God Against the Gods (24 page)

The Insanity of the Sacrifices

Constantine, as we have seen, may have favored Christianity but he never dared to openly persecute paganism, the colorful array of rituals and beliefs that were still practiced by a vast majority of his subjects. Indeed, by a profound and telling irony, the only faith that was
not
generally if grudgingly tolerated during the reign of the first Christian emperors was Christianity—or, at least, those strains of Christianity that were condemned by one faction or another as heresy and schism. “[V]enerable confessors were tortured into heresy upon the rack,” writes Gerald Henry Rendall. “[P]relates or clergy were exiled, starved, strangled, or beheaded.”
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The sons of Constantine, however, escalated the war of God against the gods by issuing the first recorded edict that criminalized the rites and rituals of paganism. Although they claimed to be re-enacting a law of Constantine, the fact is that no such earlier decree has been found. “Let superstition come to an end, and the insanity of sacrifices be abolished,” goes one imperial decree issued in 341,
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and a second decree ordered that “the temples be immediately shut, and carefully guarded.” The death sentence was threatened for anyone who defied the decree: “Let him feel the sword of vengeance.”
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Here ends the era of official toleration that commenced with the Edict of Milan, and here begins the formal persecution of paganism in ancient Rome. The declaration of open war thrilled the Christian rigorists who had long denounced the pagan gods and goddesses as not merely false but demonic. “Paganism, most holy emperors, must be utterly destroyed and blotted out, and disciplined by the severest enactments of your edicts, lest the deadly delusion of that presumption continue to stain the Roman world,” urged Firmicus Maternus, a pagan convert who reinvented himself as a relentless enemy of his former faith. “How fortunate you are that God, whose agents you are, has reserved for you the destruction of idolatry and the ruin of profane temples.”
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At first, the persecution of paganism was a halfhearted, mostly symbolic undertaking. The oft-quoted decree against sacrifices, according to Pierre Chuvin, was aimed only at the practice of examining the viscera of sacrificed animals, and the other rites and rituals of paganism were still tolerated. Gibbon insists that “this formidable edict was either composed without being published, or published without being executed.”
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A law of 342 specifically prohibited the destruction of the pagan temples that stood just outside the walls of Rome—the traditional sites of spectacles, circuses and games—so that the people of Rome might still enjoy “their ancient entertainments.”
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And Constantius II, like his father, retained the old title of
Pontifex Maximus
, thus serving as high priest of the pagan cults that still functioned, strictly speaking, as the state religion of Rome.

“That emperor suffered the privileges of the Vestal Virgins to remain inviolate,” insists the pagan orator Symmachus, “and, though he had embraced a different religion, he never attempted to deprive the empire of the sacred worship of antiquity.”
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A state of cold war between monotheism and polytheism prevailed for a few more years. Just as many provincial magistrates had declined to enforce the anti-Christian decrees of the Great Persecution, the antipagan decrees were now “largely shipwrecked on the passive resistance of pagan governors,” according to Diana Bowder.
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Among the pagans who converted to Christianity, some did so only as a kind of protective coloration in an effort to promote their careers in public service. As a result, many Romans went to their graves “with Charon’s penny on their tongues”—a gesture that honored the ferryman of pagan myth who was thought to carry dead souls across the Styx—“and a cross in their hands,” as John Holland Smith puts it.
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But even the first tentative measures of repression fired the spirit of opposition among the pagans who had accommodated themselves to the Christian idiosyncrasies of the all-powerful Constantine. The disgruntled and embattled pagans were eventually offered an opportunity for open rebellion in the person of an ambitious officer called Magnentius (d. 353), a soldier of German stock who had risen to noble rank and command of the elite legions of the Roman army. The target of his coup d’état was not the accommodating Christian emperor in the east, Constantius II, but his zealous younger brother, Constans, who ruled in the west. So began the pagan counterrevolution, a conflict in which not only the imperial crown but the whole edifice of classical paganism were at stake.

At Midnight

In 350, Magnentius was feasting with his fellow officers in the winter quarters of the imperial legions under his command, according to the tale as told by Zosimus, when the table talk turned to the excesses of Constans and the notorious young barbarians with whom he surrounded himself. Here is an example of pagan morality at work: pagans were apparently no less scandalized than Christians by the sexual adventures of the young emperor. At midnight, Magnentius excused himself “as if to answer a call of nature,”
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and when he returned, he had taken off his military uniform and now wore the garb of the Augustus, the purple mantle and the diadem, a wordless but unmistakable claim on the imperial crown.

Constans and the young barbarians who were his intimate companions, in the meantime, were absent from the imperial court, engaging in the pleasures of the hunt—or, perhaps, as Gibbon proposes, “some pleasures of a more private and criminal nature.”
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When Constans learned that the army had rallied behind the pagan usurper, he literally ran for his life. The young emperor reached what he thought was a safe refuge in a fortification at the foot of the Pyrenees—one ancient source suggests that, ironically, the ardent Christian sheltered himself in a temple—but he was betrayed to his pursuers, dragged from his hiding place and slaughtered with no more courtesy or ceremony than he had afforded to his own brother a few years earlier.

The sudden and surprising success of the pagan coup inspired a few other usurpers to make their own claims on the crown, but Magnentius was the one who ultimately prevailed as the champion of resurgent paganism. Six weeks after the fateful midnight feast, Magnentius and his rebel army reached Rome, which lay within the realm of the emperor Constans, and he was acclaimed by the local pagan aristocracy as prefect. By the end of the year, he replaced Constans as emperor of the western empire, ordered the reopening of pagan shrines and temples that had been closed during the reign of the Christian emperors and invited his fellow pagans to resume the solemn sacrifices to the gods and goddesses that had been regarded with such horror by the Christians.

Constantius II was campaigning on the Persian frontier when the first reports of Magnentius’s pagan counterrevolution reached him. He withdrew from the front and retreated to the imperial capital, pondering all the while how to battle the threat that he faced from Magnentius and the other challengers, Christian and pagan alike. Both his brothers were now dead, of course, and so were the uncles, cousins and in-laws whom he had ordered to be killed during the purge that followed the death of Constantine. Constantius II himself was married but remained childless. When he cast about for allies and confidants, he was thus forced to consider the only blood relations who had survived the slaughter: the young sons of the dead uncle who had been among the principal victims of the blood purge.

The Orphans of Macellum

Whether or not young Gallus and his half brother, Julian, witnessed the murder of their father is not recorded in the ancient sources, although Rendall imagines that they “listened in hushed terror to the tramp of soldiers and cries of bloodshed” from the hiding place where they had been taken by a kindly priest .
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After the purge, they were placed under the equivalent of house arrest by Constantius II, and they spent their early years in separate confinement, Gallus in Ephesus and Julian in Constantinople, until they were finally reunited in 344 at Macellum, an imperial estate in a backwater of Asia Minor.

Gallus, born in what is now Tuscany in 325 or 326, was the son of Julius Constantius’s first wife, Galla. Julian, born in Constantinople in 331 or 332, was the son of his second wife, Basilina. Both women, however, were already dead by the time that their sons’ father was murdered. So the orphans were raised by a series of surrogates—slaves, eunuchs, priests and tutors—who were charged with the task of turning them into good Christians and loyal subjects while monitoring their state of mind and reporting back to their cousin and captor, the emperor Constantius II.

Macellum was an opulent but remote place surrounded by high mountains and forests full of wild beasts. Indeed, the palace had been used as a kind of hunting lodge until it was converted into a place of confinement for Gallus and Julius. Here the orphaned brothers were both sent on the order of Constantius II, whose anxieties had been sharpened by the death of Constantine II and the ascension of Constans to the rank of sole Augustus in the western empire. Constantius II fretted that the boys might find sponsors among his enemies or grow up to make claims of their own on the imperial crown—and so he resolved to put them in a place where they would remain under constant scrutiny of spies and watchers and far beyond the reach of potential conspirators. Julian himself records the experiences of a lonely and fearful childhood.

“How shall I describe the six years we spent there?” muses Julian in
Letter to the Athenians
. “For we lived as though on the estate of a stranger, and were watched as though we were in some Persian garrison, since not one of our old friends was allowed to visit us; so that we lived in glittering servitude, and shared the exercises of our own slaves as though they were comrades.”
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Constantius II had deprived them not only of their father and their freedom but their patrimony, too. “Of my father’s estate nothing came to me,” complains Julian, “not the smallest clod of earth, not a slave, not a house.”
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Still, the boys were encouraged by their guardians to regard Constantius II as a benefactor, and the purge in which their father died was prettied up. “[T]hey kept telling us and tried to convince us that Constantius had acted thus,” Julian writes, “partly because he was deceived, and partly because he yielded to the violence and tumult of an undisciplined and mutinous army.”
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Constantius II declared himself to be “stung with remorse” over the role he had played in the death of their father, or so went “the gossip of the court,” as Julian puts it. “He thinks that his unhappy state of childlessness is due to those deeds, and his ill success in the Persian war he also ascribes to that cause.”

Constantius II himself visited Macellum in 347, perhaps to do some hunting in the surrounding woods and, at the same time, to satisfy himself that his prisoners were not nursing a dangerous grudge against him. Three years later, when he was seeking someone to serve as his second in command in the struggle against Magnentius, he was forced to consider the orphans of Macellum. Gallus, after all, was not only his cousin but his brother-in-law—Constantius II’s first wife had been Gallus’s sister. With so pitifully few candidates available to the emperor, and so many enemies arrayed against him, Gallus must have seemed a chance worth taking.

Gallus, now in his midtwenties, is depicted by the ancient sources as a striking figure, blond and handsome, but also a man with a cold and cruel nature. Julian himself insisted that the years at Macellum, where they were denied the care of their own parents or the companionship of boys their own age, so distressed Gallus that he blamed Constantius II for the character flaws that his older brother would later display. “[W]hatever cruelty or harshness was revealed in his disposition was increased by his having been brought up among those mountains,” writes Julian. “It is therefore I think only just that the Emperor should bear the blame for this also.”
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Gallus himself, as we shall see, proved himself to be far more dutiful than Constantius II had any right or reason to expect. An imperial messenger appeared at Macellum in 351 with a wholly unexpected summons—Gallus was ordered to present himself at the imperial court in Constantinople and put himself in service to his cousin. When he arrived at court, he found himself suddenly and unpredictably elevated from the “splendid slavery” of Macellum, as the nineteenth century historian Augustus Neander puts it, to the very highest circles of power and privilege.
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The former prisoner of state was now advanced to the rank of Caesar. He was presented with a wife—Constantina, the eldest daughter of Constantine the Great, thus making him a brother-in-law of Constantius II for a second time. He was also placed in command of an army and charged with the crucial task of securing the eastern frontier of the Roman empire while Constantius II marched off to do battle with Magnentius and the other rebellious pagans. In fact, Gallus discharged his new duties so well that Constantius II was able to devote his attention to the crushing pagan counterrevolution in the west. By 353, only three years after Magnentius had replaced Constans as western emperor, the pagan had been defeated and driven to suicide—he took his own life when the last of his troops proposed to surrender him to the Christian emperor—and Constantius II now reigned as the sole Augustus of the whole of the Roman empire.