Paganism in the third-century Roman Empire took many different forms. In the forefront were the mainstream public cults of the Graeco-Roman cities. Throughout the empire the inhabitants of the provinces, especially those living in cities, identified their local gods with members of the Graeco-Roman pantheon. Although in many cases the indigenous origins of these cults remain identifiable, the practice of giving the gods familiar Greek or Latin names gave a unified appearance to public religion.
This unity was reinforced by the broadly similar institutions and patterns of religious practice.18 Cult activity was most conspicuous at major temples in towns and cities, and was often associated with large public festivals. Animal sacrifice was the most important form of ritual observance, but the festivals included ceremonial processions, public feasts, and especially games, competitions, and other spectacles. Many festivals from the first to the third centuries were associated with emperor worship, which enhanced rather than competed with traditional cult in provincial cities. Gladiatorial contests were a form of spectacle closely linked to the imperial cult. All this activity was expensive to mount and was only made possible by the disposable surplus wealth to be found in prosperous cities. Temple building and public festivals were either financed by the cities themselves or by donations from members of the local aristocracy. Sometimes individual families also paid the expenses of the priesthoods. This was in essence a city-based religious system. Cults and ritual activity were integrated into the institutions of the polis and funded to a considerable degree by the euergetism of private benefactors.
Social and economic changes during the third century had a big impact on the pattern of religious behavior. The most important of these was the decline of the city-states as viable and independent economic units with the freedom to dispose of their own surplus wealth. Aristocratic generosity, which had sustained the boom in public civic paganism since the later Hellenistic period, and which had reached a climax in the cities of the second and early third centuries ad, occurred while the empire was mostly at peace. New temples, lavish festivals, musical and athletic games were also a particular feature of the empire’s peaceful provinces. The overall tax burden of the empire was generally affordable, and the most urbanized areas of the empire were not exposed to intense requisitioning or direct demands by Roman armies. These conditions changed during the third century, especially after the end of the Severan period, when increased taxation and militarization affected the ability and the willingness of Rome’s richer subjects to pay for buildings and local festivals. Local elites no longer voluntarily spent their surplus wealth to enhance the public facilities of the cities. It is significant that in the fourth and fifth centuries public civic building was rarely initiated by members of the local elite but by provincial governors or other Roman officials.19 When the empire’s fortunes revived at the end of the third century thanks to the energetic measures of the tetrarchs, the initiative came not from provincial cities but from the central authorities.20 Meanwhile polis-based religion declined along with other institutions of the city-states.
This did not bring civic paganism to an immediate end. Although smaller cities succumbed to the pressures, large centers, and especially the capital cities of the new provinces, provide evidence for continued urban vitality. The municipalities of Roman North Africa remained viable until the end of the fourth century, and their leading families continued to finance local civic cults until the time of Augustine.21 But the overall impact of social and economic changes was to shift attention away from showy public festivals, which were supported by and served the interests of the urban elites, to popular and less formal aspects of paganism. Augustine, who had spent his student years in the aggressively secular environment of Carthage, encountered enthusiastic pagan festivities of this sort during his years as bishop of Hippo. In 409 he deplored blatant pagan impieties in the town of Calama:
At the June 1st festival, the impious ceremony of the pagans was celebrated without hindrance from anyone, with such impudent audacity as was not ventured in Julian’s day: an aggressive crowd of dancers in the precinct passed directly in front of the church doors. And when the clergy attempted to prevent such an outrageous thing, the church was stoned. (Augustine, ep. 91.8)
But he was fighting not only against pagan traditions but against the government line. Ten years earlier Honorius had issued a law to the proconsul of Africa which expressly permitted these activities:
When by our salutary law we forbade the practice of sacrilegious rites, we were not giving our authority for the abolition of the festivals which bring the citizens together for their communal pleasure. In consequence we decree that, according to the ancient customs, these forms of entertainment should be available to the people, although without any sacrifice or illegal superstition. (CTh. 16.10.17 = CJust. 1.11.4)22
Blood sacrifice, the defining activity at the heart of pagan ritual, was banned, with gradually increasing effect, throughout the Christian empire,23 But animals were still slaughtered at feasts, which retained most of the elements of pagan festivities. Libanius at Antioch in the late 380s explained how the practice continued and might avoid Christian sanction:
But for a banquet, a dinner, or a feast and the bullocks were slaughtered elsewhere (not in temple grounds): no altar received the blood offering, no single part of the victim was burned, no offering of meal began the ceremony nor did libations follow it. If the people assemble in some beauty spot, slaughter a calf or a sheep or both, and boil or roast it, and then lie down on the ground and eat it, I do not
See that they have broken the laws____Even if they were in the habit of drinking
Together amid the scent of every kind of incense, they broke no law, nor yet if in their toasts they sang hymns and invoked the gods. (Libanius, Or. 30.17ff.)
In modern Islam animal sacrifice has no place within the religious ritual, but the Eid al-Adha festival (the Turkish Kurban Bayram), including the blood sacrifice of a victim, commemorating Abraham’s sacrifice of the ram in place of his son Ishmael (or in Christian tradition Ishmael’s half-brother Isaac), is a universal practice of Moslem societies.
It is, however, open to question whether these non-Christian rituals were fully pagan, or whether they had been tacitly accepted as part of popular everyday culture, whose religious overtones could be ignored. Of course they were deplored by bishops and other Christian authorities, but so too were other diversions such as circus spectacles and wild beast hunts in the amphitheater, which were as popular with Christian as with pagan spectators. Christians perpetuated many forms of popular pagan activity by disregarding their religious associations and re-branding them as secular or even as Christian events. We may compare the persistence of May Day and other festivals in Christian Europe, or the secular festival of Nourouz (New Year’s Day) in contemporary Iran, which attracts criticism from zealots but is universally celebrated by the people and tolerated even by a strongly religious regime. One of the literary works of the fourth century which points towards a desacralization of popular festivities was the almanac of Dionysius Philocalus, produced in Rome in 354, which assembled lists of emperors and consuls, city prefects and bishops of Rome, as well as publishing the ecclesiastical calendar of the Roman Church juxtaposed with that of the non-Christian holidays of the civic year.24
It is much harder to classify the private religious beliefs and practices which played a large part in people’s lives across the empire. Magical practices were ubiquitous, and belief in their effectiveness was widespread. People called on supernatural powers to achieve their personal goals in love, life, and business, or to thwart their rivals. Practitioners of magic, amateur or professional, drew on an eclectic medley of religious traditions. So magic texts refer to Greek, Near Eastern, Jewish, and Christian divine powers and demonic forces. People hedged their bets by calling on gods of all sorts to help them. However, it would be mistaken to see all this as merely random activity. Magic comprised a complex cultural system with its own recognized patterns and rules for curses and binding spells, spirit consultations and exorcisms.25 Belief in magic cut across other divisions, being common to pagans, Jews, and Christians, and was prevalent among all social classes. In the later empire accusations of sorcery were common in tense and competitive political environments, among the upper classes of the major cities, and around the fringes of the imperial court.26 Laws against magic and consulting astrologers were usually more concerned with the politically subversive implications of these activities than with the rituals themselves.27 Legislation about magic, however, implicitly concedes that there was an enormous body of “superstitious” activity which could not be suppressed. The social significance of magic may be compared with that of exorcism in this period. One third of Rome’s clerical establishment in ad 251 consisted of exorcists; and exorcism, which had its origins in Palestinian Jewish practice, is portrayed as an essential remedy against demonic possession by Christian sources from the Gospels themselves, through the main Christian apologetic writers of the second and third centuries, to countless lives of saints between the fourth and sixth centuries.28 It spread beyond Judaeo-Christian circles and became part of a shared culture of magical activity.29
While magical practices assumed the existence of an almost unlimited number of daemonic forces, which might be marshaled to support or oppose human endeavors, it is also clear that monotheistic religious ideas were widespread. The notion that the universe was dominated by a single supreme god can be traced back to archaic Greek thought. The idea became a mainstream one in Greek philosophy and can be traced in the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic traditions.30 The growing numbers of Jews and Christians, at all levels of the population, helped to spread monotheistic ideas even among those who did not fully subscribe to them. Paradoxically, it was not difficult to reconcile pagan monotheism with the pattern of polytheistic worship in Greek cities. Educated and also less sophisticated members of the population could see the logic of the argument that there should be one supreme god, to whom other divinities were subordinated. During the third century AD the oracle at Claros in Asia Minor propounded the view that there was a single god in heaven, known from many inscriptions as Theos Hypsistos (“Highest God”), to whom other divine beings, including the Olympian divinities were subordinate. Another oracle put out by Zeus Philios at Antioch in 311 offered a theology in which Zeus was the supreme deity, whose protective authority covered all the local civic gods and goddesses.31 In competition with the growing infiuence of Christianity, various forms of pagan monotheism emerged after the mid-second century and into late antiquity. Particularly important were the beliefs propagated by the so-called Chaldean oracles, a religious movement based in the Syrian city of Apamea.32
The most distinctive characteristic of Christianity was not that it was a monotheistic religion, which was by no means out of place in the spectrum of religious activity in the later Roman Empire, but that it was based on formal commitment to beliefs about Jesus’ divinity. Christians believed that they would be redeemed through Christ’s self-sacrifice, and consequently achieve eternal life.33 Their sacred books, especially the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and Paul’s letters, taught them that God had sent his son in human form to redeem mankind; that he had suffered for men, died on the cross and risen again; and that through his sacrifice his followers would find redemption from their own sins and eternal life in the kingdom of heaven. Christians through their faith would thus find salvation in the world to come. Those who denied Him forfeited their own redemption. Christians were distinguished not only from pagan polytheists, but also from other monotheists, including the Jews, whose religion was based not on the belief in redemption but on adherence to righteousness and God’s law. Faith in Christ the redeeming god, which was at the core of Christian self-definition, was extraordinary by pagan and Jewish standards. It could be tested very simply. Do you believe that Jesus is the son of God, came to earth to redeem us, and rose from the dead? Those who subscribed to these claims considered themselves, and were considered by others, to be Christians. Those who called themselves Christians could be assumed to hold these beliefs.
Christian faith was represented by powerful symbols. Most important of these were the Easter festival and the sign of the cross, which simultaneously represented Christ’s death and the locus of his resurrection, and thus became the central expression of Christian belief in redemption. In the search for Christian unity during the later Roman Empire it became essential to define the precise nature of Christ. The fundamental tenets of the faith had to be sharpened and presented in a form that was universally recognized and acceptable. The innumerable versions of the creed which were put forward and debated during the fourth and early fifth centuries were intended to supply this essential requirement. Between the ecumenical councils of Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381 the relationship of Christ to God was the central theological and political issue for all believers. In the fifth century the debate shifted to the related issue of the nature of Christ himself, whether he had the dual nature of God and Man, or whether these two aspects were fused into a single divine nature. The first of these two positions was finally upheld by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which thereby defined Christian orthodoxy for the remainder of antiquity in the East. However, this was only achieved at the expense of creating an unhealable split between orthodox Chalcedonians and other Christians, mainly in Syria, Egypt, and the eastern frontier areas of the empire, who upheld the Monophysite position of believing in the one nature of Christ (see pp. 313-9).
World History
