The Last Gospel

by David Gibbins

  ‘I am ready.’

  An hour later the two men sat motionless opposite each other in the boat, a silhouette that was growing darker in the moonless sky, and would soon be no more. The lamps spluttered between them, then one went out. The Nazarene shifted along the plank he was sitting on towards one side of the boat, then put his hand on the space beside him.

  ‘We must pull the oars together.’

  Claudius looked up from the paper, and smiled. ‘I should like nothing better.’ He looked down one last time, scarcely able to see now, and read the final words the Nazarene had spoken, that Claudius had translated:

  The kingdom of heaven is on earth.

  Men shall not stand in the way of the word of God.

  And the kingdom of heaven shall be the house of the Lord.

  There shall be no priests.

  And there shall be no temples . . .

  Author’s Note

  According to the ancient sources, the Roman emperor Claudius died in AD 54, probably by poison. He was succeeded by Nero, who ruled until AD 68, and then by Vespasian, who ruled until AD 79, the year that Vesuvius erupted and buried the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii. The idea that Claudius should have faked his own death, disappeared with his freedman Narcissus and survived in secret for all those years is fictitious, though in keeping with what can be surmised of his character. Claudius had been a famously reluctant emperor, sidelined for years because of a crippling condition, probably a form of palsy, and then dragged from behind a curtain to assume the royal purple in AD 41 when he was already well into middle age. He learned to accommodate himself to the role, and achieved much as emperor - public reforms, practical building projects, the invasion of Britain - but by the end had been worn down by corruption and a succession of scheming wives. He may have looked back wistfully to his earlier life as a scholar, to his histories of Rome, of the Etruscans, of Carthage - all now lost - and yearned for the same again, perhaps with a plan to write a history of Britain; he himself had visited Britain in the aftermath of the invasion, in AD 43. Had he survived, he would have mourned Calpurnia, his mistress probably also poisoned in AD 54, but he could have been driven on by the need to complete his account of his British triumph and maintain the family honour of his revered brother Germanicus and father Drusus - a reverence seen in the commemorative inscription on the coin in this book, a genuine issue of Claudius from the beginning of his reign.

  Narcissus was Claudius’ freedman secretary, his ab epistulis. He reputedly amassed a huge personal fortune as only Imperial freedmen could do, with dealings in Gaul and Britain. He appears to have served his own interests, and sometimes Claudius’ wives’ interests, more so than he did those of his master, yet there was evidently a transcending bond that kept Narcissus in Claudius’ employ after the emperor must have been aware of his nefarious activities. It is not known whether Narcissus was a eunuch, though Claudius had several eunuchs at his court - one was his taster - or whether Narcissus had Christian affiliations, though it is possible. According to the sources, Narcissus’ reputation was such that he was forced to commit suicide after Claudius’ death, so my fictitious escape route would have been an attractive lifeline.

  Pliny the Elder - the most famous encyclopedist from antiquity - was a young army officer on the German frontier when Claudius was emperor, and it is quite likely that the two men met. Before the end of Claudius’ reign Pliny had already written a history of the wars against the Germans, the lost Bella Germaniae, the result, his nephew claimed, of a vision his uncle had of Claudius’ father Drusus (Pliny the Younger, Letters iii, 5, 4). As a veteran Pliny would have cherished the memory of Drusus and Germanicus, and his mentions of Claudius in the Natural History are respectful, almost familiar, and rarely refer to him by the official designation Divus, which Claudius would have scorned. The Natural History was dedicated to the Emperor Titus, who had succeeded his father Vespasian on 23 June AD 79, so was completed only a short time before Pliny’s own death in the eruption of Vesuvius on 24 August that year. It is entirely consistent with Pliny that he should already have been at work on additions to his great work; Pliny the Younger inherited 160 notebooks from his uncle, ‘written in a minute hand on both sides of the page’. He had watched from Misenum as his uncle departed by galley towards Herculaneum on that fateful day of the eruption, and was told of his final hours (Letters vi, 16).

  Herod Agrippa, grandson of King Herod the Great of Judaea, is the King Herod of Acts of the Apostles; his formal name was Marcus Julius Agrippa, and his coins refer to him as Agrippa. He and Claudius were the same age, born in 10 BC, and were brought up in the same household after Herod Agrippa was adopted by Claudius’ mother Antonia. Whether or not Claudius visited Judaea and the Sea of Galilee as a young man is unknown, though little is certain about his life at this time, just as little is known of Jesus of Nazareth during his years in Galilee. What is recorded is that Herod Agrippa was appointed agoranomos at Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities xviii, 147-50). The appointment was on the instigation of his wife Cypros, and occurred after the sudden death in AD 23 of his companion Drusus, the dissolute son of the emperor Tiberius. Years later, as King of the Jews, Herod Agrippa appears in Acts as the man who allowed the execution of James, son of Zebedee and brother of John the Apostle, yet his attitude towards Christianity is far from clear. The idea that his new walls around Jerusalem may have included building at the site of the Holy Sepulchre is speculation. As for Claudius, he knew what it was to be an outcast, he may have felt let down by his own gods, and he may have been attracted by the Stoic philosophy later associated with Christianity; he would certainly have known of Christians by the time he was emperor in Rome, but there can be no certainty of his thoughts on the matter.

  The archaeology of Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples - buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 - has advanced greatly in recent decades, not least with discoveries along the shorefront that have included an ancient boat and the skeletons of many of the town’s occupants, huddled together in their last refuge in the cellars by the sea. Nevertheless, our picture still largely derives from the excavations of the eighteenth century, and large areas have seen little exploration since. One exception is the House of the Bicentenary, investigated in 1938; the discovery of a possible household ‘chapel’ led some to speculate on an early Christian presence. The room was extraordinarily well preserved, showing how the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius in AD 79 could bypass some places, leaving them miraculously intact.

  Much attention has focused on the Villa of the Papyri, a palatial structure which was tunnelled into during the eighteenth century but remains largely unexcavated. A wonderful sense of it can be gained in California at the Getty Villa, based on plans made by Carl Weber when he oversaw the eighteenth-century tunnelling. The finds included bronze statues as well as carbonized papyrus scrolls, many of them by the little-known Greek philosopher Philodemus. Work continues on reading those scrolls, with remarkable advances being made through multispectral imaging, but scholars yearn for more excavation to search for additional Greek scrolls and a possible Latin library which many believe must exist. The excavation in this novel is fictitious, though the finds are plausible and suggest the extraordinary revelations that could await archaeologists in the villa.

  Cumae was an important early Greek colony on the Bay of Naples, but was destroyed in the thirteenth century AD and remains a remote and overgrown place. The Sibyl’s ‘cave’ - first identified in 1932 - is a trapezoidal corridor, or dromos, hewn out of the rock, some 44 metres long, 2.5 metres wide and 5 metres high. At one end is an oecus, an inner sanctum, and on either side are openings, some leading to chambers that may have contained lustral waters. This seems likely to be where the Roman poet Virgil - buried somewhere nearby - had his Trojan hero Aeneas visit the Sibyl on his way to found Rome (Aeneid vi, 42-51). The image in the Prologue draws on the account of Virgil, who describes prophecies written on oak leaves, and the Roman poet Ovid, who
recounts the story of Apollo condemning the Sibyl to wither away for as many years as she could hold grains of sand (Metamorphoses 14). The use of opium is conjectural, but seems consistent with the trance-like state of the oracle, as well as the pliability she may have wished of her supplicants. The Sibyl is said to have sold a book of prophecies to the last king of Rome, Tarquinus Superbus, in the fifth century BC, and these were consulted as late as the fourth century AD. The cult was important in the ideology of the first emperor, Augustus, and it is possible that he and subsequent emperors secretly visited the Sibyl in her cave.

  The Temple of Jupiter at Cumae was transformed into a Christian basilica in the fifth-sixth century AD, and the cave of the Sibyl shows evidence for Christian occupation and burials. An association between Sibylline prophecy and early Christianity has long been proposed on the basis of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, where he has the Sibyl foretelling a future ‘golden age’, heralded by the birth of a boy; it is also seen in the medieval Des Irae, which has no known ancient source but may derive from this tradition.

  The final resting place of St Paul may be Rome, where a fourth-century sarcophagus found in 2006 beneath the Church of St Paulo fuori le Mura has been associated with him. The tradition that he was martyred along with St Peter in the Circus of Caligula and Nero, the site of Piazza San Pietro in the Vatican, led me to imagine that his original tomb may lie under St Peter’s Basilica, close to the tomb identified as that of St Peter. The extension in this novel to the ancient necropolis excavated during the 1940s under St Peter’s is fictional, but its early Christian burials, symbols and inscriptions are based on actual catacombs I have explored elsewhere in Rome and in North Africa.

  The shipwreck off Sicily is based on a wreck of about AD 200 excavated under my direction at Plemmirio, off Capo Murro di Porco south of Siracusa. This was where the British Special Raiding Squadron landed in July 1943, in advance of the disastrous glider assault recounted in this novel; my grandfather Captain Lawrance Wilfrid Gibbins gave me a first-hand account of this action, as he was close inshore that day with his ship Empire Elaine of the assault convoy. The seabed around the Roman wreck was strewn with ammunition, thrown into the sea after the Italian garrison surrendered. We had been led to the site by an account of one of Captain Cousteau’s divers, who had seen the wreck in 1953 during a Calypso expedition. The description of the site is largely factual up to the point where Jack and Costas follow the shotline beyond fifty metres depth. Nevertheless, the deep wreck they discover, with Italian wine amphoras from the first century AD, is itself closely based on other sites I have seen, with the same form of wine amphora found in the taverns of Herculaneum and Pompeii. One of those wrecks, off Port-Vendres in the south of France, is dated to the reign of Claudius by the stamped inscriptions on lead ingots in the cargo. The ingots of Narcissus are fictional, but the inscription is closely based on the actual formulae found on British lead-silver ingots of this period, some of which have also been found at Pompeii.

  One of our finds from the wreck was an amphora sherd with the painted graffito Egttere, meaning ‘to go’. Other finds included a sounding lead with a cross-shaped depression underneath, as described in the novel, and - uniquely from a wreck - a Roman surgeon’s instrument kit.

  Another Roman wreck, off Italy, has produced the contents of an apothecary’s chest - numerous small boxwood phials filled with substances including cinnamon and vanilla. So far, nobody has identified opium from an ancient shipwreck, though its use is well established in the ancient sources. Pliny the Elder devotes a chapter to the poppy and its sleep-inducing extracts, telling us that ‘the seed cures leprosy’, and describes the overdose taken by the father of one Publius Licinius Caecina, a man of praetorian rank, who ‘died of opium poisoning at Bavila, in Spain, where an unbearable illness made his life not worth living’ (Natural History xx, 198-200).

  We searched for an ancient Greek wreck also reported by Cousteau’s divers, in deep water beyond the Roman wreck. On our last dive we discovered a scatter of amphoras, several of seventh or sixth century BC date. At this point the sea bed dropped off to abyssal depth, three thousand metres and more, and we could only imagine what treasures lay in the darkness beyond. You can see a picture of me holding one of those amphoras at the moment of discovery on my website.

  In 2007 archaeologists announced a stunning discovery in the heart of ancient Rome. Probing beneath the Palatine Hill - home of the emperors, and site of Rome’s earliest settlement - revealed a subterranean chamber, some 16 metres below the House of Augustus. The chamber measures seven and a half metres high and six metres wide, and was formed partly from one of the natural fissures that honeycomb the hill. A camera lowered into the grotto revealed lavish mosaics studded with seashells, and in the centre of the floor a marble mosaic of a white eagle, an imperial motif. This may be the long-lost Lupercale, the cave where Rome’s founders Romulus and Remus were supposed to have been suckled by the she-wolf, and decorated by Augustus to form the focus of a cult which lasted until Christianity eclipsed the old rituals. Nearby was a circular shrine of Vesta, as described in the novel, part of a cult which survived until the time of the last known Vestal Virgins, Coelia Concordia, in the late fourth century AD.

  The ‘urban speleologists’ of my novel are inspired by true-life heroes of underwater archaeology, a group of divers and explorers who have charted the fetid passageways of the Cloaca Maxima - the ‘Great Drain’ - beneath the city of Rome. The main line of the Drain runs from the forum to the river Tiber beneath the Arch of Janus, where another branch runs in from under the Palatine Hill. The entrance beneath the Arch is fictional, though the appearance of the circular staircase is inspired by one that leads into the Aqua Virgo, the aqueduct that feeds the Trevi Fountain. The description of being in the Cloaca and inside an aqueduct is based on my experience and on the accounts of ‘urban speleologists’ who have gone further, revealing many areas under Rome that remain to be explored. The continuation of the tunnel beneath the Palatine is conjectural - the central chamber is based on the appearance of the Cave of the Sibyl at Cumae - though it follows a plausible route between known points of the main drain; the idea that such a project should have been the brainchild of Claudius is consistent with his bent for utilitarian projects, including his aqueduct in Rome, the Aqua Claudia, his huge rock-cut tunnel to drain the Fucine Lake and his construction of the great harbourworks at Ostia, the port of Rome.

  Whether or not there was a church on the site of St Lawrence Jewry in London before the Norman period is unknown, but it is a plausible location for one of the lost churches of Roman London. St Lawrence Jewry has endured successive destructions, most recently by German bombing on the night of 29 December 1940, in the same raid that produced the famous image of the dome of St Paul’s rising miraculously above the devastation. The bombing was watched from the roof of the Air Ministry by Air Vice Marshal ‘Bomber’ Harris, who famously remarked that ‘they have sown the wind’; thus was born the British bomber offensive against Germany. In the City, air was sucked into the vacuum created as the fires consumed oxygen and hot air rose, creating violent winds which fuelled the fires further and spread burning debris. The account of St Lawrence Jewry shrieking that night is true: a soldier on leave who had been an organmaker recognized the noise of hot air rushing through the pipes. Unexploded German ordnance such as the SC250 bomb still lies under London, and the Royal Navy Fleet Diving Squadron bomb disposal teams are called out frequently to deal with discoveries such as the fictional bomb in this novel.

  Almost three centuries earlier the medieval church had been destroyed in another firestorm, ‘a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame, not like an ordinary fire’, as Samuel Pepys described it in his diary of 2 September 1666. And sixteen hundred years before that, the newly laid-out town of Londinium, created soon after Claudius’ conquest, had been laid waste by the forces of Boudica, the warrior queen, who razed the buildings and slaughtered the inhabitants during a terrible rampage in AD
60 or 61. There is no surviving description of the sack of London, but in the estuary of the Thames had been seen a frightful vision: ‘the Ocean had appeared blood-red . . . the ebbing tide had left behind what looked to be human corpses’ (Tacitus, Annals xiv, 32).

  The Roman historian Dio Cassius wrote that Boudica’s followers exacted their retribution to the accompaniment of sacrifices in their sacred places, particularly ‘the grove of Andate’ - probably the same as Andraste, who Boudica herself invokes in a speech - who they regarded ‘with the most exceptional reverence’ (lxii, 7). As for Boudica, after her death following the final battle against the Romans, ‘the Britons mourned her deeply and gave her a costly burial’. The location of this burial has been sought ever since, but it is possible that both the tomb and the ‘grove of Andate’ lie somewhere under modern London. The fictional tomb in this novel incorporates features from actual Iron Age discoveries in England, including the chariot burial, the horse iconography of the Iceni, Boudica’s tribe, and the golden neck torque - ‘a great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips; around her neck was a large golden necklace’ (Dio Cassius lxii, 2.4). The decorated bronze cylinder is based on one actually found in a chariot burial in Yorkshire. Some of the artefacts described in the novel can be seen in the British Museum, including a row of Roman wine amphoras from an Iron Age burial at Sheepen and the magnificent Battersea Shield, found on the bed of the river Thames.

  Apart from the tomb and the gladiators’ chamber, the picture of archaeology in the Guildhall Yard owes much to actual finds. You can go underground and visit the remains of the Roman amphitheatre, discovered in 1988; and beneath the restored Church of St Lawrence Jewry lies a vaulted burial chamber, forgotten since the seventeenth century and discovered by chance in 1998. It contains the only surviving part of the medieval church. As these extraordinary discoveries show, underground London may continue to harbour untold secrets. Much of this can be appreciated in the marvellous displays and publications of the Museum of London, which has overseen many excavations during the regeneration of the City following the bomb damage of the Second World War.