God and the soldier all men adore in time of danger and no more. For when the danger is past and all things righted, God is forgotten and the soldier slighted.
Rudyard Kipling
Most of history is an obscenity, literally off-scene. Most of the reality of events are never recorded. Those in authority may have had motive to suppress it. Nothing remains more obscene than military insubordination, whether in the armed forces of any modern nation or ages ago.
This volume is an adventure in scholarship, a detective quest to reveal the truth of such an event. If the events had occurred in recent memory in Vietnam or Afghanistan, the evidence would be destroyed or concealed. These happened seventeen centuries ago, when Christians of a Roman legion were annihilated for rejecting orders they considered immoral.
Assuming the evidence ever existed, presumably most is lost. The tale is legend.
That every ancient legend contains a grain of truth is an illusion. An old tale may be wrought of imagination, misunderstanding and error hallowed by age and tradition.1
In 383, Bishop Eucherius of Lyon recorded that a Roman legion of Christians recruited in the Theban district of Egypt was annihilated in south-western Switzerland at the village known today as St Maurice-en-Valais, for rejecting commands they held immoral.2 A flood collapsing a bank of the River Rhone revealing a mass grave identified as that of the Thebans had prompted his sermon.
This is cited as occurring under the caesar Maximian Herculius, a rank held only briefly in the spring of 286AD. It relates no miracles but asserts as facts matters elsewhere unrecorded. One might consider it good reason to dismiss it as fiction since Roman authorities never executed an entire legion even in civil wars, yet the monastic accounts all agree that the Theban legionnaires were at least 6,000 in number.
The earliest manuscript of the event was written a century after it supposedly occurred, a time gap that prompts doubts. The story had enemies, both pagan and Christian, with motive to suppress it. Nevertheless, legions do vanish without explanation in Roman histories. Roman rulers forbid bad news to be publicized.3 No historian mentioned the volcanic destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79. Only a letter of an eyewitness, Pliny, records it. Plutarch, in his biographies of prominent Greeks and Romans, told quite a different story than the official politically correct versions. He shrewdly arranged his works be publicized only after his death. Tacitus, perhaps the greatest of Roman historians, was beheaded for his blunt honesty about the early imperial rulers.
Christian historians at odds with the story included the bishop Eusebius4 of Caesarea an Arian Christian who in seeking the favour of Emperor Constantine obscured the insubordination of military martyrs. The Theban Legion has never been recognized by Orthodox churches. Lactantius, 5 a layman, abhorred the thought of Christians in the armed forces. Both writers denied that there were any military martyrs between 252 and 304. Yet scores of records of the deaths of hundreds survive to directly contradict their view.
Martyrs were first honoured only where they fell, usually as mere epitaphs of surname, place of death and the emperor at the time. Family names and career backgrounds were considered worldly and of no concern to a Christian. Years later, the relics might be distributed to several churches, creating an impression that not one but many persons were commemorated. A reverse tendency also existed. Several persons with the same name might be merged by scribes into one super saint, as in the case of St George. Occasionally, the historical details were recorded at some length in documents called Acts or Passions.
Persecutors systematically destroyed whatever evidence of the victims they could find, whether bodily remains or written records. Overall, the pious records convey the impression of a long casualty list with the Acts as occasional citations, with personality, social relationships and politics missing, the complexities and psychological depths of real people reduced to platitude and one dimension.
To delve into the legend of the Theban Legion by relying upon the Acts begs the question. In order to be unbiased, the search must depend upon clues, both official and pagan, such as coinage, chronicles, inscriptions on stone, bureaucratic papyri, imperial army lists and the findings of archaeology.
The Acts used here include previously untapped Church records translated in the twentieth century from the Coptic language of pre-Arab Egypt.6 That they describe events missing in Greek and Latin accounts suggests that the attitudes of these martyrs disturbed many politically conservative Christians.
In the West, Protestant historians have tended to ignore the martyrs entirely. Hagiographers, largely Catholic, have meticulously assembled and translated the records, but rarely compared them with other sources. This is typical of continental European scholars, specialists in translations, coinage, inscriptions etc., producing a wealth of brilliant but narrow research.
Without the labour of these specialists, this work would have been impossible. The debt to them is total. Nevertheless, only a generalist could have succeeded in this investigation.