Questions raised by religious change in the later Roman Empire The persistence of paganism
The diversity of paganism: civic cults and sacriice; private beliefs and magical practice The central articles of Christian belief Christian sects and heresies. Jews, Manichees, Montanists Christianity and the state Anti-Christian legislation from Nero to Diocletian The great persecution Constantine's pro-Christian legislation Julian promotes paganism
The state and pagan cults, from tolerance to persecution The disappearance of paganism in the later empire
The later Roman Empire underwent an unprecedented level of religious change. At the center of this transformation was the conversion of pagans to Christians in the fourth century, when it seems likely that more than half the inhabitants of the Roman world converted to Christianity. The eradication of paganism was
A History of the Later Roman Empire, AD 284-641, Second Edition. Stephen Mitchell. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
By any standards rapid, but it was not instantaneous. Many people, at all levels of society, stuck to their old beliefs and practices, and significant pagan groups were to be found in the fifth and even the sixth centuries. The impact of this religious revolution is evident in almost every aspect of the history of late antiquity. It remains, however, a challenging task to explain how and why this process occurred, and to evaluate its significance. These simple questions in turn raise a series of complicated historical problems. Neither pagans nor Christians formed homogeneous groups. Conversion itself can be seen both as an individual and as a collective phenomenon, sometimes adopted voluntarily, at others as a result of force and coercion. If we use the metaphor of a journey to describe the progress from one side to the other, it is clear there were many different starting points and destinations, that some pagans had much further to travel to become Christians than others, and that not all the traffic was in one direction. Certain features of pagan polytheism were more easily discarded than others, and many communities that called themselves Christian undoubtedly retained and perpetuated pre-Christian traditions.
There is also a larger consideration. How large a place did religion occupy in public and private life? Was conversion to Christianity of overwhelming importance in determining how individuals or communities related to one another? Did religious preferences largely determine people’s social and political behavior, or was there plenty of secular space within which people could fraternize, intermarry, and conduct business regardless of each other’s beliefs?
This chapter begins with a general account of the religious scene in the Roman Empire in the third century AD, drawing attention to the main aspects of pagan polytheism before the conversion of Constantine. It then considers the importance of state policies towards traditional paganism and Christianity during the main period of transition in the third and fourth centuries. Chapter 8 is concerned with conversion, and examines the importance of religion in shaping communal identities in the later empire.
There are serious difficulties in assessing the balance between paganism and Christianity in late antiquity, particularly during the fourth century. Most of the mainstream written sources available to us are Christian, and they belittle or suppress the evidence for paganism.1 Pagan rituals were often represented as the activities of a deluded minority. Christian writing at the beginning of our period had been predominantly apologetic, offering a defense and justification for the faith in the face of criminalization by the Roman state and the critique of Greek intellectuals. After the conversion of Constantine the tone and format of this literature changed to become assertively triumphalist. Christian authors had no interest in providing a realistic view of the strength of paganism, whether numerically or in other ways. Meanwhile secular authors of the fourth century, who were by no means all pagans, preferred to mention Christianity as little as possible. The brief historical epitomes, which document the period of the tetrarchs and Constantine, scarcely mention religious issues at all. Even Ammianus Marcellinus, who was fully aware of the nature and significance of Christianity, and may have been a Christian himself for some of his life, pushes all aspects of Christianity to the margins of his narrative, usually excluding it altogether from view.2
Other sources are also difficult to evaluate. Inscriptions, especially religious dedications, are the richest single source of information about pagan cults in the Roman Empire. They occur in great numbers during the second and third centuries, but become rare in the fourth.3 However, this is at least as much to do with a change in epigraphic habits of commemoration as it is with the abandonment of paganism. An exception must be made for the city of Rome, where the epigraphic habit remained strong and pagan cults are well attested, at least in the senatorial class until around 400. Archaeology may offer a more dispassionate and objective record, but the archaeology of cult is a problematic area. It is very rare to find archaeological evidence for the construction or even for the major rebuilding of pagan temples after the mid-third century. On the other hand material evidence for monumental church building is also sparse before the mid - or later fourth century in any part of the empire. Thus the most dynamic period of religious change from 250-350 has left little mark in monumental archaeology.4
Later paganism was also camoufiaged and obscured by the distortions of its opponents. After the religious re-orientation of the Roman state, which was achieved by Constantine and his successors, all pronouncements or actions by emperors and their officials were also either explicitly or implicitly Christian. This characteristic became more pronounced as affairs of state and church became inextricably bound to one another. This creates an illusion that nonChristian religions had disappeared or had been marginalized. But much religious activity, like many other aspects of life in the late Roman world, was beyond the reach of the state.
In any case the society and culture of late antiquity were thoroughly imbued with pagan traditions that could not be speedily diluted. At the highest political level emperors developed a style of rulership which increasingly distanced them from the populations that they ruled. The huge gap between rulers of large territories and their subjects in the ancient world was one that was invariably bridged by cult.5 In the later Roman Empire, ritualized behavior which emphasized the emperors’ power and authority became an even more prominent part of political life.6 Inevitably, therefore, many aspects of ruler worship survived in the late empire. Of course, both in literature and in representational art formulae were found to distinguish between the nature of divinity, in a Christian sense, and the charismatic power of the emperors. Both Constantine and Justinian were the agents of God’s will, not divine beings themselves, but this did not prevent Eusebius from portraying Constantine as virtually a second Christ (Eusebius, VC 4.71), or Procopius from envisaging Justinian as a supernatural daemonic force (Procopius, Secret History 12). Priscus, in his famous account of the embassy to the Huns in 449, records how the separate groups of Romans and Huns that were encamped together on the road from Constantinople to Serdica became embroiled in a violent argument about the qualities of their respective rulers, Theodosius II and Attila. To the Roman party the question was incomprehensible, for how was it possible to make a comparison between a mere man and the emperor, a god (Priscus fr. 11.2)? The contradiction, at least to a modern student of the period, between Christian belief and the notion of ancient rulers as divinities appears most starkly in Procopius’ Secret History. Procopius bitterly attacked Justinian and Theodora for requiring even members of the Senate to perform an extreme and humiliating form of proskynesis, corresponding to the conduct of slaves before their masters. The ideology of this despotism, which reflected similar practices in the contemporary Sassanian court, was that all mankind should abase themselves before the omnipotent and virtually divine authority of the emperor (Procopius, Secret History 30, 21-30).7
Pagan traditions also remained ineradicably embedded in the high culture of late antiquity. This was partly due to the enduring appeal to educated people of classical literature. But it was also the result of an educational system which was based on the study of grammar and rhetoric. The language of public life in the eastern part of the empire was a sophisticated and artiicially elaborated form of literary Greek, which had been mastered by those who were the products of this system.8 However, it was only possible to master language at this level through the study of literature, and that unavoidably meant a familiarity with pagan mythology, philosophy, and rhetoric.9 The wealthy elite of the cities of the eastern Roman Empire, and also, to a lesser extent, their counterparts in the Latin-speaking West, were reared on classical learning and the pagan religious ideas that were embedded in it. Famously Julian the Apostate attempted to ban Christians from teaching this traditional syllabus. A Christian teacher was by deinition guilty of gross hypocrisy if he rejected the moral substance of the works he was expounding.
I think it absurd that men who expound the works of these writers should dishonour the gods whom they used to honour. Yet, though I think this is absurd, I do not say that they ought to change their opinions and then instruct the young. But I give them the choice; either not to teach what they do not think admirable, or, if they wish to teach, let them persuade their pupils that neither Homer nor Hesiod nor any of these writers who they espoused and have declared to be guilty of impiety, folly and error in regard to the gods, is such as they declare. (Julian, ep. 42, 423a-b, trans. Stevenson)
Julian’s legislation was short-lived, and was rejected by Christians as well as by pagans. Speciic literary genres, notably epic poetry and panegyric oratory, retained the hallmarks of paganism throughout late antiquity. The longest Greek epic that survives is the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, written in Egypt around the middle of the ifth century by a poet who was also responsible for rendering St John’s Gospel into hexameter verse.10 The fusion of Christian piety with the high culture of the pagan tradition is particularly evident in literary circles around the court of Theodosius II at Constantinople (see p. 116). It was left to Justinian to follow through the logic of Julian’s law in legislation that forbade all pagan teaching (CJust. I.5.18, I.11.10).11
Of course the illiterate inhabitants of the ancient world, the great majority, had at best only indirect access to this sophisticated literature. During the fourth and fifth centuries there was a shift away from the traditional learning and elaborate rationality of what we call the classical world to much less sophisticated ideas. However, much of the writing of the fourth and fifth centuries, notably saints’ lives, letter collections, and accounts of miracles, reveals popular superstitions and beliefs that are absent from more sophisticated genres of literature. After 300, as power in the empire began to slip from the civic elites and was transferred to thousands of state bureaucrats, and as the size of the clergy was vastly enlarged, so many more people in positions of authority were drawn from a wider pool of the population. These brought a less educated approach to decision making. The ideas and educational values of the elite were diluted by the popular beliefs of the masses.12
Pagan traditions were also tenaciously preserved at a popular level. Most of the evidence relating to popular festivals in the ancient world comes from late antiquity. The religious changes of the period could not obliterate pagan practices and cultural attitudes which were engrained in society itself.13 There is abundant evidence from late antiquity that non-Christian festivals and rituals continued to be celebrated throughout the empire.14 Most notable were traditional calendrical celebrations, associated with particular times or seasons of the year, but not strongly attached to specific pagan gods. These included the Brumalia and Saturnalia, staged in November and December respectively, festivities associated with the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and above all the celebration of New Year’s Day, the Kalends, which was frequently deplored by Christian preachers, but left in place by imperial legislation (CTh. 16.10.3 [341]; 8 [382], 17 [399], 12.1.145 [399]).15 A notable event which was widespread in the Near East was the popular festival of the Maiuma, which involved night-time spectacles of pantomime, parties, and, according to the unreliable hostile testimony of the preacher John Chrysostom, naked female bathing.16 The event spread throughout the empire, to fifth-century Aphrodisias in Caria, to sixth-century Constantinople, and to the port of Ostia in the West.17 Christian leaders objected resolutely, but largely in vain, to these events.
World History
