If Christian preachers invented paganism, imperial legislators defined it. And it is the imperial law codes that justify, above all, my using the term in this chapter, for it was as pagans that the Christian empire officially treated those who observed the traditional cults. In fact the word filtered only belatedly into legislative vocabulary (the earliest such usage occurring in ad 370: Cod. Theod. 16. 2. 18), but was firmly established by the early fifth century, when the editors of the Theodosian Code classified some twenty-five miscellaneous imperial pronouncements under the title ‘‘On Pagans, Sacrifices and Temples’’ (Delmaire and Rouge 2005). So important have these laws been in providing the basis for our narratives ofpagan decline that we do well to recognize how intractable the editors evidently found their material. The section, the penultimate section of the whole Code, is a miscellany - an oddly jumbled conclusion to a book that otherwise organizes the institutions of Christianity and its deviations into crisply defined categories. The cumbersome title, bundling together (uniquely in the Code) people (‘‘pagans’’), actions (‘‘sacrifices’’), and places (‘‘temples’’), itself suggests the compilers’ difficulty in imposing coherence. By the second quarter of the fifth century, all professional servants of the imperial regime could take for granted that the practice of paganism was a criminal monstrosity; the Code reflects their difficulties (like those the conscientious Pliny faced concerning the Christians over three centuries earlier) in discovering a basis for this.
The three terms in the title occur together in only two of the extracts preserved - since one is the last ( Cod. Theod. 16. 10. 25), this might have suggested their heading to the editors. This method of organizing the material has had enormous consequences. The extracts chosen for inclusion, and indeed our own conception of late antique paganism, would have been quite different if, as might easily have happened, the compilers had decided to divide these measures between two separate chapters, ‘‘On Pagan Temples’’ and ‘‘On Pagan Sacrifices.’’ Above all, it is thanks to the Code that we tend to think of pagan sacrifices and temples as intrinsically interrelated - and as clearly identifiable targets for effective repression. Hence the common interpretation of these laws as a creeping barrage, working inexorably toward the innermost citadels of paganism. And indeed the narrative that has been inferred from them seems plausible enough. Whatever restrictions were imposed by Constantine (according to this version) become positively repressive under his sons; a respite under the Valentinianic dynasty (Julian’s legislation on this matter is naturally ignored) is followed by the definitive prohibition of public pagan ritual under Theodosius I, whose sons could cheerfully declare paganism extinct. Such is the commonly accepted trajectory. However, as the following sections will show, it has scant basis. Here again, the study of paganism has lagged behind recent scholarship on Christianity (in particular concerning the evolution and operation of the anti-heresy laws, which are to some extent parallel). A more nuanced reading of these laws would have important implications for our understanding of the people whose actions provoked them.
World History
