Jesus the Simple - A World Without Christians

Vixagoras

Banned
It could certainly be said that Maryām was excited in the days leading up to her delivery, though not exactly for the reasons that immediately come to mind for most expecting parents. She was more than overjoyed at the prospect of being a mother, as she felt that her entire life had been leading her to the moment of birth, but her pregnancy with her first child had been... difficult. There had been a few scares in the last few months after she had been knocked over twice by sheep, and she had started bleeding at random while hunched over the fire trying to cook just weeks before. Her mother-in-law, Rāḥēl, had been keeping her confined to the house for the passed three days for fear that she might miscarry. As if it did any good anyways, since she could never sleep because of the baby's constant kicking. “The girl can't seem to stay on her feet.” She had heard her gossiping to her friends, “Which, well... is fine, really. She fought me when I put her to bed, but... whether she likes it or not, I will have a grandchild at the end of all of this.” Just thinking about the way the other women laughed with her made Maryām feel embarrassed, and so she had promised herself that she was not going to scream the way her sister-in-law Åsənaṯ had. When she had made the promise allowed to her gaunt-faced mother-in-law, she smiled at her condescendingly and told her simply, “That's not possible, my dear.”


As bitter as a young Maryām might have felt toward her mother-in-law however, all of that seemed to dissipate on the day of her labor. It was a cold spring morning, so cold that she had awoken being able to see her own breath. The sound of her husband Yosef at work was what had ended her sleep, as was the norm for her daily routine over the passed three days. Every day it was something different. He might have been fixing something, perhaps a chair or a wheelbarrow, or pounding out fibers for rope, or stripping branches for fencing. Sometimes he and his father Yaqob made finer items, like chairs, tables, and even doors. Others, their wares were crude. Although the overwhelming majority of the time, they repaired things that other people had broken. Today, he was actually outside chopping wood to help in the construction of a neighbor's house, though the upper level of the house where the family was supposed to eat and sleep had become overcrowded with all manner of objects in need of fixing. Her precious mother-in-law could be heard outside grinding wheat between rocks... something Maryām normally helped her do, but was, at least per the woman's insistence, something she was now not able to do.

Not wanting to hear Rāḥēl's incessant complaining about having to grind all the wheat by herself, Maryām, for the first time in days, stepped over a wheel and a stool to get out of bed, and started her way down the latter to the lower level of the house. Her husband immediately noticed, and told her to get back in bed, while Maryām pleaded with him to be quiet. Rāḥēl however, had the ears of a rabbit, and could be heard outside telling her daughter-in-law to get back in bed. “Nothing is going to happen! Please, stop it. I'm just going to come out and help you for awhile.”
“No you are not!” She heard her mother-in-law directly behind her, “Get back into bed, now! I won't hear this nonsense.”
“Mother, please...”
“No!” Rāḥēl hissed, “Get back into bed! I won't have you compromising my grandson for your pride. Go... go on!”
“You don't even know if it's a boy...” Maryām sighed, starting back up the latter.
“Oh I know... believe dear, it's a boy.” Rāḥēl said as she pushed her daughter-in-law up the wooden ladder.
“Indeed.”
“Oh I know. I've been able to accurately predict the sex of babies for years now. With girls you can't expect a belly like that, or the same kind of kicking. Not that girls don't kick. Åsənaṯ kicked me so hard once I had to sit down, and I'm sure you kicked your mother too. But boys... boys keep you up for days at a time, and they always seem to sit in just the wrong place too. You know it's a boy when he gives you that kind of trouble. Everyone knows boys are trouble when they're young. Everyone. But if you can get them to manhood, their demeanor calms down considerably. That's why wars come to an end. If God had made Hawwā before Adam, and tasked her with the responsibilities that he tasked him with... well, there would have been no Qáyin and Hebel, that's for sure.”


What did that even mean? No matter. Rāḥēl was one of the few women in the community that could actually read, and if you let her, which most people did, she could talk for hours. Sometimes Maryām thought it was delightful, seeing her mother-in-law as a role model, and others she couldn't stand it. It depended on the context, but at present, she was doing her best to tune her out until she felt a contraction in her abdomen. She had had contractions the other day that had subsided, which initially gave her pause, but this one was very different. The pain seemed to be shooting down to her thighs.
“Mom, wait...” She said.
“Wait for what, come on now!”
“I feel something.”
“Let me see!” Rāḥēl stuck her head up Maryām's skirt to have a look.
Just as she did, Maryām felt something pop inside her, something that had popped loud enough to be audible to everyone in the house.
“What – ” Yosef was cut off by the sound and sight of what was happening.


Maryām immediately felt a flow coming out from between her legs that was unlike anything she was used to feeling. It wasn't like urinating, because in that case there was some control over it. This was different. This wouldn't stop, even if she wanted it to, and it was accompanied by the painful sensations in her abdomens and thighs that almost made her fall off the ladder, especially when Rāḥēl jerked her head out from beneath her daughter-in-law's skirt to avoid having her head soaked.
“Right. When nobody's here...” She complained, “Yaqob!”


It took a moment for Maryām's father-in-law to make it into the room, but once he did, he found himself being ordered to clear the goats out, bring a clean cloth and help her mother-in-law walk her around the room while Yosef ran outside to fetch his sister, the midwife, and Maryām's mother, who would all make their appearances at different times. Åsənaṯ came first to relieve Yaqob, who promptly made his exit on her arrival. In the presence of childbirth is no place for a man, after all. Åsənaṯ let her mother know that she had dispatched her husband and her brother Qlofa to find Maryām's parents while Yosef found Yôḵāḇeḏ, the midwife. Maryām's mother, Riḇqā, was next to arrive, tears of joy filling her lined eyes for the joyous moment of her first grandchild's birth. After all, Maryām was the last surviving child of her family after her two older brothers had died as children, meaning that she was her parents' only chance at a continuation of their family.


By the time Yôḵāḇeḏ actually made her appearance, the process was half over. Rāḥēl and Riḇqā walked their daughter around the room constantly over the course of the next four hours, stroking her hair and instructing her on her every movement. “I told you that you'd scream.” Rāḥēl whispered to her daughter-in-law, who was forced to laugh before another shot of pain rushed through her body. When the midwife actually arrived, she seemed very nonchalant about her tardiness.
“Nice of you to come.” Rāḥēl said to her when her silhouette appeared in the plaster doorway.
“I'm glad to be here.” Yôḵāḇeḏ said, sternly, “Though it seems you girls have everything under control. Where are we in the process?”
“The baby hasn't begun to crown yet...”
“Let's get that done then...” She rolled her sleeves back, "Shall we move her to the loft? The floor is cleaner, I wager."
"It's also full." Rāḥēl said through tightly clenched teeth.
"Right... oh well. Here is fine." Yôḵāḇeḏ said as she knelt down to lift Maryām's skirt.


Once the baby had actually begun to crown however, Maryām couldn't help but scream the foulest curse words in her vocabulary. She had never felt pain like this before, and she thought that she might be split in two up the middle from it. She was terribly afraid, and the only thing she could think to do once the fear had taken her was call her husband's name. The pain was so intense however that she could barely muster the sounds, instead uttering more a tearful murmur. Her husband was quick to respond, rushing into the room only to be pulled out by his father and pushed by Yôḵāḇeḏ while her mother and mother-in-law gasped at the sight of the curly black hair of their infant grandchild as it slowly began to emerge.
“How do you know which hair is which?” Maryām screamed, only to be laughed at by the other women around her.
What came after the baby's head had crowned however, was no laughing matter. Where the four women helping her with the birthing process had previously been speaking loudly, offering words of encouragement, laughing, and smiling, their demeanor changed at a moment's notice, leaving a 15 year old Maryām confused.
“We have to get it out, quickly.” Yôḵāḇeḏ said quietly before turning her eyes to Maryām's, “I'm going to count with you now, and on the count of three each time I need you to push as hard as you can as fast as you can. Can you do that for me, dear?”
Maryām nodded, and when the time came she did as she was told, and without any further trouble, she felt a release of pressure as she saw her child being pulled from her loins by the midwife's hands. For a moment her mind swam, and a feeling came over her that she had difficulty putting into words. She felt anxious, yet relieved. Disgusted, and yet in awe. The miracle of life lay bare and bloody before her, a tiny helpless bundle of purple flesh gleaming wetly with the fluid of her body. She saw the parts of a boy, and she was filled with joy. She had never felt love like she was feeling now. She could actually say that it was the first time she had ever been in love to begin with. Her marriage to her husband after all had been an arranged matter. She had had no say in it whatsoever, and neither had he. Yes, she had known him since she was a girl, though he was a distant figure for most of her girlhood until the arrangements for their betrothal had been made, and even still, he seemed distant before their wedding. Over the course of the passed year she had grown to love him indeed, but it was less romantic and more of a practical kind of love. They may have shared a bed, but they had never had the opportunity for a modern romance, instead both being forced into union with one another and having to adapt. However as she saw the helpless body of her infant son before her, she felt a love that was pure of practicality. She had literally made this tiny person who now, only she had the power to truly protect. She wanted to hold him immediately, but neither the midwife nor her mother or mother-in-law would hand him over. That's when she noticed it... the baby wasn't crying – the umbilical cord was wrapped around his tiny neck.


Yôḵāḇeḏ rushed to cut it with a hardened and sharpened piece of dough. Maryām remembered being told that this was the best instrument to use as it would only be used once, preventing further contamination, and being disposed of by way of feeding it to the goats. The room was dead silent as the midwife worked, and those few seconds seemed to be an eternity as her son lay still and lifeless in her arms. Maryām suddenly began to panic. “Cut it, cut it, cut it, cut it! What's taking you so long? Cut it!” She screached. By the time she had enunciated her last word, the cord had been cut, and the midwife immediately began unwrapping it from around the boy's neck.
Around, and around, and around she went. She must have unwound the cord five times before finally letting it drop to the hardened mud floor. Maryām could feel her eyes trying to muster the water for tears, but they had dried up hours ago. She watched helplessly as Yôḵāḇeḏ wiped the boy's face so as to remove any further barriers to breath, though it seemed to make no difference. He wasn't crying, he wasn't even breathing. “What's the matter?” She asked, “Is he alright? Is he breathing? Can you feel him breathing?”


Eight brown eyes stared back at her, the heaviness of their expressions weighing down like the weight of a thousand stones on her chest. She could scarcely breathe herself as her mother-in-law said it, “No.”
 

bluecalx

I like subtle PoDs. Battles and election results are known to the participants to be decisive moments and have real-world PoD potential. The ones that no one could know to be so consequential are somehow more powerful. Here's a private personal tragedy with colossal hidden implications -incredibly poignant no matter where it goes.

Subscribed.
 
Practical Lobster

Practical Lobster

Interesting, if unassuming, start.

I can assume this is related to the "No Jesus" thread and thus I'm very curious to see where this goes.
 

Vixagoras

Banned
In another world, on the muddy floor of the lower level of their rural home, Maryām gave birth to a boy she would later name Yēšūă. Her son was born to a humble family of handymen, in a village called Naṣrath, and she honestly never expected much more of him than the mediocre life of a village handyman in the turbulent time of oppressive foreign rule that her people were experiencing. Still, her son, despite her expectations, would found his own religious movement that challenged the fundamentals of the faith in which she had been raised and, though it would cost him his life, come to define their world for more than a thousand years afterward. People would later speak of him and claim that he had been born of a virgin mother in a manger in a town she new as Bet Lehem, the son of the One True God, the One True God himself born in human form, a great prophet, and an imposter.


But this is not that world. Yēšūă, a boy who we might otherwise have known as Jesus of Nazareth, was born with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck no less than five times. Astonishingly, he did not die, but the deprivation of oxygen to his little brain left it badly damaged, rendering him what people of the time might have called “simple” in years to come. As a result of the boy's nature, he would never grow to become the charismatic cleric whose seemingly small and insignificant movement would define an age. Instead, he lived a mediocre life in a mediocre village, helping his father and brother as they made and fixed things. He never married, nor was he even engaged, though he found himself fancying many girls in the village. No, Yēšūă died at the age of 25, after getting lost in the wilderness and finding some adorable leopard cubs that he played with for close to an hour before their mother came on the scene. His parents cried for days over their firstborn boy, who, though he lacked what other men might have in cunning, had walked the world with a pure heart.


So what happens to the world? Certainly, the various characters of the Jesus story would all live very different lives. Without Yēšūă, such people as Šimōn, who we would know as Saint Peter, and his younger brother Andréas, and their two friends Yaqob and Yōḥānān ben Zvadyah, all led regular lives as regular Jewish fishermen. All of the other men we might know as “apostles” either became enveloped in zealotry and were later killed in various different conflicts that unfolded over the course of the era, or joined Yōḥānān the Baptist's movement... and died in conflicts that unfolded over the course of the era. All with the exception of Mattityaḥu, who remained a tax collector and a staunch Jewish conservative and supporter of the priests until his death. Coincidentally paralleling the invented narrative of Maryām of Magdala as a loose woman who repented, the same woman was convicted and stoned to death for adultery after having been coerced into sexual relations with none other than Mattityaḥu, the tax collector of Kfar Naḥum. She had slept with him to avoid a fine, and it cost her both her on honor and her life. She, like every one of the characters we knew to be involved with Yēšūă, faded into obscurity, and with or without them, the world went on. That is... with the exception of Šāʼûl ha Tārsi, who would be better known by his name in his native Koiné, Saulos Tarseús. Saulos would not go on to serve any missions that crisscrossed the Mediterranean, but he certainly did have a part to play in the events to come.


In 64 CE, life had continued on in the city of Roma and in the Roman Empire in much the same way as we knew it. This included the Great Fire of Roma, which, in the absence of a new and seemingly radical sect of Jews to use as a political scapegoat when rumors of unknown sources began circulating that the fire had been set on the orders of the emperor, left the ordinary Jews of the city. Historians do not tell us the origin of this rumor, whether it started from within the ranks of government or among the common people, but what is known is that Nero's regime capitalized on it, rounding up Jews for questioning. The emperor was careful to make sure that the Jews that were placed under arrest were not of the citizen community, but rather, Jews from other parts of the empire that had been in Rome on business or for personal reasons. The rationale being that citizens had rights, and non-citizens didn't. The emperor had the arrested parties tortured into betraying their community, obtaining signed statements that he could then present to the senate that the fire was in fact an act of arson in retaliation for the treatment of the Jews during the reign of Caligula, specifically the pogroms of Alexandria. These events differed significantly from the persecution of a small and radical sect of Jews for the simple reason that the accusations were more vague, aimed at Jews at large, no matter the sect, who could be found in quite large numbers all over the empire. It was also different in that once the findings were announced to the public, the emperor didn't even need to round up Jews for the spectacles of brutality that our histories remember – the people seemed happy to oblige him.


The people of the city were whipped into a frenzy. In the ensuing weeks, the starving people of Roma resorted to barbarities that were scarcely recorded in their history. The historian Sorex would give the following eye-witness account:


“I followed my brother with the mob down the banks of the Tiberis to the section of the city that made up the bulk of the homes of the Jews. I expected to see their homes still standing, untouched by the flames they had set upon the city, but I could only laugh when we arrived, only to see that their folly had brought as much ruin on them as it had on us, their homes just as tattered and burned as our own. This did not stop the mob, which pulled sons from their fathers' arms and babes from their mothers breasts. At first the focus was directed at those grown. The men in the mob beat the Jewish men and women relentlessly, smashing their faces against the stones of the street and stomping on them into the mud. They asked what had we Romans done to deserve being set afire, crying out that none of us had killed Jews in Alexandria or anywhere else. I heard a man exclaim, 'We were neighbors! How could you betray the people who called you friends and gave you a home? Surely the Greeks would feed you to dogs given the chance!' At first it seemed as though the anger was organized, being directed primarily at grown men and women, but the demeanor changed rapidly into one of a beastly rage that consumed everyone that was there. They began to take the children, and I heard a woman say that if the children were allowed to live they would burn the city again. They left those too young to fight who were not trampled in the craze for the elements, though the children who defended their parents were abused in ways I had not imagined possible. Boys and girls were crushed beneath our feet, drowned in the mud, or raped. My brother took a young Jewish girl and passed her among the men when he was finished with her, but she died before the last were done. Many others took to the river to escape. Some of them tried to use boats, others swam. The mob followed them into the river and drowned them.”
 

Yanez de Gomera

You have a good touch for writing sir! I will watch this.
Paulus Tarseios, will become a philosopher, maybe found a new stoic sect?
"We were neighbours" is sadly the quote of every pogrom/ethnic violence ever...
 

Vixagoras

Banned
Fo_Real said:
Man, no matter the timeline, Jews just can't catch a break
Click to expand...


I think it comes with the territory. When you are a community of people that goes to great measures to set yourself apart from your fellows, you open yourself up to being "othered" by said fellows. They're not the only group of people to have had this problem... just the most populous and the most famous. It's a shame really, but it's just a part of human psychology. You fear what you don't understand, and this makes it easy for you to be demonized because people around you are already wary of you. Throw politics into the mix, and it gets especially ugly.
 

Grouchio

How should that effect the jewish revolt and the year of four emperors? Small but potent changes are in the makes...
 

Vixagoras

Banned
In the following months after the Great Fire of Roma, the formerly highly organized Jewish community on the southern bank of Tiberis was desolated first by regular mob violence and later by fully fledged persecution by the Roman state itself. Nero publicly declared that Jews were enemies of the city and began feeding them to animals in the Colosseum by day and setting them on fire at night. The ancient city that considered itself to be the very center of civilization became a cesspool of cruelty and barbarism as, for the remainder of the calendar year, its citizens gathered in hoards to watch the people who had attempted to destroy the foundation of the world in which they lived be torn to pieces trampled, butchered by the hundreds, or burned alive.


Observant Jewish men were at a particular disadvantage in this situation as their shortened foreskins were easily spotted when stripped naked, although this was not enough to identify them, and mistakes were made. Circumcision of the period could be, when contrasted to the procedure of our modern age, said to be considerably more mild, removing only the portion of the foreskin that hangs puckered below the glans of the child. This left many of the documented sexual and immunological functions of the foreskin intact (many of which were not known at the time), but also created confusion when presented with adolescent boys and men who naturally had shorter foreskins that did not cover their whole glans. In light of so many dead, Roman men and boys who appeared to be Jewish by virtue of a short foreskin who were accused of being Jews were apt to be murdered, and some hundreds of innocents came to this fate. Worse still was the fact that many Egyptians and Nabataeans were circumcised, but by extension, the majority of the Jewish men and boys in the city were not. This confused both rioters and state officials such as the Praetorian Guard, because it meant that Jews could be, well, anyone who looked to be of Near Eastern origin, really. Cilicians, Syrians, Jews, Egyptians, Carthaginians... even Armenians were dragged off to the Colosseum to meet deaths they had never dreamed of in their worst of nightmares. Though to throw a final bit of gasoline on the flame, the emperor issued a bounty on anyone who might have been a Jew.


As one could imagine, this made the recovery of commerce in the city difficult, as foreigners were set on the run... as well as anyone who was afraid of their foreskin being too short. Now, once the bounty had been issued, men of short foreskin had a better chance at surviving, because temple priests and physicians were employed to examine the genitalia of the accused for the noticeable scarring caused by the clipping of the acropostheon. However, physicians and priests were not always readily available, as many of them had died in the fire, and so these men and boys might still die... especially if they just so happened to be of dark enough complexion. All in all, the city had transformed in a very short period of time to one of the great cities of the world, where opportunities seemed boundless, to a despotic totalitarian police state where no one was safe from the persecution of the mob, with its rabid emperor at its head. What was worse was that the emperor, consumed with his own sense of self-entitlement and craving the love of the crowd, was not only willing to do whatever atrocity the crowd might have asked of him, but wanted to use the remaining funds in the treasury that should have been going to rebuilding the city in its time of such desperate need, to building himself a grandiose palace of a previously unprecedented scale. He may have had the love of the people at the moment, unleashing the Praetorians on the Jews like mad dogs, but the aristocracy was growing tired of his theatrics. Of primary concern was that the senate knew the emperor was plotting to debase the currency by a figure of 20%, which, when discovered as it undoubtedly would be, could cause a devaluation of the purchasing power of the Roman denarius. He planned to debase the currency not to rebuild the city, but to build his palace complex. The idea was utter madness, and in the early months of the next year, a plot was hatched among the senators and Praetorian guard to do away with the emperor, a plot that we would know as the Pisonian Plot, as it centered on putting Gaius Calpurnius Piso of the distinguished gens Calpurnii on the throne as emperor was hatched. This is where the absence of Yēšūă ben Yosef would have its first major implication for international politics.


In another time, a freedman named Milichus had nothing to fear in a Roma where the political scapegoat that detracted attention from the vanity and incompetence of the emperor was something as specific as a Christian. In theory of course, anybody could have been accused of being a Christian, since followers of this strange cult seemed to come from a variety of backgrounds, but in practice this was not the case, as the overall population of cult members was quite low. However as a man from Southern Spain of ambiguous background and dark complexion who, coincidentally, had a foreskin that was so short it regularly retracted on its own, he had everything to fear when the emperor issued the bounty. He became totally paranoid, and avoided washing in public, which only furthered suspicion that he may have been a Jewish proselyte, since many who knew him knew him not to be of Jewish background. When he had stumbled on a whispered conversation between Gaius Musonius Rufus and Marcus Annaeus Lucanus that implied possible malicious intent toward the emperor's good health, though did not explicitly mention anything, he kept his mouth tightly shut. The emperor was a tyrant, and a raging murderer who would do anything to further himself personally and politically, and who was also developing an appetite for cruelty. These things Milichus knew very well, but if some impoverished Roman citizen who had been left homeless after the fire wanted to collect a few denarii, he could just as easily find himself subject to that cruelty. His best bet, was to shut the fuck up, and act as normal as humanly possible.
 
Practical Lobster

Practical Lobster

This story has some of the most clever mild points of divergence. A brain damaged baby, the length of a man's foreskin... all very minor things that are going to end up having huge ramifications.

Kudos to you. Piso I presume will get at least a lot farther in his schemes.
 

Vixagoras

Banned
A Wife's Advice




So Milichus shut up when he heard the first hints that there might have been a conspiracy against the emperor. But he was having a problem shutting up when his master, Flavius Scaevinus, rewrote his will and started bestowing gifts on his slaves, employed freedmen, and family, and last but not least, personally handed him his precious knife and instructed him to sharpen it with great care. The poor man was terrified, and on the night of the 18th of April, he was soaked in sweat and brought to tears privately while he took the knife to the grinder. What was he going to do? Even if he could get an audience with the emperor, his social status demanded that by law he be tortured, and if, and this was a very big if, he could keep his composure under the torture of the Praetorian Guard, who lately had gotten very creative in their methods, Scaevinus could just as easily destroy any credibility he had with the emperor by claiming that he was a Jewish proselyte. And then what? Fed to dogs? Maybe lions? Trampled by elephants or gored by a bull... or would it be a stag? And what of his wife, and infant daughter? He had heard a morbid rumor about the emperor having executed a Jewish baby by landing a falcon on its head. His wife was quite a beautiful woman as well... would she be passed among the Praetorians, or perhaps surrendered to the Colosseum to be fucked by monkeys? After delivering the knife to Scaevinus that night with the requested bandages as well, he went to his bed. Unable to keep his composure any longer, he cried for an hour in his wife's arms.
“They're going to kill us! They're going to kill us! They're going to kill us!”
She kept asking who, but he would just repeat himself over and over again, or tell her they were all going to die.
“I have to kill myself...” He finally said once he had cried his eyes dry, “... it's the only way you and the children are going to live! If I kill myself, they can't prove you knew anything about it. You're citizens... you have rights.”
“Mel, what are you saying? Why would you have to kill yourself? I don't understand!”
“Why is he doing this to me?” He said, “What did I do?”
“Why did who do what? Milichus... tell me what's happening! You're scaring me.”
He felt as though a million ants were eating him from the inside out, so at last he let it slip, “Scaevinus is going to kill the emperor.”
For a moment his wife was quiet, devastated by the words she had just heard. Not for any love of the man who their employer was going to kill, but rather for fear. She laid back on the bed, completely taken aback by what she had just heard, her own tears had stopped flowing, her mind scattered with the most gruesome thoughts. She knew what her husband knew. Not just the plot, but the implications of his involvement, and how matters would unfold if he was to tell anyone else.
“Who is involved?” She asked, after a few moments of contemplation.
“Piso...”
“Piso... who? Be more specific. There are a thousand Pisos in this city.”
“Calpurnius Piso...” Milichus sobbed, “... I think he's the ring-leader. But Scaevinus hates him. He'll probably kill him after he kills that red-headed fucker, Nero.”
Piso seemed the perfect choice, in her mind. His family was certainly one of the oldest in Roma and had been involved in politics since the city's inception. Indeed, they claimed descent from Numa Pompilius, the second King of Roma who was said to have had a personal relationship with the gods themselves. Piso was beloved by many of the people, and anyone who knew the first thing about politics knew that he was very popular among the aristocracy. If the Roman people were going to be free of the villainy of their current emperor, she couldn't think of a better man to replace him. She indeed loved their employer for granting them their freedom, and for the gift of money that he had given them recently, as it was enough for them to buy land of their own outside the city. But... she knew well that he had no love for Calpurnius Piso, and if there really was a plot to murder Nero and replace him with Piso, that Scaevinus could not be allowed to fuck it all up.
“In the morning, you must go to Piso.” She said.
 

Daztur

Now that's how you start off a timeline.

This is making me curious about the subtle ways that the eastern Med has diverged before the fire. Specifically in religion, this is reminding me of the early non-Christian texts in my gnosticism and related texts anthology such as the Book of Baruch. There should be some interesting things moving in to fill the Jesus-shapes hole in the TL.

Or maybe not Baruch. Gotta dig up my anthology. Some weird shit there.
 

Grouchio

Also makes one wonder how Pagan religions like Celtic, Greek-Roman, Hispanic, Dacian, North African and other mythologies will evolve and continue after the 4th century.
I wonder if we could see a Sol Invictus/Neoplatonic religion become dominant with Mithraic and Zalmozian cults abound.
 
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