Rome: An Empire's Story (45 page)

Groups whose members were united primarily by religion became more widespread in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods.
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Dionysus/Bacchus was an ancient god whose name appears in texts from the Greek Bronze Age, and who had a central role in Athenian public religion signified by the festival of the Greater Dionysia, the major occasion for dramatic performances. It was not the god himself, but the form of worship and association represented by Bacchism that shocked. Other groups began as the cults of migrant populations and then attracted worshippers from their host communities. The Egyptian goddess Isis, in a Hellenized form, became popular around the Mediterranean in this way. So did the Baalim of various Syrian cities, the Great Mother of the Gods from Pessinus in Asia Minor, and the god of the Jews. Populations moved about within the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman empires for all sorts of reasons: traders, slaves, soldiers, colonists, and missionaries moved around the urban system, bringing their gods with them.
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Some, like Magna Mater, were given public cult in some cities. Others were always marginal. Religion also had roots in Greek society. Mystery cults proliferated, many imitating the original Mysteries of Demeter and the Maiden at Eleusis, once the main cult of an independent city but swallowed up into Athenian religion in the archaic age. Pilgrims came to be initiated here, and in Samothrace and in a series of other centres, and some more mobile groups, including worshippers of Cybele and Mithras, developed their own Mysteries.
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Philosophical sects provided yet another model of a group with a single name—Epicureans, Stoics, Cyrenaics—often a charismatic founder, and authoritative texts, a group one could join or leave as one chose. From the first century
AD
Jews too were identifying different traditions, and at least one, the Qumran community known from the Dead Sea Scrolls, looks very much like a religion. Sanctuaries attracted pilgrims from across the world.
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Yet often we see cults that had originated in specific places being transformed into a more mobile form. Examples of this move from ‘locative’ to ‘utopian’ forms
include the creation of Hellenized versions of Egyptian deities like Isis and Serapis, the growth of rabbinical traditions within Judaism, and of course Christianity. Almost all these groups were periodically focuses of intra-communal tension: at various points the authorities in Rome turned their fire on Bacchanales, Isis worshippers, Jews, astrologers, and Christians. Other cities often did the same. Yet religious groups of this kind continued to thrive. Mithraism and Manichaeanism both represent religions created from scratch, drawing on symbols, rituals, and divine names from older traditions but brought together into a completely new combination, well suited to the social environments within which they sought recruits. We can see some signs of competition for worshippers, or at least for the gifts they might bring. Perhaps the clearest indication is the way a successful feature of one cult would be taken up by another. The ancient Mysteries of Eleusis were copied at Samothrace, by the worshippers of Cybele, Mithras, and other groups; standard Greek anthropomorphic imagery was adopted by cult after cult; astrology was incorporated by almost every religious tradition from Judaism and Mithraism to the worship of Egyptian and German deities; and male gods were equated everywhere with Jupiter the Greatest and Best. Another sign of competition was the efforts clearly made to retain the attention of worshippers. Mithraists were invited to proceed through a series of grades; initiates at Eleusis had to return for a second initiation in a subsequent year; the ritual of the Taurobolium, a bull sacrifice associated with Cybele, had to be repeated every twenty years; while priests at healing sanctuaries and oracles advertised their successes and encouraged return visits.

Perhaps claims to a monopoly on salvation emerged from this context. The idea that a person might focus in a personal way on one god within a polytheist pantheon was an old one, and one exploited by Romans from the Republican period on.
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Sulla cultivated the idea he was a special favourite of Venus, Augustus claimed the favour of Apollo, Vespasian was assisted in his coup by Isis, and so on. Many gods were hailed in dedicatory inscriptions as ‘The Greatest and Best’ or ‘The Most High’.
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Giving one deity a special place is sometimes called henotheism. Some Isaic revelatory texts claim Isis is the ‘true’ name of a goddess also worshipped under other names, including Cybele, Artemis, Venus, and Hecate.

Early Christianity emerged into this complex religious environment. The exclusive claim, despite its origins in Judaism, was maybe most important as a unique selling point relative to other emergent proto-religions.
The Gospels represented the choice to follow Christ as something that might divide families in the most radical way. Luke tells the story of the man who says he will follow Christ once he has buried his father. ‘Let the dead bury their own dead,’ replies Christ.
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There are several stories of this kind. Even earlier Paul had declared that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.
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What we are observing in these texts is the assertion of a new social identity based solely on religious membership, and one that cuts across the most fundamental social boundaries of antiquity. Christians were not the only ones to assert that sort of identity. Augustine was raised a Christian, but for a while joined the Manichaeans, whose founder created a new religion by drawing on Christian, Zoroastrian, Jewish, and other traditions. Manichaean missionaries were sent to North Africa, India, and ultimately central Asia and China too. Then there are the rather mysterious Mandaeans of Mesopotamia, whose rituals and texts have been formed in the course of a long dialogue with Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam. Inevitably traditional religious practice came to be reinterpreted as the practice of a rival—and false—religion, which was sometimes termed Hellenism and sometimes paganism.

The Rise of Christianity

Modern estimates of the growth of Christianity stress the very small scale of its beginnings. It is difficult to imagine what life was like for the first generation of Christians: they had no scriptures, most had been born Jews, and perhaps many still thought of themselves as Jews. They numbered in the low thousands and were widely scattered, mostly among the larger cities of the eastern Mediterranean world.
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Paul’s
Letters
and the account of his travels in
Acts
give some sense of how these groups kept in touch and maintained some sort of cohesion. But there are huge gaps in our knowledge. By late antiquity there were major Christian communities in North Africa and Egypt, but we know nothing of their origins. The emergence of a greater concern with orthodoxy and discipline in later centuries produced highly edited accounts of the early Church.

Christianity emerged from these shadows during the second century
AD
. Christian writers and Jewish leaders, for different motives and certainly not in collusion, created a sharper divide between Christianity and
Judaism, one that would be entrenched in the fourth century with the aid of imperial muscle.
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House churches were drawn together in each city under the leadership of one bishop. The number of Christians grew exponentially. Many must have felt themselves surrounded by converts and part of a mushrooming movement. Yet absolute numbers remained small: non-Christian texts hardly remark on the existence of Christians before the year 200. From the later second century, we have the first evidence for Christian communities in North Africa and in Gaul. Most seem to have used Greek, suggesting their closest connections remained with the eastern Mediterranean. Something close to our notion of the New Testament had emerged by this period too, although the inclusion of some books, such as Revelation, remained controversial. Latin translations of Christian scripture began to circulate by the middle of the second century, along with apologetic works and the first attempts to police the boundaries of the Church. Heretics were those who held false beliefs, like the Marcionites who rejected the Jewish scriptures in their entirety. Schismatics had the right beliefs but rejected the authority of the proper authorities.

The rise of episcopal authority was intimately connected with the rise of orthodoxy. The life and work of Irenaeus of Lyon offers an early example. Eusebius, in his
History of the Church
written shortly after Constantine’s conversion, states that he was a pupil of the martyred Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, himself believed to be a disciple of the apostle John. But that kind of genealogy was a conventional way of establishing authority. At some point Irenaeus appears as a priest in the Greek-speaking Christian community of Lyon, around the time of a local persecution recorded by Eusebius and dated to the reign of Marcus Aurelius. That community sent Irenaeus as an envoy to the Bishop of Rome prompted by their concerns about the news that Montanus, a priest in central Anatolia, claimed to have received a New Prophecy from God. Montanism was just the first heresy Irenaeus set out to refute. As Bishop of Lyon, he wrote copious works in Greek, among them a defence of the canonical status of the four Gospels, and one of the earliest heresiologies, or catalogues of heresies. The immediate inspiration for that work was the arrival in Lyon of a group of Greek merchants spreading the ideas of Valentinus, whose blend of Christian thought and mystical revelation produced an early form of what is now termed Gnosticism. But for Irenaeus the error could be traced all the way back to the magician Simon Magus, who appears in Acts, thus creating a genealogy of error that
could be set against the genealogy of orthodox teaching. Hippolytus, Bishop of Rome, also opposed Valentinianism, using some of Irenaeus’ writings to do so. Both the campaign against Montanism and that against the teachings of Valentinus illustrate the interconnectedness of early Christian communities across the Mediterranean. Within that network new ideas circulated rapidly, carried by both missionaries and texts. From late antiquity several large bodies of episcopal letters survive concerned above all to maintain a united front against schism and heresy. The organization of the Church was generated from below, its institutions and higher-level authorities a creation of those obsessed by unity. Bishops closed ranks around scripture, and opposed the threats to their authority posed by new revelations and charismatic prophets.
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Christian communities devoted enormous energy to this activity, but it was largely esoteric. Non-Christians probably knew relatively little about their actual beliefs or concerns, just as many were ignorant about the Jews in their midst. A small number of local persecutions are recorded. Most are known through the writings of Eusebius and his early fourth-century contemporaries, who were keen to gather accounts of the deeds and deaths of martyrs. Roman governors and emperors did not extend to Christians the protection they sometimes gave Jewish communities in similar circumstances. Letters between Pliny while governor of Bithynia-Pontus and Trajan indicate that some kind of ban existed—the origins are obscure—but emperors were not keen to enforce it. Persecution was probably less common than simple unpopularity. Until the early third century Christians were perhaps a rather introverted group, if a growing one. Few scholars believe more than 10 per cent of the empire’s subjects were Christians in Constantine’s day and the figures could easily be even smaller. Very few Christians of high social status are known before the third century
AD
.

The first general persecution was that organized by the Emperor Decius in 250
AD
, in the darkest days of the military crisis. Probably this was a response to the refusal of some Christian leaders and communities to participate in a great
supplicatio
, a collective ritual of sacrifice involving all Roman citizens.
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Since Caracalla’s Edict of 211, the citizen body comprised most free subjects of the emperors. General persecution, in other words, was an accident. Caracalla had inadvertently created something completely lacking in early centuries, a form of religious authority that might be applied to the empire as a whole. Decius’ attempt to employ it had exposed a group
who practised exclusive cult of one god. Yet the anger that fuelled persecution perhaps drew on a sense that the military disasters and the great plague were a response to Christian abandonment of the gods. Galerius and Diocletian seem to have exploited the same sentiments when in 303 they organized their Great Persecution. It involved purges of the military, the confiscation and destruction of sacred texts, and attacks on churches and church property.

It was not the first edict of its kind. From the year before we have a letter addressed by Diocletian and his tetrarchic colleagues to the proconsul of Africa that roundly condemns another new religion, Manichaeism. The teachings of Mani are condemned as superstitions and errors, but also contrasted to the traditional and ancestral cults of the gods. The Manichaeans, like the Christians, were accused of trying to cast out the worship of the old gods. Worse still, they originated in the empire of the Persians, the enemies of Rome. Manichaean missionaries and sacred texts should be burned, and if any Roman of high status had converted then his property was forfeit, and he would be sent to the mines. The motivation for both persecutions seems clear. Christians and Manichaeans were enemies of the traditional gods; their origins and views were un-Roman; and they were unpopular, and the emperors wished to associate themselves with traditional values and cults. The implementation was another matter, and unfortunately our main sources are all Christian.