The transition from pagan to Christian is the point at which the ancient world still touches ours directly. We are heirs to its conclusion: on either side, participants shared an education which, until recently, we widely maintained. Like most transitions, it was a slow process, marked by unforeseen moments of sudden significance. While Christianity spread, many of the pagan gods were already a thousand years old. The contrast between the old gods and the new can be sensed in accounts of six individuals, two pagans, two Christians, two Emperors, in the years when the transition gathered speed.
In the mid-third century, to honour the pagan gods was still to expect their protection, in cities or in battles, at home or on travels abroad. They were old and proven companions whose very antiquity earned them respect, among young and old, Emperors and subjects, in the city of Rome or the provinces. In the year 242, this respect was still evident as the young Roman Emperor Gordian III prepared to march east for the safety of the Empire’s frontier; Persian armies were on the move, sacking cities as they approached Syria. Gordian was untried, a boy of some sixteen years, and before he left Rome, he paid a distinctive respect to the gods. He opened the gates of the temple of Janus and ordered a new athletic festival in honour of the goddess Athena. His ancient choice was well advised. His enemy, the Persian monarchy, was also proclaiming remote descent from the classical past, from King Darius and the princes who had once invaded the Greek world. In preparation, Gordian honoured the warrior goddess Athena, who had defended her city of Athens against those same Persian princes 720 years before.1
This type of ancient display was not new on such an occasion: in 2 B.C., while his grandson prepared for an eastern campaign, the Emperor Augustus had opened the gates of Janus, flooded the Circus in Rome and staged a massive naval battle between teams called Persians and Athenians, a show whose relics survived in Gordian’s own day.2 Honours for the old Athena sat well with the regional and literary connections of Gordian’s family. Their undistinguished name is traceable to Greek-speaking Asia Minor, perhaps to Cappadocia, now inland in southern Turkey. Gordian’s father had had contact with Greek high culture. He had conversed with the masters of Greek oratory and claimed a kinship with the grandest of them all, the rich and pre-eminent Herodes of Athens: it was probably a kinship of student to literary master, not a true kinship by marriage.3 In extravagant language, the young Gordian had already been welcomed in the Greek world. The people of Ephesus had honoured him as the “new Sun,” the ruler who “had restored and increased for his universe the ancient peace of life.”4 While he marched east, cities on or near his route asked for the right to attach his name to their athletic festivals. Others issued coins whose types alluded to hopes of victory, while Roman Imperial coins proclaimed the “felicity of the age,” the “loyalty of the soldiers” and the protection of Jupiter himself. After some early victories, Gordian was killed on the eastern frontier, a death which came to be blamed on treachery in the high command.5
In the cities through which Gordian passed, the careers of pagan notables were still honoured by durable public inscriptions. His piety was theirs, and one recent discovery can speak for most of them, a text whose finder confessed that its “circumstances, perhaps, are somewhat commonplace.”6 Near little Cibyra Minor, an ancient site in southern Turkey, the wife of Aurelius Longinus set up statues in honour of her husband and daughter. The family owned land in this small town’s territory, but Longinus’s career had been drawn elsewhere, to the “most brilliant and glorious” city of Side, some thirty miles to the southwest, on Turkey’s southern coast. On the base of his statue, a long inscription described his achievements as Side’s people had honoured them. Aurelius Longinus had been a high priest in the cult of the Emperor “with piety and honourable generosity” and during office he had won favour by making gifts to the councillors and citizens. He had paid for civic shows “with great munificence” during his priesthood. He had served “with dignity” as an official of the “festival known as the Apolline,” and then, too, he had given generously to the council and citizenry. He had held a magistracy of the agora, or marketplace, “with integrity.” He had served as a guardian of the peace “with courage and care,” words which suggest that he had led men in the field, perhaps against the area’s many bandits. He had taken his turn in charge of the corn supply and had collected local debts. He had sacrificed on behalf of the “most dignified Council.” He had “escorted the sacred grain supply three times to the people of Syria,” an intriguing task which turns up on the inscriptions of other third-century notables in the area.7 It is best related to the provisioning of Imperial armies on their marches east through Asia: Longinus had left with the grain ships from Side’s fine harbour and sailed to Syria to deliver the cargo which Emperors demanded from the city’s neighbourhood. This dutiful citizen had served with his wife as a priest of Side’s protecting goddess Athena, whose temple and portrait loom large on the city’s coinage. He had presided over the animal hunts and the gladiatorial combats which had been bequeathed to the city by a Roman dignitary, the governor of Galatia in the year 177. This task, too, he had carried out “gloriously and with great munificence.” He had also been an overseer of the “water store,” perhaps one of the city’s several cisterns which connected to its vast aqueduct, perhaps the baroque Nymphaeum which stands by its main gate. He had “been useful to the city in many other services and positions of responsibility and had proved himself always one of the best.”
This inscription belongs in the earlier third century, although its exact date is not certain. The games called Apolline are probably the “Pythian Gordianic games” which Gordian approved for the city, and if so, they place Longinus’s career in the years from c. 230 to 250, where his three “escorts of the sacred grain” belong neatly with the Roman campaigns which end in 244.8 Longinus becomes an exact contemporary of Gordian’s march, a man to whom Rome’s new games for the old Athena seemed entirely apposite.
Like hundreds of other city notables, Longinus lived out a measured career of high office and expensive public service. At a similar date, the matching life of a man of letters can be caught from inscriptions in Athens.9 There, one T. Flavius Glaucus commemorated a member of his family with a fine statue and described himself in its inscription as “poet, rhetorician and philosopher.” He numbered sophists and philosophers on both sides of his family. His father’s line ran to “key-bearers” in the cult of the healing god Asclepius and to high officials in the mystery cult at Eleusis. His grandmother, niece and uncle were the subjects of neat verse epitaphs which were presumably composed by their family poet, T. Flavius Glaucus himself. He belonged in the tentacular family circles of old-world Athenian piety, among Platonist philosophers whose ancestry traced back across a century and a half to intellectual friends of the pious Plutarch. He knew his Homer and could turn neat epigrams on masterpieces of classic Greek painting. His career had included a spell in the Imperial service as “advocate of the Treasury” and ranks as one more example of that cheering link between literary interests and the duties of administration which turns up so often in this age of education in the arts. His grandmother had crowned the Roman Emperors when they celebrated the mysteries at Eleusis in the year 176. She and he belonged to a family which called itself the “first in spacious Hellas and the East.” She met painlessly with death, “death sweeter than sleep and mightier than Argive young men,” an allusion perhaps to the two young men of Argos who had died so fortunately in the first book of Herodotus’s histories.
T. Flavius Glaucus lived and wrote in the mid-third century, a man of traditional piety and letters who had been born and educated among the highest provincial society. His literary talent is the pair to Longinus’s sonorous career. Its measured classicism belonged with an age of civic life when local power and economic patronage rested largely in the hands of a few notables. During the third century, their class had not been static.10 The gap had continued to widen between its richest and most powerful families and the lesser members who also served their cities. Civic office entailed growing burdens of time and expense, while the scope for careers at Rome diverted some of the most eligible bearers. Longinus and Glaucus’s family were willing benefactors, but even so, their careers intertwined with the avenues of Roman Imperial service, “escorting sacred grain” or serving the Imperial treasury and alluding to their links with senatorial families in the verses on their tombstones. As local civic life still gave them a valued esteem, their careers and qualities were still honoured by prominent local inscriptions, carved and displayed on stone. However, this “epigraphic habit” was already dwindling: significantly, it would not be maintained in this style by their sons and grandsons.
While these traditional benefactors still led their cities, another man, of similar culture and property, had abandoned the natural ambitions of his class and was rising to fame in a different community. Thascius Cyprianus, Cyprian in Christian tradition, had practised in Carthage as a public speaker, teaching Latin rhetoric and pleading as an advocate in the courts of law. In the mid-240s, he gave up his profession, sold the greater part of his property and gave the proceeds and most of his remaining income to help the Christian poor. Some years later, he looked back on his progress in an elegant letter which he addressed to a fellow Christian, formerly a pupil of his pagan teacher of oratory.11 In it, Cyprian connected the change in his convictions with his distaste for displays of rank and riches, the mainsprings of Longinus and his class. He endorsed the moralists’ attacks on corruption, the insecurity of riches, the indecency of the theatres and gladiatorial shows. His self-portrait may have been stylized with hindsight, but it is telling that he could represent his faith to others in this way: he had chosen a style, a setting and a stock of themes which were common to educated pagans. He makes no specific connection with a particular time of political strife which had affected Carthage and its province a few years earlier. Rather, he stresses his discovery of something personal which he had previously doubted: that a man could be “born again.” In a corrupt and violent world, Cyprian called himself a “born-again Christian.” “Let fear be the guardian of your innocence,” he wrote: he had found a new hope and a new explanation of misfortune. He had been unmarried at the time of his conversion, and as a Christian, he remained celibate for the rest of his life. “Patience,” meanwhile, became a key word in his writings, the patience which made Job a model for Christian life. “He who endures to the end is saved”: Cyprian responded to these powerful words in Scripture.
After renouncing his property, Cyprian found himself propelled rapidly to the bishopric of Carthage by the support of a Christian “people,” which included the favour of slaves and women. As a bishop, he became engaged in fierce arguments over the very nature of his community. While pagan members of his class professed a staunch civic patriotism, Cyprian was obliged to write letters and attempt to influence fellow Christians in Spain and southern Gaul, Rome and the East, as far as Cappadocia. At home, his ecclesiastical “province” extended over three separate provinces under Roman rule,12 and in each, his advice was required on practical matters, the dress and conduct of virgins, the commemoration of martyrs, the diluting of wine at Holy Communion. He debated matters of great moment with fellow bishops in Church councils whose deliberations were believed to be guided by a “holy Spirit”; as bishop, Cyprian remained conscious of God’s continuing guidance in dreams and revelations. The style and allusions of his former, pagan rhetoric passed almost completely from his writings.13 Instead, he found a new voice through the Latin Scriptures, whether he was praising the merits of almsgiving or compiling quotations against the Jews. Longinus and his class professed a “love of honour” in the many gifts which they made to their cities; Cyprian, by contrast, praised giving because it could buy forgiveness of sins.
No pagan civic notable attracted a biography, but soon after Cyprian’s death, his fame was enlarged and defended by a remarkable “life,” composed by a companion of his final months. Like Cyprian, its author was a man of sound literary education: the “life” stressed Cyprian’s exceptional faith, his rapid promotion and the charity which had touched Christians and pagans alike. It ignored the fierce arguments of Cyprian’s career and focussed on a period to which Christian ideals gave special prominence: death and its approach.14 Cyprian’s career as a bishop had been dogged by the challenge of martyrdom and persecution. In a first crisis, he had withdrawn into hiding and tried to sustain his leadership by letter. In a second crisis, seven years later, he had been tried and banished; twelve months later, in summer 258, he was arrested again and put on trial for his life. He contrived to die in his own city, Carthage, and as he prepared for his execution, he was watched by crowds, some of whom had climbed the trees for an unimpeded view. Before kneeling, Cyprian asked that his executioner be given twenty-five pieces of gold. The deacons helped him to remove his outer tunic, and “almost the last thing Cyprian saw was a little pile of cloths,” thrown by the crowd “to catch the martyr’s blood and become relics for the faithful.” No pagan notable had ever looked down on such a sight. His body was left lying until nightfall, “because of the pagans’ curiosity,” before it was escorted to a prominent cemetery, a magnet for future Christian burials.15
In the age of Gordian and Cyprian, Christianity was the persecuted faith of a minority. Nobody who marched with the old Athena or watched the public executions at Carthage expected to live to see it promoted and patronized throughout the Mediterranean. Yet only one lifetime later, in the mid-330s, such a change had become evident. When another Emperor, Constantine, prepared to campaign against the Persians, he put no trust in the old Athena.16 An emblem of the cross preceded his march and its sign stood on his soldiers’ shields. On Sundays, the troops had to meet, whatever their persuasion, and “at a given signal, offer to God with one accord a prayer which they had learnt.” They addressed it to the one God, and after thanking him for past victories, they prayed for future benefits, among which was a long life for the Emperor and his sons. Christian priests are said to have been assigned to the army units, the first mention of military chaplains in history: before going east, Constantine asked bishops at his court to accompany him, and when they agreed, is said to have revealed to them the plan of his march. Then he ordered a huge tent to be stitched in the shape of a church for their use on the campaign. In it, he intended to join them in prayers to God, the giver of victory. He had always taken with him a “tent of the cross” in which he worshipped before joining battle. “After he had prayed earnestly to God,” claimed Eusebius, writing a laudatory work, On the Life of Constantine, “he always received some revelation of God’s presence and then, as if divinely inspired, he would leap up from his tent. At once he would set his troops in motion and exhort them not to delay but at that very hour to take up their swords. In a pack, they would fall on the foe and hack them down, beginning with their young men…”
Not only had the god of battles changed: Eusebiuse own account was something new, a Christian’s work of praise “on the life” of a deceased Emperor, which quoted the Emperor’s own documents.17 Its purpose and emphasis could not conceal the continuing ambiguities. Although the Emperor was a Christian, most of his troops were not, and their prayer was directed to “god, the giver of victory and all good things,” without explicit Christian colour. The conversion of the Emperor could not change the beliefs and practices of most of his subjects. He could, however, grant favours and privileges to the “moral minority” whose faith he had accepted.18 He built them magnificent churches; he exempted their clergy from civic duties; he gave their bishops power over judicial affairs, making them judges from whom there was no appeal. He also acknowledged the new ideal of charity. Previous Emperors had encouraged schemes to support small numbers of children in less favoured families, the future recruits for their armies. Constantine gave funds to the churches to support the poor, the widows and orphans.
Laws in his name touched on central areas of Christian concern, but it is still disputed how far each law reflected the Emperor’s own Christianity; other laws in his reign showed no Christian influence and professed no Christian motive. There was no direct reference to Christian charity in his legal rulings, not even in a law which offered funds to parents who were too poor to bring their children up. Christian though this law might seem, it only expressed a fear that the parents might otherwise sell their offspring or turn to crime. At the same time, the penalties of laws against slaves or moral offenders showed a most un-Christian harshness, greater than any known previously.19 Laws alone could not compel pagan practice to cease: most of the governors who were supposed to enforce them were themselves still pagans. However, in Constantine’s reign, the transition from pagan to Christian did gain a new pace and prominence. We can see it most vividly in stories of an exceptional Christian.
Some twenty years before Constantine patronized Christianity, a boy, Hilarion, was born to pagan parents in a Syrian village just south of Gaza, a conspicuous centre of pagan cult. He was sent at their expense to a secondary teacher in Alexandria, proof that they were people of property and that Hilarion would normally have grown up to serve, like Longinus or Glaucus, as a city councillor. His life took a different turn, as we know through a text which St. Jerome composed c. 380, about ten years after its hero’s death. Other accounts of Hilarion already existed and Christians who had known him were still alive in and near Palestine, where Jerome wrote. His work was not a historical life, but belonged to another type which Christianity popularized: hagiography, or the story of a saint. Jerome’s “life” was a great success. It was translated “most elegantly” from Latin into Greek by one of his friends, whose version we probably possess. Already, the translation improved the tale, as did other imitators whose embellishments can still be followed in our various manuscripts.20
The value of this “life” does not depend on its degree of historical fact: it bears witness to the transition in another way. It shows the type of story which Christians liked to credit in an exceptional person whose long life had spanned the years before and after Constantine’s reign. With them, we can look back on Christianity in action, as a time of quickening transition gave it greater scope.
In Alexandria, Hilarion’s schoolmasters are said to have admired his gift for rhetoric, but before he could follow the usual career as a pagan speaker and public figure, he abandoned his school. Aged fifteen, he is said to have struck into Egypt’s desert to find Antony, the Coptic-speaking Christian hermit. After two months in Antony’s company, he is said to have returned to his home village and promptly given away his property. Behind the coast stretched the desert, and there Hilarion “fixed his dreary abode on a sandy beach between the sea and a morass, about seven miles from Gaza.” At first he slept in a hut of reeds, then in the cell scarcely five feet high which was still on view when Jerome wrote the hermit’s life. His diet remained a topic of interest. In his twenties, said Jerome, he had eaten bread and salt and lentils soaked in cold water. In his thirties, he changed to dry vegetables and when at the age of thirty-six his skin began to peel and his eyesight deteriorated, he dressed his vegetables with oil. Aged sixty-four, he gave up the bread and ate nothing but crushed vegetables for the next sixteen years. Holy men made achievements of diet interesting, and Jerome purported to give the exact details.
In the desert, Hilarion’s fame soon spread. It does not depend on Jerome’s testimony. We know from Sozomen, another Christian, writing c. 420, that Hilarion had exorcized a friend of his grandfather and turned the man’s family to Christianity, succeeding where Jewish and pagan exorcists had previously failed: Sozomen’s grandfather became a Christian too. Sozomen’s siting of the event conforms to Jerome’s topography and is a useful check on Hilarion’s place and fame.21 It is through Jerome, however, that the tales of Hilarion took their liveliest shape, naming known individuals and addressing Christians who had sometimes known Hilarion personally.
In his desert cell, Hilarion was thought to have coped with almost everything. He helped flustered women who wished to have babies. He cured family illnesses for an anxious mother on a long journey south with the children. Once, he straightened a charioteer whose neck had stiffened from driving, and calmed a lunatic member of the upper classes who had been carted in chains all the way to Syria from a city on the Red Sea. Animals were well within his competence. He tamed a Bactrian camel which suffered so badly from the hump that it needed ropes and thirty attendants to control it. He also upset the odds on the racecourse. A prominent Christian in Gaza was said to have asked Hilarion to bless his horses, as his archrival in the city, a pagan magistrate, was using a sorcerer to help his own team, which was winning continuously in the city’s games. Hilarion gave a blessing to the horses, their stables and the racecourse, and next time out they romped home to resounding Christian cheers. Of the betting, unfortunately, we know nothing, but “the decisive victory in those games and many others later,” Jerome commented, “caused very many people to turn to the faith.” His comment throws an unusual, Irish light on the reasons why people were thought to have become Christians.
This story reminds us how life went on in the cities after Constantine’s conversion, but its setting was not one of relaxed compromise between pagans and Christians. When the pagan Emperor Julian came to power, people in Gaza are said to have petitioned for the hermit’s prompt arrest: there was no love lost between a Christian holy man and pagans who still sat on the town council. However, Hilarion was away visiting Antony in Egypt. From there, he went by camel to Libya and by boat to Sicily, where he prophesied and caused great trouble to the local demons. Then he sailed slowly eastwards round Greece to Cyprus, where he died, aged eighty, to the usual Christian wrangle over his relics and the pieces of his body. From the first demon to this final contest, the stories of his career had broken utterly with the pattern of propertied families a lifetime earlier. “Nothing so astonishes me,” wrote Jerome, “as his power to tread honour and glory under foot.” Hilarion had moved freely in a world which spoke Syriac as well as Greek. His business was not only with the lower classes. His most ardent clients included visiting Roman officials, city notables and the wife of a future praetorian prefect of the East. He had done much good and no obvious harm, healing by faith and using his notable powers of insight to give clients of all ranks his spiritual advice.
Hilarion, it was believed, had become a Christian before Constantine, at a time when Christians still risked persecution and their future was insecure. When he was born, there was no holy man of Antony’s talent in the desert and no widespread interest in a life of solitary retreat. The first impulse to this life of perfection preceded Constantine’s conversion, but then the social climate changed: Hilarion’s own retreat coincided with a time of rapid transition, when townsfolk and people of high position would venture out to the Christian perfectionists, newly residing in the desert. Jerome’s stories show what Christians liked to remember of their holy men: their poverty and charity, their awesome abstinence, their insight, their blessings and their way with demons and miracles. They also show the continuing ambiguities in civic life: the transition from pagan to Christian was still in progress and Hilarion was at risk from pagans in his neighbourhood.
In this book, I wish to explore themes which the piety of these six individuals suggests. I will begin with the traditional cults of Gordian and Longinus and many others like them, a piety which stretched back, I wish to argue, to themes which are familiar to fellow lovers of Homer and Herodotus. Among Christians, I wish to explore the themes which ran meanwhile through Cyprian’s life: conversion and the social distribution of the churches, visionary guidance and celibacy, martyrdom, persecution and the role and choosing of the Christians’ lifelong leaders, their bishops. In each case, these themes lead outwards to other, less prominent people whom no biography honoured and whom inscriptions concerned less directly, if at all.
After setting these two types of religion in a social context, I wish to pursue them through the obscure and difficult years between the reigns of Gordian and Constantine. This age was one of quickened transition on many fronts, but it is very poorly documented. I hope to add to the evidence which historians can trust for the years between 250 and 325. Where possible, I have begun from texts which recent discoveries have recovered or freed from persistent suspicions of fiction: the pagan oracles which are preserved in late Christian handbooks, the diary of a martyr awaiting death in prison, the letters ascribed to a future Christian bishop. I have tried to explain how the life of a Hilarion could become so admired and attractive, and how a primary cause of change, in the balance of the two religions, was the conversion of Constantine himself. Here, I wish to vindicate a text which is longer than any other to be ascribed to a previous Emperor; I wish to establish it as the speech of Constantine himself at a demonstrable day and place. If rightly placed, it settles disputes about his faith in Christianity. It also bears on the religious differences which I have tried to bring out across the previous two hundred years.
To what, finally, did Constantine’s conversion lead? It was only a landmark in the history of Christianization, that state which is always receding, like full employment or a life without weeds. The degree to which people were ever Christianized is a problem which still runs through medieval history, the “age of faith.” It recurs awkwardly in eighteenth-century studies before foundering, as always, on the observable experience of our own lives. Christianity had never preached an outright social revolution. There was no “liberation theology,” no sanction for a direct assault on the forms of social dependence and slavery. In the Christian empire, the army still fought, and the soldiery did not intervene for one religion against the other. Distinctions of rank and degree multiplied and the inequalities of property widened.
Was Christianity, perhaps, not so very novel in the pagan world? Even before Constantine, Christians and pagans have been seen as members of a “common Mediterranean religious culture,” in whose changes the role of foreign ideas was minimal, nothing more than “alien thistle-seeds, drifting into the tidy garden of classical Greco-Roman culture.”22 I wish to establish the opposite view. Early Christianity arrived with very distinctive roots. Grafted onto the Old Testament, it was not easily smothered, not even by the established ground cover of the pagan towns. The Christian groups retained and passed on ideals which have continued to recur in their history, giving it familiar patterns.
These roots did not die away, although proofs of “pagan continuity” have been sought in the developing types of Christian worship. The cult of saints and worship at the graves of the dead have been seen as a pagan legacy, as have the Christian shrines of healing and smaller details of Christian practice, dancing, feasting and the use of spells and divination.23 Emphasis on these “pagan survivals” has opened long perspectives. In the West, it has led to the study of popular religion and medieval folklore as if they were living alternatives to Christian culture. In the East, it has encouraged the myth that Hellenism endured from pagan antiquity to Byzantium and far beyond, to become the national heritage of modern Greeks.24 However, almost all of this continuity is spurious. Many of its details were set in Christian contexts which changed their meaning entirely. Other details merely belonged in contexts which nobody wished to make Christian. They were part of a “neutral technology of life” and it would be as unreal to expect them to change “as to expect modern man to Christianize the design of an automobile or to produce a Marxist wrist-watch.”25
Christianity’s impact cannot simply be judged by the failures of its ideals in the practice of the later Roman Empire. It brought other fundamental changes, in people’s self-awareness, and in their opportunities and social organization. The Church and its careers and ever-growing possessions became major new forces in economic and social history. Its forms of worship distorted the town plans of established cities and created new centres which showed a new type of hospitality to a broad clientele.26 Christianity taught the ideal of charity and the spiritual worth of the poor, teachings which did lead to new practice, though never to so much as idealists hoped.
Through Christianity, the concept of sin was also spread widely in the pagan world. The subsequent history of sin is largely the history of its triumph, but awareness of its nature did lead to the growth of new agencies to cope with its effects. In turn, they, too, became new centres of power and economic consequence.27 Christians often neglected Christian virtues, but Christian attitudes and rewards were publicized to the point where Christians could not simply forget them. They changed the ways in which people regarded life’s great encounters, between man and woman and also between people and their gods, encounters which are a central theme of this book. They changed attitudes to life’s one certainty: death. They also changed the degree of freedom with which people could acceptably choose what to think and believe. Pagans had been intolerant of the Jews and Christians whose religions tolerated no gods except their own. Yet the rise of Christianity induced a much sharper rise in religious intolerance and the open coercion of religious belief. Christians were quick to mobilize force against the pagan cults and against their own unorthodox Christian brethren, a reaction which was not the late creation of Constantine and his reign. The change from pagan to Christian brought a lasting change in people’s view of themselves and others: to study it is to realize how we, still, live with its effects.