Religion is like a nail. The harder you pound it, the more you drive it in.
Soviet Minister of Education under Stalin
Diocletian transferred his capital from Rome to Nicomedia (today Ismid) on the eastern shore of the Dardanelles across from Byzantium (later Constantinople and Istanbul), a profound change.
A sincere pagan, Diocletian took part in many unofficial private acts of worship. Continually, Galerius, blunt and unanalytical, persuaded him of the perfidy of the Christians. Diocletian was obsessed with the need for discipline.1 Listening to Galerius’ words, he was swayed yet reflected that Galerius’ advice had provoked carnage and disorder in Egypt. Galerius’ response was that the persecution in Egypt was cut short before it achieved its goals. Galerius was determined to oust all Christians from the army. Despite the privilege of early retirement granted in 298, many had refused to quit the army regardless of demotion.
Increasingly, Christians in the army were baptized despite the Church’s ban on baptism for soldiers. One reason was the conscription of baptized Christians.
Roman policy had been tolerant towards religions as long as their devotees worshipped the Roman gods. Few creeds had been declared illegal. One that was was Druidism with its human sacrifices. In 301, Diocletian added Manicheanism to the illegal cults.2 The emperor may have regarded the world scorning mysticism of Mani as a new branch of Christian belief. Repeatedly, he underestimated and misunderstood the Christian position. Unknown to him, his wife and daughter were Christians, as were many of his retinue. Legend has it that his mistress, Verena, would be a martyr.
At a rite to foretell the future, the emperor was told that the omens could not be read because unbelievers were present. Later in 302, Diocletian ordered that the oracle of the temple of Apollo at Milesia be consulted in regard to Christianity. The guarded reply was taken to be hostile to the Church.3 On the feast of the Saturnalia, 22 December 302, the emperor presided at a ceremony for the harvests dressed as the goddess Ceres. Zeno,4 a Christian soldier of the palace guard, laughed at this transvestism in the emperor’s presence. His jaw was broken and he was killed within the day.
Galerius seized the occasion. According to the pagan Eutropius, he was ‘A man of excellent moral character’5 whereas he was described by the Christian Lactantius to be ‘of a savage intensity alien to the Roman character.’6 He was convinced that persecution was for the good of the Empire but unenforceable until the army was purged. Aware of the veneration given to their relics, he mandated that the bodies and records of the martyrs be destroyed.
Moved to action, on 23 February 303 Diocletian ordered that the cathedral at Nicomedia7, situated in full view of the palace, be demolished, the sacred books burned and any goods within the building be given to the mob.
The liturgical calendars of the Catholic and Orthodox rites honour yearly the many who died on this occasion. Christmas was first celebrated in February. Its relaxed and festive air as faithful gathered together was seen as opportune to attack them. At Nicomedia and Nicea, however, the persecutors inciting pagan mobs relented after realizing that Christians were a much larger element in the population than they had assumed.
Diocletian’s edict of persecution was extended empirewide.8 All Christians refusing to sacrifice to the gods were subject to torture and death. A few grains of incense would tip the scales of fate. Christians in civil service were fired. The faithful were forbidden to free slaves, indication from a pagan source that this was a Christian practice. All church members were denied the protection of the laws. Enemies could attack them with impunity. They were, literally, outlaws.9 Meanwhile, soldiers impressed by the martyrs they imprisoned, Orestes at Sebaste and Victor at Chalcedon, joined them.
Euthetius,10 a prominent and prosperous citizen of Nicomedia, tore down the posted decree and was roasted alive.
Lightning struck the palace and fires broke out repeatedly. Galerius accused Christians of arson. Several high-ranking eunuch court officials were killed for refusal to worship the idols. The empress Prisca and her daughter Valeria, Galerius’ wife, were compelled to do homage.11 On 28 April, two priests and 268 others were put to death for refusing to recant.12 Nicetas,13 an illegitimate son of Galerius, was among the martyrs at Nicomedia that summer.
In new decrees Diocletian ordered the arrest of all Church leaders and their torture until they worshipped the idols.14
Meanwhile, the purge of the army became a violent persecution. On the Danube in 292, the soldier martyr Dasius15 died, at Dorostorum (Silistria). Christian soldiers were few and secretive on those northern borders. In 304, Julius, a veteran, and Ischius and Valentinus fell at Dorostorum, the camp of Legio XI Claudia.16 In Austria at Lorch, the veteran Florianus17 was drowned in the Inn after attempting to aid jailed coreligionists.
The tribune Adrianus,18 son of the Emperor Probus, with Paternus and seventy comrades fell at Nicomedia. Fifty Moorish soldiers led by Callistratus19 were drowned at Byzance where Acacius20 and twelve of the palace guard were drowned five weeks later. Those drowned were tied in sacks with scorpions, snakes and dogs, the legal penalty for killing a parent. Memmon,21 a centurion with an Egyptian name, the priest Severus and thirty-eight enlistees from Plovdiv, Thrace (now Bulgaria), were killed at Byzance the following year. On the other side of the Dardanelles, three Egyptian legionnaires, Solochon,22 Pamphamer and Pamphalon fell. Cleonicus23 and more than forty other soldiers and slaves were drowned on the coast of the Black Sea, north-east of the Dardanelles. Many of these soldiers may have been of the Thebeorum bodyguard of the tetrarchs.
The priest Marcus,24 the brothers and soldiers Alphius, Alexander and Zosimus, and more than thirty comrades were cut down in southern Turkey where Azas who quit the army had evangelized 150 men led by the tribune Aquilinus25 – all massacred. In Palestine, Nicostratus26 and most of an unnamed cohort disappeared at Caesarea Philippi (Paneas). Possibly, these were the Egyptians martyred in Palestine mentioned by Eusebius.
Eusebius preferred to overlook these events. He briefly records that a revolt erupted in Cappodocia,27 the home of the ‘Christian legion’, the XII Fulminata. A surviving Act gives some details, nonetheless. The primicerius Eudoxius,28 a man with the same rank as Mauricius of Acaunus, senior officer among equals, probably commander of the Fulminata at Melitene after the aforementioned George, refused to worship the gods and cast off his identification tag. Some 1,100 of his men were martyred with him. It is improbable that all the ‘Thunderstruck’ Legion’s men were Christians and not all ‘martyrs’ were killed, but officers were likely to be.
Hieron and thirty-two other men were killed at Melitene for refusing military service, apparently draftees.29At Antioch, Hesychius30 tossed away his symbol of service and was drowned in the Orontes. In Syria, Laurentinus3l and more than a thousand of his men were persecuted with the pagan governor Agrippas who disobeyed the decrees.
Judging by the Acts, at least five thousand military were persecuted in the purge. Many, no doubt, were discharged. The two Christian eyewitnesses and historians of the great persecution, Eusebius and Lactantius, certainly ignore the number of military martyred. Lactantius makes no mention of any soldier executed in it, yet cites many men drowned in the Dardanelles without noting that they were soldiers, although Coptic, Greek, Syrian and Latin Acts make it quite clear.32 Eusebius acknowledges some military martyrs.33
Whatever their number, the executions must have been a grave disruption of military order, although the military martyrs under Diocletian were probably less than 2 per cent of army personnel.
Army morale was deteriorating. Battle against an enemy was one thing; to require a man to murder his comrades was something else. Could men who killed their comrades be trusted not to plot against the throne? The logic of drafting slaves, prisoners of war, criminals, gladiators, barbarians and malcontents handed over by landlords as a tax, while killing loyal soldiers whose offence was of religion alone and who were trusted to guard the tetrarchs must have eluded some patriotic pagan serviceman. How long would Christians meekly submit to torture and execution? To the faithful, incitement to violence was a sin and their patience through God’s grace endless. Pagans may have thought otherwise. The purge of Christians burdened army discipline when it was more difficult than ever to maintain.
In North Africa, Fabius34 refused to carry a military standard bearing an idol and Typasius35, having been paid a bonus in coinage depicting a pagan deity, flung it at the feet of his officers. They were executed. At Algiers, forty soldiers led by Zoticus,36 Rogatus, Modestus and Castelus are honoured as martyrs.
North Africa had witnessed relatively little persecution in several generations and its churches were less prepared for it than elsewhere. Many recanted or managed to buy their way out.
In North Africa, farmers accused townsmen and their bishops of having lost authority in the church by the yielding of some under persecution, ignoring that persecutors had generally ignored the country folk. This led to the Donatist sect, a political faction, finding points of theology to give ideological fuel to a feud continuing for more than a century37 thereafter, a pattern repeated elsewhere in the Empire.
In Caesarea, Christians crowded the temples to worship the gods but in Phrygia the entire population of the town of Antandro38 were executed for their defiant faith.
The entire East was stirring uneasily, the forces of revolt not extinguished but burning underground. Tertullian wrote that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church, yet thousands would die for gladiatorial games, witchcraft and banditry, yet not convert millions.
The most winning quality of the martyrs was their goodwill towards their persecutors. The Acts delineate time and again the victim wishing his victimizers well and promising to pray for them with a debonair determination.
Aggravating the tenseness in the East was the news from Armenia, that bone of contention between Rome and Persia. Its Roman-appointed King Tiradates was cooperating with the persecution as many fled to his realm from persecution discovered to their anguish. Among these was a beautiful woman, Hripsimeh,39 whom Tiradates asked to enter his harem. Her refusal provoked her death and that of some forty other women refugees.
Tiradates was stricken with eriyspelas, his face covered with sores. His doctors of no avail, his sister pleaded with him to seek a cure from Grigor,40 a Christian missionary he had imprisoned. Grigor was a prince of the royal family that had murdered Tiradates’ father. As a young boy he had been brought to Roman territory, where he had been raised. Cured by Grigor, who made it clear that he had no political pretensions, Tiradates asked to be baptized with most of his court. Armenia became the first officially Christian nation – if any nation can be called Christian.
The troops of Theodore and Leontius who had stayed in Armenia, despite orders to leave it, had served Rome well. During their stay, silver deposits were discovered that would be a boon to the Roman economy. If not for them, the mines might have been seized by Persia.
Continued persecution was becoming a threat to the security of the eastern frontier, the integrity and effectiveness of Legio XII Fulminata among that of units at risk.
In the autumn of 303, Diocletian voyaged to Rome to meet with Maximian. The eternal city had already undergone a baptism of blood. Some 10,000 men and women had been seized. They refused to worship the idols and were forced to labour to build the huge Baths of Diocletian standing today opposite Rome’s railroad station. When it was completed, they were taken to the temple of Mars to sacrifice, offered pardon if they did so. Those refusing were killed and buried in the cemetery that bears the name of their spokesman, the tribune Zeno,41 a site presently occupied by the Church of S. Maria Scala Coeli.
Callistratus42 died at Rome at this time with forty of his soldiers. Another thirty troopers were killed on the Appian Way43 and interred on the Via Labicana where ten more were executed.44These were probably men of the city of Rome’s only legion, II Parthica. The soldiers Papias and Maurus45 fell on the Via Nomentana. Crescentianus46 was executed at Tifernum in Perugia after unsuccessfully fleeing there with his parents.
The government systematically destroyed everything in its power to erase from history the memory of the persecution.
Diocletian took no delight in bloodletting. His talent as an administrator made him aware that unwise laws could be counterproductive. Increasingly, he discovered that some of his favourite assistants were Christians as were members of his family, whose forced worship of the idols failed to change their inner beliefs.
Returning from Rome, Diocletian became seriously ill and for months was spasmodically delirious, probably having contracted malaria, endemic around the capital.47 During his public appearances in the summer of 304, he was so sick as to be almost unrecognizable.
In 305, Galerius successfully pushed the ill emperor to issue the fourth and last decree of persecution. Christians were to burn incense before the idols.48 The repetition of the previous decrees was an admission of goals unachieved.
Diocletian was emotionally as well as physically exhausted. Let others resolve the dilemmas of dealing with people who multiplied under persecution. He understood the perils of hubris. A month after the fourth decree, at a great military review near Nicomedia, he tearfully declared that he had saved civilization and was about to retire, the first emperor to do so.49 He made Constantius augustus. Maximian, at Milan, begrudgingly followed his example.
Galerius, the only persecutor still wearing a crown, begged his patron to return to power. Diocletian wrote in reply, ‘I wish you could go to Salona (the Adriatic seaport his retreat) to see the cabbages I have planted with my own hands. Then you would never tempt me to such an action.’50
Christian writers of the era consistently maintained respect for Diocletian, while believing Galerius his instigator to evil. The emperor’s boast that he had saved Roman civilization was warranted. His reforms showed a masterful skill and dedication. He succeeded to a degree in his self-appointed mission of freezing the Empire into a little-changing, unprogressing yet prevailing culture in the Greek-speaking East for the next thousand years. The West was not his concern except as a barrier to barbarian invasion. He never visited it except for Italy.
A pagan recorded that Diocletian in retirement complained:
How often it is to the interest of four or five officials to combine together to deceive their sovereign. Secluded from mankind in his exalted dignity, the truth is concealed from his knowledge. He can only see with his eyes; he hears nothing but their misrepresentations. He confers the most impor- tant offices upon vice and weakness and disgraces the most virtuous and deserving among his subjects. By such arts the best and wisest of princes are sold to the venal corruption of courtiers.51
Galerius, scarcely literate, by decree in 305 sought to reduce all legal process to a dictatorial system, and what little media existed in manuscript publishing to be abolished.
The Christian lawyer Lactantius, unemployed as a result, describes the situation: ‘Eloquence was condemned, advocates suppressed; jurists exiled or put to death; letters were regarded as the profession of malefactors and scholars were treated as enemies, crushed and execrated.’
Only Christians dared defy this, as civil administration was militarized and the military was bureaucratized. Yet their opposition was to religious policy. Few dared assert opposition to the destruction of what could have been at least the foundations of a Roman democracy. Drastic measures seemed necessary amidst near collapse. No gentile historian’s works survived to record Galerius’ traumatic transformation of the Empire into a fascism of sorts. Christians writing of it seemed carefully politically correct, offending no officials beyond the sphere of faith. Thus, historical memory of a turning point in human affairs has been cut short and distorted.
Islamic and Russian cultures through the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire of the East would inherit the top-heavy state-controlled economies and statedominated religious models of the heritage of Diocletian and Galerius, surviving by stifling all opposition. Dissent was held treason.
Like other Romans at the time, most Christians desperately sought security, any change from deterioration an apparent progress.
In all but Galerius’ eastern provinces, pagans with political power who were friendly, tolerant or bribable by Christians carried the day as persecution waned. Romans turned again to trust in personal relationships rather than ideology.
The Church was gravely disorganized. Bitter feelings erupted over the readmission into the Church of those who had sacrificed to the gods. Marcellinus,52 the Bishop of Rome, scorned for yielding the holy books to be burned and for allowing lapsi to be reinstated after doing penance, confronted riots by professi who had honoured the idols but nevertheless suffered at the hands of the imperial authorities. They refused to make any gesture of remorse in the form of good works as penance.
Rome had had forty-six priests and 1,500 widows and distressed persons fifty years earlier.53
Some 10,000 were jailed in persecution. Judging from the Acts, these were rarely children or slaves – legally incompetents. The persecutors had succeeded in killing many of the most active and courageous and also the better educated in the Church. From 304 to 308 Rome had no bishop. Marcellus and a Eusebius (not the historian) were the subsequent popes, foreigners called in to fill the void of ecclesiastical leadership. Both were exiled by the state along with the lapsi claimant to the papacy, Heraclius.
While the Church was seriously troubled in its succession to leadership, so too was the Empire.
The population anxiously regarded the transition of power from the two augusti to their two caesars. Many anticipated with dread the usual clash of legions to determine who ruled while the potential for revolution by those deprived of rights by Diocletian had reached a critical mass.
In 306, Galerius, at Diocletian’s urgings, appointed Severus caesar of the West, a man he privately scorned as ‘A dancer who makes his nights days and his days nights.’54 He was an unsoldierly man of moderate ambition, nonetheless. Constantius made his son Constantine caesar of the West.
Persecution of Christians ceased.
It was manifest, however, that Maximian and Galerius plotted intrigue and war against the rulers of the West.