Read Millenium for Free Online Page B

writings attributed to him endowed the Roman Empire with an altogether more glorious role than it had been granted in Revelation. Teeming although its pagan enemies already were, Methodius warned, its greatest test was still to come. The hour of Gog and Magog, long dreaded, would come at last. Imprisoned for aeons on the edge of the world behind great walls of brass, these were barbarians of unspeakable savagery, devourers of'the vermin of the earth, mice and dogs and kittens, and of aborted foetuses, which they eat as though gorging on the rarest delicacies'. 21 Against the eruption of such monstrous foes, only the emperor in Constantinople - the last Roman emperor of them all - would stand firm; and in the end he would bring Gog and Magog to defeat. That great victory achieved, he would then travel to Jerusalem; and in Jerusalem, the Son of Perdition, Antichrist himself, would be revealed.
    And then the last emperor, Methodius prophesied, would 'go up and stand on the hill of Golgotha, and he would find there the Holy Cross, set up just as it had been when it carried Christ'. He would place his diadem on the top of the Cross and then raise up his hands in prayer, delivering his monarchy into the hands of God. 'And the Holy Cross on which Christ was crucified will be raised to heaven, and the crown of kingship with it' 22 — leaving the last emperor dead on Golgotha, and all the kingdoms of the earth subject to Antichrist, steeped in that profoundest darkness that would precede the dawn of Christ's return.
    So it was to come: the last great battle of the world. Small wonder that Methodius's prognostications should have attracted attention even in imperial circles. They may have been lurid and intemperate, yet they could offer a hard-pressed emperor precisely what St John, in Revelation, had so signally withheld: reassurance that the Roman Empire would continue in heaven's favour until the very end of days. More flatteringly, indeed — that the death of its last emperor would serve to precipitate the end of days. Had not St Paul, when he spoke of Rome 'restraining' Antichrist, implied as much? No matter how shrunken the dominion ruled from Constantinople, its rulers needed desperately to believe that it remained the fulcrum of God's plans for the universe. What in more prosperous times had been taken for granted was now clung to with a grim resolution: the conviction that to be Christian was synonymous with being Roman.
    Posterity, as though in mockery of Constantine's pretensions, has christened the empire ruled from his foundation 'Byzantium', but this was not a name that the 'Byzantines' ever applied to it themselves. Even as Latin, the ancient language of the Caesars, gradually faded from the imperial chanceries, then from the law courts, and finally from the coinage, the citizens of Constantinople continued to call themselves Roman - albeit in their native Greek. Here was no faddish antiquarianism. Rather, the prickliness with which the Byzantines, the 'Romaioi’, guarded their name went to the very heart of their self- image. It offered them reassurance that they had a future as well as a past. A jealous concern with tradition was precisely what marked them out as a Chosen People. It served, in short, to define their covenant with God.
     
    The City of God
     
    It is true that the identification of Christendom with empire was not entirely without its problems. A certain degree of awkwardness arose whenever the Romaioi were obliged to have dealings with Christians beyond their frontiers. Imperial lawyers had initially spun the opti­mistic formulation that all of Rome's former provinces, from Britain to the furthest reaches of Spain, remained subject to the emperor. In the earliest days of their foundation, some of the barbarian kingdoms established in the West had been perfectly content to play along with this fiction - and even those that did not had on occasion been flat­tered into accepting certain tokens of