A History of the World in 100 Objects (39 page)

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 the cases around the gallery in which the image of Christ is displayed you can see hoards of silver vessels, spoons and even pepper pots like the one in
Chapter 40
. They show a society that seems to have accommodated itself comfortably to both paganism and Christianity. A great silver dish found at Mildenhall in Suffolk shows Bacchus drunkenly cavorting with pliant nymphs, while the spoons found in the same hoard carry Christian symbols. A pagan dish with Christian spoons: that pretty well sums up Britain at this period, and it wouldn’t have disconcerted anybody at the time. In the Britain of the third and fourth centuries Christ was merely one god among many others, so the pairing of Christ with Bellerophon is not as incongruous as it might initially seem to us. The historian Professor Eamon Duffy explains how Jesus fitted in to the pantheon:

The image of Christ is not, I think, an attractive one; there’s that Desperate Dan chin! What impresses me is the juxtaposition of the image of Christ with powerful imagery from pagan mythology, the whole story of Bellerophon, Pegasus and the Chimaera. Christianity adapts that material for its own purposes to convey the message of resurrection, the triumph of life over death, and the implicit comparison of Christ’s work on the cross to a hero slaying a monster. That paradox – that the defeat of the founder of Christianity is actually a heroic victory …

Bellerophon is a figure of life triumphing over the powers of darkness. Eventually that kind of symbolic imagery would find its own Christian versions in figures like St George killing the dragon, or St Michael the archangel fighting the devil.

I wonder how many of the people who crossed this floor realized that they were walking from one world to another, from the familiar realm of myth to the new modern world of faith. Everybody would recognize the energetic Bellerophon. They might be less sure who was represented by the still figure facing away from them on the other side of the room, because very few of them would ever before have seen Christ represented. After all, how do you represent a god that you have never seen? There was nothing to go on – no likeness, no model, no description of what Christ looked like. It is a testing conundrum, both theologically and artistically, and I think we can all sympathize with the Dorset artist who had to confront it. Orpheus and Bacchus would have been easy in comparison – Orpheus would be wistful, young, artistic-looking, Bacchus energetic and sexy, clearly ready for a good time. And both of these would be recognizable by their attributes – Orpheus would have his lyre, Bacchus a bunch of grapes or something similar. At this time there were no such physical attributes associated with Jesus. Few people would have wanted to show the victorious, all-powerful Christ with that shameful instrument of suffering, the cross. He had told his disciples that he was the way, the truth and the life, but it is very difficult to show any of those physically. He had announced that he was the light of the world, but it’s really hard to show light in a mosaic, especially if, as here, the artist was, frankly, not very good. Instead of a symbol, the mosaicist at Hinton St Mary gave him the monogram with which we started – the Greek (‘
Chi Rho
’). In our mosaic, it lies like a halo behind Christ’s head.

The roundel showing Bellerophon riding Pegasus and overcoming the Chimaera

The
Chi Rho
was the symbol adopted by the Roman emperor Constantine after his conversion to Christianity in the year 312. Our floor was almost certainly made about forty years later. (We can be pretty confident of that, because both Christ and Bellerophon wear their hair in the fashion of about 350.) And it was Constantine’s conversion at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge that made our floor possible. Before he converted, no villa owner would have dared display their Christian faith so brazenly – practising Christians had been persecuted. But now, everything was different. Professor Dame Averil Cameron, of Oxford University, explains:

The emperor Constantine is supposed to have seen a vision of a cross in the sky some time before the battle and seems to have converted himself to Christianity. Thereafter he never deviated from giving privileges to Christians, which was a complete overturning of what had been happening when Christianity had not even been legal. What he did was to give tax privileges to Christian priests, to intervene in Christian disputes, to declare Christianity a legal religion, to give money to Christian churches, to start building Christian churches. All of those actions together gave a great fillip to Christianity.

It was this fillip that must have given the owner of our villa the confidence to show us Christ looking out at us, full face, unequivocally a man of power. He wears the rich robes and the stylish hairdo that might well have been sported by the villa owner himself, but this is no local ruler and indeed no local god. The
monogram makes it clear that what we are being shown is Jesus Christ. There is a further clue to this man’s true nature: on either side of Christ’s head the artist has put pomegranates. To any educated visitor this would recall at once the myth of Persephone carried off to the Underworld, rescued by her mother, and brought back to the land of the living. While in the Underworld Persephone had eaten seeds from a pomegranate, and so had to spend part of every year in darkness. Her myth is a great allegory of the cycle of the seasons, of death and rebirth, of descent into hell and return to the light. By the inclusion of this simple fruit the artist links Jesus to the pagan gods who had also been gods of dying and returning – to Orpheus, who went to the Underworld in search of Eurydice and returned, and to Bacchus, who was similarly associated with resurrection. This Dorset Christ thus pulls together all the hopes of the ancient world, and the deepest of all human hopes: that death is only part of a larger story that will culminate in abundance of life and even greater fruitfulness.

We don’t know what kind of room this mosaic was in. In grand Roman villas the room with the best mosaic was usually the dining room, but in this case that seems unlikely. There was no under-floor heating in the room and it faced north, so it would have been far too cold for Dorset dining. Normally the walls, as well as the floor, would indicate a room’s purpose, but the walls of this room are long gone. There is one intriguing possibility – the figure of Christ faces east, and there would have been just enough space for an altar between it and the wall. So this room might have been an early house church.

People have often worried about the idea of Christ being shown on a floor, and eventually this worried the Romans too. In 427 the emperor specifically banned the making of images of Christ on mosaic floors and ordered all existing ones to be removed. But by the time of this proclamation Britain had ceased to be a part of the Roman Empire. The villa at Hinton St Mary had probably been abandoned and so its floor remained untouched. On the whole, the withdrawal of Roman power spelt cultural catastrophe, but in this instance we should perhaps be grateful.

In recent chapters we have been looking at images of the Buddha, of Hindu gods and of Christ. This object is a right hand, cast in bronze, but it is not the hand of a god: it is a gift to a god. It is a human hand, an almost literal manifestation of the expression ‘to give your right hand for something’. The man whose hand is represented here wished to put his hand into the hand of his particular god and to gain his favour – he even shared the god’s name, Ta’lab.

About 1,700 years ago there were far more religions in the world than today, and many more gods. Gods then tended to have strictly local responsibilities, not the worldwide embrace that we’re used to now. In Mecca, for example, before Muhammad, pilgrims worshipped in a temple that had a statue of a different god for every day of the year. Our latest object was a gift to one of those numberless Arabian gods that did not survive the coming of Muhammad. His full name was Ta’lab Riyam, meaning ‘the strong one of Riyam’. Riyam was a Yemeni hill town, and Ta’lab protected the local hill people. Yemen in the third century
AD
was a prosperous place, a hub of international trade that produced some of the most sought-after commodities for the vast markets of the Mediterranean, the Middle East and India. It was Yemen that supplied the whole Roman Empire with frankincense and myrrh.