silence. His visitors shuffled their feet with respectful little coughs. “Ambrose’s eyes kept running over the page,” wrote Augustine in his autobiography, "and after waiting for a long time in silence we used to go away. We supposed that in the hubbub of other people’s troubles, he would not want to be invited to consider more problems. We wondered if he read silently perhaps to protect himself.” (Confessions, Book VI). An acute observation, typical for Augustine’s keen intellect, but gifted as he was, Augustine never realized that Ambrose had looked right through the narcissism of his visitor. Ambrose soon realized that this new catechumen was not exactly leadership material. He baptized Augustine and sent him back to Africa where Augustine withered away a long life as the prelate of the provincial Hippo – modern Annaba – in Tunisia.

Augustine couldn’t decide what was worse in this godforsaken place: that he couldn’t find a single copy of Cicero’s speeches or was kept waiting in the antechamber of a local landowner, while watching his lordship’s gamekeeper walk right through. When in 429 AD. King Gaiseric and his Vandals knocked at the gates of Hippo, Augustine got his chance to make history; he not only didn’t spot the moment, his inflammatory appeals gave cause for centuries of armed discontent between the faiths. Saint Ambrose was a scary judge of character. Symmachus was ill advised to embark on a collision course with this man.

 

IV.

Every morning, before the senate went in session, the bare pedestal in the assembly hall reminded the senators of the insult to the dignity of the house. Since Emperor Constantius II had ordered the removal of the statue of Victory, the goddess had been in and out, depending on the inclination of the sitting bearer of the purple. Emperor Julian restored the statue, Emperor Gratian removed it again. As the most senior senator in the house, Symmachus addressed the court, pleading for the return of the idol. His speech is the plea of a religious man.

"In the exercise of two offices,” he said, “I am attending to public business as your prefect and as the Speaker of the Senate, and I recommend to your notice the charge laid on me by the citizens. This is not an expression of dissent, but it is my task to watch out on behalf of Your Graces. What could be more appropriate in the institutions of our ancestors, and the rights and destiny of our country?

“We therefore demand the restoration of that condition of religious affairs which had been advantageous to the state for times immemorial. Are we on such good terms with the barbarians that there is no longer any need for the altar of Victory? If so, we shall be careful and withhold it from the public eye. But at least let us pay homage to the title which is refused to the Goddess, the source of your greatness whose fame will last for ever and will be even greater after more victories to come. Will Your Graces desert a patronage which is benign to your triumphs? For a power that is wished for by everybody, let no one deny the liberty to follow what is generally recognized the common desire. Allow us, we beseech you, as old men to leave to our children what we have received from our fathers.

 “By what symbol shall we be sworn in to obey your laws and commands? By what religious deterrent shall the irresolute mind be terrified, so as not to give false testimony? All things are indeed filled with God, and no place is safe for the perjured, but to be urged under the religious protocol has great power to impress on the mind a fear of sinning.

“Victoria’s altar is the corner stone for the concord of us all, an appeal to everybody’s good faith, and nothing gives more authority to our decrees than to have them issued by the Senate as it were under the sanction of an oath. We ask then to leave in peace the gods of our fathers and of our country. All forms of worship should lead to unity. We look up to the same stars, one sky looks down on all of us, and we share the same world. What difference does it make if each is seeking the truth in his own way? Truth is such a vast affair, how can it be achieved by taking only one road leading to it?”

May the unseen guardians of every religion favor you, and may especially those, who in the old days have assisted our and your ancestors, defend you and listen to our prayers. We ask to restore the state of religious matters which has secured the empire for your Highnesses’ divine parent as well."

The address was never delivered. Ambrose advised the imperial court in Milan to refuse the speaker of the house an audience. Symmachus had to submit his speech to the antechamber like every other petitioner. Without as much as facing his opponent, Saint Ambrose wrote his rebuttal.

He could rest assured that the court would adopt his position. On an other occasion Ambrose had not hesitated to bar His Imperial Highness from the Eucharist until he yielded to his demands, even – and I may add in this case deservedly so – made the emperor kneel in sackcloth before him and all the people in the cathedral. Like every other penitent the emperor had to wait his turn in the company of fishmongers and shopkeepers in a specially designated area at the back of the church, furthest from the apse. Dressed beneath his status, with stubbles on his chin, the emperor waited in full public view for the gesture of reconciliation. Not surprising, Emperor Theodosius "the Great" (379 – 395 AD.) developed into a Christian hardliner who used every means of state power to hound down heretics and persecute paganism. However he tried drawing the line at the molestation of his Jewish subjects.

Little did he know. The New Testament is an anti-Semitic manifesto end to end, repeating in countless variations that the Jews had killed Jesus (Acts 4:10; 1 Thess. 2:14-16), that theirs is not salvation (Mk. 13:9; 16:16; Jn. 8.43-47 Acts 13:45-51 1 Jn. 2:22-23), and strongly hinting: kill the Jews (Mt. 23:37,38; 27:25; Titus 1:10-14; Acts 18:6): "Ye are of your father the devil. Stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? And they have slain them which showed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers" (Acts 7.51-53). The Apostle Paul, rejecting the law of the Jews as an obstacle to salvation altogether (Rom. 4:15, 7:5, 10:9, 11:6 and 1 Cor. 5:7-8), was the first to issue the infamous blood-libel (1 Thess. 2:15-17). In the mouth of Jesus himself  – supposedly a Jew and a rabbi – words are put, which announce that "upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth," (Mt. 23:35), and: "The children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Mt. 8.12). So it should be no surprise to hear the fathers of the church follow received “wisdom.” The urban theologian Origen (185 – 253/5 AD.) accused the Jews to "have committed a crime of the most unhallowed kind, in conspiring against the savior." The Christian ayatollah Chrysostomus (347 – 407 AD.) went on bitching about synagogues as "a den of thieves and a haunt of wild animals. This is why Christ said ask for my enemies, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them and slay them before me" (Orationes VIII, Adversus Judaeos). In Africa, Saint Augustine, as usual, could not bear to stay behind: "Judas is the image of the Jewish people. They bear the guilt for the death of the savior, for through their fathers they have killed the Christ." 

Again it was Bishop Ambrose of Milan who was the first to breach the divide between harsh words and actual atrocities.

As a jurist full well knowing the implication, he set a legal precedent of which the consequences are still with us. In 385 AD., at Raqqa, Syria, the local bishop took the lead in an act of vandalism against a synagogue. Emperor Theodosius was furious and demanded an inquest. To his surprise, Ambrose sent him a memo in which he threatened to withhold the Eucharist from the emperor again, if he didn’t obtain binding assurances that there was to be no reparation to be made to the Jews of Raqqa. Theodosius had learned his lesson. He complied.

Yet for the deposition of Symmachus, there came an unexpected break. In 387 AD. the Gentile sympathizer Magnus Maximus briefly assumed the purple and Ambrose momentarily lost his influence at the court in Milan. Symmachus delivered the coronation address. His plea succeeded. For less than two years, until Maximus was executed on August 28, 388 AD., the sculpture and privileges were restored.

 

V.

In 391 AD., Symmachus became consul of Rome and, upholding the tradition of his family, he introduced into the senate his ten year old (sic!) son, Quintus Fabius Memmius Symmachus. The teenager immediately got a foretaste of things to come, when in the following year, Emperor Valentinian II – Emperor Theodosius’ colleague in France – was found hanging from a noose in his bedroom.

 To fill his place, Valentinian’s chief of staff approached Eugenius, a former teacher, to assume the purple. To the horror of the Christian ayatollahs, Eugenius issued edicts of toleration for his Gentile subjects and attempted to create a united front with the still predominantly Gentile senate in Rome. Emperor Theodosius was bidding his time to gage his support, while his clerical spin doctors cranked up the heat and spoke of the final showdown between Christians and Pagans. This was hardly true.

The soldiers in both camps were mainly Christians. In the battle of the Frigidus, on September 6, 394 AD., the unfortunate Eugenius was slain in his tent and his head held aloft on a pike, signaling to his troops that there was no more cause worth fighting for. Emperor Theodosius then installed in Milan the younger of his two teenage sons, Honorius (384 – 423 AD.), as Augustus of the West. Honorius remained childless, the only good thing to be said about him. His brother, Arcadius (377/378 – 408), was already Augustus of the East with his seat in Constantinople. He had Down Syndrome and needed lifelong supervision but managed to produce heirs. Emperor Theodosius fell ill. On January 17, 395 AD. the dying emperor entrusted to his marshal Flavius Stilicho (359 – 408 AD.) “the empires of both sons” (Zosimus). Things began to unravel when the governor of Africa declared a trade embargo on Italy and offered the transfer of his jurisdiction away from Honorius to his brother. The move threatened Italy with famine. Embassies passed between Italy and Constantinople (Symmachus, Epp. IV.5; Claudian; Orosius, VII.36), Honorius’ administration could not afford to yield. The only alternative seemed open war between the brothers.

Stilicho was the magister militium utrisque, the last chief of the joint imperial forces; he could not be seen interfering in a turf war between civil administrations. He looked for diplomatic backup, the ancient equivalent to an UN resolution and turned to the senate in Rome. The senate complied and declared the governor of Africa a public enemy. Constantinople answered with recriminations against Stilicho. The marshal delegated operations to his chief of staff, a general of Gothic stock “who knew as well how to command as to preserve his troops,” and from similar occasions was known to “voluntarily spare the prisoners of war and allot to them some or other district around the Italian towns for cultivation” (Ammianus). A fleet of transports assembled in the port of Pisa. The expedition force counted barely 2,500 men under arms. Without firing a single shot they landed in Africa and dispersed the rabble confronting them. The man who had caused it all, the governor, went on the run. Unfavorable winds threw his ship back to the African coast, and he opened his veins avoiding arrest. The crisis was resolved, and during Honorius’ minority Stilicho became the de facto regent in Milan, but lost all his influence in Constantinople.

The marshal's wife and children were still living there and he sent them an urgent message. Except for the customs officer standing at the window overseeing the port of Constantinople, nobody on the Golden Horn looked up when a lonely but luxurious vessel left the Hellespont and hoisted sail to cross the Adriatic towards Italy.

It was a symbol. East- and West Rome had parted ways for good.

 

VI.

In his letters, Symmachus has left us the obituaries of his most distinguished colleagues (Ep. I:2). The courageous Consul Vettius Agorius Praetextatus (328 – 384 AD.) treaded a fine line with the law when he made formal inquests in the desecration of pagan temples and set out to restore closed down shrines. The consul was helped by his wife, by the senators Virius Nicomachus and Flavianus, and by the linguist Servius. Many of the other senators offered tacit backing. It was a heartrending and futile struggle, ruining his and his associates’ fortunes. Recruiting qualified clerics for the pagan cause became increasingly difficult. Praetextatus himself officiated at eight different cults. Some senators became initiates in every mystery cult known to exist, even joined by proxy. In Macrobius’ Saturnalia, Praetextatus is on record as the first ancient advocate for the universal manumission of slaves (Macr., Sat. I, 11:2-50).

The election of Pope Damasius (305 – 384 AD.) fell into Praetextatus’ term as chief of police. Gone were the days of hiding in the catacombs; the Christian community was no longer an assembly of low-lives and their shepherd could no longer be an ex-slave and convicted embezzler like Pope Calixtus I. Oppressed by murderous taxation and the costly burdens of a political career, taking holy orders and enter a clerical career now seemed the smart thing to do even for the better off. The Roman successor of a meek fisherman dressed up in princely regalia and was carried about in a golden sedan chair. His residence was a mosaic incrusted marvel of late Roman architecture, and the holy books were “dyed in purple, with gold on it molten into lettering and jewels decking the book cover, while Christ lies at the door naked and dying” (Jerome). Praetextatus wasn’t kidding when he said: "Make me bishop of Rome, and I will be a Christian tomorrow."

On election day the hired hooligans of one candidate besieged the hired hooligans of the other candidate in the basilica of Sicininus (now Santa Maria Maggiore). “The tempers flew high and in a pitched battle many men were wounded and killed. The chief of police and his men were unable to put an end to the brawl, or at least to restore some semblance of order, and the violence at last compelled them to withdraw to the suburbs, and the populace who had been roused to such a state of ferocity was brought to order only with great difficulty" (Ammianus, XXVII, 3:11-13). When the police finally forced entry they needed body-bags for no less than 137 corpses. In the following years Pope Damasius repeatedly faced corruption charges, even from his personal secretary, Saint Jerome. Fed up with the sleaze and the politics, Jerome finally left the city to pursue his studies in the East. Jerome was an astute storyteller and theological hardliner, disguising to the world the nihilism lurking in his heart. Although lacking the gift of faith, he propagated unconditional obedience to the dogma as the last line of defense against chaos and anarchy. These days Jerome is best remembered for his translation of the Bible into Latin.

Understandably the chief of police was not his favorite person. After Praetextatus’ sudden death, Jerome even stooped to sneering at the pains of the widow: “What a change! A few days ago the highest dignitaries accompanied him in his entourage, now he’s prisoner to the foul darkness, and not, as his unhappy wife likes to think, residing in the royal abode of the milky way. Among the tormented we see the consul now, not in his triumphal robe, but begging for a drop of water” (Letters XXIII, to Marcella). Not exactly the saint’s finest hour.

 

VII.

The best gift, Symmachus could think of was giving away a corrected copy of Livy’s history (Ep. IX:13). The poet Virgil became an object almost of worship and the satires of Juvenal provided a seemingly inexhaustible source of comfort. In the safety of his study, Symmachus never tired of consigning to memory entire passages from the canon of Gentile classics: Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Livy and Pliny. He noted the Aeneid's use for sortilegia, book oracles (Ep. III:11; 13; IV:34). You prick a needle into the book, open the page and voila there is the voice of God talking to you.

Symmachus' looked up to Pliny the Younger as his literary model, yet he knew of course why in his day and age there could be no second Pliny. This was not the time for giving unsolicited opinions; the imperial police routinely inspected the mail-bags. The intelligentsia responded with apathy and silence. Except for matters of urgency, no Gentile author cared to mention anything referring to Rome after the fall of the Republic. Symmachus quoted with approval the philosopher and statesman Seneca: “The rivers run shallow and mountains have shrunk in size; the whole cosmos is in decline.”

This was the golden age of the sermon; some of the greatest preachers of the Christian faith made the barreled ceilings of their church reverberate with bloodcurdling exhortations. The urban Gentile responded with Ciceronian eloquence (Ep. II:35; I:45; IV:28; V:86; VII:9), but lacking the accessible platform of a congregation at church, he was prevented from bringing his nuanced and well reasoned plea to a wider audience. The finest minds of the period occupied themselves with figures of speech and investigated syntactic intricacies for which we no longer have names; they explored the prosodic characteristics of every word in the dictionary. The all important question whether to start a sentence with an anapest or a spondee became the subject of voluminous tomes about the Latin language. Priscian’s Institutions is still a monument of Latin grammar. For the speaker in the senate, every gesture, the cadence in an expression, the toss of a cloak's hemp, was part of a formalized code; every sentence was meant to be reminiscent of “the old days of beauty and philosophy” (Ep. II,3; III: 51).

The idiom in Symmachus’ letters is a mix of archaic simplicity interspersed with abstract terminologies borrowed from sciences and crafts (Ep. III:22; 44). The man had more dictionaries than friends for company and his reader better has many dictionaries as his friends if he wishes to keep up with the author’s bitter reflections on his own political impotence.

In the name of a quaint idea of ancient virtues, Symmachus was putting his numerous daughters to carding and spinning, or at least had them supervise the maidservants doing it for them. He constantly traveled his estates between the seasons and on holidays visited the paradisiacal coast of Naples. The gulf of Bajae had always been the Romans' favorite spa. He owned a yacht, a colorful barge rigged with a scarlet lateen sail. Symmachus used to slip moorings on the Avernian lakes and the wind carried him into the gulf towards Puteoli while “from other vessels and the villas at the shore a gentle breeze carried music, laughter and the splashing of swimmers in the water” (Ep. VIII:23). On the way back to Rome he frequently stopped at Campania to avoid "the rat-race in the metropolis” (Ep. I:8). He took pleasure in overseeing his farmhands, taking breakfast with them at the oil press. It was autumn, "the new wine is ready to be crushed and consigned to the care of oak barrels. Stepladders reach into the top of the fruit trees; we now press the olive. Later we shall go hunting and follow the baying hounds sniffing after the boar" (Ep. III:33). He was a grandee of independent means yet sensed how precarious his situation as an intellectual dissident had become (Ep. IV:42).

In the year of his passing, the sibyllines, ancient books of prophesies, perhaps the most treasured possession of Gentile Rome, were carried out from the temple of Apollo and by orders from Milan tossed onto the flames of a bonfire. The populace looked on in silence. The custodial college of the fifteen augurs was summarily disbanded and never assembled again. Short after, Symmachus son, Quintus Fabius Memmius, presided over the funeral of his father.

In memory of the deceased the son risked to restore a temple of the goddess Flora. Everywhere else the abandoned shrines were falling in disrepair and doubled as public urinals. By imperial decree the Olympic Games had already closed down in 395 AD. yet archeology has revealed their clandestine continuance for another fifty years. Under a regime of religious tyranny the senators thought of themselves more and more as an "asylum mundi totis" (Ammian XVI:20), the entire world’s last refuge (Ep. VI:55; VIII:41; IX:67). The senators greeted each other as brothers – as custodians of a culture under siege (Ep. I:89; V:62). In an act of escapism, the cultured Gentile, not unlike the intellectual dissident in modern Iran, retreated to the circumspect privacy of his home pursuing his studies. In an act of intellectual defiance the son of Symmachus entertained visitors to his home with readings from his father's correspondence. He later published 900 letters and extracts of the speeches in ten volumes.

Over time such gatherings among the senatorial elite became an attempt to preserve in a kind of time capsule the achievements of pagan learning for a remote future. Senator Macrobius was a consul, the praetorian prefect of Spain, proconsul of Africa, and in 422 AD. even the emperor’s lord chamberlain, but nowhere in his writings, does he refer to his services, nor do his books give the slightest hint at anything Christian. Published in 430 AD., the Saturnalia is modeled on Cicero's Conversations in Tusculum, covering religion, grammar, oratory, the etymology of names, even nutrition and medicine: a complete curriculum in the humanities for the well rounded gentleman.

By now a Gentile refusing baptism lost the right to inherit. What should belong to him would go to the public revenue (Codex Iustinianus I.xi.8). Stubborn cases were ordered to present themselves and their families at the church next door and receive instruction. If still unwilling they risked losing everything they owned, leaving them to sleep out rough in the streets (Codex Iustinianus I.xi.9; XVI.x.12). In 434 AD. the son of Symmachus received the baptism.

© – 2/16/2009 – by michael sympson, 7,000 words, all rights reserved