The title of this chapter invites trouble. The two fullest recent treatments of the theme, the one a lively narrative account (Chuvin 1990) and the other an extensive analytic survey (Trombley 1993-4), have both been subjected to severe criticism, the one for muddled sentimentality (O’Donnell 1990) and the other for incoherent arbitrariness (Mitchell 1995). Both books contain much of value, but the reviewers’ strictures are solidly based. For such is the peculiar elusiveness of our evidence that any attempted retelling of the pagans’ experiences from their own perspective will be vulnerable to the former complaint, and any comprehensive analytical scheme to the latter. This is a topic where modern critical techniques have dissolved old paradigms without yet establishing a usable replacement.
As a result, many recent treatments of the subject sound distinctly unsympathetic. Forty years ago, the traditionalist aristocrats of fourth-century Rome were credited with a brave rearguard defense of the symbols of their city’s ancient greatness (Bloch 1963). Such views are now untenable, and the last pagans of Rome have been dismissed as spinelessly self-regarding (Cameron 1999). Whereas thirty years ago enthusiasts could still liken Emperor Julian’s tragically unfulfilled promise to President Kennedy’s (a comparison mildly deprecated by Browning 1975: xii), the dominant portrait is now of a quixotic fanatic, whose death occasioned a universal sigh of relief (Bowersock 1978). While modern studies have vindicated the coherence of Julian’s philosophical and religious ideals (Athanassiadi 1992; Smith 1995), Julian the politician - the pagan ruler who sought to dismantle the Christian empire - still awaits his rehabilitation. The equivalent survey of our subject in the authoritative Cambridge Ancient History duly backs away from the Christian empire, finding its heroes instead in the stubborn philosophers who remained aloof from the hurly-burly of politics (Fowden 1998). Only in studies of the pre-Constantinian era does pagan society seem to come alive (Lane Fox 1986; MacMullen 1984); the pagans of our period are generally consigned to passivity, and even in the more sympathetic accounts (MacMullen 1997) remain on the receiving end of christianization.
The modest claim advanced in this chapter, that political and cultural space remained available throughout the fourth and even the fifth centuries for pagans to assert a religious identity, is therefore more controversial than it might initially seem.
The term ‘‘pagans’’ has itself become contentious. Certainly, none of the millions of Romans who still worshiped their fathers’ gods when Constantine pledged his allegiance to Christ in ad 312 would have recognized the name. Nor indeed would their Christian neighbors, who still routinely applied the biblical label ‘‘Gentiles’’ to those who belonged neither to the Jewish Israel nor to their own. Paganism, with its implication of boorish rusticity, was a species identified a generation later, by Latin-speaking Christian taxonomists who revived an obsolete insult for their own rhetorical purposes (O’Donnell 1977); it would evolve as these purposes changed, but would remain a polemical tool. The only self-described pagan on record uses the term with exquisite irony (August. Ep. 234. 1). During the same fourth century, a rather different set of connotations would meanwhile be generated, as Greek-speaking Christians extracted from their Bibles a parallel category of ‘‘Hellenes’’; complications ensued when some of those so labeled gleefully appropriated the title and confronted the Christians with its implications (Bowersock 1990).
But ‘‘paganism’’ has its uses, and no substitute succeeds better. For we are dealing with an artificial category: those who addressed their prayers to Zeus the all-highest, to Capitoline Jupiter, to Mithras, to Baal Ammon, to Serapis-Osiris, or to any combination of these, never felt the need for a collective name or identity. Well-intentioned modern efforts to provide a neutral substitute for derogatory Christian labels therefore risk creating a single religious community where none in fact existed; more dangerously, they serve to perpetuate the artificial boundary that Christian spokesmen conjured in order to separate their own Christian sheepfolds from the dangerous beasts roaming outside, a boundary that bore little relation to the complex interactions between the ‘‘faithful’’ and their multifariously unchristian neighbors. The recent fashion for the term ‘‘polytheist’’ is a good example of the complications that modern rebranding can create - for one of the most exciting areas of recent research in late antique religions has concerned the large numbers of non-Christians, extending far beyond a philosophically minded minority, who acknowledged a single all-powerful deity (Athanassiadi and Frede 1999; Barnes 2001).
‘‘Paganism,’’ by contrast, automatically generates its own scare quotes. The alarm is helpful, for nearly every reference in our sources serves a hostile agenda. The Christians invented paganism solely to measure it against their own religion; preachers kept it alive as a useful bogey, but its principal function was to suffer defeat. Much of the following will therefore pertain to the rhetorical tropes of the Christian empire, and will explore the messy realities - or at least the misty spectrum of possibilities - behind their smooth triumphalism. We must also listen closely on those occasions when pagans speak for themselves, not least because so much of what they say seems so irrelevant to what we feel they should be saying. Such evidence inevitably concentrates our attention on a tiny handful of the elite. But theirs was a significant minority, and if the vast majority of pagans, still the predominant element in the rural population in most provinces of the empire in ad 400, must remain beyond the scope of this short chapter, they remained equally beyond the reach of the legal framework of which the ‘‘Christian empire’’ was constructed.
World History
