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 those liberal 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 watch-making. By the same year London 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.
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 Waitrose 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 (1560), 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 mindset of this valiant Christian
