If one reads the letters of Jerome, the bitter sermons of John Chrysostom, or the accounts of destruction of ‘pagan’ temples in the east, one gets the impression of the church on the offensive. Similarly traditional accounts tell of a powerful pagan fight back against Christianity especially from the ancient senatorial families of Rome. The moment of their destruction is seen as the Battle of Frigidus (see below, p. 627). Recent scholarship is providing a more nuanced account of the relationship between Christian and pagan especially within Rome itself. The work that has transformed our understanding is Alan Cameron’s The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford, 2010). Cameron is, of course, talking only about Rome although its elite held estates and thus power across the empire. He argues that there was never a strong pagan party in the city and that the ‘conversion’ of the pagans in the late fourth century was actually to maintain status. ‘It was now the church people were flocking to, and if the nobility was going to maintain its position, they too had to join the church, where their wealth and connections enabled them to maintain their traditional ascendancy. . . Roman paganism petered out with a whimper rather than a bang.’
It is worth asking, in fact, exactly what separated the ordinary Christian from his pagan counterpart. There was a broad stretch of shared territory. Christians, sometimes to the despair of their bishops (Augustine notable among them), continued to take part in pagan celebrations, attend the games, and indulge in traditional superstitions. Ambrose condemned Christians who continued to celebrate pagan banqueting rituals around the tombs of their loved ones. In the 440s pope Leo I is found denouncing a group of ‘Christians’ whom he found worshipping the sun from the steps of St Peter’s. There is no evidence that Christian marriage customs were any different from pagan ones. The text on the tomb of the pagan senator Pra-etextus describes his wife Paulina as ‘partner of my heart, nurse of modesty, bond of chastity, pure love and loyalty produced in heaven. . . united by the pact of consecration, by the yoke of the marriage vow and perfect harmony’, a description of a happy marriage as much Christian as pagan.
Slavery continued as much in Christian households as it did in pagan ones. As seen earlier (p. 518) it was accepted as a fact of life by Jesus and Paul even though there were exhortations, derived equally from Stoic philosophy, of recognizing the shared humanity of slave and free, something that, it was argued, would eventually be recognized by God in the afterlife. Although bishops had the right to free slaves, there is no evidence that they did so in greater numbers than pagan magistrates. A number of canons laid down that a slave could not be ordained. When John Cassian wrote his Institutes, a set of rules for monastic life, in the 420s, slavery was such a natural part of life to him that he tells his readers that a monk must think of himself as ‘an estate-born slave’ and submit to the demands of his abbot faster even than the slave of the harshest master.
Moreover the idea that slavery was a punishment for sin (see John 8: 34) persisted in the works of John Chrysostom and Augustine. The humility of the slave, ready to accept whatever fortune brought him, was often invoked as a mark of Christian piety. Doubtless there were many Christian households that saw it a moral duty to respect the welfare of their slaves but it was not until Gregory of Nyssa (died 395) that one finds the first Christian attack on the institution itself. (See now Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, ad 275-425, Cambridge, 2011, which stresses the continuation of slavery in both Christian and pagan society.)
The art of the period also shows the extent of shared territory. The basilica was one building adapted to Christian use; another was the circular mausoleum, traditionally used as the resting place of emperors. Constantine created one for himself in Constantinople while in Rome the mausoleums of his mother Helena and his daughter Constantina (Santa Costanza) survive. Much of the mosaic decoration of Santa Costanza (354) shows no Christian influence whatsoever. There are cupids, cherubs picking grapes, and vine leaves (although images of Christ giving the law to Peter, the so-called traditio legis, were added later). The first public Christian art (as distinct from that concealed in the catacombs) shows Christian themes mingled with pagan symbolism and motifs. In one sarcophagus of the mid-fourth century from Rome, the twins Castor and Pollux, traditionally seen in Roman mythology as guardians of the dead and symbols of immortality, are placed alongside reliefs of the feeding of the 5,000 and an incident in the life of St Peter. In the marriage casket from the Esquiline treasure (of c.380, now in the British Museum), a Christian inscription surrounds artwork that is still rooted in classical mythology with a nude Venus occupying a prominent position. Other sarcophagi show Christ receiving such traditional classical emblems as a laurel crown or depicted as a pagan god, Apollo, while images of the Virgin and Child appear to be derived from those of the Egyptian goddess Isis and her son Horus. Fifth-century mosaics in the villas of north Africa are unashamedly classical in their subject matter and even the mosaics uncovered in Justinian’s palace in Constantinople are traditional, with no hint of Christianity.
In this sense Christianity was drawing on the cultural background it shared with paganism. It was a gradual process by which Christian art was to develop its own distinct systems of iconography and ritual. If, in Rome, one walks across from the bucolic mosaics of Santa Costanza to the neighbouring church of St Agnes, the magnificent early seventh-century mosaic of St Agnes shows the difference. In the evocative words of Peter Brown: ‘St. Agnes hovers silently and alone, set against a bottomless sea of gold, above an apse made as exquisite and translucent as a honeycomb by marble columns.’ Even if pagan themes were eventually eclipsed or subsumed, they survived much longer than traditional accounts have suggested largely because the mass of Christians now flocking into the church had no incentive to abandon them.
One could perhaps talk as easily of the pagan adoption of Christianity as of the Christian adoption of the pagan world. The traditional narrative of two cultures in conflict, with Christianity ‘triumphing’ over paganism, has long been superseded. (For the developments in art see Jas Elsner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire, 100-450, New York and Oxford, 1998.)
World History
