If the excesses perpetuated by persons of unlimited and frenzied avarice could be checked by some self-restraint … But the only desire of these uncontrolled madmen is to have no thoughts for the common need.
Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices
No Christian ever recorded the history of his fellows in the army. Only by analysis of the isolated records of the military martyrs can it be reconstructed. In the first two centuries, records of martyrs in the military are few. In context, they were not killed for their creed but for insubordination. Some refused to execute prisoners, others refused to return to service after retiring and probably having accepted baptism, while others refused to take the pagan military oath.
Greek tradition records two martyrs named Longinus,1 one the enlisted man who lanced the side of Jesus at the crucifixion, the other a centurion baptized by Peter who was killed after retirement when he had become bishop in his homeland of Cappadocia.2 A third Longinus, with Megistus and Acestus, was a guard killed with St Paul.3
Initially, Romans knew of Christianity only as another Jewish sect. The humorist Juvenal confused people of the two creeds4 and despised both. Nero (r. 54–68) began persecution5 of Christians and set the pattern that, regardless of imperial law, Christians might be subject to the whim of the emperor.
By 90 tax collectors were complaining of professi living a ‘Jewish life’, i.e., Christians who refused to pay the tax on Jews for exemption from worshipping the gods.6 To make up the loss government added another tax to those paid by Jews.7 This hardly endeared Christians to Jews. A few years later, the Emperor Nerva abolished the new law.8 Christians claiming tax exemption had, meanwhile, made themselves known to the authorities.
The pagan historian Tacitus mentions Flavius Clemens,9 a cousin of the Emperor Domitian (r. 81–96), appointed in 95 to be one of the two consuls in the Empire for the year.10 Clemens, whose name meant merciful, was executed for ‘atheistic Jewish practices’ and ‘inertia’, his refusal to preside at the pagan rites intrinsic to his office. Two other ex-consuls and a senator died with him. Clemens was quite plausibly a Christian. His family villa became Rome’s first Christian cemetery and his niece Flavia Domatilla, a Christian martyr.
Two Praetorians, Nereus and Achilleus, guards of Clemens’ family in exile, were martyrs, their surviving tomb inscription declaring that they had ‘fled the impious camp’.11
Under the Emperor Trajan (r. 87–117) the number of martyrs, still few, nevertheless increased, particularly in Italy. Almost all were soldiers, retired and apparently baptized, but thereafter recalled to service. Rome’s bishop Alexander I, jailed south of Rome near Tivoli in an area where many officers had retired, evangelized the tribune and martyr Quirinus. A soldier, Herculanus,12 was executed with him and the officer Eustace.13 All refused to sacrifice and were killed with members of their families. Getulius, the priest Maro, Eutyches and Victorinus, all retired baptized officers, living in the same district as Quirinus, were killed for rejecting the recall to active duty.14 Ten enlistees, including Amantius, the brother of Getulius, fell with them. Inasmuch as every Roman soldier was required to have a Latin name and Zoticus,15 Irenaeus and Hyacinth were Greek, it can be posited that they had changed their names at baptism.
Secundus,16 a minor officer, is described receiving baptism at Milan, burying the martyred bishop of Tortona and fleeing the army to be killed at Asti. Three former soldiers, Maurus17, a bishop, Pantaleon, a deacon, and Sergius, a lector (literally, a reader at ceremonies), were executed on 27 July 117 in Apulia. Many veterans were attracted to the Christian clergy as a new career.
Outside of Italy, Romulus,18 a high ranking officer at Melitene, Cappadocia (Malaytya, Turkey), headquarters of Legio XII Fulminata, the one unit known to have included many men of Christian sympathy, died protesting the persecution of Christians.
About this time Pliny the Younger, governor of Bythnyia, wrote to the Emperor Trajan regarding Christians. He held the Christians accused by the populace of lacking respect for the gods to be otherwise law-abiding.19 Trajan responded that they were not to be sought out, but, if accused, must sacrifice or die.20 Christianity had thus become a religio licita.21 The faith was not illegal but individuals unpopular with the mob could be killed if they chose not to worship the gods. Freedom from persecution became dependent on public tolerance, which differed with locale and time.
The martyrs were fanning the issue of freedom of conscience first ignited by Judaism. The choice to refuse or toss a few grains of incense into the fire before the idols was that of life or death.
Hadrian (r. 117–138) placed the weight of evidence upon the accusers in cases of Christian ‘inertia’.22 False accusations could bring penalties upon the accusers. This paradoxic policy lessened accusations. If a Christian tossed the incense, his accuser had broken the law.
Men of Christian sympathies gathered in one army unit were revealed by an incident in a campaign of Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180) on the Rhine.23 The emperor’s army was saved from barbarian attack by a furious thunderstorm depicted as a miracle on Aurelius’ arch of triumph. The pagan Dio Cassius attributed this to an Egyptian magician in army employ. Flavius Vopiscus credited it to the emperor’s prayers.24 The bishop and historian Eusebius25 claimed it happened in answer to prayers of a detachment of Christian soldiers of the ‘Melitene’ legion, the XII Fulminata with headquarters at Melitene. Surviving inscriptions reveal a detachment from it on the Rhine in 165. Tertullian, a Christian North African of the era, praised the event.26
Three emperors minted coins honouring the individual legions. In each case the same two legions were uniquely omitted. One was the IX on Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland, the other the XII Fulminata,27 each guarding a northernmost corner of the Empire. Presumably, they were taken for granted because they were nonpolitical, too strategically vital to be risked in the army coups making and unmaking emperors.
Tertullian boasted:
We are but of yesterday, and we have filled everything of yours – cities, islands, forts, towns, marketplaces, the army itself, tribes, councils, the palace, Senate, forum. We have left you the temples only! For what war were we not fit and ready if not equal in forces, we who are willing to be slaughtered, since by our doctrine greater permission is given to be killed than to kill.28
Tertullian undoubtedly exaggerated the number of Christians in the army. Evidence of them north of the Alps is minimal. He evidences that they must have been fairly numerous in North Africa’s forces. Rome, Melitene, Carthage, and Alexandria seem to have been the centres of faith within the army.
About 180 imperial policies changed in a manner favourable to professi. Immunitas,29 special assignment status for enlistees, was made permanent duty. This had already been the practice in Egypt. Clerks, blacksmiths, medics, military police, scouts, spies, engineers etc. were immunes. A soldier henceforth could spend his career in the army without being called upon to kill.
Julius, an enlistee about 304, refusing to worship the gods, declared that he had served twenty-seven years in the army. ‘I went on seven military campaigns and never hid behind anyone, nor was I inferior to any man in battle.’30 His comrades were astonished to discover his faith. He may have been a scout or engineer, an immunes. He called his re-enlistment ‘an error’. Presumably he had been baptized after retirement.
Churchmen regarded the pagan gods as diabolical entities. They gave lapses of unbaptized catechumens more leniency than those of persons baptized.
Since the twice-yearly military oath was sworn by officers as representatives of their men, it was primarily of danger to Christian officers. Accordingly, professi avoided rank.
Permanent immunes clarifies the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus written in the early third century affirming earlier Church laws.
A soldier in power must not kill anyone. If he should be ordered to do it, he shall not do it. He must not take the military oath. If he will not agree, let him be rejected (from baptism). A military governor or magistrate of a city who wears the purple, either let him desist or let him be rejected. If a catechumen or a baptized Christian wishes to become a soldier, let him be cast out (of the Church). For he has despised God.31
Hippolytus clearly opposed both killing and the military oath. Judging from the Apostolic Tradition and the Acts, soldiers who were professi avoided baptism until retirement. If some were on active duty and baptized, they were immunes.
Tertullian was to reverse his approval of professi serving under the brass eagles. He cited an unnamed martyr in North Africa who, handed a wreath at a pagan army celebration, refused to wear it. He was executed for insubordination.32 Influenced by the heresy of Montanism, which scorned secular authority and Judaism, Tertullian declared the episode proof that a Christian could not serve God and caesar. He acknowledged that his view was unpopular with many North African Christians who regarded the martyr as an extremist violating the ‘long peace’ between pagans and Christians.33
In the secret cult of the war god Mithra within the army, which admitted only high-ranking persons as members, a crown of flowers on the end of a sword was offered the initiate to one of its highest grades. He rejected it, stating ‘I have no crown but Mithra,’34 a symbolic pledge not to take power by coup.
Montanism paralleled the sinking fortunes of the Empire. Under Marcus Aurelius, about 165, the first of many foreign-born epidemics had devastated the Roman world.35 As plagues from Asia and Africa came across the trade routes, precious metal in coinage flowed out of the Empire, never to return as the mines within it became exhausted. While the ruling class had an insatiable craving for silks, perfumes, spices and the like, their faraway sources were disinterested in Roman products except gold and silver.36 In reaction, Roman mints grossly lessened the percentage of precious metal in coinage, provoking inflation.
Epidemics, inflation, higher taxes, crime and army coups made Montanism’s denial of the world a ‘sour grapes’ reaction tainting Christian and pagan alike. Four Church authors wrote to Marcus Aurelius between 176 and 177 to disassociate the Church from Montanism’s contempt for society.37 Many pagans regarded Montanism as typical of Christianity nevertheless.
Alexander Severus (r. 222–235) granted Christians permission to own churches and cemeteries.38 Previously, private homes had sufficed for worship. Significantly, the earliest known Christian church is the archaeological find of a chapel on the Persian frontier at Duro-Europos attended by soldiers, judging from its wall murals.39
However tolerant the emperor, the army remained governed by its own laws. About 230 Quiricus (the Bishop of Ostia, the port of Rome) and eighteen soldiers evangelized by a woman, Aurea, were executed.40 Probably, these enlistees were members of Legio Julia Alexandrina, the newly created police and grain fleet marines with headquarters in Alexandria, Egypt.
Bishops had leeway to adjust general policy to suit the local situation. Clement of Alexandria (r. 217) would proclaim:
… if you be a farm worker, we tell you cultivate the earth, but cultivating the earth, mind God. Again, you that be held in a love of seafaring, sail but adhere to the Heavenly Pilot. You who the knowledge of Christ has reached employed in the army, hear you the Emperor who commands you to just deeds …41
He is the only bishop of the era known to have actively encouraged soldiers to remain in the army. Christians could militare, do military service.42 They were forbidden to bellare, to do violence to people.
Philip the Arab, (r. 244–249), formerly the Praetorian prefect of Emperor Gordian, was the first Roman sovereign openly favourable to Christianity. Several Christian writers43 repeat the story that the Bishop of Antioch denied Philip permission to attend Christian ceremonies. The earliest states that it was demanded that he place himself among the penitents, a public sinner. A later version says he was excommunicated for being party to the assassination of his predecessor’s young son. As a public official, he could not have been baptized. Nevertheless, he may have asked to attend Christian rites.
That Philip was adverse to paganism is manifest in his coinage, which utterly lacks the usual images of pagan deities.44 Some sixty years after the anti-Christian diatribe of the pagan author Celsus, Philip’s wife asked the Christian writer Origen to write a reply.
A Montanist in convictions, Origen was to write that when Jesus told Peter at Gethsamene to sheath his sword, he forbade all military service,45 a view quoted many times since. Origen, an Egyptian, was a brilliant and courageous idealist but his extreme views were not balanced. Interpreting the analogy of Jesus that if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out, Origen had castrated himself.46 His absolute pacifism must have disturbed Philip, his patron.
Until Philip’s reign, no known Christian enlisted man had ever applied for officer’s rank. Marinus,47 probably an immunes and apparently long known as a Christian to his comrades, asked for promotion at Caesarea in Israel. Tertullian had written that professi served as milites caligati or enlistees, ‘boots’, without obstacle.48 Marinus was denounced by a rival for the promotion who said that customarily Christians did not apply for commissioned rank. Marinus was executed, presumably after refusing to participate in pagan rites he previously had been able to avoid.
Marinus was either violating Church strictures or the local bishop or the ecclesia itself had changed its policy towards men of the faith in the military and allowed them to be officers. It is unclear if Marinus was a catechumen or baptized.
Marinus is celebrated in the calendar of the saints, an unlikely honour if he had been violating Church law. The time had arrived that pagans were alarmed that Christians were seeking secular office, an irony considering that the pagan complaint for two centuries had been that Christians shunned public service. Professi were damned if they did not and damned if they did.
Bishop Dionysus of Alexandria anticipated that Philip’s open partiality would provoke a violent pagan reaction when he was removed.49 A horrendous plague entering the Empire in 252 endured for fifteen years, and reduced the population of the city of Alexandria by two-thirds. Lacking explanation, defence or cure, feeling despairingly helpless, the mob had the illusion of power in destroying someone as scapegoat. Alexandrian Christians warned that the end of the world was fast approaching with Rome’s one thousandth anniversary and the anti-Christ near. They described the anti-Christian riots in Alexandria after Philip was murdered as a ‘holy war’.50
According to pious accounts, Mauricius, leader of the Theban Legion, was baptized by Zabdas, bishop of Jerusalem, about 279. Since twenty-five years was a soldier’s term of service, and two to three years’ preparation were required for baptism, he must have entered the army about 251, not long after Philip’s reign.
History is continuity and change.
The times were changing, both the dangers and the opportunities for the faithful accelerating, a crisis fast approaching both the Empire and Christians.