Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends.
Jesus of Nazareth
Mauricius’ career would span the most tumultuous years the Empire had ever endured as it was for the first time in its history assaulted by invaders on every frontier, yet recovered. In those years Christian influence accelerated as it provided aid to countless refugees ignored by the Roman state as persecution also gained powerful momentum.
Because a soldier’s career is inseparable from the military history of his era, Mauricius’ years in service can be placed amidst that chaotic age of the near collapse of the badly shaken Empire.
In the world of the third century, the Persians and Roman Empires rivalled and menaced one another as civilized areas witnessed birthrate decline and barbarian populations increased. Decay infested cities with crime and riot. The ruling class was growing fantastically wealthy as the middle class withered away, neither providing leadership. Former slaves of the state gained power, bringing with them a bureaucratic scorn towards civil rights. Crushing taxes weakened society as the military expanded.
Roman philosophy lacked vision of a better society. Roman values were profoundly conservative. In Latin, res novi (new things) was the idiom for social revolution. Everything new was viewed as potentially dangerous. Democracy was seen as ancient history, a rule by the mob that had destroyed Greek civilization. The early Roman Republic had been composed of free citizenry, farming their own land without slaves. That, too, was ancient history.
With the outbreak of epidemics, the Empire (with a third less people) was by the third century struggling to hold on to the same huge area. Epitaphs in a Christian catacomb reveal that of 127 people, fifty-three died before the age of ten and another twenty-three in their second decade.1 Most soldiers, as revealed by their gravestones, died before reaching retirement, yet they lived longer than most civilians. The archaeological evidence of decline is manifest in datable abandoned villas and constricted town walls.
Felix, ‘happy’ Dacia, the region presently known as Rumania, was evacuated in 265, a first step backwards. Rich in agriculture, its grasslands lacked natural defences.
Romans were advanced enough in technology to have had an Industrial Revolution, but these advances were forbidden by authority lest they increase unemployment or make slavery unnecessary, a transformation unthinkable to those in power, a pattern typical of slave societies.
Except for Italy, the Empire had no military reserves. Rome’s troops directly confronted their enemies across the Danube and Rhine, the moors of Scotland and the Sahara and Syrian deserts. The North Sea was becoming less a defence than a highway for raiders as Saxons took to their longships.
As Mauricius entered the army, the tolerance towards Christianity, sporadically broken in the past, was fast moving towards confrontation. The Emperor Philip’s sympathies had touched a raw nerve in pagan sensibilities. Increasingly, pagans accepted all gods to be expressions of the one, a view that Christians and Jews opposed. Jews at least worshipped the God of their ancestors. To pagans, Christians were traitors to their gods and ancestral cultures, yet arrogantly intolerant, angering heaven.
To worship the God of Christians seemed to some a perverse atheism. Was not Jesus of Nazareth an executed rebel, King of the Jews? It could no longer be tolerated.
It was a time of apprehension among pagans and Christians alike. There was increasing preoccupation with the supernatural, dreams, prophecies, omens, and a morbid fear of demoniac powers. The cultural mood fed upon a sense of powerlessness. Individuals tended to retreat into self, neglecting worldly concerns. Family life deteriorated. Single life to many seemed increasingly attractive. Fatalism grew as human cordiality and ethics eroded. Extremes met. Montanism and pagan fanaticism reinforced one another. They both required enemies. They had one another.
The army general Decius, with Senate support, had Philip murdered while returning from a campaign against the Scythians. An inscription survives hailing Decius as restitutor sacrorum, restorer of the sacred.2 Decius (r. 250–253), unlike any emperor before him, was determined to destroy Christianity. Previous persecutors had attacked individuals, the oppressions local, unsystematic and usually initiated by the pagan public. The priority of the authorities had been to preserve order, not to destroy the Church. Decius attacked not simply the faith of individuals, but the Church organization collectively.
The emperor’s first decree of persecution arrested Christian clergy throughout the Empire as the provinces were swept by popular terror. Months later, assured of public support and having won the approval of the Senate, he commanded all suspected of Christian creed to publicly worship the gods.3 The threat or use of torture, paid informers and angry citizens revealed many. Those who honoured the idols were issued certificates, libelli, protecting them from future harassment. Those who did not were killed. Pagan clergy suspected of Christian sympathies were among those harassed, judging from libelli surviving from Egypt.4
The peace of many generations, broken sporadically and briefly, leaving many provinces virtually undisturbed, had poorly prepared Christians for the ordeal. In some areas entire villages were annihilated. Elsewhere, Christians fled or hid, resorted to bribery or forgery, or called upon pagan friendships. Judging by Church laws opposing it, some magistrates directed that the fists of the faithful be pried open, incense inserted and their palms placed over the burner while the professi shouted denial. The official signed the certificate and gestured for the next would-be victim.
Many Christians yielded and honoured the gods only to ask to be restored to the Church. This was a sign of weakness but also of the continuing attraction of the faith, lapsi having escaped torture and death again risking it.
The number of Christian military who fell under Decius reveals the crisis. They were more than in all previous persecutions combined. Probably most Christians by this time were neither Greeks nor Jews in ancestry and therefore eligible for military service.
Many were immunes, men on non-combatant special duty. Four men led by Severus5 who died at Albanum, south of Rome, were cornicularii, officers detached from their unit. Mercurius6 who fell at Caesarea in Cappadocia was a primicerius, a senior acting officer not formally on regular status. Another Mercurius7 and nineteen of his comrades killed at Lentini, in Sicily, were escorting Christian prisoners.
An increasingly aggressive zeal among Christian soldiers, at least in Italy, can be detected from the Acts. Minias,8 an Armenian, was beheaded at Florence for openly preaching the gospel in the barracks. He perhaps made the error of thinking the situation to be the same as that among Legio XII Fulminata, the legion of his homeland. Felinus and Gratianus9 were baptized officers killed at Perugia for openly preaching the faith.
Some martyrs must have been of Alexandria’s fleet marine. Ammon,10 Zeno, Ptolemaeus, Ingenes and Theophilus were guards caught signalling a wavering Christian not to sacrifice. Their Greek and Egyptian names when every Roman soldier was required to have a Latin name suggest that they were baptized. They were apparently immunes. Agatho11 fell after attempting to protect the corpses of victims from the mob. Besas12 was discovered signalling encouragement to a victim who was burned alive with his slave. Isiodorus13 was an immunes, a grain officer of the fleet who refused to sacrifice and was slain on the isle of Chios. The tribunes Theodorus14 and sixteen other soldiers and a senator converted by the woman Aurea were killed under Decius at Ostia, the port of Rome and grain fleet base. At Corinth, another major seaport, the soldier Adrianus15 set fire to a pagan temple.
Basilides,16 an enlistee at Alexandria, defended the young woman martyr Potamiana from the mob. This caused no frictions with his superiors. He was doing his job. Not long afterwards he was asked by his colleagues to take a pagan oath. Apparently, this was not the military oath but a password for the day. His comrades at first thought his refusal a joke. Revealed, he would not honour the gods and was beheaded.
The local persecutions that encouraged Decius in his actions had begun at Caesarea in Palestine where Asturius,17 a civilian, had exposed a fraudulent miracle at a celebration worshipping the god Pan. His friend, Marinus,18 was the first Christian enlistee known to have applied for promotion to centurion. This unprecedented Christian bid for army rank must have fuelled pagan apprehensions and antagonized rivals for promotion.
Decius had hardly left Rome to stop an invasion by the Goths when bishops gathered in the city to choose the successor to the martyred Pope Fabian. A contemporary quoted Decius: ‘I much prefer news of a rival to the throne than that of another bishop of Rome.’19 The common folk of the eternal city could be fickle and brutal but there is no record that they ever rioted against Christians or Jews. In the emperor’s absence the persecution rapidly abated.
Lured into a swampy area where his legions could not manoeuvre or properly form up, Decius was killed in battle, the first emperor ever slain by the Empire’s foes. Pagans were alarmed but Christians must have had difficulty concealing their relief and joy. This fired public hatred against them. Unable or unwilling to reform the Empire’s ills, leaders took satisfaction in blaming the Christians. Another epidemic swept the Empire, prompting in Alexandria an hysteria against the professi who uniquely were willing to tend the ill.20 Rumours flew that Christians were poisoners and robbers of the dead.
Fabian, the first bishop of Rome who was neither Jew nor Greek in ancestry, took the name Cornelius,21 that of the officer baptized by Peter, the first of the gentiles he accepted. With the next emperor, Trebonianius Gallus (r. 251–253) the persecution revived. Cornelius was exiled south of Rome where he died in prison.22 Two soldiers instructed by him, Cornelius and Cerealis, were martyred.
Pagan guards converted by the example of their prisoners appear repeatedly in the Acts. Justus,23 Maurus and Heraclius were such examples, killed under Decius at Rome.
Gallus24 was murdered by the followers of Volusian who a few months later was cut down by his own troops who hailed Valerian (r. 253–260) emperor.
The coups destabilizing the army gave opportunity to Rome’s enemies. For the first time in four centuries a barbarian horde crossed the Alps and raided northern Italy. A new and vigorous Persian dynasty seized Roman cities on its frontier. Goths entered the Mediterranean in squadrons of undecked ships pouring forth from the great rivers of eastern Europe into the Black Sea.25 Since Rome had faced no foe on the Mediterranean in ages, it had few warships on the inner seas. Goths raided the ports of Greece with impunity. Nature itself seemed to have become an enemy of Rome. In 256, a devastating earthquake shattered a wide area of northern Iraq and Syria while a prolonged drought and famine gripped much of the East. The cry of enraged despair arose in cities throughout the Empire. ‘If the Tiber rises too high or the Nile too low, the cry is “Christians to the lion!” What, all to a single lion?’ Tertullian had wisecracked.26
The tribune Olympius,27 influenced by his wife and servants, was baptized by Pope Stephen and martyred in 256. The Emperor Valerian was an aristocratic soldier indecisive in power, gullible and fatalistic. His unlucky reign was beset by problems worse than any in centuries. Initially quite friendly to Christians, his anxieties eroded his patience. At a formal ceremony of his haruspice, the official fortune teller, he was told that it was impossible to discover what fate held because the presence of Christians drove away the spirits. Valerian’s tolerance metamorphosized into a persecutory rage.28
Decius had demanded worship of the gods but had not killed people for Christian worship of itself.
In 257, Valerian confiscated all Christian meeting places, churches and cemeteries and placed the clergy in supervised exile.29 Attendance at church services was to be punished by death. His second decree, approved by the Senate, ordered all arrested church leaders to be executed.
This was a radical transformation of policy. No longer was the faith tolerated if its lapsi honoured the gods. The pagan writers Celsus, Porphyry and Plotinus had argued versus Christian belief but none had advocated persecution. They had urged Christians to participate in civil and military service. Valerian, in contrast, was determined to rid the forums and camps of them. This suggests that believers within public service had become numerous enough to worry pagans. Valerian’s second decree removed all Christian senators and equites, the local gentry, from office and seized their property. They were to sacrifice to the gods or die. One of these was the martyr Cornelius Domitius Philippus, exprefect of the Praetorian guards.30 That office, army chief of staff, was a stepping-stone for many soldiers to mount the throne. A Christian had been a heartbeat away from being emperor. Pagans saw good reason for anxiety.
In Carthage, Tunisia, a fifty-year-old soldier, Aemelianus,31 was killed about 258. In 259 Polyeuctus,32 an officer at Melitene, smashed several idols, probably after being recalled for campaign against Persia. He was executed.
The Persian (Iranian) Empire was Rome’s most civilized, populous and dangerous foe. Valerian was persuaded by the tribunes, the short-term Senate appointees to the legions, that he should negotiate directly with the Persian Shah-I-Shah. Prompted by the plague ravaging his army, under a flag of truce, Valerian met the Persian king in 260. Perhaps his trust was encouraged by the secret cult of the Persian wargod Mithra, that of many Roman officers, officials and business leaders, a sort of international freemasonry, with Persian its sacred language.
Under a flag of truce the rival emperors met. Valerian was seized, the first Roman emperor ever captured by a foe.33 Made literally a footstool unto his enemies, he was forced to kneel so that the Shah might use him as a step to mount his horse. His corpse was flayed and his skin stuffed with straw to be exhibited as a trophy of war.
It had long been Rome’s good fortune that her foes were of many cultures more often fighting one another than Rome. Simultaneous assault against every frontier had never occurred until the Emperor Valerian’s fall.
News of the Emperor’s capture raced along the borderlands, triggering attacks by all of Rome’s enemies. Persian forces occupied Syria. Every frontier from Britain to Egypt was overrun. The usual dispatch of Roman troops from peaceful areas to those under attack was impossible. Valerian’s son Gallienus (r. 260–268) as emperor dared not leave Italy. For ten years the Empire was in chaos as local generals and satellite royalty fought back against the invaders while proclaiming themselves Roman emperors.
In 259, there were eighteen claimants to the Roman throne. Valerian’s fall a year later prompted more. Many were bandits, others were officials caught with their hands in the public treasury, their superiors not objecting to graft but without mercy towards subordinates denying them their share. There were leaders forced to seize power by the urgings of troops and civilians loyal to them. Some were contenders sincerely believing their firm hand upon power was essential if law and the Roman order was to prevail amidst economic collapse, anarchy and invasions.
Mauricius was an eyewitness. He could no longer view authority without question, idolizing it, if he ever had. The faith of the public that the army was genuinely their protector needed to be confirmed.
It seemed the end of the Roman world.
Christians rejoiced as pagans were stunned. The God of the Christians seemed to hear their prayers. First, Decius, now Valerian. The God of the Christians hardly seemed a Roman patriot.
Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria34 wrote to a friend that the imminent end of the world that he had expected was cancelled. Instead, Valerian’s son, the Emperor Gallienus, was ushering in a new age of tolerance and peace. Gallienus was a man of civilian talents, open minded and practical, who freed the army of the Senate’s tribunes whose bad advice had caused Valerian’s capture. This, however, lessened whatever remained of civil control of the army.
Gallienus rescinded the edicts of persecution, sending the announcements as personal letters to various bishops.35 He exempted all Christians in public service from pagan rites and oaths as Mauricius began his career. Thus, Mauricius may have begun his army career openly as a Christian, in sympathies if not baptized.
If the sole objection of the church to military service was the pagan rites and oaths it entailed and not an objection to shedding blood, nothing now stood in the way of Christians entering the service.
Gallienus remained in Italy as the army struggled to restore overrun frontiers on every side.
The invaders, unprepared for unexpected success, failed to consolidate their gains. In innumerable battles the foot-slogging Roman infantry pressed forward and recovered the borders, only to deal with hordes of runaway slaves, wandering barbarian bands, refugees turned looters, army deserters and local chiefs resorting to banditry to escape oppressive taxes and heartless punishments. Liberation became reconquest. City after city, ravaged repeatedly by invaders, was plundered anew by unpaid soldiers. Finally, venturing to restore order in Gaul, Gallienus was killed by legionnaires.
In his career Mauricius probably moved from posts in North Africa to Syria where he would have been engaged in ousting the Persian invaders. Many of the leaders of auxiliary units in Egypt were Moors. That rank was prelude to a legionary command, likely to be the highest he would attain before retirement.
Officers were allowed to live in camp with their families. Septimius Severus (r. 192–211) had allowed soldiers to marry and live outside the camp, loosening discipline. It was hoped this would increase enlistment of soldiers’ sons. Under the previous policy, with family life handicapped, military birthrates were too low to maintain the original idea that the army should be virtually an hereditary caste.
In army tradition, Mauricius probably maintained a family of kin, veterans and calli, soldier’s slaves who could be armed in an emergency.
Increasingly, it was difficult to distinguish slave from freeman. Most slaves wore a broad leather belt. Freemen wore bulla, a semi-precious stone or small ball of gold or silver around their neck, signifying that they had certain legal rights. Slaves serving as stewards or slave managers as depicted in the gospels were wealthy. Most free folk were poor. Among Christians the line between slave and free was held to be essentially an accident, every individual of equal importance in the eyes of God.
The concept of equality in rights was also a Stoic faith but Stoicism discouraged emotional attachment to any idea or person. Mauricius probably found Stoicism reasonable and admirable, but to be utterly dispassionate was alien to his Moorish cultural values. Jesus was no mere philosopher, but an angry man, as Stocis held, to discount him. Stoic values, nevertheless, moved many towards Christian integration of emotion and reason.
Claudius II (r. 268–270) was an elderly senator given the throne by the army as an interim ruler rather than yield to the general Aurelian, notorious for his severe discipline. Learning that the Senate was purging Gallienus’ associates, many of them Christians, Claudius sent a dispatch urging clemency.36
It was too late to save many.
The Senate was the most conservative institution in the Empire and quite pagan. Senators were ministers of the imperial cults. Most were egregiously wealthy, their unearned prosperity increasing as rapidly as the poverty of the majority. Everywhere, senators were the major landholders. Although Italians comprised less than a fifth of the Empire’s populace, the Senate remained overwhelmingly Italian. Senators saw the Church as a threat in its egalitarianism and organization surpassing imperial frontiers. Increasingly powerless before the military, in attacking Christian soldiers the Senate was moving against the two things it feared most, the faith and the army. Since Christians would not defend themselves, attacking them gave the Senate an illusion of power.
In and around Rome, an accelerating wave of persecution struck the army. Twenty-five soldiers led by Secundus37 were beheaded on the Via Lavicana. In 269, forty-six soldiers, including Theodosius,38 baptized by Bishop Dionysius,39 fell at Rome while others led by Herculanus died at Ostia. A year later at Ostia thirty-eight soldiers instructed by the woman Bonosa40 were executed, like those evangelized by the woman Aurea at Ostia a generation earlier. Five more of her converts, baptized by Felix I, were beheaded in Rome.
Outside of Italy there were no military martyrs in these years.
More martyrs fell during Claudius’ brief reign than the total in the previous two centuries. Gallienus’ bid to attract Christians to the standards by exempting them from pagan practices was no guarantee of their safety.
After twenty-one months in office, Claudius died of a new plague brought into the Empire by invaders. Aurelian (r. 270–275) took command amidst virtual collapse. The Rhine and Danube were crossed by invaders. The East was partially recovered with the aid of the Roman satellite kingdom of Palmyra, which then claimed to rule it. Gaul was in the hands of rebellious generals.
Aurelian’s coins bore the motto ‘Restorer of the world’. He promptly marched from the Danube to save Italy, smashing barbarian raiders. In Rome, he ordered the city to be walled, a frank admission of increasing imperial vulnerability and deterioration. Following Claudius’ policy, he recruited troops from the Goths and other invaders defeated by the legions. In 271, the emperor led his forces against Palmyra while sending Probus to recover Egypt.
A devotee of the sun god, Aurelian as a monotheist recognized that the imperial cult of many gods no longer inspired popular confidence. He formally replaced it with that of the god Sol.41 Given hierarchal office in the new worship and generous pay for it, the senators accepted the religious revolution without complaint. It was no threat to their power. That so fundamental a change in religious policy could be carried out with virtually no opposition from the public speaks for itself as regards the appeal of the imperial cult.
In and around Rome, in 270 fifty soldiers were martyred,42 and in 272 the officer Sabas and seventy of his men were executed.43 He apparently was one of the Goths recently conscripted by Rome from its defeated foes. As a doctor, a training officer, Sabas was an immunes. In 275 in Rome44 165 Christian soldiers were beheaded. Persecution within the army was accelerating but restricted to the Empire’s capital.
In the summer of 275, Aurelian was assassinated by an official who had been warned that the emperor, a man furious towards deceivers, was aware of his thieving from the Treasury. Believing that he had to kill Aurelian or face his vengeance, the assassin was then killed by those who had warned him, a repeated Roman scenario.
Proof that Aurelian’s death was not part of a coup was that his legions took the unheard of step of asking the Senate to choose the next emperor. The most experienced of these legionnaires were of the generation after the catastrophe of Valerian’s capture. They had seen the danger of coups dividing the Empire in the face of enemies on every frontier. The Senate had a window of opportunity opened to it and appointed Tacitus, a man in his seventies, one of their own. It was a rare moment when positive decisions by authority seemed to meet with an army and public ready to accept them.
Tacitus was an able leader but many professional military had expected the Senate to have chosen a soldier, not a civilian. That a Roman emperor had to rule not from a throne but on horseback was the common opinion.
The army placed upon the throne a civilian, Tacitus, who realized that the Senate was powerless before the army. Within six months he was murdered as emperors usually were, by a soldier. His brother, Florianus, in charge of the Praetorian Guard on campaign, assumed the throne. On the march in the Middle East he halted at Tarsus, today in southern Turkey, the birthplace of St Paul. There, his plague-stricken forces met those of his rival Probus, raised as candidate of the desert armies from North Africa to Syria. Probus’ army was undermanned. He bided his time, refusing combat.
At this point in time the Empire could have moved towards a restored Republican democracy with a reinvigorated Senate recruited empirewide or yield to militarism, a vast array of soldiers and officials exploiting the population and an emperor honoured as nothing less than a living god. The results would determine society for centuries to come. A key element in this crisis would be the Christians in the army, a small minority with influence beyond their numbers.
The earliest event in the Theban epic was discovered midway in the research. Ronald Bainton, a major scholar on Christian attitude towards the military, cited a large group of soldiers in the Roman army in 276 whom he regarded as Christians. Curious, and suspecting an error, examination of the third century document quoted proved the date correct.
Eucherius’ account cites Mauricius as a campidoctor, a retiree on recall and another record mentions his baptism about 280. Baptism required several years’ preparation. Thus, 276 may well have been the year of his discharge after twenty-six years of service.
The document begins with an otherwise unknown event occurring that year one night in what is today northern Iran. It was an event that would have scarred the psyche of a soldier with conscience for years to come.