The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson
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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 Leadenhall Market (we have found a big bronze arm from 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 called 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 would celebrate 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 TS 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 he may have died of his terrible self-inflicted injuries – but 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 a boyfriend of his called Antinous, who had mysteriously drowned in the Nile. Temples and oracles were founded in the name of Antinous; coins were struck of the sulky-looking youth.
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 co-existed 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 which emerged from them both) in that it did not tolerate – and Christians would not accept – the idea of any coexisting religion, whether it was 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 312 AD the Emperor Constantine changed the course of history by making Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.
The pagans started to come under pressure. 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 torch-bearers 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 Christianity 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 what are 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 physical schism between England and Scotland 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