The price of being right
This is a photo i took of the bust of the Emperor Augustus in the Ephasus Museaum this afternoon. He was quite a guy.
He ruled during the time that Jesus Christ was born but he died before Jesus got really going. At Ephesus, he was the subject of a cult, which transferred love and affection from the official state gods to heads of state. You can see how that can happen.
But there is something really interesting about this bust. Carved into the Emperors forehead is a cross. It is a result of the Christians getting their comeuppance on the Roman emperors that did nasty things to them…reportedly Nero used burning crucified Christians as street lights from time to time. Paul the apostle preached from a stage I stood on today in ancient Epesus against pagan worship and was jeered with heckles of “Artemis is great!” from the 24000 people who were rooting for the home team. It eventually took the clerk of the city three hours to calm people down enough that he could be safely run out of town. Once Christianity was made okay by Constantine in the 400s, Christians got to finally get their revenge. And they did it in impressive style, including carving a cross in the emperor’s head.
Of course their hegemony didn’t last long. Tonight is the last night of Ramadan, and everyone is celebrating the holidays tomorrow. So even Christianity had its time around here, but was replaced when the Ottomans took over, and the churches were wrecked,
Wandering around Turkish antiquities has been an education in “getting the last word.”. In Capadocia, we saw incredible frescos in cave Churches that had the eyes scratched out of them by the anti-icon brigades while the debate about worshipping pictures was going on. And on some of the ancient caves around the region there is so much modern day graffiti that there is nothing left of the original ornamentation.
On a larger scale this whole region is all about getting the last word. From colonization to empire building to invasions to the switch from pagan to Christian to Moslem, and into the contemporary political debates about Armenian genocide and Kurdish independence everyone is selling you on the latest and greatest last word about how right they are.
But when it comes to history, there is never a final word. Today’s certainty is tomorrow’s museum curiosity.
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“It [the cross carved onto Augustus’s forehead] is a result of the Christians getting their comeuppance on the Roman emperors that did nasty things to them.”
Is this really a “comeuppance”, in the sense of a revenge? It seems to me that in Christian iconography, drawing a cross on the forehead has one, and only one, possible meaning: a sign of baptism. So I think the Christian who carved the cross had more complicated motives than you are ascribing to him. I think he was assimilating Roman imperial history into a late Roman, Christian world view.
Rather than effacing the past, he was embracing it. One remembers how the Christian Byzantine Greeks proudly called themselve romanoi right up to the Turkish conquest in 1453.
Could be but I think this bust is generally agreed to have been effaced. I’m not sure what Christian was thinking when she did this, but there was a larger pattern of destroying the temples of previous gods, including emperors, when the chance presented itself.
Also the cross on the forehead is displayed today by some Christians on Ash Wednesday for repentance among other reasons, so there are multiple meanings for this practice.