Dorothy L. Sayers’s sequence of twelve radio plays, The Man Born to be King, happened because the BBC asked her to put the life of Christ, distilled from the Gospels, in dramatic form. But Sayers was not content simply to string together episodes: she wanted to make something thematically coherent and aesthetically powerful. The through-line of the plays, it seems to me, can be put in the form of a question Jesus asks in all three of the synoptic Gospels: “Who do you say I am?” (Matthew 16:15, Mark 8:29, Luke 9:20.) In these plays, everyone who meets Jesus is implicitly confronted by this question, which most of them answer. They may admire or worship or mock or comdemn or despise, but they all respond. They seem compelled to.
But it is not just individual persons who need to respond to Jesus. The two Great Powers whom Jesus challenges are the Sanhedrin and Rome; and the members of those bodies respond in complex and often contradictory ways.
For Caiaphas, the High Priest, Jesus is not an unique figure: he is, rather, exemplary of an ongoing problem: the inability of the Sanhedrin to command the respect and obedience of the Jewish people. And that inability leads to the increasing dominance of Roman power in Judaea. In the eleventh play, which concerns the Crucifixion, Caiaphas reflects despairingly on this situation:
CAIAPHAS … It is the duty of statesmen to destroy the madness which we call imagination. It is dangerous. It breeds dissension. Peace, order, security — that is Rome’s offer — at Rome’s price.
JOSEPH [of Arimathea] (gloomily): We have rejected the way of Jesus. I suppose we must now take yours.
CAIAPHAS: You will reject me too, I think…. Be content, Jesus, my enemy. Caiaphas also will have lived in vain.
I may have more to say in a later post about the role of the Jewish authorities in these plays. These are matters that call for great delicacy, and I think it’s fair to say that delicacy was not Sayers’s strong suit. So stay tuned.
What Jesus means for Rome — and what Romans think Jesus means for Rome — is the question I want to focus on here.
One of the more intersting minor characters in these plays is a Roman named Proclus. We see him in the first play as a young soldier assigned to the household of Herod the Great; later we see him, a much older man, as the one Les Murray calls “the say-but-the-word centurion”; and we see him once more giving vinegar to the dying Jesus. Sayers’s decision to make these disparate figures one character is striking — and a reminder of how brief the earthly life of Jesus was. For a Roman soldier who was beginning his career when Jesus came into the world could still have been on duty to see this strange man out of it.
To Pilate Jesus is an object of little interest — though he does admire the fortitude with which the prophet bears his suffering: he muses that Jesus should have been a Roman. For most of the Roman soldiers he’s just another criminal they must deal with, along with the usual crowd-control problems. For one of the aristocrats his execution is worth seeing: it’s a pleasing “novelty” to watch a god being crucified.
But the most interesting figure here is Claudia Procula, the wife of Pilate. As Jesus hangs on the cross, Pilate asks her about this dream she has had, and she replies (I must quote at length here):
CLAUDIA: I was in a ship at sea, voyaging among the islands of the Aegean. At first the weather seemed calm and sunny — but presently, the sky darkened — and the sea began to toss with the wind….
(Wind and waves)
Then, out of the east, there came a cry, strange and piercing …
(Voice in a thin wail: “Pan ho megas tethneke — Pan ho megas tethneke– ”)
And I said to the captain, “What do they cry?” And he answered, “Great Pan is dead.” And I asked him, “How can God die?” And he answered, “Don’t you remember? They crucified him. He suffered under Pontius Pilate.” …
(Murmur of voices, starting almost in a whisper)
Then all the people in the ship turned their faces to me and said: “Pontius Pilate.” …
(Voices, some speaking, some chanting, some muttering, mingled with sung fragments of Greek and Latin liturgies, weaving and crossing one another: “Pontius Pilate. … Pontius Pilate … he suffered under Pontius Pilate … crucified, dead and buried … sub Pontio Pilato … Pilato … he suffered … suffered … under Pontius Pilate … under Pontius Pilate…. )
… in all tongues and all voices … even the little children with their mothers….
(Children’s voices: “Suffered under Pontius Pilate … sub Pontio Pilato … crucifie sous Ponce Pilate … gekreuzigt unter Pontius Pilatus … and other languages, mingling with the adult voices: then fade it all out)
. . . your name, husband, your name continually — “he suffered under Pontius Pilate.”
This is an extraordinary scene in several ways. Note, for instance, the inclusion, in the midst of the Second World War, of French and German voices. If you listen to the performance of this play available online and compare it to the book, you’ll discover that the performed version of the scene is considerably shorter than the published version and is placed after the death of Jesus rather than when he is dying — the book has the Roman soldiers giving the dying Jesus vinegar, then switches to Claudia Procula and Pilate, then returns to the cross for Jesus’s last outcry and death. It’s impossible to be sure, but it seems likely that Sayers allowed changes to her script in order to meet the exigencies of radio broadcast but then restored the full version for publication — because she thought what she had written and her placement of it are important.
The most remarkable thing about the scene is Sayers’s inclusion of words written by the Greek historian and biographer Plutarch, a pagan who was born probably just a few years after Jesus was crucified. Plutarch was from the village of Chaeronea in Boeotia, about twenty miles from the famous temple of Apollo at Delphi, where he served as a priest. His devotion to Apollo seems to have been sincere and deep. Therefore he was appropriately concerned about the silence of the oracles, his essay/dialogue on which I wrote about at some length here.
Philip, one of the characters in the dialogue, tells this story:
As for death among such beings, I have heard the words of a man who was not a fool nor an impostor. The father of Aemilianus the orator, to whom some of you have listened, was Epitherses, who lived in our town and was my teacher in grammar. He said that once upon a time in making a voyage to Italy he embarked on a ship carrying freight and many passengers. It was already evening when, near the Echinades Islands, the wind dropped, and the ship drifted near Paxi. Almost everybody was awake, and a good many had not finished their after-dinner wine. Suddenly from the island of Paxi was heard the voice of someone loudly calling Thamus, so that all were amazed. Thamus was an Egyptian pilot, not known by name even to many on board. Twice he was called and made no reply, but the third time he answered; and the caller, raising his voice, said, ‘When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.’ On hearing this, all, said Epitherses, were astounded and reasoned among themselves whether it were better to carry out the order or to refuse to meddle and let the matter go. Under the circumstances Thamus made up his mind that if there should be a breeze, he would sail past and keep quiet, but with no wind and a smooth sea about the place he would announce what he had heard. So, when he came opposite Palodes, and there was neither wind nor wave, Thamus from the stern, looking toward the land, said the words as he had heard them: ‘Great Pan is dead.’ Even before he had finished there was a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many, mingled with exclamations of amazement. As many persons were on the vessel, the story was soon spread abroad in Rome, and Thamus was sent for by Tiberius Caesar. Tiberius became so convinced of the truth of the story that he caused an inquiry and investigation to be made about Pan; and the scholars, who were numerous at his court, conjectured that he was the son born of Hermes and Penelopê.
Tiberius, of course, was Caesar at the time of Jesus’s death. So, though Plutarch was writing around 100 A.D., this story concerns an event that occurred decades earlier; and it seems likely that Philip, who gives the account in a for-what-it’s-worth spirit, is suggesting that the oracles may have fallen silent because the gods or demigods who spoke through them have died.
The Christian interpretation of this story is of course that the coming of Jesus is what silences the oracles, whether by slaying the gods or by rendering them powerless.
Brief Digression: Conversely, the implication of Arthur Machen’s superb horror story “The Great God Pan” (1894) is that such deities have neither died nor lost all their power but have gone underground, as it were, conducting a permanently furtive campaign of resistance to a triumphant Christianity. And of course the justly famous “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter in The Wind in the Willows (1906) makes a similar suggestion, but in a gentler and sunnier key. The survival of paganism in Europe is the subject of Francis Young’s Paganism Persisting: A History of European Paganisms since Antiquity and his consistently interesting Substack. Here is a recent piece by him on the renewal, real or imagined, of British paganism. These matters too deserve more attention than I can give them here. End of digression.
Sayers probably was alerted to Philip’s story by Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man (1925), which offers a very interesting take on the meaning of Philip’s tale. His suggestion is that Jesus did not have to kill Pan, because the disenchanting bureaucratic system of the Roman empire had already done so:
The Empire at the end was organised more and more on that servile system which generally goes with the boast of organisation; indeed it was almost as servile as the modern schemes for the organisation of industry. It is proverbial that what would once have been a peasantry became a mere populace of the town dependent for bread and circuses; which may again suggest to some a mob dependent upon doles and cinemas. In this as in many other respects, the modern return to heathenism has been a return not even to the heathen youth but rather to the heathen old age. But the causes of it were spiritual in both cases; and especially the spirit of paganism had departed with its familiar spirits. The heart had gone out of it with its household gods, who went along with the gods of the garden and the field and the forest. The Old Man of the Forest was too old; he was already dying. It is said truly in a sense that Pan died because Christ was born. It is almost as true in another sense that men knew that Christ was born because Pan was already dead. A void was made by the vanishing of the whole mythology of mankind, which would have asphyxiated like a vacuum if it had not been filled with theology. But the point for the moment is that the mythology could not have lasted like a theology in any case. Theology is thought, whether we agree with it or not. Mythology was never thought, and nobody could really agree with it or disagree with it. It was a mere mood of glamour, and when the mood went it could not be recovered. Men not only ceased to believe in the gods, but they realised that they had never believed in them. They had sung their praises; they had danced round their altars. They had played the flute; they had played the fool.
So came the twilight upon Arcady, and the last notes of the pipe sound sadly from the beechen grove.
The superior organization of the great Empire governed from a great City easily defeated this ancient pastoral paganism, which was, after all, “a mere mood of glamour.” (Stalin famously asked how many divisions the Pope had; one might imagine Tiberius Caesar asking how many legions Pan can command.)
Sayers’s use of all this is fascinating, and especially powerful is her decision to embed it in her narrative as a dream. For like all important dreams, that of Claudia Procula has an iron logic beneath its chaotic surface. The surface confuses the death of Jesus and the death of Pan; in fact, Pilate in his role as a Roman bureaucrat has indeed helped to kill Pan, though his acquiescence in the death of Jesus … well, that’s a more complicated matter. It is true that Jesus, at the very moment that Claudia Procula tells her dream, is dying on a Roman cross; but it is also true that, as King Melchior says in the sequence’s first play, “It is written in the stars that the man born to be king shall rule in Rome.” Immolatus vicerit.
