the_late_Geoffrey_de_Ste._Croix-Christian_Persecution ...

CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION,MARTYRDOM, AND ORTHODOXY

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ChristianPersecution,Martyrdom, andOrthodoxyG. E. M. DE STE. CROIXEdited byMichael WhitbyandJoseph Streeter1

3Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dpOxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,and education by publishing worldwide inOxford New YorkAuckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong KarachiKuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City NairobiNew Delhi Shanghai Taipei TorontoWith oYces inArgentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France GreeceGuatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal SingaporeSouth Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine VietnamOxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Pressin the UK and in certain other countriesPublished in the United Statesby Oxford University Press Inc., New YorkßThe Estate of G.E.M. de Ste. Croix 2006The moral rights of the author have been assertedDatabase right Oxford University Press (maker)First published 2006All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriatereprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproductionoutside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,Oxford University Press, at the address aboveYou must not circulate this book in any other binding or coverand you must impose the same condition on any acquirerBritish Library Cataloguing in Publication DataData availableLibrary of Congress Cataloguing in Publication DataDe Ste. Croix, G. E. M. (Geoffrey Ernest Maurice)Christian persecution, martyrdom, and orthodoxy/G. E .M. De Ste. Crox;edited by Michael Whitby and Joseph Streeter.p. cm.ISBN-13: 978–0–19–927812–1 (alk. paper)ISBN-10: 0–19–927812–1 (alk. paper)1. Persecution. 2. Martyrdom–Christianity. 3. Church history–Primitive andearly church, ca. 30–600. I. Whitby, Michael. II. Streeter, Joseph. III. Title.BR1604.23.D4 2006272’.1–dc222006011789Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, IndiaPrinted in Great Britainon acid-free paper byBiddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, NorfolkISBN 0-19-927812-1 978-0-19-927812-11 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

PrefaceAfter the death of GeoVrey de Ste. Croix in February 2000, his widowMargaret passed a mass of academic papers to David Harvey andRobert Parker. Among these was a group of essays relating to Greekhistory which Ste. Croix had worked on during the 1960s and whichwere in reasonably good shape for publication; Harvey and Parkerwere able to bring these out under the title Athenian DemocraticOrigins and Other Essays (OUP 2004).The majority of the papers, however, related to religious andintellectual matters, primarily the Old Testament, Early Christianity,and Plato. For the most part these represented elements of twosubstantial publication projects on which Ste. Croix had embarkedin the 1980s, a pair of volumes which were intended to present hisradical views on a wide range of religious and related topics: EarlyChristian Attitudes to Women, Sex and Marriage, which woulddevelop ideas from the lecture series he had given at Gregynog andCornell, and Radical Conclusions, which was to be a rather moredisparate collection of papers on some speciWc biblical passages orissues and on Early Christian topics. Unlike the Greek historicalmaterial most of these papers did not exist in clearly publishableforms, but comprised diVerent versions of lectures or seminarpapers, drafts and redrafts, and working notes, some in typescriptbut much in Ste. Croix’s distinctive handwriting which becameincreasingly diYcult to decipher as his health declined during the1990s. Credit for the Wrst and fundamental contribution to transformingthis mass into what appears in the current volume belongsto David Harvey. With great patience, a clear head, and a mastery ofSte. Croix’s hand, David managed to impose some organization onthe Wles and boxes of papers. The results of his eVorts were passed toMichael Whitby in summer 2002 in six substantial cardboard boxescrammed full of Ste. Croix’s characteristic lever arch Wles, folders,and notebooks.

viPrefaceThereafter administrative distractions impeded progress, but during2003 it was possible to identify, in dialogue with Hilary O’Shea ofOUP, the building blocks of a potential volume on Christian matters.At an early stage it was decided that the material on Plato was tooremote in subject matter and insuYciently complete to be able to beincorporated in the project. Ste. Croix had devoted much of his lastdecade to working on various papers on biblical topics, and to reXecthis intentions a selection of these was incorporated alongside variousEarly Christian pieces in the Wrst formal proposal to OUP for a Ste.Croix religious volume; a pair of sympathetic and very helpfulanonymous readers indicated that the biblical papers required agreat deal of work and might still not have the impact that theirauthor had intended. As a result it seemed better not to proceed withthese, and to focus instead on the Early Christian writings in avolume which brought together Ste. Croix’s seminal writings onmartyrdom and persecution, a couple of related early items fromthe 1960s which might well have been published then and which evenin unpublished format had been inXuencing academic colleagues, adigest of further work on persecution which Ste. Croix presented inlecture series during the 1970s and 1980s, a substantial piece on theCouncil of Chalcedon which had been frequently presented at seminarsin the 1980s and was also exerting inXuence on subsequentwork, and a published item on Christian attitudes to property whichcould represent some of the lines of inquiry pursued by Ste. Croix inthe Gregynog and Townsend lecture series.1 This at least reduced theboxes of papers under active consideration to manageable proportions,although the unpublished work on Heresies and Chalcedon inparticular were both represented by several diVerent drafts and1 A Greek translation of seven of Ste. Croix’s Christian writings has just beenpublished: ˇ×ÑÉÓÔÉ`˝ÉÓÌˇÓ ˚`É ˙ ÑÙÌ˙: ˜ÉÙˆÌˇÉ; `ÉR¯Ó¯ÉÓ ˚`É˙¨˙, ed. D. I. Kyrtatas, trans. I. Kralle (Athens, 2005). In addition to the three articleswhich we reprint (‘Aspects’ ¼ Ch. 1; ‘Early Christians’ ¼ Ch. 3; ‘Early ChristianAttitudes’ ¼ Ch. 7) this also includes translations of three short general pieces: ‘TheReligion of the Roman World’, Didaskalos, 4 (1972), 61–74; ‘Christianity’s Encounterwith the Roman Imperial Government’, in A. Toynbee (ed.), The Crucible of Christianity(London, 1969), 345–51; ‘AWorm’s-Eye View of the Greeks and Romans and how theySpoke: Martyr Acts, Fables, Parables and Other Texts’, Latin Teaching, 37.4 (1984), 16–30. The Wnal item is a seminar version of ‘Chalcedon’. We are grateful to Robert Parkerfor bringing this to our attention, and lending his copy for the sake of comparison.

Prefaceviirewritings, while the thoughts on Toleration did not extend farbeyond a list of relevant references.The current volume was commissioned by OUP in autumn 2003,just when Michael Whitby’s administrative duties at Warwick increasedsubstantially. A deus ex machina appeared, courtesy of theBritish Academy which generously allocated one of its small grants tothe project. Thanks are due to all those involved, and especially toPeter Garnsey and Doug Lee, who wrote in support of the project tothe BA. This money permitted the employment of a research assistantand, thanks to a suggestion by Robert Parker, Joseph Streeteragreed to join the project in late summer 2004. The intelligence,energy, and quality of his input soon indicated that it was appropriateto upgrade him from assistant to co-editor, so that the volumeassumed its Wnal form. Without his collaboration it is certain that thevolume would have been far longer in the gestation and quitepossible that it would have remained unpublished.The editorial challenge of the Christian papers was more variedthan that of the Greek papers. Three items had already appeared inprint (Chapters 1, 3, and 7), and here we have restricted ourselves tominor updating. In many respects the paper on the Fourth Edict andElvira (Chapter 2) was similar, since this had been accepted by JTS inthe late 1960s, while for Voluntary Martyrs, a topic central to all Ste.Croix’s work on persecution, the challenge was to preserve the corpusof evidence while reducing unnecessary overlap with other papers inthe volume. Heresy, Schism, and Persecution and Chalcedon bothpresented signiWcant challenges. In the former there were severalideas and issues which might have been pursued at considerablelength, so that the question was to decide where to curtail discussion,especially in the absence of clear direction as to where Ste. Croixmight have taken the topic. On Chalcedon there were comparableopportunities, though here it was possible to be much more conWdentabout where and how Ste. Croix wanted to develop the extantpiece.Primary editorial responsibility for the material has been dividedas follows, though we have both read and commented on each other’ssections: introduction to the chapters on Persecution and Martyrdomand editorial work on Chapters 1–2, 4–5, Joseph Streeter;editorial work on Chapters 3 and 6–7, plus the introductory material

viiiPrefaceto the latter two chapters, Michael Whitby. Editorial additions to,and commentary on Ste. Croix’s material are presented in squarebrackets. Our work on all the papers has been greatly assisted bygenerous help from numerous friends and colleagues: Alan Bowman,Averil Cameron, Catherine Edwards, Peter Garnsey, Matthew Gibbs,Martin Goodman, Thomas Graumann, Caroline Humfress, MarkHumphries, Neil McLynn, Fergus Millar, Kate Nichols, John North,Christopher Parrott, Richard Price, Stefan Rebenich, and Benet Salway.

ContentsAbbreviationsxiPERSECUTION AND MARTYRDOM 1Introduction: de Ste. Croix on Persecution Joseph Streeter 31. Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 352. The Fourth Edict in the West and the Date of theCouncil of Elvira 79Appendix: The Date of the Council of ElviraJoseph Streeter 993. Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 1054. Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 1535. Heresy, Schism, and Persecution in the LaterRoman Empire 201Appendix: Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquityand Early Christianity Joseph Streeter 229CHURCH COUNCILS 253Introduction Michael Whitby 2556. The Council of Chalcedon with additions byMichael Whitby 259CHRISTIANITY AND PROPERTY 321Introduction Michael Whitby 3237. Early Christian Attitudes to Property and Slavery 328Index of Passages 373Index 378

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AbbreviationsAbbreviations listed in the Liddell–Scott–Jones–McKenzieGreek–English Lexicon are not included.ABACOBHGBHLBZCAHCSCOCSELDOPEHRGCSHTRJbACJECSJEHJTSNPNFOCPPGPLPLREAnalecta BollandianaActa Conciliorum OecumenicorumBibliotheca Hagiographica GraecaBibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Antiquae et Mediae AetatisByzantinische ZeitschriftCambridge Ancient HistoryCorpus Scriptorum Christianorum OrientaliumCorpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum LatinorumDumbarton Oaks PapersEnglish Historical ReviewDie griechische christliche Schriftsteller der ersten JahrhunderteHarvard Theological ReviewJahrbuch für Antike und ChristentumJournal of Early Christian StudiesJournal of Ecclesiastical HistoryJournal of Theological StudiesA Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of theChristian ChurchOrientalia Christiana PeriodicaPatrologia GraecaPatrologia LatinaProsopography of the Later Roman Empirevol. i, ed. A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris(Cambridge, 1971)vol. ii, ed. J. R. Martindale (Cambridge, 1980)vol. iii, ed. J. R. Martindale (Cambridge, 1992)

xiiPOSCTTHTUVig. Chr.ZACAbbreviationsPatrologia OrientalisSources chrétiennesTranslated Texts for Historians (Liverpool UP)Texte und UntersuchungenVigiliae ChristianaeZeitschrift für antikes Christentum

Persecution and Martyrdom

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Introduction:de Ste. Croix on PersecutionJoseph StreeterThe Wve essays collected in this section focus on persecution.Chapters 1 to 4 look at diVerent aspects of the Christian persecutionsup to the conversion of Constantine in 312. Chapter 5 examines thepersecutions of pagans, Jews, and Christian heretics or schismatics inthe Constantinian Empire. ‘Aspects of the ‘‘Great’’ Persecution’ and‘Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?’ have already been publishedand are recognized classics of the Weld; the three unpublishedessays develop themes raised therein, and overlap to a limited extentwith parts of The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.1 We havearranged the essays thematically: Chapter 2 complements ‘Aspects’,strengthening its arguments against the criticisms of W. H. C. Frend;Chapter 4 expands the short discussion on voluntary martyrdom in‘Early Christians’; Wnally, Chapter 5 shows the direction of Ste.Croix’s work from the late 1960s, which focused on the late Empireand persecutions in the name of Christianity.2There is always a complex of narratives to any long-standinghistoriographical problem, particularly one as ideologically chargedas the early Christian persecutions. This has almost certainly beencomplicated by the long-standing disciplinary ambiguity of earlychurch history, which continues to be subject to the competingclaims of historians, classicists, theologians, and students of religion.1 G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From theArchaic Age to the Arab Conquests (1981; corr. imprint, London, 1983), esp. 445–52;this overlap relates mainly to Ch. 5, ‘Heresy’.2 Perhaps the Wrst of his papers systematically to develop this notion was ‘Christianity’sEncounter with the Roman Imperial Government’, in A. Toynbee (ed.), TheCrucible of Christianity: Judaism, Hellenism and the Historical Background to theChristian Faith (London, 1969), 345–51, with bibliography at 357. See also theinterview between Ste. Croix and D. Kyrtatas, A. Matthaiou, and G. Pikoulas,Horos, 6 (1988), 123–33 at 130.

4 Persecution and MartyrdomI have decided to isolate two strands, which illuminate Ste. Croix’sbroader intellectual aims, and the immediate debates that headdressed. The Wrst goes back to the eighteenth century and the Wrstsecular histories of Christianity: here I have singled out the work ofMontesquieu and Gibbon, who attended to the intolerance of Christianityand its socially harmful consequences. The second is a morespeciWc historiography dating back to the late nineteenth century,which focused on the legal basis of the persecutions and their relationshipto Roman government. Ste. Croix’s inXuence has perhapsbeen greatest in relation to the second line: the central conclusions of‘Aspects’ and ‘Early Christians’ are seldom disputed. However, thesespeciWc problems were addressed within the Wrst, broader, historicalframework. Ste. Croix wanted to understand the form that Christianitydeveloped in the Roman Empire and its historical consequences.This inquiry was guided by strong personal considerations,above all his hostility to Christianity, and must be understood withthis background in mind. By juxtaposing these two lines of historiographywe can examine the strengths and weaknesses of Ste. Croix’sapproach to early Christian persecution, and gain a good perspectivefrom which to consider subsequent developments, in both earlychurch history and our understanding of the Roman Empire.IFor Ste. Croix, the salient characteristic of Christianity wasintolerance, and this intolerance is the central feature in his accountof the Christian persecutions. It generates persecution of Christiansand persecution by Christians: in the generally tolerant RomanEmpire, Christians, Gnostics apart, were persecuted for ‘their totalrefusal to worship any god but their own’3 and active rejection anddenunciation of all other forms of worship. To quote from his lecturenotes, ‘Christianity entirely refused recognition of any other religion,declining to countenance any form of paganism at all, and indeedrejected the pagan gods with disgust, either as evil demons or as3 Ste. Croix, ‘Early Christians’ (below, Ch. 3, p. 133).

Introduction 5altogether non existent and invented’. Throughout the essays on pre-Constantinian persecution, Ste. Croix looks forward to the featuresof later Christianity that he found so distasteful, particularlyintolerance and acquiescence in the face of exploitation and stateoppression.4 This chronological scope is apparent from the start: inthe conclusion of ‘Aspects’, Ste. Croix postulated a causal linkbetween the ‘atmosphere of constant menace in which Christianityhad matured’ and ‘some of the deplorable features which we Wnd inthe mentality of so many of the prominent churchmen and ecclesiasticalwriters of the fourth and following centuries—above all thereadiness to persecute and the hysterical denunciation of theologicalopponents.’5Christian intolerance manifested itself in other ways. In relation tothe non-Christian world, perhaps its most signiWcant aspect was zealfor martyrdom. Ste. Croix located the origins of Christian martyrdomin Maccabean-era Judaism, and his account has exercisedconsiderable inXuence through the indirect medium of W. H. C.Frend’s Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church.6 He consideredvoluntary martyrdom fairly widespread and a ‘factor whichboth contributed towards the outbreak of persecution and tendedto intensify it when it was already in progress’.7 Equally signiWcant, inthe long term, was Christian intolerance of internal dissent andargument, embodied in the twin concepts heresy and schism,which Ste. Croix believed to go ‘right back to the very beginning ofApostolic times’.8 Following the conversion of Constantine, thisexclusiveness and zeal combined with imperial power to transformChristianity into ‘a persecuting force without parallel in the world’shistory’, which would attack both those who claimed to be Christiansand outsiders such as Jews and pagans.94 See Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, 398.5 Ste. Croix, ‘Aspects’ (below, Ch. 1, p. 68).6 W. H. C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford, 1965),p. vii; note, however, that Ste. Croix considered Frend’s argument for the exclusivelyJewish basis of Christian martyrdom too strong; see his review of Martyrdom in JTS18 (1967), 217–21.7 See Ste. Croix, ‘Voluntary Martyrdom’ (below, Ch. 4); also ‘Early Christians’(below, Ch. 3, pp. 131–3).8 See Ste. Croix, ‘Heresy’, below, Ch. 5, p. 201.9 A phrase used in Class Struggle at 452, an unpublished paper of 1974, and,slightly modiWed, ‘Heresy’, below, Ch. 5, p. 201.

6 Persecution and MartyrdomIn the recent volume of Ste. Croix’s essays on classical Athens, theeditors David Harvey and Robert Parker describe him as ‘a historianin the Enlightenment mould, as little inclined as were Sidney andBeatrice Webb or his mentor A. H. M. Jones to reconstruct culturalcontexts imaginatively’.10 I shall have more to say about Ste. Croix’smethodology below, but the analogy with the Enlightenment isworth pursuing, since his account of Christian persecution sharesmuch with the work of Montesquieu and, more particularly, ofGibbon. Christianity for them, as for Ste. Croix, was notable for itsintolerance. In his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur desRomains et de leur décadence (1734),11 Montesquieu pointedlyignored the early Christian persecutions, concentrating instead onthe deleterious consequences of later Christian intolerance, withparticular reference to Justinian.12 In 1716 he had spoken of ‘thatspirit of tolerance and softness which prevailed in the pagan world’,13and in Considérations he contrasted the toleration of ‘every sort ofcult’ in the thriving early Empire with the enervating bigotry of thelater ‘Greek’ Empire. What I want to draw attention to here is not somuch a direct inXuence on Ste. Croix as a certain discourse onChristianity’s tendency to dogmatism and intolerance, which perhapsultimately goes back to Machiavelli, but gains Wrmer historicalgrounding in the eighteenth century.While Montesquieu preWgures certain of Ste. Croix’s interests, theinXuence of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman10 G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Athenian Democratic Origins and Other Essays, ed. D.Harvey and R. Parker (Oxford, 2004), 369.11 See the edition of F. Weil and C. Courtney, with the commentary of P. Andrivetand C. Volpilhac-Auger, Œuvres Complètes de Montesquieu, ii (Oxford, 2000), 1–318with text at 89–285. There is a translation by David Lowenthal, Considerations on theCauses of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (New York, 1965). OnMontesquieu’s work on Roman history, see recently V. de Senarclens, Montesquieuhistorien de Rome: un tournant pour la réXexion sur le statut de l’histoire au XVIIIesiècle (Geneva, 2003), esp. 101–83. For a brief introduction, see J. N. Shklar,Montesquieu (Oxford, 1987), 49–66.12 Weil and Courtney edn., 256–7; Lowenthal trans., 190–1: ‘what did most harmto the political condition of the government was his [Justinian’s] scheme for reducingall men to the same opinion in matters of religion, in circumstances which made hiszeal entirely indiscreet’.13 Montesquieu, ‘Dissertation sur la politique des Romains dans la religion’, inM. A. Masson (ed.), Œuvres Complètes de Montesquieu, iii (Paris, 1955), 37–50, at 45.

Introduction 7Empire is undoubtedly more direct, although it should be noted thatGibbon himself took much from Montesquieu.14 Ste. Croix regardedGibbon as the most signiWcant British historian before A. H. M.Jones,15 and the inXuence of chapters 15 and 16 of Decline and Fall(1776) on Ste. Croix’s account of persecution is clear. FollowingDavid Hume’s contrast between tolerant polytheism and intolerantmonotheism,16 Gibbon outlined an account of the persecutions inwhich Christian fanaticism took centre stage. It engendered persecutionup to 311, and led Christians to exaggerate its extent thereaftereven as ‘in the course of their intestine dissentions’ they wereinXicting ‘far greater severities on each other, than they had experiencedfrom the zeal of inWdels’.17 He suggested that the numberof martyrs was not large, either before 303 or during the GreatPersecution, and posited voluntary martyrdom as a commoncause of those that did occur.18 On one of the most important14 In his Memoirs, Gibbon recorded his reading habits while at Lausanne (1753–8)and his ‘delight in the frequent perusal of Montesquieu, whose energy of style, andboldness of hypothesis were powerful to awaken and stimulate the Genius of the Age’;see Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. B. Radice (Harmondsworth, 1984), 99. OnMontesquieu’s inXuence on Gibbon, see A. Momigliano, ‘Gibbon’s Contribution toHistorical Method’, Historia, 2 (1954), 450–63, at 457–8, repr. in his Studies inHistoriography (London, 1966), 40–55, at 48; P. Ghosh, ‘Gibbon’s First Thoughts:Rome, Christianity and the Essai sur l’étude de la littérature 1758–1761’, JRS 85(1995), 148–64; J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, iii: The First Decline andFall (Cambridge, 2003), 338–60.15 See Ste. Croix, ‘Class in Marx’s Conception of History’, New Left Review, 146(1984), 94–111, at 97.16 See Hume, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ (1742) in his Essays Moral,Political, and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London, 1889), 144–50;and ‘The Natural History of Religion’ (1757), ed. J. W. Colver, in Hume, The NaturalHistory of Religion and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Oxford, 1976), 23–98,at 58–9. On Hume’s inXuence on Gibbon, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Superstition andEnthusiasm in Gibbon’s History of Religion’, Eighteenth Century Life, 8.1 (1982),83–4; D. Womersley, The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire(Cambridge, 1988), 20–38.17 E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ed. J. B. Bury, London, 1909–14),580. For some of the controversy chapters 15 and 16 generated, see D. Womersley(ed.), Religious Scepticism: Contemporary Responses to Gibbon (Bristol, 1997).18 Gibbon, Decline, 545: ‘the assurance of a lasting reputation on earth, a motive socongenial to the vanity of human nature, often served to animate the courage of themartyrs’. For the prevalence of voluntary martyrdom in the Great Persecution, seeDecline, 576–9.

8 Persecution and Martyrdomproblems—why the Christians were persecuted and not the Jews—Ste. Croix followed Gibbon’s explanation that ‘the Jews were a peoplewhich followed, the Christians a sect which deserted, the religion oftheir fathers’.19 Other central features of Ste. Croix’s account overlapsigniWcantly with that of Gibbon. Always alive to the ‘scanty andsuspicious materials of ecclesiastical history’,20 Gibbon argued thatwhen presented with Christians ‘it was esteemed the duty of ahumane judge to endeavour to reclaim, rather than to punish,those deluded enthusiasts’, and attributed the familiar picture ofjudicial savagery to ‘the monks of succeeding ages, who, in theirpeaceful solitudes, entertained themselves with diversifying thedeaths and suVerings of the primitive martyrs’, adding that ‘themore ancient as well as authentic memorials of the church are seldompolluted with these extravagant and indecent Wctions’.21 AlthoughSte. Croix was far from regarding Roman magistrates as particularlyhumane or under any compulsion of duty to ‘reclaim’ Christians, hedid argue that the ‘sacriWce test’ was originally ‘a privilege’, whose‘essential aim was to make apostates, not martyrs’, and shared Gibbon’scontempt for later hagiography.22 We can even see some inXuenceof Gibbon’s terminology, or rather Hume’s terminologytransmitted through Gibbon: towards the end of The Class Strugglein the Ancient Greek World Ste. Croix speaks, in very Humean terms,of the ‘eVects of religious enthusiasm’.23There are, of course, many diVerences between Ste. Croix and hiseighteenth-century predecessors. Both Montesquieu and Gibbonwrote in a belles-lettres, historical culture, before the professionalizationof the discipline and with many modern techniques of sourcecriticism in their infancy.24 Ste. Croix was very much a modern19 Gibbon, Decline, 517; see also ‘Early Christians’ (below, Ch. 3, p. 135).20 Gibbon, Decline, 446.21 Gibbon, Decline, 538–9.22 Ste. Croix, ‘Early Christians’ (below, Ch. 3, p. 127–8).23 Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, 452.24 For some of the background to Gibbon’s Decline, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Gibbon’sDecline and Fall and the World View of the Late Enlightenment’, in his Virtue,Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, ChieXy in the EighteenthCentury (Cambridge, 1985), 143–56; idem, Barbarism and Religion, i: TheEnlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999). See also D. Kelley’suseful survey, Faces of History from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, 1998), 217–49.

Introduction 9historian in his comprehensive and critical grasp of source material,being unusually well read in the sources that classically trainedancient historians customarily ignored, such as martyr acts andhagiography.25 To understand the parallels between Gibbon andSte. Croix we must look to more personal matters. Only brief mentionneed be made of Ste. Croix’s Marxism. His dislike of Christianitydid not follow from his Marxism, and there is in any case littlesanction in the works of Marx for hostility to historical forms ofreligion.26 Indeed, Marx’s friend and colleague Engels had evendrawn parallels between the communist movement and the earlyChurch, seeing Christianity as the (inevitably incomplete) communismof its day, and its triumph as the herald of the modern worldrevolution.27 Ste. Croix’s more thoroughgoing turn to Marxismfollowed the events of 1968, and for most of the period in which hewas working on these essays, although broadly Marxist in sympathy,he did not commit himself to a Marxist framework.Ste. Croix’s hostility to Christianity developed in opposition to thebeliefs of his fundamentalist Christian mother. In his lecture ‘Sex andSt Paul’, he explained the personal factors that drew him towards thesubject and which, he felt, gave him a special insight into its characteristicattitudes. Mentioning the early Christian belief that the Old25 Ste. Croix’s enthusiasm for propagating these texts led him to recommend themto a colloquium for those interested in the reform of Latin teaching in schools, anaddress subsequently published as ‘A Worm’s-Eye View of the Greeks and Romansand how they Spoke: Martyr Acts, Fables, Parables, and Other Texts’, Latin Teaching,37 (1984), 16–30. This contains several long translations of his favourite martyr acts,such as the Passio Fructuosi, to illustrate both the simplicity of the syntax and theinterest of the content.26 Summarizing Marx’s ideas about religion is not easy, owing to the wide varietyof contexts in which he wrote on the subject. Perhaps his most famous exposition is‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in Marx, EarlyWritings, trans. R. Livingstone and G. Benton (Harmondsworth, 1975), 243–57.Here he coined the oft-misunderstood description of religion as the ‘opium ofthe people’. Religion has social reality for Marx: ‘religious suVering is at one andthe same time the expression of real suVering and a protest against real suVering’.However, the cure for this suVering cannot be eVected by denying the reality ofreligion, but by transforming the material conditions that create the suVering manifestedin religion.27 F. Engels, ‘On the History of Early Christianity’, originally published in Die neueZeit, 1 (1894–5), 4–13 and 36–43, repr. in K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion(Moscow, 1957), 313–43.

10 Persecution and Martyrdomand New Testaments constituted ‘the very Word of God, all ofit divine revelation, absolutely true, factually and historically’ hecontinued thus:As it happens, I feel particularly well trained to deal with this attitude, sinceit was imparted to me very powerfully as a child. My widowed mother (myfather died when I was four) belonged to the sect of the British Israelites, oneof those groups on what I hope I may be allowed to call ‘the lunatic fringe’ ofChristianity. My mother accepted the Bible, every word of it, as in everyrespect the inspired Word of God, and for many years I was never allowed tocome into contact with any other view.The central tenet of British Israelism is that the British, or sometimesthe Anglo-Saxon people more generally, descend from the ten losttribes of Israel.28 Although it was not, strictly speaking, a sect,29British Israelism inXuenced a number of unsavoury organizations,among them the Ku Klux Klan and Christian Identity.30 A feature ofSte. Croix’s upbringing that particularly inXuenced his views on theearly Christians was the violent punishments his mother anticipatedfor the enemies of her sect,31 and his abhorrence of early Christianpolemic is apparent at numerous points in these essays.32 He alsodespised the Jewish God Yahweh, whom he regarded as ‘a cruel andvicious creature, guilty of innumerable acts and commands which no28 Although many of the ideas of British Israelism have long antecedents, not leastin English Puritanism, the notion that the British are the actual descendants of Israel,and not just analogous to Israel, was most inXuentially promulgated in John Wilson’sLectures on our Israelitish Origins (London, 1840), which went through Wve editions.See also J. Wilson, ‘British Israelism: The Ideological Restraints on Sect Organisation’,in B. R. Wilson (ed.), Patterns of Sectarianism: Organisation and Ideology in Social andReligious Movements (London, 1967), 345–76.29 Ste. Croix’s description is a little misleading: British Israelism was not a sectarianbody, with a distinct institutional structure, but a doctrine, which members ofdiVerent Protestant sects—by deWnition those with strong aYnities to fundamentalismand evangelicalism—might hold. The sociologist John Wilson has described it as‘an interdenominational fellowship, recruiting in various churches—from theChurch of England to the Pentecostal movement—which are hospitable to thetraditions of fundamentalist, evangelical Protestantism’; see Wilson, Patterns ofSectarianism, 345.30 On which, see M. Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of theChristian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill, 1994).31 See R. Parker, ‘GeoVrey Ernest Maurice de Ste. Croix 1910–2000’, Proceedings ofthe British Academy, 111 (2001), 447–78, at 448–9.32 pp. 218–19, 227–8, 301–2.

Introduction 11one today, whether Christian, Jew, agnostic or atheist, would regardwith anything but detestation’, and charged Jesus with failing tocondemn his father’s excesses.33 Note that he distinguishes carefullybetween atheism and agnosticism, with the former a distinct doctrinalposition, not an attitude of sceptical detachment. Although heconfessed never to have believed in Christian doctrine, it is perhapsunsurprising that his renunciation of Christianity took such anextreme form.The early Church was always a central negative part of his life. Hefrequently treated early Christians as though contemporaries, attackingPaul and Augustine in particular with a ferocity worthy of earlyChristian polemic, and showing the ways in which institutionalChristianity distorted positive Christian teachings, most notably onproperty and slavery, but also on toleration.34 He articulated hishostility to Christianity more explicitly over time, and in this collectionit is clearest in Chapter 5. In an interview given shortly before hisdeath, having criticized the pro-Christian bias of most scholarly workon the early Church, he boasted that the book he was then workingon was going to be ‘completely antichristian’.35 Ste. Croix also consideredthe early Church relevant to contemporary Marxism, althoughin a way quite diVerent from Engels. In a number of letterswritten following the publication of The Class Struggle in the AncientGreek World he compared the multiplicity of Christian heresies withthe numerous varieties of Marxism. It is, however, unclear how hethought his own, rather fundamentalist, approach to the works ofMarx would remedy this situation.36Within this larger narrative, Ste. Croix addressed a number ofmore speciWc problems. Although he devoted much attention tothe attitudes of Christians, in his view the persecutions could onlysatisfactorily be studied if this perspective was married with a clearunderstanding of the administration and religion of the Roman33 A quote from the conclusion to Ste. Croix’s unpublished paper on Job.34 Ste. Croix, ‘Attitudes’; ‘Heresy’ (below, Chs. 7 and 5).35 This book was to be called Radical Conclusions; see the interview with ChristyConstantakopolou, Utopia, 44 (2001), 157–70, at 168. I would like to thankDr Constantakopolou for giving me a copy of this interview.36 On his fundamentalism, see the reference to ‘ ‘‘Marxists’’ (genuine or not)’ inthe index of Class Struggle, 718.

12 Persecution and MartyrdomEmpire, and its changes over time.37 In ‘Why were the Early ChristiansPersecuted?’, he divided the persecutions into three mainperiods on the basis of their relationship to the actions of Romangovernment: the Wrst up to Nero’s persecution of 64, the second from64 to the Decian persecution of 250–1, and the third thence to either313 or 324.38 Before 250, the persecutions were sporadic and localwhile after 250 they were centrally initiated. He passed over the Wrstand third periods rather brieXy, devoting more attention to thesecond. This required a more comprehensive examination of thelegal basis of the persecutions, a subject thoroughly debated sincethe late 1880s and early 1890s.39 It is quite common to Wnd the termsof the debate divided into three schools, with one advocating ageneral law (either a senatus consultum or imperial edict), issuedunder either Nero or Domitian, which prohibited Christianity;40one following Theodor Mommsen’s work on the provincial governor’spower of coercitio, which could be exercised without the need37 Ste. Croix, ‘Early Christians’ (below, Ch. 3, pp. 113–20, 133–8). See also hisreview of Frend’s Martyrdom and Persecution, JTS 18 (1967), 217–21 at 221.38 ‘Early Christians’ (below, Ch. 3, pp. 106–8).39 For the outline of this debate, see N. H. Baynes, ‘The Great Persecution’, in S. A.Cook, F. E. Adcock, M. P. Charlesworth, and N. H. Baynes (eds.), CAH xii: TheImperial Crisis and Recovery A.D. 193–324 (Cambridge, 1939), 646–77, at 654–5;A. N. Sherwin-White, ‘The Early Persecutions and Roman Law again’, JTS 3.2 (1952),199, repr. with minor changes in his The Letters of Pliny: A Historical and SocialCommentary (Oxford, 1966), 772–87, at 772–4; A. Wlosok, ‘Die Rechtsgrundlagender Christenverfolgungen der ersten zwei Jahrhunderte’, Gymnasium, 66 (1959),14–32, repr. in R. Klein (ed.), Das frühe Christentum im römischen Staat (Wege derForschung 267; Darmstadt, 1971), 275–301; Ste. Croix, ‘Early Christians’, n. 18(below, Ch. 3); P. Keresztes, ‘The Imperial Roman Government and the ChristianChurch I: From Nero to the Severi’, ANRW 23.1 (Berlin and New York, 1979),247–315, at 279–87.40 Perhaps the most signiWcant exponent of this view is the Belgian scholar C.Callewaert; see particularly his ‘Les Premiers chrétiens furent-ils persécutés par éditsgénéraux ou par mesure de police? Observations sur la théorie de Mommsen principalementd’après les écrits de Tertullien’, Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 2 (1901),771–97 and 3 (1902), 5–15, 324–48, and 601–14. Also, J. Zeiller, ‘Nouvelles observationssur l’origine juridique des persécutions contre les chrétiens aux deux premierssiècles’, Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 46 (1951), 521–33, and idem, ‘‘‘InstitutumNeronianum’’, loi fantôme ou réalité?’, Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 50 (1955), 393–9; P. Keresztes, ‘Law and Arbitrariness in the Persecution of the Christians and Justin’sFirst Apology’, Vig. Chr. 18 (1964), 204–14, at 204–5. For further bibliography, seeKeresztes, ‘The Imperial Roman Government and the Christian Church I: From Neroto the Severi’, 279–80 n. 182.

Introduction 13for explicit legislation;41 and Wnally one arguing that the Christianswere merely persecuted for breaking existing criminal law.42Sometimes this division is categorized by linguistic area, with theWrst school predominantly Francophone, and the second predominantlyGerman and Anglophone,43 although notable German andEnglish scholars have advocated the Wrst position,44 and Frenchscholars the second.45 In 1885 Mommsen’s Provinces of the RomanEmpire was translated into English and immediately exercised astrong inXuence on British Roman historians. They were receptiveto his explanation for the persecutions, and it formed the basis ofW.M.Ramsay’sTheChurchintheRomanEmpirebeforeA.D.170(1893)and E. G. Hardy’s Christianity and the Roman Government (1894).4641 T. Mommsen, ‘Der Religionsfrevel nach römischen Recht’, Historische Zeitschrift,28 (1890), 389–429 and ‘Christianity in the Roman Empire’, Expositor 4.8(1893), 1–7; ‘Religionsfrevel’ is reprinted in Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften: juristischeSchriften, iii (Berlin, 1907), 389–422 and ‘Christianity in the Roman Empire’,in Gesammelte Schriften: historische Schriften, iii (Berlin, 1910), 540–5 (any subsequentreference to these articles will follow the page numbers of Gesammelte Schriften);and his Römisches Strafrecht (Leipzig, 1899), 35–54 and 567–80. See also E. G.Hardy, Christianity and the Roman Government (London, 1894).42 The charges vary; L. Cezard, Histoire juridique des persécutions contre les chrétiensde Néron à Septime-Sévère (64 à 202) (Paris, 1911), 123–4 (repr. in 1967 as vol.15 of the series Studia Juridica), advocated high treason. More common is the notionthat Christianity was prohibited as a collegia illicita; see among others E. T. Merrill,Essays in Early Church History (London, 1924), esp. 52–66. Hugh Last’s essay ‘TheStudy of the ‘‘Persecution’’ ’, JRS 27 (1937), 80–92, overlaps with this approach. In acritique of Mommsen’s notion of national apostasy, he argued that until the late 1stcent. ad, Romans had not persecuted on religious grounds but had merely takenaction against ‘swindlers’, but that the situation changed as the collection of the Wscusjudaicus diVerentiated Christianity from Judaism; see also Last, ‘ChristenverfolgungII (juristisch)’, Reallexicon für Antike und Christentum, 2 (1954), 1208–28. HenriGrégoire, while accepting Tertullian’s ‘institutum Neronianum’ as sound evidence,argued that Nero’s law was in fact an edict or rescript which merely set a precedent,and that it was based on republican prohibitions of superstitio; see H. Grégoire, LesPersécutions dans l’Empire romain (2nd edn.) (Mémoires de l’Académie royale deBelgique, Classe des Lettres 56.5; Brussels, 1964), 22–4.43 See Sherwin-White, ‘The Early Persecutions and Roman Law again’ andWlosok, ‘Die Rechtsgrundlagen’ as cited in n. 39 above.44 See, for instance, E. Schwartz, Kaiser Constantin und die christliche Kirche(Leipzig and Berlin, 1913), 35; Baynes, ‘The Great Persecution’, 655.45 See, for instance, L. Dieu, ‘La Persécution au IIe siècle: une loi fantôme’, Revued’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 38 (1942), 5–30.46 See Ramsay, The Church in the Roman Empire before A.D. 170 (London, 1893),207–11; Hardy, Christianity and the Roman Government, pp. v–vi. In his preface,

14 Persecution and MartyrdomSte. Croix, as Sherwin-White had shortly before him, worksbroadly within Mommsen’s framework. One important modiWcationintroduced by Sherwin-White and developed by Ste. Croix is anemphasis on the locally responsive nature of coercitio and its operationin a legal setting, rather than in direct ‘police measures’.47 Bothplace the trials of Christians within the procedure of cognitio extraordinem, a nineteenth-century expression which characterizes thejudicial powers bound up with the provincial governor’s imperium,48although in a reprint of ‘Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?’Ste. Croix accepted Fergus Millar’s correction that this expressionshould not be used to characterize standard procedure in Romancriminal trials, since it was not used by any ancient sources.49Sherwin-White and Ste. Croix did not disagree in their understandingof judicial procedure, but in the charges levelled atChristians to bring them before the provincial governor. As Sherwin-Whitenoted, this was the central question unanswered byMommsen’s work on coercitio, in that it still remained to say whythe Christians were subject to coercitio.50 Mommsen argued that theChristians were persecuted for inducing ‘national apostasy’ from theancestral Roman religion: ‘the contempt of the dii publici populiRomani, in itself high treason, or as the Christians express it(thoughts being free but words not), the mere Christian Name. . . constitutes a crime in the eye of the law’.51 However, one of theHardy lists those articles or books that assisted him most fully, of which all apart fromJ. B. Lightfoot’s The Apostolic Fathers are German.47 See Sherwin-White, ‘The Early Persecutions and Roman Law again’, 205; Ste.Croix, ‘Early Christians’ (below, Ch. 3, p. 113–16).48 On which, see A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the NewTestament (Oxford, 1963), 30; J. Crook, Law and Life of Rome (London, 1967), 85; I.Buti, ‘La ‘‘cognitio extra ordinem’’: da Augusto a Diocleziano’, ANRW 2.14 (Berlinand New York, 1982), 29–59 at 30 with n. 3; W. Turpin, ‘Formula, cognitio, andproceedings extra ordinem’, Revue Internationale des Droits de l’Antiquité, 46 (1999),499–574, at 502 with n. 3.49 Ste. Croix, ‘Early Christians’, repr. in M. I. Finley (ed.), Studies in Ancient Society(London, 1974), 249 n. 170, with Millar’s review of Sherwin-White’s Letters of Pliny:A Historical and Social Commentary and Fifty Letters of Pliny, JRS 58 (1968), 218–24,at 222.50 Sherwin-White, ‘The Early Persecutions and Roman Law again’, 203.51 Mommsen, ‘Christianity in the Roman Empire’, 542; ‘Der Religionsfrevel nachrömischen Recht’, 407.

Introduction 15characteristics of what we call Roman religion is precisely its lack ofcoercive apparatus,52 and no ancient source records the phrase diipublici populi Romani. Sherwin-White argued that the persecutionswere based not on religion but primarily on Christian contumacia,orrefusal to obey the reasonable requests of magistrates, for instance topay homage to di nostri.53 Ste. Croix in contrast placed religion at thecentre of the persecutions. Emphasizing the importance felt by theinhabitants of the Graeco-Roman world for maintaining the properrelationship to the gods, or the pax deorum, he argued that the‘pagans were naturally apprehensive that the gods would vent theirwrath at this dishonour not upon the Christians alone but upon thewhole community; and when disasters did occur, they were only toolikely to fasten the blame on to the Christians’.54 Ste. Croix can clearlyexplain the processes characteristic of Christian trials much betterthan Sherwin-White, and his emphasis on the widespread need tomaintain divine favour allows for considerable regional variations inpersecution. In the words of one recent author, religion in the RomanEmpire is now often approached Wrst as a ‘local, collectiveendeavor to negotiate fertility, safety, health, misfortune, identity,and collective solidarity’, and it is in such a context that disputesbetween Christians and their neighbours arose and were referred toprovincial governors.55 Nonetheless, while Sherwin-White and Ste.Croix disagreed over why the early Christians were persecuted, theirwork on how they were persecuted overlaps substantially.52 On which see J. North, ‘Religious Toleration in Republican Rome’, PCPS 25(1979), 85–103, repr. in C. Ando (ed.), Roman Religion (Edinburgh, 2003), 199–219.53 Sherwin-White, ‘The Early Persecutions and Roman law again’, 210.54 ‘Early Christians’ (below, Ch. 3, p. 133–8).55 I have quoted from D. Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation andResistance (Princeton, 1998), 5–6; see also R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians(Harmondsworth, 1986), 33; J. B. Rives, Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage:From Augustus to Constantine (Oxford, 1995); H. Cancik and J. Rüpke (eds.),Römische Reichsreligion und Provinzialreligion (Tübingen, 1997); T. Kaizer, The ReligiousLife of Palmyra: A Study of the Social Patterns of Worship in the Roman Period(Oriens et Occidens 4; Stuttgart, 2002). See also P. Hordern and N. Purcell, TheCorrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000), esp. 403–60.Although Hordern and Purcell cover a much greater period than just the RomanEmpire, in emphasizing the interaction between diverse regional ecologies (or‘microecologies’) and the Mediterranean, they examine many issues germane to theinteraction between widely distributed ‘great traditions’ and locally grounded ‘littletraditions’.

16 Persecution and MartyrdomSte. Croix passed over his third period rather brieXy, but subjectedthe shorter period 303–12 to close scrutiny. Although the changefrom locally initiated to centrally directed persecution was signiWcant,one that Ste. Croix considered indicative of changing popular aswell as elite attitudes to the Church, many aspects of his work on theearlier persecutions remain relevant. ‘Aspects’ demonstrates wellthe importance of persecution for Roman administrative history,providing exemplary evidence for the workings of the tetrarchy,56showing its transformation from a loosely organized division of rulefounded on the auctoritas of Diocletian, to a more fragmented andfractious state of aVairs following his abdication in ad 305. Just as inthe early Empire, regional variation is signiWcant: the workings of thetetrarchy are relatively unsystematic, with enforcement of edictsdependent on the whim of the individual Caesar or Augustus aswell as the provincial governor.This picture of regional variation and limited central control startsto change in his work on the post-Constantinian persecutions, indicatedby his comparison between the Church and Eisenhower’s‘military industrial complex’. He Wrst published these ideas in TheClass Struggle, and they attracted mixed reactions, with a number ofreviewers criticizing his overt hostility to Christianity.57 ‘Heresy,Schism, and Persecution’ is valuable primarily for the light it shedson the larger historical preoccupations underpinning Ste. Croix’swork on persecution. SigniWcantly it ends with an extract from thethirteenth-century Life of St Louis, whose violently intolerant contenthe sees as a consequence of the ‘great structure of dogmaticand organizational intolerance’ imposed during the later RomanEmpire.58 This emergence of institutional religious intolerance outof the relative openness of the classical Roman Empire occurred, heargues, through the fusion of Christian exclusiveness and hostility topluralism, traced back to the Apostolic period, and the traditionalRoman concern with establishing the pax deorum, or the correctrelations between man and divine that guarantee the well-being56 A point reiterated by Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East 31 BC–AD 337(Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 198.57 See particularly the criticisms of T. D. Barnes, Phoenix, 36.4 (1982), 363–6, at365; Averil Cameron, Times Higher Education Supplement, 19th Feb. 1982; B. D. Shaw,‘Anatomy of the Vampire Bat’, Economy and Society, 13.2 (1984), 208–49, at 247 n. 57;C. G. Starr, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 13.3 (1982), 521–2, at 522.58 Below, Ch. 5, pp. 228–9

Introduction 17of the empire. While the need to maintain divine support wasclearly important for both the pre- and post-Constantinian Empires,the latter propagated a much more comprehensive form of stateintolerance by emphasizing orthodoxy of belief: adherence to ‘outward’ritual forms, which allowed substantial freedom of belief, wasreplaced by adherence to articles of doctrine, with baleful consequencesfor human freedom.Few would disagree with the general outline of this narrative,which can be connected with what Peter Brown called the transitionfrom ‘soft’ to ‘hard’ government.59 However, as with any grand thesisthere are problems. The sense of local contingency characteristic ofhis work on early Christian persecution largely disappears, theemphasis shifting to the centralized implementation of Christianorthodoxy. The link between intolerant rhetoric and persecutionis never explored, and he tends to assume that one necessarilyfollows from the other, with little attention to context.60 Althougha substantial body of discriminatory legislation emerged in the lateEmpire, it was far from uniformly imposed, and persecutionsof pagans, Jews, and heretics or schismatics were, like persecutionsof Christians up to the mid-third century, sporadic, withdoctrinal and organizational problems resolved as they arose inlocal disputes. Moreover, the central argument of this essay restsupon a number of stark contrasts between Christianity andthe institutions of the classical Graeco-Roman world. Althoughhe notes that the Roman state ‘underwent far less change afterit had become Christian than many ecclesiastical historians59 P. Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 48; on whichsee recently C. Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Revealing Antiquity 15;Cambridge, Mass., 2004) and more brieXy P. Garnsey and C. Humfress, The Evolutionof the Late Antique World (Cambridge, 2001), 25–51; see also M. Gaddis, There is NoCrime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire(Berkeley, 2005).60 See in contrast Peter Brown’s work on paideia in late antique society; Brown seesthe rules of etiquette bound up with paideia as creating something roughly homologousto ‘civil society’, encompassing both pagans and Christians and providingpractical limits on Christian exclusiveness. For Brown’s ideas on the signiWcanceand power of paideia in late antique society, see his Power and Persuasion in LateAntiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, 1992); for more explicit applicationsto religious toleration, see Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisationof the Roman World (Cambridge, 1995), esp. 29–54, and ‘Christianisation andReligious ConXict’, in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey (eds.), CAH xiii: The Late Empire,A.D. 337–425 (Cambridge, 1998), 632–64.

18 Persecution and Martyrdombelieve’,61 his separation of ‘persecution of Christians’ and ‘persecutionby Christians’ posits an identity between the Christianity of theEmperor and that of the state, which seriously underplaysthe complexities of ‘christianization’. This contrast also renders thepost-Constantinian world rather homogeneous. Intolerance and persecutionwere more pervasive in some parts of late antique and earlymedieval Europe than in others. As R. I. Moore notes, at least for thepost-Roman West, persecution ‘far from being ‘‘normal’’ in medievalsociety . . . faded away with the Roman Empire, and did not reappearuntil the eleventh century’.62 Where, for the pre-Constantinianperiod, Ste. Croix’s hostility to Christianity is a strength, givinghim a much more sceptical appreciation of Christian rhetoric thanmany of his peers and predecessors, here it is perhaps a weakness,impelling him to take at face value the violent rhetoric of Christianargument. Nonetheless, it remains important in showing the broaderhistorical and ethical problems against which Ste. Croix studied thepre-Constantinian Church.63IIWhat inXuence has Ste. Croix’s work on persecution exercised onsubsequent scholarship, and how does it stand up in the light of that61 ‘Heresy’ (below, Ch. 5, p. 202).62 R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987), 4.63 One might note that Ste. Croix’s interpretation of the post-ConstantinianEmpire, with its emphasis on intolerance and persecution, overlaps with that ofa number of European scholars who lived through the Second World War. For acomparison between intolerance in the later Roman Empire and in 1930s and 1940sEurope, see F. Poulsen, Glimpses of Roman Culture, trans. J. D. Hansen (Leiden, 1952),276. Herbert Bloch saw 4th-cent. Rome as a period ‘kindred’ with the years 1910–60,which he described as a ‘period of darkness . . . in which long-established traditionsand values disintegrate, in which one crisis precipitates another’; see his ‘The PaganRevival in the West at the End of the Fourth Century’, 193–218 in A. Momigliano(ed.), The ConXict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford,1963), at 193. Indeed this emphasis on conXict, since Andreas AlXoldi’s seminal workof the 1940s, for a time dominated the historiography of late antique Rome. There islittle evidence of this work exerting a direct inXuence on Ste. Croix, but fascismand world war, although experienced from quite diVerent perspectives, may haverendered intolerance and repression particularly salient.

Introduction 19scholarship? For a number of reasons, the Wrst question is not an easyone to answer. Ste. Croix’s published essays on early Christianpersecutions stand up well on their own terms, and some of thediYculty in charting their inXuence lies precisely in their comprehensiveness:they have resolved long-standing problems morethan they have posed new questions. Both were based on thoroughmastery of source materials, and while certain details have beenquestioned, for the most part this has never been serious enoughsubstantially to modify his main arguments, and, along with thework of T. D. Barnes, they are almost taken for granted, providinga basis from which historians have studied other subjects.64 The maindiYculty, however, derives from changes in the disciplinary backgroundof early church and late Roman history, and changes in thequestions posed by ancient historians. The academic environment inwhich Ste. Croix wrote these essays diVers profoundly from thattoday, and here I want to review how these changes might modifysome of the assumptions underlying Ste. Croix’s work on persecution,but also how his work might have contributed to these changes.Before examining these broader academic changes, it is worthreviewing some more speciWc aspects of Ste. Croix’s work on persecutionthat might be questioned in the light of subsequent scholarship.Perhaps most obviously problematic is his argument for JewishinXuences on the Christian idea of martyrdom. As I have notedabove, Ste. Croix’s argument for Jewish inXuences on Christianmartyrdom was neither as strong nor as exclusive as that of W. H. C.Frend. Nonetheless, following Glen Bowersock’s Martyrdom andRome, it is clear that martyrdom is a concept that overlaps withearlier examples of Jewish or pagan self-sacriWce in the face ofRoman power, but also designates a distinct way of resisting, orperhaps acquiescing in, authority, one ‘absorbed into a conceptualsystem of posthumous recognition and anticipated reward’, bearing adistinct name (martyrdom), and coming into being at a speciWc time(c. ad 50–150).65 This should not lead us to neglect the connections64 So, for instance, J. B. Rives, ‘The Piety of a Persecutor’, JECS 4.1 (1996), 1–25, at18 n. 44; M. Beard, J. North, and S. Price, Religions of Rome,i:A History (Cambridge,1998), 237 n. 87.65 See G. W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge, 1995), 5. Frend hasdefended his position against Bowersock, but misrepresents Bowersock’s argument,

20 Persecution and Martyrdombetween early Christianity and Judaism, but it should lead us torethink how we understand ‘inXuence’. Other points of debate areSte. Croix’s contention that the Fourth Edict was never promulgatedin the West.66 Here the balance of scholarly opinion is very largelywith him.67 The tetrarchy has been a fruitful Weld in recent historiography,68but with the exception of P. S. Davies’s argument againstsuggesting that Bowersock, in connecting Christian martyrdom with the civic worldof the Graeco-Roman Empire, is simply arguing that the inspiration for Christianmartyrdom came from Graeco-Roman, and not Jewish, exemplars; Frend, ‘Martyrdomand Political Oppression’, in P. F. Esler (ed.), The Early Christian World, ii(London, 2000), 815–39, at 817–18. Bowersock’s book is vulnerable in that, havingestablished that 4 Maccabees should not be accorded any priority to the NewTestament and the letters of Ignatius, he pays little heed to the ongoing interactionbetween Jews and Christians; see D. Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and theMaking of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, 1999), 93–126, although Boyarin’scontention that Bowersock constitutes martyrdom as ‘an essence’ by noting itsdistinctiveness is puzzling, especially given Bowersock’s argument that Christianmartyrdom emerges in the historically contingent setting of the Graeco-Roman city.66 Against Ste. Croix, see Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, 502–3; ‘A Note on theGreat Persecution in the West’, in Studies in Church History, 2 (1965), 141–8, repr. inFrend, Religion Popular and Unpopular in the Early Christian Centuries (London,1976); ‘Martyrdom and Political Oppression’, 832 and 837 n. 57; M. B. Simmons,Arnobius of Sicca (Oxford, 1996), 84–96; K. Rosen, ‘Passio sanctae Crispinae’, JbAC 40(1997), 106–25, esp. 122–3. A. K. Bowman, ‘Diocletian and the First Tetrarchy, A.D.284–305’, in Bowman, P. Garnsey, and Averil Cameron (eds.), CAH xii: The Crisis ofEmpire, A.D. 193–337 (Cambridge, 2005), 67–89, at 87; G. W. Clarke, ‘Third-CenturyChristianity’, in CAH xii: 589–671, at 654 states that ‘the evidence is not compellingthat this edict, certainly issued throughout the east, was ever promulgated in the west:if it was, it cannot have been enforced systematically’.67 J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford,1979), 249; T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 23;idem., ‘The Constantinian Settlement’, in H. W. Attridge and G. Hata (eds.), Eusebius,Christianity, and Judaism (Detroit, 1992), 635–57, at 640, repr. in his From Eusebius toAugustine (Aldershot, 1994); ‘From Toleration to Repression: The Evolution ofConstantine’s Religious Policies’, Scripta Classica Israelica, 21 (2002), 189–207, at192–3; A. Marcone, ‘La politica religiosa: dall’ultima persecuzione alla tolleranza’, inA. Carandini, L. Cracco Ruggini, and A. Giardina (eds.), Storia di Roma, iii.1: L’etàtardoantica: crisi e trasformazioni (Rome, 1993), 223–45, at 236; S. Corcoran, TheEmpire of the Tetrarchs: Imperial Pronouncements and Government AD 284–324, rev.edn. (Oxford, 2000), 182 and n. 51; see also the relevant chapters in Bowman,Garnsey, and Cameron, CAH xii.68 See recently A. Demandt, A. Goltz, and H. Schlange-Schönigen (eds.), Diokletianund die Tetrarchie: Aspekte einer Zeitenwende (Millenium-Studien 1; Berlin andNew York, 2004); also W. KuhoV, Diokletian und die Epoche der Tetrarchie: dasromische Reich zwischen Krisenbewaltigung und Neuaufbau (284–313 n. Chr.) (Frankfurt,2001); F. Kolb, Diocletian und die Erste Tetrarchie: Improvisation oder Experiment

Introduction 21Galerius’ centrality to the persecutions,69 on which Ste. Croix was inany case equivocal,70 subsequent scholarship either reinforces hisconclusions or, as R. Bratoz has done recently, provides moredetailed study of the eVects of persecution on a distinct region.71One potential modiWcation to Ste. Croix’s narrative of persecutionis suggested if we accept the argument of G. W. Clarke, ReinhardSelinger, and James Rives, that the Decian persecution was notoriginally directed against Christians.72 Nonetheless, that a changein the relationship between the Christians and central governmentoccurred around the mid-third century remains indubitable, even ifthe reason for this change is not entirely clear.73 The importance ofin der Organisation monarchischer Herrschaft? (Berlin and New York, 1987); vols. 1and 2 of the journal Antiquité Tardive (1993–4) with T. D. Barnes, ‘Emperors,Panegyrics, Prefects, Provinces and Palaces (284–317)’, JRA 9 (1996), 532–52; Corcoran,Empire.69 P. S. Davies, ‘The Origin and Purpose of the Persecution of A.D. 303’, JTS 40(1989), 66–94, against which Barnes, ‘The Constantinian Settlement’, 639–40, andidem, ‘Christentum und dynastische Politik (300–325)’, in F. Paschoud and J. Szidat(eds.), Usurpationen in der Spätantike (Historia Einzelschriften 111; Stuttgart, 1997),99–109, at 104; D. S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay AD 180–395 (London, 2004),338. Contrary to Davies’s assertion (66 n. 2), Galerius’ centrality to the greatpersecution had been questioned earlier: see J. Burckhardt, Die Zeit Constantins desGrossen (Basel, 1853), 325–30, trans. by M. Hadas as The Age of Constantine the Great(London, 1949), 246–8; M. Gelzer, ‘Der Urheber der Christenverfolgung von 303’, inTheologischen Fakultät der Universität Basel (ed.), Vom Wesen und Wandel der Kirche(Basel, 1935), 35–44, repr. in his Kleine Schriften, ii (Wiesbaden, 1963), 378–86; Kolb,Diocletian und die Erste Tetrarchie, 128–39.70 As was A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economicand Administrative Survey (Oxford, 1964), 71.71 See recently R. Bratoz, ‘Die diocletianische Christenverfolgung in den DonauundBalkan-provinzen’, in Diokletian und die Tetrarchie, 115–40, although he doesnot cite Ste. Croix. See also K.-H. Schwarte, ‘Diokletians Christengesetz’, in R.Günther and S. Rebenich (eds.), E Fontibus Haurire: Beiträge zur römischen Geschichteund zu ihren Hilfswissenschaften (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich, 1994), 203–40,which attempts to uncover Diocletian’s motivation for persecuting Christians.72 G. W. Clarke, The Letters of St. Cyprian, i (Ancient Christian Writers 43; NewYork, 1984), esp. 22–5; also ‘Third-century Christianity’, CAH xii: 625–6. R. Selinger,Die Religionspolitik des Kaisers Decius: Anatomie einer Christenverfolgung (Frankfurt,1994), esp. 29–37, and idem, The Mid-Third Century Persecutions of Decius andValerian (Frankfurt, 2002), esp. 63–8; J. B. Rives, ‘The Decree of Decius and theReligion of Empire’, JRS 89 (1999), 135–54, esp. 141–2. Note that this argument isnot altogether new: Baynes advocated a similar position in the 1930s; see his ‘TheGreat Persecution’ at CAH xii: 657.73 See R. Selinger, The Mid-Third Century Persecutions, 83–94. Drake has arguedthat the third century witnessed a change in the ideological basis of imperial rule,

22 Persecution and Martyrdomthis period can, perhaps, be clariWed by recent work on Christiandemography and material culture. While there are many methodologicalproblems posed by the study of Christian numbers,74 recentestimates—which date the major expansion of absolute Christiannumbers to the third century—tally well with the material record,which shows the Wrst distinctively Christian remains appearingtowards the end of the second century and growing substantiallyover the course of the third century. Attempts have been made toresurrect the general law theory,75 but this can only be entertained indeWance of modern scholarship on government in the principate, notto mention the enormous variety of punishments for Christiansrecorded in our sources, which range from death by burning totemporary imprisonment.76 Ste. Croix’s account remains markedlyaway from a system ‘anchored squarely in senatorial tradition’ to one based on divinefavour, in which the threat posed by Christian ‘atheism’ was more salient: see hisConstantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore, 2000), 148. Gaddisnotes the important religious implications of the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212,which made ‘the gods of Rome . . . everyone’s gods’; There is No Crime for Those WhoHave Christ, 33.74 R. Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton,1996), 3–27; K. Hopkins, ‘Christian Number and its Implications’, JECS 6.2 (1998),185–226, at 192–8. Hopkins is much more aware of the problems than Stark, whotreats early Christianity as exactly the same sort of phenomenon as an American newreligious movement, with no reference to contextual diVerences.75 See particularly M. Sordi, The Christians and the Roman Empire, trans. A. Bedini(London, 1988), 29–35 and 59–65; P. Keresztes, ‘The Imperial Roman Governmentand the Christian Church I: From Nero to the Severi’, 279–82 and Imperial Rome andthe Christians, I:From Herod the Great to about 200 A.D. (Lanham, Md., 1989),111–20; on the latter, see the review of Barnes, JTS 42.1 (1991), 314–16.76 A point noted by T. D. Barnes, Tertullian, rev. edn. (Oxford, 1985), 147–8. Thebibliography on government in the principate is vast, and could not possibly be listedhere in full. Some prominent examples include D. Nörr, Imperium und Polis in derhohen Prinzipatszeit (Münchener Beiträge zur Papyrusforschung und antikenRechtsgeschichte 50; Munich, 1966), esp. 76–114; F. Millar, ‘Emperors at Work’, JRS57 (1967), 9–19, repr. in idem, Rome, the Greek World, and the East, ii: Government,Society, and Culture in the Roman Empire, ed. H. M. Cotton and G. M. Rogers (ChapelHill, 2004), 3–22; idem, The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC–AD 337) (London,1977), esp. 79–84; F. Jacques, Le Privilège de liberté: politique impériale et autonomiemunicipale dans les cités de l’Occident romain (161–244) (Collection de l’École Françaisede Rome 76; Rome, 1984); P. Garnsey and R. Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy,Society and Culture (London, 1987), 20–40; J. E. Lendon, Empire of Honour: The Art ofGovernment in the Roman World (Oxford, 1997); C. Ando, Imperial Ideology andProvincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (Berkeley, 2000), 49–70.

Introduction 23more convincing, and shortly after publication was strengthened byT. D. Barnes’s comprehensive examination of the evidence for thelegal basis of the persecutions, which conWrmed that up to Deciusthere was no general law against Christianity. Like Ste. Croix, Barnessought an explanation for the persecutions at a local level, arguingthat the Christian violation of the mos maiorum, ‘the most importantsource for Roman law’, was suYcient to arouse hostility.77 FergusMillar further endorsed this in 1973, reckoning, along lines verysimilar to Ste. Croix, that ‘the most important conception whichlay behind the persecutions was precisely the one which was to be thefoundation of the Christian empire: that the world was sustained,and the earthly government of it granted, by divine favour’.78In most speciWc details, then, Ste. Croix’s essays on early Christianpersecution are valid, and continue to be standard works. However,they were written, or at least conceived, in the 1950s and 1960s, invery diVerent academic conditions from those pertaining today.Perhaps the most important change in Anglophone scholarship isthe growth of interest Wrst in the ‘later Roman empire’ and subsequentlyin ‘late antiquity’.79 This proceeds most obviously from thework of Ste. Croix’s mentor A. H. M. Jones, although a Wgure whoseinXuence on late Roman historiography is often underestimated wasSir Ronald Syme, who started working on the Historia Augusta in themid-1960s.80 The subsequent emergence of ‘late antiquity’ asa recognized historical period, part of the mainstream of secular77 T. D. Barnes, ‘Legislation against the Christians’, JRS 58 (1968), 32–50, at 50,repr. in his Early Christianity and the Roman Empire (London, 1984). See also hisTertullian, 143–63.78 F. Millar, ‘The Imperial Cult and the Persecutions’, in Le Culte des souverains(Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique 19; Geneva, 1973), 143–65, repr. in Rome, theGreek World, and the East, ii. 298–312, at 312. See also his chapter on the relationshipbetween emperor and church in The Emperor in the Roman World, 551–607, esp. 555–7.79 My focus here is the Anglophone, and speciWcally English scholarly world, but itis worth noting brieXy that ‘late antiquity’, while an expression now common to allmajor European scholarly languages, has a complex history, emerging at diVerenttimes in diVerent language areas and in diVerent disciplines; see J. H. W. G.Liebeschuetz, ‘The Birth of Late Antiquity’, Antiquité Tardive, 12 (2004), 253–61.80 On Jones, see J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz (a near contemporary of Ste. Croix’s atUniversity College London, and fellow student of Jones): ‘A. H. M. Jones and theLater Roman Empire’, Institute of Archaeology Bulletin, 29 (1992), 1–9. For Syme’swork on late antiquity, see particularly his Ammianus and the Historia Augusta(Oxford, 1968). Syme heavily inXuenced John Matthews and T. D. Barnes.

24 Persecution and Martyrdomhistory writing, developed particularly under the inXuence of PeterBrown.81 The magnitude of this change can be seen in the enlargementof the chronological scope of the Cambridge Ancient History.Where, in 1939, volume 12 ended with Constantine’s defeat ofLicinius in 324, volume 14 of the second edition extends to theturn of the seventh century.82 Following the reception of HenriPirenne’s Mahomet et Charlemagne, translated into English in 1939,it is not uncommon for late antiquity to extend as far as 800 and thecoronation of Charlemagne.83 While there were important Englishscholars working on later Roman history before the Second WorldWar,84 the emergence of late antiquity as a Weld in Anglophonescholarship owed most to the émigrés of European fascism whohad come to England, notably Arnaldo Momigliano.85 This has also81 See Averil Cameron, ‘The ‘‘Long’’ Late Antiquity: A Late Twentieth-CenturyModel’, in T. P. Wiseman (ed.), Classics in Progress: Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome(Oxford, 2002), 165–91; M. Vessey, ‘The Demise of the Christian Writer and theRemaking of ‘‘Late Antiquity’’: From H.-I. Marrou’s Saint Augustine (1938) to PeterBrown’s Holy Man (1983)’, JECS 6.3 (1998), 377–411. Cameron has noted howBrown, at least in his early works written while he was still at Oxford, still workedon ‘the later Roman Empire’, but from the 1970s turned increasingly to ‘late antiquity’as a Weld deWned predominantly in cultural terms; see her comments on Brown’s ‘TheWorld of Late Antiquity revisited’, Symbolae Osloenses, 72 (1997), 33–7, at 36.82 A. Cameron, B. Ward-Perkins, and M. Whitby (eds.), CAH xiv: Late Antiquity:Empire and Successors, A.D. 425–600 (Cambridge, 2000).83 See Cameron, ‘The ‘‘Long’’ Late Antiquity’; examples include P. Brown, TheWorld of Late Antiquity AD 150–750 (London, 1971) and ‘Mohammed and Charlemagneby Henri Pirenne’, Daedalus, 53 (1974), 25–33, repr. in his Society and the Holyin Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1982), 63–79; G. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth:Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1993); P. Athanassiadi andM. Frede, ‘Introduction’ to their edited volume Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity(Oxford, 1998), 1–20, at 3; G. W. Bowersock, P. Brown, and O. Grabar (eds.), LateAntiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).84 The most notable of those immediately to precede A. H. M. Jones were HughLast and Norman Hepburn Baynes. Before that, J. B. Bury’s History of the EasternRoman Empire: From Arcadius to Irene (395 A.D. to 800 A.D.) (London, 1889) andHistory of the Later Roman Empire from the Death of Theodosius I to the Death ofJustinian (A.D. 395–A.D. 565) (London, 1923) were standard works. For a study ofBury, Baynes, and Arnold Toynbee in relation to British Byzantine historiography, seeAveril Cameron, ‘Bury, Baynes and Toynbee’, in R. Cormack and E. JeVreys (eds.),Through the Looking Glass: Byzantium through British Eyes (Aldershot, 2000), 163–75.85 Of the Oxford graduates of the early 1960s who went on to major careers in thesubject, Alan Cameron, Averil Cameron, and Peter Brown have testiWed to theinXuence of Momigliano, then professor of ancient history at UniversityCollege London. See his important edited volume The ConXict between Paganismand Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1963).

Introduction 25had important consequences for early church history, as sourcespreviously read almost exclusively by theologians or patristic scholarshave become central for intellectual, cultural, and social history.86The place of later Roman and early church history in the 1950s and1960s, when Ste. Croix started his academic career, was perhapsparticularly unclear in Great Britain. At Oxford and Cambridge,where the majority of professional ancient historians were trained,early Christianity was predominantly a subject for theology ordivinity. Moreover, in Oxford the classics or ‘Greats’ syllabus onlycovered Roman history up to the death of Trajan in ad 117, and fromits inception was guided by distinct moral and aesthetic imperatives(in fact, the later Roman Empire still has a rather liminal status withinthe Oxford ‘schools’).87 Ste. Croix was unusual in having studiedAncient History at University College London under A. H. M.Jones, where he covered a vast period of history, from 3000 bc tothe death of Heraclius in 641. After his move to Oxford to a fellowshipat New College in 1953, he mainly taught classical Greek history, butencouraged his undergraduate students to explore new areas, forexample by attending Peter Brown’s lectures in All Souls or readingAmmianus Marcellinus. While he was consistently interested in theChurch and the history of the later Roman Empire, he focused on thisalmost exclusively after he had retired. It is important, though, that wedo not overemphasize the uniqueness of the division between churchhistory and Roman history in England. For example, the ‘historicalcritical’method in church history that developed in the‘natural-scientiWc’ environment of late nineteenth-century German86 See in general Cameron, ‘The ‘‘Long’’ Late Antiquity’, 180, and, with respect tothe study of Augustine, see R. Markus, ‘Evolving Disciplinary Contexts for the Studyof Augustine, 1950–2000: Some Personal ReXections’, Augustinian Studies, 32 (2001),189–200. On parallel processes in the USA, particularly the creation of departmentsof religion in the 1960s, see D. B. Martin, ‘Introduction’, in D. B. Martin and P. CoxMiller (eds.), The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, andHistoriography (Durham, NC, 2005), 1–21, at 3–4.87 On which, see O. Murray, ‘The Beginnings of Greats, 1800–1872 II: AncientHistory’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University ofOxford, vi:Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part I (Oxford, 1997), 520–42, esp. 536–7.This was only changed in 1995, with the inclusion of a third period of Roman historygoing up to the death of Hadrian in ad 138, although the creation of a late antiquenetwork Wrst by John Matthews, and more latterly by Bryan Ward-Perkins, RogerTomlin, and James Howard-Johnston, has to some extent overcome the problem.

26 Persecution and Martyrdomuniversities still, at least in practice, distinguished betweenChristian history and Roman history. It is clear in the work of AdolfHarnack, whose Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums,published in 1902, barely mentioned a non-Christian source.88While German Religionswissenschaft did much to broaden the contextwithin which early Christianity was studied, this context remained,unsurprisingly, religious, with interest focusing on the origins ofritual and dogma, and not on the practicalities of life in the RomanEmpire.89Ste. Croix commented on the problems engendered by thesedivisions in his review of Frend’s Martyrdom and Persecution in theEarly Church. He judged the treatment of martyrdom a ‘triumphantsuccess’, but that of persecution a ‘severe disappointment’, describingFrend as ‘an ecclesiastical historian of an unusual and most welcomekind’, but ‘not a Roman historian’, and went on to lament ‘the presentorganization of academic studies’ which ‘makes it exceedingly diYcultfor an historian of the early Church to be . . . capable of dealingboth with the Church and with its secular and pagan environment’.90Frend’s problem, in fact, was similar to Ste. Croix’s. In the prefaceto Martyrdom and Persecution he describes how he had originallyintended to update Hardy’s Christianity and the Roman Government,but subsequently wanted to extend the subject from ‘the outlook ofthe Roman authorities and the legal system of the Roman Empire’ to88 Noted by Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven,1981), 206 n. 16; for the relationship between Mommsen and Harnack, seeS. Rebenich, Theodor Mommsen und Adolf Harnack: Wissenschaft und Politik imBerlin des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin and New York, 1997), and morebrieXy his Theodor Mommsen: eine Biographie (Munich, 2002), esp. 138–9.89 For some background to Religionswissenschaft, see S. Marchand, ‘From Liberalismto Neoromanticism: Albrecht Dieterich, Richard Reizenstein, and the ReligiousTurn in Fin de Siècle German Classical Studies’, in I. Gildenhard and M. Ruehl (eds.),Out of Arcadia: Classics and Politics in Germany in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzscheand Wilamowitz (London, 2003), 129–60; for religious studies in relation to thehistoriography of the later Roman Empire, see A. Demandt, Der Fall Roms: dieAuXösung des römischen Reiches im urteil der Nachwelt (Munich, 1984), 246–73.90 Ste. Croix, review of Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, JTS 18 (1967), 217–21,at 217. See also Peter Brown’s contemporary description of the disciplinary backgroundto his 1967 biography of Augustine as ‘that rather lonely and precariousbridge . . . between ancient and medieval history, between the disciplines ofthe historian, the theologian and the philosopher’; Brown, Augustine of Hippo: ABiography, rev. edn. (London, 2000), p. xi (orig. pub. 1967).

Introduction 27‘the attitude of the Christians themselves and the inXuence of Christiandoctrine as sources of conXict’.91 Nonetheless, his account isbased on a number of theological concepts, and at times, a ratheruncritical reading of source material. He refers repeatedly to ‘LateJudaism’, on the basis that it had been superseded by Christianity,92and regards the Jews as frequent instigators of Christian persecution.93Moreover, the ‘weakness’ of paganism is a decisive factor inthe ‘failure of the persecutions’: by the beginning of the fourthcentury, he argues, ‘it was clear that the Christian message containedmuch, perhaps nearly all, that the pagans had been gropingtowards’.94 Such theological bias was not limited to theologians. Upto the mid-1970s Roman religion was, with some exceptions, studiedwithin an evolutionary paradigm that rendered its extinction at thehands of Christianity historically inevitable.95Apart from disciplinary changes, the interests of Roman historianshave changed considerably since the 1960s. This is related in part toextra-academic factors. As we have seen, Mommsen’s Provinces of theRoman Empire had a galvanizing inXuence on British Roman historians,focusing attention on Roman administrative history. From 1892there was a close relationship between training in ancient history and91 Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, p.vii.92 See Boyarin, Dying for God, 127–30.93 Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, esp. 259, 271–2; on the implausibility of thisidea, and its basis in Christian allegory, see J. Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in theWorld of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh, 1996), 91; and ‘Accusationsof Jewish Persecution in Early Christian Sources, with Particular Reference to JustinMartyr and the Martyrdom of Polycarp’, in G. N. Stanton and G. Stroumsa (eds.),Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity (Cambridge, 1998), 279–95. Marcel Simon had argued along similar lines in his Verus Israel: étude sur lesrelations entre chrétiens et juifs dans l’empire romain (135–425) (Paris, 1948), 144–54,trans. into English by H. McKeating (Oxford, 1986), 115–25. See also Fergus Millar’sreview of Martyrdom and Persecution, which criticized Frend’s ‘bias in favour of(orthodox) Christianity, and against the Jews’ and endorsed Simon’s assessment ofthe evidence for Jewish persecutions of Christians; JRS 56 (1966), 231–6, at 233–4.94 Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, 521.95 On which, see J. North, ‘The Religion of Rome from Monarchy to Principate’, inM. Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London, 1997), 57–68, at 57.Although it is now rare to Wnd this model justiWed in evolutionary terms, contrastsbetween the superiority of Christianity over ‘paganism’ can still be found, with littleaccount taken of the fact that the comparison would only be meaningful to aChristian; see, for instance, MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 136; Stark,The Rise of Christianity, 196–215.

28 Persecution and Martyrdomimperial administration, with the raising of the age limit for entryinto the Indian Civil Service to 23 and the revision of the markingsystem of the entrance exam, which particularly beneWted OxfordGreats students.96 Although parallels between Roman and Britishimperial administration were not new,97 the study of Roman provincialgovernors such as the younger Pliny derived considerableimpetus from this connection.98 Inevitably it also created an electiveaYnity between historians and the Roman provincial governors,focusing attention on the perspective of the administrator and notthe administered. In most Anglophone studies of the persecutions upto the Second World War, the persecuted Christians rarely appear asactive agents.99 Accompanying this focus on Roman administratorswas a corresponding focus on Roman sources, and on the highRoman Empire.100 The most notable exception to this rule amongBritish ancient historians was Norman Baynes, who correspondedregularly with such continental scholars as Delehaye, Ensslin, Stein,Bides, Grégoire, and Dölger. However, while trained as a classicist, hetaught in the history department at UCL.101 With the rapid break-upof the British Empire after the end of the Second World War, not tomention the growth in immigration from former colonies to Great96 For the background, see V. T. Larson, ‘Classics and the Acquisition andValidation of Power in Britain’s ‘‘Imperial Century’’ (1815–1914)’, InternationalJournal of the Classical Tradition, 6.2 (1999), 185–225; R. Symonds, ‘Oxford andthe Empire’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University ofOxford, vii: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2 (Oxford, 2000), 689–716, at 699; alsoO. Murray, ‘Ancient History, 1872–1914’, ibid. 333–60, at 346–9.97 See, for instance, George Cornewall Lewis, An Essay on the Government ofDependencies (London, 1841); 2nd edn. by C. P. Lucas (Oxford, 1891), 111–34.98 Murray, ‘Ancient History, 1872–1914’, 348–9.99 An exception to this, at least in principle, is Ramsay; see his The Church in theRoman Empire before A.D. 170 at 173–7 and 185–90.100 Ramsay brieXy ventured beyond the 2nd cent., although he attributes his late2nd-cent. terminus to a lack of scholarly resources, and in a lecture delivered atCambridge in 1889 asked ‘why should traditional belief—or should I say traditionalignorance?—exclude all Christian Fathers or Byzantine historians from the classicalscholar’s interest, and almost conWne him to producing the 43rd edition of one out ofabout a score of writers?’; The Church in the Roman Empire at 443–80, esp. 449. Hardyended his Christianity and the Roman Government at ad 195 without comment, whileboth Last and Sherwin-White stayed within similar temporal boundaries.101 See J. M. Hussey, ‘Norman Hepburn Baynes’, Proceedings of the British Academy,49 (1963), 365–73, and more brieXy her biography of Baynes in DNB iv (Oxford,2004), 476–7.

Introduction 29Britain, it is perhaps unsurprising that scholarly attention shiftedfrom administrator to those administered. Although one should bewary of drawing too much from parallels between historiographyand wider social and political changes, it is at least a notable coincidencethat the later Roman Empire should have become so interestingto so many Oxford-trained classicists and historians in the 1950sand 1960s, given the earlier interconnection between classics,and particularly the ‘high’ Roman Empire, and the British imperialadministration.Changes in Britain’s imperial role had more tangible consequences.At Oxford the relationship between undergraduate trainingand ‘public life’ came under scrutiny. In 1961 the newly electedChichele Professor of history, Richard Southern, argued that historyas a ‘system of education for practical men’ was no longer sustainable,and that the subject needed to be broadened in scope toacknowledge the insights of other disciplines such as anthropology.102The eVects of these changes in Roman history are clear.Where, before the Second World War, Hugh Last was able to defeata proposal for an honours school of anthropology at Oxford on thegrounds that ‘an acquaintance with the habits of savages is not aneducation’, from the 1960s ancient historians increasingly turned tosocial and cultural anthropology to understand both the vagaries of‘local knowledge’ and local social structures within the RomanEmpire, a focus which has been further strengthened with the inXuenceof postcolonial studies. This generated new interest in Romanreligion.103 Although the relationship between anthropology andancient history was not new, the study of Roman religion in Great102 R. W. Southern, The Shape and Substance of Academic History (inaugurallecture, Oxford 1961), quoted in J. Harris, ‘The Arts and Social Sciences,1939–1970’, in B. Harrison (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, viii: TheTwentieth Century (Oxford, 1994), 217–49, at 237.103 Recent works on Roman religion could not possibly be listed in full. Someimportant examples include J. North, ‘Conservatism and Change in Roman Religion’,PBSR 44 (1976), 1–12; J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change in RomanReligion (Oxford, 1979); MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire; A. Wardman,Religion and Statecraft among the Romans (London, 1982); J. Scheid, Religion et piété àRome (Paris, 1985), 2nd edn. (Paris, 2001); R. L. Gordon, Image and Value in theGraeco-Roman World: Studies in Mithraism and Religious Art (Aldershot, 1996), andhis essays in M. Beard and J. North (eds.), Pagan Priests: Religion and Power in the

30 Persecution and MartyrdomBritain between Warde Fowler’s The Religious Experience of theRoman People (1911) and the mid-1970s was remarkably static,locked in an evolutionary framework that the emergence of Weldwork-basedethnography had rendered obsolete.104 Ste. Croix’saccount of the persecutions is unusual in that it bears very littletrace of this framework. He emphasized the strong religious feelingsthat motivated Christian persecution, and while he made someconcessions to contemporary ideas of elite religious apathy, he didnot try to divide the religious feelings of the elite and the populace.As we have seen, he did not regard Christianity as a good thing, andargues that Graeco-Roman paganism and Christianity are categoricallydiVerent rather than qualitatively comparable.105 Ste Croix’sdistinction between individualist, belief-centred Christianity andcommunal, ritual-centred paganism might now seem a little overdrawn,but it needs to be placed in its historiographical context. Asreligion in the Roman Empire has been more widely studied, suchstrong contrasts between Christianity and paganism have been scrutinized,and their edges softened. The identity between paganism andpolytheism, for instance, is no longer sustainable,106 likewiseGibbon’s contrast between the tolerant pagan Roman Empire andAncient World (London, 1990), 179–255; S. Price, Rituals and Power: The RomanImperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge, 1984); Beard, North, and Price, Religions ofRome, vol. i.104 Warde Fowler was heavily inXuenced by the evolutionary anthropology associatedparticularly with E. B. Tylor, of which the most famous contemporary exponentwas James Frazer, himself, of course, an eminent classicist. A. D. Nock, much themost interesting writer on Roman religion after Warde Fowler, was appointedFrothingham Professor of the History of Religion at Harvard following his movethere from Cambridge in 1930.105 As Garth Fowden noted, Robin Lane Fox’s Pagans and Christians is based onjust such a contrast, with similar beneWts and drawbacks; Fowden, ‘Between Pagansand Christians’, JRS 78 (1988), 173–82, at 173. See also Averil Cameron, Christianityand the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley, 1991),21 with n. 16.106 See the essays collected in P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede, Pagan Monotheism inLate Antiquity; although note the criticisms of M. Edwards, ‘Pagan and ChristianMonotheism in the Age of Constantine’, in S. Swain and M. Edwards (eds.),Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire (Oxford,2004), 211–34. Garth Fowden has recently made a rather unconvincing defence of‘polytheism’ as ‘less nakedly oVensive’ a category than ‘paganism’, and states that‘there was no such thing as ‘‘pagan monotheism’’ ’: see his ‘Late Polytheism’, in CAHxii: 521–72, at 521–2.

Introduction 31its intolerant Christian successor which, as we have seen, signiWcantlyunderpins Ste. Croix’s work on persecution. In 1984 Peter Garnseyargued that the Roman authorities were not so much tolerant asappreciative of ‘the limits of their power’.107 Mary Beard, John North,and Simon Price have further demonstrated that the most signiWcantRoman religious concepts, religio and superstitio, were normative andpotentially discriminatory, and argue that ‘oYcial Roman responsesto Christianity’ should be placed ‘in the context of their responses toother forms of undesirable behaviour’.108 In consequence the earlyChristian persecutions are, if not less unique than they seemed to Ste.Croix, then less starkly deWned against a background of openness andtoleration. Indeed, Keith Hopkins has suggested we should not askwhy the early Christians were persecuted, but why they were notpersecuted more often.109The turn to cultural history is a particular feature of Anglophonelate antique history, although the inXuence of hermeneutic philosopherssuch as Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, oftenreceived through the medium of CliVord Geertz’s interpretativeanthropology, has contributed to a pluralizing trend across the historicaldiscipline.110 One of the hallmarks of work inspired by Geertzis the emphasis on perception, or the need to understand ‘from thenative’s point of view’, insofar as this is possible. Ste. Croix diVersfrom this approach emphatically, and sometimes advocates a rigidly107 P. Garnsey, ‘Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquity’, Studies in ChurchHistory, 21(1984), 1–27 at 9.108 Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, i. 211–44 esp. 236–44; see alsoH. Drake, ‘Lambs into Lions: Explaining Early Christian Intolerance’, Past andPresent, 153 (1996), 3–36.109 K. Hopkins, ‘Christian Number and its Implications’, 197.110 The direct inXuence of Geertz is most obvious in Peter Brown’s essay ‘The Saintas Exemplar in Late Antiquity’, Representations, 1.2 (1983), 1–25, but his inXuence onhumanities more generally has been enormous, particularly since the publication ofThe Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973). For a study ofGeertz’s work and inXuence, see F. Inglis, CliVord Geertz: Culture, Custom and Ethics(Cambridge, 2000). For an interesting set of reXections on Geertz’s work, see S. B.Ortner (ed.), The Fate of ‘Culture’: Geertz and Beyond (Berkeley, 1999), and the ratherhagiographical collection of R. A. Schweder and B. Good (eds.), CliVord Geertz by hisColleagues (Chicago, 2005). On the prominence of cultural history in Anglophonelate antique studies, see A. Giardina, ‘Esplosione di tardoantico’, Studi Storici, 40(1999), 157–80, at 167 and n. 35; and Cameron, ‘The ‘‘Long’’ Late Antiquity’, esp.171–2.

32 Persecution and Martyrdomfact-based epistemology, such as in his assertion that the Church is a‘theological’ and not a ‘historical’ concept,111 and his frequent denunciationof later Christian hagiography as ‘worthless’ since it doesnot provide accurate information on actual events. The Wrst of thesecontentions is clearly false: ‘the Christian Church’ is a historicalconcept, even if one that does not denote any objective reality. Thesecond position remains valid, but shows how much historians’priorities have changed,112 and readers may now Wnd that Ste.Croix raises some important problems, which he is not interestedin developing. For instance, in ‘Voluntary Martyrdom in the EarlyChurch’, he notes the contradiction between the explicit denunciationof voluntary martyrdom by most leading early Christianwriters and the common praise accorded to voluntary martyrs inpractice, but then expressly ignores ‘the considerable quantity of lateand Wctitious Passions in which the martyrs are made to behave in aprovocative manner and abuse their judges’.113 Yet this is an interestingcontradiction: why, in periods after the conversion ofConstantine, when Church and State were not necessarily in relationsof hostility, and were often closely intertwined, were Christianmartyrs presented as antagonists?The other main problem of recent scholarship with importantramiWcations for Ste. Croix’s work on persecution is closelyconnected to the concerns of Geertz and later with those of Michel111 Ste. Croix, ‘Heresy’ (below, Ch. 5, p. 202); ‘Chalcedon’ (below, Ch. 6, p. 260);Class Struggle, 6, 420, and 495.112 Concern with the literary and rhetorical aspects of early Christian sources isone of the most notable developments in late antique historiography. It is not anentirely new development: Hippolyte Delehaye and Pierre Courcelle, to name twoparticularly noteworthy authors, transformed the study of hagiography and Augustine’sConfessions respectively by attending to their literary status. Nonetheless, Delehaye’swork on hagiography prioritized texts according to their reliability as a recordof events; see his six-part classiWcation of martyr acts in Les Légendes hagiographiques,4th edn. (Brussels, 1955), 106–9. Contrast this with two recent books on martyrdom,which disavow any interest in using martyr acts as sources for the events they purportto record: L. Grig, Making Martyrs in Late Antiquity (London, 2004), 1, who statesthat her book ‘does not seek to uncover the historical facts about the martyrsvenerated by the late antique Church but to examine the construction of heroes’;and E. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York,2004), 4: ‘This book is not a history of early Christian martyrdom but an explorationof the culture-making aspects of its representations’.113 Ste. Croix, ‘Voluntary Martyrdom’ (below, Ch. 4, p. 165).

Introduction 33Foucault and particularly Edward Said, namely identity.114 Ste. Croixrarely questions what Christian identity is, short of noting the pluralismof Christianity in practice. It appears that he regards it asPauline, or at least would like to do so, as illustrated in his possiblyrhetorical question: ‘Would it be an exaggeration to say thatthe earliest systematic impulse towards execrating those who werebelieved to be proclaiming false doctrine came from St Paul and hiscircle?’115 The most radical recent thesis on early Christian identity isDaniel Boyarin’s ‘wave theory’, in which second-century Judaism andChristianity constitute ‘points on a continuum, from the Marcionites,who followed the second-century Marcion in believing that theHebrew Bible had been written by an inferior God and had nostanding for Christians, and who completely denied the ‘‘Jewishness’’of Christianity, on one end, to many Jews on the other end for whomJesus meant nothing’.116 In between these two poles, Boyarin seems toenvisage people uncertain as to their identity, whether Jewish orChristian. It is perhaps signiWcant that scholars working in theologyor religion departments have done much of this work on religiousidentity. For Ste. Croix, as an ancient historian, the problem ofChristian identity would seem less diYcult. By around the late Wrstcentury the Romans had a clear conception of what Christians were,which encompassed most, although by no means all, of the myriad ofgroups who considered themselves Christians. This understandingfocused on what Christians were not, namely people who wouldnot participate in traditional sacriWces, and they developed distinctprocedures for testing whether someone was a Christian by concentratingon a negative that no Christian, so they thought, wouldundertake. The very existence of martyrdom, particularly voluntarymartyrdom, suggests that this perspective was not entirely separate114 Much recent work has focused on the identities of Jews and Christians, andtheir fashioning through mutual interaction. See, among others, the essays collectedin A. H. Becker and A. Y. Reed (eds.), The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christiansin Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 95;Tübingen, 2003); Boyarin, Dying for God; idem, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia, 2004); S. N. C. Lieu, Image and Reality; Neither Jew norGreek? Constructing Christian Identity (Edinburgh, 2003); Christian Identity in theJewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford, 2004).115 Ste. Croix, ‘Heresy’ (below, Ch. 5, pp. 213–14).116 Boyarin, Dying for God, esp. 11; Border Lines, 17–19.

34 Persecution and Martyrdomfrom the understanding of Christians. Identity lies at the heart of theChristian persecutions: Christians are persecuted for being Christian,for the Christian name, an aYliation demonstrated by the refusal tosacriWce. Although this does not necessarily resolve the diYculties ofdetermining what Judaism and Christianity were in the early Empire,it is an absolutely essential perspective. Both were incorporated intoconceptual and administrative structures by people with no particularinterest in the Wner points of doctrinal dispute.It is here that we can see perhaps the most important inXuence ofSte. Croix’s work on persecution on subsequent scholarship.Although he was no historian of mentalities, his emphasis on thepotentially dynamic force of Christianity contrasts markedly with thefocus of Roman historians from the late nineteenth century, onpersecution as a problem primarily of Roman administration, oneconWned very largely to the high Empire. While some may think thatSte. Croix placed too much emphasis on the ‘enthusiasm’ or intoleranceof the early Christians, he also helped to restore the relationshipbetween Christians and their Graeco-Roman environment to thecentre of any study of persecution. Even if Ste. Croix’s approach toand questions about Christian persecution may now seem uncontroversialor dated, that is partly because his arguments have beeninternalized by participants in subsequent debates; his articles andunpublished writings helped to create a new context in which Christianpersecution could be investigated, in more subtle ways, inmyriad local settings, local rivalries and disputes, where ChristianssuVered but also contributed to the suVering of Christians asprovocative agents or, in due course, as enforcers.

1Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution*The ‘Great’ persecution, of the years 303 to 312/3, requires thoroughreconsideration. This paper will discuss certain features of the persecution,and, without attempting to present a complete picture, willsuggest some modiWcations in the received view.1. The Edicts of PersecutionIn this section it is necessary, for the sake of clarity, to go rapidly oversome familiar ground.The First Edict (hereafter referred to as ‘E 1’) was apparently issued(datum) on the 23rd February 303, on which day the church oppositethe imperial palace at Nicomedia was dismantled. Next day the edictwas posted up (propositum). The probable contents may be summarizedas follows:I. (a) All Christian churches (and, it appears, any house in which theScriptures mightbediscovered)1were tobe destroyed.2(b)Allcopies ofFirst published as ‘Aspects of the ‘‘Great’’ Persecution’, Harvard Theological Review,47.2(1954), 75–113.* I am much indebted to Professors N. H. Baynes, A. Momigliano and particularlyA. H. M. Jones for help, encouragement and criticism, and to Professors E. G. Turnerand Claire Préaux for replying to questions on papyrological matters. They must notbe held responsible for any errors which remain or for the opinions expressed. I alsowish to acknowledge a special debt to the works of Hippolyte Delehaye, who did somuch to advance the study of the Passions of the martyrs as historical sources.References to Passions are to the editions mentioned in Appendix I below.1 See Optat. Append. ii, pp. 200, 202 (ed. C. Ziwsa, CSEL xxvi): ‘ubi scripturaeinveniuntur, (et) ipsa domus diruitur’ [‘where the scriptures are found, the houseitself is destroyed’].2 Euseb. Hist. Eccles. viii 2.4; Mart. Pal. Praef. 1; 2.1; Optat. Append. ii, pp. 198–9;cf. Lactant. De Mort. Pers. 12.

36 Persecution and Martyrdomthe Scriptures and other liturgical books were to be surrendered andburnt, and all church plate and other such property was to be conWscated.3(c) All meetings for Christian worship were prohibited.4II. Persistent Christians were apparently deprived of the capacity tobring actions in the courts;5 those who possessed juridical privileges6were to lose them;7 and ïƒ Kí ïNŒåôßÆØò (probably those members of theimperial civil service who were not technically soldiers and wouldmostly have been imperial freedmen)8 were to be reduced to slavery.93 Eus. HE viii 2.4; MP Praef. 1; Optat. Append. i, pp. 186–8; ii, p. 199; AugustineC. Cresc. iii 27.30; Conc. Arelat. i, Can. 13; and several Passions cited later. [On thedestruction of books, see W. Speyer, ‘Büchervernichtung’, JbAC 13 (1970), 123–52,esp. 139–40; Speyer, Büchervernichtung und Zensur des Geistes bei Heiden, Juden undChristen (Stuttgart, 1981). See also P. Oxy. xxxiii 2673, from Feb. 304, in which thelector of a church in the village of Chysis reports to the gymnasiarchs of Oxyrhynchusthat his church possesses nothing apart from a bronze gate, then in the process ofbeing delivered to Alexandria.]4 Eus. HE ix 10.8; and the Passions of the martyrs of Abitina and Philip ofHeraclea.5 Lact. MP 13.1; cf. 15.5.6 i.e. senators (clarissimi), those of equestrian status (perfectissimi, egregii), decurions,veterans, and to some extent soldiers. [See P. Garnsey, Social Status and LegalPrivilege in the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1970), and more recently his ‘RomanCitizenship and Roman Law in the Late Empire’, in S. Swain and M. Edwards(eds.), Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire(Oxford, 2004), 133–55, esp. 140–9.]7 Lact. MP 13.1; Eus. HE viii 2.4; MP Praef. 1. Thus the privileged classes wouldbecome liable to torture and the more savage punishments normally reserved for thelower orders. [See also P. Oxy. xxxi 2601. On the relationship between social statusand punishment, citing the distinction between the treatment of citizens and aliens inthe pogrom at Lyon in 177 ce, see P. Garnsey, ‘Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire’,Past and Present, 41 (1968), 3–24, at 19–20, repr. in M. I. Finley (ed.), Studies inAncient Society (London, 1974), 141–65, at 160–1; also F. Millar, ‘Condemnation toHard Labour in the Roman Empire, from the Julio-Claudians to Constantine’, PBSR52 (1984), 124–47, repr. in Millar, Rome, the Greek World, and the East, ii: Government,Society, and Culture in the Roman Empire, ed. H. M. Cotton and G. M. Rogers(Chapel Hill, 2004), 120–50.]8 Cf. the Caesariani of the Valerianic persecuting edict (Cypr. Epist. lxxx 1). SeeA. H. M. Jones, ‘The Roman Civil Service (clerical and sub-clerical grades)’, JRS 39(1949), 38–55, at 46 [repr. in idem, Studies in Roman Government and Law (Oxford,1960), 151–75, at 164–5; see also The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social,Economic and Administrative Survey (Oxford, 1964), 564–5]; N. H. Baynes, ‘TheGreat Persecution’, in S. A. Cook, F. E. Adcock, M. P. Charlesworth, and N. H. Baynes(eds.), CAH xii: The Imperial Crisis and Recovery, A.D. 193–324 (Cambridge, 1939),646–77, at 666 and nn. 1–4. [See more recently K.-H. Schwarte, ‘Die ChristengesetzeValerians’, in W. Eck (ed.), Religion und Gesellschaft in der römischen Kaiserzeit (Kölnerhistorische Abhandlungen 35; Cologne and Vienna, 1989), 103–63, esp. 146–8.]9 Eus. HE viii 2.4; MP Praef. 1.

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 37The results of E 1 will be discussed presently. The Second andThird Edicts (EE 2 and 3) can be disposed of brieXy now: their eVectshave already been admirably summarized by Baynes in his masterlychapter on the persecution in the Cambridge Ancient History.10 E2,ordering the arrest of the Christian clergy,11 was probably issuedduring the spring or early summer of 303, as a consequence (if wemay believe Eusebius) of political disturbances in Melitene and Syria,in which the Christians were apparently believed to be implicated.There is no valid evidence that this edict was ever promulgated in theWest. In regions where Christians were plentiful, its enforcementseems to have put an intolerable strain on a rudimentary prisonsystem, intended to provide not for convicted criminals undergoingsentence but merely for accused persons awaiting trial. Ordinarycriminals, according to Eusebius, were positively crowded out. Thegovernment, therefore, took advantage of the vicennalia of Diocletian,which were celebrated either in September or in November,303,12 to issue an amnesty to the incarcerated Christian clergy,granting them pardon on condition they sacriWced.13 This was E 3.The local authorities evidently lost no time in ridding themselves oftheir unwelcome guests. Some of the clergy gave in, and others weretortured into compliance; but if we may generalize from a strikingpassage in Eusebius’s Martyrs of Palestine,14 it appears that practicallyall those who remained Wrm were compelled to go through themotions of sacriWcing, protesting the while, and then released, or10 Baynes, CAH xii. 666–7.11 Eus. HE viii 6.8–9; cf. MP Praef. 2.12 Opinions still diVer regarding this date, but it is not necessary to discuss thequestion here. Contrast W. Seston, Dioclétien et la Tétrarchie, i (Paris, 1946), 49–51,with W. Ensslin in Pauly–Wissowa, Realenc., 2te Reihe, vii ii, 2423–4. [November ismuch more likely. It is given by Lactantius, our source closest to the events: DeMortibus Persecutorum 17.1.1, and supported by a papyrus from Panopolis whichrecords a donative given on 20 Nov. 299 commemorating the accession of Diocletian;T. C. Skeat (ed.), Papyri from Panopolis in the Chester Beatty Library (Dublin, 1964), 2.162–4. The early 7th-cent. Chronicon Paschale is the only source to date Diocletian’saccession to 17 Sept. 284, but its evidence on imperial succession in the late 3rd andearly 4th cent. is often inaccurate: see M. Whitby and M. Whitby, Chronicon Paschale284–628 AD (TTH 7; Liverpool, 1989), nn. 1, 17.]13 Eus. HE viii 6.10; MP Praef. 2. Despite the language of the former passage, itseems unlikely that torture was prescribed as a penalty for recusants.14 1.3–4. Cf. the 14th ‘canon’ of the episcopal letter of Peter of Alexandria (p. 46and n. 44 below).

38 Persecution and Martyrdommerely dismissed with the information that they were deemed tohave sacriWced.The Fourth Edict (E 4) ordered all inhabitants of the empire tosacriWce to the gods,15 on pain of death. E 4 cannot be dated exactly,but it was probably issued in January or February, 304, for it hadapparently not reached the proconsul of Africa by February 12th, butwas being enforced in the Balkans by March.162. The Nature and Consequences of the First EdictSince the edict and rescripts of Gallienus in the early 260s, recordedby Eusebius,17 the Christian Church (or churches) had received acertain measure of toleration and recognition—how complete, andaccording to what constitutional principles, there is fortunately noneed to discuss here. By E 1 the government forbade the collectivepractice18 of Christianity by attacking the churches, books andservices of its adherents, and it inXicted special penalties uponmembers of the upper classes and imperial civil servants who refusedto abandon Christianity; but for the ordinary individual—provided,of course, he retained no religious writings and attended noservices—merely ‘being a Christian’ (the nomen Christianum) wasvisited with only one penalty: deprivation of the use of legal process.15 Eus. MP 3.1: ŁýåØí ôå ŒÆd óðÝíäåØí [‘to sacriWce and pour a libation’]. Therecords of martyrdoms suggest that oVering incense or pouring a libation could beaccepted as suYcient.16 See N. H. Baynes, ‘Two Notes on the Great Persecution’, CQ 18 (1924), 189–94,esp. 189–92. It should, however, be realized that of the Balkan martyrdoms discussedby B. only those of Agape, Chione and Irene (March and April, at Thessalonica) aresecurely dated to 304. For an outline of the views adopted here about the divisions ofthe empire among the tetrarchs, see Appendix II below. For a criticism of the theoryabout the origin of E 4 advanced by Baynes, see Appendix III below.17 HE vii 13; cf. 30.19; viii 1.1–6. On this very thorny question, see esp. theexcellent summary of Baynes, CAH xii. 655–6. [On Gallienus’ rescript see L. de Blois,The Policy of the Emperor Gallienus (Leiden, 1976), 175–85; R. Lane Fox, Pagans andChristians (Harmondsworth, 1986), 553; D. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, AD180–395 (London, 2004), 259–63; G. W. Clarke, ‘Third-Century Christianity’, in A. K.Bowman, P. Garnsey, and Averil Cameron (eds.), CAH xii: The Crisis of Empire, A.D.193–337 (Cambridge, 2005), 589–671, at 645–6.]18 See esp. the edict of Maximin of 313 (Eus. HE ix 10.8), where the wholepersecution is summed up in the words, ôaò óıíüäïıò ôHí ×æØóôØÆíHí Kîfi çæBóŁÆØ[‘the abolition of the Christian assemblies’].

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 39According to Lactantius,19 Diocletian insisted that ‘eam rem sinesanguine transigi’ [‘this matter be carried through without bloodshed’].This isolated statement has often been construed in an exaggeratedsense, and some modern writers have gone so far as toconclude that E 1 altogether forbade the inXiction of the deathpenalty.20 This view, which is intrinsically improbable, is deWnitelydisproved by reliable contemporary evidence of executions of Christianswho disobeyed the speciWc clauses of the Wrst section of E 1 (asreconstructed above), by refusing to hand over their Scriptures or byholding services.21 Yet there is no trace of any lesser punishmenthaving been laid down for disobedience to the provisions of the Wrstpart of E 1. It seems most likely that for such oVences—which thegovernment might reasonably have expected to be rare—no speciWcpunishment was prescribed by the edict. The public would naturallyassume that the death penalty was liable to be inXicted on anyobstinate recusant who openly deWed the orders of a governor insuch a matter;22 and this impression might be expected to have awholesome eVect in securing obedience. ‘Mortuus fueras, si non illasinvenisses’ [‘you would have been dead if you had not found those’],said Victor the municipal clerk to Silvanus the fossor, of the churchof Cirta, when the latter produced some of the church plate.23Instructions may have been given to the provincial governors notto resort to capital punishment at all if they could help it; but furtherthan this the evidence forbids us to go. The emperor who had alreadyissued the ferocious edict against the Manichaeans24 would hardly19 MP 11.8.20 e.g. H. J. Lawlor and J. E. L. Oulton, Eusebius, ii (London, 1928), 272: the deathpenalty would have been ‘a violation of the First Edict’. [In support of Ste. Croix, seemore recently Barnes, ‘From Toleration to Repression: The Evolution of Constantine’sReligious Policies’, Scripta Classica Israelica, 21 (2002), 189–207, at 192.]21 See Appendix IV below.22 Cf. CTh xvi 5.34 (398), where the death penalty is speciWcally prescribed forEunomians and Montanists who fail to hand over their heretical books.23 Optat., Append. I, p. 187.24 Mosaicarum et Romanarum Legum Collatio 15.3.1 in E. Seckel and B. Kübler,Iurisprudentiae anteiustinianae reliquias (Lipsiae, 1927), ii ii, 381–3, or F. Girard andF. Senn, Textes de Droit Romain, 7th edn. (Paris, 1967), 582–3. [See also S. Riccobonoet al. (eds.), Fragmenta Iuris Romani Anteiustiniani, 2nd edn. (Florence, 1968), ii.580–1.] The date is probably 31st March 297: see W. Seston, ‘De l’authenticité et de ladate de l’édit de Dioclétien contre les Manichéens’, in Mélanges de Philologie, de

40 Persecution and Martyrdomhave been squeamish in his attitude towards Christians who wereguilty of open deWance of his orders.Except during the persecution of Decius, and to a smaller extent inthat of Valerian, the Roman government had adhered, ever since thetime of Trajan at least, to the wise principle that Christians were notto be sought out: ‘conquirendi non sunt’.25 This principle was not yetto be abandoned, save in respect of the two groups (the privilegedclasses and ïƒ Kí ïNŒåôßÆØò) who had been specially noticed by theedict, and those instituting legal proceedings. It seems unlikely thatany widespread inquisition was carried out among the two specialcategories, since additional machinery would have been required forthis; but it was easy to apply a test in court to intending litigants, todiscover which of them were Christians.26 (This may explain thechoice of the penalty to be imposed on the ordinary Christian: itwas when initiating court proceedings that he could most easily beexposed.)Littérature et d’Histoire Anciennes oVerts à Alfred Ernout (Paris, 1940), 345–54. Thegreater severity with which Manichaeans were treated was no doubt due to theirbeing regarded as agents of a hostile power, as well as religious oVenders; but much ofDiocletian’s invective against the Manichaeans would have applied equally to theChristians. [For a translation of Diocletian’s rescript against the Manichees, seeM. Beard, J. North, and S. Price, Religions of Rome, ii: A Sourcebook (Cambridge,1998), 281–3; D. Lee, Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity (London, 2000), 66–7;or I. Gardner and S. N. C. Lieu, Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire(Cambridge, 2004), 116–18. Lieu supports Ste. Croix’s explanation for the severityof the edict, reckoning that Diocletian saw them as ‘a Persian Wfth column’; see Lieu,Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China, 2nd edn.(Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 63; Tübingen, 1992),121–4, at 121. The date of this rescript to the proconsul of Africa is probably 302;see T. D. Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, Mass.,1982), 55 n. 41 and S. Corcoran, The Empire of the Tetrarchs: Imperial Pronouncementsand Government AD 284–324, rev. edn. (Oxford, 2000), 135–6.]25 Pliny, Epist. x 97.2. [Whether Decius’ edict was aimed at Christians has recentlybeen questioned by Reinhard Selinger, J. B. Rives, and Graeme Clarke: see Selinger,Die Religionspolitik des Kaisers Decius: Anatomie einer Christenverfolgung (Frankfurt,1994), esp. 29–37, and idem, The Mid-Third Century Persecutions of Decius andValerian (Frankfurt, 2002), esp. 63–8; Rives, ‘The Decree of Decius and the Religionof Empire’, JRS 89 (1999), 135–54, esp. 141–2; G. W. Clarke, The Letters of Cyprian, i(Ancient Christian Writers 43; New York, 1984), 22–5; against which I. Gradel,Emperor Worship and Roman Religion (Oxford, 2002), 368. See now G. W. Clarke,‘Third-Century Christianity’, CAH xii. 625–6. Ste. Croix later divided the persecutionsinto three stages; see ‘Early Christians’, Ch. 3, pp. 106–7.]26 See Lact. MP 15.5.

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 41The time-honoured method of deciding whether a given personwas a Christian was the ‘sacriWce test’, as it will be called here: theindividual concerned was asked to sacriWce, oVer incense, or make alibation, to the gods or the emperor.27 Since we Wnd the sacriWce testapplied on several occasions, before the issue of E 4, in a manner notdirectly authorized by E 1, it is necessary to deWne its purpose moreprecisely. Its primary aim had always been not to expose Christiansbut to give those falsely accused of Christianity a chance to clearthemselves in a universally recognized manner. The government, as arule, took action against Christians only in response to popularclamour or individual delation, and the oVence it punished wasbeing a Christian, up to the moment sentence was pronounced, nothaving been one. Provided the Christian was not also guilty of somespeciWc crime such as treason, by word or deed, he could obtain‘veniam ex paenitentia’ [‘pardon for his repentance’], as Trajan putit,28 by sacriWcing, to show that he had apostatized from Christianity.The sacriWce test was thus essentially a convenient method by which asuspected person could demonstrate that he had ceased to be aChristian, or had never been one. It was a privilege which a wronglysuspected or accused person, or a Christian prepared to apostatize,might wish to demand. A humane judge might make a practice ofurging accused Christians to sacriWce as a means of saving themselves.When, from the time of the Antonines and Severansonwards,29 the judicial torture of free men belonging to the lower27 There seems to be no good evidence from the Great persecution of attempts tomake accused Christians curse Christ (as in Passio Polycarp. ix 3) or swear by theemperor’s genius or ôý÷ç (as in Id. ix 2; x 1; Passio Scillitan. 5;Passio Apollon. 3).28 See n. 25 above.29 The exemptions in Cod. Just. ix 41.11.pr.; cf. 1 (and see Dig. xlviii 18.15.1;18.16.1; 18.21; 22.6.2; xlix 5.2; 16.7; l 2.14), show that the practice was already wellestablished by the reign of Marcus. The situation under the Severi onwards is wellknown: see T. Mommsen, Römisches Strafrecht (Leipzig, 1899), 406–8. [See amongothers P. Garnsey, ‘Why Penal Laws became Harsher: The Roman Case’, Natural LawForum, 13 (1968), 141–62; E. Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale àByzance 4e–7e Siècles (Paris, 1977), 9–35; D. Grodzynski, ‘Tortures mortelles etcatégories sociales: les summa supplicia dans le droit romain aux IIIe et IVe siècles’,in Du Châtiment dans la cité: supplices corporels et peine de mort dans le monde antique(Collection de l’École Française de Rome 79; Paris, 1984), 361–404; and R. MacMullen,‘Judicial Savagery in the Roman Empire’, Chiron, 16 (1986), 147–66, repr. in hisChanges in the Roman Empire: Essays in the Ordinary (Princeton, 1990), 204–17 and357–64.] For the 4th century, Dig. xxii 5.21.2 is illuminating.

42 Persecution and Martyrdomclasses became customary, it was only too likely that the sacriWce testwould on occasion be used, or rather misused, combined withtorture, to force Christian confessors to become apostates. But thatwas far from being its original object. If we may trust his own accountof his procedure, Pliny imposed the sacriWce test not on confessorsbut only on those who said they were not Christians.30Only upon the issue of E 4 did Diocletian and his colleaguesabandon the principle, conquirendi non sunt, and in eVect provide,by the universal imposition of the sacriWce test, for the publicexposure of all Christians, who must then suVer the extreme penalty.It is obviously wrong, however, to take the application of the sacriWcetest during the Great persecution as proof that it is E 4 which is beingenforced, as is commonly done. The appearance in a Passion of ademand (or invitation) that an accused Christian ‘sacriWce to thegods’, even if there is reason to think it was actually made, is by nomeans conclusive proof that E 4 was being invoked, for, as we havejust seen, such a demand had long been usual in trials of Christians,and we know that it was revived in 303, in both East and West,31 afterthe publication of E 1, but before E 4 could have been issued. Only anorder to sacriWce ‘in accordance with the imperial decree’ is conclusive—providedthere is good ground for thinking the phrase wasactually used and has not been added by a hagiographer as a stockformula. The hagiology of the fourth and subsequent centuries cameto be written with diminishing restraint and increasing contempt forhistoricity; and the stories of the martyrs of the Great persecutionwere, as we should say, ‘written up’, according to a pattern whichbecame ever more standardized.32 Refusal to comply with a demandto sacriWce, with or without a reference to an imperial decree to thateVect, became a stock feature and was included in virtually allPassions, even of martyrs who suVered under emperors other thanDecius or the tetrarchs.3330 Pliny, Epist. x 96.3, 5.31 There is evidence for Syria, Palestine and Numidia: see below.32 See esp. H. Delehaye, Les Passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires, 2nd edn.(Subsidia Hagiographica 13B; Brussels, 1966); Les Légendes hagiographiques, 3rd edn.(Subsidia Hagiographica 18; Brussels, 1927) [trans. by D. Attwater as The Legends ofthe Saints (Dublin, 1998)].33 See e.g. Delehaye, Les Passions des martyrs, 183–5.

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 43It will be proWtable to examine all the reliable detailed accounts wehave of martyrdoms taking place between E 1 and E 4. From theWest, we have nothing but the Passions of Felix of Thibiuca and ofthe congregation of Abitina, which are quite straightforward, themartyrs concerned being executed for direct disobedience to E 1.These documents call for no comment now. From the East, we haveonly34 the descriptions in Eusebius’s Martyrs of Palestine of the deathsof Procopius, Romanus, and Alpheus and Zacchaeus, which we maynow consider.The Martyrs of Palestine contains the earliest and most authenticversion of the story of Procopius, the Long Recension (L) being atthis point much more informative than the Short Recension (S).35The reason for the arrest of Procopius is obscure: it may or may nothave taken place in consequence of E 2. When Procopius was broughtbefore the tribunal at Caesarea on the 7th June 303, the governor Wrstordered him to sacriWce to the gods, and then, when he refused, topour a libation to the four emperors. He tactlessly replied by quotingwith approval the famous lines of Odysseus in the Iliad against amultiplicity of rulers, and was immediately beheaded for treason. Inview of what has been said above about the insertion of a reference toE 4 in virtually all Passions, it is interesting to Wnd that even in theWrst of a series of legendary elaborations of the Passion of Procopiusthe execution is represented as taking place under an edict whichordered everyone to sacriWce or be put to death36—that is tosay, under E 4, which was certainly not issued until months afterProcopius’s martyrdom.34 The Passion of Philip of Heraclea, of which we possess only a Latin translation,contains valuable material and seems to depend ultimately on the account of an eyewitness(though not the oYcial Acta); but it has been so heavily embroidered, asregards its dialogues, that it is unsafe to use it for present purposes. The order tosacriWce mentioned in Eus. HE viii 6.2 can be explained as by A. C. McGiVert,Eusebius: Church History, Life of Constantine the Great, and Oration in Praise ofConstantine (NPNF I; Oxford, 1890), 327.35 1.1–2. Lawlor and Oulton, at the end of Vol. i of their Eusebius, convenientlyprint side by side admirable English translations of S and of a composite version(from the Greek, Latin and Syriac) of L.36 See Delehaye, Les Légendes hag.3, chap. v, at pp. 124–5 [Attwater trans., 105]. Cf.the similar addition to the Passio Felicis, given in H. Delehaye, ‘La Passion de S. Félixde Thibiuca’, AB 39 (1921), 241–76, at 272, ch. 11.

44 Persecution and MartyrdomOn the 17th November 303, still before E 4 had been published, aPalestinian named Romanus, while present at Antioch, saw withindignation men, women and children (among whom were evidentlymany Christians) ‘going up in crowds to the idols and sacriWcing’.37Romanus intervened to rebuke the sacriWcers, and was immediatelyarrested and sentenced to death, either for an act of rebellion orbecause his speech to the sacriWcers included statements technicallytreasonable. According to L, the governor was commanding sacriWce;but it is hard to believe that he did anything more than invite thepeople to make a public demonstration of loyalty in this manner.An oYcial order to sacriWce also enters into the martyrdom ofAlpheus and Zacchaeus on the same day, presumably at Caesarea.38Eusebius has just made indirect reference to EE 2 and 3, and it isoften assumed that these men, one a reader and exorcist of Caesareaand the other a deacon of Gadara, had been arrested under E 2. Thisis certainly not true of Alpheus, a bold volunteer, whom Eusebiusdescribes as being arrested in consequence of a public intervention,like that of Romanus, to prevent mass apostasy. Zacchaeus wasapparently arrested at Gadara, and it seems very probable that hetoo had been guilty of some special provocation, although the detailsdid not come to Eusebius’s knowledge. Alpheus and Zacchaeus wereordered to sacriWce but refused, saying they acknowledged only oneGod, the king of all, whereupon they were beheaded, presumably formaking a statement technically amounting to treason.Mass apostasies similar to those rebuked by Romanus and Alpheusno doubt took place all over the empire during the year 303. Inparticular, Christians who belonged to the upper classes, and consequentlyhad more to lose if they remained Christians, would think itprudent to forestall attack by ‘voluntarily’ making a public demonstrationof their abandonment of Christianity. We know fromCyprian that in 250, upon the publication of the persecuting edictof Decius, very many African Christians publicly apostatized of theirown accord before they were even arrested or interrogated or orderedto sacriWce: in two very striking passages in his De Lapsis,39 Cyprian37 MP 2.1. If the churches were only now being destroyed, as S states, theauthorities had been very slow to put E 1 into operation in Syria.38 Eus. MP 1.5. L is very much fuller.39 7; 8. Cf. Eus. HE vi 41.11–12.

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 45represents them as rushing in crowds to clear themselves of suspicionby sacriWcing.At the other extreme from these voluntary apostates are the ‘voluntarymartyrs’, as they will be called here: men who deliberately andunnecessarily went out of their way to seek martyrdom, like Romanusand Alpheus. Voluntary martyrdom was oYcially condemned bythe orthodox, except in the case of those who were seeking to redeeman earlier lapse;40 but it was evidently by no means infrequent duringthe second and third centuries, and an astonishingly high proportionof the martyrs of the Great persecution whose stories we know indetail were volunteers. The curious phenomenon of voluntarymartyrdom deserves closer attention than it has hitherto received,and it will be dealt with elsewhere.40 a The subject will also come upagain later in this paper. It is suYcient now to record the fact thatMensurius, bishop of Carthage at the beginning of the Great persecution,had to forbid Christians to honour those who ‘gave themselvesup of their own accord and volunteered the information thatthey possessed Scriptures which they would not hand over, when noone had asked them to do so’. Mensurius also referred, rather uncharitably,to ‘criminals and debtors to the treasury, who took advantageof the persecution to rid themselves of a life burdened withmany debts, or hoped to purge themselves and (so to speak) washaway their crimes, or at any rate to make money and live likeWghting-cocks in prison on the charity of the Christians’.4140 As in Peter Alex. Epist. Can. (see n. 44 below), 8; contrast 9, 10. Among themany other passages condemning voluntary martyrdom are Passio Polycarp. iv (cf.Eus. HE iv 15.7–8); Clem. Alex. Strom. iv iv. 16.3 to 17.3; x. 76–77; vii xi. 66.3 to67.2, ed. O. Stählin; Cypr. Epist. lxxxi; Passio Cypr. 1.6 (endorsed by Aug. C. Gaudent.i 31.40); Conc. Illib., Can. 60; cf. Lact. MP 13.2, 3. [See below, Ch. 4, pp. 155, 160–1.]40 a [See further Ch. 4.]41 Aug. Brev. Coll. iii 13.25, in the translation of A. H. M. Jones, Constantine andthe Conversion of Europe, rev. edn. (London, 1972), 108. But this allegation may havebeen a commonplace: cf. the Passio Theodoriti 3 (‘audivi te esse Wsci debitorem, etideo mori desideras ne reddas quod debes’) [‘I have heard that you are a debtor of thetreasury, and thus you long to die lest you return what you owe’; see the more recentedition of M. Marcovich (Berlin, 1986)]; Hippol. Elench. ix 12.7, ed. P. Wendland(Callistus, the future bishop of Rome, unable to repay money he had embezzled,voluntarily sought martyrdom).

46 Persecution and Martyrdom3. The First and Fourth Edicts: Contrasts between Eastand WestModern writers42 commonly speak as if the ‘dies traditionis’ underE 1 were everywhere distinct from and succeeded by a very greatlyintensiWed phase of the persecution, the ‘dies turiWcationis’ broughtabout by E 4. Those who hold this view might have taken warningfrom the fact that Lactantius never refers to E 4 at all, and thatEusebius mentions it only in his Martyrs of Palestine,43 not in hisChurch History.In the East, the characteristic form of apostasy is always conceivedas sacriWcatio or turiWcatio; there seems to be no evidence at all thattraditio was regarded as a religious oVence. This is true even of theearliest document we possess which deals oYcially with the problemof the Eastern lapsi of the Great persecution: the ‘Canonical Letter’ ofPeter, bishop of Alexandria,44 dating from Easter, 306, in which, ifanywhere, we might expect to Wnd some emphasis on traditio. Thefourteen ‘canons’ of this letter are concerned entirely with the questionof apostasy in the persecution, in various forms. Although thenature of the act constituting the lapse is seldom speciWed, it isobviously assumed throughout the document to be something inthe nature of sacriWcing, oVering incense, or partaking of foodpreviously oVered to idols; there is no reference whatever to traditio,42 e.g. Baynes, ‘Two Notes on the Great Persecution’, 189, and CAH xii at 668;M. Besnier, Histoire Romaine, iv: L’Empire Romain de l’avènement des Sévères auConcile de Nicée (Paris, 1937) (vol. iv of Histoire Générale, ed. G. Glotz), 328; G.Costa, ‘Diocletianus’, in E. de Ruggiero (ed.), Dizionario EpigraWco di AntichitàRomane, ii (Rome, 1926), 1793–1908, at 1860–1; L. Duchesne, Early History of theChristian Church, ii (London, 1912), 79; cf. W. Ensslin in Pauly-Wissowa, 2te Reihe,vii ii, 2487.43 3.1. Our remaining contemporary authority for the persecution, Constantine(ap. Eus Vita Const. ii 51), does not distinguish between the various ‘sanguinaryedicts’. [See the English trans. of Averil Cameron and S. Hall, Eusebius: Life ofConstantine (Oxford, 1999), 112.]44 Migne, PG xviii 467–508; M. J. Routh, Reliquiae Sacrae, iv (Oxford, 1846),23–45; A. P. de Lagarde, Reliquiae Iuris Ecclesiastici Antiquissimae (Lipsiae, 1856),63–73; E. Schwartz, ‘Zur Geschichte des Athanasius’, part 4, Nachrichten von derköniglichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (Philologisch-historischeKlasse; 1905), 166–75 [repr. in Schwartz, Gesammelte Schriften, iii (Berlin, 1959),at 89–103].

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 47direct or indirect. The canons45 of the Council of Ancyra, of (probably)314, the next document of the same kind which has survived,also ignore traditio completely, although many of them areconcerned with the problem of the lapsi, and these go into somedetail on the diVerent ways in which sacriWce could be carried out.None of the participants in the controversies which vexed the Easternchurches in the fourth century accuses his opponents of traditio,although Meletius was later accused by his adversaries, absurdlyenough, of sacriWcatio.46 In none of the Passions from the Easternprovinces is traditio made an issue. In that of Agape and her fellowmartyrsof Thessalonica,47 Chione complains that her religiousbooks and papers have all been taken away from her, andIrene is accused of preserving äØöŁÝæÆò ŒÆd âØâºßÆ ŒÆd ðØíÆŒßäÆò ŒÆdŒøä،ݺºïıòŒÆdóåºßäÆò; ªæÆöHíôHíðïôå ªåíïìÝíøí×æØóôØÆíHí ôHíIíïóßøí [‘parchments, books, tablets, codices, and pages of thewritings of the erstwhile Christians of unholy name’]. Doubtless allChristians retained their sacred books when they could. But it appearsthat giving them up, or allowing them to fall into the hands ofthe authorities, was not regarded as a sin in the Eastern part of theempire. We have one positive piece of evidence to this eVect, in thePassion of Philip, bishop of Thracian Heraclea.48 Here we are toldthat Philip himself agreed to hand over the church plate to Bassus,the governor, but refused to give up the Scriptures. However, thedeacon Hermes, who was later martyred with Philip, ‘diu anteaverberatus, ingressus est ubi vasa omnia et scripturae laterunt’[‘having previously been beaten for a long time, he went to whereall the church plate and scriptures were hidden’]—and the narratorshows no sign of disapproval of Hermes’ action but continues to treathim with the greatest respect and sympathy. Finally, it is signiWcantthat there appears to be no Greek term in the ecclesiastical writers fortraditio.45 C. J. Hefele–H. Leclercq, Hist. des conciles, i i, 301–26; Mansi ii 513–22. The Wrstnine canons deal with the lapsi. [On the council of Ancyra, see J. A. Fischer and A.Lumpe, Die Synoden von den Anfängen bis zum vorabend des Nicaenums (Paderborn,1997), 453–88; and S. Parvis, ‘The Canons of Ancyra and Caesarea (314): Lebon’sThesis Revisited’, JTS 52 (2000), 625–36.]46 Athan. Apol. c. Arian. 59.1; Socr. Hist. Eccles. i 6.47 §§ 4–6.48 See, on this Passion, n. 34 above.

48 Persecution and MartyrdomIn the West, the situation is totally diVerent. If we compare withthe canons of the purely Eastern Council of Ancyra those of theWestern Council held at about the same time (August 314) at Arles,we are at once struck by the fact that its canons49 make no referenceat all to apostasy by sacriWcing or burning incense. The persecutionhad ceased in the West more than nine years before the Council met,and only two canons50 are concerned with oVences committed duringthe persecution: they deal only with false accusations, and withtraditio, in its diVerent forms, by those ‘qui scripturas sanctas tradidissedicuntur vel vasa dominica vel nomina fratrum suorum’ [‘whoare said to have handed over the holy scriptures or the Lord’s vesselsor the names of their brothers’]. Here even traditio of the vasadominica, like the other two forms of traditio, is treated as a religiouscrime, justifying the removal of the delinquent from the ranks of theclergy; whereas Philip of Heraclea, as we have seen, saw nothingwrong in handing over the church plate immediately he was orderedto do so. In the Donatist controversy, which convulsed the Africanchurch henceforward, traditio is the one issue which dwarfs allothers, as far as the Great persecution is concerned.50 a In Africa,certainly, the oYcial view, of Catholics as well as Donatists, was thattraditio was an act of apostasy. We have already referred to thoseadmirable documents, the Passions of Felix of Thibiuca, executed forrefusing to commit traditio, and of the martyrs of Abitina. Althougha great part of the latter is an almost verbal reproduction of theoYcial Acta, the Passion in the form in which we have it is the workof a Donatist, who represents the diVerence between the faithful andthe lapsi as turning entirely on the question of traditio,51 and does notfail to emphasize that Fundanus, bishop of Abitina, had given uphis Scriptures—the most heinous form of traditio, needless to say.49 Hefele–Leclercq, op. cit. 280–95; Mansi ii 471–4. [For a more recent editionand French translation of the Canons of Arles, see J. Gaudemet, Conciles gaulois duIVe siècle (Sources Chrétiennes 241; Paris, 1977), 35–67. For an English translation,see J. Stevenson (ed.), A New Eusebius: Documents Illustrating the History of theChurch to AD 337, rev. W. H. C. Frend (London, 1987), 293–6.]50 13 (traditio); 14.50 a [See Y. Duval, Chrétiens d’Afrique à l’aube de la paix constantinienne: lespremiers échos de la grande persécution (Collections des Études Augustiniennes 164;Paris, 2000), 65–99.]51 Passio 2; 19–23.

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 49Several bishops besides Fundanus, not to mention other clerics andlaymen, were guilty of traditio.52 Others went in for evasions,53 whichthe authorities were evidently quite willing as a rule to countenance.54The emphasis is always upon traditio. A bishop could even askanother how he could possibly have gained release after arrest ‘exceptby giving something up or ordering it to be given up.’55 All thisconcentration of interest upon traditio, and the virtual absence ofany early reference to sacriWcatio or turiWcatio, shows that the persecutionin the West was carried out under E 1, and that E 4 could nothave been enforced to any signiWcant extent.56There is another piece of evidence of the non-enforcement of E 4 inthe West, or at any rate in the African provinces,57 the one area forwhich we have much evidence. This is the entire absence of anyWestern reference to the purchase of immunity from sacriWcing.The silence of the sources on this point presents a strong contrast tothe wealth of references to the libellatici of the Decian persecution,5852 e.g. Paul of Cirta (Optat. Append. i, pp. 186–7), Donatus of Mascula (Aug. C.Cresc. iii 27.30), possibly the bishops of Zama and Furni (Optat. Append. ii, p. 199).Victor of Rusiccade admitted throwing a copy of the Gospels into the Xames,claiming in extenuation that it was virtually illegible (Aug. C. Cresc. iii 27.30).53 Mensurius claimed that he had given up heretical works (Aug. Brev. Coll. iii13.25). Donatus of Calama surrendered medical books, Marinus of Aquae Tibilitanaesome other papers (Aug. C. Cresc. iii 27.30).54 See Aug. Brev. Coll. iii 13.25. The obliging oYcials tell Mensurius to give them‘aliqua ecbola aut quodcumque’ [‘some rubbish or anything whatever’]. When herefuses, they discover and take away some heretical works. Some Carthaginiandecurions complain to Anullinus, but he refuses to pursue M.55 Aug. C. Cresc. iii 27.30.56 C. Bigg, The Origins of Christianity, ed. T. B. Strong (Oxford, 1909), 482–3, wasinclined to doubt whether E 4 was ever published in the West. And see Jones (op. cit.in n. 41 above, 55): ‘There is no sound evidence for the promulgation of the fourthedict in the West.’ [This is now widely accepted, although for dissenters see Introd.above, p. 20 n. 66. W. H. C. Frend argued against Ste. Croix in two works: Martyrdomand Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford, 1965), and ‘A Note on the GreatPersecution in the West’, in Studies in Church History, 2 (1965), 141–8, repr. inFrend, Religion Popular and Unpopular in the Early Christian Centuries (London,1976); see Ch. 2 for Ste. Croix’s response: pp. 79–95.]57 Byzacena (Byzacium), here treated as part of the Proconsular province, may havebeen a province separate from Proconsularis in 303–4, as it certainly was at some timeduring the Wrst tetrarchy (ILA 3832 ¼ CIL viii 23179). [See Barnes, New Empire, 212.]58 There is evidence for libellatici in Spain (Cypr. Epist. lxvii 1.1; 6.1–2), at Rome(Id. xxx 3.1; also xxi 2.2; 3.2), and also of course in Africa: Id. xx 2.2; lv 3.2; 10.2;13.2; 14.1; 17.3; 26.1; De Lapsis 27–8; Ad Fort. 11. In Epist. lv 26.1, Cyprian describesthe purchase of a certiWcate as a far less grave sin than adultery.

50 Persecution and Martyrdomwho procured false certiWcates of compliance with the imperial order.We must not, of course, expect to Wnd any mention in the Greatpersecution of libellatici or libelli, for this time certiWcates were notissued—a question to which we shall return presently. If E 4 had reallybeen put into operation in the West, however, the sale of immunitieswould certainly have taken place there, as we know it did in the East;and since the washing of dirty linen which went on after the persecutionin some of the Western churches was decidedly more vigorousthan in the East, and is much better evidenced, largely owing to theDonatist controversy, we should certainly have expected to hearsomething about the practice we are considering. It is impossible tobelieve that the rigorist Africans, who, in common with their Romanand Spanish brethren, had denounced this form of evasion in the 250sas a form of apostasy, would have accepted it as permissible Wfty yearslater.We cannot leave this question without drawing a contrast againbetween East and West. In the East there is conclusive evidence thatChristians did buy exemption from E 4; but here it was not regardedas a sin. In his twelfth ‘canon’, Peter of Alexandria declares that thosewho purchased immunity are not to be blamed, for they sustainedloss of money with the object of saving their souls. He speaks of themalmost with respect. After this we hear nothing more about thepractice. Anyone who reads the canons of the Council of Ancyrawith Cyprian’s De Lapsis and letters in mind may well be astonishedat the lack of any reference to the sale of immunities in the Wrst ninecanons, which deal in detail with the various grades of apostasyduring the persecution. The one satisfactory explanation is that thedevice was not regarded as sinful by the Eastern churches, andtherefore did not require to be dealt with in the disciplinary canons.All our evidence about the sale of exemptions in the Decian persecutioncomes from the West, whereas for the Great persecution ourone piece of positive evidence (Peter’s letter), with the clear negativeevidence of the canons of Ancyra, comes from the East. It is surelypermissible, however, to use all the evidence for both persecutionstogether in this respect, and to draw conclusions accordingly. In theEast, we may infer, the purchase of exemptions was not regarded assinful in either persecution. This would explain the absence of anydenunciation of Eastern libellatici in the 250s. As regards the West,

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 51where the practice would undoubtedly have seemed as reprehensiblein the Great persecution as it did Wfty years earlier, we can explain thelack of any reference to the purchase of immunities only on theassumption that E 4 was little enforced, so that very few Christians(if any) would have needed to buy exemption. We shall return later tothe methods of evasion of E 4, but we may note in passing that bycountenancing the purchase of exemptions the Eastern churchesmade it possible for very many Christians to avoid the alternativesof apostasy or death without the least stain on their consciences.So rarely does sacriWcatio (or turiWcatio) make its appearance in thecontemporary or near-contemporary documents of the Africanchurches that it is impossible to believe E 4 could have been enforcedin Africa, except perhaps in a few isolated cases. It is worth examiningall the references in the earliest sources to sacriWcatio (or turiWcatio)in the African provinces. They may be considered in three groups:1. (a) At the meeting of Numidian bishops at Cirta in 305, whichhas already been mentioned, Donatus of Mascula evasively replied tohis metropolitan’s accusation of traditio, ‘Scis quantum me quaesivitFlorus ut turiWcarem, et non me tradidit deus in manibus eius, frater.’[‘You know how often Florus asked me to burn incense, but God didnot hand me over into his hands, brother.’] (b) At the Council of someseventy Donatist bishops at Carthage in (probably) 312, Marcian isreported to have declared that ‘TuriWcati, traditores, abhorrentes deomanere in ecclesia dei non possunt, nisi (etc.).’ [‘Incense burners andtraitors, being abhorrent to God are unable to remain in the church ofGod unless...’]59 (c) Maximus, an elder of the church of Carthage,making an oYcial accusation of traditio against Felix of Abthugna onthe 19th August 314, twice referred (according to the surviving procèsverbal)to an imperial order for sacriWce as well as traditio.60 Thealleged traditio of Felix, however, was supposed to have taken placeat the very beginning of the persecution under E 1, a long time beforeE 4 was issued, and there is not another word about sacriWce in thesubsequent proceedings, which describe how E 1 was enforced at59 Aug. Adv. Fulg. 26.60 Optat. Append. ii, pp. 198–9. The form Abthugna, or Abthugni, is the bestattested: see CIL viii (Suppl. iv) 23085, and the remarks of H. Dessau at p. 2338.

52 Persecution and MartyrdomAbthugna. The references to an imperial order to sacriWce are not evenconsistent: in one place the Christians have to sacriWce or deliver theirScriptures to be burnt, in the other everyone is to sacriWce and give upthe Scriptures. We know deWnitely that there had been no suchimperial order at that time. Before we try to explain the three passageswhich have just been cited we must look at some further evidence.2. (a) The Catholic bishop Optatus of Milevis, writing his bookagainst the Donatists some sixty years after the persecution, speaks inoneplace61asiftheChristiansof AfricaProconsularisandNumidiawereeverywhere compelled to oVer incense to the pagan gods. He also sayselsewhere62 that it was a matter of common knowledge that during thepersecution some bishops were guilty of turiWcatio; and whendescribingthe session of Numidian bishops to which reference has already beenmade he speaks63 scornfully of Menalius as having stayed away from themeeting,onthepretencethathewassuVeringfromophthalmia,toavoidbeing convicted of turiWcatio. (Optatus is not above calling the earlyDonatists collectively ‘traditores, turati, homicidae’ [‘traitors, incenseburners, and murderers’], just as Augustine after him calls them ‘traditores,turiWcati, schismatici’ [‘traitors, incense burners, and schismatics’],64and so forth; but these are merely the ordinary pleasantries ofcontroversybetweenCatholicsandschismatics.)(b)Withthesepassagesof Optatus we may couple CIL viii 6700 (19353), an inscription fromnorthern Numidia, referring to an unspeciWed number of martyrs‘qui sunt passi sub preside Floro in civitate Milevitana in diebusturiWcationis’ [‘who suVered under the governor Florus in the city ofMilevis in the days of incense burning’].64 aNow there is conclusive proof that Valerius Florus could neverhave enforced E 4, at any rate in northern Numidia—that part ofthe province which at the date of the ‘Verona List’ and certain61 3.8, a rhetorical contrast between Florus and Macarius the imperial notary sentto Africa by Constans in 347 (see W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movementof Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford, 1952), 177 V.).62 ii 25.63 i 13.64 Optat. i 15; Aug. Adv. Fulg. 26.64 a [See the critical edition of Y. Duval, Loca Sanctorum Africae: le culte des martyrsen Afrique du IVe au VIIe siècle (Collection de l’École Française de Rome 58; Rome,1982), i. 245–7, no. 117.]

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 53inscriptions of the early fourth century was Numidia Cirtensis, andwhich included Milevis.65 An inscription from Ksar el-Ahmar, theancient Macomades, shows that Florus had been replaced as governorby Aurelius Quintianus by the time of Diocletian’s vicennalia,which took place between 17th September and 20th November 303.66Quintianus is never named as a persecutor, a fact which it is hardlypossible to explain on the conventional view, according to which the‘dies turiWcationis’ followed the publication of E 4, early in 304, andrepresented a second stage of the Great persecution, more severe thanthe Wrst stage, the ‘dies traditionis’.67 On this view, we should beobliged to suppose that the bishop of Milevis, the inscription, andeven the contemporary record of the Cirta meeting are all mistakenin their references to Florus. The name of the chief persecutor,however, is surely just the very thing that is most likely to havebeen correctly remembered locally. The obvious explanation is thatmany Christians, anxious to forestall persecution, had publiclyannounced their apostasy, soon after the promulgation of E 1, byoVering incense to the pagan gods; and that Florus, like the governorsof Syria and Palestine—and doubtless many others—had attempted,possibly in accordance with oYcial instructions from above, toinduce at least some Christians to oVer sacriWce or burn incense tothe gods as well as hand over their books. The public defection of abishop or two in this way might be expected to induce numbers ofrank-and-Wle Christians to apostatize.68The language used by Donatus of Mascula—‘quantum me quaesivitFlorus ut turiWcarem’—supports the interpretation given here,for it hardly Wts an oYcial command, which would have been backedby torture (a trial Donatus did not claim to have endured) andenforced if necessary by execution. The natural interpretation ofDonatus’s statement is that he had yielded to a demand for traditiobut had not given in to the suggestion of the governor that he shouldalso oVer incense.68 a65 See Appendix V below.66 ILS 644 ¼ CIL viii 4764 (18698). On the date of the vicennalia see n. 12 above.67 See p. 46 and n. 42 above.68 Cf. Cypr. Epist. lix 10.3.68 a [Perhaps quaesivit means ‘sought for’rather than ‘asked’. But it is still implied, byDonatus’ silence on the subject, that he had committed traditio; and in view of ILS 644(see above) E 4 could not yet have been issued, the governor being Florus.]

54 Persecution and Martyrdom3. We are left with only one set of sources which can be broughtforward as evidence of the promulgation and enforcement of E 4 inAfrica: the Passions of the African martyrs. Felix of Thibiuca andSaturninus and his companions of Abitina suVered before E 4 couldhave been published in Africa. Of the other Passions, the only onewhich is suYciently important69 to require serious consideration isthat of Crispina of Thagora, martyred on 5th December 304 atTheveste (at this time included in the Proconsular province), aftera trial before Anullinus. Four passages70 are material for our investigation.The interrogation begins, ‘Anulinus proconsul dixit: ‘‘Praeceptisacri cognovisti sententiam?’’ Crispina respondit: ‘‘Quidpraeceptum sit nescio.’’ Anulinus dixit: ‘‘Ut omnibus diis nostrispro salute principum sacriWces, secundum legem datam a dominisnostris Diocletiano et Maximiano piis Augustis et Constantio etMaximo [Maximiano (one MS), i.e. Galerio Maximiano] nobilissimisCaesaribus’’.’ [Anulinus the proconsul said: ‘Do you understandthe meaning of the sacred decree?’ Crispina replied, ‘I do not knowwhat has been commanded.’ Anulinus said: ‘That you shouldsacriWce to all our gods for the welfare of the emperors, followingthe law issued by our masters the reverend Augusti Diocletian andthe most noble Caesars Constantius and Maximus.’] A little later theproconsul says, ‘Caput tibi amputari praecipio, si non obtemperaverispraeceptis imperatorum dominorum nostrorum, quibus deservirecogeris subiugata: quod et omnis Africa sacriWcia fecit, nec tibidubium est.’ [‘I will give orders for you to be beheaded if you do notobey the edicts of our lords the emperors. You will be forced to yieldand obey them: all the province of Africa has oVered sacriWce, as youare well aware.’] Further on again Anullinus says, ‘Sacrilega non erissi sacris obtemperes iussionibus’ [‘You will not commit sacrilege ifyou obey the sacred edicts’]. Finally, the sentence pronounced onCrispina reads, ‘Crispina in superstitione indigna perdurans, quaediis nostris sacriWcare noluit, secundum augustae legis mandatacaelestia, gladio eam animadverti iussi.’ [‘Seeing that Crispina haspersisted in infamous superstition and refuses to sacriWce to our godsin accordance with the heavenly decrees of the Augustan law, I have69 See, on the remainder, Appendix VI below.70 i 2–3; i 7; ii 3; iv 1.

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 55ordered her to be executed with the sword.’] If these passages aregenuine, we shall have to admit that E 4 was promulgated in at anyrate the Proconsular province, and therefore, presumably, throughoutthe area controlled by Maximian. No doubt most people will take thisview, which seems the natural one. Some, however, may not feelentirely convinced, especially since the Passion does contain at leastone Xagrant insertion,71 and the addition of a few references tosacriWce would have seemed almost de rigueur to any later hagiographer.It is diYcult to believe that an aristocrat like Anullinus wouldhave begun his formal written sentence with a nominativus pendens;and in the clause which follows, the more respectable reading, ‘augustae’,found in one or two manuscripts of the Passion, may well be alater attempt to improve on the ‘Augusti’ of the others, betraying thehandiwork of a clumsy compiler. Even the proconsul’s statement, ‘AllAfrica has sacriWced, as you very well know’, does not prove theenforcement of E 4: the statement is a rhetorical exaggeration in anycase, and it could just as well have been used of the large numbers ofChristians who had lapsed before E 4 was issued. Moreover, as Monceaux72noticed, the Passion which has survived would seem to be byno means identical with the version known to Augustine.Thus there is hardly suYcient evidence that E 4 was even promulgatedin Africa, and it cannot have been enforced there, save perhapsin a few individual cases. Yet the African provinces, with those ofEgypt, were regarded by Eusebius73 as conspicuous for the number oftheir martyrs. In Gaul and Britain, Constantius did not even enforceE 1 properly,74 and E 4 can never have been published in those areas.71 Id. iii 1: ‘Et adiecit Anulinus commentariensi oYcio dicens: ‘‘Ad omnemdeformationem deducta, a novacula ablatis crinibus decalvetur, ut eius primumfacies ad ignominiam deveniat.’’ ’ [Anulinus then turned to the court notary andsaid: ‘Let her be completely disWgured by having her hair cut and her head shaveduntil she is bald, that her beauty might Wrst thus be brought to shame.’] Franchi,curiously enough, was willing to accept this; but see P. Monceaux, ‘Les ‘‘Actes’’ deSainte Crispine, martyr à Théveste’, in Mélanges Boissier: recueil de mémoires concernantla littérature et les antiquités romaines dédié à G. Boissier (Paris, 1903), 383–9,at 386. For other defects in the Passion see Monceaux, Histoire littéraire de l’AfriqueChrétienne depuis les origines jusqu’à l’Invasion Arabe, iii (Paris, 1905), 386–7, 388–9.72 Op. cit. 383–7.73 HE viii 6.10.74 See Appendix II and n. 117 below. Alban’s martyrdom cannot be dated: see C. E.Stevens, ‘Gildas Sapiens’, EHR 56 (1941), 353–73, at 373.

56 Persecution and MartyrdomFor the remainder of the West—Italy, Sicily, Spain, Raetia andNoricum—the evidence is very scanty indeed. It is desirable to setout what little evidence does exist.From Sicily we have one fascinating document, the Passion ofEuplus, an enthusiastic volunteer for martyrdom. Clasping a copy ofthe Gospels, Euplus went and shouted, ‘I wish to die, for I am aChristian’, outside the oYce of Calvisianus, the corrector Siciliae.After a preliminary interrogation and some weeks’ imprisonment,Euplus was brought up again before the governor, who merely orderedhim to produce his ‘forbidden writings’ and, possibly misunderstandinghis reply, ordered him to be tortured (according to the Passion)‘until he promises to sacriWce to the gods’—the only mention ofsacriWce in the earliest version of the Passion. Franchi de’ Cavalieri,who produced the best edition of the document,75 may have beenright in believing this to be a later insertion. However, it is quitepossible that the words were actually spoken, and that they wereequivalent to ‘until he agrees to abandon Christianity’. This Passion,then, is easily explicable without invoking E 4. And we may go furtherthan this. The dates on which Euplus was interrogated were 29th Apriland 12th August 304. If E 4 was ever promulgated in Sicily, it is hard tobelieve that this had not happened by April 29th, let alone August12th; yet both interrogations of Euplus are concerned entirely with hispossession of the Scriptures. It is true that Euplus was carrying a copyof the forbidden documents when he made his appearance before thegovernor, and of course the Passion cannot be cited as evidenceagainst the previous publication of E 4 in Sicily; but it is worth notingthat the one Passion we have for the West, outside Africa, whichreproduces the oYcial Acta (apart from the sentence) with hardlyany alteration or embellishment should turn entirely on a provision ofE 1 and relate to an insistent volunteer for martyrdom.From Spain we have not one reliable Passion: Vincent’s is a mere‘historical novel’;76 and although that of Faustus, Januarius andMartial may go back ultimately to a respectable written source,77 it75 Studi e testi xlix (1928) at p. 16.76 See Delehaye, Les Légendes hag.3 114. The opening words show that the compilerhad no written source available.77 Evidently Delehaye thought so, for he places the work in his third class ofPassions (op. cit. 114–15).

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 57is impossible to feel any conWdence in its verbal accuracy; moreover,these three martyrs too are represented as volunteers, who publiclychallenged the governor and proclaimed themselves Christians.Otherwise, we have nothing better than some poems in the Peristephanonof Prudentius, written about a hundred years later andhaving very little to do with history. From Augusta Vindelicorumin Raetia we have one document, the Passion of Afra, the ‘GermanMagdalen’, which has been thought by some to be a substantialreproduction of the oYcial Acta and by others (with more reason)to be a pure romance.78 It seems that only one79 among manymanuscripts of this Passion contains any direct reference to animperial command to sacriWce or otherwise suggests that Afra suVeredin the Great persecution; and although the manuscript inquestion would appear to be the earliest, it will not inspire muchconWdence, except perhaps in those who are already predisposed toaccept the ‘Afra legend’.From Noricum we have nothing of real value.80 As regards Italy,from which we might have expected some evidence, we are very badlyoV indeed. The Roman church in particular did not preserve in atrustworthy form a record of a single one of the numerous martyrs itclaims during the Great persecution: the Roman Gesta Martyrum,noless than twenty-three of which profess to relate to this persecution,are not earlier than the Wfth century, and they are probably in themain of the late Wfth and early sixth.81 We have a number of scattered78 For a summary of the literature, see A. Harnack, Die Mission und Ausbreitungdes Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, 4th edn. (Leipzig, 1924), ii. 884 andn. 1 [trans. by J. MoVatt as The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the FirstThree Centuries (London, 1908), ii. 271–2] (‘Die Märtyrerakte taugt nichts; dieTatsache ist gut bezeugt’).79 That edited by Vielhaber (see Appendix I below). The crucial words, apparentlylacking in the other MSS, are ‘necesse est ut praeceptis imperatorum obtemperes, utaccedens sacriWces’ [‘it is necessary that you obey the commands of the emperors andgo up to sacriWce’]. In this MS the sentence on Afra begins with a nominativus pendens.80 The Passion of Florian of Lauriacum (on which see J. Zeiller, Les Origineschrétiennes dans les Provinces Danubiennes de l’Empire Romain (Paris, 1918), 62–4)preserves some historical elements, but so much of it is Wctitious that we cannot use itfor present purposes. (Noricum ought perhaps to be considered as falling in theEastern part of the empire during the years 303–6, and not in the area subject toMaximian.)81 See A. Dufourcq, Étude sur les Gesta Martyrum Romains (Paris, 1900–10), esp. i.287–90. It is Delehaye’s opinion also that the Roman legends ‘sont dépourvues de

58 Persecution and Martyrdomreferences to the Roman and other Italian martyrs in fourth and Wfthcentury writers, earlier than the Passions, and some of them—likethe Passions themselves—may conceivably preserve historical material;but none of these references is of such a character that thehistorian can safely use it. There is no trace of any contemporaryattempt to preserve records of the deeds of the Roman and Italianmartyrs, and as early as the time of Pope Damasus (366–384) theywere already more or less legendary Wgures, about whom ‘traditions’circulated, based on no written documents. The Roman church failedto distinguish itself in the persecution, which left it demoralized and,until 311, continuously disorganized by violent factional strife.82 Itwas actually without a bishop for more than half the sevenyears intervening between the death or technical apostasy83 of PopeMarcellinus in 304 and the election of Miltiades in 311. The historyof the persecution at Rome cannot be written; but there is at any rateno real evidence of the application of E 4, even if we accept thetradition that Marcellinus oVered incense to the gods, for this couldbe explained as the result of pressure applied to Marcellinus quiteapart from that edict.The evidence for the rest of Maximian’s provinces thus providesno reason for modifying the opinion arrived at on examination of theAfrican evidence, that E 4 was hardly, if at all, enforced in Maximian’sarea. The only evidence of the enforcement of E 4 which commandsany respect at all, apart from the Passio Crispinae, is provided by asingle manuscript of the very questionable Passio Afrae.In the West the persecution seems to have fallen into abeyanceeven before the abdication of Diocletian and Maximian on 1st May305; although in Italy and Africa, and presumably Pannonia, peacedid not fully return to the Church until after Severus had beentoute valeur au point de vue de l’histoire qu’elles prétendent faire connaître’[‘are deprived of all value with respect to the history that they claim to report’](Les Origines du culte des martyrs2, 262). For the worthless Passio Sabini(Savini), which so impressed Mason and others, see also F. Lanzoni, ‘La ‘‘PassioS. Sabini’’ o ‘‘Savini’’ ’, in Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde undfür Kirchengeschichte, 17 (1903), 1–26, endorsed by Delehaye, Les Légendes hag.383 n. 2.82 See the good brief summary in L. Duchesne, op. cit. (in n. 42 above), 72–6.83 See Appendix VII below.

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 59overthrown, late in 306 or early in 307, by Maxentius.84 Eusebius85 issubstantially right in saying that in the West the persecution lasted‘not two whole years’. The last datable Western martyrdom is that ofCrispina, on 5th December 304. In Numidia, where the persecutionseems to have been at least as severe as anywhere in the West, it hadevidently ceased for all practical purposes by February or the beginningof March 305, since clamorous meetings could then be heldopenly in Cirta itself, the Numidian capital, for the election of a newbishop in place of the traditor Paul, now deceased.864. The Administration of the Fourth EdictWe must now consider the way in which E 4 was put into eVect.A comparison with what we know about the administration of thepersecuting edict of Decius will be helpful.It is clear from the language used by Cyprian87 that under the edictof Decius a particular day was appointed, whether for the wholeempire or separately in each province, by which everyone had tosacriWce and obtain a certiWcate that he had done so. When the fatalday was past, anyone who had not sacriWced and secured his certiWcatewould have been liable to the death penalty. Cyprian’s correspondenceand treatises show that the eVect of the persecution was to divide theChristians into three broad classes: at one extreme the lapsi, who hadeither sacriWced or procured false certiWcates to that eVect; at the otherextreme the confessors, a few of whom were martyred; and in betweenthe two, a substantial third group (often overlooked nowadays) whichis referred to many times by Cyprian and his correspondents88 as the84 Eus. HE viii 14.1; Optat. i 18. Church property was only returned to theChristians of Rome by Maxentius in 311 (Aug. Brev. Coll. iii 18.34) and to theAfrican Christians (probably) by Constantine in 312/3 (Eus. HE x 5.15–17).85 MP 13.12; cf. 13.13; HE viii 13.11.86 The actual election of Silvanus, described at length in the Gesta apud Zenophilum(Optat. Append. I, pp. 192–7 [trans. by M. Edwards, Optatus: Against theDonatists (TTH 27; Liverpool, 1997), 150–69]), must of course have taken placebefore the consecration-meeting on the 4th or 5th March 305: for this date, seeAppendix IV below, § (d).87 De Lapsis 3.88 Cypr. De Laps. 2; 3; 4; and many letters, esp. xii 2.2; xiv 2.1; xix 2.2; xxx 5.3;xxxi 6.2; lv 5.1.

60 Persecution and Martyrdomstantes: Christians who were not arrested or called upon to make anypublic profession of their faith, but had at least run the risk ofpunishment for failing to sacriWce by the appointed day and mightbe charitably assumed to be ready to confess their faith should they beapprehended. Cyprian would have these people treated as potentialconfessors: he says the confessors proper had made a public and they aprivate confession.89 We have no information as to what steps weretaken to discover those who had no certiWcates, and it seems unlikelythat any systematic procedure was adopted. We know from a letterof Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, quoted by Eusebius,90 that inAlexandria—and therefore, presumably, in at least some other capitalcities—there was some kind of public roll-call; but this formed part ofthe procedure for organizing the sacriWces and was not a subsequentcheck.The Decian certiWcates of sacriWce which have been preserved fromEgypt, forty-three in number,91 were issued by local commissionersdescribed by some such title as ïƒ Kðd ôHí ŁıóØHífi æçìÝíïØ,92 whowere doubtless chosen by their local curiae. In every civitas throughoutthe empire the local magistrates and curia must have been89 De Laps. 3.90 HE vi 41.11: OíïìÆóôd ... ŒÆºïýìåíïØ [‘they were called by name’].91 See J. H. KnipWng, ‘The Libelli of the Decian Persecution’, in Harv. Theol. Rev.xvi (1923), 345–90, supplemented by H. Grégoire, Les Persécutions dans l’Empireromain, 2nd edn. (Mémoires de l’Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres56.5; Brussels, 1964), 129–30, and the works there referred to. [There are now 46extant certiWcates of sacriWce from the Decian persecution. 41 were edited andtranslated by KnipWng. Those published subsequently are: PSI vii 778; J. Schwartz,‘Une déclaration de sacriWce du temps de Dèce’, Revue Biblique, 54 (1947), 365–9,repr. in Sammelb. vi 9084; P. Oxy. xli 2990; P. Oxy. lviii 3929; and P. Lips. ii 152. Seethe complete list of Decian libelli with concordances in R. Duttenhöfer and R. Scholl,Griechische Urkunden der Papyrussammlung zu Leipzig (P.Lips.II) (Leipzig, 2002),226–41. For the general context, see Rives, ‘The Decree of Decius’, 135–6; Selinger,Die Religionspolitik des Kaisers Decius.]92 Cf. Cypr. Epist. xliii 3.1 (Carthage) and (if the document really relates to 250)Passio Pionii. iii 1 (Smyrna). [The Passio Pionii is generally dated to the Decianpersecution; see, for example, T. D. Barnes, ‘Pre-Decian Acta Martyrum’, JTS 19(1968), 509–31, at 529–31, repr. in Barnes, Early Christianity and the Roman Empire(London, 1984); Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, 460–8; and L. Robert, Le Martyrede Pionios, prêtre de Smyrne (Washington, 1994), esp. 1–9. For an argument in favourof dating it to the reign of Marcus Aurelius, see H. Grégoire, P. Orgels, and J. Moreau,‘Les Martyres de Pionios et de Polycarpe’, Bulletin de l’Académie royale de Belgique,classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, 47 (1961), 72–83.]

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 61saddled with the responsibility of choosing commissioners andseeing that they did their work properly; and certiWcates of sacriWcewere no doubt provided for everywhere.The machinery of the Great persecution was diVerent. Two featuresstand out. First, certiWcates of sacriWce were not issued. For this wehave only negative evidence: the fact that no mention is ever made ofcertiWcates in the sources, and that no certiWcates have survivedamong the papyri; but the contrast with the evidence for the Decianpersecution is so striking that we can regard the complete absence ofany provision for the granting of certiWcates as virtually certain.Secondly (and much more important), there is strong evidence thatuntil 306 the central government did not make the municipalitiesresponsible for taking active steps to enforce E 4. It must have beenearly in 306—long after the persecution had ceased in the West—thatMaximin ‘for the Wrst time’ (ôïFôï ðæHôïí) issued an edict orderingthe municipal magistrates to enforce general sacriWce by men, womenand children.93 Immediately, according to the Long Recension ofEusebius’s Martyrs of Palestine, heralds in every city called uponeveryone to assemble at the temples, and ‘the military tribunes andcenturions went from house to house and from ward to ward(ŒÆôš ïYŒïıò ŒÆd ¼ìöïäÆ), making registers of the citizens; then theysummoned each one by name and thus compelled him to do what hadbeen decreed.’ (Eusebius, who is concerned only with Palestine, partof Maximin’s dominions, speaks of Maximin alone as the author ofthis decree; but Maximin was still only a Caesar, and it seems probablethat the edict was in fact issued by Galerius and Maximin jointly, inthe whole of the East.) Eusebius adds that throughout Caesarea(where he himself was living at the time)94 heralds proclaimed theedict, and military tribunes summoned each individual by name froma roll. A similar edict, instructing the local magistrates to enforceuniversal sacriWce, was issued in 309,95 in an even stronger form; butthis time we hear nothing of the compilation of new registers.93 Eus. MP 4.8.94 MP 4.6, 8, 14.95 By Maximin, according to Eus. MP 9.2. By now M. had probably been recognizedas Augustus by Galerius, who may have prompted this action. It is obviouslywrong to seek, with A. J. Mason, The Persecution of Diocletian: A Historical Essay(Cambridge, 1876), 284–5, for echoes of this edict in Passions the wording of which isuntrustworthy.

62 Persecution and MartyrdomThere can be little doubt that the edict of 306 was the Wrst of itskind during the whole persecution, and not merely during Maximin’sreign. Eusebius96 has already said that Maximin set to work on thepersecution with greater vigour than his predecessors. When recordingE 4, he does not mention any instructions such as he quotesMaximin as giving in 306 and 309, and the steps taken in 306 toprepare registers would not have been necessary had they been takena year or two previously. Eusebius also speaks of the roll-calls as ifthey were unprecedented.Now a decree such as E 4 could not be properly carried out,especially in districts where Christians were numerous and notunpopular, without the creation of special administrative machinerysuch as that which was set up in pursuance of the Decian edict. Untilthis was done, in 306, and the municipal governments were madeactively responsible for enforcing E 4, the edict could only have beencarried out to a very small extent. Some Christians would havebeen frightened into sacriWcing, and some others would have beenexposed and given the alternative of apostasy or death, but the stanteswould have run even less risk of detection than in Decian times,for they were not even liable to exposure by inability to producecertiWcates. This is certainly what we should expect, and, as we shallsee presently, it is conWrmed by the narrative of the Martyrs ofPalestine. It also appears that until the compilation of special registersin 306 the authorities in at least some areas (the larger towns, at anyrate) may not have possessed the complete lists of inhabitants whichwere essential if general sacriWce was to be eYciently organized. Listswould have been available of landowners, country-dwellers, andthose liable to perform liturgies, but it seems rather unlikely thatthe non-propertied classes in the towns would have been included inany oYcial register.97 If this is correct, little could have been done toenforce compliance with E 4 on the part of the urban poor, who stillprovided a large part of the Christian congregations. This is thesituation which Maximin’s drastic edict of 306 was intended to96 MP 4.1.97 See Appendix VIII below.

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 63remedy: the government now proposed to compel the local authoritiesto act, after completing their registers. According to the Martyrsof Palestine, the government did not leave the carrying out of the newedict entirely to the municipal oYcials; but it is permissible tosuggest that the procedure described by the Long Recension, whichEusebius witnessed with his own eyes at Caesarea, was conWned tothe provincial capitals and perhaps a few other important towns ofthe East—it would hardly have been possible to Wnd enough troopsand oYcers to perform these burdensome duties in more than a fewcities, and in most of the civitates the decurions must have been leftto do the work themselves. The amount of work involved throughoutthe East would have been considerable. The new procedure ought tohave made the enforcement of the order to sacriWce much morecomplete. In fact, however, the evidence of the Martyrs of Palestinesuggests that there was no great increase in the seeking out ofChristians—a fact which can only be explained by the reluctance ofthe provincial and civic authorities to carry out the orders given tothem from above.We have already seen that in the West, where the Church wouldhave condemned the purchase of exemption from sacriWcing as aform of lapse, E 4 was so little enforced—if at all—that resort to suchevasions was unnecessary, whereas in the East the purchase ofexemption did take place, but was not condemned. Those Christianswho were reluctant to run the risk of arrest by becoming openconfessors or secret stantes, and yet were unable for some reasonto buy immunity from sacriWcing, were often able to avoid openapostasy—but not the displeasure of the Church, and subsequentpenance—by devices we are fortunately able to trace in the canons ofPeter of Alexandria and the Council of Ancyra. Some Christianssuccessfully deceived the authorities by inducing pagans to impersonatethem at the ceremony of sacriWcing, or by sending their ownslaves (some of them Christians themselves) to sacriWce in theirstead.98 Others evaded the edict with the connivance of the authorities,extending sometimes (in the case of priests) as far as thearrangement of bogus torture-sessions, to enable them to claimthey had sacriWced only after enduring extreme agony, and thus to98 Peter Alex. Epist. Can. 5–7 (see n. 44 above).

64 Persecution and Martyrdomreturn to the bosom of the Church on easier terms.99 It is diYcult todecide whether these collusive arrangements testify more strongly tothe humanity, or to the venality, of the oYcials concerned. If all otherresources failed, a stalwart Christian might take to Xight, as manyhad done in the time of Decius, hoping to return when the persecutionhad died down. We know from Athanasius100 that many Christianswere given shelter by compassionate pagans, who hid them (atthe risk of their own lives) while the persecution was at its height.5. The Evidence of Eusebius’s Martyrs of PalestineOf all the provinces of the empire, it is only Palestine—Syria Palaestina,to give it its proper title—for which we have a full list of all themartyrdoms of the Great persecution. It has sometimes been deniedthat Eusebius’s Martyrs of Palestine gives a complete list of all thePalestinian martyrdoms of the Great persecution. The expressionsEusebius uses, however, are suYciently clear. After describing themartyrdoms of 310 at Caesarea, the last there, he says,101 ŒÆd ôa ìbíŒÆôa ˚ÆØóÜæåØÆí Köš ‹ºïØò ôïEò ôïF äØøªìïF ÷æüíïØò KðØôåºåóŁÝíôÆìÆæôýæØÆ ôïØÆFôÆ [‘Such were the martyrdoms accomplished at Caesareaduring the entire period of the persecution’]. And at the very endof his narrative, after mentioning the later mass execution at Phaeno,he adds,102 ôÆFôÆ ìbí ïsí ôa ŒÆôa —ƺÆØóôßíçí Kí ‹ºïØò ŠôåóØí OŒôgóıìðåæÆíŁÝíôÆ ìÆæôýæØÆ [‘These, then, were the martyrdomsaccomplished in Palestine in eight entire years’]. Eusebius evidentlybelieved he had mentioned all the Palestinian martyrdoms, and thereis no reason to think his list is incomplete.102 a Eusebius was a priest ofthe church of Caesarea, the capital of the province, and he probablyremained in Palestine, if not at Caesarea itself, during most of theyears in question. Few Palestinian martyrdoms (except of course99 Conc. Ancyran. I, Can. 1 (see n. 45 above).100 Hist. Arian. ad Monach. 64.101 MP 11.31.102 13.11 S (cf. L).102 a [Note T. D. Barnes’s more sceptical appreciation of this text which, he argues,only contains those martyrs known to Eusebius; Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge,Mass., 1981), 154–5.]

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 65those at Phaeno) could have taken place elsewhere than at Caesarea,for sentence of death could be pronounced only by the provincialgovernor, who would spend most of his time in his capital city, andexecution was public and normally followed immediately after sentence.If the governor condemned a Christian when holding hisperiodic assize in some city other than the provincial capital, theproceedings would receive full publicity, and it would have beeneasy for Eusebius to obtain particulars. There are no grounds forsupposing that any Palestinian martyrdoms failed to come to Eusebius’snotice.Eusebius’s Palestinian103 martyrs can proWtably be divided, forpurposes of analysis, into three classes: Wrst, volunteers, who activelybrought arrest and death upon themselves; secondly, those who,without going so far as to demand martyrdom, nevertheless attractedattention to themselves;104 and thirdly, those whose arrest was notcertainly due to their own act and who may have been sought out bythe authorities. The results of classiWcation on these lines are astonishing.Out of a total of ninety-one martyrs, we must set aside fortyfourwho were executed at Phaeno in the last years of the persecution:we have no details of the circumstances in which they were arrested,and at least two-thirds of them must have been Egyptians.105 Of theremaining forty-seven, at least thirteen were volunteers, and at leasteighteen drew attention to themselves, leaving at most sixteen whomay have been sought out. Small as this last group is, it contains atleast three who acted most contumaciously at their trial.106 For103 In the special sense in which Eus. uses the term, to include Palestinians,wherever they suVered, and Christians from other provinces martyred in Palestine.104 Cf. Peter Alex. Epist. Can. 11.105 Including 5 out of the 6 whose names we know. In MP 13.1 L, Eus. gives over100 Egyptians out of a total of about 150 Christians remaining at Phaeno. Cf. 13.6 S.He records no great number of Palestinian confessors as being condemned to themines: cf. MP 7.2, 3; 8.3, 4; 13.1 L; 13.10 L. InMP 8.1, 13 he mentions 227 EgyptianChristians sent to Palestine in two groups: the Wrst batch (of 97: MP 8.1 L, against S)were all sent to Phaeno; of the second (numbering 130: MP 8.13), some were taken toCilicia.106 Procopius, Zacchaeus, and the woman of Gaza (Ennatha: Eus. MP 8.8 L). Theother members of this third group are Timothy, Thecla (whose execution is notactually recorded—perhaps she died in prison), Ulpian, Agapius I (MP 3.1; 6.3–7),Domninus, Auxentius, the two Pauls, Ennathas, Peter, Asclepius, Pamphilus andValens. The 13 outright volunteers are Alpheus, Romanus, the 6 young men of Eus.MP 3.3–4, Apphianus, Aedesius, Antoninus, Zebinas and Germanus.

66 Persecution and Martyrdomthe fourteen who suVered before the abdication of Diocletian,the corresponding Wgures (even more striking) are eight, two andfour.It is necessary to be very circumspect in drawing conclusions fromthese Wgures. They emphatically do not prove that the persecution inPalestine was a trivial aVair or that it did not cause the Christiancommunity great anxiety and misery. Some condemned Christians(whose numbers, by the way, are to be reckoned in dozens or scoresrather than hundreds)107 were sent to the mines at Phaeno, and someintrepid confessors, like the Donatus to whom Lactantius addressedhis De Mortibus Persecutorum,108 are known to have spent monthsand even years in prison, some of them sustaining repeated interrogationsunder torture. Some of those who apostatized in fear orunder pressure may have suVered great agony of mind. Mere statisticsof martyrdoms are not at all a reliable index of the suVerings ofthe Christians as a whole. Nevertheless, one certain conclusion doesimpose itself. Of the martyrs of Palestine about whom we have anydetailed information, very few had been sought out: approximatelytwice as many (if not more) were volunteers or had otherwiseattracted the attention of the authorities. No such deWnite conclusioncan be reached in respect of the other provinces of the empire.However, since Eusebius represents the two men who governedPalestine during almost all the years of persecution—Urban(304–308/9) and Firmilian (308/9–310)—as particularly enthusiasticand cruel persecutors, and the same historian depicts Maximin as themost zealous in this regard of all the emperors, it seems very possiblethat the extent to which Christians were sought out was at least nogreater in most of the other provinces. The number of martyrs maywell have been exceptionally great in Egypt—but it is precisely inEgypt that we should have expected to Wnd the highest proportion ofvolunteers among the martyrs; and indeed it is certain that voluntarymartyrdom was extensively practised by the Egyptians, of theThebaid at any rate, for when Eusebius describes his experiencesthere, he makes it clear that the ‘many’ Christians he himself sawcondemned to death ‘in a single day’ were in fact volunteers, who107 See n. 105 above.108 16.3–11; 35.2.

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 67‘leapt up before the judgment seat from this side and that(KðåðÞäøí ¼ººïŁåí ¼ººïØ), and confessed themselves to be Christians’,receiving sentence with hymns of thanksgiving.109According to a statement of Lactantius,110 some governors boastedof having shed no Christian blood. Others, like Anullinus, whowinked at Mensurius’s evasion of E 1,111 performed their dutieswithout unnecessary enthusiasm. The whole climate of opinion hadchanged since the mid-third century, when the persecution of Deciushad been preceded by serious anti-Christian rioting at Alexandria.112Spontaneous popular hostility to Christianity seems to have virtuallyceased by the end of the third century. It is therefore not surprisingthat the edicts enjoining general sacriWce, despite pressure fromabove, were enforced in a very lax manner. In the hagiographers, asDelehaye113 put it, ‘c’est toujours et partout la chasse aux chrétiens detout rang’ [‘it is, absolutely invariably, the hunt for Christians of allranks’]. That picture could hardly be more misleading.We may reasonably conclude that except on isolated occasions, as forexample during the brief but intense local persecution at Nicomediasoon after the issue of E 1,114 and perhaps a massacre of the wholepopulation—or at any rate the whole Christian congregation—of aPhrygian town,115 the ordinary Christian who did not insist onopenly parading his confession of faith (the stans) was most unlikelyto become a victim of the persecution at all, especially in the years109 HE viii 9.5. On Id. 3 we should note the sceptical observations of Gibbon (ed.Bury, ii 137, n. 183 [Womersley edn. i. 578–9 n. 182]). And here also the martyrs maywell have been mainly volunteers. For Wve Egyptian volunteers in the Decian persecution,see Eus. HE vi 41.22–23. For the militant characteristics of lower classEgyptians in the later 4th century, see Amm. Marc. xxii 16.23.110 Div. Inst. v 11.13. Lact. characteristically contrives to make his statementredound to the discredit of the governors concerned.111 See n. 54 above.112 Dionys. Alex., ap. Eus. HE vi 41.1–9; cf. Firmilian, ap. Cypr. Epist. lxxv 10.1.Contrast Eus. MP 9.3.113 Delehaye, Les Passions des Martyrs 175; cf. the quotation on p. 177 from thePassion of Trophimus and others.114 Eus. HE viii 6.1–7; Lact. MP 15.1–3.115 Contrast Lact. Div. Inst. v 11.10 with Eus. HE viii 11.1 (and RuWnus’s version).This may be exaggerated hearsay: not even the name of the town is given. Ramsay’ssuggestion (Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia (Oxford, 1897), i ii, 505–9) that the townwas Eumeneia is mere conjecture.

68 Persecution and Martyrdombefore the municipal authorities of the East were made responsiblefor the active enforcement of E 4. And in the West, where thepersecution ceased before it had properly developed, we need notbe surprised to Wnd very few martyrdoms indeed, except of volunteersor of those who deWed E 1. The so-called Great persecution hasbeen exaggerated in Christian tradition to an extent which evenGibbon did not fully appreciate. Other persecutions of Christianitywere sporadic and short-lived, and none of them, except those ofDecius and perhaps Valerian, were general, involving the whole oreven the greater part of the empire. No estimate of the total numberof martyrs can proWtably be attempted, but the considerationsbrought forward here certainly reinforce the arguments of thosewho have maintained that in the Great persecution, at any rate, thenumber was not large.But when all this is said, we must beware of underestimating thegreat suVering caused to the Christians by the atmosphere of hostility,liable to turn at any moment into active persecution, in which theChurch grew up and ultimately triumphed. The threat of persecution,always hanging over their heads, was a factor of the utmostimportance in the environment of the early Christians. And for someof the deplorable features which we Wnd in the mentality of so manyof the prominent churchmen and ecclesiastical writers of the fourthand following centuries—above all the readiness to persecute and thehysterical denunciation of theological opponents—the atmosphereof constant menace in which Christianity had matured was in somedegree responsible.APPENDICESI: The Passions. The bibliography by Baynes in Camb. Anc. Hist. xii 790–3gives full references to the best texts of most of the Passions cited here, withthe principal recent discussions. The remaining Passions, except that ofFlorian (for which see n. 80 above), will be found in R. Knopf, AusgewählteMärtyrerakten3 (ed. G. Krüger, 1929 [see the more recent edition withadditions and amendments by G. Ruhback (Tübingen, 1965)] ), or the

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 69various editions (1690–1859) of Th. Ruinart, Acta Martyrum. The doubtfulPassio Afrae is edited by B. Krusch in Mon. Germ. Hist., Scr. rer. Merov. iii61–4 (cf. 41–54), and a single MS by G. Vielhaber in Anal. Bolland. xxvi(1907), 59–61 (cf. 58, 61–5). [See J.-L. Maier, Le Dossier du Donatisme,i:Desorigines à la mort de Constance II (303–361) (Texte und Untersuchungen134; Berlin, 1987) for critical texts and French translations of the Acta of themartyrs of Abitina, the Passio Felicis and the Passio Crispinae; for Englishtranslations see M. A. Tilley, Donatist Martyr Stories: The Church in ConXictin Roman North Africa (TTH 24; Liverpool, 1996). See Musurillo, Acts of theChristian Martyrs (Oxford, 1972), for texts and English translations of theActa of the martyrs of Scillitana, the Passio Apollonii, the Passio Agapi et al.,and the Passio Pionii. See also the edition of the Passio Pionii by LouisRobert, Le Martyre de Pionios, prêtre de Smyrne (Washington, 1994).]II: The divisions of the Empire (see n. 16 above). It used to be generallyassumed that there was a more or less complete territorial division of theempire among the four emperors of the Wrst tetrarchy, 293–305 (cf. Lact. MP7.2: ‘in quattuor partes orbe diviso’), and that the government of anyparticular area at any given time was primarily in the hands of the Augustusor Caesar who was then supposedly in charge of that area. Quite recentlySeston (op. cit. in n. 12 above, 231–47) has shown that this conceptioncannot be right: the Roman world still remained in principle an ‘indivisumpatrimonium’ [‘an undivided inheritance’], the term used by a panegyrist(Paneg. Lat. xi (iii) 6.3) a few years earlier during the ‘dyarchy’ of Diocletianand Maximian. It is perhaps worth adding that ‘quadripartito imperio’, in F.Pichlmayr’s standard text of Aurelius Victor (Caes. xxxix 30), is animplausible interpretation of the contractions in the MSS (q u i and qī):A. Schott’s ‘quasi partito imperio’ is distinctly more acceptable [Schott’sversion is followed in the edition of P. Dufraigne (Paris, 1975), but the recentedition of K. Gross-Albenhausen and M. Fuhrmann (Düsseldorf, 1997)prints ‘quadripartito imperio’]. Seston, however, goes too far when he says(op. cit. 243) that ‘la division de l’empire en quatre parts ne concerna que lesrevenus de la capitation et de l’annone aVectés àchaque empéreur pour sestroupes; elle ne toucha pas l’administration proprement dite qui resta une.’[‘The division of the empire into four parts only concerned the revenuesfrom tax and grain allocated to each emperor for his troops; it did not aVectthe administration technically speaking, which remained one.’] Even if thisis a substantially correct statement of the pure theory of Diocletian’s tetrarchy,it gives a misleading impression of its practice. It is evident from thediatribe against Maximian in the De Mortibus Persecutorum (8.3–4), rhetoricaland exaggerated as it is, that Lactantius conceived M. as pursuing, in aparticular area, a deWnite policy of his own choice, which, even if its motives

70 Persecution and Martyrdomwere Wnancial, went far beyond the purely Wnancial sphere. This must becorrect: M. was unable to make new laws in the West without obtaining theapproval of D.; but subject always to the overriding control of the ‘seniorAugustus’, whose personal auctoritas was supreme,116 he must have had aconsiderable degree of freedom in the way he enforced the existing laws, inevery sphere, in the West. This conclusion is strengthened by the fact thatConstantius, who was only M.’s Caesar, evidently had in practice a more orless free hand in the administration of Gaul and Britain, where he spent allhis time. M., as far as we know, never entered C.’s area after 293, except toguard the Rhine frontier while C. was reconquering Britain, but remained inItaly, Africa and Spain, which C. never visited again. We know117 that C. didnot even enforce E 1 properly, contenting himself with the perfunctorydemolition of churches. This nicely illustrates the position of C. (andindirectly, that of M.) in theory and in practice: the edict had to bepromulgated, and in theory it had to be enforced, but in practice C. couldand did prevent its having much eVect.Unfortunately, we seem to have no reliable evidence about the position ofGalerius. It is usually believed that he was allotted a distinct territorial sphereof authority, in the Balkans; but this is by no means certain, or evenprobable. D. and his Caesar did not, like their colleagues in the West,spend all their time in separate areas. G., for instance, warred against thePersians in 297/8 from Syria, where D. was also present, and he passed thewhole winter of 302/3 and part of the spring of 305 with D. at Nicomedia. D.was in the Danube provinces and Thrace throughout 293 and all but the lastfew weeks of 294, spending much of his time at Sirmium in Pannonia; in thesummer of 303 he was on the lower Danube again, and after a visit to Italyfor his vicennalia towards the end of 303 he spent the spring and summer of304 in the Balkans.118 There may well have been other such journeys. Again,if G. had really been the ruler of the Balkan area, we might have expected to116 See esp. Lact. MP 15.6; Julian Orat. i 7ab. Cf. also Eus. HE viii 13.11; MP 3.5;Vita Const. i 14; ii 51. [See Corcoran, Empire, 266–92.]117 The best evidence is the Donatist petition in Optat. i 22. Against the disingenuousEus. HE viii 13.12–13 and viii Append. 4, and the absurd Vita Const. i 16,we must obviously accept Lact. MP 15.7.118 The details can be reconstructed from Lact. MP 10.6; 11.3; 14; 17–19 and thesubscriptiones of the constitutions issued during the years 293–4 and 303: see the listof constitutions in chronological order in P. Krüger’s edn. of the Cod. Just., appendixI, and T. Mommsen, ‘Über die Zeitfolge der Verordnungen Diocletians und seinerMitregenten’, in Gesammelte Schriften, ii.ii (Berlin, 1905), 195–291, at 273–88, 290.[On the movement of the emperors in the tetrarchic period, see now Barnes, NewEmpire, 47–87, with amendments in his ‘Emperors, Panegyrics, Prefects, Provincesand Palaces (284–317)’, JRA 9 (1996), 532–52, at 543–4.] Lact. MP 18.6 is veryexaggerated.

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 71Wnd him given a pre-eminent position in the reliefs on his triumphal arch atThessalonica (for which see K. F. Kinch, L’Arc de Triomphe de Salonique(Paris, 1890), esp. pl. v–vi and pp. 24–6, 34–7 [see also J.-M. Spieser,Thessalonique et ses monuments du IVe au VIe siècle: Contribution à l’étuded’une ville paléochrétienne (BEFAR 254; Athens, 1984), 99–104; C. C.Vermeule, Roman Imperial Art in Greece and Asia Minor (Cambridge,Mass., 1968), 336–50]; but it seems that in fact he is there subordinated toD., except when he is represented as the victorious general of the Persian war(see Seston, op. cit. 180–3, 250–2). It is signiWcant that an independentpolicy in a particular area in regard to the persecution seems never to beattributed to G. by any writer, even Lact. and Eus., who considered G. as theinstigator of the whole aVair; and Lact. represents G. as gaining his endsolely by working upon and through D.Only two fourth century writers profess to state G.’s share in a division ofthe empire. Aurelius Victor (Caes. xxxix 30), who gives him ‘Illyrici oraadusque Ponti fretum’ [‘the coast of Illyricum right across to the strait ofPontus’], was probably inXuenced in his allocation of all four areas, asSeston119 has pointed out, by his knowledge of the regional praetorianprefectures of the time at which he himself was writing. Praxagoras ofAthens (FGrH 219 F 1.1), who allows G. Greece, Macedon, ŒÜôø š `óßÆand Thrace, gives an incomplete account of the division, actually ignoringSyria, Africa, Spain, Gaul and the greater part of the Balkans. Eutropius, onthe other hand, although he describes (x 1) the partition of the Romanworld between Constantius and Galerius in 305, says nothing about aterritorial division among the members of Diocletian’s tetrarchy. And Eusebius(HE viii 13.11; MP 13.13) describes as quite unprecedented the pursuitof two entirely diVerent policies in regard to the Christians in the East and inthe West, from the abdication of D. and M., or rather, from shortly beforethat event (ïhðø in HE viii 13.11), when D. was ailing.All this suggests that contemporaries recognized in the second tetrarchy adivision of authority which had not existed in the Wrst. The facts certainlysupport this view. The unity of the Wrst tetrarchy had been preserved mainlyby the auctoritas of D.; the second tetrarchy, having no such cohesiveprinciple, soon resolved itself into distinct territorial principalities.Although in theory the pretence of unity was maintained, yet immediatelyupon the abdication of D. and M. there seems to have been a fairly clear119 Op. cit. (in n. 12 above), 244–5, citing the proof by J. R. Palanque, Essai sur laPréfecture du Prétoire du Bas-Empire (Paris, 1933), 34, of the existence of a separatePrefecture of Illyricum from 357 to c. 361. [See more recently T. D. Barnes, ‘Praetorianprefects, 337–361’, ZPE 92 (1992), 249–60, esp. 258–9, who lists evidence forthe prefecture of Illyricum from 343–344 to 361.]

72 Persecution and Martyrdomterritorial division between Constantius and his Caesar Severus in the West(who took between them roughly the Latin-speaking half of the empire,including Pannonia), and Galerius and his Caesar Maximin in the East.There was even a well-marked division between the Augustus and the Caesarin each area, C. leaving Italy and Africa to Severus, and G. similarly leavingto M. the vast diocese of Oriens, stretching from the Taurus to the GreatSyrtis.III: The issue of E 4 (see n. 16 above). The number of martyrdoms in thisperiod in the whole empire to which dates can be assigned with anyconWdence is very small indeed. From Asia Minor, where Christianity wasas strong as anywhere, there are no such martyrdoms at all. It does seemquite probable, however, that enforcement of E 4 Wrst began in the Balkanarea (see n. 16 above). On this probability, and the assumption (which wehave seen to be not well founded) that the administration of the Balkans hadbeen entrusted to Galerius to the same extent as that of Italy, Spain andAfrica to Maximian and that of Gaul and Britain to Constantius, a boldtheory has been developed about the origin of E 4 (Baynes, op. cit. in n. 16above, 193, and in Camb. Anc. Hist. xii 667–8). That edict is conceived ashaving been issued by G. on his own responsibility, in February 304, while D.was incapacitated, and put into operation in the Balkans, then forced on M.with the threat of civil war, and Wnally adopted with reluctance by D. in theEast in 305.This theory has little to commend it. The hazards of communication inthose days might result in long delays before an edict was promulgatedeverywhere. A glance at the subscriptiones of some of the constitutions in theCodes will reveal unaccountable variations in this respect. To quote only onewell attested early example, Wve and a half months elapsed before three lawsissued at Trier early in November, 313 (CTh ix 40.1; xi 30.2; 36.1), werereceived at Hadrumetum by the governor of Byzacena. Thus the earlierappearance of E 4 in the Balkans could be explained quite simply by thefact that the edict reached these provinces earlier than many other areas,because it was issued there, or nearby. D. was at Ravenna on January 1st, 304;his next move—after how long an interval, we do not know—was into theBalkan district (Lact. MP 17.3–4). G. may well have been in the Balkans tooat this time; but if indeed E 4 was more widely enforced, in the spring of 304,in this area than elsewhere—and the evidence (see n. 16 above) provides novery sure basis for the assumption—the most probable explanation wouldbe the presence of D. himself. There is no reason to conceive D. as veryseriously ill in the early part of 304: he would hardly have spent the summertravelling along the Danube shore (Lact. MP 17.3–4: ‘lectica plurimumvehebatur’ [‘he was conveyed for most of it on a litter’]; cf. ‘morbum

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 73levem’ [‘a minor illness’] if he had been so ill as to be incapable of exercisingcontrol of aVairs; and in the autumn of 304 he was able to appear in publicand dedicate his new circus at Nicomedia (Lact. MP 17.4; and note the dateof CJ iii 28.26). Lact. (MP 17.8), mentioning D.’s next public appearance, on1st March 305, when he was convalescent and ‘scarcely recognizable’, adds,‘quippe qui anno fere toto aegritudine tabuisset’ [‘after the wasting eVect ofnearly a whole year’s illness’], where fere, taken with toto, must mean ‘nearly’rather than ‘about’ a year. This too accords badly with the picture of a D.gravely ill in the very Wrst weeks of 304.The testimony of the sources, such as they are, is certainly in favour of theview that G. was a particularly bitter enemy of the Christians and the chiefinstigator of the persecution: both Lact. (MP 10.6; 11), who was at Nicomediain 303, and Eusebius (HE viii 16.2 and appendix 1, 4; Vita Const. i56–8) evidently believed this. On the other hand, the emperor Constantine(ap. Eus. VC ii 51), claiming Wrst-hand knowledge, seems to have attributedthe persecution (the ‘sanguinary edicts’) mainly to the personal superstitionof D.; he ignores G. Moreover, the author of the Oratio ad Sanctos (whetherConstantine or some contemporary),120 apostrophizing recent persecutorsof the Church, from Decius onwards, addresses himself to D. alone amongthe tetrarchs: this is all the more signiWcant, in that the point of the wholepassage (ch. 24–5) is that persecutors come to a bad end, and G.’s end wasnotoriously gruesome, whereas D.’s was not. One may think that G.’s painfuldeath would in any event have tended to lead to his being represented inChristian propaganda as the inspirer of the persecution. And it is perhapsworth noticing that Eutropius (Brev. ix 26) credits D. with being clever atmaking others bear the odium for his own severities.We may conclude, then, that D. undertook the persecution partly at leastfor superstitious reasons of his own, although pressure exerted upon him byG. may well have been an important factor, perhaps even decisive. Toattribute E 4 entirely to the initiative of G. is to go far beyond the evidence.Lact., for all his anxiety to represent the persecution as the constant preoccupationof G., never even hints that his object in threatening M. with warwas to make him join in the persecution: he speaks of G. as intent at this120 See N. H. Baynes, Constantine the Great and the Christian Church, 2nd edn., ed.H. Chadwick (London, 1930), 50–6. [The Oratio ad Sanctos is now generally acceptedas the work of Constantine; for an English trans. see M. J. Edwards, Constantineand Christendom (TTH 39; Liverpool, 2003), pp. xvii–xxii. Disagreements remainconcerning its date and purpose. See the contrasting interpretations of M. J. Edwards,‘The Constantinian Circle and the Oration to the Saints’, in M. J. Edwards, M. D.Goodman, and S. R. F. Price (eds.), Apologetics in the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1999),251–76; and T. D. Barnes, ‘Constantine’s Speech to the Assembly of the Saints: Placeand Date of Delivery’, JTS 52 (2001), 26–36.]

74 Persecution and Martyrdomtime solely on driving both Augusti to resign, so that he himself could attainsupreme power (MP 18.1–7).120 aWe may well ask how the remarkably intelligent Diocletian could haveallowed himself to be persuaded to undertake a more extreme policy whichevents later showed to be seriously mistaken. The answer is perhaps that E I(especially in the East, where the Church did not regard traditio as a sin) mayeasily have appeared to the government to have been highly successful, andthat little resistance may have been anticipated to E 4.IV: Executions under E I (see n. 21 above). (a) Felix, bishop of Thibiuca,according to his Passion, was executed at Carthage for refusing to committraditio, on 15th July 303. (b) Saturninus and his companions of Abitina weretried at Carthage on 12th February 304 (Aug. Brev. Coll. iii 17.32) for holdinga religious service, before E 4 could have been promulgated in Africa: see theirPassion. These Christians were done to death in one way or another, bystarvation if not by the sword. (c) Secundus, bishop of Tigisis in Numidiaduring the persecution, wrote in 304 or 305 of Numidian Christians martyredfor refusing to hand over the Scriptures (Aug. Brev. Coll. iii 13.25;15.27). (d) At the meeting of Numidian bishops at Carthage on 4th or 5thMarch 305 (on the date, see O. Seeck, ‘Quellen und Urkunden über dieAnfänge des Donatismus’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 10 (1889),505–68 at 526–7), the same Secundus said of the martyrs, ‘quia non tradiderunt,ideo et coronati sunt’ (Aug. C. Cresc. iii 27.30). (e) CIL viii 6700 (19353),referring to the martyrs of Milevis, must also relate to executions previous toE 4 and therefore under E 1: see p. 52 above. [(f) See the Acta Gallonii, recentlyedited by P. Chiesa, ‘Un testa agioagrafica africane ad Aquileia: Gli actaGallonia e dei martiri Timida Regia’, AB 114 (1996), 241–68.]120 bV: The divisions of Numidia (see n. 65 above). Inscriptions attest thegovernorship of Florus in the North, centre, and extreme South-West ofNumidia: CIL viii 6700, 19353 (Milevis); 4324 (Casae); 2345–7 ¼ ILS 631–3(Thamugadi); Ann. ép., 1942–3, 81 (the South-West). Only the Thamugadiinscriptions refer to Florus as governor of ‘N.M’ (G. Goyau, ‘La NumidiaMilitiana de la liste de Vérone’, Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’ÉcoleFrançaise de Rome, 13 (1893), 251–79, with plate opp. p. 255), i.e., presumably,the ‘Numidia Militiana’ of the Verona List. Seston (op. cit. in n. 12above, 326–30) believes that F. Wrst governed Numidia as a whole, and thenan enlarged Numidia Militiana which now included Tripolitania; but if so,120 a [See further, P. S. Davies, ‘The Origin and Purpose of the Persecution of A.D.303’, JTS 40 (1989), 66–94, who argues that Galerius was much less central to thepersecution than Lactantius reports.]120 b [See also Chiesa’s account of the editorial problems posed by this text, and themethods used in making it: ‘Testi agiograWci stratiWcati: problemi editoriali negli ActaGallonii e nella Passio Peregrini Bolitani’, Sanctorum, 1 (2004), 13–23.]

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 75why is Quintianus, in the inscription mentioned in n. 66 above, said to begoverning ‘p(rovinciam) N(umidiam)’, and not ‘N(umidiam) C(irtensem)’?A ‘N(umidia) C(irtensis)’ is attested in 306: ILS 651 ¼ CIL viii 5526(18860); 7965. Some problems remain, but Macomades, the site of Quintianus’sinscription, must have been included in the Northern rather thanthe Southern subdivision of Numidia, and there can be no doubt at all thatFlorus had left Northern Numidia before the vicennalia.VI: The African Passions (see n. 69 above). On the African Passions seeP. Monceaux, Hist. litt. de l’Afrique chrét. iii (1905) 122–61. Nothing need besaid here of Restituta (Id. 133–4), Innocentius (Id. 134–5), the Twelve Brothersof Hadrumetum (Id. 135–6), Arcadius (Id. 154–6), or Marciana (Id.156–8): their Passions are of no value for present purposes. The ‘martyr’Salsa (Id. 163–8) has been shown to be imaginary by H. Grégoire, ‘SainteSalsa, roman épigraphique’, Byzantion, 12 (1937), 213–24. Aug. Serm.cccxxvi 2 purports to quote the dialogue between a governor and certainmartyrs (perhaps the ‘Twenty Martyrs’ of Numidia, on whom see Monceaux,op. cit. 153) who are ordered to sacriWce and refuse. This may be based on theoYcial Acta, but the governor’s convenient question, ‘Quam ergo auctoritatempotestis habere?’[‘In that case, what authority can you have?’] (invitingthe reply, ‘Auctoritatem regis aeterni portamus’ [‘We bear the authority of theeternal king’]), does not sound genuine. And in any event, as we have no morethan a small fragment of the interrogation we cannot safely conclude that wehave here an example of the enforcement of E 4, rather than, for instance, thetrial of Christians arrested, as so often in Africa, for disobeying E 1. ByAugustine’s day, of course, refusal to sacriWce was already a stock formula.The curious Passion of Typasius120 c the veteran (Monceaux, op. cit. 27,126–32), from Mauretania Caesariensis, declares that Maximian ‘edictumper Africam misit, ut demolirentur ecclesiae, incenderentur divinae legiscodices, turiWcarent sacerdotes et populi, atque omnes revocarentur ad militiamveterani’ [‘sent an edict through Africa, that the churches be demolished,the books of divine law burned, that the priests and people sacriWce, and allveterans be summoned to the army’] (§ 4); the oYcer who brings T. beforethe dux accuses him of declining to sacriWce to the gods ‘sicut praeceptum est’(§ 5); and there are other references to sacriWcing. But the main oVencecommitted by T. is refusal to obey a recall to the colours, and the questionof sacriWce is incidental. The Passion of Fabius120 d (Monceaux, op. cit.27, 122–6), who was martyred for refusing to carry a standard in the governor’s120 c [Ed. C. De Smedt, ‘Passiones tres martyrum Africanorum, SS. Maximae, Donatillaeet Secundae, S. Typasii Veterani et S. Fabii Vexilliferi’, AB 9 (1890), 116–23.]120 d [Ed. C. De Smedt, ‘Passiones tres’, 123–34; see also P. Franchi de’ Cavalieri inStudi e testi, 65 (1935), 101–13, and H. Delehaye, ‘Contributions récentes à l’hagiographiede Rome et d’Afrique’, AB 54 (1936), 265–315, at 300–2.]

76 Persecution and Martyrdomprocession, also comes from Mauretania Caesariensis. We are told (§ 2) thatone of the tetrarchs ‘qui Orientis partibus praesidebat, mittit ad socios suos perdiabolum scripta feralia, ut beatum Fabium a Christianorum castris ad turiWcationisnefas compellerent’ [‘who was governing the Eastern regions, usedthe devil to send his associates a savage letter, that they force St Fabius awayfrom the Christian camp to the oVence of sacriWce’]; but after this we hear nomore about oVering incense or sacriWcing. Monceaux has shown that there isno reason to date either of these Mauretanian martyrdoms during the Greatpersecution.Monceaux’s conclusion (op. cit. 30) is that the only North African Christianscertainly martyred for refusing to sacriWce (i.e., under E 4) are Crispina,the martyrs of Milevis (pp. 52, 54–5 above), and Maxima, Donatilla andSecunda.120 e The Passion of these three women (on which see Monceaux,op. cit. 148–51; H. Delehaye, ‘Contributions récentes’, 296–300) may containhistorical elements, but it does not deserve the respect it has received frommost commentators: it has suVered extensive interpolations and revisions, andits wording cannot at any point be trusted. This is apparent from the ludicrouslyunhistorical opening sentence, ‘In illis diebus Maximianus et Gallienusimperatores litteras miserunt per omnem illam provinciam ut ChristianisacriWcarent in possessione Cephalitana’ [‘In those days Maximian and Gallienusthe emperors sent letters through that entire province that the Christiansshould sacriWce on the Cephalitan estate’]; from the proconsul’s questions,‘Christiani estis an pagani?’, ‘Christiana es an pagana?’ [‘Are you Christians orpagans?’, ‘Are you a Christian or a pagan?’]; from the double sentence pronouncedon the women; and similar absurdities (Passio 1; 3; 6). The Passionprovides no good evidence that the condemnation was in fact under E 4.VII: Pope Marcellinus (see n. 83 above). Marcellinus was evidently guiltyof some act which was regarded at the time, or shortly afterwards, asdiscreditable: he is accused in the sources of traditio of the Scriptures,121or of turiWcatio,122 or of both these crimes;123 and the legends of his120 e [Ed. C. De Smedt, ‘Passiones tres’, 110–16, or Franchi de’ Cavalieri in Studi etesti (1935), 75–97. Repr. with a French trans. in Maier, Dossier du Donatisme,92–105. For an English trans. of this text, see Tilley, Donatist Martyr Stories, 17–24.]121 Aug. C. Litt. Petil. ii 92.202; cf. Gesta Coll. Carth. iii 491–514; Aug. Brev. Coll.iii 18.34–36.122 L. Duchesne, Le Liber PontiWcalis: Texte, Introduction, et Commentaire, i, 2ndedn. (Paris, 1955), 162–3; cf. 72–3 [English trans. by R. Davis, The Book of the PontiVs(Liber PontiWcalis): The Ancient Biographies of the First Ninety Roman Bishops to AD715, 2nd edn. (TTH 6; Liverpool, 2000)]; Acta ps.-Synod. Sinuessae, in Mansi i1249–60 (cf. Hefele–Leclercq, Hist. des conciles i i, 207–8).123 Aug. De Unic. Bapt. 16.27, 30; Liber Genealogus 626 (ed. Mommsen, in MGHAuct. Antiq. ix, Chron. Min. i. 196). On the Donatist additions to this work, seeMonceaux, op. cit. (in Appendix VI above) iv 101–2.

Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution 77subsequent repentance and martyrdom124 are most unconvincing. In thelight of what has been said above, it may be suggested that perhaps M. in factcommitted traditio, before the rigorist African view that such an act wastantamount to apostasy came to prevail generally in the Western churches,and that the memory of this was kept alive, especially by the Donatist groupat Rome, and exaggerated in the customary manner to include turiWcatio.Atany rate, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion of Duchesne (op. cit. in n.42 above, 74) that ‘something unpleasant must have happened’. M. evidentlysuVered some sort of damnatio memoriae: see T. G. Jalland, The Church andthe Papacy (London, 1944), 185–6 (where Diocletian’s vicennalia, however,are dated a year too late). [See also E. H. Röttges, ‘Marcellinus-Marcellus zurPapstgeschichte der diokletianischen Verfolgungszeit’, Zeitschrift für katholischeTheologie, 78 (1956), 385–420; A. Amore, ‘Il preteso ‘‘lapsus’’ di papaMarcellino’, Antonianum, 32 (1955), 411–26; and J. Curran, Pagan City andChristian Capital: Rome in the 4th Century (Oxford, 2000), 49–50.]VIII: What registers were available for enforcing E 4? (see n. 97 above). Wedo not know for certain what personal registers were kept, even in Egypt, butit is hard to believe that any such lists would have been compiled for otherthan Wscal purposes—i.e., in connection with anything except taxes orliturgies.124 aAs a result of Diocletian’s reorganization of the taxation system, comprehensiveregisters should have been available of all landowners and agriculturalworkers: P. Cairo Boak 1, the edict (dated 297) of the prefect of Egypt,Aristius Optatus, speaks speciWcally of ¼ªæïØŒïØ only.124 b A. Déléage, LaCapitation du Bas-Empire (Macon, 1943), 49, lists the returns made underthis edict; add P. Ryl. iv 656. However, until the introduction of the collatiolustralis, or÷æıóÜæªıæïí, probably by Constantine, there seems to be nogood evidence that the urban poor paid direct taxation anywhere in theempire in the early fourth century, except in the dioceses directly subject toGalerius (or some of them) in the years c. 306 to 311: see Lact. MP 23; 26.2;124 Liber Pontif. and Acta ps.-Synod. Sinuess. (as cited in n. 122 above); cf.Theodoret, Hist. Eccles. i 2. The silence of the Catalogus Liberianus (Duchesne,Liber Pontif. i 6–7), Depositio Episcoporum (Id. 10: here ‘Marcellini’ shouldclearly be ‘Marcelli’), and Depositio Martyrum (Id. 11–12) [both these in the editionof R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, Codice TopograWco della Città di Roma, ii (Rome,1942), 12–28] as well as of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, seems conclusive.124 a [See A. E. R. Boak and H. C. Youtie, The Archive of Aurelius Isidorus in theEgyptian Museum, Cairo, and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, 1960), 23–9.]124 b [See also the inscriptions from Syria collected in F. Millar, The Roman NearEast, 31 BC–AD 337 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 535–44 with discussion at 193–6, andthe comments of Corcoran, Empire, 175–6; for the general background, see Barnes,New Empire, 226–37.]

78 Persecution and Martyrdomand CTh xiii 10.2, dated 311 by O. Seeck, Regesten der Kaiser und Päpste fürdie Jahre 311 bis 476 n. Chr: Vorarbeit zu einer Prosopographie der christlichenKaiserzeit (Stuttgart, 1919), 52–3.124 c In Julian’s reign the townsfolk ofCaesarea in Cappadocia were free from taxes imposed on the villagers(Sozom. HE v 4). Even if P. Cairo Boak 12 and P. Strasb. 42 ( ¼ W. Chrest.210) are returns made for the purpose of a capitation tax, as believed byDéléage (op. cit. 44–6), the tax in question was probably limited to theagricultural population, as Déléage realized (op. cit. 46). Similarly, theIíäæØóìüò of P. Ryl. iv 658, line 8, is simply the Diocletianic capitatio(Iæïıæçäeò ŒÆd IíäæØóìüò ¼ jugatio et capitatio). The evidence for a polltaxdiscussed by H. I. Bell in his Introduction (pp. 167–73) to P. Lond. iv1419 is for a later period. The KðØŒåöܺÆØïí ðüºåøò of Oxyrhynchus,evidenced only from 301 to 315, is puzzling, but whether it is to be explainedas by Déléage (op. cit. 46–48), or as by A. C. Johnson and L. C. West,Byzantine Egypt: Economic Studies (Princeton, 1949), 259–61 (and see265–8), or in some other way, it does not establish the existence of a generalpoll-tax payable by the urban population. Even in Egypt the original poll-tax(ºÆïªæÆößÆ) had died out during the Wrst half of the third century (see H. I.Bell, ‘The Constitutio Antoniniana and the Egyptian Poll-Tax’, JRS 37 (1947),17–23), and the poll-tax of Syria and other provinces must also have ceasedto be exacted at the latest during the severe inXation of the 260s, in the reignof Gallienus.124 dSome lists have been preserved on papyrus which may well contain thenames of those liable to liturgies: P. Oslo iii III (in which only males appear)is a good example. In some cases all but the poorest citizens may have beenincluded—but it was probably still among this class that the highest proportionof Christians was to be found in the early years of the fourth century.It would be very rash to dogmatize, especially since Déléage (op. cit.) hasshown how wrong it is to generalize from particular areas; but the proceduredescribed by Eus. MP 4.8 is inexplicable if the authorities already possessedproper registers.124 c [S. Mitchell has recently dated it to 312; see his ‘Maximinus and the Christiansin A.D. 312: A New Latin Inscription’, JRS 78 (1988), 105–24, at 123, and Anatolia,Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor, ii: The Rise of the Church (Oxford, 1993), 64 n. 68.See also Corcoran, Empire, 151–2.]124 d [The epikephalaion is attested from around 297/8 to 319/20. R. Bagnallsuggests that it might have functioned similarly to the later chrysargyron (seeabove), since many of the receipts list the occupation of the payer; see Bagnall, Egyptin Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1993), 154; and for a collection of receipts, P. Parsonsin P. Oxy. 42. 3036–45. The last extant receipt for the laographia dates to 248; see R.Bagnall and B. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (Cambridge, 1994), 10–11.]

2The Fourth Edict in the West and the Date ofthe Council of Elvira1In an article published in 1954 I tried to establish, against the standardview of the Great Persecution, that there is no good evidence, and nolikelihood, that the ‘Fourth Edict’ (issued early in 304 and enjoininguniversal sacriWce) was ever enforced in the Western part of the RomanEmpire.2 This thesis was challenged in two publications by Frend,3whose arguments can be summarized, partly in his own words, asfollows; the Wrst four relate only to Africa, the Wfth only to Spain.1. ‘The victims in 304 were layfolk, such as the women arrested onthe Saltus Cephalitanus in proconsular Africa and executed on30 July, and perhaps all the thirty-four martyrs recorded atHaidra (Ammaedara), in contrast to the clerics or organizedcongregations arrested in the previous year.’42. ‘Eusebius compares speciWcally the persecution in Africa withthe horriWc scenes he witnessed in Egypt. Neither this, nor thestatement in Mart. Pal. (13.12) that the persecution in the West1 Thisessay, writtenaround1965 in responseto criticisms byW.H.C. Frend,defendsthe contention of Chapter 1 that the Fourth Edict was never promulgated in the West.Henry Chadwick, the editor of the Journal of Theological Studies, accepted it, but Ste.Croix did not go ahead with publication. It was, though, read by Robin Lane Fox, whocites it approvingly in Pagans and Christians (Harmondsworth, 1986), 784 n. 4.2 ‘Aspects’ [Ch. 1 above, pp. 48–59, 63–4].3 Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford, 1965), 502–3;‘A Note on the Great Persecution in the West’, in Studies in Church History, 2 (1965),141–8 [repr. in Frend, Religion Popular and Unpopular in the Early Christian Centuries(London, 1976)].4 Frend, Martyrdom, 502–3; ‘Note’, 144–5.

80 Persecution and Martyrdomlasted ‘‘not fully two years’’ would make sense if the persecutionhad ended eVectively in the spring of 304.’53. Crispina, executed at Theveste in December 304, was requiredto sacriWce.64. An argument on which I laid particular stress,7 showing fromepigraphic evidence that Valerius Florus, the one persecutinggovernor known in Numidia, had ceased to be governor, at anyrate in northern Numidia, well before the end of 303, is Wrstmisrepresented and then discounted, as I shall explain.5. On the assumption that the Council of Elvira (Illiberris) can bedated to 15 May 309, or at any rate some time after the GreatPersecution, its Wrst four canons are cited as evidence that inthe Great Persecution in Spain ‘the crime of apostasy wasreckoned in terms of sacriWce to the gods and not surrenderof Scriptures’.81. Frend is basing himself on a petitio principii when he refers to‘the victims of 304’ and includes among them the women from theSaltus Cephalitanus (Maxima, Donatilla, and Secunda)9 and themartyrs of Ammaedara, as well as Crispina. In fact there is noevidence at all of the year of persecution in any of the cases he5 Frend, Martyrdom, 503; cf. ‘Note’, 143. [Frend adds, ‘i.e. before Eusebius’ Wrst‘‘persecution year’’ was complete’. Frend follows H. J. Lawlor’s study of Eusebius’‘persecution years’, according to which the Wrst lasted around 20 months, from April303 to January 305, while the rest correspond to normal calendar years—so thesecond year is January to December 305, third year January to December 306, and soon; see Lawlor, Eusebiana: Essays on the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius (Oxford,1912), 179–210. G. W. Richardson criticized this chronology, arguing convincinglythat the persecution years start with the publication of the Wrst edict in Palestine, inApril 303, and run subsequently from April to April. See Richardson, ‘The Chronologyof Eusebius’, CQ 19 (1925), 96–100. Either way Frend’s point is valid: theFourth Edict would fall in the Wrst ‘persecution year’ in both chronological schemes.]6 Frend, Martyrdom, xii, 503; ‘Note’, 144.7 Ste. Croix, ‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, pp. 52–3, 74–5]. I think that Frend must bereferring to my article at Martyrdom, 503 (cf. 530 n. 178) and ‘Note’, 145–6 (cf. 141 n. 2).8 ‘Note’, 148; cf. Martyrdom, 503.9 I hoped that I had suYciently shown, in ‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, pp. 52–3, 76],that the Passion of Maxima, Donatilla, and Secunda does not in any way provide goodevidence that their condemnation was under the Fourth Edict. [For an edition of thistext, see J.-L. Maier, Le Dossier du Donatisme, i: des origines à la mort de Constance II(303–361) (Texte und Untersuchungen 134; Berlin, 1987), 92–105, trans. by M. A.Tilley, Donatist Martyr Stories: The Church in ConXict in Roman North Africa (TTH24; Liverpool, 1996), 13–24.]

The Fourth Edict in the West 81mentions, except Crispina’s, which I shall deal with presently.10 Themartyrdom of Maxima, Donatilla, and Secunda is recorded as havingoccurred on 30 July; but the year date of 304, which is always given inthe books, has been reached by presuming that these women wereexecuted under the Fourth Edict—the very fact that has yet to beproved.11 That the three women and Crispina, and some othervictims of the persecution, were ‘layfolk’ proves nothing, in view ofthe enthusiastic attitude towards martyrdom prevailing in Africa.And the thirty-four martyrs, or alleged martyrs, of Ammaedaracould well have been just such an ‘organized congregation’ as themartyrs from Abitinae of the Acta Saturnini et al.—who werearrested, we may usefully recall, only at the end of 303 or thebeginning of 304, since they were martyred on 12 February 304.12As for Crispina, martyred apparently at the end of 304, there maywell have been special reasons for making an example of her: she wasa noble-born and wealthy lady, of the highest social rank13—the onlyChristian martyr of either sex in Africa at this time who is known tohave been a person of consequence. Crispina may have played aprominent role in the Christian community of the little town of10 The best MS of Crispina’s Passion (that of Autun) has Diocletiano novies etMaximiano (octies) Augustis consulibus [‘in the 9th consulship of Diocletian and the8th consulship of Maximian’]: this makes it reasonable to date the event to 304,the year of Diocletian’s ninth consulship (and Maximian’s eighth). [See the editionof P. Franchi de’ Cavalieri, Studi e testi, 9 (1902), 21–35, repr. with trans. byH. Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford, 1972), 302–9.]11 See, for example, P. Monceaux, Histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne depuisles origines jusqu’à l’invasion arabe, iii (Paris, 1905), 149; Frend, ‘Note’, 144; [andMaier, Dossier, 92. The year 304 is, though, justiWed by Tilley, Donatist Martyr Stories,13–14.]12 See the best text of these Acta, edited by P. Franchi de’ Cavalieri in Studi e testi,65 (1935), 48–71. [M. A. Tilley has criticized this edition as an ‘unhappy conXation’of the Donatist and Catholic manuscripts; Tilley, ‘Sustaining Donatist Self-Identity:From the Church of the Martyrs to the collecta of the Desert’, JECS 5.1 (1997), 21–35,at 24 n. 9. She has translated the Donatist manuscript in her Donatist Martyr Stories,25–49 following the critical text of Maier, Dossier, 57–92. Note, however, thatFrançois Dolbeau has recently defended Franchi de’ Cavalieri’s edition as largelyreliable, apart from a few minor points; see Dolbeau, ‘La ‘‘Passion’’ des martyrsd’Abitina: remarques sur l’établissement du texte’, AB 121 (2003), 273–96.]13 See Augustine, Enarr. in Psalm 120. 13: clarissima enim fuit, nobilis genere,abundans divitiis [‘for she was most eminent, noble by birth, and abounding withriches’; however, the Acta Crispinae do not support Augustine’s suggestion that shewas of senatorial status].

82 Persecution and MartyrdomThagora, as did another clarissima femina, Lucilla, at the Numidiancapital Cirta14—and it may have been thought necessary to single herout at a time when the impetus of the persecution had died away andthings were generally quieter.2. When Frend speaks of Eusebius’ comparison of the persecution‘in Africa’ with that in Egypt, he is thinking of HE 8.6.10. Here thereare two points to be made:(a) Eusebius uses the phrase ‘especially those of Africa and Mauretania’(malista oi kata tēn Afrikēn kai to Maurōn ethnos). He uses asimilar expression in MP 13.12, ‘as far as Spain, Mauretania andAfrica’ (epi Spanian Mauretanian te kai Afrikēn). Indeed ‘Africa andMauretania’ seems to have been a current way of referring to thewestern provinces of North Africa as a whole, as when Constantine inan oYcial letter written in 313 used the phrase per Africam etMauretanian inde ad Hispanias [through Africa and Mauretania(and) from there to Spain] when speaking of journeys of clericsfrom the individual provinces of Byzacium, Tripolitania, Numidia,and Mauretania.15 Certainly Eusebius’ Afrikē kai to Maurōn ethnoswas intended to cover Numidia as well—if he had really thoughtabout it. But there must have been far fewer martyrs in Mauretaniathan either Proconsularis or Numidia. The fact that Eusebius twicerefers to the persecution in Africa by a phrase which omits the veryprovince of that area in which the persecution probably claimed themost victims suggests that his information about the events of 303–4in the African provinces was not extensive.16(b) Frend forgets that the large number of martyrdoms in theThebaid was due particularly, according to Eusebius’ own eyewitnessaccount, to the prevalence of voluntary martyrdom on a large scale,with Christians ‘leaping up before the judgement seat from this side14 See Optatus (Ziwsa edn., CSEL 26), 1.16–19 [trans. M. Edwards, Optatus:Against the Donatists (TTH 27; Liverpool, 1997), 15–19]; Appendix 1, 189–96 ¼ H.von Soden (ed.), Urkunden zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Donatismus [hereafterUED], 2nd edn. rev. by H. von Campenhausen, Kleine Texte, 122 (Berlin, 1950),no. 28, pp. 42–50 (esp. 189 lines 4–5 ¼ UED 42 line 5) [Edwards, Optatus, 156–7]. Seealso Augustine, C. Cresc. 3.28.32 and 3.29.33; Enarr. in Ps. 36.2.19; Ep. 43.6.17.15 Optatus, Appendix 3, 205–6 ¼ UED no. 14, pp. 17–18 [Edwards, Optatus, 183].16 He certainly knew of the existence of a place called Numidia: see the letter ofConstantine quoted in HE 10.6.1.

The Fourth Edict in the West 83and that’, confessing themselves Christians and receiving the sentenceof death with delight.17 It is probable that many of the African(especially Numidian) martyrs were also volunteers,18 and voluntarymartyrs provide no evidence for the enforcement of the Fourth Edict.3. In my earlier article I dealt at some length with the ActaCrispina,19 on which Frend lays much stress. Such as it is, thisdocument is the one and only piece of apparently respectable evidenceof a martyrdom in Africa, or indeed anywhere in the Westernpart of the Empire, for refusing to obey an imperial order to sacriWce.It would not, however, amount to convincing proof of the enforcementof the Fourth Edict in the West, even if there were not strongcircumstantial evidence against such enforcement. Monceaux longago pointed out a number of suspect features in the Passion,20 andsome of his criticisms remain, even after the publication by Franchide’ Cavalieri of a better text based on the Autun MS.21 In particularthere is the brutal behaviour of Anullinus the proconsul which,although reXecting the unpleasant picture of him so familiar inhagiography,22 accords ill with the two pieces of good evidence wehave for his behaviour as a persecutor.2317 HE 8.9.5; cf. Ste. Croix, ‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, p. 67] and n. 109.18 See Ste. Croix, ‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, p. 67], citing Augustine, Brev. Coll.3.13.25 (CSEL 53) ¼ UED no. 4, 6.19 ‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, p. 45].20 ‘Les ‘‘Actes’’ de Sainte Crispine, martyr à Théveste’, Mélanges Boissier: recueil demémoires concernant la littérature et les antiquités romaines dédié à G. Boissier (Paris,1903), 383–9.21 See above, n. 11; cf. Monceaux, Histoire, iii. 159–61.22 See Monceaux, Histoire, iii. 31–2.23 (1) Augustine, Brev. Coll. 3.13.25 ¼ UED no. 4, pp. 5–7; (2) Acta Saturnini et al.,passim (see n. 12 above). [For full references to Anullinus see PLRE i. 79, s.v. C.Annius Anullinus 3, and A. Mandouze, Prosopographie chrétienne du bas-empire, i:Afrique (303–533) (Paris, 1982), s.v. Anulinus. On the reliability of the Acta Saturnini,see now A. Dearn, ‘The Abitinian Martyrs and the Outbreak of the Donatist Schism’,JEH 55.1 (2004), 1–18. Dearn argues convincingly that the extant text was composedafter the anti-Donatist Council of Carthage in 411, and represents the reinterpretationof the Great Persecution in the light of early 5th-cent. arguments, although thecentral section, which records the exchanges between governor and martyrs, mayantedate the council. Its probable composition as a compendium of disparate localmartyrs argues against relying too heavily on its evidence.]

84 Persecution and MartyrdomThere is moreover, as Frend himself has admitted, evidence thatthe provincial governors Anullinus in Proconsularis and Florus inNumidia oYcially demanded, at an early stage in the persecution,that Christians should not only hand over their scriptures and churchproperty but also sacriWce and oVer incense.24 Optatus also speaks asif Christians of both provinces had been ‘everywhere compelled tooVer incense’ to the pagan gods.25 Evidently Anullinus and Florusmay have demanded an act of sacriWce or the oVering of incense onany occasion when Christians were brought before them, chargedwith possessing scriptures etc., or with assembling contrary to theFirst Edict.There is good evidence from other provinces for accused Christiansbeing ordered to sacriWce or burn incense, and even doing thisof their own accord, during the earliest phases of the Great Persecution,when only the First Edict had been issued. Examples are:(a) Peter, an imperial slave, tortured to death at Nicomedia,26presumably on 12 March 303, the date in the Syriac Martyrology;27(b) possibly also the imperial slaves Dorotheus and Gorgonius andthe others mentioned by Eusebius, HE 8.6.5–7; (c) the large numbersof Christians who were sacriWcing at Antioch of their own accord ‘atthe very time the churches were destroyed’ (under the First Edict);with (d) Romanus, who voluntarily came forward to rebuke theseAntiochene apostates, and was arrested and later strangled in prison,on 17 November 303;28 (e) Procopius of Scythopolis, the Wrst Palestinianmartyr of the Great Persecution, executed at Caesarea on24 Anullinus: Optatus, Appendix 2, pp. 198–9 ¼ UED no. 19B, pp. 26–7: ‘cumpersecutio esset indicta Christianis, id est, ut sacriWcarent aut quascumque scripturashaberent, incendio traderent’ [Edwards, Optatus, 172: ‘when an edict of persecutionhad been issued against the Christians, namely, that they should sacriWce or handover to the Xames whatever scriptures they possessed’], and ‘ex iussione proconsulariomnes sacriWcarent et si quas scripturas haberent, oVerrent secundum sacram legem’[Edwards, Optatus, 173 with modiWcation: ‘all should sacriWce according to theproconsular edict, and if any had scriptures, they should present them according tothe sacred law’]. Florus: Augustine, C. Cresc. 3.27.30 ¼ UED no.5,p.7.25 Optatus 3.8, p. 90; cf. 1.13, p. 16; 15, p. 17; 2.25, p. 65; Augustine, C. Fulg. 26. See‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, pp. 46–51].26 Eusebius, HE 8.6.2–4, cf. 7–8.27 See H. Lietzmann (ed.), Die drei ältesten Martyrologien (Kleine Texte 2; 1911), 9.28 Eusebius, MP 2.

The Fourth Edict in the West 857 June 303;29 and (f) Alphaeus of Caesarea, a volunteer beheaded atCaesarea on 17 November 303.304. But it is the technical evidence about the governors of Numidiaon which I wish to lay most stress, particularly since Frend hasmisunderstood and misrepresented the argument that I put forward.31There are, unfortunately, complications which make it diYcultto set out the position brieXy and clearly, but the eventual resultis certain.The only persecuting governor of Numidia who is mentioned assuch in the literary or epigraphic sources is Florus. He appears inOptatus, operating in Numidia as Anullinus does in Africa Proconsularis;and a document preserved by Augustine represents him aspressing Donatus, bishop of Mascula (in the southern part ofNumidia), to oVer incense.32 He is also named in a Christianinscription from Castellum Elephantum (RouVach, some 12 km.west of Cirta/Constantina) as the governor under whom certainmartyrs of Milevis (a few km. further west) suVered in diebus turiWcationis[‘in the days of incense oVering’].33 As we shall see presentlytwo successive phases must be distinguished in Florus’governorship: in one (the earlier one, it is virtually certain) he waspraeses provinciae Numidiae, governor of the whole of Numidia; inthe other (the later) he was governor of only the southern part ofNumidia, Numidia Militiana as it is often called now in accordancewith the Verona list.34 Of the Wrst seven inscriptions relating to29 Eusebius, MP 1.1–2.30 Eusebius, MP 1.5, especially in the Long Recension.31 Ste. Croix, ‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, pp. 52–3, 74–5].32 Optatus 3.8, p. 90 in Ziwsa edn. [Edwards, Optatus, 75]; Augustine, C. Cresc.3.27.30 ¼ UED no.5,p.7.33 CIL viii. 19353 ¼ 6700, printed in Kolbe’s monograph (see below) at 47, no. 8.[See now the much fuller edition, with a photograph and commentary, of Y. Duval,Loca Sanctorum Africae: le culte des martyrs en Afrique du IVe au VIIe siècle (Collectionde l’École Française de Rome 58; Rome, 1982), i. 245–7, no. 117.] For the site ofRouVach, see S. Gsell, Atlas archéologique de l’Algérie (Paris, 1911), 17, no. 93 [see alsoR. A. Talbert (ed.), Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Princeton, 2000),31 E4].34 See H.-G. Kolbe, Die Statthalter Numidiens von Gallien bis Konstantin (268–320)(Vestigia. Beiträge zur alten Geschichte 4; Munich, 1962), 65 V.; G. Goyau, ‘LaNumidia Militiana de la liste de Vérone’, Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire de

86 Persecution and MartyrdomFlorus’ governorship,35 the Wrst Wve call him governor of N(umidia)M(ilitiana); in the sixth the description of the province has perished,but the place where the inscription was found, Casae (El Mahder,some 20 km. north-east of Lambaesis and north-west of Thamugadi/Timgad),36 would certainly have fallen in Numidia Militiana, asKolbe states.37 But Kolbe’s seventh inscription, from Aqua Viva(near Mš Doukal in the extreme south-west of the province),38describes Florus as p(raeside) N(umidiae)—and this is an oYcialdocument, with the consular date 303, which would be extremelyunlikely to make a mistake about Florus’ title. This inscriptionconWrms the evidence of the literary sources, quoted above, and ofthe Christian inscription from RouVach, that Florus was in chargeof the whole of Numidia, including the northern section of theprovince, in the early part of 303.39Now, in an inscription found near the site of ancient Macomades,40we Wnd Aurelius Quintianus, who is nowhere named as apersecutor, governing the province of ‘Numidia’, regente p(rovinciam)N(umidiam) vestra(m), at the time of the vicennalia ofDiocletian, which took place between 17 September and 20 November303 and probably on the latter date.41 We have already noticedevidence which, for what it is worth, represented Florus, like Anullinusand other provincial governors, as demanding acts of sacriWce orburning incense at a time before the Fourth Edict was in operation;and what the inscription from Macomades proves is that Florus canl’École Française de Rome, 13 (1893), 251–79; A. H. M. Jones, ‘The Date and Value ofthe Verona List’, JRS 44 (1954), 21–9 [repr. in Jones, The Roman Economy: Studies inAncient Economic and Administrative History, ed. P. Brunt (Oxford, 1974), 263–79].‘Militana’, the form of the name employed by Frend (by analogy with Tripolitana),has no ancient evidence to support it.35 Kolbe, Statthalter, 46–7. [For full references to Florus see PLRE i. 368, s.v. Florus 3.]36 See Gsell, Atlas, 27, no. 141 [Barrington Atlas, 34 E2]. [See also W. KuhoV,Diokletian und die Epoche der Tetrarchie: das römische Reich zwischen Krisenbewältigungund Neuaufbau (284–313 n. Chr.) (Frankfurt, 2001), 347–8.]37 Kolbe, Statthalter, 52n.3.38 AE (1942/3), 81; Gsell, Atlas, 37, no. 36 [see Barrington Atlas, 34 D2].39 [All references are collected in T. D. Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian andConstantine (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 172; also KuhoV, Diokletian und die Epocheder Tetrarchie, 347–8.]40 ILS 644 ¼ CIL viii. 18698 ¼ 4764; Kolbe, Statthalter, 53, no. 1.41 [20 Nov. 303 is much more likely—see Ch. 1, n. 12.]

The Fourth Edict in the West 87never have enforced the Fourth Edict in Numidia at all, since he hadceased to be governor, at least as we shall see of the northern part ofthe province, Numidia Cirtensis, well before the end of 303, whereasthe Fourth Edict was not issued until early in 304.42According to Frend, the Macomades inscription merely provesthat in November 303 Florus was no longer governor of the southernpart of Numidia, the part referred to in inscriptions as NumidiaMilitiana after it became a separate province; he seems to regardthis as my view as well,43 and goes on to suggest that ‘Florus may havemoved [when Quintianus took over the southern part of Numidia]to the new civil province of Numidia Cirtensis’,44 the northern part ofNumidia, the existence of which as a province separate fromNumidia Militiana is attested in 305–6.45 Frend’s argument is misconceivedfor, in a divided Numidia, Macomades would have fallenin the northern part, the later Numidia Cirtensis.46 This is proved,beyond question, by the discovery there of another inscription (CILviii.18700 [4766]) referring to Valerius Antoninus, who is knownfrom three other inscriptions, from Thibilis (Announa) and Rusicade(Philippeville) to have been governor of the province of N(umidia)C(irtensis).47 In any case geographical consideration made thisvirtually certain: Macomades is a mere 40 km. or so south-east ofCirta, the capital of Numidia Cirtensis, and well north of the chain oflakes or marshes which lie to the north of Bagai and Thamugadi.Numidia Militiana must have been above all a frontier district,48extending southwards from the area of Bagai, Mascula, Thamugadi,Lambaesis, and Lamasba. In my article I pointed out that inscriptionsthen attested the title Numidia Militiana at Thamugadi and nowhereelse. We can now add its neighbour Lambaesis, on the strength of thesubsequently discovered inscription which in fact records a votive42 See Ste. Croix, ‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, pp. 52–3]; cf. Frend, Martyrdom, 493.[See n. 51 below.]43 See n. 6 above.44 Frend, ‘Note’, 145–6; the argument in Martyrdom, 503 is not easily intelligiblewithout reference to this.45 [ILS 651; AE (1895), 80; ILAlg. 2.31.] The four inscriptions in question areprinted by Kolbe, Statthalter, 55–6, cf. 51–5 [and listed in Barnes, New Empire, 172].46 As I stated explicitly in ‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, pp. 74–5].47 All four inscriptions are printed by Kolbe, Statthalter, 55–6.48 Cf. Frend, ‘Note’, 145–6.

88 Persecution and MartyrdomoVering by Florus himself to the god Mithras, of whom he wasevidently a devotee.49Only one problem remains, and it has a simple solution. Theinscription from Macomades calls Quintianus governor of ‘p(rovinciae)N(umidiae)’, the undivided province of Numidia, not of N(umidia)C(irtensis). Although my case would be if anything even strongerif this could be accepted—because we could then say that Florus thepersecutor had been superseded by Quintianus as governor of thewhole of Numidia before the issue of the Fourth Edict—the situationrevealed by the inscriptions relating to Florus as well as Quintianusmakes it necessary to suppose that the Macomades inscription has notstated Quintianus’ title correctly, and that in fact he must have beengovernor of N(umidia) C(irtensis) only.50 It would be easy for themunicipal senate of Macomades, a one-horse town, which set up theinscription, to assume that their new governor was praeses Numidiae,as his predecessors had been, and so, not realizing that the provincehad now been divided, to have used a title which had just becomeobsolete.51 At any rate, when the province had been divided andQuintianus arrived to take over Numidia Cirtensis, Florus musthave remained as governor of Numidia Militiana, and it is in thissecond phase of his governorship that Kolbe’s Wrst Wve inscriptions, aswell perhaps as the sixth, must have been set up.49 AE (1955), 81; Kolbe, Statthalter, 47, no. 5 [see also M. Clauss, Cultores Mithrae:Die Anhängerschaft des Mithras-Kultes (Stuttgart, 1992), 248].50 This is the conclusion of Kolbe, Statthalter, 54, with 50–3.51 T. D. Barnes has pointed out to me the parallel with certain inscriptions whichcontinue to give the governor of the province of Numidia, when it had become newlyseparate from Africa, his old title of leg. leg. III Aug.—not, it is true, an incorrect title,but an example of an out-of-date formula which persisted for a time. See B. E.Thomasson, Die Statthalter der römischen Provinzen Nordafrikas von Augustus bisDiocletianus (Lund, 1960), ii. 203. [See also KuhoV, Diokletian und die Epoche derTetrarchie, 348, who discusses the Macomades inscription, but does not place muchweight on it. Like Ste. Croix he notes that Macomades was in the vicinity of Cirta, butalso suggests that the reference to the vicennalia does not necessarily specify the exactdate of the inscription, since it does not state that the honoriWc arch on which it wasplaced was set up on that day. Accordingly, Quintianus may only have becomegovernor sometime after 20 Nov. 303. He dates the division of Numidia to 303/304without specifying when this happened, and argues that Florus was initially governorof the undivided province then became governor of the militarily more importantNumidia Militiana.]

The Fourth Edict in the West 89We may now be certain, therefore, that Quintianus took over, ifnot the whole of Numidia, at least Numidia Cirtensis, the moreimportant and thickly populated part of Numidia; and that if themartyrs of Milevis, in Cirtensis, suVered sub pr(a)eside Floro in diebusturiWcationis, as their inscription states, it must have been well beforethe end of 303 and before the Fourth Edict was issued.52I must also add a protest against Frend’s statement that ‘Numidianfolklore recorded a ‘‘dies thuriWcationis’’ as well as a ‘‘dies traditionis’’’.53 It is not merely that in the one piece of evidence we have forthe use of the expression ‘dies thuriWcationis’ the ‘dies’ are plural andnot singular; much more important is the fact that in the ancientsources the expression ‘dies traditionis’ never occurs at all, and ‘diesthuriWcationis’ only in the inscription concerning the martyrs ofMilevis, which was apparently set up many years afterwards.54There is certainly no warrant in the sources for the chronologicalsequence, ‘dies traditionis’ followed by ‘dies thuriWcationis’: this, asfar as North Africa is concerned, is a pure invention of modernscholarship.555. Frend’s Wfth and Wnal argument obliges us to consider oncemore that much disputed question, the date of the Council of Elvira.Frend accepts Grégoire’s date of 309,56 itself a reWnement of thedating proposed by Koch on the basis of very unsatisfactory arguments,as we shall see.57 Frend only deals with Canons 1–4, but thereare several others which we must examine: 25, 45–6, 55, 56–7, 59, 60,52 I see no reason to bring in the Third Edict, as Kolbe does, Statthalter, 51.53 Frend, ‘Note’, 145.54 [Duval, Loca Sanctorum Africae, 247, argues that the context of the inscription isnot well enough known to date it with any exactitude.]55 It can be traced back at least as far as de Rossi. See G. B. de Rossi, ‘Scoperte diinsigni storiche epigraW di martiri di Milevi (Milah), di SitiW (Setif), e di luogoincerto tra Kalama (Ghelma) e Cirta (Constantina)’, Bullettino di archeologia cristiana(1875), 162–74, esp. 165–6; idem, ‘Notizie più precise intorno all’insigne epigrafe deiMartiri di Milevi sotto il preside Floro’, BAC (1876), 59–64, esp. 62–3.56 H. Grégoire, Les Persécutions dans l’Empire romain, 2nd edn. (Mémoires del’Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres 56.5; Brussels, 1964), 77, 146–8.57 H. Koch, ‘Die Zeit des Konzils von Elvira’, Zeitschrift für die neutestamentlicheWissenschaft, 17 (1916), 61–7.

90 Persecution and Martyrdomand 73—some of these are quite irrelevant, but they have beenbrought into the discussion by other writers.58Canons 2–4 can be dismissed immediately: they refer speciWcallyand only to pagan Xamines [priests] who have become baptizedChristians (Canons 2–3) or catechumens (Canon 4), and have thenperformed some objectionable act, sacriWcing or giving publicgames—if that is what Xamines qui non immolaverint, sed munustantum dederint [‘priests who have not sacriWced, but who havemerely given games’] in Canon 3 means. Three degrees of guilt arerecognized: sacriWcing is to entail total exclusion from communion,extending even to the deathbed. It is quite wrong to represent thesecanons as referring to apostasy by sacriWcing during a persecution:there is no reference to persecution, explicit or implied. Canons 3–4deal expressly with those who have not sacriWced but have carried outother duties attached to pagan priesthoods, and Canon 2 simplycovers the extreme case in the same series, where a Xamen has actuallysacriWced. The fact that the punishment in this last case was the mostsevere that the Church in the pagan empire was able to inXictindicates that the sacriWcing, like the giving of games etc., was notconceived as being done in the time of persecution, under the threatof death, but in a situation where freedom of action was untrammelled.One might have expected that municipal priests could nothave avoided sacriWcing, but Canons 3 and 4 of Elvira prove that theycould, at least in Spain at this period. These canons suggest that whatcould not be avoided was giving games. This is understandable:games would be much more costly than sacriWces, and thus itwould not be easy to induce another person to give the gamesinstead, though he might be persuaded to perform sacriWces.58 For the text, see J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio,ii (Florence, 1759), 1–20; C. J. Hefele and H. Leclercq, Histoire des conciles i.i (Paris,1907), 212–64; E. J. Jonkers, Acta et Symb. Conc. Saec. Quarto (Textus Minores 19,1954), 5–23. [See also J. Vives, Concilios Visigóticos e Hispano-Romanos (Barcelonaand Madrid, 1963), 1–15, and the more recent text of G. Martinez Diez and F.Rodriguez, La colección canónica Hispana IV, concilios Galos, concilios Hispanos:primera parte (Madrid, 1984), 233–68. For an English translation, see S. Laeuchli,Power and Sexuality: The Emergence of Canon Law at the Synod of Elvira (Philadelphia,1972), 126–35, repr. in B. Ehrmann and A. Jacobs (eds.), Christianity in LateAntiquity, 300–450 CE: A Reader (Oxford, 2003), 244–51. See the Appendix to thischapter for recent bibliography on these canons.]

The Fourth Edict in the West 91With Canons 2–4 we should take Canon 55, which also refersspeciWcally and only to pagan priests, sacerdotes. If they ‘only wearcrowns and do not sacriWce or oVer anything to idols at their ownexpense’, they can be received into communion after two years.I agree with Hefele that this canon is a complement to Canons 2–4:while they refer to pagan priests who have either sacriWced or givengames, it completes the series by dealing with those who have doneno more than publicly wear the distinctive sign of their priesthood.59I also agree with Hefele that the series is continued in a way byCanons 56–7, the last being a little more severe simply because theChristians concerned had not been obliged to act as they did.60 Theseries, in order of severity of punishment, is: Canon 2, 3, 4 and 57, 55,56. Certainly there is, again, no trace of persecution.Canons 59 is another to which persecution is irrelevant: it merelyprohibits Christians from being present at sacriWces on the Capitol—where the main oYcial ceremonies of a city would take place. Thepenalty is severe: ten years’ penance for merely seeing the sacriWceperformed by others. Again, persecution is not mentioned.Canons 45 and 46 deal with catechumens (45) or baptized Christians(46) who ‘have not been to church for a very long time’, perinWnita tempora. Here again—whatever Hefele and others maysay61—there is no hint of persecution. Indeed the words per inWnitatempora show that the bishops could not possibly have had the GreatPersecution in mind, since it lasted only about two years in the West,and for most if not all of that time the churches in Spain would havebeen closed and attendance at services would have been a capitaloVence.62Canon 60 deals with voluntary martyrdom:63 it declares thatChristians executed for smashing idols are not to be accountedmartyrs. Certainly voluntary martyrdom was more frequent duringpersecutions, but the phenomenon could occur at other times. In59 Hefele–Leclercq, Histoire, 251–2.60 Hefele–Leclercq, Histoire, 252–3.61 Hefele–Leclercq, Histoire, 247–8.62 See Ste. Croix, ‘Aspects’ [see above, Ch. 1, pp. 35–6].63 See Ste. Croix, ‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, pp. 45, 65–8; and see below, Ch. 4,pp. 159–60].

92 Persecution and Martyrdomspite of this prohibition, Faustus, Januarius, and Martial,64 as well asEulalia,65 were duly canonized, although they are all represented asvolunteers.Canon 73 punishes Christians who ‘delated’ fellow-Christians.Koch was quite wrong to associate this canon with Canon 13 ofArles (314) and take it as proof of recent persecution. The Arlescanon says nothing of delation but speaks of those clerics who ‘aresaid to have betrayed . . . the names of their brethren’ (tradidissedicuntur. . . nomina fratrum suorum).66 Accusation of Christianity,it is true, was normally made by individual delatio,67 but this wouldnot have happened in the Great Persecution: then, in an area wherethe persecution was being taken seriously, mere information wouldhave been suYcient to have a Christian arrested by the authoritiesand put on trial, whether under the First Edict, for not handing overthe scriptures or church property, or under the Second for being acleric, or under the Fourth for not having sacriWced. Hence thewording of the Arles canon. The situation it contemplates can beseen in the Gesta apud Zenophilum, where Wrst Paul, the bishop ofCirta, evades a request for names of the readers (lectores) who havescriptures, and later the sub-deacons Catulinus and Marcucliusrefuse point-blank to identify readers: nos non sumus proditores.Ecce sumus: iube nos occidi [‘we are not traitors. Here we are: orderus to be killed’].68 Elvira Canon 73 is dealing with something entirelydiVerent: delation of Christians by Christians for any crime whatsoever.This is proved by the later part of the canon—of which Kochquotes only the Wrst sentence referring to delations ending in proscriptionor death, where the penalty is to be total exclusion fromcommunion. The canon goes on to say that if the accusation is a lessserious one (not involving proscription or death), the exclusion is tolast for only Wve years. That is to say the canon is a general one,64 See their Passion in T. Ruinart, Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta (1689;ed. Ratisbon, 1859), 556–7.65 Prudentius, Peristephanon 3, esp. 41–95.66 [For a text and French trans. of the canons of Arles, see J. Gaudemet, Concilesgaulois du IVe siècle (Sources Chrétiennes 241; Paris, 1977), 35–67.]67 See Ste. Croix, ‘Early Christians’ [below, Ch. 3, pp. 110–11, 120].68 On the Gesta apud Zenophilum, see Y. Duval, Chrétiens d’Afrique à l’aube de lapaix constantinienne: les premiers échos de la grande persécution (Collections desÉtudes Augustiniennes 164; Paris, 2000), 21–63.

The Fourth Edict in the West 93punishing all delation within the Christian community. Persecution,again, is not there.Canon 25 deals with letters of communion, litterae communicatoriae.69DiVerent interpretations have been oVered, but I do not see anyproblem. Especially in view of Canon 9 of Arles,70 there is no doubtwhatever that Canon 25 has in mind a Christian who, before settingout on a journey, asks his bishop to certify a letter of recommendationto other Christian churches he may visit: such people are to begiven only litterae communicatoriae (for which see Canon 58), andthey are not to be described as confessors,71 because such a titlemakes too much of an impression upon simple folk.72 Here at lasta reasonable case can be made for supposing that there previouslyhad been a persecution—but it is by no means an unanswerable case,for three reasons. First, individual persecutions may have occurred inindividual localities in Spain during the 45 years between the persecutionof Valerian and the Great Persecution. Second, even if theCouncil of Elvira took place only just before the Great Persecution,Valerianic (and even Decian) confessors might still be alive. Third,volunteers who came forward on their own initiative to testifypublicly to the Faith, and who were dismissed or visited with somepunishment less than death, might describe themselves as confessors.That leaves us with only one indication of a probable date forElvira after 305, as we come to the last canon which can have anyrelevance to our problem: Canon 1. This excludes from communion,even on his deathbed, the adult Christian who after baptism has69 Omnis, qui attulerit litteras confessorias, sublato nomine confessoris, eo quodomnes sub hac nominis gloria passim concutiant simplices, communicatoriae ei dandaesunt litterae [‘Anyone who carries a letter of a confessor should be given a letter ofcommunion with the title ‘‘confessor’’ removed, since all those sharing in this glory ofthe title upset simple people everywhere’].70 De his, qui confessorum litteras aVerunt, placuit ut sublatis iis litteris aliasaccipiant communicatorias [‘Concerning those who carry a letter of a confessor, it isdecided that this letter be taken away from them and they receive another letter ofcommunion’].71 Sublato nomine confessoris refers to the deletion of the title of confessor.72 Here I agree with Hefele–Leclercq, Histoire, i 235, cf. 287 n. 2. In spite of Hefele’sclear explanation, Koch (as his reference to Cyprian, Epist. 15.4 shows) evidentlyreturned to an older view in which Canon 25 was taken to refer to the libelli pacisgiven by confessors to penitent apostates. He is very wrong when he brackets Canon25 with 73 as proof of a previous persecution.

94 Persecution and Martyrdom‘gone to an idol’s temple to worship’, ad templum idoli idolaturus,onthe ground that he has committed ‘a capital crime, the worst ofcrimes’. At Wrst sight this too looks like a post-305 decision. Butneed it be—can it be, even? There are two questions to consider:(a) The wording is very narrow. A Christian who had sacriWced notin an actual temple but, for instance, in a courtroom,73 or some otherpublic place, would not be caught by this provision at all. Yet thecourtroom in particular must often have been the scene of apostasy,when an accused Christian was coerced, with or without torture, intooVering incense. I cannot help thinking that Canon 1 means exactlywhat it says and refers to going into a pagan temple to participate inthe cult.74 If this is so, there is no reference to persecution.(b) The penalty is again the most terrible the Church had it in itspower to inXict on a believer. In spite of the severity of so many of theCanons of Elvira, it is impossible to believe that the Spanish bishopswould have treated participation in pagan cult in a persecution assuch an unforgivable crime. Koch quotes Cyprian, De Lapsis 17 (andhe might have added many similar passages), as evidence of anintransigent attitude to lapsi.75 But De Lapsis was written before theDecian persecution was entirely over, and after that rules had beenlaid down for the readmission of penitent apostates in Africa, accordingto which even those who had actually sacriWced could bereadmitted, at the latest at death’s door,76 and in some cases muchearlier, with as short a term of penance as three years if they hadbegun as confessors and had apostatized only after torture.77 NowCyprian is known to have been in correspondence with at leastfour Spanish congregations or their bishops, in three widely separatedparts of Spain: Legio (Leon) and Asturica (Astorga), Emerita(Merida), and Caesaraugusta (Saragossa).78 On a matter whichhad caused so much discussion in the mid-third century but hadeventually been settled in a perfectly reasonable manner, to the73 Note Lactantius, DMP 13.1; cf. 15.5.74 We may compare Canon 59, discussed above, where merely being a spectator ofpagan cult in the Capitol is declared a crime.75 Koch, ‘Zeit’, 63.76 Cyprian, Ep. 55.17.3, sacriWcatis in exitu.77 Cyprian, Ep. 57.1, 3, 5; 56.2.1.78 See Cyprian, Ep. 67salut.; 1.1; 6.1.

The Fourth Edict in the West 95satisfaction of all but a few extremists, there is no reason to think thatthe Council of Elvira would have so broken with precedent andcommon sense.For these reasons I conclude that Canon 1 also must not be taken asevidence of a recent persecution, but refers to Christians who hadmore or less voluntarily sacriWced in a pagan temple, perhaps duringthe holding of a civil magistracy. Such an act might well be consideredunforgivable by a gathering of bishops, if torture or the other circumstancesof persecution were not available to oVer any mitigation.We are left, then, with no canon, except perhaps 25, which evensuggests that the Council of Elvira was held soon after the GreatPersecution. And it is then possible to turn the argument round andask whether we are not obliged to date Elvira either before the GreatPersecution or else considerably later: for if the council took placewithin a few years of the persecution, would it not have been boundto deal with the problem of the various categories of lapsi?I do not see how we can be positive about the date of the council.But at the least this must be said: if it is put soon after the GreatPersecution, it provides strong evidence that apostasy in Spain wasnot a great problem, and hence that the persecution there had notbeen all that severe. A long time ago Duchesne, in support of a datefor Elvira before the Great Persecution, emphasized the strikingcontrast between its canons and those of the Council of Ancyra(314), or of the Canonical Letter of Peter of Alexandria (306);79and we may notice here that the Elvira canons contain nothing tocorrespond even with Canon 13 of Arles, dealing with traditores.Koch’s attempted reply to Duchesne’s argument has no validity: itis based on the certainly false assumption that Constantius Chlorusruled Spain at the time of the persecution. In my earlier article I triedto show that in the ‘First Tetrarchy’ (293–305) there was probably aless complete territorial division among the four emperors than inthe Second (after 305);80 but at any rate, in so far as Italy, Africa, and79 L. Duchesne, ‘Le Concile d’Elvire et les Xamines chrétiens’, Mélanges Rénier.Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, 73 (1887), 159–74. [Supported by T. D.Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 53, with n. 108, p. 314.]80 ‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, pp. 69–72]. See also W. Seston, Dioclétien et la tétrarchie(Paris, 1946), i. 231 V., esp. 244–5. [The evidence is presented by Barnes, New Empire,

96 Persecution and MartyrdomSpain had a particular ruler, everyone would now agree that it wasMaximian, an enemy of the Christians, and that the area in whichConstantius was the key Wgure was Gaul and Britain only.The evidence of Eusebius is distorted by his desire to pleaseConstantius’ son Constantine, by painting as rosy a picture aspossible of his late father.81 But we may accept the statement ofLactantius that Constantius merely had the churches destroyed butdid not allow any persecution of individuals (DMP 15.7), for it ispartly conWrmed by the Donatist petition of 313 to Constantine,preserved by Optatus,82 in which the Africans beg Constantine tochoose judges from Gaul to decide between them and the party ofCaecilian on the grounds that Constantius did not persecute thereand Gaul was ab hoc facinore immunis, free from the crime of traditio.The evidence of Lactantius is the more valuable in that he actuallylived in Gaul for some time as tutor to Constantine’s son Crispus,and presumably wrote the De Mortibus Persecutorum there, betweenabout 318 and 321.83 The Council of Arles did deal with traditio, butit was, of course, much more than a merely Gallic council: itcontained bishops from most of the western part of the empire,including Liberius of Emerita, the metropolitan see of Lusitania,and dealt with wider issues such as the African schism.We ought to expect some reference to traditio in a Spanish councilheld soon after the Great Persecution, for the First Edict was surelyenforced by Maximian and his provincial governors, and traditiomust have occurred in Spain. The contrast in this respect between196–7, who supports Ste. Croix and Seston. The most comprehensive recent narrativeof the tetrarchic period is KuhoV, Diokletian und die Epoche der Tetrarchie, 17–326,784–934. In English see Barnes, Constantine, 3–73; for a briefer narrative see S.Corcoran, The Empire of the Tetrarchs: Imperial Pronouncements and GovernmentAD 284–324, rev. edn. (Oxford, 2000), 5–9, and D. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay,AD 180–395 (London, 2004), 280–90, 333–63.]81 In ‘Aspects’, [above, Ch. 1, p. 70] n. 117 I have referred to ‘the disingenuous HEviii 13. 12–13 and viii append. 4, and the absurd Vita Const. i 16’. The truth leaks outa little in Mart. Pal. 13.12.82 Optatus 1.22, Ziwsa 25–6 ¼ von Soden, UED no. 11, p. 13 [Edwards, Optatus,22–3].83 See J. Moreau, Lactance: ‘De la mort des persécuteurs’ (Sources Chrétiennes 39:Paris, 1954), I. 34–7. [There is some debate about the date of De Mortibus Persecutorum,and its place of writing and publication: see Barnes, ‘Lactantius andConstantine’, JRS 63 (1973), esp. 32–9, who dates it to some time between July orAugust 314 and 315. The earlier date, however, merely strengthens Ste. Croix’s point.]

The Fourth Edict in the West 97Elvira and Arles is striking—unless, of course, the standard chronologicalorder of the councils is reversed and we place Elvira later thanArles. This is one of two solutions of the date of Elvira which I wouldregard as possible. It would explain the absence of any reference totraditio at Elvira—the question had already been settled at Arles, withLiberius among others being present to agree to the decision.Two arguments have been produced against a date after 313. Littleweight need be attached to the Wrst,84 that Ossius (Hosius) of Cordobamust have been in constant attendance upon Constantine from 312onwards. Ossius could easily have been given brief leave to attend animportant synod in his own province. The other argument, proposedby Grégoire,85 is that if the political situation had permitted (as it wouldof course have done after Constantine had made himself master of thewhole of the West at the end of 312),86 bishops from MauretaniaTingitana, part of the civil diocese of the Spains, would necessarilyhave been present at Elvira. This is not conclusive. There is no parallelto Elvira, for the bishops attending the other known synods of theperiod—Arles, Ancyra, Neocaesarea—came in each case from a verylarge area. But the argument has some substance: one would certainlyhave expected a synod of bishops from all the Spanish provinces to beattended by the bishops of Mauretania Tingitana.The alternative is to accept a date for Elvira before 303. The onlyargument I can see against this, but it is a strong one, is that we knowof no parallel for such a council.87 The habit of holding assemblies ofbishops grew up only by degrees, and as a result of the need to settlemajor disputes, such as the Donatist and Arian controversies. SurelyElvira ought to come after Arles, as Neocaesarea after Ancyra. Onceproblems relating to the lapsi of the Great Persecution had beenthrashed out at Arles and Ancyra, the bishops at Elvira and84 Advocated among others by Koch, ‘Zeit’, 67, Grégoire, Persécutions, 146–7 [andLaeuchli, Power and Sexuality, 87 n. 65].85 Grégoire, Persécutions, 147–8.86 [In fact, Constantine probably inherited Spain from his father Constantius in306; both Julian (Oration 2.51d) and Orosius (Hist. Adv. Pag. 7.25.15) record thatConstantius ruled there and, as Barnes notes, the panegyric of 313 makes no mentionof Constantine liberating Spain (Pan. Lat. 12.9.25); cf. Barnes, New Empire, 197.Maxentius defeated Severus to rule Italy and Africa in 307, lost Africa brieXy toDomitius Alexander, then reconquered it in 309.]87 Ossius’ attendance at Elvira is no objection to an early date, for when he died in357–8 he could be called a centenarian: Athanasius, Hist. Arian. 45.

98 Persecution and MartyrdomNeocaesarea could devote themselves entirely to other matters. Onbalance I think that this argument outweighs the one objection to thelater date, and with some misgiving I would place Elvira after 314and, because of an acute point made long ago by Baluze,88 before theCouncil of Nicaea in 324, and preferably earlier rather than later inthat period because Valerius, bishop of Caesaraugusta, who waspresent at Elvira, was bishop at the time of the Great Persecution,during which he was exiled.89At any rate the canons of Elvira provide no evidence whateverabout the operation of the Fourth Edict of the Great Persecution, orindeed about any aspect of that persecution. It is a pity that thedetailed evidence for the persecution in Spain is so poor.90 There areno really reliable Passions: the best, that of Faustus, Januarius, andMartial, like Prudentius’ account of Eulalia, exhibits martyrs asvolunteers.91 No doubt there were some executions, but the redoubtableOssius, though a confessor,92 survived the persecution, and if webelieve the Passion of the archdeacon Vincentius—a mere historicalnovel according to Delehaye93—his bishop, Valerius of Caesaraugusta,was only exiled, a milder punishment than that meted out tomost confessing bishops.To sum up, the hypothesis I advanced in my earlier article, that theFourth Edict was not enforced, and probably not even promulgated,in the western part of the empire, stands unimpaired. The mainweight of the argument still rests not only on the absence of goodevidence for the enforcement of the Fourth Edict in the West,but even more on the striking contrast between the emphasis onsacriWcing alone in the canons of Ancyra and the letter of Peter ofAlexandria,94 and the emphasis on traditio in the canons of Arles andin the Donatist controversy in Africa.88 See Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum, ii 1–2 n. 2; Hefele–Leclercq, Histoire, i.i. 218.89 See the Passion of S. Vincentius, in Ruinart, Acta, 400–1. But note thecomments below on the dubious value of this text.90 Cf. J. Zeiller, in A. Fliche and V. Martin, Histoire de l’Église, ii; Eng. trans. byE. C. Messenger, History of the Primitive Church, iv. 1074.91 See ‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, pp. 56–7].92 Athanasius, Hist. Arian. 42, 44.93 H. Delehaye, Les Légendes hagiographiques, 4th edn. (Brussels, 1955), 114. [Eng.trans. by D. Attwater, The Legends of the Saints, repr. with an introduction by T.O’Laughlin (Dublin, 1998), 95.]94 See Ste. Croix, ‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, pp. 48–9].

Appendix to Chapter 2 99APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 2The Date of the Council of ElviraJoseph StreeterA considerable amount has been written on the Council of Elvira after 1965,not all of which is particularly relevant to the concerns of this chapter.1Unsurprisingly, given the paucity of evidence from early fourth-centurySpain, debate about the date of the council has continued, much of whichremains within the scholarly traditions outlined by Ste. Croix. Accordingly,dating depends upon whether the historian interprets Elvira as a response tothe Great Persecution. Barnes and Lane Fox do not, but choose diVerent dates.Barnes follows Duchesne2 in dating the council to around ad 300, or ‘not longbefore Diocletian decreed persecution’.3 Lane Fox follows the arguments of thischapter, noting the absence of any reference either to lapsi or traditores, andprefers a date after the Council of Arles (314) to one before 303, on the groundsthat between 260 and 295 no confessors were created.4Laeuchli, Frend, and Chadwick continue to argue for a date of around309–10, although neither Frend nor Chadwick defends this at any length.51 It has been of particular interest to Catholic theologians, owing to the stipulationof priestly celibacy in Canon 33. For a summary of writings on this subject between1970 and 1979, see R. Gryson, ‘Dix ans de recherches sur les origines du célibatecclésiastique: réXexion sur les publications des années 1970–1979’, Revue Théologiquede Louvain, 11.2 (1980), 157–85.2 See n. 79 above. F. Salvador Ventura, on prosopographical grounds, has reWnedDuchesne’s date to the years 300–2; see his Prosopografía de Hispania Meridional, iii:Antigüedad tardía (300–711) (Granada, 1998), 46 (s.v. Barbatus, and in most subsequententries for participants).3 Barnes, Constantine, 53–4; see also his ‘The Constantinian Reformation’, TheCrake Lectures 1984 (New Brunswick, 1986), 39–57, at 45–6, repr. in Barnes, FromEusebius to Augustus: Selected Papers 1982–1993 (Aldershot, 1994), where he defendsthis date further.4 Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, 664–5, reaYrmed in his ‘Literacy and Power inEarly Christianity’, in A. Bowman and G. Woolf (eds.), Literacy and Power in theAncient World (Cambridge, 1994), 126–48, at 137.5 Laeuchli, Power and Sexuality, 86 n. 65; W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity(London, 1984), 448; H. Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee toGregory the Great (Oxford, 2001), 181–2.

100 Persecution and MartyrdomThe date of 309 is problematic, at least as presented by Grégoire.6 As Ste.Croix explains above, Grégoire’s case for 309 rests on the absence of bishopsfrom Mauretania Tingitana, part of the diocese of Spain, at a Spanish churchcouncil.7 The assumptions underlying this are that Maxentius was, until 310,in control of Spain and prevented signiWcant movements of Christians in histerritories, whereas once Spain came under Constantine’s rule in 310 theimpediment would have been removed.8 However, the numismatic evidenceunderpinning this argument—namely Maxentian coinage thought to havebeen minted at Tarraco in Spain—has been discredited since the coins inquestion were actually struck at Ticinum in Italy.9 There is no other evidenceto link Maxentius to Spain, control of which was probably inherited byConstantine directly from his father in 306.10 Laeuchli defends 309 in lessconcrete terms, seeing the contradictory nature of the canons as characteristicof the pre-Constantinian Church, and their ambivalent attitudetowards Rome as suggesting a Church removed by some distance frompersecution—which would not be the case if the canons were dated to306.11 Both arguments could also justify a date before 303, and given thegeneral lack of evidence for early fourth-century Spain—let alone the SpanishChurch—there are few objective grounds upon which either point can beestablished. Finally, the earliest date proposed by Koch, 306, is tentativelysupported by Gaudemet12 and more Wrmly by Ramos-Lisson,13 who links6 See n. 56 above.7 See p. 97 above, with n. 86.8 See E. Stein, Histoire du Bas Empire, i (Paris, 1959), 87. In the original draft ofthis essay Ste. Croix accepted this chronology, noting that ‘numismatic evidenceshows that Spain adhered to Constantine as early as 310’.9 C. H. V. Sutherland, Roman Imperial Coinage, vi (Oxford, 1967), 6–7, 266–98.Cf. Barnes, Constantine, 314 n. 108, and New Empire, 195–200, for the politicaldivisions of the empire under the tetrarchy.10 See n. 86 above.11 How far the council would need to be removed from persecution for thisambivalence to remain is only dealt with Xeetingly. Laeuchli notes, somewhatvaguely, that ‘Man forgets fast, especially if the conXict he is about to forget didnot touch him as deeply as he thought it did at the time’; see Power and Sexuality,87 n. 65. Perhaps, but while the persecution in Spain was brief, Spanish Christianswould surely have been aware of more brutal events elsewhere which, one imagines,would keep any memory of persecution fresh.12 J. Gaudemet, ‘Concile d’Elvire’, Dictionnaire d’Histoire et de Géographie Ecclésiastique,15 (1963), 312–48.13 D. Ramos-Lisson, ‘En torno al la autenticidad de algunos canones del conciliode Elvira’, Scripta Theologica, 11 (1979), 181; idem, ‘Das Konzil von Ilíberis (um 306)’,in J. Orlandis and D. Ramos-Lisson, Die Synode auf der iberischen Halbinsel bis zumEinbruch des Islam (Munich, 1981), 3–30, at 6, later translated into Spanish, Historiade los Concilios de la España romana y visigoda (Pamplona, 1986), 25–67.

Appendix to Chapter 2 101the concerns of the canons with those of a Church under immediatepressure from without—a position that Ste. Croix convincingly criticizes.Much the most radical study of the canons of Elvira is that of MauriceMeigne,14 although it has not occasioned much discussion in Anglophonescholarship.15 It will have been noted that throughout this essay Ste. Croixtreats the canons of Elvira as a complete document, as do Barnes, Lane Fox,Laeuchli, Frend, Chadwick, Gaudemet, and Ramos-Lisson, and it is thisassumption that Meigne attacks. He argues that the document now called‘the canons of the council of Elvira’ is in fact a composite text, a collection,consisting of 21 original canons (numbers 1–21) from the turn of the fourthcentury,16 another more or less coherent group of 13 canons (63–75) datingto some time between the councils of Arles and Nicaea,17 and 47 remainingcanons of later date.18 Meigne’s reasons for this are several: the Elvirancanons are, he notes, unusually long—around four times the length ofother fourth-century canons; the list of decisions is disorderly; they arefrequently contradictory, both philologically and in terms of content;19and Wnally, several canons appear anachronistic, preWguring later problemsof church discipline in both East and West. Suberbiola Martinez has furtherreWned Meigne’s thesis, positing two early councils in 298 (canons 59–77)and 309 (1–22) with three further councils in 354 (53–8), 365 (37–52), and396 (23–36).20One signiWcant objection is that Meigne oVers no motive for such acollection. Ramos-Lisson adds other criticisms,21 suggesting that theunusual length of the canons derives simply from the number of problemspresented to the fathers of Elvira, and that the discrepancy between Canons1 and 59 might indicate one later interpolation and not the existence of acollection. As to anachronisms, he suggests that the presence of the14 M. Meigne, ‘Concile ou collection d’Elvire?’, Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 70(1975), 361–87.15 Although see H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance(Baltimore, 2000), 508 n. 70; H. Hess, The Early Development of Canon Law andthe Council of Serdica (Oxford, 2002), 40–2; and M. Kulikowski, Late Roman Spainand its Cities (Baltimore, 2004), 328–9 n. 3. Barnes mentions it, but without criticalcomment: see his ‘The Constantinian Reformation’, 55 n. 43.16 Meigne follows the dating of Duchesne; see n. 79.17 Meigne, ‘Concile ou collection’, 386.18 Meigne, ‘Concile ou collection’, 366.19 Most conspicuously between Canons 1 and 59.20 See his Nuevos concilios Hispano-Romanos de los siglos III y IV: La colección deElvira (Malaga, 1987). He attacks the integrity of the canons on much the samegrounds as Meigne, but also notes the diversity in penitence (see esp. 16–18). He alsonotes further contradictions between canons, notably 7 and 47.21 Ramos-Lisson, ‘En torno’.

102 Persecution and MartyrdominXuential Ossius of Cordoba explains the diVusion of the issues debated atElvira, and their importance in later doctrinal debate. Despite these criticisms,Meigne’s collection thesis has been well received by Gryson,22 Brennecke,23and Drake,24 while Reichert describes it as ‘common property’.25Certainly it provides a novel explanation for an exceptional document,which Ramos-Lisson’s criticisms do not address very convincingly. Whyshould the canons of Elvira be so much longer than those of every otherfourth-century council, and why should a council consisting only of Spanishbishops resolve so many important doctrinal issues? Moreover, in contrastto later fourth-century canons, those at Elvira are often contradictory, andmuddled in order. However, other explanations are possible, which do notinvolve rejecting the integrity of the Elviran canons. Above all it is questionablewhether coherence of order is a necessary feature of church canons.Discrepancies could be explained as textual traces of disharmony in theChurch.26 Parallels with other councils for which we have more evidence arealso instructive. While the Council of Chalcedon in 451 met to resolve aspeciWc doctrinal issue (the nature of Christ), the simple fact that manybishops were assembled in one place made it a convenient opportunity todeal with any other ecclesiastical problems. Thus following discussion of thecentral doctrinal problem, the emperor Marcian instructed the bishopspresent to ‘remain three or four days longer, and in the presence of ourmost magniWcent oYcials, move whatever proposals you wish’.27 Of coursethe circumstances of the Church in the mid-Wfth century were very diVerentfrom those in the Wrst quarter of the fourth century, and we are fortunate tohave unusually detailed evidence for the proceedings at Chalcedon. Nonetheless,similar issues of convenience may well explain the range of issuesdiscussed at Elvira. Also, if we were to accept Duchesne’s early date, accordingto which the Canons of Elvira are the Wrst published canons of any22 Gryson, ‘Dix ans de recherches’ (n. 95), 161–3: Gryson largely discountsMeigne’s philological argument, but concedes that his general point on the collectionis probably correct.23 H. C. Brennecke, ‘Bischofsversammlung und Reichssynode: das Synodalwesenim Umbruch der konstantinischen Zeit’, in F. von Lilienfeld and A. M. Ritter (eds.),Einheit der Kirche in vorkonstantinischer Zeit (Oikonomia 25; Erlangen, 1989), 35–53,at 42–3.24 Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 223 and 508 n. 70.25 E. Reichert, Die Canones der Konzil von Elvira: Einleitung und Kommentar, Ph.D.diss. University of Hamburg (1990), 49. As Hess says, this probably overstates thecase; cf. Hess, Early Development of Canon Law, 42.26 Cf. Lauechli, Power and Sexuality, 4–8.27 E. Schwartz (ed.), ACO ii.i.2 (Berlin, 1933), 158 §23. On the Council ofChalcedon, see Ch. 6 below.

Appendix to Chapter 2 103church council, it would be unwise to expect them to conform to genericregularities, given that they would themselves constitute a new genre.Similarly, an early date would place the Council of Elvira in quite diVerentcircumstances from the councils of Arles or Nicaea. Constantine’s conversionto Christianity and the transformation of religious power that iteVected ‘rationalized’ problems of doctrine and church organization: ratherthan actively seeking to resolve a wide range of ostensibly unrelated ecclesiasticalproblems, Constantine more often responded to speciWc localdisputes, as rival groups appealed to him in order to receive his patronage.If Elvira dates to the turn of the fourth century, religious authority withinthe Church was considerably more diVuse than it became after 312, and therange of problems to be raised and subsequently resolved may have beencorrespondingly greater.What consequences might Meigne’s thesis have for Ste. Croix’s argument?At one level the Meigne and Suberbiola Martinez hypotheses providepossible solutions to the dating diYculties that Ste. Croix reviewed in thelatter part of the paper. Whether the theory of conXated council decisions issuperior to Ste. Croix’s cautious review of the possibilities is a matter ofchoice: scepticism is due any answer to a problem with so little supportingevidence, and Suberbiola Martinez’s work in particular seems unduly bold.28Meigne shows well the unusual nature of the canons of Elvira, and thisdeserves some comment. If we follow Ste. Croix and accept a single council,why might the canons have been composed between 314 and 325? They maysimply have been ‘any other business’ in between the more focused meetingsof Arles and Nicaea, which might also explain their unusual length. In thiscase it is not clear why the bishops chose to meet in Spain, although thepresence of the inXuential Ossius could have been important, or whybishops from beyond Spain were not involved in discussing issues of widerimport. Against an early date for Elvira, Ste. Croix simply notes its lack ofprecedent—although this did not stop the Wrst published canons of aChurch council being published. Indeed, lack of precedent is one way toexplain the unusual quality of the Elviran canons, particularly in relation toother fourth-century canons—not least given that they would then constitutethe only published canons of the pre-Constantinian Church. There isalso a good piece of evidence for an early date that Ste. Croix does notdiscuss, namely the list of nineteen bishops present at the council: Ossius ofCordoba is second, with Felix of Acci (Cadiz) presiding, which, as Barnes has28 See M. Sotomayor, ‘Consideraciones sobre las fuentes para el estudio delchristianismo primitivo en Andalucia’, in C. González Román (ed.), La Bética en suproblemática histórica (Granada, 1991), 299–311, esp. 304–8.

104 Persecution and Martyrdomnoted, would surely be unlikely after 312.29 Nonetheless, the central theme ofthis chapter, that the canons of Elvira provide no evidence for the promulgationof the Fourth Edict in Spain, is intact whether we regard them as acollection or as the genuine pronouncements of a council. On the date of thecouncil, Ste. Croix had for some time been uncertain, as the reference toElvira in Chapter 4 clearly shows.3029 See Barnes, ‘The Constantinian Reformation’, 45.30 See Ch. 4, pp. 159–60.

3Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?1The persecution of the Christians in the Roman Empire has attractedthe attention of scholars of many diVerent kinds. The enormousvolume of literature on the subject is partly due to the fact that itcan be approached from many diVerent directions: it oVers a challengeto historians of the Roman Empire (especially of its publicadministration), to Roman lawyers, to ecclesiastical historians, toChristian theologians, and to students of Roman religion andGreek religion. In fact all these approaches are relevant, and theymust all be used together.First published as ‘Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?’, Past and Present,26(1963), 6–38.1 This article is a revised version of a paper read to the Joint Meeting of the Hellenicand Roman Societies and the Classical Association at Oxford on 12 August 1961. As Iam engaged upon a book on the persecutions, in which the matters discussed here willbe treated in greater detail, I have not attempted to supply complete documentationand bibliographies; but I have added a certain number of references. Except whenotherwise stated the Passions of the martyrs to which I have referred here can be foundin R. Knopf and G. Krüger, Ausgewählte Märtyrerakten, 3rd edn. (Tübingen, 1929).[4th edn. (Tübingen, 1965). For a new text and English translation of most of thesemartyrdoms, see H. Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford, 1972). There isno evidence that the projected book on persecutions ever took even rudimentaryshape; for most of the 1960s Ste. Croix’s energies were turned towards aspects ofClassical Greek History, resulting in the publication of The Origins of the PeloponnesianWar and the collection of papers on Athenian Democracy which has recently beenpublished as Athenian Democratic Origins, while towards the end of the decade he wasbeginning to contemplate the issues which eventually appeared in The Class Strugglein the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (1981; corr.imprint, London, 1983). The ongoing work on Persecutions is represented by thearticle on Elvira (Ch. 2 above) dating from the late 1960s and the lecture materials on‘Heresy, Schism and Persecution’ (the basis for Ch. 5 below) from the 1970s and1980s. The 1963 P&Particle, but not the 1964 rejoinder, was reprinted in M. I. Finley(ed.), Studies in Ancient Society (London, 1974), 210–49.]

106 Persecution and MartyrdomThe question I have taken as a title needs to be broken down in twoquite diVerent ways. One is to distinguish between the generalpopulation of the Graeco-Roman world and what I am going tocall for convenience ‘the government’: I mean of course the emperor,the senate, the central oYcials and the provincial governors, the keyWgures for our purpose being the emperor and even more theprovincial governors. In this case we ask Wrst, ‘For what reasons didordinary pagans demand persecution?’, and secondly, ‘Why did thegovernment persecute?’ The second way of dividing up our generalquestion is to distinguish the reasons which brought about persecutionfrom the purely legal basis of persecution—the juridicalprinciples and institutions invoked by those who had already madeup their minds to take action.But let us not look at the persecutions entirely from the top, so tospeak—from the point of view of the persecutors. Scholars who havedealt with this subject, Roman historians in particular, have with fewexceptions paid too little attention to what I might call the undersideof the process: persecution as seen by the Christians—in a word,martyrdom, a concept which played a vitally important part in thelife of the early Church.2It is convenient to divide the persecutions into three distinctphases. The Wrst ends just before the great Wre at Rome in 64; thesecond begins with the persecution which followed the Wre andcontinues until 250;3 and the third opens with the persecutionunder Decius in 250–1 and lasts until 313—or, if we take accountof the anti-Christian activities of Licinius in his later years, until thedefeat of Licinius by Constantine in 324. We know of no persecutionby the Roman government until 64, and there was no general persecutionuntil that of Decius. Between 64 and 250 there were onlyisolated, local persecutions; and even if the total number of victimswas quite considerable (as I think it probably was), most individual2 See W. H. C. Frend, ‘The Failure of the Persecutions in the Roman Empire’, Pastand Present, No. 16 (Nov. 1959), pp. 10–30; ‘The Persecutions: Some Links betweenJudaism and the Early Church’, Jl. of Eccles. Hist. ix (1958), pp. 141–58; ‘The GnosticSects and the Roman Empire’, Jl. of Eccles. Hist. v (1954), pp. 25–37. [See also‘Voluntary Martyrdom’, Ch. 4 below.]3 In fact the persecuting edict was probably issued before the end of 249, but thereare no recorded martyrdoms before January 250.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 107outbreaks must usually have been quite brief. Even the generalpersecution of Decius lasted little more than a year, and the secondgeneral persecution, that of Valerian in 257–9, less than three years.The third and last general persecution, by Diocletian and hiscolleagues from 303 onwards (the so-called ‘Great Persecution’),continued for only about two years in the West, although it wenton a good deal longer in the East.4 In the intervals between thesegeneral persecutions the situation, in my opinion, remained verymuch what it had been earlier, except that on the whole the positionof the Church was distinctly better: there were several local persecutions,but there were also quite long periods during which theChristians enjoyed something like complete peace over most of theempire;5 and in addition the capacity of the Christian churches toown property was recognized, at least under some emperors. ButI agree with Baynes6 and many others that complete toleration ofChristianity was never oYcially proclaimed before the edict ofGalerius in 311.The subject is a large one, and I cannot aVord to spend time on theWrst phase of persecution (before 64), during which, in so far as ittook place at all, persecution was on a small scale and came aboutmainly as a result of Jewish hostility, which tended to lead todisturbances.7 After the execution of Jesus, the organs of governmentcome quite well out of it all: their general attitude is one of impartialityor indiVerence towards the religious squabbles between Jewsand Christians. In consequence of riots provoked by Christianmissionary preaching, action was sometimes taken by the oYcials4 See my ‘Aspects of the ‘‘Great’’ Persecution’, Harv. Theol. Rev. xlvii (1954), pp.75 V., at pp. 95–6 [Ch. 1, pp. 58–9 above].5 Especially from the reign of Gallienus (260–8) to the beginning of the GreatPersecution (303).6 N. H. Baynes, ‘The Great Persecution’, in S. A. Cook, F. E. Adcock, M. P.Charlesworth, and N. H. Baynes (eds.), CAH xii: The Imperial Crisis and Recovery,A.D. 193–324 (Cambridge, 1939), 646–77, at p. 655. [See also R. Lane Fox, Pagans andChristians (Harmondsworth, 1986); W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia,1984).]7 See Act. Apost. vi.8–vii.60; viii.1–4; ix.1–2; xii.1–2, 3–19; xiii.45, 50–1; xiv.2, 4–6,19–20; xvii.5–9, 13–14; xviii.12–17; xx.2–3; xxi.27 V. Cf. I Thessal. ii.14–16. Jewishhostility continued, and Tertullian (Scorp. 10) could call the Jewish synagogues‘fontes persecutionis’ [‘sources of persecution’].

108 Persecution and Martyrdomof local communities. But any Christians who were martyred, likeStephen and James ‘the Just’ (the brother of Jesus),8 were victims ofpurely Jewish enmity, which would count for little outside Judaeaitself. The Sanhedrin acted ultra vires in executing James—andStephen, if indeed his death was not really a lynching.I do not intend to give a narrative, even in outline, of the secondand third phases of persecution, which I shall mainly deal withtogether. The earliest stages of intervention on the part of thegovernment,beforeabout112,areparticularlyobscuretous.Wecannotbe certain how and when the government began to take action; but,like many other people, I believe it was in the persecution by Nero atRome which followed the great Wre in 64. The much discussedpassage in Tacitus9 which is our only informative source leavesmany problems unsolved, but I can do no more here than summarizemy own views, which agree closely with those expressed by ProfessorBeaujeu in his admirable recent monograph on this persecution.10 Inorder to kill the widely believed rumour that he himself was responsiblefor starting the Wre, Nero falsely accused and savagely punishedthe Christians. First, those who admitted being Christians11 wereprosecuted, and then, on information provided by them (doubtlessunder torture), a great multitude were convicted, not so much(according to Tacitus) of the crime of incendiarism as because oftheir hatred of the human race (‘odio humani generis’).12 Tacitus,like his friend Pliny and their contemporary Suetonius,13 detested theChristians; and although he did not believe they caused the Wre14 he8 Act. Apost. vi.8–vii.60 (Stephen); xii.1–3; Josephus, Ant. Jud. xx.9.1, §§ 197–203; Euseb. Hist. Eccles. ii.23 (James).9 Tac. Ann. xv.44.3–8.10 J. Beaujeu, L’Incendie de Rome en 64 et les chrétiens (Coll. Latomus, xlix,Brussels, 1960). The other sources are discussed and quoted by L. H. CanWeld, TheEarly Persecutions of the Christians (Columb. Univ. Stud. in Hist. Econ. and Pub. Law),lv, 1913), pp. 43 V., 141 V. A good selective bibliography up to 1934 will be found inS. A. Cook, F. E. Adcock, M. P. Charlesworth, and N. H. Baynes (eds.), CAH x: TheAugustan Empire 44 B.C.–A.D. 70 (Cambridge, 1934), pp. 982–3.11 The imperfect tense, ‘qui fatebantur’ [‘who were confessing’], shows that theconfession was one of Christianity and not of incendiarism.12 Tac. Ann. xv.44.5. Cf. Hist. v.5; Tert. Apologet. 37.8; Cic. Tusc. Disp. iv.25, 27;Diod. Sic. xxxiv.1.1.13 Suet. Nero 16.2.14 His words ‘abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos’ [‘to eliminate this rumour,Nero furnished culprits’] (44.3) prove that.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 109does say they were ‘hated for their abominations’ (‘Xagitia’) and hecalls them ‘criminals deserving exemplary punishment’.15 The Christianswere picked on as scapegoats, then, because they were alreadybelieved by the populace to be capable of horrid crimes, Xagitia: thatis worth noticing. (Had not the Empress Poppaea Sabina beenparticularly sympathetic towards the Jews,16 they might well havebeen chosen as the most appropriate scapegoats.) And once the Wrstbatch of Nero’s Christian victims had been condemned, whether on acharge of organized incendiarism or for a wider ‘complex of guilt’,17there would be nothing to prevent the magistrate conducting thetrials (probably the Praefectus Urbi) from condemning the rest onthe charge familiar to us in the second century, of simply ‘being aChristian’—a status which now necessarily involved, by deWnition,membership of an anti-social and potentially criminal conspiracy.I now want to begin examining the attitude of the governmenttowards the persecution of the Christians. I propose to considermainly the legal problems Wrst, because although they involve somehighly technical questions of Roman public law, the more importantones can, I believe, be completely solved, and we shall then be in a verymuch better position to understand the reasons which prompted thegovernment to persecute; although before we can Wnally clarify these,we shall have to consider the other side of our problem: the reasonsfor the hatred felt towards Christianity by the mass of pagans.The legal problems,18 from which a certain number of non-legalissues can hardly be separated, may be grouped under three heads.15 Ann. xv.44.4, 8.16 Jos. Ant. Jud. xx.8.11, § 195; cf. Vita 3, § 16. Jos. describes Poppaea as ‘Godfearing’(ŁåïóåâÞò). And see CanWeld, op. cit., pp. 47–9, on the implications of I Clem.4–6.17 A. Momigliano, ‘Nero’, in CAH x. 702–42, at pp. 725–6.18 The modern literature is vast and much of it is worthless. All the works thatanyone could wish to consult today are given by Knopf and Krüger, op. cit. (in n. 1above), pp. viii–ix and the bibliographies for individual Passions; A. N. Sherwin-White, ‘The Early Persecutions and Roman Law Again’, Jl. of Theol. Stud., n.s., iii(1952), pp. 199–213; V. Monachino, Il fondamento giuridico delle persecuzioni neiprimi due secoli (Rome, 1955, repr. from La Scuola Cattolica, lxxxi, 1953); A. Wlosok,‘Die Rechtsgrundlagen der Christenverfolgungen der ersten zwei Jahrh.’, Gymnasium,lxvi (1959), pp. 14–32. [See also H. Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford,1972), pp. lvii–lxii.]

110 Persecution and MartyrdomFirst, what was the nature of the oYcial charge or charges? Secondly,before whom, and according to what form of legal process, if any,were Christians tried? And thirdly, what was the legal foundation forthe charges? (For example, was it a lex, orasenatusconsultum, oranimperial edict speciWcally directed against Christianity, or some moregeneral edict, or an imperial rescript or series of rescripts?) I will dealwith the Wrst question now, and then the other two together.First, then, the nature of the charges against the Christians. Here Iam going to be dogmatic and say that from at least 112 onwards(perhaps, as we have seen, from 64) the normal charge againstChristians was simply ‘being Christians’: they are punished, that isto say, ‘for the Name’, the nomen Christianum. This is quite certain,from what the Christian Apologists say in the second and early thirdcenturies,19 from several accounts of martyrdoms,20 and from thetechnical language used by Pliny and Trajan in their celebratedexchange of letters, probably at about the end of 112,21 concerningthe persecution conducted by Pliny in his province of Bithynia etPontus.22 Pliny speaks of the Christians he had executed as ‘thosewho were charged before me with being Christians’ (‘qui ad metamquam Christiani deferebantur’), and the only question he sayshe asked these confessors was whether they admitted this charge(‘interrogavi ipsos, an essent Christiani’);23 and Trajan in his replyspeaks of ‘those who had been charged before you as Christians’ (‘quiChristiani ad te delati fuerant’), and goes on to say that anyone ‘whodenies he is a Christian’ (‘qui negaverit se Christianum esse’) andproves it ‘by oVering prayers to our gods’ can go free.24 With theother evidence, that settles the matter. Now the delatores who Wrstaccused the Christians as such before Pliny could not be sure (as weshall see) that Pliny would consent to take cognizance of the matter at19 e.g. Justin, I Apol.4;II Apol. 2; Athenag. Legat. 1–2; Tert. Apol. 1–3 etc.; Ad Nat.i.3; and many similar passages.20 Euseb. Hist. Eccles. iv.15.25 and Passio Polyc. 12.1; Passio SS. Scillitan. 10, 14;Passio Apollon. 1V.21 But perhaps a year or even two years earlier: see R. Syme, Tacitus (Oxford,1958), i, p. 81; ii, p. 659 (App. 20).22 Pliny, Epist. x.96–97. It is a pleasure to be able to welcome at last a really goodEng. trans. of Pliny’s Letters, by Betty Radice (Penguin Books, 1963).23 Idem, 96.2–3.24 Idem, 97.1, 2.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 111all, let alone inXict the death penalty. Since they thought it was worth‘trying it on’, they evidently knew that in the past other oYcials hadbeen prepared to punish Christians as such. And in fact Pliny nowdid so,25 although later on he had second thoughts and consulted theemperor, saying he was doubtful on what charge and to what extenthe should investigate and punish, and in particular whether heshould take the age of the accused into account, whether he shouldgrant pardon to anyone who was prepared to apostatize, and whetherhe should punish for the Name alone or for the abominable crimesassociated with being a Christian (the ‘Xagitia cohaerentia nomini’).Trajan explicitly refused to lay down any general or deWnite rules andwas very selective in his answers to Pliny’s questions. In two passageswhich do him great credit he instructs Pliny that Christians must notbe sought out (‘conquirendi non sunt’), and that anonymousdenunciations are to be ignored, ‘for they create the worst sort ofprecedent and are quite out of keeping with the spirit of our age’.Christians who are accused as such, in due form (by a privateprosecutor, delator), and are convicted must be punished, but anyonewho denies he is a Christian, and proves it ‘by oVering prayers to ourgods’, is to receive ‘pardon on the score of his repentance’ and be setfree. In my opinion, Pliny could justiWably take this to mean thatpunishment was to be for the Name alone.As I have shown, I believe that persecution ‘for the Name’ beganeither in 64 or at some time between 64 and 112. As an alternative,many writers have brought forward certain passages in the NewTestament, especially the Apocalypse and I Peter,26 and have soughtto show that under Domitian, if not under Nero, emperor-worshipwas enforced in Asia Minor, and that the Christian sect wasproscribed when Christians refused to take part in it, the charge beingreally political disloyalty. I would put no weight on such considerations;although on the evidence of the Apocalypse I do not doubtthat some Christians may have been put to death in Asia (especiallyat Pergamum) for refusing to pay cult to the emperor. (Of course,25 Idem, 96.3.26 Esp. Rev. ii.10, 13; vi.9–11; vii.13–14; xiii.15; xvii.6; xviii.24; xix.2; xx.4; I Pet.iv.12–19. The dates of both works are still controversial. As regards I Peter, I agreewith F. W. Beare, The First Epistle of Peter, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1958), pp. 9–19, that itcomes from the early second century.

112 Persecution and Martyrdomthey ought not to have been compelled to do anything of the sort, noemperor being oYcially numbered among the gods of the Romanstate until he was dead and had been duly pronounced divus, eventhough in practice he received cult in his lifetime at provincial leveland below.) One often hears it said that the Christians were martyred‘for refusing to worship the emperor’.27 In fact, emperor-worship is afactor of almost no independent importance in the persecution of theChristians.28 It is true that among our records of martyrdomsemperor-worship does crop up occasionally;29 but far more often itis a matter of sacriWcing to the gods30—as a rule, not even speciWcallyto ‘the gods of the Romans’. And when the cult act involved doesconcern the emperor, it is usually an oath by his Genius (or in the Eastby his Ôý÷ç)31 or a sacriWce to the gods on his behalf.32 Verycharacteristic is the statement of Vigellius Saturninus, proconsul ofAfrica in 180, to the Scillitan martyrs: ‘We too are religious, and ourreligion is simple, and we swear by the Genius of our lord the emperor,and we pray for his welfare, as you also ought to do’.33 This is also thesituation which is reXected in the Apologists. Tertullian, addressinghimself in 197 to the Roman governing class in the Apologeticus,examines at great length the charges against the Christians: he sumsthem up by making the pagans say to the Christians, ‘You don’tworship the gods, and you don’t oVer sacriWce for the emperors’.3427 Cf. Syme, op. cit., ii, p. 469: ‘an invincible spirit that denied allegiance to Romewhen allegiance meant worship of Caesar’.28 That this is just as true of the third century as of the second has recently beendemonstrated by R. Andreotti, ‘Religione uYciale e culto dell’imperatore nei‘‘Libelli’’ di Decio’, Studi in onore di A. Calderini e R. Paribeni, i (Milan, 1956), pp.369–76. It is particularly signiWcant that Cyprian never mentions the imperial cult.And ‘the cult of the emperors plays a very subordinate part in the last greatpersecution’ (Baynes, ‘Great Persecution’, p. 659).29 As in Pliny, Epist. x.96.5 (contrast 97.1: ‘dis nostris’ [‘to our gods’]); Euseb. Hist.Eccles. vii.15.2.30 As e.g. in Pliny, Epist. x.97.1; Passio Justini, v.8; Passio Carpi et al. (Gr.), 4 etc.;Passio Fructuosi, ii.2; Passio Conon. iv.3–5.31 As e.g. in Euseb. Hist. Eccles. iv.15.18, 20, 21 and Passio Polyc. 9.2, 3; 10.1; PassioSS. Scillitan. 3,5;Passio Apollon. 3. Contrast Tert. Apol. 32.2–3.32 As e.g. in Passio SS. Scillitan. 3;Passio Perpet. vi.2; and other sources. See alsoTert. Apol. 10.1; 28.2 etc.33 Passio SS. Scillitan. 3.34 Tert. Apol. 10.1; and see, for discussion of the two charges separately, 10.2–28.1and 28.2–35. Tert. goes on (10.1) to sum up the two charges against the Christians as

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 113And there is ample evidence to show that the situation remainedsubstantially the same right through the third and early fourthcenturies, even during the general persecutions.35I now turn to the nature of the judicial process against the Christians.(In considering this, I shall go beyond the strictly legal sphere fromtime to time, and look at some of the reasons why persecution tookplace.)The procedure against Christians was in every case that used forthe vast majority of criminal trials under the Principate: cognitioextra ordinem (or extraordinaria) [‘special investigation’/‘specials’],which I shall discuss in a moment. Capital trials under this process inthe provinces took place before the provincial governor and no oneelse. In Rome, the only trials of Christians about which we have goodevidence were before the Praefectus Urbi36 or a Praefectus Praetorio;37none of the known cases was important enough to comedirectly before the emperor himself, or the senate,38 although in theearly Principate appeals by Roman citizens Wrst accused elsewheremay have gone to the emperor’s court.Now Roman law was surely the most impressive intellectualachievement of Roman civilization. But what Roman lawyers oftoday mean when they speak of Roman law is essentially privatelaw, a large part of which is concerned with property rights, theirdeWnition and protection. (Did not Cicero in the De OYciis, anticipatingMarx, say that the main reason for the very existence ofpolitical communities was the security of private property—‘ut suasacrilegium [literally ‘sacrilege’, but in this context ‘disregard for gods’] and maiestas[‘treason’], but he is hardly using either word in its technical sense: his ‘sacrilegium’seems to be a rhetorical equivalent for IŁåüôçò. (For the technical meaning ofsacrilegium, see Th. Mommsen, Römisches Strafrecht (Berlin, 1899), pp. 760 V.)35 See n. 28 above.36 Justin, II Apol. 1–2 (Ptolemaeus, Lucius and another); Passio Justini 1.37 Early in the reign of Commodus, Apollonius was tried and sentenced by thePraetorian Prefect Perennis; but the surviving versions of the Passion, and thenarrative of Euseb. Hist. Eccles. v.21, are confused, notably with regard to the roleplayed by the senate, which has been much discussed. A conWdent explanation ishardly possible: the best so far produced seems to me that of E. GriVe, ‘Les actes dumartyr Apollonius’, Bull. de littér. ecclés. liii (1952), pp. 65–76; cf. Monachino, op. cit.(in n. 18 above), pp. 33–9.38 See the preceding note.

114 Persecution and Martyrdomtenerent’ [‘so that they could possess what was theirs’]?)39 Large areasof Roman criminal and public law, however, were by contrast veryunsatisfactory, and one of the worst of these blemishes was preciselycognitio extra ordinem, the procedure by which the large deWcienciesof the quaestio system (the ordo iudiciorum publicorum [‘system ofpublic courts’], regulating the punishment of what may be called‘statutory crimes’), which at least was subject to fairly strict rules,were supplemented by direct governmental intervention. As Mr.Sherwin-White pointed out in his Sarum Lectures for 1960–61, therather few oVences dealt with by the quaestio system were essentiallythose of ‘high society and the governing personnel’; the ‘crimes of thecommon man’—theft and so forth—had largely to be dealt withextra ordinem, even at Rome.40 In making use of cognitio extraordinem the magistrate concerned had a very wide discretion41—even more so, of course, in criminal trials than in civil actions, justbecause of the relative vagueness of the criminal law. This discretionextended not only to Wxing penalties, but even to deciding whichcases the magistrate would recognize as criminal and which—likeGallio when appealed to by the Jews of Corinth against St. Paul42—hewould refuse even to consider. The right of judicial cognitio (iurisdictio)belonged to all provincial governors as part of their imperium.In the criminal sphere it was almost unlimited, save in so far as therights of Roman citizens (under the Lex Iulia de vi publica)43 had tobe respected, and in so far as a prosecution might be brought againstthe governor at Rome after his term of oYce was over.44 The spherein which the judge might exercise his discretion was actually at itswidest in the early Principate, before it began to be circumscribed bythe imperial constitutions issued more and more frequently from39 Cic. De OYc. ii.73.40 A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament(Oxford, 1963), pp. 13–23 and passim.41 The ‘arbitrium iudicantis’ [‘power of the judge’], on which see F. M. de Robertis,‘Arbitrium Iudicantis e Statuizioni imperiali’, Zeitschr. der Savigny-Stiftung fürRechtsgesch. lix (1939), Rom. Abt., pp. 219–60.42 Act. Apost. xviii.12–17.43 The principal text is Digest, xlviii.6.7; cf. Sent. Pauli, v.26.1. See esp. A. H. M.Jones, Stud. in Roman Government and Law (Oxford, 1960), pp. 54 V.44 See P. A. Brunt, ‘Charges of Provincial Maladministration under the EarlyPrincipate’, Historia, x (1961), pp. 189–227.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 115Hadrian’s time onwards.45 Tacitus, in his famous comment on AntoniusFelix, governor of Judaea in St. Paul’s time, can speak of his‘royal prerogatives’ (‘ius regium’);46 and, in one of the worst cases ofprovincial misgovernment on record, a proconsul of Asia, towardsthe end of the reign of Augustus, could congratulate himself proudlyand in Greek, over the dead bodies of three hundred provincials hehad executed in a single day, on having performed a kingly act.47In a sense, the power to conduct a criminal cognitio was part of thepower of coercitio [‘right to punish’] inherent in imperium; but it isquite wrong to conceive the Christians as being punished by purecoercitio in the narrower sense, summarily and without the exercise ofproper iurisdictio: coercitio in that sense, exercised (as the lawyers putit) de plano, in an informal manner, was limited to minor oVences.48 Icannot help feeling that some of those who have persisted in speakingof the proceedings against the Christians as ‘police measures’ havenot fully realized that the trials in question were in no way summaryproceedings by pure coercitio but proper legal trials, involving theexercise of iurisdictio in the fullest sense.The arbitrary and irresponsible character of the cognitio systemwas well understood by Mommsen, who says contemptuously in hisRömisches Strafrecht that it entirely eludes scientiWc exposition, itsvery essence being a ‘legalised absence of settled form’.49 ‘To Romancriminal law’, says Schulz, ‘the rule ‘‘nullum crimen sine lege, nullapoena sine lege’’ [‘no crime, no penalty without a law’] was andremained for ever unknown.’50 Jolowicz, discussing the criminalsystem of the Principate, rightly pointed out that it ‘never passed45 See n. 41 above.46 Tac. Hist. v.9.47 Seneca, Dial. iv(De Ira, ii).5.5; cf. Tac. Ann. iii.68.1. The proconsul was L.Valerius Messalla Volesus and the date a.d. 11 or 12.48 The principal text is Dig. xlviii.2.6 (‘levia crimina’); cf. i.16.9.3; xlviii.18.18.10.Several passages in the law-books and elsewhere (e.g. Sen. De Clem. i.5.3) distinguishbetween a decision given ‘pro tribunali’, as a result of a formal trial, and one given ‘deplano’, informally: the technical terms ‘cognitio’ and ‘decretum’ are reserved for theformer type (see Dig. xxxvii.1.3.8; xxxviii.15.2.1; xlviii.16.1.8). The position wasmuch the same in civil cases: see R. Düll, Z.S.-S.R. (n. 41 above), lii (1932), Rom.Abt., pp. 170–94.49 T. Mommsen, Römisches Strafrecht (Leipzig, 1899), 340.50 F. Schulz, Principles of Roman Law (Oxford, 1936), p. 173, cf. p. 247 (‘Nocriminal charge except by a law, no punishment except by a law’).

116 Persecution and Martyrdomthrough a stage of strict law’, and ‘the ‘‘rule of law’’, towards which thequaestiones had been a step forward, was never established’.51 To Wndthat in a very important part of the Roman legal system the rule oflaw as we know it did not exist will surprise only those who Wx theireyes on the splendid system of civil jurisprudence52 and ignorecriminal and administrative law and procedure.Recalcitrant as it is to precise analysis, the system of cognitio extraordinem has been adequately discussed in the standard textbooks.53Through his understanding of the nature of the cognitio process, Mr.Sherwin-White, in an article published in 1952,54 has been able to cutaway a vast amount of dead wood and provide by far the bestintroduction to the study of the legal aspects of the early persecutions—althoughI shall argue presently that he is mistaken in onevery important point.Since our information comes almost entirely from Christiansources, interested in recording martyrdoms, the great majority ofthe trials of Christians we know about in detail end in conviction anda death sentence. But the very wide discretion exercised by theprovincial governor might on occasion work in favour of accusedChristians. The most signiWcant evidence comes from Tertullian’sAd Scapulam, written probably in 212, where we hear that thevery Wrst proconsul to shed Christian blood in Africa was Vigellius51 H. F. Jolowicz, Historical Introd. to the Study of Roman Law, 2nd edn. (Cambridge,1952), p. 413. [3rd edn. (1972), 404.]52 Even in civil jurisdiction the growth of cognitio extraordinaria resulted in an‘assimilation to administrative and police action’ (W. W. Buckland, A Text-Book ofRoman Law, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1932), p. 663). [See also W. Turpin, ‘Formula,cognitio, and Proceedings extra ordinem’, Revue internationale des droits de l’antiquité,3rd ser. 46 (1999), 501–2.]53 Notably Mommsen, op. cit., pp. 340–1, 346–51; P. F. Girard, Man. élém. de droitrom., 6th edn. (Paris, 1918), pp. 1084–97; and in more detail U. Brasiello, Larepressione penale in dir. rom. (Naples, 1937). See also Maxime Lemosse, Cognitio.Étude sur le rôle du juge dans l’instruction du procès civil antique (Thèse de Droit, Paris,1944), pp. 129 V., esp. 211–57. Useful contributions have been made in this countryby J. L. Strachan-Davidson, Problems of the Roman Criminal Law, ii (Oxford, 1912),pp. 159–75; Jones, op. cit. (n. 43 above), pp. 53–98; Sherwin-White, op. cit. (n. 40above), v. Index, s.v. ‘Cognitio’. [In the reprint in Studies in Ancient Society, 249 n. 170,Ste. Croix accepted the correction of Fergus Millar (JRS 58 (1968), 222) that thestandard procedure in Roman criminal trials should not be called cognitio extraordinem, since this was not an expression used in ancient sources.]54 See n. 18 above.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 117Saturninus,55 who was in oYce as late as 180;56 and that a wholeseries of African proconsuls (after Saturninus, it seems) had gone outof their way to be friendly to accused Christians:57 one of themhelped the Christians to conduct their case in such a way as to securean acquittal (I only wish we had more details of that); anotheracquitted an accused Christian outright, apparently on the groundthat to convict him would cause a riot; yet another, reluctant athaving to deal with such a case, released an accused Christian whoconsented under torture to apostatize, without actually making himsacriWce; and a fourth tore up the vexatious indictment of a Christianwhen his accuser failed to appear.That shows how things might work in practice. A governor exercisingcognitio extraordinaria in a criminal case was bound (forall practical purposes) only by those imperial constitutiones andmandata58 which were relevant in his particular area and were still inforce.59 Unfortunately, oYcial publication of imperial constitutionsseems to have been an extremely ineYcient and haphazard process,60and a conscientious governor might often Wnd himself in great55 Tert. Ad Scap. 3.4.56 See Passio SS. Scillitan. 1.57 Tert. Ad Scap. 4.3–4.58 Mandata, imperial administrative regulations relating mainly to the provinces(some of general application, others not), were technically distinct from constitutiones.The most complete deWnition of constitutiones is Ulpian’s, in Dig. i.4.1.1 (cf.Inst. J. i.2.6; Gaius, i.5): it can be reduced to epistulae and subscriptiones, edicta,decreta (formal legal decisions), and summary decisions de plano (see n. 48 above). Atechnical term often employed, which cuts across the deWnition just given, isrescripta: this includes all subscriptiones (dealt with through the emperor’s secretarya libellis) and most epistulae (dealt with through the secretary ab epistulis).59 Some modern scholars have held that in strict legal theory imperial constitutionesoriginally remained law only during the reign in which they were issued. Yet bythe third quarter of the second century Gaius (i.5) could say it had never beendoubted that such constitutiones had ‘the force of law’. Cf. Pomponius in Dig.i.2.2.11, 12; Ulpian in Dig. i.4.1.1; also i.4.1.2, explaining that some constitutionesare ‘personal’ and not to be treated as precedents. By the early second century theconstitutiones of emperors were evidently regarded as holding good until reversed bytheir successors—and this is true not only of ‘good emperors’ such as Augustus(Pliny, Epist. x.79, esp. §§ 2, 4, 5; x.80 and 84), but even of Domitian (who hadsuVered a ‘damnatio memoriae’): see Idem, x.58 (esp. §§ 3, 10); 60.1; 65–6 (esp. 65.3;66.2); 72; cf. Papinian in Dig. xlviii.3.2.1 (Domitian) and Gai. i.33 (Nero). See on thewhole question Jolowicz, op. cit. (n. 51 above), pp. 374–83.60 See F. von Schwind, Zur Frage der Publikation im röm. Recht (MünchenerBeiträge zur Papyrusforschung, xxxi, 1940); and brieXy Jolowicz, op. cit., pp. 381–3;

118 Persecution and Martyrdomperplexity as to what the law was. This is nicely illustrated by a letterfrom Pliny to Trajan dealing with the problem of the status of foundlings(Łæåðôïß).61 He can Wnd nothing to the point, he says, in theconstitutiones of previous emperors. An edict said to have been issuedby Augustus had been quoted to him, with letters of Vespasian, Titusand Domitian, addressed to other parts of the empire, but he did notenclose copies of these, as he was not certain of their accuracy or even(in some cases) of their authenticity, and he felt sure there would beproper copies in the oYces of the emperor’s central administration.One sentence is particularly signiWcant: he did not feel that in a matterwhich called for the emperor’s authoritative decision he ought to be‘content with precedents’.62Once Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan had been ‘published’ (nodoubt by his friends, soon after 117, when he and Trajan were bothdead), every educated Roman would be likely to know what instructionsTrajan had given regarding the Christians; and thereafter anyprovincial governor might well feel that until oYcial policy towardsthe Christians changed he had better follow the same procedure. Butother governors, at any rate in other provinces, were not absolutelybound by this precedent; and indeed some ten years later we Wnd aproconsul of Asia consulting Hadrian on the treatment of the Christians,and instructions being sent in return to his successor,C. Minicius Fundanus, the purport of which, unhappily, is notentirely clear from the version which has come down to us throughChristian writers63—I myself believe this rescript represented noSchulz, op. cit. (n. 50 above), pp. 243–7. Cf. also U. Wilcken, ‘Zu den Kaiserrescripten’,in Hermes, lv (1920), pp. 1–42; F. M. de Robertis, ‘Sulla eYcacia normativa dellecostit. imp.’, Annali della fac. di giurispr. della R. Univ. di Bari, n.s. iv (1941),pp. 1–100, 281–374; G. I. Luzzatto, ‘Ricerche sull’applicaz. delle costit. imp. nelleprovincie’, Scritti di dir. rom, in onore di C. Ferrini, ed. G. G. Archi (Pavia, 1946),pp. 265–93. [For discussion of diVerent forms of imperial communications, seeF. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (London, 1977), ch. 5.]61 Pliny, Epist. x.65.62 On precedent in Roman law, see Jolowicz, op. cit. (n. 51 above), pp. 363–5, andthe works cited on p. 569.63 Justin, I Apol. 68 (our texts give Eusebius’s Greek version); Euseb. Hist. Eccles.iv.9; RuWnus, Hist. Eccles. iv.9. The traditional date of Fundanus’s proconsulate is124–5, but it is 122–3 according to R. Syme, Tacitus, ii, p. 468 n. 5. I believe thisrescript has been misunderstood by e.g. H. Grégoire, Les Persécutions dans l’Empireromain, 2nd edn. (Mémoires de l’Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 119departure from the policy laid down by Trajan. The decisions takenby Nero in 64 and Trajan in 112 did not constitute precedentsabsolutely binding upon provincial governors generally. Tertullian’snotorious reference to an ‘institutum Neronianum’64 does not referto a general edict: ‘institutum’ is not a technical legal term, and wemust translate ‘the practice adopted by Nero’. We are told by Lactantiusthat Ulpian (in the early third century) collected and publishedin his treatise De OYcio Proconsulis the nefarious imperial rescriptslaying down the penalties to be inXicted on Christians.65 I wouldemphasize that Lactantius speaks of rescripta, not edicta or mandata.Unless he is using the word very loosely, this is another piece ofevidence against the existence of a ‘general law’ speciWcally proscribingChristianity, a notion which, as far as I am aware, no specialist inRoman public law and administration has ever been willing toentertain, popular as it has been among ecclesiastical historians.66It is very possible that these rescripts laid down no more deWniterules than those we Wnd in Trajan’s letter to Pliny or Hadrian’s toFundanus. A rescript of Marcus Aurelius ordered the penalty ofrelegation to an island to be applied to anyone who did anything toalarm the Wckle minds of men with dread of the supernatural;67 butthis is scarcely relevant for our purposes, especially as we never hearof any Christians suVering under this provision. The Sententiae Pauliinclude a rule of unknown date, threatening punishment to thosewho ‘introduce new sects or religious practices not founded on56.5; Brussels, 1964), 155–64 [pp. 138 V. in 1951 edn.]; contrast W. Schmid, ‘TheChristian reinterpretation of the Rescript of Hadrian’, Maia, vii (1955), pp. 5–13;CanWeld, op. cit. (n. 10 above), pp. 103–18; Wlosok, op. cit. (n. 18 above), p. 23 n. 29.The alleged letter of Antoninus Pius, in Euseb. Hist. Eccles. iv.13, is certainly Wctitious(contrast 26.10).64 Tert. Ad Nat. i.7. See J. W. Ph. BorleVs, ‘Institutum Neronianum’, Vig. Christ.vi(1952), pp. 129–45, esp. 141–4. Cf. Cic. In Pis. 30; Ad Att. iv.18.1; Brut. 269; Tac. Ann.xiv.43.1; Inst. J. i.2.10; Suet. Nero, 16.2.65 Lact. Div. Inst. v.11.19.66 Against the historicity of the statement in Scr. Hist. Aug., Sep. Sev. 17.1, thatSeverus forbade conversion to Christianity (‘Iudaeos Weri sub gravi poena vetuit.Idem etiam de Christianis sanxit’ [‘He prohibited conversion to Judaism with a heavypenalty, and he also decreed the same for Christianity’]), see the convincing argumentsof K. H. Schwarte, ‘Das angebliche Christengesetz des Sep. Sev.’, Historia, xii(1963), pp. 185–208.67 Dig. xlviii.19.30. Cf. Marcus Aurel. Med. i.6.

120 Persecution and Martyrdomrational grounds, so as to inXuence the minds of men’;68 but this tooseems to me of little importance for us. Nor does it seem at all likelythat a governor would wish to commit himself in his provincial edicton such a minor criminal matter as the prosecution of Christians.And if he was ever in serious doubt about the course he ought topursue, he could always consult the emperor.It is important to remember that the standard procedure in punishingChristians was ‘accusatory’ and not ‘inquisitorial’: a governorwould not normally take action until a formal denunciation (delationominis) was issued by a delator, a man who was prepared not merelyto inform but actually to conduct the prosecution in person, and totake the risk of being himself arraigned on a charge of calumnia,malicious prosecution, if he failed to make out a suYcient case.69Trajan, as we have seen, forbade the seeking out of Christians. Thisprinciple, however, could be and sometimes was disregarded. Thebest attested example comes from the savage persecution at Lyonsand Vienne in 177, when the governor did order a search to be madefor Christians70—and incidentally seems to have punished apostatesfor what Pliny had called the ‘Xagitia cohaerentia nomini’, the shockingcrimes of which Christians were supposed to be guilty, and whichhad been alleged against them in this case by their pagan slaves.71 It iswrong to say the governor here was acting ‘illegally’, because ofcourse he was not absolutely bound to follow Trajan’s rescript toPliny; but it looks as if the great majority of governors did follow it.On this occasion the governor actually condemned to the beasts, as afavour to the enraged populace, a Christian named Attalus, who wasa Roman citizen, although the emperor had just given speciWc instructionsto the governor that Christians who were Roman citizensshould be beheaded.72 He was exceeding his instructions, certainly;but he could plead political necessity, and there is no reason to thinkhe was taken to task by the emperor, who was Marcus Aurelius.68 Sent. Pauli, v.21.2.69 Cf. Euseb. Hist. Eccles. iv.9.3.70 Idem, v.1.14.71 Idem, 33, cf. 14.72 Idem, 50–52, cf. 44, 47 (where IðïôıìðÆíØóŁ~çíÆØ is explained byIðÝôåìíå ôaò ŒåöƺÜò [‘cut oV the heads’]); cf. Digest xlviii.19.31.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 121This raises another point: the attitude of the emperor. Christianpropaganda from at least the middle of the second century onwardstried to make out that it was only the ‘bad emperors’ who persecuted,and that the ‘good emperors’ protected the Christians;73 but there isno truth in this at all. We know, for example, of quite a number ofmartyrdoms under the Wrst two Antonines in widely separated partsof the empire, and even at Rome itself.74 In reality, persecution wenton automatically, if sporadically, whoever the emperor might be; anduntil the third century at any rate it is better not to think ofpersecutions primarily in terms of emperors. It was the provincialgovernor in each case who played the more signiWcant role—andeven his attitude might be less important than what I must call ‘publicopinion’. If the state of local feeling was such that no one particularlywanted to take upon himself the onus of prosecuting Christians, veryfew governors would have any desire to instigate a persecution. If, onthe other hand, public opinion was inXamed against the Christians (aswe shall see it often was, down to the middle of the third century),then delators would not be lacking, and Christians would be put ontrial; and few governors would have any motive for resisting stronglocal feeling demonstrated in this perfectly permissible way, especiallyif some of the more inXuential men in the area were leading theagitation, as they often would be. Imperial instructions (mandata)given to provincial governors bade them take care to rid their provincesof ‘bad men’ (mali homines);75 and Ulpian said it was characteristicof a good and serious-minded governor that he keep hisprovince ‘settled and orderly’ (‘pacata atque quieta’), adding that hewould have no diYculty in securing this end if he diligently saw to itthat the province was cleared of ‘mali homines’—and sought themout accordingly.76 The governor was advised by a Wrst-century jurist toconsider not so much what was the practice at Rome as what thecircumstances required;77 and the principle that in the exercise of73 The Wrst writer we know to have asserted this is Melito of Sardis: see Euseb. Hist.Eccles. iv.26.9. It soon became ‘common form’: see Tert. Apol. 5 etc.74 e.g. those of Polycarp, of the Christians of Lyons, of the Scillitans, and, at Rome,of Ptolemaeus and Lucius, of Justin and his companions, and of Apollonius—toname only a few of whom we possess reasonably reliable records.75 Paulus, in Dig. i.18.3; cf. Sent. Pauli, v.22.1.76 Dig. i.18.13. pr.77 Proculus, in Dig. i.18.12.

122 Persecution and Martyrdomhis criminal jurisdiction the governor should act according to thecircumstances existing in his particular province was wellrecognized.78 Probably the main reason why some martyrdoms—perhaps many martyrdoms—took place was that they were thoughtto be necessary if the province were to be kept ‘pacata atque quieta’.79Most governors were doubtless only too willing to take action againstmen who were strongly disapproved of by ‘all right-thinking people’,and who tended to become the centre of disturbances. Everyone willremember how Pilate yielded to the vociferous demands of the localnotables and their followers for the cruciWxion of Jesus.80 If a governor,indeed, refused to do what was expected of him in this way, notonly would he become unpopular: the general indignation against theChristians would be only too likely to vent itself in riots and lynching,as we have evidence that it did on occasion;81 and once violencebegan, anything might happen.Christians might also be suspect, as mali homines, in the eyes ofsome governors, because they worshipped a man who had admittedlybeen cruciWed by a governor of Judaea, as a political criminal,82 whothought of himself as ‘king of the Jews’.83 Their loyalty to the state,whatever they might say, could well appear doubtful, if only becausethey refused even to swear an oath by the emperor’s Genius.84 Theywere always talking about the imminent end of the world; and one oftheir books spoke with bitter hatred of Rome, thinly disguised underthe name of Babylon, and prophesied its utter ruin.85 And furthermorethe secrecy of their rites might well seem a cover for politicalconspiracy, or at any rate anti-social behaviour. A governor who hadsuch considerations in mind when trying Christians might evendecide to Wnd them guilty of maiestas (treason): this would account78 See e.g. Ulpian, in Dig. xlvii.11.9, 10 (cf. 14.1.pr.); Saturninus, in Dig.xlviii.19.16.9.79 A. Ronconi, ‘Tacito, Plinio e i Cristiani’, Studi in onore di U. E. Paoli (Florence,1956), pp. 615 V., at p. 628, gives great emphasis to the need to satisfy ‘publicopinion’ as a cause of persecution.80 Mark xv.1–15 and parallel passages; and esp. John xix.12, 15.81 See e.g. Euseb. Hist. Eccles. v. Praef. 1; 1.7; vi.41.1–9.82 See Minucius Felix, Octavius, 9.4.83 Mark xv.2, 9, 12, 26 (and parallel passages); Luke xxiii.2; John xix.12, 15.84 Cf. n. 31 above.85 Rev. xiv.8; xvi.19; xvii–xviii.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 123for various statements by Tertullian about Christians being accusedof that crime86—although I would not take these pieces of rhetoricvery seriously myself. In any event, the factors I have just beenmentioning would have less and less weight as time went on, and itbecame clear that Christians had no political objectives whatever andfew particularly anti-social habits.Sometimes a Christian who was in danger of being put on trialmight be able to escape altogether by bribing the intending delator orthe authorities. There is evidence that this was happening in Africa bythe early third century at the latest:87 not merely individuals but wholechurches had purchased immunity, to the disgust of Tertullian,88 whobelieved that during persecution Christians must stand their groundand neither take to Xight nor buy themselves oV. This rigorist attitudewas only partly shared by the churches of the West, and in the East itseems to have been generally repudiated: Xight or concealment duringpersecution was oYcially approved everywhere (except in so far asleading clergy might incur disapproval for deserting their Xocks); butin the West, though apparently not in the East, the purchase ofimmunity, at any rate in a form which might give the impression ofapostasy, was regarded as a sin, if not a particularly grave one.89 Ourevidence comes mainly from Africa, Spain and Rome during theDecian persecution, when certiWcates of compliance with the imperialorder to sacriWce to the gods were purchased wholesale by the lesssteadfast members of the Christian community.90Although we have not yet disposed of all the legal issues, we have atleast reached a point from which we can see that the last of my threequestions of a legal nature, ‘What was the legal foundation for thecharges against the Christians?’, has answered itself, because underthe cognitio process no foundation was necessary, other than a prosecutor,a charge of Christianity, and a governor willing to punish onthat charge. Theories that the Christian churches could be legallyregarded as collegia illicita, unlawful associations, either in the sense86 Tert. Apol. 10.1; 28.3 V., etc.87 Tert. De Fuga in Persec. 5.5; 12–14 (written c.212, during Tert.’s Montanistperiod).88 Idem, 13.5.89 See my op. cit. (n. 4 above), pp. 87–8 [Ch. 1 above, pp. 50–1].90 Ibid. n. 58.

124 Persecution and Martyrdomof being irremediably illegal (so that their members were at all timesliable to criminal punishment), or merely because they wereunlicensed (and liable to be prosecuted if they failed to obey anorder to disband), have been strongly attacked in recent years byspecialists in Roman public law;91 and in spite of some texts whichsuggest there may have been some technical irregularity,92 Iamconvinced that this issue can have had no real importance: wenever hear that any Christian was ever prosecuted as a member of acollegium illicitum.I want to deal at this point with a theory produced by Mr. Sherwin-White in the admirable article I mentioned earlier93 and repeated inhis Sarum Lectures.94 According to this theory, once Pliny haddiscovered that the Xagitia generally attributed to the Christiansdid not exist, the real foundation for condemning them was theircontumacia, their refusal to obey the reasonable order of a magistrate;and in the second and early third centuries this contumacia was ‘thecore of the oYcial objection’. Against this theory there are Wveseparate arguments:1. In every single case the very word required is stubbornly lacking.Pliny does not use the term contumacia at all: employing entirelyuntechnical language, he says he did not doubt ‘whatever sort ofthing it was they were confessing to, their pertinacity and inXexibleobstinacy ought to be punished’;95 and as far as I know the essential91 See esp. F. M. de Robertis, Il diritto associativo romano (Bari, 1938), pp. 289–91,366–86; G. Bovini, La proprietà eccles. e la condiz. giurid. della chiesa in età precostant.(Milan, 1949); Sherwin-White, op. cit. (n. 18 above), pp. 205–6. Contrast P. W. DuV,Personality in Roman Private Law (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 169–70: until its recognitionby Constantine ‘the Church must have appeared to the private law as a collectionof unauthorised and therefore illegal colleges’.92 Notably Origen, Contra Celsum, i.1 [trans. H. Chadwick, Origen, Contra Celsum(Cambridge, 1953)]; cf. Pliny, Epist. x.96.7 (with 33.3; 34.1); Tert. Apol. 38.1–2; 39(esp. §§ 20–1); De Ieiunio, 13. But for the third century see Scr. Hist. Aug., Sev. Alex.49.6; Euseb. Hist. Eccles. vii.13; 30.19.93 Op. cit. (n. 18 above), pp. 210–12. The essence of the theory (though withoutactual endorsement of the view that the crime was called ‘contumacia’) seems to havebeen accepted by H. Last, Reallex. für Antike und Christentum, ii (Stuttgart, 1954), col.1208 V. (see col. 1213).94 Op. cit. (n. 40 above), pp. 4, 18, cf. pp. 19–20, 72–3.95 Epist. x.96.3: ‘pertinaciam ...etinXexibilem obstinationem’.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 125word never appears in any authentic account of a martyrdom or anyother reliable ancient source dealing with the persecutions.96 Thisalone is enough to put the theory out of court in so far as it dependson attaching a technical meaning to contumacia.2. Pliny’s victims, Mr. Sherwin-White says, had refused to complywith ‘a reasonable order. . . . the test requiring homage to thedi nostri . . . The test was reasonable, and its refusal revealedcontumacia’.97 In fact Pliny never says he had asked any self-confessedChristians to sacriWce: he makes it quite clear that he had imposedthis act only upon those who denied that they were Christians, as atest of their sincerity.98 This destroys the whole foundation of thetheory, an essential presupposition of which is that the Christianswere ordered to sacriWce and contumaciously refused.3. It is true that in many later trials of Christians the accused areactually ordered to sacriWce or to do some other act which theirreligion did not allow them to perform. But even here contumaciacould not make its appearance until after the trial had begun. Andwould it not be absurd to accept as the legal ground of a prosecutionan element which could not even arise until after proceedings hadbegun and the accused was being questioned?4. The theory we are considering would make contumacia theessential element, quite gratuitously, in every persistent crime—asof course it is, in a sense; but would it not be perverse to pick out themere persistence and hold it up as the essential part of the crime?Only in so far as the act or default originally complained of is itselfcriminal can the mere persistence in it be a crime. The essentialelement in the condemnation of Christians is the illegality of Christianity,not the mere behaviour in court of the accused, which, as we96 The other examples given by Sherwin-White, op. cit. (n. 18 above), pp. 210–12,show nothing more than what he himself calls ‘the remarkable reluctance ofRoman oYcials to condemn Christians’. For the further assertion, ‘They are onlycondemned when their contumacia has been proved’ (p. 211), there is no evidenceat all.97 Op. cit. (n. 18 above), p. 210. The same mistake has been made by other writers,even A. D. Nock, in his mainly admirable article. ‘The Roman Army and the RomanReligious Year’, HTR 45 (1952), 187–251, at 218.98 Pliny, Epist. x.96.5, cf. 3. Sherwin-White himself admits elsewhere (p. 205) thatPliny did not require ‘the Wrst batch’ of Christians to sacriWce to di nostri!

126 Persecution and Martyrdomhave seen, is the only point at which contumacia could conceivablycome in. We want to know why the government wanted Christians tobe brought to trial. The contumacia theory distracts attention fromthis main issue.5. Close examination of three legal texts to which Mr. Sherwin-White appeals in defence of his theory99 and of the dozens of othersin which contumacia (and the corresponding adjective and adverb)are used does not at all support his interpretation; but this question istoo technical to be discussed in the body of this article.100Nor can I accept Mr. Sherwin-White’s statement that ‘the RomanoYcial is indiVerent to the religious aspects in the known cases,provided that the Christian sheds his contumacia’.101 This is to ignorea signiWcant part of Pliny’s letter: ‘It is clear that the temples, recentlyalmost deserted, are beginning to be frequented again, and that thesacred rites, long neglected, are being renewed; also that the Xesh ofthe sacriWcial animals, which has been Wnding very few purchasers, is99 In the Wrst, Dig. xlviii.19.4, contumacia merely increases penalties alreadyincurred (cf. Trajan, in Pliny, Epist. x.57.2). The second, Dig. xlviii.19.5, deals withthe condemnation of accused in their absence: here the contumacia consists in notappearing at the trial, and may involve sentence in absentia. In the third example, thecases described in Coll. xv.2.2, no one doubted that professio of the magic arts wasalready illegal: all Ulpian says is that the Magi, ‘per contumaciam et temeritatem’,went from private scientia, which on some earlier views (see loc. cit., init.) was notforbidden, to public professio. Ulpian does not make the contumacia a ground for thesubsequent suppression, as Mr. Sherwin-White represents him as doing when hewrites (p. 211), ‘This, says Ulpian, was contumacia. Hence most emperors imposed atotal ban’—Ulpian mentions the contumacia et temeritas incidentally.100 The words ‘contumacia, contumax, contumaciter’ occur very frequently in thelegal sources—over 40 times in the Digest alone. They are often used quite untechnically(as of the behaviour of children to their parents: Cod. Just. viii.46.3; 49.1), andas a rule they simply indicate an attitude of mind, rather than any speciWc act: in atleast 13 of the texts in the Dig. the expression used is ‘per contumaciam’ and merelysigniWes that the person concerned is acting deliberately, wilfully, deWantly (it will besuYcient to cite Dig. l.1.13), and thereby in many cases incurring an added penalty(see e.g. Dig. xlviii.19.4). The only texts I have been able to Wnd which use contumaciaand its cognates in anything approaching a technical sense are those referring to menwho deliberately refuse to comply with a summons to appear (or produce documents),whether in criminal or in civil trials: e.g. Dig. xlii.1.53.pr., 1, 2, 3; 1.54; Cod.Just. iii.1.13.2b, 2c, 3, 4, 7 (dealing with civil cases only); vii.43.4, 7, 8, 9 etc.; Cod.Theod. ii.18.2; x.13.1; xi.31.5. This gave rise to what has been called in modern times a‘Contumacialverfahren’: see Mommsen, Römisches Strafrecht, 335–6; T. Kipp inPauly-Wissowa, RE iv, cols. 1166–70 (contumacia).101 Op. cit. (n. 18 above), p. 211.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 127on sale everywhere’.102 In view of this it can hardly be denied thatPliny was genuinely concerned—whether for what we should callreligious reasons or not!—about the decline of the traditionalreligion in his province, and regarded its revival as a justiWcation ofhis policy of repression, tempered by mercy to apostates.On the faceof Pliny’s letter the ‘obstinacy’ of the Christians consistedmerely in their threefold confession of Christianity, in face of awarning(after the Wrst confession) that they would be punished for it. Furtherlight is shed upon this ‘obstinacy’ by some of the Passions of themartyrs, many of whom either repeat the standard formula, ‘Christianussum’, in reply to all questions, or make legally irrelevant replies.If you will give me a quiet hearing, I will tell you the mystery of simplicity...Idonotrecognizethe empire of this world, but rather I serve that Godwhom no man sees or can see with these eyes. I have committed no theft; butif I buy anything, I pay the tax, because I recognize my Lord, the King ofkings and Emperor of all peoples . . . It is evil to advocate murder or thebearing of false witness.These are the answers given to the proconsul of Africa by Speratusthe Scillitan103—edifying, no doubt, but irritating to a judge andcertainly giving an impression of other-worldly ‘pertinacity andinXexible obstinacy’.My next point concerns what I call ‘the sacriWce test’, used by Pliny inorder to give those who denied being Christians a chance to provetheir sincerity.104 The earliest example we have of the use of such atest in the Roman world, as far as I know, is at Antioch early in theyear 67, when it was used during a pogrom by the Greeks of that city,to distinguish between Jews and non-Jews.105 The character of thesacriWce test changed when judicial torture, which until the secondcentury had been used (except in very special circumstances) only onslaves, came to be regularly applied to all those members of the lowerclasses (the vast majority of the population of the empire) whobecame involved in criminal trials, whether they were Roman citizens102 Epist. x.96.9–10.103 Passio SS. Scillitan. 4, 6, 7. Cf. Euseb. Hist. Eccles. v.1.20; Passio Conon. iv.2; etc.104 Pliny, Epist. x.96.5.105 Josephus, Bell. Jud. vii.3.3, §§ 50–1. For the date, see § 46.

128 Persecution and Martyrdomor not.106 Once judicial torture had become a standard practice, thesacriWce test naturally tended to lose its original character as aprivilege, and to become something which was enforced, usuallywith the aid of torture. But the essential aim was to make apostates,not martyrs. One could say without exaggeration that a governorwho really wanted to execute Christians would be careful to avoidtorturing them, lest they should apostatize and go free. For there isno doubt that with few exceptions an accused who was prepared toperform the prescribed cult acts was immediately released withoutpunishment. Tertullian, of course, in his barrister’s way, makes muchof this as evidence that the authorities did not really regard theChristians as criminals at all. ‘Others, who plead not guilty’, hecries, ‘you torture to make them confess, the Christians alone tomake them deny.’107 This was perfectly true, and it must surely countas a lonely anomaly in the Roman legal system. The explanation isthat the only punishable oVence was being a Christian, up to the verymoment sentence was pronounced, not having been one. I certainlyknow of no parallel to this in Roman criminal law. Tertullian ridiculesthe situation. What is the use of a forced and insincere denial,he asks scornfully. What is to prevent a Christian who has given sucha denial and been acquitted from ‘laughing at your eVorts, aChristian once more?’108I need not spend much time on the question of the supposedabominations (Xagitia) with which the Christians were charged—¨ıÝóôåØÆ äå~ØðíÆ ŒÆd ˇNäØðüäåØïØ ìßîåØò [‘Thyestian banquets andOedipodean intercourse’], as they are called,109 meaning of coursecannibalism and incest. It is hard to say how seriously these chargeswere taken by the government. The Christian Apologists of the106 The practice seems to have been well established by the reign of Marcus Aurelius(161–80): see the references in my op. cit. (n. 4 above), p. 80 n. 29 [Ch. 1, p. 41].107 Tert. Apol. 2 (esp. § 10); cf. Ad Scap. 4.2; Cyprian, Ad Demetrian. 13; Min. Fel.Octav. 28.3–5.108 Tert. Apol. 2.17.109 Euseb. Hist. Eccles. v.1.14; Athenag. Legat. 3, 31; cf. Euseb. H.E. iv.7.11; v.1.26;ix.5.2; Justin, I Apol. 26; II Apol. 12; Dial. c. Tryph. 10; Tert. Apol. 6.11–7.2 etc.; Min. Fel.Octav. 8–9, 28, 30–1; Orig. c. Cels. vi.27, 40. [For discussion of Christian apologeticliterature, see the collection edited by M. Edwards, M. Goodman, and S. Price,Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, Christians (Oxford, 1999), esp. S.Price, ‘Latin Christian Apologetics: Minucius Felix, Tertullian, and Cyprian’, 105–29.]

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 129second and early third centuries devote a good deal of attention torebutting such accusations, which were evidently believed by thepopulace in both the eastern and the western parts of the empire.After the Wrst half of the third century, however, they seem to havedied out, although we know from Eusebius that a Roman militarycommander in Syria in 312, under the bitterly anti-Christianemperor Maximin, did try to fake charges of immoral behaviouragainst the Christians of Damascus, in order to inXame publicopinion against them.110 The behaviour of the ordinary pagan duringthe Great Persecution suggests that he no longer believed suchslanders. Moreover, even for the early period, when these accusationswere generally credited, one may feel that a more fundamentalinterpretation is necessary. As Macaulay said over a hundred yearsago, ‘There never was a religious persecution in which some odiouscrime was not, justly or unjustly, said to be obviously deducible fromthe doctrines of the persecuted party.’111 The reproaches of Xagitiaseem to have been essentially appendages of some more realcomplaint. Unfortunately, these charges were given some colour bythe fact that orthodox Christians and heretics tended to Xing them ateach other, a fact upon which Gibbon severely remarks, ‘A paganmagistrate . . . might easily have imagined that their mutual animosityhad extorted the discovery of their common guilt.’112Before I come to the Wnal stage of this investigation, I want to take abrief glance at a long series of events which may have given pagansrather more ground for their active antagonism to Christianity thanwe tend to suppose: I refer to what I have called ‘voluntary martyrdom’.113Examination of it will require us to look at persecution, foronce, mainly from the receiving end.110 Euseb. Hist. Eccles. ix.5.2. [For analysis of the context, see S. Mitchell, ‘Maximinusand the Christians in AD 312: A New Latin Inscription’, JRS 78 (1988), 105–24.]111 See H. Last, Jl. of Rom. Stud. xxvii (1937), p. 89 n. 63.112 E. Gibbon, Decl. and Fall of the Rom. Emp. (ed. J. B. Bury), ii, ch. xvi, pp. 80–1.For examples, see Justin, I Apol. 26; Iren. Adv. Haeres. i.6.3–4; 24.5; 25.3–5 (and seeEuseb. Hist. Eccles. iv.7.9–11); Clem. Alex. Strom. iii, esp. 2, 4, 5; Tert. De Ieiun. 17;Philaster, De Heres. 29 (57), ed. F. Marx.113 For some remarks on this phenomenon, see my op. cit.[Ch.1,pp.45,56,65–7]Ishallgive the very considerable body of evidence for voluntary martyrdom in my forthcomingbook (see n. 1 above). [For Ste. Croix’s collection of the evidence, see Ch. 4 below.]

130 Persecution and MartyrdomIt is a signiWcant fact, as yet not generally appreciated, that a verylarge number of sources (Passions as well as literary texts) showintrepid Christians going far beyond what their churches oYciallyrequired of them, often indeed oVering themselves up to the authoritiesof their own accord, and occasionally acting in a provocativemanner, smashing images and so forth. After making a detailed studyof the evidence for these ‘voluntary martyrs’, I would claim that thepart they played in the history of the persecutions was much moreimportant than has yet been realized. It seems to me impossible todoubt that the prevalence of voluntary martyrdom was a factorwhich, for obvious reasons, both contributed to the outbreak ofpersecution and tended to intensify it when already in being.Contrary to what is usually said, voluntary martyrdom was by nomeans conWned mainly to heretical or schismatic sects such asMontanists and Donatists, but was a good deal more commonamong the orthodox than is generally admitted. The heads of thechurches, sensibly enough, forbade voluntary martyrdom again andagain, and were inclined to refuse to these zealots the very name ofmartyr—passages to this eVect could be cited from a dozen diVerentsources, including Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Lactantius, atleast three bishops (Cyprian and Mensurius of Carthage and Peter ofAlexandria), the Passion of Polycarp, and the Canons of the Councilof Elvira.114 Nevertheless, we do hear of an astonishingly largenumber of volunteers, most of whom, whatever the bishops mightsay, were given full honour as martyrs, the general body of thefaithful apparently regarding them with great respect.One of the most fascinating of the Passions of the Great Persecutionis that of Euplus, who suVered at Catana in Sicily. It beginsIn the consulship of our lords Diocletian (for the ninth time) and Maximian(for the eighth time) [that is, in 304] on the 29th of April, in the mostfamous city of Catana, in the court room, in front of the curtain, Euplusshouted out, ‘I wish to die, for I am a Christian.’ His excellency Calvisianusthe corrector said, ‘Come in, whoever shouted.’ And the Blessed Euplusentered the court room, bearing the immaculate Gospels—and he achieved the end he had sought.115114 For some of these references, see my op. cit., p. 83 n. 40 [Ch. 1, p. 45].115 Passio Eupli, 1.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 131In the next year, 305, while a festival was being celebrated atCaesarea in Palestine, a false rumour began to spread that certainChristians would be given to the beasts as part of the joyful celebrations.While the governor was on his way to the amphitheatre, sixyoung men suddenly presented themselves before him with theirhands bound behind them, crying out that they were Christiansand demanding to be thrown to the beasts with their brethren. Wecan well believe Eusebius when he adds that the governor and hisentire suite were reduced to a condition of no ordinary amazement.The young men were arrested and imprisoned, but instead of givingthem to the beasts as they had demanded, the merciless pagancondemned them to a speedy death by decapitation.116These are but two of a large number of similar examples. Sometimesthe fact that certain martyrs were volunteers, and were notsought out by the authorities, may alter our whole picture of apersecution. For example, the many Christians Eusebius says hehimself saw condemned to death in a single day in the Thebaid inUpper Egypt during the Great Persecution are described by him interms which show that they were volunteers, who, after sentence hadbeen pronounced upon one of their brethren, ‘leapt up before thejudgment seat from this side and from that, confessing themselves tobe Christians’.117 The seeking out of Christians in this area, therefore,need not have been nearly as vigorous as we might otherwise haveassumed from the evidently large number of victims.Now voluntary martyrdom was not just a late phenomenon, whichappeared only in the general persecutions: we have examples fromthe second century too—indeed, from the very earliest period atwhich we have any detailed records of martyrdoms at all: that is tosay, from the 150s onwards, including one on quite a large scale fromabout the year 185, recorded in Tertullian’s Ad Scapulam. WhenArrius Antoninus, proconsul of Asia, was holding his periodic assizein one of the towns of his province, a whole crowd of Christianspresented themselves in a body before him, demanding the privilegeof martyrdom—all the Christians of that town, says Tertullian,but we must allow for his customary exaggeration. The astonished116 Euseb. Mart. Pal. 3.2–4 (in both Recensions).117 Euseb. Hist. Eccles. viii.9.5.

132 Persecution and Martyrdomproconsul ordered a few oV to execution, but contemptuouslydismissed the remainder, saying to them, ‘If you want to die, youwretches, you can use ropes or precipices’.118The positive evidence for voluntary martyrdom begins in theAntonine period, about 150. Conceivably, I suppose, it could havebeen a Montanist practice in origin. But I should like to suggest, withall the reserve necessitated by lack of direct evidence, that in fact it islikely to have begun much earlier, and that the reason why we do nothear of it before the middle of the second century is simply that wehave too little speciWc evidence of any sort about persecution ormartyrdom before that time. Here the Jewish background of Christianity,above all the Jewish martyr-literature, is a very materialfactor. As far back as the Maccabaean period, as Professor Baronhas put it, there was born ‘that great exaltation of religious martyrdomwhich was to dominate the minds of Jews and Christians forcountless generations’.119 We have examples of voluntary martyrdomon the part of Jews even before the Christian era, notably the incidentin 4 b.c., described by Josephus, when two pious rabbis instigatedtheir followers to cut down the golden eagle set up by Herod over thegreat gate of the Temple: about forty men were executed, the rabbisand the actual perpetrators of the deed being burnt alive.120 Now thetwo most fervent works of Jewish martyr-literature, the Second andFourth Books of Maccabees, with their unrestrained sensationalismand gruesome descriptions of tortures, both formed part of theSeptuagint, and must therefore have been well known to the earlyChurch. And indeed a detailed linguistic study by Dr. Perler hasshown it to be very likely that IV Maccabees exerted an importantinXuence on the thought and writings of Ignatius,121 whose martyrdommust have taken place during the Wrst quarter of the secondcentury. Although there is no evidence of any value that Ignatiushimself was actually a voluntary martyr,122 we may, I think, see him118 Tert. Ad Scap. 5.1, quoting the proconsul’s words in the original Greek.119 S. W. Baron, A Social and Relig. Hist. of the Jews, 2nd edn. (New York, 1952), i,p. 230. [For further discussion of Jewish precedents, see Ch. 4 below, pp. 193–8.]120 Jos. Bell. Jud. i.33.2–4, § § 648–55 (cf. ii.1.2–3); Ant. Jud. xvii.6.2–4, § § 149–67.121 O. Perler, ‘Das vierte Makkabäerbuch, Ignat. v. Antiochien u. die ältestenMartyrerberichte’, Riv. di archeol. crist. xxv (1949), pp. 47–72.122 John Malalas (Chronogr. xi, p. 276, ed. W. Dindorf [11.10, ed. Theil]) speaks ofTrajan as ‘exasperated against Ignatius because he reviled him’, and the ‘Antiochene

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 133as the precursor of the whole series; for in his letter to the Church ofRome, written while he was being taken from Antioch to the capitalfor execution, he displays what has often been called a pathologicalyearning for martyrdom. He describes himself as ‘lusting for death’(Kæ &øí ôï &ı IðïŁÆíå&Øí),123 and he admonishes the Roman Christiansnot to try to do anything to save him. The eager way in which hespeaks of the tortures confronting him—‘Come Wre and cross andencounters with beasts, incisions and dissections, wrenching ofbones, hacking of limbs, crushing of the whole body’124—shows anabnormal mentality. It is diYcult to believe that Ignatius was anisolated case, even in his own day. If even a few Christians of the lateWrst and early second centuries had a similar craving for martyrdom(as so many others certainly did later), and gave practical expressionto it, especially if they did so by insulting pagan cults, it would beeven easier to understand how persecution quickly became endemicin many parts of the Roman world.We are in a position at last to attempt to answer the questionconfronting us, which, it will be remembered, is twofold: ‘Why didthe government persecute?’, and ‘Why did the mass of pagans oftendemand and initiate persecution?’ I propose to take the secondquestion Wrst.The answer is clear: it is given to us over and over again in thesources. It was not so much the positive beliefs and practices of theChristians which aroused pagan hostility, but above all the negativeelement in their religion: their total refusal to worship any god buttheir own. The monotheistic exclusiveness of the Christians wasbelieved to alienate the goodwill of the gods, to endanger what theRomans called the pax deorum (the right harmonious relationshipbetween gods and men),125 and to be responsible for disastersActs’ of Ignat. (§ 2) say he was ›Œïıóßøò Xªåôï [‘was willingly led’] to Trajan atAntioch. But this hardly makes Ignat. a volunteer, and is entirely unreliable anyway:cf. The Apostolic Fathers, ed. J. B. Lightfoot, 2nd edn. (London, 1889), ii. 2, pp. 363 V.,383–91, 436 V., 480–1 V., 575–6.123 Ignat. Epist. ad Rom. 7.2.124 Ibid. 4.1–2; 5.2–3.125 This subject has been discussed in innumerable works, of which I will mentionhere only W. Warde Fowler, The Relig. Experience of the Rom. People (London, 1911),pp. 169 V., 272 V.

134 Persecution and Martyrdomwhich overtook the community. I shall call this exclusiveness, forconvenience, by the name the Greeks gave to it, ‘atheism’(IŁåüôçò);126 characteristically, the Latin writers refer to the samephenomenon by more concrete expressions having no philosophicalovertones, such as ‘deos non colere’ (not paying cult to the gods): theword atheus Wrst appears in Latin in Christian writers of the earlyfourth century, Arnobius and Lactantius.127Whatever view we may hold about the mentality of educated,upper-class intellectuals, we must admit that the great mass of thepopulation of the Roman Empire, in both East and West, were atleast what we should call deeply superstitious; and I see not the leastreason why we should deny them genuine religious feeling, providedwe remember the essential diVerences between their kind of religionand that with which we are familiar. By far the most important ofthese was that pagan religion was a matter of performing cult actsrather than of belief, or ethics. No positive and publicly enforceableobligation, however, rested upon any private individual, whether aRoman citizen or not, or upon a common soldier,128 to participate inany particular acts of cult,129 although magistrates and senators ofRome itself,130 and magistrates (and perhaps senators) of individual126 See A. Harnack, Der Vorwurf des Atheismus in den drei ersten Jahrh. (Texte u.Untersuch. xxviii [N.F. xiii].4, 1905). Among the texts are Epist. ad Diogn. 2.6; PassioPolyc. iii.2; ix.2; cf. xii.2 (Euseb. Hist. Eccles. iv.15.6, 18–19, cf. 26); Euseb. H.E. v.1.9;Justin, I Apol. 5–6, 13; Athenag. Legat. 3, 4–30; Clem. Alex. Strom. vii.1.1.1; Tert. Apol.6.10 (note ‘in quo principaliter reos transgressionis Christianos destinatis’ [‘forwhich in particular you have identified Christians as guilty of wrong-doing’]);10.1–28.2 (esp. 24.1, 9); Arnob. Adv. Gentes, i.29; iii.28; v.30; vi.27.127 Arnob., as cited in the preceding note, each time referring to pagan chargesagainst Christians. Lact. (Epit. 63.2; De Ira, 9.7) uses the word of pagan philosophersonly. Cicero (De Nat. Deor. i.63) has the Greek word ¼Łåïò (applied to Diagoras), andMin. Fel. (Octav. 8.2) transliterates (acc. ‘atheon’).128 See Tert. De Idolol. 19: for a man serving in a ‘[militia] caligata vel inferiorquaeque’ [‘military position or some lesser one’] there is no ‘necessitas immolationum’[‘necessity to sacriWce’].129 See, brieXy, Mommsen, Röm. Strafr. p. 568, and on the whole subject Nock, op.cit. (n. 97 above), esp. pp. 189–92, 212–13.130 For Roman senators, see e.g. S.C. ap. Edict. Augusti ad Cyren. 135–6 (S.Riccobono, Fontes Iuris Rom. Anteiustin. i, 2nd edn. (Florence, 1941), no. 68); Suet.Div. Aug. 35.3. If Euseb. Hist. Eccles. viii.1.2, is to be believed, some Christian oYcials inthe provinces in the late 3rd century will have been given an imperial dispensation fromreligious duties. (These men to whom the emperors entrusted ôaò ô &øí KŁí &øíªåìïíßÆò[‘the rule of nations’] will hardly have been provincial governors: cf. H.E. viii.9.7; 11.2.)

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 135Greek and Roman towns,131 might be legally obliged to do so; and ofcourse great social pressure might be brought to bear upon individualswho refused (on adopting Christianity or Judaism, for instance)to take part in family or other observances. No compulsion wasnecessary, because until the advent of Christianity no one ever hadany reason for refusing to take part in the ceremonies which othersobserved—except of course the Jews, and they were a special case, aunique exception. Much as the Jews were detested by the bulk of theRoman governing class, as well as by many humbler Romans andGreeks, it was admitted (by the educated, at any rate) that theirreligious rites were ancestral, and very ancient. All men were expectedpiously to preserve the religious customs of their ancestors. And soeven Tacitus, who strongly disliked Judaism, could say that thereligious rites of the Jews ‘have the recommendation of beingancient’.132 The gods would forgive the inexplicable monotheism ofthe Jews, who were, so to speak, licensed atheists.133 The Jews ofcourse would not sacriWce to the emperor or his gods, but they werequite willing, while the Temple still stood, to sacriWce to their owngod for the well-being of the emperor; and Augustus, if we maybelieve Philo,134 by a happy compromise not only accepted this buthimself paid for the sacriWces. Matters were very diVerent with theChristians, who had ex hypothesi abandoned their ancestral religions.Gibbon expressed the contrast perfectly when he wrote, ‘The Jewswere a people which followed, the Christians a sect which deserted,the religion of their fathers.’135The Christians asserted openly either that the pagan gods did notexist at all or that they were malevolent demons. Not only did they131 If only to take oaths when required: see e.g. the Lex Municipalis Salpensana,xxvi (Riccobono, F.I.R.A., i2, no. 23). The Severi gave Jews holding municipal honoresexemption from religious acts oVensive to them: Dig. l.2.3.3.132 Tac. Hist. v.5: ‘antiquitate defenduntur’. Cf. Orig. c. Cels. v.25 V. And the factthat Jewish cult was aniconic seems to have appealed to some Romans, e.g. Varro(August. De Civ. Dei, iv.31).133 For pagans calling Jews ‘atheists’, see J. Juster, Les Juifs dans l’Emp. rom. (Paris,1914), i, p. 45 n. 1, § 2.134 Philo, Leg. ad Gai. 157, 317. Contrast Jos. c. Ap. ii.6, § 77 (and cf. B.J. ii.10.4, §197). For an attempt to explain the contradiction between Philo and Jos., see E. M.Smallwood’s edn. of the Leg. ad Gai. (Leiden, 1961), pp. 240–1.135 Gibbon, op. cit. (n. 112 above), ii, ch. xvi, p. 74 (marginal summary).

136 Persecution and Martyrdomthemselves refuse to take part in pagan religious rites: they would noteven recognize that others ought to do so. As a result, because a largepart of Greek religion and the whole of the Roman state religion wasvery much a community aVair, the mass of pagans were naturallyapprehensive that the gods would vent their wrath at this dishonournot upon the Christians alone but upon the whole community; andwhen disasters did occur, they were only too likely to fasten the blameon to the Christians. That the Christians were indeed hated forprecisely this reason above all others appears from many passagesin the sources, from the mid-second century right down to the Wfth.Tertullian sums it all up in a brilliant and famous sentence in theApologeticus: the pagans, he says, ‘suppose that the Christians are thecause of every public disaster, every misfortune that happens to thepeople. If the Tiber overXows or the Nile doesn’t, if there is a droughtor an earthquake, a famine or a pestilence, at once the cry goes up,‘‘The Christians to the lion.’’’136The essential point I want to make is that this superstitious feelingon the part of the pagans was due above all to the Christians’‘atheism’, their refusal to acknowledge the gods and give them theirdue by paying them cult. The Christian Apologists have much to sayin reply to this charge137—and, by the way, they are addressingthemselves to the educated class, sometimes in theory to theemperors themselves. The earliest surviving Apologists are of themid-second century, but there is no reason to think the situationwas diVerent earlier.We must not confuse the kind of atheism charged against theChristians with philosophical scepticism. Tertullian pretends to bevery indignant because philosophers are permitted openly to attackpagan superstitions, while Christians are not. ‘They openly demolishyour gods and also attack your superstitions in their writings, andyou applaud them for it’, he exclaims.138 The vital diVerence was, of136 Tert. Apol. 40.1–2 (with 37.2); cf. Ad. Nat. i.9; also Firmilian, ap. Cypr.Epist.lxxv.10; Cypr. Ad Demetrian. esp. 2–5; Arnob. Adv. Nat. i.1 V. (esp. 13, 16, 26) andpassim; August. De Civ. Dei, ii.3 (proverb: ‘No rain, because of the Christians’) etc.;Orig. c. Cels. iii.15; Comm. ser. in Matt. 39; Maximin Daia, in Euseb. Hist. Eccles.ix.7.3–14 (esp. 8–9); 8.3.137 See n. 126 above.138 Tert. Apol. 46.4.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 137course, that the philosophers, whatever they might believe, and evenwrite down for circulation among educated folk, would have beenperfectly willing to perform any cult act required of them—and thatwas what mattered.That the religious misbehaviour of certain individuals should bethought of by pagans as likely to bring unselective divine punishmentmay seem less strange to us when we remember that similar views wereheld by Jews and Christians. Orthodox Christians felt towards hereticsmuch as pagans felt towards them. The martyred bishop Polycarp, who(it was said) had actually known the Apostles personally, used to tellhow the Apostle John, entering the baths at Ephesus, rushed out againwhen he saw the heresiarch Cerinthus inside, crying, ‘Away, lest thevery baths collapse, for within is Cerinthus the enemy of the truth.’139About the middle of the third century, however, the attitude of thegeneral run of pagans towards the Christians begins to undergo adistinct change. Whereas until then the initiative in persecutionseems to have come from below, from 250 onwards persecutioncomes from above, from the government, and is initiated by imperialedict, with little or no sign of persecuting zeal among the mass ofpagans. The beginning of the change seems to me to come with theDecian persecution. The last two recorded major outbreaks of popularfury against the Christians which I know of were those in Cappadociaand Pontus in 235140 and at Alexandria in 249.141 The change has gonequite far by the time of the Great Persecution, when the majority ofpagans (except in a few places, like Gaza)142 seem to be at leastindiVerent, some even sympathetic to the Christians,143 and fewprovincial governors display any enthusiasm for the task. ‘Thegovernment had outrun pagan animosity.’144 The reason for thechange, I take it, is that Christianity had by now spread widely and139 Iren. Adv. Haeres. (ed. W. W. Harvey), iii.3.4; Euseb. Hist. Eccles. iii.28.6; iv.14.6.The same mentality can be found among the Christian emperors: see e.g. Constantine’sletter to AelaWus, of 313–14 (Optatus, Append. iii, f. 30b [trans. Edwards, Optatus]);Cod. Theod. xvi.5.40.1 (a.d. 407); Nov. Theod. iii. pr., and above all 8 (a.d. 438).140 Firmilian, as cited in n. 136 above.141 Dionys. Alex. ap. Euseb. Hist. Eccles. vi.41.1–9. The cause of this outbreak is notgiven.142 See Euseb. Mart. Pal. 3.1 (Long Recension).143 See esp. Athanasius, Hist. Arian. 64.144 Baynes, ‘Great Persecution’, 677.

138 Persecution and Martyrdomlost its secretive character, and pagans had come to realize that Christianswere not so diVerent from themselves, and just as religious.I have ignored minor reasons for popular dislike of the Christians;but no doubt some people might feel a grudge against them onsimple economic grounds: we may remember how these are said tohave been responsible for arousing opposition to apostolic preachingat Philippi and Ephesus.145Finally, we can try to analyse the attitude of the government. Foronce it is of little avail to ransack earlier Roman history for precedents,in the hope of discovering the principles on which Rometreated foreign religions,146 because the great problem posed byChristianity, its exclusiveness, was something Rome had neverencountered before—except under very diVerent conditions, in theJewish national religion.147I do not myself believe that there is a single solution to ourproblem. I believe that diVerent members of the governing classmay have been actuated by diVerent motives, and I think that eachone of us must decide for himself how much weight he would attachto each. I have already mentioned some minor factors, which may insome cases have played an important and even a decisive part: theneed to pacify public opinion; and suspicion of the Christians as aconspiratorial body, or at least as undesirables, mali homines. But formy own part I believe that the main motives of the government, inthe long run, were essentially religious in character, according to theancient conception of religion. These religious motives appear in tworather diVerent forms, which some people might prefer to call145 Act. Apost. xvi.16–24; xix.23–41. (For the trade in images, see Philostr. VitaApollon. v.20.) See also Tert. Apol. 42–3. And cf. Pliny, Epist. x.96.10—perhaps in acase such as this the butchers might be aggrieved!146 The article by H. Last, ‘The Study of the Persecutions’, JRS 27 (1937), pp. 80–92,is nevertheless useful for its detailed examination of earlier acts of interference inreligious matters by the Romans.147 It was perhaps a failure to realize the importance of this factor that led Nock,op. cit. (n. 97 above), p. 217, to make a generalization about the policy of the Romangovernment in religious matters which seems to me mistaken in regard to Christianity:‘To sum up, the state interfered not because the Roman gods were failing to gettheir due but because particular practices or groups were held to be unsuitable orsubversive or demoralizing. That is in substance true of oYcial action against theChristians prior to Decius.’

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 139‘superstitious’ and ‘political’ respectively, thereby avoiding the term‘religious’ altogether. Some of the governing class, in the third centuryat any rate (and I believe from the Wrst), were undoubtedly inspired bythe very motives I have described as characteristic of their subjects.Among the persecuting emperors, we must certainly place Galerius inthis category (on the contemporary evidence of Lactantius),148 andalso Diocletian, who seems to have been a thoroughly religiousman.149 About Decius and Valerian I would reserve my opinion. It istrue that after the Severan period we Wnd many soldier-emperors oflittle or no education, whom we might suspect of the grosser forms ofsuperstition; and of course among the higher oYcials such as provincialgovernors there will have been a greater proportion of uneducatedmen. But, as it happens, Decius cannot be called a man of that sort,and conspicuously not Valerian. I would concede that even in the thirdcentury, and to a far greater extent in the second, especially the earlysecond, there may have been a signiWcant number of members of thegoverning class who did not share the superstitious horror feltfor the Christians by the masses. But even such people, I believe,were impelled to persecute—perhaps as vigorously as their lessemancipated brethren—by motives I think we are justiWed in callingreligious,150 in that their aim also was always primarily to break downthe Christian refusal to worship the pagan gods, even if the basis fromwhich they proceeded was diVerent.I want to stress two vital pieces of evidence which I do not see howwe can explain away. First, there is the fact that except to a limitedextent in the time of Valerian, and more seriously under Diocletian,what I have called the positive side of Christianity is never oYciallyattacked: persecution did not extend to any aspect of the Christianreligion other than its refusal to acknowledge other gods. No attempt148 Lact. De Mort. Persec.9V., esp. 10.6; 11.1–4, 8. Galerius seems to have been thechief instigator of the Great Persecution: see my op. cit. [Ch. 1, pp. 70–2 above].149 See e.g. Euseb. Vita Const. ii.51 [trans. with commentary, Averil Cameron andS. G. Hall (Oxford, 1999)], and note the tone of parts of Diocletian’s copiouslegislation, esp. the long edict concerning marriage (Mos. et Rom. Leg. Coll. vi.4,esp. §§ 1, 2, 6), or that against the Manichees (Idem, xv.3, esp. § 3), or even theopening of the edict on prices (see Econ. Survey of Anc. Rome, ed. T. Frank (Baltimore,1940), v, p. 311). See also Lact. M.P. 11.6.150 In general, I warmly agree with the views expressed by J. Vogt, Zur Religiositätder Christenverfolger im Röm. Reich (Sb. Akad. Heidelberg., Phil.-hist. Klasse, 1962).

140 Persecution and Martyrdomwas ever made, even in the general persecutions, to prohibitChristians from worshipping their own god in private, althoughValerian151 and Diocletian152 (but not Decius) forbade them toassemble for common worship, and Diocletian also ordered thedestruction of churches and the conWscation of sacred books andchurch property.153 As the deputy prefect of Egypt said to BishopDionysius of Alexandria in 257, ‘Who prevents you from worshippingyour own god also, if he is a god, along with the naturalgods?’154 And of course the sacriWce test continues to be used, andif the Christian complies with it he goes free, even in the generalpersecutions.Secondly, there is what I believe to have been the completeimmunity from persecution of most of the Gnostic sects. Some ofthese professed doctrines of a recognizably Christian character(heretical in varying degrees as they were) and called themselvesChristians. Yet in Roman eyes there was evidently a fundamentaldiVerence between Gnostics and orthodox Christians, if Gnosticswere not persecuted. Why? The reason can only be that the Gnosticsdid not think it necessary to be exclusive, like the orthodox, andrefuse to pay outward respect to the pagan gods when the necessityarose. We are told by orthodox Christian sources that Basilides,perhaps the most important of all the Gnostic heresiarchs, permittedhis followers to eat meat which had been oVered to idols, and in timeof persecution ‘casually to deny the faith’, doubtless by accepting thesacriWce test.155 It appears, then, that although the tenets of theGnostics must have appeared to the Roman governing class to bevery similar to those of the orthodox, the Gnostics escaped persecutionprecisely because they consented to take part in pagan religiousceremonies on demand, when the orthodox refused to do so.151 See Passio Cypr. i.7; Euseb. Hist. Eccles. vii.11.10–11.152 See Euseb. H.E. ix.10.8; Passio Saturnini et al. Abitin. esp. 1, 2, 5–14 (the besttext is by P. Franchi de’ Cavalieri, Studi e testi, lxv (1935), pp. 49–71; see also Th.Ruinart, Acta Martyrum, edn. of 1859, pp. 414 V.); Passio Philippi Heracl. 4 (Ruinart,op. cit., p. 441).153 The references are given in my op. cit. [Ch. 1 above, pp. 35–6], nn. 1–3.154 Euseb. H.E. vii.11.9.155 Agrippa Castor, ap. Euseb. H.E. iv.7.7; cf. Iren. Adv. Haeres. (ed. W. W. Harvey),i.19.3; iii.19.4; iv.54; Tert. Scorp. esp. 1, 15; Clem. Alex. Strom. iv.4.16.3–17.3;9.71.1–72.4; 12.81–8. And see Frend, op. cit. (1954), in n. 2 above.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 141What then was the attitude of the more enlightened pagans amongthe governing class? Why did they too persecute?Here I think it may be helpful if I re-tell a story told by HenryCrabb Robinson about the reception by Lord Thurlow, Lord Chancellorof England, of a deputation which waited upon him in 1788 tosecure his support in their eVorts to bring about the repeal of theCorporation and Test Acts. Lord Thurlow ‘heard them very civilly,and then said, ‘‘Gentlemen, I’m against you, by God. I am for theEstablished Church, damme! Not that I have any more regard for theEstablished Church than for any other church, but because it isestablished. And if you can get your damned religion established,I’ll be for that too.’’’156Lord Thurlow may not have been exactly what we should calltoday a religious man, but his attitude may help us to understandthat of some members of the Roman governing class of the lateRepublic and early Principate—though of course I am not saying itis the same. Religion, for such Romans, was above all the ius divinum,the body of state law relating to sacred matters, which preserved thepax deorum by means of the appropriate ceremonial.157 It derivedits great value, as Cicero repeatedly aYrms, mainly from the factthat it rested upon the auctoritas maiorum,158 the force of ancestraltradition. As Dr. Weinstock has pointed out,159 St. Augustinewas very much in the Ciceronian tradition when he declaredthat he would not believe the very Gospel itself, did it notrest upon the auctoritas of the Catholic Church160—a point of view156 Diary, Reminiscences, and Corr. of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. T. Sadler, 3rd edn.(London, 1872), i, p. 197 (ch. xv).157 See the remark by Caecilius, the pagan speaker in Minuc. Fel. Octav. 7.2: allreligious ceremonies were invented ‘vel ut remuneraretur divina indulgentia, vel utaverteretur imminens ira aut iam tumens et saeviens placaretur’ [‘either to berewarded by divine approbation, or that anger when threatening might be avertedor, if already swelling and raging, be placated’].158 Cic. De Nat. Deor. iii.5–9 is perhaps the most illuminating passage. See also DeDiv. ii.148, etc.159 S. Weinstock, review of K. Latte, Römisches Religionsgeschichte, JRS 51 (1961),206–15, at 210. (I am grateful to Dr. Weinstock for allowing me, before the delivery ofthe paper on which this article is based, to read the MS of his very impressivediscussion, then not yet published. I found his para. 3, pp. 208–10, particularlyhelpful.)160 August. Contra Epist. Manich. 5.

142 Persecution and Martyrdomstill held today by some Christian churches. Cicero, legislating in theDe Legibus for his ideal commonwealth, begins with ius divinum.161In the De Natura Deorum he makes his more scepticalspeaker, Cotta, open his case in Book i by proclaiming that he ishimself a pontifex, who believes that ‘religious rites and ceremoniesought to be maintained with the utmost reverence’,162 and muchmore to the same eVect. He makes his Stoic speaker, Balbus, echosentiments he had expounded himself in his speech to the senate, DeHaruspicum Responsis, to the eVect that the Romans ‘in religion, thatis the cult of the gods, are far superior to other nations’.163 Suchpassages could be multiplied. It seems to me entirely beside the point(though doubtless true enough) to object that Cicero rarely if evershows any unmistakable sign of ‘personal religion’, as we should callit. And when Professor Latte, in his great history of Roman religion,says that one Wnds in Cicero’s philosophical works no ‘inward participation’,164I feel as if I were being invited to note the absence ofcolour in a black-and-white drawing. The Roman state religioncontained nothing that was personal to the individual. And as forrational belief (or disbelief) in the gods—did it ever Wgure in thethoughts of Cicero and his kind except when they were playing theGreek game of philosophical disputation? Contrast the instinctivebelief which Cotta in the De Natura Deorum, speaking to Balbus,proclaims in the words, ‘From you, a philosopher, I am bound to askfor a rational account of religion. Our ancestors I must believe, evenin the absence of rational explanation.’165 These people had a deepemotional feeling for Roman religion, as the ius divinum, the ‘foundationof our state’,166 an essential part of the whole Roman way oflife. One can still hold this to be true, even if, taking perhaps anuncharitable view (as I would myself), one holds that quite a large161 Cic. De Leg. ii.18–22.162 Cic. De Nat. Deor. i.61.163 Ibid. ii.8; cf. De Har. Resp. 19. Among many similar passages in other authors,see Val. Max. i.1, esp. §§ 8, 9; Tert. Apol. 25.2. An interesting early text is S.I.G.3, no.601 (b.c. 193), and one of the last (and most important) is Symmachus, Rel. iii (ed.O. Seeck, pp. 280–3), of a.d. 384. Other texts are cited in A. S. Pease’s edn. of the DeNat. Deor. ii (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), p. 567.164 K. Latte, Römisches Religionsgeschichte, 2nd edn. (Munich, 1960), p. 285.165 Cic. De Nat. Deor. iii.6.166 Ibid. iii.5.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 143part of that religion was above all an instrument by which thegoverning class hoped to keep the reins of power in its ownhands.167 In the De Legibus, Cicero, himself an augur, gloriWes thatoYce because past augurs have been able to annul laws passed byreforming tribunes, to which Cicero refuses the very name of law.168But such deep-seated expressions of his own interests and those of hisclass are far from making his conception of religion ‘insincere’ or‘cynical’—indeed, the reverse is true.I have appealed to Cicero because I suppose most people wouldagree that the author of the De Divinatione may well be consideredone of the least superstitious men in an age which was distinctly lesssuperstitious than the age of the persecutions. For Cicero’s spiritualdescendants of the early Principate, Roman religion was part of thevery stuV of Roman life and Roman greatness; and they were preparedto extend their protection also to the cults of the peoples oftheir empire, whose devotion to their ancestral religions seemed totheir rulers only right and proper. Can we imagine that such men,however intellectually emancipated from the superstitions of thevulgar, would have had any compunction about executing thedevotees of a new-fangled sect which threatened almost everyelement of Roman religion, and indeed of all the traditional cultsconducted by the inhabitants of the Roman world? I would beprepared to speak of persecution so motivated as being conductedfor religious reasons, though I realize that other people might preferto use another word—political, perhaps.I shall end by quoting what seems to me the most illuminatingsingle text in all the ancient sources, for the understanding of the167 For äåØóØäÆØìïíßÆ (which in this passage is perhaps best translated ‘fear of thesupernatural’) as the very cement of the Roman constitution, see Polyb. vi.56.7–12.Varro, the greatest authority on Roman religion, thought it expedient, as did Scaevolabefore him, that ‘states should be deceived in matters of religion’: August. De Civ. Dei,iv.27, cf. 31, 32. See in addition Augustine’s attack on Seneca (based on his lost workon Superstition), in C.D. vi.10; also Livy, i.19.4–5; Dio Cass. lii.36.1–3.168 Cic. De Leg. ii.14, 31. In the face of conXicting opinions among the expertswhether divination really had a supernatural basis or was simply a political expedient(‘ad utilitatem . . . reipublicae composita’), Cicero proceeds (Ibid. 32–3) to declare hisbelief in the divine origin of augury, while lamenting its present decline. In the laterDe Div., however, he makes it perfectly clear that he had no belief in the reality ofdivination (ii, esp. 28–150), although in public he would keep up a pretence of takingit seriously, as a useful buttress of the constitution and the state religion (ii.28, 70–1).

144 Persecution and Martyrdompersecutions. Paternus, proconsul of Africa, is speaking to Cyprian athis Wrst trial in 257, and telling him what the emperors have justdecreed. This, it is true, is a special edict, making it incumbent uponthe Christian clergy, on pain of exile, to perform certain acts whichordinary folk would not normally be obliged to carry out; but what isenjoined is something any accused Christian might be ordered toperform, and this gives the text general signiWcance. The decree is:‘Eos qui Romanam religionem non colunt debere Romanas caerimoniasrecognoscere’.169 I think the sense is brought out best bytranslating the main clause negatively: ‘Those who do not professthe Roman religion’—it is admitted that there are such people—‘must not refuse to take part in Roman religious ceremonies.’Ste. Croix’s article provoked an immediate response from Sherwin-White, whose views on contumacia and the relevance of accusationsof immorality to persecutions he had questioned.1 Sherwin-Whiteaccepted that Ste. Croix’s thesis would ‘for long rank among the mostsatisfactory treatments of this theme’ (23) and agreed that it wasapplicable to the period from the late second century onwards (25).His concern was for the earliest period of persecutions, the evidencefor which he complained that Ste. Croix interpreted in the light oflater developments. Ste. Croix’s typically combative and rapidresponse fairly represents and fully counters Sherwin-White’s arguments,especially with regard to the crucial evidence of Pliny’scorrespondence with Trajan. Perhaps the only element of Sherwin-White’s article that needs to be recalled is his citation of evidencefrom Lucian who, writing at the end of the second century, did notmention accusations of immorality against Christians and thoughttheir only oVence was ‘godlessness’ (De Morte Peregrini 11–14;Alexander 25); Sherwin-White accepted that by Lucian’s time theSte. Croix thesis of persecution on religious grounds was beyondchallenge and oVered these references as additional support. Lucian’saccount of Peregrinus is discussed by Ste. Croix in ‘VoluntaryMartyrdom’ (pp. 186–8 below).169 Passio Cypr. i.1.1 A. N. Sherwin-White, ‘Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?—AnAmendment’, P&P27 (1964), 23–7; repr. (with an Addendum) in his Letters ofPliny: A Historical and Social Commentary (Oxford, 1966), 772–87.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 145The exchange in Past and Present 1964 terminated the publicdebate: there was clearly insuYcient evidence to demonstrate thecontumacia theory, and scholars have been increasingly willing toaccept that issues of religion could and did have a signiWcant impactin all periods of the ancient world. It has also become clear that inmany respects the Roman world did not operate in a neat andcoherent legal way, so that concern for the precise legal basis forpersecution is misdirected. This acceptance of Ste. Croix’s contentionthat the ill-deWned processes of what he labelled the cognitio extraordinem were capable of adaptation for occasions of persecution doesprovide the possibility of a partial rapprochement between an aspectof Sherwin-White’s thesis and the Ste. Croix view, namely withregard to contumacia. For Ste. Croix, the phenomenon of volunteermartyrs was a plausible trigger for some, perhaps even many, of theoutbreaks of persecution (see further Ch. 4 below), but the behaviourof these volunteers, which might include outbursts from spectatorsin court or public disrespect for acts or sites of worship, represented adeWance of authority and a disregard for convention which mightwell have been termed contumacia.2Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?—A Rejoinder*There are two diVerent questions in dispute between Mr. Sherwin-White and myself: [A. N. Sherwin-White, ‘Why were the EarlyChristians Persecuted?—An Amendment’, P&P27 (1964), 23–7](1) whether ‘sheer disobedience’, as such, was ever a ground for thejudicial condemnation of Christians; and (2) whether at Wrst thegovernment behaved to Christianity ‘exactly as it did towards other‘‘superstitions’’’ (P &P(1964), 24), and ‘the only ground indicatedfor the proscription of the [Christian] cult1 is its association withcrimes and immoralities—Xagitia, scelera, maleWcia’ (p. 23, with thenext two paragraphs: my italics).2 Musurillo, Acts, p. lxi, also saw scope for convergence between the rival theories,though this was through their common acceptance of the arbitrariness of the cognitioextraordinaria procedures.* First published in Past and Present, 27 (1964), 28–33.1 It is inexact to speak of the Christian ‘cult’ in this connection: the Christian cultwas not directly attacked before the Valerianic persecution (see [pp. 139–40 above]).

146 Persecution and Martyrdom1. On the Wrst question, most of my criticisms of Mr. Sherwin-White’s article of 1952 still stand (see [pp. 124–7 above]), especiallythe second, to which he has made no reply; and he now exposes theweakness of his case even more clearly by citing texts which, whencorrectly interpreted, turn against him.First, the passage in Marcus Aurelius (xi.3). Here Mr. Sherwin-White takes the phrase ŒÆôa łØºcí ðÆæÜôÆîØí, out of its context, asthe equivalent of ‘ob meram contumaciam’ and assumes that Marcusis accusing the Christians of seeking death ‘out of sheer disobedience’.In fact Marcus is contrasting the attitude of the Christians to deathwith the attitude he himself approves, formed by an act of individualjudgment (Iðe NäØŒ çò & Œæßóåøò), arrived at ‘rationally and withdignity and without theatricality’ (ºåºïªØóìÝíøò ŒÆd óåìí &øòŒÆd ...Iôæƪfiþäøò). There is no room here for any idea of disobedienceor deWance of authority (‘contumacia’). What Marcus is objectingto is the Christians’ irrational pig-headedness, and the Latinequivalent of ðÆæÜôÆîØò here is obstinatio2—a complaint oftenlevelled against Christians.3 Mr. Sherwin-White, substituting contumaciafor obstinatio, converts ‘mere obstinacy’ (cf. pp. 126–7 above)into ‘sheer disobedience’. In exactly the same way he tries to turn thepuzzled Pliny’s attribution to the Christians of ‘pertinacia...etinXexibilis obstinatio’ [‘stubbornness and unshakeable obstinacy’]into something quite diVerent: ‘deWance of his authority as governor’.But again, the text speaks of ‘obstinacy’, not of deWance or disobedience.And Pliny is not giving a formal, technical justiWcation of hisactions: that was not necessary. What he is saying is, ‘Well anyway,they were a thoroughly obstinate crew and deserved what they got.’In spite of his ‘nescio quid . . . puniri soleat’ [‘I do not knowwhat punishment is customary’], his own actions (see the Wrsttwo sentences of § 3 of his letter) show that he knew confessorsshould be executed for the ‘Name’, for ‘being Christians’. Their‘obstinacy’ was one of the undesirable manifestations of the Christiansuperstitio.2 See F. Martinazzoli, Parataxeis (Florence, 1953), pp. 17 V.3 See e.g. Tert. Apol. 27.2 (where T. goes on in § 3 to call it ‘constantia’), 7; 50.15;De Spect. 1.1; Ad Nat. i.17–19; and of course Pliny, Epist. x.96.3.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 147Secondly, the Sardinian inscription (P&P(1964), 26). 3a I ignoredthis as irrelevant: it reveals an entirely diVerent situation, and the textactually underlines Mr. Sherwin-White’s inability to cite any directevidence. Here the proconsul does indeed accuse the Galillenses ofdisobedience, to an actual judicial decision (‘nec parentes decretosuo’), and of contumacia (even longa contumacia, deWance ofrepeated orders to clear out), and he threatens that if the situationcontinues he will treat them as guilty of seditio. How convenient itwould be for Mr. Sherwin-White if he could quote even a fewstatements of this sort in relation to the persecution of Christians,as his theory demands that he should! But there is in fact no evidencethat Christians were ever executed because they were guilty of ‘disobedience’.When Mr. Sherwin-White says there are ‘no later oYcialdocuments’ in which his favourite expression ‘contumacia’ mightappear, he forgets that ‘the early martyr-acts, . . . written in the formatof a Roman court-record’ (P&P(1964), 23), sometimes preserve theactual words spoken by the magistrate trying the case. Here thesentence on the Scillitan martyrs is very signiWcant: the proconsulsays, ‘quoniam oblata sibi facultate ad Romanorum morem redeundiobstinanter perseveraverunt’4—not that they ‘disobeyed an order’,but that they ‘obstinately persevered, although given an opportunity ofreturning to Roman behaviour’. What I have called ‘the sacriWce test’(see pp. 124–8 above) was indeed originally a privilege oVered to thosewho were prepared to apostatize, or who denied being Christians, toenable them to prove their detachment from the Christian superstitio.2. On the second question, Mr. Sherwin-White has not paid attentionto what his sources (Suetonius, Tacitus and Pliny) actually say.His ‘maleWcia’ can only refer to Suetonius, Nero 16.2, where,however, only the corresponding adjective appears, with a signiWcantdiVerence of emphasis. Suetonius calls Christians a ‘genus hominumsuperstitionis novae ac maleWcae’ [‘a class of men from a new and evilsuperstition’]. His attention is concentrated upon the actual religion,the superstitio: this itself he regards as ‘maleWca’, as a likely cause ofevil-doing.3 a [Text in E. M. Smallwood, Documents Illustrating the Principates of Gaius,Claudius and Nero (Cambridge, 1967), 392; trans. in B. Levick, The Government ofthe Roman Empire, 2nd edn. (London, 2000), no. 53.]4 Passio SS. Scillitan. 14.

148 Persecution and MartyrdomIn Tacitus (Annals, xv.44.3–5, 8, in Furneaux’ edition) it is againprecisely the superstitio which is detestable (‘exitiabilis’), an evil(‘malum’, to be classed with ‘atrocia aut pudenda’ [‘atrocious andshameful acts’]). Although Tacitus describes the Christians as ‘hatedfor their abominations’, and doubtless himself shared the belief intheir ‘Xagitia’ [‘disgraceful acts’] which he attributes to the commonherd, and although he calls the Christians ‘guilty and deservingexemplary punishment’, he evidently did not believe the ChristiansWred Rome (as Mr. Sherwin-White admits in his 1952 article, p. 208);and—the essential point—unless Tacitus is misleading us, thegovernment did not believe this either!5 The government, then, wasnot persecuting the Christians for a crime it believed them to havecommitted. The evidence of Tacitus here may be recalcitrant toprecise analysis; but such as it is it merely shows the governmentpersecuting the Christians (primarily as incendiaries) because thepopulace believed them guilty of abominations and would thereforebe the readier to suppose them guilty of starting the Wre.Fortunately, the evidence of Pliny can be pressed, and is conclusive.There is not the least suggestion in Pliny’s letter or in Trajan’sreply that on this occasion the ‘Xagitia’ were actually the ground ofpersecution, although Pliny was prepared to regard persecution for‘Xagitia’ as a theoretical possibility (§ 2 of his letter). Pliny executedthe confessors for the ‘Name’, without any evidence of ‘Xagitia’, orindeed of anything except their confession that they were Christians,and he later discovered (from apostates) that there were no ‘Xagitia’.He nevertheless, in the acknowledged absence of ‘Xagitia’, still regardedChristianity as something disgusting; but again, as with Suetoniusand Tacitus, it is the religion itself, the superstitio, which is abhorrent:it is ‘prava, immodica’ (§ 8 of his letter). Even Last, on p. 91 of thearticle recommended by Mr. Sherwin-White,5 a had to admit thatPliny is ‘far...from proving that the denial of the Roman gods wasnot the essence of the Christian oVence’.At Wrst Pliny had not felt certain what it was customary to doabout Christians (note the word ‘soleat’ in § 1 of his letter). Among5 See the treatment of the expression ‘subdidit reos’ by Beaujeu, on pp. 16–17 ofthe work cited in n. 10 to my article [p. 108 n. 10 above].5 a H. Last, ‘The Study of the Persecutions’, JRS 27 (1937), 80–92.

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 149other things, he says he did not know whether he ought to punish (1)for the ‘Name’ alone, even in the absence of ‘Xagitia’, or (2) for the‘Xagitia’. The vital diVerence, which commentators seldom bring out,is that (1) punishment for the ‘Name’ alone (a) would be inXicted forthe mere confession of Christianity, but on the other hand (b) couldbe avoided by denial or apostasy, demonstrated by sacriWcing,whereas (2) punishment for the ‘Xagitia’ (a) would involve an inquisitioninto their nature, but (b) presumably, if ‘Xagitia’ were discovered(or invented), the guilty could not escape by merely apostatizingfrom Christianity. We must distinguish between three categoriesamong those accused before Pliny as Christians: some proved to beconfessors (§§ 2–4 of his letter), others denied that they had everbeen Christians (§ 5), others again had apostatized or were ready todo so (§ 6). After some hesitation, Pliny decided in practice toconsider the charges both against confessors and against outrightdeniers as being in respect of the ‘Name’ alone; and he clearly hopedthat Trajan would allow him to apply exactly the same policy toapostates as to deniers (§§ 6–10). It was to this course of conduct, inrelation to all three categories (confessors, deniers and apostates),that Trajan, betraying no surprise at the absence of ‘Xagitia’, explicitlygave his oYcial approval. (It looks to me as if Mr. Sherwin-White hasnot fully realized this: cf. P&P(1964), 24.) It is most signiWcant thatdeniers and (by Trajan’s rescript) even apostates were allowed toescape by accepting the sacriWce test: this is yet another proof thatthe ‘Xagitia’ were not nearly as important as Mr. Sherwin-Whitethinks—if you take charges of cannibalism seriously, you do notpardon the cannibals simply because they tear up their membershipcards of the Cannibals’ Club. Again, it was having the ‘superstitio’which made the Christians dangerous, and abandoning the ‘superstitio’removed the cause of oVence: get them to give up Christianity,and the likelihood of their wanting to go in for ‘Xagitia’ woulddisappear. This makes excellent sense of the Roman attitude, whichon Mr. Sherwin-White’s version of the facts is unreasonable in theextreme.In view of the scantiness of the evidence, no one could safely denythat belief in ‘Xagitia’ supposedly committed by Christians mayhave been a factor, on occasion perhaps an important factor, inducingthe government to persecute. But the evidence to which

150 Persecution and MartyrdomMr. Sherwin-White himself appeals aVords no basis for taking the‘Xagitia’ as the only element, or even the main element, in the mindof the government, although it still leaves open the possibility that the‘Xagitia’ may have played an important role in the minds of ordinaryfolk. Only in so far as the government felt it necessary to give in topopular demands for persecution motivated in this way can weconWdently put particular emphasis on the ‘Xagitia’ as a factorinXuencing the government.6 But apart from the fact that the Christiansuperstitio was itself the objectionable thing, there is no directevidence for the ground of persecution in the early days, so far as thegovernment is concerned. I am myself inclined to think that riots—especially with Jews—caused by Christian preaching (see n. 7 to myarticle [p. 107 n. 7 above]) and perhaps provocative acts committedby early enthusiasts (see pp. 131–3 above, on ‘voluntary martyrdom’)may have played an important part. It is when we look at thebehaviour of the Roman government over the centuries7 (undeterredby Mr. Sherwin-White’s description of this as ‘beginning at the endand working backwards’) that we Wnd reason to attribute a majorrole to the Christians’ total rejection of the whole of Roman ‘religio’,summed up in the charge of ‘atheism’. The onus is on those who denythe early importance of this long-lasting element to produce reasonswhy it should have arisen only after Pliny’s day, when all that weknow of Roman religion would lead us to expect its appearancevery soon after Christianity Wrst attracted the attention of thegovernment.I wonder why Mr. Sherwin-White interprets § 10 of Pliny’s letter tomean that it was only ‘subsequently’ (some time after his persecutionbegan) that Pliny ‘became concerned at the reported neglect of civiccults due to the inXuence of the Christians’. How can he possiblyknow this? Pliny says (perhaps with some exaggeration) that thetemples, which had been almost empty, were beginning to befrequented again. This, says Mr. Sherwin-White (n. 3), ‘refers to thesituation some time after the measures reported by him in §§ 1–6’.But it is only the revival of the cults which we can thus date. And6 Here, some pertinent remarks have been made by A. Ronconi, in the lastparagraph of his paper referred to in n. 79 to my article [p. 122 n. 79 above].7 See esp. n. 139 to my article [p. 137 n. 139 above].

Why were the Early Christians Persecuted? 151Pliny goes on to say something Mr. Sherwin-White fails to repeat:that the sacred rites which had long been allowed to lapse (‘diuintermissa’) were being renewed, and the Xesh of the sacred victimswas again being sold. We cannot know when Pliny ‘becameconcerned’, but in view of the words ‘diu intermissa’ we may wellthink it likely that the neglect of the traditional observances wassomething that forced itself on Pliny’s notice soon after his arrivalin the area. However, my point is not so much that this may haveinXuenced Pliny in deciding whether to persecute (on this we haveno information), but that Pliny, in his tactful attempt to get Trajan toapprove the policy he had followed, laid great emphasis on thereligious revival he had brought about, which he evidently believedwould weigh with the emperor.That anyone can say the government behaved to Christianity‘exactly as it did towards other ‘‘superstitions’’ ’ is incomprehensibleto me. The devotees of what other ‘superstitio’ did the Romans everexecute as such whenever anyone brought a charge against them ofholding that superstition? The answer, of course, is None. Mr. Sherwin-Whiteshould reXect in particular upon the details of thesuppression of the ‘Bacchanalia’ in b.c. 186.8 Here, (1) punishmentwas inXicted not for professing adherence to the cult, or even takingpart in it, but for committing ‘Xagitia’; (2) the cult was not madealtogether illegal but was sanctioned even at the time to devoteesalready committed to it, in small groups of not more than Wvemembers, if they obtained the permission of the senate; and (3)later, the Bacchic cult was freely tolerated. Actions taken by Romeagainst other cults (that of Isis, for example) were equally short-livedand always for speciWc abuses, and they contrast equally strongly withthe permanent ban on the mere profession of Christianity.Mr. Sherwin-White would do well to re-read a very useful work towhich he himself appeals as if it fully supported his theories: that ofE. G. Hardy (cited in his n. 4, and more familiar to most people as the8 For which see A. H. McDonald, in Jl. of Rom. Stud. xxxiv (1944), at pp. 26–31,with full references. [R. A. Bauman, ‘The Suppression of the Bacchanals: FiveQuestions’, Historia, 39 (1990), 334–48; E. S. Gruen, ‘The Bacchanalian AVair’, inStudies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy (Berkeley, 1990), 34–78; P. G. Walsh,‘Making a Drama out of a Crisis: Livy on the Bacchanalia’, Greece and Rome, 34.2(1996), 188–203.]

152 Persecution and MartyrdomWrst section of Hardy’s Studies in Roman History, i, London, 1906,1910). Here he will Wnd a point of view rather diVerent from his own.‘The Christians’, says Hardy, ‘subsequently to, as before [my italics],the rescript of Trajan were punished generally for the name, i.e. . . .for the inherent disloyalty to the state involved in their IŁåüôçò[atheism], and manifested in the obstinatio with which they clungto it’ (Studies, 2nd edn., p. 101, cf. 13). This is much nearer the truth.Christianity, unlike all the various forms of paganism, which enjoyed‘peaceful co-existence’ among themselves, would never countenanceother religions: this was surely the heart of its unique oVence—against the gods and therefore against the state. Toleration of a veryancient idiosyncrasy of the national faith of the Jews (cf. p. 135above) could not be extended to the potentially dangerous innovationsof a missionary superstitio.

4Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early ChurchIn considering the relation between early Christianity and its environment,historians have paid far too little attention to the phenomenonwhich I shall call voluntary martyrdom. By a volunteer martyr,or volunteer, I mean a Christian who deliberately and unnecessarilyprovoked persecution and thus sought a death which he might haveavoided without any sacriWce of Christian principle. There is suYcientevidence to show that voluntary martyrdom was by no meansconWned to heretical or schismatic sects but, although frowned uponby the dominant section of opinion in the Catholic Church, was agreat deal more common among the orthodox than the Christianapologists have cared to admit. In all probability quite a substantialproportion of the ‘noble army of martyrs’ of the Wrst three centuriesconsisted of volunteers and those whom I shall presently deWne as‘quasi-volunteers’. It is impossible to doubt that the prevalence ofvoluntary martyrdom was a factor which both contributed towardsthe outbreak of persecution and tended to intensify it when it wasalready in progress.In my class of voluntary martyrs, as I have deWned them, I includeonly those who (a) explicitly demanded the privilege of martyrdom;or (b) came forward of their own accord in times of persecution andmade a public confession of Christianity which was bound to lead toinstant execution; or (c) by some deliberate act—destroying images,for example, or assaulting a provincial governor while he wassacriWcing—clearly invited arrest and execution. Intermediatebetween these volunteers and the ordinary martyrs are those whom[This collection of evidence was put together in the late 1950s, and served tounderpin the brief discussion in Past and Present (1963), 21–4 (Ch. 3, pp. 129–33).]

154 Persecution and MartyrdomI shall call ‘quasi-volunteers’. These fall into three groups: I. those inwhom we cannot demonstrate a conscious desire for martyrdom forits own sake, but who were rigorists of one kind or another, goingbeyond the general practice of the Church in their opposition tosome aspect of pagan society—for example, Christian paciWsts whorefused military service; II. those who without, as far as we know,actually demanding or inviting martyrdom, deliberately and unnecessarilyattracted attention to themselves, for example by ministeringopenly to arrested confessors, and hence brought about theirown arrest; III. martyrs who are not recorded to have been directlyresponsible for their own arrest, but who after being arrested behavedwith deliberate contumacy at their trial. Being Christian confessors,they would probably have been put to death in any event, but some ofthem brought upon themselves particularly unpleasant forms ofexecution.It is diYcult to decide how one should regard those Christians who,after being arrested, or in fear of arrest or of some violation of theirchastity, deliberately committed suicide, ‘religious suicide’ as I shallcall it. I will not in fact be treating them as volunteers or quasivolunteers,nor have I attempted to record them all. Their motivesare seldom, if ever, known to us: sometimes they may have beenactuated by a very understandable desire to escape a possibly lingeringand painful death, or may have feared that when subjected to torturethey would deny their faith and thus destroy their immortal souls.Sometimes, on the other hand, especially when a neurotically sexualelement is present, one may suspect the existence of some pathologicalyearning for death, which is so evident in some of the voluntarymartyrs. Anyone who concerns himself seriously (as I do not feelqualiWed to do) with the psychological aspects of martyrdom mustobviously take these cases into account. I shall limit myself to giving abrief account of the ‘oYcial’ attitude of the Church on this question.My principal aim in this paper is to show that a large body ofevidence exists for voluntary martyrdom. I shall therefore set out thisevidence, in three parts: Wrst, the passages in which the practiceis condemned by leaders of orthodox opinion; second, the evidencefor individual volunteers, including quasi-volunteers, roughlyin chronological order; third, some other relevant material,

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 155including a discussion of Jewish antecedents. Finally, I shall drawsome conclusions.OYcial Disapproval of Voluntary MartyrdomIn trying to state the oYcial attitude of the Church towards voluntarymartyrdom we are confronted from the Wrst with an obvious conXictbetween theory and practice, between the verdict on principle byparticular churches, clerics, and at least one episcopal council, andthe attitude actually adopted by the Catholic Church towards numerousindividual volunteers.Apart from the works of heretics and schismatics, includingTertullian in his later, Montanist, phase,1 I know of no open advocacyor approval of voluntary martyrdom in principle by any survivingChristian writer of the Wrst few centuries, apart perhaps from twosituations in which it is sometimes countenanced. First, where alapsed Christian repents and wishes to atone immediately for hisfall,2 and, second, where one of the faithful sees other believers on thepoint of lapsing and hopes to prevent this by making a voluntaryconfession at the decisive moment.3 Certainly the practice of voluntarymartyrdom was repeatedly condemned in general terms, as weshall see. This is natural enough and eminently sensible during thepagan Empire, when an act of provocation might endanger both theindividual concerned and the Christian community—the individualbecause he might lapse under torture, and the community because apersecution (at any rate a local one), or an intensiWcation of persecution,might well follow. However, the treatment of individual1 For such heretical views, see below, pp. 191–2.2 See Peter of Alexandria, Ep. Can. 8. [Cyprian also argued that the lapsed couldgain pardon by making a public confession, the consequences of which could rangefrom exile to execution; see Ep. 19.2.3; Eps. 24 (Caldonius to Cyprian) and 25; Ep.55.4.1–2, 7.1, 16.3; De Lapsis 36. See further G. W. Clarke, ‘Double-Trials in thePersecution of Decius’, Historia, 22 (1973), 650–63, at 656–7, and his commentaryand translation of Cyprian’s letters, The Letters of St. Cyprian, 4 vols. (AncientChristian Writers 43–7; New York, 1984–9). Note, however, that such acts onlywin pardon for Catholics. Schismatics cannot be martyrs (De Ecclesiae CatholicaeUnitate 14).]3 The only authority I can quote for this exception is Peter of Alexandria, Ep. Can.11 (if I have interpreted it correctly). A good example would be Eusebius, HE6.41.22–3 [and perhaps MP, Long Recension, 1.5 e–h; see n. 78 below].

156 Persecution and Martyrdomvolunteers is not at all what the general statements about voluntarymartyrdom might lead us to expect: the deeds of very many wereevidently remembered with enthusiasm by the faithful and they arecertainly recorded without disapproval in the sources, which virtuallynever make an adverse comment upon any particular volunteerwho remained steadfast to the end. It is incorrect to say that ‘Christianswho deliberately courted martyrdom were denied the name ofmartyr’.4This curious contradiction between theory and practice has largelyescaped the notice of historians. Thus Le Blant, in an address deliveredin 1875, could say, ‘Dans le camp des chrétiens . . . la foule avaitses entraînements, et, trop facilement parfois, saluait comme desmartyres des personnages que l’Église se refusait à inscrire au nombrede ses saints’ [‘in the Christian camp . . . the crowd had its passions,and sometimes too easily hailed as martyrs those whom the Churchitself refused to include among its saints’] without acknowledgingthat the Church frequently capitulated to the masses.5 Rather morerecently Delehaye has written, ‘Nos texts donnent l’impression que,sauf le cas d’hérésie, la mort héroïque du martyr arrêtait sur les lèvresdu juge ecclésiastique le reproche que son inconsidération auraitméritée . . . Les tourments et la mort subis sans défaillance pour lavraie foi, étaient, en pratique, le seul critère du martyre’ [‘Our textsgive the impression that, excepting the case of heretics, the heroicdeath of a martyr would stop the ecclesiastical judge from voicing thereproach that his lack of consideration should have deserved ...inpractice, the only criteria for a martyr were the torments and deathsuVered without weakness for the true faith’].6 The explanation may4 Thus H. Chadwick in his excellent translation of Origen, Contra Celsum (Cambridge,1953), 501 n. 3. To the same eVect see E. Le Blant, ‘Polyeucte et le zèletéméraire’, in Mémoires de l’Institut Nationale de France, Académie des Inscriptions etBelles-Lettres, 28 (1876), 335–52, at 335: ‘Selon les rigoureuses lois de la discipline desanciens âges, Polyeucte ne serait pas un martyr; l’acte même de violence qui a illustrésa mémoire l’exclurait de tout droit à ce titre’ [‘According to the strict rules andrequirements in ancient times, Polyeucte would not be a martyr; the very act ofviolence which made his memory famous would exclude him from all right to thistitle’; on Polyeuctes, see below, p. 169 and n. 21].5 E. Le Blant, ‘Polyeucte et le zèle téméraire’, 337.6 H. Delehaye, Sanctus: Essai sur le culte des saints dans l’Antiquité (SubsidiaHagiographica 17; Brussels, 1927), 167, 169.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 157be correct as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough: it fails toexplain the contradiction between theory and practice. We still needto ask why voluntary martyrdom was condemned unequivocally ifvirtually every successful volunteer received as much veneration as anordinary martyr. If the Church was prepared to forgive, and evenapplaud, all such infractions of discipline, why did it condemn themwithout qualiWcation beforehand? Why did it not merely issue awarning against the dangers of volunteering for martyrdom, bothto the individuals concerned and to their church? The answer, surely,is that in practically all cases of voluntary martyrdom the mass ofsimple believers forced the hand of their more intelligent andworldly-wise leaders and insisted on having the volunteers veneratedjust like other martyrs.7The evidence for condemnation of voluntary martyrdom down tothe time of the Great Persecution can conveniently be presented inroughly chronological order.1. Passio Polycarpi 4; Eusebius, HE 4.15.7–8. In the persecution atSmyrna just before the reign of Marcus Aurelius in which PolycarpsuVered,8 a Phrygian named Quintus, accompanied by some otherswhom he had induced to follow him, came forward voluntarily tooVer himself to the authorities as a Christian; but his courage failedhim and under threat of torture he apostasized. What the others7 [This is a slightly unconvincing explanation, not least because it fails to explainwhy Christian writers should have included accounts of voluntary martyrs if therewas such consensus amongst the elite concerning their proper status. It seems to memore convincing simply to accept it as a contradiction between theory and practice,one that cannot be divided into elite and popular elements. On the shortcomings ofsuch a ‘two-tiered’ model see P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago, 1981), esp.17–22; Arnaldo Momigliano’s ‘Popular Beliefs and the Late Roman Historian’, inStudies in Church History, 8 (1971), 1–18 is often cited in this context, although itshould be noted that he does not dismiss the model as such, but disagrees with itsapplication to late antiquity.]8 [The date is much disputed. Eusebius places it in the reign of Marcus Aurelius,which is supported by H. Grégoire and P. Orgels, ‘La Véritable Date du martyre de S.Polycarpe (23 février 177) et le ‘‘Corpus Polycarpianum’’ ’, AB 69 (1951), 1–38 andmore recently by P. Brind’ Amour, ‘La Date du martyre de Saint Polycarpe (le 23février 167)’, AB 98 (1980), 456–62. However, his dating is not always reliable (see, forinstance, the Passio Pionii, at n. 55 below) and it is more convincingly placed in themid- to late- 150s. See T. D. Barnes, ‘Pre-Decian Acta Martyrum’, JTS 19 (1968),509–31, at 512–13; and J. Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of theChristians in the Second Century (Edinburgh, 1996), 72–3.]

158 Persecution and Martyrdomaccompanying him may have done we are not told. The churchat Smyrna, in whose letter the Passion of Polycarp is preserved,expresses its disapproval of this action as contrary to the advice ofthe Gospel. The reference is no doubt to Matthew 10: 23 [‘when theypersecute you in this city, Xee into another’], a text often cited in thisconnection.92. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 4.4.17.1–3; 4.10.76.1–77.3;7.11.66.3–67.2 (about ad 200). Clement condemns the practice ofvoluntary martyrdom in the most vigorous terms in three separatepassages. He defends the orthodox position against the Gnostics whodeprecated physical martyrdom as a form of suicide (Strom.4.4.16.3), and at the same time rebukes volunteers with a mostingenious argument (Strom. 4.10.77.1): they become accomplices inthe crime of those who put them to death, an accusation which isdiYcult to resist on logical grounds. There is nothing whatever inClement’s polemic to suggest that the volunteers he had in mind were‘heretics’.103. Tertullian, De Corona Militis 1.4.4–5. In one of the most aggressiveworks of his later phase, written (perhaps in 211) after hehad become a Montanist,11 Tertullian reveals that the orthodoxChristians of Africa were perturbed by the openly anti-militaristtendencies of the Montanists, which were endangering the thensatisfactory situation of the African Church. Praising a fanaticalsoldier who had been executed for refusing to wear a wreath at thedistribution of a donative (and who would therefore fall into ourcategory of quasi-volunteers of type I), Tertullian denounces thoseCatholic Christians who had passed strictures on the soldier ‘ut de9 Cf. also Matt. 26: 41; 6: 13; 26: 47. Cited by Peter of Alexandria, Ep. Can. 9, andQuirinus, bishop of Siscia, on being arrested while in Xight from his see, probably in308 (Passio Quirini 2, T. Ruinart, Acta primorum martyrum sincera et selecta (1689;ed. Ratisbon, 1859), 522–3). Origen, Contra Celsum 8.44, evidently has this text inmind when he says that a Christian who Xees from persecution is observing thecommandment of his Master.10 As asserted by M. M. Hassett, ‘Martyr’, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, ix (NewYork, 1910), 736–40, at 737.11 [T. D. Barnes originally dated this work to 208, but later conceded that this wastoo early; note, however, that Ste. Croix’s caution in suggesting 211 is well justiWed.See Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1985), 37and 328.]

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 159abrupto et praecipiti et mori cupido, qui de habitu interrogatusnomini negotium fecerit’ [‘as being headstrong and rash, and tooeager to die, because in being interrogated about a matter of dress, hebrought trouble on the Christian name’] and had complained ‘that apeace so good and long is endangered for them’. The orthodox hadgood cause for anxiety in the activities of such men, and in thispamphlet of Tertullian, who was in eVect exhorting Christian soldiersto desert—as Gibbon put it, ‘a counsel which, if it had been generallyknown, was not very proper to conciliate the favour of the emperorstowards the Christian sect’.124. Origen, Comm. in Johannem 28.23 (18), written perhaps aboutad 232–5, also rebukes would-be volunteers, and at some length,using much the same arguments as Clement and appealing to numeroustexts of Scripture. This passage, in the mature Origen, is allthe more weighty in that Origen himself, when a mere boy, is said tohave been on the verge of becoming a voluntary martyr.135. Passio Cypriani 1.5 (ad 257). Cyprian tells the proconsul thatchurch discipline does not allow the presbyters of Carthage to givethemselves up of their own accord, but that he will Wnd them if heseeks them out. Cyprian’s attitude is commended by Augustine,Contra Gaudentium 1.31.40.6. Cyprian, Ep. 81.1.4 (ad 258): ‘Let no one among you stir up anytrouble for the brethren or oVer himself up to the Gentiles of his ownvolition.’147. Commodian, Instr. 2.21 (‘Martyrium volenti’), writing probablyin the second half of the third century, urges those who wouldrush into martyrdom to be satisWed instead with living the good life.158. Council of Elvira, Canon 60 (either c.300 or towards 320).Anyone who smashes an idol is not to be counted as a martyr. The12 E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ed. J. B. Bury, London,1909–14), i. 482 n. 102. See also H. Grégoire, Les Persécutions dans l’Empire romain,2nd edn. (Mémoires de l’Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres 56.5;Brussels, 1964), 31–3.13 See below, pp. 168–9.14 [Trans. G. W. Clarke, The Letters of St. Cyprian, iv. 105–6, slightly modiWed.]15 Cf. Instr. 2.7 (‘Fideles cavete malum’), lines 14–18, where Commodian expresseshis view that ‘multa sunt martyria, quae sunt sine sanguine fuso’ [‘there are manymartyrdoms which occur without blood being shed’].

160 Persecution and Martyrdompractice is not warranted by the Gospel and was unknown in theApostolic Age.169. Lactantius, DMP 13.2.3, speaks of the man who tore downDiocletian’s Wrst persecuting edict when it was posted up in Nicomediaon 24 February 303 as acting non recte, and unfeelingly saysthat he was legitime coctus.17 Eusebius on the other hand is sympatheticto this martyr (HE 8.5), although he was in fact, of course,executed for an act of civil disobedience and only indirectly as aChristian.10. Augustine, Brev. Coll. 3.13.25. Mensurius, bishop of Carthage,writing in ad 304–5 to Secundus the bishop of Tigisis, says hehas forbidden his Xock to honour those ‘who gave themselves up oftheir own accord and volunteered that they possessed Scriptures whichthey would not hand over, when no one had asked them to do so’.18Mensurius also refers uncharitably to ‘criminals or debtors to the treasury,who took advantage of the persecution, wishing to be rid of a lifeburdened by many debts, or thought they could thus purge and washaway their crimes19—or at any rate make money and live like Wghtingcocks in prison on the charity of the Christians’.2011. Peter of Alexandria, Ep. Can. (Easter ad 306). Four of theWfteen canons (numbers 8–11) refer to voluntary confessors. Theyare in general mildly censured (Canon 9) for ignoring the precepts ofJesus.21 Peter expresses himself rather obscurely at places, but itappears that he countenanced voluntary confession only when16 [On the date of the Council of Elvira, see further, Ch. 2.]17 Possibly Eutherius, whose martyrdom at Nicomedia on 24 Feb. is recorded inthe Syriac martyrologies: see H. Delehaye, Les Origines du culte des martyrs, 2nd edn.(Subsidia Hagiographica 20; Brussels, 1933), 148.18 Failure to hand over sacred books was almost certainly the only capital oVenceof which Christians could be guilty in Africa, where it is very unlikely that any but theWrst of the persecuting edicta of Diocletian and his colleagues had been published: see‘Aspects’ [above, Ch. 1, pp. 46–53].19 The early Christian Church saw the martyrs as assessors in the divine judgement,and believed that their ‘baptism of blood’ had wiped away all their sins, eventhe sins of those who, as mere catechumens, had not yet received baptism in theordinary way; see Hippolytus, Apost. Trad. 19.2.20 Trans. by A. H. M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe, rev. edn.(Harmondsworth, 1972), 108.21 And see Canon 10, which is particularly diYcult to interpret but must refer toclerics who oVered themselves up (see the commentaries of Balsamon and Zonaras,printed alongside the English translation in the Ante-Nicene Christian Library 14

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 161undertaken by those who had lapsed but repented (Canon 8), or bythose who wished to set an example to prevent others from lapsing(Canon 11).22 Peter refuses to condemn those who had left everythingand Xed (Canon 13).23In the Christian Empire few opportunities for voluntary martyrdompresented themselves, and references to it are correspondingly uncommon.The orthodox attitude is stated brieXy byGregoryofNazianzus(Or. 43.6): ‘It is the custom of martyrdom for people not to go asvolunteers to the contest...nor when present to withdraw—for theone is the mark of rashness, the other of cowardice’. The same sentimentsare expressed in more detail by Athanasius (Apologia de Fuga Sua22 [31]), who disapproves of ‘rashly tempting the Lord’ and regardsXight from persecution as a divine law.24 The practice of the blessedmartyrs, he says, was to Xee, but to submit to martyrdom whendiscovered. It is interesting at this point to Wnd him suddenly changinghis ground. If, he says, some of the martyrs oVered themselves up to thepersecutors, they did not do so without reason: they demonstrated bytheir deaths that their oVering up of themselves was from the Spirit.25(Edinburgh, 1869), 292–322). [On the general context of Peter’s letter, see T. D.Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 201–2, and D. Potter,The Roman Empire at Bay AD 180–395 (London, 2004), 411–13. For editions see Ch.1 n. 44.]22 See above, p. 155.23 He cites Acts 12: 4, 18–19; 19: 26–30; Gen. 19: 17; Matt. 2: 13–16. [See also hisletter (although it is possibly apocryphal) to Apollonius the bishop of Sioout, whohad apparently lapsed into idolatry; Peter admonishes him, and confesses to being ‘ata loss about you, where your wits have gone, that you have not had the wit to turnback and escape, and have not had the wit to exercise yourself and escape by means of[others] who have their wits about them, before you were ruined’. See J. Barns and H.Chadwick, ‘A Letter ascribed to Peter of Alexandria’, JTS 24 (1973), 443–55, at 454.Note too that his Canonical Epistle should be read against his own Xight following thepublication of Diocletian’s Wrst persecuting edict in 303.]24 [On the relationship of this text to the rest of Athanasius’ thought, seeA. Petterson, ‘To Xee or not to Xee: An assessment of Athanasius’ de Fuga Sua’, Studiesin Church History, 21 (1984), 29–42; for the general background, see T. D. Barnes,Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Cambridge,Mass., 1993), 124–6.]25 [To these might be added the earlier example of Lactantius, Div. Inst. 4.18.1–2,who states that Christ Xed from persecution as a lesson to future Christians. On thispassage, see O. Nicholson, ‘Flight from Persecution as Imitation of Christ: Lactantius’Divine Institutes IV.18.1–2’, JTS 40.1 (1989), 48–65.]

162 Persecution and MartyrdomThe mid-Wfth-century ecclesiastical historian Theodoret expressesmild disapproval of the destruction of a Persian Wre temple in ad419–20 by, according to the story,26 a bishop named Abdas, who thenrefused to obey an order from the Persian king Yazdgard I to rebuildthe temple, and thus brought about his own martyrdom and apersecution which aZicted the Church in Persia for thirty years(HE 5.39.3). However, Theodoret cannot bring himself to condemnAbdas altogether: he says he much admires him and thinks himworthy of the martyr’s crown. The Western Fathers of the fourth tothe sixth century rarely mention voluntary martyrdom except, ofcourse, in relation to sectarian fanatics such as the Donatist Circumcellions,to be mentioned later, against whom are aimed the SecondCanon of the Council of Carthage of ad 348–9 and some of Augustine’spolemical writings.27 Augustine certainly implicitly condemnedthe practice of oVering oneself up for martyrdom when, as we havealready noticed, he applauds the statement of Cyprian that churchdiscipline did not allow the Carthaginian presbyters to give themselvesup of their own accord. Ambrose is much more explicit:although martyrdom must be eagerly accepted if it oVers itself, itmust not be rashly sought out, for there is a danger that the volunteermay be betrayed by his own weakness or bring down a persecutionupon the Christian community.28 Jerome twice emphasizes that26 But see J. Labourt, Le Christianisme dans l’empire Perse sous la dynastie Sassanide,224–632 (Paris, 1904), 105–7, and P. Peeters, ‘Une passion arménienne des SS.Abdas, Hormisdas, Sâhîn (Sueres) at Benjamin’, AB 28 (1909), 399–415, who makesuse of other sources, notably the Syriac Passion of Abdas, according to which thedestruction of the Wre temple was the work of a presbyter, Hasu. [See also L. VanRompay, ‘Impetuous Martyrs? The Situation of the Persian Christians in the LastYears of Yazdgard I (419–420)’, in M. Lamberigts and P. Van Deun (eds.), Martyriumin Multidisciplinary Perspective: Memorial Louis Reekmans (Louvain, 1995), 363–75,at 365–7.]27 Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, iii (Florence, 1759),143 V., 151 V.; summarized in Hefele–Leclercq, Histoire des conciles, i (Paris, 1907),837–41; Augustine, Contra Epistolam Parmeniani 1.10.16; Contra Gaudentium1.22.25, 1.27.30, and 1.28.32; Eps. 88.8, 185.3.12. [See further the bibliography in E.Lepelley, ‘Circumcelliones’, in C. Mayer (ed.), Augustinus-Lexicon, i (Basel, 1986–94),930–6.]28 Ambrose, De OYciis Ministrorum 2.30.153, laudabilis mortis cum occasiodatur, rapienda est illico [‘should the opportunity arise to die a death that willbring you great praise, seize it there and then’; trans. I. J. Davidson]; see also1.37.187, 1.42.208.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 163martyrdom is worthless if it is undertaken for the sake of the honourand glory (Comm. in Ep. ad Galat. 5.14, 26; PG 26.410, 424).It is convenient at this point to draw attention to some interestingremarks by Augustine (CD 1.16–28) and Ambrose (De Virginibus3.7.32–6) on one particular variety of what I have called ‘religioussuicide’.29 Faced with the problem of whether virtuous Christianwomen in danger of being raped by barbarian Vandals might lawfullyescape violation by committing suicide, or after being raped mightfollow the example of Lucretia, Augustine denounces all such practices;and he enlarges the scope of his discussion to include even casesin which a Christian commits suicide to avoid ‘rushing into sinthrough the allurement of pleasure or the intensity of pain’. However,it is signiWcant of the division of opinion on such questions withinthe Christian community that he feels obliged to make an honourableexception of certain holy women who, in time of persecution,had drowned themselves in their determination to preserve theirpudicitia,30 and were honoured as martyrs by the Catholic Church.As Augustine uncomfortably says, ‘concerning these I am reluctant tomake any rash comment’; perhaps they acted, like Samson, ‘underGod’s orders, not in error but obedient’ (CD 1.26). Augustinemust be referring here to the three well-born ladies of Antioch, leftanonymous in the narrative of Eusebius (HE 8.12.2–4) whose nameswere traditionally Domnina, Bernice, and Prosdoce. The attitude of29 See above, p. 154. On attitudes towards suicide in antiquity, see M. RostovtzeV,The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, iii (Oxford, 1941), 1329 n.31; H. A. Musurillo, The Acts of the Pagan Martyrs (Oxford, 1954), 236–7. Particularlyinteresting is Tacitus, Agricola 42.4–5. [The subsequent bibliography on this subject islarge. See most recently T. D. Hill, Ambitiosa Mors: Suicide and the Self in RomanThought and Literature (London, 2004); P. Plass, The Game of Death in Ancient Rome:Arena Sport and Political Suicide (Madison, 1995); A. Van HooV, From Autothanasiato Suicide: Self-Killing in Classical Antiquity (London, 1990); and M. GriYn, ‘Philosophy,Cato, and Roman Suicide’ I and II, Greece and Rome, 33 (1986), 64–77 and192–202. On the parallels between Christian martyrdom and suicide, see G. Bowersock,Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge, 1995), 59–74.]30 On condemnation to a brothel as a punishment for Christian women, seeEusebius, MP 5.3 following the numbering of H. J. Lawlor and J. E. L. Oulton,Eusebius (London, 1928), i. 327–400; add Ambrose, De Virginibus 2.22–33; JohnChrysostom as cited below n. 35. The actual inXiction of the penalty was probablyvery rare indeed.

164 Persecution and MartyrdomAmbrose is even more ambiguous than that of Augustine. Dealingwith the question of whether Christian virgins had a right to escapeviolation at the price of suicide, he praises a nameless virgin ofAntioch who refused to save herself in that way when condemnedto a brothel in time of persecution (De Virginibus 2.4.22–33); butwhen he goes on to tell the story of the suicide of certain Christianwomen in similar circumstances he carefully refrains from condemningtheir action.31 Jerome is more explicit: only when chastity isendangered should the prohibition against suicide be relaxed.32Others, like Eusebius (HE 8.12.2–4, 8.14.16–17) and JohnChrysostom, were warmly sympathetic to those who committedreligious suicide.33 Chrysostom devoted two panegyrics to Domninaand her daughters,34 and at least one to Pelagia, a virgin of Antiochwho was said to have thrown herself from a roof in order to escapearrest and possible prostitution.35 (It is worth noting that none of thewomen had been tried, let alone sentenced; and it is diYcult tobelieve that there was any real or immediate threat to their chastity.)Chrysostom insists that many other Christian women had similarlycommitted suicide to avoid arrest.36Volunteers and Quasi-VolunteersI shall now present the evidence for individual acts of voluntarymartyrdom. I do not pretend that this collection is complete, even31 De Virginibus 3.7.33–6; cf. Ep. 37.38 (ad Simplicianum). Ambrose speaks ofPelagia and her mother and sisters: he seems to be combining the stories of Pelagia(see n. 35 below) and of Domnina, Bernice, and Prosdoce.32 Jerome, Comm. in Jonam 1.402 (PL 25.1129A).33 [It is important to note, however, that Chrysostom does not always consider‘religious suicide’ a valid option: ‘the death of martyrs who kill [themselves] is anobvious defeat, yet of those who are murdered, a splendid victory’; Hom. in S. Jul. 3,trans. W. Mayer.]34 Hom. in SS. Bernic. etc. (PG 50.629–40); Hom. in Quatrid. Lazarum et SS.Domnina etc. (PG 50.641–4).35 Hom. in S. Pelag. I and II (PG 50.577–84). The ‘Hom. in S. Pelag. II’, ed.P. Franchi de’ Cavalieri in Studi e testi, 65 (1935), 301–3 is declared spurious (ibid.281–300). On Pelagia, see H. Delehaye, Les Légendes hagiographiques, 4th edn.(Brussels, 1955), 186–95, against H. Usener, Legenden der heiligen Pelagia (Bonn,1879).36 Hom. in S. Pelag. 1.2 (PG 50.580), and see Eusebius, HE 8.12.2.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 165within the limits I have set myself: it is quite possible that I havemissed a number of examples. Moreover, because of the disfavourwith which voluntary martyrdom was regarded by many leadingmembers of the Church, it may well be that in some cases a voluntaryact which really occurred was toned down or entirely suppressedwhen the written record of the martyrdom was compiled. I may saythat I have deliberately omitted cases in which I am not satisWedwith the evidence for the voluntary nature of the martyrdom—forinstance, when it is recorded in a Passion of unhistorical character,37or an untrustworthy literary source.38 Having regard to what seemsto me the excessive veneration of martyrdom in many parts of theNorth African provinces, I have been particularly chary of acceptingstories of voluntary martyrdoms from that area, unless there isparticularly good evidence for them. St Salsa, an alleged volunteerat Tipasa, has been shown by Grégoire to be wholly Wctitious,39 and Iam very suspicious of other supposed North African volunteers suchas Marciana at Mauretanian Caesarea.40 Nor have I paid any attentionto the considerable quantity of late and Wctitious Passions inwhich the martyrs are made to behave in a provocative manner andabuse their judges.1. At the end of the trial of Ptolemy before Q. Lollius Urbicus,praefectus urbi about ad 150, a Christian bystander whose name isgiven as Lucius reproached the prefect for having given an unjustsentence of death against an innocent man, and was immediatelyexecuted. Another Christian bystander also came forward to makehis confession and was duly sentenced.412. I have already described the abortive attempt at voluntarymartyrdom by Quintus the Phrygian at Smyrna, just before the37 e.g. Rusticus and Proculus in Passio Firmi et Rustici (Ruinart, Acta, 636–42); the37 Egyptian martyrs (Ruinart, Acta, 576–8).38 e.g. Philemon in RuWnus, Historia Monachorum 19.4–11 [see the critical text ofE. Schulz-Flügel, Tyrannius RuWnus Historia Monachorum sive de Vita SanctorumPatrum (Patristische Texte und Studien 34; Berlin, 1990)].39 H. Grégoire, ‘Sainte Salsa, roman epigraphique’, Byzantion 12 (1937), 213–24.40 Her Passio (Acta Sanctorum 9 January (vol. i, p. 569)) seems to preserve morehistorical reminiscences (see P. Monceaux, Histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétiennedepuis les origines jusqu’à l’invasion arabe, iii. 3 (Paris, 1905), 156–8) but cannot betrusted at any point.41 Justin, Apol. 2.2, repeated in Eusebius, HE 4.17.8–13.

166 Persecution and Martyrdomreign of Marcus Aurelius.42 It is often forgotten that Quintus is saidto have prevailed upon others to follow his example, kai ...proseltheinhekontas [‘and come forward willingly’]. We may perhaps infer thatthey were duly martyred, but this is left obscure.3. Paeon, who was present in court during the trial of Justin andothers at Rome in ad 165, came forward saying that he was aChristian and was beheaded with the rest.434. At the trial of Carpus and Papylus at Pergamum, perhapsduring the early part of the reign of Marcus (ad 161–9),44 a Christianbystander named Agathonice45 made a voluntary confession and wasburnt to death, fastening herself at the stake according to the GreekPassio, ‘un texte beaucoup trop vanté’ [‘a much overrated text’]according to Delehaye.4642 Passio Polycarpi 4.1; Eusebius, HE 4.15.7–8.43 Passio Justini 4.6. The word hestōs (he stood up) is decisive.44 This is the date usually accepted, but it is far from certain. The Latin Passio putsthe martyrdom tempore Decii imperatoris [‘in the time of the emperor Decius’]. [Onthe diYculties in dating this text, see T. D. Barnes, ‘Pre-Decian Acta Martyrum’, 514–15, who argues that the question Principalis es? in the Latin recension suggests a 3rdcent.date, since there is a reference to this oYce in the Severan period in the Digestjurist Callistratus (Dig. 48.19.27.2–28), but this may well be the result of Justinianicediting. The Wrst documentary record is CJ 10.48.2 perhaps from 287, on which see S.Corcoran, The Empire of the Tetrarchs: Imperial Pronouncements and Government AD284–324, rev. edn. (Oxford, 2000), 254–5. It is common in the Theodosian Code andis attested epigraphically in the 4th cent. (e.g. ILS 6623, IRT 559, 564, 567, and 595);see A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic, andAdministrative Survey (Oxford, 1964), 731 and V. Weber, ‘Die Munizipalaristokratie’,in K.-P. Johne (ed.), Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft des römischen Reiches im 3. Jahrhundert(Berlin, 1993), 245–317, esp. 303–4. Accordingly the use of principalis probablysuggests a date from Diocletian onwards for the Latin recension. I would like to thankBenet Salway for his help with this problem. Of course the date of the Latin recensiondoes not necessarily coincide with the actual martyrdom of Carpus, Papylus, et al.Onthis, see J. Den Boeft and J. Bremmer, who note that Papylus, a citizen of Thyatira,was tried in Pergamum (one of the assize centres of the Roman province of Asia),which they argue suggests a date before ad 215, when Caracalla granted the right tohold assizes to Thyatira; see their ‘Notiunculae martyrologicae II’, Vig. Chr. 36 (1982),383–402, at 384–5.]45 The expression used is Agathonikē de tīs hestōsa [‘There was a woman namedAgathonicē standing there’]: Passio Carpi 42.46 The Greek Passio Carpi 42–7; Delehaye, Sanctus, 168 n. 5. There may well be alacuna in the Greek text: the cry of the crowd suggests that Agathonice was at any rateduly sentenced (as she is in the Latin text of the Passio) and did not simply rush intothe Xames. [See also Den Boeft and Bremmer, ‘Notiunculae martyrologicae II’, 385.]

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 1675. During the persecution at Lugdunum (Lyons) in ad 177 twovoluntary martyrs came forward to make their confession: VettiusEpagethus, who demanded to be heard in defence of his brethren attheir trial and was immediately sentenced (Eusebius, HE 5.1.9–10);and Alexander, a doctor from Phrygia, who stood by the tribunal,encouraging the Christians accused by signs to confess, and wasnoticed by the crowd, brought before the governor, and sentencedto the beasts (Eusebius, HE 5.1.49–50).6. When Arrius Antoninus, proconsul of Asia in about ad 184–5,was holding his periodic assize in one of the towns of this province, alarge number of Christians—all the Christians of that town, accordingto Tertullian, but we must allow for his customary exaggeration—presentedthemselves in a body before him, demanding theprivilege of martyrdom. The astonished governor ordered a few oV toexecution, but contemptuously dismissed the remainder with thewords, ‘If you want to die, you wretches, you can use ropes orprecipices.’477. The future Pope and Saint, Callistus, is said by his bitter enemyand fellow-saint, Hippolytus (Elench. 9.12, esp. 7–9), to have madean attempt at voluntary martyrdom, happily unsuccessful, at a datewhich would be somewhere about ad 190. Hippolytus says thatCallistus, the slave of a well-to-do Christian (who seems to havebeen an imperial freedman), having embezzled money entrusted tohim in connection with a banking business, tried to escape, wasrecaptured and sent to the treadmill, but was soon liberated, apparentlyin the hope that he would be able to get some of the moneyback. Not being able to do so, according to Hippolytus, he plannedfor himself a hero’s death: pretending that he was going after hisdebtors, he went to the Jewish synagogue on the Sabbath and deliberatelycreated a disturbance. The Jews brought him before thepraefectus urbi, who did not sentence him to death but had himXogged and sent to the mines in Sardinia, from which he was soonreleased. This story must be treated with considerable suspicion. It istold by Hippolytus, unhappily our only authority for these events,with concentrated venom, and the Refutation of All Heresies, in whichit occurs, was not published until 30 or more years later, after the47 Tertullian, Ad Scapulam 5.1.

168 Persecution and Martyrdomdeath of Callistus. Döllinger’s explanation,48 that Callistus really wastrying to collect debts from the Jews and that the disturbance wascreated by their assaulting him, may well be true. What is importantfor our present purposes, however, is that Hippolytus evidentlythought it a plausible allegation that a Christian who was in a verybad position might deliberately court martyrdom by attacking theenemies of the Christian Church in circumstances which would belikely to bring upon him the supreme penalty.498. At Alexandria in ad 202–3 Origen, then a mere boy of 16, wasimpelled by the arrest of his father Leontes (who was subsequentlymartyred) to rush forward himself to make his confession (and ofcourse be put to death); but he was prevented, according to Eusebius(HE 6.3.4–5), by his mother’s hiding his clothes, and he had to contenthimself with writing his father a letter in praise of martyrdom, whichhas not survived.50 Origen remained a steadfast confessor until thevery end of his life (Eusebius, HE 6.39.5), and during the persecution atPalestinian Caesarea under Maximinus in ad 235–7 wrote an Exhortationto Martyrdom, addressed to two of his friends who were confessors.51However, in his more mature years (as we have already seen),52he ceased to approve of volunteering for martyrdom and indeed gave areasoned condemnation of it. This change of attitude may not beentirely unconnected with his self-castration, prompted by a literalinterpretation (too literal, as he himself later acknowledged: Comm. in48 J. Döllinger, Hippolytus und Kallistus; oder die römische Kirche in der erstenHälfte des dritten Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1853), 117–21 (see also the Eng. trans. byA. Plummer, Hippolytus and Callistus; or, the Church of Rome in the First Half of theThird Century (Edinburgh, 1876), 108–12), which is generally followed by RomanCatholic writers. What Hippolytus says is [‘Callistus, having nothing to pay andbeing unable to run away again because he was watched, planned a scheme for hisdeath on the Sabbath indeed (kai sabbatoi); pretending to go out as if to his creditors,he hurried to the synagogue of the Jews, who were gathered together, and created adisturbance among them’]. The position of sabbatoi suggests to me that Hippolytus isridiculing Callistus’ pretext—‘on the Sabbath, if you please’.49 Cf. the allegations of Mensurius in the letter quoted by Augustine, Brev. Coll.3.13.25 (see above, p. 160); also Passio Theodoriti 3 (Ruinart, Acta, 606–7).50 It was still available when Eusebius was writing: see HE 6.2.6.51 [See the translation of Henry Chadwick, in J. E. L. Oulton and H. Chadwick,Alexandrian Christianity (London, 1954), 393–429.]52 See above, p. 159.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 169Matthew 15.3) of the reference in Matthew 19. 2 to those who have‘made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake’.539. Saturus, Perpetua’s catechist, gave himself up at Carthage in ad203 (Passio Perpetuae 4.3).10. In about ad 205–6, during the governorship of SubatianusAquila, the virgin Potamiaena, threatened by the prefect with apunishment involving violation of her chastity, evidently madesome very abusive reply, for which she was immediately put todeath in a very unpleasant manner, being gradually boiled to deathwith pitch.54 Potamiaena is thus probably a quasi-volunteer of typeIII. Another quasi-volunteer (of type I) is Basilides (Eusebius, HE6.5.5–6), the soldier who led Potamiaena to execution. Shortly afterwardshe suddenly refused to swear an oath (a thing which otherChristian soldiers must often have been prepared to do) and wasdenounced and beheaded. Yet another quasi-volunteer of the samevariety is the African soldier mentioned earlier in whose honourTertullian wrote his De Corona Militis.5511. Perhaps the best known of all voluntary martyrs is theeponymous hero of Corneille’s play, Polyeucte, who is credited withtearing down the persecuting edict of Decius (ad 250) at Melitene onthe upper Euphrates. The Latin Passio which appears in the BollandistActa Sanctorum (AA SS Feb. II [13 Feb.], 651–2) contains nomention of provocation by Polyeuctes, of which (if it is indeedhistorical) the compiler may have disapproved; but the provocationdoes appear in the Greek texts of the Passio,56 which, although it isobviously a late composition with some characteristic hagiographicaltouches, does, I think, preserve a historical nucleus.53 See Eusebius, HE 6.8.1–2. [The veracity of Eusebius’ anecdote is not universallyaccepted. Sceptics include H. Chadwick, Sentences of Sextus (Cambridge, 1959), 110,and P. Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man (Berkeley, 1983), 89–90. See also M. J. Edwards, Origen Against Plato (Aldershot, 2002), 12 and 38 n. 4, and,for a more positive evaluation of the story, P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Womenand Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988), 168 with n. 44.]54 Eusebius, HE 6.5.1–4. Palladius, Lausiac History 3, gives a slightly diVerentstory. Eusebius calls Potamiaena ‘the famous maiden’.55 See above, pp. 158–9.56 The best is that published by E. Aubé, Polyeucte dans l’histoire: Étude sur lemartyre de Polyeucte, d’après des documents inédits (Paris, 1882). For an Englishtranslation of an Armenian translation of the Greek Passio, see F. C. Conybeare,The Armenian Apology and Acts of Apollonius and other Monuments of Early Christianity(London, 1896), 123–46. See also AA SS Feb. ii. 652–4.

170 Persecution and Martyrdom12. Six or seven volunteers are recorded among the victims of theDecian persecution at Alexandria in ad 250.57 Besas, a soldier, triedto protect other martyrs from insult as they were being led away toexecution; he was tried and beheaded (Eusebius, HE 6.41.16).13. During the Valerianic persecution in ad 258–9 three Palestinians,Priscus, Malchus, and Alexander, and apparently a Marcionitewoman, deliberately sought martyrdom by making a voluntaryconfession before the governor (Eusebius, HE. 7.12).14. As Cyprian was being led to execution on 14 September 258, anumber of his Xock cried out, ‘Let us be beheaded with him.’58 Therewas little danger, however, of their pious wish being granted.15. In the same persecution, when Marianus, Jacobus, and otherswere being tried at Lambaesis before Aemilianus, who was perhapsacting as provincial governor in place of the deceased proconsul,59 aChristian who was present drew attention to himself, quod iam pergratiam proximae passionis Christus in eius ore et facie relucebat[‘because already Christ shone in his countenance through thegrace of his imminent passion’], proclaimed himself a Christianand apparently suVered with the others.6016. During the years immediately preceding the ‘Great Persecution’,and perhaps during its course, we hear of several martyrs whowere executed for oVending against military discipline, by refusingto enlist, continue in military service, or obey orders, owing to57 If, with most scholars, we date the martyrdom of Pionius to the Decianpersecution, following the Passio Pionii, we cannot reckon Pionius a volunteer,even though after being arrested he put chains around his own neck and those ofhis two companions (Pass. Pion. 2.3–4), since Pionius and the others would have beenrequired to sacriWce in any event; but if Eusebius (HE 4.15.47) is right in putting themartyrdom under Marcus Aurelius (as believed, e.g., by Grégoire, Persécutions,108–14, 157 f.), then we should have to count Pionius and his two companions asvolunteers. [See H. Grégoire, P. Orgels, and J. Moreau, ‘Les Martyres de Pionios et dePolycarpe’, Bulletin de l’Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des lettres et des sciencesmorales et politiques, 47 (1961), 72–83 for an argument in favour of dating the Passionto the reign of Marcus Aurelius. It is still normally dated to the reign of Decius; see,for example, T. D. Barnes, ‘Pre-Decian Acta Martyrum’, 509–31, at 529–31; R. LaneFox, Pagans and Christians (Harmondsworth, 1986), 460–8; and L. Robert, LeMartyre de Pionios, prêtre de Smyrne (Washington, 1994), esp. 1–9.]58 Passio Cypriani 5.1.59 Passio Mariani et Iacobi 9.2, with Passio Montani et Lucii 6.1.60 Passio Mariani et Iacobi 9.2–4.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 171Christian scruples. There are some four or Wve of these cases, whichwe may conveniently consider together. I do not think that there wasa unanimous consensus of opinion in the Christian Church, beforethe reign of Constantine, on the question of whether Christiansmight serve as soldiers. Several prominent early Fathers of theChurch believed that service in the army was entirely incompatiblewith Christianity—Tertullian, Hippolytus, Origen, and Lactantius.61However, Christians had undoubtedly served in the army from atleast the second half of the second century, and probably earlier, andChristian soldiers must have been numerous by the end of the thirdcentury. It is certainly true to say that by that time the great majorityof Christians saw nothing intrinsically un-Christian in militaryservice. The actions of the martyrs listed below were, therefore,those of extremists, and they may properly be reckoned among thequasi-volunteers of type I.(i) On 12 March 295 the Christian paciWst Maximilian was executedat Theveste in what is usually called proconsular Numidia,62for refusing to enlist.6361 See C. J. Cadoux, The Early Church and the World (Edinburgh, 1925), 272–80,417–40, 573–92. [See generally J. F. Ubiña, Cristianos y militares: la iglesia antiguaante el ejército y la guerra (Granada, 2000); also the survey of J. Helgeland, ‘Christiansand the Roman Army from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine’, ANRW ii. 23.1 (Berlinand New York, 1979), 724–834.]62 That part of Numidia at this time was joined to the province of Africa andunder the jurisdiction of its proconsul [on which see T. D. Barnes, The New Empire ofDiocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 212].63 The Passio Maximiliani, in my opinion, is virtually an exact copy of the oYcialActa, down to and including the sentence of Maximilian. It is a fascinating document,our one authentic description of the enrolment of a Roman recruit and a veryvaluable historical source from more than one point of view. Yet, as far as Iknow, no English translation has ever been published, and the Latin text has notbeen re-edited since it was included in Ruinart’s collection in the 17th cent. [Ruinart’sedition was reprinted and translated into English by H. Musurillo, Acts of theChristian Martyrs (Oxford, 1972), 244–9; see the more recent critical editions of P.Siniscalco, Massimiliano, un obiettere di conscienza del tardo impero: studi sella PassioS. Maximiliani (Turin, 1974), with text at 159–61; and E. di Lorenzo, Gli Acta S.Maximiliani Martyris: Introduzione, testo, traduzione e commento (Naples, 1975), 20–7, who also translates it into Italian. The reasons behind Maximilian’s refusal to enlisthave received considerable attention. See among others, J. Helgeland, ‘Christians andthe Roman Army’; P. Brock, ‘Why did St. Maximilian Refuse to Serve in the RomanArmy?’, JEH 45.2 (1994), 195–209; and J. Ubiña, Cristianos y militares, 386–98.Delehaye, in an article Wrst published in 1932, also viewed Maximilian as an extremist;‘Réfractaire et Martyr’, in Delehaye, Mélanges d’hagiographie grecque et latine

172 Persecution and Martyrdom(ii) On 21 July 298 Marcellus, centurion of the Legio VII Gemina,then serving in Galicia in north-west Spain, threw away his belt andcane and refused to serve in the army any longer, on the ground thathe was a Christian. He was tried before the provincial governor andthen, on 30 October 298, before Aurelius Agricolanus, vicar of theSpains, at Tingis (Tangier) in Mauretania. He was executed forinfringement of military discipline: the fact that he acted as he didbecause he was a Christian was legally immaterial.64 Tacked on to thePassion of Marcellus is that of Cassian, who is represented as theshorthand writer (excerptor) taking down the record of the casebefore Agricolanus. Cassian, we are told, when sentence of deathwas pronounced, threw his pen and book on the ground, declaringthe sentence unjust, and was shortly afterwards executed as a Christian.Cassian is referred to as early as 400 or thereabouts by Prudentius(Peristeph. 4.45–8); but, as Delehaye has shown, the PassioCassiani is entirely worthless,65 and although there may very wellhave been a martyr named Cassian at Tangier, we must admit that weknow nothing of the date or the circumstances of his execution.(Subsidia Hagiographica 42; Brussels, 1966), 375–8. The scholarly consensus aboutthe value of this Passion has been challenged by David Woods, ‘St. Maximilian ofTebessa and the Jizya’, in P. Defosse (ed.), Hommages à Carl Deroux (CollectionLatomus 279; Brussels, 2003), 266–76. Woods argues that the text was producedduring the period 724–838 on the grounds that the lead seal that marked his status asa recruit reXects knowledge of the operation of the Muslim poll-tax or jizya. Even ifthis claim is not accepted, Woods advances other arguments against accepting thetext as a contemporary and accurate account of a real martyrdom.]64 [See the edition of G. Lanata, ‘Gli atti del processo contro il centurioneMarcello’, Byzantion, 41 (1972), 509–22, although note the comments in F. Dolbeau’sreview, Revue des Études Latines, 52 (1974), 570–3 and Barnes, New Empire, 178; seealso Ubiña, Cristianos y militares, 398–411, and the English translation inJ. Helgeland, R. Daly, and J. Patout Burns, Christians and the Military: The EarlyExperience (Philadelphia, 1985), 60–1.]65 See Ruinart, Acta, 345. The oYcial Acta were certainly not used as a source inthis case. The words iisdem fere responsionibus, iisdemque sententiis, quibus sanctusMarcellus [‘with almost the same replies and the same opinions as those of SaintMarcellus’] place this beyond any doubt. And there are various touches characteristicof later hagiography: multum iudicem iudicantis crederent omnes esse Marcellum[‘everyone believed that Marcellus was more truly a judge than the one judging’];tremefactus Aurelius Agricolanus exsiliens de sella [‘trembling, Aurelius Agricolanussprang up from the bench’]; venerabilis Cassianus [‘blessed Cassian’]. The wholedocument is of a totally diVerent character from the Passio Marcelli, which reproducesthe Acta closely. See H. Delehaye, ‘Les Actes de S. Marcel le centurion’, AB 41

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 173(iii) It was probably during the last years of the third century thatthe veteran Typasius and the soldier Fabius were condemned to deathby the dux of Mauretania Caesariensis, the former for refusing torejoin the colours when ordered,66 and the latter for declining tocarry a banner in the governor’s procession.67 Most Christians wouldhave performed these acts with a clear conscience.(iv) The very curious Passion of Dasius of Durostorum, who wouldnot play his allotted part in the Saturnalia, must be largely if notwholly Wctitious,68 and I do not feel able to make any use of it.(1923), 257–87, at 278, who rightly concludes, ‘Tout le récit est un plagiat; il ne nousapprend rien ni sur S. Cassien ni sur l’audience où fut condamné S. Marcel, et il fauts’abstenir de le citer à côté des Actes de ce martyr comme un text indépendant’ [‘Theentire account is plagiarized; it tells us nothing about either Saint Cassian or theaudience which condemned Saint Marcel, and one must refrain from citing italongside the acts of this martyr as though it is an independent text’]. See alsoN. H. Baynes, ‘The Great Persecution’, in CAH xii, 1st edn. (Cambridge, 1939),646–77, at 663 and n. 3.66 See Ste. Croix, ‘Aspects’, 111 [above, p. 75]; Monceaux, Histoire littéraire del’Afrique chrétienne, iii. 27, 126–32. [The value of the Passio Typasii as a historicalsource has received some attention, particularly with respect to its literary characteristics.J. Fontaine and C. StancliVe have noted parallels with Sulpicius Severus’ lifeof Martin of Tours; see Fontaine, ‘Sulpice Sévère a-t-il travesti Saint Martin de Toursen martyr militaire?’, AB 81 (1963), 31–58, at 43–8, and StancliVe, St. Martin and hisHagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus (Oxford, 1983), 144–8.D. Woods has noted the parallels with Eutropius’ Breviarium; see Woods, ‘A HistoricalSource of the Passio Typasii’, Vig. Chr. 47 (1993), 78–84. Finally, Alan Dearn hasrecently examined it in relation to the sectarian problems of 4th- and 5th-cent. NorthAfrica, arguing that ‘the way in which Typasius is remembered, or more likely,invented, aims to give legitimacy to the spread of monasticism in late fourth- orearly Wfth-century North Africa by depicting Typasius as a proto-Monk’; Dearn, ‘ThePassio S. Typasii Veterani as a Catholic Construction of the Past’, Vig. Chr. 55 (2001),86–98, at 87.]67 See Ste. Croix, ‘Aspects’, 111 [above, pp. 75–6]; Monceaux, Histoire littéraire del’Afrique chrétienne, iii. 27, 122–6; Franchi de’ Cavalieri in Studi e testi, 65 (1935),101–13; H. Delehaye, ‘Contributions récentes à l’hagiographie de Rome et d’Afrique’,AB 54 (1936), 265–315, at 300–2. [For the possible dates of Fabius’ martyrdom, seeHelgeland, ‘Christians and the Roman Army’, 823.]68 I agree with the judgement of H. Delehaye, Les Passions des martyrs et les genreslittéraires, 2nd edn. (Subsidia hagiographica 13B; Brussels, 1966), 230–5; see also his‘Saints de Thrace et de Mésie’, AB 31 (1912), 161–300, at 265–8. [See the more recentedition of R. Pillinger, Das Martyrium des heiligen Dasius: Text, Übersetzung undKommentar (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-HistorischeKlasse 517; Vienna, 1988) with the comments of J. Den Boeft and J. Bremmer,‘Notiunculae martyrologicae V’, Vig. Chr. 49 (1995), 146–64, at 159–61.]

174 Persecution and MartyrdomWe now come to the martyrs of the ‘Great’ Persecution.17. The earliest is the man who tore down the Wrst edict ofpersecution on the very day it was posted up at Nicomedia, andwas burnt to death. We have had occasion to refer to him already[above, p. 160]. Soon afterwards there were many other martyrdomsat Nicomedia, and Eusebius’ source declared that men and women‘leapt upon the pyre with a divine and indescribable eagerness’(Eusebius, HE 8.6.6)—a phrase which may, or may not, implyvoluntary martyrdom.18. If Mensurius was speaking the truth in his letter to Secundus,quoted above (p. 160), certain African Christians in ad 303–5 hadvoluntarily and unnecessarily denounced themselves to the authoritiesas possessing Scriptures which they would not surrender.19. Eulalia, a young fanatic of Augusta Emerita (Mérida)inSpain,iscelebrated in a poem by Prudentius, written in about 400.69 Accordingto the poet, who of course exaggerates and invents freely, Eulalia, a girlof 12, was taken to the country by her parents during a time ofpersecution (no doubt in ad 303–4), but escaped, came to town,publicly denounced the provincial governor for idolatry, and wheninvited to oVer incense spat in his face, smashed the pagan image andtrampled the incense underfoot. Prudentius, who loves to expatiate onthe tortures suVered by the martyrs he celebrates, gives himself fullscope in describing what happened to poor little Eulalia before theXames devoured her. The whole story may conceivably be invented, butthere may well be a historical nucleus, merely embroidered by the poet.20. Three other Spaniards are said to have oVered themselves up tothe provincial governor during the ‘Great’ Persecution: Faustus,Januarius, and Martialis in Cordova. Their Passion, however,isinmyopinion an unsatisfactory document, although Delehaye was willing(with some hesitation) to include it in his third class of Passions,namelythose having as their main source a written document based on theoYcial Acta or the reports of trustworthy eyewitnesses.7069 Peristephanon 3 [On Prudentius’ account of the martyrdom of Eulalia, seeJ. Petruccione, ‘The Portrait of St. Eulalia of Mérida in Prudentius’ Peristephanon3’, AB 108 (1990), 81–104]. The Passion (BHL i. 405, with Suppl. 3rd edn. 308) isworthless.70 Ruinart, Acta, 556–7; H. Delehaye, Les Légendes hagiographiques, 4th edn.(Brussels, 1955), 115, cf. 106–8.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 17521. On 29 April 304 at Catana in Sicily there appeared in thegovernor’s court-room, secretarium, a man named Euplus (or it maybe Euplius) who shouted out, ‘I wish to die, for I am a Christian.’ Hewas deWnitely clasping a copy of the Gospels, retention of which wasnow, in consequence of the Wrst persecuting edict of Diocletian, aserious crime.71 The interrogation which followed immediately, andwas renewed when Euplus was formally tried before the governor on12 August 304, centred upon Euplus’ possession of the Scriptures: hisstatement to the governor par’ emoi eisin, seems to have meant, ‘Theyare here with me, in my heart’; but the same words could also mean,‘They are in my possession’, and the governor evidently understoodthem in that sense. Euplus was then tortured, perhaps to death—atany rate dying a martyr.7222. According to Basil, Gordius made a voluntary confession inthe stadium outside Caesarea in Cappadocia, presumably betweenad 304 and 312. The details may be unhistorical, but the main factmay well be true.7323. It is evident from the Canonical Epistle of Peter of Alexandria,quoted above [pp. 160–1], that there had been a number of voluntarymartyrdoms in Egypt by the spring of 306.71 [See ‘Aspects’ (above, Chapter 1), p. 36 with n. 3.]72 Passio Eupli 2.2. After the words ‘let Euplus be racked and beaten until hepromises to sacriWce to the gods’ the superior Greek version of this Passion evidentlyceases to be a transcript of the oYcial Acta and neither it nor the inferior Latinversion can be relied on. They both profess to record the usual sentence of beheading,but it may be that Euplus died under torture.73 Basil, Homily XVIII, in Gordium mart. (PG 31.489–508, esp. § 3, col. 497).[Following the Byzantine synaxaries, Gordius’ death is generally dated to 321, andthe tyrant identiWed as Licinius, although there is little compelling evidence for this;see B. Gain, L’Église de Cappadoce au IVe siècle d’après la correspondance de Basile deCésarée (330–379) (Rome, 1985), 219 n. 280.] Basil’s comment is interesting: ‘there issome vague story which has been transmitted to us preserving the manly feats of theman in his struggles’. For Basil’s probable lack of real knowledge about Gordius’smartyrdom, see Delehaye, Les Passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires, 139–40.[Also F. Halkin, ‘Un second saint Gordius?’, AB 79 (1961), 5–15, at 5–6. Raymond VanDam has recently reiterated this point, noting that Basil ‘hardly knew what to say’about him, and suggests that the commonness of his name in Cappadocia mightindicate that Basil was ‘trying to embellish some local traditions into full Christiancults’; see his Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia,2003), 90, and Kingdom of the Snow: Roman Rule and Greek Culture in Cappadocia

176 Persecution and Martyrdom24. At the trial of Phileas, bishop of Thmuis, probably in 305 or306, a soldier named Philoromus made a voluntary confession andwas beheaded by the spring of 306.7425. Eusebius, while in the Thebaid between the years 306 and 312,saw ‘many’ voluntary martyrs condemned to death ‘in a single day’(HE 8.9.5). The fact that they were volunteers is guaranteed byEusebius’ statement that they ‘leapt up before the judgement seatfrom this side and that (epepedon allothen alloi), made their confessionand received sentence with hymns of thanksgiving’. As I havealready pointed out,75 it is quite wrong to cite this passage, as somany modern writers have done, as evidence of the intensity of thatpersecution. If the men in question had not been volunteers, but hadbeen under arrest already, they would have been brought in underguard, probably in chains.26. As I have already shown,76 a remarkably high proportion ofthe ‘Palestinian’ victims of the ‘Great’ Persecution, of whom Eusebiusgives us a complete list in his Martyrs of Palestine,77 were volunteersor quasi-volunteers. Of the 91 martyrs mentioned by Eusebius, weknow nothing at all about 44 (mostly Egyptians) who were executedat the copper mines of Phaeno. That leaves us with 47. Of these atleast 14 were volunteers proper, and at least another 17 were quasivolunteersof types II and III. The following is a brief summary of thedeeds of the outright volunteers.(Philadelphia, 2002), 54–5. Pauline Allen reckons that ‘the general veracity of hisaccount ...isguaranteed by the fact that in the audience there are some who rememberthe event’, but this is surely rather naïve; see J. Leemans, W. Mayer, P. Allen, and B.Dehandschutter, ‘Let us die that we may live’: Greek Homilies on Christian Martyrs fromAsia Minor, Palestine and Syria c. AD 350–AD 450 (London, 2003), 57 (whosetranslation is used above). On the context and aims of Basil’s homilies to martyrs,see P. Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley, 1994), 184–9.]74 Passio Phileae et Philoromi 3.1–3; Eusebius, HE 8.9.7.75 ‘Aspects’ [above, pp. 66–7].76 ‘Aspects’ [above, pp. 64–7]. [See also Barnes, Constantine, 148–63 on thehistorical background.]77 In this work Eusebius concerns himself with Palestinians, wherever they weremartyred, and Christians from other provinces martyred in Palestine.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 177(i) Alpheus publicly rebuked a large number of fellow-Christianswho were sacriWcing at Caesarea,78 and Romanus did the same atAntioch.79(ii) Apphianus seized the governor of Palestine by the arm while hewas pouring a libation (MP 4.2–15). Aedesius, his brother, violentlyassaulted Hierocles, the prefect of Egypt, who, according to Eusebius,had just sentenced some Christian virgins to a fate they wouldconsider worse than death: he knocked Hierocles down and wenton hitting him and admonishing him as he lay prostrate (MP 5.2–3).Antoninus, Zebinas, and Germanus interrupted the governor ofPalestine while he was sacriWcing and exhorted him to cease fromerror (MP 9.4–5).(iii) The most extraordinary incident of all took place at Caesarea,early in 305. While a festival was being celebrated, a false rumourbegan to spread that certain Christians would be thrown to the beastsas part of the joyful celebrations. While the governor was on his wayto the amphitheatre, six young men (Timolaus, Dionysius, Romulus,Paëis, and two named Alexander) suddenly presented themselvesbefore him with their hands bound behind them, crying out thatthey were Christians and demanding to be thrown to the beasts withtheir brethren (MP 3.2–4). We can well believe Eusebius when headds that the governor and his entire suite were reduced to a conditionof no ordinary amazement. The young men were arrested andimprisoned, but they were to be disappointed in the manner of theirdeath, for instead of giving them to the beasts, as they haddemanded, the merciless pagan condemned them to a speedy deathby decapitation. Eusebius gives not only the names of the young men78 Eusebius, MP 1.5e–k Long. In citing the Long Recension (L) of this work I havefollowed the numbering of Lawlor and Oulton, Eusebius, i. 327–400, who give anEnglish translation of L, from the Greek, Latin, and Syriac, side by side with the ShortRecension. [Alpheus’ actions seem to be of the type countenanced by Peter of Alexandria,Ep. Can. 11 (above, n. 3): ‘And because he saw that at that time laxity and great fearhad fallen upon all men, and many were swept along, as it were, before the torrent ofmany waters and were led to the foul worship of idols, he considered how he mightoppose the torrent of evil by his fortitude’; MP 1.5 f, trans. Lawlor and Oulton.]79 MP 2; De Resurr.2(PG 24.1097–1100); John Chrys. Laud. in S. Roman. I and II(PG 50.605–18). [Romanus’ actions appear to have been motivated by the samereason as those of Alpheus (see above): according to MP 2, he was ‘wont to deter byrebukes those whom terror was dragging down to the error of idolatry’, trans. Lawlorand Oulton.]

178 Persecution and Martyrdombut also their places of origin: two were Palestinians, two wereEgyptians, one was a Phoenician, and one came from Pontus. It isinteresting to Wnd Eusebius showing no disapproval of their action,any more than of the exploits of the other volunteers he records:indeed, he speaks of the young men, especially in the Long Recensionof his work, with real enthusiasm.(iv) A fourteenth confessor who is perhaps to be counted amongthe volunteers proper is Valentina (MP 8.6–8), who was so infuriatedby the spectacle of a Christian woman of Gaza being tortured atCaesarea in about ad 309 that she shouted out to the governor, ‘Howlong will you torture my sister so cruelly?’; and on being arrestedstruggled violently and kicked over a pagan altar. The two womenwere bound together and burnt alive.At least 17 of the remaining martyrs are quasi-volunteers of typeII, who drew attention to themselves by openly visiting or assistingarrested confessors or concerning themselves with the dead bodies ofmartyrs. Agapius, brother of Alexander of Gaza (one of the six youngmen mentioned above), frequently visited his brother in prison, andwas executed at the same time, as was another man called Dionysiuswho had also been ministering to the imprisoned confessors (MP3.4). Theodosia of Tyre approached confessors who were on trial andasked them to pray for her; she was condemned and drowned (MP7.1–2). In 309 certain Egyptian confessors who had been dispatchedto Palestine for penal labour in the mines were sent on to Cilicia.Some of their fellow-Christians set out from Egypt to take food tothem there, but were arrested at Ascalon; some were sent to themines, but two (Promus and Elijah) were beheaded, and one(Ares), who may have been guilty of special provocation, was burned(MP 10.1). Five unnamed Egyptian Christians had succeeded inescorting the arrested confessors to Cilicia, but on their returnjourney they were arrested at Caesarea. They pretended that theycame from Jerusalem and gave themselves Hebrew names; this is saidto have alarmed the governor of Palestine, who thought the Christiansmust somewhere have established a city hostile to Rome. TheWve were all beheaded (MP 11.5–14). Among others who werebeheaded at Caesarea that same day were four Christians who haddrawn attention to themselves in much the same manner as those we

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 179have just noticed. Porphyry, a slave, on hearing sentence of deathpronounced against his master Pamphilus, shouted out a request thathe might be given the body for burial; he was burned alive (MP11.15–19). An ex-oYcer from Cappadocia named Seleucus broughtnews of Porphyry’s death to Pamphilus, and greeted one of theconfessors with a kiss; he was beheaded (MP 11.20–3). Theodulus,a slave of the governor’s household, also kissed a confessor and wascruciWed (MP 11.24). Another Cappadocian, Julian, embraced thedead bodies of the martyrs and was burnt (MP 11.25–8). Soonafterwards Hadrian and Eubulus, who had come from Batanaea tovisit the confessors, were given to the beasts and Wnally decapitated(MP 11.29–30).At least two more of Eusebius’ ‘Palestinian’ martyrs were quasivolunteersof type III, who after being arrested behaved in an unnecessarilyprovocative manner. Procopius, the Wrst in Eusebius’catalogue, was arrested and ordered to sacriWce to the gods. Whenhe refused to pour a libation to the four emperors,80 he quoted withapproval the famous words of Odysseus in the Iliad against a multiplicityof rulers [‘lordship for many is no good thing; let there be oneruler, one king’].81 For this treasonable reXection upon the Tetrarchyhe was immediately executed. The woman of Gaza,82 at whose trialValentina made her protest, had abused the emperor while beinginterrogated.Among the remaining 16 ‘Palestinian’ martyrs it seems quite likelythat there may have been other volunteers or quasi-volunteers. Theextraordinary punishment (that proper to parricides) inXicted uponUlpian at Tyre (MP 5.1 Short Recension) suggests that he had beenguilty of something more than a plain confession of Christianity; and ofDomninus, who was burnt, a punishment not often inXicted uponordinary Christian confessors other than slaves, we are expressly toldthat he was famous for his confessions and his great boldness (MP 7.4).A few religious suicides are recorded from this period, notably ofthose at Antioch who are said by Eusebius to have thrown themselvesdown from the roofs of houses in order to escape arrest and torture80 MP 1.1–2. See H. Delehaye, Les Légendes hagiographiques, 119–39 for developmentsof the Procopius’ story; also BHG (3rd edn.), 218–20.81 Iliad 2.204–5, trans. Lattimore.82 Ennatha according to MP 8.8. L; but cf. 9.6–8.

180 Persecution and Martyrdom(HE 8.12.2); the three women of Antioch already mentioned [above,pp. 163–4], who drowned themselves in alleged fear of violation; anda Roman woman of the upper classes who stabbed herself to death toavoid being prostituted to Maxentius (Eusebius, HE 8.14.16–17).With the birth of the Christian Empire the period in which I amprimarily interested comes to an end—except for the short intervalof less than two years, in ad 361–3, when Julian became emperor andpaganism was oYcially restored; I shall presently refer to somevoluntary martyrdoms which took place at that time. My mainconcern is with the relationship of the early Church in the RomanEmpire to its pagan environment. I therefore propose to say virtuallynothing about the persecutions of Christians by Christians, whetherCatholics, heretics, or schismatics, which took place with distressingfrequency from the early fourth century onwards, although this strifeof sects also produced its voluntary martyrs.83 Nor do I intend tomake more than a very brief reference to the Donatist Circumcellionsof the fourth and Wfth centuries, who carried the practice of voluntarymartyrdom to the most extreme lengths.In Julian’s reign martyrdom at the hands of pagans was voluntarilyundertaken by Christians once more. As Baynes has put it, ‘Julian wasnever a persecutor in the accepted meaning of that word: it was the mostconstant complaint of the Christians that the emperor denied them theglory of martyrdom.’84 Some of them retaliated with acts of deliberateprovocation, which provincial governors less tolerant than the emperorhimself sometimes punished savagely as acts of civil rebellion.83 To give only one example: in ad 414–15 Amonius, a fanatical Nitrian monk,threw a stone at Orestes the prefect (hated by the Patriarch Cyril and his partisans)and was tortured to death. Cyril wished to have him reverenced as a martyr: Socrates,HE 7.14.84 N. H. Baynes, ‘Constantine’s Successors to Jovian: and the Struggle with Persia’, inCMH i, ed. H. M. Gwatkin and J. P. Whitney (Cambridge, 1911), 55–86, at 80. For anaccount of Julian’s religious policy by a modern Roman Catholic writer, see P. deLabriolle, ‘Christianisme et paganisme au milieu du IVe siècle’, in A. Fliche andV. Martin, Histoire de l’Église, iii (Paris, 1936), 177–204, esp. 189–91. [The bibliographyon this subject is substantial. See the contrasting interpretations of G. W. Bowersock,Julian the Apostate (London, 1978), 79–93; P. Athanassiadi, Julian: An Intellectual Biography(London, 1992), orig. publ. as Julian and Hellenism (Oxford, 1981), 24–7, 161–91;andR.Smith,Julian’s Gods:Religionand Philosophy in the Thoughtand Action of Julian theApostate (London, 1995), esp. 179–218.] Complaints in, for example, Greg. Naz. Or.4(contra Julianum I) 58, 61, 84; Theodoret, HE 3.17, cf. 11; Sozomen, HE 5.17 Wn.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 18127. We hear of martyrdoms which may properly be called voluntary,85resulting from the destruction of pagan temples or images atDurostorum in Moesia,86 and at two places in Asia Minor: Caesareain Cappadocia,87 and Merum in Phrygia.88 Two young Christiansinsulted the Mother of the Gods at Pessinus in Phrygia while Julianhimself was there; but what happened to them is not clear—one atany rate was Xogged, but apparently not executed, and we hear of nopunishment of the other, although he appeared in court.89 The Wfthcenturyecclesiastical historians, Socrates and Sozomen, give a highlycoloured description of the fate of the three martyrs of Merum(Macedonius, Theodulus, and Tatian); while after various torturesthey were being roasted on gridirons they begged the governor toturn them over, in order, they said, that they might not be cooked onone side only. Another volunteer who was cruelly tortured butappears to have survived was Mark, bishop of Arethusa in Syria,who had destroyed a pagan temple in the reign of Constantius.90Ordered by Julian to restore the temple himself or to pay for itsreconstruction, he at Wrst Xed, but returned when he heard thatvengeance was being taken on his Xock. He was tortured, but herefused, successfully, to pay for the rebuilding, even when the pagansoVered to accept a very small contribution. Other Christians werepunished for oVering public insult to paganism: thus Basil of Ancyrawas martyred, and Busiris of the same town was tortured andimprisoned but survived the apostate emperor.9185 I have not included here those martyred under Julian for destroying paganimages under the earlier Christian emperors, e.g. Cyril of Heliopolis (Theodoret, HE3.7) and Artemius (3.18).86 Jerome, Chronicle 2379; Theodoret, HE 3.7; see J. Zeiller, Les Origineschrétiennes dans les provinces danubiennes de l’Empire romain (Paris, 1918), 126–7.87 Greg. Naz. Or. 4.92; Ep. 58; Basil, Ep. 100.88 Socrates, HE 3.15; Sozomen, HE 5.11.89 Greg. Naz. Or. 5.40. It is possible, but not I think likely, that both were executed.90 Greg. Naz. Or. 4.88–91; Theodoret, HE 3.7; Sozomen, HE 5.10. According toSozomen, Mark was tortured to death, but from Theodoret, and the silence ofGregory, it is clear that he was ultimately released.91 Sozomen, HE 5.11. The Passion of Basil (for a Latin translation see Ruinart,Acta, 599–603) is historically worthless. [This verdict has been contested by D.Woods, who argues that it is ‘on the whole . . . a reliable historical source’; see his‘The Martyrdom of the Priest Basil of Ancyra’, Vig. Chr. 46 (1992), 31–9, at 36, againstwhich H. C. Teitler, ‘History and Hagiography: The Passio of Basil of Ancyra as aHistorical Source’, Vig. Chr. 50 (1996), 73–80.]

182 Persecution and Martyrdom28. Gregory of Nazianzus, in one of his scurrilous orations againstJulian, tells us of some Christian soldiers whom Julian induced toburn a few grains of incense before receiving one of their customarydonatives, but who later repented, tore their hair and rushed out intothe street, crying out that they were Christians and wanted to atonefor their sin. When they reached the palace they uttered execrationsagainst Julian and demanded to be burnt alive, so that they might becleansed by the very Wre with which they had deWled themselves inthe act of oVering incense. Julian condemned them to banishment.The Wfth-century ecclesiastical historian Theodoret gives a moredramatic account in which the emperor Wrst passes sentence ofdeath and only changes it at the very last moment: ‘In this’, addsTheodoret, ‘the emperor was actuated by the most malign jealousy,for he envied them the glory of martyrdom.’9229. Julian did execute two Christian soldiers of his guard, Juventiusand Maximus, who abused him at a banquet as ‘more wickedthan all the nations of the earth’ and, when brought before him,persisted in their attitude; but he was careful to proclaim that theexecutions were for insulting the emperor and not for religion.93There would undoubtedly have been many more voluntary martyrdomshad Julian not exercised surprising self-restraint in the face ofdeliberate provocations of various kinds, as for example when hisattempt to make peace between a Christian father and his apostateson was insolently rebuVed (Theodoret, HE 3.15), or when Maris,bishop of Chalcedon, interrupted him while he was sacriWcing andpublicly rebuked him as an impious man, an apostate and an atheist(Soc. 3.13; Soz. 5.4). Maris suVered severely from cataract, and whenthe exasperated Julian uncharitably taunted him with his blindness,which his God could not cure, Maris replied that he thanked God forit because it prevented him from looking upon the face of anapostate. Yet Julian took no action against Maris. Theodoret tellswith great pleasure the story of some Christian nuns of Antioch who,when Julian passed, sang hymns especially loudly to show theircontempt for him (HE 3.19). When the Christians of Antioch were92 Greg. Naz. Or. 4.82–4, and see also Sozomen, HE 5.17; Theodoret, HE 3.16–17.[As Theresa Urbainczyk has noted, such forceful condemnation of Julian is characteristicof Theodoret’s history; see her Theodoret of Cyrrhus: The Bishop and the HolyMan (Ann Arbor, 2002), 30–1.]93 Theodoret, HE 3.15.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 183ordered by Julian to remove the body of their third-century martyr,Babylas, from Daphne to Antioch, they did so with a great demonstration,as a result of which several were arrested and a young man,Theodorus, tortured but eventually released.94I have said that I propose to deal very brieXy with the Circumcellions,‘the shock troops of Donatism’ as they have been called.95 It is myobject in this paper to show that voluntary martyrdom, far from beingpeculiar to heretics and schismatics, occurred constantly in the verybosom of the Catholic Church, even though the dominant section ofopinion in the Church disapproved of it. The Circumcellions, however,are a class apart. Although substantially orthodox in doctrine, theywere extreme schismatics to a man.96 They were a characteristicallyAfrican phenomenon, for it was in North Africa, and especially inNumidia (modern Algeria), that the cult of the martyrs reached itsgreatest intensity. More than one ancient author describes the Circumcellionsas having their minds Wxed on martyrdom.97 In themthe tendencies which we have seen at work in other sections of the94 Soc. 3.18–19; Soz. 5.19–20; Theod. HE 3.10–11; RuWnus, HE 1.37.95 See W. H. C. Frend, ‘The Cellae of the African Circumcellions’, JTS 3 (1952),87–9; also The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa(Oxford, 1952). [The subsequent bibliography on the Circumcellions is substantial.Frend continued to work on them and his analogy between the Circumcellions andvarious peasant revolts has proved inXuential; see particularly his ‘Circumcellionsand Monks’, JTS 20 (1969), 542–9, repr. in his Town and Country in the EarlyChristian Centuries (London, 1980), and ‘Heresy and Schism as Social and NationalMovements’, in Studies in Church History, 9 (1972), 37–56, repr. in his ReligionPopular and Unpopular in the Early Christian Centuries (London, 1976). It shouldbe noted, however, that a number of scholars had developed similar approachesindependently of Frend; see the bibliography listed in B. D. Shaw, ‘Who were theCircumcellions?’, in A. H. Merrills (ed.), Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectiveson Late Antique North Africa (Aldershot, 2004), 227–58, at 227–31 nn. 1–13. Seealso M. Gaddis, There is no Crime for those who have Christ: Religious Violence in theChristian Roman Empire (Berkeley, 2005), 111–24.]96 [Although they would not have considered themselves schismatics; on some ofthe classiWcatory problems associated with the ‘Donatists’, see B. D. Shaw, ‘AfricanChristianity: Disputes, DeWnitions, and ‘‘Donatists’’ ’, in M. R. Greenshields and T. A.Robinson (eds.), Orthodoxy and Heresy in Religious Movements: Discipline andDissent (Lampeter, 1992), 5–34, repr. in Shaw, Rulers, Nomads, and Christians inRoman North Africa (Aldershot, 1995).]97 See Frend, Donatist, 174 V. [Note, however, that considerable source diYcultiesattend any study of the Circumcellions. Brent Shaw has shown recently that ‘externalaccounts’ of the Circumcellions, found in handbooks of heresies (among whichhe includes Augustine’s Liber de haeresibus), are ‘largely useless for any viable

184 Persecution and MartyrdomChristian Church appeared in an acute and intense form. If no otherdeath oVered itself conveniently, the Circumcellions might on occasionresort to ritual suicide, sometimes in masses, throwing themselves overprecipices or into rivers, or even, we are told, burning themselves alive.Others would perish in attacks on villas or Catholic churches. Thesemen were greatly honoured by their fellow Donatists as martyrs.98 Eventhose who did not feel that their time had yet come to seek martyrdomwere very dangerous to their enemies, the Catholic clergy and theCatholic villa-owning aristocracy of North Africa, because of the contemptof death, even desire for death, which their outlook engenderedin them. The Circumcellions, however, are in reality outside the Weldwith which I am concerned, and I need say no more about them.It is beyond my ability to deal in general with martyrdoms occurringoutside the Roman Empire; but I have already referred (above, p. 162)to the destruction of a Persian Wre-temple in 420, and I may add thatTheodoret may have known of voluntary martyrdoms during thepersecution which followed under Yazdgard I and Vahram V, for hesays that ‘of their own accord they rushed . . . in their desire to gainthe death which brings about indestructible life’ (HE 5.39). Sabas, theGothic saint martyred in 372, made two confessions in which heshowed excess of zeal, and rejected attempts by his fellow villagers toconceal him, before he was Wnally arrested; and even after that hetwice failed to make use of opportunities to escape.99 And there isone other interesting episode which I must not fail to mention. InMuslim Spain in the mid-ninth century, under the Emirs ‘Abd al-Rahman (822–52) and Mohammed I (852–86), Christianity wastolerated and even given a certain oYcial status (as usual in Muslimcountries, at least before the Crusades), there being few restrictionson churches except that they were not allowed to ring bells forservices or organize public processions.100 However, a party centredinvestigation of the social phenomenon in Africa’; see Shaw, ‘Who were the Circumcellions?’at 257.]98 The Wrst Council of Carthage in ad 348–9 forbade that those who destroyedthemselves be honoured as martyrs (Conc. Carthag. I, Canon 2); see above, n. 27.99 [See the translation of P. Heather and J. Matthews, The Goths in the FourthCentury (TTH 11; Liverpool, 1991), 111–17.]100 See É.Lévi-Provençal, Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane (Paris, 1950), i. 225–39.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 185at Wrst at Cordova and led by Eulogius and Alvar was avid formartyrdom, although this could hardly be obtained except for oVeringpublic insult to the Prophet, a crime for which many Christianfanatics were executed during the last years of ‘Abd al-Rahman II.Such voluntary martyrdom was oYcially proclaimed sinful andtantamount to suicide by a Council convened at Cordova in 852;but the movement spread and, shortly after the Council, the Christiancommunity at Toledo, evidently dominated by more fanaticalelements, even elected Eulogius metropolitan, a choice which MohammedI refused to ratify. In 859 Eulogius, arrested on a charge ofillegal proselytization, publicly insulted the Prophet and was dulydecapitated. The movement continued for a time, but eventuallypetered out in the tenth century.101Other Relevant Source MaterialIn this section, as before, I have deliberately ignored evidence which Ibelieve to be valueless, such as the clearly unhistorical story in JohnMalalas and John of Antioch of a letter sent to Trajan by Tiberianus,governor of Palestina Prima, complaining of his weariness inpersecuting Christians who ‘will not stop incriminating themselvesin order to be put to death’.1021. It is very well known that from the earliest times Christianityvenerated its martyrs and conceived of them as occupying a specialplace in the future life.103 There is a great deal of evidence, which I101 [See K. B. Wolf, Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain (Cambridge, 1988); J. A.Coope, The Martyrs of Córdoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of MassConversion (Lincoln Nebraska, 1995).]102 Malalas, Chronicle 11.5 (273) [trans. E. JeVreys, M. JeVreys, and R. Scott; seethe recent edition of H. Thurn, Ioannis Malalae Chronographia (Corpus FontiumHistoriae Byzantinae 35; Berlin, 2000)]; John of Antioch fr. 111 in FragmentaHistoricum Graecorum, iv (Paris, 1851), 580–1.103 On the original signiWcance and the developments of the word martus and theconcept of martyrdom, see H. Delehaye, Sanctus, 74–121; F. Günther, Martus: DieGeschichte eines Wortes (Berlin, 1941). [See also H. Von Campenhausen, Die Idee desMartyriums in der alten Kirche (Göttingen, 1936); N. Brox, Zeuge und Märtyrer:Untersuchungen zur frühchristlichen Zeugnis-Terminologie (Munich, 1961); Grégoire,Persécutions, 238–49; H. Strathmann, ‘Martus’, in G. Kittel and F. Friedrich (eds.),Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (London, 1964), 474–508; T. Baumeister,Die Anfänge der Theologie des Martyriums (Münster, 1979); and G. W. Bowersock,Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge, 1995), 1–21.]

186 Persecution and Martyrdomneed not review in detail now,104 showing that confessors awaitingmartyrdom, benedicti martyres designati as Tertullian calls them (AdMartyras 1.1), using the technical term for Roman magistrates whohad been elected but had not yet entered upon their oYce, werepersons of extraordinary consequence among the faithful, whovisited them in relays (sometimes exposing themselves in doing so)and brought them food and comforts.105 Confessors, at any ratethose awaiting execution, might sometimes even claim the prerogativeof forgiving the sin of apostasy on the part of weaker brethrenwho had lapsed under pressure:106 during the Decian persecutions of250 this practice was carried to such lengths in Africa that certiWcatesof forgiveness, libelli pacis, were given wholesale by imprisonedconfessors—thousands a day, according to Cyprian (Ep. 20.2), whowas exasperated at the aVront to his own authority, and whose lettersare full of indignant complaints about these libelli pacis. The venerationpaid to confessors sometimes went to their heads: we hear ofcomplaints from Tertullian and Cyprian about iactatio martyris.1072. We have just one work by a pagan author which corroborates, iffrom a hostile point of view, some of the things we learn fromChristian sources about the reverential attitude of the ordinaryChristians towards imprisoned confessors. This is The Death ofPeregrinus, written probably during the late 160s by the satiristLucian. And as it happens the same work also provides us with anexcellent pagan parallel to the voluntary Christian martyrs. Peregrinus,or Proteus as he preferred to call himself, was a real historicalcharacter, a citizen of Parium on the Hellespont and a very curiousperson indeed. It was in Palestine, according to Lucian, that Peregrinusfell in with the Christians ‘and picked up their queer creed. Ican tell you, he pretty soon made them look like children: prophet,chairman, organizer—he was everything at once; expounded their104 See the opening chapter of H. Delehaye, Les Origines du culte des martyrs, 2ndedn. (Subsidia hagiographica 20; Brussels, 1933), esp. 15 V.105 See Delehaye, Sanctus, 11–14.106 See Tertullian, Ad Martyras 1.6; De Pudicitia 22.1–2; Cyprian, Ep. 15; 16; 17.2;20.2–3; 21.3; 22.2; 23; 27; 35; 36; Dionys. Alex. ap. Eusebius, HE 6.42.5–6; Peter ofAlexandria, Ep. Can. 5; probably Eusebius, HE 5.2.5. I know of no reference to thispractice after the Decian persecution.107 Tertullian, Adv. Prax. 1.4; Cyprian, Ep. 11.1; cf. 13.4, 5; 14.2, 3.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 187books, commented on them, wrote a lot of books himself. They tookhim for a sort of god, accepted him as a lawgiver, and declared himtheir president . . . the end of it was that Proteus was arrested andthrown into prison. This was the very thing to lend an air, in hisfuture career, to the storytelling and notoriety he was addicted to.Well, the Christians took it all very seriously: he was no sooner inprison than they began trying every means to get him out again, butwithout success. Everything else that could be done for him theymost devoutly did. Aged widows and orphan children might be seenhanging about the prison from break of day. Their oYcials evenbribed the gaolers to let them sleep inside with him. Then elaboratedinners were conveyed in; their sacred writings were read; and ourold friend Peregrinus, as he was still called in those days, became forthem ‘the modern Socrates’. From some of the Asiatic cities, too, theChristian communities put themselves to the expense of sendingdeputations, with oVers of sympathy, assistance, and legal advice.The alacrity of these people in dealing with any matter that aVectstheir community is something extraordinary: in no time they spendtheir every penny. Peregrinus, all this time, was making quite anincome on the strength of his bondage: money came pouring in.You see, these misguided creatures have convinced themselves thatthey are going to be altogether immortal and live for ever, whichexplains the contempt for death and voluntary self-devotion whichare so common among them (par ho kai kataphronousin tou thanatoukai hekontes autous epididoasin hoi polloi)...Nowanadroit, unscrupulouscharlatan, who has seen this world, has only to get amongthese simple souls, and his fortune is pretty soon made: he plays withthem.’108Eventually Peregrinus was released from prison by the legate ofSyria and returned to Parium, but his wandering soon began again.‘The Christians’, says Lucian (De Mort. Peregr. 16), ‘were meat anddrink to him; under their protection he lacked nothing, and thisluxurious state of things went on for some time.’ At last the Christiansfound him out and excommunicated him. He then became a108 De Morte Peregrini 11–13; I have used the delightful free translation of F. G.Fowler, in H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, The Works of Lucian of Samosata: Completewith Exceptions SpeciWed in the Preface, iv (Oxford, 1905), 79–95, adapting it slightly.

188 Persecution and MartyrdomCynic philosopher, and at the Olympic Games of 161 announced thatat the next Games, in 165, he would immolate himself on a pyre,a promise which he actually fulWlled (Lucian, De Mort. Peregr. 1–6,20–42; Fugitivi 1–2, 7). Lucian presents him as a man dominated by apassion for notoriety and theatricality; but this, of course, is not thewhole story,109 and evidently the suicide of Peregrinus made a deepimpression at the time, as Lucian indirectly admits.110 There werethose who searched the burning remains for some precious relic theycould carry away;111 and a venerable disciple of Peregrinus insistedthat immediately after his cremation Peregrinus had appeared to himin white raiment (De Mort. Peregr. 40). It seems merely fortuitousthat Peregrinus did not conceive his plan of self-immolation when hewas still a member of the Christian community. If he had done so,and had chosen a suitable method of inducing the authorities to puthim to death, he might even have achieved a place among the saintsand martyrs of the Church.3. The distinguishing characteristic of the voluntary martyrs is apositive craving for martyrdom for its own sake. This characteristicsometimes appears in martyrs who are not known to have taken109 See M. Caster, Lucien et la pensée religieuse de son temps (Paris, 1937), 237–55,with bibliography at 396–7. I agree with Caster’s comment on p. 245 that Lucian istotally lacking in any religious feeling. [It is doubtful whether Lucian’s religiousfeelings can be inferred so easily from his work. As J. L. Lightfoot has recently argued,‘for all the caustic tone of the religious satire in Lucian’s . . . works, the crucialobservation is that they are not, for the most part, up-to-the-minute responses tothe changing contemporary scene, but rather heirs to a long tradition of comic andphilosophic satire directed against religious Xummery (not necessarily against theidea of gods per se)’; see Lightfoot, Lucian: On the Syrian Goddess (Oxford, 2003),200. See also J. Hall, Lucian’s Satire (New York, 1981), 194–220, and C. P. Jones,Culture and Society in Lucian (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 33–45.]110 The suicide was copied from Indian models: see Lucian, De Morte Peregrini 25,39; Fugitivi 6–7 (Brachmanes, gymnosophistai). Two such Indian suicides were wellknown in the West, that of Calanus at Susa in 324 bc in the presence of Alexander(the main sources are Arrian, Anab. 7.2–3; Strabo 15.1.68; Diodorus 17.107.1–5;Plutarch, Alex. 69), and that of Zarmanus or Zarmarus at Athens in 25 bc in thepresence of Augustus (Cassius Dio 54.9.9–10; Strabo 15.1.4; 1.73; Plutarch, Alex.69.8). [Note that Peregrinus claims the Cynic hero Heracles as his model; see DeMorte Peregrini 33 and 36. On the importance of Heracles in Cynic thought seeR. Höistad, Cynic Hero and Cynic King: Studies in the Cynic Conception of Man(Uppsala, 1948), 22–73.]111 Lucian, De Morte Peregrini 39. Compare the Christian attention to martyrs’relics, the earliest evidence of which appears to be Passio Polycarpi 18.2–3.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 189active steps to realize their desire, although in some cases there maybe reason to suspect that in fact they did so. Prominent among theseis an important Wgure in the history of the early Church, who, thoughhe cannot be proved to have been a voluntary martyr, is perhaps theprecursor to the whole series: Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, who wasmartyred at Rome, probably between the years 110 and 125, butpossibly even as late as the 160s.In his letter to the Church of Rome, written while he was beingtaken from Antioch to the capital for execution, Ignatius displayswhat I can only call a pathological yearning for martyrdom.112 Theprospect of being given to the beasts at Rome Wlls him with intensepleasure. He describes himself as ‘desiring to die’ (Ep. ad Rom. 7.2),and admonishes the Roman Christians not to try to save him. ‘I amwillingly dying for God,’ he says (Ep. ad Rom. 4–5), ‘unless youhinder me. I urge you, do not become an untimely kindness to me.Allow me to be bread for the wild beasts; through them I am able toattain to God. I am the wheat of God and am ground by the teeth ofthe wild beasts, that I may be found to be the pure bread of Christ.Rather, coax the wild beasts, that they may become a tomb for meand leave no part of my body behind . . . May I have the full pleasureof the wild beasts prepared for me; I pray they will be found ready forme. Indeed, I will coax them to devour me quickly. . . Fire and crossand packs of wild beasts, cuttings and being torn apart, the scatteringof bones, the mangling of limbs, the grinding of the whole body, theevil torments of the devil—let them come upon me, only that I mayattain to Jesus Christ.’113 We do not know the circumstances in whichIgnatius was arrested and sentenced. John Malalas (Chron. 11, p. 276)and the Antiochene Acts of Ignatius depict him as a volunteer givingdeliberate provocation;114 but these sources are late (the AntiocheneActs are probably later than Malalas, whose Wrst edition was112 [Note, however, that he never uses the word ‘martyr’; see Bowersock, Martyrdomand Rome, 6.]113 [Trans. B. D. Ehrmann, The Apostolic Fathers, i (Cambridge, Mass., 2003),274–7; see also the commentary of W. R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch (Philadelphia,1985), 175–80.]114 Ed. J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, 2nd edn. (London, 1889), ii.ii.477–95, 589–95.

190 Persecution and Martyrdomcompleted c.530), and quite untrustworthy,115 and we cannot pay anyserious attention to them. Any suggestion that Ignatius was a volunteer,plausible as it may seem, must remain unsupported by credibleevidence. However, although we cannot actually count Ignatius as avolunteer, his letter to the Romans is evidence of the existence in theearly Church of a trend which was only too likely to lead to voluntarymartyrdom, even at times when the authorities were not muchinclined to persecute. I can Wnd no trace of any disapproval amongChristians of Ignatius’ attitude. Indeed the curious and rather repellentmetaphor about being the wheat of God, to be ground into purebread by the teeth of the wild beasts, is quoted approvingly byIrenaeus in the 180s (Adv. Haeres. 5.28.4: though without attributionto Ignatius by name), and no doubt the letters of Ignatius didcirculate in the early Church,116 although, as it happens, they arerarely quoted in the surviving literature. There seems little reason tothink that the state of mind visible in Ignatius’ letter to the Church ofRome was an isolated phenomenon.4. I now wish to refer brieXy to one of the most remarkable of allearly Christian documents, the Passion of Perpetua and her companions,described by Delehaye as ‘the masterpiece of hagiographicliterature’.117 It is indeed an extraordinary composition. There is noattempt to use the oYcial Acta of the trial. Nearly half of the original115 See the thorough analysis of Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, 383–91 (Acts),436–7 (Malalas).116 See esp. Eusebius, HE 3.36.2–15. The evidence is set out and discussed at lengthin Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, i. 135–232; P. N. Harrison, Polycarp’s Two Epistlesto the Philippians (Cambridge, 1936), 209 V. [C. Munier, ‘Où en est la questiond’Ignace d’Antioche? Bilan d’un siècle de recherches 1870–1988’, ANRW ii.27.1(Berlin and New York, 1993), 359–484.]117 Ed. Knopf, no. 8; Delehaye, Les Passions, 63. [See J. Amat’s edition of the PassioPerpetuae; Passion de Perpétue et de Félicité, suivi des Actes (Sources chrétiennes 417;Paris, 1996), with the text and French trans. at 98–183. Perpetua’s Passion hasreceived much attention in recent years. See particularly Louis Robert’s classicstudy of her last vision, ‘Une vision de Perpétue martyre à Carthage en 203’, CRAI(1982), 228–76, repr. in Robert, Opera Minora Selecta: Épigraphie et AntiquitésGrecques, v (Amsterdam, 1989), 791–839. See also B. D. Shaw, ‘The Passion ofPerpetua’, Past and Present, 139 (1993), 3–45, repr. in R. Osborne (ed.), Studies inAncient Greek and Roman Society (Cambridge, 2004), 286–325; and J. Bremmer,‘Perpetua and her Diary: Authenticity, Family and Visions’, in W. Ameling (ed.),Märtyrer und Märtyrerakten (Stuttgart, 2002), 77–120.]

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 191Latin Passion, in its complete form, consists of Perpetua’s own vividrecord of her arrest, her trial, and her experiences in prison,outstanding among which are her visions. A few more paragraphscontain the record of further visions, those of Saturus, Perpetua’scatechist and fellow-martyr and a volunteer, the only one in thisgroup of martyrs (see above, p. 169). The rest of the Passion is thework of an editor who was either an eyewitness to the martyrdom orobtained his material from an eyewitness; and it must havebeen composed soon after the events it relates, which took place atCarthage in 203. It is believed by many scholars that the editor, whoshows Montanist characteristics, was no less a person than Tertullianhimself, who became a Montanist a few years after Perpetua’s martyrdom.118Recent Roman Catholic writers, however, while admittingdistinct Montanist elements in the outlook of the editor of thePassion, consider the contributions of Perpetua and Saturus themselvessuYciently orthodox, even if they show traces of MontanistinXuence.119 There is certainly no sign that Perpetua and the otherswere in any way separated from the Catholic community in Africa.However, even if the martyrs considered themselves, and were consideredby the rest of their community, to be orthodox CatholicChristians, I do not myself see how one can possibly avoid theconclusion, which has imposed itself on most scholars, that a distinctMontanist Xavour pervades even the passages written by Perpetuaand Saturus. I therefore do not think it right to treat the Passion astruly representative of the outlook of Catholic Christianity. Nevertheless,it was undoubtedly characteristic of what we might call theleft wing of the Catholic Church in Africa, which a century later was118 [Tertullian was Louis Robert’s preferred choice as author, although heconceded that this could not be established with any certainty; see Robert, ‘Une visionde Perpétue’, 235 n. 35; against this see T. D. Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical andLiterary Study, rev. edn. (Oxford, 1985), 79–80 and 329; and R. Braun, ‘Nouvellesobservations linguistiques sur le rédacteur de la ‘‘Passio Perpetuae’’ ’, Vig. Chr. 33(1979), 105–17. Brent Shaw reckons Robert’s caution to be ‘perhaps the point...where the whole matter ought to be left’; see his ‘The Passion of Perpetua’ at 309 n. 70.]119 Delehaye, Les Origines, 63V., esp. 66–7; P. de Labriolle, La Crise montaniste(Paris, 1913), 339–53. [Barnes originally reckoned the Passion of Perpetua to be‘Montanist through and through’, but later conceded that the visions of Perpetuaand Saturus need to be separated from the general tone of the text; see his Tertullianat 77–9 and 329, with the review of J. Matthews, JTS 24 (1973), 245–9, at 248–9.]

192 Persecution and Martyrdomto break away in the Donatist schism. Moreover, its great popularityshows that it made a very strong appeal to Christians generally, and itseems to me representative of a signiWcant section of opinion withinthe Catholic Church. The most striking feature of the Passion ofPerpetua is its atmosphere of elation, or exaltation, in the face ofapproaching martyrdom. The martyrs are greedy for death: theyreceive with joy the sentence of execution by exposure to the beasts,hilares descendimus ad carcerem (‘we went down to the cell joyfully’);and they spend the interval before execution in a state of intenseexcitement and pleasurable anticipation, enhanced by comfortingvisions in which they see themselves play a most distinguished part.The brethren who visit them treat them with the very greatest respect,and their prayers, for the living and for the dead, are believed to havespecial eYcacy. The act of martyrdom is everything. One of thecompany, Saturninus, is said to have declared while in prison, inwords which remind us irresistibly of Ignatius, that ‘he wished hecould be thrown to all the beasts, that he might wear a more gloriouscrown’.5. When Epictetus (Diss. 4.7.6), after speaking of various classes ofmen who have no fear of tyrants (because they wish for death, arenobly indiVerent to it, or are deranged by madness or despair), goeson to ask ‘if madness can produce this attitude of mind toward thethings which have just been mentioned, and also habit, as with theGalileans, cannot reason and demonstration teach a man that Godhas made all things in the universe, and the whole universe itself, tobe free from hindrance, and to contain its ends in itself, and the partsof it to serve the needs of the whole?’ He may not be referring to theChristians at all, but rather to the Jewish Zealots;120 and even if he hasthe Christians in mind, he may be alluding to the steadfastness oftheir martyrs in general. However, in the Meditations of MarcusAurelius there is a passage which suggests that the philosophic120 Thus A. Schlatter, ‘Der Märtyrer in den Anfängen der Kirche’, in Beitrage zurFörderung christlicher Theologie, 19.3 (1915), 226–310, at 241 and 290–1 n. 35. [Seealso M. Hengel, Die Zeloten: Untersuchungen zur jüdischen Freiheitsbewegung in derZeit von Herodes I. bis 70 n. Chr (Leiden, 1976), 60–1, trans. by D. Smith as TheZealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod Iuntil 70 A.D. (Edinburgh, 1989), 58–9.]

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 193emperor thought the Christian martyrs guilty of theatricality.121 Theaccusation was no doubt thoroughly unjust as regards the ordinarymartyrs, but some of the volunteers may well have acted in such away as to lend colour to Marcus’ criticism.6. A passage in Origen’s Contra Celsum suggests that Christianswould sometimes revile and strike a pagan image in their eagerness toprove it powerless to avenge such an insult (8.38). Origen, however,reproves such conduct as unseemly and not characteristic of educatedChristians (see also 8.41). Another passage shows that Celsus,writing in the Antonine period,122 had accused the Christians ofbeing ‘mad’ and of ‘deliberately rushing forward to arouse thewrath of an emperor or governor and bringing upon themselvesblows and tortures and even death’ (Contra Celsum 8.65). OrigenXatly denies this, but he seems to be thinking of acts of outright civildisobedience.Jewish Antecedents of Christian MartyrdomThe literature of the Jewish resistance movement against AntiochusIV Epiphanes had immediately produced its mythical confessors(Daniel in the lions’ den, and the three young men in the burningWery furnace: Dan. 6 and 7, of 167–165 bc) and soon it was commemoratingits martyrs, actual or mythical. At Wrst, perhaps, theywere a nameless band: thus the author of 1 Maccabees, certainlywriting before (probably long before) the Roman conquest of Judaeain 63 bc, refers with restraint to anonymous people who chose to dierather than eat prohibited meats (1 Macc. 1: 62–4).123 Tradition121 [11.3, trans. Farquharson: ‘How admirable is the soul which is ready andresolved, if it must this moment be released from the body, to be either extinguishedor scattered or to persist. This resolve, too, must arise from a speciWc decision, notout of sheer opposition like the Christians, but after reXection and with dignity, andso as to convince other, without histrionic display.’ Although see P. Brunt, ‘MarcusAurelius and the Christians’, in C. Deroux (ed.), Studies in Latin Literature andRoman History, i (Brussels, 1979), 483–520, at 498, who argues that the reference tothe Christians is ‘almost certainly a gloss’.]122 I do not think it possible to be more precise than this. For the relevantevidence, see Chadwick, Contra Celsum, pp. xxvi–xxviii.123 Cf. Revelation, where the martyrs are exalted, but only one individual (Antipas)is casually named.

194 Persecution and Martyrdomultimately retained the memory of a small company of ten ‘Maccabeanmartyrs’, the heroes of 2 and 4 Maccabees, of which the formerwas probably written in the early Wrst century bc and the latter inthe Wrst half of the Wrst century ad (2 Macc. 6–7; 14: 37–46; 4 Macc.5–18).124 A gradual development was also taking place in Jewishthought: most of the prophets were now credited with having beenmartyrs, or at least confessors who had suVered persecution for theirreligion, if only at the hands of their own people.125 The bestknown and one of the earliest attested of these legendaryaccretions is the tradition that Isaiah was martyred by being sawnin half,126 a tradition certainly known to Justin in the 150s (Dial c.Tryph. 120), and possibly to the author of the Epistle to theHebrews (11: 37).The notion of special rewards for those Jews who perished for theirfaith probably emerged during the Wrst century bc. 1 Maccabeesknows nothing of a future life;127 but 2 and 4 Maccabees assert aresurrection of at any rate those Israelites who die as martyrs for theirfaith.128 Eternal life with the Patriarchs,129 ‘in the bosom of Abraham’124 The standard texts are those in the editions of the Septuagint by A. Rahlfs(1935) and by H. B. Swete. For 2 Macc. see Les Livres des Maccabées (2nd edn., 1949),a text of 1 and 2 Maccabees with French trans. and comm.; for 4 Macc. see M. Hadas,The Third and Fourth Books of Maccabees (1953), a text with Eng. trans. and comm.,and a good select bibliography on pp. 139–41; A. Dupon-Sommer, Le QuatrièmeLivre des Maccabées (Bibl. de l’École des Hautes-Études, 274; 1939), a French trans.and comm.; O. Perler, ‘Das vierte Makkabäerbuch, Ignat. v. Antiochen und dieältesten Martyrerberichte’, Riv. di archeol. crist. 25 (1949), 47–72. See also H. W.Surkau, Martyrium im jüdischer und frühchristlicher Zeit (1938).125 See H. A. Fischel, ‘Martyr and Prophet (a Study of Jewish Literature)’, JewishQuarterly Review, ns 37.3 (1947), 265–80, and 37.4 (1947), 363–86, 279–80.126 See R. H. Charles, Apoc. and Pseudep. of the OT (1913), ii. 155–8, with an Eng.trans. of (and notes upon) the Martyrdom of Isaiah, pp. 159–62; The Ascension ofIsaiah (1919).127 ‘All the rewards of faithfulness enumerated by the dying Mattathias (ii 52–61)are limited to this life’: see R. H. Charles, A Critical History of the Doctrine of a FutureLife in Israel, in Judaism, and in Christianity (2nd edn., 1913), 266.128 2 Macc. 7: 9, 14, 23, 29, 36; 12: 44; 14: 46; 4 Macc. 5: 37; 7: 18–19; 13: 17; 15: 3;16: 25; 17: 5, 12, 18; 18: 23. I cannot agree with Charles, Critical History, 275 etc., that2 Maccabees actually presents all the righteous as sharing in the resurrection; butthree passages in 4 Macc. (5: 37; 13: 17; 18: 23) do concede immortality to theforefathers of the martyrs (in this work there is no reference to a resurrection of thebody, as in e.g. 2 Macc. 7: 11; 14: 46).129 4 Macc. 13: 17; cf. 7: 19; 16: 25.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 195to use the New Testament phrase,130 is the particular privilege of themartyrs. ‘Men dying for God’, says the author of 4 Maccabees, ‘liveunto God as live Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the Patriarchs’(16: 25; cf. 7: 19);131 the martyrs ‘stand beside the throneof God’ (4 Macc. 17: 18). So in the Christian Apocalypse the soulsof the martyrs are ‘under the altar’ (Rev. 6: 9), which is ‘before God’(Rev. 9: 13); they are ‘before the throne of God’ (Rev. 7: 15) andthey alone have part in the First Resurrection, living andreigning with Christ for a thousand years (Rev. 20: 4–6). The earlyChurch saw the martyrs as assessors in the divine judgement,132and believed that their ‘baptism of blood’ had wiped away alltheir sins,133—even the sins of those who, as mere catechumens,had not yet received baptism in the ordinary way (Hippol. Apost.Trad. 19.2).The Church saw itself from the Wrst as a new ‘Israel of God’,134 aconception which the disastrous failure of the Jewish revolt and thedestruction of the Temple in ad 70 could only strengthen.135 Part ofits inheritance from the ‘Israel of the Xesh’ was the attitude towardsmartyrdom, and even some actual martyrs with their stories. TheMaccabean martyrs, strangely neglected by the Pharisaic movement,136were enthusiastically adopted, so that by the fourth century130 Luke 16: 22–3. Is it fanciful to Wnd an echo of the Eleazer of 2 and 4 Maccabeesin the name Lazarus, a colloquial form of Eleazar, given to the only character in anyparable of Jesus who receives a name, and who goes to a blessed future life ‘in thebosom of Abraham’?131 So in Tacitus, Hist. 5.5 animos proelio aut suppliciis peremptorum aeternosputant [Judaei].132 Hippolytus, Comm. in Dan. 2.37; Dionys. Alex. ap. Eusebius, HE 6.42.5; andother passages cited by H. Delehaye, Les Origines, 4 n. 6.133 For the earliest evidence on this subject, see H. Windisch, Taufe und Sünde imältesten Christentum bis auf Origenes (1908), 414–15, 423, 435, 481–3.134 In the NT, see esp. Gal. 6: 16; 3: 7, 9, 29; Rom. 9: 6–8; cf. Eph. 2: 11–13; Phil. 3:3. See also 1 Clem. 29; Justin, C. Tryph. 123, 135, 119–20; Irenaeus, Adv. Haeres. 4.8.1;5.32.3, 34.1; Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 2.6.28.4; 29.1. I have not been able to gainaccess to A. Oepke, Das neue Gottesvolk, im Schrifttum, Schauspiel, bildender Kunstund Weltgestaltung.135 See H. J. Schoeps, Aus frühchristlicher Zeit (1950), 153–67.136 It is true that the Pharisaic movement became thoroughly alienated from theHasmonaean ruling house from the time of John Hyrcanus, towards the end of the2nd cent. bc (see Jos. AJ 13.10.5–6, §§ 288–98); but that is no reason why theMaccabean martyrs gloriWed in 2 and 4 Maccabees should have fallen out of favour,

196 Persecution and Martyrdomtheir cult had spread in a remarkable manner;137 numerous panegyricsin honour of these martyrs—inspired, apparently, by 4 ratherthan 2 Maccabees—were pronounced by the Fathers of theChurch.138 John Chrysostom could call Eleazar ‘the Wrst martyr ofthe old dispensation, the image of Peter the chief of the apostles’.Many individual elements in the Christian conception and storiesof martyrs were taken over directly from Judaism, with 2 and 4Maccabees as the main source; these works were known in the earlyChurch,139 including the churches of Smyrna and of Vienne andLyons, from which emanated the best known of our earliest survivingPassions, those of Polycarp and of the Gallic martyrs of ad 177.140Prominent among these inXuences is the habitual use of the terminologyof Greek athletic games, and in particular of the word athletesas a characteristic designation of the martyr or confessor: this we Wndin 4 Maccabees (6: 10; 17: 15–16, cf. 12–13).141 To compare thestruggle for virtue with the games, employing metaphors and similesdrawn from the stadium and gymnasium, is of course a Stoic practice,adopted also by Philo;142 but it seems likely that it took rootespecially as the author of 2 Maccabees seems himself to have been a Pharisee, and theauthor of 4 Maccabees is not in the least interested in the political resistancemovement led by the Hasmonaeans (which he never mentions) but in the purelyreligious victims only. The explanation, I think, must be that in the absence of actualcults of the martyrs, discouraged by oYcial Judaism, interest in particular martyrswould not be likely to remain alive unless their teaching, as prophets or Rabbis, hadbeen preserved.137 See Delehaye, Les Origines, 201–2; M. Maas, ‘Die Maccabäer als christlicheHeilige’, Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wiss. D. Judentums, 44 (1900), 145–56;J. Jeremias, ‘Die Makkabäer-Kirche in Antiochia’, Zeitschrift d. neutest. Wiss. 40(1942), 254 V.138 The principal texts are Greg. Naz. Or. 15, in Machab. Laud.; John Chrysostom,Hom. in SS. Maccab. I and II (PG 50.617–28); Hom. 11, de Eleaz. (PG 53.523–30);Ambrose, De Jacob et vit. Beat. 2.10.43–12.58; Augustine, Serm. 300, 301 (PL 38.1376–93). Razis very rarely appears, but see Augustine, C. Gaudent. 1.31, 38, and Ep. 204.6–8, where he does not escape reproof for his suicide (his death is described asmirabilior quam prudentior, ‘more marvellous than sensible’).139 For Clement, Hippolytus, Origen, and Cyprian, see E. Schürer, Geschichte desjuud. Volkes, iii (4th edn., 1909); O Machabaeicam matrem in Pass. Montan. Et Luc16.4 (¼ Musurillo, ACM, p. 230) presupposes an audience familiar with 2 or 4Maccabees.140 Perler, ‘Das vierter Makkabäerbuch’.141 There are an astonishing number of other metaphors drawn from the games:see 4 Macc. 9: 23, 11: 20, 13: 14, 16: 16, 17: 11–16.142 Philo, Quod Omn. Pro. Lib.88;De Migrat. Abr.27;De Sobrietat.65;De Somniis 1.59.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 197among Christian writers primarily because of the extended use madeof it by the author of 4 Maccabees. Among other elements whichChristian Passions seem to have borrowed from Judaism are theattribution of prophetic and other visions to the martyr beforeexecution;143 the miraculous invulnerability or temporary preservationof the martyr;144 the admiration excited by the martyr in hisguards and executioners, who are sometimes converted, even to theextent of deciding to die with him;145 the angelic radiance of the faceof the martyr when death approaches;146 the prodigies which oftenaccompanied a martyrdom, including on occasion the sudden deathof the persecutor concerned.147The impact of Judaism on Christian attitudes included examplesof volunteers for martyrdom. The incident about which we are bestinformed occurred early in 4 bc, shortly before the death of Herod,and is sympathetically narrated by Josephus (BJ 1.33.2–4, §§ 648–55;AJ 17.6.2–4, §§ 149–64). Two rabbis named Judas and Matthiassuccessfully urged their disciples to cut down the golden eaglewhich Herod had set up over the great gate of the Temple at Jerusalem.Some forty of these fanatics were arrested immediately, and theywere all put to death on Herod’s orders, the two rabbis and the manwho had actually pulled down the eagle being burnt alive. Eventuallyit became necessary for the leaders of Judaism to check voluntarymartyrdom, because of the dangers to Jewish communities byinXaming opinion: giving oneself up to persecutors was authoritativelycondemned.148 A council of rabbis held at Lydda during thesecond great Jewish revolt against the Romans in ad 132–5 declaredthat a Jew might yield to any compulsion except to commit idolatry,incest, or murder to save his life.149 Islam also condemned voluntarymartyrdom, which was nevertheless practised from time to time by143 In one or two of these cases it is just possible that the borrowing was byJudaism from Christianity. See Fischel, ‘Martyr and Prophet’, 364–71.144 Ibid. 376–7.145 Ibid. 267, 279.146 Ibid. 381–4.147 Ibid. 377–9.148 See J. H. Greenstone, ‘Martyrdom, Restriction of’, in Jewish Encyclopaedia, viii(1904); G. F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era (1927), ii. 106n. 4, 107–8; Fischel, ‘Martyr and Prophet’, 268.149 See Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries, 30, 106–7.

198 Persecution and Martyrdomfanatics and sectarians,150 areXection of the shared heritage andsimilar pressures on these three religions.ConclusionsI believe that I have produced suYcient evidence to prove that fromat least the Antonine period onwards voluntary martyrdom was verymuch more prevalent in the early Church than has hitherto beenrealized. It was not a peculiarity of heretics and schismatics, evenif some members of schismatic or heretical sects—Donatists andperhaps Montanists, for example—indulged in it more than theorthodox. The main reason for the oYcial condemnation of thepractice, stated with peculiar clarity by Ambrose, was that it mightwell bring down a persecution upon the Christian community. As Isaid at the beginning of this paper, the prevalence of voluntarymartyrdom must have contributed towards the outbreak of persecutionand tended to intensify it when it already existed.But I should like to go further than that. The evidence for Christianvoluntary martyrdom begins in the Antonine period. I wish tosuggest, with all the reserve necessitated by the lack of evidence, thatin fact the practice probably began very much earlier, and that thereason why we do not hear of it before about 150 is that we have toolittle evidence for any sort of persecution or martyrdom or indeedabout the life of the Church in general—before the end of the secondcentury. Here the Jewish background and literature of martyrdom ismaterial. The new ‘Israel of God’ could not have been unaware of theJewish attitude to martyrdom, and it very quickly made up its mind(as we can see from the New Testament) that it too would have to beprepared to suVer persecution. Many Christians must have read andtaken to heart the stories of the Maccabean martyrs, so much moredetailed, concrete, and vivid than the vague ‘noble army of martyrs’,‘nameless martyrs’, in Revelations. It is hardly possible to doubt thatIgnatius had read 4 Maccabees, and there is good reason to thinkthat the book became widely known in the Church in the second150 See I. Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, ii (Halle, 1890), 388–91 [trans.C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern, Muslim Studies ii, ed. S. M. Stern (London, 1971),351–4]; F. DornseiV, Archiv für Religionswiss. 22 (1923–4), 151–3.

Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church 199century.151 Would not many an emotional convert be likely to bepowerfully aVected and react in the same way as Ignatius? Thatfamous martyr, if not actually a volunteer, was of the very stuV ofwhich voluntary martyrs were made. As we have seen, his letter to theRoman Church shows him as devoured by a passionate desire formartyrdom, erōn tou apothanein. Would not rewarding his lettertend to inspire in others of the faithful something of his own longingfor martyrdom? And a Christian who desired martyrdom intenselyenough could easily Wnd it: even before the mere nomen Christianumbecame a suYcient ground for condemnation, he had only to oVerpublic insult to a pagan image or an oYcial cult (the imperial cult inparticular) to be instantly apprehended and—unless the magistrateconcerned happened to take an unusually lenient view of the case—sentenced to death. I would claim that since voluntary martyrdomwas evidently practised quite extensively from at least the reign ofMarcus Aurelius onwards, and since the conditions for its existence(particularly the characteristic mentality, found in Ignatius, and aliterature glorifying martyrdom and describing individual examples151 [The date of 4 Maccabees has been much discussed, and is now most commonlyassigned to around ad 100, although certainty is impossible (the books of theMaccabees are Wrst mentioned in the late 2nd cent., in Clement of Alexandria’sStromata, 5.14.97). Ste. Croix may well have been following Elias Bickerman’s datingof ad 19–54; ‘The Date of Fourth Maccabees’, in Louis Ginsberg Jubilee Volume (NewYork, 1945), 105–12, repr. in Bickerman, Studies in Jewish and Christian History, i(Leiden, 1976), 275–81. The date of Ignatius’ letters is equally uncertain; Eusebiusdates Ignatius’ death to ad 107, and his letters are generally assigned to the early 2ndcent.; see the recent discussions of R. M. Hübner, ‘Thesen zur Echtheit und Datierungder sieben Briefe des Ignatius von Antiochen’, ZAC 1 (1997), 44–72 with theresponses of G. Schöllgen, ‘Die Ignatien als pseudepigraphisches Briefcorpus: Anmerkungzu den Thesen von Reinhard M. Hübner’, ZAC 2 (1998), 16–25 and H. J. Vogt,‘Bemerkungen zur Echtheit der Ignatiusbriefe’, ZAC 3 (1999), 50–63 (with a furtherresponse by Hübner to come). Similarities between Ignatius and 4 Maccabees should,perhaps, be explained in terms of shared concerns rather than direct authorialinXuence; see further J. W. Van Henten, ‘The Martyrs as Heroes of the ChristianPeople: Some Remarks on the Continuity between Jewish and Christian Martyrology,with Pagan Analogies’, in M. Lamberigts and P. Van Deun (eds.), Martyrium inMultidisciplinary Perspective: Memorial Louis Reekmans (Bibliotheca EphemeridumTheologicarum Lovaniensium 117; Leuven, 1995), 303–22; D. Boyarin, Dying for God:Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, 1999), 115–17. Seealso Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome, 77–81, at 79, who argues that ‘the language ofIgnatius and IV Macc. seems clearly to reXect . . . a common origin for both in theimperial Greek of Asia Minor.’]

200 Persecution and Martyrdomof it in an emotionally disturbing manner) were equally prevalent inthe earlier period, from which we could hardly expect any evidenceanyway, we can conclude that there may have been quite a number ofvolunteers in the late Wrst and early second centuries.If that were so, it would be much easier to understand whypersecution originally became rooted and why the mere nomenChristianum became punishable. I have dealt in a separate paperwith the causes and legal basis of the persecution of Christianity,152and all I need do here is to say that in my opinion the principal causeof persecution was religious: a fear that the Christians, by their‘atheism’ or refusal to recognize the Roman gods, would destroythe pax deorum and bring down the anger of the gods on the wholecommunity, local or imperial. How much more easily would theirpagan contemporaries jump to this conclusion if a number of Christianswent out of their way to insult the gods deliberately, therebyshowing that their ‘atheism’ was more than a mere withdrawal fromthe worship to which the gods were traditionally entitled.152 See Ch. 3.

5Heresy, Schism, and Persecution in the LaterRoman EmpireMy purpose in this chapter is essentially to explain why and how theChristian Church—or rather churches—became during the fourthand following centuries, and remained for more than a millenniumand a half, the greatest organized persecuting force in human history.I shall argue that we can understand the origin of this situation farbetter if we consider the persecution of the Christians in the Wrstthree centuries and the early years of the fourth, as well as persecutionby the Christians from the fourth century onwards. We can learnsomething about each kind by studying the other: there are importantelements of continuity between the two periods, although thereare also some entirely new and important features in the Christianperiod. Unfortunately, it seems virtually unknown for a modernscholar to treat both types of persecution together;1 indeed, as faras I know, the only work of any kind that does try to do this is still avery brief article of my own.2 For Christians, naturally, all theemphasis tends to be placed upon the persecutions of Christianity;the much more extensive, long-lasting, and often successful persecutionsby Christians, of pagans, Jews, Manichees, and Christian sectsother than their own, are easily overlooked. It is not uncharacteristicthat the usually very scholarly and reliable Oxford Dictionary of the1 When I wished to do this some years ago, for a paper presented to the InternationalColloquium on Ecclesiastical History held at Oxford in 1974, I could Wnd nopublished work of any value on these lines in any of the few languages I can read.2 ‘Christianity’s Encounter with the Roman Imperial Government’, in A. Toynbee(ed.), The Crucible of Christianity: Judaism, Hellenism and the Historical Backgroundto the Christian Faith (London, 1969), 345–51, with bibliography at 357.

202 Persecution and MartyrdomChristian Church should be most inadequate in its second edition(1974) and scarcely better in its third (1997) in dealing with persecutionsin antiquity by Christians.3Before I go any further I should say that although the term ‘theChristian Church’ in the singular is a perfectly permissible theologicalexpression, referring to an ideal situation which could be contemplatedin the abstract, the historian, as distinct from the theologian, isusually obliged to employ the plural and speak of ‘the Christianchurches’; for the theologian’s ideal of a single Church, sometimesreferred to in a mystical sense as ‘the Body of Christ’, never came nearto being realized in practice, even in Apostolic times and far lesswhen Christianity became the established religion of the RomanEmpire. The expression ‘the Christian Church’, therefore, denotesstrictly a theological and not a historical concept.4 But the term is tooconvenient to be entirely abandoned, especially for the fourthcentury onwards when the Christians formed, for all their divisions,the one and only important empire-wide organization, or series oforganizations, apart from the State itself.5Although we must draw a distinction between persecutions ofChristians and persecutions by Christians, there is (as I have alreadyindicated) an important similarity between them. Both were carriedout by a Roman state which underwent far less change after it hadbecome Christian than many ecclesiastical historians believe, whichmakes it all the more strange that so few modern writers have paidany attention to continuities between pagan and Christian persecutors.This continuity resided above all in a deep-seated belief in the3 Although the entry ‘Persecutions, early Christian’ in the third edition notes thatfrom Theodosius I onwards the State coerced pagans into conversion ‘with morefervour and success than it had shown in suppressing Christianity’, it is still overwhelminglyfocused on persecutions of Christians. Under the entry ‘toleration,religious’, there is a short reference to ‘the increasingly close connection betweenecclesiastical authority and civil power’ after the conversion of Constantine, but themain focus is on the post-Reformation period.4 [See Introduction, pp. 31–2.]5 I am sometimes tempted to compare these, in a strictly functional sense, to whatPresident Eisenhower called ‘the military-industrial complex’ in the United States.[See also Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the ArchaicAge to the Arab Conquests (1981; corr. imprint, London, 1983), 420. In an interviewpublished in 1988 Ste. Croix explained this analogy by remarking that the earlyChurch ‘was almost a rival to the government’; see ‘The Ancient World Today’,Horos, 6 (1988), 123–33, at 130.]

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 203necessity (to which I shall return shortly) to preserve the goodwilland favour of the gods, or of God: the pagans sometimes called thisthe ‘pax deorum’. Accordingly, the central characteristic of paganpersecutions of Christians is that they proceeded essentially fromreligious motives, and I would argue that there is good evidence thatthe persecutions by the Christians were, to a considerable degree,similarly motivated.6 The traditional religions of Rome, enshrinedabove all in what a Roman like Cicero would call ius divinum, thecorpus of State law governing sacred matters, was for a member ofthe Roman governing class one of the very foundations of the RomanState, the fundamenta . . . nostrae civitatis to use Cotta’s phrase in DeNatura Deorum (3.2.5).7 It was, of course, primarily a matter ofperforming certain prescribed cult acts, and it involved scarcelyanything in the way of belief, except in the eYcacy of those cultacts.8 It was also completely tolerant of, and indeed would protect,Greek and other non-Roman cults,9 even if they had not beenadmitted among the oYcial sacra populi Romani [‘sacred things ofthe Roman people’], unless they gave rise to behaviour the Romangovernment considered criminal, scandalous, or excessive.106 [Ste. Croix justiWes the category ‘religious persecution’ in ‘Why were the EarlyChristians Persecuted?’ (above, pp. 138–40): even the governing classes, he argues,‘were impelled to persecute . . . by motives I think we are justiWed in calling religious,in that their aim also was always primarily to break down the Christian refusal toworship the pagan gods’. Note, however, that the distinction between religion andpolitics in the ancient world has been called into question; see esp. S. R. F. Price,Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge, 1984), 15–19;J. A. North, ‘Religion and Politics, from Republic to Principate’, JRS 76 (1986), 251–8,esp. 257.]7 See Ste. Croix, ‘The Religion of the Roman World’, Didaskalos, 4 (1972), 61–74;also ‘Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?’ [above, Ch. 3, pp. 141–3].8 See Introduction.9 Ste. Croix, ‘Religion’, 67 cites Minucius Felix, Octav. 6.3 and Arrian, Tact.33.4 V., to which might be added Cic. II Verr. 4.113–15; Jos. AJ 19.5.278–91. [It isprobably an overstatement to suggest that the Romans felt a commitment to tolerateand protect indigenous forms of worship. On the whole they felt no need to suppressthem. See Appendix to this chapter on toleration.]10 [Certainly accusations of immorality or criminal behaviour often accompaniedthe suppression of non-Roman religious groups, and Christian apologists regularlyfelt the need to counter such charges: see, for example, Tertullian, Apol. 2.5, 2.19–20,4.2; Minucius Felix, Octav. 9–10, 28. However, suppression could occur withoutimmoral behaviour or criminal activities speciWed—for instance, neither Tacitus(Annals 2.85) nor Suetonius (Tiberius 36) suggests that Tiberius’ expulsion of the

204 Persecution and MartyrdomWith the conversion of Constantine in 312, Christianity becamethe most favoured religion of the empire,11 and well before his deathin 337 it had become the main oYcial religion.12 Before the end ofthe fourth century all forms of paganism and all Christian sectsexcept the Catholic one, by now accepted as Nicene, had beenproscribed and were persecuted in one way or another.13 Moreover,Christians generally shared the outlook of their pagan contemporariesto the extent of feeling that religious misbehaviour of individualsmight bring down punishment not merely upon the individualsconcerned but upon at least their immediate communities andeven perhaps the empire as a whole—especially its rulers. Hencethe numerous persecuting edicts against heretics, schismatics, Manichees,Jews, Samaritans, and pagans—and to quote a pompousimperial constitution of 423, ‘all the others whose sects it disgustsus to insert in our most pious sanction, all of which have diVerentnames but a single perWdy’ (Cod. Theod. 16.5.60).14 The evidenceJews and Egyptian rites from Rome was a response to immoral or criminal activity.Moreover, whether immoral behaviour or criminal activity was the reason for thesuppression of non-Roman religious groups is further complicated by the rhetoricaluse of immorality in polemic. Above all, Roman suppression of non-Roman religiousgroups lacks any clear structure. While at times it seems to have been in response toperceived immorality, at others it seems more like a show of power justiWed as aresponse to immorality, as in the suppression of the Bacchic cult in 186 bc, on whichsee J. A. North’s important study, ‘Religious Toleration in Republican Rome’, PCPS 25(1979), 85–103, repr. in C. Ando (ed.), Roman Religion (Edinburgh, 2003), 199–219.See also M. Beard, J. North, and S. Price, Religions of Rome,i:A History (Cambridge,1998), 211–44.]11 T. D. Barnes, ‘The Conversion of Constantine’, Échos du Monde Classique, 4(1985), 371–91 [repr. in Barnes, From Eusebius to Augustine (Aldershot, 1994); seealso R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (Harmondsworth, 1986), 609–62; Beard etal., Religions of Rome, 364–88].12 [Although note that this process was uneven, varying across diVerent parts ofthe empire; see now T. D. Barnes, ‘From Toleration to Repression: The Evolution ofConstantine’s Religious Policies’, Scripta Classica Israelica, 21 (2002), 189–207, esp.200–5.]13 Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, 396–405, 419–41, 445–52, 477, 481, 483–4, 495–7;K. L. Noethlichs, Die gesetzgeberischen Massnahmen der christlichen Kaiser des viertenJahrhunderts gegen Häretiker, Heiden und Juden (Ph.D. diss., Cologne, 1971). Fortranslations of many key texts, see P. R. Coleman-Norton, Roman State and ChristianChurch: A Collection of Legal Documents to A.D. 535 (London, 1966).14 [Note the comments of T. Honoré, who sees Sallustius, the quaestor drafting thelaw, as less ideologically driven than does Ste. Croix, and interprets the formulaquorum sectas sanctioni taedet inserere as a complaint that ‘listing the names of

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 205extends from the earliest Christian times well into the Later Empire;there is far too much to quote in bulk and I shall merely select eightrepresentative examples, from the Wrst to the sixth century.1. Old Polycarp, who was said to have known the Apostlespersonally, used to tell a story, which is reported both by Irenaeus(Adversus Haereses 3.3.4) and twice by Eusebius (HE 3.28.6; 4.14.6),of how the Apostle John when entering the baths at Ephesus caughtsight of the notable heretic Cerinthus inside and immediately rushedout shouting, ‘away, lest the very baths collapse, for within isCerinthus the enemy of the truth.’ Even to remain under the sameroof as such a man was dangerous.152. In the mid-third century Demetrianus, a pagan, attributed tothe impiety of the Christians the plagues, wars, famines, and droughtswhich were then aZicting the empire. St Cyprian, in his reply toDemetrianus, also accepted these tribulations as a divine punishment,but of course attributed them to the failure of the pagans to worshipthe Christian God (Ad Demetrianum 1.5, 7–10, etc.).15 a3. The emperor Constantine aVords numerous examples of theattitude I am describing.16 During the winter of 313–14, he wrote aheretical sects is boring’; see his Law in the Crisis of Empire: The Theodosian Code andits Quaestors (Oxford, 1998), 109–10. Moreover, whether this imperial constitution isespecially pompous—at least any more than other imperial constitutions—is questionable,and attention should be drawn to the legitimating function of such language;see W. E. Voss, Recht und Rhetorik in den Kaisergesetzen der Spätantike: EineUntersuchung zum nachklassischen Kauf-und Übereignungsrecht (Frankfurt, 1982);and J. Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1999), 56–77. Nonetheless,this wording demonstrates Ste. Croix’s hostility to late antique religiouslegislation.]15 The veracity of this anecdote has sometimes been doubted, but to my mind itbecomes much more easily acceptable when we take into account the fourth item inmy selection.15 a See the recent French edition, with translation and commentary, by J.-C.Fredoville, À Démétrien (Sources Chrétiennes 467; Paris, 2003).16 Most of the texts have been admirably dealt with by N. H. Baynes, A. H. M.Jones, and T. D. Barnes; see Baynes, Constantine the Great and the Christian Church,2nd edn., ed. H. Chadwick (London, 1972), esp. 10–14; Jones, Constantine and theConversion of Europe (London, 1948), 80–3, and The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: ASocial, Economic, and Administrative Survey (Oxford, 1964), 93–7; and Barnes, TheNew Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 238–47. I merelyselect one example for illustration.

206 Persecution and Martyrdomletter about the Donatist controversy to AelaWus, if the name iscorrectly transmitted, the vicar or vice-prefect of the civil dioceseof Africa: ‘Since I have been informed that you are also a worshipperof the Most High God, I confess to your eminence that I think it in noway right that such disputes and altercations [i.e. the Donatistcontroversy] should be concealed from us, when they might perhapsarouse the highest deity not only against the human race, but alsoagainst myself, to whose care he has by his celestial nod committedthe regulation of all things earthly...Foronly then shall true and fullsecurity be possible for me, and a hope of the best and most prosperousoutcome always and in everything from the unstinting benevolenceof the most almighty God, when I am aware that all menworship the most holy God by the due rites of the Catholic religion inharmonious and brotherly observance.’17 The emperor felt personallyresponsible to God for the empire which God had entrusted to hischarge, and he feared that if he allowed religious error and disorderto exist, God might well punish him, and with him the empire.4. Now comes my personal favourite in this list of examples, apassage in the Ecclesiastical History of Theodoret, a leading theologianof the mid-Wfth century, which I have never seen quoted but is,to me at least, highly signiWcant.18 It recalls the behaviour of theApostle John when confronted in the Ephesus baths by the heresiarchCerinthus. In about 374 the eastern emperor Valens, who had Ariansympathies, exiled—among other Catholic bishops—the orthodoxand zealously anti-Arian bishop Eusebius of Samosata, whom Theodoretgreatly admired. He was replaced by an Arian bishop, Eunomius,but Eusebius had evidently impressed upon his congregationthat if they associated with an Arian bishop they would bring deWlementupon themselves. When Eunomius went down to the publicbaths and his attendants shut everyone else out, he graciouslyordered that the doors be opened and everyone who wanted tocome in be admitted. Eunomius urged them to come into thewater with him, but they all held back, which Eunomius attributed17 Optatus, Appendix 3, Ziwsa edn., 206 [trans. M. Edwards, Optatus: Against theDonatists (TTH 27; Liverpool, 1997), 183–4].18 [On Theodoret, see T. Urbainczyk, Theodoret of Cyrrhus: The Bishop and theHoly Man (Ann Arbor, 2002).]

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 207to the natural respect for himself as bishop. When he went oV,however, the others refused to enter the bath until the water hadbeen drained and replaced, feeling that it had been subject to pollution,agos, by the presence of the heretic (Theodoret, HE 4.15.2–3).The word agos is very familiar from Greek literature of the classicalperiod for, among other things, the curse one brings upon oneself bysacrilegious behaviour.19 According to Theodoret, Eunomius soonrealized how detested he was and left the city (HE 4.15.4–7).5. In 428, in his Wrst sermon soon after his election to the archbishopricof Constantinople, Nestorius, who was not yet regarded asa heretic, said to Emperor Theodosius II in words that were longremembered, ‘Give me the earth purged of heretics and I will give youheaven in return. Destroy the heretics with me, and I will destroy thePersians with you’ (Socrates, HE 7.29.5).6. Ten years later, in 438, the emperors Theodosius II and ValentinianIII declared in a constitution directed against Jews, Samaritans,heretics, and pagans, ‘We perceive that a special responsibility of ourImperial Majesty is the pursuit of true religion. If we can hold fast tothis worship, we shall open the way to prosperity in human undertakings’(Nov. Theod. 3.pref.). It would pain me to reproduce thedegenerate rhetoric of the rest of the document,20 and I shall merelysummarize it by saying that the emperors attribute the recentinclement weather, which has ruined the crops, to divine anger atpagan practices, which they are accordingly obliged to persecute.7. The emperor Zeno’s Henoticon, issued in 482, expresses conWdencethat if God is worshipped in harmony by the empire, enemieswill be wiped out, all will submit to the imperial rule in peace, andthe earth will yield its fruits in abundance (Evagrius, HE 3.14).19 e.g. Aesch. Eum. 166–7 (and cf. miasma at 169); Herodotus 6.56, and 6.91.1.There are other interesting literary passages about the fear of being deWled by wateralready used by men under a curse or in a polluted condition: e.g. Polybius 30.29.3–5(Sicyon, c.165 bc); also Plutarch, De Invidia et Odio (Moralia 538a) for allegedAthenian detestation of the accusers of Socrates in the early 4th cent. The Greekwords used in such situations included not only agos, but also the closely relatedterms miasma (cf. Aesch. Eum. cited above) and miaino: see R. Parker, Miasma,Pollution, and PuriWcation in Early Greek Religion (Oxford, 1983), introd.20 [For more recent approaches to late antique legal rhetoric, see n. 14 above.]

208 Persecution and Martyrdom8. In the sixth century Justinian shows in several of his laws that heexpected divine punishment of a collective nature to follow thecommission of certain religious oVences. For example, in a Novel of535 against blasphemy and taking the name of God in vain with anoath, he declares that such crimes are a direct cause of ‘famines,earthquakes and plagues’ (Nov. 77.1.1). In a later Novel denouncingmale homosexual practices at Constantinople, Justinian mentionsGod’s ‘just punishment of those in Sodom’ and expresses his fearthat if such crimes are allowed to continue God may be moved towrath again (Nov. 141 of 559). There is a clear implication thatConstantinople may share the fate of Sodom if its inhabitants donot mend their ways.It would be superXuous to quote more of the many passages inimperial laws and the early Fathers which similarly anticipate divinepunishment of the empire as a whole, or of some part of it, as a resultof heresy, schism, paganism, or some other form of impiety. Just asChristianity had been seen by pagans as a ‘contamination’, a contagioto adopt one of the expressions used by Pliny in his correspondencewith Trajan (Pliny, Ep. 10.96.9), so to a Christian convert like theex-astrologer Firmicus Maternus and in various imperial laws,paganism was a contagio.21 And to most sincere Christians heresy,even schism, was if anything worse.22When persecution took place in the Christian empire, the persecutorsnormally—indeed almost always—denied that their actionscould be called persecutio, ordiōgmos in Greek, terms which hadbecome standard for the persecution of Christians.23 Of course21 Firmicus Maternus, De Errore Profanorum Religionum 7.1, 12.1, 20.7, 26.2; Cod.Theod. 16.5.56, 62; Const. Sirmond. 6, etc.22 [For instance, it is signiWcant that anti-heretical legislation between the 4th and6th centuries vastly outnumbers legislation against pagans; see C. Humfress, ‘RomanLaw, Forensic Argument and the Formation of Christian Orthodoxy (III–VI Centuries)’,in S. Elm, É. Rebillard, and A. Romano (eds.), Orthodoxie, Christianisme,Histoire (Paris, 2000), 125–47.]23 [Although note that Christians use diōgmos and persecutio to describe persecutionof themselves; we do not have much evidence for how persecutors of Christiansdescribed their behaviour, but note that Pliny, in the passage cited above (Ep.10.96.9), speaks of being able to ‘set right’ the contagio that is Christianity, languagethat would not be out of place in the Theodosian Code. For examples of this use byChristians, see Passio Polycarpi 1.1; Hegesippus quoted in Eusebius, HE 3.20.5.]

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 209persecution by one’s own sect was not regarded as belonging to thecategory of ‘persecution’ at all, and, as Lactantius could remark in theearly fourth century, even heretics always considered their own sectto constitute the true Catholic Church (Divine Institutes 4.30.13).They preferred to speak of just retribution, or the like, as whenOptatus retorted against the Donatists, who complained about thesevere treatment they had received in 347, that what they had suVeredwas not persecution but deserved punishment (3.10). It is importantto understand here that Christians, to whatever denomination theybelonged, not only regarded themselves as Catholic and Orthodox,and their opponents consequently as heretics or schismatics, but alsoalmost invariably refused to recognize as Christians those who werenot in communion with themselves;24 indeed they condemned themall, individually and collectively, to everlasting perdition. ‘Separatedas you are from the Church,’ wrote Augustine to a priest of theDonatist schism, ‘you will be punished with eternal torment, evenif you were burnt alive for the name of Christ’ (Aug. Ep. 173.6).25That is a typical statement by Augustine, justiWed on his own principles,perhaps, but revealing one of the viciously sectarian characteristicswhich make it impossible for many of us to join in thegeneral Christian chorus of praise for that remarkable man.Before the empire became oYcially Christian there were somesplendid Christian pleas for religious toleration, in the most absoluteterms.26 The so-called Edict of Milan of 313 is of course one of the24 [In general Christians were exclusive, but in certain circumstances, especially inresponse to a challenge or when speaking from a minority perspective, they might bemore accepting of alternative Christian points of view. Thus Nestorius, whose hardlinecomment is quoted above (§ 5), in his Egyptian exile came to hold a moreinclusive opinion of the opponents whose views he had been confronting during hisPatriarchy (Evagrius 1.7). Evagrius (1.11) developed a remarkably accommodatingassessment of the zigzag progress towards orthodoxy, in response to criticisms ofepiscopal tergiversations at church councils, though he had earlier expressed traditionalhostility towards Nestorius as enemy of Christ (1.1–2).]25 Note, too, Cod. Theod. 16.7.3 for ‘those who have polluted themselves’.26 For example, Tertullian, Apol. 24.5–10; Ad Scap. 2.2; Lactantius, Div. Inst.5.19.9–24 (esp. 11, 22–4); 5.20.7–10 (esp. 9–10); Epit. Div. Inst. 47.52.3 to 49.54.7.See P. Garnsey, ‘Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquity’, Studies in Church History,21 (1984), 1–27. [See also n. 9. This probably overstates the case: the modern principleof religious toleration has no commensurate form in the ancient world. See Appendixto this chapter.]

210 Persecution and Martyrdommajor documents in the history of human freedom:27 it repeatedlyaYrms most emphatically that liberty of religion ought to be completeand unrestricted. In the Christian empire, however, few wereprepared to raise their voices in defence of any freedom but that oftheir own particular sect, and pleas for toleration, from now on, camealmost exclusively from pagans and other victims of persecution. Ofthe pagan voices, little now survives apart from a few isolated passagesin Julian, Themistius, Libanius, Symmachus, and Ammianus.28I can only give the barest summary of the many violent, ‘extralegal’actions of enthusiastic Christian mobs such as the destructionof pagan sanctuaries and statues,29 the lynching of individual pagans(that of Hypatia in 415 or 416 is only the most famous example),30 orof hated Christians (even bishops) belonging to rival sects,31 and themassacre of each other, as when scores of corpses were left on theXoor of the Roman basilica on a single day in 366 during the factionWghting between the supporters of the rival popes Damasus andUrsinus, for which we have the alternative Wgures of 137 in Ammianus(27.3.13) and 160 from a document preserved in the Collectio27 For the Edict, see Eusebius, HE 10.5.1–14, with Lactantius, DMP 48.1–12;I think we may continue to speak of ‘The Edict of Milan’, although, of course, asOtto Seeck pointed out as long ago as 1891, the document is not an edict, was notpublished in Milan, and was not issued by Constantine [Seeck, ‘Das sogenannte Ediktvon Mailand’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 12 (1891), 381–6 at 381]. See furtherT. D. Barnes, ‘Lactantius and Constantine’, JRS 63 (1973), 29–46, esp. 44 and nn.173–4 [repr. in Barnes, Early Christianity and the Roman Empire (London, 1984)];also idem, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 318 n. 4.28 See Appendix to this chapter.29 Libanius, Or. 30(Pro Templis) esp. 8–11, 22–3, 54–5; Sozomen, HE 7.15.11 V.(discussed below). [On the role of bishops in the destruction of pagan shrines andtemples in the East, see G. Fowden, ‘Bishops and Temples in the Eastern RomanEmpire’, JTS 29.1 (1978), 53–78 and for a more general survey of late antiquereligious conXict, see Fowden, ‘Polytheist Religion and Philosophy’, in A. Cameronand P. Garnsey (eds.), CAH xiii (Cambridge, 1998), 538–60, esp. 539–43, 548–54.]30 [On Hypatia’s murder, see A. Cameron and J. Long, Barbarians and Politics atthe Court of Arcadius (Berkeley, 1993), 59–62; M. Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria,trans. F. Lyra (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 83–100.]31 For instance Proterius, installed as patriarch of Alexandria after Chalcedon, andlynched by anti-Chalcedon fanatics in 457; see Evagrius 2.8 [with further references inM. Whitby, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus (Liverpool, 2000),85–9]. W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the Historyof the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge, 1972), 154–5. [See below,Ch. 6, p. 317.]

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 211Avellana (1.7; CSEL 35.1, p. 3).32 Among many interesting narrativeswhich may reXect useful local knowledge, I will mention only Sozomen’saccount of the zealous missionary bishop Marcellus of Apameain Syria (HE 7.15.11 V.): Marcellus had been keen to destroy all thepagan temples in his diocese, but was eventually caught during one ofthese exploits by a group of local pagans who found him on his own,without the ‘soldiers and gladiators’ in his following, and Wnishedhim oV. A provincial council later refused to allow the bishop’s sonsto avenge him, expressing the delicate feeling that the young menwould do better to give thanks to God for having graciously foundtheir father worthy of dying as he did (he had been burnt to death).Was the attitude of the Christian authorities substantially the sameas that of the pagan persecutors? To some extent it was: as I haveshown, they were as concerned to maintain the pax Dei, if I may call itthat, as the pagans had been to secure the pax deorum. But there werealso two new interdependent concepts, of enormous importance:heresy and schism; these were indeed something entirely new, thatthe pagan world had never known and, owing to the extraordinarilyheterogeneous character of polytheism, could never conceivably haveknown.33 Because of these new notions, the Christians were not32 [For the struggle between Christian factions early in Damasus’ career, seeA. Lippold, ‘Ursinus und Damasus’, Historia, 14 (1965), 105–28; C. Pietri, Romachristiana: recherches sur l’église de Rome, son organisation, sa politique, son idéologie deMiltiade à Sixte III (311–440) (Rome and Paris, 1976), i. 405–18, and idem, ‘Damase,évêque de Rome’, in Saecularia Damasiana (Studi di Antichità Cristiana 39; VaticanCity, 1986), 29–58; J. Curran, Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the FourthCentury (Oxford, 2000), 137–42; R. Lizzi Testa, Senatori, popolo, papi: il governo diRoma al tempo dei Valentiniani (Munera 21; Bari, 2004), 129–70.]33 [Certainly the distinctively Christian preoccupation with heresy and schism wasquite new, and unthinkable to a ‘polytheist’—not least because polytheism, unlikeChristianity, is a scholarly construct (one that originated in Christian polemic), andwas not an institution with members conscious of their identities as members.However, certain non-Christian institutions used comparable strategies to maintaindoctrinal orthodoxy. Indeed, the argument has recently been advanced that theChristian concern with orthodoxy arises in response to Platonist criticisms that thediversity of Christian thought precluded Christians from discerning the truth; seeG. R. Boys-Stones, Post-Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of its Development from theStoics to Origen (Oxford, 2001), 151–75. See also P. Athanassiadi’s study of theinstitutional and doctrinal strategies used to maintain the authority of the Atheniandiadoche, although she views this primarily as a response to Christianity; ‘TheCreation of Orthodoxy in Neoplatonism’, in G. Clark and T. Rajak (eds.), Philosophyand Power in the Graeco-Roman World (Oxford, 2002), 271–91.]

212 Persecution and Martyrdomcontent, as the pagans had been, merely to procure acts of outwardconformity. By the fourth century, if not long before, most inXuentialChristians had formed the opinion that there was only one set of truebeliefs in matters divine, and, since salvation itself depended uponbelief, the nature of belief was all-important. As Pope Leo I said,veritas . . . simplex atque una and varietatem . . . non recipit [‘Truth issimple and one’ and ‘does not admit of divergence’] Ep. 172. FalseChristian belief was heresy; the introduction of disunity in theorganization of the Church, as by the Novatians and Donatists, wasschism. That was the ultimate Christian position, but for a long timethere was little or no clear distinction between the terms.Heresy and schism in the new, Christian sense go right back to thevery beginning of Apostolic times. I cannot go into details here aboutthe many usages of these and similar words in Josephus and the NewTestament,34 but I would like to recommend the two best treatmentsthat I know of the evolution of these words and their cognates,35 and34 Josephus, Vita 10–12; AJ 13.171–3; BJ 2.119–66, cf. 118. Acts 5: 17 (Sadducees),15: 5, 26: 5 (Pharisees), 24: 5, 14; 28: 22; Gal. 5: 20; 2 Pet. 2: 1; Titus 3: 10; Acts 20:29–30. [Although hairesis and schisma feature in the New Testament, it is probably anexaggeration to say that they bear their distinctively Christian meaning. It isextremely diYcult to determine precisely when this occurs, and examples of thepositive meaning of hairesis (as a sect or school) can still be found in 4th-cent. texts,perhaps most signiWcantly in the Greek translation of Constantine and Licinius’ letteron the restoration of the Church (the ‘so-called Edict of Milan’) in Eusebius, HE10.5.2 and 10.5.4 and Constantine’s letter to Alexander and Arius in Eusebius, VC2.71.5 and Socrates, HE 1.7.12. Acts 20: 29–30 is important, in that it shows howdoctrinal and social unity was important among Christian communities before thearticulation of the concepts ‘heresy’ and ‘schism’; here Paul tells the elders of Ephesus,in characteristically violent language, that after he has gone ‘savage wolves will comein among you and will not spare the Xock’, and ‘even from your own body there willbe men coming forward who will distort the truth to induce the disciples to breakaway and follow them’. The Wrst appearance of a distinctively Christian sense of‘heresy’ is perhaps Ignatius’ letters to the Ephesians (6.2) and to the Trallians (6.1)from the early 2nd cent. It might, however, be safer to date this emergence to the later2nd cent. and the work of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, in which heresy is central toChristian historical consciousness. Here we Wnd the Wrst genealogies of heresy, whichestablished an opposition between the apostolic succession of the Church and thesuccession of all heresies from Simon Magus; see for instance Irenaeus, AdversusHaereses, 1.27.4, and in general A. le Boulluec, La Notion d’hérésie dans la littératuregrecque aux IIe–IIIe siècles (Paris, 1985).]35 J. Glucker, Antiochus and the Late Academy (Hypomnemata 56; Göttingen,1978), 166–206; M. Simon, ‘From Greek hairesis to Christian heresy’, in W. R.Schoedel and R. L. Wilken (eds.), Early Christian Literature and the Classical

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 213to draw attention to a list of New Testament passages which refer,often in very strong terms, to religious strife and dissension of manykinds in the earliest Christian communities.36 Not even in the Wrstgeneration do we Wnd Christians as anything like a united body. Wouldit be an exaggeration to say that the earliest systematic impulsetowards execrating those who were believed to be proclaiming falseIntellectual Tradition (In honorem Robert M. Grant) (Théologie Historique 53; Paris,1979), 101–16. [The subsequent bibliography on heresy is enormous, and cannotadequately be summarized here. One of the most inXuential studies of the 20th cent.was Walter Bauer’s Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (Tübingen,1934), trans. by G. Krodel and R. A. Kraft as Orthodoxy and Heresy in EarliestChristianity (Philadelphia, 1971), who demonstrated the historical falsity of Eusebius’account of a pristine and orthodox early Church assailed after the deaths of theapostles by heretics, arguing that heresy often preceded orthodoxy; for criticalexaminations of this thesis, see R. Williams, ‘Does it make sense to speak of pre-Nicene orthodoxy?’, in idem. (ed.), The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour ofHenry Chadwick (Cambridge, 1989), 1–23, and M. Desjardin, ‘Bauer and beyond: OnRecent Scholarly Discussion of hairesis in the Early Christian Era’, The SecondCentury, 8 (1991), 65–82. Perhaps most problematic is Bauer’s rather ‘essential’understanding of heresy and orthodoxy as separate entities, such that one couldpossibly precede the other; see D. Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia, 2004), esp. 2–3. On the origins and subsequent Christiantransformation of hairesis, see also H. von Staden, ‘Hairesis and Heresy: The Case ofthe hairesis iatrikai’, in B. F. Meyer and E. P. Sanders (eds.), Jewish and Christian Self-DeWnition, iii: Self-DeWnition in the Graeco-Roman World (London, 1982), 76–100.Attention has also focused on the literary techniques by which heresiologies wereconstructed; see particularly A. le Boulluec, La Notion d’hérésie dans la littératuregrecque aux IIe–IIIe siècles (Paris, 1985); for the later empire, see H. Inglebert,‘L’Histoire des hérésies chez les hérésiologues’, in B. Pouderon and Y.-M. Duval(eds.), L’Historiographie de l’Église des premiers siècles (Théologie Historique, 114;Paris, 2001), 105–25, and idem, Interpretatio Christiana: les mutations des savoirs(cosmographie, géographie, ethnographie, histoire) dans l’antiquité chrétienne 30–630après J.-C (Collection des Études Augustiniennes 166; Paris, 2001), 393–456; AverilCameron, ‘How to Read Heresiology’, Journal of Early Modern and Medieval Studies,33.3 (2003), 471–92, now repr. in D. B. Martin and P. Cox Miller (eds.), The CulturalTurn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography (Durham, NC,2005); on the legal setting of later doctrinal disputes, see Humfress, ‘Roman Law,Forensic Argument and the Formation of Christian Orthodoxy (III–VI centuries)’and Orthodoxy and the Courts in Late Antiquity (Oxford, forthcoming).]36 Acts 15, esp. 1–2, 5, 7, 24; 20: 29–30; Rom. 16: 17–18; 1 Cor. 1: 10–11, 12–13; 3:3–4, 5–9; 11: 18–19; 12: 25; 2 Cor. 11: 3–4, 12–15; Gal. 1: 6–9; 2: 11–14; 5: 20; 1 Tim. 1:3–4, 6–7, 19–20; 4: 1–3, 7; 6: 3–5, 20–1; Titus 1: 9–14; 3: 10–11; 2 Pet. 2: 1–3; 1 John 2:18; 2 John 7; Jude 18–19; Rev. 2: 6, 15–16 (cf. 14), 20–4. The list is by no meanscomplete. Among the terms used are hairesis, schisma, hairetikos anthrōpos, antichristos,antilegontes, apodiorizontes, dichostasiai, ergatai dolioi, eris, skandala, stasis,heterodidaskalein, zēlos, zētēsis, pseudapostaloi, pseudodidaskaloi, pseudophrophētai,

214 Persecution and Martyrdomdoctrine came from St Paul and his circle?37 I hope it is clear now whyas a historian, I am so insistent that the term ‘the Christian Church’in the singular is, after nearly 2,000 years, still in strictness not ahistorical expression but a theological one.38Heresy and schism, then, are Christian innovations. Again andagain in Christian literature, however, we Wnd an expression of theneed for unity, both in belief and organization. In paganism, ofcourse, belief mattered little; it was the performance of cult actsthat was essential.39 Even those pagan cults that recognized degreesof seniority among worshippers (like Mithraism with its seven gradesof initiates) had no uniWed hierarchical organization remotelyresembling that of the Christians.40This, I suggest, introduced a new element which created an entirelynew situation and made religious persecution far more likely in theChristian Empire. Whereas in pre-Christian times the emperor, or aprovincial governor, would feel bound to see to the maintenance ofthe established cults, he would see no reason at all to interfere withother systems of cult (other religiones), of whatever kind, providedthey did not involve Xagitia or the like, or, as with Christianity,refusal to pay respect to the established gods.41 As soon as the empirebecame Christian, however, an entirely new factor appeared whichcan be seen very clearly in the writings and actions of the Wrstlukoi bareis (‘grievous wolves’). [Compare with the slightly shorter list in ClassStruggle, 644 n. 26, which catalogues ‘New Testament passages which refer to orforeshadow the rise of heresy and schism’.]37 See especially Acts 20: 29–30; Rom. 16: 17–18; and Gal. 1: 6–9.38 [See above, Introduction, pp. 31–2.]39 [See Appendix to this chapter.]40 [This is very probably true, although paucity of evidence militates againstsecure statements on the structure of Mithraic worship. For a comprehensive summaryof 20th-cent. historiography of Mithraism, including diVerent approaches tothe Mithraic grades, see R. Beck, ‘Mithraism since Franz Cumont’, ANRW ii. 17.4(1984), 2002–2115, esp. 2089–93. See also R. Gordon, ‘Reality, Evocation, andBoundary in the Mysteries of Mithras’, Journal of Mithraic Studies, 3.1–2 (1980),19–99, repr. in Gordon, Image and Value in the Graeco-Roman World (Aldershot,1996). For a minimalist interpretation of the possible structure of the priestly grades,see M. Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and his Mysteries, trans. R. Gordon(Edinburgh, 2000), 131–40.]41 [It is slightly misleading to translate religiones as ‘systems of cult’. Religio is anormative term, and a religio would by deWnition not involve Xagitia of any sort. SeeAppendix to this chapter.]

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 215Christian emperor: Constantine felt the necessity, for the Wrst time,of enforcing unity in worship. With the active encouragement of thebishops he began to take steps to stamp out Wrst a schismatic sect,the Donatists, and a little later heretical beliefs, especially those of theArians, courses of action which, at great cost, proved only moderatelysuccessful in the long run over a large part of the empire.42At this point I wish to draw attention to a very signiWcant precedentfor the use during the pagan empire of ‘the secular arm’ in theservice of the principal Christian Church. Even if we disregard a storyabout the Christians and the popinarii in one of the most disreputablelives in the Historia Augusta (Severus Alexander 49.6), we mustcertainly accept the account of Eusebius, brief as it is, of the successfulappeal of the orthodox Christian bishops to the pagan Aurelian,about 270, that he drive out the excommunicated bishop of Antioch,Paul of Samosata, by force and hand over his church to the Catholics(HE 7.30.19).43 And so, as Eusebius says, Paul was driven out of thechurch by ‘the secular arm’, if I may so translate hē kosmikē archē.There is nothing that need surprise us here. It is true that St Paulhad forbidden Christians to have recourse to the civil courts indisputes among themselves (1 Corinthians 6: 1–8). But the Catholicsno doubt applied here a most convenient doctrine which they, andmany heretics and schismatics, utilized against each other under theChristian empire: there can only be one true Christian Church (theone, naturally, to which I, the person making the decision, happen tobelong) and a man who has been excommunicated by my bishop hasobviously ceased to belong to the Church and need no longer beconsidered a Christian. There could be no objection, under thisdoctrine, to employing the resources of civil power against a hereticlike Paul of Samosata. It is worth remembering here the command ofSt Paul to Christians to obey the civil powers which, as he put it, were‘ordained by God’.44 And it is interesting to note, by the way, that the42 [Contrast with Drake’s recent argument for Constantine’s ‘moderate and inclusionistpolicy’; Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore,2000), 451–4, at 452.]43 For the date, see F. Millar, ‘Paul of Samosata, Zenobia and Aurelian: The Church,Local Culture and Political Allegiance in Third-Century Syria’, JRS 61 (1971), 1–17.44 Rom. 13: 1–7; Titus 3: 1; cf. 1 Pet. 2: 13–17; 1 Tim. 2: 1–2; John 19: 11. SeeC. D. Morrison, The Powers That Be: Earthly Rulers and Demonic Powers in Romans

216 Persecution and Martyrdomparticular bone of contention which brought about the appeal toAurelian was property: it seems to have been only possession of thechurch building which made the appeal to civil power necessary.Long before Constantine became interested in the Arian controversyhe found himself involved with the Donatist schism in NorthAfrica. Indeed, this happened almost immediately after his victoryover Maxentius in 312.45 In a whole series of letters written between312 and 316 we Wnd him showing exasperation at the existence offactions in the African Church; in one he particularly emphasizes hisdetermination to ensure unity of worship, as he puts it ‘in virtue ofmy established policy and of my duty as emperor’, pro instituto meoipsiusque principis munere.46Ironically enough, Constantine Wrst became personally involved inthe Donatist dispute at the insistence of the Donatists, who of allschismatic sects enjoyed the greatest amount of popular adherence intheir own particular area (mainly Numidia, roughly modernAlgeria), but were never able to obtain any positive support from thepolitical authorities and could hope for nothing better than a grudgingtoleration, except during the reign of Julian (and perhaps whileFirmus and Gildo were in power in Africa). It was the Donatists whoWrst proclaimed the principles, ‘What has the emperor to do with theChurch?’ ‘What have Christians to do with kings? Or what havebishops to do with the palace?’47 But this was only after their repeatedappeals to the ‘secular arm’ of Constantine had resulted in victory forthe Catholics. Nor were most Donatists averse to using coercion ontheir own account in the localities, especially in Numidia, where they13.1–7 (Studies in Biblical Theology 29; London, 1960); see also Ste. Croix, ‘EarlyChristian Attitudes to Property and Slavery’ [see below, Ch. 7, pp. 343–4 n. 41] andClass Struggle, 398, 432–3, 439–40, 447.45 W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman NorthAfrica (Oxford, 1952); R. A. Markus, ‘Christianity and Dissent in Roman NorthAfrica: Changing Perspectives in Recent Work’, Studies in Church History, 9 (1972),21–36 [repr. in Markus, From Augustine to Gregory the Great (London, 1983); H. A.Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 212–21]. On Constantine’s role, see F. Millar, TheEmperor in the Roman World (London, 1977), 584–90.46 Optatus, Append. 7.47 ‘Quid est imperatori cum ecclesia?’, Optatus 3.3, where the saying is attributedto Donatus himself; ‘Quid Christianis cum regibus? Aut quid episcopis cum palatio?’,Optatus 1.22.

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 217were strong enough to do so, in particular—as the Catholics werefond of reminding them—during the reign of the ‘Apostate’ Julian, towhom they had not hesitated to appeal and with whom alone theyhad been successful.Again we must not be surprised that the Catholics should havemade full use of the coercive power of the State which was suddenlyplaced at their disposal by Constantine. He had already shown adesire to repress Donatist ‘trouble-makers’ in his letter to the bishopof Carthage in the winter of 312–13 (Eusebius, HE 10.6.1–5), beforeany appeal was made directly to him. When he was Wrst invoked, bythe Donatists, he referred the matter to Bishop Miltiades of Rome,for an ecclesiastical decision (Eusebius, HE 10.5.18–20): so far noChristian need have felt cause for alarm. But in the event, no mereecclesiastical decision, not enforced by the secular arm, proved eVective:not even a second verdict, that of the Synod of Arles, could cowthe Donatists into submission, and Constantine’s emissaries, Eunomiusand Olympius, equally failed. It was at this point thatConstantine, without (as far as we know) any objection from withinthe Church at the time, took the fateful step leading inevitably to‘Caesaro-papism’, which had so much deeper roots in the practice ofthe Church, as distinct from the theory, than many modern scholarshave been prepared to admit. When ecclesiastical decisions failed toinhibit the Donatists, Constantine realized that if he wanted to securereligious peace he must intervene personally and use force—his veryimportant letter to Domitius Celsus in the winter of 315–16, preservedby Optatus (Appendix 7), is perfectly clear on that point. Andthe letter implies that it is not only the Donatists who may need to betaught a lesson, but the Catholic bishop Caecilian himself, if he isfound to be in the wrong. Of course Constantine has been blamed bychurchmen for reopening ecclesiastical questions already decidedover and over again by bishops, but what else could he do? Hemust by now have realized that massive force might have to beused in the cause of the unity of religion, and that bloodshed wasvery likely to result, the exact opposite of what he so ferventlydesired. We cannot blame him for wishing to satisfy himself Wrstthat the force would be used on the right side.In 316 Constantine did institute the persecution of the Donatists:their churches were taken away from them, and the Donatists

218 Persecution and Martyrdomhonoured as martyrs those who died in the resulting conXict. Thiswas the moment at which, I believe, the Catholic Church, by acceptingimperial aid in the repression of its opponents, took the Wrst in aseries of fateful steps which were to make of organized Christianity,as I said at the beginning, a persecuting force without parallel inhuman history. I suggest, then, that ideally the Catholics should haverefused the use of force oVered by the State to coerce their Donatistopponents. In taking such a course of action they would have beenjustiWed both in principle and on grounds of expediency: in principlebecause some of them, Lactantius in particular, had proclaimed theright of religious liberty in the most unqualiWed terms, and ongrounds of expediency, because once the coercion that the Statecould employ was accepted, in however ‘righteous’ a cause, dissidentschismatic or heretical sects, equally convinced of their own righteousness,would inevitably use, and did use, the same kind ofcoercion against the Catholics themselves, when they could.Actually, after about Wve years of repression in Africa, the hardheadedConstantine realized that persecution was only stiVeningDonatist resistance, and that the religious peace and uniformity hedesired could not be achieved in that area without the use of evenmore formidable and bloody measures, which he was not prepared toundertake. Reluctantly, Constantine completely abandoned the persecutionof Donatism. In a fascinating letter to the Catholic bishopsand laity of Africa, written probably in May 321, he sadly admits hisfailure to secure peace for ‘the most holy brotherhood’ in completeconcord, and advises the Catholics to await the working of ‘theheavenly medicine’, caelestis medicina, and meanwhile to perseverepatiently and leave vengeance to God (Optatus, Append. 9). In oneextraordinary phrase he expresses the hope that suVering so enduredwill avail with God as a kind of martyrdom! Finally in 330Constantine wrote to the Catholic bishops of Numidia, whereDonatism was still strongest, harping from the outset, as always, onhis great theme of concord, and urging them again that vengeance beleft to God (Optatus, Append. 10). Since the Donatists had seizedthe Catholic basilicas of Cirta (now renamed Constantina after theemperor), he promised to build them another out of public funds.I have no time here to go into the details of the Arian controversy,which involved much persecution on both sides, but I should just like

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 219to draw attention to another extraordinarily interesting letter ofConstantine, written to Alexander, the predecessor of Athanasius aspatriarch of Alexandria, and to Arius, a mere priest (Eusebius, VC2.64–72). As yet Constantine had simply no idea how stronglychurchmen could feel about issues which he regarded as unnecessary,and futile theological quibbles that should never have been raised atall. As always he shows that his mind is Wxed entirely on achievingconcord and harmony, concordia and harmonia.The Catholics showed no sign of being willing to adopt a policy ofreligious toleration at any time when they were able to decide thereligious policy of an emperor. With very rare exceptions it was onlythe victims, or the potential victims, of Christian persecution whodenounced it. A. H. M. Jones has expressed the truth admirably:48The Donatists originally applied to Constantine to settle their quarrel withthe Catholics: it was only when the verdict Wnally went against them thatthey evolved the doctrine that the church ought to be independent of thestate ...Athanasius, Hilary and the homoousian party in the West enunciateda similar doctrine and put forward pleas for religious liberty whenConstantius II was lending his support to their adversaries. They had raisedno protest when Constantine had ejected their rivals, and they said nothingabout religious freedom when Gratian and Theodosius I banned all beliefsbut their own.One may see various factors contributing to this situation. I havealready stressed the importance of the new concepts of heresy andschism. The physical existence of church property, which expandedseveral times over during the fourth century, was another factorwhich tended to make legal coercion necessary: for what was tohappen when, as so often in Africa (and later Syria), and sometimeselsewhere, one and the same church building was claimed by tworival sects, each representing itself as ‘the Catholic Church’? The onecertain example of an appeal to a pagan emperor by Christians forsettlement of a dispute was when Aurelian was enlisted in order toeject Paul of Samosata from the church of Antioch (Eusebius, HE7.30.19).48 The Later Roman Empire, 934–7, at 935.

220 Persecution and MartyrdomThere is yet another factor I would emphasize, which Christiansnowadays usually prefer to forget: the sinister inXuence of OldTestament precedent, appeal to which was often made. For theearly Church the Old Testament was the Word of God, equally withthe New, and Christians of all denominations ransacked its pages forsuitably deadly missiles to hurl at each other and at pagans: thesewere not diYcult to Wnd.The two earliest works we possess which deal approvingly and atlength with persecution by Christians are the De Errore ProfanorumReligionum [‘On the Errors of Profane Religion’] of Firmicus Maternus,written in the late 340s, and the work by the African bishopOptatus against the Donatists (it seems to have no speciWc title), Wrstpublished about 365–6 and reissued in an amended version sometwenty years later.49 Firmicus is advocating the persecution ofpaganism in general; Optatus is dealing with a particular Christianschism. There are many unspeakably horrifying and bloodthirstypassages in the Old Testament which have been invoked to justifythe punishment of religious crimes. One of the nastiest Old Testamentcharacters to earn the approval of Optatus is the grandson ofAaron, Phineas, who killed Zimri the Israelite and his Midianite wifeCozbi, spearing the woman through the belly, and thereby earned thewarm approval of Yahweh and the cessation of a plague which hadapparently caused 24,000 deaths (Numbers 25. 6–15).50 Firmicus’justiWed comment on a ferocious passage in Deuteronomy 13 chillsthe blood: ‘God orders neither son nor brother to be spared and hethrusts the avenging sword through the beloved body of a wife’.51 Theexample of Phineas is later quoted with approval by others, including49 Firmicus: see above, n. 21. For discussion of Optatus, see the introduction toEdwards, Optatus.50 Optatus 3.5, 7; 7.6, citing for example Exod. 32, esp. 26–9; 1 Kings 18: 17–40;Num. 25: 1–15. Phineas (see Num. 25: 6–15; 1 Chron. 9: 20, Ps. 106: 28–31) is oftenreferred to with admiration by Jewish writers (notably Philo). Compare the story ofKorah, Dathan, and Abiram (Num. 16: 1–35 (and cf. 41–50!), 26: 9–11), cited byOptatus at 1.21; 6.1 to justify the punishment of the wicked; Didascalia Apostolorum23 (ed. R. H. Connolly (1929), pp. 194–7) invokes the punishment of the adherents ofKorah, Dathan, and Abiram as ‘a monument and example of the destruction ofschismatics’, and adds ‘and everyone who imitates them shall perish even as they’.51 Firmicus, De Errore 28.10 and 29.1–2, on Exod. 22: 20 and Deut. 13: 6–11,12–18; ‘nec Wlio iubet parci nec fratri, et per amata coniugis membra gladiumvindicem ducit’.

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 221St Ambrose, Expositio Psalmorum 118.18.10–11, as a worthy exampleto be followed in the suppression of heresy by Christians.52 AnyoneinsuYciently acquainted with the Old Testament who feels surpriseat the ferocity of such passages should look at some of the texts inwhich Yahweh is represented as insisting upon genocide by the Israelitesin the Promised Land, some of which I have collected.53But what of the New Testament? The ‘Parable of the Tares’, theweeds among the wheat (Matthew 13), was used, at least from theearly third century onwards, and in particular by St Cyprian, tojustify a lenient policy to sinners, until the fertile ingenuity of StAugustine, justiWed for once, produced a triumphant counterblast tothis use of the parable:54 No, said Augustine, verse 29 (‘lest while yegather up the tares ye root up the wheat with them’) shows clearlythat only when there is uncertainty and fear of punishing the innocentare the tares to be allowed to remain until harvest; if there is nodoubt about the tares, they are to be rooted out as soon as they areidentiWed. And it was also left to Augustine to produce the one prooftext from the New Testament which those who had a taste for deviousallegory could regard as justiWcation by their Lord himself of thecoercion of heretics and schismatics.55 This was the ‘Parable of theGreat Supper’ in Luke 14, where in the command in verse 23 to ‘goout into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in’ the‘highways and hedges’ were interpreted allegorically as heresies andschisms. This seems to me a conspicuous example of wilfully perverseexegesis. The vital text does not occur in the parallel passage inMatthew 22 (the ‘Parable of the Wedding Feast’), and in both casesthe centre of interest is the failure of those originally invited—clearly52 CSEL 62.401–3; contrast Ps.-Dionysius, Ep. 8.5 (cited Appendix, p. 250).53 Class Struggle, 331–2, with 617–18 nn. 9–12. [As noted in the Introduction, Ste.Croix abhorred the Jewish God Yahweh and intended to examine the inXuence of theOld Testament on Christian intolerance at greater length. An example of the signiWcanceof the Old Testament in late antiquity is Eutychius’ selection by Justinian asPatriarch of Constantinople on the basis of his knowledge of Old Testament precedent:see Evagrius, HE 4.38, p. 187, and Eustratius, Vita Eutychii, ed. C. Laga (Brepols,1992), 613–38 ¼ PG 86.2 § §22–3; on Eutychius, see A. Cameron, ‘Eustratius’ Life ofthe Patriarch Eutychius and the Fifth Ecumenical Council’, in G. Clarke (ed.), Readingthe Past in Late Antiquity (Rushcutters Bay, 1990), 205–24, repr. in ead., ChangingCultures in Early Byzantium (Aldershot, 1996), ch. 1.]54 Augustine, C. Epist. Parmen. 3.2.13.55 Augustine, Ep. 93.2.5; 173.10; 185.6.24; 208.7; C. Gaudent. 1.(xxv).28.

222 Persecution and Martyrdomthe Jews—to attend the Feast.56 Yet the text in question, with itscompelle intrare (Luke 14: 23), was appealed to repeatedly right downinto the Middle Ages and beyond.It is no wonder that a tolerant pagan like Ammianus should saythat ‘wild beasts are not such enemies to mankind as are mostChristians (plerique Christianorum) in their deadly hatred of oneanother’ (22.5.4). Ammianus is referring, of course, not to individualbehaviour but to the way the Catholics and other sects treated eachother, and he will have had in mind such incidents as the one hehimself relates of the bloody strife in Rome between the partisansof the rival popes Damasus and Ursinus, which I have alreadymentioned.57 Ammianus was not markedly hostile to Christianityin general, and he severely censured his hero, Emperor Julian, forforbidding Christians from becoming teachers of rhetoric andliterature—a form of Berufsverbot which, by the way, was retortedagainst the pagans by Justinian.58It is sometimes claimed that the death penalty for religiousoVences was not speciWcally prescribed before the last decade of thefourth century. This is far from true. When Constantine orderedthat the writings of Arius be burnt, he also decreed that anyone56 [The exegesis is less perverse than Ste. Croix would wish—he was no lover ofAugustine, and was happy to convict him of false interpretation. The Jews werecertainly the focus of the Parable as it was told by Christ, but it was not illegitimate fora later interpreter to substitute the Church for the Jews since it could be regarded asrepresentative of the body of Christians invited to share Christ’s message; on this basisthose who failed to adhere to the Catholic Church, heretics and schismatics, might beequated with those lurking in the highways and hedges.]57 [See above, n. 32; see also T. D. Barnes, Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representationof Historical Reality (Ithaca, 1998), 110.]58 Cod. Just. 1.5.18.4; 1.11.10.2. [On Ammianus’ attitude to Christianity, see thecontrasting interpretations of J. Matthews, The Roman Empire of Ammianus (London,1989), 435–51, at 450, for whom ‘Ammianus’ expressed attitude to Christianitywas not one of indiscriminate hostility’, and T. D. Barnes, ‘Literary Convention,Nostalgia and Reality in Ammianus Marcellinus’, in Clarke, Reading the Past in LateAntiquity, 59–92 at 72, and Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of HistoricalReality, 79–94. Barnes argues that Ammianus, like Julian, was an apostate Christianwho sought to marginalize the importance of Christianity in his Res Gestae. Forfurther criticisms of Matthews, see J. P. Davies, Rome’s Religious History: Livy, Tacitusand Ammianus on their Gods (Cambridge, 2004), 227–33. For a summary of thehistoriography on Ammianus’ attitudes to religion, see R. L. Rike, Apex Omnium:Religion in the Res Gestae of Ammianus (Berkeley, 1987), 1–7.]

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 223concealing such a work should be put to death.59 Other laws useexpressions like severissimum supplicium [the harshest penalty],which would be understood as including the death penalty.60 It istrue that death was rarely prescribed as a punishment for a purelyreligious oVence, one not involving, for instance, riotous assembly orsome practice tainted with magic. But there was a very good reasonfor this, which is well explained by St Augustine: to put a heretic orschismatic to death is to send him straight to eternal perdition,without any opportunity for repentance.61 Against this consideration,however, there was another which seemed to many devoutChristians to be even more powerful: the grave danger of allowing aheretic to corrupt the faithful with the deadly poison of his falsedoctrine and thereby perhaps consign them to damnation. Certainly,every conceivable penalty short of death is imposed in law after law:exile in various degrees, many diVerent forms of deprivation of civilrights, prohibition against assembling, Wnes (sometimes enormous,up to 50 lb. weight of gold), and—for free coloni as well as slaves—Xogging.62 All this was enacted with the full consent of the bishops,and often doubtless at their instigation. Even the barbarous punishmentof mutilation, very rarely prescribed by the Roman criminallaw (cruel as it could be), was used for the punishment of purelyreligious oVences, as, for example, when Justinian in a Novel of 536provided that the writings of Severus the Monophysite were to beburnt and that anyone who copied them was to have his hand cut oV(Just. Nov. 42.1.2).To sum up, persecution in various forms for purely religiousreasons was oYcially decreed by all the Christian emperors from59 Socrates, HE 1.9.30–1; Gelasius, HE 2.36.1–2; see P. R. Coleman-Norton,Roman State and Christian Church: A Collection of Documents to A.D. 535 (London,1966), iii. 1293, s.v. ‘book-burning’ for some similar edicts—the burning both ofheretical and of anti-Christian works, especially those of Porphyry, was repeatedlyordered by Christian emperors.60 Cod. Theod. 16.8.1.pr. ¼ Cod. Just. 1.9.3 (ad 315, 329 or 339). Cod. Theod. 16.9.2¼ Cod. Just. 1.10.1; cf. Cod. Theod. 16.8.6. Cod. Theod. 16.10.4 (ad 354 or 356); cf.16.10.6 (356). Cod. Theod. 16.5.9.61 Ep. 100.1; 153.1.3, 6.18; cf. 173.1–2.62 See esp. Cod. Theod. 16.5.52.4 (412), 54.7 (414), 65.3 (428); Augustine, Ep.133.2. It is often not only coloni and slaves who are to be Xogged: see Cod. Theod.16.5.21 (392); 40.7 (407); 53 (probably 398); 16.6.4.1 (405).

224 Persecution and MartyrdomConstantine onwards.63 Even Valentinian I (364–75), who was in thisrespect milder than the others, was not a complete exception.64Invoking the assistance of the emperor in this manner, in trying tocrush opponents, involved the Christians in submitting to theemperor’s will in many ways, even in the settlement of strictlytheological disputes.65 In particular it came to be recognized that aGeneral Council of the Church, an ‘Oecumenical’ Council, could besummoned only by an emperor, and when and where he pleased; ifhe wished to inXuence its decisions, he could do so decisively.66It is often assumed that the vast mass of imperial legislationagainst religious dissent was not properly enforced—as indeed itsconstant re-enactment may suggest. But, if so, the main reason may be63 The best account I know of the imperial legislation is to be found scatteredthrough Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: see his index, s.v. ‘persecutions’,‘heretics’, ‘paganism’, ‘Jews’, ‘Samaritans’, ‘Manichees’, etc. See also Jean Gaudemet,L’Église dans l’Empire romain, IVe–Ve siècles (Paris, 1958), 593–652. It is seldomsuYciently realized how shamefully Christians treated the Jews at various times: seefor example J. Parkes, The ConXict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in theOrigins of Antisemitism (London, 1934); and the inaugural lecture by E. Mary Smallwood,From Pagan Protection to Christian Oppression (Belfast, 1979), which, however,scarcely reaches the 6th cent. Some of the worst known examples come from the 6thand 7th cent., especially under the emperor Heraclius and in the Visigothic kingdomin Spain after it became Catholic under Reccared I in the late 580s. For Jewswelcoming the Arabs in the 630s, see my Class Struggle, 484, with 652–3 n. 39.[The relationship between Jews and Christians in late antiquity has become a veryfertile Weld. While the position of Jews in the later Roman Empire undoubtedlybecame more diYcult from Constantine onwards, Ste. Croix’s picture is perhaps alittle overdrawn. As Seth Schwartz judiciously notes, ‘Local persecutions, forcedconversions, seizures of synagogues, and so on, which violated the letter but notalways the spirit of the laws, may have been somewhat less common than has oftenbeen thought (surprisingly few are attested in contemporary sources), but theyundoubtedly occurred’; see Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to640 C.E. (Princeton, 2001), 179–202, at 183. See also G. Stroumsa, ‘Religious Contactsin Byzantine Palestine’, Numen, 36 (1989), 16–42; F. Millar, ‘Jews of the Greco-Roman Diaspora between Paganism and Christianity’, in J. Lieu, J. North, and T. Rajak(eds.), The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire (London, 1992),97–123.]64 See esp. Ammianus 30.9.5; cf. Cod. Theod. 9.16.9; Socrates, HE 4.1 withSozomen, HE 6.6. His law against the Manichees is Cod. Theod. 16.5.3; againstUrsinians, Coll. Avell. nos. 7–12 (CSEL 35.1.49–54), cf. nos. 5–6 (ibid. 48–9).See also Cod. Theod. 16.6.1, and the very interesting letter in Theodoret, HE 4.8.65 See Class Struggle, 403–5, and note esp. the reference to Chadwick, The EarlyChurch (London, 1967), 132.66 [See below, Ch. 6.]

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 225simply that the governors of the provinces and the other leadingoYcials responsible for enforcing such legislation were mainlypagans even in the early Wfth century,67 and would feel littledisposition to take action under persecuting edicts. And of coursemany of the edicts may have achieved their intended objective, atleast in some degree, merely by the threat they represented.68We have no right, however, to expect to Wnd much evidence of theenforcement of persecuting edicts in speciWc cases: there are fewsources that would give us that kind of information, and it wouldbe rash to conclude, from the rarity of particular examples, that theedicts were not enforced. We do have some evidence, of which I shallcite four specimens. The Wrst of these examples of speciWc cases ofpersecution must date from the reign of Constantine: our source isEpiphanius’ description of how he denounced to the bishops, anddrove out, some eighty members of an Egyptian Gnostic sect withpeculiar practices in which he himself had been participating (Panarion26.17.8–9). A second piece of evidence comes from an inscriptionfrom Sardis in Asia Minor:69 this appears to refer to the punishmentof oVenders against an early law of Justinian (Cod. Just. 1.11.10,presumably of 529–34), which would have had the eVect of makingall pagans liable to compulsory baptism, on pain of exile andconWscation of property.Next comes a story with a particularly delightful ending.70 In theWrst quarter of the Wfth century the Catholic Bishop Theodosius of67 See R. von Haehling, Die Religionszugehörigkeit der hohen Amsträger desrömischen Reiches seit Constantins I Alleinherrschaft bis zum Ende der TheodosianischenDynastie (324–450 bzw. 455 n. Chr.) (Antiquitas iii.23; Bonn, 1978), admirablyreviewed by J. R. Martindale in JRS 69 (1979), 194–6.68 [The eYcacy of late antique law has recently come under considerable scrutiny.R. Macmullen has argued forcefully that they were not eYcacious, based upon thenumber of references to unenforced laws and ‘strident wording’ which, he argues,suggests frustration; see his ‘Social Mobility and the Theodosian Code’, JRS 54 (1964),49–53, at 49–50, and more generally Corruption and the Decline of Rome (New Haven,1988), 168. For a more positive interpretation, see Harries, Law and Empire in LateAntiquity, 77–98.]69 W. H. Buckler and D. M. Robinson, Sardis, vii: Greek and Latin Inscriptions(Leiden, 1932), i. 43–4, no. 19. [C. Foss has dated the inscription to some time after539; see Foss, Byzantine and Turkish Sardis (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 29, withinscription reprinted at 116.]70 Socrates, HE 7.3; copied by Cassiodorus, HE Tripart. 11.3 (CSEL 71.632–3).

226 Persecution and MartyrdomSynnada in Phrygia was a very keen persecutor of the Macedonianheretics in his diocese. He even armed his clergy against them, as wellas persecuting them in the courts and driving them out of thedistrict, an example of episcopal behaviour which I am certain wasby no means uncommon. Finding that the governors of the provincedid not have suYcient enthusiasm for the punishment of the heretics,he went to Constantinople and persuaded the praetorian prefectof the east to issue special edicts stiVening the penalties against them.But while he was away Agapetus, the local bishop of the Macedonians,induced his whole congregation to go over to the Catholicfaith. One can imagine the consternation of Theodosius when hereturned, to Wnd that Agapetus had calmly usurped his own position.He went oV to Constantinople again in a fury, only to be told by thewise Patriarch Atticus that he had better consider himself (shall Isay?) to have made himself redundant.My fourth example is not nearly as well known as it deserves to be,and it brings out the fact that in the Christian Empire exceedinglyunpleasant consequences might attend the propagating of a beliefwhich may seem shocking to few people today: that virginity is notinherently superior to marriage. The ex-monk Jovinian discoveredthis when he wrote in favour of that view, and compounded hisoVence by arguing against the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary,even in partu and post partum, a doctrine which was then beingenthusiastically preached by prominent bishops such as Ambroseand Augustine.71 Jovinian was not only attacked by Jerome in thelongest of his sometimes rather scurrilous pamphlets against individualopponents; in addition he was condemned by Pope Siricius71 See conveniently J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome (London, 1975), 180–7; for the virginityof Mary, 181 with n. 11. [See also D. Hunter, ‘Helvidius, Jovinian, and the Virginity ofMary in Late Fourth-Century Rome’, JECS 1.1 (1993), 47–71; idem, ‘Rereading theJovinianist Controversy: Asceticism and Clerical Authority in Late Ancient Christianity’,Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33.3 (2003), 453–70, now repr.in D. B. Martin and P. Cox Miller (eds.), The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies:Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography (Durham, NC, 2005), 119–35; Y.-M. Duval,L’AVaire Jovinien: d’une crise de la société romaine à une crise de la pensée chrétienne àla Wn du IVe et au début du Ve siècle (Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 83; Rome,2003). On the Virgin Mary in late antiquity, see now Averil Cameron, ‘The Cult of theVirgin in Late Antiquity: Religious Development and Myth-Making’, in R. N. Swanson(ed.), The Church and Mary (London, 2004), 1–21, esp. 7.]

Heresy, Schism, and Persecution 227and the even more powerful Bishop Ambrose, and by two churchcouncils, at Rome and Milan. And that was not all. The bishopsdenounced Jovinian at the imperial court; the result was what thegreat (and pious) historian of the late Empire, Ernst Stein, enigmaticallydescribed as ‘mesures énergiques’.72 To Wnd out the peculiarappropriateness of the phrase ‘energetic measures’ one must consultthe Theodosian Code: an imperial constitution issued in 398 refers tothe episcopal denunciation, condemns the sacrilegious meetingsorganized by Jovinian outside Rome, orders that Jovinian’s associatesbe deported for life to diVerent islands, and prescribes for Jovinianhimself the same punishment, preceded—and here we see just what‘mesures énergiques’ really means—by Xogging with a leadedscourge, the terrible plumbum or plumbata whose application couldwell be fatal.73 This may well be why we hear no more of the wretchedJovinian, who may well have succumbed to the Xogging even if hewas hardly the debauched voluptuary depicted with such relish byJerome (Contra Jovinian 1.40; 2.21, 36–7).I must draw to an end now, and have no time to describe the bitterstrife that went on and on between those we refer to as Catholics orOrthodox and the Monophysites or Miaphysites (and the variants onboth sides), which involved much oYcial persecution by the Catholicsand some furious popular outbursts, particularly on the otherside.74 An appearance of episcopal unanimity was produced at thegreat Council of Chalcedon in 451, which was dominated by anoverwhelming parade of imperial authority in the shape of the augustlay commissioners who presided over it. But, as Norman Baynes well72 E. Stein, Histoire du Bas-Empire: de l’État romain à l’État byzantin, vol. i, 2ndedn. (Paris, 1959), 214. Cod. Theod. 16.5.53, rightly redated to 6 Mar. 398 by Seeck,Regesten der Kaiser und Päpste für die Jahre 311 bis 476 n. Chr: Vorarbeit zu einerProsopographie der christlichen Kaiserzeit (Stuttgart, 1919; repr. Frankfurt, 1964), 28,accepted by Stein, BE i.ii.533–4.73 For death as a common result of application of the plumbum, see Augustine, Ep.10*.4.3 (ed. J. Divjak, CSEL 88 (1981), 48.20–1), and even from ordinary RomanXoggings, Athanasius, Hist. Arian. 60; see further Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, 472–3.74 [The main source from the Monophysite perspective is John of Ephesus’ Lives ofthe Eastern Saints, whose evidence provides the basis for the discussions in Frend,Monophysite Movement, chs. 6–7, esp. pp. 247–53, 273–6; see also the more partisantreatment in S. Ashbrook Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis (Berkeley, 1990);consult index under ‘Monophysites, persecution of’.]

228 Persecution and Martyrdomput it, Chalcedon ‘came not to bring peace, but a sword’.75 It seems tome beyond question that the persecution of the Monophysites greatlyweakened the unity of the empire and facilitated the extraordinarilyrapid conquest of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt by the Arabs in the630s and 640s.76 I will merely add that the chapter on the Council ofChalcedon ends with a melancholy story from the Syriac Chronicle ofMichael the Syrian which shows how vehemently Byzantine rulerspersecuted the Monophysitism to which many communities in Syriahad become devoted.77I end with a story which seems to me to be a particularly goodillustration of the consequences, in medieval Europe, of the impositionduring the Later Roman Empire of a great structure of dogmaticand organizational intolerance which was to plague variousparts of the world for many centuries. The story, which comes in theWrst chapter of Joinville’s Life of St Louis (King Louis IX of France,who died in 1270), has a peculiarly delightful ending.78 Joinville isretelling a story told to him by the sainted king about a greatassembly of Christian clergy and Jews held at the monastery ofCluny to stage a religious debate. There was a certain lame knight,leaning upon a crutch—one must not forget the crutch, since it playsan important a part in the story as the suspenders in Kipling’s ‘Howthe whale got its throat’. The knight asked the abbot if he could speakWrst, and when the abbot agreed the knight demanded to have themost important and learned of the Jewish rabbis brought before him.As soon as the Jew had come, the knight asked him whether hebelieved that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a virgin at the time ofhis birth and in truth the Mother of God. The Jew indicatedthat ...no,hedidnotacceptthat. Whereupon the knight exclaimed,‘By heaven, I’ll make you pay for it!’, and he lifted up his crutch andstruck the Jew such a blow with it over the ear that he knocked him75 N. H. Baynes, Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London, 1955), 355.76 Class Struggle, 483–4, with 651–3 nn. 32–9 [following Jones, Later RomanEmpire, 1034–5]; H. Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests (Cambridge,1992).77 [Cf. Ch. 6 below, p. 319.]78 Life of St Louis, in Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, Engl.trans. by M. R. B. Shaw (Harmondsworth, 1963), 175.

Appendix to Chapter 5 229down. The Jews hastily took up the wounded rabbi and Xed; thereand then the conference ended, before it had scarcely begun. Whenthe abbot protested to the knight, the knight retorted that the abbothad been guilty of even greater folly in calling people together forsuch a conference because there were many good Christians therewho, before the discussion ended, would have done away with doubtsabout their own religion, though not fully understanding the Jewishposition. The sainted king was entirely on the knight’s side. ‘So I tellyou’, he said to Joinville, ‘that no one, unless he is an expert theologian,should venture to argue with these people. But a layman,whenever he hears the Christian religion abused, should not attemptto defend its tenets except with his sword—and that he should thrustinto the scoundrel’s belly, as far as it will go.’APPENDIX TO CHAPTER 5Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquity andEarly ChristianityJoseph StreeterIn the 1999 draft of this paper, Ste. Croix included a comprehensive list ofevidence on toleration in the Christian Roman Empire and beyond. Initiallywe planned to incorporate this into the body of the text, but this provedimpossible. However, the collection of evidence is of value, not least becauseit provides a good vantage point from which to examine some of the salientaspects of Ste. Croix’s approach to Christianity, and their historiography.As I have noted in the Introduction, Ste. Croix contrasts pagan orpolytheist tolerance and Christian intolerance. This contrast was mostinXuentially expressed in English by David Hume in his essay ‘Of superstition,and enthusiasm’ (1742), and The Natural History of Religion (1757),although it has deeper roots.1 According to Hume, polytheism is tolerant1 The destructive eVects of Christianity on social harmony had been explored forsome time before Hume, most signiWcantly in the Machiavellian tradition. As notedin the Introduction, apart from Hume, another important inXuence on Gibbon is

230 Persecution and Martyrdomowing to its falsity: ‘being entirely founded in vulgar tradition’, it ‘is liable tothis great inconvenience, that any practice or opinion, however barbarous orcorrupted, may be authorised by it.’2 In contrast, monotheism or ‘theism’always tends to intolerance, since each sect regards its own faith and worshipas exclusively true. Accordingly, ‘the several sects fall naturally into animosity,and mutually discharge on each other, that sacred zeal and rancour, themost furious and implacable of all human passions’.3 Although Hume didnot, at least in 1757, dispute the intellectual foundations of ‘theism’,reckoning that ‘the whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author’,4the consequence of corrupted theism (intolerance or ‘enthusiasm’) was farworse than that of corrupted polytheism (superstition), because ‘thecorruption of the best things produces the worst’.5 Hume’s inXuence onGibbon is clear,6 although Gibbon, like Ste. Croix, noted Islam’s superiorrecord on religious toleration.7 The inXuence of Hume and Gibbon is stillapparent in contemporary scholarship, with both Ramsey MacMullen andGlen Bowersock asserting the inherently tolerant character of polytheism.8Montesquieu’s Considérations, on which see V. de Senarclens, Montesquieu, Historiende Rome: un tournant pour la réXexion sur le statut de l’histoire au XVIIIe siècle(Geneva, 2003). Montesquieu had made this contrast as early as 1716 in his ‘Dissertationsur la politique des Romains dans la religion’, in Œuvres complètes deMontesquieu, ed. M. A. Masson, iii (Paris, 1955), 37–50.2 D. Hume, ‘The natural history of religion’, ed. J. W. Colver, in Hume, The NaturalHistory of Religion and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Oxford, 1976), 23–98,at 58–9. For a clear introduction to Hume’s philosophy of religion, see J. C. A. Gaskin,Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, 2nd edn. (London, 1988); for the broader intellectualand historical context, see P. Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religious in the EnglishEnlightenment (Cambridge, 1990) and K. Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment andReligion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1996).3 Hume, ‘Natural history of religion’, 60.4 Hume, ‘Natural history of religion’, 25.5 Hume, ‘Of superstition and enthusiasm’, in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary,ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London, 1889), 144–50, at 144.6 E. Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, i. 447 (ed.Womersley); on Hume’s inXuence on Gibbon, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Superstition andEnthusiasm in Gibbon’s History of Religion’, Eighteenth Century Life, 8.1 (1982),83–94; D. Womersley, The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the RomanEmpire (Cambridge, 1988), 20–38.7 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, iii. 315; for the background to Gibbon’s account of thespread of Islam, and particularly the use of Muhammad in 17th- and 18th-cent.trinitarian disputes, see D. Womersley, Gibbon and the ‘Watchmen of the Holy City’:The Historian and his Reputation 1776–1815 (Oxford, 2002), 147–72.8 R. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven, 1981), 1–5; G. W.Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor, 1990), 6: ‘Polytheism is bydeWnition tolerant and accommodating.’

Appendix to Chapter 5 231While Ste. Croix indicts Christianity for its intolerance, he notes, citingTertullian, Lactantius, and the ‘so-called Edict of Milan’, that ‘before theempire became oYcially Christian there were some splendid Christian pleasfor religious toleration, in the most absolute terms’ and charges post-Constantinian Christianity with failing to follow this precedent. However,it is unclear that these texts bear this interpretation. Two problems standout: Wrst, we need to ask what the phrase ‘toleration in the most absoluteterms’ might mean; second, we need to ask whether the texts Ste. Croix citesreally establish a precedent for later Christians.A recent collection of essays, principally by philosophers and politicaltheorists, aptly characterizes toleration as ‘an elusive virtue’, and one of thecontributors, the philosopher Bernard Williams, notes that it seems ‘at oncenecessary and impossible’.9 That the meaning and consequences of tolerationare still disputed obviously presents signiWcant diYculties to a historianof toleration. Nonetheless, toleration ‘in the most absolute terms’ mustsurely refer to some positive concept of toleration, which aYrms diversity asinherently valuable. Such an understanding of toleration is generally combinedwith the idea of human rights, according to which a person is entitledto certain beliefs and practices by virtue of being human, as long as they donot interfere with the freedom and dignity of others. This is very much amodern conception, formulated following the Reformation and installed asone of the fundaments of civil society during the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies.10 Accordingly, ancient and medieval historians should use theconcept ‘toleration’ with caution. Some have suggested that it has norelevance to the ancient world.11 In contrast, the argument has recentlybeen advanced that it can be used to describe pre-Modern and non-Westernsocieties, and should not be seen as the exclusive preserve of the modernWest.12 There are certainly problems with starting from a ‘strong’ deWnition9 See D. Heyd (ed.), Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (Princeton, 1996), andB. Williams, ‘Toleration: An Impossible Virtue’, 18–27, at 18.10 This is, of course, a process with a very diVerent momentum in diVerent parts ofEurope. For some of the historical background, see the essays collected in O. P. Grelland R. Porter (eds.), Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2000) and J. I.Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750(Oxford, 2001). See also R. Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge, 2001),73–84.11 This has been much discussed in the last decade. M. Beard, J. North, and S.Price, Religions of Rome, i:A History (Cambridge, 1998), 212, have argued that ‘theconcept ‘‘toleration’’ is distinctively modern and does not apply in this period’.12 See the work of John Christian Laursen and Cary Nederman, who have arguedthat historians of toleration need not use a ‘positive’ concept of toleration as their

232 Persecution and Martyrdomof toleration, since it runs the risk of rendering all societies intolerant untilthey reach precisely the strong deWnition that is the starting point. Nonetheless,if we do extend toleration, we need to use the term carefully; inparticular we need to distinguish intention from eVect. Toleration was nevera positive aim of late antique emperors, kings, or bishops, and it was only anaim for their addressees if they could not maintain their beliefs or practicesin any other way. It was a consequence of discourses on the exercise ofpower, perhaps most notably clemency which, as we shall see, was often aneVective mask for practical limitations of government, or a rhetorical strategyemployed by those in a position of weakness. As Peter Brown has argued,ideas of toleration were not the main limitation on religious intolerance inlate antiquity. Brown himself has emphasized the importance of the forms ofcomportment bound up with elite paideia, which encompassed both pagansand Christians and blunted the edge of Christian intolerance, and has shownhow practicalities of government, particularly revenue collecting, could leadto greater tolerance than suggested by Christian rhetoric.13 Perhaps the maindiVerence between such a society and one based on an explicit concept oftoleration is that the limits of intolerance are potentially very fragile, withthe consequence that once violence breaks out it can quickly escalate.The other central diYculty in referring to ‘religious toleration’ in theancient world is the absence of any concept commensurable with ‘religion’.The Latin religio carries quite diVerent connotations, and is better translatedas ‘correct practice’, to be contrasted with superstitio.14 As Mary Beard,John North, and Simon Price have argued, religio and superstitio weremeasure, since doing so renders all pre-Enlightenment and non-Western societiesintolerant. See Laursen and Nederman, ‘Problems of Periodization in the History ofToleration’, Storia della StoriograWa, 37 (2000), 55–65; Nederman and Laursen,‘DiVerence and Dissent: Introduction’, in Nederman and Laursen (eds.), DiVerenceand Dissent: Theories of Toleration in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Lanham,Md., 1996), 1–16, at 1, restated in Nederman, Worlds of DiVerence: EuropeanDiscourses of Toleration, c.1100–c.1550 (Philadelphia, 2000), 1–2. See also Laursen(ed.), Religious Toleration: ‘The Variety of Rites’ from Cyrus to Defoe (London, 1999),esp. 1–11; Laursen and Nederman (eds.), Beyond the Persecuting Society: ReligiousToleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia, 1998), 1–10.13 P. Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the RomanWorld (Cambridge, 1995), esp. 29–54, and ‘Christianisation and Religious ConXict’,in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey (eds.), CAH xiii: The Late Empire, A.D. 337–425(Cambridge, 1998), 632–64. On limitations of power, see also P. Garnsey, ‘ReligiousToleration in Classical Antiquity’, Studies in Church History, 21 (1984), 1–27, at 9.14 See Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, i:A History, 215–28; P. Garnseyand C. Humfress, The Evolution of the Late Antique World (Cambridge, 2001), 139.

Appendix to Chapter 5 233simultaneously ‘discursive categories which framed religious arguments’and ‘labels of approval or disapproval’.15 The boundaries between religioand superstitio should not be sought objectively. Their precise meaning wasdependent on context, and was very much in the eye of the beholder. Whileour concept ‘religion’ is certainly not value-neutral, it is perhaps less explicitlynormative than religio.16 Thus when we speak of ‘religious toleration inthe ancient world’, we must recognize that the concept religio had a muchmore restrictive meaning that ‘religion’, and that many practices that weclassify as religious could equally well be prohibited as superstitio. The ‘socalledEdict of Milan’ is signiWcant because it classiWes Christianity as religio,alongside the traditional religiones of the Roman Empire.17 It does not signala commitment to ‘religious toleration’ in anything like the sense we mightuse, as superstitiones would still be subject to coercion and prohibition.Ste. Croix’s examples from Tertullian and Lactantius pose more complexproblems. Lactantius has recently been claimed as a supporter of religioustoleration,18 and both he and Tertullian make arguments that overlap withlater ideas of freedom of conscience.19 Lactantius also inXuenced earlymodern scepticism, which was an important source of ideas for later theoriesof religious toleration.20 Tertullian coins the phrase libertas religionis atApologeticus 24.6, a passage worth quoting in full:Videte enim ne et hoc ad inreligiositatis elogium concurrat, adimere libertatemreligionis et interdicere optionem divinitatis, ut non liceat mihi colerequem velim, sed cogar colere quem nolim.15 Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, i:A History, 215.16 On the development of the category ‘religion’, see T. Asad, Genealogies ofReligion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore,1993); and D. Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledgeand Ideology (Baltimore, 2003).17 Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum 48.2–12.18 See for instance E. de P. Digeser, ‘Lactantius, Porphyry, and the Debate overReligious Toleration’, JRS 88 (1998), 129–49, and The Making of a Christian Empire:Lactantius and Rome (Ithaca, 2000), 91–114; H. Drake, ‘Lambs into Lions: ExplainingEarly Christian Intolerance’, Past and Present, 153 (1996), 3–36, and Constantine andthe Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore, 2000), 211; Garnsey and Humfress,Evolution of the Late Antique World, 206–7, who recognize the contextual limits toLactantius’ tolerance.19 On the importance of freedom of conscience in Enlightenment ideas of toleration,see J. Dunn, ‘The Claim to Freedom of Conscience: Freedom of Speech,Freedom of Thought, Freedom of Worship?’, in The History of Political Theory andOther Essays (Cambridge, 1996), 100–20.20 On which see L. A. Panizza, ‘Lorenzo Valla’s De vero falsoque bono, Lactantiusand Oratorical Scepticism’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 41 (1978),76–107.

234 Persecution and MartyrdomLook to it, whether this also may form part of the accusation of irreligion—to do away with freedom of religion, to forbid a man choice of deity, so that Imay not worship whom I would, but am forced to worship whom I wouldnot.I have included the Loeb translation, which shows well some of thediYculties that this text poses. If we translate inreligiositas as ‘irreligion’and religio as ‘religion’, all seems clear. The diYculty lies in knowing what anon-Christian would have understood by libertas religionis. This is presumablyanticipated by Tertullian, when he explains that doing away with libertasreligionis entails forbidding optio divinitatis, a description that certainlyresembles our understanding of religious toleration, and this pluralistunderstanding of religio is supported by his earlier reference to Judaism asa religio licita (Apol. 21.1). In Ad Scapulam 2.2 he argues along similar lines:‘it is ordained by both man-made and natural law that each person mayworship whatever he wishes’. We must be wary, however, of letting attractiveand, to us, self-evidently plausible sentiments cloud our sense of what theymight have meant in context. Tertullian interprets coercion and persecutionof Christians as being about what Christians worship, or at least this is therhetorical strategy that he adopts. However, as Ste. Croix argued, it is not thepositive aspect of Christian worship that seems to have angered contemporaries,but rather its negative aspect, the fact that being a Christian entailedthe rejection of ancestral religious practices.21 Indeed, if we look at otherreligious groups or practices coerced or prohibited by the Roman authorities,attention focuses almost exclusively on the manner of worship, and notits object. Although the adherents of some deities certainly attractedparticular ridicule,22 the deity itself is not blamed. When, in 186 bc, theRoman senate suppressed the Bacchic cult, it regulated, but did not prohibit,the worship of Bacchus.23 Late republican and early imperial deWnitions ofreligio are concerned with the attitude with which the gods are approached,21 Ste. Croix, ‘Early Christians’ [above, Ch. 3, pp. 133–8].22 See for instance Juvenal, Satire 6.522–41 on a priestess of Isis; perhaps alsoApuleius’ account of Lucius’ conversion, Metamorphoses 11, although the precisesigniWcance of this text remains controversial and, as John Winkler argued, it isprobably misguided to look for a Wxed and conclusive meaning; see Winkler, Auctorand Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (Berkeley, 1985),204–47.23 The senate’s measures are recorded on ILLRP 511 ¼ ILS 18, trans. in Beard,North, and Price, Religions of Rome, ii. 290–1 inscription, with Religions of Rome, i.91–8; on the suppression of the Bacchic cult, see J. North, ‘Religious Toleration inRepublican Rome’, PCPS 25 (1979), 85–103, repr. in C. Ando (ed.), Roman Religion(Edinburgh, 2003), 199–219.

Appendix to Chapter 5 235and the same is true of deWnitions of superstitio or deisidaimonia, articulatedperhaps most famously in Theophrastus’ sketch of a ‘superstitious man’.24Tertullian’s inconsistent use of religio further complicates the meaning oflibertas religionis. Earlier in chapter 24 he defends Christianity againstaccusations of treason against Roman religio (crimen laesae maxime Romanaereligionis) on the grounds that ‘if they (the Roman gods) deWnitely arenot gods, then deWnitely it is not religio’ (si enim non sunt dei pro certo, necreligio pro certo est) and goes on to contrast the ‘true religio of the true god’with the ‘crime of true irreligio’ (crimen verae inreligiositatis). In Ad Scapulamhe plays other games with religio. The assertion nec religionis est cogerereligionem (‘it is not a part of religio to force religio’) alludes to the relationshipbetween superstitio and excess, suggesting that the urge to forceChristians to sacriWce is the opposite of religio. It is, then, very unclearhow a non-Christian would have understood the phrase libertas religionis.They would almost certainly have chafed at Tertullian’s temerity in claimingChristianity as religio. Whether we should expect clear principles from a textlike Apologeticus is doubtful, and it seems to me that Tertullian is playingwith paradoxes rather than trying to make a coherent argument fortoleration. The most that can be inferred securely from this passage is thathe advocates freedom to be a Christian.Lactantius’ use of religio is similarly contradictory. Witness Divine Institutes5.19.21:25They (pagans) realise that nothing matters more in human aVairs thanreligio and that it ought to be defended with every endeavour, but they arejust as deceived in the religio itself as they are in how to defend it.In book 4 Lactantius discusses the meaning of religio, which he deWnes as‘worship of what is true’, and superstitio, which is ‘worship of what is false’(4.28.11). He is not therefore asserting that there are many legitimatereligions: if religio is ‘worship of what is true’, then it can only refer toChristianity. Non-Christians have a sort of primordial understanding of theimportance of Christianity (religio), but are led astray by demons intothinking that their worship is religio. Elsewhere, however, we Wnd a morepluralist use of religio; in a contrast between Christianity, or ‘our religio’(nostra religio) (5.19.30) and paganism, Lactantius states that ‘when the24 Theophrastus, Characters 16; see the recent edition with Engl. trans. and comm.by J. Diggle, Theophrastus: Characters (Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries43; Cambridge, 2004), 110–13.25 See the recent translation and commentary of A. Bowen and P. Garnsey,Lactantius: Divine Institutes (TTH 40; Liverpool, 2003). All subsequent translationswill follow this edition, with some modiWcations.

236 Persecution and MartyrdomsacriWce is over in all its emptiness, they leave their religio as they found it, inthe temple and with the temple’, and that ‘religiones of that sort (eiusmodi)cannot make people good and cannot be reliable and stable’ (5.19.27–8).There is not necessarily a contradiction between these two uses of religio: thejob of rhetoric is persuasion, and one way to make a point is to use, andsubvert, the discourses through which opponents understand themselves.I do not want to downplay the potential signiWcance of Tertullian’s andLactantius’ arguments against coercion and persecution, which contrastfavourably with the attitudes of many leading Christians after the conversionof Constantine, although later Christians were able to Wnd scripturaldefences of pluralism. However, as Socrates remarked of the phrase usedby the Arians in 382, ‘they say now many are called and few are chosen—anexpression which they never used when on account of fear and terror themajority of people were on their side’.26 Neither Tertullian nor Lactantiusmade a positive case for toleration. Although they issued pleas againstpersecution, they did so from positions of weakness. They were not interestedin general principles of toleration, but in the immediate toleration oforthodox Christians. Both fail what Perez Zagorin, in a slightly diVerentcontext, has called the ‘heresy test’, in that neither accepted diversity withinthe Church.27Organizing the sources collected by Ste. Croix into useful categories hasnot proved easy. The classiWcation I have chosen is threefold, and is designedless with logical coherence in mind than with general context within whichgroups of texts can be understood. The Wrst section includes explicit pleasfor toleration, which argue for a plurality of legitimate worship (with thecaveat that ‘legitimate worship’ already presupposes the exclusion of manypractices that we would categorize as religious); it will be noticed that theseare all issued by non-Christians. The second section comprises materialfrom Christian historians (not just Church historians) critical of intoleranceor persecution. While a historian was under no compulsion to be tolerant ordetached, a detached mode of narrative was at least available for use, anddiVerent historians use this to diVerent degrees. Openness and toleration isnot common in the work of post-Constantinian Christians; it features mostabundantly in works of history. The Wnal section comprises pleas againstcoercion or persecution, which overlap with our understanding of toleration,but were generally directed to speciWc problems.26 Cited by P. Brown, ‘Christianisation and Religious ConXict’, in A. Cameron andP. Garnsey (eds.), CAH xiii: The Late Empire, A.D. 337–425 (Cambridge, 1998),632–64, at 643–4.27 See P. Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton,2003), 313–14.

Appendix to Chapter 5 237Support for tolerationOf the sources collected by Ste. Croix, the three authors who make thestrongest cases for toleration are Themistius (Orations 5 and 6, 364 and365),28 Symmachus (third Relatio, 384),29 and Libanius (Oration 30, 386).30Although the texts proclaim the plurality of legitimate forms of worship, it isdiYcult to infer principles or attitudes from them, and the circumstances oftheir delivery must be taken into account. In the speech to celebrate the startof Jovian’s consulship on 1 January 364,31 Themistius praises Jovian’s ‘legislationon divine matters’32 on the basis that ‘there are some matters whichhave escaped compulsion and are superior to threat and injunction, forexample the whole question of virtue and, above all, reverence for thedivine’, adding that it is ‘necessary for whoever intends that they (virtueand reverence for the divine) should exist naturally to take the lead in thesegood things, having realized most wisely that the impulse of the soul is28 Themistius, Or. 5 esp. 67b–70d, with Socrates, HE 3.25.20–1. Eng. trans. byP. Heather and D. Moncur, Politics, Philosophy, and Empire in the Late Fourth Century:Select Orations of Themistius (Liverpool, 2001), 159–73, 180–98, with introductorydiscussion at 149–58, 173–9. See also G. Dagron, ‘L’Empire romain d’Orient au IV esiècle et les traditions politiques de l’Hellenisme: le témoignage de Thémistios’,Travaux et Mémoires, 3 (1968), 1–242, at 163–98 for discussion and partial Frenchtranslation. Also J. P. Daly, ‘Themistius’ Plea for Religious Toleration’, Greek, Romanand Byzantine Studies, 12 (1971), 65–79; C. Ando, ‘Pagan Apologetics and ChristianIntolerance in the Ages of Themistius and Augustine’, JECS 4.2 (1996), 171–207.29 Latin text and trans. in R. H. Barrow, Prefect and Emperor: The Relationes ofSymmachus A.D. 384 (Oxford, 1973), 34–47. On this episode see the collection ofsources, German trans., and comm. of R. Klein, Der Streit um den Victoriaaltar: diedritte Relatio des Symmachus und die Briefe 17, 18, und 57 des Mailänder BischofsAmbrosius (Texte zur Forschung 7; Darmstadt, 1972). For the historical background,see J. F. Matthews, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court AD 364–425 (Oxford,1975), 205–11, and N. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a ChristianCapital (Berkeley, 1994), 166.30 For the content and context see the introduction to A. F. Norman’s translationin Libanius, Selected Works ii (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 92–9;and cf. n. 29 above.31 Socrates, HE 4.32.2–5; Sozomen, HE 6.36.6–37.1; Cassiodorus, HE Tripart.8.12.1 (CSEL 71. 484–5).32 There is some debate over whether Jovian had issued this legislation, or whetherThemistius was urging him to do so. For the former position see A. H. M. Jones, TheLater Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey(Oxford, 1964), 150, against which J. Vanderspoel, Themistius and the ImperialCourt: Oratory, Civic Duty, and Paideia from Constantius to Theodosius (Ann Arbor,1995), 148–53. Jones’s position is more likely; see Heather and Moncur, Politics,Philosophy, and Empire, 154–5.

238 Persecution and Martyrdomunconstrained, and is both autonomous and voluntary’. Themistius thenharmonizes Christian and non-Christian forms of worship: ‘while thereexists only one Judge, mighty and true, there is no one road leading tohim’. For Themistius persecution simply will not work, though he alsodevelops arguments for religious diversity on the grounds of the beneWtsof competition and from comparison to the varied composition of the army.Although Jovian’s acceptance of toleration might appear to be a rareexample of a person in a position of power rejecting the opportunity toimpose their religious beliefs, the policy proclaimed for him by Themistiuscannot bear this weight. Jovian’s position as emperor was in fact shaky, sincethe praetorian prefect Salutius Secundus (non-Christian) had commandedsupport in discussions over the succession in Julian’s beleaguered army inPersia, and Jovian had not yet reached the heartlands of the empire toimpose his authority.33 In the immediate circumstances, it would havebeen politic for Jovian to avoid causing oVence to inXuential sections ofthe army or administration which he had inherited from Julian; how hisreligious policies might have developed is beyond speculation, since he diedon 17 February after a reign of less than 8 months.Jovian’s successor in the East, Valens, had been elevated by his brother,Valentinian I, on 28 March 364 and before the end of the year he too was beingpraised by Themistius for religious toleration, although this is not one of themain themes of Oration 6, which focuses on the concordia of the two coemperors.34There are, however, signiWcant changes in Themistius’ approachto the topic: whereas to Jovian Themistius could present Christianity as thereligion of the Syrians, which had its place alongside the alternative religionsof the Greeks and Egyptians, in addressing Valens Themistius proclaims thatsome religions are better than others and nowhere suggests that diversitywithin Christianity might be acceptable. Valens was clearly a committedChristian and Themistius will already have been made aware of his strongpreference for a non-Nicene Christological approach: the emperor sooninitiated action against the philosophers favoured by Julian, in particularMaximus of Ephesus, and set about returning the Church to the anti-Nicenesituation which had pertained under Constantius II. From reports in Socrates(4.32) and Sozomen (6.36.6–37.1), it appears that Valens had to soften his33 For discussion of the evidence, see P. Heather, ‘Ammianus on Jovian, Historyand Literature’, in J. W. Drijvers and D. Hunt (eds.), The Late Roman World and itsHistorian: Interpreting Ammianus Marcellinus (London, 1999), 105–16, at 105–8.34 Heather and Moncur, Politics, Philosophy, and Empire, 177–8; N. Lenski, Failureof Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century A.D. (Berkeley, 2002),28–9.

Appendix to Chapter 5 239line on divisions within the Church, since both historians complimentThemistius on persuading the emperor to moderate his severity and acceptthat God was honoured more greatly by a diversity of approach. The speech inquestion does not surive, unless Socrates has conXated the message of thespeech to Jovian and so distorted the historiographic tradition.35 It is,however, not unduly cynical to suspect that Themistius was merely acting,as usual, as the imperial mouthpiece for a policy decided on other grounds,36in this case most probably the threat posed to Valens by the usurpation ofProcopius, which certainly led to a change of heart with regard to the Nicenechampion, Athanasius of Alexandria.37Whereas Themistius devised arguments to promote the policies of Christianemperors, Symmachus and Libanius write as non-Christians broughtup in a world where intellectuals with diVerent beliefs had been more closelylinked to each other by educational, family, and social ties than separated bya religious divide.38 Libanius in particular demonstrates an accommodationwhich can be appealing to modern commentators: he wrote letters on behalfof Christians during Julian’s reign (Eps. 724, 763, 819, 1411) and in 364appealed to Priscianus, the governor of Palestina Prima, to provide securityfor the Manichees ‘who do no harm to anyone but are persecuted by somepeople’ (Ep. 1253 ¼ 132 Norman),39 and commiserated with the Jewishpatriarch, perhaps after the Christian attack on the synagogue at Callinicum(Ep. 914 ¼ 160 Norman).40 There was, however, no question where thebalance of power lay, and in the 380s both Libanius in the East and35 From Socrates it passed to Sozomen, and from them to Cassiodorus, HETripart. 8.12.1 (CSEL 71. 484–5).36 For this general interpretation of Themistius, see Heather and Moncur, Politics,Philosophy, and Empire, 29–42.37 See T. D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in theConstantinian Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 161–3.38 For the context, see J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Antioch: City and ImperialAdministration in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford, 1972), 224–42; also P. Petit,Libanius et la vie municipale à Antioche au IVe siècle après J.-C. (Paris, 1955); and,brieXy, P. de Labriolle, La Réaction paienne: étude sur la polémique antichrétienne duIer au VIe siècle (Paris, 1934), 429–33.39 See PLRE i. 727, s.v. Priscianus I.40 With regard to the identity of the Patriarch, Menahem Stern argued for GamalielV; see his Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism II: from Tacitus toSimplicius (Jerusalem, 1980), 581–3, with Ep. 914 reprinted with an English translationat 589–90. Otto Seeck and PLRE argue for Gamaliel VI; see Seeck, ‘Gamaliel. 3’,Pauly–Wissowa, RE 7. 690; PLRE i. 385 s.v. Gamalielus. On the role of the patriarchatein late antique Palestine, see M. Goodman, State and Society in Roman GalileeA.D. 132–212, 2nd edn. (London, 2000), 116–18.

240 Persecution and MartyrdomSymmachus in the West had to respond to an increasingly intolerantatmosphere. Symmachus started his defence of the Altar of Victory bypraising the value of tradition and the need to guarantee the safety of theempire, employing much the same strategy as Themistius to Jovian, with asimilar metaphor:it is reasonable that whatever each of us worships is really one and the same.We gaze up at the same stars, the sky covers us all, the same universeencompasses us. What does it matter what practical systems we adopt inour search for truth? Not by one avenue only can we arrive at so tremendousa secret.41Vanderspoel has suggested that both Themistius and Symmachus derivedthis metaphor from Porphyry.42 To suggest that there are many ways to thedivine does not mean that all are legitimate, nor that all forms of worship areways to the divine: this still remains to be said.In the East a few years later Libanius decided to petition Theodosius I thatfurther destruction of temples should be stopped.43 The commitment of theemperor to Nicene Christianity had changed the religious balance, partlythrough a series of laws on heretics and non-Christians, partly through thecreation of a permissive atmosphere in which Nicene champions, who hadbeen on the defensive for half a century, could settle scores with a conWdencethat any misdemeanours would be overlooked—a parallel to the behaviourof polytheists under Julian. In contrast to Themistius who had advocated toemperors policies which he already knew they were interested in implementing,or at least discussing, Libanius addresses Theodosius as an outsider. Hehas to argue from a position of weakness, that non-Christians are notbreaking any law, that destruction of temples might enrich those participatingin the pillage but will not secure any genuine conversions, and thatthe empire receives beneWts from the range of religious practice, includingpolytheist practices which had protected it for centuries (Or. 30). But oYcialssuch as the praetorian prefect Cynegius, or bishops such as Marcellus ofApamea or Theophilus of Alexandria knew that the results of their actionswere in line with imperial preferences, even if their methods were not.41 Symmachus, Relatio 3.10, trans. Barrow.42 Pierre Courcelle traced this motif back to Porphyry; see his ‘Verissima philosophia’,in J. Fontaine and C. Kannengiesser (eds.), Epektasis: mélanges patristiquesoVerts au Cardinal Jean Daniélou (Paris, 1972), 653–9. Vanderspoel argues likewise:Themistius and the Imperial Court, 24–6.43 For the context, see G. Fowden, ‘Bishops and Temples in the Eastern RomanEmpire, ad 320–435’, JTS 29 (1978), 53–78.

Appendix to Chapter 5 241Libanius’ stance is directly comparable to that of Tertullian and Lactantiusin the pre-Constantinian world: in such circumstances recourse to pleas fordiversity and arguments for toleration are indications of the weakness of thewriter’s position,44 as Ambrose had exploited in his responses to Symmachus’request (Ambrose, Eps. 72–3 (17–18) ). In a period of transition therewill have been a number of Christians like Pegasius, the bishop of Ilium,whose alleged respect for the old gods is recorded by Julian (Ep. 19).However, there are strong biblical injunctions against worship of othergods and numerous stories of the suVerings of those who did. In anestablished Christian society there are unlikely to have been many Christianswho would have accepted arguments for a pluralism of legitimate worship.45Ambrose made quite clear that he regarded the restoration of the Altar ofVictory as entirely illegitimate, tantamount to persecution (72 (17).9), andemphatically rejected any idea of pluralism of legitimate worship by quotingMatthew 6: 24: ‘no man can serve two masters’. He followed up his success inthe Altar of Victory dispute by opposing attempts of Valentinian II and hismother Justina to grant toleration to Arians (Ambrose, Eps. 20–1). ThemistiusdiVers from Libanius and Symmachus, since the arguments he addressesto successive emperors chimed with initiatives they were undertaking orplanning to undertake,46 but the apparent tolerance of Jovian and Valensmust be interpreted in the context of their political vulnerability.47 MostChristian emperors believed that they had an obligation to intervene inreligious matters, a view articulated, for example, in the Henoticon of Zeno(Evagrius 3.14) or the Theopaschite Edict of Justinian (Codex IustinianusI.1.6) and enacted through Theodosius I’s forceful support for NiceneChristianity or the role of Marcian in the Council of Chalcedon. Even44 There was an analogous situation in Athens in the early 4th cent. bc when,although references to oligarchic activities in the late 5th cent. were prohibited undersevere penalty by the amnesty sworn at the restoration of democracy, in practicereliance on the amnesty as part of a defence of character was a very weak argumentand only adopted when individuals had nothing better to exploit.45 McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 166, cites Ambrose, Ep. 72 (17).8, Quod si aliquinomine Christiani tale aliquid decernendum putant (‘so, if anyone calling themselvesChristians believe such a decree should be passed’), as evidence for Christians at theMilanese court speaking in support of Symmachus, but this is unclear. If there weresuch Christians, we do not know upon what grounds they issued their support, and itseems as likely that Ambrose is warning Valentinian of Christians who might placesenatorial loyalties before matters religious; see 72 (17).6: ‘I too urge you to respectthe high character of senators; but beyond doubt, God is to be put Wrst, before allothers.’46 For this general interpretation of Themistius, see Heather and Moncur, Politics,Philosophy, and Empire, 29–42.47 The same is true for Julian’s toleration of diversity.

242 Persecution and MartyrdomValentinian I, who is praised by Ammianus for his moderate approach toreligious diVerences (30.9.5), issued strict legislation against the Manichees(Cod. Theod. 17.5.3).Christian historians on tolerationIn contrast to these examples of secular preference for toleration favourablereferences to heretics and non-Christians are, of course, hard to come by inChristian sources. Two sources which appear to be unusually inclusive areSalvian’s De Gubernatione Dei48 and Socrates, Historia Ecclesiastica.49 In hisaccount of heretical barbarians,50 Salvian argues that they are not wilfuldissenters, but have been led astray by false teachings and, though in error,‘they err with a good heart, not in hatred but in love of God, believing thatthey honour and love God’. Salvian remarks upon the perspectival characterof the category ‘heresy’51 (although it should be noted that he does not drawany pluralist conclusions from this), then sounds a note of caution,concluding that ‘in what manner, for this erroneous and false belief, theyare to be punished on the day of judgement, nobody can know but thejudge’.52 However, Salvian’s barbarian heretics need to be placed in context.In De Gubernatione Dei they have a distinct narrative function, as acounterpoint by which the destitute morals of contemporary Romans canbe exposed.53 In juxtaposing simple-minded and virtuous barbarians, unwittinglyled astray from the truth, with polished Romans, who understandscripture properly but fail to live by it, Salvian does not make a positive casefor barbarian theology, but uses it as a device to undermine Roman moralauthority, as demonstrated by his citation from Luke 12: 47–8: ‘the slave,who does not know his master’s will and does not carry it out will be Xoggedlightly; however, the slave who knows his master’s will and does not carry itout will be Xogged severely’.5448 See the edition of G. Lagarrigue, Salvien de Marseille: Œuvres, ii (SourcesChrétiennes 220; Paris, 1975).49 See the edition of C. C. Hansen, Sokrates Kirchengeschichte (Die griechischenchristlichen schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte 1; Berlin, 1995). On Socrates, seeT. Urbainczyk, Socrates of Constantinople: Historian of Church and State (Ann Arbor,1997).50 See esp. De Gubernatione Dei 5.2.5–11.51 See esp. 5.2.9: ‘among us they are heretics, among themselves they are not’.52 Salvian, De Gubernatione Dei 5.2.10.53 On which, see D. Lambert, ‘The Barbarians in Salvian’s De Gubernatione Dei’, inS. Mitchell and G. Greatrex (eds.), Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity (London,2000), 103–15.54 Salvian, De Gubernatione Dei 5.2.11.

Appendix to Chapter 5 243Ste. Croix regarded Socrates as ‘outstandingly tolerant’, particularly withregard to his doctrinal position, and collected a number of passages from hisHistoria Ecclesiastica to support this view. Socrates certainly criticizes thecontentiousness of bishops a number of times.55 In the preface to book 5 heapologizes to the reader for including an account of wars, partly:so that those reading it do not get weary from a surfeit of only the bishops’arguments and their plots against each other. But more than these reasons,so that it may be realized that when public aVairs were in turmoil, those ofthe church were also in turmoil, as from some kind of sympathy.56He praises Jovian, who dismissed contending Christian factions with thewords ‘I hate contentiousness, but I love and honour those who side withunanimity’, which apparently subdued ‘those who were desirous of altercation’.57Later he lauds the patience of Proclus, bishop of Alexandria, andcontrasts it with that of his teacher, the bishop Atticus, who ‘occasionallypractised severities upon the heretics’ (7.41.4–7). In the next chapter, hepraises Theodosius II for never having approved persecutors (7.42.1). Theheresiarch Nestorius, whose pursuit of heretics while Patriarch of Constantinopleis linked to his rage, vainglory, and mental levity, is presented as awarning against the perils of intolerance which stirs up unnecessary troubles(7.29.4–13; 31).58 Moreover, Socrates appears to have allowed for variety inthe practice of worship, discoursing on regional variations in Christianpractices of worship, not least Easter, arguing at 5.22.1 that ‘neither theancients nor moderns who have aVected to follow the Jews, have had anyrational foundation for contending so obstinately about it’, and adding thatthere is no apostolic legislation on the date of Easter.59 He regrets thetrinitarian disputes which the Council of Nicaea had failed to resolve, partlybecause these were arguments between people who agreed on the importantessentials of a Trinity with the Son of God as a distinct member of thatTrinity (1.23.8). Perhaps as a result he refers to Arian Goths as ‘martyrs’.6055 Cf. 1.23.5–8 on Eustathius of Antioch and Eusebius of Caesarea’s dispute overthe term homoousios; 7.29.4–13.56 Socrates, HE 5. praef. 2–4, trans. Urbainczyk, Socrates of Constantinople, 178.57 Socrates, HE 3.25.4–5.58 His famous pronouncement to Theodosius II, ‘Give me the earth purged ofheretics and I will give you heaven in return; destroy the heretics with me, and I willdestroy the Persians with you’, demonstrates his arrogance.59 Socrates, HE 5.22.7–11.60 Socrates, HE 4.33.7; on this occasion his views were copied by Sozomen, HE6.37.12.

244 Persecution and MartyrdomSocrates is certainly the most tolerant of the Wfth-century church historians,and appears to have viewed much of the episcopal contention of thefourth and early Wfth centuries as based either on vanity and unwillingness toconduct debate within the context of friendship, or on practical matters thatdo not deserve treatment. His near contemporary Sozomen, though oftenfollowing Socrates quite closely, has many fewer clear expressions in favour oftoleration (e.g. 4.26.4) and more characteristic are passages deploring heresies,61while the independent Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who was attacked andultimately deposed as bishop by Theodosius II for his doctrinal links withNestorius, criticized secular interference in church aVairs but did not urgetoleration.62 The basis for Socrates’ openness in unclear. Some have argued,on the basis of a number of positive references to Novatian and his followers,that Socrates was himself a Novatian and so, as a member of a minoritygroup, more inclined towards tolerance,63 but this is diYcult to proveconclusively:64 although the Novatians were among the victims of Nestorius’persecution which Socrates condemned (7.29), they were a rigorist sectamong whom toleration might be a surprising attribute. Moreover, it isimportant to note that Socrates rarely values diversity: his solution todoctrinal issues is that Christians should stop debating rather than try toWnd the institutions to maintain doctrinal openness. Jovian is praised forcriticizing contention, not for making a positive appeal to toleration. The keyto Socrates’ attitude may well lie in his rather novel conception of therelationship between Church and State, according to which ‘sometimes thetroubles of the Church happen Wrst and public ones follow’ and ‘sometimes itis the other way round’.65 This is notably diVerent from the relationshipenvisaged by Lactantius and Eusebius, where the well-being of the Empire is61 Sozomen, HE 6.25.13–14 and 6.26.8; see also 7.12.12. Note, though, that hedoes comment with regard to the heretical Apollinarii that the dispute might havebeen avoided if personal hatreds had not caused complications (6.25.13–14).62 For discussion of Theodoret’s Christological position and his Werce argumentswith his opponents, see Ch. 6 below, pp. 294–303.63 See recently M. WallraV, Der Kirchenhistoriker Sokrates: Untersuchungen zuGeschichtsdarstellung Methode und Person (Forschungen zur Kirchen und Dogmengeschichte68; Göttingen, 1997), 251–79, supported in the review of S. Rebenich,Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 4 (2000), 392–5, at 394.64 See H. Leppin, ‘The Church Historians (I): Socrates, Sozomenus, and Theodoretus’,in G. Marasco (ed.), Greek and Roman Historiography in Late Antiquity:Fourth to Sixth Century A.D. (Leiden, 2003), 219–54, at 221–2; Urbainczyk judiciouslyconcludes that ‘there is not enough evidence for a conclusive judgement’;Socrates of Constantinople, 27.65 On which, see J. Szidat, ‘Friede in Kirche und Staat: zum politischen Ideal desKirchenhistorikers Sokrates’, in B. Bäbler and H.-G. Nesselrath (eds.), Die Welt desSokrates von Konstantinopel (Munich, 2001), 1–14.

Appendix to Chapter 5 245dependent on that of the Church.66 The complementary relationship envisionedby Socrates, where struggles between Christians rebound upon thecondition of the Empire, perhaps predisposes him to seek peace by suppressingepiscopal contention, where a Eusebius would see the well-being of theEmpire dependent precisely on the constant protection of the Church fromheretics. For all this, Socrates’ signiWcance is unclear. Peter Garnsey alsosingled out his tolerance, along with Salvian and Pseudo-Dionysius theAreopagite, but noted that they are ‘peripheral Wgures compared with Ambroseand Augustine who dominate the debate with pagans and dissentingChristians in the crucial late fourth and early Wfth centuries’.67Socrates, however, is interesting as a precursor for three sixth-centuryhistorians who included some positive comments on toleration. In thetradition of ecclesiastical historiography, Evagrius, writing in the 590s,remarks that Christian heresies had arisen not because individuals hadintended to dishonour God but because while striving to worship Himbetter their attempts to improve on deWnitions of the ineVable and inscrutablehad resulted in inappropriate innovations—though even these served toadvance the clariWcation of doctrine (HE 1.11); he subsequently commentson the smallness of the divide between the Christological opponents, whichrevolved around a single letter, ek or en (2.5). These statements have to beread in context. The apparent acceptance of the inevitability of heresy islocated within a rhetorical defence of Christianity against a notional pagancritic, while the minimal diVerence between Chalcedonians and Monophysiteswas an argument in favour of attempts to overcome the schism ratherthan a defence of diversity.68 Evagrius also roundly criticizes Nestorius forhis blasphemy which performed the devil’s work by disrupting orthodoxy(1.2),69 and praises Gregory of Antioch for bringing Monophysites into theorthodox church (6.22), passages which point to the limits to his ownacceptance of diversity. At the same time, however, he had a strong preferencefor conciliation and believed that the dangers of dispute outweighedthe beneWts of unanimity: thus Emperor Anastasius is praised for preservingtranquillity by tolerating divergent views, whereas Justinian, who struggledthroughout his reign to produce a unifying doctrine, is criticized for thedisruption which resulted.7066 The arrogant Nestorius shared this attitude.67 Garnsey, ‘Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquity’, at 17.68 For discussion of context, see M. Whitby, The Ecclesiastical History of EvagriusScholasticus (TTH 33; Liverpool, 2000), 29–30, 80–1 with 7–8.69 Though Evagrius also recorded Nestorius’ defence of his Christological positionas a compromise that was intended to reconcile warring factions (1.7).70 See Whitby, Evagrius, pp. xxxviii–xlvii.

246 Persecution and MartyrdomProcopius, too, roundly condemned Justinian’s persecutions, which hepresented as one of the emperor’s excuses for destroying mankind (SecretHistory 13.7–8), though, as often with Procopius’ criticisms, the opposite isasserted in the panegyrical Buildings (1.1.9).71 In Wars (5.3.6–9) Procopiusadvocates a limit to human inquiry:For I think it insane folly to investigate the nature of God, what that mightbe. For I think that even human matters cannot be comprehended exactly byman, and much less what pertains to the nature of God. Accordingly thesematters have been safely passed over in silence by me (sesiōpēsthō) so as notto discredit what had been honoured. For I would not state anything elseabout God other than he is completely good and has everything in hispower. But let everyone say whatever he thinks he knows about thesematters, both priest and layman.As a classicizing historian who had to grapple with the problem ofreconciling the omniscience of God with the mundane business of causationin the world (e.g. 2.10.4–5), it is not surprising that Procopius opted forcautious comments, though it is important to emphasize that his views arefully compatible with Christian belief.72 Procopius’ reservations about thediYculties of precise investigation are similar to those of Evagrius, but hisinvitation to diverse opinions is more inclusive, a reXection perhaps of thelong-standing tradition in Greek historiography of accepting diversity ofpractice.73 Procopius’ successor Agathias includes a lenient comment onerrors of belief (1.7.3):Therefore all those who miss the truth are more worthy of pity thanreproach, and of obtaining complete forgiveness. For without doubt theydo not intentionally slip and fall, but while striving for the good they fail in71 For the complementary relation between the two works, see Averil Cameron,Procopius (London, 1985), esp. ch. 1.72 For Procopius’ Christianity, see Averil Cameron, ‘The ‘‘Scepticism’’ of Procopius’,Historia, 15 (1966), 466–82; Averil and Alan Cameron, ‘Christianity andTradition in the Historiography of the Late Empire’, CQ 14 (1964), 316–28, bothrepr. in Averil Cameron, Continuity and Change in 6th Century Byzantium (London,1981); ead., Procopius, ch. 7. The attempt by A. Kaldellis (Procopius of Caesarea:Tyranny, History and Philosophy at the End of Antiquity (Philadelphia, 2004), ch. 5) toprove the contrary is not convincing: it depends on a sequence of interlockinghypotheses, including the assumption that the historian Agathias was also a non-Christian (see n. 74).73 The classic antecedent is Herodotus’ contrast of the burial customs of Greeksand the Indian Callatiae, who ate their dead (3.38).

Appendix to Chapter 5 247judgment and thereafter hold Wrm to what they think, whatever indeed thatmight happen to be.The statement is made in the context of Agathias’ digression on the religiouspractices of the Alamanni, whose worship of natural features has just beennoted, albeit with the qualiWcation that contact with the Franks (who wereCatholic Christians) was eVecting a change.74 As with Procopius thestrong historiographical tradition of relativity may have inXuencedAgathias’ presentation here.75Pleas against coercion and persecutionAccording to Libanius, the emperor Julian’s policy towards Christiansclosely resembles one of toleration, in that he objected strongly to theirbeliefs, but did not feel that he could coerce them to change. In his funeraloration for Julian, Libanius praises Julian’s desire to win Christians over bypersuasion and not force, which he says was motivated by the fact thatpersecutions had only strengthened the Christian cause.76 A number offactors might account for this. One is imperial clemency, which Julianproclaims in two of the letters selected by Ste. Croix.77 Ammianus (esp.22.5.3–4) suggests pragmatic motives, namely that in allowing each person‘fearlessly and without opposition to observe his own religio (religio sua)’ hewould intensify the Christian tendency to internecine strife and therebyreduce the prospect of facing a united populace.78 The dispute between74 Averil Cameron established Agathias’ Christianity; Cameron, Agathias (Oxford,1970). The recent attempt by A. Kaldellis, ‘The Historical and Religious Views ofAgathias: A Reinterpretation’, Byzantion, 69 (1999), 206–53, to question his Christianitydoes not withstand scrutiny: Kaldellis does not note the similarity of Agathias’views in 1.7.3 to those of Evagrius, and he incorrectly suggests that his tolerancerelates to animal sacriWce, whereas his comments on sacriWce occupy 1.7.4–5 and areintroduced as a strong exception to the tolerance of the previous section.75 Ammianus’ preference for toleration (e.g. 30.9.5 on Valentinian) has alreadybeen noted. The majority view of Ammianus as a traditional non-Christian commentatoron religious developments has been challenged by T. D. Barnes, AmmianusMarcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality (Ithaca, 1998), ch. 8, whospeculates that Ammianus was an apostate.76 Libanius, Or. 18.121–3.77 See Ep. 40, on disputes between the churches at Edessa and Ep. 41, where Juliancontrasts his position with the persecution of Constantius (436A) and orders thepeople of Bostra not to follow the clerics in fomenting public disorder (though hesuggested that they might take action against their bishop).78 Julian may also have calculated that he had little chance of rapidly overturningsupport for Christianity across the Eastern Empire.

248 Persecution and MartyrdomValentinians and the Arian Church (hē Arianikē ekklēsia) at Edessa wasprobably a consequence of the imperial permission for exiles to return totheir cities; Julian punished those involved by conWscation of church property,ostensibly to assist the Church to adhere more closely to its ideals ofpoverty (Ep. 40), but, with soldiers and the imperial private purse as thebeneWciaries, Julian’s concern for ecclesiastical purity was as pragmatic as hisadvocacy of toleration. This should be read alongside one of Ste. Croix’sfavourite passages from Ammianus that ‘no wild beasts are such enemies tomankind as are most Christians in their deadly hatred of each other’(22.5.4), which he coupled with Ammianus’ account of the struggle betweenDamasus and Ursinus for the bishopric of Rome in 366 (27.3.12–13).79Julian’s letters corroborate Libanius’ account to some degree. Ep. 36, thefamous rescript on Christian teachers, which forbade Christians from teachinggrammar and rhetoric but not from attending schools as pupils, arguesagainst coercing Christian boys to renounce their Christianity, and similararguments against coercion can be found in letters 37 to Atarbius, thegovernor of Macedonia,80 and 41, where Julian aYrms the necessity ofpersuading through reason (logos) and not violence. Certainly Julian wasno persecutor of Christians, and later Christian writers had to go to somelengths to demonstrate his cruelty, suggesting even that his refusal topersecute was motivated by a desire to deny Christians the crown of martyrdom.Nonetheless, he did discriminate. Ep. 37, while stating that Christiansor ‘Galileans’ should not be executed or abused unjustly, orders that‘god-fearers’ (theosebeis) be given preferential treatment, while Ep. 36wasclearly regarded as unjust and discriminatory by contemporary and laterChristians,81 and ‘harsh’ (inclemens) by Ammianus (25.4.20).It would, then, seem judicious to say that Julian opposed coercion ratherthan favoured toleration, and from an imperial perspective a reluctance toengage in enforcement or a certain degree of passive toleration might, inmany circumstances, have been the most sensible approach to controllingtheir territory at times of imperial weakness.82 Throughout the Wfth centurywestern emperors almost always had more pressing matters to attend to thanreligious or doctrinal purity. In 535 the new Ostrogothic king Theodahad,an Arian, protested to Emperor Justinian with regard to the Catholic convertRanilda that:79 See, for example, Class Struggle, 451; for bibliography on this struggle, seeabove, Ch. 5, n. 32.80 See PLRE i. 120, s.v. Atarbius.81 e.g. Ambrose, Ep. 72 (17).4.82 Even the powerful Constantine came to realize that it was pointless to attemptto force the Donatists into communion with Catholics.

Appendix to Chapter 5 249I do not presume to exercise judgement in those cases where I have nospecial mandate. For, since the Deity allows various religions to exist, I donot dare to impose one alone. For I remember reading that we shouldsacriWce to the Lord of our own will, not at the command of anyone whocompels us. He who does otherwise clearly opposes the heavenly decree.83At the time Theodahad was desperate to avoid oVering Justinian groundsfor further interference in the West.84 Theodahad’s precursor, Theoderic theAmal, had maintained good relations with the Catholic hierarchy in Romethroughout most of his reign, since this contributed to harmony betweenGoths and Romans, though this changed when the danger of a doctrinalrapprochement between Rome and Constantinople and signs of growingeastern interest in western aVairs transformed religious aYliation into apotential matter of political loyalty.85 The beneWts of stability also underlieexamples of toleration extended to Jews, unsuccessfully by Theodosius I inthe famous case of the Callinicum synagogue,86 and justiWed in a letter fromTheoderic, datable to the period 507–12, concerning a synagogue in Genoa:the Jewish community could add a roof, but nothing more in the way ofexpansion or ornament, since Theoderic, while condemning ‘the prayers oferring men’ admits, ‘I cannot command your faith because no one is forcedto believe against his will’ (Cassiodorus, Variae 2.27).87By the late sixth century the position of the eastern empire was coming toresemble that of the west a century earlier. Tiberius Constantine (578–82)had a reputation for moderation and he restrained the persecuting zeal ofthe Constantinopolitan patriarchs John Scholasticus and Eutychius, on thegrounds that he had enough trouble with external wars without arousing aninternal one as well (John of Ephesus, HE 1.37; 3.12); part of Tiberius’justiWcation was that Monophysites, whose persecution he was being asked83 Cassiodorus, Variae 10.26, trans. by S. J. B. Barnish, Cassiodorus: Variae (TTH12; Liverpool, 1992), 140–1; the reference is to Psa. 53: 8 (54: 6).84 Thus, the risks taken by the regime of Valentinian II in opposing the CatholicChurch are pointed out in a letter from the Gallic emperor Magnus Maximus in 386(Collectio Avellana 39); the threat was that Maximus would invade to support theCatholics.85 Discussion in J. Moorhead, Theoderic in Italy (Oxford, 1992), 235–45. For abrief summary of Theodahad’s reign, see M. Humphries, ‘Italy, A.D. 425–605’, inA. Cameron, B. Ward-Perkins, and M. Whitby (eds.), CAH xiv: Late Antiquity:Empire and Successors, A.D. 425–600 (Cambridge, 2000), 525–51, at 533–4.86 Discussion in McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, 298–300.87 In both this letter and that of Theodahad discussed above the precise framing ofthe argument must be attributed to Cassiodorus, though in each case he wasproviding appropriate justiWcation for royal policy and it is likely that his argumentswould have become those of the ruler, if the latter had ever been challenged.

250 Persecution and Martyrdomto sanction, were neither pagans nor heretics. The motives of would-bepersecutors might also be suspect, with greater attention being paid toopportunities for enrichment from conWscations than securing repentancethrough education (John 5.15; 21). Imperial leniency could be pushed toofar, however, and violent reaction provoked. Tiberius’ willingness to tolerateprovision of church services for the Arian families of non-Roman soldiersengaged in the current Persian War prompted accusations of heresy againstthe emperor himself, and his mildness was then a factor in the violent antipaganriots which rocked the capital when the populace suspected that thoseaccused of sacriWce might not be properly punished (John 3.30–4).88 For theremainder of his reign Tiberius had to permit attacks on non-Christians,and his successor Maurice was likewise made to approve the public executionof a so-called magician when the Patriarch John Nesteutes overrode hispreference for clemency (Theophylact 1.11.15–20).Later examples of this attitude can be found in Christian sources, and ofcourse Christians could Wnd a scriptural basis for forbearance. Persecutionor coercion did not have to be opposed for its inability to dissuade pagans orheretics. Other, more practical reasons could be cited. Thus, with regard tothe trial at Trier of Priscillian by Magnus Maximus, Martin of Tours, whoregarded the Spanish ascetic as a heretic, opposed the execution of Priscillianand the aftermath in which Priscillianists in Spain were to be hunted down.Expulsion from the Church was suYcient punishment for heretics, while awitch-hunt would aVect many true Christians as well: overall the Churchshould be permitted to resolve its own troubles.89 Education was a possiblealternative to coercion. In the sixth century, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagiteadmonished Demophilus for turning away an unholy and sinful manwho had come to the monastery in which he lived to ‘heal his evil ways’, andargued against following the violent examples of Phineas and Elijah; insteadhe advocated the example of Christ, according to which ‘it is necessary toteach, not take vengeance on the ignorant, just as we do not punish but leadthe blind’.90 This approach could be adopted with regard to the Jews. In 591–2 Pope Gregory instructed Peter of Terracina and two other neighbouring88 See I. Rochow, ‘Die Heidenprozesse unter Kaisern Tiberios II Konstantinos undMaurikios’, in Studien zum 7. Jahrhundert in Byzanz. Probleme der Herausbildung desFeudalismus (Berliner Byzantinische Arbeiten 47: Berlin, 1976), 120–30.89 Sulpicius Severus, Chron. 2.50 in the new edition of G. de Senneville-Grave(Sources Chrétiennes 441; Paris, 1999); Dial. 3.11–13 (esp. 11); for the generalbackground, see H. Chadwick, Priscillian of Avila (Oxford, 1976).90 Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite, Ep. 8,MPL 3.1096C–7B, esp. 1096C, Eng. trans.in R. F. Hathaway, Hierarchy and the DeWnition of Order in the Letters of Pseudo-Dionysius (The Hague, 1969), 148–9.

Appendix to Chapter 5 251bishops to stop pressurizing the local Jewish community by closing theirplaces of worship, since kindness and admonition rather than force wouldwin them over (Gregory, Register 1.34; 2.6), while the anti-Jewish actions,which included forced baptism, by King Sisebut in Spain were criticized byIsidore of Seville.91 In the early ninth century the argument of Ps.-Dionysiuswas exploited by Theodore the Studite in a letter to Theophilus of Ephesus(2.152; PG 99, cols. 1481–5). Theodore was reacting against the citation of aletter which Symeon Stylites the Younger was said to have written to Justin II(565–78) to urge the emperor to kill rebellious Samaritans: this letter hadbeen read out at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. According toTheodore the emperor could use force against the Samaritans if they werein revolt against imperial government, but not on religious grounds alone,citing Ps.-Dionysius against the application of the precedents of Phineas andElijah and urging that Iconoclasts must be taught rather than killed.9291 Isidore of Seville, Hist. Goth. 60(MGH Auct. Ant. 11.2.291); Chronica 416.92 Brief discussion in Chadwick, Priscillian, 151–2.

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Church Councils

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IntroductionMichael WhitbySte. Croix started working on the Council of Chalcedon in the1970s. It is clear from scattered remarks in Class Struggle that hehad been intrigued by the detail as well as the extent of the materialavailable for its analysis, and that the framework for a full treatmentwas already being mapped out mentally. Thus he comments on thelack of familiarity with the Acta among historians, with even ecclesiasticalhistorians included ‘since a large part of the contents is (orought to be) rather painful reading for those who wish to believe thatthe deliberations and decisions of orthodox bishops may be expectedto reveal the workings of the Holy Spirit’ (145–6). Subsequently,when discussing emperors’ powers and their relations with theChurch, the issue of the control of Ecumenical Councils is raisedand reference is made to how the degree of imperial interference isrevealed with ‘startling clarity in the proceedings of the Council ofChalcedon’ whose deliberations were dominated by the highpoweredlay commission (403–4). These two passages introduce threekey themes from Ste. Croix’s paper: the richness of the evidence,which deserves to be better known;1 the discreditable behaviour ofmany of the episcopal attendees; and the emperor’s ability to controlproceedings through his commissioners (though Ste. Croix had notyet singled out the signiWcance of the chief commissioner, Anatolius).Once Class Struggle had been dispatched to the publishers, Ste.Croix turned to working up these comments. An early airing for hisviews, perhaps even the very Wrst, was at a meeting in London heldunder the aegis of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studieson 3 June 1982. Croix revelled in the ambiguity of his initial title,‘The Council of Chalcedon, 451’, since he suspected that the audience1 This point is now developed much more fully in the forthcoming publication ofFergus Millar’s Sather Classical Lectures, A Greek Roman Empire: Power, Belief andReason under Theodosius II, 408–50 (2006).

256 Church Councilsmight contain people who had turned up in the expectation oflearning about some obscure aspect of the Peace of Callias or theworking of the Athenian Empire in the mid-Wfth century bc—topicson which, thanks to Origins of the Peloponnesian War, Ste. Croix’sexpertise was well known, especially to an audience of Hellenists. Forthe sake of clarity he acceded to a request from the organizers to addthe essential ad to the date. Thereafter the paper was presented atvarious gatherings, including the East Christian seminar run bySebastian Brock and Kallistos Ware in Canterbury Road, Oxford, in1982 or 1983, where I heard it for the Wrst time, the seminar of theBirmingham Centre for Byzantine Studies and in Manchester, also in1982/3. Preparations for these seminars generated a dense paperwhich, even with some excisions, easily exceeded the normal60-minute slot, as well as pages of references. In the mid-1980s thepaper was set aside as being reasonably Wnished, although, as with allSte. Croix’s projects, new ideas, additional bibliography, and anyother material relevant to the particular topic were gathered in alever-arch Wle. When in 1986 he reviewed the possible contents ofa volume of Christian essays, Chalcedon was the Wrst item in the list,with a comment only about the need to identify the latest version ofthe seminar text. The state of the text at this stage can be gauged fromthe recent Greek translation of the paper as presented in Athens in1987, under half the length of the current version (and with only 34footnotes!).2Matters remained thus for the next decade, with Chalcedon scheduledfor inclusion in the Radical Conclusions volume of his grandertwo-volume Christian project. In 1998/9 Ste. Croix returned to workon the text, by which time he had reverted to a slimmed-down singlevolumeversion of his Christian researches. There was some tinkeringto the original seminar script, with the introductory section beingrewritten several times, though without deWnite improvement. Additionalwork on some of the later sections was intended, since the leverarchWlecontainednotesandhintsforissueswhichoughttobepursued.For example in the seminar version Ste. Croix had dismissedthe complexities of the imperial commissioners’ connections with2 ˇ ×ÑÉÓÔÉ`˝ÉÓÌˇÓ ˚`É ˙ ÑÙÌ˙: ˜ÉÙˆÌˇÉ, `ÉѯӯÉÓ ˚`É˙Ł˙, ed. D. I. Kyrtatas, trans. I. Kralle (Athens, 2005), 319–65.

Introduction 257the words, ‘I prefer to have my prosopography done by someoneelse’; in reality, however, he had started to compile the necessarymaterial, or at least left notes to remind himself to do this. The post-Chalcedon reputation of Dioscorus was another topic on which hecertainly wanted to add material. I had happened to send him thetext of a chapter on ecclesiastical historiography after Chalcedon,which I had produced for a Brill volume on Late Antique historiography.3This contained a section on the Plērophories (Proofs) of JohnRufus, a Monophysite collection of miraculous proofs of the error ofChalcedon and the heroic behaviour of its two main opponents,Dioscorus and Timothy Aelurus; Ste. Croix had marked this upwith evident enthusiasm, and identiWed that it would supplementthe brief comments he had already made about the Life of Dioscorus.He was also eager for information about the presentation of Chalcedonin Evagrius, which I was currently engaged in translating andannotating.4 These more substantial revisions, however, were neverundertaken.In preparing Ste. Croix’s seminar paper for publication, I havechosen to keep a certain amount of the original delivery style. Thisappears to have been his intention from the various rewritings ofChalcedon on which he embarked in 1999,5 and there is merit inpreserving somewhere in this volume the combative style of Ste.Croix in full Xow about his ‘beastly’ Christians. I have followed upas many of his suggestions or directions for further work as possible;on occasion, for example on subscriptions, there was not much tosuggest exactly what might have been said, but more often thegeneral direction has been clear—what one might term in Thucydideanlanguage the xumpasa gnōmē of the argument.6 I have made3 As happens with such collaborative enterprises the volume was very slow toappear. I had sent a copy of the Wnal text to Ste. Croix in 1998, the date of submissionto the editor, but publication was delayed for Wve years: ‘The Church Historians andChalcedon’, in G. Marasco (ed.), Greek and Latin Historiography in Late Antiquity(Leiden, 2003), 447–93.4 The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus, an English translation withintroduction and notes (TTH; Liverpool, 2000).5 Ste. Croix was revising this piece in the late autumn of 1999, so that this wasprobably the last paper on which he was working before his death.6 For Ste. Croix’s important discussion of this term, see his Origins of thePeloponnesian War (London, 1972), 7–16.

258 Church Councilsfairly substantial additions, amounting perhaps to between a thirdand a half of the whole, but I do not believe that I have introducedanything with which Ste. Croix would have disagreed;7 the centralpoints of the argument remain as they were articulated in Ste. Croix’sseminar presentations. At the very few points where I do not accept,or where I want to qualify, Ste. Croix’s discussions, I have usedsquare-bracketed notes to indicate as much. Apart from these speciWcpassages, all uses of the Wrst-person singular refer to Ste. Croix.7 D. Harvey and R. Parker, in the Editors’ Introduction to Ste. Croix’s AthenianDemocratic Origins and Other Essays (Oxford, 2004), 3, sensibly refer to the temerityof attempting to predict Ste. Croix’s reaction to new information or arguments. Itmay be rash to have tried to round oV and Wll out what Ste. Croix had left, but it wascertainly his intention to do more work on the paper.

6The Council of Chalcedonwith additions by Michael WhitbyThe Council of Chalcedon, in October 451, is one of the events inancient history about which we know most: the wealth of contemporarysources is altogether outstanding, in both quantity and quality.1Indeed I have sometimes tried to tease colleagues in ‘AncientHistory’ or ‘Classics’ by insisting, half seriously, that we actuallyknow more about the council than about any other event in ancienthistory. Since it will not be as familiar to those who work in the1 The prime source is the very full Acta in Greek, with a Latin version which ismainly a translation though with some diVerences and additions, edited in six foliovolumes by E. Schwartz, Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, ii.i–vi (Berlin and Leipzig,1932–8). The Greek Acta are in ii.i, the Latin in ii.iii; ii.iv contains the relevantletters of Pope Leo (also available in PL 54) as well as other essential documents.There are some indices in ii.vi, which can be supplemented by ACO iv.iii (1974–84).One potential point of confusion is that in the Greek Acta the second session ofthe council, that of 10 Oct., is presented as the third meeting; the Latin retains thecorrect order.There are French translations of substantial sections in A. J. Festugière, Éphèse etChalcédoine: Actes des Conciles (Paris, 1982) and Actes du Concile de Chalcédoine,Sessions III–VI (Geneva, 1983); the Wrst part of the Wrst volume (pp. 27–650)translates large parts of the Acta of First Ephesus, after which there are some imperialletters relating to the convocation of the council and the Acta of the Wrst and thirdsessions, while the second volume covers the second, fourth, Wfth, and sixth sessions(since Festugière’s title accepts the numbering of the Greek Acta). An Englishtranslation of the Greek Acta, with the supplementary Latin material and some ofthe key correspondence immediately before and after the council, is being preparedby Richard Price. [This is now published: R. Price and M. Gaddis, TTH 45; Liverpool,2005. I have beneWted from the chance to read parts of this translation in draft, andmany of the translations of the Acta are taken from, or adapted from this draft; I amgreatly indebted to Richard Price for this opportunity to consult and use hisunpublished material, and Richard has also made many useful comments on andcorrections to this chapter.]

260 Church Councilscentral areas of ancient history, I will begin by giving a brief outline ofthe salient facts one needs to know as background.BackgroundWith Christianity there arose for the Wrst time two entirely newphenomena, which could never exist at all in paganism. One washeresy, departure from orthodox belief; the other was schism, separationfrom the single universal Church—which, as I have emphasizedin my book on the class struggle, is a strictly theological concept andhas never had any real existence as a historical one, for in reality thoseclaiming to be Christians have never at any time been a single unitedbody: both schism and heresy existed from Apostolic times.2Beginning with Constantine there were repeated attempts by theauthorities of the Christian Empire to create unanimity, harmony(homonoia, concordia); dissidents were persecuted on occasion fromthe Wrst, and there were numerous outbreaks of popular fanaticism,sometimes resulting in massacres, and evoking from Ammianus thestatement that ‘wild beasts are not more hostile to mankind than aremost Christians (plerique Christianorum) in their deadly hatred ofone another’ (22.5.4). Ammianus, of course, was thinking in terms ofsectarian rather than personal hatred.The principal heresy of the fourth century, Arianism,3 had beenlargely stamped out by the early Wfth century, except among German‘barbarians’, although later it revived here and there for a time. Butnow entirely new Christological controversies broke out in the East,beginning with Nestorius, archbishop of Constantinople from 428 to431.4 Without making any attempt to describe his doctrines, I shall2 The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the ArabConquests (1981; corr. imprint, London, 1983), 445 V. (esp. 451–2), with the notes,643–4, esp. 644 n. 26. See further Introduction, pp. 31–2 above, and Ch. 5, p. 202.[Against dating the concepts of heresy and schism to Apostolic times, see Ch. 5 n. 34.]3 See the contributions to M. Barnes and D. H. Williams (eds.), Arianism afterArius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth-Century Trinitarian ConXicts (Edinburgh,1993).4 For narrative of developments, see W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity(London, 1984), 752–70; H. Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society from Galilee toGregory the Great (Oxford, 2001), 515–68; T. E. Gregory, Vox Populi: Popular Opinionand Violence in the Religious Controversies of the Fifth Century A.D. (Columbus, Oh.,

The Council of Chalcedon 261only say that, as generally remembered by the great majority of thefaithful, Nestorius was the heresiarch who, although willing to callthe Virgin Mary Christotokos, ‘Mother of Christ’, refused to describeher as Theotokos, ‘Mother of God’, a distinction then possessing greatsigniWcance.5 As early as the late fourth century the cult of the VirginMary had come to evoke curiously strong passions, in the West aswell as the East, and the theory of her perpetual virginity, not merelypost partum, but even miraculously in partu, was already widely held.Nestorius was condemned at the First Council of Ephesus in 431,where Cyril of Alexandria managed to arrange matters in his favour,and then exiled as a result of intrigues at the court of Theodosius II.Cyril, though initially deposed by Theodosius after being condemnedby Nestorius’ supporters at Ephesus and strongly challenged over theorthodoxy of his anti-Nestorian Twelve Anathemas, emergedtriumphant, thanks to the support of the Augusta Pulcheria and PopeCelestine as well as enormous bribes lavished on imperial courtiers.A fascinating list of Cyril’s gifts is preserved in the Acta of FirstEphesus in the form of a letter from an Alexandrian archdeaconwho complains that Cyril stripped his enormously wealthy churchof everything (ecclesia Alexandrina nudata) and incurred a debt of1,500 pounds of gold into the bargain: the bribes included one gift of200 pounds of gold to a eunuch Grand Chamberlain, and somedelightful presents such as carpets, pictures, ivory chairs and otherfurniture, not to mention a few ostriches.6 Nestorianism soon lostany importance it had had in the Roman Empire when John of1979); P. Allen, ‘The DeWnition and Enforcement of Orthodoxy’, in A. Cameron,B. Ward-Perkins, and M. Whitby (eds.), CAH xiv: Late Antiquity: Empire andSuccessors 425–600 (Cambridge, 2000), 811–34.5 Nestorius, The Bazaar of Heracleides, trans. G. R. Driver and L. Hodgson(Oxford, 1925), 97–100; Barhadbeshabba, Ecclesiastical History, ed. and Frenchtrans. F. Nau, PO 9 (1913), 489–631, and 23 (1932), 177–343, ch. 21 (PO 9, 531–3);Evagrius 1.2. J. A. McGuckin, St Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy, itsHistory, Theology and Texts (Vig. Chr. Suppl. 23; Leiden, 1994), ch. 2. For the interestof the Theodosian dynasty in Marian devotion, see K. Holum, Theodosian Empresses:Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1982), 147–74.6 ACO i.iv, pp. 222–5; see Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, 177 and 574 n. 13 (with fullreferences); Festugière, Éphèse, does not translate this document. The precise occasionof these bribes within this complex sequence of events is unknown, but they mayhave been deployed after Cyril’s initial rehabilitation while he was struggling todefend his Twelve Anathemas.

262 Church CouncilsAntioch and the bishops under his jurisdiction were persuaded toaccept reconciliation with Cyril of Alexandria in winter 432.7The great question now was whether Jesus Christ should be conceivedas having two diVerent Natures, divine and human, united butfully retaining their separate identities, or whether, after the Incarnation,there was only one Nature, a divine one into which Christ’shuman nature was in some way subsumed.8 For convenience I willrefer to the latter as Monophysites, as they are usually now known,9although this term seems not to have been accepted by them or evenregularly applied to them for several generations. Those who held thedoctrine of the Two Natures (and who triumphed at Chalcedon) I willrefer to as Orthodox, as they are regarded by the great majority ofChristians today, including the Orthodox churches, Roman Catholics,and Protestants, but not by the Coptic and Ethiopic churches,the Armenian church, and the Syrian Jacobites, who are all what weshould call Monophysites, or at least non-Chalcedonians in varyingdegrees.The next episode to note was in 448 when Eutyches, a Constantinopolitanarchimandrite, was condemned by a local synod chaired bythe Patriarch Flavian for holding Monophysite ideas in what was laterto be regarded as an extreme form.10 Attempts were made to reversethis decision until, in the next year, 449, Theodosius II ordered thecase to be considered at a Second Council of Ephesus. Here Eutycheswas rehabilitated through the inXuence and pressure of Dioscorus ofAlexandria, a fervent Monophysite who had succeeded Cyril aspatriarch in 444, and was appointed to chair the council by imperialcommand. This council is usually referred to as the Latrocinium, the7 ACO i.i.4, nos. 123, 127, 130; Evagrius 1.6. McGuckin, Cyril, 110–16.8 Festugière, Actes du Concile, 7–16, contains a valuable introduction by HenryChadwick which presents the fundamental Christological problems from an essentiallyorthodox perspective. See too the ‘Theological Introduction’ to Richard Price’stranslation of the Acta of Chalcedon.9 S. Brock, ‘The Christology of the Church of the East’, in Tradition and Heritage ofthe Christian East: Proceedings of the International Conference (Moscow, 1996), 163–4,proposes Miaphysite or Henophysite as more accurate alternatives; although theformer has now been adopted by some, Monophysite remains the recognized term.10 Eutyches’ One Nature views had just been attacked by Theodoret of Cyrrhus inhis Eranistēs, for which see G. H. Ettlinger, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Eranistes (Oxford,1975). This provoked retaliation against Theodoret and other clerics believed to haveNestorian inclinations, but it may also have prompted others to attack Eutyches.

The Council of Chalcedon 263‘Brigandage’, ‘Banditry’, or ‘Robber Council’, the name given to it in aletter of Pope Leo on the grounds that it was characterized byextreme violence which Dioscorus promoted;11 it is not recognizedin the oYcial list of ecumenical councils, which began with Nicaea in325 and in which First Ephesus and Chalcedon are reckoned as thethird and fourth. The proceedings of Second Ephesus are notpreserved intact, though an important Syriac version survives; alsosubstantial sections relating to the condemnation of Flavian and thefailure to admit for discussion what was to become known as theTome of Leo were read out at the Wrst session of Chalcedon, and soare preserved in its Acta.12At Second Ephesus the Wrst casualties were Flavian of Constantinopleand Eusebius of Dorylaeum, who were condemned for theirtreatment of Eutyches, though technically the oVence was propoundingadditions to the Creed of Nicaea.13 At subsequent sessions anumber of eastern bishops were deposed, Ibas of Edessa who wasregarded as a follower of Nestorius’ teacher, Theodore of Mopsuestia,Ibas’ nephew, Daniel of Carrhae, and Irenaeus of Tyre, a personalfriend of Nestorius who had accompanied him to First Ephesus; Ibas’cousin, Sophronius of Tella, was also investigated, but judgement wasreserved and he was still in post for the Council of Chalcedon. Themost prominent victims were Theodoret bishop of Cyrrhus, theleading intellectual advocate of views similar to those of Nestorius,and Domnus of Antioch, who had hoped to escape by acquiescingin the deposition of his subordinates but then found himself withoutsupporters himself. There was a variety of accusations, butthe common threads were connections, direct or indirect, withNestorius, and opposition to Alexandrian theology: for Dioscorusand his supporters these clergy were irredeemably heretical.14 The11 Leo, Ep. 95, sent to Pulcheria on 20 July 451 (ACO ii.iv, no. 51, p. 51 line 4).12 For the Syriac version there is a German trans. by J. Flemming, ‘Akten derephesinischen Synode vom Jahre 449, syrisch mit Georg HoVmanns deutscher Übersetzungund seinem Anmerkungen herausgegeben’, Abhandlungen der königlichenGesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, phil.-hist. Kl. 15.1 (Berlin, 1917), 1–159;also an Eng. trans. by S. G. F. Perry, The Second Synod of Ephesus (Dartford, 1881).13 On Flavian see H. Chadwick, ‘The Exile and Death of Flavian of Constantinople:A Prologue to the Council of Chalcedon’, JTS 6 (1955), 17–34, an illuminatingarticle even if its conclusion on the probable date of Flavian’s death is not accepted.14 See Chadwick, Church, 563–6.

264 Church Councilsunfortunate Theodoret had been both a personal friend of Nestoriusand probably the most potent doctrinal opponent for Cyril ofAlexandria, whose anti-Nestorian Twelve Anathemas he embarrassedby probing their own orthodoxy.15Then, in the summer of 450, Emperor Theodosius II died afterfalling from his horse, to be succeeded by Marcian, who in religiousmatters was clearly inXuenced by the wishes of his formidable wife,Pulcheria, the elder sister of Theodosius; she had held the rank ofAugusta since 414 and now, at the age of 51, married Marcian oncondition that her virginity be preserved.16 Although Pulcheria hadbeen persuaded to support Cyril against Nestorius in the 430s—herstaV were among the recipients of Cyril’s bribes—and so might havebeen expected to favour his successor at Alexandria, Dioscorus, overthose alleged to be tainted with Nestorian views,17 during the latteryears of Theodosius’ reign she had lost inXuence and so may havebeen inclined to oppose her brother’s current doctrinal favourite,Eutyches. She was now a passionate champion of Orthodoxy, andwas already corresponding with Pope Leo about her hostility toSecond Ephesus (Leo, Ep. 60), so that the religious policy of theimperial house changed drastically, to total support for Orthodoxy.The result was the Council of Chalcedon, in October 451, where thecomplete victory of Orthodoxy was secured by a clear expression ofthe imperial will, enforced by a presiding commission of some of thehighest dignitaries in the empire. The Wrst Wve sessions dealt with twofundamental issues, the fates of Dioscorus (Wrst and third sessions)and of some of his supporters at Second Ephesus (fourth session),and the need for a new deWnition of faith (second and Wfth sessions),with the imperial couple attending the sixth session to ratify15 At the Wrst session of Chalcedon the Egyptian bishops chanted ‘Theodoretaccused Cyril. We exclude Cyril if we admit Theodoret. The canons have expelledhim. He is rejected by God.’ ACO ii.i.70 § 43, and cf. also §§ 29, 39 for otherexpressions of hostility.16 For references see PLRE ii. 929–30, s.v. Aelia Pulcheria; R. W. Burgess, ‘TheAccession of Marcian in the Light of Chalcedonian Apologetic and MonophysitePolemic’, BZ 86–7 (1993–4), 47–68.17 At the Wrst session of Chalcedon the Egyptian bishops clearly hoped for thiswhen they chanted ‘The Augusta expelled Nestorius. Many years to the orthodoxAugusta. The Council does not admit Theodoret’ (ACO ii.i.69, § 33, and cf. also §§31, 39).

The Council of Chalcedon 265decisions so far. Thereafter a further ten sessions dealt with morespeciWc issues.Sources and DiscussionsThe sources for the Council of Chalcedon are, as I have said, extraordinarilyrich, and on this occasion, for once, there is no need forQuellenforschung which is all too often an attempt to get behind realworks which do survive and can be read, to hypothetical ones whichdo not and cannot. In the Wrst place we possess very full minutes ofthe proceedings of the council, the Acta, based on stenographicrecords, which run to over 400 folio pages of Greek text in EduardSchwartz’s remarkable scholarly edition, not to mention a Latinversion (also printed in ACO) which, although it was edited in itspresent form about a century after the event, is a very faithfultranslation and indeed contains much good additional material;this runs to well over 500 folio pages. There are also four smallervolumes in Schwartz’s great work which contain a mass of contemporarymaterial, such as letters and petitions, relating to the aftermathand reception of the council.18 The forthcoming annotatedEnglish translation of the full Greek Acta will make this materialmuch more accessible, since Schwartz’s corpus is not exactly easy touse. At present the best help is provided by digests or abbreviatedversions, of which the most useful by far is Hefele–Leclercq’s Histoiredes Conciles.19 These do, however, lose much of the real richness ofthe Acta, especially the torrents of invective, so that, for example, onedoes not expect to Wnd in them remarks like that made in the tenthsession by the metropolitan bishop of Cyzicus, Diogenes: Diogenes,18 There is work to be done on identifying the diVerent agendas and audiences ofthe various post-Chalcedon collections of documents. For an illuminating example ofwhat can be done with a collection related to First Ephesus, see F. Millar, ‘RepentantHeretics in Fifth-Century Lydia: Identity and Literacy’, Scripta Classica Israelica, 23(2004), 111–30.19 C. J. Hefele and H. Leclercq, Histoire des Conciles: d’après les documents originauxii.i–ii (Paris, 1908), esp. ii. 649–834; this summary is based on the text of theActa in J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio vi–vii(Florence, 1761–2). There is an English translation from an earlier German versionby Hefele, published as A History of the Councils of the Church, iii (Edinburgh, 1883),esp. 285–428.

266 Church Councilsone of the leading turncoats at the council, commented that theEphesians if left to themselves elect as their bishops salgamarioi, adirect Greek borrowing from the Latin word for something like‘pickle-sellers’ (ACO ii.i.411, § 56).20The massive bulk of this collection of evidence does not, however,mean that we have a complete record of proceedings, since onoccasions it is apparent that some exchanges have been omitted orreordered: thus in the second session, the Acta represent the full textof Leo’s Tome as being read out before certain speciWc objections arerecorded and rejected (ACO ii.i.277–8, §§ 22–6), although it is clearthat the objections were registered at speciWc points during theformal reading of the Tome; the compilers of the Acta did not wantto enshrine disrespect for the Tome by recording repeated interruptions,which may well have been more vehement and protracted thanthe calm account of their dismissal suggests, an example of theimportant role which the controllers of a council played in deWningits memory.21It has been argued, to my mind with some exaggeration, by leadingscholars that the procedure for church councils was modelled closelyon that of the Roman Senate; one signiWcant diVerence is thatcouncils worked by consensus, with episcopal unanimity reXectingand demonstrating the will of God, whereas in senate meetings it waspossible to introduce counter-proposals or at least disagree with the20 This Wrst appears in Liddell and Scott only in the 1968 Supplement to the 9thedition, where the single reference given is a 6th-cent. inscription from Corinth. [Ste.Croix made this point in ‘A Worm’s-Eye View of the Greeks and Romans and Howthey Spoke: Martyr Acts, Fables, Parables and Other Texts’, Latin Teaching, 37.4(1984), 16–30, at 23–4, where he uses the energetic and colloquial language of thebishops as part of his argument that teachers of classical languages should make moreuse of early Christian texts to enliven their material. The word is recorded in Lampe’sPatristic Greek Lexicon, which also notes the Corinth inscription. Ste. Croix’s pointreXects the frustrating separation of secular from ecclesiastical Greek in the mainlexica. The all-round importance of the collections of council Acta, including theirlinguistic signiWcance for issues such as bilingualism and translation, has beenrecognized by Fergus Millar, ‘Repentant Heretics’, 116, a comment which will bedeveloped at greater length in the forthcoming publication of his Sather lectures,A Greek Roman Empire: Power, Belief and Reason under Theodosius II, 408–50.]21 See further below for discussion of ‘turncoats’. M. J. van Parys, ‘The Council ofChalcedon as Historical Event’, Ecumenical Review, 22 (1970), 305–20, at 314, notesthat the Acta for the Wfth session are rather meagre, but without identifying anyobvious reason.

The Council of Chalcedon 267motion under discussion.22 Fortunately, however, one feature of therecording of senatorial procedure was preserved, since the Actarecord not only decisions and speeches but vast numbers of acclamations(ekboēseis, acclamationes in Latin), as well as less formalexclamations. As early as Pliny’s Panegyric, delivered to Trajan inad 100, the acclamationes of imperial speeches were being solemnlyrecorded in the Acta Senatus (Pan. 75).23 The practice increasedduring Late Antiquity and extended to new venues, such as churchcouncils, not least because emperors had demonstrated their interest:Constantine encouraged provincial gatherings to praise or criticizetheir governors through acclamations which were to be reported tothe emperor himself (Cod. Theod. 1.16.6 of 331), and by 371 provincialson such reporting missions were permitted to use the imperialpost (Cod. Theod. 8.5.32). The fact that both laws were included inthe Codex Theodosianus, which was compiled about a decade beforethe Council of Chalcedon, indicates that they were still in force, andthe Constantinian law indeed was retained in the Codex Justinianus.Acclamations might well digress from the occasion or event whichhad triggered them. The senatorial Acta which record the receptionin Rome in 438 of the newly promulgated Codex Theodosianusprovide a good example in a compact series of acclamations whichmove from praise of the emperors, particularly in their capacity aslaw-makers, to requests for the consulship to be granted to certainleading senators.24 In the Acta of Chalcedon, we have not only theconventional shouts in honour of the emperor and empress, but alsomany highly charged and even abusive explosions. On occasion thereare also comments on, or reactions to acclamations. These mightinvolve the assertion that the acclamations being recorded did notrepresent a majority view, ‘Only a few are shouting. The council doesnot speak’ as the Constantinopolitan clergy responded to chants at22 F. Dvornik, ‘Emperors, Popes and Councils’, DOP (1951), 3–23, at 4, 18;P. BatiVol, ‘Origines de règlement des concils’, in Études de liturgie et d’archéologiechrétienne (Paris, 1919), 84–153, at 85; H. Gelzer, ‘Die Konzilien als Reichsparlamente’,in Ausgewählte kleine Schriften (Leipzig, 1907), 142–55.23 For a good discussion of the prevalence of acclamations, see C. Roueché,‘Acclamations in the Later Roman Empire: New Evidence from Aphrodisias’, JRS 74(1984), 181–99.24 J. F. Matthews, Laying Down the Law: A Study of the Theodosian Code (NewHaven, 2000), 35–49.

268 Church Councilsthe second session for the restoration of Dioscorus and otherdeposed bishops (ACO ii.i.279, § 35). Occasionally the presidingoYcials attempted to restrain the vehemence of the outbursts,‘These vulgar outbursts are not becoming to bishops, nor useful toeither party. Allow everything to be read’ (ACO ii.i.70, § 44), butsuch interventions were rare; they tend to occur when, as on thisoccasion when the presence of Theodoret was at issue, the councilwas in danger of straying from the oYcial agenda. Mutual episcopalmud-slinging was tolerated and at Chalcedon the most frequentchant was the repeated exō bale, ‘Chuck ’em out’—or perhaps,since these are the cries of holy bishops, one should translate ‘Castthem out’.But the Acta are very far from being our only source of knowledgeabout Chalcedon. Evagrius, who came from Epiphania in Syria andwas employed in a legal capacity by the orthodox bishop of Antioch,Gregory, during the 580s, compiled an ecclesiastical history of theyears 431 to 594 which continued the narratives of the mid-Wfthcenturytriad of writers, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret. Evagriusdeliberately began his account with the origins of the Christologicaldispute about the Natures of Christ by starting with Nestorius’patriarchy and the First Council of Ephesus, even though thisentailed some overlap with Socrates (1.2). Chalcedon was crucial toEvagrius’ story, and he provides a substantial account of proceedingsin two parts, a shorter version within the chronological narrative inBook 2 (ch. 4) and then a longer one which is presented as anappendix to Book 2.25 It is clear that Evagrius used a version of theActa, which he summarized reasonably well: at one point heconXated two letters by Pope Leo, at two places he seems to havemisunderstood which side of a complex argument a particularspeaker was supporting, and there are a few errors over the orderof arguments and particular names. However, in the light of the sheerquantity of the material which he was attempting to summarize, thisrecord is not too bad, and his account is a reasonably brief and25 This occupies 37 pages in the standard Bidez–Parmentier text, 9 for the initialaccount and 26 for the appendix. There are annotated translations, with crossreferencesto the relevant sections of ACO, by M. Whitby, The Ecclesiastical Historyof Evagrius Scholasticus (Liverpool, 2000) and A. J. Festugière, ‘Évagre, HistoireEcclésiastique’, Byzantion, 45 (1975), 187–488.

The Council of Chalcedon 269informative introduction to the key events.26 In the main narrativeEvagrius focused on three key issues, the reversal of the incorrectdecisions of Second Ephesus, the deposition of Dioscorus for disciplinaryreasons, and the establishment of a new Creed. In the appendixthe focus is even more clearly on Dioscorus, whose misconduct andintransigence are displayed to the full, though the reputation of PopeLeo is also upheld through demonstrations of the parallels betweenthe views in his Tome and the teachings of Cyril of Alexandria.27Inevitably, as a good orthodox writer, Evagrius omitted much of themost ‘spicy’ material, but he does not entirely disguise the vital roleperformed again and again at critical points in proceedings by theemperor himself and the imperial commissioners who presided atevery session except the formal disciplinary proceedings at whichDioscorus was condemned in his absence.28 In addition to Evagriusthe Ecclesiastical History of the Monophysite Zachariah rhetor preservesa brief account of proceedings from the losers’ perspective.The letter collections of Pope Leo and Bishop Theodoret provideimportant evidence for the views of two of the main participants aswell as of some of their correspondents; Theodoret’s letters inparticular reveal interesting links with some central players atChalcedon.29There is no modern work on the council which, to my mind,provides a thoroughly acceptable account. Most writing on Chalcedonhas been done by theologians,30 whereas I am a professional26 Whitby, Evagrius, p. xxxix.27 See further Whitby, Evagrius, pp. xxxviii–xxxix.28 [To my mind the full extent of imperial involvement is only clear in the Acta,but it is true that Evagrius does not write the commissioners out altogether.]29 Theodoret, Correspondance, ed. Y. Azéma (Sources Chrétiennes 40, 98, 111;Paris, 1955–65), esp. i. 44–56; there is an older Eng. trans. by B. Jackson in NPNF ii.3(Grand Rapids, 1892).30 For an account in English by a theologian, see R. V. Sellers, The Council ofChalcedon, a Historical and Doctrinal Survey (London, 1953); brief and usefultheological treatments are provided by L. R. Wickham, ‘Chalkedon, ökumenischeSynode (451)’, Theologische Realenzyklopädie, 7 (1981), 668–75, and in H. Chadwick’spreface to Festugière’s Actes du Concile. T. Camelot, Éphèse et Chalcédoine (Paris,1962) does not add much. The massive collection (over 2,700 pages) edited byA. Grillmeier and H. Bacht, Das Konzil von Chalkedon. Geschichte und Gegenwart (3vols., Wurzburg, 1951–4) is essentially theological and has little of historical value,although there is a useful and accurate historical table covering the years 422 to 564 at

270 Church Councilshistorian and a theologian in only a very amateur way—althoughI have tried hard to understand all the main theological issues, someof which are immensely subtle and complex and diYcult to grasp.I sympathize very much with the comments of the sixth-centuryhistorian Procopius of Caesarea who, when mentioning an abstrusetheological controversy, refused in principle to give details eventhough he insisted that he thoroughly understood it: ‘for I hold it asort of mad folly (an aponoia maniōdēs tis) to research into the natureof God. Even human nature cannot, I think, be precisely understoodby men; still less can the things which pertain to the nature of God.So let me shun this peril and pass these things by in discreet silence’(Wars 5.3.5–9). It is probably already clear that I do not myself shareany of the theological opinions of any of the great divisions of WfthcenturyChristendom: this does at least enable me to claim completeimpartiality as between Orthodox and Monophysites,31 even if theferocious strife between them, which sometimes, as we shall see, tookon a murderous character, often makes me feel like repeating thedying words of Mercutio in Act 3 of Romeo and Juliet, ‘A plague o’both your houses’.ii. 941–67 which helps to clarify the antecedents as well as the reception of thecouncil. In addition to van Parys, ‘Council’, the best modern treatments of the councilfrom the historical point of view are W. de Vries, ‘Die Struktur der Kirche gemässdem Konzil von Chalkedon (451)’, OCP 35 (1969), 63–122 (there is a French trans. ofthis article in idem, Orient et Occident: les structures ecclésiastiques vues dans l’histoiredes sept premières conciles oecuméniques (Paris, 1974) ); see also idem, ‘Das Konzil vonEphesus 449, eine ‘‘Räubersynode’’?’, OCP 41 (1975), 357–98, where the questionmark in the title points to de Vries’s overall approach. De Vries’s articles get to gripswith what actually went on at councils, even if the author’s commitment to PopeLeo’s outlook and activities can sometimes seem overconWdent. V. C. Samuel,‘Proceedings of the Council of Chalcedon and its Historical Problems: A PaperWritten from a Critical Point of View’, Ecumenical Review, 22 (1970), 321–47 is ofsome interest, in that the author, a priest in the non-Chalcedonian Indian SyrianOrthodox Church, rightly regards the council proceedings as eYciently controlled bythe combined power of Pope and Emperor, but his doctrinal stance leads him to makedubious claims about proceedings at Second Ephesus. [I am sure that Ste. Croixwould also have commended the very helpful introductions and annotations to thenew English translation of the Acta.]31 It is diYcult to Wnd in English an account of the council, its antecedents, andconsequences from the Monophysite perspective. In addition to Samuel, ‘Proceedings’,noted above, see also idem, The Council of Chalcedon Re-examined: A Historicaland Theological Survey (Madras, 1977; repub. London, 2001), which is of greatertheological than historical interest.

Some IssuesThe Council of Chalcedon 271At this point I will refer to two or three themes which I will not bepursuing. The theological struggles of the period are sometimestreated as essentially a battle for ecclesiastical supremacy betweenthe three great Eastern patriarchates, Alexandria, Constantinople,and Antioch. Certainly the rivalry of the three great sees could be,and sometimes was, a major factor: jealousy of the upstart see ofConstantinople might draw together Alexandria and sees in AsiaMinor threatened by the extension of the metropolitan power ofthe capital, or might unite Rome and Alexandria against its universalpretensions. The humbling of John Chrysostom in which Theophilusof Alexandria played a leading part is one instance; doctrine playedno part, whereas episcopal power was crucial.32 Furthermore thetheologians of Alexandria and Antioch had strong local doctrinaltraditions, though those of Constantinople did not. But to my mindin these theological contests what I might call issues of episcopal orecclesiastical geography are secondary, and we must always treat asprimary the actual doctrines held by each of the participants in thiswhole ideological strife. I do not, however, wish to belittle theimportance of the greatly added weight and bitterness which mightbe given to a doctrinal dispute by the fact that the participants werealso Wghting for their own ecclesiastical power and the prestige oftheir sees.33 Another issue to be set aside is the ambition of theodious Bishop Juvenal to turn his see of Jerusalem into a patriarchate,at the expense of Antioch, which he succeeded in doing at SecondEphesus and then maintained at Chalcedon even though he had toreturn some of the ill-gotten territorial gains he had just made.3432 J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops, Army, Church, and State in theAge of Arcadius and Chrysostom (Oxford, 1990), chs. 19–20; S. Elm, ‘The Dog that didnot Bark: Doctrine and Patriarchal Authority in the ConXict between Theophilus ofAlexandria and John Chrysostom of Constantinople’, in L. Ayres and G. Jones (eds.),Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric and Community (London, 1998), 68–93.33 Those who wish for an account of the episcopal/ecclesiastical aspect of thedogmatic disputes could begin with Norman Baynes, ‘Alexandria and Constantinople:A Study in Ecclesiastical Diplomacy’, in Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London,1955), 97–115. Samuel, ‘Proceedings’, 342–3, sees Pulcheria’s support for opponents ofEutyches as motivated mainly by her desire to secure the elevation of her imperial see ofConstantinople at the expense of Alexandria, but his extreme cynicism is unjustiWed.34 For his long and generally successful career, see E. Honigmann, ‘Juvenal ofJerusalem’, DOP 5 (1950), 209–79.

272 Church CouncilsNeither do I intend to lay any stress at all on alleged politicalmotives, such as the supposed necessity in 451 for Emperor Marcianto take great account of the views of the 32-year-old senior Augustus,the western Emperor Valentinian III,35 as well as of Pope Leo, thebishop of his capital city, Rome, which was not in fact Valentinian’snormal residence.36 Valentinian resented the unilateral proclamationof Marcian in the East on the grounds that he should have beenconsulted, and did not recognize Marcian as Augustus until 30March 452; during 451 the rift was symbolized by a refusal in theWest to acknowledge Marcian’s consulship, while Marcian may haveclaimed not to have been informed about the western consulAdelWus.37 In reality, for both emperors Attila the Hun provided amore pressing problem: in 450 Marcian risked his wrath by refusing35 E. Stein, Histoire du Bas-Empire, i (2nd edn., 1959), 312. [Evagrius 2.1, however,may hint at a possible link between Valentinian’s ratiWcation of Marcian’s elevationand the summoning of the council, though the conjunction of events could beinnocent.]36 [Ste. Croix’s comment that Rome was not Valentinian’s normal residencereXects the standard scholarly view that Ravenna served as the western imperialcapital from the date of Honorius’ move there in the early 5th cent. Although Ste.Croix is correct that across the whole of his reign Valentinian III spent more time inRavenna than Rome, it has now been pointed out by A. Gillett, ‘Rome, Ravenna andthe Last Western Emperors’, PBSR 69 (2001), 131–67, esp. 145–8, that the imperialcourt was based at Rome on various occasions during the 440s and regularly from450; furthermore, Valentinian and his family provided Wnancial support for PopeLeo’s buildings in and around Rome, and used ecclesiastical ceremonies to advertisetheir attachment to the city. I am grateful to Fergus Millar for drawing my attentionto this article.We may assume that Valentinian broadly shared the doctrinal views of his Pope,and may have exploited the embarrassment of the eastern regime over the conductand decisions of Second Ephesus, but in spite of Valentinian’s Roman connection Ste.Croix is still right not to attach signiWcance to this possible motive for the council.Eastern emperors were quite capable of disregarding papal views, as Theodosius IIhad already demonstrated. The impetus for the council came from the East, partlyfrom clerics who believed that Second Ephesus had gone too far or had aVected theepiscopal balance of power, but much more importantly from the imperial pair, who,for example, coerced the reluctant eastern bishops into agreeing a new Creed:comparisons with Constantine and Helena were presumably not unwelcome to thenew regime, and personal as well as religious considerations may have inXuencedtheir determination to secure the ‘right’ decisions at Chalcedon. Promotion of goodrelations with the Pope and the West was an advantage, but not such a crucial onethat it would override eastern interests.]37 R. S. Bagnall, A. Cameron, S. R. Schwartz, and K. A. Worp, Consuls of the LaterRoman Empire (Atlanta, 1987), 436.

The Council of Chalcedon 273to continue payments agreed by Theodosius, but Attila had Wrstattacked the West where he claimed a share in the empire as thebride price of Honoria, who had attempted to betroth herself toAttila; during summer 451, as Wnal preparations for Chalcedonwere being made, the western general Aëtius and his Visigothic alliesdefeated the Huns at the battle of the Catalaunian plains. In 450–1Valentinian may have suspected Marcian of exporting the Hunnicproblem to the West, but by early 452 the prospect of an attack onItaly should have encouraged a rapprochement. It does not seem thatthe convocation of the council, or even its decisions, had any impacton the divide. As far as Pope Leo was concerned, suYcient reassurancethat the emperor was now in full sympathy with his views wouldhave been provided by a synod which convened at Constantinople on21 October 450; this comprised eastern bishops who had not beenparty to the deposition of Flavian, plus four western bishops representingthe pope.38 Nor can I follow the great historian Ernst Stein inattributing the role of Empress Pulcheria above all to her hatred ofChrysaphius,39 the inXuential eunuch chamberlain of Theodosius II,who is so often represented as primarily responsible for the religiouspolicy adopted by that emperor; I am very sceptical about this theory,and will not mention it further.Secular ControlMy overall thesis is that the Council of Chalcedon was every bit asmuch an engine of coercion as the ‘Robber’ Council of SecondEphesus, and that the machinery of compulsion was actually far38 P. Mouterde, ‘Fragment d’Actes d’un Synode tenu à Constantinople en 450’,Mélanges de l’Université S. Joseph Beyrouth, 15.2 (1930), 35–50; idem, ‘Saint Abundiusde Côme et ses trois compagnons à un synode de Constantinople en 450’, AB 48(1930), 124–9; ACO ii.i.8–10, nos. 9–10 (letters from Marcian and Pulcheria to Leo of22 Nov. 450).39 Stein, Histoire, 310. [I am more sympathetic to this theory than Ste. Croix: thestrong evidence for hostility between Pulcheria and Chrysaphius is set out in PLRE ii.295–6, as well as for the links between Chrysaphius and Eutyches, his godfather, andfor his hostility towards Flavian of Constantinople; cf. Evagrius 2.2 and Whitby,Evagrius, 26 n. 81. What cannot be proved is that Pulcheria was primarily motivatedby opposition to Chrysaphius rather than doctrinal conviction, but it is the case thatshe came to oppose the current champions of Cyrilline theology, in particular ofCyril’s Twelve Anathemas, which she had supported in the 430s.]

274 Church CouncilsmorepowerfulatChalcedon,somuchsothatactualforcedidnotneedtobe used, or even visibly threatened, because everyone knew that resistanceto the imperial will would result in his ruin: the loss of episcopaloYce, and perhaps excommunication and exile to a distant part of theempire, as happened to the one determined opponent, Dioscorus.40This should not surprise anyone, as it only provides one more amongmany examples of the very high degree of control that a Roman emperorcould exercise (if he wished) over the Christian churches in the area overwhichhe ruled,eveninthesphereofdoctrine.41 Itwaseasiest to enforce aparticular set of theological views by summoning a general Council ofthe Church, which the emperor alone had the power to do.42 Even PopeLeo the Great, who had the most exalted idea of the importance of hisown Apostolic See, had to admit throughout his correspondence withTheodosius II, Pulcheria, and Marcian, which fortunately survives, thatit was the emperor and the emperor alone who decided whether, when,and where to summon a general council. Leo changed his own viewabout the desirability of a general council more than once between 449and451inthelightofchangingcircumstances,butwasunabletoimposehiswishes.Intheendhehadtobecontentwithhaving hisdoctrinallettertoFlavianofConstantinople,whichiscommonlyreferredtoastheTomeof Leo,43 endorsed at Chalcedon as the best statement of the true faith.40 Samuel, ‘Proceedings’, 324, claimed that the level of imperial interest wasunprecedented, but this forms part of his argument to undermine the legitimacy ofChalcedon as opposed to Second Ephesus, whose decisions he presents as free fromcoercion. J. MeyendorV, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions (New York, 1989),168, saw the close imperial involvement as permitting greater freedom of debate thanat previous councils; contrast van Parys, ‘Council’, 317, who urged that imperialinXuence should not be exaggerated and suggests that Marcian exercised sensiblediscretion in leaving doctrinal matters to the council. Both these views underestimatethe extent of imperial direction, which tolerated limited disagreement provided thatthe emperor’s wishes were approved in due course, and included very Wrm imperialguidance even on doctrinal decisions; see further below.41 See, for example, W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement,Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge,1972), ch. 2; Dvornik, ‘Emperors’.42 However, after a council had deWned current orthodoxy, an emperor might havegreater problems in securing the imposition of these views on bishops and monksscattered throughout his dominions.43 The best text of the Tome (Leo, Ep. 28, PL 54. 755–82) is in ACO ii.ii.24–33, ofwhich there is a French trans. in Festugière, Actes du Concile, 32–7; there is an Eng.trans., from the PL text, by C. L. Feltoe in NPNF 2nd ser. 12 (Leo and Gregory the

The Council of Chalcedon 275The signiWcance of imperial initiative and of the control ofproceedings is revealed by some of the ecclesiastical gatheringsof Theodosius II’s reign.44 First Ephesus had been summoned byTheodosius II at the request of Nestorius, who hoped to exploitcertain complaints which he had received from Egyptian monksabout Cyril of Alexandria’s behaviour, charges which might allow himthe opportunity to dispose of a powerful doctrinal rival withoutbecoming locked into a detailed argument about terminology.Nestorius was conWdent in the emperor’s favour since Theodosiushad appointed Candidianus, the comes domesticorum, to maintainorder and ensure that the participants attended to the issues. Candidianuswas a supporter of Nestorius, as is clear from the backing hegave to the attacks on Cyril which John of Antioch led after hisbelated arrival (ACO i.i.1.120; i.i.5.119–20), but he had not been givenauthority to participate, and this limitation prevented him fromarranging proceedings within the council, while a lack of physicalsupport left him unable to oppose the partisans organized by Cyril ofAlexandria and the local bishop Memnon outside.45 At First Ephesusthe community of interest between Pope Celestine and Cyril allowedCyril to claim the presidency as the Pope’s representative on thedecisive Wrst day (ACO ii.iii.197, § 911, lines 5–6), and Candidianusthen lacked authority to halt proceedings. It was only by placingcontrol of a council in the right hands that an emperor could becertain of securing the decisions that he wanted: even an emperor’srepresentative might be outmanoeuvred if he was not presiding.Great) (London, 1895), 38–43. For the Greek trans. which was read at Chalcedon, seeACO ii.i.10–20 (Epist. Coll. M, no. 11), with Schwartz’s observations in ACO ii.i,pp. xiv–xvi.44 For Caesaropapism in the Byzantine Empire, see G. Dagron, Emperor and Priest:The Imperial OYce in Byzantium (Eng. trans. by J. Birrel, Cambridge, 2003), ch. 9;although most of the discussion is devoted to the later Byzantine Empire, pp. 296–7do touch on the issues in the 5th and 6th cent.45 Candidianus’ brief was to prevent disturbances round about the council, but hewas not to meddle in matters of the faith since that was not the business of a layman;nevertheless he was also to see that no dissensions arising from the passion ofargument should disturb the consultation and precise search after the truth, andensure that all should hear clearly what was said and speak their mind without harmso that when, by single propositions and counter-propositions, the inquiry had beencompleted, the decisions of all might be duly recorded (ACO i.i.1.120).

276 Church CouncilsThe importance of presidency is further revealed in the conXictbetween Flavian of Constantinople and Eutyches in 448/9. Proceedingshad begun in November 448 at a local, or ‘home’ synod ofbishops at Constantinople which Flavian had summoned to considera dispute in the Church at Sardis; this was naturally chaired byFlavian. The assembly was exploited by Eusebius of Dorylaeum topresent a doctrinal indictment of Eutyches; there may have beencollusion between Flavian and Eusebius, since the former is unlikelyto have objected to the elimination of this turbulent monk and thesequence of events put Flavian in charge of the investigation withoutgiving advance warning to Eutyches or his supporters. There waslittle that Eutyches could immediately do to hinder developments:after the opening of proceedings on 12 November (ACO ii.i.103, §238) and Eutyches’ refusal to respond to summons on the 15, 16, and17, an ultimatum brought him to attend on the 22, when he wasaccompanied by ‘a large following of soldiers, monks and membersof the prefect’s staV’(ACO ii.i.138, § 463). Emperor Theodosius’ wishto inXuence proceedings is revealed by the presence of the silentiaryMagnus who read out an imperial missive which decreed that thepatrician Florentius, ‘a man of faith and proven orthodoxy’, wouldattend the hearing; Florentius was to be present precisely ‘because thediscussion was about the faith’, a reversal of the attitude which hadprevented Candidianus from inXuencing proceedings at Ephesus.The emperor’s simple statement about the suYciency of the synodsof Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus was further proof of hissupport for Eutyches for whom this was almost a catchphrase(ACO ii.i.138, § 468). Flavian appears to have been somewhat tetchyabout the presence of Florentius, Wrst asking Eutyches whether hewanted him to attend and then rejecting Magnus’ request that a clericbe sent to invite him in (ACO ii.i.139, §§ 473–4); Florentius did thenshape the direction of proceedings to try to enable Eutyches to assentto an acceptable doctrinal formula (ACO ii.i.139–40, 142–4, §§ 478,484, 521, 526, 541, 543), much to the annoyance of his accuserEusebius, who feared that this might compromise his own position(ACO ii.i.139–40, §§ 477–85). In spite of this pressure Theodosiuscould not circumvent Flavian’s power as president, and Eutyches wascondemned. Imperial displeasure was displayed in late March 449,when Theodosius publicly withdrew from communion with his

The Council of Chalcedon 277patriarch in Santa Sophia, and in April three separate attempts weremade to overturn Eutyches’ condemnation by demonstrating irregularitiesin Flavian’s proceedings. The record produced by Flavian’snotaries was subjected to detailed scrutiny, and under extreme pressurefrom Florentius these conceded that it was extremely diYcult toproduce an exact transcription (ACO i.i.153–6, §§ 576–614); accusationsby the silentiary Magnus that Flavius had prepared Eutyches’condemnation in advance and so precluded a fair investigationfurther weakened the patriarch’s position (ACO i.i.178, §§ 838–42).46Flavian’s control of proceedings, however, even if challenged, wasnot overturned, and the solution for Theodosius was to summon anecumenical council.47 To avoid a repetition of the unintended outcomeof First Ephesus and the embarrassment of Flavian’s synod atConstantinople, Theodosius wrote to Dioscorus of Alexandria todirect him to convene the synod, with Juvenal of Jerusalem andThalassius of Caesarea in support; he also appointed Helpidius,count of the imperial consistory, and the tribune Eulogius to controlproceedings. The emperor repeatedly insisted that Theodoret was notto participate and furthermore clearly demonstrated his hostilitytowards Flavian and his treatment of Eutyches: ‘we wrote to thismost God-beloved bishop repeatedly in an attempt to still theturmoil he had stirred up . . . We repeatedly pressed this most religiousbishop several times to drop the inquiry, lest it be cause ofdisturbance to the whole world, but he refused.’48 Theodosius knewwhat he wanted the council to achieve and was satisWed with theresult: when writing to Emperor Valentinian, and the empressesLicinia and Galla Placidia to defend himself against protests fromPope Leo, he referred to Flavian as ‘chief cause of contention’ andsaid that peace reigned after his expulsion—‘nothing contrary to therule of faith or of justice had been done there’ (Leo, Ep. 62–4).46 Nestorius, Bazaar, pp. 341–2; ACO ii.i.148–79, §§ 555–849. Chadwick, Church,555, notes the impact on Flavian.47 Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, 95 refers to Theodosius’ ‘surenessof touch in ecclesiastical aVairs’ after First Ephesus, but this is not borne out by eventsin the capital in 448–9 when, in the short term, he was outmanoeuvred by hispatriarch.48 Dioscorus: ACO ii.i.68–9, § 24; Helpidius and Eulogius: ACO ii.i.72, § 49 (andcf. § 189 for Helpidius’ involvement); Theodoret: ACO ii.i.74, § 52; Flavian: ACOii.i.73, § 51.

278 Church CouncilsFinally, the preliminaries to Chalcedon provide further examplesof imperial interest in the close control of events. Much was done insupport of the Orthodox cause between the assumption of power byMarcian and Pulcheria in August 450, over a year before the openingof the council. First, it is revealed by fragmentary Acta preserved inSyriac that in October 450 the new patriarch of Constantinople,Anatolius, who had been appointed after Second Ephesus and theexpulsion and subsequent death of Eutyches’ opponent Flavian, andall his bishops had formally subscribed the Tome of Leo.49 Supportfor the deceased Flavian was now a touchstone for orthodoxy, hisname was reinstated in the diptychs and his remains were returned toConstantinople. Anatolius was in an awkward position. He had beendeacon and apocrisarius of Dioscorus (Liberatus, Breviarium 12, 76),who will have presented him to Emperor Theodosius as an acceptableleader for the Constantinopolitan Church in which Eutyches wascurrently prominent; he owed his position to Flavian’s death andhad also been consecrated by Dioscorus, which all suggest that at thetime of appointment he was eager to present himself as an opponentof Theodoret and Two Nature Christology. Whether he saw anopportunity to throw oV an unwelcome subservience to Alexandria,50whether he simply recognized the doctrinal consequences ofthe change of ruler, or whether pressure had to be applied, Anatoliusswitched Christological sides. Pope Leo’s correspondence reveals thatboth Anatolius and Maximus, the new patriarch of Antioch who hadalso been appointed after Second Ephesus and now also had todemonstrate his independence from Dioscorus, had been using alltheir immense inXuence in the vast areas in which they were thedominant ecclesiastical Wgures, in support of Orthodoxy and theTome of Leo and in condemnation of Eutyches and Nestorianism(Leo, Ep. 88; ACO ii.iv.46–7); Eutyches, brieXy reinstated at SecondEphesus, had again been condemned and banished. Both patriarchswill have known that anything less than enthusiastic commitment tothe new ecclesiastical direction would leave them vulnerable at afuture council; Anatolius at least had the comfort that his expelled49 Mouterde, ‘Fragment’, 47; V. Grumel, Les Regestes des Actes du Patriarchat deConstantinople i.i (2nd edn., Paris, 1972), 89, no. 116.50 He may have been moving in this direction even before the death of Theodosius.

The Council of Chalcedon 279predecessor had died and he could present himself as a leader in thenew doctrinal direction, but Maximus had to be wary of the dangerthat Domnus, one of the victims of Second Ephesus, might return.The decisive council was initially summoned to meet at Nicaea, torecall the Wrst ecumenical council and present this new gathering asan extension of its work. However, after reports reached court thattroublemakers were gathering to disrupt proceedings, Pulcheriawrote to the governor of Bithynia with instructions that he expelmonks, clergy, and laity who had no business to be present (ACOii.i.29: 17–29). Perhaps most important of all, though rarely evennoticed, Emperor Marcian in a letter dated 22 September 451 made itclear to the bishops at Nicaea that he was determined to crush anyattempt at the council by unruly behaviour, stasis or thorubos, tomaintain the wishes of the people referred to as ‘those who share theopinions of Eutyches, or of anyone else’ (ACO ii.i.30: 21–9); Eutychesis here, as frequently in the Acta of Chalcedon, regarded as thechampion of One Nature Christology, though the vagueness of theexpression ‘of Eutyches or of anyone else’ may have been intended toincrease worries among possible targets.Most modern writers simply ignore this imperial letter, whichI would regard as one of the most signiWcant of all the survivingdocuments relating to the council, because it provides explicit evidencethat Emperor Marcian, even before the opening of the counciland the expression of any episcopal consensus, had every intention ofcrushing the Monophysites. Whether the crucial decisions were takenby Marcian or his wife Pulcheria is impossible to decide, but theupshot was the same: the emperor had revealed the regime’s doctrinalpreferences and these would be enacted. Such determination wasnecessary, since Dioscorus and his supporters challenged the imperialredirection of doctrine by anathematizing Pope Leo; it was perhapsthis act of intransigence which persuaded Marcian to order that thecouncil be transferred to Chalcedon, immediately across the Bosporusfrom the capital, although the public explanation for the switch wasthat urgent public business was detaining the emperor.51 After51 ACO ii.i.28–9, § 14. Monophysites attributed the change of venue to divineintervention which served to preserve the reputation of Nicaea: Michael the Syrian8.10 (trans. J. B. Chabot (Paris, 1901), vol. ii, p. 39); Zachariah of Mitylene, Chronicle,3.1, trans. F. J. Hamilton and E. W. Brooks (London, 1899).

280 Church Councilstravelling to Illyricum, Marcian promised that he would not undertakefurther trips away from the capital (ACO ii.i.30, § 16), a furtherdemonstration that he intended to keep in close touch with proceedings.The way was being prepared at the very highest level for acomplete reversal of Second Ephesus, the result which we can seebeing eVected in the Acta of Chalcedon.A further sign of secular inXuence in preparations for the councilis in dealings with the exiled Nestorius, a most contentious issue forclerics. Evagrius angrily rejected the assertion by the Monophysitehistorian Zachariah that Nestorius had been invited to attend, arguingthat he was consistently anathematized by the council and wasalready dead before proceedings began (2.2). This, however, misrepresentsZachariah’s text, which records that Marcian did order therecall but that Nestorius died while setting out (3.1, p. 42).ConWrmation that Marcian actually did send a message to Panopolisin Egypt to order Nestorius’ return, but that death supervened, isprovided by the Nestorian history of Barhadbeshabba (ch. 30) andthe Monophysite collection of Plērophories (Proofs) by John of BethRuWna (33, 36), a Greek text which survives only in Syriac translation.52Quite what Marcian intended to do with Nestorius is uncertain,since opposition to him provided one of the most powerfulrallying points in the current doctrinal arguments. It is possible thathe hoped to pressurize him in the kind of interview which Dioscorusis presented as having with Marcian and Pulcheria in the Life ofDioscorus by Theopistus, another Greek work which, inevitablybecause of doctrinal position, is preserved in a Syriac version:53Dioscorus resisted the call to acknowledge the need to follow the52 Barhadbeshabba, Ecclesiastical History, ed. and French trans. F. Nau, PO 9(1913), 489–631, and 23 (1932), 177–343; John Rufus, Plērophories, ed. and trans.F. Nau, PO 8 (1911), 1–208.53 F. Nau, ‘Histoire de Dioscore, patriarche d’Alexandrie, écrite par son discipleThéopiste’, Journal Asiatique, 10th ser. 1 (1903), 1–108, 241–310. On the work, seeP. Mouterde, ‘La Concile de Chalcédoine d’après les historiens monophysites delangue syriaque’, in Grillmeier–Bacht, Konzil, i. 581–602, at 597–601, and M. Cramerand H. Bacht, ‘Der antichalkedonische Aspekt im historisch-biographischen Schrifttumder koptischen Monophysiten (6.–7. Jahrhundert.). Ein Beitrag zur Geschichteder Enstehung der monophysitischen Kirche Ägyptens’, in Grillmeier–Bacht, Konzil,ii. 315–38; Honigmann, ‘Juvenal’, 265, suggested that the Plērophories were the sourcefor this Life, but there seems to be too much independent information in the latter,and cf. Baynes, ‘Alexandria’, 114–15 for acceptance of authenticity.

The Council of Chalcedon 281Pope’s doctrinal lead, but Nestorius might have been less resilient,especially after more than a decade of uncomfortable exile. He couldalso have been paraded before the assembled bishops, placed in themiddle to await judgement and then subjected to a renewed interrogation;this might have revealed that Nestorius did not hold fully‘Nestorian’ views and that he was prepared to condemn some of themore extreme formulations which went under his name. At any ratehis presence might have allowed the council to demonstrate itsorthodox credentials either by welcoming back a long-lost sheep orby condemning a persistently obstinate opponent—but this wouldhave been an imperial rather than episcopal strategy, since for almostall bishops Nestorius was best left in his remote exile.Such emphasis on secular control of doctrinal issues may disconcertsome, for example those who see the council as a providentialcorrection for the errors of Second Ephesus,54 and an alternativeexplanation might be sought along the lines that force was unnecessarybecause almost all bishops at Chalcedon favoured the decisionswhich restored divinely favoured orthodoxy. It is true that mostbishops whose voices can be heard wanted to be on record as deeplycommitted to stamping out what was identiWed as heresy, but thatshould come as no surprise. Dioscorus, however, had supporters ofwhom some stayed loyal even after the contentious Wrst session hadgone against him. Some of these bishops simply absented themselvesfrom later sessions when they might have been coerced intosubscribing a document against Dioscorus: thus the third session atwhich Dioscorus was deposed was attended by 204 bishops (ACOii.i.199–204) as opposed to 343 at the Wrst session. Reservationsmight also be signalled in the way in which bishops subscribed to adecision: thus Amphilochius of Side, whose antipathy to theproceedings is clear from his request for a delay before the secondsummons to Dioscorus and his subsequent repudiation of the council,reluctantly explained his decision to subscribe, ‘It was not mywish to cut oV any member of the Church, particularly one of rank;but because Dioscorus, formerly bishop of the great city of Alexandria,in addition to the charges that certain persons have brought54 e.g. P. Goubert, ‘Le Rôle de Sainte Pulchérie et de l’eunuque Chrysaphios’, inGrillmeier-Bacht, Konzil, i. 303–21, at 304, 318.

282 Church Councilsagainst him, refused to present himself when summoned for a thirdtime by the holy and ecumenical Council and brought down thesentence of the Council on his own head, he has only himself toblame.’55 This contrasts with the majority of acceptances which arebland comments of assent with the occasional more expansive statementof episcopal allegiance or other contextual comment.56 Thedeposition was secured, but it is clear that perhaps only just over halfthe bishops at Chalcedon were Wrmly behind this decision.The third session at Chalcedon is exceptional in that it was the onemeeting of the council at which there was not a secular president: themeeting was chaired by the papal representative, Paschasinus ofLilybaeum, and the imperial commissioners commented four dayslater at the fourth session (17 October) on the lack of secular input:‘But your devotion will give an account to God, both concerningDioscorus who was deposed by you without the knowledge of themost sacred eminence and of us’ (ACO ii.i.305, § 12). This departurefrom normal practice might seem to undermine the argument aboutimperial control, but it is possible that the commissioners werecontent to be spared involvement in the formal trial of Dioscorusand a contentious decision which would have a serious impact on theoperation of imperial authority in Egypt.57 In any event the bishops55 Zachariah 4.7, Evagrius 2.10. The Greek Acta preserve only the names ofsubscribers, but the Latin version contains the complete subscriptions: ACOii.iii.309, § 94.22; cf. § 94.26 (Onesiphorus of Iconium) for another equivocalreference to Dioscorus’ mistakes which avoids a formal statement of condemnation,and contrast § 94.34 for the combination of Dioscorus’ behaviour with explicit assentto the condemnation.56 Standard acceptances: ‘I too concur with the declarations of the holy fathers . . .’,‘I too concur with the condemnation by the holy fathers . . .’, ‘I am in completeagreement with the decision by the holy fathers . . .’, ‘I assent to the condemnation bythe holy fathers and the holy Council . . .’, ‘I make the same judgement as the most holyfathers before me . . .’ (ACO ii.iii.313–14, § 94.50–4). Episcopal attachment: ‘I tooassent to the sentences delivered by the most holy bishops Paschasinus and Lucensiusand the most devout presbyter Boniface, legates of the most holy and blessed bishop ofRome, and by the most holy and blessed Anatolius archbishop of the capital city ofConstantinople, New Rome, and to all the decrees of the holy and ecumenical Council. . .’ (ACO ii.iii.312, § 94.42; cf. p. 330, § 94.188, 192), which can be contrasted withthe reference to Anatolius but not the papal legates in § 94.37).57 [It should also be noted that the session was held on the third day after thesecond session, even though that had closed with the presiding commissionersdeclaring a Wve-day recess to allow bishops to reXect on endorsing the Tome of

The Council of Chalcedon 283ultimately reinforced the decision to depose Dioscorus along withWve colleagues associated in the direction of Second Ephesusannounced by the commissioners at the end of the Wrst session(ACO ii.i.195, § 1068). This deposition had been pronounced, albeitwith the speciWc qualiWcation ‘if the emperor agrees’, and the bishops’decision at the third session to reinstate the Wve associates also had tobe referred to the emperor for ratiWcation (ACO ii.i.305, §§ 12, 14).58Leo. Samuel, ‘Proceedings’, 346, claimed that the papal legates’ intention was toremove one implacable opponent of the Pope’s views and so further the work ofthe council.]58 [I am rather more suspicious than Ste. Croix about proceedings at the thirdsession. The session opened with a clear statement of papal supremacy from Paschasinus:‘It is well known to this God-loving council that an imperial letter was sent tothe blessed and apostolic Pope Leo summoning him to the holy council. But sinceneither the custom of antiquity nor the necessities of the general time appeared toallow this, he has charged my littleness to preside over this holy council in his stead. Itis therefore necessary that whatever is brought forward should be examined by oursentence. Therefore let the petition that has now been presented by our most Godbelovedbrother and fellow-bishop Eusebius be received by the most God-belovedarchdeacon and primcerius Aetius and be read’ (ACO ii.i.204, § 4). There is noreference to the long discussion of Eusebius’ complaint at the Wrst session, andPaschasinus appears to treat the commissioners’ sentence on Dioscorus as irrelevant.At the start of the Wrst session there had been signs of tension between the commissionersand the papal representatives over the control of proceedings, and theconduct of this third session seems to continue this. It also appears that the commissionershad been expected to attend any trial of Dioscorus (ACO ii.i.208, § 31),and Dioscorus was able to argue, when explaining his refusal to present himself forjudgement, that the absence of the commissioners prejudiced proceedings (ACOii.i.207–10, 221, §§ 22, 36, 70), so that the conduct of the trial might be thought tolack legitimacy.To my mind there are two signiWcant factors. First is the personal grievance whichthe pope had against Dioscorus because of the anathema against Leo recentlypronounced at Nicaea. Second is the evidence from the end of the second sessionon 10 October of episcopal support for the reinstatement of Dioscorus and the otherbishops deposed on the Wrst day: this began as a plea on behalf of the whole group,but soon resolved into chants for Dioscorus: ‘We have all sinned, forgive us all.Dioscorus to the Council. Dioscorus to the churches’ (ACO ii.i.279–80, §§ 30–44). Topre-empt any chance of forgiveness for Dioscorus the papal representatives perhapsdecided to take the lead in securing the formal condemnation of Dioscorus by hisfellow bishops, a move which the commissioners and the emperor retrospectivelytolerated since the result did not contradict their own agenda.The suggestion that the commissioners absented themselves to protect theemperor’s position, and especially his authority in Egypt, is not compelling: thesecular power was still perceived to be implicated in the deposition of Dioscorusand the imposition of a successor at Alexandria.]

284 Church CouncilsOne major issue where the application of imperial pressure isclearly visible is the decision to consider a new deWnition of faith.The need for a new Creed was raised by the presiding imperialcommissioners as the major item of business for the second sessionon 13 October, but this provoked Werce opposition from the bishops:‘This is what we all say. What has already been expounded is suYcient.It is not permissible to produce another exposition’ and ‘Wewill not produce a written exposition. There is a canon whichdeclares that what has already been expounded is suYcient. Thecanon forbids the making of another exposition. Let the work ofthe fathers prevail’—in each case the chant was a collective one from‘the most devout bishops’ (ACO ii.i.274, §§ 5, 7). However, theproposal from the commissioners that a drafting committee representingeach patriarchy should be constituted was eventuallyaccepted, with the proviso of an adjournment of Wve days to permittime for deliberations, before the meeting dissolved into chaos overdemands for the readmission of Dioscorus (ACO ii.i.279, §§ 31, 33).At the Wfth session on 22 October Anatolius of Constantinoplepresented a draft deWnition through his deacon Asclepiades, whichhad clearly been ratiWed on the previous day by a general meeting ofbishops (ACO ii.i.319, §§ 2–8), for which no record is preserved.There was opposition from the papal legates and bishops from thediocese of Oriens over the need to include speciWc references to Maryas Theotokos, and the existence of two natures, divine and human, inChrist (ACO ii.i.319–20, §§ 6, 9–20); during the argument the legatesasked that imperial instructions be given for their return to Rome sothat the council might be concluded there. An appeal to MarcianconWrmed the stark choice facing the bishops, recourse to a newdrafting group of Anatolius, the legates, and eighteen eastern bishopsor ‘If your Holiness does not want even this, you are to know that theCouncil will have to meet in the western parts, since your Religiousnessis unwilling to deWne here unambiguously the true and orthodoxfaith’ (ACO ii.i.320–1, § 22).59 Even this threat did not bring59 It might be questioned whether Marcian and Pulcheria would themselves havewanted to lose their tight control of proceedings which a move to the West wouldhave entailed; it was possible that they were bluYng the bishops, conWdent in theability of their commissioners to broker a deal, or they may have thought thatthe parameters for any discussion at a western council were suYciently tight for theswitch not to be a threat to their plans.

The Council of Chalcedon 285immediate acquiescence, since the Illyrian contingent shouted, ‘Letthose who dissent make themselves known. The dissenters areNestorians. Let the dissenters go oV to Rome’ (ACO ii.i.321, § 25).The commissioners, however, who had been trying to direct thebishops to focus on the overlap between the Tome of Leo, which allhad recently accepted, and the proposed additions about Mary andthe Two Natures, eventually channelled discussions in the requiredway (ACO ii.i.320, §§ 13, 15, 17). The episcopal leaders, for exampleAnatolius of Constantinople, the author of the unsatisfactory draft,could appreciate the consequences of surrendering decisions ondoctrine to a westerner whose abilities they doubted, as well as thedanger of creating a powerful precedent for future papal interferencein the aVairs of the Eastern Church. Although the drafting groupcontained Eusebius of Dorylaeum, who had speciWcally opposed theneed for another deWnition (ACO ii.i.320, § 19), as well as threeIllyrians from the group prepared to dispute even the imperialinstruction, a revised version was produced and accepted, apparentlywithout further fuss (ACO ii.i.130, § 35). There is certainly noevidence that physical force was applied to achieve this result, butthere is also no doubt that the bishops were constrained to accept adocument which was somewhat diVerent from that which they hadprepared, with some reluctance, for themselves.The Mechanics of ControlAgainst this recent background, the issue of precisely how controlwas implemented at the council should be important, and thisprovides a good example of the great gulf that lies between a theologicaland a historical approach to Chalcedon. For me as a historian,the Wrst thing that needs to be examined carefully in the proceedingsis the way in which it was run by those who presided: who were they,what was their attitude—were they impartial, or were they committedin advance to one side? No modern work, however, pays nearlyenough attention to these key individuals.60 It has indeed been stated60 R. Delmaire, ‘Les Dignitaires laïcs au Concile de Chalcédoine: notes sur lahiérarchie et les préséances au milieu du Ve siècle’, Byzantion, 54 (1984), 141–75,provides a technical discussion which focuses on issues of secular precedence anddoes not pursue the more interesting investigation of the commissioners’ doctrinal

286 Church Councilsthat the presidents were the legates of Pope Leo, namely the bishopsPaschasinus of Lilybaeum and Lucensius of Ascoli and the Romanpresbyter Boniface. Thus the current English version of Altaner’sPatrology, in its section on Pope Leo, states that ‘the Council ofChalcedon . . . was presided over by his legates’.61 The confusion isillustrated in the successive editions of the scholarly Oxford Dictionaryof the Christian Church: in its Wrst edition this makes the sameassertion about the legates’ presidency, but the passage was radicallyaltered in the second edition to read ‘his legates spoke Wrst at theCouncil of Chalcedon’, and this is repeated in the third edition.62 Thisis at least a great improvement, since it no longer falsiWes a centralfact about the council, yet the entry still ignores the issue ofpresidency.There is much that needs to be said about those who reallypresided at Chalcedon, the imperial commissioners as they areusually called now—appropriately enough since they were the directpersonal representatives of the emperor and had been appointed byhim.63 The commissioners, of whom most were serving magistrates,64holders of major state oYces, have in Greek the oYcialtitle of archontes (literally ‘rulers’, but ‘those with power to decide’aYliations. Samuel, ‘Proceedings’, recognized the commissioners’ importance but didnot probe their allegiances, even though this would have bolstered his argument thatChalcedon did not promote a free discussion of doctrinal matters.61 B. Altaner, Patrology (Eng. trans. by H. G. Graef, Edinburgh, 1960), 418; asubsequent edition of the German original (Freiburg, 1978), 357 omits this error. VanParys, ‘Council’, 311 states that the right to preside belonged to Paschasinus, whoexercised it several times, though he also concedes that the commissioners usuallypresided.62 F. L. Cross, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford, 1957), s.v. Leo I,St; 2nd edn. (1974); 3rd edn. by E. A. Livingstone (1997).63 Chadwick, Church, 571, brieXy notes that leading secular oYcials presided at allsessions except one, but does not probe their allegiances; Allen, ‘DeWnition’, 814,acknowledges that the imperial oYcials ensured orderly proceedings, but does notmention more substantive input; MeyendorV, Imperial Unity, 168, notes that thecommissioners led proceedings, but still manages to call the papal legate Paschasinusthe council’s ecclesiastical president, as if that position was signiWcant.64 Of the regular commissioners Martialis was an ex-magister oYciorum, beinglisted immediately after the current holder of the oYce, Vincomalus; at the sixthsession they were joined by Martialis’ immediate successor (and Vincomalus’ predecessor)Placitus, who was listed after Martialis. It is not clear why the former holdersof the post of magister oYciorum are treated diVerently from other ex-oYce holders,who are recorded in the list of senators.

The Council of Chalcedon 287may in the circumstances give a better expression of that function)and in the Latin iudices (judges). They numbered seven at the three ofthe Wrst four sessions when secular oYcials presided. On 25 Octoberat the climactic and celebratory sixth session, when Marcian andPulcheria were present to add solemnity to the unanimous acceptanceby the bishops of the new Creed and Marcian addressed theassembly, ten archontes attended. At most subsequent sessions farfewer archontes presided, often only three, though these were Anatolius,Palladius, and Vincomalus, who belonged to the top four interms of seniority.65 At each of the more important sessions thecommissioners, doubtless to magnify their prestige and lend weightto their interventions, were accompanied by a rather larger group ofsenior senators, of whom most were not currently holding magistracies;at the initial sessions the archontes were accompanied by 12senators, though 28 attended for the imperial visit; no senators werepresent for the later sessions. Collectively the combined archontesand senators form the most august and powerful body of dignitariesthat I have ever encountered in such a situation in the whole ofantiquity and they completely dominated the council’s proceedings.At the start of each session the archontes and senators in attendancewere personally identiWed by name as well as by the principal oYceseach had held.All members of the presiding party had the most illustrious titlespossible. Above the mere clarissimi, and later the spectabiles andillustres, of the Wrst four centuries, familiar to all Roman historians,there were now two supremely digniWed groups, magniWcentissimiand, at the very top, gloriosissimi, or in Greek megaloprepestatoi andendoxotatoi.66 Every one of the nineteen commissioners at Chalcedonhas both these titles, with only one probable exception who may havebeen merely magniWcentissimus.67 The whole group is referred to65 Apart from one or two slips in the record, the commissioners are always named inprecisely the same order, because rank and precedence were, of course, matters of thehighest importance in the Later Roman Empire. On this see Delmaire, ‘Dignitaires’.66 On senatorial ranks, see A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602:A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey (Oxford, 1964), 528–30.67 [The position may be more complicated: see Delmaire, ‘Dignitaires’, 157–61, fordiscussion of the two titles. In the Wrst session the Greek Acta record Martialis,Sporacius, and Genethlius with the single epithet megaloprepestatos, but at the secondsession Martialis and Sporacius are also accorded endoxotatos; Genethlius alone is

288 Church Councilsrepeatedly by very high-sounding phrases such as hoi megaloprepestatoikai endoxotatoi archontes kai hē huperphues sunklētos, or in LatinmagniWcentissimi et gloriosissimi iudices et amplissimus senatus. Itisworth pursuing these individuals a bit further.On numerous occasions in the Acta we are told that ‘the commissioners’,decorated with one of their exalted titles, said something ortook some action.68 Now, nineteen or so people—and not even thethree who presided at the later sessions—do not react to unforeseenand unrehearsed situations in an identical way and with identicalwords. No one, I think, who has studied late Roman procedure willdoubt that it would always be the senior member of the collectivewho would normally speak and take the necessary action; the restwould simply support him.69 Who, then, was the leading commissioneramong the nineteen? The name which appears Wrst at thebeginning of each of the fourteen sessions at which he presided is thatof Anatolius.70 Anatolius is commonly referred to by theologians, onthe rather rare occasions when they do notice his embarrassingpresence at all, simply as a patrician, which indeed he was since itwas a distinguished but not unusual title;71 but had he only beenpatrician he would not have ranked at the top of the team, or even inregularly just megaloprepestatos, which suggests that this is not a mistake. In the Latintext, however, at the Wrst four sessions all three men are merely magniWcentissimus,and in the lists for the sixth session, when Emperor Marcian attended, only the mostsenior individuals, Anatolius, Palladius, and Vincomalus as well as the fourex-consuls receive both epithets, which might suggest that there were not yet strictrules about the combined usage.]68 By contrast, commissioners and senators do not intervene individually.69 The same is true of Second Ephesus where Dioscorus undoubtedly determinedthe direction taken by the Wve leading bishops who were also held to be partlyresponsible for the conduct of proceedings and who were brieXy deposed at Chalcedon.The junior commissioners probably shared many of the views of their overallpresident or were judged to be suYciently impressionable to follow the required line.At Second Ephesus Juvenal of Jerusalem was the most committed of Dioscorus’associates, whereas Thalassius of Caesarea and the others appear more malleable.70 Numerous references in PLRE ii. 84–6, s.v. Anatolius 10; also Delmaire, ‘Dignitaires’,161–2. Anatolius did not preside at the third session when Dioscorus wascondemned by the bishops, while Marcian and Pulcheria were present at the sixth;session seven in the Greek Acta (15 in the Latin) was not a proper session of thecouncil but a list of the canons. Anatolius chaired all the other sessions.71 Patricians were not listed in PLRE ii, but the omission was made good in PLREiii. 1462–6: over 160 individuals are included in the list, of whom at least a dozen wereactive in the East in the mid-5th cent.

The Council of Chalcedon 289the top group of archontes of whom most were serving magistratesactually in oYce at the time of the council.72 The position whichplaced him among the archontes and at the top of the whole nineteenwas that of magister militum praesentalis, one of the two commandersof the central imperial armies, a man therefore whose troops werestationed in the vicinity of the council. As a strictly military man,Anatolius may have been second in the whole Eastern Empire only tothe great Aspar, who, with the empress Pulcheria, had been mostresponsible for bringing his former domesticus, or bodyguard,Marcian to the throne in the previous year.73 But Aspar was not onlyan Alan ‘barbarian’, he was also an Arian and so could not beadmitted to an orthodox Christian council. Anatolius, on the otherhand, was an orthodox Christian as well as being a senior commander;in addition, perhaps even more important, he was also amost distinguished and successful diplomat who, as magister militumper Orientem under Theodosius II, had negotiated a peace treaty withPersia in 441, and subsequently been selected for missions to Attilathe Hun in 447 and 450. It is no joke to say that the capacity to dealwith Attila, who emerges as a very wily negotiator from the accountsof embassies in Priscus—and Priscus had participated in one of thesemissions—had the appropriate experience for dealing with a gatheringof several hundred bishops and their attendants.74 Apart from72 Contra Delmaire, ‘Dignitaires’, 161–2, who places Anatolius’ appointment asMM praesentalis shortly after his return from the East, which forces him to concludethat he was out of oYce before April 449 when he was acclaimed at Edessa after thepraetorian prefect Protogenes, the quaestor Nomus, and the MM per OrientemZenon. Delmaire explained Anatolius’ priority at Chalcedon on the grounds thathis earliest holding of a senior title, that of MM, preceded all his colleagues, and thathe was the only imperial representative to have the title of patrician (which he sharedwith the ex-consuls among the senators). Delmaire’s chronology is wrong, and hefails to observe the signiWcance of Anatolius’ current military position as commanderof troops in the vicinity; he was in fact the only general, or ex-general, to attend thecouncil.73 Holum, Empresses, 208–9; Whitby, Evagrius, 60 n. 12; Burgess, ‘Accession’,attributes the elevation entirely to Aspar, but his scepticism about Pulcheria’s roleseems excessive.74 B. Croke, ‘Anatolius and Nomus: Envoys to Attila’, Byzantinoslavica, 42 (1981),159–70; repr. in idem, Christian Chronicles and Byzantine History 5 th –6 th Centuries(Aldershot, 1992), xiii. [The notion of Christian bishops being as much of achallenge as Attila greatly appealed to Ste. Croix.]

290 Church CouncilsAnatolius, Wve of the other commissioners and senators are alsoknown to have been sent on oYcial embassies: Tatian (third in thelists), Florentius (8th), Senator (9th), Nomus (10th), Constantine(17th).75 The three commissioners who regularly follow Anatolius inthe lists are men of considerable experience who between them heldthe three most powerful administrative posts in the empire: Palladius,praetorian prefect of the east, Tatian, city prefect at Constantinople,and Vincomalus, the magister oYciorum for the east.76I began this part of my discussion by saying that I was going to givean illustration of the gulf between the historical and theologicalapproaches to Chalcedon, and I am now in a position to explainexactly what I had in mind. In the enormous volume edited byGrillmeier and Bacht, Das Konzil von Chalkedon, a volume whichhas a comprehensive index occupying 188 double-columned pages,Pope Leo, who did not of course attend the council, has almost twowhole columns to himself; Theodoret has nearly four inches, andanother Anatolius, the patriarch of Constantinople, has some twoinches—but the great Anatolius, the man who was primarily responsiblefor running the council, is simply not there at all: if the index isnot at fault, and I am sure that it is not, then he is entirely ignored.77Even Frend’s Monophysite Movement, a volume which is more sensitiveto historical issues, does not recognize the signiWcance ofAnatolius, and yet Frend was well aware of the role of emperors indeciding doctrinal issues:78 Anatolius is mentioned once, in thecontext of acclamations at Edessa in 449, but not in relation to75 Senator and Nomus had been identiWed, along with Anatolius, by Attila asacceptable Roman envoys (Priscus fr. 13.1.13–14), and in 450 Nomus had accompaniedAnatolius to Attila (Priscus fr. 15.3, 4); see also Croke, ‘Anatolius’, 167–70.76 In March 452 these three oYcials, along with Valentinian the praetorian prefectof Illyricum, received the decrees of Marcian conWrming the acts of the council, aswell as its decisions on Flavian and Eutyches (ACO ii.i.479–83, §§ 23–5); their postscollectively gave them the range of authority to oversee the implementation of itsprovisions. Valentinian, the most prominent absentee, was presumably preventedfrom attending the council by the business in Illyricum which had threatened todistract Marcian.77 [These Wgures are not entirely fair, since most of these massive volumes isconcerned with the doctrinal background to the council and its aftermath, in bothof which the Tome of Leo was crucial so that Leo’s predominance is not surprising;but the omission of the secular Anatolius is still a signiWcant fact.]78 Frend, Monophysite Movement, 45–6 for Chalcedon, and ch. 2 more generally.

The Council of Chalcedon 291Chalcedon, where Marcian is presented as a prime mover.79 YetAnatolius’ personal position in the great theological controversywhich the council was summoned to settle can easily be identiWedfrom his correspondence with Theodoret, who was the subject of acrucially important decision by the commissioners early in the Wrstsession at Chalcedon. Anatolius was no neutral. He is the closest andmost regular of Theodoret’s secular correspondents. We possessseven letters to him from Theodoret, of which six were writtenduring the period of the bishop’s disgrace in the latter years ofTheodosius when Theodoret hoped that Anatolius would help toremove the various imperial restrictions which had been imposed(Eps. 79. 92) or secure imperial approval for a journey to Rome forjudgement by the Pope (Ep. 119). Apart from this signiWcant associationwith Theodoret, Anatolius had a long-standing reputation fororthodox involvement in church aVairs: in 433 Paul of Emesa wroteto him about church unity shortly after the reconciliation betweenJohn of Antioch and Cyril had been achieved. In 442 he dedicated asilver reliquary for the bones of Thomas at Edessa, a sign of Christiandevotion, but it might be signiWcant that the local bishop was thenIbas, who was associated with Theodoret and anti-AlexandrianChristological views (he was a casualty at Second Ephesus). Of courseMarcian, who in principle chose all the commissioners, would havetaken particular care over the selection of his chief representative andso can retain some claim to be the prime mover at the council, but hischosen agent deserves much more attention than he is traditionallyaccorded: Anatolius was unlikely to be favourably disposed towardsDioscorus and the Alexandrian cause.8079 Frend, Monophysite Movement, 67, quoting the Edessa acclamation ‘Long livethe Patrician Anatolius. May he be preserved for Romania’, which is preserved inthe Syriac Acta of Second Ephesus (Frend’s reference to Flemming is unhelpful: theprecise location of the quote is p. 17, lines 45–6, and there are other chants forAnatolius at 17.10–12 and 25.45).80 The only possible evidence that might undermine this is the chant for Anatoliusamong the Edessa acclamations of 449 (see above); this demonstration was directedagainst Ibas, so that positive comments for a friend of Ibas might seem strange, butAnatolius appears in a sequence of important Wgures (Zeno, Chrysaphius, Stratelates,Patricius, Urbicius) and it is likely that the anti-Nestorian demonstrators wanted toreassure one of Ibas’ more powerful supporters that he was not being included intheir attack on the bishop.

292 Church CouncilsIt might be signiWcant that we have letters from Theodoret to twoof the other commissioners, Vincomalus and Sporacius, and Wve ofthe senators including all the Wrst four to be named, Florentius (8),Senator (9), Nomus (10), and Protogenes (11), along with Constantine(17).81 One letter survives from Theodoret to Vincomalus whichconveys thanks for the assistance in securing his return from exileafter the death of Theodosius II (Ep. 141); therefore Vincomalus, likeAnatolius, was a supporter of Theodoret before the council wassummoned. Sporacius, the uncle of Anatolius, is another establishedally; Theodoret had written to him in late 448, when he was alreadyunder pressure from Theodosius (Ep. 97); Sporacius also acceptedthe dedication of Theodoret’s compendium on heresies, and could bedescribed as his patron by Michael the Syrian (8.13). Florentius alsoreceived letters in the late 440s (Eps. 89, v), but appears to havesupported a diVerent doctrinal stance, since in November 448 Theodosiusappointed him as a person of guaranteed orthodoxy to attendFlavian’s investigation of Eutyches’ views (ACO ii.i.138, § 468; seeabove) and then to participate in the subsequent inquiry into theseproceedings;82 he does not receive the sort of begging or thankingletters addressed to the likes of Anatolius, Vincomalus, and others.Theodoret had asked Senator to help with a tax remission forCyrrhus in 446/7, and then approached him again in November448 to urge that he listen favourably to bishops who were inConstantinople to plead Theodoret’s case (Eps. 44, 93). Nomus wassent a defence of Theodoret’s orthodoxy in 448 but appears not tohave reacted since in November Theodoret wrote again wonderingwhy he had not responded to earlier letters (Eps. 58, 81, 96). Nomus’position seems to have been ambiguous: he was prepared to lendmoney to two nephews of Cyril of Alexandria, whose relatives cameunder pressure after his death in 444 from his successor Dioscorus(Theodoret’s most determined enemy), but charged an extortionate81 For full references on all these individuals, see PLRE ii.82 Florentius’ doctrinal views are obscured by the problems in the record ofFlavian’s proceedings against Eutyches, whose accuracy he questioned rigorously,and he attempted to deny some of the statements attributed to him (ACO ii.i.172,§ 778). If Theodoret had regarded him as a potential ally, then he would probablyhave written to him in Nov. 448 along the same lines that he did to Sporacius, thoughthe lack of such a letter from the collection is not decisive evidence.

The Council of Chalcedon 293rate of interest which he used an imperial oYcial to collect (ACOii.i.216–18, § 57). In 449 he was regarded as close to the position ofChrysaphius in supporting Eutyches, another of Theodoret’s bitterenemies, over the imperial decision to summon the Second Councilof Ephesus (Theodore Lector 346). His presence at Chalcedon suggeststhat he was one of the numerous secular as well as ecclesiasticalleaders who were prepared to trim their views according to theprevailing imperial preferences; participation was perhaps intendedas a test of his allegiance to the change of doctrine. In his capacity aspraetorian prefect of the east Protogenes received a letter fromTheodoret in 448/9, similar to those sent to Anatolius and Senator,to ask that he ensure he had a fair hearing when defending accusationsof heresy (Ep. 94). Constantine too was PPO, in which capacityhe received a request for tax relief for Cyrrhus, and one subsequentletter (Ep. 42, xix).Theodoret’s links with the commissioners are signiWcant, eventhough some of the letters originated from the sort of contacts thata provincial bishop might be expected to have with high oYcialsresponsible for taxation and security matters.83 The fact that not allthe connections are positive, however, does help to highlight thediVerent nature of Anatolius’ association:84 his contacts with Theodoretare closer than for any of his colleagues.85 Theodoret’s aVairsare not the only signiWcant factor relating to the commissioners.Tatian, for example, was trusted to act as intermediary betweenPope Leo and Marcian in April 451, which suggests that he was83 Though both Zoilus and Apollinaris (present at Chalcedon as senators) servedas praetorian prefect of the east in the early 440s, but are not among the correspondentsof Theodoret.84 W. E. Kaegi, Byzantine Military Unrest 471–843 (Amsterdam, 1981), 78 assertedwith regard to leading generals that there was ‘little evidence of partisanship arisingfrom their personal religious views’. Overall this statement is true, which makes thecase of Anatolius all the more interesting.85 [Ste. Croix recognized the importance of Theodoret’s correspondence, andinvestigated it with regard to Anatolius, but did not pursue it further: in his seminarpresentations on Chalcedon he would comment about his lack of interest in thedetails of prosopography, which he preferred to have undertaken for him by others.Although he might initially have been surprised by the presence among the commissionersof Theodoret’s former opponents, Florentius and Nomus, this would haveprovided further evidence for the power of imperial patronage to aVect doctrinalviews.]

294 Church Councilsdoctrinally in sympathy (Leo, Ep. 82). Martialis, however, hadattended the inquiry in April 449 into Flavian’s treatment ofEutyches, like Florentius, and so is likely to have been sympatheticto One Nature views at that stage. Romanus, the former praepositussacri cubiculi and member of the presiding group at the Wrst, second,fourth, and sixth sessions, was among those who received Cyril’sbribes in 431/2, but the trajectory of Pulcheria’s views illustratesthat allegiances could change over two decades. Overall, Anatoliusremains the key individual; some of his colleagues might be expectedto oVer strong support to moves in favour of Theodoret and againstEutyches, whereas a few had records which might suggest the reversebut whose prominence now might constrain them to acquiescencewith the imperial agenda.Theodoret at ChalcedonIn justiWcation of the thesis about the high degree of control thatwould be exercised over the Christian churches by an emperorwho had the inclination and the requisite inXuence, I shall concentratenow on a particular event at Chalcedon, the admission tothe assembly of Theodoret. In the 430s and 440s Theodoret was theleading theologian in the Antiochene Christological tradition and,after the death of Cyril of Alexandria, he could claim to be foremostin the Greek-speaking world. He also produced a history ofthe Church as a continuation of Eusebius; this was probablyWnished by 450, while he was deposed from his see, but its coverageonly extended down to 428, thereby enabling Theodoret to evadethe problems associated with the patriarchy of Nestorius whichincluded imperial opposition to his own views. Patriarch Photiuswas complimentary about the style, which he found to be appropriate—clear,elevated, and restrained, although the use of metaphorswas sometimes excessive (Cod. 31). As to content, it hasbeen noted that Theodoret’s attitude to imperial involvement inchurch aVairs was much more negative than that of the twoother contemporary ecclesiastical historians, Socrates and Sozomen:his account of the Council of Nicaea gives Constantine muchless credit than Socrates’ version, or than Eusebius in his Life of

The Council of Chalcedon 295Constantine.86 One further work was the Historia Religiosa, a collectionof stories about Holy Men (and a few women); most came fromSyria, and Theodoret recorded his own dealings with some of themore prominent contemporary saints, for example Symeon Stylitesand Jacob of Cyrrhus. Theodoret was a prominent theologian with adistinctive Christological position in an age when theology could be adangerous occupation87—the more dangerous indeed the moreseriously it was pursued, however harmless it might seem to a mereVicar of Bray, a species which, even in its episcopal form, was not atall uncommon in the Wfth century, as we shall see presently.I cannot hope to describe in a few sentences the theology ofTheodoret and how it diVered from that of his opponents. All I willsay is that it was characteristically ‘Antiochene’, as opposed to theAlexandrian variety espoused by Cyril and Dioscorus, and that Dioscorus,recognizing that Theodoret was his most dangerous intellectualenemy, was keen to have him excluded from discussions. Thishad been achieved in the preliminaries to Second Ephesus whenEmperor Theodosius issued an edict conWning Theodoret to hisown diocese of Cyrrhus. It was a measure of the great importanceattached to Theodoret as an intellectual spokesman for the opponentsof Dioscorus and Eutyches that the edict is said to have beenwritten out in the emperor’s own hand, that it was brought personallyto Theodoret, who was apparently at Antioch, by an importantimperial oYcial, the comes Rufus, and that a few days later an oYcialof the magister militum per Orientem went to Cyrrhus to verify thatTheodoret had gone back there as ordered, and to make him sign anacknowledgement that he had received the edict (Theodoret, Ep. 79,80). I know of no parallel for such a series of measures directedagainst an individual cleric, not even the extremely diYcult Athanasiusof Alexandria who was expelled from his see more than once.8886 H. Leppin, ‘The Church Historians (I): Socrates, Sozomenus, and Theodoretus’,in G. Marasco (ed.), Greek and Roman Historiography in Late Antiquity: Fourth toSixth Century A.D. (Leiden, 2003), 219–54, at 230–1, 242.87 It is arguable that the production of his Eranistēs, with its attack on Eutyches’One Nature Christology, reawakened doctrinal controversy and triggered thesequence of events which led to Second Ephesus and hence Chalcedon.88 On Athanasius, see T. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politicsin the Constantinian Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), esp. chs. 3 and 11.

296 Church CouncilsThe Acta of Chalcedon, in the section where the proceedings ofSecond Ephesus are read into the record, preserve two letters fromTheodosius which state that he had forbidden Theodoret to attendthe forthcoming council at Ephesus unless the council itself shouldspeciWcally invite him (ACO ii.i.68–9, 74, §§ 24, 52); the texts make itclear that the emperor detested Theodoret because of his oppositionto Cyril of Alexandria, whom he had anathematized in the 430s, andwhose Twelve Anathemas he had subjected to such searching challengethat their full acceptance was delayed. Theodosius clearlywanted to have Theodoret excluded from the council, which dulyhappened, and in his absence he was virulently attacked, expelledfrom his see, deprived of clerical status, and anathematized. The Actaof Second Ephesus, although incompletely preserved, contain theedict later issued by Theodosius which not only endorses the depositionof Theodoret but associates his writings with those of theheresiarch Nestorius and even of the pagan Porphyry, and ordersthat these are to be delivered up to be publicly burnt. We possessseveral of Theodoret’s letters written over the following monthswhich show him in a state of great distress at his expulsion fromthe see he had occupied for twenty-six years and where he hadcampaigned energetically against various heresies.89 The burning ofbooks regarded as heretical, or which attacked Christianity as in thecase of Porphyry, was prescribed by Christian emperors from Constantineonwards in the case of serious challenges to the faith.90 ThatTheodoret should now be singled out for such treatment testiWes againto his importance as a theologian. Theodoret’s absence from SecondEphesus meant that Flavian and other opponents of Eutyches andDioscorus were deprived of their most eVective potential defender,which made their own condemnation a foregone conclusion.9189 Theodoret, Eps. 113–25, esp. 113 to Pope Leo, 119 to Anatolius of Constantinople,and 125 to John of Germanicia.90 P. R. Coleman-Norton, Roman State and Christian Church (London, 1966), iii.1293 (index s.v. book-burning). There is a very full treatment by W. Speyer, Büchervernichtungund Zensur des Geistes bei Heiden, Juden und Christen (Stuttgart, 1981).91 Theodoret did his best by providing Domnus of Antioch with detailed advicebefore his departure to the council: Ep. 112; to no avail. At Chalcedon he contributedto refuting objections to the Tome of Leo by pointing to useful parallels in thewritings of Cyril of Alexandria (ACO ii.i.82, § 26).

The Council of Chalcedon 297Then came the great change in the aVairs of the Eastern Churchwhich I mentioned earlier, the death of Theodosius, and the successionof Marcian in August 450. We possess letters from both Marcianand Pulcheria to Pope Leo, dating from November 450, whichcontain some exceedingly important information that rarely, ifever, is accorded its full weight:92 Marcian proclaims not only thathe had personally recalled from exile all the bishops who had beenremoved at Second Ephesus but, explicitly, that this had been done sothat they might receive back their sees by the decision of a churchcouncil, which was then already in prospect. We also have Theodoret’sletters to three of the most inXuential men in the empire,Anatolius, Aspar, and Vincomalus, written early in 451 after he hadreceived the news of Marcian’s edict, which, plausibly enough, heattributes to Pulcheria also (Eps. 139–41). They all express his delightat what he calls, in the letter addressed to Anatolius, the righting ofthe wrong done to himself (Ep. 139).93 Now, technically, the emperorand empress could not by themselves reinstate Theodoret and theother victims of Second Ephesus in their sees: this could only be doneby a church council, preferably an ecumenical council such as Theodorethad been eagerly advocating and the imperial pair were nowplanning.94 Theodoret and the others, however, now had permissionto return to their own cities, and since it was known that the emperorhad annulled his predecessor’s edict and brought back the menconcerned speciWcally with a view to their reinstatement as bishops,that was now certain to happen. For Theodoret in early 451, as justmentioned, it was now a foregone conclusion since he can speak ofthe wrong done to himself as having already been righted. Everyonein the diVerent sees would have known what was about to occur, andhave adjusted their behaviour accordingly.9592 Preserved as Leo, Eps. 76–7 (ACO ii.i.1, pp. 8–10 for the Greek texts; ii.iii.18–19for the Latin).93 Theodoret’s closeness to Anatolius is shown by the fact that his letter is farlonger than those to the other two supporters, indeed almost matching their combinedlengths.94 De Vries, Orient, 107.95 [Richard Price argues (‘Letters before Council’, Introduction) that a council wasnot necessary to secure Theodoret’s reinstatement, since Marcian’s edict had alreadyeVected this. This may well be right, but the treatment of Theodoret at the eighthsession of Chalcedon indicates that his position still required the sort of doctrinalvalidation that the emperor could not bestow.]

298 Church CouncilsI now come to two very revealing episodes at Chalcedon, on 8 and26 October, which constitute the climax in the saga of Theodoret. Atthe opening session of the council, 8 October 451, the nineteenimperial commissioners headed by Anatolius took their seats in theChurch of St Euphemia at Chalcedon, with clerics to their right andleft—mainly bishops, but in a few cases priests representing theirabsent bishops (some absentees were represented by neighbouringbishops). On their left sat the three oYcial papal legates, the patriarchsof Constantinople and Antioch with their subordinate bishopsfrom the dioceses (i.e. the late Roman civil dioceses) of Pontica,Asiana and Thrace, and of Oriens, with the exception of Palestinewhose bishops sat with the bishop of Jerusalem. These bishops werenow prepared without exception to follow an Orthodox line. Onwhat the Acta call the right sat the patriarch of Alexandria, Dioscorus,with the Egyptian bishops, Bishop Juvenal of Jerusalem withthe bishops of Palestine, and bishops from the civil diocese ofIllyricum; all of these had recently been allies of Dioscorus, andretained some attachment to him during the proceedings of Chalcedonas some of their interventions reveal.96 This placing represented96 The overall number of bishops at the council is somewhat uncertain, since thesubscriptions vary for the diVerent sessions and some bishops certainly had theirsignatures added after the event (for example to demonstrate support for thecondemnation of Dioscorus). An inXated Wgure of 600, roughly double the attendanceat Nicaea, was already being mentioned at the fourth session of Chalcedon (ACOii.i.113, § 53). However, the best attended session was the Wrst, with 340 participatingwhen bishops might have thought there was still some chance to determine theoverall direction of proceedings, with the sixth session, at which the emperor waspresent, being next with 324 in attendance. Attendance obviously varied according tothe bishops’ commitment to the particular business of the day, with the proceedingsagainst Dioscorus at the third session only attracting 204. There were also ‘supernumeraries’present at some sessions whose voices at least might contribute to thegeneral clamour (ii.i.75, 78, §§ 55, 74), and these may have been included in some ofthe more optimistic calculations by those interested in maximizing support forproceedings. Opponents of the council were keen to belittle the numbers and statusof those in attendance: see Michael the Syrian 8.13 (ii, pp. 98, 102 for the assertionthat fewer than 300 attended the Wrst session, while no more than 200 were presentfor Dioscorus’ condemnation, with in each case the numbers including priests anddeacons as well as bishops). [Ste. Croix suggested that there were several bishops inthe vicinity who never participated in a session, but it seems implausible that churchleaders would endure the discomforts of travel to Chalcedon and the inconveniencesof lengthy absence from their own sees and yet be content not to appear at anysession. One possible explanation would be that there were unoYcial quotas for

The Council of Chalcedon 299the great division between those who called themselves Orthodox,on the commissioners’ left, and the Monophysites on the right. Ofcourse the right was always the place of honour and the left of relativedebasement;97 but we must understand the Acta to be referring tothe right and left of the imperial commissioners who had their seatsfacing the mass of bishops seated in the nave of the church. Thebishops would, of course, see the placings in the opposite way, withthe Orthodox approved by the emperor grouped on the right andthose to be disciplined or reprimanded on the left. The symbolismwas such that when Juvenal decided to switch allegiance at the veryWrst session he moved, together with the contingent from Palestine,from one side of the commissioners to the other, where they werewelcomed by the Orientals, ‘God has led you well, orthodox one.You are welcome’ (ACO ii.i.115, §§ 284–5); they were followed bythe Illyrican bishops and four from Egypt (ACO ii.i.115–17, §§286–98).Dioscorus had pronounced an anathema on Pope Leo on arrivingin Asia for the council, so that open religious war had been more orless declared between Alexandria and Rome. Immediately proceedingsbegan the papal legates protested against his presence as amember of the council: ‘We have instructions from the most blessedand apostolic bishop of the city of Rome, the head of all the churches,in which he has thought it right to say that Dioscorus should not takea seat in the assembly, and that if he presumes to do so, he should beexpelled. This we are obliged to observe. If it pleases your Greatness,either he must leave or we will leave’ (ACO ii.i.65, § 5). They alonespoke in Latin, and their short interventions were usually translatedat once into Greek, often by Veronicianus, secretary to the imperialconsistory, though the interpreter is not always speciWed. Probablymany of the other bishops understood some Latin, however imperfectly,although there were only two bishops from the West apartdiVerent dioceses to prevent domination by any one episcopal interest group, withthe result that a metropolitan might travel with some ‘reserves’. At First Ephesus, forexample, metropolitans had been invited by Emperor Theodosius to attend withlimited numbers of attendant bishops, although this was ignored by Cyril in particular;there is, however, no evidence for such a provision at Chalcedon, and it is simplestto admit that numbers were much lower than claimed by the council’s supporters.]97 Cf. Priscus fr. 13.1.33–5 for arrangements at a banquet held by Attila.

300 Church Councilsfrom the papal legates.98 It is possible that at the third session, whenthe papal legates were in control, translations were not alwaysprovided: sometimes the involvement of an interpreter is noted(ACO ii.i.206, § 18), but the legates may have expected other Latinpronouncements to be understood or have relied on Aetius, thearchdeacon and chief notary, to enact their instructions or providesuYcient paraphrase of their words to permit proceedings tocontinue (ACO ii.i.204–6, 211, §§ 4, 8–9, 42–3).After an exchange between the legates and the commissioners, inwhich the latter insisted that the speciWc charges against Dioscorus bestated, the plea for Dioscorus to be excluded was refused. It isprobable that the complete exchange was not recorded in the Acta,since there are likely to have been further interventions, including byDioscorus, before the commissioners adopted a sensible compromisewhich they addressed to Dioscorus, ‘If you are acting as judge, youcannot in that capacity plead your cause’ (ACO ii.i.66, § 13):99Dioscorus would not be excluded, though also he would not sit asa full member of the council but in the middle of the two groups, asan accused person rather than a judge. The Pope’s representativeshad to accept this decision, and business could continue once Dioscorushad moved to the middle ‘and the most devout Roman bishopshad also sat down in their proper places and had ceased speaking’(ACO ii.i.66, § 14). The implication is that the papal representativeswere not best pleased with the result; in the brief tussle for controlthey had failed to secure their wishes outright, while the commissionershad managed to keep the western delegates at Chalcedon anddemonstrate their own superior authority. Thereupon Bishop Eusebiusof Dorylaeum, a very tough individual who had once been animperial agens in rebus,100 came forward to denounce Dioscorus,98 Aurelius the African and Restitianus the African (ACO ii.i.64, § 3.341, 343),who may well have now been resident in Constantinople, refugees from the ArianVandals; invitations had not been sent to western bishops apart from the Pope and hisrepresentatives. Note Schwartz’s observations in ACO ii.i, p. xv about the lack ofbilingual skills in the Church at this time.99 In the light of later exchanges it is most unlikely that the Oriental bishops didnot chip in with some comments about their arch enemy or that the Egyptians didnot voice support for their leader.100 Collectio Avellana 99.4 (CSEL 35.1, p. 441); for the position, see Jones, LaterRoman Empire, 578–82.

The Council of Chalcedon 301accusing him of disgraceful behaviour at Second Ephesus anddemanding that the Acta of that council should now be read out.After another brief exchange the commissioners ordered this to bedone. The Acta began with the letter of Emperor Theodosius bywhich the council was convened and which ended with the statementreferred to earlier that Theodoret should be excluded from thecouncil at Ephesus unless it issued a speciWc invitation to him.I suggest that the reading of the letter in question, which convenientlyended with the question of Theodoret, had been agreed beforehandbetween Eusebius and the commissioners, since the latterpromptly interrupted and ordered that Theodoret should join thecouncil: ‘Let the most devout Theodoret enter and take part in theCouncil, since the most holy archbishop Leo has restored his see tohim, and the most divine and pious emperor has decreed his attendanceat the holy Council’ (ACO ii.i.69, § 26). Now the Pope, ofcourse, had no power to intervene in the aVairs of an eastern see,except in his own opinion of his universal rights and in so far asothers might Wnd it useful to invoke his prestige in their favour; hewas certainly a most useful ally now for the proponents of TwoNature Christology. The essential fact was that the commissionerswere able to report that the emperor had commanded the admissionof Theodoret. The bishops on the other side, who are described asthose of Egypt, Illyricum, and Palestine, put up a determined Wght,shouting ‘Have mercy, the faith is being destroyed. The canonsexclude him. Drive him out. Drive out the teacher of Nestorius’—the expression exō bale occurs no fewer than fourteen times at thispoint within about a single page of the Acta (ACO ii.i.69–70, §§27–40), as well as innumerable times later on. Slogans were shoutedacross the Xoor from each side. Theodoret’s opponents were furiousat hearing the commissioners accord him the title of bishop: ‘Do notcall him a bishop, he is no bishop. He is not a bishop. Drive out theenemy of God. Drive out the Jew’ (ACO ii.i.70, § 37); they alsoappealed to the Augusta Pulcheria, hoping that she would continueto demonstrate hostility to Nestorians and not realizing where herallegiance now lay. The Orthodox group was equally violent in itslanguage in the opposite direction: ‘Drive out the Manichaeans.Drive out the enemies of Flavian. Drive out the enemies of theFaith’, ‘Drive out the murderer Dioscorus’ (ACO ii.i.69, §§ 28, 30).

302 Church Councils‘Jew’ and ‘Manichee’ were standard accusations to be exploitedagainst opponents,101 while Dioscorus could be held responsible forthe death of Flavian of Constantinople who succumbed while beingled oV into exile after Second Ephesus.Eventually the imperial commissioners felt that they had givensuYcient rein to the mutual animosity of the bishops. They insistedthat Theodoret should remain, which he did for the present, sittingin the middle in his capacity of accuser just as Dioscorus sat there asan accused,102 and that the Acta of Second Ephesus should be read;Theodoret’s presence would not be prejudicial to anyone, sinceeveryone had free speech, while Maximus of Antioch could vouchfor his orthodoxy. After further exchanges they commanded thebishops to be silent, ‘These vulgar outbursts are not becoming tobishops, nor useful to either party. Allow everything to be read’ (ACOii.i.70, §§ 35, 44). The Egyptians made one last eVort, pleading thatthey would be silent if Theodoret alone were expelled: ‘Our interjectionsare in the cause of piety. We speak on behalf of the orthodoxfaith’—by which they naturally meant their own belief in the OneNature in Christ. But the commissioners overrode them, ‘Let, rather,the hearing be conducted according to God, and allow everything tobe read in order’ (ACO ii.i.70, §§ 45–6). Long extracts from the Actaof Second Ephesus, mainly documents, were then read out byConstantine, magistrianus and secretary to the imperial consistory.This revealed a story which reXected great discredit on many of thebishops now at Chalcedon, a fact which undoubtedly further tiltedthe balance in favour of both the commissioners and the papallegates, since at Second Ephesus the pope’s representative Hilarywas perhaps the only participant to emerge with any credit.The complete rehabilitation of Theodoret was never going to bethwarted, but it was not until the eighth session on 26 October thatthe process was completed.103 Theodoret’s enemies did ensure that he101 Since Nestorians were alleged to reject the full divinity of Christ, to be called‘Jew’ appeared an appropriate insult (cf. Evagrius 1.2), whereas ‘Manichees’ whoaccepted that Christ was special but not equal to God was an insult applicable tothose who were believed to impugn the equality of Christ the Son with God the Father.102 Presumably Nestorius, if he had survived to obey the invitation to attend,would also have been placed in the middle to await a decision.103 ACO ii.i, pp. 368–70 (Actio IX (Latin VIII), §§ 4–25).

The Council of Chalcedon 303was made to swallow a most bitter pill by having to pronounce ananathema against his long-standing friend Nestorius. Theodoret wasmost reluctant to oblige, but as soon as he hesitated there wereferocious cries, ‘This man is a heretic, a Nestorian. Drive out theheretic’ (exō bale again). Eventually he had to obey orders andpronounce a speciWc anathema against Nestorius (ACO ii.i.368,§ 13), at which point the imperial commissioners immediatelyweighed in again, insisting that all doubts about Theodoret’s faithwere now removed; Theodoret thereafter remained back in post asbishop of Cyrrhus.Episcopal Decision-MakingA moment ago, when I skipped from the Wrst to a later session of thecouncil, I mentioned that a situation had been revealed at the Wrstsession which was most discreditable to many bishops. Chalcedonwitnessed extraordinary changes in the dogmatic position of dozensof bishops, which raises the question of how so many could bepersuaded to change their allegiance on such a crucial matter asChristology. The bishops known by name to have been present atSecond Ephesus have been shown by Honigmann to have numberedabout 145–50, depending on how they are counted.104 When Flavianof Constantinople was condemned on 8 August, the only participantrecorded as speaking against this verdict in the parts of the Actareread into those of Chalcedon was Hilary, the Roman deacon whowas then Pope Leo’s legate and would succeed him as Pope in 461: theGreek Acta record him as saying kontradikitour, adding ‘that is todissent’ (ACO ii.i.191, § 964), after which he took refuge at the altar.Before the session on 22 August at which Theodoret and otherbishops were condemned, Hilary had prudently departed Ephesus;he later claimed to have feared for his safety (Leo, Ep. 46). With thisexception (and Hilary was not at Chalcedon to take credit for hisprescience), the bishops unanimously accepted the One NatureChristology associated with Eutyches and Dioscorus, and supportedthe various condemnations. Yet Honigmann has shown that the great104 E. Honigmann, ‘The Original Lists of the Members of the Council of Nicaea,the Robber Synod and the Council of Chalcedon’, Byzantion, 16 (1942/3), 20–80.

304 Church Councilsmajority of bishops at Second Ephesus, all but about twenty-six, werepresent or represented among the larger numbers at Chalcedon,where they all, with the exception of Dioscorus, took the oppositeline. How many of this group can have been sincere on both occasions?It looks as though dozens of bishops, on one or other occasion,committed themselves to a theological position which they did nothold and indeed had regarded as heretical immediately before theirchange of heart: such inconsistency would, surely, be fatal to theirchances of eternal life (see, for example, the story in Plērophories 9).One of those who changed their stance at Chalcedon, Theodore ofClaudiopolis, described the pressures on bishops at Second Ephesus:these arose partly through the fear that people who had receivedbaptism from them would be ruined, partly because of confusedorganization which left many bishops uncertain of what was happening,and partly because of intimidation by Dioscorus’supporters—out of 135 bishops, 42 had been ordered to be silentand only 15 were left to oppose the actions of Dioscorus and Juvenal(ACO ii.i.76, § 62). Dioscorus was certainly a determined leader forthe council: not content with vocal support from the assembledbishops, at one point he demanded a show of hands to conWrmwhat was being said (ACO i.i.140, § 494), and all decisions naturallyhad to be subscribed in due course.Respect for authority was one factor: as Theodore of Claudiopoliscontinued, ‘Dioscorus and Juvenal and all those who signed Wrst had,as orthodox, been entrusted by the master of the world with passingjudgement in matters of the faith. Plotting nefariously among themselves,they made us act as judges, who were sitting there in allinnocence as men ignorant of the aVair’ (ACO ii.i.76, § 62): howcould a minor bishop oppose such leaders of the Church? Even quitea prominent bishop could proclaim the need to follow authority:thus when Dioscorus accused Basil of Seleucia of failing to uphold hisbeliefs at Ephesus, ‘Have you, out of respect for human beings,transgressed what is correct and rejected the faith?’, Basil respondedby emphasizing the importance of clerical obedience: ‘If I had beenup before secular oYcials I would have borne witness, for I displayedunfettered speech at Constantinople. But if one is judged by one’sfather, one cannot defend oneself’ (ACO ii.i.94, §§ 179–80). Thisrespect is shown in some of the formulae used by subscribing

The Council of Chalcedon 305bishops, where the opinion of their metropolitan, or of leadingpatriarchs, might be cited: ‘It is a most pious rule that one mustobey the holy fathers and heed their decisions . . .’, ‘I make the samejudgement as my metropolitan and the holy council . . .’ (ACOii.iii.312–13, 322, §§ 43, 130).105An emphatic exposition of the currently favoured doctrinal linewas another factor, especially for bishops who were not expert in theintellectual gymnastics of advanced Christological debate. At SecondEphesus Dioscorus forcefully pursued the plausible argument that itwas wrong to go beyond the deWnitions of Nicaea, Constantinople,and First Ephesus, an argument which clearly still resonated with thebishops at Chalcedon, since this explained their very reluctant acquiescencein the imperial instruction that a new creed be formulated(ACO ii.i.274, §§ 5, 7).106 If patriarchs and metropolitans expressedsupport for a particular view, then ordinary bishops were likely tofollow; consensus could be achieved by securing the support of arelatively small number of key participants. Even an individual withstrong views on the faith might be persuaded to adapt his terminologyif he had the chance to discuss issues in the presence ofsomeone in whom he had conWdence, as the exchanges betweenEutyches and Florentius at Constantinople in April 448 illustrate:‘The most magniWcent and glorious ex-prefect, ex-consul and patricianFlorentius said: ‘‘Since the mother is consubstantial with us,then in every way the Son is consubstantial with us.’’ Eutyches thepresbyter said, ‘‘Till today I did not say this . . . Before I did notsay this of Him; I am saying to you what, I think, I did not sayoriginally. But now, since your Sacredness has said it, I say it’’’ (ACOii.i.139–44, §§ 478–545, quoting from 521–2).107 Florentius seems tohave been trying to encourage the assembly eVectively to leadEutyches through a series of stages designed to produce an orthodox105 See above, nn. 56–7.106 As van Parys, ‘Council’, 309, notes, distaste for innovation was a powerfulconsideration, so that the alleged fear and coercion were not the only motivatingfactors at Second Ephesus. For a blanket defence of that council, see Samuel,‘Proceedings’.107 Florentius’ intentions are made absolutely clear during the review of Flavian’sproceedings against Eutyches when, in addition to objecting to certain misrepresentationsof his words in the Acta, he explained ‘but because I saw everyone exertingpressure on him, I was urging him to give his assent’ (ACO ii.i.172, § 776).

306 Church Councilsconfession, though this was negated by the determination of Flavianand Eusebius to have Eutyches condemned.Disorganization is another issue noted by Theodore of Claudiopolis.We know rather little about the detailed procedure of a council.Proceedings were controlled by a president or presidents who shoulddetermine the business of the day. Each session presumably beganwith a roll-call of those present, since the Acta for each session beginwith a list of names which does not necessarily tally exactly withthose who might later subscribe the decisions of that session. Participantswere seated, and usually made their interventions while stillseated, since occasional exceptions are noted in the form that so-andso‘stood and spoke’ (ACO ii.i.144, § 546). Moments of high dramawere signalled by departures from this norm, as when Eustathius ofBeirut leapt into the middle of the meeting, brandishing a book in anattempt to excuse his part in Second Ephesus (ACO ii.i.113, §265).108 Formal complaints or petitions were presented in writing,to be read by a notary, with the individual responsible being requiredto come forward into the middle, as Eusebius of Dorylaeum on theWrst day at Chalcedon (ACO ii.i.66, §§ 14–15). Proposals to initiateaction or to read items into the Acta were usually made by metropolitanbishops, another example of the importance of seniority.Exchanges must often have been quite rowdy, with two or moreopposed groups chanting and individuals also attempting to makethemselves heard. Although it might sometimes have been convenientto plead deafness, there is considerable plausibility in the excuseof Bishop Julian, ‘Because there was an uproar I don’t remember whosaid it’ (ACO ii.i.175, § 814).The presiding oYcials determined the agenda for each day. Thus atSecond Ephesus Dioscorus wanted the issue of the Faith, whichincluded the review of Flavian’s condemnation of Eutyches, consideredWrst, and he was able to secure this through pointing to theimperial instructions which had convened the council (ACOii.i.86–7, §§ 116–20; cf. 221). This permitted him to evade the issue108 [This suggestion is not very plausible, since in a meeting of several hundredbishops and attendants it would have been very diYcult for a prospective speaker toattract the attention of the presiding commission or to make himself heard to theoften noisy multitude.]

The Council of Chalcedon 307of Leo’s Tome while appearing not to reject it (ACO ii.i.83, §§ 84–5).At Chalcedon, however, when Dioscorus appears to have embarkedupon a similar strategy by demanding that the Faith be dealt withWrst (ACO ii.i.67, § 21), his request was ignored; similarly whenDioscorus knew that proceedings were going against him, and hesuggested an adjournment on the grounds that ‘your magniWcence istired’, which must refer to the imperial commissioners, the proposalwas also disregarded (ACO ii.i.180–1, § 862). Any control over whospoke and in what order must have been vested in the presidents. Onoccasions they might direct questions at speciWc participants, aswhen Dioscorus challenged one of the papal representatives, Julian,to approve procedures at Second Ephesus, or the commissioners atChalcedon demanded a response from Dioscorus (ACO ii.i.99, 112,§§ 217, 259); but overall they probably had less chance of regulatingongoing discussions than the Speaker on a most ill-tempered Houseof Commons occasion. A well-timed intervention might focusbishops’ attention on a particularly important issue, as when theimperial commissioners directed the council to give its views on theorthodoxy of Flavian’s faith (ACO ii.i.114, § 272), an initiative whichtriggered the desertion of most of Dioscorus’ supporters. Someadvance preparation would also have been useful, and it has alreadybeen suggested that the commissioners at Chalcedon may haveagreed tactics with Eusebius of Dorylaeum to ensure that the issueof Theodoret’s presence was introduced; at First Ephesus two collectionswere read out to provide examples of orthodox doctrine fromthe Fathers and then of Nestorian errors, and these had clearly beenprepared well before the proposal by Flavian of Philippi that they beread (ACO i.i.2.39–52, §§ 59–60).109 On the other hand, suchpreliminary work might appear to pre-empt discussion in the council:in 449 Flavian of Constantinople was accused of drawing up thesentence of deposition against Eutyches in advance of the meeting of22 November 448 (ACO ii.i.177–9, §§ 829–49).This confusion made control of the recording of a council justas important for its eventual outcome as the ordering of actual109 On the Wrst day at Chalcedon Dioscorus had clearly prepared a dossier ofpatristic texts to support his doctrinal position (ACO ii.i.117, § 299), although he didnot have the chance to read these into the record.

308 Church Councilsproceedings, and we have evidence for several challenges to theaccuracy of the formal Acta which suggest that everything was notalways precisely agreed.110 A perfect record was not easy to achieve.Aetius, who served as senior notary during Flavian’s investigation ofEutyches, subsequently had to defend his record against chargesof falsiWcation by Eutyches and his supporters (ACO ii.i.153–76, §§576–827). Aetius admitted that it often happened that a remarkmade by one bishop, or only by one or two, was recorded as a cryof the whole synod (ACO ii.i.170–1, § 767); proceedings sometimesbecame heated, and it must have been almost impossible for thenotaries to sort out exactly what was being said by whom, and byhow many, and in what order. Aetius also pointed to another sourceof distortion when he was challenged over the omission of somecomments which narrowed the gap between Eutyches and the orthodox:‘Many remarks are made in councils by the most God-belovedbishops in the course of general discussion and by way of advicewhich they do not permit to be written down’ (ACO ii.i.173, §792).111 Interventions might also be wrongly attributed: Florentiuscomplained that he had been allocated one statement that he had notmade since it was not his business to pronounce on matters ofdoctrine, and that in spite of a request to be shown the Acta he hadnever received them (ACO ii.i.172, §§ 778, 781). It seems that theparty in control of a synod, unless there was an exceptional arrangementfor the ratiWcation of all comments as at Carthage in 411, hadconsiderable control over what was distributed as the acceptedaccount of proceedings, with some material being struck out if itdid not accord with the overall objectives of those in control andwords being attributed, perhaps even maliciously, to some who werenot given the chance to check the record.110 Most revealing for the diYcult position of ordinary bishops caught up in therapid changes is the case of the unfortunate Aetherius of Smyrna: he was on record asparticipating in the condemnation of Eutychius at Constantinople in 448, but he thendenied this in a rather disjointed exchange with Dioscorus at Ephesus; at Chalcedon heattempted a further exculpation of his behaviour (ACO ii.i.118–19, §§ 308–29). Basilof Seleucia was another bishop in a diYcult position (ACO ii.i.179–80, §§ 851–7).111 At Constantinople in 449 the deacon Constantine asked ‘that my words about arule of faith be erased. I uttered them in the midst of the uproar without beingconscious of what I was saying’ (ACO ii.i.157, § 624).

The Council of Chalcedon 309With regard to Second Ephesus, in a signiWcant exchange triggeredby an objection on the part of the Eastern bishops at Chalcedon to achant attributed to the whole council in 449, Dioscorus was able todemonstrate that his notaries112 had not been the only ones to keep arecord: ‘Look the notary of Bishop Juvenal kept a record, as did thenotary of Bishop Thalassius and that of the bishop of Corinth. Was itonly mine?’ But, at the prompting of Eusebius of Dorylaeum, theimperial commissioners asked Stephen of Ephesus about his notariesand he claimed that his men had been displaced: ‘My notaries—Julian who is now the most devout bishop of Lebedos and the deaconCrispinus—were keeping a record but the notaries of the mostdevout bishop Dioscorus came and erased their tablets, and almostbroke their Wngers in the attempt to snatch their pens. I didn’t getcopies of the minutes and I don’t know what happened next, but onthe very day the investigation took place we signed the sheet and thebishops who had not signed it did so under my guarantee on thefollowing day’ (ACO ii.i.87–8, §§ 121–30). It would appear that thehost bishop had some responsibility to provide professionalrecorders for the diYcult task of compiling an agreed record, thoughthe president also had an interest;113 Dioscorus, while permitting112 Later Dioscorus admitted in passing that his notary Demetrianus was incontrol of the record when he accused Basil of Seleucia of secretly asking the latterto have the record changed (ACO ii.i.179–80, § 854).113 Procedures are revealed in the Acta of a meeting at Carthage in 411 betweenCatholics and Donatists, even though this event assumed the character of a formalcourt case rather than a standard church council: text by S. Lancel, Actes de laConférence de Carthage en 411 (3 vols. Sources chrétiennes 194, 195, 224; Paris,1972, 1975); also, idem, in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 149A (Turnhout,1974); discussion of proceedings in M. A. Tilley, ‘Dilatory Donatists or ProcrastinatingCatholics: The Trial at the Conference of Carthage’, Church History, 60 (1991),7–19; also B. D. Shaw, ‘African Christianity: Disputes, DeWnitions and ‘‘Donatists’’ ’,in M. R. Greenshields and T. A. Robinson (eds.), Orthodoxy and Heresy in ReligiousMovements: Discipline and Dissent (Lampeter, 1992), 5–34; repr. in his Rulers,Nomads and Christians in Roman North Africa (London, 1995). The tribune and notaryMarcellinus—another example of a president with pronounced (anti-Donatist)views—was put in charge by Emperor Honorius, and he provided lay notaries,while the two sides each produced four notaries of their own; these were dividedinto teams to ensure there were no breaks in the shorthand record, and the process ofrewriting the shorthand notes into a longhand record was supervised by two bishopsfrom each party. A day was left vacant between each meeting to permit the full recordto be prepared, but even this was insuYcient since at the start of the second sessionsome of the material was still in shorthand. Once the longhand version was ready,

310 Church Councilssome of his allies to keep their own notaries, had ensured his personalcontrol of the crucial account.As an example of possible changes, in the middle of the Wrstsession at Chalcedon the Eastern bishops protested that they hadhad no part in some violent expressions of hatred against Eusebius ofDorylaeum, who had led the attacks on Eutyches in 448: the Acta ofSecond Ephesus recorded that ‘The holy council said, ‘‘Destroy andburn Eusebius. Burn him alive. May he be split in two. As he hasdivided, let him be divided’’ ’ (ACO ii.i.140, § 491), a reference to theOne Nature of Christ as upheld by the Monophysites being dividedinto the Two Natures not only of the ‘Orthodox’ but also of theNestorians; however, at Chalcedon the Eastern bishops asserted,somewhat confusedly, ‘No one said this. Dioscorus said it. TheEgyptians said it’, an accusation which the Egyptian bishops werehappy to accept (ACO ii.i.140–1, §§ 496–7). The chant had clearlybeen voiced at Ephesus, but the degree of support for it had beenexaggerated in the oYcial account. Recording proceedings was anextremely challenging task, and the professional skill of Greek shorthandwriters who struggled to distil the essence of a mass of confusedcries deserves our admiration.114Intimidation, however, is the most common defence used toexplain the changes of mind, and has already been noted in connectionwith the accuracy of the Acta. Early in the Wrst session, whenTheodoret entered, the Egyptians contributed a couple of exō balesto express their disgust at the appearance of this heretic, but theEasterners and their allies responded: ‘We signed blank sheets.We suVered blows and we signed’ (eis agrapha hupergrapsamen.each bishop signed every remark he had made, an unusual precaution but sensible inthe light of the highly contentious nature of this debate. Detailed discussion of theproduction of the record in E. Tengström, Die Protokollierung der Collatio Carthaginensis:Beiträge zur Kenntnis der römischen Kurzschrift nebst einem Exkurs über dasWort scheda (schedula) (Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia 14, 1961).114 [Experience of the production of the record of Parliamentary proceedings inthe UK indicates that, even with the help of tape recordings, it can be diYcult toproduce a complete and accurate record: for example, heavy regional accents, especiallyin a noisy session, are diYcult to transcribe. Deliberate change is not impossible:on one occasion when an under-prepared Minister answered a straight yes/noquestion the wrong way round, the record was adapted to ensure that the correctinformation was preserved in the published proceedings.]

The Council of Chalcedon 311Etuptēthēmen kai hupergrapsamen).115 And then they too go intoseries of exō bales against Manichees, the enemies of Flavian andthe enemies of the faith (ACO ii.i.69, §§ 27–8). There can be nodoubt that some essential information has been left out of the Actahere, doubtless owing to the fearful episcopal hubbub in this Wrstsession of the council, since the Eastern bishops were trying to excusethemselves by pointing to the compulsion they had been underwhen, so far as the Acta of Chalcedon are concerned, no accusationhad been brought against them.116 Apparently Dioscorus and hissupporters had been pointing out, quite correctly, that the condemnationsof Theodoret and the others had been unanimous,117 whichwould have included support from some of the Eastern bishops nowfavouring his readmission at Chalcedon; as a result the unfortunateEasterners, dismayed at their own cowardice at Second Ephesus,118but now eager to exculpate themselves and place themselves securelyon what would be the winning side, had to explain their behaviour.They knew they had uttered, or at least signed up to, theologicalexpressions which they had imperfectly understood and never perhapsreally held, but now wanted to repudiate everything they hadsaid or subscribed, to secure forgiveness and be allowed to retaintheir bishoprics. The beneWts to be gained at Chalcedon fromallegations of intimidation at Second Ephesus mean that theseshould be investigated critically rather than accepted as self-evidentlytrue, which is the usual verdict.115 Few, if any parts of the Acta of Chalcedon are as dramatic as these twosentences, brilliant summaries of what must have been a scarcely intelligible babbleof emotional cries.116 Samuel, ‘Proceedings’, 329–30, is suspicious about the accusation of signingblank sheets, on the grounds that the charge does not appear in Eusebius of Dorylaeum’sWrst indictment of Dioscorus and is not mentioned in any of the reactions toSecond Ephesus before this Wrst day at Chalcedon. However, this justiWcation onlybecame relevant to excusing the bishops’ behaviour at Ephesus when they werepressed to explain their changes of mind at Chalcedon.117 We only have the incomplete record in the Syriac Acta for the condemnationson 22 Aug. 449 but there is no reason to question that they were indeed agreedunanimously by all those present.118 [The use of the words ‘at their own cowardice’ does reveal that Ste. Croix couldslip into the traditional assumption that Second Ephesus was indeed a latrociniumwhere many bishops felt unable to uphold their ‘real’ views.]

312 Church CouncilsIn the standard Orthodox picture we are presented with one greatvillain, Dioscorus, who behaved in the most arbitrary and tyrannicalway at Second Ephesus. It is worth remembering, however, that hehad presided by imperial command, and that whatever intimidationactually occurred was supported by Helpidius and Eulogius, the twocounts provided by Emperor Theodosius to keep order if necessary.Since imperial objectives coincided with those of the leading bishopsthere could be little doubt over the outcome: it was Helpidius whorelayed the imperial instruction that Eusebius of Dorylaeum shouldnot be permitted to attend, and who controlled the order of businessin such a way that the letter of Pope Leo, the future Tome of Leo atChalcedon, was not presented to the council in spite of the protests ofthe papal representatives (ACO ii.i.97–9, §§ 197–222). Thesedecisions suited Dioscorus’ purpose, though at Chalcedon it wasconvenient for him to stress the dominance of the secular controller(ACO ii.i.96–7, §§ 189, 193). With regard to the subscriptions theEastern bishops at Chalcedon asserted that ‘Soldiers with clubs andswords stood by, and we took fright at the clubs and swords. We wereintimidated into signing. Where there are soldiers and clubs, whatkind of Council is it? This is why he [Dioscorus] accepted soldiers’(ACO ii.i.75, § 54; cf. ACO ii.i.180, §§ 858, 861). Coercion extendedbeyond the meetings according to Stephen of Ephesus, who referredto a band of Eutyches’ monks and of soldiers led by the imperialrepresentatives Helpidius and Eulogius that marched on his episcopalpalace to denounce his reception of some of those nowdeclared heretical (ACO ii.i.75, § 58).119Dioscorus certainly contributed his share to the coercion. Hecontrolled the record and ensured that the necessary subscriptionswere provided, as already noted, and he had also arranged for thecouncil to be attended by the zealous Syrian archimandriteBarsauma, who spoke only Syriac and so would not have been ableto contribute much to doctrinal discussions. Barsauma’s role,however, was more physical in that he was said by the Orthodox119 I would stress that I am very distrustful of anything said by Stephen, who isrevealed, especially by the Syriac Acta, to have taken a positively enthusiastic part inSecond Ephesus in the condemnation of several orthodox bishops, being one of theWrst bishops to oVer their opinion on several key issues. Inevitably the full evidencefor this behaviour was not included among the sections recited at Chalcedon.

The Council of Chalcedon 313bishops at Chalcedon to have ‘brought a thousand monks against us’(ACO ii.i.312, § 78);120 according to Diogenes of Cyzicus, anothervery unreliable witness to my mind, he was anxious to murderFlavian of Constantinople (ACO ii.i.312, § 77). Two Orthodoxbishops, Onesiphorus of Iconium and Marinianus of Synnada,drew a particularly vivid picture of Dioscorus seeking to enforcegeneral conformity with his wishes by exclaiming, ‘Call the counts’,‘Bring the counts here’, dos tous komētas (ACO ii.i.180–1, §§ 858–61).According to these two bishops the counts then brought in theirsoldiers with weapons, and these were accompanied by the Proconsulof Asia with attendants and chains; Barsauma and his monks werethere too, and even the fearsome parabalani of Alexandria (ACOii.i.179, § 851). At this point all the bishops signed up.Dioscorus, however, denied all these allegations, and the parts ofthe Acta of Second Ephesus read out at Chalcedon, unsurprisingly,contain no evidence for such coercion, nor do the discussions preservedin the Syriac Acta. Which side was telling the truth is diYcultto tell, but the accumulation of accusations of intimidation maycontain an element of ‘overkill’. This might have been sensed by theimperial commissioners. On several occasions the ‘turncoat’ bishopscollectively or individually expressed their repentance: ‘We all sinned,we all beg forgiveness.’ At one point the commissioners respondedrather sharply, ‘Yet you declared earlier that you were forced byviolence and compulsion to sign the deposition of Flavian of sacredmemory on a blank sheet.’ The implication was that the bishopswould not be acknowledging a sin if they had really been intimidated;to this challenge the Eastern bishops could only respond withanother round of ‘Sin and Forgiveness’ (ACO ii.i.94, §§ 181–4).121One approach to determining the truth of accusations of intimidationmight be to consider the representation of Chalcedon in120 [The thousands of monks may have been mobilized against episcopal opponentsin Syria, rather than at Second Ephesus, but he is very likely to have broughtsome monastic supporters with him.]121 Samuel, ‘Proceedings’, interpreted this second apology as a sign that thebishops were indicating acknowledgement of the falsehood of the accusation about‘blank sheets’, for which they now apologized to the commissioners, but that seemstoo precise a reading. The bishops might well have felt, or at least wanted to conveythe impression that they admitted, that they might have put up more resistance atSecond Ephesus.

314 Church CouncilsMonophysite tradition. Monophysite writers had to explain whymost bishops accepted the decisions of the council, and it wouldhave served their purpose to underline the wickedness of Marcianand Pulcheria by pointing to any violence they may have applied tothe Church. Compulsion is mentioned, but only in general terms, inZachariah’s Ecclesiastical History, where the bishops are said to haveaccepted Theodoret’s presence because of royal authority and to havesubscribed under compulsion (3.1). The Life of Dioscorus also statesthat imperial pressure had to be applied to secure episcopal agreement,though the description of Dioscorus’ dealings with the imperialpair focuses as much on Pulcheria’s attempted seduction as onMarcian’s exhortation to follow the primacy of Rome. In thePlērophories most criticism is directed at the bishops themselves:Satan predicted that the bishops at the council would adore him,while Abba Andrew had a vision in which the bishops symbolicallyrecruciWed Christ by throwing a pure child into a furnace, a performancefrom which only the upright Dioscorus abstained (9, 14).There is a signiWcant diVerence between these texts and what was saidabout physical compulsion at Second Ephesus.In many respects Dioscorus was a convenient scapegoat whoseguilt cleared all other participants at Second Ephesus. This is certainlythe line which Thalassius of Caesarea pursued when attempting todefend his role in the leadership at Second Ephesus: ‘I was named inthe sacra, but I did not know why. . .’, ‘I only know that I did notprevent it, and that I did not have suYcient authority by myself toinsist on the reading’, ‘I was not responsible.’122 Dioscorus is acharacter who often evokes detestation, with even Norman Baynes,a scholar seldom given to denunciation, referring to him as ‘the Attilaof the Eastern Church’, with the additional comment that ‘This issurely an insult to Attila.’123 The only sympathetic verdict that I havecome across in modern literature is that of Otto Seeck, who describesDioscorus at Chalcedon as the one man who ‘behaved like a man inthis collection of howling old women’.124 Among contemporaries122 ACO ii.i.76, 85, 97, §§ 61, 106, 191; the commissioners may have tired of suchevasion, since the last plea drew the sharp response, ‘When the faith is being decided,this is no excuse’ (§ 192).123 Baynes, ‘Alexandria’, 114.124 O. Seeck, Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt, vi (1920), i. 274. Partisanwriters such as Samuel also, naturally, praise Dioscorus.

The Council of Chalcedon 315sources from the Monophysite communities naturally upheld hisreputation. The Life of Dioscorus shows that he could evoke deepadmiration among his followers, but this text is rarely noticed, whilevarious stories in the Plērophories of John Rufus show Dioscorus as alone hero at the council, with Timothy Aelurus as his one loyalfollower (14). Dioscorus certainly did not lack courage. Of theleaders at Second Ephesus all except Dioscorus, who alone neverrecanted, were pardoned and reinstated during the fourth session;they had confronted the choice between loss of position, along withall the beneWts that leadership of a large and rich see could bring, andacceptance of the new order. Juvenal of Jerusalem was a very politicalanimal and managed to negotiate a reasonably good result for himselfand his see, with a separate patriarchal jurisdiction for Jerusalembeing agreed on 23 October and ratiWed by the full council on the26th (ACO ii.i.109–10, §§ 11–18; ii.i.364–6, §§ 3–17).125 Thalassiusof Caesarea and the others were much weaker individuals, and hadprobably been as ineVectual at Second Ephesus as they were atChalcedon.126 Dioscorus’ Egyptian followers also failed to matchhis courage. Early in the Wrst session at Chalcedon the Egyptianbishops cried out, ‘Bring Wre and we’ll show you’ (ACO ii.i.76, §64), but they were bluYng: even these Egyptians eventually changedallegiance without there being, on this occasion, any explicit threat ofphysical violence:127 four of the bishops abandoned Dioscorus on theWrst day (ACO ii.i.116, §§ 293–6), while the others, after failing toattend the third session and oppose the attack on their leader, thenapproached the council in the fourth session in an attempt toaccommodate themselves to the world after Dioscorus (see below).The power of an almighty state was irresistible.It is worth remembering that pressures were created not onlyinside a council and by those present, but that bishops might alsohave to answer back home to the clergy and laity of their diocese.This is revealed by a particularly vivid and arresting scene at Chalcedon,which occupies some four and a half pages of the Acta of the125 On this see Honigmann, ‘Juvenal’, 245–6.126 Thalassius was another bishop to have been involved in proceedings at Constantinoplein 448–9 as well as Second Ephesus and Chalcedon; he appears to havefollowed whatever position was currently dominant (e.g. ACO ii.i.157, §§ 626–7).127 Twelve centuries later Galileo at least had to be shown the instruments oftorture by another all-powerful Christian tribunal.

316 Church Councilsfourth session (ACO ii.i.306–10, §§ 19–62, esp. 48–58). It begins withthe announcement by the imperial commissioners that they hadreceived a petition to the emperor, signed by thirteen Egyptianbishops, on behalf of all the bishops of Egypt. Apart from the thirteenthere were another four Egyptians who had already, literally, crossedthe Xoor during the Wrst session and thus gone publicly over to theother side, the ‘Orthodox’, but these thirteen had not yet publiclydisowned Dioscorus, who had Wnally been deposed at the previoussession (numbered 2 in the Greek Acta).128 These bishops wereterriWed of what might happen to them when they returned homeand it became known that they had departed from the Alexandriantheological position and abandoned Dioscorus, doing what everyoneelse at Chalcedon, except Dioscorus, had done: namely, if theysubscribed the Tome of Leo, who had been anathematized by Dioscorus,and anathematized Eutyches whom Dioscorus had welcomedback into the orthodox communion at Second Ephesus. The Egyptianswere quite willing to hand out other anathemas and doanything else which the council demanded, but these two thingsthey simply could not aVord to do, they said, until a new patriarchhad been installed in Alexandria, a man who would be able to telleveryone what the True Faith now was. Eventually they gave way onEutyches, and duly anathematized him, but they continued to refuseto endorse the Tome of the Pope who had been anathematized bytheir patriarch.All the other bishops in the council were insistent that thisconciliatory move was not enough, and that the wretched Egyptiansshould be excommunicated; but the latter prostrated themselvesbefore the bishops, throwing themselves on the council’s mercy andbegging for pity on their grey hairs: ‘By your feet’, nai tōn podōnhumōn, they keep saying. This continues in a highly emotional vein,because, as the Egyptians repeat again and again, their congregationswould simply kill them if they went home having in eVect apostatizedfrom the True Faith before there was a new patriarch in Alexandriawho alone could save them by giving an authoritative new expositionof that Faith. Eventually it was the imperial commissioners, in128 There were, of course, many other Egyptian bishops who had not come toChalcedon.

The Council of Chalcedon 317another display of their superior authority, who produced a reasonablesolution, against the whole weight of episcopal opinion whoseintolerance might in part reXect the zeal of recent conversion, sincenot one bishop is recorded as expressing any sympathy for theEgyptians’ plight. The commissioners very sensibly decided that theEgyptians could stay at Constantinople until a new patriarch wasinstalled at Alexandria (ACO ii.i.310, § 60). This story is mostinformative about the passionate feelings roused in many places,including Egypt, by the question of Christian doctrine: a bishopwho lapsed, even under extreme pressure, and subscribed to credalformulae produced by a person whom his own archbishop or patriarchhad anathematized, even if that person was the bishop of Rome,might risk being murdered out of hand by his own congregation. Thereality of this danger is revealed by what happened in 457 to Proterius,an Egyptian cleric who was prepared to accept the decisions ofChalcedon and was accordingly installed as Dioscorus’ orthodoxreplacement as patriarch of Alexandria. His position in the citydepended on military backing, but when the death of EmperorMarcian was announced, news which will have created uncertaintyabout the status of Chalcedon, a mob stormed the church in whichhe was preparing to celebrate some baptisms, lynched him in thecentre of the city, inXicted various insults on his corpse includingallegedly the eating of his liver, then burnt the remains and scatteredthe ashes. The situation in Jerusalem immediately after Chalcedon isanother example: Juvenal was adamant before his departure for thecouncil about the need to uphold the decisions of Second Ephesus,and his U-turn caused considerable unrest. This was led by a monknamed Theodosius who had himself been appointed bishop andbegan to ordain subordinates of the same view; it took almost twoyears before Juvenal reclaimed his see, and then only with powerfulsecular backing (Evagrius 2.5).ConclusionHowever sceptical I may be about the traditional story of the councilsof the mid-Wfth century, it is diYcult to dispute the considerableevidence that points to Second Ephesus being an occasion when theinevitable pressures to which bishops would be subjected crossed a

318 Church Councilsboundary of acceptability. Chalcedon was diVerent, but it is utterlywrong to imagine that it was an occasion for simple and honestdebate which permitted the wrongs of the Church to be rectiWed.The signiWcance of the wishes of the imperial pair, Marcian andPulcheria, determined the direction of proceedings, and they foundin the great Anatolius a man with the diplomatic skill and doctrinalconvictions to ensure that their preferences were brought into eVect.The very Wrst day demonstrated the course which discussions wouldtake, and thereafter those bishops who did not share all the imperialviews were restricted to a damage-limitation exercise, unsuccessful inrespect of the new Creed, more successful in securing that only theintransigent Dioscorus suVered permanent punishment. But thedoctrinal decisions were ultimately political in conception andthe investment of papal authority in these decisions caused furtherproblems, which eventually proved insuperable for their acceptance.Chalcedon introduced bitter rivalries between Chalcedonianorthodox and Monophysites (with variants on each side), whichinvolved intermittent oYcial persecution by the Orthodox andsome furious outbursts, particularly from those excluded fromimperial favour. The amount of intellectual energy and imperialprestige devoted to eVorts to construct a formula of reconciliation,from the Henoticon of Zeno in the 470s through the Theopaschite,Three Chapters, and Aphthartodocest initiatives of Justinian in themid-sixth century, to the Monothelete Ekthesis of Heraclius of 638 isdiYcult to credit.129 But the image of Pope Vigilius being draggedfrom sanctuary to prevent him evading Justinian’s pressure in themonths before the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553), with such forcethat the altar rails to which he was clinging were torn away with him(Malalas 18.111), conveys something of the intensity of feeling in theWest: Vigilius knew that he would be required to subscribe to somesigniWcant modiWcations to the decisions of Chalcedon with respectto the so-called Three Chapters, the term used to denote the condemnationof Theodore of Mopsuestia, the writings of Theodoretagainst Cyril, and the letter of Ibas to Maris the Persian, and thisslight to the perfect authority of the council in which Pope Leo’s129 Frend, Monophysite Movement; P. Allen, Evagrius Scholasticus the ChurchHistorian (Louvain, 1981), ch. 2.

The Council of Chalcedon 319views had been endorsed was bound to provoke uproar in thewestern Church.I shall end with a melancholy but characteristic little storyrecorded in Michael the Syrian (Chron. 11.6, vol. ii. 422–3), since itshows that even in the direst emergency, with the Arabs overrunningSyria, the orthodox Byzantines refused to tolerate adherents of theOne Nature Christology who now constituted the majority of theinhabitants in Egypt, much of Syria and northern Mesopotamia. Atthe great battle of Yarmuk in 636 the Byzantine army in Syria wasutterly defeated by the Arabs under Omar and, although a few citiesheld out for two or three years longer, Byzantine power in Syria wasnow irretrievably broken. The emperor Heraclius sent an army todefend the passes of Cilicia against the Arabs, and to it there Xed thelocal Syrian Monophysite bishop, who seems to have been Epiphaniusof Callisura. The Byzantine commander Gregory questionedhim closely about his faith. When Epiphanius discoursed about theOne Nature of the Divine Word united hypostatically with the Xesh,and speciWcally repudiated the doctrines of Chalcedon, Gregory cutoV his head.130 Imperial success at Chalcedon exacted a substantialprice from Marcian’s successors over the next two centuries.The Council of Chalcedon, which in isolation can be seen as acomplete triumph for Marcian and Two Nature Christology, andwhich has been lavishly praised by some modern theologians, hasoften been described, rightly in my opinion, as a disaster for theEastern Empire: as Norman Baynes put it, Chalcedon came ‘not tobring peace, but a sword’.131 Monophysite views were far too strongto be suppressed in some areas, above all in Egypt and much of Syriaand Mesopotamia,132 and the Orthodox Empire would surely havedone better to be content with doctrinal formulae that would haveaccommodated it, or at least tolerated its existence.130 Cf. W. E. Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests (Cambridge, 1992),215, and for broader discussion of the impact of religious divisions on the Islamicconquests, ibid. 209–17; also Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, 483–4.131 Baynes, ‘Alexandria’, 115.132 The best account of these subsequent developments is in Frend, MonophysiteMovement; also MeyendorV, Imperial Unity, chs. 7–8, 10.

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Christianity and Property

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IntroductionMichael WhitbyAlthough the following essay was reprinted with only minor revisionsto the arrangement of material in Class Struggle, wehavedecided that it deserves a place in this collection as the best exampleof the themes pursued and approaches adopted by Ste. Croix inpreparation for his projected monograph ‘Early Christian Attitudesto Women, Sex and Marriage’. In this chapter the word ‘Early’ is vital:Ste. Croix begins with the settlement structure of Palestine under theHellenistic kings and early Roman empire, and then considers theevidence of the Gospels on poverty and property in the light of Greekand Roman attitudes. Locating the Gospels in their social, literary,and intellectual contexts is of prime importance,1 whereas much lessattention is paid to the equally interesting issues of how attitudes tothese matters evolved in the expanding Church of the second toWfth centuries, especially after imperial recognition by Constantineprovided the beneWts and temptations of security and respectability.This approach was taken further in a succession of lecture seriesand seminars, most importantly the Gregynog Lectures at Aberystwythin 1986, a sequence in Copenhagen in 1987, and the TownsendLectures at Cornell in 1988. As an example of how Ste. Croix’s workdeveloped, St Paul’s declaration in Galatians 3:28 that ‘There isneither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neithermale nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’, which is alluded tobrieXy in ‘ECAPS’, became the focus of extended treatment. Thepurpose was to ram home the message that St Paul, one of Ste.Croix’s trinity of bêtes noires (the others being Plato and St Augustine),could oVer absolutely no help to feminist theologians eager to1 As Ste. Croix put it at the start of a seminar in March 1982, ‘To understand theearly Christian attitude to women and marriage, and to discover which of its elementsare new, one needs to know the situation in the Jewish communities (in the Diasporaas well as Palestine) and in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.’

324 Christianity and PropertyWnd biblical authority for the equality of the sexes. The presentationwas susceptible to challenge from two sides: Wrst, Ste. Croix, whilebeing fully in command of the classical texts and their problems ofinterpretation, was not conversant with all developments in thevoluminous Pauline scholarship, so that attacks on alleged views ofSt Paul, or demonstrations of discrepancies of thought betweendiVerent Pauline texts, might be evaded by appeal to the need todistinguish between Pauline and deutero-Pauline works; second,although Ste. Croix referred to some modern scholars for whomthe Pauline injunction was signiWcant, it is now more common forcontemporary feminist theologians to accept that St Paul himself didnot pursue the practical implications of his statement so that hiswords can in fact still provide biblical justiWcation for sexual equality.The desire to demonstrate the frail basis for Christian teaching onother family matters led Ste. Croix to investigate the ‘misuse’ ofGenesis 2: 242 in Jesus’ teaching on marriage in Mark 10: 7–9 andMatthew 19: 5–6, as well as by St Paul in 1 Corinthians 6: 15–16.Part of the discussion centred on the apparently divergent view ofmarriage in Luke 16: 18, which introduced a section on other signiWcantdiscrepancies between Luke and Mark, most notably over theexpression attributed in Mark to the centurion at the cruciWxion,‘Truly this man was a Son of God’ (15: 39; cf. Matthew 27: 54).Another part was occupied by a full demonstration of the prevalenceof polygamy in the Old Testament, and its continued acceptance inthe family of Herod the Great, practices which Jesus was able toignore since he operated primarily within peasant communitieswhere very few people had ever had the wealth to indulge in polygamy.The issue of polygamy acted as a cue to a topic close to Ste.Croix’s heart, St Paul’s obsession with fornication, an aspect of hispersonality which he believed was too often ignored or downplayed.Ste. Croix’s arguments on these topics developed through thevarious presentations in the late 1980s, but it would be fair to saythat the overall trajectory of these changes was to push the balance ofdiscussions away from Early Christianity as such and towards theantecedents of the New Testament, naturally the Old Testament, but2 ‘Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife;and they shall be one Xesh.’

Introduction 325less obviously Plato. With regard to the Old Testament, Yahweh andthe question of prophecies of the Messiah attracted attention. As aresult one reasonably polished piece emerged on the Immanuelprophecy in Isaiah 7: 14 and its misappropriation in Matthew 1 torefer to the Virgin birth of Jesus. The argument that the prophecy inIsaiah must relate to a contemporary birth is diYcult to refute, butfew other than fundamentalist theologians would want to disputethis contention in any case. The signiWcant question of whether themisuse of the prophecy in Matthew was an innovation or reXected amore widespread messianic reinterpretation of various Old Testamentpassages in Wrst-century bc Jewish circles is not broached.Perhaps the main interest of the piece is the indication that Ste.Croix was returning to the challenges of his fundamentalist upbringing.3This is pursued much further in work related to the issue ofTheodicy, the justiWcation of God against objection or criticism,which culminated in a very substantial paper (well over 20,000words) devoted to the book of Job. This study occupied the betterpart of two years in the early 1990s, advancing through successivehandwritten drafts with visitors and correspondents being treated tothe latest developments in the presentation. Ste. Croix’s central thesiswas that the text of Job as we have it is an amalgam of an anti-Yahwehtract, which reveals the behaviour of the deity to be morally objectionablein the highest degree, and a limited amount of more traditional‘Yahwehist’ material which came to provide the outside layersof what was eVectively a sandwich. Although Ste. Croix recognizedthat Christian believers (presumably Jews as well) could hardly allowthemselves to accept the full implications of his remorseless arguments,he was somewhat disappointed by reactions from the fewcolleagues to whom he had oVered the full piece for comment. WhatSte. Croix had produced was a broadside against fundamentalistinterpretations of Job, but whose central premises could besidestepped by less doctrinally rigid believers. In a short piece on‘Yahweh/God Almighty’ Ste. Croix expressed what had become the3 On a very personal note Ste. Croix comments on the name Maher-shalal-hashbaz(Isaiah 8: 1), ‘one of the longest and most ferocious names of a male child in theOld Testament’, that its owner may have preferred to keep a low proWle in thecommunity, adducing his own experience as the possessor of a name exportedfrom France by Huguenots which had naturally excited the derision of young boys.

326 Christianity and Propertydriving force for this prong of his intellectual project, the desire ‘Afteralmost a whole long lifetime of false politeness towards the deitywhom I was brought up to worship and adore, . . . to speak and writeexactly as I please about the ancient genocidal monster representedby his worshippers as glorifying in the mysterious Name of Yahweh’.The other direction in which Ste. Croix’s concern to uncover thefull intellectual context for Christian attitudes led was to Plato,whom he regarded as essential to his thinking on Christian persecution(i.e. persecution by Christians) as well as on sex and familymatters. Plato, as noted above, was one of Ste. Croix’s key targets: hisanimosity was already well formed in the early 1950s when KarlPopper had been one of his teaching colleagues at the London Schoolof Economics.4 For Ste. Croix, Plato’s passionate advocacy of religiouspersecution in Laws 10 (887–910) anticipated the behaviour ofChristian persecutors, just as his views on a judgement of the deadand punishment in Hell5 had little resonance beyond a very fewPlatonist philosophers before the development of Christian eschatologicalthought, while his proposed laws on sexual and family mattersalso foreshadowed Pauline and later Christian views.In the late 1980s, in the aftermath of the Gregynog and Townsendlecture series, Ste. Croix had been extremely enthusiastic to develophis lectures into the intended book on ‘Sex and Marriage in EarlyChristianity’, but in spite of presenting his views in more than twodozen universities in North America and Europe he never felt that hehad fully mastered the complexities of his subject. The problem wasnot in the treatment of legal material, which was fully discussed inthe lectures, nor in the Patristic sections where much more couldcertainly have been said about the voluminous documentation. Ste.Croix’s unease centred on origins, and as his writing progressed evena strong desire to ‘nail’ Augustine, the third of his bêtes noires, couldnot counteract the pull of Plato and Paul, especially when coupledwith the chance to revisit some of the fundamentalist debates on4 They had, for example, discussed the publication of Popper’s Open Society and itsEnemies, which had been rejected by one major University Press on the grounds that itwas ‘too disrespectful to Plato’. For his own assessment of Plato as ‘one of the mostdetermined and dangerous enemies that freedom has ever had’, see Class Struggle, 284.5 Plato, Gorgias 523a–527c; Phaedo 80d–82b, 107e–108c, 110b–115a; Republic614b–621b.

Introduction 327which he had cut his teeth in the 1920s and 1930s. By the mid-1990sSte. Croix had virtually admitted that a publication of the lectureseries was impossible, and he focused his eVorts on salvaging what hecould from his writings of the previous decade, but he was perhapsno longer the best judge of what was most eVective since papers witha primarily Old Testament focus were prominent in his plannedvolumes of Christian essays.It is the earlier writing which has stood the test of time best and so,although it might have been possible to excavate the versions of theGregynog lectures, say, to produce a somewhat revised version of Ste.Croix’s thoughts, it seemed more appropriate to include in thiscollection the one item which he had seen through to publicationhimself.

7Early Christian Attitudes to Property andSlavery1I begin with the central fact about Christian origins: that althoughthe earliest surviving Christian documents are in Greek and althoughChristianity spread from city to city in the Graeco-Roman world, itsFounder lived and preached almost entirely outside the area ofGraeco-Roman civilization proper; the world in which he was activewas not at all that of the polis (the city) but the very diVerent world ofthe chōra (the countryside). This may require some explanation.In the classical period, in Greece itself and in some of the earlyGreek colonies in Italy and Sicily and on the west coast of AsiaMinor, the word chōra was often used as a synonym for the agroi(the Welds), the rural area of the polis;2 and sometimes the word polisitself, in the special limited sense of its urban area, was contrastedFirst published in Studies in Church History, 12 (1975), 1–38.1 This paper is a re-presentation of parts of my book, The Class Struggle in theAncient Greek World (to be published by Duckworth about the autumn of 1976),which incorporates the substance of the J. H. Gray Lectures delivered at CambridgeUniversity in February 1973, greatly expanded. Full documentation for those statementsfor which I have not provided proper references here will be found in thatbook, referred to below as CSAGW.The best collection of early Christian views concerning property (from the OTdown to the early 5th century) is by Paul Christophe, L’Usage chrétien du droitde propriété dans l’écriture et la tradition patristique ¼ Collection Théologie, Pastoraleet Spiritualité, no. 14 (Paris, 1964). I have made much use of this book (although attimes it is uncritical), as of C. J. Cadoux, The Early Church and the World (Edinburgh,1925 and repr.). Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches i, trans.Olive Wyon (London, 1931), pp. 1–200, has some useful material, but for mypurposes does not lie suYciently close to the historical background, and I have notcited it here.2 For example in Thuc. ii.5.7, KŒ ô çò & ×þæÆò is equivalent to KŒ ô &øí Iªæ &øí [‘fromthe Welds’] in 14.1; cf. Kí ôï&Øò Iªæï&Øò in 14.2, and the same expression andŒÆôa ôcí ×þæÆí [‘throughout the countryside’] in 16.1.

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 329with its chōra.3 This usage continued in the Hellenistic period(roughly the last three centuries bc) and under Roman rule: everypolis had its own chōra in the sense of its own rural area. However,except where a native population had been reduced to a subjectcondition4 there was generally in the areas just mentioned no fundamentaldiVerence between those who lived in or near the urbancentre of the polis and the peasants who lived in the countryside, evenif the latter tended to be noticeably less ‘urbane’ (less cityWed) thanthe former; all were Greek and participated in a common culture to agreater or less degree. But in those parts of Asia and Egypt into whichGreek civilization penetrated in the time of Alexander the Great andin the Hellenistic period the situation was very diVerent. In Asia,from at least the time of Alexander (and probably, as I have arguedelsewhere,5 as early as the Wfth century bc), the terms chōra and polishad come to be used on occasion with a recognized technical sense,which continued throughout the Hellenistic period and beyond inAsia and Egypt: in this sense the chōra was the whole vast area notincluded in the territory administered by any Greek polis; it wasunder the direct, autocratic rule of the kings, the successors ofAlexander, and it was bureaucratically administered, while the poleishad republican governments and enjoyed forms of precariousautonomy which diVered according to circumstances. UnderRoman rule the same basic division between polis and chōra continued;but the great bulk of the chōra came by degrees under theadministration of particular poleis, each of which had its own chōra(territorium in the Latin west). The cities in the strict sense (thepoleis) were Greek in very varying degrees in language and culture;native languages and cultures prevailed in the chōra, where thepopulation lived mainly in villages, the most common Greek termfor which was kōmai. Graeco-Roman civilization was essentiallyurban, a civilization of cities; and in the areas in which it was notnative, in which it had not grown up from roots in the very soil, it3 As in Thuc. vi 4.2; Lyc. C. Leocr. 1; etc.4 I shall mention the main examples in CSAGW: they include Heracleia Pontica,Zeleia, Priene, Syracuse.5 In The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (London, 1972), pp. 154–5, 313–14.

330 Christianity and Propertyremained largely an upper-class culture, parasitic on the countrysidewhich supported it and to which it gave little in return.6The essential point I want to make is that—apart from Jerusalem, aspecial case—as I shall explain presently—the mission of Jesus tookplace entirely in the chōra, in its kōmai, in the agroi of Palestine.Partly it was conducted altogether outside polis territory, in areas ofGalilee and Judaea administered not by cities but directly by HerodAntipas the ‘tetrarch’ or by the Roman governor of Judaea; but it ishighly signiWcant that on the rather rare occasions when we do WndJesus active inside polis territory, it is never in the polis itself, in thesense of its urban area, but always in its country district. As we shallsee, whenever we have any speciWc information (as distinct fromvague general statements) the terms used are such as to point unmistakablyto the countryside—the kōmai, kōmopoleis, agroi, chōra,also the merē, horia, paralios, perichōros. There is of course a greatdispute about how much reliable historical information can legitimatelybe extracted from the narratives of the Gospels, even thesynoptics. But I would emphasize that in so far as we can trust the6 Perhaps the best account of this fundamental opposition between town andcountry in the Greek east is in part v (‘The Achievement of the Cities’, pp. 259–304)of A. H. M. Jones’s great work, The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian (Oxford,1940), esp. 285 et seq. Another major work by Jones, Cities of the Eastern RomanProvinces (frequently cited in The Greek City) has been reissued in a second edn.(Oxford, 1971), with the sections on Palestine in ch. 10 (on ‘Syria’, pp. 226–94)revised by M. Avi-Yonah. A recent work, limited to the late republic and principate, isRamsay MacMullen, Roman Social Relations 50 B.C. to A.D. 284 (London, 1974): theWrst two chapters of this (I ‘Rural’, and II ‘Rural-Urban’, pp. 1–56) have much wellchosenillustrative material. For the opinions of a scholar who knew the archaeologicalas well as the literary evidence particularly well, see M. RostovtzeV, Social andEconomic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1957), i, pp. 261–73 (with ii, pp. 660et seq., esp. pp. 664–6), 344–52, 378–92. For an able account of the social andeconomic background of the great Jewish revolt in Palestine of ad 66–70, see HeinzKreissig, Die sozialen Zusammenhänge des judäischen Krieges: Klassen und Klassenkampfim Palästina des 1. Jahrh. v.u.Z. ¼ Schriften zur Geschichte und Kultur der Antikeno. 1 (Berlin, 1970). [For the relationship between Hellenistic cities and ruralhinterlands, and the impact of Greek inXuences on the latter, see G. Shipley, TheGreek World after Alexander, 323–30 bc (London, 2000); there are also several relevantdiscussions in A. Erskine (ed.), A Companion to the Hellenistic World (Oxford, 2003),esp. ch. 15, ‘Town and Country in Ptolemaic Egypt’ by Jane Rowlandson, and ch. 8,‘The Seleukids and Asia’ by Michel Austin. For the situation in Palestine in the 1stcent. ad, see F. Millar, The Roman Near East 31 BC–AD 337 (Cambridge, Mass.,1993), ch. 10. Although its main focus is later, there is also much of relevance inM. Goodman, State and Subject in Roman Galilee, 132–212 (Oxford, 1983).]

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 331speciWc information given us by the Gospels there is no evidence thatJesus ever even entered the urban area of any Greek city. That shouldnot surprise us: Jesus, as I indicated at the beginning, belongedwholly to the chōra, the Jewish countryside of Galilee and Judaea.Palestine, which had been ruled by the Ptolemies for over ahundred years after the death of Alexander, became around 200 bcpart of the Seleucid kingdom. Just before the middle of the secondcentury Judaea achieved a considerable degree of independence fornearly a century; but from 63 bc onwards the whole of Palestine andSyria was always eVectively under Roman control, although Judaea(and Samaria) did not actually become a Roman province until ad 6,and Galilee and Peraea until 44.7 In Palestine the native language atthe beginning of the Christian era was Aramaic, which was spokenthroughout the countryside and also by a good proportion of theinhabitants of many of the cities. By the time of Jesus, Palestinecontained a number of genuine poleis, some of which were muchmore Hellenic in character than others.8 With the exception of Tyreand Sidon, which I shall mention presently, the cities on the coast(Caesarea, Ascalon, Gaza and others) were too far from the mainscene of Jesus’s activity to be mentioned in the Gospels, and we canignore them here. The cities we need to notice are, Wrst, Sepphorisand Tiberias, the only two in Galilee; next Samaria, between Galileeand Judaea, recently re-founded by Herod the Great as Sebaste (butnever mentioned under that name in the New Testament); thirdly thewell-marked cluster of ten genuine cities administering a large area7 For the history of Palestine in the late Hellenistic and early Roman period, seethe admirable new English version, by Geza Vermes and Fergus Millar, The History ofthe Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.–A.D. 135), of Emil Schürer’sGeschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi (3/4 edn., 1901–9), of whichonly vol. i (Edinburgh, 1973) has already appeared. The events of 63 bc to ad 44 aredealt with on pp. 237–454. [The remaining volumes of Schürer’s History have nowappeared: vol. ii, ed. G. Vermes and F. Millar (Edinburgh, 1979); vol. iii.1–2, ed. G.Vermes, F. Millar, and M. Goodman (Edinburgh, 1986–7). See also F. Millar, TheRoman Near East 31 BC–AD 337 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), ch. 10.]8 See Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (Philadelphia/Jerusalem,1959), pp. 90–116; Jones, Cities, ch. 10, esp. pp. 248–9, 255–9, 269–76; ‘TheUrbanization of Palestine’, in JRS 21 (1931), pp. 78–85; RostovtzeV i2, pp. 269–73, ii2,663–6 nn. 32–6; M. Avi-Yonah, The Holy Land from the Persian to the Arab Conquest(536 B.C. to A.D. 640): A Historical Geography (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1966), esp. pp.127–80.

332 Christianity and Propertyknown as Decapolis, to the east and south-east of Galilee and thenorth-east of Judaea; and Wnally one or two cities at the periphery ofthe area within which Jesus moved: Caesarea Paneas, founded in 2 bcby Herod’s son, Philip the tetrarch,9 some 25 miles to the north of thelake of Galilee (and referred to in Mark and Matthew as CaesareaPhilippi), and the ancient Phoenician towns of Tyre and Sidon, ofwhich Tyre lay on the coast, due west of Caesarea Paneas, with Sidonto the north of it.Now the word polis is often used by Greek authors (and in theSeptuagint) in a loose sense, of places which were not true cities butsimply large villages or market-towns which were described morecorrectly by other expressions such as mētrokōmiai, kōmopoleis. Inthe Gospels, Luke especially, the term polis is used on dozens ofoccasions for individual named places which were not technicallycities at all: Nazareth, Capernaum, Nain, Chorazin, Bethsaida, Sycharof Samaria, Ephraim, Arimathea, Bethlehem—and Jerusalem.10 Thelast is a special case. From the early Hellenistic period onwards, Greekauthors such as Hecataeus of Abdera and Agatharchides of Cnidos(ap. Jos. C. Apion. i. 197–8, 209) could call Jerusalem a polis, and insome respects it did qualify for that title, although I think it would bepreferable to regard it essentially as the administrative capital ofJudaea, of the ethnos (the ‘nation’) of the Jews. In any event, it wasvery far from being a proper Greek polis. Of the other places calledpoleis in the Gospels, we might wish to call Bethsaida a ‘town’;11 noneof the others was really more than a village. And although much of9 See Jones, Cities, pp. 282.10 Jerusalem appears as a polis in all four Gospels. Otherwise, Mark has onlyCapernaum (which also appears as a polis in Luke and by implication in Matthew);Ephraim and Sychar appear only in John; Arimathea, Bethlehem and Nain only inLuke: Bethsaida (a kōmē in Mk. 8.22–3), Chorazin and Nazareth are found as poleis inMatthew and Luke. Perhaps I should emphasize here that Jerusalem was never at anytime a polis in the technical sense, except when Hellenizing Jews attempted to turn itinto the polis of ‘Antioch-by-Jerusalem’ during a short period beginning in 175 bc: seeTcherikover pp. 153 et seq., esp. pp. 161–74, 188. If Jerusalem really had a theatre,amphitheatre and hippodrome (alien to the Jewish way of life), it was only becausethese were provided by that ardent Hellenizer, Herod the Great—who is also said tohave built the same three structures at Jericho, which no one would dream of calling apolis: see Schürer pp. 304–5 n. 56.11 It was the capital of the (originally Ptolemaic) toparchy of Gaulanitis, and it hadbeen re-named Julias by Philip the tetrarch: see Jones, n. 9 above.

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 333the activity of Jesus is said in the Gospels to have taken place in desertplaces or by the shore of the lake of Galilee or elsewhere in thecountry districts, we are sometimes told in very general terms thatJesus went through poleis (Mt. 11: 1; compare Lk. 4: 43), or poleis andkōmai (Mt. 9: 35; Lk. 13: 22), or kōmai, poleis and agroi (Mk. 6: 56).But in such contexts the word poleis must be understood in the veryloose and untechnical sense in which the evangelists (like some otherGreek authors) habitually use it. As I said earlier, wherever we have aspeciWc reference to a visit by Jesus to one of the genuine poleis,itisinevery single case made clear that it was the country district of thepolis concerned to which Jesus went.12Let us begin with Samaria. We can forget the bogus polis of Sychar(Jn. 4: 5), a mere village of course, and the passage in Matthew (10: 5)in which Jesus tells his disciples not to go into a polis of the Samaritans.That leaves us with only two passages in Luke: in 17: 11 Jesusmerely goes ‘through the midst of Samaria and Galilee’, and in 9: 52he sends messengers ‘to a kōmē of the Samaritans’ to prepare for hiscoming, which in fact never took place—Jesus went to another kōmē(9: 55). There is never a mention of Sebaste, the city founded byHerod, which was a pagan town, with no large proportion of Jewishsettlers, and the only genuine polis in the Samareitis.12 aThe Decapolis crops up in two passages in Mark and one inMatthew, and the manner of its appearance is signiWcant. In Mt. 4:25 crowds from Decapolis (which had a large chōra) and elsewherefollow Jesus. In Mk. 7: 31 Jesus comes from the borders of Tyre,through Sidon,13 to the lake of Galilee, via (as the text has it)‘the midst of the boundaries (or ‘territory’) of Decapolis’.14 But it is12 Whether ‘he could no longer enter åNò ðüºØí’, in Mk. 1: 45, means ‘into a city’ or‘into the city concerned’ (perhaps Capernaum, as in 1: 21, but compare 39), itobviously refers to no more than the immediate situation: see 2: 1 and much of thefollowing narrative, esp. for example 6: 56.12 a [On the Samaritans, see A. D. Crown, The Samaritans (Tübingen, 1989).]13 I accept KŒ ô &øí ›æßøí Ôýæïı MºŁåí & äØa ÓØä &øíïò [‘he came from the borders ofTyre through Sidon’] as a preferable textual reading to ŒÆd ÓØä &øíïò MºŁåí & [‘he came Sidon’], though I doubt whether the territory of Sidon was in fact involved;compare D. E. Nineham, Saint Mark (Pelican Gospel Comm., 1963), p. 203. [On thecities of the Decapolis, see Millar, Roman Near East, 408–14; I. Browning, Jerash andthe Decapolis (London, 1982).]14 A curiously roundabout route: see Nineham.

334 Christianity and PropertyMk. 5: 20 which brings out most clearly what I am trying toemphasize: that in these cases Jesus is clearly in the country districtattached to a polis and not in the actual polis itself. It needs to betaken with its whole context: the story of the demoniac out of whomwas cast the legion of devils (Mk. 5: 1–20; Mt. 8: 28–34; Lk. 8: 26–39),whether this is to be located at Gadara or Gerasa,15 both of whichwere cities of the Decapolis. In all three synoptics Jesus is in the chōraof the city, and the incident is pictured as taking place beside the lakeof Galilee; the demoniac comes out of the city (Lk. 8: 27) and indeedwas always ‘in the tombs and in the mountains’ (Mk. 5: 2–5);afterwards the swineherds go into the city (Mt. 8: 33), and they tellthe story in ‘the polis and the agroi’ (Mk. 5: 14; Lk. 8: 34), whereuponpeople (‘the whole polis’: Mt. 8: 34) come out to Jesus (Lk. 8: 35) andbeg him to go away—in Lk. 8: 37 it is ‘the whole multitude of theperichōros of the Gerasenes’ who do this. When Jesus tells the formerdemoniac to go home and publish the news of the divine work, heproclaims it, in Luke (8: 39), ‘throughout the whole polis’, and inMark (5: 20) ‘in the Decapolis’.15 Variant readings exist in each case for the name of the city into the chōra ofwhich Jesus goes at the beginning of the story: the best reading in Mark and Luke is‘Gerasa’ (åNò ôcí ÷þæÆí ô &øí ˆåæÆóçí &øí), in Matthew, ‘Gadara’ ( . . . ô &øí ˆÆäÆæçí &øí).In some MSS of all three Gospels there also occurs the reading ‘Gergesa’ ( . . .ô &øí ˆåæªåóçí &øí): this goes back to Origen, Comm. in Johan. vi.41, p. 150, ed. E.Preuschen, in the GCS Origen 4 (Berlin, 1903) [trans. R. E. Heine, Origen, Commentaryon the Gospel according to John Books 1–10 (Fathers of the Church 80; Washington,1989), 6 §§ 208–11, pp. 225–6], who realized that the distance from the lake of Galileeof both Gerasa (nearly 40 miles) and Gadara (5 or 6 miles) is considerable, and inorder to allow the swine to ‘run violently down a steep place into the sea’ proposed tosubstitute a place he called Gergesa, ðüºØò Iæ÷ÆßÆ ðåæd ôcí í ıí & ŒÆºïıìÝíçí ÔØâåæØÜäƺßìíçí; ðåæd mí Œæçìíeò ðÆæÆŒåßìåíïò ô fi çºßìífi & ç [‘an ancient city near the lake whichis now called Tiberias; near it is a cliV which is right next to the lake’]. It has beensuggested, however, that Origen was simply exercising his ingenuity on the basis ofGen. 10: 16. A place with some such name as Gergesa may have existed: in the 6thcentury Cyril of Scythopolis (a city of Decapolis) refers to a locality in this area whichhe calls Chorsia (Vita Sabae 24, p. 108.14 ed. E. Schwartz, Kyrillos von Scythopolis ¼ TU49, ii, 1939), and this may correspond with the modern Kursi—which however is saidto have no precipice. But there is no trace elsewhere of any ‘Gergesa’, and even if such aplace existed it cannot have been more than a kōmē, whereas the whole story demandsthat it be a polis, and indeed (see Mk. 5: 19) a member of the Decapolis, as were Gerasaand Gadara. There was, by the way, another city of the Decapolis, namely Hippos (theold Susitha), lying to the east of the lake of Galilee and possessing a territory whichincluded villages that adjoined the territory of Gadara (Jos. Vita [ix] 42), but it is nevermentioned in the New Testament.

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 335The situation is exactly the same on the two occasions on whichJesus is said to have visited the territory of cities outside his main areaof action. It is not in Caesarea Philippi itself that he is found, but inits kōmai (Mk. 8: 27) or merē (Mt. 16: 13);16 and when he visitsPhoenicia it is to the merē or horia of Tyre and Sidon that he goes(Mt. 15: 21–2; Mk. 7: 24, 31), and he is there approached by a woman‘from those horia’. When multitudes come to him on another occasionfrom Tyre and Sidon, it is from their paralios (coastal district,Lk. 6: 17). There is one reference in Matthew (11: 21) and Luke (10:13) to the doing of ‘mighty works’ in Tyre and Sidon; but (and thisnicely conWrms what I have been saying) this is simply part of thereproach to the ‘cities’ (in reality, kōmai) Chorazin and Bethsaida(and Capernaum) that if the mighty works which had actually beendone in them had been performed instead in Tyre and Sidon, theywould have repented!16 aIt will have been noticed that I have said nothing so far about theWrst two Palestinian cities which I put at the head of my list above:Sepphoris and Tiberias, the only two real poleis of Galilee, which hadbeen founded by Herod Antipas.17 There is the best of reasons forthis: just as we hear nothing in the Gospels of Sebaste (the polis of theSamareitis), so we hear not a word of Sepphoris, and Tiberias ismentioned only in the fourth Gospel (Jn. 6: 1, 23; 21: 1) in connectionwith the lake that bore its name, better known to us as the lake ofGalilee. Yet Sepphoris was only about four miles from Jesus’s homevillage of Nazareth, and Tiberias is on the shore of the lake of Galileeat almost the nearest point to Nazareth. One can understand thatJesus would not wish to enter Sebaste, a predominantly pagan city;but both Sepphoris and Tiberias were thoroughly Jewish in populationand religion, even if their civic institutions (those of Tiberias atany rate)18 were of the standard Greek pattern, and even if Sepphoris16 Nineham pp. 219, 228 n., is unnecessarily puzzled by the use of the perfectlycorrect expression kōmē in Mk. 8: 23, 26, 27.16 a [On Tyre and Sidon, see Millar, Roman Near East, 285–95.]17 Sepphoris (re-founded): Jos. AJ 18. 27. Tiberias: Jos. BJ 2. 168; AJ 18. 36–8; Vita37; and see M. Avi-Yonah, ‘The Foundation of Tiberias’, in Israel Exploration Journal,1 (1950–51), pp. 160–9. For both these cities, see Jones, Cities, pp. 274–8.18 See Jones, Cities, p. 462 n. 67. Compare also Tessa Rajak, ‘Justus of Tiberias’,Classical Quarterly, 67, ns 23 (1973), pp. 345–68, esp. 346–50.

336 Christianity and Propertywas to be exceptionally pro-Roman during the great Jewish revolt of66–70.19 Yet it need not surprise us to Wnd no record of Jesus’spresence in either of these cities: they were both regarded with hatredby the Galilaeans in Josephus’s army in 66,20 and Jesus would nodoubt have seen them as belonging to an alien world. In Mk. 1: 38 itis the nearby kōmopoleis (the substantial villages) of Galilee in whichhe contemplates preaching: that represents the reality.I dare say that some New Testament scholars may object that I havemade far too much of topographical evidence in the Gospels whichthey themselves are in general reluctant to press.21 To this I wouldreply that I am not using any of the Gospel narratives for anytopographical purpose: it is a matter of indiVerence to me whether,for example, the pericope containing the ‘confession of Peter’ (Mk. 8:27 V.; Mt. 16: 13 V.) is rightly located near Caesarea Philippi ratherthan anywhere else. Nor have I drawn any conclusions from uses ofthe word polis. My one purpose has been to demonstrate thatthe synoptic Gospels are unanimous and consistent in locating themission of Jesus entirely in the countryside, not within the poleisproper, and therefore outside the real limits of Hellenistic civilization.It seems to me inconceivable that this can be due to theevangelists themselves, who (as we have seen) were very likely todignify an obscure village like Nazareth or Capernaum22 with the titleof polis but would certainly not ‘down-grade’ a locality by making it acountry district if in their source it appeared as a polis. I conclude,therefore, that in this respect the evangelists accurately reXect the19 See Jos. BJ 3. 30–4; Vita 30, 38–9, 103–4, 124, 232, 346–8, 373, 394–7, 411.(Tiberias had quite an inXuential pro-Roman element: see Jos. Vita 32–42, 155 et seq.,381, 391; compare 82 etc.)20 For Tiberias, see Jos. Vita 98–100, 381–9 (esp. 384), 392; for Sepphoris, 374,384; compare 30, 375–80. [For Tiberias and Sepphoris, see Millar, Roman Near East,358–9, 369–70.]21 Opinions diVer greatly here, and none of the New Testament scholars I haveread has an approach at all similar to mine. There is some good material in G. Schille,‘Die Topographie des Markus-Evangeliums, ihre Hintergründe u. ihre Einordnung’,in Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins, 73 (1957), pp. 133–66, but his intereststoo are quite diVerent from mine.22 The well-known synagogue that has been excavated at Capernaum was builtmore than a hundred years after the time of Jesus. Josephus, in the whole of his works,makes no reference to Nazareth and at most two to Capernaum: BJ 3. 519 (a merespring), and perhaps Vita 403 (the village of Kepharnokos).

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 337situation they found in their sources; and it seems to me that thesesources are very likely indeed to have presented a true picture of thegeneral locus of the activity of Jesus.Within a generation the message of Jesus had been transformedinto what is sometimes described (perhaps not unfairly) as PaulineChristianity. This process cannot be understood by the historian (asdistinct from the theologian) unless it is seen as the transfer of awhole system of ideas from the world of the chōra to that of thepolis23—a process necessarily involving the most profound changesin that system of ideas. And in my opinion it is in this process oftransformation that the most serious problems of ‘Christian origins’arise.Jesus, then, lived and taught within an area which was neitherGreek nor Roman but wholly Jewish.24 As I mentioned earlier,Galilee, within which by far the greater part of the activity of Jesusapparently took place, was not even a Roman province during hislifetime: it was still a Roman ‘client kingdom’, until 39 part of thetetrarchy of Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great. Of courseJesus was well aware of the Roman imperial power that had alreadyengulfed Judaea as a tributary province and could easily swallow upthe remaining petty client kingdoms of Palestine whenever it wantedto. But he may well have had virtually no direct contact with theRoman imperial administration before his Wnal arrest and trial, onthe pretence that he was a political agitator, indeed a ‘resistanceleader’. Even the ‘publicans’ (publicani in Latin, telōnai in Greek)who crop up in the Gospels, such as Matthew (or Levi the son ofAlpheus),25 will have been employed by Herod Antipas, the tetrarch,and not by the Roman governor of Judaea—who by the way at thisdate, as we know from a recently discovered inscription, had the title23 See esp. n. 6 above. Here I should like to mention an excellent article which isrelevant to the one aspect of this vast subject named in its title: Heinz Kreissig, ‘Zursozialen Zusammenstellung der frühchristlichen Gemeinde in ersten Jahrh. u.Z.’, inEirene, 6 (1967), pp. 91–100.24 This is best brought out, in my opinion, in the admirable recent book by GezaVermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (London, 1973): see esp. pp.48–9.25 In Mk. 2: 14 it is Levi the son of Alpheus, and Levi also in Lk. 5: 27, 29; in Mt. 9:9 it is Matthew.

338 Christianity and Propertynot of procurator but of praefectus.26 How much contact Jesus hadwith Greek culture it is not possible to say, but I think it is likely tohave been minimal.Now the Graeco-Roman world was obsessively concerned withwealth and status. In regard to the vast majority of the members ofthe upper classes whom we happen to know about from literaryevidence or from honoriWc or funerary inscriptions or otherwise, itis of course their oYcial careers which are best known to us; weseldom have any details of their wealth.27 But wealth was by far themost important determinant of status. Ovid put it beautifully inthree words: dat census honores, ‘it is property that confers rank’(Amores iii. viii. 55). In the time of Jesus virtually all the greatfortunes belonged to Romans rather than Greeks; but in the Greekworld there had always been wide variations of wealth and poverty,and these had become much more pronounced now that the democracywhich had Xourished in the Wfth and fourth centuries wasgradually being extinguished by the joint eVorts of the Greek propertiedclasses and the Romans.28The Greeks, from archaic times through the Classical and Hellenisticperiods and on into the Roman age, habitually expressed politicalcomplexion and social status in a fascinating vocabulary which isan inextricable mixture of socio-economic and moral terminology,with two sets of terms applied more or less indiscriminately to thepropertied and the non-propertied classes respectively. On the onehand we have not only words which mean property-owning, rich,fortunate, distinguished, well-born, inXuential,29 but also, as alternativesfor virtually the same set of people, words having a basically26 See Schürer p. 358 and n. 22. [For the complex interaction between Romanemperors and their client kingdoms in the Levant during this period, see Millar,Roman Near East, ch. 2.]27 Richard Duncan-Jones, The Economy of the Roman Empire: QuantitativeStudies (Cambridge, 1974), gives a useful list of 29 of the largest fortunes knownto us under the principate, ranging from HS 400 million to about 2 million (app. 7,pp. 343–4), and a detailed analysis of the wealth of one particular Roman ofdistinction whom we know much better than most: Pliny the Younger (cap. 1, pp.17–32).28 I shall explain how this happened in CSAGW.29 For example ïƒ ôaò ïPóßÆò Š÷ïíôåò; ðºïýóØïØ; ðÆ÷å&Øò; åPäÆßìïíåò; ªíþæØìïØ;åPªåíå&Øò; ªåííÆ&ØïØ; äıíÆôïß; äıíÆôþôÆôïØ.

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 339moral connotation and meaning literally the good, the best, theupright, the fair-minded and so forth.30 And on the other hand weWnd applied to the lower classes, the poor, who are also the many, themob, the populace, words with an inescapably moral quality, meaningessentially bad.31 Even Solon, often regarded as the founder of theAthenian democracy, could say in one of his poems that he had madelaws equally for the kakos and the agathos32—for the ‘lower class’ andthe ‘upper class’, of course, rather than ‘the bad’ and ‘the good’; butnothing could alter the social fact that the upper class were ‘the good’,the lower class ‘the bad’. The Roman governing class was as thoroughlydevoted to property as the most wealth-conscious of theGreeks. No surviving Greek writer is quite as explicit about theoverriding importance of property rights as Cicero, the earliestknown to me in a long line of thinkers, extending into moderntimes, who have seen the protection of private property rights asthe prime function of the state. In the De OYciis, for example, afterasking what greater mischief there could be than an equal distributionof property (aequatio bonorum . . . qua peste quae potest essemaior?), Cicero goes on to declare that states were establishedabove all with the aim of preserving property rights (ii.73, compare78, 83–5; i.21).Let us now turn back to the Jewish world inhabited by Jesus. Thecontrast between Jewish and Graeco-Roman attitudes to questions ofwealth and poverty comes out vividly in the account given in chapter4 of Luke’s Gospel of the public preaching of Jesus at Nazareth. (The30 For example ïƒ IªÆŁïß, ŒÆºïd ŒIªÆŁïß; ÷æçóôïß; KóŁºïß; ¼æØóôïØ; âݺôØóôïØ;äåîØþôÆôïØ; ÷Ææßåíôåò; KðØåØŒå&Øò. I know of no detailed examination of the use ofthese Greek terms comparable to that of J. Hellegouarc’h, Le Vocabulaire latine desrelations et des partis politiques sous la République2 (Paris, 1972), who studies the useof the corresponding Latin terms boni, optimi, optimates etc. on pp. 484–505, and theequivalent of those given in n. 31 below (for example plebs, populus, populares, mali,improbi etc.) on pp. 506–41. But see R. A. Neil, The Knights of Aristophanes (London,1909), pp. 202–9, app. ii, ‘Political use of moral terms’.31 For example (a) ïƒ ðÝíçôåò (sometimes used almost in the sense of ‘the deservingpoor’), ¼ðïæïØ (the propertyless), ðôø÷ïß; (b) ïƒ ðﺺïß; ôe ðº çŁïò; & › Z÷ºïò;›ä& çìïò; ïƒ äçìïôØŒïß; (c) ïƒ ŒÆŒïß; ìï÷Łçæïß; ðïíçæïß; äåغïß; ôe ŒÜŒØóôïí. CompareMacMullen, Roman Social Relations, app. B: ‘The Lexicon of Snobbery’, and theworks there cited on p. 138.32 Solon, fr. 24.18–20 (ed. E. Diehl, Anthologia Lyrica Graeca, i3. 45); compare fr.23.19–21; fr. 1.33.

340 Christianity and Propertypart I am interested in does not occur in parallel accounts in theother synoptics.) Jesus reads from the 61st chapter of Isaiah, openingwith the words, ‘the spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hasanointed me to preach the gospel to the poor’ (Lk. 4: 18). Now theword for ‘poor’ used here by Luke, as in the Septuagint version ofIsaiah, is ptōchoi, a very strong word indeed, which very often inGreek means not just the poor but the down-and-out, the destitute,the beggar—Lazarus in the parable is a ptōchos (Lk. 16: 20, 22).Classical scholars will remember the appearance of Poverty (Penia)as a character in the Plutus of Aristophanes (lines 415–612), and howangry she becomes when Chremylus refers to Penia and Ptocheia assisters: no, says Penia, the ptōchos has nothing, whereas her man,the penēs, may toil and scrape, but he has enough to live on (lines548–54).32 aI must just mention here that although the word ptōchoi does alsoappear in the Septuagint version of Isaiah 61: 1, it there translates aHebrew word which is sometimes better rendered—as indeed it is inthe Authorized Version—by ‘the meek’. But this takes us into irrelevantquestions, which I am anyway not competent to deal with, of thevarious shades of meaning of the Hebrew words expressing poverty,lowliness and the like. Some of these are as ambiguous as the Englishword ‘humble’, which can be purely social or purely moral or amixture of the two. The only point I need make here is that in theHebrew terminology, unlike the Greek, poverty and a lowly station inlife are often associated with the moral virtues.33But let us return to Jesus. In Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes,in the so-called ‘Sermon on the Mount’ (Mt. 5–7), Jesus is made tosay ‘Blessed are hoi ptōchoi tōi pneumati, the poor in spirit’ (we mightsay, ‘humble at heart’), ‘for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’; and‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they32 a [For Christian conceptions of and attitudes to poverty and their impact on thesecular classical world, see E. Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale àByzance (Paris, 1977); P. Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire(Hanover, 2002).]33 Perhaps it will be suYcient if I merely give a few references to the massive workof S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, which cites much modernliterature: i2 (New York, 1952 and repr.) pp. 152 (with 364 n. 25), 262–7, 278 (with414 n. 36); ii2 (1952 and repr.) pp. 46, 241–2, 256, 269–74. See below, n. 33a.

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 341shall be Wlled’ (5: 3, 6); but Luke’s corresponding version, in the‘Sermon on the Plain’ (6: 17–49), has simply ‘Blessed are ye poor’(ptōchoi, without qualiWcation), ‘for yours is the Kingdom of God’,and ‘Blessed are ye that hunger now’ (not ‘hunger after righteousness’),‘for ye shall be Wlled’ (6: 20–1). In both cases, of course, thefulWlment of the blessings is intended eschatologically: they willbe realized not in this world but only in the Age to Come. Andeven the Lucan version is echoing the large number of passages in theOld Testament (especially in the Psalms, Isaiah, Proverbs and Job) inwhich the poor and lowly as such are treated with special reverence—several diVerent Hebrew expressions are involved. In the thoughtworldof Palestinian Judaism, out of which Jesus came, it was not somuch the rich and inXuential from whom the moral virtues were tobe expected, as in the Graeco-Roman world, but the poor. Anilluminating recent treatment of the Beatitudes by David Flusser33 ashows interesting connections with some of the literature of the DeadSea sect. Although Flusser is sure that it is Mt. 5: 3–5 which ‘faithfullypreserves the saying of Jesus and that Luke 6: 20 is an abbreviation ofthe original text’, he nevertheless insists that ‘Matthew’s ‘‘poor inspirit’’ also has a social content’.34The main element in the preaching of Jesus was the message,‘repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’. The meaning ofthis is that the end of the whole present dispensation is near: Godwill intervene and bring to a speedy end all the powers of this world.In preparation for these earth-shaking events men must repent oftheir sins and obey the law of God. In another sense of the expression‘Kingdom of Heaven’ (or ‘Kingdom of God’), that kingdom is withinman’s power to grasp now:34 a if he repents and follows the right wayof life, he can to that extent enter into the kingdom even before the33 a D. Flusser, ‘Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit’, in Israel Exploration Jnl, 10 (1960),pp. 1–13. I agree with Vermes p. 241 n. 53 that Adolph Büchler, Types of Jewish-Palestinian Piety from 70 B.C.E. to 70 C.E. (Oxford, 1922), is ‘a rich mine ofinformation rather than a valid historico-critical assessment of the data’.34 p. 11, compare pp. 6–8.34 a Particularly interesting is the article by C. H. Roberts, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven(Lk. XVII.21)’, in Harvard Theological Review, 41 (1948), pp. 1–8, showing that themuch-disputed expression Kíôeò •ì &øí in Lk. 17: 21 is most likely to mean that thekingdom is ‘within your power’ (‘It is a present reality if you wish it to be so’, p. 8),rather than ‘within you’ or ‘among you’.

342 Christianity and PropertyWnal cataclysm. Various consequences follow from this. One of themost important is that the possession of wealth is a positive hindranceto entering into the kingdom. ‘It is easier for a camel to gothrough the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdomof God’, said Jesus, after the man seeking eternal life who ‘had greatpossessions’ had gone away disconsolate on being told to sell all thathe had and give it to the poor.35 (Incidentally, this story is commonlyreferred to nowadays as that of ‘The Rich Young Man’, and that iscertainly what Matthew calls him; but Mark and Luke make it clearthat in their minds young is what he is not!)36 There is one respect inwhich Matthew’s account diVers radically from that of the other twosynoptics: Matthew (19: 21) inserts into the command of Jesus thequaliWcation, ‘If you would be perfect’ (ei theleis teleios einai), whichis not in Mark (10: 21) or Luke (18: 22); and, as we shall see presently,it is in Matthew’s formulation that the passage is invariably quoted bythe early Fathers.37Luke (16: 19–31) is the only evangelist to give us the parable ofLazarus—who, as I said earlier, is speciWcally a ptōchos, here quiterightly translated ‘beggar’. Expositors seldom bring out the fact thatthe terrible fate of the rich man (Dives, as we usually call him) isclearly seen as a direct result of his great wealth, for he feels (verses27–8) that Lazarus alone will be able to teach his Wve survivingbrothers how to avoid a similar fate. I need not cite any of the35 Mk. 10: 17–31; Mt. 19: 16–30; Lk. 18: 18–30. For an interesting variant, see theextract from the so-called Gospel according to the Hebrews, quoted for example byAlbert Huck, Synopsis of the First Three Gospels (9th edn., rev. by H. Lietzmann,English edn. by F. L. Cross, Oxford, 1957), p. 145 n., from E. Klostermann and E.Benz, Zur Überlieferung der Matthäuserklärung des Origenes ¼ TU 47, 2 (1931), pp.91–2; there is an English trans. in M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament(Oxford, 1924 and repr.), p. 6. [See also J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament:A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation based on M.R. James (Oxford, 1993), 10–11.]36 In Mark and Luke he says he has observed the commandments KŒ íåüôçôïò:itisMatthew who calls him › íåÆíßóŒïò. Incidentally, it is only Mark (10: 21) who saysthat Jesus ‘loved him’ (or is it ‘caressed him’?).37 For a desperate attempt by a modern Christian scholar to retain, here and in theBeatitudes, the Matthaean version in preference, although realizing that the other ismuch more likely to be the historically true one, see Christophe pp. 37–8. Would it beunfair to paraphrase his exegesis by saying that Mark and Luke have what Jesus moreprobably said, Matthew what a modern Christian feels he must surely have meant?

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 343other evidence38 showing that the possession of any substantialamount of property was regarded by Jesus as a positive evil, becauseit was only too likely to ensnare its possessor and divert him from theprimary task of seeking the Kingdom of God.There is just one other New Testament passage, again in Lukealone, which I wish to mention: the MagniWcat.39 Here we Wnd aninteresting variant on the eschatological conception we have noticedalready, according to which in the Age to Come the poor and hungrywill be satisWed. We are still within the realm of eschatology, but thedesired result is now conceived—in one form of the tradition ofJewish apocalyptic—as having been in some mysterious wayachieved already. ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seatsand hath exalted them of low degree. He hath Wlled the hungry withgood things and the rich he hath sent empty away.’ In the Greek the‘mighty’ are the dynastai, and Thomas Hardy took his title, ‘TheDynasts’, explicitly from this passage.40 In fact nothing of the sort hadactually happened: the dynasts were now more Wrmly in control thanever, as the Roman principate began its long era of power. Thepicture in the MagniWcat, in which the events are represented ashaving in a mystical sense occurred already, was a pleasantly harmlessone from the point of view of the dynasts, who certainly cashed theblank cheque Saint Paul later wrote them when he said, ‘The powersthat be are ordained of God’, and enjoined strict obedience to thecivil authorities.4138 Cadoux pp. 61–6 quotes as usual all the texts, even if his interpretations cannotalways be accepted.39 Lk. 1: 46–55 (esp. 52–3). See Joseph Vogt, ‘Ecce ancilla domini’, in VigiliaeChristianae, 23 (1969), pp. 241–63, repr. in Vogt Sklaverei u. Humanität (2nd edn.¼ Historia, Einzelschr. 8, 1972), pp. 147–64, 168.40 See Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts, After Scene (p. 522 of the ‘Papermac’ edition1965), where the Semi-chorus 1 of the Pities has the line, ‘Who hurlest Dynasts fromtheir thrones’, and Hardy quotes the Greek of the MagniWcat in a footnote. The termdynastēs, in the sense of a chief or prince, occurs from the 5th century bc onwards(see for example Thuc. vii. 33.4), and in the Hellenistic period becomes almost atechnical term for the ruler who is not actually a king. Thus in oYcial formulaereferring to ruling authorities, dynasts are linked with kings, cities and peoples(ethnē), in various combinations: see for example OGIS 229.11; 383.172–3, 228–9;441.129–30, 131–2; SIG3 581.64; Diod. xix.57.3.41 Rom. 13: 1–7; Titus 3: 1; compare 1 Pet. 2: 13–17; 1 Tim. 2: 1–2. There has beena long controversy over the nature of the ‘powers’ (exousiai) to whom every soul is

344 Christianity and PropertyI shall waste little time on the so-called ‘communism’ of theearliest apostolic community, which appears only momentarily inthe opening chapters of Acts, while the Christian church was a singlesmall body,42 and then ceases altogether, to reappear only withinsingle monastic communities from the early fourth century onwards.This situation, which was already characteristic of certain Essene andother communities among the Jews,43 is entirely absent from theremainder of the New Testament, and even in the early chapters ofcommanded to be subject, in Rom. 13: 1. It should be suYcient to refer to Clinton D.Morrison, The Powers That Be (¼ Studies in Biblical Theology no. 29 (1960) ), who hasexhaustive bibliographies. The reader should be warned, however, that the author is atheologian and not a historian, and that some of his statements are such as no ancienthistorian could accept—for example p. 125: ‘Since the State was part of the cosmicorder established by the Ruler of All . . . the ancients considered subjection to theState a religious duty, and anarchy was synonymous with atheism. Wise and godlymen had no alternative but submission to this order, and no doubt the Christianconscience was largely tempered by this common understanding.’ Apologists for Paulmust try to do better than this.42 Acts 2: 44–5; 4: 32–7; 5: 1–11; cf. Jn. 12: 6; 13: 29. I need refer only to RudolfBultmann, Theology of the New Testament (trans. K. Grobel; New York, 1952 andrepr.), i, p. 62: ‘It is self-evident that in an eschatological congregation awaiting thenear end of the world no special economic system was set up. What is often called thecommunity of property in the earliest Church on the basis of Acts 2: 45; 4: 34 V.isinreality a practical sharing of property on the basis of love. To call this actualcommunism is out of the question, for it lacks both a social programme andorganized production.’43 For the ancient Greek and Latin texts relating to the Essenes, see Antike Berichteüber die Essener, ed. Alfred Adam ¼ Kleine Texte für Vorlesung und Übungen, no. 182(Berlin, 1961; new edn. by C. Burchard, Berlin, 1972). There is of course a largeliterature on the Essenes: see the select bibliography in vol. 9 of the Loeb edition ofJosephus, by L. H. Feldman (1965), app. D, pp. 561–3. This has been growing sincethe appearance of the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’, emanating (in my view) either from theEssenes themselves or from a closely related sect. For a useful recent bibliographydealing with all the recent discoveries in the Judaean desert, see Schürer i, pp. 118–22.G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls (Penguin, 1962 and repr.) is the best English version:see esp. pp. 29–30. And compare R. de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls(London, 1973), esp. 129–30. Doubtless Jewish inXuences also lie behind suchpassages in the ‘Apostolic Fathers’ as Didache 4.8 (contrast 1.5–6; 4.9, 11); Hermes,Shepherd, Vision iii.vi.6 (contrast for example Mandate ii.4–6; Similitude ii.5–10);Barnabas 19.8. [The subsequent bibliography on the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrollsis very substantial; see, for example, E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish Peoplein the Age of Jesus Christ, iii, rev. Engl. trans. by G. Vermes et al. (Edinburgh, 1986),380–469; J. A. Fitzmyer, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools for Study(Atlanta, 1990); and from a diVerent perspective, P. F. Esler, The First Christians intheir Social Worlds (London, 1994), ch. 5.]

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 345Acts it is clear that communal ownership was not complete, and inany event had nothing to do with communal production. Laterreferences which have sometimes been taken wrongly as evidence ofa continuance of community of property are no more than idealizationsof a situation in which charity is conceived as complete, aswhen Tertullian says, ‘omnia indiscreta sunt apud nos, praeter uxores’[‘Among us all things are held in common, with the exception ofwives’] (Apol. 39.11), or when Justin boasts that Christians share alltheir property with one another (I Apol. xiv.2).At this point, before I go on to consider the attitude of the fathers tothe question of property-ownership, I want to turn aside and dealwith early Christian attitudes to the speciWc problem of slavery,which of course is partly one aspect of the larger question of propertyin general, for slaves ranked very high indeed among the forms ofproperty considered essential for the good life in classical antiquity.The main organizational diVerence between the economy of theancient world and our own is that in antiquity the propertied classesderived their surplus, which enabled them to live as they pleased, notfrom the exploitation of free wage labour (which was relatively rareand was never of any great importance in the economy) but fromunfree labour44—that of chattel slaves above all, but also to someextent that of serfs (such as the Spartan helots or the majority of thecoloni of the later Roman empire) or of debt-bondsmen. Of course, avery large part of both agricultural production and manufacture wascarried on by small independent peasants and artisans; but anyonewho wanted to live as a gentleman and have time to spend on suchthings as politics or philosophy45 or just a life of pleasure would haveto rely mainly on exploiting slave labour. (There was hardly anyalternative, except the letting of land or houses to tenants.)Now of course in a class society, especially one resting largely onservile labour, the governing class will have to keep the threat of forceup its sleeve, to ensure the subservience of those at whose expense it44 I shall have a great deal to say about this in CSAGW and can omit the evidencehere. [For slavery at Rome, see Class Struggle, ch. 3.4; K. R. Bradley, Slavery andSociety at Rome (Cambridge, 1994).]45 According to Arist. Pol. i.7, 1255 b 35–7, such a man would not even troublehimself with the supervision of his slaves but would entrust it to an overseer.

346 Christianity and Propertylives; and the Greeks, and even more the Romans, could treat refractoryslaves with extreme harshness. During the debate in the Romansenate in 61, on whether there should be the traditional mass executionof all the four hundred urban slaves of Pedanius Secundus, thePraefectus Urbi, who had been murdered by one of his slaves, theconservative lawyer Gaius Cassius told the nervous senators, ‘You willnot restrain that scum except by terror’; and the execution was dulycarried out, in spite of a vigorous protest by the common people ofRome, who demonstrated violently for the relaxation of the savageancient rule—which, incidentally, was still the law in the legislation ofthe Christian emperor Justinian Wve centuries later.46 But a ruling classseldom tries to rule by force alone; some kind of ideology is usuallydevised which both justiWes the privileged position of the rulersand also seeks to persuade the ruled that the existing state of aVairsis only right and proper and is even in their ‘own best interests’.Two main types of philosophical justiWcation of slavery wereconstructed by the Greeks and Romans.47 The Wrst, the famoustheory of ‘natural slavery’, which is implicit in Plato’s thought andfully developed by Aristotle, grew naturally out of the historical factthat most Greek slaves in the classical period were barbaroi—strictly,non-Greeks, but ‘barbarians’ is normally used as the translation ofthe corresponding Greek and Latin words, as it is so convenient inpractice, if often technically incorrect. Aristotle’s theory was basedupon the proposition, which he regarded as self-evident, that certainpeople (including virtually all barbarians) are slaves by nature, in thesense that they are actually better oV when subjected to a master: for46 The story is given by Tac. Ann. xiv.42–3. It is strange that some standard works,such as W. W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery (Cambridge, 1908), pp. 95 etc.,and W. L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity ¼ Mem.Amer. Philos. Soc. 40 (1955), p. 82, speak of the S. C. Silanianum as ordering only thetorture of the murdered master’s slave household. It is quite clear that if they failed togive aid to their murdered master (whether killed by a fellow-slave or anyone else), allthose slaves sub eodem tecto were held to be guilty and were not merely tortured butexecuted: see CJ vi. xxxv.12 (Justinian, ad 532); and many passages in Dig. XXIX.v,for example 1. §§ 18, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, 31, 33; 3. §§ 16, 17; 14; and esp. 19. Many heirsmust have been very angry at being thus robbed of valuable property!47 My treatment of this subject here is somewhat over-simpliWed, and I have citedlittle ancient evidence; but there is a rather fuller analysis in my [The Class Struggle inthe Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (1981; corr.imprint, London, 1983), 416–18].

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 347such a person, slavery is both beneWcial and just. The essential view ofPlato and Aristotle was nicely expressed, more vividly than by eitherof them, by the Virginian slaveowner, George Fitzhugh, in 1854:‘Some men are born with saddles on their backs, and others bootedand spurred to ride them; and the riding does them good’!48 (Fitzhugh,of course, was quoting, and contradicting, some famous wordsspoken on the scaVold in 1685 by the English radical, RichardRumbold.)49 One passage in Aristotle’s Politics that is particularlyinteresting is the one containing the advice that all slaves should beoVered the reward of ultimate emancipation (vii.10, 1330 a 32–3):Aristotle promises to give his reasons later, but unfortunately neverdoes so. If we read this advice with earlier passages explaining howthe slave can beneWt from his association with his master, we may seea fairly precise parallel, at the individual level, with the theory of the‘tutelage of backward nations’, one of the main planks in the ideologyof modern western imperialism.The other type of philosophical justiWcation of slavery, which isparticularly associated with the Stoics, has its antecedent in a statementin the Politics of Aristotle (i.6, 1255 a 25–6), which denies thevery name of slave to the man who does not deserve to be in acondition of slavery—or, as we might say, denies that the man whodoes not deserve to be in slavery is ‘really’ a slave at all. This, and notthe theory of ‘natural slavery’, became the standard view of thinkingslaveowners in Hellenistic and Roman times. Even before Aristotlewrote there had been protests against the hypothesis of ‘natural’slavery50 and even against the assumption that barbarians are naturallyinferior to Greeks. Indeed, the theory of ‘natural slavery’ is not atall prominent in antiquity after Aristotle’s time, and when it doesreappear it is mainly applied to peoples rather than individuals.5148 George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (Richmond,Va., 1854), p. 179.49 See The Good Old Cause. The English Revolution of 1640–1660, Its Causes, Courseand Consequences2. Extracts from contemporary sources, ed. Christopher Hill andEdmund Dell (2nd edn., rev. 1969), p. 474.50 See my The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, p.45.51 As it had sometimes been earlier, for example in Arist. Pol. vii.14, 1333 b 38 V.,esp. 1334 a 2. [For discussion of Aristotle’s concept of natural slavery within thecontext of his overall philosophy, see F. D. Miller, ‘Naturalism’, in C. Rowe and M.SchoWeld (eds.), The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought(Cambridge, 2000), 320–43, at 332–6.]

348 Christianity and PropertyThis may be in a merely rhetorical context, as when Cicero stigmatizesJews and Syrians as ‘peoples born for slavery’ (De Prov. Cons.10), but we also Wnd it seriously stated by a speaker in Cicero’sdialogue De Republica (iii.25/37) that a nation can beneWt frombeing in a state of complete political subjection (servitus) toanother.52 There were, however, some distant but powerful echoesof the ‘natural slavery’ theory in much later times, when it played ahighly signiWcant role in Christian Spain in the controversy concerningthe rightfulness of enslaving negroes, and the Indians of theCaribbean and of central and south America, in the Wfteenth centuryonwards. At the great debate ordered by Charles V at Valladolid in1550, to decide whether Christian Spaniards might lawfully wage warupon Indians and enslave them, before even preaching the faith tothem, Aristotle’s doctrine was accepted in principle by both theleading disputants: the great scholar Juan Gines de Sepúlveda andthe Franciscan friar Bartolomé de las Casas. (The main book inEnglish on this topic, upon which I am relying here, bears thedelightful title, Aristotle and the American Indians.)53 The mainpoint of disagreement, it seems, was simply the factual questionwhether or not the Indians were ‘natural slaves’; it was hardlyquestioned that negroes were.In the Hellenistic period onwards, Greek and Roman thought onthe subject of slavery, with hardly an exception, provides a set ofuninspired variations on a single theme: that the state of slavery—like poverty and war, or liberty, riches and peace—is the result ofaccident, of Fortune rather than of Nature, and that it is a matter ofindiVerence, aVecting externals only; that the good and wise man isnever ‘really’ a slave, even if that happens to be his actual condition,but is ‘really’ free; that it is the bad man who is ‘really’ a slave, becausehe is in bondage to his own lusts—a wonderfully comforting set ofdoctrines for slaveowners. (I fancy that such austere philosophicalnotions are of greater assistance in the endurance of liberty, riches52 The source of Cic. De Rep. iii.24/36 to 25/37, ed. K. Ziegler (6th edn., 1964) isoften said to be Panaetius, but I agree with H. Strasburger, ‘Poseidonios on Problemsof the Roman Empire’, in JRS 55 (1965), pp. 40–53 (esp. pp. 44–5 and n. 50) that thisis unjustiWed.53 It is by Lewis Hanke (London, 1959).

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 349and peace than of slavery, poverty and war.) Ingenious developmentscan be found of this or that aspect of the standard view I have justdescribed, and of course some authors emphasize one aspect of it,others another; but there is a general dreary similarity of sentiment.I think the fourteenth oration of Dio Chrysostom is probably themost entertaining example I know of this kind of perverse ingenuity.It is often said that Christianity introduced an entirely new andbetter attitude towards slavery. Nothing could be more false: Jesusaccepted slavery as a fact of his environment,54 just as it is accepted inthe Old Testament; and his followers accepted and adapted theprevailing Graeco-Roman view which I have just described. ThesigniWcance of the oft-quoted text in Colossians (3: 11), ‘There isneither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian,Scythian, bond nor free’ is better understood in the light of theparallel text in Galatians (3: 28): ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek,there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for yeare all one in Christ Jesus’. There is ‘neither bond nor free’ in exactlythe same sense as there is ‘neither male nor female’: these statementsare true in a strictly spiritual sense; the equality exists ‘in the sight ofGod’ and has no relation whatever to temporal aVairs. The distinctionbetween slave and master in this world is no more seen asneeding to be changed than that between male and female. ForSaint Paul, Jesus has set all his followers free—from the Xesh andall its works.55 The exhortation to the Christian slave to regardhimself as ‘Christ’s freedman’ (in the same sense that the Christianwho is a free man is ‘Christ’s slave’, 1 Cor. 7: 22) may well haveaVorded him greater spiritual comfort than the pagan slave couldobtain from the familiar philosophic view that if he was a good manhe was ‘really’ free already; but it was basically the same view. And if,54 See esp. Lk. 17: 7–9 (addressing potential slaveowners); also Mk. 12: 2–5 (¼ Lk.20: 10–12; compare Mt. 21: 34–6); 13: 34; Mt. 10: 24–5; 13: 27–8; 18: 23 V.; 22: 3–10(compare Lk. 14: 17–23); 24: 45–51; 25: 14–30 (compare Lk. 19: 13–22); Lk. 12: 37–8;43–8; 15: 22, 26; and other texts. [For an important discussion of the limitations toChristian radicalism in the ancient world, including on the question of the proprietyof slavery, see P. Garnsey and C. Humfress, The Evolution of the Late Antique World(Cambridge, 2001), ch. 9, esp. pp. 206–10.]55 See for example Bultmann i, pp. 243–5, 246, 249, 331–3, 340–3; ii. pp. 205, 214,compare 230–1.

350 Christianity and Propertyas by philosophic pagans, Christian masters are brieXy enjoined totreat their slaves fairly,56 the yoke of slavery is fastened even moreWrmly upon Christian slaves as the emphasis on obedience to theirmasters becomes even more absolute. Certain phrases in the Paulineepistles,57 such as that in Ephesians (6: 5), exhorting slaves to obeytheir masters ‘with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as untoChrist’, had sinister implications which were made explicit in twopost-apostolic works, the Epistle of Barnabas (19.7) and the Didache(4.11): they expressly tell the slave that he must serve his master ‘as acounterpart of God’ (hōs typōi theou), ‘in reverence and fear’. I knowof nothing that goes as far as that in pagan literature. Whatever thetheologian may think of Christianity’s claim to set free the soul of theslave, therefore, the historian cannot deny that it helped to rivet theshackles rather more Wrmly on his feet.58 It performed the same socialfunction as the fashionable philosophies of the Graeco-Romanworld, and perhaps with deeper eVect: it made the slave bothmore content to endure his earthly lot, and more tractable andobedient. Saint Ignatius, in his Epistle to Polycarp (4.3), is anxiousthat Christian slaves should be neither despised nor ‘puVed up’56 In the New Testament, the only relevant passages I can Wnd are Coloss. 4: 1;Ephes. 6: 9; also Philem. 10 V. (esp. 16–18), a special case, Onesimus having beenconverted by Paul (10). [Ste. Croix expanded his thought on Gal. 3: 28 in one of thechapters for his projected volume on ‘Early Christian Attitudes to Women, Sex andMarriage’, although the essence of his argument, that the Pauline text must beinterpreted solely in a spiritual sense, is encapsulated here. Much of the longerversion was to be occupied with arguments against modern feminist theologianswhose views, in Ste. Croix’s judgement, lacked proper historical grounding.]57 See Ephes. 6: 5–8; Coloss. 3: 22–4; 1 Tim. 6: 1–2; Titus 2: 9–10; 1 Pet. 2: 18–20.Compare 1 Cor. 7: 20–4: here there has been much dispute about the meaning of vv.20–1, which must certainly be taken as an injunction against seeking manumission,both because of the ei kai (‘even if’: the force of this is missed in the AuthorizedVersion and by many commentators) and because of the gar at the beginning of v. 22.The sense is, ‘Let each man remain in the calling (occupation) wherein he was called(converted to Christianity). Were you a slave when you were called (converted)? Don’tlet it concern you; but even if you are able to become free, be content with your presentcondition, for he who was called in the Lord (converted), being a slave, is the Lord’sfreedman; similarly, he who was called being a free man is a slave of Christ’. Paul’s pointis that the believer’s earthly condition, as slave or free, is of no importance.58 In his article, ‘Slavery, Christian’, in Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion andEthics, II (London, 1920 and repr.), p. 604a, L. D. Agate felt obliged to admit that theChurch tended, ‘owing to its excessive care for the rights of the masters, even toperpetuate what would otherwise have passed away’. I doubt, however, if slaverywould have ‘passed away’ any earlier in the absence of Christianity.

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 351(mē physiousthōsan); that they should ‘serve the more, to the glory ofGod’; and that they should ‘not wish to be set free at the public cost,lest they become slaves of lust’. (I confess that I Wnd the last phrasesomewhat inconsequential, nor can I see exactly how an even moreintense degree of labour on the part of the slave can enhance the gloryof God.) The Wfth Canon of the Council of Elvira (in the late thirdcentury or the early fourth) punished with no more than seven years’excommunication even the intentional Xogging to death by a womanof her slave-girl—perhaps one who had received the sexual attentionsof the woman’s husband.58 a And baptism seems to have been refusedto a slave by at least some churches without the consent of hismaster—perhaps only at Wrst if a Christian one,59 but later even if apagan.60 Such a sacriWce of the immortal soul of a would-be Christianslave to the property-rights of a master seems to me indefensibleon Christian premises.The situation changed not at all when Christianity succeeded tothe seats of power in the fourth century, and the Church61 assumed aposition even in the public life of the Roman empire of the fourthand following centuries which I can only compare, functionally, withthe role of what President Eisenhower called ‘the military-industrialcomplex’ in the United States today.61 a Saint Augustine at leastadmitted that slavery was an evil in principle; but with that extraordinaryperverse ingenuity which never ceases to astonish one, he sawit as God’s punishment upon mankind for the sin of Adam.62 (It did58 a [For the date of Elvira, see Ch. 2 above.]59 See Hippol. Apost. Trad. 15 (ed. Bernard Botte, Hippolyte de Rome: La traditionapostolique d’après les anciennes versions2 ¼ SC 11 b , 2nd edn., 1968) ¼ xvi. 4 in theEnglish trans. by Gregory Dix, The Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytusof Rome2 (1968, 2nd edn. rev. by H. Chadwick). The date of the Apost. Trad. is veryclose to 215.60 Can. Hippol. x. 63 (pp. 76–7, ed. H. Achelis, TU 6, 4, 1891); compare the Arabicversion, with a French trans., in R. G. Coquin, Les Canons d’Hippolyte ¼ PO 31, 2(1966), can. 10, p. 95 ¼ 363.61 Strictly, the expression ‘the Church’ is a theological rather than a historicalconcept, for the Christians were never anything like a united body, and each sect(including of course the Catholics) had a habit of denying the very name of Christianto all ‘heretics’ and ‘schismatics’—that is to say, those who were not within itscommunion. But the expression is too convenient to be abandoned entirely.61 a [For this comparison, cf. Ch. 5, p. 202 n.5]62 Aug., esp. CD xix. xv–xvi. [By contrast, Gregory of Nyssa, in the passages fromhis Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes 2: 7 quoted by Garnsey and Humfress, Evolution,

352 Christianity and Propertynot occur to him that it might be thought blasphemous to attributeto an all-just Deity such a singularly indiscriminate method ofcollective punishment.) In thus suggesting that ‘justly was the burdenof servitude laid upon the back of transgression’ Augustine representedslavery as something divinely ordained, and gave the institutionan even weightier justiWcation than it had ever received frompre-Christian thinkers since the days when theories of ‘natural slavery’were abroad. Indeed, Augustine and Ambrose went so far asto think that slavery could actually be good for the slave, an instructiveform of correction and a blessing even63—for, as Ambrose put it,‘the lower the station in life, the more exalted the virtue’.64 I have notbeen able to Wnd in any early Christian writer anything like a demandfor the abandonment of slavery or even for a general freeing ofexisting slaves. The nearest thing I know to this is in one of theHymns on the Nativity (surviving only in Syriac) of Ephraim ofNisibis and Edessa in Mesopotamia: here Ephraim makes Mary say,‘Let the man who owns a slave give him his freedom’.65 But immediatelythere follow the words, ‘so that he may come and serve hisLord’; and in one of his Hymns on the Epiphany Ephraim makes itclear that in his eyes it is through baptism that the slave and the freeman are equated66—the standard Christian view. I have not even beenable to discover any attack on slavery in heretical works, comparableto the Pelagian onslaught on riches which I shall mention presently.At least two Christian scholars of modern times, C. J. Cadoux and207, asserted that slavery was a sin of pride against God since it had not existed in theGarden of Eden and contravened God’s hierarchy of creation. But, as Garnsey andHumfress note, Gregory’s line of argument is exceptional.]63 Aug. CD xix.xv; Ambr. Ep. 77.6 (‘is qui regere se non potest et gubernare,servire debet . . . pro benedictione igitur huiusmodi confertur servitus’ [‘those whocannot control and govern themselves ought to be slaves . . . and so servitude of thistype is given as a blessing’ ¼ M. M. Beyenka, Saint Ambrose, Letters (Fathers of theChurch 26; New York, 1954), 47].64 Ambr. Ep. 2.19 (‘quo status inferior, eo virtus eminentior’ [‘the more lowly theirstatus the more exalted their virtue’, Beyenka 15]). Among other passages in Ambrosedealing with slavery, see Ep. 37passim [Beyenka 54]; 63.112 [Beyenka 59]; 75.4–5[Beyenka 69].65 Ephraem Syrus, Hymn. de Nativ. xvii.8, p. 80, in the German trans. of E. Beck,CSCO 187 (¼ Syr. 83), 1959. For this and the passage cited in the next note, see Vogtpp. 161–2.66 Ephraem Syrus, Hymn. de Epiph. iv.6–8 (p. 143).

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 353R. M. Grant,67 have declared that the gnostic Acts of Thomas 68 attackthe very institution of slavery on the ground that all men are equalbefore God. In the text I see nothing of the sort, but only an expressionof sympathy for slaves whose masters lay burdens on them as brutebeasts and refuse to treat them as men like themselves.In the Roman lawyers (apparently pagans to a man), from thesecond or third century of the Christian era to the sixth, we sometimesWnd the admission that slavery was contra naturam, iurinaturali contraria.69 (Slavery indeed seems to have been regardedby at least some of the lawyers as the only feature of the ius gentiumthat did not form part of ius naturale.)70 This is a line of thought thatcan be traced right back to the unnamed thinkers of the Wfth orfourth century bc who are said by Aristotle to have declared thatslavery, because it was based on force, was contrary to nature andwrong—not merely ‘not according to nature’ (ou kata physin) but‘contrary to nature’ (para physin), a signiWcant diVerence.71 This lineof thought may or may not have descended to the Roman lawyersthrough the Stoics. Certainly some Stoics—the ex-slave Epictetus, forexample72—may occasionally have spoken as if they actually disapprovedin principle of possessing slaves. But this is all ultimatelyunreal, part of the smokescreen of plausible ideas by which the morefastidious thinkers of antiquity concealed from themselves the unpalatabletruth about a ruthless world of which they were trying tomake the best they could, according to their lights. The unreality ofall this talk emerges most clearly from Epictetus’s description of the67 Cadoux p. 454 (with the Greek text in n. 5); R. M. Grant, Augustus to Constantine:The Thrust of the Christian Movement into the Roman World (London, 1971),p. 301.68 Act. Thom. 83, in Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha ii.ii.198–9, ed. M. Bonnet(Leipzig, 1903). There is a good English trans. in James at p. 402. [For the Syriacversion, with Engl. trans., see A. F. J. Klijn, The Acts of Thomas: Introduction, Text,and Commentary (2nd edn., Leiden, 2003).]69 Dig. i.v.4.1 (Florentinus); xii.vi.64 (Tryphoninus); i.i.4 (Ulpian); Inst. J. i.ii.2.70 See H. F. Jolowicz and Barry Nicholas, Historical Introduction to the Study ofRoman Law3 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 106–7.71 See my The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, p. 45.72 See Gnomologium Epicteteum 36–7 (pp. 486–7 in H. Schenkl’s Teubner text ofEpictetus, 1916) ¼ fr. 42–3 Schweighäuser. [Although it is very unlikely that thiscollection of aphorisms preserves genuine words of Epictetus, this does not aVect Ste.Croix’s point that a Stoic expressing ‘Epictetan’ views articulated this opinion.]

354 Christianity and Propertyex-slave who ends up by becoming a senator: he is then subject, saysEpictetus, to ‘the fairest and sleekest slavery of all’!73 If being asenator was slavery, it was slavery in a Pickwickian sense, a kind ofslavery which the vast majority of the population of the Graeco-Roman world would have embraced eagerly enough.72 aIn early Christian thought, then, I have been able to Wnd little ornothing that goes even as far in rejecting slavery as the purelytheoretical statements of the Roman lawyers to the eVect that it is‘contrary to nature’. And at this point I must mention one thing thathas long puzzled me. I realize that on Christian principles a good casecan perhaps be made for accepting the condition of slavery for theslave, in the way that Stoics and Epicureans accepted it, as well asSaint Paul and so many of the other early Christians, as somethingexternal and unimportant. This is so, even for those who might notgo all the way with Cardinal Newman when he declared that accordingto the teaching of his church ‘it were better for sun and moon todrop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millionswho are upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far astemporal aZiction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should belost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilfuluntruth, though it harmed no one, or steal one poor farthing withoutexcuse.’74 But what of slavery as it aVects the master? Surely theChristian who prays not to be ‘led into temptation’ should proceedto renounce the total irresponsible domination over fellow humanbeings which belongs to the master of slaves and is only too likely tolead him (as we know it did) into the gravest temptation, to commitacts of cruelty and lust? I do not know when this was Wrst realized;but it was evident to the genius of Tolstoy, who in a remarkablepassage in War and Peace makes Prince Andrey tell Pierre that what ismost evil about serfdom is its eVect upon those masters who have thepower to punish their serfs as they please, and who, in doing so, ‘stiXetheir remorse and become hardened’.75 I can only conclude that what72 a [For discussion of Stoic views of slavery, see Bradley, Slavery, 134–40; P.Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 9.]73 Epict. Diss. iv.i.40, p. 360, ed. H. Schenkl (1916).74 J. H. Newman, Lectures on certain DiVerences felt by Anglicans in submitting tothe Catholic Church (London, 1850), p. 199; (new and rev. edn., Dublin, 1857), p. 190.75 The conversation occurs in book V, during Pierre’s visit to Andrey at Bogucharovo.

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 355prevented the Christian church from admitting the dangerous, brutalizingeVect of slavery (and serfdom) upon masters was theirresistible force of social reality—what I would call, with Marx,the class struggle:75 a the absolute necessity for the dominant classesof the Graeco-Roman world to maintain those social institutionsupon which their whole privileged position depended, and whichthey were not willing, or even able, to forgo.I cannot speak from personal knowledge of Christian literaturemuch after the sixth century; but I would say that I know of noabsolute condemnation of slavery as an institution by any Christianwriter during the Middle Ages: statements I have seen quoted fromTheodore the Studite, Smaragdus Abbas and others always havesome particular limited application.76 I dare say it is only my ownignorance, but I know of no general, outright condemnation ofslavery inspired by a Christian outlook, before the petition of theMennonites of Germantown in Pennsylvania in 168877—a sect verylike the Quakers, outside the main stream of Christianity. Christianwriters have often emphasized attempts by Christians to prevent or atleast discourage enslavement; but these eVorts were rarely if everextended for the beneWt of those outside the Christian fold, andwriters who have drawn attention to them have often failed tomention that condemnation of the sin of enslaving Christians iscommonly accompanied by the tacit admission that enslaving nonbelieversis permissible, and even praiseworthy if enslavement isfollowed by conversion to the faith—a conversion which perhaps insome cases could hardly be attained by other means.So much for slavery. I turn now to the more general problem of theattitude of the early fathers to the question of property-ownership.7876 For Smaragdus, see R. W. and A. J. Carlyle, A History of Medieval PoliticalTheory in the West, i2 (London, 1927), pp. 208–9; David Brion Davis, The Problem ofSlavery in Western Culture (New York, 1966), pp. 92–3. There is a great deal ofinteresting material in the latter work (the best general account of its subject) onChristian attitudes to slavery; compare also C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese SeaborneEmpire 1415–1825 (London, 1969; Pelican 1973), for example pp. 20–5, 66 et seq., andesp. pp. 265–8.77 A text often reprinted: see for example Documents of American Hist.,5 ed. H. S.Commager (New York, 1949), pp. 37–8, no. 26. And see Davis pp. 308–9.78 The bibliography is vast, and I will only refer to Christophe, pp. 55–214;and Jean Gaudemet, L’Église dans l’empire romain IV a –V a siècles (Paris, 1958),

356 Christianity and PropertyThere are of course considerable diVerences of emphasis, but I thinkit would be true to say that with hardly an exception all the orthodoxwriters seem to have no serious qualms in accepting that a Christianmay own property, under certain conditions, the most important ofwhich are that he must neither seek it avidly nor acquire it unjustly;that he ought not to possess a superXuity but only a suYciency; andthat what he does have he may use but must not abuse: he must holdit as a kind of trustee79 (if I may be permitted to use that peculiartechnical term of English law) for the poor, to whom he must givecharity. This last condition, the necessity for almsgiving, is the oneupon which there is most insistence: the whole conception of coursedescended direct to Christianity from Judaism;80 and here the Christianchurches do seem to have gone far beyond the ordinary paganstandard. (There are some interesting remarks about the absence ofsimilar organized activities among the pagans, in the works of theemperor Julian.)81 Occasional anticipations of the Christian ideasI have just outlined can be found in earlier Greek authors, as whenEuripides makes Jocasta say that mortals do not hold their propertyas their own private possession: it belongs to the gods, and mortalsmerely have the care of it; the gods, whenever they want it, take itback again (Phoen. 555–7).I shall return in a moment to the question of almsgiving, which isworth special attention, and I shall also have something to say on thequestion of suYciency or superXuity of property. But I must Wrst adda rider to what I have said about the general early Christian view ofpp. 569–73 (compare pp. 694–8 on almsgiving), who give suYcient references toother modern work. A. R. Hands, Charities and Social Aid in Greece and Rome(London, 1968), deals mainly with the pre-Christian world, as does H. Bolkestein,Wohltätigkeit und ArmenpXege in vorchristlichen Altertum (Utrecht, 1939). [For commentson the divergent Stoic views on private property, see J. Annas, ‘Cicero on StoicMoral Philosophy and Private Property’, in M. GriYn and J. Barnes (eds.), PhilosophiaTogata, i (Oxford, 1989), 151–73, at 167–70.]79 Of many possible examples I will cite only Jerome, Ep. 130.14 (to the verywealthy Demetrias).80 See below, and some of the passages cited in n. 33 above.81 For Julian, see esp. (1) Ep. 84a (ed. J. Bidez and F. Cumont, Iuliani Imp. Epist.,Leges etc. [1922] ¼ 84a Bidez [Budé] ¼ 49 Hertlein ¼ 22 W. C. Wright [Loeb iii]).429c–30a, 430bcd (compare 430d: no Jew is a beggar); (2) Ep. 89b (Bidez–Cumontand Bidez ¼ Wright ii. 296–339). 305bcd; compare (3) Misopog. 363a; (4) Orat. vii(ad Heracl.). 224bc. I have not been able to make use of Jürgen Kabiersch, Untersuchungenzum BegriV der Philanthropie bei dem Kaiser Julian (Wiesbaden, 1960).

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 357property-ownership. The words of Jesus to the rich man seekingeternal life, which I discussed earlier, were not entirely disregarded;but it seems that the unqualiWed version of Mark and Luke wasconveniently forgotten and the words of Jesus were always quotedin Matthew’s formulation (19: 21), in which the direction to sell alland give to the poor was prefaced by the qualiWcation, ‘If you wouldbe perfect’. Out of scores of passages I have come across in the fathersI have not found one that even notices the discrepancy between theMatthaean text and that of Mark and Luke. So complete was therefusal to recognize the existence of any other version than that ofMatthew that when Clement of Alexandria, in his Quis dives salvetur?,sets out Mark’s narrative of the whole story in extenso in his owntext, explicitly as his source, he inserts Matthew’s ei theleis teleioseinai, at the point that corresponds to Mt. 19: 21, without anyindication that these words are not in Mark.82 Saint John Chrysostomis even at pains to put the conditional clause in the forefront andto make out that Jesus did not merely say to the rich man, ‘Sell whatyou have’: he actually rubs it in, expanding the words of Jesus into‘I lay it down for your determination. I give you full power to choose.I do not lay upon you any necessity’.83 Thus, by quoting the statementof Jesus in its qualiWed, Matthaean form, the fathers were able tomake use of the standard distinction between ‘precept’ and ‘counsel’:the command to sell all became literally a ‘counsel of perfection’.84And I think it would be true to say that after the rise of monasticismin the fourth century there was a tendency to take ‘If you would beperfect’ to refer essentially to the adoption of the monastic life: thuswhen Jerome presses on his rich friend Julian the desirability ofridding himself of all his possessions (again of course on the basisof the Matthaean text we have been considering), he is clearlyadvising him to become a monk.8582 Clem. Alex. Quis dives salvetur? iv.6; cf. x.1. The standard edition of this work isby O. Stählin, 2nd edn. by L. Früchtel, GCS 172¼Clemens Alex. iii2 (1970), pp.158–91. English readers will Wnd useful the Loeb edn. by G. W. Butterworth (London,1919 and repr.), in which The Rich Man’s Salvation is printed mainly in Stählin’s text,with a good facing English trans. and some notes, on pp. 270–367.83 John Chrys. Hom. II De Stat. 5(PG 49 (1859), col. 40).84 Among very many examples see Aug. Ep. 157.23–39.85 Jerome, Ep. 118, esp. §§ 4, 5, 6 (init.), 7 (init.). Compare Ep. 60, to Heliodorus,where the priest Nepotian is said to have lived in practice the life of a monk (§ 10) and

358 Christianity and PropertyWe can now return to almsgiving. There is an enormous amountof evidence of the high value attached to almsgiving by early Christianthinkers which it would be superXuous to quote, and I shallconcentrate on two passages, one from a Latin and one from a Greekfather, both of which emphasize the expiatory character of almsgivingand thus demonstrate the Jewish roots of Christian thinking inthis Weld. Optatus, in his work against the Donatists, had occasion toallude to almsgiving when speaking of the visit of certain imperialemissaries (Macarius and others) to Africa in 347, in order to makecharitable distributions provided by the emperor Constans.86 He Wrstclaimed, on the strength of Proverbs 22: 2, that it was God who hadmade both the poor and the rich, and he then proceeded to explainthat God had a very good reason for establishing this distinction: itwould of course have been perfectly possible for him to give to bothclasses at once, but if he had done so, the sinner would have had nomeans of atoning for his faults (si ambobus daret, peccator quae sibisuccurreret invenire non posset). To drive his point home, Optatusnow quotes what was for him another inspired and canonical work,Ecclesiasticus (3: 30): just as water quenches Wre, so do alms atone forsin (sic eleemosyna extinguit peccatum).87 Later, the theology of almsgiving—ifI may call it that—may have become more subtle (that isbeyond the scope of this paper), but whenever almsgiving is beingdiscussed, the notion that it can be an atonement for sin is seldomabsent. This is certainly true of the second example I said I would giveof the Christian concept of almsgiving, from a Greek father. Thiscomes from the work by Clement of Alexandria, usually referred toby its Latin title, Quis dives salvetur?, which is actually the earliestthus fulWlled Mt. 19: 21. [For Christian attitudes to property and its uses, see P.Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (Madison, 1992), ch. 3, esp. pp. 89–100; idem, Poverty, esp. ch. 3; W. J. Sheils and D. Wood, The Church and Wealth(Studies in Church History 24, 1987; brief discussion in G. Clark, Christianity andRoman Society (Cambridge, 2004), 107–11). For a heretical exception to the Christianacceptance of property, see Garnsey and Humfress, Evolution, 197–203, for discussionof a Pelagian text.]86 Optatus iii. 3, pp. 74.19 to 75.3, ed. C. Ziwsa, CSEL 26 (1893) [M. Edwards,Optatus: Against the Donatists (TTH; Liverpool, 1997), 63]. This work was publishedabout 365–6, and a revised edition was issued some twenty years later.87 Compare another apocryphal passage, Tobit 12: 9; and, from the Old Testamentitself, Prov. 13: 8; Dan. 4: 27 (LXX).

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 359treatise to provide a detailed justiWcation of property-ownership byChristians, and is perhaps the most important work of its kind.Clement puts most eloquently the argument that almsgiving canactually purchase salvation, and he exclaims, ‘What a splendid commerce!what divine trading!’88 Needless to say, almsgiving oftenplayed an important part in penance.89 Too often, however, itseems to have been resorted to as a means of self-advertisement,90contrary to the admirable prescription of Jesus in Mt. 6: 1–4.The early Christian attitude to property-ownership, as I havedescribed it, is open to criticism from more than one direction. Ishall concentrate on two respects in which it can now be seen to beunsatisfactory: Wrst, the exceedingly important role it allotted toalmsgiving; and secondly, its notion that a suYciency of wealth washarmless enough, even if a superXuity was dangerous.Until quite recently, of course, charity was accepted by the greatmajority as an entirely admirable thing; and it is only in our owngeneration that a large number of people have begun to criticizepowerfully the whole principle of organized charity within the communityas a remedy for social evils, not only because it provides thegiver with a moral justiWcation of his privileged position but alsobecause it is increasingly felt by the recipient as something degrading,as a derogation from human dignity—a feeling with which, I mustsay, I myself entirely sympathize. (In the conception of the ‘welfarestate’, such as it is, everyone contributes if he can; and he receiveswhat he does receive not as charity, but as a social right—a fundamentallydiVerent principle.) The almsgiving upon which the earlyChristians so prided themselves, therefore, appears to many of usnowadays in a very much less attractive light than it did in its owntime and for centuries afterwards. My other criticism of theearly Christian position concerning property-ownership is that theconcept of a ‘suYciency’ of property, whenever it was introduced,88 Clem. Alex. Quis dives salvetur? (n. 82 above), xxxii. 1 (p. 181); compare xix.4–6etc. The Greek of the words I have quoted in the text is J ŒÆº &çò KìðïæßÆò; J ŁåßÆòIªïæ &Æò; and the passage continues, Tíå&ØôÆØ ÷æçìÜôøí ôØò IöŁÆæóßÆí::: ðºå &ıóïíKðd ôÆýôçí; ií óøöæïí fi çò; & ôcí ðÆíÞªıæØí; J ðºïýóØå Œôº.89 A good brief account of the whole diYcult subject of penance is given byGaudemet pp. 78–87, 667–81.90 See for example Paulinus of Nola, Ep. 34. 2, 7, 10 (CSEL 29, pp. 303–12).

360 Christianity and Propertywas always left vague and was no better deWned than by some suchimprecise formula as non plus quam necesse est [‘no more than isnecessary’],91 with the result that anyone except the ancient equivalentof a multi-millionaire could feel that he had no superXuity. Plinythe Younger could claim that he had no more than a ‘modest fortune’(Sunt quidem omnino nobis modicae facultates [‘our resources areindeed quite modest’], Ep. ii.iv.3), yet he cannot have been worthmuch less than twenty million sesterces92 and counts among the twoor three dozen richest Romans we happen to know about during theprincipate,93 even if his assets were hardly more than a Wfteenth or atwentieth part of those attributed to the richest men of all, who mayhave owned three hundred or even four hundred million—and whothemselves did not approach the great imperial families in wealth.The great fortunes became greater still in the fourth and Wfth centuries,94and in those days it was even easier for the well-to-do to feelthat they were possessed of only ‘modest fortunes’.95The orthodox Christian position that I have outlined was heldwith only minor variations by virtually all the great names:96 in thewest, Irenaeus (who of course thought and wrote in Greek), Tertullian,Cyprian, Lactantius, Hilary of Poitiers, Jerome, Augustine, andJohn Cassian; in the east, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa,Gregory of Nazianzus,97 John Chrysostom,98 and Theodoret. So far91 Pelagius (?), De Divit. ii (p. 32, ed. Haslehurst: see n. 124 below). Yet this is awork which is far more hostile to riches than most: see below.92 See Duncan-Jones pp. 17–32, esp. pp. 18 n. 4, 32 n. 6.93 Ibid. p. 343 (no. 21 in app. 7).94 See A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire (Oxford, 1964), 2, pp. 554–5.95 See Gaudemet p. 573, who alludes to ‘le diYcile problème de la mesure’ [‘thediYcult problem of proportion’] in this regard. After asking what proportion of hiswealth the rich man was expected to spend in charity, he replies, ‘Son superXu doitassurer le nécessaire à ceux qui sont dans le besoin. Notions imprécises dont il seraitvain de chercher la détermination’! [‘His surplus had to provide necessities for thosein need—vague notions which it would be futile to try to pin down!’]96 Christophe gives much of the material.97 Four lines in a poem by Greg. Naz. (Carmina Theologica ii.xxxiii.113–16) areworth quoting: ‘Cast away all and possess God alone, for you are the dispenser ofriches that do not belong to you. But if you do not wish to give all, give the greaterpart; and if not even that, then make a pious use of your superXuity’(ôï&Øò ðåæØôôï&Øò åPó›âåØ).98 I have quoted above Chrysostom’s exegesis of Mt. 19: 21. As he is often justlyremembered as a specially vehement and eloquent denouncer of the very rich, it is

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 361I have found only three partial exceptions among the non-hereticalwriters. The Wrst, Origen, I do not yet feel that I know well enough tobe able to give a fair summary of his attitude. But I have noticed thatOrigen refused, for example, to countenance prayers for temporalbeneWts of any sort,99 and that, unlike Clement, he did not try toallegorize away those biblical texts which attack wealth, while interpretingliterally those usually quoted as permitting it—very much thereverse, in fact.100 I would say that the very idea of wealth tended tomake Origen feel uneasy. And he is insistent that priests must give upall property.101 Much the same is true of my second exception: Basil,in whose writings contradictions are found which cannot be resolvedexcept by admitting that Basil, whose whole thought was of a thoroughlymonastic cast, sometimes applied to the outside worldprecepts which were really applicable only to a monastic community,in which the renunciation of all individual property was possible in away that was simply impracticable in the Graeco-Roman world atlarge.102 My third exception, perhaps a rather surprising name in thisconnection, is no less than Ambrose, certainly in the social sense oneworth also recalling his curious defence of the wealth of Dives (in the parable ofLazarus) as God-given: see his Homilies on Lazarus iii.4 (PG 48 (1859), cols. 996–7);vi.9 (cols. 1040–3), summarized by Christophe pp. 138–9. See also Otto Plassmann,Das Almosen bei Joh. Chrys. (Diss., Bonn, 1960), a collection of material not utilizedto much eVect.99 He even took ‘Give us this day’ (Mt. 29: 11) or ‘day by day’ (Lk. 11: 3) ‘our dailybread’ to refer to incorporeal bread, food of the spirit: see his De Orat. (—åæd åP÷ &çò)27, pp. 363–75 ed. P. Koetschau, in GCS Origenes ii (1899).100 See for example Orig. Comm. in Matth. xv.14–20, esp. 15, pp. 391–5, ed.E. Klostermann, GCS 40¼Origenes x (1935) [also R. Girod, Commentaire surl’Évangile selon Matthieu (Paris, 1970)]. Compare xv.20 (pp. 405–9), where Origenpoints out that it is only diYcult, and not impossible, for a rich man to be saved—though it is clear that in his mind a divine miracle is needed, comparable to getting acamel through the eye of a needle! And see also Orig. C. Cels. vii.18, pp. 169–71 ed.Koetschau; see n. 99 above.101 See Christophe p. 93 for a French trans. of the main passage: Hom. in Genes.xvi.5.102 The treatment of Basil’s thought is perhaps the best part of Christophe: see hispp. 107–29, esp. 108–12, 119–21, 123–5, 128–9. Decisive in favour of the view thatBasil did not regard the mere ownership of property as an evil is Basil’s so-called‘Shorter Rules’ no. 92 (PG 31, col. 1145; Christophe p. 108); compare the ‘LongerRules’ no. 18 (PG 31, col. 965; Christophe pp. 128–9). [For discussion of thecomplexities of Basil’s writings on ascetic matters, see P. Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea(Berkeley, 1994), ch. 6, esp. pp. 196–201.]

362 Christianity and Propertyof the most exalted of all the early Christian fathers—he was amember of the senatorial aristocracy, the son of a praetorian prefectof the Gauls and, at the time of his appointment to the bishopric ofMilan in 374, the governor of the province of Aemilia and Liguria, ofwhich Milan was the capital. (I know of no other early father whocould be considered his social equal, except Paulinus of Nola.)102 aNow Ambrose is far from consistent in his attitude to property rights;and some recent continental commentators, in their anxiety torescue him from any such heinous oVence as a belief in ‘communism’(one monograph is entitled, Il preteso comunismo di San Ambrogio),103have given rather perverse interpretations of some of hiswritings, in particular a famous passage in the De OYciis Ministrorum(i.132) containing the words usurpatio ius fecit privatum[‘taking possession made private rights’].104 The fact is that in suchpassages Ambrose shows great uneasiness on the whole question of102 a [On Ambrose in general, see N. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Courtin a Christian Capital (Berkeley, 1994), although there is no speciWc discussion of hisattitudes to property rights.]103 By J. Squitieri (Sarno, 1946). It will hardly repay the eVort of reading it.104 It is absurd to pretend, as for example Squitieri and Christophe have done (seeChristophe pp. 168–74), that in De OYc. i.130–2 Ambrose is simply agreeing withCicero, and that his ‘usurpatio’ [‘taking possession’] is equivalent to Cicero’s ‘vetusoccupatio’ [‘long-standing occupation’] (Cic. De OYc. i.20–22) [there is a Frenchtrans. of de OYciis Ministrorum: M. Testard, Saint Amboise, Les Devoirs, i (Paris,1984), 158]. In § 131 Ambrose makes a Wrst objection to Cicero’s ‘iustitiae primummunus’ [‘the Wrst function of justice’]; and in § 132, whereas Cicero had accepted therule that while common possessions should be used for the common good, a mancould use private possessions for his own good, Ambrose now, with the words ‘nextthey thought it a form of justice that one should treat common public property aspublic, but private as private’, raises a second objection to the Ciceronian position:after the passage beginning ‘sic enim deus’ [‘for thus God’], for which there is noparallel in Cicero, he says, ‘natura igitur ius commune generavit, usurpatio ius fecitprivatum’ [‘therefore nature created communal rights while taking possession madeprivate rights’], and he then carefully omits the sentence (‘ex quo . . . societatis’) at theend of Cicero’s § 21 which is the climax of Cicero’s argument, asserting that it is rightfor a man to retain what he has acquired and that anyone else who seeks to annex itwill be violating a law of human society—a quintessentially Ciceronian statement.Ambrose’s use of the word usurpatio too is decisive, and Christophe’s arguments (pp.172–4) against Calafato are obviously worthless. His conclusion that Ambrose is here‘maintaining the legitimacy of private property’ has no justiWcation. Of course inseveral other passages, listed by F. Homes Dudden, The Life and Times of St. Ambrose(Oxford, 1935), 2, pp. 548–50, Ambrose takes private property for granted, althoughin others again (see pp. 545–7) he regards it with aversion.

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 363property rights.105 Yet he can allegorize away the statement of Jesuscontained in all three synoptics (Mk. 10: 25; Mt. 19: 24; Lk. 18: 25)that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than fora rich man to enter the Kingdom of God; he can say that not allpaupertas is sancta [‘poverty’ is ‘sacred’] nor all divitiae necessarilycriminosae [‘riches’ necessarily ‘evil’], and that in good men richescan be adiumenta virtutis [‘aids to virtue’];106 and of course heaccepts almsgiving as the great panacea through which the taint ofriches can be removed:107 thus alone can riches become ‘the ransomof a man’s life’ and ‘the redemption of the soul’,108 for almsgiving‘purges from sin’.109 And so, when Ambrose says that God intendedthe whole earth and its produce to be the common possession of allmen,110 and continues, sed avaritia possessionum iura distribuit [‘butgreed apportions the laws of possession’], he nevertheless goes on toaccept the existing situation, provided the property-owner gives tothe poor. His attitude is very nicely brought out in a passage in the DeHelia et ieiunio (76), where he tells the sinner to redeem himself fromhis sins with his own money, thus using one poison to subdueanother: Et venenum frequenter antidoto temperatur, hoc est venenovenenum excluditur, veneno mors repellitur, vita servatur [‘and poisonis often tempered by an antidote; that is to say that poison is drivenout by poison, that death is driven away and life is preserved bypoison’]—wealth itself is a poison, but almsgiving, which redeemsfrom sin, turns wealth into sin’s antidote!Augustine seems not to have been troubled about property rights.With characteristic ingenuity he extracts an argument in his favoureven from the parable of Lazarus: Lazarus, we are told, went to105 On the whole I accept the account given by Homes Dudden 2, pp. 545–50.However, when he summarizes Ambrose’s attitude (p. 547) as ‘But wealth is not onlyunproWtable: it is positively demoralizing’, most of the passages he proceeds to quote(though by no means all) require the substitution for ‘wealth’ of ‘avarice’ or ‘seekingafter wealth’.106 Ambr. Expos. Ev. Luc. viii.70–2, 13, 85 (in CSEL 22.iv).107 See Homes Dudden, 2, p. 548 nn. 5–8.108 Ambr. Ep. 63.92 [Beyenka 59], quoting Prov. 13: 8 and perhaps also Dan. 4: 27(LXX).109 De Helia et ieiunio 76, quoting Tobit 12: 9.110 Ambr. Expos. in Ps. cxviii, Sermo 8.22; compare De Viduis 4–5; De Nabuth. 2,11; Expos. Ev. Luc. vii. 124, 247.

364 Christianity and PropertyAbraham’s bosom; well, Abraham was rich!111 (As this and manyother such passages show, the level of argument in this Weld is notalways high, and some may feel some sympathy for the Pelagian whoturned one of Augustine’s own favourite weapons against him byadvocating a Wgurative interpretation of Abraham in the parable!)112Sometimes in the fourth century the poor are warned that they mustnot think they can take the initiative and demand even the necessaryminimum of subsistence from those Christians who had vast possessions.Two centuries earlier Irenaeus, citing the scriptural parallel ofthe Israelites ‘spoiling the Egyptians’ at the time of the Exodus,113 hadexpressed some sympathy for the man who, after being compelled togive years of forced labour to another, makes oV with some smallportion of his property.114 But now Gregory of Nyssa is careful toshow that no such initiative can be justiWed by an appeal to the‘spoiling of the Egyptians’ in Exodus as a precedent.115At this point I should like to mention one minor passage which isnot very well known generally and indeed may come as a surprise tothose who remember the condemnation by Saint Cyprian and theother western bishops of the libellatici of the Decian persecution,who had purchased certiWcates falsely stating that they had compliedwith the imperial order to sacriWce, and were treated as lapsi, thoughof a less serious kind than those who had actually sacriWced or oVeredincense. The text I have in mind is the twelfth ‘canon’ in the CanonicalLetter issued at Easter 306, during the ‘Great Persecution’, bySaint Peter, bishop of Alexandria,116 acquitting of any religiousoVence those who had purchased immunity from sacriWcing, onthe ground that they had sustained a loss of property in order tosave their souls. It is interesting to Wnd here a very diVerent (andsurely much more sensible) attitude from that which had prevailed inthe west during the Decian persecution just over half a century111 See for example Aug. Ep. 157.23–4; compare Serm. xiv.4 etc.112 See the Pelagian De Divit. (cited in n. 124 below) ix.1–3 (pp. 50–2, ed.Haslehurst).113 Exod. 3: 21–2; 11: 2; 12: 35–6.114 Iren. Elench. iv.xxx.1–3, ed. W. W. Harvey (1857).115 Greg. Nyss. Vita Moys. ii pp. 67–8, ed. H. Musurillo, in Greg. Nyss. vii.i(Leiden, 1964).116 See my ‘Aspects of the ‘‘Great’’ Persecution’, in Harvard Theological Review, 47(1954), pp. 75–113, at p. 84 n. 44 [above, Ch. 1, p. 46].

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 365earlier. As it happens, our evidence from the west in this respect is forthe Decian persecution only and from the east for the ‘Great Persecution’only; but I have argued elsewhere that we can put all thisevidence together and conclude that in the east the purchase ofimmunity from sacriWcing was not regarded as sinful in eitherpersecution.117If we may ignore some passages in early Judaeo-Christian writings,it is only in the mouths of heretics that we Wnd an unqualiWeddenunciation of private property ownership. Usually, of course, weknow nothing of their arguments, all our information being derivedfrom orthodox condemnations of their views. In this category are atleast four or Wve strains of heretical thought. First, there is thesecond-century work On Justice ascribed by Clement of Alexandriato Epiphanes and attacked by Clement as a Carpocratian gnosticproduct which advocated not only equality and community of propertybut also community of women118—although I must say, I acceptthe view recently advanced that Clement’s biographical and historicalinformation about the author of this work, Peri dikaiosunēs, isworthless, although his actual quotations from it are genuine;119I believe it may have nothing to do with gnosticism or Christianheresy. I need only give the briefest mention of the unimportant, ifmuch discussed, Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, the Wfteenth of whichespecially has some material denying to those who have chosen theheavenly kingdom the right to property in anything except bread andwater and a single garment, and insisting that in them the possessionof other property would be a sin, which could only be taken away bythe abandonment of that property.120 Among genuine Christianheretics there are the followers of Eustathius of Sebaste condemnedin the Synodal Letter of the mid-fourth-century council of Gangra for117 See Ibid. esp. pp. 87–8 [above, Ch. 1, pp. 49–50].118 Clem. Alex. Strom. iii (ii) 5.1 to 9.3, pp. 197–200 in GCS 52 ¼ Clemens Alex.ii3, ed. O. Stählin and L. Früchtel (1960), esp. 6.1 to 8.1.119 See Heinz Kraft, ‘Gab es einen Gnostiker Karpokrates?’, in Theologisches Zeitschrift,8 (1952), pp. 434–43.120 Ps.-Clem. Homil. xv. vii–x, esp. vii.4–6, ix.2–3, pp. 215–17, ed. B. Rehm, inGCS 42 (1953). The Homilies in their present form date from the 4th century butseem to derive from an original of the 3rd or even 2nd century, which may haveemanated from a Jewish-Christian sect with gnostic tendencies. See also Christophepp. 96–8, using a French translation.

366 Christianity and Propertydenying the possibility of salvation to rich people who do not give upall their possessions;121 there are also the fourth-century dualistsdenounced by Cyril of Jerusalem, who rejected the ownership ofproperty, with all other physical things, as belonging to the provinceof the devil;122 and Wnally there are the various ascetic sects describedas encratites and Xourishing especially in Asia Minor, such as theapostolics or apotactites who are attacked in the 370s in the Panarionof Epiphanius for preaching that complete abstention from property(as well as marriage) was a necessity for all Christians.123 Unfortunately,we have no details of the arguments by which any of thesesects sought to justify its interpretation of scripture against theorthodox position. I have been able to discover only one singlesurviving work which argues at length that the mere possession ofwealth creates a tendency to sin and that it really is best to divestoneself of all one’s possessions. This is a work probably written in theWrst decade of the Wfth century, the De Divitiis, one of a groupof Pelagian works published by Caspari in 1890.124 This has beenattributed by de Plinval to Pelagius himself, and by others to one of121 Mansi ii (1759), col. 1102; C. J. Hefele and H. Leclercq, Histoire des Conciles;d’après les documents originaux, i.ii (Paris, 1907), p. 1032: the Eustathians are said tobelieve that the rich who do not give up all their property have no hope of salvation.(Compare also the Epilogue to the Canons.) It is interesting to Wnd, both from theSynodal Letter and from Canon 3 of this council (Mansi, col. 1101; Hefele-Leclercqii.ii, 1034), that the Eustathians had also been inciting slaves to leave their masters,apparently to become monks: Can. 3 anathematizes anyone who ‘on a pretext ofpiety, teaches a slave to despise his master and to leave his service, and not to servehim with goodwill and all honour’.122 Cyril Hierosol. Catech. viii.6–7 (Migne, PG 33, cols. 632–3).123 Epiphan. Panar. Haer. lxi, esp. i.1; iii.1 (pp. 380, 382, ed. K. Holl. in GCS 31 ¼Epiphan. ii, 1922); compare Aug. De Haeres., Haer. 40; and see also Basil, Ep. 188,can. 1; 189, can. 47; C. Th. xvi.v.7, 11, compare 9; CJ i.v.5. [See Garnsey andHumfress, Evolution, 192–7, for brief discussion of some 4th-cent. radical ascetics,and more generally P. Brown, ‘Asceticism: Pagan and Christian’, in Averil Cameronand P. Garnsey (eds.), CAH xiii: The Late Empire A.D. 337–425 (Cambridge, 1998),ch. 20, 601–31.]124 Pelagius (?), Tractatus de Divitiis, ed. C. P. Caspari, Briefe, Abhandlungen undPredigten aus den zwei letzten Jahrhunderten des kirchlichen Altertums und dem Anfangdes Mittelalters (Christiania, 1890), pp. 25–67, repr. in PL Suppl. 1 (1958), cols. 1380et seq. and by R. S. T. Haslehurst, The Works of Fastidius (London, 1927), pp. 30–107:the last has a good facing English trans. There are other Pelagian works touching onthe same theme, for example the Epist. ii ad Geruntii Wlias (De contemnenda haereditate),inPL 30, cols. 45–50.

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 367the followers of Pelagius: Fastidius, Coelestius or Agricola. It has beenmuch discussed in recent years.125 I will only remark that althoughthis remarkable treatise does recommend divesting oneself of allproperty (thus ‘transferring it from earth to heaven’, xix.4), it doesnot actually condemn suYcientia [‘suYciency’], and it regards evenwealth not as an actual sin (vii.5) but as a peccandi occasio [‘anopportunity for sin’] (xix.3), something that is very likely indeed toresult in sin; if we keep the commandments of the New Testament,then per divitiarum contemptum, peccatorum aufertur occasio[‘through contempt for riches the opportunity for sins is removed’](x.1). The most radical passage goes so far as to treat the existence ofthe few rich as the reason why there are so many poor: pauci divitespauperum causa sunt multorum; and so tolle divitem et pauperem noninvenies, ‘get rid of the rich and you won’t Wnd any poor’ (xii.2).There is, however, not a word to suggest that this desirable end can beachieved by anything but religious persuasion; and—rather strangely,perhaps—there is no appeal to the ‘primitive communism’ (if I maycall it that) of the earliest apostolic community at Jerusalem,126 andindeed no advocacy at all of community of property, even as atheoretical ideal. I know of no evidence that any Pelagian everadvocated the reform of secular institutions. I will only add thatthis work, the De Divitiis, in spite of some over-ingenious argumentsand the usual inXated rhetoric, seems to me a far better approximationto the thought of Jesus, as expressed in the synoptic Gospels(Luke especially), than at any rate the principal work on the orthodoxside, Clement’s Quis dives salvetur?, from which I quoted earlier.127Clement, of course, makes adroit use, here as elsewhere, of the125 By Haslehurst; Georges de Plinval. Pélage: ses écrits, sa vie et sa réforme. Étuded’hist. littér. et relig. (Lausanne etc., 1943), esp. pp. 160–2, 189–91, 221–3; J. N. L.Myres, ‘Pelagius and the End of Roman Rule in Britain’, JRS 50 (1960), pp. 21–36; W.Liebeschuetz, ‘Did the Pelagian Movement have Social Aims?’, Historia, 12 (1963), pp.227–41; John Morris, ‘Pelagian Literature’, JTS ns 16 (1965), pp. 26–60; Liebeschuetz,‘Pelagian Evidence on the Last Period of Roman Britain?’, Latomus, 26 (1967), pp.436–47; Peter Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine (London, 1972),pp. 183–207, 208–26 (the last particularly informative on Pelagius’s circle). None ofthese works deals exclusively with the De Divit., but they all bear upon it in one wayor another.126 The only allusions I notice in the De Divit. (those in x.5, 6) to the earliestapostolic community make no reference to its ‘communism’.127 See pp. 26–7 [p. 357] above and nn. 82, 88.

368 Christianity and Propertyallegorical method of interpretation which had been inventedby pagan Greek scholars in the classical period and perfected byHellenistic Judaism in regard to the Old Testament (Philo providessome extraordinary examples); this type of exegesis Xourishedextravagantly at Alexandria in particular.128 Clement does not scrupleto make use of the argument (cap. 13) that only if a man possessessome property can he do the things the Lord requires: feed thehungry and give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked and entertainthe homeless—as Zacchaeus and others entertained the Lord himself(Lk. 19: 1–10). ‘What sharing (koinōnia) would be left among men,’he asks, ‘if nobody had anything?’ This at least is not quite as feeble asthe passage in which Aristotle (Pol. ii.5, 1263 b 5–14) pretends that thevery great delight of doing a kindness to friends or guests or comradesis possible only when there is private ownership of property—as if generosity or liberality could be expressed only in the form ofmaterial beneWts.It is time to sum up. Why did early Christianity so signally fail toproduce any important change for the better in Graeco-Romansociety? Why did slavery and kindred forms of unfree labour suchas the colonate persist, without Christians even realizing that theywere evil in themselves and that they tended to brutalize both slavesand masters? Why after the empire became oYcially Christian, didthe extremes of wealth and poverty throughout the Roman world(and especially in the west) become even greater, with enormouswealth concentrating in the hands of the senatorial class, andtaxation becoming decidedly more oppressive? Why did punishmentsbecome even harsher and torture even more prevalent?129128 For the use of allegory by Clement, in Quis dives salvetur?, see esp. v.2–4; xi.2–3;xiv.1–6; xv–xvii; xviii–xx; xxvi.2–7; xxvi.8 to xxvii.2. The most complete account Ihave found of allegory, from the beginnings to the time of Augustine and GregoryNazianzen, is Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie: Les Origines grecques et les contestationsjudéo-chrétiennes (Paris, 1958). R. P. C. Hanson, Allegory and Event: A Study of theSources and SigniWcance of Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture (London, 1959) hardlygoes back behind Jewish and Hellenistic allegory (pp. 11–64). For the earlier stages,see J. Tate, in Oxford Class. Dict.2 (1970), pp. 45b–6b (‘Allegory, Greek’ and ‘Latin’),and his articles there cited in Class Rev. 1927 and Class. Quart. 1929, 1930 and 1934[see also A. Louth, Discerning the Mystery (Oxford, 1983), 96–131].129 I discuss all these questions in CSAGW.

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 369The standard answer to all these questions is familiar to all of us:Jesus himself and the early Christians were concerned exclusivelywith the relations between man and man, or man and God, andnot at all with social, economic or political institutions—with therelations between men and men, if I may use that expression. Thatdoes not seem to me a very good answer, even as far as it goes, foralthough the New Testament writers (like the early fathers) concentrateon questions of individual morality and make no attempt toprescribe a general code of economic or political behaviour, they domake a series of statements on political and economic questionswhich the Church duly accepted as canonical and inspired: SaintPaul’s disastrous ‘The powers that be are ordained of God’, which Iquoted earlier, is only one among many such pronouncements.But can the traditional Christian position, which I have outlined,provide a satisfactory answer to my questions, even if it is adjusted insuch a way as to shed those unpleasant features of early Christianthought such as the acceptance of slavery and of political autocracywhich so many Christians today are unwilling to endorse? This ofcourse is a matter of opinion. I will only say that in my opinion it wasprecisely the exclusive concentration of the early Christians upon thepersonal relations between man and man, or man and God, and theircomplete indiVerence, as Christians, to the institutions of the worldin which they lived, that prevented Christianity from even havingmuch eVect for good upon the relations between man and man.I suggest that the relations between man and man in any organizedhuman society are severely conditioned by the relations between menand men—between diVerent states, and between diVerent classes andgroups within states, relations governed as a rule by criteria verydiVerent from those which can be applied between man and man. Ithas often been realized that Christianity has been conspicuouslyunsuccessful in preventing wars between nations. It took the Churcha long time to evolve a doctrine of the ‘just war’130—although130 The evidence for early Christian views on military service and war is most fullyset out by Cadoux, pp. 51–7, 116–22, 183–90, 269–81, 402–42, 564–96. See alsoGaudemet pp. 706–9, who gives a brief summary of the main 4th/5th century views(esp. those of Augustine, who went further than many early Christians in defendingwar), with bibliography. Recent work, including the article by R. H. Bainton, ‘TheEarly Church and War’, in Harvard Theological Review, 39 (1946), pp. 189–212, is

370 Christianity and Propertyincidentally even the early Roman republic had had a doctrine of thebellum iustum, derived from the principle of fetial law: that no warwas acceptable to the Roman gods unless it was a defensive war,waged to protect Rome or her allies.131 And the doctrine of the justwar has never come to very much, because any country that goes towar can always justify itself easily enough in its own eyes. As for whatI would call the class struggle, I cannot see that the Christianchurches have done much more than either deplore it in principleor ignore its very existence; and all too often they have explicitlyunderwritten the existing social and economic order in its crudestform. ‘The rich man in his castle’—but I need not go on. Pope PiusXI’s encyclical, Quadragesimo anno, of 1931, admits that the classstruggle had been a serious danger forty years before, but thenproceeds to speak of this danger as having been largely dispelled byLeo XIII’s Rerum novarum—an opinion which has hardly beenconWrmed by the events of the years since 1931. There have, needlessto say, been a few striking exceptions within the churches who havebroken right away from their oYcial policy, from John Ball in 1381132to Camilo Torres in our own time.133When the early Hebrew prophets, or Plato and Aristotle, tried toformulate a vision of the good society, they thought Wrst in terms ofthe Israelite nation or of the Greek city: for Plato and Aristotle, thesociety as such had Wrst to be good, to have good institutions, beforemen could lead the good life within it. Their successors, in both cases,brieXy reviewed by Jacques Fontaine, ‘Christians and Military Service in the EarlyChurch’, in Concilium, 7.1 (1965), pp. 58–64. [For detailed consideration, see J. F.Ubina, Cristianos y Militares: La iglesia antigua ante el ejército y la guerra (Granada,2000); brief discussion in M. Whitby, ‘Emperors and Armies, 235–395’, in S. Swainand M. Edwards (eds.), Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation from Early toLate Empire (Oxford, 2004), 156–86, esp. 175–9.]131 Itself nicely criticized in Cic. De Rep. iii.12/20, ed. K. Ziegler (6th edn., 1964)preserved in Lact. Div. Inst. vi.ix.4: it was the means by which the Romans gave theiraggression the appearance of legitimacy (‘per fetiales bella indicendo, et legitimeiniurias faciendo’).132 The most convenient English version of the relevant part of Froissart isFroissart’s Chronicles, ed. and trans. by John JolliVe (London, 1967), caps. 73–4, pp.236–52 (esp. 237–8). The traditional English version is Froissart’s Cronycles, trans. bySir John Bouchier Lord Berners, I, 4 (Oxford, 1928), pp. 1095–1121 (esp. 1096–7).133 Revolutionary Priest: The Complete Writings and Messages of Camilo Torres, ed.John Gerassi (1971; paperback in Pelican Latin American Library, 1973).

Early Christian Attitudes to Property 371tended to despair of creating a good society: for them, either theindividual man (the Stoic, in particular) had to discover how best tolive his personal life in an indiVerent if not hostile world, or else therewas a Good Time Coming, but it would be achieved by somesupernatural agency. In the latter case one could comfort oneself byimagining (as in Jewish apocalyptic) that in some mysterious way thedesired result had been achieved already: the passage in the MagniWcatwhich I quoted earlier provides a good example. At the presenttime there is a debate going on among Christians whether (to use thelanguage I have employed) it may not be absolutely necessary toreform the relations between men and men—in particular the relationsbetween states and between classes within states—in order thatthe relations between man and man may not be for ever distortedand damaged. Among these relations between men and men, I wouldsuggest that a central role is played by property relations, including inparticular the ownership of property and the way in which productionis organized. Those of us who watch the debate within thechurches, even from the outside, may feel that careful study ofwhat actually happened in the early Christian centuries, both in theWeld of ideas and in actual social life, might well shed some usefullight on current problems and controversies, and as a result mighthave a powerful eVect upon the future of man.

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Index of PassagesActa Conciliorum OecumenicorumI.iv 261–2II.i.29:17–29 279II.i.30:21–9 279II.i.65, §§5 299II.i.66, §§13–14 300II.i.69–70, §§26–4 264, 301–2,310–11II.i.70 §§43–6 264, 268II.i.73, §51 277II.i.75, §54 312II.i.76, §61–4 304, 314–15II.i.87–8, §§121–30 309II.i.94, §§179–84 304, 313II.i.97, §§191–2 314II.i.103 276II.i.115, §§284–5 299II.i.138, 276II.i.139–40 276II.i.140, §491 310II.i.140–1, §§496–7 310II.i.142, §§521–2 305II.i.153–6, §§576–614 277II.i.157, §624 308II.i.172, §776 305II.i.173, §792 308II.i.175, §814 306II.i.178, §§838–42 277II.i.180–1, §§858–61 312–13II.i.191, §964 303II.i.204, §4 283II.i.274, §§5–7 284, 305II.i.277–8 266II.i.279–80, §§30–44 268, 283II.i.305, §§12–14 282–3II.i.306–10 316–17II.i.312, §78 313II.i.320, §22 284II.i.321, §25 285II.i.368, §13 303II.i.411 266II.ii.24–33 274II.iii.312, §94.42–3 282II.iii.313–14, §94.50–4 282Acta of Second Ephesus, p.17.45–6291AE 1942/43.81 74, 861955.81 87–8Agathias, History 1.7.3 246–7Ambrose, Expositio in Ps. 1188.22 363de Helia et Ieiunio 76 363Letters 2.19 35272.9 241de OYciis Ministrorum1.130–2 362–32.30.153 162de Virginibus 3.7.32–6163–4Ammianus Marcellinus22.5.3–4 222, 247, 26027.3.12–13 210, 248Aristophanes, Plutus 415–612 340Aristotle, Politics 1255a25–6 3471330a32–3 347Athanasius, Apologia de fuga sua22 161AugustineBrev.Coll. 3.13.25 49, 74, 83, 160,174City of God 1.16–28 16319.15–16 351–2

374 Index of PassagesAugustine (cont.)c. Cresconium 3.27.30 49, 85c. Epist. Parmen. 3.13 221adv. Fulgentium 26 51–2Letters 93 221157.23–4 357, 363–4173.6 209173.10 221Sermones 326.2 75Aurelius Victor, de Caesaribus39.30 69, 71Basil. Homily 18 175BibleColossians 3.11 349I Corinthians 7.22 349–50Ephesians 6.5 350Galatians 3.28 323, 350Luke 1.46–55 3434.18 3406.17–49 3418.26–39 3349.52 33314.23 22216.19–31 340, 34217.11 3332 Maccabees 1944 Maccabees 194–7Mark 5.1–20 3347.31 333Matthew 5.3–6 340–18.24–34 33419.21 342, 35722 221–2Cassiodorus, Variae 2.27 24710.26 248–9Cicero, de Natura Deorum 1.611423.2.5 2033.5–9 141–2de Legibus 2.14 1432.18–22 142de OYciis 1.20–2 3622.73 113–14, 339de Re Publica 3.25/37 348CIL 8.2345–7 (ILS 631–3) 748.5526 (ILS 651) 758.4764 (ILS 644) 53, 86, 888.6700 52, 74, 85, 898.4766 87Clement of Alexandria, Quis divessalvetur? 4.6 35713 36832.1 358–9Stromateis 4.4.17.1–3 1584.10.76.1–77.3 1587.11.66.3–67.2 158Cod. Theod. 16.5.34 3916.5.60 20416.7.3 209Collatio Mosaicorum et RomanorumLegum 15.2.2 126Commodian, Instructiones 2.21 159Council of Ancyra, Canons 1 63–41–9 47Council of Arles, Canons13–14 92–3Council of Elvira, Canons 101–21 93–52–4 90–15 35125 9345–6 9155 9159 9160 91–2, 15973 92CyprianAd Demetrianum 205De Lapsis 3 59–607–8 44–5

Index of Passages 375Letters 43.31 6081.1.4 159Didache 4.11 350Digest 1.5.4.1 3531.18.3 1211.18.13 12148.2.6 11548.19.4–5 12648.19.30 119Ephrem, Hymns on the Epiphany4.6–8 352Hymns on the Nativity 17.8 352Epictetus, Diss. 4.1.40 3544.7.6 192Epistle of Barnabas 19.7 350Eusebius,HE 3.28.6 139, 2054.9 1204.14.6 139, 2054.15.7–8 157–8, 166, 1704.17.8–13 1655.1 120, 128, 1676.3.4–5 1686.5.5–6 1696.41.11 607.11.9 1408.1.2 1348.6.6 84, 1748.6.8–9 848.6.10 37, 828.9.5 66–7, 83, 131, 1768.13.11 718.13.12–13 708.30.19 215–169.10.8 31, 14010.5.18–20 21710.6.1–5 217MP 1.1–2 43, 1791.5 1772.1 443.1 38, 433.2–4 131, 1774.1 624.6–8 618.6–8 17811 178–911.31 6413.1 6513.11 6413.12 59, 79–80Oratio ad Sanctos 24–5 73Eutropius 9.2610.1 71Evagrius 1.11 2452.5 245, 3172.10 2823.14 207, 241Firmicus Maternus, de Errore28.10 22029.1–2 220Gesta apud Zenophilum 92Gregory the Great, Register1.34 251Gregory of Nazianzus Orations4.82–4 18243.6 161Carm. Theol. 2.33.113–16360Hippolytus, Elenchus 9.12 45,167–8Ignatius, Letter to Polycarp 4.3350–1Letter to Romans 4–5 133, 1897 133, 189Irenaeus, adversus Haereses3.3.4 137, 205

376 Index of PassagesIrenaeus (cont.)Elenchus 4.30.1–3 364John Chrysostom, Homily II on theStatues 5 357, 360Joinville, Life of St Louis 228–9Julian, Ep. 36 24837 24840 24841 248Justin, 1 Apol. 68 118–19Justinian, Novel 42.1.2 223Lactantius,De Mortibus Persecutorum 7.2 698.3–4 69–7011.8 3913.2.3 16017.3–4 72–317.8 7318.1–7 73–4Divine Institutes 4.28.11 2354.30.13 2095.19.21 235–6Leo, Ep. 62–4 27788 278172 212Libanius, Ep. 914 239–401253 239Lucian, The Death ofPeregrinus 186–8Malalas, Chronicle 11.5 18511.10 132–3, 189–90Marcus Aurelius, Meditations11.3 146, 192–3Michael the Syrian, Chronicle11.6 319Novel of Justinian 77.1.1 208141 208Novel of Theodosius 3, pref. 8 207Optatus,1.13 521.15 521.22 70, 96, 2162.25 523.3 216, 3583.5–7 2203.8 52, 85Appendix 1 39Appendix 2 51, 84Appendix 3 206, 209Appendix 7 216–17Appendix 9 218Appendix 10 218Origen, Comm. In Johannem6.41 33428.23 159Contra Celsum 8 193PassioAbitinan Martyrs 48, 140of Agape 47of Carpus 166of Cassian 172of Crispina 54–5, 81–3of Cyprian 144, 159, 170of Dasius 173of Euplus 56, 130, 175of Fabius 75–6of Justin 166of Marcellus 172of Marianus and Jacob 170of Maxima, Donatilla &Secunda 76of Maximilian 171of Perpetua 169, 190–2of Phileas and Philoromus 176of Philip of Heraclea 43, 47–8of Pionius 170

Index of Passages 377of Polycarp 157–8, 166of Polyeuctus 169of Scillitan martyrs 112, 127,147of Theodoret 45of Typasius 75, 173Pelagius, Tract. de Divitiis 366–7Peter of Alexandria, Canonical Letter5–7 638–11 45, 155, 160–111 6512 50, 364Pliny, Letters 10.65 11810.96 42, 110–12, 123–4,126–7, 146, 148–50, 20810.97 40, 110, 112, 148–9Praxagoras of Athens 71Procopius, Buildings 1.1.9 246Secret History 13.7–8 246Wars 5.3.5–9 246, 270Prudentius, Peristephanon 3 1744 172Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite, Ep.8 250Salvian, De Gubernatore Dei5.2.5–11 242Sententiae Pauli 5.21.2 119–20Socrates, EH 4.32 238–94.33.7 2435, preface 2435.22.1 2437.3 225–67.15.11 2117.29.4–13 2437.29.5 2077.41.4–7 243Sozomen, EH 7.15.11 211Suetonius, Nero 16.2 108, 147Symmachus, Relatio 3.10 240Tacitus, Annals 14.42–3 34615.44.3–8 108–9, 148Histories 5.5 1355.9 115Tertullian, ad Nat. 1.7 119ad Martyras 1.1 186ad Scapulam 2.2 2345.1 131–2, 167Apologeticum 2.17 12824.6 233–527.2.3 14639.11 34540.1–2 13646.4 136de Corona Militis 1.4.4–5158–9Themistius, Or. 5, 67b–70d237–8Theodore the Studite, Ep.2.152 251Theodoret, EH 3.15 1824.15 206–75.39 182, 184Zachariah, HE 4.10 282

General IndexAbd al-Rahman II, emir 184–5Abdas 162Abiram 220Abitinan Martyrs 48, 69, 74, 81, 83Abthunga 52Acts, Passions; see individualmartyrsAdelWus 272Aedesius 65, 177AelaWus 137, 206Aemilia, province 362Aemilianus 170Aetherius of Smyrna 308Aetius, archdeacon 300, 308Aetius, patrician 273Afra of AugustaVindelicorum 57–8, 69Africa 49, 54–6, 70–2, 74–6, 79,81–2, 88–9, 94–5, 97, 117, 123,144, 158, 165, 173–4, 183–4,191, 206, 216, 218–19, 358Proconsularis 49, 51–2, 79, 82,84–5African Passions 54, 75–6Agape of Thessalonica 38, 47Agapetus of Synnada 226Agapius 65, 69, 177Agatharcides of Cnidus 332Agathias, historian 246–7Agathonice 166Agricola (Pelagian) 367Agricolanus, Aurelius 172Alamanni 247Alan, Alans 289Alexander, doctor fromPhrygia 167Alexander the Great 188, 329, 331Alexander, Palestinian martyr 170Alexander of Alexandria 212, 219Alexander of Gaza, volunteer 177–8Alexander, volunteer atCaesarea 177Alexandria 60, 67, 137, 168, 170,210, 264, 271, 278, 283, 299,313, 316–17, 368Patriarch’s power 261Almsgiving, see Christians, charityAlpheus of Caesarea 44, 65, 85, 177Altar of Victory 240–1Alvar 185Ambrose 162–4, 198, 221, 226–7,241, 352, 361–3Ammaedara (Haidra) 79–81Ammianus Marcellinus 25, 210,222, 247–8, 260Amonius 180Amphilochius of Side 281Anastasius, emperor 245Anatolius, magister militum 255,287–94, 297, 318connection withTheodoret 291–3Anatolius of Constantinople 278,282, 284–5, 290, 296Ancyra, Council of 47–8, 50, 63, 95,97–8Andrew, Abba 314Antioch 84, 127, 133, 163–4, 177,179–80, 182–3, 215, 219, 271,295, 298Antiochus IV Epiphanes 193Antonines 41, 121, 132, 193, 198

General Index 379Antoninus, Arrius 131, 167Antoninus, Valerius 87Antoninus, volunteer 65, 177Anullinus 54–5, 67, 83, 85–6Apollinarii, heretics 244Apollinaris, senator 293Apollonius, martyr 69, 113Apollonius of Sioout 161Apologists 112, 128–9, 136, 203Apostasy, Apostates; see underChristianityApphianus 65, 177Aphthartodocetist 318Aqua Viva 86Aquila, Subatianus 169Arabs 224, 228, 319Aramaic 331Arcadius, martyr 75Ares, martyr 178Arian controversy, Arians 97, 206,216, 218–19, 236, 241, 243, 248,250, 260, 289, 300Arimathea 332Aristotle 346–8, 353, 370Arius, heresiarch 212, 219, 222Arles, Council of 48, 92, 95–8,103, 217Armenian Church 262Arnobius 134Artabius, governor 248Artemius, martyr 181Ascalon 178, 331Asclepiades, deacon 284Asclepius, Palestinian martyr 65Asia, continent 329Asia, province 115, 118, 131,166–7, 313Asia Minor 72, 111, 225, 271, 299,328, 366Asiana 298Aspar 289, 297Asturica (Astorga) 94Athanasius of Alexandria 64, 161,219, 239, 295Atheism 11Atticus of Constantinople 226, 243Attila the Hun 272–3, 289–90,299, 314Augusta Vindelicorum 57Augustine 11, 75, 141, 143, 159,162–4, 209, 221, 223, 226,351–2, 360, 363–4allegory in 221–2, 364bête noire 222, 323, 364Augustus 114, 117–18, 135Aurelian, emperor 215–16, 219Aurelius the African 300Auxentius 65Babylas, martyr 183Bacchanals, Bacchic cult 151,204, 234Bagai 87Balbus 141Balkans 38, 70–2Ball, John 370Barbarians 242, 260, 289, 346Barhadbeshabba 280Barnes, T.D. 19, 23, 88, 99, 103–4,158, 166, 191, 247Barsauma, archimandrite 312–13Basil of Ancyra 181Basil of Caesarea 175, 361Basil of Seleucia 304, 308Basilides, Gnostic 140Basilides, soldier 169Bassus 47Baynes, Norman 28, 37, 107, 180,227–8, 271, 314, 319Beatitudes 340–2bellum iustum 369–70Bernice 163–4

380 General IndexBesas, soldier 170Bethlehem 332Bethsaida (Julias) 332, 335Bithynia 110, 279Boniface, presbyter 282, 286Books; see under Christianity; alsotraditioBosporus 279Bostra 247Bowersock, Glen 19, 230Boyarin, Daniel 33Britain 55, 70, 72, 96British Israelites 10Brown, Peter 17, 24, 26, 157, 232Bury, J.B. 24Busiris of Ancyra 181Byzacena 49, 72, 82Caecilian 96, 217Caecilius 141Caesaraugusta (Saragossa) 94Caesarea (Cappadocia) 78, 175, 181Caesarea (Palestine) 43–4, 61, 63–5,84–5, 131, 168, 177–8, 331Caesarea Paneas 332Caesarea Philippi 332, 335–6Calanus 188Callinicum 239, 249Callistus, Pope 167–8Calvisianus, corrector 56, 130Cameron, Averil 24–5, 246–7Candidianus, comesdomesticorum 275–6Capernaum 332–3, 336Cappadocia 137, 175, 179Caracalla 166Carpus 166Carthage 51, 60, 74, 159, 162, 169,191, 217Councils at 83, 162, 184, 308–9Casae 86Cassian, excerptor 172Cassiodorus 249Cassius, Gaius 346Castellum Elephantum(RouVach) 85Catana 130, 175Catholic, see OrthodoxCatulinus 92Celestine, Pope 261, 275Celsus 193Celsus, Domitius 217Cephalitan estate 76, 79–80Cerinthus 137, 205–6Chalcedon, Council of 102, 210,227–8, 241, 255, 259–319chanting, noise at 267–8, 301–3,306, 308, 310–13Church of Euphemia 298–9coercion at 272–4commissioners at 268–9, 282–94,298–303, 307, 316–18Creed of 272, 284, 287, 305, 318Fifth Session 284First Session 264, 281, 298,315–16, 318Fourth Session 282, 315–16interruptions 266numbers at 281–2, 298, 304providential role 281recording of 307–10seating 298–9Second Session 268, 283Sixth Session 264, 288, 298sources for 265–70subscriptions to 281–2, 298,304–5Third Session 264, 281–3, 288,298, 315Chalcedonians 245Charity, see ChristiansCharles V 348

General Index 381Chione 38, 47chora, see CountrysideChorazin 332, 335Christian Church 31–2, 38, 202,214–15, 260, 351, 369–70Christianity, Christiansabominations, crimes,Xagitia 109, 111, 120, 128–9,145, 148–51, 203allegory 27, 221–2, 364, 368apostasy, apostates 41–2, 44–6,48, 50, 84, 90, 94, 117, 120, 123,127, 149, 157, 177, 182, 186ascetics, monks 8, 312–13,357–8, 361beastly 257books 45, 47–9, 52–3, 56, 76–7,80, 84, 92, 140, 160, 174catechumens 90–1charges against 14–15, 122–3,128–9, 144; see alsoChristianity, abominations,namecharity 356, 358–60, 363clergy 37, 92, 123, 144, 184communion, exclusionfrom 90–4, 187, 274, 316–17confessors 59–60, 63, 93, 154, 186debtors 45, 160deplorable, repellentattitudes 68, 190, 325–6destructive eVects of 229–30,318–19exaggerations 68, 122–3, 131,167, 174exclusivity of 16, 133–4, 139–40factions, feuding 129, 209,212–13, 216, 219, 222, 240, 243,260, 271, 301–2fanaticism 7, 158, 183–5, 192Xight of 64, 123, 161fundamentalist 325hostility towards 11, 67–8,108–9, 122, 129, 136–8identity 33–4immunity 49–50, 123, 364; seealso libellatici, libelli pacisintolerance of 4–7, 16, 18, 133–4,152, 228, 234, 243lapsi 47–8, 59, 94–5, 97, 155, 364magistrates, service as 95name 110–11, 146, 148–9, 152,199–200obstinacy of 15, 54, 124–7, 144–7persecution by 5, 7, 17–18, 180,201–4, 208, 211, 214, 217–29,243, 247–50, 326priesthoods (pagan) 90–1property, plate 47–8, 84, 92, 140,215–16, 219, 328, 344–5, 351,355–71provoke Jews 107–8, 150rhetoric 17–18, 128, 232, 235sacriWcing 42, 44–9, 51–4, 59–63,67, 83–4, 90–5, 98, 241, 364stantes 60, 62–3upper class 44, 180, 184use secular powers 215–19, 224see also sacriWce test, Slavery,Volunteer MartyrsChristology 262, 268, 303, 305Alexandrian 263, 271, 295, 316Antiochene 271, 291, 294–5One Nature 261, 279, 294–5,302–3, 310, 319Two Nature 262, 278, 284–5, 301,310, 319Chrysaphius 273, 291, 293Cicero 141–3, 203, 339, 348, 362Cilicia 178, 319Circumcellions, see DonatistsCirta 51, 53, 59, 87, 218

382 General IndexCities, poleis 328–33Class Struggle 255, 355, 370–1Clement of Alexandria 130, 158–9,357–61, 365, 367–8Cluny 228Codex Theodosianus 166, 204, 267Coelestius 367cognitio extra ordinem 14, 113–14,116, 145Commodian 159Commodus 113Confessors; see ChristianityConstans 358Constantine I 24, 46, 73, 77, 96–7,100, 103, 106, 171, 204–5,212, 236, 248, 260, 267, 272,294, 296coercion by 215, 217–18, 223–5support for Catholics 216–19Constantine, commissioner 290,293Constantine, deacon 308Constantine, magistrianus 302Constantinople 208, 226, 271, 273,276, 298, 304Council of (381) 276, 305Council of (553) 318Synods of 448/9 276–7, 294, 305,307–8Constantius I Chlorus 54–5, 70,95–6Constantius II 181, 219, 238, 247contumacia; see Christianity,obstinacyCoptic Church 262Cordoba (Cordova) 185Corinth 114, 266Cotta 141, 203Councils (Church) 255, 274, 277;see also individual locationsacclamations at 267–8, 309Acts, accuracy, completeness of266–7, 277, 284, 296, 308–10compilation of 310subsciptions to 298, 310–12control of 268, 270, 275–81,284–7, 294, 297pressures at 272, 284, 301, 304,310–13procedures 306–7translation at 299–300violence, disruption at 268, 275,278, 309–14Countryside, chora 328–31, 333–7Cozbi the Midianite 220Crispina of Thagora 54–5, 58, 76,80–3Crispinus, deacon 309Crispus 96Cynegius, prefect 240Cynics 188Cyprian 44, 49, 59, 94, 130,144, 155, 159, 162, 170, 186,360, 364Cyril of Alexandria 180, 262, 264,269, 275, 291–2, 294, 299at First Ephesus 261Twelve Anathemas 261, 264,273, 296Cyril of Heliopolis 181Cyril of Jerusalem 366Cyril of Scythopolis 334Cyrrhus 292–3, 295Damascus 129Damasus, Pope 58, 210–11, 222, 248Daniel of Carrhae 263Danube 70, 72Daphne 183Dasius of Durostorum 173Dead Sea Sect, see EssenesDecapolis 332–4

General Index 383Decius, emperor; Decianpersecution 12, 21, 40, 42, 44,50, 59–62, 64, 67–8, 73, 93–4,106–7, 123, 137–40, 166,169–70, 186, 364–5delatores, delation 92–3, 110–11,120–1, 123Delehaye, H. 28, 156, 166, 172,174, 190Demetrianus 205Demetrianus, notary 309Demophilus 250dies turiWcationis, turiWcatio 46, 49,51–3, 76–7, 85, 89dies traditionis 46, 89Digest 126Dio Chrysostom 349Diocletian 16, 37, 42, 53–4, 58, 65,69–74, 77, 107, 130, 139–40,160, 166Edict, First 35, 38–9, 41–3, 49,51, 55, 67, 84, 92, 96, 175Edict, Second 37, 42, 44, 92Edict, Third 37, 44, 52Edict, Fourth 20, 38, 41–4, 46,49–51, 53–6, 58–9, 61–3, 68, 72,74, 79–81, 83, 86–8, 92, 98, 104health 72–3superstitions 73Diogenes of Cyzicus 265–6, 313Dionysius of Alexandria 60, 140Dionysius, prison visitor 178Dionysius, volunteer 177Dioscorus of Alexandria 257,263–4, 274, 277–84, 291,295–6, 298–304, 317at Second Ephesus 262, 288–300,305–6, 309–13at Chalcedon 307, 312–16deposition of 268–9, 281–3,299–300, 316, 318Disasters 133, 136, 205Domitian, emperor 12, 111, 117–18Domnina 163–4Domninus, martyr 65, 179Domnus of Antioch 263, 279, 296Donatists, Donatist controversy 48,50–2, 70, 77, 81, 96–89, 130,162, 180, 183–4, 192, 198, 206,209, 212, 215–19, 248, 309, 358Donatus 66Donatus of Calama 49Donatus of Mascula 51, 53, 85Dorotheus 84Durostorum 181Easter 243Edessa 247–8, 289–90, 352Egypt, Egyptians 55, 60, 66, 77–8,131, 140, 175, 178, 204, 209, 225,228, 239, 280, 282–3, 319, 329Egyptian bishops 264, 298, 301–2,310, 315–17Egyptian martyrs 65–7, 131, 176, 178Egyptian monks 275Eisenhower, President 202, 351Eleazar 195–6Elijah, martyr 178Elijah, prophet 250–1Elvira, Council of 80, 89–104, 130,159–60, 351Emerita (Merida) 94, 174emperorsCaesaropapism 217, 275decisions of 69–71, 118, 120–1,239–40Genius, Tyche of 112, 122relations with Church 204,206–7, 214–19, 223–4, 227,237–41, 249, 255, 260, 264, 270,272, 274–81, 284–5, 294, 297,301, 305

384 General Indexemperors (cont.)worship of 111Engels, F. 9, 11Ennatha of Gaza 65Epagethus, Vettius 167Ephesus, Ephesians 137–8, 205–6,212, 266, 303First Council of 261, 263, 268,275–7, 299, 305, 307Second, ‘Robber’, Councilof 262–4, 269–73, 277–8,280–1, 283, 288, 291, 293,296–7, 301–8, 310–17Ephraim 332Ephraim of Nisibis 352Epictetus 192, 353–4Epicureans 354Epiphanes 365Epiphanius 225, 366Epiphanius of Callisura 319Essenes 341, 344Ethiopic Church 262Eubulus of Batanaea 179Eulalia of Merida 92, 98, 174Eulogius of Toledo 185Eulogius, tribune 277, 312Eumeneia 67Eunomius, bishop 206–7Eunomius, envoy 217Euplus of Sicily 56, 130, 175Eusebius of Caesarea 37, 46, 59,61–6, 71, 79–80, 129, 131, 157,160, 164, 176–9, 205, 212–13,215, 244, 294Eusebius of Dorylaeum 263, 276,283, 285, 300–1, 306–7,309–11Eusebius of Samosata 206, 309–11Eustathius of Beirut 306Eustathius of Sebaste 365Eutherius 160Eutyches, archimandrite 263–4,271, 273, 276–8, 290, 292–6,303, 305–8, 310, 312, 316Eutychius of Constantinople 221,249, 262Evagrius of Epiphania 245–6, 257,268–9, 280Fabius, soldier 75–6, 173Fastidius 367Faustus, volunteer 56, 92, 98, 174Felix, Antonius 114Felix of Abthunga 51Felix of Acci 103Felix of Thibiuca 48, 54, 74Firmilian, governor 66, 136Firmus 216Fitzhugh, George 347Flavian of Constantinople 262–3,273–4, 276–8, 290, 292, 294,296, 301, 303, 305–8, 311, 313Flavian of Philippi 307Xogging, see tortureFlorentius, patrician 276, 290,292–3, 295, 305, 308Florian of Lauriacum 57Florus, Valerius, governor 51–3,74–5, 80, 84–9Foucault, Michel 33Franks 247Frend, W.H.C. 5, 19, 26, 49, 79–85,87, 89, 99, 290Fundanus, C. Minucius 118–19Fundanus of Abitina 48–9Furni 49Gadara, Gadera 44, 334Galerius, emperor 21, 54, 61, 70–4,77, 107, 139Galicia 172Galileans 192, 248

General Index 385Galilee 330–7Galileo 315Galillenses 147Galla Placidia 277Gallic martyrs 196Gallienus 38, 76, 78Gallio 14Gallonius 74games 90, 131, 177, 196–7Gangra, Council of 365–6Garnsey, Peter 31, 232, 245Gaul 55, 70–2, 96Gaulanitis 332Gaza 137, 178–9, 331Geertz, CliVord 31–2Genethlius 287Genoa 249Gerasa 334Gergesa 334Germantown, Pennsylvania 355Germanus, volunteer 65, 177Gibbon, Edward 4, 6–9, 30, 129,135, 159, 230Gildo 216Gnostics 4, 140, 158, 225, 353, 365Gordius of Caesarea 175Gorgonius 84Goths 243, 249government 40, 63, 106–7, 109,138, 148–51; see also emperors,provincesineVectiveness, limitationsof 117, 224–5, 232Gratian, emperor 219Great Syrtis 72Greece 71Grégoire, Henri 28, 89, 97, 100, 165Gregory, commander 319Gregory, pope 251Gregory of Antioch 245Gregory of Nazianzus 161, 182, 360Gregory of Nyssa 360, 364Hadrian, emperor 114, 118–19Hadrian, martyr 179Hadrumetum 72, 74Hardy, E.G. 13, 26, 28, 151–2Hardy, Thomas 343Harnack, Adolf 26Hecataeus of Abdera 332Helena 272Helpidius, count 277, 312Heracles 188Heraclius, emperor 25, 224, 318–19heresy, heretics 137, 183, 209,211–15, 218–19, 221–3, 245,248–50, 351, 365; see alsoArians, Marcionites,MontanistsHermes 47Herod the Great 132, 197, 324,332–3, 337Herod Antipas, the Tetrarch 330,335, 337Herodotus 246Hierocles, prefect 177Hilary, pope 302–3Hilary of Poitiers 219, 360Hippolytus 167–8, 171Hippos (Susitha) 334historians, history 156, 202, 255,337, 350ecclesiastical 17, 25–6, 105,119, 202Oxford 25, 28–9Roman 25–9, 34, 105–6Homer 43, 179Honigmann, E. 303Honoria, Augusta 273Honorius, emperor 309Hopkins, Keith 31Hume, D. 7, 229–30

386 General IndexHuns 273Hypatia 210Ibas of Edessa 263, 291, 318Iconoclasts 251idols, breaking, striking of 153, 174,181, 193, 199, 210Ignatius of Antioch 132–3, 189–90,192, 199, 212, 350Illyricum 71, 280, 290bishops of 285, 298–9, 301images, see idolsImmanuel prophecy 325immunity; see libellaticiincense 51–3, 84–5; see also diesturiWcationisInnocentius 75interpreters 299–300Irenaeus 190, 205, 212, 360, 364Irenaeus of Tyre 263Irene 38Isis 151, 234Islam 197–8, 230Italian martyrs 57–8Italy 56–7, 70, 72, 95, 97, 273, 328ius divinum 141–2, 203Jacobites 262Jacob of Cyrrhus 295Jacobus, Numidian martyr 170James the Just 108Januarius, volunteer 56, 92, 98, 174Jerome 162–4, 226–7, 357, 360Jerusalem 178, 271, 298, 315, 317,332, 367Jesus 333–43, 349, 357, 359, 369–70Jews 8, 17, 33, 114, 127, 135, 137,193–8, 201, 222, 224, 228–9,234, 239, 243, 249, 251, 323,326, 330, 333, 335–6, 344, 348–9hostility to Christians 27, 107–8inXuence on martyrs 19–20, 132,195–8martyrs 19, 132, 193–8synagogues 167–8use as insult 301–2Job 325John, apostle 137, 205–6John Cassian 360John Chrysostom 164, 196, 271,357, 360John Nesteutes 250John Rufus 257, 280, 314–15John Scholasticus 249John of Antioch, bishop 261,275, 291John of Antioch, historian 185John of Germanicia 296Joinville 228–9Jones, A.H.M. 23, 25Josephus 132, 197, 212Jovian, emperor 237–9, 243–4Jovinian, monk 226–7Judaea 115, 122, 193, 330–2, 337Judas, rabbi 197Julian, emperor 78, 180–3, 216, 222,238–41, 247–8, 356Julian, friend of Jerome 357Julian, slave 179Julian of Lebedus 309Justin, Roman martyr 121, 166, 212Justin II, emperor 251Justina 241Justinian, emperor 208, 221–3,225, 241, 245–6, 248–9,318, 346Juvenal of Jerusalem 271, 277, 288,298–9, 304, 309, 315, 317Juventius, guardsman 182Koch, H. 89, 93–5, 100Korah 220

General Index 387Lactantius 39, 46, 66, 69, 71, 96,119, 130, 134, 139, 160, 171,209, 218, 231, 233, 235–6, 241,244, 360Lamasba 87Lambaesis 86–7, 170Lane Fox, Robin 79, 99Last, Hugh 24, 29, 148,Law, Roman 113–16, 118–22, 128,145, 353–4access to 36enforcement of 224–5processes of 113–20, 123–4rhetoric of 204–5, 207savagery of 223Legio (Leon) 94Leo, I, Pope 264, 268–9, 272–4, 277,279, 283, 286, 290, 299, 301,303, 319Tome of 263, 266, 278, 282–3, 285,290, 293, 296–7, 307, 312, 316Leo XIII, Pope 370Leontes 168Letters of communion 93Levi, son of Alpheus 337Libanius 210, 237, 239–41, 247–8libellatici 49–50, 364libelli pacis 186Liberius of Emerita 96–7Licinia Augusta 277Licinius, emperor 24, 106, 175, 212Liguria 363Louis IX 228–9Lucentius of Ascoli 286Lucian 144, 188Lucilla of Cirta 82Lucius, martyr 113, 121, 165Lucretia 163Lugdunum, see LyonsLusitania 96Lyons 120–1, 167Macabees 132, 193–9Macarius 52, 358Macedon 71Macedonia 248Macedonians (heretics) 226Macedonius of Merum 181MacMullen, Ramsay 225, 230Macomades 75, 86–8MagniWcat 343, 371Magnus, silentiary 276–7Magnus Maximus 249–50maiestas (treason) 122–3, 235Malalas, John 185, 189Malchus, Palestinian martyr 170Manichees 39–40, 139, 201, 204,224, 239, 242, 301–2, 311Marcellinus, pope 58, 76–7Marcellinus, tribune 309Marcellus, soldier 172Marcellus of Apamea 211, 240Marcian, African martyr 75Marcian, bishop 51Marcian, emperor 264, 272–4,278–80, 284, 288–91, 293, 296,314, 317–18at Chalcedon 287, 290letters, instructions of 102, 279,283, 297Marcian, African martyr 75Marciana of Caesarea 165Marcion, Marcionites 33, 170Marcuclius 92Marcus Aurelius 41, 119–20, 146,157, 166, 170, 192–3, 199Marianus, Numidian martyr 170Marinianus of Synnada 313Marinus of Aquae Tibilitanae 49Maris of Chalcedon 182Maris the Persian 318Mark of Arethusa 181Martialis, ex-magister 286–7, 294

388 General IndexMartialis, Spanish volunteer 56, 92,98, 174Martin of Tours 173, 250Martyrs; see under individual namesveneration of 130, 157, 185–6Marx, Karl 9, 11, 113, 355Marxism 9Mary, virgin 226, 228, 261, 285Christotokos 261Theotokos 260, 284Mascula 87Maternus, Firmicus 208, 220Matthew 337Matthias, rabbi 197Mauretania 82, 165, 172Mauretania Caesariensis 75–6, 173Mauretania Tingitana 97, 100Maurice, emperor 250Maxentius, emperor 59, 97, 100,180, 216Maxima, Donatilla & Secunda 76,80–1Maximian, emperor 54–5, 57–8,69–73, 75–6, 96, 130Maximilian 171–2Maximinus Daia, emperor 38,61–2, 72, 129, 136Maximinus Thrax, emperor 168Maximus, guardsman 182Maximus of Antioch 278–9, 302Maximus of Carthage 51Maximus of Ephesus 238Meigne, M. 101–3Meletius 47Melitene 37Memnon of Ephesus 275Menalius 52Mennonites 355Mensurius of Carthage 45, 49, 67,130, 160, 168, 174Merum (Phrygia) 181Messianic prophecy 325Miaphysites; see MonophysitesMichael the Syrian 228, 298, 319Milan 227, 241, 363Edict of 209–10, 212, 231, 233Milevis 52–3, 76, 85, 89military service, see soldiersMillar, Fergus 14, 23Miltiades of Rome 58, 217Mithras, Mithraism 88, 214Moesia 181Mohammed I, emir 185Momigliano, Arnaldo 24Mommsen, Theodor 12, 14, 27, 115Monophysites 227–8, 245, 249, 262,270, 279–80, 298, 310, 314–15,318–19Monotheletes 318Montanists 130, 132, 155, 158,191, 198Montesquieu 4, 6–8Musurillo, H.A. 145Nain 332Nazareth 332, 335–6, 339Neocaesarea, Council of 97–8Nepotian, priest 357Nero, emperor 12, 108–9, 111,117, 119Nestorians, Nestorian views 261,278, 280, 284, 301–2, 307, 310Nestorius 207, 209, 243–5, 260–1,263–4, 268, 275, 280–1, 294,296, 302–3Newman, Cardinal 354Nicaea 279, 283First Council of 98, 103, 243,263, 276, 305Second Council of 251Nicene Christianity 204, 240–1; seealso Orthodoxy

General Index 389Nicomedia 35, 67, 70, 73, 84,160, 174Nile 136Nisibis 352Nock, Arthur Derby 138Nomus, quaestor 289–90, 292–3Noricum 56–7Novatian, Novatians 212, 244Numidia 52, 59, 74, 82–9, 183,216, 218bishops of 51–2, 74Numidia Cirtensis 53, 75, 87–9Numidia Militiana 74, 85–8Numidia Proconsularis 54–5, 171Old Testament, sinister inXuenceof 220–1Olympius, envoy 217Omar 319Onesiphorus of Iconium 282, 313Optatus, Aristius 77Optatus of Milevis 52, 209, 220, 358Orestes, prefect 180Oriens 298bishops of 284, 299–300, 309–13Origen 130, 158–9, 168, 171, 193,361Orthodox, Orthodoxy 17, 137, 204,206, 209, 212, 217–19, 227–8,249, 262, 264, 270, 278, 280,289, 298–9, 301, 309–10,318–19Ossius (Hosius) of Cordoba 97–8,102–3Ovid 338Oxyrhynchus 78Paëis, volunteer 177Paeon 166Pagans 15, 17, 19, 27, 30, 204, 250;see also Polytheistscompassion for Christians 64cult acts 150–1, 203, 214religious feelings 112, 127,134–6, 138–9, 142, 202–5, 208paideia 232, 239Palestine 53, 61, 64–6, 80, 131,177–8, 185, 239, 323, 337bishops of 298–9, 301Palestinian martyrs 64–6, 176–9Palladius, praetorian prefect 287–8,290Pamphilus, owner of Porphyry 65,179Pamphilus, Palestinian martyr 65Pannonia 58, 70, 72Panopolis 280Papylus of Thyatira 166Parables, Gospel storiesGreat Supper 221–2Lazarus 342, 361, 363–4Rich Young Man 342, 357, 363Tares 221Paschasinus ofLilybaeum 282–3,286Passions 42, 68–9, 165Paternus, governor 144Patricius 291Paul of Cirta 49, 59, 92Paul of Emesa 291Paul of Samosata 215, 219Paul of Tarsus 11, 33, 14, 212–15,324, 343, 349–50, 354, 369apologists for 344bête noire 323Paul, Palestinian martyr 65Paulinus of Nola 362pax dei 211pax deorum 15–16, 133, 200,203, 211Pegasius of Ilium 241Pelagia 164Pelagians 352, 364, 366–7

390 General IndexPeraea 331Peregrinus (Proteus) ofParium 186–8Perennis, prefect 113Pergamum 166Perpetua 169, 190–2Persecution 23, 31, 106, 121,201–4, 208–10, 217–18,238, 248–50, 326machinery, mechanics of 60–8,127phases 12, 16, 106, 144religious motivation 4, 15, 30, 34,127, 133–8, 143, 150–2, 200,203, 211targets 38Persia, Church in 162, 184Pessinus 181Peter of Alexandria 46, 50, 63, 95, 98,130, 155, 158, 160–1, 175, 364Peter of Terracina 251Peter, imperial slave 84Peter, Palestinian martyr 65Phaeno 65–6, 176Phileas of Thmuis 176Philemon 165Philip of Heraclea 43, 47–8Philip the Tetrarch 332Philippi 138Philo 135, 368Philoromus 176Philosophers 136, 142, 346–8,350, 353Phineas, grandson of Aaron 220,250–1Phoenicia 178, 335Photius, patriarch 294Phrygia 67, 157, 165, 181, 226Pilate, Pontius 122Pionius 60, 69, 170Pius XI, Pope 370Placitus, ex-magister 286Plato, 325–6, 346–7, 370bête noire 323Plerophories, see John RufusPliny the Younger 28, 42, 108,110–11, 117, 119–20, 124–7,144, 146, 148–51, 208, 267,338, 360Polycarp 121, 130, 137, 157–8,196, 205Polyeuctus of Melitene 169Polygamy 324Polytheism, Polytheists 211,229–30, 240; see also PagansPontica, diocese 298Pontus 71, 110, 137, 178poor, see povertyPoppaea Sabina 109Popper, Karl 326Porphyry, philosopher 296Porphyry, slave 179Potamiaena 169poverty 363–4, 366–8Greek attitudes to 340Jewish attitudes to 340–1moral connotations of 339, 341Priscillian 250Priscus, historian 289Priscus, Palestinian martyr 170Proclus of Alexandria 243Procopius, historian 246–7, 270Procopius, quasi-volunteer 42,65, 179Procopius, usurper 239Procopius of Scythopolis 84Proculus 165Promus 178Property; see Christianity, propertyProsdoce 163–4Proterius of Alexandria 210, 317Protogenes, prefect 289, 292–3

General Index 391provinces,governors of 12, 14, 28, 39, 43–4,65–7, 75, 106, 114–22governors’ attitudes 16, 128,131–2, 167, 177, 180, 214,225–6, 339Prudentius 57, 98, 174Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite 245,250–1Ptolemy, Ptolemaeus, martyr 113,121, 165Ptolemies 331public opinion 121, 129, 138,150, 157Pulcheria 261, 264, 271, 273–4,278–80, 284, 287–9, 294, 296,301, 314, 318Puritans 10Quintianus, Aurelius 53, 75, 86–9Quintus 157, 165–6Raetia 56–7Ramsay, W.M. 13, 28.Ranilda 248Ravenna 72, 272Reccared I 224records; see under Councils, Actsrelics 188, 291religio, religiones 31, 214, 232–6Restitianus the African 300Restituta 75Rhine 70riches, see Wealthriots 107, 150anti-Christian 122Christian 210–11, 279, 317; seealso Christianity, factionsRobinson, Henry Crabb 141Roman Empire 12, 16, 26, 69,244–5, 329Roman religion 15, 141–4, 203–4,235, 370study of 27, 29, 202–3, 232Romanus, commissioner 294Romanus, martyr 44Romanus, volunteer 65, 84, 177Rome 58, 77, 100, 106, 108, 113,121–2, 133–4, 148, 151, 166,189–90, 227, 248–9, 267, 271–2,284–5, 291, 299, 314, 317Romulus, volunteer 177Rufus, count 295Rumbold, Richard 347Rusicade (Philippeville) 87Rusticus 165Sabas, Goth 184SacriWcatio; see under Christianity,sacriWcingsacriWce certiWcates 59–63; see alsolibellaticisacriWce test 33, 40–2, 125, 127–8,140, 147Said, Edward 33Sallustius, quaestor 204Salsa of Tipasa 75, 165Salutius Secundus 238Salvian 242, 245Samaria 331, 333Samaritans 204, 251, 333Sardinia 147, 167Sardis 225Saturninus, companion ofPerpetua 192Saturninus of Abitina 54, 74Saturninus, Vigellius 112, 117Saturus 169, 191schism, schismatics 183, 211–15,218–21, 260, 351Scillitan martyrs 69, 112, 121, 147Scythia, Scythian 349

392 General IndexSebaste (Samaria) 331, 333Secundus, Pedanius 346Secundus of Tigisis 74, 160, 174Seeck, Otto 314Seleucids 331Seleucus, ex-oYcer 179Senate, senators 36, 134, 241,266–7, 287, 354Senator, envoy 290, 292–3Sepphoris 331, 335–6Severans, Severan period 41, 139, 166Severus, Septimius 119Severus, Tetrarch 58, 72, 97Severus of Antioch 223Sherwin-White, A.N. 14, 114, 116,124–6, 144–51Sicily 56, 175, 328Sidon 331–3, 335Silvanus of Cirta 39Siricius, Pope 226Sirmium 70Sisebut 251slavery, slaves 167, 323, 345–55, 368as punishment 36Christian attitudes to 349–55, 369punishments of 167, 223, 242,346, 351Smaragdus Abbas 355Smyrna 158, 165, 196Socrates, historian 181, 236, 238–9,242–5, 268, 294soldiers 75, 158–9, 169–73, 182,312–13, 369Solon of Athens 339Sophronius of Tella 263Southern, Richard 29Sozomen, historian 181, 211,238–9, 244, 268, 294Spain 49, 56, 70–2, 79, 82, 90–1,93–8, 100, 103–4, 123, 172,174, 184, 250–1Sparta 345Speratus the Scillitan 127Sporacius 287, 292Stein, Ernst 273Stephen, protomartyr 108Stephen of Ephesus 309, 312Stoics 141, 347, 353–4, 371Stratelates 291Suetonius 108, 147–8, 203suicidereligious 154, 163–4subscriptions; see Chalcedon,subscriptions tosuperstitio, superstition 31, 134–7,139, 143, 145, 147–52, 232–3Sychar of Samaria 332–3Syme, Sir Ronald 23Symeon Stylites 295Symeon Stylites the younger 251Symmachus 210, 237, 239–41Syria, Syrians 37, 44, 53, 71,77–8, 129, 181, 187, 211,219, 228, 239, 295, 313,319, 348Syrian Orthodox Church 270Tacitus 108, 135, 147–8, 203Tarraco 100Tatian, city prefect 290, 293Tatian of Merum 181Taurus 72taxation, taxes 77–8, 232, 292–3temples 94, 126destruction of 162, 181–2,210–11, 240Tertullian 112, 119, 122–3, 128,131, 136, 155, 158–9, 167,169, 171, 186, 191, 231,233–6, 241, 360Tetrarchs, Tetrarchy 42, 69–72,95–6, 179

General Index 393Thalassius of Caesarea 277, 288,309, 314–15Thamugadi, Timgad 74, 86–7Thebaid 66, 82, 131, 176Thecla, Palestinian martyr 65Themistius 210, 237–40Theodahad 248–9Theoderic the Amal 249Theodore of Claudiopolis 304, 306Theodore of Mopsuestia 263, 318Theodore the Studite 251, 355Theodoret of Cyrrhus 162, 182, 184,206–7, 244, 264–5, 311, 360correspondence of 269, 291–3,296–7exclusion from SecondEphesus 263, 277, 295–6, 301restoration at Chalcedon 268,294–8, 301–3, 307, 310, 314Theodosia of Tyre 178Theodosius I, emperor 202, 219,240–1, 249Theodosius II, emperor 207, 243–4,261–2, 264, 272–8, 289, 291–2,295–7, 299, 301Theodosius, monk 317Theodosius of Synnada 225–6Theodoulus of Merum 181Theodulus, slave 179Theologians, Theology 27, 269–71,285, 288, 319, 325, 337, 350Theopaschite formula 241, 318Theophilus of Alexandria 240, 271Theopistus 280Theveste 54, 171Thessalonica 38, 71Thibilis (Announa) 87Thomas of Edessa 291Thrace 70, 298Three Chapters 318Thurlow, Lord 141Tiber 136Tiberianus, governor 185Tiberias 331, 335–6Tiberius, emperor 203Tiberius Constantine,emperor 249–50Ticinum 100Timolaus, volunteer 177Timothy, martyr 65Timothy Aelurus 257, 315Tingis (Tangier) 172Titus 118Toledo 185toleration 152, 202–3, 209–10,218–19, 229–51Tolstoy 354Torres, Camilio 370torture, judicial 36, 41–2, 53, 63, 66,76–7, 95, 117, 127–8, 157,174–5, 178, 181, 227, 368traditio, traditores 46–9, 51–3, 74,95–6, 98Trajan 25, 40–1, 110–11, 117,119–20, 132, 144, 148, 151–2,185, 208, 267Trier 72, 250Tripolitania 74, 82turiWcatio; see dies turiWcationisTypasius, veteran 75, 173Tyre 179, 331–3, 335Ulpian, jurist 117, 119, 121, 126Ulpian, martyr 65, 179Urban, governor 66Urbicius 291Urbicus, Q. Lollius 165Ursinus 210, 222, 248Vahram V 184Valens, emperor 206, 238–9Valens, Palestinian martyr 65

394 General IndexValentina, volunteer 178–9Valentinian I, emperor 224, 239,242, 247Valentinian II, emperor 241,249Valentinian III, emperor 207,272–3, 277Valentinian, prefect ofIllyricum 290Valentinians 248Valerian, emperor 36, 40, 68, 93,107, 139–40, 145, 170Valerius of Caesaraugusta 98Valladolid 348Vandals 163, 300vengeance, divine; see wrathVerona List 74, 85Veronicianus, secretary 299Vespasian, emperor 118Victor of Cirta 39Victor of Rusicade 49Vienne 120, 196Vigilius, pope 318Vincentius, archdeacon 56, 98Vincomalus, magister oYciorum286–8, 290, 292, 297Visigoths 224, 273Volunteer Martyrs 33–4, 44–5, 56,65–8, 81–5, 93, 129–33, 145,150, 153–93, 197–200dangers of 155, 162, 197–8oYcial disapproval of 32, 45,91–2, 130, 155–62, 165, 168war, Just; see bellum iustumwealth, riches 338–9, 341–3,356–71basis for charity 358–60, 368moral terminology for338–9suYciency of 356, 359, 367Weinstock, Julius 141Williams, Bernard 231wrath, divine 136–7, 200,204–8, 218Yahweh 10, 325–6Yarmuk 319Yazdgard I 162, 184Zacchaeus 368Zacchaeus, martyr 44, 65Zachariah rhetor 269, 280, 314Zama 49Zarmanus, Zarmarus 188Zealots 192Zebinas, volunteer 65, 177Zeno, emperorHenoticon 207, 241, 318Zeno, magister militum 289, 291Zimri the Israelite 220Zoilus, senator 293

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