The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  He aimed his beam back to the left wall of the room, between the basket and the shelves, at something he had seen earlier but not properly registered. Now he realized what it was, and drew in his breath in excitement. It was two shadowy heads, portrait busts perched on a small shelf looking towards the table. He took a few careful steps towards them. He needed to find out who had been here, who had been the last person to sit at that desk, almost two thousand years ago. He stood in front of the busts, and saw that they were life-sized. For a moment they had a ghostly quality, as if the occupants of the villa that fateful day had walked out of the wall and were staring straight at him, with lifeless eyes. Jack forced himself to look dispassionately. Typical early imperial portrait busts, extraordinarily lifelike, as if they had been taken from wax death masks. Handsome, well-proportioned heads, slightly protuberant ears, clearly members of the imperial family. Jack peered down at the small pedestals below each bust.

  NERO CLAVDIVS DRVSVS

  NERO CLAVDIVS DRVSVS GERMANICVS

  ‘Drusus and Germanicus,’ he whispered.

  ‘The two guys you mentioned just now? The guy on the coin?’ Costas said. ‘Father and brother of Claudius?’

  ‘Seems an incredible coincidence,’ Maria said.

  Jack’s mind was racing. He still had the coin in his hand, and he held it up so the portrait was framed by the two busts. The similarity was truly remarkable. Could it be? ‘There’s something about this coin,’ he murmured. ‘Something staring us in the face.’

  ‘But that one coin doesn’t necessarily mean much, surely,’ Maria said. ‘This villa was like an art gallery, a museum. The great villa owners of Italy in the Renaissance collected medallions, old coins. Why not Roman villa owners too?’

  ‘Possibly.’ Jack looked around the chamber pensively. ‘But I think we’re in the room of an old person, stripped to its essentials. This isn’t just Roman minimalism, it’s real austerity. Books, a writing table, a few revered portraits, wine. No wall paintings, no mosaics, nothing of the hedonism we associate with the Bay of Naples. The room of someone prepared for the next step, for the afterlife, already swept clean of the past. The twilight of a life.’

  ‘Seems pretty odd for a lavish villa,’ Costas said. ‘I mean, this room’s like a monk’s cell.’

  Hiebermeyer had squatted down, and was peering closely at one of the scrolls on the floor. ‘This papyrus is fantastically well preserved,’ he murmured, carefully prising at it with his fingers. ‘It’s even pliable. I can read the Greek.’

  ‘Ah. Greek,’ Jack said, his voice neutral.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Costas said.

  ‘Nothing,’ Jack said. ‘Nothing at all. We just want Latin.’

  ‘Bad news, Jack,’ Hiebermeyer said, peering closely at the script, then pushing up his glasses and looking at him. ‘I may have brought you here on a wild goose chase.’

  ‘Philodemus.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘I thought Greek philosophers were highly esteemed,’ Costas said.

  ‘Not all of them,’ Jack said. ‘A lot of Romans, educated men like Claudius, like Pliny the Elder, thought many of these Greek philosophers around the Bay of Naples were quacks and charlatans, hangers-on in the villas of the wealthy. But there was a lot of this stuff around, and in a typical library here you were probably more likely to pick up a book by someone like Philodemus than one of the great names we revere today. Remember, the classical texts that have survived, that were saved and transcribed in the medieval period, represent the pinnacle of ancient achievement, and only a small part of that. It spoils us into thinking that all ancient thinkers were remarkable minds. Look at the academic world today. For every great scholar, there are dozens of mediocrities, more than a few charlatans. But they’re still all called professors. It was just bad luck for us that old Calpurnius Piso patronized one of the flaky ones.’

  ‘I hope to God we haven’t just stumbled into Philodemus’ study,’ Hiebermeyer muttered. ‘I hate to lead you on, Jack. Hardly worth calling you from your shipwreck.’

  ‘I wouldn’t miss being here for anything,’ Jack said fervently, ‘Philodemus or not. And we weren’t going anywhere with the wreck until all the equipment for a major excavation’s in place, a week at least.’

  ‘It’d be such a pity, though,’ Maria said, slumping slightly. ‘Some second-rate philosopher. It’s hard to believe someone was trying to save it all, when the eruption happened,’ she said, waving at the strewn scrolls all over the floor.

  ‘Maybe they weren’t,’ Costas said. ‘Maybe the clearance was already underway, and they were trying to get rid of it.’

  ‘Or searching for something. You said it before.’ Jack glanced back at the macabre form of the skeleton at the entrance, its hand seeming to grasp towards the scrolls inside the room. ‘But there’s something about this place. It doesn’t seem like the study of a Greek philosopher. Not at the end, anyway, not in AD 79. It’s just too Roman. It’s a very private room, a hidden sanctuary almost, a place where someone could live in their own world and forget about impressing others. And I just can’t imagine a Greek choosing to have two imperial Roman portrait busts as the only decoration in his study, the only things to look at from his desk.’

  Hiebermeyer flipped on the extractor fan again, and it flashed red. ‘Let’s give it a few more minutes,’ he said. ‘I think we’re still okay to talk, with the noise. I don’t think they can hear us down there with that drill going.’

  They backed up to the entrance again, clustering round it, and Jack held up the coin. He looked at the statues again, then back at the coin. He realized that the coin had been fingered a lot, in the same place on both sides. ‘Maybe this was the memento of an old soldier, an old man who lived here in AD 79,’ he murmured. ‘Perhaps one who had served under Claudius in the invasion of Britain, or even under Germanicus, sixty years before the eruption. An old man who revered his general, and that general’s brother and father.’ He paused, troubled. ‘But it’s still odd.’

  ‘Why?’ Costas said. ‘It’s a great find, but as Maria says, it’s just one coin.’

  ‘Well, it would still have been risking it,’ Jack said. ‘In the Roman period, you didn’t hang on to old coins, unless you were hoarding them. You just didn’t want to be seen with issues of a past emperor. Coins were hugely important propaganda tools. It was how a new emperor conveyed his image, asserted his power. And the coin reverse had commemorative images which celebrated the achievements of the emperor and his family.’

  ‘The Jewish triumph of Vespasian,’ Costas said. ‘Judaea Capta. The menorah.’

  Jack grinned. ‘A great example. How could we forget. That issue was less than two years after the eruption of Vesuvius. Another famous example is the Britannia issues of Claudius, celebrating his conquest of Britain in AD 43.’

  ‘But this coin commemorates Claudius’ father.’ Costas took the coin from Jack, and looked at it closely with his headlamp. ‘It seems a selfless thing for an emperor to do, a little touching. I think I like this guy.’

  ‘It’s not quite what it seems,’ Jack said. ‘This coin probably dates to the first year of Claudius’ reign, before he had anything to brag about. Harking back to a glorious ancestor was a way of giving your claim to the throne some authority, reminding people of the virtues of your ancestors. In AD 41, when Claudius was proclaimed emperor, Rome had just suffered four years of insanity under Caligula, Claudius’ nephew. What people desperately wanted was a return to the hallowed old days. Personal honour, integrity, family continuity, living up to your ancestors, that was all very much the Roman way. At least in theory.’

  ‘In Italy,’ Costas murmured. ‘The family. Sounds familiar.’

  ‘Claudius was Rome’s most reluctant emperor,’ Jack continued. ‘Dragged from behind a curtain by the Praetorian Guard when he was already in middle age, looking forward to his remaining years as a scholar and historian. But he revered the memory of his father, and all his
life he wished he’d been fit enough to join the army like his brother Germanicus, whom he adored. Being emperor gave him the chance. And the acclamation of every new emperor, even Caligula and Claudius’ successor Nero, was always accompanied by pious assertions of a return to the ways of the past, the end of debauchery and corruption and a reminder of the virtues of their ancestors.’

  ‘Did Claudius live up to it?’ Costas asked.

  ‘He might have done, if he hadn’t been ruled by his wives,’ Hiebermeyer muttered.

  ‘Britain was a great triumph,’ Jack said. ‘Claudius was doomed never to cover himself in personal glory, riding out from the waves of the English Channel rather absurdly on a war elephant, arriving in time to see the corpses of the British vanquished but not to lead his legions in battle. But he was a good strategist, a visionary of sorts who had spent his life studying empire and conquest and could see beyond the individual campaign, the triumph. The world would be a very different place today if Claudius hadn’t conquered Britain. And remember, for the men in the legions nothing could be worse than Caligula a few years earlier forcing them to line up on the French side of the English Channel and attack the sea god Neptune. With Claudius they didn’t mind having a cripple for an emperor, as long as he was sane. And Claudius chose very able field commanders, generals like Vespasian, middle-ranking officers like Pliny the Elder, and they were loyal to him. And the legionaries revered the memory of Claudius’ father and his brother.’ Jack paused, and looked up again at the portrait bust. ‘Just like the occupant of this room.’

  ‘Their loyalty didn’t prevent Claudius from being poisoned,’ Hiebermeyer said.

  ‘No,’ Jack murmured. ‘But for a first-century emperor, that was also the Roman way.’

  ‘Speaking of poison, what’s all this about opium?’ Hiebermeyer said. At that moment the light flashed green, and he reached over and deactivated the fan. ‘Sorry. It’ll have to wait.’

  Jack crouched back into the ancient chamber and went straight over to the table, around to the far side between the chairs. He looked at what lay on the surface. He had been right. They were shrouded with grey matter, dust and fallen plaster, but there was no mistaking it. Sheets of papyrus, blank sheets. A pinned-out scroll, ready for writing. Ink pots, a metal stylus poised ready to dip into the ink, left where it had been abandoned for ever, the day when this place became hell on earth. Jack stared down, then glanced up again at the two portrait busts. Drusus and Germanicus. There were Romans alive in AD 79 who would still hark back to those glory days. The untimely deaths of two heroes meant that their memory lived on, for generations. Jack remembered something he had thought before. A Roman would have known the portraits of his ancestors intimately. And this was a private room. A room where a man kept his most precious heirlooms, the portraits of his ancestors.

  Jack was beginning to think the impossible.

  The portrait of his father. Of his brother.

  The pieces were suddenly falling together. Jack felt a heady rush of excitement. Something else sprang into his mind, from talking to Costas about Pliny the Elder the day before. He reached into his bag, his heart pounding, took out the little red book and placed it on the table, under his headlamp beam. He clipped on his dust mask, carefully picked up an ancient sheet of papyrus, shook it slightly, and shone his Maglite through it. He laughed quietly to himself. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’

  ‘What is it?’ Costas said.

  Jack held the paper up to the light so the others could see. ‘Look, there’s a second layer of papyrus underneath, coarser than the upper layer. It means the surface is of the best quality, but underneath it the paper is strengthened, less transparent. And unless I’m mistaken, the sheet measures exactly one Roman foot across.’

  ‘So?’

  Jack put down the sheet and picked up the book, his copy of the Natural History. ‘Listen to what Pliny has to say about paper. Book 13, Chapter 79, on papyrus:

  ‘ “The Emperor Claudius imposed modifications on the best quality because the thinness of the paper in Augustus’ time was not able to withstand the pressure of pens. In addition it allowed the writing to show through, and this brought fear of blots caused by writing on the back of the paper. Moreover, the excessive transparency of the paper looked unsightly in other ways. So the bottom layer of the paper was made from leaves of the second quality, and the cross-strips from papyrus of the first quality. Claudius also increased the width of the sheet to a foot.” ’

  Hiebermeyer leaned over the table and peered at the sheet closely with a small eyeglass. ‘And unless I’m mistaken, this is the best-quality ink available at the time,’ he said excitedly. ‘Gall ink, in all probability, made from the desert beetle. I’m a bit of an expert, you know, having studied ink types when we found papyrus documents reused as mummy wrappings in Egypt. Pliny writes about that too.’

  ‘Then I’m about to make an extraordinary suggestion,’ Jack said, replacing the sheet carefully on the table and looking intently at the others. ‘I think it’s possible, just possible, that we’re standing in the study of a man who should never have been here, who history tells us died a quarter of century before the eruption of Vesuvius.’

  ‘A man who once ruled an empire,’ Maria said softly.

  Hiebermeyer was nodding slowly, and whispered the words, almost to himself. ‘Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus.’

  Jack held up the coin, allowing the light to pick out the portrait. ‘Not the emperor Claudius, not the god Claudius, but Claudius the scholar. Claudius who may have somehow faked his own poisoning and survived for all those years after his disappearance from Rome, hidden away in this villa. Claudius who must have finally perished just as Pliny the Elder did, in the cataclysm of AD 79.’

  There was a stunned silence, and Costas looked keenly at Jack. ‘Well,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s another little bit of history you’re going to have to rewrite.’

  ‘And not the only bit.’ Maria had her back to them, and was hunched over the lower shelf in the corner of the room. ‘There’s more here, Jack. Much more. Books and books of it.’

  Jack came round the table and they all crouched beside her. There was a collective gasp of astonishment. In front of them, below the shelves they had seen from the entrance, were two further shelves packed with several dozen cylindrical boxes, each about eighteen inches high. ‘They’re lidded, sealed with some kind of mortar,’ Hiebermeyer murmured. ‘Hollowedout stone, Egyptian marble by the look of it. They look like reused canopic jars. No expense spared here.’

  ‘This one’s open.’ Maria took out her Maglite, twisted it on and shone it at the top of the cylinder on the right side of the lower shelf. The hollowed-out interior was about a foot wide, and inside it they could see further narrow cylindrical shapes, with a space where one appeared to have been removed.

  ‘Eureka,’ Hiebermeyer said, his voice tight with emotion.

  ‘What is it?’ Costas asked.

  ‘Papyrus scrolls,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘Tightly wound papyrus scrolls.’

  ‘Jack, they’re not carbonized,’ Maria whispered. ‘It’s a miracle.’ She reached out, then held back, as if she wanted the spell to remain unbroken, to preserve that moment of realization before their action changed history.

  ‘Any idea what they are?’ Costas said.

  ‘There should be sillyboi, labels describing each book,’ Jack said. ‘Scrolls don’t have spines, so books were identified with pasted labels, usually hanging out over the shelf. I don’t see any here.’

  ‘Wait a second.’ Maria peered closely at the top of the sealed cylinder next to the one with the displaced lid. ‘There are markings. Engravings in the stone. Words, in Latin. I can read it. Historiae Carthaginienses Antiquae.’

  ‘The History of the Ancient Carthaginians,’ Jack whispered. ‘Claudius’ lost History of Carthage. It’s mentioned in other ancient sources, but not a word of it survived. Or so we thought. There may only ever have been one copy, too controversial to publish. T
he only dispassionate account of Rome’s greatest rival. Who else but Claudius himself would have had that, in his own private library? These jars must contain his other works.’

  ‘Wait for it, Jack.’ Hiebermeyer had sidled over to the basket of scrolls by the door, and was holding up a flap of papyrus attached to one of the decorative handles. ‘Naturalis Historia, G. Plinius Secundus. My God. Looks like we’ve got a complete edition of Pliny’s Natural History.’

  ‘Looks like you’ve found that Latin library after all,’ Costas said.

  Jack felt an overwhelming sense of certainty. He looked at the scroll, remembered his sense of the room when he first saw it, those two portraits. There had been another here, another presence, as if the old man so covetous of his private space had allowed in one other, a man whose imprint was still here, around them. ‘There’s something else that’s niggling me about this place,’ Jack said. ‘About who was here.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well, we’ve got what looks like an entire copy of Pliny’s Natural History, hot out of the scriptorium. How does Claudius get hold of that?’

  Costas jerked his head towards the skeleton at the door. ‘Maybe he sent the eunuch to buy books for him.’

  ‘Let’s just think about it,’ Jack said. ‘Let’s say we’re right, that Claudius was living here in secret up to the time of the eruption, in AD 79. That’s hypothesis, but one of the most famous facts of ancient history is that Pliny the Elder was here, on the Bay of Naples, based at Misenum only a few miles away, admiral of the Roman fleet, and that he died in the eruption.’

  ‘You’re saying they may have met each other, here,’ Costas said.

  Jack flipped open the index pages of his copy of the Natural History. ‘This is what sparked me off. Pliny the Elder mentions Claudius a number of times throughout the book, always studiously, always lauding his achievements. He owed Claudius his career, when Claudius was emperor and Pliny was a young man, but the passages in the Natural History are almost too laudatory, for an emperor who had supposedly been dead for a quarter of a century. Just an example. Listen to this. He talks of Claudius’ achievement in having a tunnel dug to drain the Fucine Lake near Rome, taking thirty thousand men and eleven years, an immense operation “beyond the power of words to describe”. That final phrase is odd, by itself. For Pliny the Elder, absolutely nothing was beyond the power of words. And another thing. He should have referred to Claudius as Divus Claudius, the divine Claudius, in keeping with his status as a deified emperor, years after his death and supposed apotheosis. But instead, Pliny refers to him as Claudius Caesar. It’s almost too familiar, almost as if Claudius is still alive when Pliny is writing this. The clues are all here.’