The AD 392 law mentions temples only as an afterthought - those caught sacrificing in public temples (rather than in their own homes) were to be fined, since there was no relevant property to confiscate (Cod. Theod. 16. 10. 12. 3). Previous references in the Code suggest that temples had become drawn into the scope of legislation as the sites where sacrifices were conducted (Cod. Theod. 16. 10. 4), and that the government attempted to neutralize them so that they could continue to host the various cultural and commercial activities with which they were associated. The eventual demolition of the temples seems a brusque afterthought: only in the last law in the chapter on pagans (Cod. Theod. 16. 10. 25, ad 435) are ‘‘all their groves, temples, shrines, if any still remain intact’’ consigned to destruction.
We tend, however, to attribute a larger significance to the temples, corresponding to their sheer visibility in the cityscape. Moreover, the physical traces of the vandalism that has scarred or shattered many pagan monuments are so impressive that they have been argued to amount to a wholesale ‘‘archaeology of religious hatred’’ (Sauer 2003; see Sauer 1996). Literary sources cataloguing the aggression of Christian iconoclasts have seemed to support the view that a campaign of systematic violence by Christian gangs, gathering momentum in the last quarter of the fourth century, inflicted fatal damage to the fabric of paganism (Fowden 1978): the Theodosian laws have thus been interpreted as a specious veil of legitimacy for a brutal populist assault.
And indeed, the temples ought to have been flashpoints, their mute presence a standing call to arms for zealous Christians, and a rallying point for pagans. But again the evidence fails to live up to our expectations. Eusebius crows over token actions by Constantine - three temples demolished and the treasuries of others plundered by a handful of roving commissioners, a command that temples be stripped of doors and roof cladding, and their idolatrous mystifications be exposed to public ridicule (Euseb. Vit. Const. 3. 54-8; see Cameron and Hall 1999: 301-5). But even Eusebius betrays the limited impact of this salutary humiliation: not only did the government lack both the resources and the certainty of purpose for a comprehensive crusade, but in a period when traditional civic services were being increasingly squeezed by the state, even token interventions by the central government might stir a patriotic resentment, which some local Christians might also share. With the temples, as with sacrifices, urban pagans thus had time to adjust to the Christian empire. Even if (as a law of ad 346 seems to command, although again context is lacking: Cod. Theod. 16. 10.4) the temples were at some point and in some sense ‘‘closed’’ to the public, there is abundant evidence for their continued accessibility - one suspects that formal cult practices, which would imply government sponsorship, were forbidden, but (as with sacrifice) most ordinary temple activities could be redefined so as to escape any such ban. Nor should we foreshorten our perspectives. There was ample time to rethink the relationship between the gods and their temples during the several generations that elapsed while the Christian authorities gradually summoned up the political will to support the more drastic measures that some of their constituents demanded. This was a period, moreover, during which Christian leaders were seeking to contain a ‘‘privatization of the holy’’ (Brown 1982: 32-6); no such inhibitions were operative within the much looser institutional structures of paganism.
With temples, too, Theodosius I has been credited with a decisive shift in policy - for at the same time as he began issuing his laws restricting sacrifice, there occurred one of the most dramatic clashes on record between pagans and Christians. Zealous Christian crowds had occasionally destroyed temples previously; but the Serapeum of Alexandria was world-famous, a ‘‘treasure-house second only to the Capitol of Rome’’ (Amm. Marc. 22. 16. 12), and its destruction in ad 391 prompted the most extensive commentary we have of any such act, from the Christian historian Rufinus (Hist. eccl. 11. 22-30; see Thelamon 1981: 159-279). Rufinus seems to show the pagans swept helplessly away by a triumphant Christian tide. His account therefore deserves careful attention.
Rufinus minimizes a blatant provocation by the Alexandrian bishop Theophilus, who (according to the later historian Socrates: Hist eccl. 3. 2) had reopened a thirty-year-old wound by parading pagan images around the city; deliberate effort was needed to inflame intercommunal tensions. A band of militant pagans duly gratified Theophilus by organizing themselves, in response, into a terrorist militia. Their occupation of the Serapeum as their base recalls modern parallels, from India to Iraq (which might in turn suggest that the temple authorities were reluctant hosts); the kidnappings and ritual executions that followed also seem grimly familiar. But the most striking element in the episode, as reported by Rufinus, is the trust that these militants still placed in the emperor’s justice. They defied the local authorities (who are plausibly alleged to have been complicit with the bishop: Eunap. VS 472), but after these had reported the stalemate to Theodosius, they joined the Christians for a solemn reading of the emperor’s verdict. But they never heard it. So ominous did the opening paragraphs of Theodosius’ letter sound, with their conventional flourish denouncing pagan superstition, that the pagans fled and the Christians then swept forward (thus Rufinus, carefully exculpating the latter of aggression) to ransack the temple and demolish the cult statue of Serapis. Rufinus helpfully supplies the contents of the letter, as if to reassure us that the destruction indeed accorded with the imperial will. The emperor granted impunity to the pagan extremists, whose victims had received compensation enough in their martyrs’ crowns; he added, however, that ‘‘the cause and root of the discord, which had come from the defence of images, must be removed’’ (Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 11. 22). Like Rufinus himself, his readers have assumed that Theodosius had meant the statue of Serapis; however, the prominence of images in Socrates’ converging account might suggest instead that the emperor had merely intended to sequestrate the statues that the Christians had used to provoke the original riot. Even in the most favorable possible circumstances, then, when a pagan temple had become the center of unequivocally criminal activity, it was no simple matter to mobilize official consent for repression.
Nor, perhaps, did the event have as much impact upon the pagans of Alexandria as Rufinus claims. He boasts casually of a rush of converts after the exposure of the frauds and crimes of the pagan establishment ( Hist. eccl. 11. 24), but is much more concerned with those temple priests who happily discovered that their hieroglyphs had indeed prophesied Christ (Hist. eccl. 11. 29). Rufinus too readily credits these men with an ability to discard their past; during the same period, indeed, a mischievous pagan author at Rome could credit to Hadrian the claim that ‘‘those who worship Serapis are, in fact, Christians; and those who call themselves bishops of Christ are in fact priests of Serapis’’ (SHA Saturninus 8). Moreover, and more important, at least some Alexandrian pagans soon learned to live without the physical presence of Serapis. Their god was not destroyed by the brutish iconoclasts, but merely withdrew from a world that had proved itself unworthy of his beneficent presence (see Brown 1998: 635). Serapis’ patient resignation recalls the Christian confessors, and pagans duly mocked the insensate fury of the persecutors who ‘‘made war on stones’’ (Eunap. VS472).
Such divine quietism made no sense to contemporary Christians, and many modern scholars are equally unimpressed. But neither the pagans nor their gods necessarily felt obliged to fight the battles that we would have them fight. Our most circumstantial account of an officially sanctioned temple demolition thus shows Zeus and his minions at Gaza responding to the blow with whimpers rather than bangs; but, even if Mark the Deacon’s narrative is treated as a genuine contemporary record (and controversy continues here), a close reading shows that it leaves the majority of the local pagans unaccounted for (Trombley 1993-4, i: 187-245). The temples were an adjunct to devotion rather than a prerequisite. Although some Christians certainly swallowed their own propaganda and believed that by smashing a cult statue they could expel the demon it represented, so freeing its deluded bondsmen from its thrall, we have no good evidence that those they thus rescued ever accepted this interpretation, and no reason to do so ourselves.
World History
