One man's conception of Constantine -- Frank Slaughter

I wonder what the buzz was in the literary world in 1967, when the late Frank Slaughter, a Florida physician and author, published the first in what was to be his series on notables in Christian history.

Of course, I was not yet born. I have come to the party a few decades late. My secondhand copy of his book on Constantine the Great has been well worn since it rolled off the press -- who knows how many hands it has been through -- its pages are yellowed and its cheap paperback binding is failing.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this book, this week. Mr. Slaughter wrote more than 60books in his lifetime. This is the first that I have read. He digs deeply into his subject -- and you have to admire a writer who would dare to take on the excruciatingly complex politics and society of 4th Century Rome, as the Eternal City had its crown wrenched away by Byzantium in the east and the old gods lost out to Christianity.

But I fear that I will have no one to talk with about the book. It's 42 years old, the author has passed away and he never seems to have become a household name.

Nightmare men

"Then the strife of war being aroused will come to the west,
and the fugitive from Rome will also come, brandishing a great spear,
having crossed the Euphrates with many myriads." -- Sibylline Oracles, Book 4, 135.

"The sudden and mysterious disappearance of Nero encouraged a belief that he was alive and would return, a belief still prevalent as late as the time of [Emperor] Trajan, and shared by pagan, Jew and Christian." -- Cambridge Ancient History Vol. 11, p. 144.

Only a few times in history has it happened: A man holds the reigns of power, a man so loathsome, so horrible, so hated, that his very name becomes a synonym for evil. He rises to the pinnacle of power, but over-reaches, his empire collapses and he dies in squalor and infamy. He becomes, as the brilliant poet-prophet Isaiah wrote hopefully about Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, a "branch so abominable" that the very grave would spit him out.

The modern generation remembers this with the late, disgusting madman Adolph Hitler, whose mysterious death in the ashes of Berlin fed rumors for years that he yet lived. And perhaps there are people who still so believe.

For the people of the first century A.D., the hiss and byword was Nero, disgraced and disgusting Emperor of Rome, last scion of the once-glorious Julio-Claudian line. He, too, perished a suicide, and of him, too, rumors of survival long echoed through the lands he had ravaged.

That is the meaning of that cryptic paragraph I quoted above, from the Pseudepigrapha -- the fear that wouldn't die, that the end of the world would be ushered in by the return of Nero from the East to lead apocalyptic war.

The lesson from it: History, like nature, is non-moral. History does not always care to hand over human monsters for exhibit and execution but leaves us to wonder and worry long after their noxious reichs have crumbled. And so, our nightmares linger.

Another lesson: It is a cliche but also a truism, that "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." And in the cases of both Nero and the modern Nazi madman, it is a sobering fact that they were both hailed as heroes of the people, when they first came to power.

Sarmation Surprise

When I was young and went to school, there were certain teachers who ... taught me about Rome.

I learned about the wild German barbarians of Europe, who eventually muscled their way into the Empire. Later, I learned that Rome had other enemies -- the Parthians to their east, ruling over what we today call the Middle East.

Plunging into Cambridge Ancient History this month, Ive learned even more. Rome had another enemy, a people called the Sarmatians. Nomads who rode small, fast horses and built no cities, these people ranged from Siberia to Ukraine -- and menaced Rome and Parthia alike.

Among them was a tribe called the Moetians, almost unique in ancient history for the level of equality between the Women and men among them. Had they had great literary apologists such as did the democrats of Athens, perhaps that innovation would have become more widely known, for the betterment of the world.

Another Sarmatian tribe were the Alans -- so wide ranging as to even be recorded in the Chinese annals. The Alans gradually pushed west into Europe as Rome weakened, in time reaching Spain and then crossing into Africa. Imagine a grizzled Alan elder, trying to explain to his young kin born under the African sun, the stories of his grandparents about life in the frozen hell of Siberia.

Not all the Alans went west, my boy. A chunk of them lingered in the Caucasus region, where their headquarters became known as Ossetia. Ossetia -- where had I heard that before?

Remember last summer, when Russia and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia went to war? Turns out that Russia claims a piece of that turf wherein Ossetians still dwell and Georgia claims another piece where southern Ossetians dwell. The latter group want independence, Russia for her own ends supports it, and therefore, blood was shed.

Russia being a huge and nuclear-armed country, the travails of these restless, modern-day Alans could easily have led to a cataclysmic war.

This is the year in which the U.S. celebrates the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, from whence this nation was born.

I realize that to anybody living practically anywhere else in the world, 400 years isn't worth a pfft. Some Europeans probably have cat litter boxes older than that.

The more you study the Jamestown history, the more you realize how messy it all was. Not referring to the battles with the natives -- any idiot by now knows that they had their own human motives for variously supporting or attacking the newcomers, they weren't just naive nature children.

But rather, the notion of saying, this was first, that was first. There was a colony (Roanoke) established further south, which mysteriously vanished, although a local native tribe claims that its survivors joined up with them. And there were several other attempts before Jamestown by the English to found forts along the Atlantic coast, from Newfoundland on down.

Anyway, on some side street in Richmond, Virginia, a metal cross was put up 100 years ago, in commemoration of Jamestown VIP Christopher Newport's visit in 1607 to the future site of that city. It replaces the long-lost, wooden, original cross of Newport's, which he put up somewhere in that general area -- nobody knows exactly where.

Am I stupid for wanting to travel to see this cross, even though it's not the real one and not even in the right place? I'm just trying to do my part to commemorate. It's not like I have to drive for days to get there -- and that's as specific as I dare to be on this blog.