Roman anti-pagan legislation in theory and practice
By Edward Watts.
Paper presented to the Indiana University Law and Society Workshop (2011)
Introduction: My paper today concerns the Christianization of the Roman Empire, one of the big issues with which historians of the later Roman world must grapple. For those of you unfamiliar with this process and its timeline, a brief summary might be useful. Christianity, of course, emerged in the first decades of the first century as a movement that began among Palestinian Jews but quickly spread among urban, Greek-speaking populations across the Roman world. Some of its central tenets conflicted with established Roman practices and, for this reason, its adherents sometimes found themselves subject to judicial proceedings. In some cases, these proceedings resulted in execution. This was by no means the average Christian experience, however. The cities of the Roman world were diverse religious marketplaces and the absence of an individual or individual family from civic religious activity was seldom noticed and even less frequently a cause for concern. Many people skipped the religious festivals and public sacrifices that crowded the calendar for a range of reasons (one devout pagan teacher, for example, tells of requiring his students to skip a festival for Artemis because their declamations needed work). Christianity then represented but one of an infinite number of possible explanations for one’s absence.
Christian decisions to refrain from religious participation became more problematic in 250 when the emperor Decius issued an edict requiring every person in the empire to offer a public sacrifice to the gods. It has been argued (plausibly, in my view) that Decius (whose edict was issued in 250) did not issue this law in an attempt to target Christians but hoped instead that this action would simply push lazy Romans to take a greater interest in the gods. Whatever his intent, however, this was the moment in Roman history when imperial policy and imperial legislation first singled outChristians who had decided to abstain from traditional religious life. In 257 and again in the early fourth century the imperial government also used its power to attack Christian leaders and Christian property. Neither attack, of course, managed to destroy the church, but each proved serious enough to split individual Christian communities in some parts of the empire into factions following rival bishops. This dynamic of persecution ended in 313 with the emperor Constantine’s embrace of Christianity and his military victory over Maxentius. Aside from a reaction against Christians by Licinius, Constantine’s opponent in a civil war in the late 310s and early 320s, the empire would never again persecute Christians. In fact, within 30 years of Constantine’s unification of the empire under his rule, the imperial court began a process of encouraging the disassembly of the pagan religious infrastructure the empire had long treasured. In a generation, the Empire was transformed from one that persecuted Christianity to one that actively suppressed paganism — a remarkable turn.
Click here to read this article from Indiana University
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Roman anti-pagan legislation in theory and practice
By Edward Watts.
Paper presented to the Indiana University Law and Society Workshop (2011)
Introduction: My paper today concerns the Christianization of the Roman Empire, one of the big issues with which historians of the later Roman world must grapple. For those of you unfamiliar with this process and its timeline, a brief summary might be useful. Christianity, of course, emerged in the first decades of the first century as a movement that began among Palestinian Jews but quickly spread among urban, Greek-speaking populations across the Roman world. Some of its central tenets conflicted with established Roman practices and, for this reason, its adherents sometimes found themselves subject to judicial proceedings. In some cases, these proceedings resulted in execution. This was by no means the average Christian experience, however. The cities of the Roman world were diverse religious marketplaces and the absence of an individual or individual family from civic religious activity was seldom noticed and even less frequently a cause for concern. Many people skipped the religious festivals and public sacrifices that crowded the calendar for a range of reasons (one devout pagan teacher, for example, tells of requiring his students to skip a festival for Artemis because their declamations needed work). Christianity then represented but one of an infinite number of possible explanations for one’s absence.
Christian decisions to refrain from religious participation became more problematic in 250 when the emperor Decius issued an edict requiring every person in the empire to offer a public sacrifice to the gods. It has been argued (plausibly, in my view) that Decius (whose edict was issued in 250) did not issue this law in an attempt to target Christians but hoped instead that this action would simply push lazy Romans to take a greater interest in the gods. Whatever his intent, however, this was the moment in Roman history when imperial policy and imperial legislation first singled outChristians who had decided to abstain from traditional religious life. In 257 and again in the early fourth century the imperial government also used its power to attack Christian leaders and Christian property. Neither attack, of course, managed to destroy the church, but each proved serious enough to split individual Christian communities in some parts of the empire into factions following rival bishops. This dynamic of persecution ended in 313 with the emperor Constantine’s embrace of Christianity and his military victory over Maxentius. Aside from a reaction against Christians by Licinius, Constantine’s opponent in a civil war in the late 310s and early 320s, the empire would never again persecute Christians. In fact, within 30 years of Constantine’s unification of the empire under his rule, the imperial court began a process of encouraging the disassembly of the pagan religious infrastructure the empire had long treasured. In a generation, the Empire was transformed from one that persecuted Christianity to one that actively suppressed paganism — a remarkable turn.
Click here to read this article from Indiana University
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