by Douglas Boin
There are problems with this model of history, too. To begin, it assumes that Christianity’s rise in Rome was the result of a quasi‐democratic political process by which everyone in the empire gradually came to recognize the superiority of the new faith. Comforting as that vision may be to some Christians today, it nevertheless silences the voice of Rome’s non‐Christians during some of the most intense political debates of Late Antiquity. Second, it also lumps all “the Christians” into one undifferentiated group and presumes that every self‐professed “follower of Jesus” would have made the same political choices – that is, to outlaw other people’s religious options and to establish Christianity as the official worship of Rome as their faith allegedly required them to. Many of these approaches silently drive many scholarly studies today. Sometimes, they are even regular starting points for scholars working on Late Antique Christianity, but it is important for us to recognize that, as approaches to historical questions, most of them are faith‐driven. And all of them are swimming in a stew of highly questionable notions about how monotheistic faiths must necessarily feed intolerant behavior.
Recognizing political disagreement among Rome’s Christian community
How the Roman Empire became a Christian state remains today an unsettled question. The widely accepted view is that, at most, 10 percent of the population was Christian in 313 CE, and there may be little use in trying to compile any more precise data. Relevant evidence is slim. That’s why, rather than starting our conversation from the assumption that the majority of the Roman world was flocking towards Christianity by the end of the fourth century CE, we should leave room to entertain other models.
One alternate approach would be to consider the idea that Christianity’s imposition on the Roman world was exactly that: an imposition. Today, some scholars are likely hesitant to support this view because it will sound, superficially, like a return to the eighteenth‐century bigoted idea that Christians advocated an “intolerant zeal.” (Indeed, that’s how Edward Gibbon characterized Christianity in his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776].) We don’t need to fall into Gibbon’s trap, however, assuming that all Christians subscribed to the same political behavior, to recognize the benefits of taking a top‐down approach to this important question. As a decision imposed on the Roman people, the establishment of a Christian state – through legal mechanisms by which traditional worship was outlawed and stigmatized – may have been the product of competing Christian political visions for the Roman state. Consequently, the decision to outlaw traditional worship practices may have been one that not every Christian citizen of the Roman Empire would have chosen to support.
This model has at least one strong benefit. It suggests that counting the number of Christians in the empire, although a noble endeavor, is not crucially important for understanding Rome’s social change. To the contrary, the transformation of Rome into a Christian empire would be dependent on the ideologies of its Christian politicians and their advisors, not on the democratic or spiritual wishes of its citizens (Working With Sources 6.1: Descriptions of the City of Constantinople).
Working With Sources 6.1 Descriptions of the City of Constantinople
In the seventh century BCE, Greeks established a colony on the western side of the Bosporus Strait, one of the bodies of water that separates Europe and Asia. They called this city Byzantion. Throughout its early history Aegean and Black Sea sailors would stop here to trade. In 493 BCE, the Persian King Darius I crossed the Bosporus in his bold attempt to subjugate the Greek city‐states, or poleis. The Persian invasion ultimately failed; but by the second century BCE, another army and its generals had marched into the territory: Rome’s.
Over the next several centuries, Byzantion would watch as Rome’s power and influence grew. Emperor Hadrian established an aqueduct in the city, which was distinguished with a race track, theater, and agora. These amenities gave Byzantion and its people the feel of being a part of the broader Roman cultural world. Later, Byzantion’s residents would have to pick sides during Rome’s intense struggles for power. Misplaced allegiances doomed the city.
In 193 CE, the people of Byzantion (known as Byzantium in Latin) supported the general Pescennius Niger for the imperial throne – against the rising commander Septimius Severus from North Africa. Niger moved to capture Byzantium, and the historian Herodian, writing in Greek, gives us a glimpse of Niger’s motives.
Located at the narrowest part of the Propontis [the ancient name for the Sea of Marmara, including the Bosporus Strait at the northern end], Byzantium grew immensely wealthy from its marine revenues, both tolls and fish; the city owned much fertile land, too, and realized a very handsome profit from all these sources. [Pescennius] Niger wished to have this city under his control because it was very strong but especially because he hoped to be able to prevent any crossing from Europe and Asia by way of the Propontis.
(Herodian, Roman History 3.1.5–6, trans. by E. Echols [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961], with slight modification)
Septimius prevailed, however, and he enacted a harsh retribution against Byzantium. The city was largely razed to the ground: “stripped of its theaters and baths,” Herodian writes, “and, indeed, of all adornments.” Byzantium was “now only a village” (Roman History 3.6.10).
Byzantium did not stay a village for long. By the early third century, Septimius Severus paid to repair the city, its baths, and, most importantly, its walls. Finally, on November 8, 324 CE, the Emperor Constantine decided to rededicate it by naming it after himself. Byzantion now became Constantinopolis, that is, Constantinople, “the city of Constantine.” It would grow into the government capital of what later sixteenth‐century writers termed the “Byzantine Empire.”
Unfortunately, the sources for the urban history of this important Greek colony on the Bosporus, later transformed into a Roman city, are not easy to sort through. Knowledge of the city’s earliest history is largely drawn from textual, not archaeological, sources.
Some of these writings, like the histories of Herodian, date from a century before Constantine. Other texts were written later and look back with a nostalgia on Constantine’s capital. The eighth‐century gazette, written in ancient Greek, called Brief Historical Notes (Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai) preserves many details, for example, of Greek and Roman statues and temples once located in Constantine’s city. Not all of these survive. The archaeology of Constantinople – modern Istanbul – has only recently begun to illuminate the history of the city.
Summary
For four hundred years, Christians were a tiny fraction of the empire’s 60 million people. As such, they faced the same stigmas – bigotry, public and private hostility, and stereotyping – that other minority groups had faced throughout the empire. What we also saw in the beginning of this chapter is that, like Jews, foreigners, and other minority groups, Christians could also use similar strategies for managing their stigmas. They could participate in civic sacrifice, like they did during Cyprian’s day. And they could make connections to patrons in their cities, as they did in Dura Europos. These acts took place in the context of a growing, almost manic desire on the part of many third‐century emperors to find a way to legislate social and political cohesion.
The evidence seen here also tells us that the rise of Christianity is probably more complex than a simple tale of how Jesus’ followers converted their friends and neighbors through acts of “martyrdom.” For, notwithstanding Valerian’s or Diocletian’s attempts at legalized discrimination, the political successes of the empire’s Christians may have been dependent on long‐term strategies for acceptance that Christian individuals and groups had been undertaking for centuries. Balancing the long, complicated legacy of Christians finding ways to embrace Roman values with the more widely known history of Christians who rejected any cultural compromises is essential for writing the history of the empire and its cities in the fourth and fifth centuries.
Study Questions
Who was Mani? Who was Cyprian of Carthage?
How did Emperor Galerius change the city of Thessaloniki?
In the age before Diocletian’s legal persecution, what was it like for Christians to live in Roman cities?
In your own words, state some of the reasons why the word “Christianization” might be problematic for historians to rely upon when describing the fourth century CE.
Suggested Readings
Douglas Boin, Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar’s Empire (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
Laura Nasrallah, Charalambos Bakirtzis, and Steve Friesen (eds.), From Roman to Early Christian Thessaloniki: Studies in Religion and Archaeology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Theological Studies, 2010).
Michael Peppard, The World’s Oldest Church: Bible, Art, and Ritual at Dura‐Europos, Syria (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
Christine Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
7
Law and Politics
Diocletian’s decision to attack Rome’s Christian community, which he pursued zealously between 303 and 311 CE, is a powerful example of how Roman laws could be used to muscle citizens’ behavior. During this crucial decade for the empire, according to contemporary accounts, the Roman government passed legislation “commanding that churches be leveled to the ground and [Holy] Scriptures be destroyed by fire” (Eusebius, History of the Church 8.2, trans. by A. McGiffert in NPNF series [1890]). Furthermore, men and women of high class who held positions of authority in the church had their social status stripped (Eusebius, History of the Church 8.2).
Fortunately, we have a general idea of how at least some Christians reacted at being made the targets of imperial bigotry. In Nicomedia in Roman Turkey, the city where Diocletian had established his own capital, the emperor’s laws were written up and published on the streets. As soon as they were hung, they were being ripped down in protest and disgust. One culprit, says the church historian Eusebius, was not a low‐class rabble‐rousing peasant, either. A “certain man, not obscure but very highly honored with distinguished temporal dignities, moved with zeal toward God and incited with ardent faith, seized the edict as it was posted openly and publicly, and tore it to pieces as a profane and impious thing” (Eusebius, History of the Church 8.5).
A contemporary Latin writer, Lactantius, also evokes the general spirit of civic disobedience that arose in response to Diocletian’s legislation. When the emperor’s first edicts were announced “depriving the Christians of all honors and dignities,” Lactantius explained, “a certain person tore [it] down and cut it in pieces … with high spirit, saying in scorn, ‘These are the triumphs of Goths and Sarmatians’” (Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors 13, trans. by W. Fletcher in the ANF series [1886]). The protester’s language would not have been lost on his Roman audience. Emperor Diocletian’s priorities were being compared to the behavior of two “barbarian” tribes, the Goths and Sarmatians. The commentary was scathing; real Romans were not supposed to act like this against their own citizens.
It was Caracalla’s decree of universal citizenship, in many ways, that had led the empire into this quagmire. The result was a difficult decade for the Roman people. Now, after fifty years of political and military instability had come to a close, during which foreign entities like the Sasanian state and Gothic tribes had functioned as easy enemies around which Romans could build their own secure sense of identity, unresolved questions of what constituted a real Roman were now testing every level of society. Emperor Diocletian himself would put up a passionate fight for his own political convictions, but his legislative program had much larger implications for Rome, too – far beyond the sincere but perhaps parochial concerns of many Christians that the law required them to hand over their scriptures to the Roman authorities.
Diocletian’s broader vision struck at the heart of what it meant to be Roman. He himself was intent on stripping Roman citizenship once and for all from the empire’s Christian community, and that included limiting Christian access to the basic guarantees of legal protections. Lactantius makes this point clear when he explains that the emperor was uncompromising about barring Christians “from being plaintiffs in questions of wrong, adultery, or theft” in their local cities and advocating that the right of voting in Roman municipal elections be taken away from any Christian (Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors 13). Diocletian’s divisive policy, unleashed at the start of the fourth century, nearly ripped the empire in two.
In 311 CE, the year that Diocletian died, it would be Galerius who recognized the need for political reconciliation. On May 1, at the palace at Nicomedia, an announcement was made. Diocletian’s decrees would be repealed. Galerius’ edict permitted Christians to rebuild their places of worship and restored to them the legal protections of Roman citizenship (Eusebius, History of the Church 8.17; Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors 34–35).
7.1 Roman Law: History From the Ground‐Up, Top‐Down, and Sideways
The narrative of the late third and early fourth centuries CE can lure one into associating all legal questions with the personalities who occupied the highest chambers of the state. But as we saw in our examination of Diocletian’s edicts against Christians, there were larger issues at stake in these conversations. One issue was the extent to which a segment of Romans throughout the Mediterranean would continue to have access to the Roman legal system.
Before continuing with a top‐down view of Rome’s constitutional developments – a story which famously includes the dramatic meeting in 313 CE between Augustus Constantine and Augustus Licinius at the Tetrarchic capital in Milan – we should give attention to some broader details of Roman legal culture. What was so important about Roman law in people’s daily life? What evidence is there to help us research that question?
Petitions from Roman Egypt
Aurelia Ataris was a Roman woman from Egypt, a landowner in the city of Hermopolis, and the daughter of a man who had served in the Romany army. She lived in the fourth century CE and, although a resident of a city in the Egyptian desert, was probably grateful for her access to the Roman legal system.
Hermopolis is located near the modern town of El‐Ashmunein, on the west bank of the Nile between Upper and Lower Egypt. In antiquity, it was the capital of its nome, one of the smaller governmental units into which Egypt had been organized by the Hellenistic kings, the Ptolemies. Romans continued this practice of subdividing Egypt in this way, and by the third century CE, there were approximately 60 nomes in Roman Egypt. Hermopolis, the administrative center of its nome, played a strategic administrative role for the government, whose local officials were responsible for communicating with the top‐level military and civic governors of Roman Egypt. These officials were the praeses, the civilian governor of the diocese; and the dux, its military authority. In the time of Aurelia Ataris, the presence of these officials in Roman Egypt was a relatively recent development, however. The separation of provincial authority along civilian and military lines had been initiated by the Rule of Four.
By 346 CE, Aurelia Ataris knew enough about the workings of the Roman government to appeal for legal help when she needed it. And that year, according to a petition that she submitted, events led her to the authorities, specifically, to the local liaison of the Roman dux. Her petition, which survives on papyrus, was found as part of an archive of the local official whom she sought out. His name was Flavius Abinnaeus, and his official papers have been published (The Abinnaeus Archive: Papers of a Roman Officer in the Reign of Constantius II, ed. by H. Bell, V. Martin, E. Turner, and D. van Berchem [Oxford, 1962]). Copies of Aurelia Ataris’ consultation with the authorities were found in this archive. Here is a record of what she reported:
On the third intercalary day [of the week] at the tenth hour, I do not know why, and acting in the manner of thiev
es, when I was collecting a debt which he owes me, Pol, surnamed Obellos; and the son of Horion, Apion by name; and his sister Kyriake shut me up in his house. I escaped from his house … [but] I [now] am laid up, sitting at death’s door. Therefore, I ask you this and beg your benevolence: Arrest these people and send them to our lord, the dux, for it is his job to punish those who dare to do such things.
(Papyrus from the Abinnaeus archive [P. Abinn.] 52, trans. by A. Bryen [2013], pp. 264–265, whose study of this papyrus and others is listed in the Suggested Readings at the end of this chapter)
The second papyrus record in the archive elaborates on the details of the kidnapping. There, Aurelia Ataris suggests she was “practically beat[en] to death” by her assailants (P. Abinn. 51, trans. by A. Bryen [2013], p. 264).
Roman legal texts in Late Antiquity
Aurelia’s case gives us an important insight into the social world of Roman Egypt and the legal culture of the fourth‐century empire. The petition is significant for obvious economic and social reasons. It attests to the high financial status of a local woman and the fact that several local men were dependent on her for loans. It also attests to Aurelia Ataris’ ability to read and communicate; she signed the last lines of the document. This petition opens a window, more broadly, however, onto the customs of the law that people like her, as citizens, had access to throughout the empire.
The two petitions we possess are dated the day of her attack and the very next day. As historian Ari Bryen has observed in his recent study of these texts, “[I]t would appear [Aurelia Ataris] was aware of her options for finding her way to justice” (2013, p. 93). The language that she used in her report is also revealing. Even though she had a personal and business relationship with the assailants, she described their attack as a surprise (“I do not know why” they assaulted me, she says) and characterized their behavior as if they were an anonymous group of “thieves.” We don’t need to question the details of the attack to realize how effectively Aurelia Ataris has used the legal system to her advantage as a plaintiff. She has placed the onus on the people she has accused to come clean and to testify as to their motives and their intent.