The fiasco at the border outraged Theodosius. He hastened to make amends by releasing the Gothic prisoners and drafted the most capable Gothic men into the army. The emperor’s quick intervention averted a diplomatic disaster although news of the incident unfolded rather differently on the streets of Constantinople, where the still relatively inexperienced emperor used it to promote his young administration’s prowess on the battlefield. By the end of that year, the Gothic “encounter” at the Danube had been presented to the public as if it were a military victory. The emperor imported an Egyptian obelisk, nearly sixteen hundred years old and originally quarried for Pharaoh Ramses II, to mark the occasion as a fitting trophy and ordered his staff to hoist the pink granite monument into place in the center of the city’s racetrack, where he could see it from the windows of his palace. Scenes of groveling foreigners were carved at the base of the old Egyptian monument to enliven it for the Roman audiences. Its presence put a pharaoh’s imprimatur on Theodosius’s increasingly grandiose rule.
Much had already changed in Rome. An unrealistic desire for unity defined the emperor’s approach and had led to undeniable milestones, such as the signing of a landmark treaty with Persia, which concluded decades of hostility on Rome’s eastern borders. But a confidence in his own convictions also sent Theodosius in pursuit of more quixotic ideals, which others enabled. Early in his tenure, Theodosius and his like-minded co-rulers, Gratian and Gratian’s half brother, Valentinian the Second, had announced a law that cut funding from the society of Vestal Virgins, likely with the intent of starving the group into nonexistence. Hundreds of women of all ages had been honored to serve in the Vestals’ exclusive priesthood, whose origins went back several centuries and whose duties, including the protection of Rome’s eternal flame, offered one of the few visible roles for powerful females in Roman society. The law, although it did not bar women from joining the association, made it all but impossible for it to continue its mission. In A.D. 380, the emperors declared that the only permissible religious option for citizens of the Roman Empire would henceforth be Christianity.
Eager churchmen enforced the radical decree by requiring their congregations to make a formal recitation of faith, enforcing technical language drafted fifty-five years earlier during a contentious bishop’s conference at Nicaea. This Nicene Creed, which made bold proclamations about the eternal nature of Jesus’s being—“light from light, God from God, begotten, not made”—offered Christians important clarifications about the identity of the Son of God. But its adoption also marked an abrupt change from three hundred years of church precedent, when no such statement of belief had been required of any Christian, let alone imposed on pagan Romans. The intrusive imperial law, requiring every Roman to acknowledge that Jesus and God were “one in being,” as the Nicene Creed articulated, represented an aggressive new track in an ongoing political fight for the soul of Rome.
Within a decade, the old sights and smells of pagan Rome—of incense wafting from outdoor altars and of pagan priests dressed smartly to visit the stately temples, religious activities that men like Cicero and Virgil would have instantly recognized as an essential part of being Roman—gradually disappeared. Zealots patrolled the empire’s streets. Places of worship, stunning architectural monuments, were attacked. In 388, after Christians burned a synagogue at Callinicum, in Syria, no one was held accountable; Theodosius refused to punish the guilty faction of Christians because they counted among his most loyal supporters.
Three years later, a cell of militant Christians, perhaps inspired by notions that the elimination of idolatry would hasten Jesus’s return, took hatchets to the city of Alexandria’s wondrous Temple of Serapis, whose tall columns overlooked Cleopatra’s harbor. In 392, after Gratian’s half brother, who had succeeded Gratian, was discovered hanged in the palace, Theodosius solidified his own position as the single most powerful person in the empire. Tens of thousands of Roman citizens watched as a religiously motivated hatred engulfed their towns and as state-imposed Christianity came to the empire during these years, in the form of an aggressive coup coordinated by Theodosius and enforced by fanatics. Romans of every denomination, pagan, Jewish, and Christian, felt anger and frustration as their world slipped away.
Flavius Eugenius seemed a smart choice to marshal the opposition. A well-liked Latin teacher and a professor of rhetoric whose “high reputation for eloquence” had earned him a coveted palace position as chief of correspondence, Eugenius was nearing fifty and, in principle, an ideal standard-bearer against the rising tide of Christian radicalism because he was also a moderate Christian. Although there were many Christian public figures who taught their congregations to see Rome’s smoke-filled altars as the frightening home of pagan “demons,” Eugenius read his Scripture with a critical mind, apparently finding little of practical value in its pugilistic stories, like the tales of righteous angels who battle demons in the book of Revelation. As a Christian, Eugenius had not been raised to demonize his neighbors.
Eugenius’s Rome had always been a society where people of all faiths could worship as they pleased. Roughly three decades before he was born, the state had granted Christians a protected status, and it’s almost certain that those years hardened Eugenius’s commitment to the legal principle of toleration. It was one he had been taught to value and, if necessary, to defend. One tyrant, Eugenius believed, should not mandate the use of a strict formula to promote his vision for Romanitas and remove the freedom of religious choice from the Roman people.
In 392, as the cultural situation deteriorated and an imperial vacancy opened in the western palace, a high-placed foreign general named Arbogast, with the support of several distinguished senators in Rome, asked Eugenius to bring a temperate influence to Theodosius’s increasingly despotic rule. The professor consented to their plan. Fine Roman men in Eugenius’s profession won debates and wrote well. They knew their history, literature, and art. But whereas those qualifications might have distinguished a candidate for high office in an earlier day and ensured some measure of success, none of them mattered in the bruising arena of fourth-century politics. Mavericks ruled Theodosius’s world, and Eugenius would always be a cautious academic.
Notwithstanding his evident gifts for Latin grammar and composition, Eugenius’s background was largely unsuited to the task of leading an urgent movement that crossed religious lines. His upbringing almost certainly lacked anything comparable to the sidekick heroism Theodosius had acquired during the years spent on military campaigns with his father; Eugenius’s own contemporaries were keen to point out that he was “unused to the blast of war.” His reputation suffered a fatal blow when, asked by the Roman Senate to assume the role of Theodosius’s co-ruler, he made the timid decision to write to Constantinople to ask for permission to share authority. The bull-headed emperor assented, preserving a fiction of collegiality in a time of rapidly vanishing consensus and irreparable partisanship.
Over the next several months, Eugenius and his diverse group of supporters grew more vocal in their opposition to Theodosius’s policies, confident that they would be able to turn public opinion against the runaway emperor since, they reassured themselves, they had the force of history on their side. Pluralism had formed the basis of the empire’s legal system for generations and had been enshrined in a famous edict. “We gave to Christians and to all people,” the Christian emperor Constantine and the pagan emperor Licinius had announced on June 13, 313, “a free ability to follow the worship practices that each one wished, so that whatever divinity there is in the heavenly seat above may be appeased and made favorable to us and to everyone who had been put under our rule.” The emperors’ constitutional decree, brokered at Milan and forever bearing that city’s name, safeguarded the legal status of Christianity by overturning decades of state-sponsored discrimination but did so in a way that protected everyone’s religious rights, not just Christians’.
The successes Rome’s Christian community won with the Edict of Milan can lead h
istorical interpreters to wild speculation about how Christianity proliferated in a supposedly hostile pagan environment. Christian writers of the fourth century, like Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, the author of The Church History, which covered the period from Jesus’s execution under Emperor Tiberius to the time of Constantine, labored hard to tell a story about Christianity’s tireless evangelism and the outspoken witness Christians gave to their faith. Although it would become commonplace among the more pious Christians to attribute the momentous act of toleration in 313 to their uncompromising forebears, the reasons for Rome’s about-face were less dramatic. Simple acts of patriotism had, by and large, guided the conduct of the earliest church and profited the community.
In the first century A.D., as Jesus’s apostles passed down the first oral traditions about his life and crucifixion, a new generation of followers emerged, drawn from a wide social and economic background. Gathering in the houses of wealthy sponsors and relying on well-heeled patrons to provide lodging during their travels—like Prisca and Aquila, Chloe, and Stephanas, known from the letters of Paul—they built a network for their movement. These small communities, usually no more than a handful of people, lived in large Roman cities like Thessaloniki, Philippi, Corinth, and Ephesus, where, to the consternation of sterner men like Paul, they often gathered with their fellow citizens to celebrate animal sacrifices and share public meals during their cities’ patriotic pagan festivals. Sometimes they encouraged one another to embrace antiquity’s most questionable values. In several letters attributed to Paul, Christian wives were told to obey their husbands, children were told to listen to their parents, and slaves were told to submit to their masters, in each case to conform with the widely accepted standards of patriarchy, parental authority, and slavery prevalent at the time.
By the second century, as war threatened to open an unbridgeable chasm between Jews and Rome after the burning of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, the next generations of early Christian patriots began attending a wider variety of festivals, like those celebrating Rome’s dead emperors. “Honor the emperor,” the biblical letter of Peter instructed its readers, and many Christians did. By the third century, at least some Christians were so confident about their unassailable social status that they renovated their houses and apartments to create bigger worship spaces and, in the process, contributed to the creation of the first recognizable church buildings. Wealth, connections, and a degree of calculated risk brought these fearless Christians, amid the noises of demolition and construction, into the main streets of their cities. Fifty years before Constantine and Licinius granted Christians a protected status, acceptance had already become a regular fact of life for many towns.
Rome witnessed many senseless acts of violence against Christians in these same years. Christians would always remember those difficult times when opinionated individuals suffered for their outspokenness and an imperious magistrate could bring criminal charges against the members of their group, leading to trials and sometimes public executions. Born of Roman ignorance and fear, these acts of discrimination made heroes out of many Christians, who were glorified by their friends and loved ones for the daring witness they had given to their faith. Much later, the stories about these martyres, as the “witnesses” were called in Greek, were twisted into fanciful legends about an age of widespread Roman persecution against the early church. But such was never the case in the first 250 years of Christianity; nor did every Christian in Rome endure threats of open hostility, suffer bodily harm, or seek out occasions for public confrontation. Many found their solace in Scripture, in passages that reminded them to steel themselves against the world. “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house,” Matthew’s Gospel taught them. Other Christians committed themselves to enacting popular civic values, like philanthropia, as they would have expressed it in Greek, meaning “love of one’s fellow human beings.” In the visual language of the day, pagan artists personified the idea as a shepherd caring for his sheep, usually with a fluffy animal wrapped around the shepherd’s shoulders. Wise, noble, and caring emperors were said to fit the model.
When Christians started appropriating the image during the third century in their catacomb paintings, tombs, and houses, their choice to do so must have flabbergasted hardheaded Roman traditionalists, especially those raised to think of Christians as dangerous religious radicals, unable to mold their beliefs to Roman culture. Yet with the birth of the “Good Shepherd” artwork and other nods toward popular culture, Christians subtly pledged their Romanitas. Even as Christian writers omitted this side of history from their narratives of the early church, preferring, instead, to portray the faith as relentlessly besieged by Roman culture, the stoic confidence that inspired these and other patriotic Christian displays must have blazed a path to toleration.
No one could have foreseen the difficult times ahead. The backlash came swiftly. As much as the group’s robust public presence angered cultural traditionalists, the support Christians were earning from pagan society probabaly upset them more. Everywhere they looked, it must have seemed, to rearguard Romans, as if their established way of life was quickly disappearing. It’s understandable, then, that discrimination was soon written into the Roman law code. During these darkest years of persecution, from 303 to 311, almost a century after Caracalla expanded the definition of a Roman citizen, a faction of politicians used the legal system to punish Christians for their growing but, to the officials’ minds, unjustified self-confidence. Emperor Diocletian threatened Rome’s Christian citizens with the loss of civil liberties and, in some cases, their lives, if they did not hand over their Bibles and empty their church coffers. Attending civic events, like pagan sacrifices, was no longer a matter of individual conscience. It was mandatory, the emperor said, and the government would strip all Christians of “their freedom” if they chose not to comply with the directive.
Diocletian’s invasive, oppressive edicts were crafted by a simple-minded politician at a time when civil war was common and Rome’s experiment with empire faced grave threats. The emperor, an efficient problem solver whose surviving portraiture shows the face of a tireless but perhaps beleaguered administrator, had already implemented a radical constitutional reform, in A.D. 284, by announcing the creation of two emperors, each of whom would reside away from the capital and be served by two close assistants. The push for greater collaboration and renewed government oversight saved the empire from political ruin.
Convinced that Christians were a threat to the state by virtue of their religion and scrambling to preserve the unity of his empire, Diocletian enacted his edicts during this tense time. The edicts were also published at a time when pagan Romans and Christian Romans had been amicable neighbors for nearly three hundred years, and by a politician whose own wife and daughter, Prisca and Valeria, publicly identified as Christians. Countless Roman Christians suffered needlessly during Diocletian’s hardheaded campaign, and the laws were later repealed by Valeria’s husband, Diocletian’s pagan son-in-law, Galerius. In 311, he reversed his father-in-law’s edicts and announced that Christians could “be Christian again” without fear of reprisal. Yet just as the new law was set to take effect, Galerius died. His sudden passing stranded the Roman people in a social crisis.
Two years later, in 313, tolerance would finally, and irreversibly, be enshrined in the Edict of Milan. Eugenius and his supporters aspired to uphold the noble spirit of the centuries-long fight that had led to the formulation of Constantine and Licinius’s law.
Not every Christian shared their vision. In Theodosius’s day, radical Christians claimed that their faith was still under attack by Rome’s predominately pagan culture. They expressed hysterical claims that the dreaded emperor Nero would rise again from his grave to persecute Christians, just as he had supposedly done in the first century A.D. In Milan, Bishop Ambrose preached about the contentious debates in the Roman senate and reminded Christians that they were locke
d in a spiritual war against the forces of evil. Fed a regular dose of his vivid, apocalyptic language, many Christians came to believe that angels were fighting demons for control of their empire and that only the emperor Theodosius deserved their unqualified support.
The question of how, when, and why Rome’s predominantly pagan society converted to a Christian one is a topic many scholars have pondered with unnecessary bewilderment and undue credulity. In ancient Rome, the decisions of a single emperor could have far-reaching systemic effects. The emperor could marshal an army to enforce his will, had the power of the magistrates and courts to prosecute his enemies, and could ask his spokesmen to stand at the rostrum to communicate his wishes to the public. The clearest path to implementing a Christian takeover of society was for the emperor to mandate it, which is exactly what Theodosius did.
Christian conversations about culture, politics, and values—traces of which survive in the sermons, letters, and theological treatises produced at the time—turned the public arena into a frightening place. Christians demanded that the Roman government prevent Jews from rebuilding their temple in Jerusalem, based on interpretations of biblical passages that set forth the requirements for the Second Coming of the Messiah. Churchmen preached a gospel of fear, whipping their congregations into a moral frenzy about the need to eliminate the evils of pagan society. Their favorite fixation was protesting the horror of pagan animal sacrifice, a practice whose abolition they had been demanding since the time of Saint Paul, even though it had never interfered with the practice of their own beliefs. Their obsessive complaints about this single issue consumed the attention of Roman politicians for nearly three hundred years. Other Christians composed misleading prophecies, modeled after a collection of widely regarded pagan writings called The Sibylline Oracles, and shared them with other Christians to stoke anxiety about another coming age of persecution.
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