A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity

by Douglas Boin

  By chance, the text of Caracalla’s announcement survives. A copy of it was written on a small piece of papyrus that was later thrown into an ancient trash dump in Roman Egypt, where it was later fished out. Today, this scrap is known as P. Giss. 40 because it belongs to the papyrus collection (“P.”) at the University of Giessen (“Giss.”) in Hesse, Germany. Although torn and tattered, which makes piecing the lines of text back together again a frustrating exercise, Giessen Papyrus no. 40 (P. Giss. 40) offers a ghostly record of Caracalla’s voice:

  I grant … to all [free persons of the Roman] world the citizenship of the Romans … For it seems fair [that the masses not only] should bear all the burdens [of empire] but participate in the victory as well. [This my own] edict is to reveal the majesty of the Roman people. [For this majesty happens] to be superior to that of the other [nations]. (P. Giss. 40, trans. by F. M. Heichelheim, “The Text of the ‘Constitutio Antoniniana’ and the Three Other Decrees of the Emperor Caracalla Contained in Papyrus Gissensis 40,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology [1941], p. 12)

  This piece of papyrus is also important because it preserves a story that speaks to Caracalla’s motivations. In the opening lines of the decree, Caracalla alludes to a recent assassination attempt. The emperor makes clear that his citizenship decree was a way of giving thanks to Rome’s divinities for saving him. Caracalla would not be the last third‐century emperor to appeal to the gods as part of a policy initiative for uniting the Roman Empire. The role that the Roman gods played as a kind of civic glue, keeping the diverse people of the Roman world together, is one that we will look again in the next chapter.

  As for reaction to the news, only one writer – a man who wrote comfortably in ancient Greek – provides us any immediate comment on Caracalla’s decree. Cassius Dio (d. 235 CE) was a senator, a consul, and a provincial manager, and he was also not entirely convinced by the sincerity of the emperor’s piety. “This was the reason why [Caracalla] made all the people in his empire Roman citizens,” Cassius Dio says in his Roman History. “Nominally he was honoring them, but his real purpose was to increase his revenues by this means, inasmuch as aliens [non‐citizens] did not have to pay most of these taxes” (Roman History 78.9, LCL trans. by E. Cary [1927]).

  Was the senator pulling back the curtain on the policy deliberations which had led to Caracalla’s announcement? Or was his cynicism a personal gripe, the result of his own cultivated contempt for Caracalla’s decision to knock down Rome’s borders and admit a whole host of “new Romans” to the empire? It would be helpful if we had more sources. As it stands, one has to start to wonder from what corners of Rome the notion of a third‐century “crisis” may have originated. For the new citizens of Rome, Caracalla’s decree marked the start of a new day, a new way of being Roman.

  Rome’s birthday is celebrated, a saeculum is renewed

  To think that third‐century Rome was a festive place – a place where cultural traditions continued, social customs were passed on, and the composition of the empire grew larger – cuts against the standard view of crisis. But there is every reason to look behind the curtains of gloom and doom, hanging in the palace, and see what was happening outside. The streets of Rome, even its most resplendent entertainment venues, were about to be filled with a celebration.

  The faces of this new, changing Rome were everywhere, starting with Emperor Philip. In 248 CE, the soldier who would later be remembered for having murdered Gordian III would preside over the thousand‐year birthday of Rome. The city which had been founded by Romulus at the mythical moment of April 21, 753 BCE – the asylum city, the open city of debtors and creditors and murderers and magistrates (Plutarch, Life of Romulus 9.3) – was now run by a man, Philip, who had been raised in Roman Syria. Tradition, which is to say, the awkward customs of other history writers, would prefer that we label him as “Philip the Arab”; generations of history students have reduced Philip’s biography to this one ethnic attribute. But we should do better for the leader of 60 million people. Philip was Roman; he just happened to come from a corner of the Mediterranean most traditionalists in Italy couldn’t bring themselves to admit was part of their same world.

  Like Caracalla, however, Philip, too, would depend upon the gods to unite the Roman people. And the thousandth‐year birthday party was a fitting time to give thanks for the empire’s resilience. Bronze coins that were circulated during Philip’s reign (r. 244–249 CE) show one of the most iconic symbols of Rome’s empire, the she‐wolf who had taken care to nurse the young Romulus and Remus after their birth. On the legends of these coins, a Latin text announced to everyone who picked them up that a new saeculum, or “divine age,” had been inaugurated.

  The new saeculum would have given all residents of the empire enthusiastic reason for celebrating the gods, paying thanks to Rome’s long‐standing divine protection. Students approaching ancient history for the first time, however, may have some difficulty grasping the cultural significance of this word. Because it looks deceptively like the English word “secular,” it can lead aspiring historians to imagine that daily life in ancient Rome was similarly divided into the neat and tidy boxes which we use to organize our lives today: “religious” and “secular.”

  Unfortunately, the Latin word saeculum did not carry that connotation. Romans had no word for distinguishing, or isolating, the “religious” elements of their daily life from the “secular” state. Both these concepts are borrowed from more recent periods of history, specifically the intellectual exploration of the Enlightenment, when thinkers and politicians began to devise conceptual frameworks for quarantining clergy from managing the government. By creating the idea of a “secular” space, one that was divorced from the influences of “religion,” Enlightenment thinkers engineered one of the most important social and cultural developments of the eighteenth century. Neither of these categories applies to Rome, to Late Antiquity, or to any period of pre‐modern history, however. And to write about the people who lived during this time as if they understood our modern terms is not recommended.

  When Emperor Philip inaugurated the new saeculum for Rome, he was writing the next chapter in a divine story that stretched all the way back to the Etruscans – for whom the history of the world had been divided into discrete segments of time, or saecula (the Latin plural of saeculum). Only Etruscan priests knew the exact length of time that each saecula lasted, but the passing of one and the coming of the next marked a momentous occasion which had to be celebrated. Romans, who from the time of the earliest Republic had invited Etruscan priests into their governmental system, had continued this practice. It served to remind all Romans that the gods were truly looking out for the health of the Roman people and their empire. Caracalla, Philip, and still other third‐century emperors would all strike this optimistic note in their public policies, as we will see very clearly in our next chapter, which explores the role of worship in the Roman Empire.

  New walls and city borders are constructed

  As the Roman people took account of the Sasanian Empire on their eastern border, as they wrestled with the presence of “new Roman citizens” in their own streets and city centers, Rome and its emperors began to work to repair the snags and tears at the edges of society. Break‐away provinces were reincorporated. By the 280s CE, the Rule of Four would move into palaces throughout the empire. Throughout this time, the city of Rome matured.

  By 275 CE, the capital would be encircled by a towering new wall, both a practical defensive posture and a powerful statement about the city’s grandeur. (For material culture works in both these ways. It occupies a physical place in the landscape but it also shapes the world people live in.) In this way, the walls of Emperor Aurelian (r. 270–275 CE) would come to define the urban appearance of Rome for the next seventeen centuries (Figure 4.5). Designed to keep out raiders, at the same time they embraced parts of Rome – like the right bank of the Tiber and the tallest hill of Rome, the Janiculum – which had never been incorporated into the cit
y. At the conclusion of the third century, then, even Rome’s city boundaries were changing, just as the boundaries of the empire were in flux around it. Aurelian’s walls are not a monument that can be easily made to disappear from history, either. Their durability and their lasting physical authority help explain why Rome would always carry the memories – even in the city’s darkest hours – of its once glorious empire.

  Figure 4.5 In the late third century CE, the Roman Emperor Aurelian constructed a new brick‐and‐mortar wall for the city of Rome. The capital had long since outgrown its earlier defenses, constructed out of volcanic rock seven hundred years earlier during the city’s Republican period. Aurelian’s new wall would begin to redefine life in Rome and play a lasting role, in many urban forms, throughout the Middle Ages. This view of Rome faces to the west from the ramparts of the ancient gate now called the Porta San Sebastiano, leading to the church of St. Sebastian. With this new spectacular fortification, the neighborhoods in the distance, on the west bank of the Tiber, were included in Rome’s walls for the first time in the third century CE.

  Photo credit: Author’s photograph, 2012.

  If there was one hard‐and‐fast way to define what it meant to live within these borders, however, neither Emperors Caracalla, Philip, nor Aurelian had been able to articulate it. The best that some Roman writers seemed capable of mustering – if we consider the subtext to Cassius Dio’s discussion of the citizenship decree or, later, the fabricated tales told about Gordian’s death – was the highly debatable idea that being a real Roman simply meant not being or acting like “them,” whoever it is “they” actually were.

  Summary

  In the third century CE, another empire was formed at the eastern border of Rome’s. This Sasanian state would remain an important conversation partner for the Roman government and Roman people until it was conquered in 651 CE. Here, at sites in modern Iran like Naqsh‐i Rustam, Sasanian kings drew upon a wealth of Persian history, combining it with a divinely inspired understanding of their status as rulers, to evoke their strong vision for the Sasanian Empire. Kings like Sapur I used these sites to advertise their military victories over Rome’s emperors.

  The Roman people themselves had long been fascinated by Persian culture and told themselves stories that the popular god Mithras, whom many Roman communities worshipped, had come from Persia. We also saw, however, that many of the traits and characteristics which Romans believed were “exotic” and “Persian” had been filtered through Hellenistic and Roman customs, transforming Mithras into something that tells us very little about the Persian people. Still, traces of dialogue between the two empires and their people can indeed be detected in the third century CE by looking at material evidence, which speaks to a level of artistry and craftsmanship that was crossing the newly erected political borders.

  Lastly, we saw that, inside the borders of Rome during this same time, a simmering conversation about what it meant to be a Roman had led many emperors – Caracalla, Philip, and Aurelian – to take a more active role in promoting social and cultural unity among the people of the Roman provinces and the residents of the city of Rome itself.

  Study Questions

  Who was Ardashir? What did he do, and why are his actions historically significant?

  Did the Roman and Persian people always live in conflict? How do you know?

  Evaluate the evidence for the death of the Roman Emperor Gordian III, using both Persian and Roman sources. How do you make sense of the conflicting reports?

  What do the policies and programs of Emperors Caracalla, Philip, and Aurelian tell you about Roman society in the third century CE?

  Suggested Readings

  Matthew Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

  Hendrik Dey, The Aurelian Wall and the Refashioning of Imperial Rome, AD 271–855 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  Beate Dignas and Engelbert Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity: Neighbors and Rivals (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  Jaś Elsner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100–450 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  5

  Worship

  Less than a year after Emperor Philip had staged grand celebrations for Rome’s thousandth birthday – to which he had treated the people of the capital to parades of elk, lions, leopards, hippopotami, giraffes, and hordes of gladiatorial games, according to Writers of the Imperial History (Life of the Three Gordians 33.1) – Rome’s first Syrian‐born ruler died. The year was 249 CE. Whether he was assassinated by his own soldiers or was killed in a civil war being fought against the Senate’s new favorite choice for emperor, Decius, is unclear. But in the aftermath of the loss, the Roman government, its military, and the new citizens of the Roman Empire remained fractured politically and socially. Looking for ways to heal the divisions, Emperor Decius (r. 249–251 CE) used a bold solution to try to address the problems. He called for a universal act of sacrifice to be performed in cities throughout the Roman world.

  To modern commentators, Emperor Decius will look like yet another tired example of a manipulative politician who, in the long history of government officials, used “religion” to advance his own ideological agendas. This analysis makes a mockery of Roman history and has to be avoided by researchers writing about Rome. Here’s why.

  As we saw in our previous discussion of ancient Greek and Latin sources in Chapter 3, neither Decius nor any other politician, in his day or after, had the intellectual tools to think of the idea of “religion” as a sphere of private, individual behavior. The proper worship of the gods, what Romans referred to as the practice of their religio, was an integral, necessary part of the good management of the state. Priests and priestesses who oversaw these public rituals held positions that were the equivalent of government offices. To put it in simpler terms, then, “the proper worship of the gods” functioned like a branch of the Roman constitutional system. Religio provided support to the empire’s very fabric and foundations. As an idea, then, it went to the very heart of what it meant for a man or a woman to call themselves a Roman.

  This ongoing political conversation about what it meant to be a Roman had profound effects on Rome over its long history. To start, individuals and groups who happened to find their rituals and beliefs outside the mainstream faced an uphill battle for greater social integration. However important their own sets of worship practices might be to them – indeed, however legitimate their “religious beliefs” may be in our eyes – the people associated with these outside groups were looked down upon. They were stigmatized for practicing an unhealthy, detrimental form of worship. To conservative Romans, their rituals and beliefs were called in Latin a superstitio.

  People who were mocked for practicing a superstitio were not seen as successfully integrated into the life of the empire. To some second‐century CE Romans, for example, Jews counted among the empire’s most harmful practitioners of superstitiones. On the eve of Rome’s cataclysmic war with the Jewish people in Judaea, which was waged between 66 and 74 CE, the historian Tacitus tried to explain what made Jews so fundamentally different: “Prodigies had indeed occurred [announcing the signs of a coming war in Jersualem], but to avert them either by victims or by vows [as a Roman politician might] is held unlawful by a people which, though prone to superstitio, is opposed to all propitiatory rites” (Tacitus, Histories 5.13, LCL trans. by C. Moore [1931]). Tacitus and his contemporaries would characterize Jesus’ worshippers with the same derogatory word (Tacitus, Annals 15.44; Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96).

  Throughout the empire the hostile headwinds faced by these groups were strong and at times destructive, but that does not give historians license to write about this tense social dynamic as if it were the same as widespread, legally backed persecution. Even facing the challenges that they did, many Jews and Jewish communities lived openly th
roughout the Mediterranean alongside their Roman neighbors, friends, and co‐workers, as we will see later. Jews themselves did not need to win a special legal status to achieve this level of interaction and integration. Their small successes, notwithstanding the profoundly devastating wars fought against Rome, suggest that precisely what kind of worship counted as religio was a topic Romans themselves would contest and debate – at home, in the forum, or at a local town council. Despite harsh policies being imposed from the top‐down, in Roman culture there was always the potential for a bottom‐up conversation to shape Roman society.

  5.1 The Civic Sacrifice Policy of 250 CE

  In 250 CE, Decius would attempt to legislate and legally enforce what was culturally “proper” or socially “acceptable.” He did so by calling for an empire‐wide moment of civic sacrifice. Facing the realities of Roman citizens living on three continents, it makes sense that one of Decius’ first goals for his administration would be to find a way to unite the people of his disparate empire and to do so with an act that could strengthen the bonds of its community. It’s also natural that he and his advisors chose to make sacrifice the central component of their plan.

  Public sacrifices to the Roman gods had long been a feature of Mediterranean cities, even before the people who lived in them had won Roman citizenship. At the most important festivals, there were even public banquets where the leading figures of town, Romans and locals alike, were present among the people. Participation at a sacrifice, meeting one’s neighbors, seeing and being seen, had long been a way to bridge economic and social divides that existed in Roman towns.