Eusebius of Caesarea, foremost champion of a triumphalist vision of Christianity, regarded Constantine’s conversion in ad 312 as a definitive turning point in the history of salvation. Christ, through his suffering, death, and resurrection, had vanquished Satan, and yet for a long while the earthly realm remained under the latter’s rule and that of his angels. The faith of Constantine, Eusebius’ ideal prince, was supposed to have turned the Roman Empire into a fitting instrument of God’s plan to effect the total triumph of Christianity. The emperor as triumphator represents a familiar Roman imperial image that was given a fresh face in the following manner: Constantine, according to Eusebius (Vit. Const. 3. 3), had commissioned numerous images that show himself bearing the Christogram and crushing the dragon-serpent underfoot. In short, he regarded Christ’s triumph over Satan as the model for his earthly victory over the servants of the vanquished gods. For those who shared the Eusebian Constantine’s vision of the defeat of the gods and their supporters as a form of imitatio Christi, christianization in the post-Constantinian age was merely a form of mopping up after the issue had already been decided.
As presented, this triumph was manifested first and foremost in the removal of the outward expressions of the old religion, such as sacrifice and cultic worship at shrines and temples. Putting an end to the blood sacrifice of animal victims thus became the singular goal of christianization (Barnes 1984; Bradbury 1994, 1995). While positions for and against the practice galvanized both sides of the debate regarding sacrifice, there was never any serious doubt in the mind of most Christians that blood sacrifice as such amounted to forbidden pagan idolatry. Along the same lines, the temples and shrines dedicated to the gods, which appeared as sacral places to their worshipers and as haunts of demons to Jews and Christians, were treated as an abominable aspect of pagan worship by a broad - but, surprisingly, by no means universal - consensus. Constantine’s admirers underscored the fact that the first Christian emperor took decisive steps to abrogate or curtail these two most visible expressions of the old religion. Thus he was credited with a decree that outlawed blood sacrifice, the efficacy and scope of which remains open to debate, and was said to have declined to ascend the Capitol and enter the Temple of luppiter Optimus Maximus at the end of his triumphal procession in Rome, a clear break with centuries of Roman ritual tradition.
However, despite these and similar ostensibly robust gestures, hints abound that Constantine did not seek to institute many christianizing changes advocated by his fellow Christians. This has brought the nature of the emperor’s religious outlook and even the authenticity of his conversion into question. The discussion of such matters has been treated fully and thoughtfully elsewhere, and requires no elaboration here (Van Dam 2003b). Whether Constantine acted as a ‘‘good Christian’’ has arguably served as a red herring for scholars over the generations. Rather than ask whether he deserved Eusebius’ panegyrical praise of him as the ideal Christian prince on account of his staunch support of christianization, it is more historically relevant and accurate to ask what role Constantine - and his successors - played in negotiating and creating the categories of Christian, pagan, and secular.
As mentioned earlier, accounts of christianization have often been illustrated, on the one hand by enumerating the bans on sacrifices and the shutting down and destruction of temples, and on the other by the institution of Christian ritual practices and the building of ecclesiastical structures such as basilica churches. Seen as barometers of change, imperial interventions in such areas became the building blocks for the new narrative of religious transformation that is commonly associated with the story of christianization. Often left out is any acknowledgment that the imperial construction of paganism was focused mainly on the cultic worship of the gods and their divine statues through sacrifice (which drew on the normative early Christian definition of what is pagan) - a policy that effectively applied the label ‘‘religious’’ to selected traditional institutions and practices, while allowing others to be presented as ‘‘nonreligious’’ or secular. Whereas in the preceding period, the notion of sacrality and references to the gods permeated most aspects of life, the new construction of a ‘‘religious’’ sphere imposed sharp, distinct boundaries where they did not previously exist in the same manner. Such a perspective permitted the program of de-paganization to be narrowly construed as the deletion of offending divine statues, temples, and sacrifices.
This did little to alter the culture of public spectacles that some Christians wanted to regard as idolatrous, because reform in such an area was not widely regarded at the time as an aspect of christianization. While Constantine is alleged to have banned gladiatorial combats in ad 325, the report of this decree survives in only one source and, even if genuine, the law had in any case limited scope and effect (MacMullen 1986b). Gladiatorial munera in fact continued for well over a century, and their eventual disappearance may be better explained as due to social and economic causes, even to a change in fashion, rather than as a direct result of christianization (Ville 1960; Wiedemann 1995). Overall, Constantine’s enacted measures had little or no transformative impact on the civic culture ofancient communities in general or on the culture of public spectacles in particular. If anything, the emperor did what he could to ensure the continued vitality of civic culture. In Rome itself, Constantine greatly embellished the Circus Maximus, to the delight of the citizens (Humphrey 1986: 126; Curran 2000: 84). He not only supported the shows but also helped establish them on a more solid footing by restructuring the obligations of senators to give games and by enrolling stage and other performers in hereditary professions, in order to bind them to ‘‘public service.’’
Overall, the so-called Constantinian Revolution had little immediate impact on the status of traditional spectacles. Such an observation need not have embarrassed even a fervent champion such as Eusebius, since his view of what christianization entailed did not materially include in its purview the culture of Roman shows. There was in fact a long-standing diversity of opinion on this issue within Christian communities. Pre-Constantinian Christians such as Minucius Felix (Oct. 37. 11) and Tertullian (De spect. passim) argued that all the public shows, be they games in the amphitheater, theater, or hippodrome, were inextricably tied to sacred rituals and therefore constituted pagan idolatry. Tertullian, in particular, offered a forensic response to counter the belief that Christians were not forbidden from attending the shows because the Scriptures do not refer to them at all: by using antiquarian and other arguments, he established an equation between attendance at the Roman spectacles and pagan idolatry. By making a case that the games were the pompa diaboli, he contended that (baptized) Christians who had vowed to forsake the devil’s pomp could no more justify going to the theater than participating in a public sacrifice to the gods. Clearly, such an argument was needed only because many of Minucius Felix’s and Tertullian’s fellow Christians did not subscribe to the view that living a Christian life required abstinence from public spectacles. According to Tertullian (De spect. 3), some indeed refused to accept his identification of the shows with idolatry and, arguing that God was not offended by his own creation, asked for the authority of scriptural warrants (scripturis auctoritatem) before they would accept that the spectacula were forbidden to Christians. These men, according to Tertullian, carried on as though the public spectacles did not belong to the pagan sphere.
The anatomy of this pre-Constantinian Christian conversation highlights the extent to which arriving at the precise definition of what constituted objectionable pagan idolatry was by no means a straightforward exercise. Negotiations regarding the scope of christianization, particularly regarding whether it encompassed the culture surrounding the public spectacles, continued well into the late empire. The emperors’ official bans on public sacrifice, and the elimination of the rite from the ceremonies surrounding the public spectacles, served to undercut some of Tertullian’s most powerful arguments regarding the close connection between cult and spectacles.
In the post-Constantinian world, many Christians, including members of the aristocracy and imperial family, continued to sponsor and attend the shows. In short, the abolition of public spectacles was not generally regarded by the christianizing elite and the broader population as an integral goal of christianization (Lim 1994). Arguably, it took the rise of a Christian ascetic culture in the later fourth century to make the ending of public spectacles an avowed project of christianization. Since Tertullian’s main argument that games were tantamount to idolatry gained little purchase, moralizing critiques against games (which philosophers had long offered) came into play. Tertullian himself invoked a stoicizing moral topos regarding the corrupting force of spectacles, a view that was articulated by, for instance, Seneca the Elder in his discourse on the adverse influence of crowds on the moral stance of an individual (Sen. Ep. 7). Later fourth-century Christian authors such as John
Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo would further develop such a line of argument in discourses that criticized the morally corrupting effect that games had on those Christians who could not resist the temptation to attend them. Their line of attack, which again derived from Stoic critiques, focused on how the sounds and sight experienced at games enter the body through the senses and eventually work upon the soul in accordance with the ancient theory of emotions. By coupling this thesis with the Christian view regarding man’s inability to resist evil without the aid of God, a theme particularly central to Augustine of Hippo’s thinking in the Confessions, a lasting impression was formed that the continued ‘‘survival’’ of the Roman public spectacles in a christianizing empire was the result of recidivism, human weakness, and man’s propensity to prefer the sins of the flesh.
Christianization thus came to be represented in textual sources from the later fourth century on as the remaking of society according to a Christian ethos inspired by the so-called desert ascetics. The effort to adapt such a strict moral code for the christianized population generally resulted in a via media that effectively universalized the ancient philosophers’ worries about the dangers of living under the corruption of civilization. As everyone was now considered able and therefore also duty-bound to live a good life, the project of sanctification included as part of its brief the termination of Roman public spectacles that were thought to corrupt their spectators. The moral discourse preached by individuals such as John Chrysostom admitted of no middle ground, since a given aspect of life was either ‘‘in Christ’’ or it was not, and what was not in Christ properly belonged to the realm of Satan. In short, preachers such as Chrysostom would expand the project of christianization beyond the ban on sacrifices and attendance at temples to include the reform of morals and habits of everyday life (Leyerle 2001).
Urban spectacles such as gladiatorial combats, animal hunts, theatrical performances, and chariot races, long emblematic of Roman imperial civilization, were regarded by ascetic Christians as liabilities rather than assets and as stumbling blocks to Christian moral progress. Christianization, as articulated within this framework, required the reinvention of society and its mores according to the moral values upheld by martyrs and desert monks: ‘‘Ascetics competed with one another and with both churchmen and secular authorities for a specific prize - the authority to define, teach and exemplify in definitive form the virtues of the Christian religion, and to guarantee their observance and preservation’’ (Rousseau 2002: 256). According to this model, to christianize a Roman city would therefore have meant transforming it into a symbolic desert, a model of the heavenly Jerusalem. The new Christian community, saintly and pure, could have had no truck with the unruly and licentious culture of the ancient city.
Many aspects of traditional culture were thought to stand in the way of such a transformation, and none more so than that of Roman public entertainments. Some Christians even conceived of the spectacula as the devil’s last-ditch effort to retard the christianization of Roman society. Thus the author of the Life of Pelagia of Antioch portrayed the mime actress Pelagia, with her charm and feminine guile, as Satan’s final hope to ensnare unsuspecting Christians (Lim 2003). In this perceived role as a source of cultural resistance to christianization in the post-Constantinian age, the
Roman games came to be represented in many Christian works as the bulwark of the unchristianized, and indeed unchristianizable, saeculum.
Until very recently, the perspectives of Patristic authors such as John Chrysostom and Augustine have largely determined how scholars approach the question of changes in public life in Late Antiquity. At one level, the works of these writers offer an irresistible store of raw material for study, so that they are often mined for information regarding the realia of contemporary practices. On another level, the prestige of the Patristic figures and the voluminous quality of their works render the point of view contained therein a sympathetic lens - for certain modern readers at least - through which to view the social and cultural significance of public spectacles in Late Antiquity (Weismann 1972; Jurgens 1972). Every student of early Christianity who has to work with such highly filtered and sharply ideological texts faces this challenge: how can she find a way to use the texts to understand a given historical phenomenon without being unduly influenced by the perspectives that are bound up in the Patristic texts themselves? Some scholars have argued, for eminently persuasive reasons, that the highly ideological and rhetorical nature of such texts renders their employment as historical sources problematic, and that they are most appropriately used by a historian as texts that reveal particular modes of discursive representation (Clark 2004). I venture to suggest that historians should still be able to make use of Patristic texts to address questions in such a way as to move beyond their particular discursive frames, presumably having first come to an adequate understanding of what those frames are. In our case, a useful starting point is first to recognize that the anti-games writings of the likes of John Chrysostom and Augustine represent but one side of a complex set of past conversations, and then, second, to move to discover, as much as possible, the fuller contours of the ancient debate.
The ability to separate out the preacher’s message and the points of view of his putative audience has been one of the major areas of advancement in the scholarship of early Christianity (MacMullen 1989; Klingshirn 1994; Rousseau 1998; Maxwell 2006). A similar principle may be introduced to guide one’s approach in our case. Anyone seeking with an open mind to understand the reception of games in Late Antiquity will quickly come to the conclusion that many, if not most, Christians entertained views on the matter that were greatly at variance with those articulated in the celebrated Patristic writings. Many in fact did not accept the view that the games were forms of pagan idolatry or that their own Christian self-identities categorically required them to stop attending the shows of the theater, amphitheater, and hippodrome. Why did some Christians come to adopt the view that the games were not part of the objectionable tradition of Greco-Roman paganism? How indeed did the ludi and munera come to be desacralized or secularized?
World History
