David Stuttard, co-author of AD 410: The Year that Shook Rome
As we enter the period of Lent, it is perhaps as good a time as any to consider the impact of Christianity on the Roman world in the years leading up to the momentous events of AD 410. And as good a place as any to witness the growing influence of the new religion is in England, just south of the M25 corridor in Kent, at a Roman country house now called Lullingstone villa.
For much of its three-hundred-year life span, Lullingstone villa was relatively unremarkable. It was probably built around AD 100, one of a number of well appointed and comfortable mansions, each with its own estate, which dotted the fertile Darent Valley, within easy distance of the province’s new capital Londinium and the estuary of the River Thames. Indeed, its owners seem to have valued the fecundity of their valley to such an extent that they later built a shrine, apparently to the local water nymphs, whose walls they painted with graceful representations of the goddesses.
In the mid fourth century – perhaps around AD 360 – the villa underwent what in the language of today would be called a ‘makeover’. A new dining room was built, and new mosaics were laid depicting scenes from pagan mythology – Europa, her breasts stylized but prominent, being abducted (side-saddle) by Jupiter in the shape of a jolly bull, flanked by two cupids, one beckoning them on, the other tugging the bull’s tail, the whole scene set beneath a row of alternating hearts and swastikas (the ancient symbol of the sun); Bellerophon mounted on the winged horse Pegasus, jabbing his spear into the back of the Chimaera, while four exotic sea-creatures (a cross between walruses, porpoises and slugs) wriggle round the corners, from where representations of the seasons look benignly on.
But even as these mosaics were being laid down, in another room a series of wall-paintings were going up which would give the villa its place in history. For these paintings adorned what was clearly a Christian chapel, built above the shrine of the nymphs. The most impressive (over 4 metres long) shows six male figures, five with their arms held high in prayer, one with his left hand raised in benediction. All are dressed in flowing robes, but it is the device shown on the robes which is so striking – the Christian cross, perhaps the earliest representation of its use on clothing anywhere.
Christian wall painting from Lullingstone Villa, Kent, c.360
This was not the only treasure which the chapel yielded up. In the same room were found depictions of the early Christian ‘logo’, the Chi-Rho symbol, placed in the centre of what seems to be a garland symbolizing fertility. This symbol had been relatively recently legitimized by the emperor Constantine I (r. AD 306-337), who had his soldiers paint it on their shields before their victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge ( AD 312). He later claimed that on the day before the battle ‘when the sun had already passed its highest, he saw with his own eyes, in the sky above the sun, the sign of the cross, along with the words: “With this, be victorious”.’ (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.28)
Part of a wall painting from Lullingston, Kent, 4th century AD
The symbol combines the Greek characters chi (X) and rho (P), the first two letters of the name ‘Christ’. In the Lullingstone painting (as elsewhere) they are flanked by two more Greek letters, alpha and omega, recalling the words of the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, ‘I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end’ (Revelation 21.6; 22.13). What has been less well observed, however, is that the four letters form a word of their own, a kind of Christian Da Vinci Code. For read as one, they spell ‘archo’, which means ‘I rule’. The message of this symbol of the new imperial religion could not be clearer.
Code-breakers have seen other intriguing hidden messages at Lullingstone – this time contained in the ostensibly pagan mosaics. For, above the image of Jupiter and Europa is a quotation based on a passage of Vergil’s Aeneid, in which numerologists claim to have found a cryptic suggestion that the owner is giving up the worship of Isis and embracing Christianity. Even the owner’s choice of Bellerophon and the Chimaera for the subject of the central mosaic has been seen as ambiguous – in Christian art elsewhere it commonly appears in the company of depictions of St. George and the Dragon.
At Lullingstone (again as elsewhere), even if Christianity ruled supreme, it did not immediately supplant the older pagan religions. Even in the Chi-Rho painting, the roundel in which the symbol appears is shown floating on the very stream, whose nymphs the villa’s owners worshipped – the chapel, remember, was built above the pagan shrine – and evidence suggests that for some time paganism and Christianity could live relatively comfortably side-by-side.
But even as the banter of the builders and decorators was disturbing the peace of the Darent valley, elsewhere in the Roman world, the pax Romana was drawing to a close. Waves of barbarian tribes would soon pour across the frontiers; soon, the Roman army would leave Britain altogether; and in the early C5th, the villa at Lullingstone would itself be burned.
Its ruins lay undisturbed until, in 1939, a storm brought down a tree and unearthed a scattering of fragments from one of the mosaics. By then, of course, the world had changed. The symbol of the swastika had taken on a new and ominous meaning, and Britain, Europe and the world faced a threat as deadly as any that the Romans feared from the Goths or the Vandals or the Huns. It was only once the Second World War was over that excavations began, and the site was uncovered. Today the villa is in the very capable hands of English Heritage, while the Christian wall paintings can be seen in the British Museum (Room 49) along with two splendid second century stone busts from the pagan shrine.
David Stuttard
AD 410: The Year That Shook Rome
by Sam Moorhead and David Stuttard
£9.99
Available to buy now from the British Museum Shop
