As in any port city of the Roman world, the population of Ostia was very mixed. An extraordinary discovery was made on the outskirts of Ostia in 1961, while a road was being constructed linking Rome to its new door to the world, Fiumicino airport: the synagogue of Ostia, the oldest synagogue structure to have survived in Europe. The earliest part dates from the first century AD, but the building was repaired or partly rebuilt in the fourth century. It was in continuous use for Jewish prayer for at least 300 years. An inscription from the second century commemorates the building of the Ark for the scrolls of the Law, at the expense of a certain Mindis Faustos; the inscription is mainly in Greek, with a few Latin words, for the Jews of Rome, with their connections to the East, continued to use Greek as their daily language. The building and its annexes have an area of 856 square metres, and everything suggests that this was the major synagogue of a prosperous community of hundreds of Jews. More than a synagogue, by the fourth century the complex contained an oven, possibly for the baking of unleavened bread for Passover, and a ritual bath. There were side rooms that were probably used for teaching and for meetings of the Jewish council and of the rabbinical court. A carved architrave portrayed the great candlestick that had stood in the Temple, the ram’s horn blown at New Year, and the symbols of the Feast of Tabernacles, the citron and decorated palm branch.1 Nor was Judaism the only eastern cult with many followers in Ostia. A small brick-built temple elsewhere in the city has been identified as a shrine of Sarapis. Within the precinct there was a courtyard paved with a black-and-white mosaic of Nile scenes. Plenty of inscriptions refer to the cult of Isis; there were several shrines to Mithras, much favoured in the Roman army; during their wild ecstasies, male devotees of the mother-goddess Cybele, who was also worshipped at Ostia, were said to castrate themselves.2
Carried along the trade routes, ancient systems of belief transplanted themselves into Italy and other lands from Judaea or the Nile, and were modified by their own contact with the Hellenistic culture of the eastern Mediterranean. Sometimes individuals travelled across the Mediterranean bearing with them a new rather than an old faith. Paul of Tarsus has been encountered on his way to Rome, and in the same city a line of succession developed that traced itself back to another traveller from the East, his fellow-believer Simon Peter. On his travels in Syria, Asia Minor, Greece and Italy, Paul preached that a man acclaimed by his followers as the Jewish Messiah was actually God Incarnate. The slowly maturing seeds of a great religious revolution in the Mediterranean had been sown.
The two obvious transformations of the Mediterranean in the late Roman period were the Germanic invasions and the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman emperors. Christianization took place slowly in the teeth of vigorous opposition from pagans and Jews. Eastern cults spread easily across the surface of the Mediterranean, but neither Judaism nor Christianity could be compared to the pagan cults, as the Romans were aware. Jews and Christians were seen as ‘atheists’, in the sense that they straightforwardly denied the very existence of the pagan gods. They refused to sacrifice to the deified emperor. Yet the Romans, as they gained power in the eastern Mediterranean, were careful to make an exception of the Jews; the Jews were willing to sacrifice to their God in honour of the emperor, and were understood to have an eccentric way, therefore, of guaranteeing their loyalty. All other subjects were expected to make the required sacrifice to the deified emperor, and the refusal of Christians to do so placed them outside the law and exposed them to the risk of violent death in the amphitheatre. By vigorously preaching the word of Christ beyond the Jewish community, St Paul and his successors had created a growing community of Christians whom the Romans could no longer classify as a branch of the Jewish people. Nor did they follow Jewish observances: circumcision was to be of the heart, not of the body; avoidance of pork was understood to mean avoidance of pig-like behaviour. The very fact of persecution strengthened the Christians in their resolve: they revered as martyrs those who were executed by the Romans and, discarding the Jewish concept that the bones of the dead were unclean, they developed a cult of the martyrs’ remains. In the view of some enthusiasts, even their suffering was an illusion, for Christ would anaesthetize them against the claws of the lions, though others rejoiced in pain and suffering, as proof that they had won the mercy of Christ and the reward of eternal life.3
Although the Jews were generally guaranteed the right to practise their religion, Roman policy was not consistent. As punishment for a fraud perpetrated in Rome, by four crooks who claimed to be collecting money for the Temple, Emperor Tiberius had already shunted 4,000 Roman Jews to Sardinia, a traditional land of exile. One of those they defrauded was the wife of a Senator, who (not unusually) was sympathetic to Judaism. Claudius agreed to restore to the Jews in Alexandria civil rights they had lost under the mad emperor Gaius Caligula, but there is no evidence that the Jewish communities of the diaspora were united in opposition to the powers-that-be; when there was trouble on the streets of Alexandria it was the result of a long-established dislike between Jews and Greeks, not of government policy, which the Greeks thought too favourable to the Jews. However, pressure on the Jews in Palestine resulted in both the forced and voluntary diffusion of the Jews across the Mediterranean. From the perspective of Mediterranean history the significance of the destruction of the Temple by Titus in AD 70, and of Jerusalem itself by Hadrian in AD 131, lies in the single word ‘diaspora’. It is unlikely, as the Jewish historian Josephus pointed out, that the Romans intended to destroy the Jewish Temple when they quashed the Jewish revolt in 70; but, once it had been burned and pillaged, the new emperor Vespasian and his son Titus saw the political advantage of a great triumph in which they could parade the Temple treasures, and Titus commemorated this procession in the famous reliefs inside the arch of Titus which still stands at the southern end of the Roman Forum.4 Large numbers of Jewish slaves were deported to Italy and beyond.
What was unusual was that Rome did not allow the Jewish sacrificial cult to resume in Jerusalem. It was not as if the capture of the Temple could have resulted in the complete destruction of the vast sanctuary and its colonnaded courts (large parts of the perimeter walls survive to this day). With extensive repairs, restoration of the cult could have begun. The kindly old emperor Nerva (d. 98) was happy to relieve the Jews of a special tax imposed after the Jewish War and it seemed that restoration of the cult was not far off.5 But his soldier successor Trajan adopted a tough policy, and at the end of his reign he ruthlessly suppressed Jewish rebellions in Syria, Egypt and Cyrenaica (115–16): as Jews dispersed across the Mediterranean, tensions previously largely confined to Palestine and Alexandria became more widespread. Indeed, Palestine was relatively quiet during these revolts. His successor Hadrian had an uncompromising solution: he rebuilt Jerusalem as a city dedicated to Jupiter Capitolinus, under the name Aelia Capitolina; he banned circumcised males from entering the city. He set his mind against the Jews and the God of Israel in a manner completely at odds with traditional Roman respect for other religions. The revolt that followed in Palestine in 132–6 was fierce but hopeless; short-term successes, including the recovery of Jerusalem and possibly even the restoration of the sacrificial cult, culminated in massive defeat and in horrific massacres by Hadrian’s armies, and as many as 600,000 Jews may have lost their lives.6 Once again these events had a wider Mediterranean impact: very many Jews were dispersed westwards, as slaves or fugitives; Jews were certainly living in Spain a century later.7 The effects of defeat in Jerusalem were not simply political and demographic. Judaism was already changing its character in the late Temple period, as sects such as the Pharisees challenged the authority of the old Temple priesthood. The loss of the Temple gave further impetus to these changes, led by the rabbis, learned laymen rather than Temple priests; and the synagogue, not in itself a novelty, became the focus of Jewish study and prayer.
Persecution of the Christians had also come in waves. In the first century, Nero had blamed Christians for the great fire that gave him the opportunity to rebuild parts of Rome in gilded magnificence. In the middle of the third century the emperors renewed the persecution of Christians across the empire. The emperor Decius was commemorated in the Tuscan port of Cosa as restitutor sacrorum, ‘restorer of the holy things’, a reference, apparently, to his enthusiastic hunt for Christians. One way to avoid persecution was to make outward compromises, worshipping in public but maintaining the faith behind closed doors. Disagreement about the validity of this policy, and, even more seriously, about the validity of the priestly orders of those who ‘handed over’ (donaverunt) the scriptures to the Roman authorities, generated bitter recriminations and schism: the Donatist Church, active in Africa in the fourth century, saw itself as the standard bearer of true belief in the face of the appeasers. Another way out of the dilemma presented by the Roman authorities was for Christians to pose as Jews: ‘synagogue on Saturday, church on Sunday’, a position condemned in vigorous anti-Jewish sermons at Antioch in the 390s.8 By then, of course, the Christians had the upper hand, but throughout the Mediterranean the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism were less clear to observers (including even many Jews and Christians) than the angry prophets of Christian orthodoxy such as St Cyprian would have us believe. The vituperation expressed towards Judaism derived from a sense of bitter competition, not a wish to kick those who were already down. No quarter was given by either side. And yet the wider public was not much interested in the finer points of doctrine, and was probably attracted by ethical codes and religious aspirations that were not vastly different – love for one’s neighbour, the hope that God would offer rewards in the next world if not in this one. Many Jews were probably quite liberal in their approach to the rules of the religion, which were still being finely honed in the academies of Babylonia, and this rendered movement back and forth between religions and sects much easier.
An account of the life and trial of the Christian martyr Pionius, who died at Smyrna in the Decian persecutions, constantly alludes to the ‘Greeks, Jews and women’ who formed a hostile crowd in the public squares of Smyrna when he was arrested; Pionius refused to take part in the pagan cult at a time when both Jews and pagans were celebrating their festivals (possibly the Jewish festival of Purim and the pagan Dionysia – both times when drunkenness was more than tolerated). On such occasions the celebrations of Jews and Gentiles merged imperceptibly, despite any number of rabbinic injunctions.9 In Smyrna and elsewhere there existed large and respected Jewish communities that attracted many converts, as well as the ‘God-fearers’ who attended Jewish rites without converting, so that the Jewish population was ethnically quite mixed.10
As galling to many Christians as the success of the Jews was the presence of heretic Christians. Of course, one man’s heretic was another man’s orthodox Christian. Yet there were certainly some very radical movements. On his cross the dying Pionius found himself side by side with an adherent of the Marcionite creed, a movement of Christian origin that regarded the God of the Jews as Satan, and rejected the Hebrew Bible.11 For all their disagreement with the Jews, mainstream Christians accepted the Hebrew Bible and did not seek to emend its text; finding in it prophecies of the coming of Christ, they valued it highly but read it quite differently from the Jews. For St Augustine (d. 430), the Jews were the bearers of the holy books, occupying the place of servants ordered to look after their masters’ property, though this did not mean that they understood what they preserved.12
Jews and Christians also came into contact on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. There were Jewish shipowners. Ports frequented by Jews included Gaza. The rabbis debated whether the Jews of Gaza could take part in the local fair held in honour of a Greek god, a debate which once again reveals the often fuzzy boundaries between Jewish and pagan communities in the late Hellenistic and Roman world.13 Yet some maritime Jews were very meticulous in their observance. In 404 a bishop from Asia Minor sailed to his see from Alexandria, where the Jews had their own guild of navicularii and owned and operated a good many ships. The captain of this ship was Amarantus, and he and his crew were Jews, whom the bishop lampooned; he feared for his life when the captain let the ship drift after nightfall on Friday. It was the Sabbath eve and he was permitted (he said) to navigate the ship only when the passengers were in danger of their life. In that case, virtually all Jewish laws could be abrogated. Everything that is reported about the ship makes one wonder how it ever arrived: the rigging was broken, so its sails could not be unfurled; the captain had sold the spare anchor. In the same period, the discussions of the rabbis recorded in the Talmud reveal that Jews had become quite used to crossing the Great Sea. As well as examining issues in commercial law, they debated whether it is licit for Jews to travel across the sea on the Sabbath and what actions are permissible on the day of rest (such as the drawing of water, or even taking a stroll on the ship’s deck).14
The conversion of Constantine to Christianity is traditionally supposed to have followed his victory over his rival Maxentius at the battle of the Milvian Bridge just outside Rome in October 312; it took him another thirteen years to establish himself as sole master of the Roman Empire. In fact he was baptized only on his deathbed in 337, but the Edict of Milan in 313 lifted the ban on Christian worship, and the New Rome he established at Constantinople was to be a Christian city, uncontaminated by pagan temples. He presided over a contentious Church Council at Nicaea in 325, which attempted to resolve difficult theological questions over the nature of the Trinity, mediated by the emperor (no theologian); the result was further schism in an already divided Church, even though the Nicaean Creed thereafter became the basis for Orthodox Christianity. He saw himself as ‘bishop of those outside the Church’; but he was also the pontifex maximus, the chief priest of the empire. Whether through an awareness that religious change must be gradual, or through his own confusion of pagan and Christian ideas, Constantine paid attention to pagan as well as Christian practices, even – oddly – in the ceremonies of dedication of the New Rome, where the cross of Christ was placed above the chariot of the sun-god. In the Old Rome, his heavily decorated triumphal arch, which still stands, made no reference to his new faith, to which, in any case, the Senators were averse. But he also laid the foundations for the great Christian basilica dedicated to St Peter, ruthlessly cutting across a pagan cemetery that now lies underneath the Renaissance blunderbuss of St Peter’s. To pursue the contradictions further: his coins carried the inscription SOL INVICTVS, ‘the unconquered sun’. He banned under penalty of death the private use of the haruspices, Etruscan soothsayers who read the entrails of sacrificial beasts, while also requesting that harsupices should be consulted if lightning struck an imperial palace in Rome. There were attempts to bring together pagans and Christians: the army was commanded to use a prayer addressed to the god who had brought the emperor and his god-fearing sons victory, without specifying who that god might be. There were practical reasons for moving slowly; the worship of the emperor was well developed, and a ruler who had spent nearly twenty years engaged in a struggle for power could not release his pagan followers from a cult that vividly expressed their loyalty to the deified emperor.15
That the spread of Christianity across the Mediterranean was enormously eased by Constantine’s policies goes without saying. There were, however, some constraints. One problem faced by the imperial ‘establishment’ was the emergence of non-Orthodox factions that rejected the Nicaean compromise dictated by Constantine: Monophysites in Syria and Egypt (notably the Coptic Church); Arians among the barbarian peoples of the European landmass – alternative Churches that, in the view of the Orthodox, denied the equal status of the Father and the Son in the Trinity. And then there were countless small groups such as the Marcionites and the Donatists, whose quarrel with their Christian neighbours was rooted in events that had taken place before Constantine’s legalization of Christianity. All these movements were also represented in the Mediterranean and moved around it, sometimes in the baggage of barbarian mercenaries and invaders, sometimes with pilgrims and with fugitives from persecution, as one Church squeezed another in Carthage or Antioch or Alexandria.
Another problem was the persistence of pagan beliefs. Only one of Constantine’s successors, the colourful Julian, abandoned Christianity. Julian studied Neo-Platonic philosophy in Athens and by the time he became emperor in 360 he had turned his back on Christianity. His aversion to it made him look favourably on Jewish requests to resume sacrifices in Jerusalem, and to demand that pagan temples be reopened.16 He aimed to establish a pagan ‘church’ with its own high priest; this was a back-handed compliment to the Christian bishops, who had shown how to organize their own cult throughout the empire.17 Julian’s reign was brief, and it was dominated by wars with the Persians in the East; but paganism did not lie down and die. It was only in the sixth century, with the suppression of the ancient schools and academies at Athens by Justinian I, that the study of philosophical texts from a pagan perspective came to an end. ‘Paganism’ is best understood not as a set of beliefs but as local cults of great variety, syncretistic, fluid, lacking any creed or divinely revealed texts.18 These paganisms, in the plural, were hard for Christianity to defeat, despite the appeal of the ethical code Christianity offered, its emphasis on charitable work, and its willingness to include ‘Jew and Greek, slave and free’. Locally, Christian cults accommodated pagan elements, as local gods were turned into Christian saints (the eastern warrior saints have more than a tinge of Herakles). The line between pagan and Christian was not a sharp one, and pagan cults remained a powerful force among local communities along the shores of the Mediterranean: they were well ensconced in North Africa and Spain at the time of the Islamic invasions, around 700.
A robust way of dealing with non-Christians was to destroy their temples and synagogues. Around 400, Gaza was a lively port and intellectual centre that benefited from its position on the trade route linking the Mediterranean through Beersheba and Petra to the Nabataean towns of the Arabian desert.19 Imperial orders to close its temples were ignored here as elsewhere; local interests could override orders sent from Constantinople, and the great majority of Gazans remained pagan.20 Its painfully ascetic bishop, Porphyry, suffered the humiliation of having to operate from a single church, while the pagans worshipped in any number of grand temples, dedicated to the Sun, Aphrodite, Athena and a god known as Marnas, a manifestation of Zeus whose temple, the Marneion, was particularly magnificent: a circular, domed structure surrounded by two sets of colonnades. When Porphyry complained about this state of affairs to the patriarch of Constantinople, the formidable John Chrysostom, an order was issued closing the temples, but the emperor’s emissary happily accepted a bribe and permitted the Marneion to remain open. Porphyry felt obliged to petition the emperor directly; he travelled to Constantinople, where Empress Eudoxia took an interest, and troops were despatched to Gaza in 402. They spent ten vigorous days burning and demolishing the lesser temples and seizing their treasures. Then they turned their attention to the Marneion, where the pagans tried to defend the building, barricading its great doors. The imperial soldiers greased the doors with lard and pitch, and set them alight. The soldiers sacked the temple, before purging the city of all the idols they could find. Empress Eudoxia sent funds to build a church on the site of the ruined Marneion, and to the fury of the pagans marble slabs recovered from the Marneion were re-used as paving slabs, so pagans would have to walk on the remains of their sanctuary. Eudoxia provided thirty-two green marble columns from Euboia, and the church was consecrated at Easter 407. Meanwhile, many pagans converted, according to Porphyry’s hagiographer.21 The pagans also resorted to violence: on one occasion Porphyry was forced to flee across the flat rooftops of Gaza (he may have been an ascetic, but he lacked the inclination for martyrdom).22 Christianity was only one of the cults in Gaza, a city that also teemed with pagans, Jews and Samaritans, and Christians were neither the most numerous nor the most powerful. The advantage they possessed was official sanction; the advantage pagans and Jews possessed was the sheer size of the empire. What happened in Gaza or the Balearic islands was generally well out of sight of Constantinople.
The third constraint on Christian expansion was the continuing self-assertiveness of Judaism. There is a tendency to assume that Judaism was a spent force after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus and Hadrian, and the choice of Christianity by Constantine. Yet its antiquity continued to impress. Its ethical code was not greatly different from that of Christianity: ‘do not do to others what you would not have done to yourself; that is the whole Law and the rest is but a commentary’, as Jesus’ contemporary Rabbi Hillel observed. Converts were welcomed (including slaves, who were often made to convert), without a great fuss being made over how knowledgeable or observant the convert was.23 It is thus no surprise to find that battles for supremacy between Judaism and Christianity continued to take place in the Mediterranean world as late as the fifth century. The Christian emperors attempted to prevent the circumcision of slaves, and to ban Jews from office-holding. Representing Judaism as a spent force, imperial legislation of the start of the fifth century denied the right of Jews to build new synagogues, though they could keep what they had.24 Judaism would literally crumble away.
The nature of the battle for souls in the far corners of the Mediterranean is illustrated by a remarkable letter written by a friend of St Augustine of Hippo, Severus, bishop of Minorca, in which he describes the mass conversion of 540 Minorcan Jews in AD 418.25 Severus insists that the Jews were the most powerful group in Minorcan society, not that Minorca was a place of much consequence: ‘the most forsaken of all lands, due to its tiny size, dryness and harshness’. The Jews were based in the east of the island, at Magona, the modern Maó or Mahón, while the Christians were concentrated in the west at Jamona, now Ciutadella; Severus asserts that Jews were physically unable to live in Jamona – if they tried, they were struck down by disease or even by a thunderbolt. Be that as it may, the most prominent figures on the island were Jews, notably Theodorus, ‘who was pre-eminent in both wealth and worldly honour not only among the Jews but also among the Christians’ of Magona.26 Theodorus’ younger brother Meletius was married to Artemisia, the daughter of Count Litorius, a very prominent military commander who would become second-in-command to the greatest Roman general of the fifth century, Flavius Aetius, and would lead armies of Hunnish mercenaries to victory in Gaul.27 That does not mean Litorius was a Jew, especially since current imperial legislation did not countenance the granting of such high office to Jews; whatever religion he observed, his daughter adhered to Jewish rites. Severus deliberately lays emphasis on the tension between Jews and Christians on the island, and yet it is abundantly clear that relations between the communities were peaceful enough until 400. Severus talks of ‘our old habit of easy acquaintance’, and of ‘our longstanding affection’, though he insists that this behaviour was in fact sinful.28 Laws framed in Constantinople did not displace Theodorus and his Jewish family from leadership.
This was a time of deep uncertainty in the western Mediterranean. Alaric the Goth had sacked Rome in 410, and after that Visigothic armies had invaded Spain, and other barbarian peoples – Vandals, Suevi, Alans – were also on the march in the western Roman Empire. None of these groups was yet a naval power, but even in Minorca the sense of threat was powerful. The arrival of the newly discovered relics of St Stephen on Minorca in 416 triggered an outburst of enthusiasm among the Christians of Magona, who acted as host to the bones.29 St Stephen was the ‘first martyr’ of the Christians, regarded as ‘the first to wage the Lord’s wars against the Jews’; he was engaged on a tour of the Mediterranean, from Jerusalem, where his bones had recently been found, to Spain and North Africa. Minorca was the one halt where he effected a revolution.30 Their discovery was exploited by the Christians of Jerusalem to increase pressure on the local Jews; just before the bones were found Gamaliel, patriarch of the Jews of Jerusalem, had been stripped of his traditional precedence as the equal of an imperial prefect, and ordered not to allow further circumcision of converts nor the building of new synagogues. In 414 the patriarch of Alexandria is said to have expelled the Jews from his city, and across the eastern Mediterranean there were forced conversions and seizures of synagogues.31 With the arrival of the relics of St Stephen in Minorca, the Christian population gained in confidence. Christians (including Severus) and Theodorus the Jew had dreams that the bishop knew must foretell the conversion of the Jews. There was an apocalyptic atmosphere: surely the conversion of the Jews would herald the Second Coming of Christ? Severus wrote:
Perhaps that time predicted by the Apostle has indeed come when the fullness of the Gentiles will have come and all Israel shall be saved. And perhaps the Lord wished to kindle this spark from the ends of the earth, so that the whole breadth of the earth might be ablaze with the flame of love in order to burn down the forest of unbelief.32
The methods the Christians employed were not subtle. The Jews were accused of hoarding weapons for use against them. On 2 February 417, the Christians gathered in Jamona and marched across the length of the island, thirty miles, but we are assured it was a painless journey, because they had in mind their glorious purpose. Severus requested admission to the synagogue to look for weapons, and he was reluctantly admitted, but before an inspection could take place violence broke out. The Christians invaded and set fire to the synagogue, while taking care to seize its precious items – its silver (which they later returned) and the Torah scrolls (which they decided to keep). The weapons proved imaginary. Severus admits that the riot against the Jews was begun by a thieving Christian, ‘drawn not by love of Christ, but by love of plunder’. The next day the first Jew, named Reuben, converted; the rest of the Jews deliberated for three days, and Theodorus tried to debate the truth of the two faiths with the Christians, but finally he was worn down by arguments that seem as much practical as theological, for Reuben urged him: ‘if you truly wish to be safe and honoured and wealthy, believe in Christ’. Theodorus was willing to convert only if the great majority of his people followed him to the font, as indeed happened.33 Some delayed longer: Theodorus’ sister-in-law Artemisia fled to a cave, intending to hold fast to her beliefs after her husband converted, but when the water her servant drew for her tasted of honey she realized that a miracle had happened, and she too conformed.34
Since Severus is the only source of information for these events, it is difficult to penetrate below the surface of what he says. Some points are striking: the political importance of the Jews, and the prominent role of Jewish women. A hint that even the long march from Jamona to Magona may not have begun with aggressive intentions comes from the remark that the Jews joined in ‘with a wondrous sweetness’ when they heard the Christians singing Psalm 9.35 It is impossible to escape the conclusion that Jews and Christians had not just been on good terms until St Stephen arrived, but that the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity had been very permeable, which was exactly what bishops disliked. Violence prompted the Jews of Minorca to convert; but mutual familiarity lessened the shock of conversion.36 Monotheism after the model of Nicaea was beginning to triumph in the Mediterranean, but its exclusive character left not just pagans but monotheists of a different persuasion in an embattled position.