City of Echoes: A New History of Rome, Its Popes, and Its People

By Jessica Wärnberg

From a bold new historian comes a vibrant history of Rome as seen through its most influential persona throughout the centuries: the pope.

Rome is a city of echoes, where the voice of the people has chimed and clashed with the words of princes, emperors, and insurgents across the centuries. In this authoritative new history, Jessica Wärnberg tells the story of Rome’s longest standing figurehead and interlocutor—the pope—revealing how his presence over the centuries has transformed the fate of the city of Rome.

Emerging as the anonymous leader of a marginal cult in the humblest quarters of the city, the pope began as the pastor of a maligned and largely foreign flock. Less than 300 years later, he sat enthroned in a lofty, heavily gilt basilica, a religious leader endorsed (and financed) by the emperor himself. Eventually, the Roman pontiff would supplant even the emperors as de facto ruler of Rome and pre-eminent leader of the Christian world. By the nineteenth century, it would take an army to wrest the city from the pontiff’s grip.

As the first-ever account of how the popes’ presence has shaped the history of Rome, City of Echoes not only illuminates the lives of the remarkable (and unremarkable) men who have sat on the throne of Saint Peter, but also reveals the bold and curious actions of the men, women, and children who have shaped the city with them, from antiquity to today. In doing so, the book tells the history of Rome as it has never been told before.

During the course of this fascinating story, City of Echoes also answers a compelling question: how did a man—and institution—whose authority rested on the blood and bones of martyrs defeat emperors, revolutionaries, and fascists to give Rome its most enduring identity?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781639365227

Jessica Wärnberg

Jessica Wärnberg is a historian of the religious and political history of Europe, focusing on the History of Art (Courtauld Institute), Cultural and Intellectual History (Warburg Institute), and Modern History, in which she holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews, Scotland). In Rome, Jessica has worked extensively in the archives of the Vatican, the Jesuits, and the Holy Office of the Inquisition. She has written about popes, princes, inquisitors, and the Jesuits for History Today and the Catholic Herald. Jessica has received multiple recognitions for her work, including fellowships at the British School at Rome (British Academy), the Society for Renaissance Studies, and election as a Permanent Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She now lives in London.

Book preview

City of Echoes: A New History of Rome, Its Popes, and Its People, by Jessica Wärnberg.City of Echoes: A New History of Rome, Its Popes, and Its People, by Jessica Wärnberg, Pegasus Books, New York | London.

For KGW

Prologue: City of Echoes

Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.

Giotto di Bondone

Pacing through empty streets just after dawn, two young men slip into Santa Maria in Traspontina, a sixteenth-century church on the approach to Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The men are strangers in the city. Not Romans nor even Italians but Austrian Catholics, visiting Rome on a singular, grave mission. In their view, they have come to Rome to save Santa Maria in Traspontina from desecration: they have come to defend the holy Catholic faith. On a recent trip to the city, one of the men had been disturbed to discover wooden statues to a naked fertility goddess in the church, alongside altars to Saint John and the Virgin Mary, Mother of God. What’s more, he could not appeal to Catholic authorities to stop what he saw as an act of sacrilege for the statues had been venerated in the Vatican Gardens in the presence of the pope himself.

Entering the silent church, the men genuflect solemnly in front of the high altar before sweeping into the side chapels to scoop up the sculptures and carry them away. Their arms full, they flee, running a few minutes to the Ponte Sant’Angelo, a bridge built by the emperor Hadrian and later adorned with angels bearing the instruments of the crucifixion of Christ. Standing beneath the angel that holds the cross itself, the men hurl the statues into the dark depths of the River Tiber. Their mission accomplished, the sun risen, they flee the scene.

Discovering the theft, the Carmelites who run the church raise the alarm. News of the incident divides Rome and Catholics across the globe. Are these men heroic champions of the Catholic faith? Or are they vandals who have disrespected the donors of the statues and stolen from a Roman church? In the ensuing investigation the chief of the Italian police dredges the river to recover the sculptures. Meanwhile, the pope is resolute. During the next papal mass, a ritual bowl of soil honouring the goddess, Pachamama, is placed on the High Altar at Saint Peter’s Basilica.

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It was the winter of 2019 and I was leaving a restaurant in London when I heard about the theft of the Pachamama statues. A friend showed me the video on his phone as we walked through rain-washed streets. He was surprised that I had not seen it when it had emerged a few weeks before. At that time, I was living in the UK, nearly 1500 km from Rome. Despite the distance, it mattered to me what had happened in the Italian city that morning. It also mattered to me how the pope had reacted to the theft. I had encountered similar interest among friends, of various religions or no faith, who balked or rejoiced when the pope spoke on pressing questions for the modern world. For, despite appearances, Rome and the popes are not mere historic curiosities. They are ancient symbols of universal significance that survive, remarkably intact, provoking interest, affection and even bold action in the digital age.

From the time of the emperors to our own day, the deeds of the popes have reverberated beyond the walls of Rome. Within them, the fabric of the ancient capital has been transformed. In words, deeds and travertine stone, over almost twenty centuries, the city of Rome and the popes have become inextricably intertwined. Streets crowded with Baroque churches and punctuated with dimly lit shrines, the smiling face of a recent pontiff hanging behind the till of a bar – even today, the visual result of the union is so complete that it appears to be preordained. Layers of legend – whether black or golden – also cloud our view. This book illuminates its evolution over nearly 2,000 years. Tracing the history of Rome, its people and popes in conversation with one another, it tells stories with a symbolism that echoes into our own day. Ancient heiresses swap their fortunes for hair shirts. Ethiopian diplomats roar with laughter in the palaces of cardinals. The son of a hosteler rises up to rule Rome, aping emperors and popes, only to become a bloated, tyrannical disappointment. As modernity dawns, men and women from all over the globe travel to the city, shooting from behind barricades of mattresses to defend treasured ideals. Unpicking narratives familiar and strange, we can illuminate the lives of those who walked Rome’s streets to reveal how the city developed its most enduring identity.

It will be a commonplace for some readers that the first Christian emperors forged the foundations of papal Rome. Lauding saints in brick, marble and paint, leaders from Constantine the Great (306–37) onwards crystallised religious belief and papal authority in monumental form. However, the story of Rome and the popes begins much earlier, with a much humbler man and a narrative that weds the city, its people and the divine. It was the mid-first century when Peter, a fisherman from the shores of the Sea of Galilee, journeyed to pagan Rome to spread the nascent Christian faith. As a younger man, he had walked the baking streets of Jerusalem. There, a man calling himself the son of God told Peter that he was the rock upon which he would build his entire Church. By the time that Peter was in Rome, that leader, Jesus of Nazareth, had been crucified. For followers such as Peter, Jesus’ agony on the cross was the salvation of all of mankind. Soon enough, Peter’s own blood would be spilt near a racetrack in the north of Rome. It too would become a wellspring for Christians to come. When Peter died in Rome, he imbued the city with the unique authority given to him by Jesus. On these foundations, Rome’s bishops would elevate themselves as universal pastors and supreme leaders of Christ’s Church on earth.

In the age of Nero (54–68), Peter’s death went unnoticed by most men and women. He was killed as an anonymous criminal, compelled by a bizarre new cult. It was the feet of the earliest adherents to Christianity in Rome that marked out the first pilgrimage route in the city: a pathway to the dusty hill where they believed that the Prince of the Apostles had died. It was only some centuries later that Constantine raised a great basilica where they had long prayed. Rome became the centre of Western Christendom as the result of one unlikely visitor, whose death in the city inspired the devotion of ordinary hearts. Paradoxically, while Rome remained pagan that devotion only entrenched the city’s Christian character. As men and women died for the faith in Roman circuses and streets, Christians declared that their blood steeped the city in holy prestige. Christian Rome, then, appears to emerge as an accident of history. The early popes ensured that it did not remain that way for long. Stories of the lives and deaths of the Christian martyrs, including Peter, were engraved, sculpted and painted across the city. The story of the Christian Church was written into Rome’s fabric as a powerful drama that linked heaven and earth. The result has compelled countless people, from those first furtive Christians to the Ethiopians who arrived proffering jewels in exchange for salvation in the fifteenth century. Today, statues of martyrs in Rome still stand amid piles of notes scribbled with prayers. It is this continued devotion that has bolstered the Christian identity of the city down the ages, whether at the hands of Baroque artists or the guns of nineteenth-century papal Zouaves.

At the centre of this remarkable story sit the popes, totemic and enduring. Their office has survived even as monarchies, dictatorships and empires have faded into the annals of the past. ‘Rome is the city of echoes’, in the words of the Renaissance artist Giotto di Bondone. The last gasps of empire certainly resonated in the foundations of the Roman Church. Nevertheless, it is the echo of Christ’s words to Peter that continue to underpin the authority and significance of Christian Rome. Inside the dome of the Basilica of Saint Peter, ‘Tu es Petrus…’ – those words spoken by Jesus in Jerusalem – speak out in an unbroken ring on rich gold ground. From the first centuries after Peter’s death to the election of the present Pope Francis I in 2013, the Bishops of Rome, or popes, stand in a line that Peter began. The potency of this Petrine authority – a link to Jesus Christ himself – was recognised early by princes seeking legitimacy for their political power. By the early modern period, secular leaders had granted the popes so many lands in the name of Peter that the Papal States cut a swathe right across the Italian peninsula, making the pope a prince himself.

But even when the Papal State was wrested from the pontiffs in the political tumults of the nineteenth century, Rome’s popes retained an inalienable authority that compelled even non-believers to seek their ear. As late as 1922, this was recognised by the fascist premier, Benito Mussolini, who knew that he could not rule Italy without Pope Pius XI (1922–39) on side. Despite the Church’s waning influence in the modern West, political leaders still arrive in Rome. A century after the rise of Mussolini, Emmanuel Macron, the head of the secular French Republic, was at the Vatican imploring Pope Francis to intervene for peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Moreover, even as the Church becomes increasingly global, this influence is bound to the city of Rome. The idea of Rome is so powerful that it is often synonymous with Catholicism itself. When the missionary Matteo Ricci arrived in China in the sixteenth century, he adopted the dress and philosophy of Confucius to convert souls to Christianity. Now, many Chinese Catholics see proximity to Rome as the hallmark of authentic Catholic belief, in spite of (or, in some cases, because of) the political barriers that have divided them from the structure of the Church.¹

The history of Rome and its popes is one of many narratives, which interweave not only with one another but with the history of the Christian Church and the world at large. To tell its story coherently, this book commits many sins of omission, but aspires, as far as possible, to illuminate fundamental truths. At its heart, it aims to reveal the often unlikely story of the emergence of the papacy in the city of Rome, tracing a remarkable story of mutual influence and the endurance of an institution (as well as an idea) that was born in the age of Saint Peter and lives on in our own day.

PART 1

BECOMING ROME

A statue of Saint Anthony covered in written prayers and requests. (Alamy)

1

In the Footsteps of Peter

‘I can point out the monuments of the victorious apostles’, Gaius, a Christian in Rome, scratched in thick black ink.¹

‘If you go as far as the Vatican or the Ostian Way, you will find the monuments of those who founded this church.’ It was around 200 AD when the now lost papyrus bearing these words illuminated the first, shallow traces of the Christian Church in Rome. These were the first marks of a force that would one day shape, expand and gild the city: the monuments to Saint Peter and Saint Paul, those early followers of Jesus of Nazareth whom we know from biblical texts. From Jerusalem, they had taken roads and seas westward, grazing the southern coast of Crete to reach Reggio, Pozzuoli and then Rome. It was the mid-first century when they had made their way down cobblestone roads into the centre of the Roman Empire. In that pagan city, that seat of Caesar, Paul would encounter a community of Christians: Aquila, Priscilla, Andronicus and others. Paul’s presence in Rome is well recorded. We know less of Peter’s time there. As in so many of the early chapters of Christian and Roman history, the evidence is sparse, patchy and often vexed. Still, the overwhelming majority of historians now agree that both men walked among the first Christians of the city and that, in Rome, both would eventually spill their blood.²

The monuments highlighted by Gaius stood on those scarlet spots. Within a few hundred years, they would steep the city in holy prestige. Yet when Gaius wrote, the stones that marked the memory of Peter and Paul were humble and inauspicious, much like the Church of Rome itself.

The earliest extant Roman sources tell us that Peter chose a Roman called Linus to continue his work in the mid-first century AD.³

After him would come Anacletus and then, around the year 96, Clement, the third Bishop of Rome. That title would one day be latched to the prestigious office of the papacy. During Clement’s life, Peter and Paul were emerging legends, holy saints, but only to the humble nucleus of the Christian Church. In that day and for more than two hundred years after Clement’s death, Christian Rome was invisible. As Bishop of Rome in the late first century, Clement was resident of an anonymous building, pastor of an Eastern cult and most probably a dweller of one of the lowlier quarters of Rome. Most Christians lived in one of the areas traditionally inhabited by Jews, such as the quarter of Trastevere, across the River Tiber from the legal, religious and administrative centre of the city.⁴

From that deep bend of the river, he too could take you on foot to the tomb of Peter on the barren, dusty Vatican Hill. From there, snaking southwards and then crossing the Tiber, he could lead you to the lonely spot where Paul had lost his head.

By the time that Gaius wrote, the Christians of Rome had quietly begun to forge the foundations of the papal city. Rough brick after brick, footstep after footstep, in humble markers and repeated pilgrimage they began to make their belief visible in and under the streets. By 161 at the latest they had raised an aedicula over the bones of Peter – a small monument marking his tomb for those who wished to visit.⁵

At the wayside of the via Cornelia, facing the northern walls of the Circus of Nero, the physical remains of the Prince of the Apostles lay in a ditch, shuddering as reeling chariots passed.⁶

Nobody would make this a site for pilgrimage and veneration out of choice. But for many pagans and Christians alike this was an open-air graveyard, a final place to try to rest. For Christians visiting that site, one simple fact mattered: it was the location of Peter, the saint whom Christ trusted to build his kingdom on earth and the founder of their nascent Roman Church.

The aedicula, too, was humble but helped Gaius and others by making the spot more visible to those who came looking. The main part of the structure comprised a simple niche covered by a stone canopy atop two columns. This was not even a distant cousin to the shelter that Gian Lorenzo Bernini raised around 1500 years later. A majestic baldacchino standing on barley sugar columns of swirling bronze, Bernini’s monument to Peter befitted his – by then – unchallenged status as Prince of the Apostles and founder of the Church of Rome. Yet when the labourers broke the earth to dig the foundations for Bernini’s canopy, they found markers of Peter’s memory that were bolder yet: bodies wrapped in bandages of linen, stone chests brimming with burnt, human bones.⁷

Here, the first Bishops of Rome, our proto-popes, if you will, were interred alongside the remains attributed to the apostle Peter.

For many centuries Christians knew the approximate site of Peter’s tomb, but his resting place was only confidently identified in the mid-twentieth century. Reverence restrained the hand of many popes curious to dig around underneath the basilica. As late as the 1930s, Pius XI would disappoint the administrator of Saint Peter’s, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, when he asked if he might tidy up the sunken grottoes that lay beneath its floor.⁸

When that pope died in 1939, the monsignor got his way, venturing down into the crypt to find his master a tomb. The walls were weak; they swiftly crumbled. Inadvertently, the monsignor inaugurated an archaeological investigation that would reveal an ancient cemetery that had laid undisturbed for hundreds of years. In 1950, Kaas led the representatives of the American magazine LIFE on an exclusive tour of the site. For just twenty cents, hundreds of thousands of readers could follow the monsignor on ‘a journey into the unknown, whose difficulties, hardships and excitement are unforgettable to those who shared in the labours.’⁹

Even before Gaius’ time, Peter’s memory had spread well beyond the slopes of the Vatican Hill. Out in the far north of the city at the Cemetery of Priscilla, small, subterranean rock tombs soon bore his name, smeared in paint on the bricks facing numerous tombs.¹⁰

The name is not Roman but Greek. It surely honours the apostle. And, like the aedicula, quietly commemorates Saint Peter’s presence in the fabric of Rome. Travelling straight southwards from that cemetery, over the hump of the Caelian Hill, Romans would encounter another early catacomb that murmured the names of both Peter and Paul. There, on the Appian Way, that thoroughfare into the city from the south-east, rooms under the church of San Sebastiano fuori le Mura bear early pilgrims’ graffitied hopes and prayers.¹¹

Much ink has been spilt debating the nature of this site. Was it the true grave of Peter? Or even the domestic quarters of the apostles? Was it, in fact, a hiding place for holy bones when emperors hunted the followers of Christ? What we can be sure of is that by the mid-third century, pilgrims came to this additional, humble spot of remembrance, as well as the Vatican Hill. For these Christians, the connection between Peter and Rome was undoubted well into at least the ninth century.¹²

Today some bemoan the lack of contemporary written evidence of Peter’s visit to the city. For a few, the silences in the literature cry out that he was never in Rome at all. Such authors have disputed traditional literary sources such as Peter’s letter to Christians in Asia Minor. In this epistle he greeted them ‘from [their] sister church in Babylon’ – traditionally interpreted as a greeting from Rome.¹³

After it had been involved in several conflicts with Jews, the Mesopotamian city of Babylon became a byword for oppressive, worldly powers – particularly those that attacked the people of God. In turn, pagan Rome became synonymous with Babylon, a city and a power that would weigh heavily on its Christian people. Some have argued that Rome was only identified with Babylon well after Peter’s death in the mid-sixties, claiming that the apostle greeted his interlocutors from some other region where Christians were reviled.¹⁴

Yet we know that Peter travelled from Jerusalem to Antioch, across Asia Minor to Corinth in Greece. And when Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome in the year 56, he told them that he had not yet visited, as he did not want to build ‘on someone else’s foundations’.¹⁵

Rome certainly hosted a strong community of people worshipping Jesus when Paul arrived around four years later. Had Peter known that community, or even built it in the years before? Later, more missives referred to the presence of both Paul and Peter in the city. Several decades after their deaths, Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch, assured the Roman Christians that he would not ‘command’ them ‘as Peter and Paul’ had.¹⁶

Later writers also spoke with surety of the deaths of Peter and Paul in the city: for example, around 170, Bishop Dionysius of Corinth. In that very same period, Irenaeus of Lyon claimed that they had built the Church of Rome before delegating power to Linus, whose bones were dug up with the foundations of Bernini’s Baroque baldacchino.¹⁷

The words of Gaius, Ignatius and Irenaeus punctuate silence, illuminating the very earliest days of the Christian Church in Rome. At the same time, the bricks of the catacombs, the Vatican graves and the monuments on the Appian Way and via Ostia build a quiet, fragmentary story of continued veneration and nascent tradition. The continuous worship of the followers of Jesus, their veneration of Peter and Paul in the city, is the thread that laces together the patchwork evidence of early Christian Rome. The Bishops of Rome would call upon the legacy of the apostles, particularly Peter, to assert their pre-eminence in the centuries to come. However, it is difficult to comprehend why any second-century Roman would raise a monument on the slopes of the Vatican Hill if it was not already an oft-visited and venerated spot. At that time enough Christians visited the site to warrant raising a marker in the seedy shadows of a racetrack among mainly pagan tombs. Around the year 200, Gaius would speak of these Roman monuments to the apostles as part of an established pilgrimage tradition among Christians in the city. It is known that traditions often go unwritten by their very first adherents, even if the actions of the first Christians in Rome took form in words, brick and marble.

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When we seek the faces of those early followers of Jesus in Rome we realise why shadows cloud the history of early Christianity in the city. The first Christians there were mainly low-born, Greek-speaking foreigners, arriving in the forties and fifties from the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire.¹⁸

In Rome, the followers of Jesus worshipped within a vast, oriental crowd; they were near indistinguishable, even to keen observers, among a multilingual Roman mass. As the heart of the empire pulsated with politics, religion and the force of hundreds of cults, the first Christians appeared, were expelled and returned largely undetected. They were not hidden or hiding but merely overlooked. Over the centuries, some were brutally executed in the city, as histories and martyrologies attest. The majority of Romans saw no heroic virtue in these deaths because the majority did not see such deaths at all. In the centuries to come, the spotlight of sanctity would illuminate the executed, bathing them in the light of a Golden Legend. Yet in the first centuries after the death of Christ, they were members of a cult that was practised in lowly quarters such as the fly-filled huts on the lowlands that flanked the Appian Way.¹⁹

In the first century it was the traditional pagan worship of the Romans that coloured the fabric and life of the city. The very physicality of Rome was defined by its worship of many, many gods. According to tradition, the Pomerium, the very line that marked the legal limits of the city, was first ploughed on the prophecy of augury as two brothers, Romulus and Remus, debated where to found Rome. Legend tells us that Romulus saw twelve vultures on the Palatine Hill before taking yoke, cow and bull to forge a furrow defining the sacred precinct, from the Quirinal Hill in the north to the Palatine in the south.²⁰

With divination, plough and beast Romulus made his city. Legend this may be. Yet religion truly came to define the area of Rome within the Pomerium, where temples to gods, goddesses and deified emperors peppered the ground. From the early sixth century BC, Romans walking at the feet of the Palatine and Capitoline Hills travelled in the groove of the Pomerium and the shadow of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Built and rebuilt in monumental, Grecian style, this looming sanctuary for Rome’s foremost god would soon be surrounded by ever denser clusters of trophies, shrines and altars. Across the city, temples to Concord, Venus and even Emperor Julius Caesar swiftly rose. Within the Pomerium, under gleaming roofs, Romans could worship gods and the first mortals to join their ranks. They also raised palaces and fora in the zone as places of business and leisure. In ancient Rome, entreaty and sacrifice to the gods was deemed essential to both.

Crossing Rome’s sacred centre, men, women and children met a pagan religion that pulsated with the breath and blood of life. Oxen sauntered down the city’s main streets, led for sacrifice on ice-white altars. The Roman sun blazed down on their nodding heads as they were sprinkled with grain and wine. Their assent noted, their blood was spilt for the gods.²¹

Rome moved in perpetual anticipation of demands and wrath from on high. When the gods – or emperor – demanded it, everybody in the city had to make sacrifice to the higher powers. At the main sanctuaries: oxen.²²

Among ordinary people: incense and wine. Religious festivals set the meter of the year for all, leaving the city enraptured, jolly and even purified. From the Lupercalia, childless women emerged with branded backs, marked by the lashes of a thong of goat skin that promised them fecundity.²³

Participation in the Saturnalia took a more voluptuous form: Romans shed their togas, drank heavily and gambled. Chucking down a few sesterces before the roll of a dice or waiting with bated breath for the wheel of a chariot to cross the finish line at the Circus Maximus, citizens, freedmen and slaves delighted in the diversions of the feast. During major religious festivals in early first-century Rome, participation was so high that Emperor Augustus (27–14 BC) sent guards to man the empty streets. Had he not, houses abandoned by their owners for the sake of religion and, often, pure amusement would have fallen ‘prey to footpads because of the few people who remained at home’.²⁴

It is a popular belief that the first murmurings of Christianity in Rome brought hope to the lowly: current and former slaves, foreigners and the many others marginalised in a highly stratified society. It is true that, from the very beginning, the followers of Jesus lauded a poverty and simplicity that Romans had traditionally reviled. Moreover, in Rome, the overwhelming majority lingered on the bottom rungs of a hierarchy crowned by an emperor, buoyed by patricians, equestrians and citizens of the city. Yet casting your eye around at the games or even the inner sanctums of temples of first-century Rome, you would have found many humbler figures immersed in the religious traditions of the city. Even non-citizens and slaves were obliged to take part in the revelry and sacrifices of the Roman religion, inside the temples and out on the streets. Some filled the air with the round, low tones of the twin tibia pipes, while ex-slaves could take on the work of the haruspex, leaning over marble slabs to divine prophecy from the smeared entrails of sacrificed beasts.²⁵

Women could become priestesses of the Great Mother Goddess, Magna Mater, whose pine tree processed through the city to her temple on the Palatine.²⁶

Flanking the tree, one might also find ex-slaves, wielding reeds to commemorate the death of Attis, Magna Mater’s consort who lost his mind and then his life when he deliberately castrated himself on a tree.²⁷

Furthermore, for all ranks of society, the Roman traditions were hardly the only religious option around, even if it was only beyond the Pomerium, in the ager or fields of Rome, that other cults like Christianity were permitted to live and to pray. Beliefs and traditions of all kinds were carried to Rome on the same economic and political winds that drove their foreign adherents to the city. Isis and Serapis arrived from Alexandria, Antioch and Athens.²⁸

By the turn of the third century, the Persian cult of Mithras had also carved out a large place in Rome. Even before the year 300, initiates had some forty places to meet.²⁹

In rented rooms, private homes and even military quarters, the devotees of Mithras performed rituals that raised them through ranks from Raven to Lion and Father. The bolted doors and shady rooms of Rome’s Mithraea were antithetical to the city’s showy temples to gods such as Jupiter. But on the Campo Marzio, a flatland flanked by the Tiber and the western ridge of the Pomerium, evidence of other Eastern cults could be seen and heard. There, sonorous chant and the metallic rattle of the sistrum rose above the walls of a sanctuary to Isis, built in fine Grecian style in the first century BC. A foreign cult it was, but its physical home in Rome was vast. With a courtyard of 70 by 140 metres, it was several times the size of the Pantheon to all of the Roman gods that stood nearby.³⁰

Palm trees and obelisks flanked the placid, central pool. In the apse of the sanctuary resided Isis herself, an arresting and imperious statue with figures of Sarapis and Anubis at her sides. For most Romans crossing the Campo Marzio, these tranquil scenes were concealed by lofty walls, though very occasionally devotees of the sanctuary would burst beyond its confines. With shaved heads and white robes billowing in their wake, they dashed across the plain past the ancient Theatre of Pompey.

The acolytes of Isis completed their ritual by breaking the surface of the Tiber, leaping from its banks to cleanse themselves in the murky waters of Rome. Emerging on the opposite side of the river, they would find themselves in Trastevere, where the rumble of foreign cults rang ever more strongly. Here, even further from the sacred confines of the Pomerium, immigrants from Palmyra and Syria had settled their cults in the city. Here Simios, Hadad, Sol and Atargatis were worshipped in sanctuaries etched with devotions in Latin but also Aramaic and Greek.³¹

It was in this most oriental of quarters that the early third-century Emperor Antoninus (218–22), also known as Heliogabalus, would intensify the cult of El Gabal, the sun god of his homeland in the Roman province of Syria.³²

Within the Pomerium, the teenage ruler had divided Romans when he took to a bejewelled golden chariot to vaunt a black, conical stone said to represent the god. Conservative senators were scandalised when he worshipped the stone with a dance before ascending a tower to shower the crowd with presents, from cups of precious metal to living domestic pets.³³

Still, Antoninus was certainly not the first Roman emperor to embrace the rites of the East. From the dawn of the empire in the mid-first century BC, emperors had built temples to Isis, Serapis and others. Views shifted. Some cults were banned. At the turn of the first century, Emperor Tiberius (14–37) had the cultic statue of Isis taken from the Campo Marzio and sunk in the Tiber while her priests were nailed to crosses.³⁴

Despite such violent fluctuations in popularity, Eastern cults were a regular fixture in the religious mêlée of ancient Rome.

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It was within this mêlée that the first Christians in the city emerged. Like the initiates of Mithras and Isis, it seems that many were not natural Romans. It seems that the first followers of Jesus in Rome were mainly Jews who worshipped at the synagogues of the city, or Gentiles who practised some elements of Judaism: the so-called ‘god-fearers’.³⁵

Others argue that, by the fifties, just seventeen years after Jesus’ death, Christian teachings in Rome had spread well beyond the Jewish community. When Paul wrote to believers in the city in the mid-fifties, he spoke of his longing to preach to them and ‘other Gentiles’, or non-Jews.³⁶

It is quite possible that men and women of other cults had thrown them off to worship the one Christian god. Some features of nascent Christianity would not be entirely alien to those caught up in the long-established religious traditions of Rome. Chastity, for example, was prized by Christians and many others, including those who lauded the Vestal Virgins who lived, veiled in white, preserving their flame at the foot of the Palatine Hill. Moreover, while the dominant Roman religion venerated a panoply of gods, like Christians the bald-headed acolytes of Isis devoted themselves to one deity, purely and totally. Members of cults were also attracted by fraternity and pragmatic benefits like group burial in Rome, which the city’s Christians also soon offered.

Monotheistic and expectant of a Messiah, members of the city’s Jewish community would surely have been some of the individuals most receptive to the news of his coming in Jerusalem. This was a large audience. By the Augustan period, the Jews of Rome numbered several thousand. Under the via Nomentana that stretches out of the city to the north-east, inscriptions in Jewish catacombs reveal the names of some eleven synagogues in the ancient city.³⁷

These do not seem to have been grand or even distinct religious buildings but rather synagogues defined by community, worship and law.³⁸

Some Jews may have already converted to Christianity far from Rome, during a visit or previous life in Syria or Judea, where Jesus had first inspired men to drop their tools and preach. Others might have left Rome to travel back to Jerusalem. There they would encounter apostles and acolytes, preaching of a Messiah who had come and, in just thirty-three years, left. Back in Rome, murmurings of the words and actions of this Jesus of Nazareth might have spread on the tongues of Jewish slaves brought into the city. Some masters tolerated a variety of religions under their roof. That of the Jewish community was treated with, at best, indifference or, more likely, cruel mocking.³⁹

When the Roman practice of manumission freed slaves from bondage, they could congregate with Jews, Gentiles and new Christians alike, believing, debating and denying the new teachings that had come from the East. Though pagan to its core – in structures and statute – the city of Rome provided a remarkably fertile ground for the growing cult of Jesus Christ.

Men and women like Aquila and Priscilla could hear of early Christian ideas in and around the synagogues of Rome, though Aquila might have become a Christian before he and his wife undertook their arduous migration to the capital. Aquila was a Jew from Pontus, a rainy Roman province on the southern shores of the Black Sea.⁴⁰

It certainly had Christians in the mid-first century; Peter addressed them from ‘Babylon’ in that famous letter to the persecuted faithful of Asia Minor. Perhaps Aquila and Priscilla had fled religious oppression in Pontus, a land rich in cherries, flax and vines, seeking obscurity and safety in the vast, anonymous crowds of imperial Rome. They were certainly in Rome in the mid-fifties, when Paul wrote to Christians in the city. The couple were known and addressed directly by the apostle, having met him in Corinth, a land bridge between Attica and the Peloponnese. As prominent Christians, Aquila and Priscilla might have opened their home as a house church in Rome. Leaderless for its first decades, at least, the Roman Church was not founded with a bishop, much less a pope. Rather it comprised a cumulation of disparate domestic churches, around seven by the time that Paul wrote.⁴¹

Though far from an organised hierarchy, the nascent Church across the world was by this time a fairly extensive network. Christians such as Aquila and Priscilla in Rome were linked to brothers and sisters overseas through letters in their shared language of Greek. As we shall see, it was only in the second, third and fourth centuries that the Latin language of public life was slowly taken up by the Church, in part to accommodate new Roman converts of higher social rank. By contrast, this early dawn of Christianity in Rome was domestic and discreet, leaving no obvious trace of exclusively ecclesiastical buildings, nor images, nor shrines, nor altars.⁴²

Considering these most private and humble beginnings of the Roman Church we can begin to understand the aspersions of those third-century observers who saw Christians as ‘a people skulking and shunning the light, silent in public, but garrulous in corners.’⁴³

For Aquila and Priscilla, home would have been a place of worship but also of work. Like Paul, they fed themselves by making tents, cutting, stretching and stitching coarse, dark goatskin into moveable shelters. As well as Trastevere, there appear to have been Christians living on the land flanking the Appian Way, far south beyond the Capena Gate where stagnant air hung between the Caelian and Aventine Hills.⁴⁴

There they might have lived in the music of clacking craftsmen’s tools, hearing braying mules and women chatting as they worked wool and textile outside of their homes. The constant flow of visitors shifting in and out of Rome on this main track south-east would certainly have provided Aquila and Priscilla with plenty of customers. But Trastevere was also a hub for small craftsmen and women, a harbour quarter that packed a large bend of the River Tiber. That region also rang with the prattle and clang of work from warehouses, mills and tanneries for leather. In winding, narrow streets artisans like Aquila and Priscilla would have lived ear-to-ear with sailors, shopkeepers and haulers, who dragged cabinets and pots from ships to be hawked for coins, clothes and oil nearby. Some of their neighbours might have been forced to leave the quarter to work, taking a short stroll up the Tiber to the Vatican Hill. At its foot, not so far from the emerging shrine to Peter, men bent over fiery kilns to forge bricks of red and white clay.

Living in these lowly, often rowdy quarters, with no visible leader, distinct buildings or devotional shrines, it is not difficult to see why the first Christians in Rome left little trace in written record. In Trastevere, many lived in tenements of bricks and wood, tapering as they rose through several storeys. For so many in these poor quarters, sleeping, praying, feasting and working might take place in the same small set of gloomy rooms. In the second century, the poet Apuleius described the workshop of a textile fuller where his guests sat among downturned tools in the stench of bleaching cloth.⁴⁵

Leaving his rooms to walk the streets, the guests would not escape the implements and products of labour, passing storage facilities piled high with sacks of grain and heavy lumber for carpentry. Only atop the busy rooms of Trastevere, or in the rafters of tenements with the nesting birds, could the first Christians of Rome find the necessary peace to worship, read and pray. After downing tools, men and women like Aquila and Priscilla laid the table and said their prayers. They lit lamps and made the sign of the cross in remembrance of the crucifixion of Jesus.⁴⁶

This is an event that Christians believe saved men and women from condemnation to hell, and for them it had happened just a couple of decades before. At that time, even the flickering candlewicks at their windows would have been as unnoticed as markers of their cult, for Jews and pagans also used rituals of candlelight.

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The men and women who gathered to celebrate the first Christian Masses in Rome could not have dreamt of the incense-filled basilicas where their successors would soon pray. Though common for Roman Christians, the cramped quarters of Trastevere might have jarred Phoebe, a rather grand lady who met members of their community around the year 56. Phoebe had journeyed more than 1000 kilometres to get to the city, bearing that famous letter to the Romans from the apostle Paul. She had come from Cenchreae, a harbour town on the eastern side of Corinth, where she was known and respected as a patroness of Christians.⁴⁷

It is possible that Phoebe greeted Aquila and Priscilla with recognition or even warmth, for they had passed some time in Corinth around six years before. Phoebe’s home, a much more capacious dwelling than the house church in which she arrived at in Rome, provided a place of worship for the Christian community of Corinth. In the letter she bore to Aquila, Priscilla, Phlegon, Hermas and others in Rome, Paul commended her as ‘protector’, ‘sister’ and even ‘deaconess’, a woman designated and blessed by a bishop to carry the gospel to her own sex.⁴⁸

Paul had certainly needed a protector on his travels throughout the East, where his outspoken ardour caused rancour among Christians, Jews and pagans alike. His conversion had been dramatic and imbued him with extraordinary zeal; dashed to the ground by a blinding vision of divine light on the road to Damascus, he had spent three days without sight and without eating before embracing the teachings of Jesus that he had once scorned. Now Paul preached the gospel with all of the fire with which he had once condemned it, earning himself a reputation and enemies along the way. Paul might have recommended Phoebe to the Christian Church in Rome but, in reality, it was Paul who was in need of a favourable interlocutor in the city.⁴⁹

Paul did not come to Rome in the late fifties to found the Church, less still to act as its first pope. He came to Rome as a man unjustly accused of a crime, seeking a fair trial from the emperor himself. During the early fifties, Paul had travelled energetically: Antioch, Cyprus, Ephesus and then Corinth. By the year 56, he was in trouble, accused of causing tension and even violence at the Temple of Jerusalem.⁵⁰

To make matters worse, he had been mistaken for a malevolent Egyptian rioter, who had caused chaos in the city before fleeing and losing himself in the desert. Some deemed Paul a loimos or ‘plague’, who had wrought ill feeling and chaos in the Holy Land.⁵¹

Paul denied this vehemently and, as a Roman citizen, requested translation to the imperial capital for his trial. By the time that he arrived in 61, Phoebe must have gone on her way. It did not matter; she had laid favourable ground. Paul was received warmly by Christians at Pozzuoli, just north of Naples, and then among the community of Rome at the Forum Appius, where the roads from the south ran together into the Appian Way. At this last stop, a day’s journey from the city, Paul was greeted by two Christians near the Tre Taverne, where they could slake their thirst, consult a blacksmith and restock at a store. Together they then walked the Appian Way, through the countryside south of Rome into the heart of the city.

Paul would experience the Eternal City predominantly under house arrest. Within a few years he would be put to death, though writers from the second century onwards have disagreed on just where and just how. Such stories of detainment and violence are woven inextricably into histories of early Christian Rome. Yet like so many pages in the earliest chapters of this narrative, there are gaps and hanging threads that often prove impossible to tie up. An early episode in the story of Christian persecution comes to us from the pen of the second-century writer Suetonius, who wrote of the banishment of Jews from Rome in the year 49 by Emperor Claudius (41–54).⁵²

The city’s Jews were cast out, he writes, after the community splintered and ‘made disturbances’ over a man called ‘Chrestus’. Wagons packed, entire families trailed out of city. Some identify the banished as those Jews – like Aquila and Priscilla – who had embraced the teachings of Jesus and clashed with others who did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah. Writing in the same period, the historian Tacitus corroborated the story of a community divided, telling us that many had turned away from the old Jewish traditions