Johnson's Life of London Page 3

  London was already a loyal and growing outpost. But when they heard the emperor was on his way, the citizens went into overdrive. It was like being awarded the right to host the Olympics: the place had to look its best—and that meant infrastructure investment. The Emperor was known to like sleeping in the barracks with the troops, so the London authorities seem to have erected a new barracks for his visit—complete with the living quarters that he famously liked to inspect.

  What looks like a governor’s palace was constructed, a splendid place of courtyards and fountains, on the site of what is now Cannon Street station. They built a new forum, far grander than the patch of gravel on which Suetonius Paulinus had addressed the first Londoners, in an area partly now occupied by Leadenhall Market. At the north end of this vast space they built a basilica—a mixture of a shopping centre and law courts.

  Parts of it are still visible in the basement of the barbershop at 90 Gracechurch Street. You can see this wasn’t any old basilica. Look at that great chunk of brick and masonry that formed one of the piers of the structure and you get a sense of the scale. This was the biggest forum and basilica north of the Alps. The building was 164 yards long, and when you look at the model in the Museum of London, you are forced to adjust your preconceptions about our city’s place in the Roman world.

  When Hadrian arrived in AD 122, he found a big, bustling place, with a population of perhaps one hundred thousand and a ruling elite in a state of sycophantic ecstasy. They installed the emperor and his retinue in the smart new barracks and governor’s palace. They showed him the upgraded baths and the renovated forum and, like the man from Del Monte, the emperor nodded his approval. Then there is no doubt that they took him to that great basilica, and somewhere near what is now the market (we have found a big bronze arm in the neighbourhood) they unveiled their special sign of esteem—the statue, garlanded with flowers. The emperor beamed.

  Then it seems highly likely that the Londoners had some sort of service; cowled priests of the cult of Hadrian gave thanks for his divine presence. They may even have slaughtered a cow or bull—right there in front of him—just to show how much they revered him. Or they might have slaughtered the bull to Jupiter. It didn’t matter. They were both gods. It is one of the most attractive features of Roman London (and the whole Roman world) that for hundreds of years it was a place of religious and racial tolerance.

  Somewhere near Blackfriars Bridge Londoners built a temple to Isis, an Egyptian goddess of motherhood, whose husband, Osiris, personified the annual flooding of the Nile. We also have proof that they worshipped Cybele, or the Great Mother—Magna Mater. This Cybele was supposed to have conceived a passion for a young man named Atys, and when Atys failed to respond to her advances, she became jealous. When she caught him having it off with someone else, she drove him so mad that he castrated himself. I am afraid that respectable young Londoners had celebrated their devotion to Magna Mater by doing the same—and we know this for sure because the river near London Bridge has also yielded a fearful set of serrated forceps, adorned with the heads of Eastern divinities. Experts have no doubt as to its purpose.

  There is even a theory that the cult of Magna Mater is remembered today in the name of the nearby Church of Magnus Martyr, noted by T. S. Eliot for its “inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.” Naturally it might seem repulsive to modern Christians that the name of this beautiful church should be contaminated by the memory of this savage Eastern cult of self-mutilation. And yet the worship of Magna Mater had more in common with Christianity than you might suppose.

  What early Londoners liked about the story of Atys was that even though he may have died of his terrible self-inflicted injuries, he then rose joyously from the dead. In traditional Greco-Roman religion there wasn’t much of an afterlife, and the underworld was a cold and miserable environment, populated by gibbering shades. In a Roman society where many faced earthly lives of hardship and injustice, it is not surprising that these Eastern tales of rebirth became ever more popular. Indeed, not long after leaving Britain, Hadrian was to start his own bizarre cult of his boyfriend Antinous, who had mysteriously drowned in the Nile. Temples and oracles were founded in the name of Antinous; coins featuring the sulky-looking youth were struck.

  His cult became so huge that some Londoners would certainly have been among his adherents, because it was essentially another resurrection and redemption story, like Atys and Osiris. But of all the Eastern cults in London, the most popular—especially with legionaries—was Mithraism. This was the story of Mithras, the son of a life-giving rock, who killed a bull and released its blood for—you’ve guessed it—the rejuvenation of mankind.

  The important point is that all these religions coexisted more or less happily. Just as the modern Hindu can go from the temple of Ganesh to the temple of Hanuman, Roman Londoners saw nothing odd about having a temple of Isis at Blackfriars, a temple of Magna Mater at London Bridge and a temple of Mithras at Mansion House.

  And then along came another Eastern religion. Christianity on the face of it seemed to have much in common with these other cults. It discussed a young man of surpassing moral virtue who died and was reborn as God. It offered the promise of eternal life. But Christianity was like the Judaism from which it emerged (and like the Islam that emerged from them both) in that it did not tolerate—and Christians would not accept—the idea of any coexisting religion, whether it was the worship of Jupiter, Isis, Hadrian, Cybele or anyone else.

  “I am the way, the truth and the life,” said Jesus. “No man shall come to the father except through me.” It took a long time before Londoners showed any interest in this bold monotheistic assertion, but in AD 312 the Emperor Constantine changed the course of history by making Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.

  * * *

  On 18 September 1954 there was a sensation in the world of archaeology—and pretty big news all round—when it was revealed that Professor W. F. Grimes had discovered the long-sought Temple of Mithras near the Mansion House. It was all astonishingly well preserved.

  You could see the place where the bulls had been killed and their steaming blood splashed to the ground. You could work out where the Mithraic torchbearers had stood—Cautes with his torch pointed upwards, Cautopates with his torch pointed down. You could imagine the chanting congregation in the dark and smoky Mithraeum, all giving thanks and praise for the sacrifice of the animal. But as Professor Grimes studied the temple, he could see that something funny had been going on.

  Significant objects appeared to have been buried in shallow pits beneath the nave and the aisles. There was a head of Mithras with his Phrygian snood; there was a statue of Serapis and a dagger-wielding hand. It wasn’t long before the archaeologists had come up with a theory.

  Sometime in the early fourth century AD, the Mithraist Londoners began to face persecution; then one day they could take the insults and the bullying no longer. Fearing that the game was nearly up, they had stolen into their temple and buried their most sacred objects.

  Shortly thereafter their religious competitors broke in and smashed every remaining statue, kicked down the altar and destroyed the Temple of Mithras, just as they destroyed the Serapaeum of Alexandria and other mighty shrines. The religious pluralism of early London gave way to the monotheism of Yahweh.

  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I put it to you that it was these same people who went to their forum, pulled down the idolatrous statue of the pagan man-god Hadrian and threw it in the river. My hunch is that it was the Christians; and that they may even have had particular objections to Hadrian. If you read the early Church fathers such as Tertullian or Origen, and the homophobic venom to which they were inspired by the memory of Hadrian and the cult of Antinous, you will see what I mean.

  Christianity triumphed across the Roman world and the cult of the emperor was over. You don’t have to go as far as Edward Gibbon, who blamed Ch
ristianity for the Fall of Rome (he claimed that its doctrine of meekness was antithetical to the Roman ancestral love of martial glory) to see that something had been lost.

  That bronze head of Hadrian incarnated the authority of Rome in divine form. Once it was clear the emperor was no longer divine—well, anybody could be emperor, or could try to be.

  From the middle of the third century on, the garrison of London was weakened by the demand for troops on other frontiers. Units were constantly sent to support some of the myriad pretenders to the imperial throne, and the province became subject to terrifying raids from the region that is now Holland and Germany. Living standards declined in London; cows and pigs were housed on mosaic floors. After AD 402 no new imperial coinage entered London, and from 410 the province was officially abandoned.

  Roman Britain was a long time dying; and, as we shall see, the memory of that epoch was never entirely to fade in the imaginations of Londoners.

  Hadrian’s mission to the city was brief but not insignificant. He triggered a spurt of building that helped shape the city for hundreds of years. He formally turned London into the capital of the province and relegated Colchester. He set up the eponymous wall between England and Scotland, a physical and psychological schism that endures to this day, and that has excited Londoners such as Samuel Johnson to satirical rudeness.

  His rule embraced a spirit of religious tolerance that the city was not to recapture until the twentieth century. Sometimes I stop my bike at the remains of the Temple of Mithras, which have been removed from their original site and are now displayed on Queen Victoria Street.

  Go and look at those enigmatic courses of stone and brick, once deep in a cellar, now out in the wind and rain. Imagine the poor Mithraists, fleeing in terror before the Christians. Think of their tears as they watched their sacred statues smashed to bits. It wouldn’t have happened in our day, and it wouldn’t have happened in Hadrian’s.

  What happened next is a terrible warning to all those educationalists who believe that standards will always keep rising. Wave after wave of invaders so shattered the old Roman system that civilisation all but collapsed. Londoners forgot their Latin. They forgot how to read; they forgot how to repair a bridge. Between the years AD 400 and 850 we find no traces of any human occupation of Southwark. There is only one conclusion: that pontoon bridge of Aulus Plautius, repaired and reinforced by generations of Londoners, had decayed and toppled into the river. The vital link was gone. There were still some hairy-looking Londoners living around what is now Covent Garden—peasants and swineherds—but the population had plummeted.

  In AD 800 Baghdad had a million people, a glorious circle of scholars and poets and a library of thousands of books on everything from algebra to medicine to watchmaking. By the same year Londoners had returned to barbarism. They were neither Roman nor Christian, until in the early seventh century a man was sent from Rome to try to rescue the situation. His name was Mellitus, which means “honeyed,” and you have a job to find Londoners who have heard of him.

  Mellitus

  He brought back Christianity and got the bum’s rush

  Mellitus?” said the guide with a faint air of surprise. I felt as if I had gone into a supermarket and asked for something quaint—like a hogshead of mead. But Vivien Kermath is one of the accredited red-sashed guides of St. Paul’s Cathedral. She knows her stuff.

  “Of course,” she said. “Mellitus. AD 604. He built the first of several churches there have been on this site. Come this way.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “There isn’t any physical evidence of the original building, is there?”

  “No,” said Vivien, “but we have an icon of Mellitus.”

  “An icon?” I boggled.

  We walked slowly through the great church of Christopher Wren, past memorials of Nelson and Wellington. We passed the spot where Lady Diana Spencer consecrated her ill-fated union to the Prince of Wales. We passed the list of former deans, including John Donne, and his illustrious predecessor, Alexander Nowell (dean 1560–1602), the Londoner who first worked out how to bottle beer—“probably his greatest contribution to humanity,” said Vivien.

  Right at the far eastern end of the church we came to the American memorial chapel, and there—perched above an illuminated book recording the names of the 28,000 Americans who gave their lives in the Second World War—is Mellitus.

  To be accurate, it is a rather recent and brightly painted icon-style portrait of how Mellitus might have looked, presented to the cathedral by the Greek Orthodox Church.

  I stared at his long thin nose and his deep-set brown eyes, and tried to think myself back into the mind-set of this valiant Christian saint, this Roman abbot who had been sent here on his dangerous mission more than 1,400 years ago.

  Behind Mellitus was London, tightly walled and neatly roofed, with an anachronistic dome of St. Paul’s bulging to heaven. Showing off, I deciphered the Greek quotation on Mellitus’s open Bible.

  “And he who sat upon the throne said, behold, I make everything new.”

  To make everything new. That was the mission of this Roman bishop to London. Fat chance.

  Having paid my respects to the icon, I went out and stood on the steps of St. Paul’s, and imagined the terrible scene that greeted him.

  Roman London had waxed and waned over the years since Hadrian left. Some buildings fell into disrepair, but other notable structures were erected, including the two-mile wall that can still be seen, intermittently girdling the city, and which we think was built in around AD 200.

  And then in the third century the Roman Empire entered a period of sustained inflation and chaos. London began to suffer. Lines of supply became too long. Civil servants went unpaid. Morale fell. By AD 410 the Saxon raids had become so terrifying that Londoners issued a desperate appeal to the emperor, Honorius—who deserves to go down in history as the man who gave this country a deep childhood rejection complex.

  Sorry, said Honorius, no can do. The legions could not be spared. In 446 the Londoners tried one last time, begging for help from the great general Aetius.

  “The Saxons drive us into the sea, and then the sea drives us back into the arms of the Saxons! It’s a massacre,” they wailed.

  It was no use. London was forsaken, no longer deemed to be part of the empire. Rome readopted the crushing verdict of Augustus, that the region was not worth the bones of a single legionary.

  Nothing now stood in the way of the most powerful Germanic tribes, and over they came—Hengist, Horsa, the lot of them, and the Romano-Londoners were put to the sword or driven to the Celtic fringes of the country. When Mellitus arrived at the place where I now stood, on what is now the crown of Ludgate Hill, he saw a postapocalyptic landscape, a scene to bring despair to a proud Roman heart.

  In my mind’s eye I erased the buses and the tourists, levelled the banks and the Costa coffees, and I could see London as it appeared in 604. The baths and the amphitheatre were wrecked, and swine were kept in the atria of the old villas. The secret of the hypocausts—the ancient Roman system of underfloor heating—was lost to Britain, and it would be centuries before Londoners rediscovered central heating.

  The governor’s palace had tumbled to the ground, and huge tracts of the city—where once tens of thousands of ambitious Roman Londoners had lived and dreamed—were covered in black earth. Archaeologists are divided as to whether this dark soil indicates some catastrophe, or whether the land had simply been turned over to farming.

  Such people as remained were called names like Cathwulf and Ceawlin and, let’s face it, folks (or Volks), they were essentially German. They had taken off the togas that Agricola had taught them to wear and they wore trousers. Yes, the barbarians wore the trousers in London now. But it was worse than that; almost three centuries after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, they now believed in the bosky German pa
ntheon, and that their rulers were descended from Woden, to whom, every November, they made prodigious sacrifices of cows and pigs, so that the month was known as “blodmonath.”

  In the words of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, when Mellitus arrived in London, “he found almost no relic of the Christian presence.”

  The bishop had a plan. He gazed about himself there on the top of Ludgate Hill, and his eye settled on a dilapidated Roman temple. That would do, he thought.

  His mission had been conceived in AD 591, when Pope Gregory had been mooching about a slave market in Rome. He spotted some male slaves with fair skin and golden hair. Where do that lot come from? he asked.

  They are English, the auctioneer replied—or “Angli sunt.”

  Gregory clapped his hands and made a famous joke: “Haud Angli, sed Angeli!” (“Not Angles, but Angels!”) And tell me, he asked, are they Christian?

  Unfortunately not, said the auctioneer. Right, said Pope Gregory. We’ll see about that.

  First he sent Augustine, in 596, and Augustine had a remarkable coup. King Aethelberht of Kent was himself a pagan, but his wife Bertha had Christian leanings. Soon Aethelberht was won for Christ, and Augustine appealed for reinforcements. Business was brisk, he reported back to Rome, but he needed more props. Vestments, altar decorations, chasubles, religious texts—that kind of thing. Get them over here quick, he urged the Pope.

  Gregory sent Mellitus and a handful of others, together with a celebrated letter on how to convert the heathen Brits. Whatever you do, said Gregory, don’t rush it. Don’t try to wean them off their pagan festivals and sacrifices. Let them enjoy it; let the fat and gravy run down their chins—but just tell them it is all to the glory of God. And don’t tear down their temples, Gregory advised. Just build new huts on the side of the old shrines.