A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity

by Douglas Boin

Unfortunately, however noble Decius’ policy may have seemed in theory, the plan to implement it was not the most bureaucratically efficient. At every performance of sacrifice – whether an animal was being slaughtered or incense and wine were being offered to thank the gods and the divine emperors for protecting the state – Decius ordered that signed receipts be given out so that Rome’s citizens could prove they had attended. The number of officials involved in these transactions must have been staggering. Thanks to the arid climate of Egypt, many of these receipts from Decius’ civic sacrifice policy have survived.

  The following receipt is dated June 27, 250 CE. It was written on parchment in ancient Greek and was pulled from the garbage at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, by scholars hunting for scraps of ancient texts. “To the commissioners of sacrifices at Oxyrhynchus from Aurelius Gaius son of Ammonius and Taeus,” it begins.

  Always has it been my habit to sacrifice and pour libations and worship the gods in accordance with the orders of divine decree, and now I have in your presence sacrificed and made libations and tasted the offerings together with Taos my wife, Ammonius and Ammonianus my sons, and … my daughter, acting through me. I request you to certify my statement. [Dated] Year 1 of the Emperor Caesar Gaius Messius Quintus Trajanus Decius Pius Felix Augustus, Epeiph 3 [an Egyptian month]. I, Aurelius Gaion, have delivered [this petition]. I, Aurelius Sarapion, also called Chaeremon, wrote on his behalf, as he is illiterate.

  (Oxyrhynchus Papyri number 12.1464 [P. Oxy. 12.1464], trans. by AnneMarie Luijendijk, Greetings in the Lord: Early Christians and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008], pp. 163–164)

  The specificity of the information written is astounding and is seen on other receipts dated to c.250 CE. The logistics of this imperial record‐keeping must have been mind‐bogglingly complicated, especially if copies were required to be filed in the local records’ hall. What people were expected to do with their receipts once they received them is also unclear. Did Romans need to carry them around, the equivalent of an ancient identity card? Or could they be kept safely at home – stored in a kitchen cupboard, for example, or under the bed – to be retrieved only in the event that a local official needed to confirm that a resident had participated? Historians don’t know.

  Implementation of the policy

  What we can say more confidently is this. The available historical evidence makes overwhelmingly clear that individuals and groups whose worship practices might have been deemed potentially questionable – like Mithras’ followers or Jews – never contested, opposed, protested, or objected to the terms of Decius’ civic sacrifice policy. This silence is significant, and historians must engage with it. For the actions of the worshippers of Mithras or the empire’s many Jewish communities speak quite loudly to the delicate social status of many minority groups throughout the Mediterranean. Neither group was an official Roman religio, yet both found ways to coexist in Roman cities alongside friends and neighbors who did not identify with either of these communities.

  The challenges faced by groups like these were steep. For its entire history, the cult of Mithras was not explicitly recognized, funded, or even socially sanctioned by the Roman state – not at the time of Decius’ decree in the mid‐third century nor even in the last years of the fourth century CE. Consequently, individuals and groups who worshipped Mithras may have born a mark of shame among friends and family. Their willing participation in Decius’ civic sacrifice decree was likely part of a strategy to ensure the successful integration of their cult.

  In the same way, there is no evidence that Jews or any Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean caused a political revolt because of Decius’ decree. Nor is there evidence that Jews ever sought to be exempted from participating in it because they felt it infringed on their liberty as a faith community (Exploring Culture 5.1: A Rich Legacy of Human Figures in Jewish Art; Figure 5.1). These points cannot be written out of the third century. Tellingly, they suggest that one did not need to be a member of a polytheist faith to support the Roman emperor’s political policies.

  Figure 5.1 In this fresco from the synagogue at Dura Europos, Syria, the pharaoh’s daughter finds the infant Moses in the Nile River – a story preserved in the Hebrew Bible. The synagogue at Dura Europos was constructed, c.239 CE, by renovating a private home. When the transformation was complete, the synagogue’s hall of assembly was painted with scenes like this one. The paintings prove definitively that Jewish individuals and communities in antiquity did not interpret the second commandment of the Hebrew Bible as a prohibition against making figural art. This nuanced observation is an important point with relevance for understanding the history of early Christianity, as well. Although Hebrew Scripture instructs Jews not to worship idols, it did not prevent them from drawing, painting, or sculpting pictures of their sacred stories.

  Photo credit: Art Resource.

  Exploring Culture 5.1 A Rich Legacy of Human Figures in Jewish Art

  As Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, Yahweh gave them a set of laws. These included the “Ten Commandments,” related in the Book of Exodus, an account likely written down in the sixth to fifth centuries BCE. The “Ten Commandments” are not the only laws in Jewish Scripture – one rabbi, writing in the third century CE, counted 613 commandments – but one Mosaic law has loomed large over many artists’ shoulders.

  The second commandment reads as follows: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord [Yahweh] your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Exodus 20.4–6 [NRSV]).

  Generations of historians have cited this one passage to claim Jews never developed a figural artistic tradition because scripture forbade it. Archaeological evidence from many Roman cities proves otherwise.

  In northern Israel, just south of the Sea of Galilee at the Roman city of Beth Alpha, one synagogue preserves a mosaic floor with human and animal figures. The mosaic shows Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac. Elsewhere on the floor, a zodiac calendar was created, depicting astrological (animal and figural) signs with Hebrew labels. In the center, it even included a personification of the sun god riding a four‐horse chariot. Assembled from thousands of tiny pieces of colored stone, tesserae, the mosaic at Beth Alpha was laid in the fifth or sixth century CE.

  Perhaps the most significant discovery has come from Syria. At the Roman city of Dura Europos, on the west bank of the Euphrates River, archaeologists working in the 1930s uncovered a room of painted walls showing scenes from the Hebrew Bible. This building, a synagogue, was later destroyed – deliberately – in 256 CE by Dura’s residents as they fortified their town during a war with Persia, but their loss preserved one of the most important examples of Jewish artwork.

  From floor to ceiling, the synagogue was covered with three rows, or registers, of scenes. They show royal episodes, such as Samuel anointing King David; iconic moments from the life of Moses, such as his discovery by the Egyptian pharaoh’s family in a basket on the Nile; as well as stories from other books, like 1 Kings, in which the prophet Elijah demonstrates Yahweh’s power in front of priests of Ba’al, a local Syrian god. All are preserved today, in reconstructed form, in the National Museum in Damascus.

  Exciting discoveries like those at Beth Alpha and Dura Europos also continue to be announced. In 2015, excavators in Huqoq, Israel, revealed that they had uncovered a synagogue mosaic floor with depictions of humans and an elephant. The interpretation of the puzzling group is ongoing, but while scholars pore over its meanings, the assumption of an earlier day – that Jews did not make figural art because it broke one of their laws – can be safely left behind.

  The absence of any public
dispute among followers of Mithras and the Jewish community suggests that both polytheist and monotheist minority individuals and groups were able to find intellectual and social reasons to justify their civic participation in the sacrifice. We will look at these groups more closely in this and the next chapter.

  This perspective gives the more famous story of the third century a sharper context. For what most people know is that some Roman Christians would forever lament Decius’ call to civic sacrifice as a period of “persecution.” This retelling of history cannot be supported by any evidence. Although it may be convenient, even comforting, for the Christian faith community to remember their complicated early history in dualistic terms, this “church view” of the larger Roman story is inside‐out. It also provides subtle misdirection for an inconvenient truth: Many of Jesus’ followers actually took part in Decius’ civic sacrifice because they did not see any problem reconciling it as part of their Roman and Christian identity (Cyprian, Letter 67; Cyprian, On the So‐Called “Lapsed”).

  The historian’s delicate task: writing about the policy

  Decius’ sacrifice decree needs to be described in neutral terms in order for the emperor’s goals and political vision to make historical sense. That’s not what usually happens. By seeing it and narrating it from the perspective of the most intransigent Christian writers – those who brooked no act of Christian compromise with Roman culture – historians become complicit in telling the story of the empire’s 60 million people from the vantage of its most extreme voices.

  The bishop of Caesarea in Roman Palestine, Eusebius, born just after Decius’ reign (c.260–c.339), is one of those influential voices who has distorted the picture. As a church official, he has disproportionately shaped Christians’ understanding of Roman imperial history. In his monumental History of the Church he writes:

  After a reign of seven years, [Emperor] Philip was succeeded by Decius. On account of his hatred of Philip, he commenced a persecution of the churches, in which Fabianus suffered martyrdom at Rome, and Cornelius succeeded him in the episcopate.

  (Eusebius, History of the Church 5.39, trans. by A. McGiffert in the NPNF series [1890])

  Contrary to what Eusebius and other modern church historians who follow his lead assert, however, Decius’ decree was not directed against Christians; nor was it designed to “persecute” them. As Eusebius makes clear from testimony quoted later in his History of the Church, the struggles of some Christian communities, in fact, pre‐dated Decius’ decree. Such was the case in Alexandria (“The persecution among us [in Alexandria] did not begin with the royal decree [of Decius],” reported Bishop Dionysius of Alexander, “but preceded it an entire year,” Eusebius, History of the Church 41.1). Oddly, some Christians were claiming “persecution” before any Roman law was ever announced compelling people to sacrifice.

  This complicated evidence suggests that simple stories of “pagans” and “Christians” clashing because of Decius’ civic sacrifice decree will not suffice to explain the challenges faced by both Rome’s leaders and its people (Key Debates 5.1: When Did Christianity Split from Judaism?). The third‐century Roman world was a melting point of different ethnicities and minority groups; and rulers like Caracalla, Decius, and others were engaged in an earnest, perhaps even urgent desire to keep the empire socially coherent. All of Rome’s politicians and their new citizens were working out the dynamics of what it meant to be a Roman, even the empire’s Christians and Jews.

  Key Debates 5.1 When Did Christianity Split from Judaism?

  Jesus was a Jewish teacher born in the last years of King Herod’s reign, around 4 BCE. Herod had been a client king of Rome. Three decades later, around 28 CE, Jesus would be executed by Roman authorities. Those thirty years may not seem like much, but they led to the birth of a far different Roman world. After one of Herod’s sons proved inept at governing, a Roman official was ordered to control the region, in 6 CE. This event officially created the Roman province of Judaea. With it, a procurator was installed in Jerusalem. Taxes were collected. The Roman army moved in.

  Because of these changes, the first century CE was a tumultuous time in Jerusalem. According to Josephus (c.37–100), at least fifteen rebels tried to foment a Jewish revolt against Roman rule. Their motivations often differed. Some opposed Roman taxes (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.3–10, 23–25). Others, like Jesus son of Ananias, preached a message of apocalyptic doom (Josephus, Jewish War 6.301–309). The hopes of all the leaders were systematically snuffed out by Roman authorities. Jesus’ preaching about an imminent end time likely led to his crucifixion by Roman authorities, too.

  In later telling, however, many of Jesus’ most vocal followers – called by tradition “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” and “John” – would insist that rival Jewish voices had arranged to kill the “Messiah” (“Christ”). These texts, authored after the Temple’s destruction, would play a key role in derailing Jewish–Christian relations. In particular, they gave rise to an ugly belief that, because “the Jews” had killed the “Messiah,” their unconscionable act demanded retribution. Centuries of anti‐Semitism would be born from this messy world of first‐century Jewish politicking.

  But when did Judaism and Christianity split from each other? There is no evidence that Jesus, Paul, or any of the early disciples articulated their mission as one of founding a new religion, “Christianity.” And all the canonical Gospels show signs of working within a Jewish worldview. Only around 80–90 CE, in the letter 1 Peter, does the first evidence emerge that Jesus’ followers had begun, willingly, to call themselves “Christian,” or “follower of the Messiah.” Prior to this time, the word had been tossed about by many Romans as a derogatory term for Jesus’ followers.

  At the start of the second century CE, unresolved identity debates among Jesus’ followers about their own Jewish roots and traditions – the group included a number of Gentile converts by now – grew more intense. Ignatius, a bishop in Antioch (d. 110 CE), testifies to that phenomenon.

  “Having become disciples of Christ,” Ignatius wrote to a community in Magnesia, Asia Minor, “let us learn to live by openly embracing the name ‘Christian’ (in Greek, Christianismos); for whoever is called by any other name than this does not belong to God… . [I]t is utterly absurd to proclaim Jesus Christ and to continue to act ‘openly Jewish’ (in Greek, Ioudaïsmos)” (Letter to the Magnesians 10.1–3, trans. by the author). Ignatius is the first person we know to juxtapose the words Ioudaïsmos and Christianismos, often translated as “Judaism” and “Christianity.” His letter has even led some scholars to deduce that Christianity and Judaism had parted ways by this time.

  The substance of Ignatius’ letter makes clear, however, that the writer was concerned with group members who were still meeting on the Jewish Sabbath and practicing circumcision. The “parting of the ways” between the two groups is now dated much later than the second century CE.

  The following survey of the different types of worship available to people in Roman cities will illustrate the richness of its traditions and the high level of diversity among them. The person who can open this wider Mediterranean world to us is a Latin writer, Minucius Felix, and the city whose streets can provide a compelling look at it is Rome’s old harbor town, Ostia.

  5.2 How Did Romans Worship Their Gods? Text and Material Culture, c. Third Century CE

  In Minucius Felix’s Octavius, three dear friends are enjoying a pleasurable stroll at the shore amid the streets of Ostia. During the course of the dialogue, Octavius, a committed Christian, debates his non‐Christian friend, Caecilius, about the legitimacy of Christianity while a third friend, although admittedly on Octavius’ side, plays the role of referee. How can historians use this one, theologically biased Latin text to illuminate the history of Roman society in the third‐century empire?

  Let’s start by exploring the author, the text, and the setting together and then connect all three to additional evidence. We do not know the precise details o
f Minucius Felix’s birth and death. Those details are lost, but we are fortunate to have the document he wrote. It is the kind of philosophical performance piece that had made Plato, teller of the tales of Socrates, so famous. The text can be dated to the early third century based on the fact that mid‐third‐century Christian writers later borrowed and cited it.

  Unfortunately, it is impossible to specify the extent to which a text like the Octavius was addressed to Christian insiders or intended for a wider audience. Like all apologetic texts written in the ancient world, that is, documents penned to “defend the faith,” these kinds of stories usually shore up the faith of people who have already made their choice to join the group. They only rarely do the hard work of recruiting others to join. The Octavius itself consistently casts Christianity as if it were a culturally superior way of worshipping God. As the passionate, even borderline fanatical Christian Octavius Ianuarius taunts his non‐Christian interlocutor:

  “[Y]ou say this superstitious worship of yours (superstitio) gave you your world‐empire, increased and established it, for your strength lay not so much in valor as in your proper sense of worship and your devotion to the gods, the family, and the state [pietas]. You say the noble and majestic fabric of Roman justice drew its auspices from the cradle of infant empire! Yet were your ancestors not in origin a collection of criminals? Did they not grow by the iron terror of their own savagery? … All that the Romans hold, occupy and possess is the spoil of outrage; your temples are all of loot, drawn from the ruin of cities, the plunder of gods and the slaughter of priests.”

  (Minucius Felix, Octavius 25.1–5, 5, slightly modified from the LCL trans. by T. Glover and G. Rendhall [1931])