Prayer is God within us and we outside ourselves.
Augustine of Hippo
The emperor did not worship the God of Christians until years after the victory for which he later claimed divine predestination and nor did his mother, Helena.1
Enemies claimed Helena to have been an innkeeper’s daughter of dubious reputation. Sensitive to the issue, Constantine forbid the prostitution of inn servants, seduction of slaves and concubinage.2These were the first occasions of Roman law intervening on behalf of women not of the upper class who previously had no protection, except in cases of rape of a slave by her master if the woman dared press charges before the usual slave-owning judge. Ironically, under the caste system he introduced, the marriage of Constantine’s father to his mother would have been illegal.
If there was goodwill, there was also misguided zeal in the emperor’s efforts to coerce people to be ‘good’. Jesus had rejected political power.3To make people ‘good’ from fear of the state was not the moral freedom taught by Christ. The woman taken in adultery in the Gospels legally was to be stoned to death. Jesus enabled her to escape punishment.4
Meanwhile, Maximin Daia in the East violated his promise of religious toleration and commenced a persecution, implicitly a challenge to Constantine. A burial inscription in Greek gives insight into this oppression.
I, Marcus Julius Eugenius served in the army of Pisidia (southern Turkey) as a member of the forces of Cyrillus Celer the senator: I was the husband of Julia Flaviana, daughter of the senator Caius Nestorianus, and I completed my military service with honour. Then Maximin (Daia) issued an order compelling Christians to do sacrifice but without abandoning their service in the army; and having suffered many annoyances from the General Diogenes, I resigned my military commission, holding fast to the Christian faith. After dwelling for a short time at Laodicea, I was by the will of God made bishop, and for twenty years I laboured in the episcopate with the forecourts, the paintings, the sculptures, the font, the vestibule, etc. And having completed all this I renounced the life of man and wrought myself a marble sepulchre. And it was ordered that the aforesaid be inscribed on the tomb built for myself and my issue.5
Presumably, Marcus Julius Eugenius was baptized upon retirement. Exactly how he was able to retire is unclear. Maximin Daia’s army policy was that officers were to sacrifice or accept demotion to enlisted rank. His policy was a change from Galerius’ effort to prematurely retire all Christian soldiers. Daia’s refusal to let Christians leave the army demonstrates that their military competence was not questioned and the failure and contradiction of his persecution policy.
Many officers become Christians and on retirement became clergy. Marcus Julius Eugenius almost directly became a bishop. Customarily, he would then, if married, separate from his wife by mutual consent. Ex-officers and officials in the clergy brought efficiency and discipline at times tinged with a materialistic pride as in the inscription above where the episcopate has become not the Christian community but a building of stone.
In 314 Constantine married his half-sister to Licinius who returned to the East to defeat Maximin Daia. The two rulers, Constantine and Licinus, uneasily divided the Empire between them. They wrote one another diplomatic pleasantries and prepared for war.
Constantine’s admission of Greeks into the army and civil service revitalized the Eastern Empire. His laws discriminating against Jews revitalized old prejudices dating back to before the time of the pre-Christian Maccabees. Some who had risked persecution, placed in power, discriminated not against former oppressors but a third party, the Jews.6 But most Christians in Constantine’s era continued to avoid government service, civil or military.
The re-emerging political power of the Greeks paralleled the growth of their intellectual influence within the Church. Many theological disputes stirring friction among Christians for centuries thereafter could hardly be followed except in Greek.
Constantine revised the military oath and ceremonies honouring the emperor to make them acceptable to Christians.7 These matters had long obscured the basic issue of the morality of military violence.
In 314 he ordered the bishops of Gaul and Britain to assemble at Arles to improve church administration. Civil war had erupted between Constantine and Licinius, resulting in an impasse, but it was obvious that East and West would clash again. Many Christians were quitting the army and others dodged the draft. The Eemperor Constantine sought the help of the Church in stemming this flow.
Constantine abolished government support for the old imperial cult, gave Christians exclusive privileges, and handed over to them pagan temples and tax monies paid by pagans.8 His summoning of the bishops to Arles implied his leadership of the Church. The bishop of Rome, the North African Miltiades, opposed this bid for power and did not appear at Arles. It was clear to him that Church and state could be united only at risk of government domination of the church. A successor, Celestine,9 wrote in reaction to clergy borrowing the regalia of the old imperial cult, that they should be distinguished from the laity in no way save their learning and exemplary lives.
The decisions of the bishops at Arles were approved by the bishop of Rome.
The council at Arles responded to Constantine’s need of Christian military in its third canon: ‘De his qui arma prociunt in pace placiut abstineri eose a cummunione.’ — Whoever lays down his weapons in peace, reconcile to be separated from those in communion.10
For three centuries the Church had strongly discouraged Christians from joining the army. The time had come that it was threatening soldiers for quitting the army in peacetime with excommunication, although the wording seems hesitant to directly condemn. Perhaps what was most significant was what the Council of Arles failed to say. It did not threaten with excommunication a soldier laying down his weapons in time of war. That was apparently left to the particular situation, the individual’s conscience and the discipline of the army and the state.
A few years later, Constantine exempted from military conscription anyone becoming a monk.11 Joining the clergy became almost the only way of changing one’s caste. Monasticism in the East enormously increased, redirecting impulses that might have led to political protest or violent revolt.
The powers of Roman judges were given to bishops if both parties in a case agreed, although they had no armed force to enforce their legal decisions.12 In the West, increased corruption turned people to the institutional church and a withering away of the state. In the East, the larger population and percentage of church membership sustained the state.
In all the research thus far on the Theban Legion a critical point remains. That a legion was recruited in the Egyptian Thebaid to serve in Britain and that Theban soldiers identified by pagans as Christians became bodyguards of the tetrarchs has been demonstrated. What remains lacking is evidence that Thebans had been martyred at Acaunus, the event of the legend.
In France, the author visited Autun, the Roman Augustodunum, once the second largest city in Roman Gaul. Knowing that burial inscriptions of Roman veterans were common in major cities of the Empire, the thought occurred that a Theban veteran might have left an inscription at Autun.
This led to the monumental collection of Roman inscriptions made in the nineteenth century by German scholars, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Turning the pages to Augustodunum, at first glance its meagre pages seemed unpromising. Inspection a moment later riveted attention to one word chiselled upon stone seventeen centuries ago. It was the name of the tiny Alpine village and Roman customs station where the Thebans had fallen in 286, Acaunus (Acaunensium, Agaunus).
What would the name of that insignificant hamlet be doing on an inscription in central France?
The inscribed stone had been discovered and recorded in the seventeenth century.13 It has since disappeared. It had never been debated by scholars. Thin and relatively small, it was not a gravestone but presumably a wall plaque. It reads:
ME. M E M
GV S T A T H
L . VIVI M I
C S C C A VNE
N V S A N
R. M . LVIII
G. P. F. C C C
D V L C I SSI
The right and left margins were both vertically aligned but the left edge of the tablet was missing. Scholars are reluctant to decipher a broken inscription. The inscription’s finders nevertheless hazarded a translation, despite several puzzling aspects of the message.
The abbreviated first line, undoubtedly, was a common memorial to the dead but lacked any of the usual religious phrases, pagan or Christian. Abbreviations are typical of Roman memorials but the tablet was more abbreviated than most, as if intended to be understood by only a few.
Because an army unit is with certainty mentioned in the sixth and seventh lines (LVIII G.P.F.), the seventeenth century translators took the word auGVSTA to be the name of a soldier’s widow and the inscription a personal epitaph. But no husband’s name is mentioned. Would a soldier’s unit but not his name be inscribed on his or his widow’s epitaph? Moreover, Augusta was not a Roman personal name. It meant royal, the title of an empress or an imperial institution such as an army unit or a city granted the honourable title. London, for example, had been the Roman Augusta Londinium.
The tablet was a memorial to the dead but contains no personal names, or family names or the, usually included, age of the deceased. Curious.
The army unit cited in the sixth and seventh lines, LVIII G.P.F. was accepted by its discoverers to be Legio VIII Augusta Pia Fidelis. This was the garrison of Argentoratum, modern Strasbourg, so carefully avoided by Maximian in his retreat and detour from AcVNENVSAN, the official name for Acaunus, spelled with a corrupt ending on the stone.
The word following auGVSTA is abbreviated TH, a sound that did not exist in Latin save for those words borrowed from Greek. It could not signify a family name as all soldiers by law were required to use a Latin tribal name for that of their family. Could auGVSTA THebeorum thus be intended in line two?
The letters CCC in the seventh line are a date.14 Commonly, CC represented two caesars. Three caesars shared power only one year in the history of the Empire, Constantine’s sons Constantinus and Crispus, and Licinius the Younger, the son of the ruler of the East, Licinius. This was in the year 317, the very year in which Constantine acknowledged himself to be a monotheist, dropping all official trappings of polytheism. It was a year of rejoicing for Christians.
Normally, the title of a legion in inscriptions is preceded by L or LEG and the unit’s number. But the marine and fleet unit Legio Julia Alexandriana had never had a number, nor did the many legions of Diocletian’s reforms.
VIVI is not an abbreviation as the spacing clearly indicates.VIVI means ‘to be lived’, a peculiar phrase. It can refer to the memory or example of a person or group. MI is a common Latin shortening for military service. The tablet thus can be read:
MEmini MEMoriae auGVSTA THebeorum Legionaria VIVI MIlitabant ConSCissa aCAVNENSAM. Reliqui Militabant Legionis VIII auGusta Pia Fidelis. CCC. DVLCISSImae.
Remember the example to be lived of the legionnaires of the Augusta Thebeorum torn apart on military duty at Acaunus. The survivors served in Legio VIII Augusta Pia Fidelis. Year of the three caesars. They were most gentle men.
As mentioned, the fortress of the Legio VIII Augusta Pia Fidelis was the only legionary station on the Rhine without military martyrs in 286. Moreover, two inscriptions of uncertain date from a Mithraic shrine at Strasbourg cite an otherwise unknown Legio VIII Avgusta Alexandrianae15 – a unit from Alexandria. The Saxon Shore was a frontier province, each of which would have had two legions, in this case one on each side of the channel.
The phrase ‘most gentle’ was a common Christian usage in epitaphs and was used as often to refer to men as to women. It was rarely, if ever, used to refer to men in pagan epitaphs.16
The translation is supported as relating to the Thebans by the remarkable situation at Autun at the time of the installation of the tablet. The bishop in 317 was Rheticius17 who was invited to Autun and won ecclesiastical permission for a coregent bishop to serve with him, Cassianus,18 an Alexandrian by birth, Bishop of Horta (Hor, the modern Zagazig) in Egypt. The transfer of a bishop to another episcopacy was forbidden by Church law; nevertheless, exceptions were very rarely allowed if there was opportunity for ‘spiritual gain in saving souls’. Transfer required the approval of many bishops. The transfer of an Egyptian bishop to serve in Western Europe in the district of another bishop was unique. The purpose for it is inexplicable unless an Egyptian colony existed at Autun – veterans of the Theban Legion?
If this interpretation of the Autun tablet is wrong, then it remains a mystery, a memorial to army dead bearing no personal name but clearly citing the small village of Acaunus.