The Ghosts of Athens

proper hold of his mind, he let out a long sigh. ‘Besides,’ he went on in a voice that carried no trace of tiredness, ‘we all know that you never go to sleep before midnight. Study, study, study, so deep into the night, isn’t it? How else does a barbarian from the edge of nowhere get such fancy Greek and that formidable learning in the classics? No, my fine, young scholar, you can sit up a while longer, to hear that Uncle Priscus didn’t entirely miss out on education. You just allow me to start this discussion with my own little summary of the issues. I’m sure you’ll have cause to correct one or two misunderstandings of detail. But do hear me out first.’

Except when all else has failed, and it’s looked as if I were moments from a grisly end, I’ve never been in the habit of praying for help. But, even as Priscus had his mouth open to start his ‘little summary’, there was a sudden rattling on the door handle.

‘You finished with that yet, My Lords?’ the old cooking woman rasped as she walked in. She pointed at the iron pot. ‘The Master hasn’t bought no other food in, and, since you ain’t all dead after all, that was to be our dinner. Now, if you’ve had your fill, we wants the leftovers.’

I’d have said seventy. Just as easily, though, she might have been fifty or ninety — you really can’t tell age with slaves or the lower classes. She stood before us, a tub of shrivelled lard in a dark dress shiny from years of cooking spills.

‘Get out of here, or I’ll have you flogged,’ Priscus hissed at her.

She looked back at him and pulled a face. ‘Please yourself, love,’ she said. ‘But the condemned boy was outside the walls all day yesterday picking up them frogs.’

Since she at least knew Greek, I wanted to sit her down and ask a few obvious questions about the management of the residency household. I also had a question about these persistent rumours of my death. But Priscus was on his feet and swaying about with a stick in his hand. He lashed out at the old woman, who, with surprising agility, dodged past him. He lunged again, this time tripping over the bottom part of an old dining couch. It splintered on impact, and Priscus vanished for a moment into a cloud of woodwormy dust.

‘So it’s just the beer for us poor slaves,’ was the last the old woman said before she got back to the door. She banged it shut behind her.

I listened for the diminishing scrape of sandals on the unswept tiles of the corridor outside. Within the room, Martin had finally got Priscus free of the heap of broken wood, and His Magnificence the Commander of the East was now breathing like an enraged bull. But he controlled himself.

‘I forgive the old witch on account of her cooking,’ he said in a forced lightness of tone. ‘Now, where was I? Oh yes, we were going to discuss the fundamental issues of our day, and in Latin.’ He grinned at me. ‘Even if you have heard them before, I can promise my own take on them will be interesting.’

Chapter 14

The rain was getting worse. Now the smoke of the expired lamp had cleared away, I could smell my borrowed clothes. The prayer I’d been considering hadn’t worked. I’d not bother with saying one. I didn’t know how long it would be until I could escape from them and run a wet sponge over my body. Worse — oh, far worse! — I was stuck until then with Priscus for company.

‘In the early days of the Faith,’ he opened in a tone that anyone who didn’t know him would have taken for reverential, ‘when professing it was still a crime in the Empire, it was enough for most believers that Jesus Christ was the only Son of God, and that He had been sent among us to call us to the Truth and to redeem us for our sins. Beyond that, it was a matter of trying to follow His ethical precepts. Once the Faith had been established by the Great Constantine, however, attention shifted to investigating the Nature of Christ. What had been a minor and theoretical question now became a dispute concerning the peace of the Empire. Was Christ in His Nature identical with the Father, or merely similar to the Father? You will recall that Bishop Arius held the latter view, and Bishop Athanasius the former — and that every other bishop in the Empire, and eventually every one of the Faithful, was expected to take sides.

‘That dispute was settled at the Council of Nicaea nearly three centuries ago — in the year 325 since the birth of Christ. The bishops there decreed that Christ was, in His Substance, identical with the Father, but had also been made flesh for our benefit. Arius was anathematised and his followers were driven from the Church wherever possible. The losers at Nicaea held out for a long time — not least because their position was accepted by most of the barbarian converts. But time and a great deal of persecution did eventually establish the Nicene position as orthodox.’

He stopped. ‘But, my dear young fellows,’ he said with what I knew was a deliberately annoying brightness of tone, ‘are we not in Athens? Is this not the city of Plato and Socrates? Is this not the place where, of old, in those supremely elegant drinking parties, knowledge was reached not through dry lectures, but by the cut and thrust of debate?’ He got up and smiled. ‘Shall I ask you both what is the nature of the good, and how we can know it is good? Shall I call that dirty and illiterate hag back in, and, by directed questioning, get her to show that knowledge is innate by revealing some truth of mathematics? No!’ He sat down again and smiled at Martin. ‘So can you tell me why the views laid down at Nicaea are orthodox? Dear young Alaric may believe that the whole matter was a trifle got up by priests with too much time on their hands. In Greek, I know, the technical words for each of the positions have only one letter of difference between them — and, without qualifying adjectives, the same Latin word describes both positions. But can you tell me why the Nicene position is orthodox, and all else is damnable heresy?’

‘Because,’ I broke in, once it was plain that Martin was too shocked or scared to join the game, ‘if the losing side at Nicaea had been more successful, the Faith itself might have fallen apart. If the Son was accepted in any sense as inferior to the Father, Christ might quickly have been degraded to the same status as the pagan philosophers gave to their many gods. Like Apollo and Hermes, He would have been regarded as one more manifestation of the Originating Principle of All Things. There would have been no establishment of the Faith, only an addition to the Old Faith. The premises being granted, orthodoxy is a logical necessity.’

Priscus nodded eagerly. ‘That’s right, dear boy,’ he cried. ‘You really have a gift for putting these things so clearly. Such a pity the Great Augustus ignored my advice to give you charge of the university at Istropolis. The world of learning lost a most remarkable scholar.’

I smiled. ‘Was that before or after the place was burned by the Avars?’ I asked. I looked into the cold and glittering eyes above the bright smile. For a moment, they narrowed.

But Priscus ignored the attempted diversion and continued: ‘After the Arian dispute was settled, a further question arose. If Christ was indeed God, to what extent was He also made flesh? That was discussed at the Council of Chalcedon a hundred and twenty-six years later. The majority opinion here — rather, the orthodox position — was that the Nature of Christ was both Human and Divine. These Natures were held to be perfectly distinct, but also perfectly fused in a single person.

‘Unfortunately, a considerable body of dissidents has continued to claim, if in various ways, that the Nature of Christ is single and Divine — that, as Eutyches once put it, whatever may be Human is at best merged into the Divine as a drop of honey is dissolved in the sea. Now, these Monophysites have been largely Egyptian and Syrian, and they seem to have gained the support of most Egyptians and Syrians. What began as a theological dispute has become a source of political division within the Empire. Every mode of official persuasion, from argument to bloody persecution, has failed to impose the orthodox line, that Christ is both Human and Divine. Instead, during the hundred and fifty years or so since Chalcedon, the Egyptians and Syrians have insensibly thrown off a cultural domination that the Greeks had enjoyed in the East since the time of the Great Alexander. This was covered over at first by a spirit of habitual obedience to the Emperor. But, during our present and, as yet, unfortunate, Persian War, the division has progressed from running sore into a possibly fatal consumption.

‘I could say more, but it would bring me to the political difficulties we face in Egypt and Syria, where the heretics await not conquest by the Persians, but deliverance. It would also involve a discussion of military issues that might be too exciting for dear little Martin. So let us turn instead to this closed council in Athens, to be attended by a select few bishops from across the entire Church.’