Pagans and Christians

This involvement was felt in two areas: the internal life of the Church and the relations between Christians and non-Christians. On the former, Socrates’s doubts were misplaced. Constantine’s generosity did not lead Christians off a former path of virtue: it intensified vices which already existed. Nor did his involvement split the Church for the first time: one Christian group appealed to him against another, just as in the 270s Christians in Antioch had already appealed to a pagan Emperor against their “heretic,” Paul. Christian petitions began by being grounded in the control of property; they became disputes about claims to be the “true,” then the “orthodox” Church. In the West, Constantine delegated the Donatist dispute to bishops’ arbitration: he ended by involving himself and his agents. In the East, the role of the Emperor and his agents was more positive throughout. The Emperor’s criminal sentences against Christians at Nicaea were followed by Church councils at which his own court advisers presided. As “servant of Christ,” the Emperor wished only to bring about Christian unity. The Christians first involved, then frustrated his efforts to this end. At Nicaea, Christians were said to have begun the council by piling the Emperor’s lap with petitions against fellow Christians: it was the Emperor himself who had the petitions burned.² After Nicaea, charges of criminal misconduct continued to be advanced by any one Christian party against the leaders of another. Constantine struggled with the results, and one of his greatest church buildings bore witness to his efforts. In 326, in Antioch, work began on the octagonal plan of the famous Golden Church. This huge building was known as the “Church of Concord,” a title which has been traced to Constantine himself.³ Concord was his aim at all times, but never more so than in Antioch, where the Emperor first collided with news of the Arian heresy and where, we now see, he had preached his Oration to a divided Church.

The style of Church life in the aftermath of his conversion emerges in vivid detail from the Acts of Christian councils summoned between 313 and 325. In the East we have the Acts of a council at Ancyra, held between 313 and 316, and another which followed it in Gregory’s own Neocaesarea, probably before 325. In the West, we have Acts of the Council of Aries in 314 and the intriguing Acts of Elvira, a council whose date may have been misjudged. Such is its picture of Christian life that its relation to Constantine’s own conversion is worth exploring more closely.

At Elvira, in southern Spain, Ossius was the presiding bishop, and his presence has generally been taken to date the council before his attendance on Constantine, in 312/3.⁴ The case is not cogent: he could have returned temporarily to his home district at any time before 324. The Acts of Elvira take an interesting stance on matters of martyrdom. They are not concerned with Christians who might lapse while on trial, and they have nothing to say on persecution. This silence has generally suggested a date before 300, but the Acts also warn against Christians who falsely claim the status of “confessor” and win an unjustified respect. Between 260 and c. 295, no “confessors” had been created by the authorities. A date after 312 is preferable, when martyrdom was not an issue, but when “confessors” were still circulating in the wake of the Great Persecution. The Council did consider one particular type of “martyrdom”: the death of Christians who tried to smash a pagan idol and were killed “on the spot.” Before Constantine, we have next to no historical record of such zealots. After Constantine, we can see at once how they could become a problem. Enthusiastic Christians, made safe in the new Empire, might start to demolish pagan idols of their own accord.

These two canons belong more readily after 312 than before. There is, however, a notable silence. The council has nothing to say on the familiar problems which followed the persecutions elsewhere: lapsing, betrayal and the “handing over” of Scriptures. The silence may be explicable. In southern Spain, the persecution may not have been so very harsh and the edict requiring sacrifice to the pagan gods was probably never enforced.⁵ At Aries, a council had already discussed priests who were supposed to have “handed over” their Scriptures: accusations had to be backed by public documentary proof. Several bishops at Elvira had already attended Arles, and there would be no need to go over the matter again, after this moderate ruling had settled it. So, too, in the East, the council at Ancyra settled major problems of conduct during the persecution: a decade or so later, the local synod at Neocaesarea did not go over them again.

Elvira, then, can best join the other councils whose Acts throw a sharp light on Church life in Constantine’s Christian era. It is all too plain that the Emperor had inherited many more problems than he created. These councils’ common concerns are unmistakable:⁶ interference by one priest or bishop in another’s sphere of authority; moneylending by clerics; gross complexities in Christians’ sex lives. There were penalties for husbands who connived at their wives’ adulteries, very heavy penalties for women with lovers, minimal penalties for hardened male adulterers, who “must be approached on their deathbeds and asked if they promise to give up adultery: if they do, they may take communion; if they recover and then also commit adultery, they must not make a mockery of communion again.” Bad though such sins were, they were seldom so bad that they should be left without forgiveness at the moment of death. At Neocaesarea, the bishops ruled that anyone who had avidly desired to sleep with a woman, but failed to realize his wish, had been saved by the grace of God. At Ancyra, the intriguing class of Christians who either had enjoyed or still enjoyed sex with animals was broken down by age groups and allotted long periods of penance. Married offenders, if aged over fifty, were to receive communion only at death. When the canon was translated into Latin, it was taken to be a ruling against homosexuals, and in the early medieval kingdoms, it was persistently cited as an authority against them.

We are still in a familiar world, where overachievers castrate themselves voluntarily, where pseudo-perfectionists claim to be living as “brothers and sisters” with the virgins in their house and where the majority gamble and go to the games, use sorcery and divination, pursue each other’s wives or ask a Jew to bless the crops. Over them presided bishops who damned the theatre, the races and paintings inside church, who forbade women to write or receive letters in their own name and who were aware that Christian wives might be coaxed into lending their finest dresses for a procession of the pagan gods. Others simply joined the sinners, lending money, sleeping with the virgins and widows and laying slanderous documents against fellow members of the Church.⁷ The prime obstacle to Christianization lay in the Christians themselves, their clergy as much as their ordinary followers. A double standard had always been present in Christian ethics: after Constantine, it became entrenched for the first time in civic life.

As Emperor, Constantine still fulfilled the public role of a pagan pontifex maximus and allowed the public cults to continue: he had begun as the patron of a small Christian minority, and he moved cautiously. In political affairs, he had to accept an army and a ruling class who were overwhelmingly pagan, and remained so throughout his reign. But his public language was unambiguous. Paganism was a false “error” and sacrifice a “foul pollution.” Although both were probably allowed to continue for the poor souls who could not see the Christians’ truth, the language which permitted them was not the language of a man tolerating equals. It was the language of a man suffering fools. The postscript to his Oration at Antioch was to be rather more robust: torture of pagans “in authority in the city” so that they admitted religious fraud. Constantine himself is not cited as responsible and here, perhaps, his Christian hearers outran his intention.

However, it took more than the Emperor’s language to win a majority of pagans to the Church. We can see the Church leaders’ initial hopes from the Acts of their first councils: at Aries, the bishops ruled that any Christian who held public office or who became a provincial governor should write and introduce himself to the local bishop. While he held power, he should then do whatever the bishop advised. This ruling did not show any grasp of the realities of power and it promptly needed revision at Elvira, a few years later.⁸ At Elvira, the council was also noticeably milder to Christians who became one of the senior “two magistrates” of a Roman town: they must stay away from church during their year of office, which involved pagan cult and shows, but they could return as good Christians afterwards. If the bishops had been any harsher, they would have lost all contact with the high officials of their cities. Here, we see the predicament of a Christian leadership given sudden prominence in a predominantly pagan society.

Constantine could not oblige the Christian leaders by abolishing pagan cult: Eusebius alleges that he banned all sacrifices by a law, but this claim is highly contestable and was certainly not fulfilled:⁹ most of the governors who would have had to enforce it were themselves still pagans. Nonetheless, Christianity did make notable progress in the Constantinian age, beginning a greater expansion outside the towns and attracting many more prominent converts.¹⁰ Here, more than any ban on paganism, the ending of persecution had its effect. Christianity’s subsequent progress owed less to legal prohibition than to a subtler compound, composed of legal privilege, the faith’s intrinsic appeal and a continuing use of force.

By Constantine, the long tension between “love of honour” and immunity from civic burdens was given a new twist: the Christian clergy were exempted from civic duties. The arbitration and judgement of bishops was given a new legal backing: on the likeliest interpretation of a complex law, Constantine allowed the parties in a civil or criminal suit to appeal to a bishop’s final “judgement” and “testimony.” The bishop’s decision was then binding on any other judge. Perhaps this law only covered disputes between Christians, but it was a remarkable recognition of the Christian “state within a state.” So, too, was the recognition of the legality of bequests to the Church, even if they were made in a person’s dying wishes. These privileges were a strong inducement to join the Church: in 320 and again in 326, Constantine already had to legislate against pagans who were claiming to be clerics in order to avoid their civic duties. This type of claim did not belong with a robust pagan “opposition.”¹¹

At the same time, the new faith became a great source of economic benefit. Not since the last year of Alexander the Great had a ruler spent so lavishly.¹² Constantine built and endowed a series of huge new churches, projects which were very dear to his own person: in a letter, we find him ordering the bishop of Jerusalem to build a new church on Golgotha at public expense, and twice asking him to report promptly to the Emperor in person. The many who benefited from the new circulation of funds will have found little to challenge in the prominence of the new religion. Pagan shrines, meanwhile, lost funds and treasures which were diverted or melted down to pay for the Christians’ publicity.

As part of this new circulation, the Christians received and redistributed huge donations, some from Constantine himself.¹³ Whereas the corn doles of pagan cities had been confined to citizens, usually to those who were quite well-off, the Christians’ charity claimed to be for those who were most in need. Swollen by the Emperor’s gifts, it helped the sick and the old, the infirm and the destitute. By the later fourth century, it had led to great hostels and charitable centres, most visible in the underurbanized province of Cappadocia, where the Christian fathers encouraged and practised its ideals. It is no coincidence that paganism ceased to trouble them in their letters, written in the 370s and 380s. In the East, a similar function was being met by the great monasteries which grew up near places of pilgrimage.

In this new climate of Christian favour and pilgrimage, Constantine was not alone in having decisive Christian dreams. In Cappadocia we learn from Gregory of Nazianzus how his father, a great landowner, was converted to Christianity by an opportune dream in the year 325: he had a Christian wife already and ended his days as the powerful bishop of the family’s home town.¹⁴ Others, too, were sensitive to the new opportunities: at Elvira, the bishops began with four strong rulings against Christians who entered temples and sacrificed to the gods after baptism or who served after baptism as pagan priests. It is easier to credit this double life if the council met after Constantine’s conversion: prominent citizens were already willing to make a show of being Christians, while continuing to lead their home towns in pagan cults. Others were adept at playing the two loyalties against one another: they included the ingenious scoundrels who were pretending to be Christian clerics in order to claim exemptions from the expense of civic duties.

These judicious “conversions” did not make immediate Christians but they did bring the new faith into yet more households, where it could take root and become the natural loyalty of the next generation.¹⁵ Christianity had not lost the appeal of a scriptural religion: it united cult and philosophy and still promised the various rewards and certainties which we have seen in it from the start. Conspicuously, it was able to hold many of the people whom it first attracted, and its bitter internal quarrels did not blind outsiders to its ideals. Here, we can share the views of Ammianus, a pagan from Antioch and the great historian of the fourth century. In his histories, he deplored the failings of many bishops and the savage hatred of Christians for each other, but he still saw Christianity as a “just and gentle” religion.¹⁶

As the new patronage made Christianity more confident, the “just and gentle religion” could turn round and answer pagan religiousness on its own terms. So far from keeping things going, the pagan gods had brought their “usurpers” to miserable ends. The Christian God now gave victory to the Emperor and helped him to bring an end to conflict: life did indeed go no worse with a Christian Emperor and no sudden calamity called in question his new faith. Christianity could thus destroy the strongest of all arguments for pagan worship, that it had always been practised and that its abandonment would be very foolhardy. The argument from success became joined to the growing impact of patronage for the Church in civic life. In 325, Constantine legislated against gladiatorial games and withdrew Imperial support: eventually, they died in every province of the Empire.¹⁷ Public occasions became increasingly Christian occasions, as a new calendar of festivals and commemorations rivalled the old sequence of pagan games and festivals. Newly built churches became alternative centres of urban life, offering legal “asylum” to fugitives, becoming places where slaves, too, could be legally freed, where big crowds could meet inside buildings for worship and where people could even expect to find a suitable girlfriend.¹⁸ The churches were not the only new centres. In a pagan city, the adult dead, traditionally, had been buried outside the city’s walls. In the Christian Empire, the dead acquired a new importance, through the building of shrines on the bones of past martyrs. Constantine built a huge church to honour the martyrs of Nicomedia:¹⁹ gradually his own capital, Constantinople, came to have martyrs’ shrines within and without the walls. Like the churches, these new centres of power changed the focus of the cities and their social existence.

Even so, the pagan cults were not quick to die away: they had been the religion of the majority at the time of Constantine’s conversion and not for another century did the balance tip decisively in the Christians’ favour. They were, however, put under strain, quite apart from their loss of supporters to the Church. Lavish pagan cult had been intertwined with particular values and a particular social order in the cities’ upper classes. During the fourth century, those classes narrowed further, while service to the home town lost almost every connection with the old “love of honour,” spread widely within a competitive local elite. Pagan cults found their funds reduced and their ceremonies threatened, while the old forms of civic education no longer survived to support them.²⁰ After 325, we hear no more of the training of a city’s youth as “ephebes” with the accompanying pagan ceremonial. By the 380s, nothing more is heard of the civic gymnasium and its officials. The reduction in the cities’ incomes may have influenced their disappearance, but Christian attitudes may also have played a part. “The physical side of education languished in a Christian environment”: in the cities, it had been linked with naked exercise, paganism and consenting homosexuality. The eventual “collapse of the gymnasia, the focal point of Hellenism, more than any other single event brought in the Middle Ages.”

While “love of honour” and “love of the home town” no longer impelled the competitive buildings and “promises” of so many pagan benefactors, Christianity released the ostentatious patronage of its supporters. They gave not merely for worldly fame but to further their own eternal life, and in turn, these gifts helped to keep their religion at the centre of public life. It is more important that prominent support for the Christian religion can be traced to distinctive patrons at the Imperial court than that individual laws can be cited prohibiting pagan worship, yet needing always to be repeated. Between c. 380 and 450, this patronage was particularly influential.²¹ In the 390s, Ossius of Cordova found his heirs in courtiers of Spanish origin who gathered round Theodosius I and showed a conspicuous Christian piety. From 423 to 451, the sister and the Empress mother of Theodosius II competed in an extravagant rivalry, citing Constantine’s mother, Helena, as the model for their charity. They patronized relics and holy men; they favoured pilgrimages and monasteries; their rivalry even advanced the fateful creed at the Council of Chalcedon (451), which was to split the Church still further.

Pagan cult had benefited from the buildings and “love of honour” of its donors, but their gifts had been made from somewhat limited motives. By contrast, Christianity combined the exercise of patronage with a sense of spiritual progress, an ethic against sin and hopes of superior treatment in the world to come. It offered this combination to upper-class females as well as to men, and in Constantine’s own lifetime both sexes were quick to take it up. In 326, the execution of Constantine’s son and the “suicide” of his wife were immediately followed by the pilgrimage of his mother, Helena, to the Holy Land and her conspicuous spending on the holy sites of the Gospels. Between the 380s and the 450s, extravagant patronage by both men and women publicized the Christian faith and greatly extended its scope.

This ever-increasing prominence was backed by a distinctive rise in the use of force. Constantine’s Christian successors tended to invert the thrust of his legislation. Their laws tended to curb the Christians’ privileges, while acting more directly against pagan cult. Constantine’s extreme favour for the bishops’ “testimony” as a court of appeal had to be revised when they failed to live up to expectations. The laws on bequests were also reviewed. In 370, a strong law attacked Christian men, especially ascetics, who tried to win legacies for themselves or their churches from innocent women. In 390, it was abandoned as unworkable.²²

Meanwhile, Christian intolerance of pagans had made gradual, but steady, progress. Against the Jews, intolerance could hardly have gone further than the attitudes Constantine inherited: they were a “deadly sect,” said the laws in his reign, parricides, murderers of God’s own Son. By his successors, it was made a crime for Christians to marry them.²³ Pagans, too, were not spared abuse in the Emperor’s letters, but only six of their sites are known to have suffered in his reign. Perhaps the list was longer, but each of the known places was a special case.²⁴

One, at Mambre, was a site of great holiness in the Old Testament; another, a shrine of Aphrodite, stood on the site of the Crucifixion and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. A third, at Aphaca, was an offensive Phoenician centre of sacred prostitution. The other three told a different story. At Didyma, Christians seized a prophet of Apollo and had him tortured, as also at Antioch. At Aigai, in Cilicia, they are said to have razed the shrine of Asclepius, a misfortune, however, from which it partially recovered.

Why were these latter shrines singled out so promptly? At Aigai, the pagan wise man Apollonius was believed to have “turned the temple into an Academy”: this temple, or a nearby shrine, had been honoured with a fine pagan inscription in honour of “godlike” Apollonius, perhaps as recently as the reign of Diocletian. In the last phase of the Great Persecution, Hierocles, a prominent governor, wrote a book exalting Apollonius as the pagan superior to Christ. Not so long before him, Porphyry had compiled the books of Philosophy from Oracles, which publicized texts from Didyma. At Didyma, the Emperors then underwent the encounter which set their Great Persecution on its course. When Constantine conquered the East, Christians therefore struck at Didyma and Aigai, the two shrines which were closely linked with the origins of their recent suffering: at Antioch, oracles from the local shrines had also embittered Maximin’s persecutions and there, too, the prophets were duly tortured and obliged to confess “fraud.” These reprisals are the counterpart to two written works by Eusebius, his polemic against the book on Apollonius and his “Demonstration of the Gospel,” which disproved Apollo’s oracles by quoting them against themselves.

In the early 340s, we find the first surviving Christian text which asks for something more, the total intolerance of pagan worship.²⁵ It was addressed by a recent convert, Firmicus, to Constantine’s sons. In it, he pleaded for the persecution of pagans, but as a former pagan astrologer, Firmicus was perhaps protesting his Christianity with a special fervour. Nonetheless, contemporary bishops were already turning temples into churches, and by the 380s, we find them taking the initiative openly, abetted by monastic leaders and their followers.²⁶ From St. Martin in Gaul to the fearsome Shenoute in Egypt, there is a robust history of Christian temple- and statue-breakers. The laws could never move so fast: they relied for application on a class of governors who were often pagans themselves.

Force alone could not make converts, but it did weigh heavily with the undecided, and by the lack of divine reprisals it did show that the “anger” of the gods was no match for Christ. Importantly, the use of force was not usually mobilized by pagans in the first instance against Christians. There were some ugly incidents, essentially under Julian’s pagan restoration, but pagans were capable of offering Christianity a mutual coexistence. As one pagan told Augustine, their gods were accustomed to “concordant discord.”²⁷ While Christians worshipped their particular God, some pagans could simply see this worship as one more way among others. The old argument that Christian atheism caused divine “anger” had been refuted by events, while the pagan gods’ own oracles had called their Supreme god “unknowable”: who was to say if the Christians’ way was not as acceptable to him as many others? Their piety, at first glance, was of the elevated, bloodless type which pagan philosophers commended: relics and martyr cult were perhaps aberrations. Intolerance had never been rooted in the long history of pagan philosophy and religious thought. After Constantine, many pagans could still extend to the new worship a tolerance which its exclusivity refused to extend to them.

Pagan attacks on Christianity were attacks on its prominent “heroes”: the virgins and holy men, monks and clergy. Such attacks made martyrs, and the victims were always replaceable. Christians, by contrast, did not attack individual pagans, after the torture of the oracular prophets at Didyma and Antioch. They attacked places to which the presence of the gods was attached. These attacks did more permanent damage, yet to ban sacrifices or close or demolish temples was only to limit cult acts. It was not to defeat the beliefs which we have studied beside pagans’ religious practice. Nobody could dim the pagan stars, those visible reminders of the souls of the departed. Nobody could hope to control every nook and cranny in the Mediterranean landscape, although Constantine, said Eusebius, sent his emissaries into “every pagan temple’s recess and every gloomy cave.”²⁸ Their mission was apt, but impossible. Not even the entire army could have covered each cave of the Nymphs, the many caves which claimed Zeus’s birthplace, the underground shrines of Mithras, the caves of Cybele and Attis or the many cavernous entries to Hades. Long after Constantine, the old Cretan caves still drew pagan visitors, couples like Salvius Menas and his wife, who climbed to the Tallaean cave every year: when his wife died, Menas came alone to make a double sacrifice on her behalf, “honouring the divine concerns of the gods.”²⁹ The persistence of this subterranean pagan piety emerges clearly from two fourth-century inscriptions which were found in Attica’s old cave of Pan at Phyle. One sophist recorded how he had climbed to Pan’s cave “for the sixth time” to honour a pagan friend; another text marked the eleventh or twelfth visit of one Nicagoras, kinsman, perhaps, of the Nicagoras whom Constantine had sent to Egypt. These pagans were still pilgrims, as Claros had once known them. The fifth century saw persistent potholing by pagan men of letters and philosophy, in search of their old gods’ “presence” below-ground.

Those other sources of “epiphany,” the pagan statues, were also subjected to Constantine’s demonstrations: Eusebius tells how his agents broke up divine statues and exhibited their stuffing as mere rubbish.³⁰ Yet there were far too many statues for such action to be more than demonstrative, and most of them survived, not least as decoration in Constantine’s new capital. To neutralize them, Christianity had to divert attention elsewhere and to leave them as “demonic” survivals beside its own new centres of religion.

The age of Constantine has been aptly described as an “age of hiatus”: we can carry this notion to our major theme, the “presence” of the gods.³¹ This theme attracted heavy spending by the new Christian Emperor, under whom the sites of the gods’ “presence” took a new, Christian turn. In 325, Constantine had been foiled of any hopes he may have had for the phoenix in Egypt; in the immediate aftermath of Nicaea, he amazed the Christian world by revealing something more spectacular. In response to local requests, he encouraged excavations to discover the site of Jesus’s tomb. After finding a range of ancient burials, the workers were able, by some unknown criterion, to pick out one example as the “Holy Sepulchre.” Plans for a vast new basilica were promptly announced and were joined by similar plans for shrines at Bethlehem and the Mount of Olives. There, caves “connected” with the Gospels’ story had been seen by the Empress mother Helena, visiting the Holy Land as a pilgrim after the scandals in her family.

Shortly afterwards, Constantine’s mother-in-law, Eutropia, reported yet another “presence.” She had been visiting Mambre, one of the supreme sites in the Holy Land according to Jewish and Christian tradition.³² It was at Mambre, in the Book of Genesis, that Abraham had met the three mysterious strangers, one of whom was the “third” whom nobody identified. Some of the Jews had already understood the scene as a meeting of their patriarch with God and his two powers; Christians understood it in terms of their own Trinity. At Mambre, Eutropia reported that the holy place of encounter was being defiled by pagan superstition: Jews and pagans were holding fairs and markets on the site. Constantine built a Christian shrine by the oak tree, scene of the biblical meeting, and adorned it with gold and precious stones. Characteristically, he did not suppress the Jews’ and pagans’ fair by legislation. It continued throughout the century, and the site’s holy well continued to receive offerings, if anything in greater numbers.

This patronage of caves, sepulchres and holy oak trees had a focus which was altogether different from the easy world of pagan “epiphany.” It owed much to the “discoveries” of Imperial females, touring hopefully on a pilgrimage: it honoured sites of a past “appearance,” not the continuing presence of gods and angels. Its foundations lay in written Scripture, not in contemporary dreams and visions. The new sense of “epiphany” focussed on historical places, seen on pilgrimage, and “historical” fragments, the relics of the saints.³³ Perhaps we can go further.³⁴ Among pagans, portraits and sculptures had focussed the idea of divinity and helped their easy company with gods by night. In the Constantinian age, Christians were encouraged to see the pagans’ statues as demonic, but they still lacked a figured art of comparable scale for themselves. At Elvira, the bishops ruled firmly that “there must not be pictures in a [or perhaps “the”] church, so that what is worshipped and adored may not be depicted on walls.” Some Christians, perhaps, were already behaving otherwise, but the ban speaks for itself. The new Constantinople did contain statues of Daniel, of the Good Shepherd and other biblical figures, but the literary descriptions of Constantine’s new churches are empty of references to figure paintings and representational sculpture. Instead, they mention abstract symbols, signs like the Christian cross. On the strength of this bias, Constantine has even been seen as a supporter of higher piety, offered without images.

The literary texts may not give a complete record, but they do suggest a marked contrast with pagan art and sculpture. This “hiatus” related to the contrast in religious experience which we met in our survey of Christian visions. In the Constantinian age, Christians still looked to one supreme epiphany, the Second Coming. They looked back, meanwhile, to the biblical epiphanies whose sites were being marked by fine new buildings. Their “oracles” were the old historical texts of Scripture; when Eusebius wrote five books called Theophany, he discussed the relation of the Creation to the Incarnation, not the continuing appearances of God to men. God did not “stand by” ordinary Christians as an “evident” helper: in Constantine’s reign, there were no longer any martyrs for God’s special company, except for the unhappy Christians whom “orthodox” Christians put to death. Instead, God’s constant “companion” was said to be the Emperor himself. On Constantine’s thirtieth anniversary, Eusebius aired the theme in his speech of honour, delivered in the Emperor’s presence: “perhaps, Constantine,” he inquired, “you will agree at your leisure to relate for us the abundant evidence of his presence which your Saviour has granted to you alone. Perhaps you will relate the repeated visions of himself which have addressed you during the hours of sleep…”³⁵ Eusebius hinted politely at his ruler’s supreme guidance, but he was flattering him in a speech. Neither he nor Constantine was specific about any vision’s content after the vision of the year 312.

Fellow Christians still acknowledged their unseen and imperceptible guides: the constant presence of their Holy Spirit and the vigilance of their angels who came, as Origen had believed, to share their meetings in church. In the new Christian Empire, however, this “age of hiatus” was not to last for long.³⁶ By c. 330–340, a portrait of a young beardless Christ had been set in a fine floor mosaic at Hinton St. Mary in Dorset: probably, it derived from a church’s decoration, a portrait, perhaps, in its dome. As yet, it is the one mosaic portrait of Christ which is known in a private house at this date, but if one existed in distant Britain, there were probably others elsewhere. As the century advanced, the Christian sense of “epiphany” was heightened by further allies: the development of the liturgy and the rise of shrines of the saints.

In the large, permanent interiors of the new churches, the Christian liturgy could be held with a greater ceremony and visual impact. In the Greek East, by c. 400, the idea of an “angelic presence” during Church services was being emphasized by the siting and form of the Eucharist. As Christians looked on at the ceremony beyond them, they sensed, and even saw, angels who had come to attend the magnified rite. By c. 380–400, some of the greatest shrines of Christian saints were already in existence, to be joined by many more in the course of the next centuries. By the early fifth century, we know of the ownership of private icons of saints;³⁷ by c. 480–500, we can be sure that the inside of a saint’s shrine would be adorned with images and votive portraits, a practice which had probably begun earlier. By now, the image of Christ and the saints had become fixed in a portrait art which was also portable: as a result, the old relationship between art and dreams came once more into play.

Like the old shrines of Asclepius, the saints’ shrines were becoming packed with works of art; like a pagan sacrifice, the Christian liturgy was drawing a heavenly presence to its offerings. Some of the saints’ new shrines were placed deliberately as counters to old pagan temples of epiphany: on the coast of Egypt, St. Cyrus and St. John “replaced” a nearby shrine of Isis, just as St. “Therapon” replaced a famous Asclepius on Mytilene. Once, pagan men of letters had “answered back” to the Asclepius who appeared to them in his shrine at Aigai; by the 380s, Christian men of letters were enjoying dreams and advice from “scholarly” St. Thecla in her shrine on a nearby hillside.³⁸ Yet these shrines were not merely “pagan” counterweights. They brought their own Christian piety to a continuing culture pattern, the “epiphanies” which still occurred to the unified human mind. In sickness or in sea storms, in moments of stress or sadness, Christians continued to “see” their “helpers,” as pagans had also seen theirs. While Christians accepted the pagans’ experience and described it as demonic, they traced their own to God and his saints. In the past, Homer and religious art had enhanced what pagans saw; by the fifth century, the legends of the saints and an emergent portrait art were helping to focus the Christians’ sense of a divine presence.

The age of Constantine has been seen as the final “ending of a debate” whereby Christians, especially the Christian monks, turned their backs on the pagans’ easy access to the divine.³⁹ Yet the same needs and tensions endured, around which so many of the types of epiphany have always cohered. Finality was not so likely, and the history of oracles, visions and appearances does not have a tidy ending.

Like the “epiphanies” of the gods, the arts of pagan divination had also been grounded in human wants and experience. As Hermas had already been shown, these arts had their attractions for Christians, too.⁴⁰ The Christian Empire saw their absorption by Christians, not their rejection. Although the sites of inspired pagan oracles were classed as seats of the demons, the “neutral technology” of divination was promptly revised in Christian dress. The best evidence for its absorption lies in the continual attempts of fellow Christians to penalize its use. Business at the Council of Antioch had already included rules against Christians who practised divination. The rules continued to be affirmed, and if we look at our texts we can see why. In the third century, pagan clients had consulted the wisdom of “Astrampsachus’s” book of oracular answers. They asked about their careers and marriages, their property and whether they were victims of a spell. By the fifth century, Christians were using the same book, although they had changed a few of the questions.⁴¹ Whereas pagans asked, “Will my first wife stay with me?” Christians asked, “Will I remain a Presbyter?” Pagans had inquired if their running away would be detected; ambitious Christians now asked if they would become a bishop, to which the answer was “yes, but not quickly.”

In Egypt, we can watch another old oracular technique being pressed into Christian service.⁴² In Christian Egypt, God began to receive questions which were submitted on papyrus as alternatives for his choice: similar petitions had been offered to the pagan gods, requests whose grammatical form did not alter across seven centuries. In Christian company, the social range of the surviving oracular questions is very revealing. They concern people who might become bishops, who feared the collectors of taxes and the burdens of civic office. They also include monks, for whom this old approach to a god was not improper. Here, no “debate on the holy” had ended: on this topic, there was no “debate” in the first place. Like epiphanies, futurology was grounded in human experience and its arts were much too precious to be rejected. By the sixth century, astrology, too, had established itself again with many Christians, despite the strong opposition of Christian teaching. Its art was the study of God’s “signs,” not his “causes,” a view which pagan practitioners had also accepted. The arts of the horoscope and the old “books of fates” thus passed usefully into the Middle Ages.

The history of epiphany also wears a familiar face. A century after the “age of hiatus,” Christian saints were appearing freely to Christians, “standing beside” them as “manifest protectors” in that exquisite Greek language which is as old as Homer. This continuity of language tempts us to see them as “pagan” intruders who kept alive a type of religious experience that was older than any revealed religion. The temptation should be resisted.⁴³ These “protectors” were no longer gods, but men with fictitious biographies, friendly “helpers” with well-known faces who had attained to the court of heaven. They were unpredictable and angry, like pagan gods and minor divinities, but they were also “patrons” before a Supreme God. They could intercede for their mortal clients, as a powerful noble might intercede for his dependents in earthly society.

These new “patrons” were not only present through their portraits: unlike any pagan god, they were “manifest” in their bones and relics. Christian beliefs about resurrection had first made these fragments into living, “manifest” tokens of power. Before them, visitors experienced a new “epiphany. “⁴⁴ Visitors did not “see” their saint, as pagans had once seen Pan on the noonday hillside. Instead, they “saw” pieces of skin and bones, phials of blood and milk, which they greeted with the language of a revelation.

Above all, saints worked in a context of belief and explanation whose echoes had sounded so clearly in Pionius’s prison diary. Like most pagans, Christians explained their misfortunes by God’s anger, but this anger was aroused by the Christians’ own sins. These beliefs, in turn, bred new public forms and practices. The saints in their healing shrines were not Asclepius in a thin Christian dress: they pinned sickness and failure on undisclosed sins and they prescribed cures which had a sacred and symbolic content. No client at pagan Pergamum could have been referred to anything so holy as the Christian “oil of the saints.”⁴⁵ In their recorded miracles, the saints did not grant new and continuing revelations: whereas Apollo might speak like a Platonist, they quoted Scripture and the recorded words of Christ. The ceremonies and experiences at their shrines had a different intensity and psychological range. We can contrast the miracles of Cyrus and John with the cures enjoyed at Pergamum, the responses of pagan oracles with the answers which Christian solitaries gave to their clients, the scenes at processions of Christian relics with the urbane poems of Callimachus which had evoked the “arrivai” of a god and the “exodus” of his statue through a city.

The new, Christian context showed clearly in men’s response to misfortune. When God’s anger seemed particularly evident, Christian cities and men of the world now turned to intercessors and begged them to plead for its relaxation. The justified wrath of God bred a new class of intermediaries, heirs to the Christian confessors in the old days of persecution.⁴⁶ In the Near East, people appealed to the prayers of the “holy men,” solitary Christian overachievers; in fifth-century Byzantium, they turned to the Virgin herself, the advocate for the city in the awesome court of heaven. When natural calamities wracked the Mediterranean world in the mid-sixth century, they were met by the invention of Rogation Processions, beseeching God for human sins. The choirs for Apollo at Claros seem far away. Sin was a new explanation of universal scope and relevance: when the Arab armies finally swept across the Near East, Christians were encouraged to feel that they had only their own sins to blame for the catastrophe.

After the mid-fourth century and the pagan revival of Julian, the major pagan oracles disappear from our evidence.⁴⁷ The torturing of prophets in Constantine’s reign must already have weakened Apollo’s willingness to continue speaking: by the 360s, little shrines for the bones of Christian martyrs had impinged on Apollo’s ancient precinct at Didyma and were interfering with reception on the old pagan frequency. The walls of the great pagan temple are scratched with Christian crosses, spidery signs which neutralized an older presence. By the late fourth century, it is doubtful if any maintained pagan prophet could be found at the major sites: subsequent references to pagan oracles as if they functioned are erudite and literary.

In the early fourth century, two ageing Christian authors had shown possible ways of “defusing” the words of the pagan gods. Eusebius had dismissed them as demonic and used them to refute their authors, whereas Lactantius had quoted them with Christian improvements and claimed them as proofs of the Christian faith. The future lay with Lactantius’s method, as the Christians gained in confidence. In the first flush of the “new Empire,” it must have been on the Christians’ initiative that torture was applied to Apollo’s prophet at Didyma and to others at Antioch, “people taken from the magistrates of the city.” They were not humble, ignorant people, Eusebius asserted proudly: they were people of “wonderful and noble philosophy,” at Antioch civic notables, at Didyma a “prophet and philosopher,” last of the long line of cultured voices who had kept philosophy running in oracles, the voices of Polites, Theophilus, Macer and the rest.⁴⁸ Philosophic oracles had begun when Apollo’s wisdom advanced with the culture of his prophets. They ended when Christians tortured the prophets who had recently helped to torture them too.

The Christians’ reprisals silenced this type of continuing wisdom from the gods, and in due course, they could exploit its other aspects. Before long, their age of change was being eased, as so often, by being attached to an unrelated past. Anyone who wondered how so many great pagan thinkers had achieved so much without Christianity could now be reassured by a simple fiction: the pagans had been predicting it all the while.

Around the year 500, as the world was expected to end, the postscript to this type of history was written by the Christian author of the book On True Belief, to which our knowledge of late pagan oracles has owed so much. It only survives in an epitome, but even so, the preface to its books of oracles is very telling. “I have often noticed,” it began, “the generous nature of theosophy,” a word which was itself, it seems, a Christian coinage. It stood for the “wisdom of God” as opposed to the wisdom of mere philosophers. “The testimonies of pagan wise men must not be thrown away. It is not possible for God to appear and converse with men, but by inspiring the thoughts of good men, he gives them to the common crowd as teachers…”⁴⁹ As a pendant to seven books of Christian orthodoxy, the author added an eighth of texts from the pagan gods, among whom spoke the old Apollos of Didyma and Claros, answering Poplas and Polites, Theophilus and the long-lost Oenoandans.

By the sixth century, the balance had shifted decisively: the debris of pagan oracles and pagan epiphaneia was Christian property, maintained on sufferance in Christian books. In the 530s, just after the world had failed to end, we see the point made firmly in art.⁵⁰ When the Emperor Justinian founded a new city in Christian North Africa in honour of his wife, Theodora, a mosaic floor in his city showed the new priorities. Its design is all the more revealing because it was drawn, it seems, from a conventional pattern book. In the centre reclined the old Castalian spring of Delphi, dimmed and muted. In either corner flowed four livelier streams, the four Christian rivers of Paradise, new streams of the wisdom of God.

Henceforward, encounters with figures from the pagan past were encounters with the particular prophets whom Constantine had honoured in his Oration: Virgil and the Sibyl. They had first been publicized as Christian proofs by Lactantius, a man who had left North Africa to teach Latin rhetoric at a pagan court and had ended as the tutor to a Christian Emperor’s family. Favoured by the Emperor, Virgil survived as a Christian guide, a “Christian before his time” who had sensed the Fall and the Christian remission of sins. If he had erred on the impregnability of Hell and the truth of the Incarnation, his grasp of the underworld did entitle him to lead the poet Dante on his travels through Purgatory.

Nothing, meanwhile, not even the fall of Rome, could cause the Sibyl to die. She had prophesied for Greeks and had spoken, too, for Jews; her books guided the Romans, and she survived as a witness to Christ. Among the pagan prophecies which Christians absorbed during the sixth century, there was already a story that the Sibyl had met Augustus on Rome’s Capitoline hill and had prophesied the birth of Christ. Sibyls had always flourished on fiction, and centuries later the pattern was repeated; this literary fiction gave the Sibyl a lasting monument. On the site of her Christian prophecy, Christians built the Church of Maria in Ara Coeli, which was to loom above medieval Rome.⁵¹ The Sibyl’s future was assured, from the Capitol to the great floor scenes in Siena’s cathedral and so to the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. The centuries of pagan epiphany survived, but only through their legacy of prophecy, as a new phase had started in the history of “manifest presence.” In the past, epiphany had multiplied the forms of pagan religiousness; from such a presence, the Christian religion itself had been born. When it ceases, religious experience will cease with it, yet “not to everyone do the gods appear…”

13. From Pagan to Christian