7
Law and Politics

Diocletian’s decision to attack Rome’s Christian community, which he pursued zealously between 303 and 311 CE, is a powerful example of how Roman laws could be used to muscle citizens’ behavior. During this crucial decade for the empire, according to contemporary accounts, the Roman government passed legislation “commanding that churches be leveled to the ground and [Holy] Scriptures be destroyed by fire” (Eusebius, History of the Church 8.2, trans. by A. McGiffert in NPNF series [1890]). Furthermore, men and women of high class who held positions of authority in the church had their social status stripped (Eusebius, History of the Church 8.2).

Fortunately, we have a general idea of how at least some Christians reacted at being made the targets of imperial bigotry. In Nicomedia in Roman Turkey, the city where Diocletian had established his own capital, the emperor’s laws were written up and published on the streets. As soon as they were hung, they were being ripped down in protest and disgust. One culprit, says the church historian Eusebius, was not a low‐class rabble‐rousing peasant, either. A “certain man, not obscure but very highly honored with distinguished temporal dignities, moved with zeal toward God and incited with ardent faith, seized the edict as it was posted openly and publicly, and tore it to pieces as a profane and impious thing” (Eusebius, History of the Church 8.5).

A contemporary Latin writer, Lactantius, also evokes the general spirit of civic disobedience that arose in response to Diocletian’s legislation. When the emperor’s first edicts were announced “depriving the Christians of all honors and dignities,” Lactantius explained, “a certain person tore [it] down and cut it in pieces … with high spirit, saying in scorn, ‘These are the triumphs of Goths and Sarmatians’” (Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors 13, trans. by W. Fletcher in the ANF series [1886]). The protester’s language would not have been lost on his Roman audience. Emperor Diocletian’s priorities were being compared to the behavior of two “barbarian” tribes, the Goths and Sarmatians. The commentary was scathing; real Romans were not supposed to act like this against their own citizens.

It was Caracalla’s decree of universal citizenship, in many ways, that had led the empire into this quagmire. The result was a difficult decade for the Roman people. Now, after fifty years of political and military instability had come to a close, during which foreign entities like the Sasanian state and Gothic tribes had functioned as easy enemies around which Romans could build their own secure sense of identity, unresolved questions of what constituted a real Roman were now testing every level of society. Emperor Diocletian himself would put up a passionate fight for his own political convictions, but his legislative program had much larger implications for Rome, too – far beyond the sincere but perhaps parochial concerns of many Christians that the law required them to hand over their scriptures to the Roman authorities.

Diocletian’s broader vision struck at the heart of what it meant to be Roman. He himself was intent on stripping Roman citizenship once and for all from the empire’s Christian community, and that included limiting Christian access to the basic guarantees of legal protections. Lactantius makes this point clear when he explains that the emperor was uncompromising about barring Christians “from being plaintiffs in questions of wrong, adultery, or theft” in their local cities and advocating that the right of voting in Roman municipal elections be taken away from any Christian (Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors 13). Diocletian’s divisive policy, unleashed at the start of the fourth century, nearly ripped the empire in two.

In 311 CE, the year that Diocletian died, it would be Galerius who recognized the need for political reconciliation. On May 1, at the palace at Nicomedia, an announcement was made. Diocletian’s decrees would be repealed. Galerius’ edict permitted Christians to rebuild their places of worship and restored to them the legal protections of Roman citizenship (Eusebius, History of the Church 8.17; Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors 34–35).

7.1 Roman Law: History From the Ground‐Up, Top‐Down, and Sideways

The narrative of the late third and early fourth centuries CE can lure one into associating all legal questions with the personalities who occupied the highest chambers of the state. But as we saw in our examination of Diocletian’s edicts against Christians, there were larger issues at stake in these conversations. One issue was the extent to which a segment of Romans throughout the Mediterranean would continue to have access to the Roman legal system.

Before continuing with a top‐down view of Rome’s constitutional developments – a story which famously includes the dramatic meeting in 313 CE between Augustus Constantine and Augustus Licinius at the Tetrarchic capital in Milan – we should give attention to some broader details of Roman legal culture. What was so important about Roman law in people’s daily life? What evidence is there to help us research that question?

Petitions from Roman Egypt

Aurelia Ataris was a Roman woman from Egypt, a landowner in the city of Hermopolis, and the daughter of a man who had served in the Romany army. She lived in the fourth century CE and, although a resident of a city in the Egyptian desert, was probably grateful for her access to the Roman legal system.

Hermopolis is located near the modern town of El‐Ashmunein, on the west bank of the Nile between Upper and Lower Egypt. In antiquity, it was the capital of its nome, one of the smaller governmental units into which Egypt had been organized by the Hellenistic kings, the Ptolemies. Romans continued this practice of subdividing Egypt in this way, and by the third century CE, there were approximately 60 nomes in Roman Egypt. Hermopolis, the administrative center of its nome, played a strategic administrative role for the government, whose local officials were responsible for communicating with the top‐level military and civic governors of Roman Egypt. These officials were the praeses, the civilian governor of the diocese; and the dux, its military authority. In the time of Aurelia Ataris, the presence of these officials in Roman Egypt was a relatively recent development, however. The separation of provincial authority along civilian and military lines had been initiated by the Rule of Four.

By 346 CE, Aurelia Ataris knew enough about the workings of the Roman government to appeal for legal help when she needed it. And that year, according to a petition that she submitted, events led her to the authorities, specifically, to the local liaison of the Roman dux. Her petition, which survives on papyrus, was found as part of an archive of the local official whom she sought out. His name was Flavius Abinnaeus, and his official papers have been published (The Abinnaeus Archive: Papers of a Roman Officer in the Reign of Constantius II, ed. by H. Bell, V. Martin, E. Turner, and D. van Berchem [Oxford, 1962]). Copies of Aurelia Ataris’ consultation with the authorities were found in this archive. Here is a record of what she reported:

On the third intercalary day [of the week] at the tenth hour, I do not know why, and acting in the manner of thieves, when I was collecting a debt which he owes me, Pol, surnamed Obellos; and the son of Horion, Apion by name; and his sister Kyriake shut me up in his house. I escaped from his house … [but] I [now] am laid up, sitting at death’s door. Therefore, I ask you this and beg your benevolence: Arrest these people and send them to our lord, the dux, for it is his job to punish those who dare to do such things.

(Papyrus from the Abinnaeus archive [P. Abinn.] 52, trans. by A. Bryen [2013], pp. 264–265, whose study of this papyrus and others is listed in the Suggested Readings at the end of this chapter)

The second papyrus record in the archive elaborates on the details of the kidnapping. There, Aurelia Ataris suggests she was “practically beat[en] to death” by her assailants (P. Abinn. 51, trans. by A. Bryen [2013], p. 264).

Roman legal texts in Late Antiquity

Aurelia’s case gives us an important insight into the social world of Roman Egypt and the legal culture of the fourth‐century empire. The petition is significant for obvious economic and social reasons. It attests to the high financial status of a local woman and the fact that several local men were dependent on her for loans. It also attests to Aurelia Ataris’ ability to read and communicate; she signed the last lines of the document. This petition opens a window, more broadly, however, onto the customs of the law that people like her, as citizens, had access to throughout the empire.

The two petitions we possess are dated the day of her attack and the very next day. As historian Ari Bryen has observed in his recent study of these texts, “[I]t would appear [Aurelia Ataris] was aware of her options for finding her way to justice” (2013, p. 93). The language that she used in her report is also revealing. Even though she had a personal and business relationship with the assailants, she described their attack as a surprise (“I do not know why” they assaulted me, she says) and characterized their behavior as if they were an anonymous group of “thieves.” We don’t need to question the details of the attack to realize how effectively Aurelia Ataris has used the legal system to her advantage as a plaintiff. She has placed the onus on the people she has accused to come clean and to testify as to their motives and their intent.

It is an extraordinary testament to the work and intellectual labors of Roman lawyers that they were able to provide a flexible, lasting legal framework for officials to handle cases like these. Many of Rome’s law codes had been written at a time when citizenship was not universal. Gaius was one important legal thinker who laid the groundwork for this lasting system. He lived in the middle of the second century CE, almost fifty years before Caracalla’s citizenship decree. One of his most famous works, the Institutes, was a handbook surveying legal questions and cases.

Many of the statements included in Gaius’ Institutes concern stolen property and physical injury. In it, Gaius also discusses the history of punishments that were associated with the cases, oftentimes going back to legal documents written in the Roman Republic:

The penalties for injuries provided by the Law of the Twelve Tables [originally compiled in the fifth century BCE] were as follows: ‘For a broken limb, retaliation; for a bone broken, or crushed, three hundred asses, if the party was a freeman, but if he was a slave a hundred and fifty; and for all other injuries, twenty‐five asses.’ These pecuniary penalties seemed to be sufficient compensation in those times of great indigence. At present, however, we make use of another rule. For we are permitted by the Judge [praetor] to estimate the damages ourselves, and the Judge may either condemn the defendant for the amount of which we have estimated it, or for a smaller sum, as he may think proper.

(Gaius, Institutes 3.223–224, trans. by F. de Zulueta, The Institutes of Gaius [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946])

As Gaius’ study shows, Roman legal claimants were not married to a strict, inflexible application of previous law or custom. Resolutions, like the amount owed in a property dispute, could be set by judges, which would shape later precedent. In this way, the Roman legal system navigated between tradition and innovation and, as citizenship grew, the number of Romans who could appeal to the law to protect them increased.

Gaius’ Institutes proved so influential, in fact, that by 533 CE, a lawyer in Constantinople named Tribonian, working on the orders of the Roman Emperor Justinian (r. 527–565 CE), was asked to update it. Justinian’s Institutes were the result of this process. Along with the emperor’s Digests and his Codex of laws, these three sixth‐century documents soon became the foundation of legal culture in the later Roman Empire. All three preserved many of Gaius’ earlier, second‐century case studies. In this way, the legal culture of the sixth‐century Roman Empire – whose capital was at Constantinople, not Rome – represented the continuity of almost a thousand years of Roman legal history (Exploring Culture 7.1: The Emperor’s Residence in Constantinople; Figure 7.1). Even as the Roman Empire lost territory and its customs changed – by the sixth century CE, citizens were required to identify with one specific version of Christian faith – legal tradition connected the present to the past.

Illustration of an artifact, Great Palace Mosaic, displaying a man on his knee attending to 2 goats (right) and a man holding a jar (left). 2 Horses are in the background.

Figure 7.1 Unlike at Rome, where excavations on the Palatine Hill provide a rich amount of material evidence about the emperor’s residence, the palace at Constantinople is not well known archaeologically. This artifact, known as the Great Palace Mosaic, was found in the area east of Constantinople’s hippodrome, where the palace was located. It depicts a scene of animal husbandry. In this close‐up, two men dressed in colorful tunics, an unpretentious garment worn by laborers, attend to horses and goats. Although a seemingly innocent, rustic scene, the proper cultivation of the land had long been used by Roman poets, like Varro and Virgil, as a metaphor for good governance. That message would have had a powerful resonance in the imperial palace, particularly if the mosaic were visible to diplomatic guests, august senators, and distinguished dignitaries. From the Great Palace Mosaic Museum, Istanbul, Turkey. Dated roughly between the fourth and sixth century CE.

Photo credit: © Dennis Cox/Alamy Stock Photo.

The history of Roman law as a story of “horizontal relations”

There is one last reason why legal texts, like Aurelia Ataris’ petitions, are so helpful for social and cultural historians of Late Antiquity. As documents that report on the scandalous, outré events that took place in Roman cities, the legal texts allow us to see a kind of interpersonal relationship that doesn’t fit neatly into models of “top‐down” or “bottom‐up” history. These texts are fascinating because they preserve snapshots of “horizontal relations” (Bryen 2013, p. 269) – of friends and neighbors whose relationship with each other has gone comically, sometimes even horribly wrong.

That’s what happened in May 336 CE when two pigs escaped from the farm of a woman named Aurelia Allous (Oxyrhynchus Papyrus [P. Oxy.] 54.3771, trans. by Bryen [2013], p. 262). After wandering off Aurelia’s property, the lost animals eventually stumbled into a waterwheel near Aurelia’s neighbor’s land. The owner of the land, a man named Pabanos, had been so enraged that he came after Aurelia with a chisel after trying to slaughter the pigs. According to the petition filed with the local magistrate, Pabanos even tried to drown Aurelia in one of the water conduits.

Although the precise circumstances that led to the escalation of the violence here are missing from the textual reports, as they are from the kidnapping case of Aurelia Ataris, the fact that Aurelia Allous went to the magistrate to pursue her case – leaving a papyrus petition behind in the archaeological record – shows us one of the most important roles that the legal system played in fourth‐century Roman Egypt. Both these petitioners saw the law as a protection from a spike in the kinds of violence that could and did disrupt the more mundane rhythms of life on their farm or in their city. Waiting in line to see a local official, reading the complaint, witnessing and signing the petition, then waiting for a response: these were the everyday signs of law that went hand‐in‐hand with the top‐down world of imperial edicts, social policies, and politics.

7.2 The “Edict of Milan,” 313 CE

Milan in the early fourth century resembled most large imperial cities. Like Thessaloniki, whose buildings are attested archaeologically, and Nicomedia, whose ghostly presence haunts many fourth‐century texts, this city of northern Italy (in Latin, Mediolanum) was a cosmopolitan environment outfitted with all the amenities expected by Late Antique Roman citizens. There was a large circuit of walls surrounding the city; an amphitheater for animal hunts and gladiatorial games; baths with statues of the Roman gods, like Hercules; a race track for chariot matches; and broad, column‐lined city streets, perfect for staging imperial ceremonies. Milan owed much to the investment of the Tetrarchs. It would also soon become famous as the site of an important “constitutional convention,” a meeting between the Augusti of the eastern and western regions of the empire. The two protagonists in this meeting were Licinius (r. 312–324 CE) and Constantine (r. 312–324 with Licinius; 324–337 CE as sole emperor of Rome).

In 312 CE, General Constantine had been proclaimed emperor by his troops at York, in Roman England. In the aftermath of this proclamation, he had decided to march his army against the current Augustus of Rome, Maxentius. It was a daring decision because it undermined the validity of Diocletian’s political reforms and challenged the notion of shared rule. In October 312 CE, Constantine successfully seized the capital. The Augustus, Maxentius, drowned in the Tiber Riber.

One year later, in 313 CE, in the aftermath of his stunning victory, Constantine arranged to meet his eastern colleague, Licinius – perhaps to allay fears that Diocletian’s system was not in danger of falling apart. The meeting was scheduled for Milan. There, the two men would sign a joint statement clarifying the role and meaning of the practice of religio throughout the empire. It is this document, drafted at Milan but announced at Nicomedia, which is known as the “Edict of Milan.” It was an imperial decree that had a transformational effect on Roman society.

The Roman constitution in context

The Roman people had no written constitution, but the absence of a formal document does not preclude us from speaking about a “constitution” in more general terms as the legal culture, the formal governmental structure, and the social traditions that undergirded the state. Since the time of the Republic, the mechanisms that allowed the Roman state to function involved a balance between codified rules and an appreciation for traditions and values.

For that reason, Rome’s “constitution” from its earliest days can be said to have depended on a combination of specific regulations, such as who could hold a magistracy and when; but also on a set of more loosely defined rituals, such as the performance of a triumph, an honor which allowed a successful general to parade through the streets of Rome and grow his political base. This system was supported by the consensus of the Senate, the men who played an advisory role, and by Rome’s priests and priestesses, who were tasked with ensuring that the government’s decisions conformed to the will of the gods. Religio, in this arrangement, functioned as a branch of Rome’s Republic.

The rise of an autocracy in the first century BCE, commonly regarded as Rome’s “Empire,” was the direct result of a breakdown of this cooperative, consensual system. Yet without reading the ancient sources too naively, it is important for us to realize that the arrangement which came about during these formative years was, in many ways, the product of a creative constitutional renegotiation – one that took hold of Roman society gradually. The “Empire” did not emerge as the result of a radical governmental overhaul, certainly not by one authoritarian man.

Just the contrary. The gradual process by which a single man, such as a highly respected politician like Augustus, was given authority to oversee the entire government ran on a certain cognitive dissonance. Romans could convince themselves that they were staying faithful to their history of living in a “Republic,” even as their state grew more and more to resemble a monarchy. The fact that Augustus assumed the role and title of pontifex maximus, “Chief Priest” of the government, ensured a particular new level of stability because priests who chose to use ill omens to object to Augustus’ policies would have been seen as deliberately undermining the authority that the Senate and people had invested in him. In extreme circumstances, however, as a vote of no‐confidence, the people or the army could always choose to remove those leaders who they saw as failing to live up to their expectations. The history of the third century CE can be seen as a time when even this system was tested.

The larger point is that the broad ideology of Rome’s “Republican” system proved remarkably resilient. Throughout Late Antiquity, the Senate continued to work in its accustomed deliberative role; the emperor commanded respect through his personal authority; and the people themselves functioned as an important check‐and‐balance, calling out political ineptitude or sometimes calling for new leadership in public venues where they met the emperors, such as at the circus games. This constitutional system, in which very little about the actual running or management of the government was ever codified – let alone written down – provided the underpinning for the Roman Empire, both when Rome was a part of the state and even when Constantinople was its sole capital (A. Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015]).

Expanding the idea of being Roman

Constantine’s conference with Licinius’ in 313 CE leaps out from history for two reasons. It’s not just that the emperors’ decisions would affect the political trajectory of Christianity, although 313 CE remains the year which Christians use to commemorate the moment when their faith was legally recognized. (Galerius’ edict of 311 CE does not traditionally receive the same recognition.)

There is a second, subtler reason why that Milan conference is important, though. The idea that any Roman ruler would take the time to define, explicitly, what and who constituted a Roman religio – by writing their opinions down and distributing that language to the citizens of the empire – represents an entirely new development in the story of Rome’s constitution. Where tradition and custom had been the norm for centuries, leading to the difficulties with civic sacrifice in the third century CE, this new formal, fixed legal language now provided a safe harbor for all the empire’s 60 million citizens. Christians, according to the language of Constantine and Licinius’ edict, were now to be accorded the official status of a religio (Lactantius, On the Death of the Persecutors 48). And unlike Galerius’ edict, this decree would never be challenged or repealed.

The idea of what it meant to worship as a Roman citizen (religio) had just been expanded to include all the empire’s diverse Christian individuals. Meanwhile, the fortunes of other Christian communities, outside the Roman Empire, would follow different paths (Key Debates 7.1: Being Christian in the Sasanian Zoroastrian State: A Case of Constant “Persecution”?). In Rome, the protection of Christian worship had now been written into Roman law. It was a decision that would have unforeseen implications for many priests and bishops, as well as for many ordinary Christian individuals, as they all would now grapple with the responsibility of having been classified as one of the religiones of the Roman state.

Neither in 313 CE nor at any time during his long reign (d. 337 CE) did Constantine or any other Roman politician make Christianity the official “religion” of the Roman Empire.

7.3 Individual Laws and the Collection of Legal Texts

As we have already seen, Gaius’ Institutes, written in the middle of the second century CE, provided later jurists with an important model. It taught them how to think, write, categorize, and order Romans laws. The sixth‐century CE compilations undertaken by Justinian and his legal team were but the end of a long process, one that involved many other individuals between Gaius and Justinian. This section provides an overview of some other sources for Rome’s legal history, particularly sources that relate to the period of Diocletian, Constantine, and later fourth‐century emperors.

In general, laws in antiquity took several forms. First, they could be issued as edicts, which the emperors or their spokesmen read publicly to the people. Second, they could be expressed in the form of letters (epistulae, in the Latin plural), which were written from the emperor to other members of the imperial administration, who then had the responsibility of disseminating them. Lastly, an imperial law could be announced during an oratio, that is, an emperor’s speech before the Senate. (A fourth category, called a “rescript,” referred to cases in which the emperor had specifically taken the time to answer the legal concerns of a private individual, which technically resulted in a law; this form of legal writing was popular during the third and early fourth centuries but was later phased out.)

In all the cases just described – and for reasons that should be quite apparent in the pre‐modern world of limited, immediate communication – the law’s announcement was a crucial step in generating public awareness of the emperor’s policies. Publication could take several forms. The law’s text could be chiseled on stone (“an inscription”) or – more commonly – it could be written on parchment, papyrus, or wood and then distributed or displayed throughout town in high traffic areas like in a city’s forum or at its temples. Because of the lasting nature of inscriptions, however, the text of several important laws from the time of Diocletian and the Rule of Four still survive.

The Edict on Maximum Prices, 301 CE

One surviving law is Diocletian’s “Edict on Maximum Prices,” an emergency economic measure known from several fragments of Greek and Latin inscriptions that have been found overwhelmingly in the eastern Mediterranean. These texts on stone make tantalizing statements about the nature of the late third‐century and early fourth‐century economy. For, as the modern name of this one text suggests, Diocletian’s price decree set the maximum amount that merchants could charge for goods and services, starting in 301 CE. The preamble to the law makes clear that it applied throughout the entire empire (CIL 3, p. 801). Although it does not seem to have worked, Diocletian’s law was an audacious attempt to regulate the economy during a time when prices for nearly every staple of the Roman pantry and kitchen – grain, beans, different types of wine, olive oil, honey, lamb, goat – were rising. Wages for everyone from the mule drivers to barbers and to tailors needed to be legislated from the palace. For that reason alone, as the sign of top‐down interventionism, the “Edict on Maximum Prices” remains one of the most intriguing pieces of the economic puzzle of the late third century CE.

The Edict against Christians, 312 CE

A second law to survive on stone was issued by the Tetrarch Maximinus (r. 305–313 CE), the nephew of Galerius who does not seem to have shared his uncle’s later preference for toleration. This inscription is a letter from Maximinus to the city of Colbassa, located in southwestern Asia Minor, encouraging them to continue their discrimination against local Christians. It dates to April 6, 312 CE (AE 1989, no. 1096). Written a year after Galerius’ death but before the “Edict of Milan,” the Colbassa decree reveals the extent to which conservative Roman mores – and an irrational fear of Christians – continued to grip many citizens during this period. It also shows the extent to which Diocletian’s successors were prepared to keep using the power of Roman law to discriminate against the empire’s minority groups. Eusebius claims to have seen a copy of a similar decree Maximinus had sent to and set up in the city of Tyre (History of the Church 9). Eusebius’ account of that inscription, although written in Greek, matches in many ways the Latin text of the Colbassa decree.

The creation of the Theodosian Code, 429–438CE

Needless to say, laws that were written on more perishable materials, like parchment or wood, and then tacked up or nailed up around town, have not fared as well. That does not mean we lack the texts of all laws which were never inscribed on stone. The archives for the study of legal history in the fourth century, more broadly, would be empty indeed were it not for the fact that many fourth‐century laws were later collected and edited, preserving them for posterity. This project was undertaken on the orders of the Christian emperor Theodosius II (r. 402–408 with Arcadius; 408–450 CE as sole ruler of the eastern empire).

The assembly of the Theodosian Code was a grand, collaborative campaign designed to collect laws from Constantine’s time to the fifth century CE. Thanks to the dedicated men who worked on it, we have an abundant collection of edicts, orations, and letters that date to the fourth century CE. We can only speculate how much information was lost during this arduous and patently political editing process. When it was finished in 438 CE, however, the Theodosian Code was one of the most up‐to‐date compendia of Roman law for its age and included sections on every aspect of daily life. In sixteen chapters, or books, it outlined and codified topics related to magistrates, marriage, property, slavery, heresy, taxes, religio, and superstitio.

7.4 Law and Politics in the Fourth Century CE

Now that we have looked at legal culture more broadly, we should return to the world of fourth‐century laws and politics. The fact that Christians around the Roman world were not united, socially or politically, before 312 CE would make the following century a particularly difficult one for those both inside the group and outside it. The “Edict of Milan” had been designed to address Christians’ legal status in the empire; it had not legislated how Christians should behave as Roman citizens (Political Issues 7.1: Gladiators, Chariot Races, and the Laws of the Christian Emperor Constantine). Even as the “Edict of Milan” gave them a new form of social security, however, it was Christians’ own spirited conversations – about how much or even whether they should embrace long‐standing Roman values, like participating in sacrifice, serving in the imperial cult, or attending Roman festivals and games – which had not been resolved.

The fact that Christians could now argue, speak, and meet openly, without fearing legal punishment, however, did ensure that their own internal, sometimes parochial conversations gained a degree of attention that they had not previously enjoyed. Two heated topics arose in the fourth century that were particularly divisive to the empire’s minority Christian community.

One was a dispute over organizational leadership in North Africa. It had ignited in the aftermath of Diocletian’s legislation, as Christians began to debate whether people who had handed over the scriptures during the persecution could even be considered “real Christians” any more. (The Christian bishop who took a strict, uncompromising position in this debate was named Donatus.) The second dispute arose out of Alexandria and concerned the relationship of Jesus’ humanity to his divinity. (The bishop of Alexandria who argued that Jesus had been created by God, rather than coexisting with God since eternity, was named Arius.) Both men, Donatus and Arius, would eventually have their names defamed, smeared into ‐isms by Christians who found that the best way to disagree with them was through open caricature. (Many triumphalist books have been written about the history of “Donatism” and “Arianism” in Late Antiquity without any attention to the complexities of all sides of the participants in these debates.)

Both these controversies, especially the one surrounding Arius, can still seem more like abstract theological lessons than necessary moments in Rome’s history; but by the late fourth century, debates like these were vitally important to bishops who had a vested interest in making sure their party platform – not that of their opponents – earned government support. The following writer, addressing his Christian congregation in 381 CE, was one of those with a vested interest in this topic raised by Arius:

If you ask for change [in the market], [people in Constantinople] wax philosophical about the Begotten and the Unbegotten. And if you ask the price of bread, they answer, “The Father is greater, and the Son is subject to him.” And if you say, “Is the bath ready yet?” they declare the Son has his being from non‐existence. I’m not sure what this evil should be called – inflammation of the brain or madness or some sort of epidemic disease which contrives to derange people’s reasoning. (Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit,” in the collected writings of Christian Greek authors [Patrologia Graeca 46, column 557], trans. by A. D. Lee in Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity [London: Routledge, 2000], p. 110)

The bishop’s concern to regulate and control daily small talk in the marketplaces of Constantinople was the sign of a Christian intra‐squad dispute which would only grow louder and more pointed in the fifth century. Church councils would be called to adjudicate these disputes. The effects on the Christian community would be politically and even geographically polarizing.

As for the mass of Romans who did not identify as Christian, one might assume that conversations of this sort – whether surrounding Donatus or Arius – really did seem like an “inflammation of the brain” with little relevance in their day‐to‐day lives (Working With Sources 7.1: The Talmud as Evidence for the History of the Jewish Community). Besides, there was a more pressing legal question for all the empire’s citizens during the fourth century. Would Christians, now that they had gained legal status, tolerate Rome’s older worship practices or would they try to eliminate them by force of law, making Christianity the only official religio of the state?

Summary

At the start of the fourth century CE, Emperor Diocletian used state power to coerce Christians to hand over their scriptures, creating an environment where churches could be legally burned and Christians themselves could be threatened with the forfeiture of their Roman citizenship. This policy of dividing citizens and families from each other, separating Christians and non‐Christians into two legal camps, was born out of a long‐running concern to unify the empire around traditional Roman values. Since the time of the Republic, proper worship, or what Romans called religio, was an essential part of this legal framework. There was no concept of secular society in the Roman world.

When Constantine and Licinius met at Milan, the constitutional underpinnings of the state were modified to include Christianity as one of the empire’s official religiones. This decision did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, but it did guarantee Christians new legal protection in the way they worshipped. This political triumph was something many people throughout the Roman Empire could appreciate, as access to the courts and the use of the legal system were crucial to the way all citizens – not just Christians – resolved conflict in their daily lives.

Study Questions

  1. Summarize some of the cases that came to the attention of magistrates in Roman Egypt.
  2. What do scholars mean by doing history “horizontally”?
  3. Describe the process by which Roman laws were made.
  4. How did the Edict of Milan reshape the Roman constitution?

Suggested Readings

  1. Ari Bryen, Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
  2. Jill Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
  3. Caroline Humfress, Orthodoxy and the Courts in Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
  4. John Matthews, Laying Down the Law: A Study of the Theodosian Code (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).