but who the Sibyl ordered me to set free. For the Sibyl of Cumae says that the high priestess of these Druids is the thirteenth of the Sibyls, and the oracle for all the tribes of Britannia.” ’
‘Stop right there,’ Costas said.
‘End of page. That’s it.’
‘You’re saying Boudica, the warrior queen, she was the high priestess? That Boudica was a kind of arch- druid?’
‘I’m not saying it, Claudius is.’
‘And this druidess was one of the Sibyls?’
‘That’s what he says. And Claudius should know. We know he was a visitor to the Sibyl’s cave at Cumae.’
‘That’s because the Sibyl was his drug-dealer.’
‘There’s something extraordinary going on here, something people have guessed at but never been able to prove,’ Jack murmured, putting the computer on the seat beside him and staring up towards the altar. ‘Let’s backtrack for a moment. Begin at the beginning. Claudius gets a document from a Galilean, a Nazarene.’
‘We know who we’re talking about, Jack.’
‘Do we? There were plenty of would-be messiahs floating round the Sea of Galilee at that time. John the Baptist, for a start. Let’s not leap to conclusions.’
‘Come on, Jack. You’re playing devil’s advocate.’
‘Let’s keep the devil out of this. We’ve got enough to contend with as it is.’ Jack paused. ‘Then, as an old man, Claudius makes a secret trip to Britain, to London. He has the manuscript with him, inside a metal container given to him during a previous visit to Britain, perhaps by a princess of the Iceni.’ Jack patted a bulge in his bag. Costas looked at the bulge, then at Jack.
‘That’s called looting,’ he said solemnly. ‘It’s becoming a habit.’
‘Just a precaution. In case that bomb cooked off. We had to have some evidence we’d really seen the tomb.’
‘No need to explain it to me, Jack.’
‘And like all good treasure-hiders, Claudius leaves a clue,’ Jack continued. ‘Or rather a series of clues. Some of them are by way of his friend Pliny.’
‘I think Claudius was having fun with us,’ Costas said, sniffing.
‘He’s addicted to riddles, to reading the leaves, has done it all his life, all those visits to the Sibyl. She has him wrapped round her shrivelled fingers, of course. Claudius becomes like a crossword freak, a cryptologist. And leaving clues seems to be part of the treasure-hiding psychology,’ Jack continued. ‘If you have to hide something, you hide it ingeniously, but you have to feel that somewhere along the line someone else might find it. If you leave clues, you’re in control of that process of discovery too. A way of assuring your own immortality.’
‘So he comes back to Britain and finds her tomb, and here we are too,’ Costas said. ‘Always hide things in the most unlikely places.’ He sneezed. ‘The word of the Messiah clutched in the dead hands of a pagan priestess.’
‘That’s one thread in our story,’ Jack said. ‘Claudius, his motivations, what drove him. But there’s another thread that’s been fascinating me. It’s about women.’
‘Katya, Maria, Elizabeth? Careful, Jack. That’s one thing you don’t seem to be able to control.’
‘I mean women in the past. The distant past.’
‘The mother goddess?’ Costas said.
‘If the priesthood that Claudius writes about did survive from Neolithic times, then there’s every reason for thinking that the cult of the mother goddess did as well,’ Jack said. ‘She’s there in the Graeco-Roman pantheon, Magna Mater, the Great Mother, Vesta, whose temple we found in Rome, and among the Celtic gods too. But I’m not just thinking about female goddesses. I’m thinking about the earthly practitioners of religion, the priests, the oracles.’
‘The Sibyls?’
‘Something’s beginning to fall into place,’ Jack murmured. ‘It’s been staring at us for centuries, the Sibylline prophecy in Virgil, the Dies Irae. And now we’ve found the extra ingredient that suddenly makes it all plausible, that tips the balance into reality.’
‘Go on.’
‘It’s about early Christianity.’ Jack suddenly felt a surge of excitement as he realized where his thoughts were leading him. ‘About women in early Christianity.’
‘Huh?’
‘What does that mean to you? First thought?’
‘The Virgin Mary?’
‘The cult of the Virgin probably incorporated pagan beliefs in a mother goddess,’ Jack said. ‘But I’m thinking about the early believers, the first followers of Jesus, who they were.’ He reached into his bag, and pulled out a red hardback book. ‘Remember I told you how elusive the written evidence is for early Christianity, how virtually nothing survives apart from the Gospels? Well, one of the rare exceptions is Pliny. Not our old friend Pliny the Elder, but his nephew, Pliny the Younger.’
‘The one who wrote about the eruption of Vesuvius,’ Costas said slowly. ‘And the Vestal Virgins.’
Jack nodded. ‘The account of Vesuvius was in a letter to the historian Tacitus, written about twenty-five years after the event. Well, here’s the younger Pliny again, in a letter written shortly before he died in AD 113. By that time he was Roman governor of Pontus and Bithynia, the area of Turkey beside the Black Sea, and he’s writing to the emperor Trajan about the activities of Christians in his province. Pliny wasn’t exactly a fan of Christianity, but then he was echoing the official line. What had started out at the time of Claudius as an obscure cult, yet another mystery religion from the east, fifty years on had become a real concern to the emperors. Unlike the other big eastern cults, Mithraism or Isis worship, the Christians had become political. That was what really put Christianity at centre stage. Far-sighted Romans could see the Church becoming a focus for dissent, especially as Christianity attracted slaves, the great underclass in Roman society. The Romans were always frightened of another slave uprising, ever since Spartacus. They were also thrown off balance by the fanaticism of the Christians, the willingness to die for their beliefs. You just didn’t see that in any of the other cults. And there was something else that really terrified them.’
‘These Romans you’re talking about,’ Costas said, sneezing. ‘They’re all men. We were talking about women.’
Jack nodded, and opened the book. ‘Listen to this. A letter from Pliny the Younger to the emperor Trajan. Pliny’s seeking advice on how to prosecute Christians, as he’s never done it before. He calls it a degenerate cult, carried to extravagant lengths. He tells Trajan he has unrepentant Christians executed, though he generously spares those who make offerings of wine and incense to the statue of the emperor, the living god. But then listen to this. In order to extract the truth about their political activities, he orders the torture of “ duabus ancillis, quae ministrae dicebantur ”. Both the words ancillis and ministrae mean female attendants, but ministra is often equated with the Greek word diakonos. ’
‘Deaconesses,’ Costas mused. ‘Priestesses?’
‘That’s what really terrified the Romans,’ Jack said. ‘It’s what terrified them about the British, too, about Boudica. She fascinated them, excited them, but also terrified them. Women could be the true power behind the scenes in Rome, women like the emperor Augustus’ wife Livia, or Claudius’ scheming wives, but it was a male- dominated system. The cursus honorum, the rite of passage through military and public offices followed by upper- class Romans like Pliny the Younger and his uncle, would never have admitted a woman. Just like the image of the wild barbarian warrior queen, the idea of this new cult having priestesses on a par with men would have been horrifying, worse still if they were slaves.’
‘But I thought the Christian Church was male dominated.’
‘That’s the really fascinating thing about Pliny the Younger’s letter. That one word, deaconesses. It implies the Church didn’t start out male dominated. Somewhere along the line, perhaps soon after the time of Pliny the Younger, the more politically minded leaders among the Christians must have realized they’d never defeat Rome head-on, that they stood a good chance of being extinguished completely. Instead, you confront the system from within. You make converts of Roman men who can see how the Church fits with their own personal ambitions, with their political careers. Ultimately you catch the emperor himself, as happened two hundred years after Pliny with Constantine the Great. The power of the Roman Church, its political power, was all about men. But in the earliest
