The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  In his uncertainty as to whether, and how, these people merited punishment, he went on to write to the emperor for further instructions. The letter survives, as does the emperor Trajan’s reply, which is worth quoting in full for its enormous historical interest.

  It is not possible to lay down any general rule for all such cases. Do not go out of your way to look for them. If indeed they should be brought before you, and the crime is proved, they must be punished; with the restriction, however, that where the party denies he is a Christian, and shall make it evident that he is not, by invoking our gods, let him (notwithstanding any former suspicion) be pardoned upon his repentance. Anonymous informations ought not to be received in any sort of prosecution. It is introducing a very dangerous precedent, and is quite foreign to the spirit of our age.

  One only has to think of examples of religious intolerance in more recent times to recognize that this was a relatively ‘mild’ position on the part of the imperial state. Despite being general overseer of the state religion, the emperor does not seem to harbour ‘theological’ objections to people becoming Christian.

  On the other hand, the early emperors were periodically prone to autocratic crackdowns on the activities and influence of individuals who behaved as freelance authorities offering ‘soapbox’ wisdom in public places, whether religious or philosophical. As well as the gamut of magicians and other religious quacks, experts such as priests of foreign gods, along with their followers, could from time to time be targeted in this way by the Roman authorities. Wandering preachers of the newfangled Jesus movement and the circles around them could be seen as undesirables for similar reasons.

  This perception was exacerbated by imperial suspiciousness of club-like gatherings of all kinds as potentially subversive. The communal character of their religious observations could have made early Christian groups permanently insecure. Pliny records that in his particular province in what is now north-west Turkey, Trajan had completely banned private associations. This had deterred Christians from holding their pre-sunrise prayer meetings.

  Another problem touching the political was the refusal of Christian converts to recognize the divinity of the existing gods. When the emperor was himself a god, in Roman eyes this refusal became tinged with politics. It might seem to imply hostility to the Roman Empire.

  It also risked alienating Christians from their own cities and villages. Here, people’s identification with the local pantheon by taking part in religious festivals and the like was a vital part of the building of community. So the early Christians could be unpopular in the wider society. This might help to explain in turn why people saw them as ‘other’ and sometimes denounced them to the authorities.

  In modern Lyon today’s roads and buildings beset what is left of the amphitheatre of the ancient Roman colony here, called Lugdunum. At the start of the fourth century AD the author of the first-ever history of the Christians set down an account of what he thought had happened here back in AD 177. His story is the earliest record of Christianity in Roman Gaul.

  For reasons unknown, the account went, one or more mobs set on local people perceived to be Christians. They dragged them before the chief magistrate, who locked them up to await the Roman governor’s arrival. When they were brought before his tribunal, the governor tested the accused in much the same way as Pliny had. Those who did not recant were sent to the arena to be killed by wild animals, a Roman punishment usually reserved for criminals seen as lower class. Our writer – his name was Eusebius – describes the deaths in gruesome detail.

  Ten or so years before these events, another Greek writer – a pagan – had ridiculed Christian belief in a life eternal, ‘in consequence of which they despise death’. As a Christian himself, Eusebius spelt out the torments of the amphitheatre because they testified to the sufferers’ sense of themselves as Christians – their willingness to die for their faith exemplified what a Christian person really was.

  He would also have known that these heroic ‘martyrs’ would have expected rewards in the Christian afterlife. So the Christian tradition had its reasons for showcasing these persecutions. That need not make the core of this story untrue, or of others like it. Religious persecution still exists today, as do martyrs who die believing in heavenly rewards.

  In AD 249 a new emperor called Decius issued an edict requiring all inhabitants of the empire to sacrifice to the gods. Some of the evidence for what happened next comes from an archaeological site in Egypt’s Nile valley where excavators between 1904 and 1906 found masses of papyri dumped as ancient rubbish.

  To the commissioners of sacrifices at Oxyrhynchus from Aurelius Gaion, son of Ammonius and Taeus. It has always been my habit to make sacrifices and libations and pay reverence to the gods in accordance with the orders of the divine [i.e. imperial] decree, and now I have in your presence sacrificed and made libations and tasted the offerings with my wife, my sons and my daughter, acting through me and I request you to certify my statement.

  Written in Greek, this certificate shows that the emperor’s order required individuals, not just in Egypt but all over the empire it seems, to obtain an official document proving that they had performed a sacrifice before local officials, tasted the meat, and testifying that they had always revered the gods in this way.

  These certificates – there are others from Roman Egypt as well as this one from ancient Oxyrhynchus – lift the lid on the empire-wide bureaucracy that must have swung into action to implement this imperial order. Decius’s edict was an extraordinary extension of the religious reach of the ancient state. The usually easy-going attitudes of the Roman authorities meant that organized religion was essentially a local matter – the province of the priests and priestesses of the cities and villages of the empire. No emperor had ever before ordered an empire-wide religious observation in which all individuals were required to take part – and obtain an official piece of writing to prove it.

  Many Christians who did not deny their faith suffered for it. Of a Christian sage called Origen, who escaped death at this time but only just, a later historian wrote of ‘how many things he endured for the word of Christ, bonds and bodily tortures and torments under the iron collar and in the dungeon.’ So there is no denying the horror to which the imperial order exposed staunch Christians. Even so, nothing in the certificate of Aurelius Gaion above suggests that he and his family had been singled out to provide religious proofs because they were suspected of being Christians. So scholars no longer think that Decius had solely Christianity in his sights, even if he must have been aware – and disapproving – of the ‘nonconformity’ of this numerous sect.

  By demanding that all inhabitants of the empire observed the practice at the heart of traditional Roman religion, Decius gave a religious dimension to the new type of ‘universal’ Roman identity grown up in recent years. This went back at least to AD 212, when an earlier emperor gave Roman citizenship to almost all inhabitants of the empire, no matter their ethnicity and first language. To be a Roman was also, Decius was now saying, to perform animal sacrifice to the gods.

  The last chapter introduced Diocletian, yet another tough soldier-emperor. As part of the fight-back against Rome’s enemies, this conservative-minded ruler tried, like Decius before him, to reset the traditional bonds between the Romans and their gods by stamping out religious ‘deviancy’. Christians must now have been perceived to exist in sufficient threatening numbers for the emperor to launch the following all-out assault in AD 303:

  In the nineteenth year of the reign of Diocletian . . . an imperial letter was everywhere promulgated, ordering the razing of the churches to the ground and the burning of the holy writings, and proclaiming that those who held high office would lose their civil rights, while those in households, if they persisted in their profession of Christianity, would be deprived of their liberty.

  Intended as an existential assault on the sect, this so-called Great Persecution naturally added to the early Christians’ already-swollen narrati
ve of heroic martyrs. The rubbish once more of Roman Egypt reveals the ducking and weaving of ordinary Egyptian Christians – the spiritual ancestors of contemporary Egypt’s beleaguered Copts – as they sought to dodge the blunt instrument of the emperor’s decree.

  One papyrus concerns the sworn testimony of a church reader in an Egyptian village. This Ammonius would have been an important figure for the largely illiterate churchgoers, to whom he recited Holy Scripture. In an official affidavit he testified that his church – which the authorities had destroyed – possessed ‘neither gold nor silver nor money nor clothes nor cattle nor slaves [!] nor building-sites nor possessions, neither from gifts or bequests’.

  The list suggests what the authorities might expect to find when they visited even an Egyptian village church at this date. That they discovered nothing of the sort here might mean that the church in question was a poor one. It could also point to concealment of at least some of the more valuable movable property by Ammonius – church plate for instance – or even to collusive officials turning a blind eye.

  Despite being the church reader, Ammonius got someone else to write his sworn signature on his behalf, claiming ‘not to know letters’. An illiterate reader is not beyond the bounds of possibility – Ammonius might have recited from memory.

  Perhaps, though, his alleged illiteracy was a Christian’s ruse to get him out of having to swear, as required, on the Good Fortune of the emperors. So between the lines of this document, there are hints of small-scale resistance to the almighty Roman emperor. How widespread this sort of thing might have been depends on the unknowable answer to the question of Christian numbers by this time.

  As seen, Diocletian instituted a college of four emperors, two senior (the Augusti) and two junior (the Caesars), to share the challenges of ruling the Roman Empire. In 305, probably in his early sixties, Diocletian did something unprecedented in the annals of imperial rule: he abdicated. In poor health, he retired to a fortified palace he had prepared for himself at what is now Split in Croatia – the modern town is built into its ruins – and died in his bed there some seven years later.

  Without his dominating presence, the new system of power sharing descended into civil war. This was triggered by the death of one of a new pair of Augusti in 306. His army promptly proclaimed as his successor this emperor’s son, an army officer in his thirties. Six years later, in 312, this Constantine, as he is best known today, was on campaign with his army when he experienced a supernatural event.

  A most marvellous sign appeared to him from heaven, the account of which it might have been hard to believe had it been related by any other person. But since the victorious emperor himself long afterwards declared it to the writer of this history, when he was honoured with his acquaintance and society, and confirmed his statement by an oath, who could hesitate to accredit the relation, especially since the testimony of after-time has established the truth? He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, Conquer by this. At this sight he was struck with amazement, and his whole army also, which followed him on this expedition, and witnessed the miracle.

  This supposed vision raises the same issues for historians as all claims of past miracles. Recently I visited the pilgrimage church of Our Lady of Tears in modern Syracuse. This gleaming tent of stone and marble is built around a cheap plaster image of the Madonna, now encased above the main altar.

  In 1953, so the story goes, this image hung in the bedroom of a young Syracusan couple, of whom the wife suffered from partial blindness. One morning she woke up cured, and the first thing she saw was the image of the Madonna, weeping tears. The image went on weeping for a while, as witnesses affirmed. Experts analysed a sample of the tears and declared it consistent with human secretions. The next year Pope Pius XII publicly acknowledged the reality of the event.

  In 1995 an Italian chemist sought to debunk Syracuse’s weeping Madonna by making a similar image of his own. He argued that water absorbed by the plaster would appear as droplets if scratches were made in the impermeable glazing around the eyes. Two years earlier, in 1993, a respected German scholar had argued that Constantine’s vision was the result of a natural phenomenon, a solar halo, although this would not explain the heavenly letters.

  Already met with, it was the churchman Eusebius who authored this account of the emperor’s vision. He was a member of the entourage of Constantine, who now began to recruit Christians to advise him. Eusebius shores up the truth of his report by being the first to admit that it was hard to believe. He then gives as his unimpeachable source the emperor himself, who, moreover, had confirmed his recollections under oath. Constantine’s regime evidently realized how important it was for Romans to believe in a miracle which showed that his rise to power was God’s work.

  Contemporaries were not sure exactly what had happened. Before Eusebius, another Christian writer had already penned his alternative version. According to this, Constantine had invaded Italy to wage war on a rival. Marching south along the main Roman road to Rome from the north, he prepared for battle outside the ancient city’s newly rebuilt walls not far from the old bridge carrying the road across the River Tiber, the Milvian Bridge. In his sleep he was told to have the shields of his soldiers marked with ‘God’s heavenly sign’. Having done so, he went on to win a great victory against the odds.

  Constantine certainly came to believe that he owed his success to the Christian God. In some sense he became himself a Christian believer, with historic consequences. He extended official support to Christians for the first time, reversing the recent persecutions. After a second victory over a rival in 324, which left him sole emperor, he also inaugurated church building at state expense.

  A work known as the ‘Book of the Pontiffs’, dating from the early sixth century AD, states that it was Constantine who commissioned the first church of Saint Peter in Rome. The site chosen was an area outside the city walls where Christians of the time gathered around a monument believed to mark the burial place of the apostle Peter.

  Here architects adapted a tried and tested form of Roman public building. This was a large rectangular hall supported by internal columns known as a basilica, suited to gatherings of large numbers, as a Christian service required. The same source records that Constantine and his mother, Helena, who also turned Christian, donated the church’s gold cross, inscribed with their names.

  Helena is a historically shadowy figure. The writer Evelyn Waugh brought her to life in his historical novel of that name. He made her a Briton and based her no-nonsense character on his friend Penelope, the wife of the poet John Betjeman. In his retelling, the aged empress goes on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and is told in a dream where to dig for the True Cross. She sets labourers to work in the torchlight. Eventually they reappear, ‘bearing a baulk of timber’.

  Nowadays historians think that Helena’s discovery of the True Cross was a legend that grew up later in the fourth century AD. The kernel of truth was her visit in about 327 to the Christian sites of what at the time was still Aelia Capitolina. This was the name that the emperor Hadrian gave to Jerusalem when he founded his colony of legionary veterans there. After being shown what passed for the holy sites, she reported back to her son, who commissioned another church in the basilica form, that of the Holy Sepulchre, which survives, much altered, today.

  The religious trajectory of the Roman Empire had changed course. At the same time, reforms in the age of Diocletian and Constantine gave a radically new mood to imperial governance, as the next chapter explores.

  CHAPTER 20

  UNITED WE STAND

  THE FINAL CENTURY

  In my early twenties I was sent off to Greece by the estimable supervisor of my PhD, under orders to see for myself the terrain of the region I was studying. So it was that one day I found myself eating a midday snack while examining the ancient fragments built into a pretty me
diaeval church in a remote part of southern Greece.

  These turned out to be of major historical interest. Framing the door were reused slabs from a large inscription. This was once on display in the market of a Roman provincial town in these parts, a small place called Geronthrae. I could make out bits of the Ancient Greek. For instance, there were lines listing three grades of linen headband, each followed by a different price per woven piece.

  In fact this was nothing less than a Roman emperor’s attempt to fix maximum prices for a range of well over a thousand goods and services in the empire, from lentils to lions. Parts of the same imperial edict have been found on other sites too – so it was meant to have a wide application, even if experts aren’t certain whether the whole empire was targeted.

  The emperor was Diocletian, acting in nominal concert with the other three members of the team of four rulers that he had created in AD 293. Passed eight years later, this edict belonged to a body of imperial reforms aimed at stabilizing the empire after the military crises of the last sixty years. As seen in an earlier chapter, these had badly affected economic life. A series of (usually) short-lived emperors had struggled to fund their ceaseless campaigning by raising taxes and also by skimping on precious metal when minting new coins. This in turn caused people to hoard the older, better-quality issues and even to prefer barter to cash payment.

  A near-contemporary writer thought that the runaway prices that the edict tried to control were the result of Diocletian’s own policies – in particular, further hikes in taxes to pay both for the army and for the new capital cities required by the fact that there were now four emperors ruling different parts of the empire. The same writer – a Christian, hostile to Diocletian’s memory and so not necessarily trustworthy – claims that the edict was a flop and had to be repealed.