The Last Gospel (21 page)

‘But you can read it,’ Costas said.

‘Not exactly.’ Jack swivelled the light table until the scroll was at ninety degrees, then pulled a magnifying glass on a retractable arm over the miniature lines of writing just visible in the margin. He pushed his chair back so Maria and Costas could take a look. ‘Tell me what you think.’

They both craned over, and Costas spoke immediately. ‘It’s not Latin, is it? Is that what you mean? But some of those letters look familiar to me. There’s a lambda, a delta. It’s ancient Greek?’

‘Greek letters, but not Greek language,’ Maria murmured. ‘It looks like the precursor Greek alphabet, the one they adopted from the near east.’ She glanced back at Jack. ‘Do you remember Professor Dillen’s course at Cambridge on the early history of Greek language? It’s a while ago now, but I’m sure I recognize some of those letters. Is this Semitic?’

‘You were the star linguist, Maria, not me,’ Jack said. ‘He’d have been proud of you for remembering. In fact, he already sends his congratulations for the discovery, as we e-mailed from the Lynx when we flew in. When I took this scroll from the shelf in Herculaneum I caught a glimpse of this writing, and I had a sudden hunch. I asked Professor Dillen to provide his latest version of the Hanno Project for us to download. It should be online now.’

‘Jack!’ Costas said. ‘Computers? All by yourself?’

Jack gestured at the keyboard beside them. ‘Don’t worry. It’s all yours.’

‘The Hanno Project?’ Maria said.

‘Two years ago, we excavated an ancient shipwreck off Cornwall, not far from the IMU campus. Costas, you remember Mount’s Bay?’

‘Huh? Yeah. Cold. But great fish and chips in Newlyn.’ Costas had sat down at the computer, and was busily tapping. He turned and glanced at Jack. ‘I take it you want a scan?’

Jack nodded, and Costas pushed away the magnifier and positioned a movable scanner arm over the margin of the scroll. Jack turned to Maria. ‘It was a Phoenician shipwreck, the first ever found in British waters, dating almost a thousand years before the Romans arrived. We found British tin ingots stamped with Phoenician letters, and a mysterious metal plaque covered in Phoenician writing. Dillen’s been working on it ever since. We called the translation project Hanno after a famous Carthaginian explorer. We don’t know it was him. Just a name pulled out of a hat.’

‘So you think our scroll writing is Phoenician.’

‘I know it is.’

‘So Pliny read Phoenician?’

‘Phoenician was similar to the Aramaic spoken around the Sea of Galilee at the time of Jesus, but that may just be a coincidence. No, I think this has to do with Claudius. You remember those scrolls on the bottom shelf of the room in Herculaneum? Claudius’
History of Carthage
? It was his biggest historical work, one thought completely lost but now miraculously discovered. Well, Claudius would have learned the language in order to read the original sources, the language spoken by the Phoenician traders who founded Carthage. It was virtually a dead language by the time of imperial Rome, and it’s just the kind of thing I can imagine Claudius teaching Pliny in their off-time together after finishing their writing, over wine and dice. So when Pliny comes to make this note, he chooses a language that was virtually a code between them. Claudius is watching, and he would have been pleased and flattered by that too.’

‘They must have been the only people around who could read this.’

‘That’s the point.’

‘It’s ready,’ Costas said, hunched over the screen. ‘There are four words the concordance has identified as transliterations, that is proper nouns, and it’s rendered them first into Latin and then into English. One word is Claudius. The other’s Rome. All the other words are in Dillen’s Phoenician lexicon. There’s one I even know.
Bos
, bull or cow. I remember that from the Bosporus.’

Jack’s heart was pounding with excitement.
This could be it
.

‘It’s appearing on screen now.’

Maria and Jack came up behind Costas. At the top of the scan they could see that the script had been enhanced, with the Greek-style letters more clearly visible. Below it was the translation:

Jack stared again. His mind was racing. Only one day after finding the shipwreck of St Paul, they had stumbled on something extraordinary, perhaps the biggest prize of them all. And now he knew he had been right to take the scroll away, to keep it hidden until they had followed the trail to the end.

The word of Jesus
. The final word, the word that would eclipse all others.
The last gospel
.

‘Well?’ Maria said, looking up at him. ‘Sacred cows?’

‘I think I know where that is.’

‘Game on,’ Costas said.

T
he next morning Jack and Costas stood beside the Via del Fori Imperiali in the heart of ancient Rome. They had flown the Lynx helicopter from
Seaquest II
to Rome’s Fiumicino airport, on the site of the great harbour built by the emperor Claudius, and had taken the train along the course of the river Tiber into the city. Despite the heat, Jack had insisted that they leave the train at Ostiense station and walk through the ancient city walls and over the Aventine Hill, and then down past the Circus Maximus towards the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. As they neared their destination, the assurance and solidity of the modern city gave way to the fractured landscape of antiquity, desolate and empty in places, in others resplendent with structures more awesome than anything built since. It was as if those ruins and the shades of monuments long gone had the power to repel any attempt to better them, an aura which preserved the heart of ancient Rome from being submerged by history. Jack knew that the impression was partly an illusion, as much of the area of the imperial fora had been cleared of medieval buildings in the 1930s under the orders of Mussolini, but even so the Palatine Hill with the remains of the palaces of the emperors remained much as it had been since the end of antiquity, ruinous and overgrown in the many places where archaeologists had still done little more than scrape the surface.

Jack had been talking intently in Italian on his cell phone, and now snapped it shut. A van carrying their gear would rendezvous with them in two hours’ time at the foot of the Palatine Hill. He nodded at Costas, and they joined a small throng of tourists lining up behind the ticket desk outside the site of the old forum.

‘Doesn’t seem right,’ Costas grumbled, wiping the sweat from his face and swigging some water. ‘I mean, a celebrity archaeologist and his sidekick. They should be paying you.’

Jack pushed his cell phone into his khaki bag and pulled out a Nikon D80 camera, slinging it round his neck. ‘I often find it’s best to be anonymous at archaeological sites. You’re less likely to be watched. Anyway, I’d never convince them with you looking like that.’ Jack was dressed in desert boots, chinos and a loose shirt, but Costas wore a garish Hawaiian outfit, complete with a straw hat and his beloved new designer sunglasses.

‘They must be used to it,’ Costas said. ‘Archaeologists’ dress sense, I mean. Look at Hiebermeyer.’

Jack grinned, paid for the tickets and steered Costas into the archaeological site, down a ramp and towards the ruin of a small circular building, with fragmentary columns still standing. ‘The Temple of Vesta,’ he said. ‘Shrine, really, as it was never formally consecrated as a temple, for some reason. Where the sacred fire was guarded by the Vestal Virgins. They lived next door, in that big structure nestled into the foot of the Palatine, a bit like a nunnery.’

‘A pretty extravagant nunnery,’ Costas murmured. ‘So all that stuff’s really true? About the Vestal Virgins?’

Jack nodded. ‘Even the stuff about being buried alive. There’s no more sober witness than our friend the younger Pliny, who wrote the famous letters about the eruption of Vesuvius. In another letter he described how the emperor Domitian ordered the chief Vestal Virgin to be buried alive, for violating her vows of chastity. Domitian was a nasty piece of goods at the best of times, and the charge was concocted. But being walled up underground was the traditional punishment for straying Vestals, and she was taken to the appointed place and immured alive.’

‘Sounds like a male domination thing, gone badly wrong.’

‘Probably right. After the first emperor Augustus became Pontifex Maximus, the supreme priest, the emperor and the chief Vestal were on a collision course. The goddess Vesta was very powerful, guardian of the hearth. The eternal fire, the
ignis inextinctus
, symbolized the eternity of the state, and the future of Rome was therefore in the hands of the Virgins. They called her
Vesta Mater
, Vesta the Mother. She was like the Sibyl.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, some of the similarities are pretty remarkable. Vesta was probably an amalgam of an ancient local deity of Italian origin with a Greek import, supposedly brought by Aeneas from Troy. The Sibyl at Cumae has the same kind of history. And the Vestals were chosen as girls from among the aristocracy of Rome, just as I believe the Cumaean Sibyls were. We might find out more here. Come on.’

Jack led Costas up the Sacred Way past the Arch of Titus, where they paused and looked silently up at the sculpture of the Roman soldiers in triumphal procession, carrying the Jewish menorah. They then carried on up the Palatine Hill into the Farnese Gardens, and then to the vast ruins of the imperial palace on the west side of the hill overlooking the Circus Maximus. They were met by a refreshing breeze as they came over the top, but even so the heat was searing and Jack led them to a shaded spot beside a wall.

‘So this was Claudius’ stomping ground,’ Costas said, taking off his sunglasses and wiping the sweat from his face. ‘Before he did his Bilbo Baggins disappearing act. It seems a far cry from that monk’s cell in Herculaneum.’

‘This was where he grew up, then where he spent most of his time as emperor apart from his visit to Britain,’ Jack replied. ‘But the image we have of this place at that time, the Hollywood image, you can forget a lot of that. Our view of the past is so often conditioned by later accretions, anachronisms. The Colosseum wasn’t built yet, was only inaugurated in AD 80, the year after Vesuvius erupted. The imperial palace, the huge sprawl in front of us, was only begun a few years after that by Domitian, the emperor who had the showdown with the Vestals. That was when megalomania really took hold, when the emperors really did begin living like gods. But for Claudius, like his grandfather Augustus, it was crucial to maintain the pretence of the republic, the idea that they were simply caretakers. They lived in a modest house, actually smaller than the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.’

‘Where was it?’

‘You’re leaning against it now.’

‘Ah.’ Costas put his hand against the worn brick facing. ‘So Claudius was here,’ he murmured.

‘And Pliny the Elder, in AD 79,’ Jack said.

‘I was wondering when you were coming to that.’

‘Right here we’re smack in between the House of Augustus and Domitian’s palace, and the building in front of us is the Temple of Apollo,’ Jack said. ‘Hardly anything’s left of the temple now, but you have to imagine an awesome structure in white marble. It was embellished with some of the most famous sculptures of classical Greece, taken by the Romans when they conquered the east. Right where we’re sitting now was the portico, a colonnaded structure that surrounded the temple. Augustus had an enclave constructed within the portico next to his house, and it contained a library, apparently large enough to hold Senate meetings. The enclave may have had particular administrative functions, including a Rome office for the fleet admirals.’

‘Got you,’ Costas said. ‘Pliny the Elder. Admiral at Misenum.’

Jack nodded. ‘Pliny would have known this place well. Augustus also built a new shrine to Vesta at this spot, probably meant to supplant the one in the forum.’

‘Right under his bedroom window,’ Costas said. ‘Talk about control.’

‘The Vestal Virgins seem to have resisted the idea of moving their sacred shrine, and continued to patronize the old one. And here’s the really fascinating thing, the reason we’re here. The shrine to Vesta in the forum contained an
adytum
, an inner sanctum, a hidden place where various sacred items were stored. Its contents were pretty mystical, sacred objects to do with the foundation of Rome. The
fascinum
, the erect phallus that averted evil, the
pignora imperii
, mysterious pledges for the eternal duration of Rome, the
palladium
, a statue of the goddess Pallas Athena supposedly brought by Aeneas from Troy. Only the Vestals and the Pontifex Maximus were ever allowed in, and these items were never shown in public.’