Defending Constantine E-Book

Peter J. Leithart

• Herausgeber: IVP Academic
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 733

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

We know that Constantine - issued the Edict of Milan in 313 - outlawed paganism and made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire - manipulated the Council of Nicea in 325 - exercised absolute authority over the church, co-opting it for the aims of empire And if Constantine the emperor were not problem enough, we all know that Constantinianism has been very bad for the church.Or do we know these things?Peter Leithart weighs these claims and finds them wanting. And what's more, in focusing on these historical mirages we have failed to notice the true significance of Constantine and Rome baptized. For beneath the surface of this contested story there emerges a deeper narrative of the end of Roman sacrifice--a tectonic shift in the political theology of an empire--and with far-reaching implications.In this probing and informative book Peter Leithart examines the real Constantine, weighs the charges against Constantinianism, and sets the terms for a new conversation about this pivotal emperor and the Christendom that emerged.

Leseprobe

Defending Constantine

The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

Peter J. Leithart

An imprint of InterVarsity Press Downers Grove, Illinois

InterVarsity PressP.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426World Wide Web: www.ivpress.comE-mail: [email protected]

©2010 by Peter J. Leithart

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept., InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at <www.intervarsity.org>.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Design: Cindy Kiple Images: Paolo Gaetano Rocco/iStockphoto

ISBN 978-0-83-8-6816-2 (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-2722-0 (print)

To Dr. Paul W. Leithart

Beloved Physician, Father, Patriot, Friend

Above all, Follower of Jesus

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 SANGUINARY EDICTS

2 JUPITERONTHE THRONE

3 INSTINCTU DIVINITATUS

4 BY THIS SIGN

5 LIBERATOR ECCLESIAE

6 END OF SACRIFICE

7 COMMON BISHOP

8 NICAEA AND AFTER

9 SEEDS OF EVANGELICAL LAW

10 JUSTICE FOR ALL

11 ONE GOD, ONE EMPEROR

12 PACIFIST CHURCH?

13 CHRISTIAN EMPIRE, CHRISTIAN MISSION

14 ROME BAPTIZED

Bibliography

Author Index

Subject Index

Preface

Constantine has been a whipping boy for a long time, and still is today. In popular culture (Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code), among bestselling historians (James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword), and among theologians (Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder and their followers), his name is identified with tyranny, anti-Semitism, hypocrisy, apostasy and heresy. He was a hardened power-politician who never really became Christian, a hypocrite who harnessed the energy of the church for his own political ends, a murderer, a usurper, an egotist.

Defending Constantine is a rather old-fashioned book. I am asking the traditional “Constantinian questions” that historians have long since tired of answering: Did he really convert? Did he control the church? Did he determine orthodoxy at the Council of Nicaea? Did he mandate that every Roman citizen become a Christian? How did he treat pagans and Jews and heretics? At least since Norman Baynes delivered a groundbreaking lecture,1 there has been a growing consensus among English-speaking scholars on some central questions about the first Christian emperor. From an examination of Constantine’s own writings, Baynes argued, against the critics of his day, that Constantine was a sincere Christian gripped with a profound confidence that God had anointed and appointed him to ensure the expansion of the gospel to the Roman world and beyond. Today, few specialists in the period question the fact that Constantine was a “real” Christian, and those who want to dispute the accounts of his conversion do so because they think he grew up a Christian. Yet, though 1930 is a long time ago, Baynes’s thesis has barely penetrated popular consciousness, or even the consciousness of scholars who are not fourth-century specialists. In this book, I summarize some results of the newer scholarship for a wider audience to provide a fairly detailed, fairly popular, and fairly fair account of Constantine’s life and work.

It was a dramatic life, full of vivid scenes: his questionable origins, conceived, so one legend has it, in a one-night stand; his nighttime escape from Nicomedia across Europe to Bologne to reach his father; the vision of the cross that preceded his victory at Rome; his entry into the Council of Nicaea; the death of the heretic Arius in a Greek water closet in Alexandria; disguised bishop Athanasius confronting the emperor as he rode into Constantinople; Constantine’s baptism and death and his burial as the “thirteenth apostle” in the Church of the Apostles. It is one of the epic lives in Western history, full of firsts and foundings. Constantine was the first overtly Christian Roman emperor, the first emperor to support the church, the first emperor to call and participate in a church council, the founder of Constantinople and thereby the founder of the Byzantine Empire, which lasted for the next millennium. Without sacrificing accuracy, I have attempted to capture some of the drama, some of the epic scope, of Constantine.

Writing a life of Constantine, though, is only one of the four aims I have in this book. Readers who enjoy a fight will be happy that here biography serves the interests of polemic, and as the book progresses biography recedes as polemic comes to the forefront. By the final chapter I have abandoned biography almost completely. Nearly everything about Constantine is disputed, from the date of his birth to the sincerity of his conversion to his exact role in the Council of Nicaea. Again, I summarize the results of recent scholarship to take sides in those debates and to rebut the popular caricatures that are still widespread.

My main polemical target, though, is a theological one, and this theological polemic opens up the third aim of the book. Constantinianism is the name given by Yoder,2 Hauerwas, and their increasing tribe to what they consider a heretical mindset and set of habits that have distorted Christian faith since (at least) the fourth century. Most of my argument is directed at Yoder, who provided the most sophisticated and systematic treatment of the concept. In part my argument is historical; Yoder gets the fourth century wrong in many particulars, and this distorts his entire reading of church history, which is a hinge of his theological project. The heart of my polemic against Yoder, though, is theological. In Yoder’s telling, the church “fell” in the fourth century (or thereabouts) and has not yet recovered from that fall. This misconstrues the theological significance of Constantine, and in the final chapter I offer an alternative account. I will not give away that secret now, but I can tell you it has something to do with sacrifice. As always, one aim in this book is to contribute to the formation of a theology that does not simply inform but is a social science.3

My final aim is a practical one. I have found that, far from representing a fall for the church, Constantine provides in many respects a model for Christian political practice. At the very least, his reign provides rich material for reflection on a whole series of perennial political-theological questions: about religious toleration and coercion, about the legitimacy of Christian involvement in political life, about a Christian ruler’s relationship to the church, about how Christianity should influence civil law, about the propriety of violent coercion, about the legitimacy of empire.

In that respect, it is a propitious time to be writing a book on Constantine. Never before have American Christians been so exercised by the question of American empire. In the back of my mind I have been asking, What, if anything, can we learn about the proper Christian response to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from examining the church’s relation to Constantine Caesar? I offer only incomplete answers to those questions here, but this book will, I hope, be followed by another where I can give more thorough and direct attention to imperialism.

These political issues are of interest to Christians throughout the world, not only in the U.S. What Philip Jenkins calls the “Southern churches” look to be forming the “next Christendom.” Given that prospect, root-and-branch rejection of “Constantinianism” or “Christendom” is doubly wrong-headed. First, insofar as Northern churches still set trends for the Southern churches, our hostility to our own heritage of Christian politics encourages the Global South to ignore the history we ignore. If the South is forming into a new Christendom, it is important that it learn from both the successes and the failures of the first Christendom. Northern Christians will be irresponsible if we have nothing more to say than “Don’t try it. It went badly last time.”

Second, the Northern churches cannot presume to be a “teaching church” to the Southern “listening church.” We are, I trust, long past that kind of paternalism. But if the Southern churches think that a new Christendom, Christian nations, Christian legal systems, Christian international alliances are worth pursuing, it is condescending for us to dismiss their efforts with a world-weary shrug and a knowing shake of the head. By listening to the Southern churches, we Northern Christians may be able to examine our own history of Christian civilization with deeper sympathy. And that could only benefit all of us.

___________________________

1 Norman H. Baynes, Constantine the Great and the Christian Church, Raleigh Lecture on History (London: Humphrey Milford, 1929).

2 The Mennonite theologian and ethicist John Howard Yoder (1927-1997) was for many years the world’s most prominent theological proponent of pacifism and was probably the most influential Mennonite theologian who ever lived. He studied at the University of Basel, Switzerland, under Karl Barth, Oscar Cullman, and other prominent theologians and philosophers, then taught at the Goshen Biblical Seminary (now called Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary) and later at the University of Notre Dame. He influenced theologians from many different traditions (most prominently Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University) and is responsible, more than any other American theologian, for the antirealist direction of contemporary Christian thought about politics. His most important book, The Politics of Jesus (1972), included an assault on the theological and ethical inconsistencies in the work of realist Reinhold Niebuhr.

3 The notion of theology as a social science comes from John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). In contrast to many modern theologians who consider social science to be foundational for theology, Milbank argues that classical orthodoxy contains its own account of social and political life.

Acknowledgments

I have many people to thank for help on this project. Aaron Rench, my literary agent, convinced me to do the book when I was lukewarm. I am very glad he persisted.

I had lively and beneficial conversations with several students, colleagues, and friends over the course of my research. My biweekly coffee meetings with Brad Littlejohn were always challenging. I had fewer opportunities to discuss the themes of this book with Justin Hughes, Davey Henreckson and Josh Davis, but they all contributed and kept me honest. Lisa Beyeler guided me to a better understanding of Constantine’s architecture. In conversations with Joshua Appel, Toby Sumpter, Doug Jones and Brendan O’Donnell my ideas have been clarified.

During the spring of 2009 I taught a course on Constantine and Constantinianism, which gave me a chance to coalesce my research; several students provided research help on issues that I could not investigate myself. Colleagues at New St. Andrews College were generous with their time. Tim Griffith assisted with several Latin questions, and Chris Schlect helped me see the complexity of church finances in the medieval period. I presented a version of the final chapter at the Graduate Forum in fall 2009, and I benefited from questions from Roy Atwood and others.

I also had help from scholars who know what they are talking about: Robert Louis Wilken was generous in answering questions and providing bibliographic and other advice; Timothy Barnes graciously responded to emails out of the blue and provided me with an essay of his that I had no access to; David Rankin guided me on some details of Tertullian; Eric Enlow gave me bibliographical help on Roman law; exchanges with Charlie Collier about Yoder helped me, I trust, read him more accurately and charitably, and Charlie also provided a copy of his stimulating recent Ph.D. thesis; Andrew Motyl kindly provided me with an electronic copy of an article I had trouble locating; Bill Cavanaugh read portions of the book and pointed out sizable weak spots in my argument; and Steven Wedge-worth read through the first four chapters and suggested several improvements. Two of my graduate students, Justin Hughes and Stephen Long, helped me revise the original manuscript by proofreading and correcting my Latin, saving me much embarrassment on both scores. My editor at IVP, Dan Reid, was encouragingly excited about this book and offered helpful suggestions to make it more accessible for readers; Dan also forwarded me enthusiastic comments and suggestions from an outside reader.

My family assisted in various ways. My son Woelke provided invaluable research aid. My sons Jordan, Sheffield and Christian each had the misfortune to catch me on a day when I was charged up about things Constantinian, and they listened to my rantings with patient good cheer. They will receive their reward. My wife, Noel, also had to listen as I droned on; she seemed to be as interested as I try to be when she talks about midwifery.

Early on, I had several lengthy conversations with my father, Dr. Paul Leithart, which convinced me that I had done enough research to begin writing. Dad has always been deeply interested in my writing, and I suspect, given his long engagement in politics, that he will find this book of particular interest. I owe more of my interest in political questions to him than I realize, and while he may differ with or be baffled by some parts of this book, I could not have written it without his lifelong example of faithful service to the city of God, a service that does not forget the city of man. With great love and deep gratitude, I dedicate this book to him.

1

Sanguinary Edicts

Amongst our other regulations for the permanent advantage of the common weal, we have hitherto studied to reduce all things to a conformity with the ancient laws and public discipline of the Romans.

EDICT OF GALERIUS, 311

Hardened by a lifetime of military and civil service, the emperor Diocletian (285-305) was no coward. According to the Historia Augusta, he was “an outstanding man and wise, devoted to the commonwealth, devoted to his kindred, duly prepared to face whatever the occasion demanded, forming plans that were always deep though sometimes overbold, and one who could by prudence and exceeding firmness hold in check the impulses of a restless spirit.”1 Eutropius casts him as a man of “crafty disposition, with much sagacity, and keen penetration” who “was willing to gratify his own disposition to cruelty in such a way as to throw the odium upon others” — in all, “a very active and able prince.”2

Contemporaries described him as an “investigator of things to come,” a man “devoted to holy usages.” Surrounded by priests and soothsayers, he examined entrails for clues to the future and started at lightning bolts. Diocletian believed his rise to the imperial purple had been foretold by a Druid priestess. He elevated Maximian to the position of second Augustus because the two shared a birthday, and when Galerius was later given the position of Caesar he took the name Maximianus “in order to effect a magic bond with the proven loyalty of the elder Maximian.”3

Diocletian was no coward, but the incident in 299 was alarming. Visiting Antioch, he had participated in a sacrifice that failed. Priests slaughtered the animal, and the haruspex, a soothsayer who foretold the future by reading entrails, stepped forward to take the liver from the hands of the servant. Planting his left foot on the ground, he raised his right foot on a stone and bent low to examine the liver.4 He found none of the usual indicators. They slaughtered another animal, and another. Nothing. Plutarch had written centuries before about the silencing of the oracles, and the same was happening to Diocletian. His recovery of the Pax Romana was, Diocletian firmly believed, the product of a pax deorum, the peace of the gods. Roman sacrifice was at the center of that peace. It was the chief religious act, the act by which Romans communicated and communed with the gods, keeping the gods happy so Romans could be happy.5 If the gods stopped talking with the emperor, what would happen to Rome? Did the failed sacrifice in Antioch foretell the end of sacrifice? Did it foretell the end of Rome?

What had gone wrong? The presiding diviner investigated and concluded that “profane persons” had interrupted the rites, and attention focused on Christians in Diocletian’s court who had made the sign of the cross to ward off demons during the proceedings. Diocletian was outraged and demanded that all members of his court offer sacrifice, a test designed to weed out Christians. Soldiers were required to sacrifice or leave the sacred Roman army.6 At least at the heart of the empire, in the court and in the army, sacrifices would continue without being polluted by Christians. At the heart of the empire, where it really mattered, gods and men would remain in communion. With the purge of Christians, the problem seemed solved. The miasma was expelled and the gods were satisfied. Diocletian was secure.

The problem, however, had not been solved. An imperial letter probably issued in March 3027 to the proconsul of Africa confronted another threat to the empire, the dualistic religion of Manichaeanism. Mani was a Persian teacher whose religion, along with other Eastern religions, had been seeping into the Roman Empire and undermining traditional Roman pieties. Diocletian’s letter was filled with encouragement of “Roman virtue” and condemnation of “Persian vice,” and ended with an exhortation to preserve the tranquillitas of the empire by suppressing dangerous Oriental innovations.8 Diocletian insisted that “it is wrong to . . . desert the ancient religion for some new one, for it is the height of criminality to try and revive doctrines that were settled once for all by the ancients.”9 This “superstitious doctrine of a most worthless and depraved kind” must be stopped.10 Manichaean leaders were to be burned along with their books, their disciples decapitated or sent to the mines.11

The parallels with Christianity were not lost on Diocletian. Like Manichaeanism, Christianity had come from the East and was non- and perhaps anti-Roman; its unpatriotic teachings undermined civic virtue. As the protector of the empire, Diocletian felt as bound to fight off an invasion of Christians and Manichaeans as he did to turn back attacks from Persians and Goths.12

Still the problem was not solved. Several years after the failed sacrifice, Diocletian was back in Antioch when a Christian deacon, Romanus, burst in on another imperial sacrifice loudly denouncing the worship of demons. Diocletian ordered that his tongue be cut out and sentenced him to prison, where he was executed,13 but the emperor knew something more needed to be done. Wintering in Nicomedia the following year, Diocletian consulted with his Caesar Galerius about the problem. “Arrogant and ambitious” and a “fanatical pagan,”14 Galerius urged Diocletian to issue a general order against the Christians. Diocletian hesitated. He needed divine guidance, but when he consulted Apollo’s oracle at Didyma it informed him that “just ones” had silenced the prophecy.15 Years later Constantine recalled the incident, which he witnessed while serving in Diocletian’s court. Calling on God as a witness, Constantine remembered how the “unhappy, truly unhappy” Diocletian, “laboring under mental delusion, made earnest enquiry of his attendants as to who these righteous ones were” and learned that “they were doubtless the Christians.” Diocletian lost no time in issuing “those sanguinary edicts,” which Constantine said were “traced, if I may so express myself, with a sword’s point dipped in blood.”16

For the Latin Christian rhetorician Lactantius and Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, the Caesar Galerius — who was, to refined Romans like Lactantius, a brutal, pagan, barely Romanized barbarian17 — was the evil genius behind the edict. Many modern historians discount the tale,18 but there is evidence that the more tolerantly pagan Diocletian was persuaded by his junior colleague to initiate the general persecution. Galerius had never quite sung in harmony with the other rulers of the empire, as Julian the Apostate was later to say. His triumphal arch that still stands in Thessaloniki highlights his personal exploits in his war with the Persians. One panel shows him “defeating the Persian king in direct hand-to-hand combat.”19

In 303, Galerius was at the height of his power. It had been a long recovery. Seven years earlier, in 296, he had lost a battle to the Sassinid Persian king Narseh, and Diocletian had added to his humiliation by forcing him to walk for a mile in front of Diocletian’s carriage, vested in his imperial robes.20 Two years later, Galerius recovered his honor by defeating the Persians in another campaign. His victory gave him considerable weight, and Diocletian, though senior emperor, had come to fear his junior colleague. The gods must be with Galerius, Diocletian thought. Galerius decided to capitalize on his recovery of ethos by jockeying for advantage. When the persecution began, Galerius held the second position in the Eastern empire. In the West, Maximian was the chief, with Constantius, Constantine’s father, his imperial lieutenant. If Diocletian died before Maximian, Galerius reasoned, Galerius would be marginalized; it would be the two Western emperors against him. He needed to protect his power, and he discerned that the Christian problem could be turned to his advantage. He hated Christians, while Constantius was sympathetic to them. If he could persuade Diocletian to attack the church, Galerius would be on the majority side of imperial religious policy and his rival Constantius would be marginalized.21 So at that private conference in 302, the vigorous Galerius had firmly nudged the vacillating Diocletian toward persecution.22

Diocletian himself believed he had plenty of reason to mount his offensive. Not only did Christians silence the oracles, but they, along with eunuch sympathizers in court, seemed to have been behind the fire that roared through Diocletian’s palace in Nicomedia several days after the first edict was issued. More deeply, Diocletian shared with many Romans the deepening suspicion that Christians were not quite Roman; their refusal to sacrifice could mean nothing else.23

He began on February 23, 303. Dates meant everything to Diocletian. February 23 was the festival of Terminalia (Limits). Established by Numa in the distant Roman past, Terminalia was a festival of boundaries. Neighbors would gather at border stones consecrated to Jupiter, offer sacrifice, and share a meal to maintain friendly relations across property boundaries. Good fences make good neighbors, and good fences, to the Romans, were best secured by sacrifice. Rome had been founded when Romulus traced the pomerium and killed his brother to protect the sacred space of the city from violation. Roman homes were sacred, and as the pater patriae, the emperor was the guarantor of the sanctity of the great house that was the city and empire.24 Terminalia was also part of the public cult, an annual reconsecration of the boundaries that separated the sacred Roman from the profane non-Roman world.25 As Jupiter’s incarnation on earth, Diocletian was especially charged with guarding the frontiers, maintaining the sacredness of Rome and its empire, and expelling any pollution that might infect it and bring down the wrath of the gods. As the high priest of the empire, he had purged the Manichaean contagion. Now he needed to deal with the Christians, who posed an even more serious threat. The sect of Christianity had grown out of Judaism, but Diocletian was perfectly tolerant of Jewish citizens. They had their own traditions and had the emperor’s permission to check out of the imperial cult. But at least they had the sense to keep to themselves. These Christians were everywhere. They mixed with other Romans in the markets and even at the court and in the army. Jews could be kept in place, but it would take some fine-grained surgery to remove the cancer of Christianity.26 Rome would be saved by a baptism in blood, a sacrifice of Christian blood.

On Terminalia in A.D. 303, Diocletian issued the first of what would become four decrees of persecution.27 The first edict prohibited Christian assemblies and required that churches be razed, Scriptures seized and burned, and Christians expelled from high positions in government and the army. Christians had no recourse. Christians with legal rights lost them, and Christians who were imperial freedpersons reverted to enslavement.28 Over the next year, three further edicts expanded the scope of the persecution. During the summer of 303, Diocletian ordered the arrest of Christian clergymen, and in November of that year, with prisons bursting with arrested Christians, he issued a constitution at the celebration of his vicennalia, the twentieth anniversary of his rule, offering clergy freedom for the price of sacrifice. Early in 304, the emperor demanded that all citizens of the empire sacrifice on pain of imprisonment or death.29 Over the year this turned into a general persecution, as the bloodshed spread from the emperor’s capital at Nicomedia, modern Izmit, on the Sea of Marmara, to Egypt, Phrygia and Palestine. Instead of focusing on the emperor’s court, it included, at least theoretically, every resident of the empire. The edicts, particularly the fourth, were unevenly enforced. Even a single emperor was always dependent on the reliability and energy of provincial rulers, and by 303, four emperors split the empire among themselves; not all of them were as eager to persecute Christians as Diocletian was. Still, sporadic as it may have been in many places, the persecution created an “atmosphere of constant menace.”30

There had been general persecutions before. Fifty years earlier, Decius had been the first emperor to require universal sacrifice,31 and a few years later Valerian had launched a general persecution. After Valerian’s capture and humiliating execution by the Persians, though, his son Gallienus recognized the church as a legal corporation, and thereafter emperors refrained from attacking the church for nearly a half century.32 The year 303 was different. Diocletian returned to persecution, with unprecedented ferocity. When the Romans put their minds to it, their tortures could be exquisite.

After the palace fire, Christians in Nicomedia “perished wholesale and in heaps, some butchered with the sword, other fulfilled by fire.” Some Christians were so eager to share in martyrdom that they leaped into the flames. Some were tied up, placed in boats, and thrust out from the beach. A Christian named Peter refused to comply with the order to sacrifice. Soldiers stripped him, hoisted him naked, and whipped him until his body was a bloody pulp, his bones sticking through the flesh and skin. Still he refused to sacrifice. The soldiers brought vinegar and salt from the mess and poured it over his wounds. Finding raw meat unappetizing, even when spiced up, they decided to cook him, slowly roasting parts of his body while trying to keep him alive. He was still refusing to sacrifice when he died.33

In the Thebais, Christians were “torn to bits from head to foot with potsherds like claws.” In the same place, a woman was hung upside down, completely naked. Others were torn in two: each leg was tied to a bent tree, and then the soldiers would let the boughs “fly back to their normal position; thus they managed to tear apart the limbs of their victims in a moment.” A Christian woman in Antioch convinced her daughters that they should preempt the persecutors by seeking safety in death, and they threw themselves into a river.34

Sharp reeds were pounded into the fingers and under the nails of Christians in Pontus; molten lead was poured down their backs, “roasting the vital parts of the body”; their bowels were sliced open and sexual organs cut off. It was almost a “prize competition.” Eventually the authorities determined that shedding the blood of citizens was in poor taste, a pollution of the city, and resorted to more humane methods. Eusebius’s description drips with irony: “The beneficence of the humane imperial authority [ought] to be extended to everybody, no one henceforth being punished with death; they had already ceased to impose this penalty on us, thanks to the emperor’s humanity.” Yet imperial humanity left something to be desired: “orders were then issued that the eyes should be gouged out and one leg maimed,” so that “as a result of this ‘humanity’ shown by God’s enemies, it is no longer possible to count the enormous number of people who first had the right eye hacked out with a sword and cauterized with fire, and the left foot rendered useless by branding-irons applied to the joints.”35 Eusebius’s catalog of maimings at Pontus seems morbid to many today, but for him it was the Christian equivalent to Coriolanus’s displaying the scars he suffered for the sake of Mother Rome. Even the apostle Paul had boasted to the Galatians that he bore the stigmata of Christ.

To individual martyrs were added towns of Christians. Roman soldiers attacked a village of Christians in Phrygia, killing every citizen and burning houses along with women and children. The city was razed, Eusebius claimed, because “all those who inhabited the town without exception, the curator himself and the magistrates and everyone else in office and the whole people, professed themselves Christians.”36

The total number of martyrs is impossible to determine.37 In the West, the persecution ran out of energy a few years after it began, as Constantius refused to comply and then Constantine overturned the persecution edict in 306-7. In the East, things were different. In the Thebaid, years went by when Christians were regularly put to death in groups of ten, twenty, or thirty. “At other times a hundred men would be slain in a single day.”38 Despite the warnings of their bishops and priests, many actively sought martyrdom by offering themselves to provincial governors, ostentatiously tearing up imperial decrees, or otherwise calling attention to themselves. Few were chased down and arrested, and many complied quietly to protect themselves.39 Because Christianity had expanded to the countryside, however, it was no longer possible to arrest its growth. Christians in villages resisted valiantly, and the church had simply become too scattered to suppress.40

Romans could be cruel, but there is something more than cruelty behind these tortures. Romans thought long and hard about not only the pain of their modes of punishment but the rhetoric of punishment. Punishments were humiliating but not, the Romans thought, inequitable. Romans believed criminals got exactly what they deserved. Roman punishments were often enactments of the crimes committed. Sometime in the first century B.C., one Selurus, calling himself “son of Etna,” gathered an army and overran the region around Mount Etna. In Rome Strabo saw Selurus “torn to pieces by wild beasts at an organized gladiatorial fight.” He was raised on “a tall contraption, as though on Etna,” and then the “contraption suddenly broke up and collapsed, and he went down with it into the fragile cages of wild-beasts.” His death reenacted the superbia of his rise and then his sudden and shameful fall.41 According to John’s Gospel, Jesus’ death was a parodic coronation and enthronement, but for the Romans every cross was a mocking throne for rebels, especially slaves who had “lifted themselves up” above their station.42 Martyrdoms were similar. Peter of Nicomedia’s martyrdom was a meal — the Roman soldiers were symbolically cannibalizing him. More commonly, the tortures resemble sacrificial procedures: human beings were flayed and dismembered and burned like animals offered to the gods. One way or another, the Romans said, Christians would offer to the gods. Timid Christians could be compelled, and the bolder ones could be made into living sacrifices. Occasionally the logic of execution was more overt. Perpetua refused to die in the garb of a priestess of Ceres, but her executioners forced it on her to show that Christian criminals fulfilled the double significance of the term “the condemned” (damnati [masc.] and damnatae [fem.]), which referred to both the offering priest(ess) and the offered sacrifice.43

PERSECUTION, POLITICALAND RELIGIOUS

“Such was the mild spirit of antiquity that the nations were less attentive to the difference than to the resemblance of their religious worship,” Edward Gibbon wrote from the comfort of his study. He avowed that Roman magistrates who persecuted Christians did so reluctantly, “strangers” as they were to the “inflexible obstinacy” and “furious zeal” of bigoted Christians. If Christians were persecuted, they had only themselves to blame: “as they were actuated, not by the furious zeal of bigots, but by the temperate policy of legislators, [the officials’] contempt must often have relaxed, and humanity must frequently have suspended, the execution of those laws which they enacted against the humble and obscure followers of Christ.”44 Ever creative, Jacob Burckhardt found hints that Christians were plotting to convert the emperor and take over the empire, and argued that Diocletian persecuted in defense of his fragile empire; his actions are those of a man “on track of a plot.”45

Gibbon, Burckhardt and other modern historians draw a delicate veil across the horrors of the Roman persecution. Well they might. Some Roman magistrates were reluctant to force a showdown with the Christians, fearing that the Christians might make them look foolish. Officials did not want to risk giving the martyrs a victory.46 Still, it is hard to make the Romans look noble and businesslike when they are flaying Christians alive, and it is even more difficult to make Christians look like ignorant zealots when they are treated with such intense hatred.

Faced with the actual practice of Roman torture and execution, it is also difficult to maintain the common distinction between theologically motivated persecution and secular, political persecution. Voltaire hinted at this distinction. From Romulus to the Christians, he argued, Romans persecuted no one. Even Nero persecuted no one for religious belief but because Christians, carried away by their own passions, set fire to Rome. When the Romans did finally get around to persecuting Christians, it was not on religious grounds but for reasons of state, and in any case, the persecutions were not as bad as Christian apologists say. Simply being a Christian was not enough to get one condemned. “St. Gregory Thaumaturgus and St. Denis, bishop of Alexandria, . . . were not put to death,” even though they “lived at the same time as St. Cyprian.” It must be that Cyprian “fell a victim to personal and powerful enemies, under the pretext of calumny or reasons of State, which are so often associated with religion, and that the former were fortunate enough to escape the malice of men.”47

In 1882, Frederick Pollock gave the distinction its classical form in his essay “Theory of Persecution.”48 Though Pollock ultimately concluded that modern states have outgrown persecution, he regarded “modern persecution for the sake of public welfare” as more rational, because more testable, than the “theological persecution” of the church and state during the Middle Ages. No one can prove that heresy endangers the soul, and persecution founded on the desire to protect people from perdition cannot be proved useful. On the contrary, modern societies, which tolerate heresy, have proven that heresy is not socially destructive, and so modern states have ceased persecuting even while laws permitting persecution remain on the books.

Even Roman persecution is more defensible than Christian. Romans had no “distinctively theological incitement to persecution.” Believing they had a corner on the truth, however, medieval Christians became intolerant of error out of love for the wandering soul of human beings. Roman persecution of Christians was “tribal.” True, the gods figured into the picture, but they figured into a political picture. Regarding the gods as “the most exalted officers of the state,” Romans naturally saw Christians as either “a standing insult to the gods” or “a standing menace to the Government,” but in either case “bad citizens.” Christians who refused to honor the gods who are guarantors of Roman imperium were more than a nuisance; they endangered the prosperity and existence of Rome itself. Roman persecution was thus “essentially a measure of public safety.” For Roman emperors, “the removal of the danger . . . is not merely justifiable, but a plain duty of self-preservation.”49 Romans did not persecute from bigotry and zeal, as Christians later did, but out of political necessity.

But then we are brought back to the accounts of the church historians, and the Romans hardly look like practitioners of rational politics. They look bloodthirsty, as Eusebius and others intend, but they also look like practitioners of a form of political theology. Pollock notwithstanding, the Romans did not conceive of an irreligious politics or apolitical religion. Christians were a threat to peace and security because they were a pollution that aroused the wrath of the gods. Romans sacrificed Christians to protect Rome by fending off the unthinkable prospect of the end of sacrifice.50

The closest thing we have to a rationale for the Great Persecution itself comes from Galerius, putatively the architect of the edict, who in his obese, worm-ridden, decaying old age revoked the persecution edict in 311 and asked the Christians to pray for him. In an effort to secure “the permanent advantage of the commonweal,” the emperors “studied to reduce all things to a conformity with the ancient laws and public discipline of the Romans.” The aim was to get Christians, who had “abandoned the religion of their forefathers” and whose “willful folly” had led them to reject “ancient institutions” and make their own laws, to “return to right opinions.” It did not work. “Because great numbers still persist in their opinions, and because we have perceived that at present they neither pay reverence and due adoration to the gods, nor yet worship their own God,” Galerius wrote, “we, from our wonted clemency in bestowing pardon on all, have judged it fit to extend our indulgence to those men, and to permit them again to be Christians, and to establish the places of their religious assemblies.” The only demand was that they not offend “against good order.”51 This might be read as a purely political justification for persecution, but the “ancient laws” and “public discipline” to which Christians failed to conform included religious laws and disciplines.52 The persecutions were not conflicts of church and state but conflicts between different visions of political theology, Roman versus Christian. Galerius saw the refusal of Christians to sacrifice as a dangerous “cult vacuum” that could undermine the welfare of the empire.53

Theological critics of Constantine have surprisingly little to say about the historical context in which Constantine rose to the purple.54 They occasionally acknowledge, with gratitude, that Constantine brought a final end to persecution, but they are as squeamish about details of the persecution as are Gibbon and Burckhardt. This has several results. Because they are reluctant to emphasize the religious motivations behind the persecution, they make Constantine seem far more innovative than he was. Constantine was very much a fourth-century Roman soldier and politician, whose thinking about the empire was thoroughly infused with religious concerns. By giving minimal attention to the persecutions, theological critics of Constantine make it difficult to sympathize with the sometimes fawning response of Christian leaders. Eusebius exaggerated Constantine’s virtues and ignored his vices, but his attitude toward a Christian empire makes more sense once we realize that he had personally witnessed some of the horrors of persecution in Palestine. Christians delivered from persecution would regard Constantine the way Poles or Czechs regard Ronald Reagan or John Paul II. These early Christians had survived through the gulag, and they were profoundly grateful to the skilled ruler who led them out.

Persecution also had the unfortunate but obvious consequence of weeding out some of the most determined leaders from the church. Persecutors targeted bishops and priests, and bishops who capitulated survived to rule the church once the persecution ended. Those who did not cooperate often died. It is hardly surprising that, with a few exceptions like Athanasius, the church leaders of the early fourth century were not men of the strongest character.

Finally, critics who ignore Constantine’s setting are doing bad political theology. If anything should characterize Christian political thought, it is attention to the gritty realities of history. Creation, incarnation, cross, resurrection — all the cardinal doctrines of Christian faith reveal a God who acts in history. To do political theology without attention to historical context and circumstance is to replace a Christian political theology with a Platonic one. Without detailed attention to the details of history, political theology becomes perfectionistic. Relative judgments — Constantine was better than Diocletian or Galerius — give way to absolute, global, often ill-informed polemics against a Constantine who has become more an idea than a man.

Persecution reveals one dimension of the complex situation in the Roman Empire in the early fourth century. To do justice to Constantine, we must attempt to make some sense of that period, and to do that we need to reach back to the previous century.

___________________________

1Historia Augusta, selections available at <http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/home.html>. The Historia Augusta is unreliable, often fictional, but it does reflect a prevailing view of Diocletian’s character. The Latin reads, “Virum insignem, callidum, amantem rei publicae, amantem suorum et ad omnia quae tempus quaesiverat temperatum, consilii semper alti, nonnumquam tamen effrontis sed prudentia et nimia pervicacia motus inquieti pectoris comprimentis.”

2Abridgement of Roman History, trans. John Selby Watson, available at <www.forumromanum.org/literature/eutropius>. The Latin reads, “Diocletianus moratus callide fuit, sagax praeterea et admodum subtilis ingenii, et qui severitatem suam aliena invidia vellet explere.”

3 The information in the foregoing paragraph is from Jacob Burckhardt, The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

4 For this stance, see David S. Potter, “Roman Religion,” in Life, Death and Entertainment, ed. David S. Potter and D. J. Mattingly (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 148-49.

5 Paula Fredricksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 89: “Cult, the ancients assumed, made gods happy; and when gods were happy, humans flourished. Conversely, not receiving cult made gods unhappy; and when gods were unhappy, they made people unhappy.” Sacrifice was the central religious act in all ancient religions, and that includes the religions of the Greco-Roman classical world. On sacrifice in the Greek world, see Maria-Zoe Petroupoulou, Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greek Religion, Judaism and Christianity, 100 BC to AD 200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); on Roman sacrifice, see George Heyman, The Power of Sacrifice: Roman and Christian Discourses in Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), and John Scheid, Quand faire, c’est croire: Les rites sacrificiels des Romains (Paris: Aubier, 2005).

6 Lactantius Death 10; Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). Timothy D. Barnes (“Sossianus Hierocles and the Antecedents of the ‘Great Persecution,’” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 80 [1976]: 245) says that this likely occurred in Antioch. A. H. M. Jones (Constantine and the Conversion of Europe [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978], p. 49) dates this incident to the previous year, 298.

7 The date 297 is sometimes given, but Barnes (“Sossianus,” pp. 247-50) argues in detail for the later date.

8 Simon Corcoran, The Empire of the Tetrarchs: Imperial Pronouncements and Government, AD 284-324, rev. ed., Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 135-36.

9 Quoted in Charles Matson Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire (London: Routledge 2004), p. 66.

10 Quoted in Ramsay MacMullen, Constantine (London: Croom Helm, 1987), p. 22.

11 Barnes, “Sossianus,” p. 247.

12 The notion that Christianity was unpatriotic is found in pagan apologists like Celsus and Porphyry. See Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire, p. 33.

13 Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, pp. 20-21.

14 Ibid., p. 19.

15 Ibid., p. 21.

16 Eusebius Life 2.51.

17 Lactantius’s description of Galerius’s character is found in Death 9, and in 11 he attributes Galerius’s anti-Christian bias to the influence of his mother.

18 The most thorough study is P. S. Davies, “The Origin and Purpose of the Persecution of AD 303,” Journal of Theological Studies 40, no. 1 (1989), which systematically eliminates all possible sources of Lactantius’s information. H. A. Drake (Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000], pp. 142-44) suggests that Lactantius is employing a technique of ancient history writing by which writers “convey their own analyses through fictional speeches.” Drake concludes that Diocletian was manipulated into beginning the persecution and that the failed sacrifice was “rigged.” That may be, but first, Lactantius may have had access to court gossip, and second, even if he made up the specifics of the conference, he presumably had some grounds for describing the interplay of Augustus and Caesar in the way he did. David S. Potter (The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180-395, Routledge History of the Ancient World [London: Routledge, 2004], p. 338) wisely notes, however, that “conversations between important men, even in camera, have a way of becoming public knowledge.”

19 Raymond Van Dam, The Roman Revolution of Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 244.

20 Ibid., p. 243; Potter, Roman Empire, pp. 292-93.

21 Ibid., 338.

22 Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, p. 19; Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire; Van Dam, Roman Revolution, 164.

23 Van Dam, Roman Revolution, 146.

24 Heyman, Power of Sacrifice, pp. 13, 47.

25 Details in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 2.74.

26 G. W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). This is a crucial point, since it demonstrates the continuity between the church of the martyrs and the church under Constantine. Neither was an isolated ghetto community; if Christians had been isolated, they would have been left alone.

27 Johannes Roldanus, The Church in the Age of Constantine: The Theological Challenges (London: Ashgate, 2006), p. 30; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, p. 21.

28 G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, “Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution,” in Harvard Theological Review 47, no. 2 (1954): 75-76, and Potter, Roman Empire, p. 337, both summarize the contents of the first decree.

29 Corcoran, Empire of the Tetrarchs, 179-82; Simon Corcoran, “Before Constantine,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine, ed. Noel Lenski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 52; Roldanus, Church in the Age of Constantine, p. 30; Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire, p. 69; Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe, pp. 50-51; Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, p. 164. Eusebius (Church History, 8.14.9) mentions a fifth edict of 309, issued by Maximinus in the East, to revitalize paganism by rebuilding temples, appointing priests, and requiring sacrifice (cf. Corcoran, Empire of the Tetrarchs, pp. 185-86).

30 The phrase is from de Ste. Croix, “Aspects,” p. 105.

31 Corcoran, “Before Constantine,” p. 36.

32 Drake (Constantine and the Bishops, p. 114) links Valerian’s defeat and the cessation of persecution, as does Barnes (“Sossianus,” p. 241).

33 Eusebius, Church History, 8.6.4.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid., 8.12.9.

36 Quoted in MacMullen, Constantine, p. 27.

37 Assuming that Eusebius records every martyr in Syria Palaestina, de Ste. Croix concludes that ninety were executed in that province (“Aspects,” p. 101) and generally estimates that “dozens or scores rather than hundreds” were put to death (p. 102).

38Church History, 8.9.3.

39 On voluntary martyrdom, see Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome; de Ste. Croix, “Aspects.”

40 W. H. C. Frend (“The Failure of Persecutions in the Roman Empire,” Past and Present 16 [1959]: 20, 26) emphasizes the importance of the demographic shift.

41 K. M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments,” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 53. Bowersock (Martyrdom and Rome, p. 18) makes the same connection, also citing Coleman’s article.

42 Joel Marcus, “Crucifixion as Parodic Exaltation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125, no. 1 (1996).

43 Coleman, “Fatal Charades,” p. 66. The point can be made from the other direction as well: Christians applied the category of sacrifice to the martyr (Heyman, Power of Sacrifice, chap. 4).

44 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols. (New York: Modern Library, 1982), 1:31, 33; 2:87; quoted in Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, pp. 21-23.

45 Burckhardt, Age of Constantine the Great, pp. 252-55.

46 David S. Potter, “Martyrdom as Spectacle,” in Theater and Society in the Classical World, ed. Ruth Scodel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 61-65.

47 Voltaire, On Toleration, available at classicliberal.tripod.com/voltaire/toleration.html, accessed June 10, 2009.

48 Frederick Pollock, Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1882), pp. 144-75.

49 Ibid., pp. 145-51.

50 Potter, “Martyrdom as Spectacle,” explores the theatrical and “spectacular” dimensions of martyrdom.

51 Lactantius, Death, p. 34. Burckhardt (Age of Constantine, p. 250) suggests that Galerius is rebuking Christians for abandoning their own ancestral practices, but that seems highly unlikely.

52 On the integration of religious and political life in Rome, see Jorg Rupke, Religion of the Romans, trans. Richard Gordon (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price, Religions of Rome, vol. 1, A History (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1998).

53 The phrase is from Roldanus, Church in the Age of Constantine, p. 32.

54 Craig Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture: A Post-Christendom Perspective (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006), provides little more than a page covering the period between Christ and Constantine (pp. 78-79). John Howard Yoder regularly speaks glowingly of the martyr church but rarely acknowledges this as the context for Constantine. J. Alexander Sider (“ ‘To See History Doxologically’: History and Holiness in John Howard Yoder’s Ecclesiology,” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2004, p. 154) is correct that from Yoder one could get the impression that the Galerian and Diocletian persecution were not all that significant in the formation of “Christian consciousness” in the early fourth century. Robert L. Wilken (The Myth of Christian Beginnings [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970], p. 55) says that the “trauma” of persecution marked Eusebius for life.

2

Jupiter on the Throne

The immortal gods will be . . . well-disposed and favourable to the name of Rome, if we scrutinize thoroughly everyone under our rule and see they properly cultivate in every way a pious, observant, peaceful, and chaste life.

EMPEROR DIOCLETIAN

Mother Rome was not well when Diocletian assumed the imperial throne in 285.1 Over the previous decades, Rome had been shaken by multiple crises: “a constant and rapid turnover of emperors between A.D. 235 and 284. . . near-continuous warfare, internal and external, combined with the total collapse of the silver currency and the state’s recourse to exactions in kind.”2

Trouble lay at the heart of the imperial system. From its beginning, the empire rested on a delicate political dance, the emperor’s ability to balance the interests and cultural assumptions of the Senate with the brute force of the military, which he commanded. Octavius3 was a consummate player of the imperial game, ostentatiously humble in relation to the Senate, careful to keep up republican appearances by avoiding threat and intimidation. Imperial power was founded on modesty, on a combination of kingship and citizenship that expressed itself in the ritual of recusatio, the emperor’s ritual reluctance to assume the imperial post.4 In theory, the emperor under the Augustan system was no more than a princeps, the “first man” of the Senate, a first among equals.

Augustus’s system, known as the Principate, had several centuries of relative success, but even before the end of the first century, there were ominous signs of internal fragility. The Year of the Four Emperors, A.D. 69, was a period of chaos that, Tacitus observed, revealed the imperial secret that “emperors could be made elsewhere than Rome.”5 With the Roman Senate’s role reduced and the military’s increased, imperial power was a reward for the most ambitious and skilled — and sometimes the most ruthless — military commander.

Succession brought the clash of interests to a boiling point. The problem of succession was endemic to the imperial system. Early on, emperors created a pseudo-dynasty by adoption, as Julius Caesar did with Octavius, but by the middle of the fourth century that system was no longer viable. During the “Year of the Four Emperors” and again in the crisis that followed the murder of Commodus (193-97), the succession system, such as it was, broke down. After the murder of Alexander Severus in 235, things became even more tumultuous. Many of the emperors between Alexander and Diocletian ruled for only a few months, and only Gallienus (253-68) ruled more than a decade.6 Political turmoil at the center encouraged adventurism in the provinces. Between 257 and 273 five emperors battled over Gaul.7

By the third century, the vulnerability at the center of the empire was exacerbated by external threats. The Principate was functional so long as borders were secure. Under Augustus they were; by the third century they were not.8 Persia threatened as never before, mainly because the dilatory Arsacid dynasty was replaced by the vigorous and ambitious Sassanids.9 Valerian’s reign was comparatively long (253-260), but his name was tarnished by the shame of defeat at the hands of the Persian king Shapur I, commemorated on a monument that can still be found in Naqsh-i-Rustam, Iran. Relief carvings show Shapur seated resplendently on horseback holding the wrist of Valerian and receiving the obeisance of the Roman emperor, Philip the Arab. Valerian died in captivity, and afterward the Persian king stripped his skin off his corpse, dyed it, and kept as a trophy. Nearly forty years later, the Romans were still smarting from the humiliation. After he defeated Shapur’s successor Narseh, Galerius, trembling with anger, chided the Persians not only for holding Valerian prisoner but for preserving his skin after his death.10 Persia was not the only threat. Goths, Franks, and other Germanic and Slavic tribes repeatedly crossed the Rhine and Danube and threatened the empire. Everywhere, and for the first time in its history, the empire was on the defensive. Rome’s enemies no longer considered it invincible, and Romans were inclined to agree.11

Rome was on the defensive because enemies attacked simultaneously from various directions. Sarmatians, Alemanni, Burgundians, Franks, and Saxons, a group known to the Romans as Skythai, all pressed in together, and this created conditions for rivalry among the leaders of Rome. When a local Roman commander repelled a Gothic invasion along the frontier, he naturally believed he had won some right to rule.12 He was, after all, the savior of the empire. Because of the pressures from outside, the boundaries of the empire weakened and in places broke altogether. In 281, a civil war broke out in Egypt, in which “the inhabitants of one part of the province, the Thebais, assault[ed] the region around Toptos with the aid of nomadic Blemmyes, who dominated what is now the northern Sudan.” That is to say, “one portion of a [Roman] province” allied itself with a group from outside the empire to attack another part of the same province.13

A SINGLE POLIS

The Roman Empire was a military and political superpower, but Romans believed that their success depended on the gods. Roman emperors had always been deeply religious. Augustus publicized the horoscope that predicted his rise to power, and he surrounded his reign with religiopolitical symbols of rebirth and renewal.14 Even a philosophical emperor like Marcus Aurelius claimed to have broken a siege with prayer in 172 and attributed his victory over the people Dio Cassius calls the Quadi to the influence of Anuphis, “an Egyptian magician, who was a companion of Marcus” and who called down a powerful rain by invoking “various deities and in particular Mercury, the god of the air.”15 During the third century, the Severans were devoted to the sun god.

Unlike Eastern rulers like Alexander, Augustus did not accept divine honors during his lifetime, and his position as emperor was not underwritten by an explicit theory of divine right. During the reign of Augustus, the eastern provinces did homage to the emperor, but in the capital he was only a man. Sacrifices were performed for the emperor but not necessarily offered to him.16 Though power was concentrated in a single man, the empire respected local autonomy and local variations in religion and even in law. Jews in Palestine were not forced to adopt polytheism and were permitted to live by their own cultural and legal traditions. Augustus was able to balance Senate and military, old and new, religion and power, in a system that maintained the Roman Empire for two centuries.17 This was the religiopolitical system of the Principate, and, despite bumps and hiccoughs, it worked fairly well for a long time.

By the end of the second century, this system was fracturing. The Senate was losing its ability to check imperial power, and the Severans of the third century began to draw their administrators from the lower equestrian class rather than the senatorial class that was originally essential to the Principate. Within the military, a meritocracy had replaced the old senatorial elite.18 Led by the youthful and bizarre Elagabalus (218-222), the Severans began to adopt some of the trappings of Eastern kingship. Xenophon captured the Hellenistic notion of kingship in the life of Cyrus, who wore high heels, makeup, and dazzling clothing to enhance his power by overawing his subjects: he intended to “cast a sort of spell upon them.”19 Virgil had implicitly castigated Aeneas for the splendor of his Carthaginian attire; to dress like an African prince was a temptation to be resisted, and we know Aeneas is recovering his sense of destiny when he sheds his exotic attire for the simplicity of a toga. The marks of Roman imperial power were modesty, simplicity of dress, and self-restraint personally and, it was implied, militarily.20 Over time, the luxurious ways of the East — of Persia and North Africa, of Egypt and the Middle East — eroded Roman simplicity. By the time of Diocletian, emperors went about in purple robes, their golden shoes studded with jewels, accepting the prostrations of their subjects. Only the most intimate of the emperor’s court could kiss his garment or enter behind the veil that screened the emperor from lesser men and see his Dominus face to face.21 In place of a Principate (the rule of the “first man”) the empire of the early fourth century was a Dominate — the rule of a Dominus, a god on earth. Elagabalus had been assassinated for his excesses and his flouting of custom, but by the early fourth century a style similar to his had taken over the court.

Just as important was the revision of citizenship that took place with the Antonine Constitution of 212. Promulgated by Caracalla, this edict granted citizenship to all free residents of the empire. It was an act more of economic desperation than of political generosity. A declining population and increasing military expenditures had created a serious financial crisis. Heavier taxes were laid on a smaller tax base, and in response many peasants abandoned the countryside, where they could no longer make a living in agriculture. Invaders meanwhile seized crops and animals from farmers, and when the invaders were expelled, the army seized them too.22 Agricultural production declined, and with it the base of taxation. Desperate for funds, Caracalla extended citizenship to every resident of the empire, and in doing so imposed the inheritance tax of Augustus on all.23