I WISH I COULD TELL THIS PART OF THE STORY THE OLD-FASHIONED way. It had such charm…
Wedded to a past which was gone for ever, absorbed in the cold and stately life of a class which was doomed to political impotence, struggling to ignore the significance of a religious revolution which was already triumphant before his death, Symmachus may appear, to a careless reader, a mere fossil, a shadowy and feeble representative of an effete order. Yet the man’s very faithfulness to that order gives him a pathetic interest. And his faithfulness, and that of the school to which he belonged, is the sign of a certain strength and elevation of character… . Commanding such universal respect, and surrounded by family affection, Symmachus enjoyed a certain subdued happiness. He was the witness indeed of great changes, which shocked and wounded old conservative and patriotic feeling. But he never lost his placid faith in the destiny of Rome. Although he was a devoted pagan, he would not deny that his Christian friends had found another avenue to “the Great Mystery.” And a true charity will not refuse to him the same tolerant hope. He is almost the last Roman of the old school, and, as we bid him farewell, we seem to be standing in the wan, lingering light of a late autumnal sunset.1
I copied that last sentence carefully into a notebook when I first read it forty-some years ago, for Samuel Dill’s book was then still the most easily accessible account of the affairs of these years in English. He captured the romanticism of high liberal culture in Europe, patronizing toward every kind of religious view and particularly the official Christianities of its time. This high liberalism—very likely a churchgoing liberalism—sees the story of Christianity’s rise as a story of lost opportunity, of a moment when enlightenment almost prevailed and milk-and-water paganism, so enlightened, so nearly innocuous, displayed an elite and tasteful population very nearly free of the scourges of superstition and religion. Julian’s idiosyncratic zealotry was lumped in with the attitude of men a generation later to tell a wistful tale of Rome’s last pagans.
That story has now all but completely collapsed.2 Where once was portrayed a struggle to the death, now we see a world in which one side—the Christians—was fighting hard against a fabrication. It’s not that there were not traditionalists and traditional practices. It’s not even, as we saw with the taurobolium, that there were not novelties. Routine alone provided momentum, however, while philosophical elevation took many curious minds away from site-specific rituals and their stories. Serious people—philosophers, intellectuals, theologians of whatever stripe—now viewed all religious practice from a loftier plane. Porphyry and Iamblichus did as much to weaken traditional practices as did Constantine and Constantius.
Brute force played its part as well. When in the last decades of the fourth century, a new generation of Christian rulers emerged who were willing to enforce the new religion, many enthusiasts for tradition would melt away.
Viewed in the long term, the fourth-century empire’s insistence that Christianity replace traditional religion was patient, persistent, and strategic. It began with a governmental preference for the new. Then, gradually, financial support for the old traditions diminished. New rites, new buildings, money, social position, and imperial example increased the pressure on the old ways. Then after almost two generations came a comprehensive ban on practices, a more systematic withdrawal of funds and enough deployment of official and unofficial temple-busting to make the old ways go away all but completely.
For most of a century, this combination of exhortation and financial starvation was left to do its work while the reins of power fell into the hands of Constantine’s officers, then their children, and then their grandchildren—who knew no other world. By the time of Julian, half a century after Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge, support for anti-Christian action was thin to nonexistent. We have seen Julian’s successors now not merely Christian but Christian in a matter-of-fact way, with no axes to grind and no special attention to religion as a matter of public policy. This was the state of affairs for twenty years through the reign of Valentinian and the reigns and regencies of his brother and sons. A leading senator, middle-aged by ancient standards, in the early 380s would have been born after Constantine himself was dead and would not yet have achieved manhood when Julian came and went. He was entirely a creature of the world Constantine had made. Demand for divinity is never universal, rarely intense. Christianity was good enough.
When I imagine that senator, I am thinking of the very man, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, whose autumnal praises I quoted.3 In every traditional account of this period, he is the spokesman for paganism and the follower-in-chief of a “last pagan revival” led by his older friend Praetextatus. I tell his story here to show how he was in fact something very different.
He could boast of old family, but this was common and these could be empty claims. By the late fourth century, wealth and influence in the city of Rome told a story of ancient heritage depending on new money and new position in the world remade by Diocletian and then Constantine. The great families of this age emerge blinking into the light of celebrity and influence under Constantine and after, perhaps marrying a daughter off to some rising colonel as insurance of continued social standing. The first stellar member of Symmachus’s family was his grandfather, who served as consul in the year 330. His own father never reached quite as high, but our Symmachus gave his name to the year 391, and his grandson did the same in 446, and his son or grandson was honored in 485 as a young man. The family evaporated after his execution in 525 for conspiring against the throne. From the time of that first consulship, the Symmachi were wealthy and well-fed, quite happy with their own social exaltation, eager and active participants in the rituals of public life at Rome, comfortable as well in their country estates. With the Palatine Hill now effectively swallowed up by the palace complex—even if there was rarely an emperor in residence—the Caelian Hill a few yards away past the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine was the best address in town and the Symmachi had made it firmly there.
Elite men of this stripe could imagine two kinds of lives. Some were creatures of the court, closely aligned with emperor and courtiers, rising from office to office and shaping the events of empire directly. These people were mostly the newcomers, the officers from the provinces, the first-generation arrivals. Those who had reached the heights were more cautious and detached. For them, a turn or two in office at court, lasting a few years in all, was enough to secure the favor of the emperor’s countenance, but wealth and home were more appealing than the inevitably volatile life at court. The emperor who favored you could be gone tomorrow, or those whom the emperor suspected could be gone and dead tomorrow. Symmachus and men like him emerge into view in the late fourth century as the leaders of the senate of Rome, by and large comfortably and carefully detached from life at court.4
Rome remained the conceptual center and capital and source of empire, but emperors were rarely seen there. It was a geopolitical backwater, not on the road from anywhere to anywhere. Constantinople had become the real capital of all the empire, but Milan was, if less grand, still important, the commonest residence of emperors looking after the western frontiers. Further from the center, Antioch in Syria and Trier on the Rhine were bases of operations for active emperors, and even elegant courtiers would visit them there periodically.
Rome remained suffused with a sense of itself and its past. Constantius had visited Rome once, in a grand ceremonial procession carried out with a sense of obligation and great obeisances to the past. He left as soon as he reasonably could and never returned. Julian never saw the city.
The forms of ancient life continued. The consuls entered their formal year of office with games and shows, pleased to give their name to the year, as a particular sign of favor from the reigning emperor. He himself might take the office once or twice himself, as pretext for showing particular generosity in the shows and spectacles he sponsored. The games and shows in honor of the new entrants to the more junior rank of praetor could be used by wealthy fathers to introduce their sons to public life. We happen to have a brace of letters from Symmachus describing how he undertook that generosity on behalf of his son. Hear how he reacts to a setback in mounting the games for his son:
They say that Socrates always thought it was useful when things turned out contrary to his plans or wishes. Secure in his own virtue, he thought that the gifts of chance were more valuable than the things he had been hankering after. I’m following his example now…
He needed his philosophical calm, because twenty-nine expensive Saxon gladiators had anticipated the violent deaths they were expected to inflict on one another in the arena—likely the Colosseum. In a murder-suicide pact they had strangled one another with their bare hands in their cells ahead of time, to find a less awful end for themselves. Symmachus’s thinly veiled anger and contempt are those of a wealthy man who needed these games to display firmly the merits of the family before anyone could suggest that they were too newly advanced and too recently wealthy to be taken quite seriously. Inferior Spanish combatants had to be rustled up on short notice, an embarrassing and inadequate alternative. (The Saxons were blond-haired and blue-eyed, and therefore in Symmachus’s eyes not terribly bright, but they made great natural fighters for the arena.)
We know Symmachus well because an extensive collection of the often jejune but always stylish and well-written letters that he wrote to family and friends survive, but we care about him because of a single episode in his life. In 384, Symmachus did a stint in public office as prefect of the city—elected leader of the Senate and chief of government of the city of Rome. From that year or so of office, we have a collection of his formal reports to the emperor, bundled together as one book of his larger collection of letters. He thus imitated the collection of letters Pliny the Younger had prepared almost three hundred years earlier, which Pliny had concluded with his correspondence with the emperor Trajan.
That collection makes clear that his time in the prefecture did not sit easily with Symmachus, mainly for the friction he had with the professional staff that managed affairs for whoever might be temporarily in office as prefect. It was perhaps unfortunate that Symmachus chose thus to preserve the evidence that his skills in composing elegant prose outran his ability to manage public affairs.
One of his reports is famous for what came of it. Writing to the emperor in the late summer of 384, Symmachus represents himself as speaking on behalf of the whole Senate in requesting that the emperor reverse his order removing the “Altar of Victory” from the Senate house. The altar displayed what was ostensibly a trophy of the war with Pyrrhus of Epirus fought in the 270s BCE, a gold statue of the goddess Victory, winged above a globe. We have to assume that everyone believed the statue was authentic, without worrying too much about the assured continued custody of that artifact for a period of time as long as that which separates us from the childhood of Chaucer. Nor should we slow down to consider that the attribution to Victoria as a goddess may not have exactly represented how the original Greek artist had intended the object to be read. Instead, we need to see and feel the attachment to the antiquity of the object. That it had been placed in the Senate house by Augustus at the moment of his victory over Antony at Actium only added to the veneration it might attract. Anxiety was high because, when Symmachus wrote, worrying warfare was afoot in the Balkans.
The statue had already been in dispute when Constantius had it removed from the Senate house in 357 on the occasion of his one and only visit to the city. Quietly preserved, it was restored under Julian in 362. Now in 382, the young emperor Gratian, son of Valentinian and ruling in the west in his own name at the ripe age of twenty-three, had been prevailed upon by Christian advisers at court to take steps to make his own faith and loyalty to Christianity clearer. Like every emperor before him, including Constantine and Constantius, he had inherited the title of pontifex maximus, the one that Julius Caesar had used to his political advantage and that Augustus reclaimed on the death of Lepidus in 12 BCE, a few years after the ludi saeculares. This made him the formal leader of the college of pontiffs of the city of Rome and thus the city’s senior religious official. When emperors came rarely to Rome, or not at all, the religious business of the city continued, but when emperors were present, their robes and function had been held for them. We do not know exactly how Constantius handled this form of his welcome in 357, though the removal of the Altar of Victory suggests he may have demurred.
Now a quarter century later, Gratian had been prevailed upon to lay aside the title of pontifex maximus and direct the removal of the altar from the Senate house.5 Constantine’s concern that Christians be able to participate in public life and his introduction of many Christians to the Senate would have more or less eliminated the religious use of the altar half a century earlier. In a moment of stress and fear, the goddess Victory might be thought of or invoked, but apart from this one site in the Senate house, her Roman life would mainly have been with the military.
Gratian died in August 383, killed for his throne by rebels in Gaul led by Magnus Maximus, a general leading forces from Britain. He left only his younger brother Valentinian II on the throne in the west, a child of twelve. (We will meet soon enough the other emperor now in service, Theodosius the Spaniard, added to the imperial college in 379 but for the moment far from Milan, ruling over the eastern half of the empire.) Valentinian II was even more a courtiers’ plaything than was his older brother. His Arianizing mother, Justina, came to the fore at a court still threatened by the rebellion of Maximus. By early 384, then, there was a Christian claimant for the throne in Gaul, Maximus in revolt (Symmachus, we think, praised him while it was safe to do so), a child emperor and his mother on the throne in Milan, and an opportunity for remonstration.
When Symmachus took up the pen to report the Senate’s desire to see their altar restored, another leading senator was at court serving as praetorian prefect, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, so Symmachus likely expected his colleague to supervise the report to a favorable reception. This was not revolt or struggle, but a statesman’s gesture.
The document Symmachus wrote is handsome in its generosities. When that old account I quoted above refers to his views on the “great mystery,” it evokes the most famous line of the report: “uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum”—“one cannot approach so great a mystery by one path alone.” He sounds like an ecumenical modern, eager to claim that all religions, ancient and contemporary, are really the same, expressions in different cultural form of human awareness of and respect for divinity.
The handsome inclusiveness of Symmachus’s sentiment was so striking that two years later a neophyte Christian intellectual, about to undergo baptism and full of the intellectual and spiritual excitement of his conversion, said something so similar that it had to be an echo. That young convert had been given a dramatic boost by Symmachus in his worldly career only two years earlier, just at the time of report about the Altar of Victory. They embody together the common culture of an upper class still finding its way to what it meant to live in a Christian empire. The same young man, forty years later, expressed regret for the too-inclusive nature of his remark, evidently embarrassed by the tolerance of his youth. By then he was an elderly bishop with a worldwide reputation as a fierce defender of Christianity against all the pagani of the world—he was Augustine. The elderly bishop’s embarrassment might have been greater had he recalled that a few years later, in about 391, writing his book about “true religion” in which he claimed that if Plato were alive then, he would certainly have converted to Christianity, he, Augustine, had echoed the same phrase of Symmachus’s again.6 Symmachus and the young Christian convert Augustine had more in common than the aged Augustine could happily admit.
Unfortunately for Symmachus, his report to the throne misfired. Worst and first, his colleague Praetextatus died before he could engineer a positive response. If the fix was in, his death broke the chain of intended events. Then, rather than being forgotten, the report was taken up instead by the fire-breathing bishop of Milan, the famous Ambrose, and Symmachus lost all control of the situation.
Ambrose was no stranger to high politics, for his own father had been praetorian prefect and Ambrose himself had started on the fast track to political power. In his thirties, he was made governor of the province of Aemilia-Liguria—that is, of the province in which Milan was situated. Called in 374 to supervise an election of a new bishop at a time when Arians and anti-Arians in Milan were at every moment likely to take to the streets to cudgel each other, he found himself instead facing an anti-Arian crowd that invited him to take the office of bishop himself. He resisted for a week, succumbed, and became one of the most striking figures of his time. He used his office and his education to make himself the quintessential public intellectual. His abundant literary output as bishop is elegant, sophisticated, and deeply learned. Among other things, he was the first serious Christian writer in the western church to take the teachings of neo-Platonism seriously and incorporate them in his own doctrine. His ability to give Christianity a cultured and philosophical face, the better to create the role of Christian philosopher, gave him a broad audience and deep prestige across the Latin Christian world.7
He was related to everyone, including Symmachus himself at some distance. He combined in one office the advantages of his education, his social position, his ecclesiastical position, and his access to court and throne. As long as the western imperial throne was held by not one but two children, Gratian and Valentinian II, power was a thing of courtiers, among whom Ambrose moved easily. Had Symmachus’s friend Praetextatus survived, Ambrose would have been an astute opponent in the matter of the altar. Absent Praetextatus, the publicity bonanza around the letter was a walkover in favor of the Christians.
Ambrose responded to the report from Symmachus before he had seen it, with a stern letter to Valentinian that turned the gentle approach of the Senate into a gauntlet thrown down in the face of all sanity and religion. “They dare to complain of their losses? They never spared our blood and they tore down our very churches!”8 Ambrose heaps on gentlemanly, quiet, tolerant Symmachus responsibility for all the persecutions and martyrdoms inflicted, in inflated historical memory, by all the hostile governors and emperors who ever were. The letter ends with Ambrose putting words in the mouth of the emperor’s dead older brother Gratian: “I did not feel I was defeated, because you were there to succeed me; I did not lament my death because I had you for an heir; I did not lay down my command with sadness because I was sure that what I had commanded—especially in matters of religion—would endure forever… . Now I am wounded worse than before, for my brother despises my laws… . That was only the death of my body—this is the death of my good name!”9 Soft words are met with a rhetorical hammer.
When Ambrose had a chance to read the actual report from Symmachus, he wrote a second letter, no more temperate but much better informed and transparently learned.
“One cannot approach so great a mystery,” says he, “by one path alone.” He lacks knowledge; we have it from the voice of God himself. He seeks wisdom by vain imaginings, but we have it from the wisdom and truth of God himself. Your paths are not our paths. You ask the emperors to grant peace to your gods, but ask Christ to grant peace to the emperors.10
The altar remained out of the Senate house, Praetextatus was dead, and Symmachus stepped down as prefect of the city. That was that.
The affair lives and distorts the telling of the history of this period. Almost twenty years after the quiet and slightly embarrassed end of the Symmachan approach, the Spanish Christian poet Prudentius picked up the controversy to make a moralizing poem of it. His two books of hexameter verse took what Symmachus and Ambrose had written and pounded the rhetorical hammer again. There have been efforts at various times to claim that the altar itself came back into play—requested again, perhaps even briefly reestablished in the Senate—but this is most unlikely and has only been believed because it has been so agreeable for moderns to watch this imaginary death struggle between pagans and Christians play itself out. What had been a modest request in a very narrow context became an opportunity for a full-out attack on all the old gods, with all the rhetorical tools that worked well against the mythic deeds of Saturn and Jupiter and their divine family.
Here I will stop for a bit, of fixed purpose, because the traditional melodramas that moderns have written about pagans and Christians in this period don’t stop. They string together a series of assumptions and fragments into a story they already know before they begin to tell it. Stop your time machine in the year 385 and look around you.
No one by this time remembers the age of persecution firsthand. Remembered grandparents may have recounted the bad days of failing Roman government more than a century earlier, before Diocletian. But present frontier skirmishes are of greater concern in a wealthy and comfortable empire. Sixty years have passed since Constantine began construction of his great new capital city on the Bosphorus and formed his council of Christian bishops. He has been dead for almost half a century and few remember him. In all that time, two years of unsuccessful anti-Christian policy by an isolated and ineffectual prince over twenty years ago represent the sum of challenges to the new god’s domination of empire. Many old rites, rituals, and places have suffered, both from the wars and economic disruption of the third century, and by the conscious policies of Christian emperors to deprive the old ways of their sustenance. New churches are abuilding on all sides, some having already been in place as long as anyone could remember—like the large church in honor of Saint Peter built by Constantine on the Vatican hill just outside Rome, a few hundred yards beyond the site of Augustus’s ludi saeculares.11 Government and society are increasingly dominated not by Constantine’s men, but by the grandchildren of Constantine’s men. Many are still attached to traditional ways, but not everyone who praised the old ways did so out of high religious sentiment. Nor was it clear to everyone that such high sentiment needed to be exclusively given either to the old or to the new. Moderation and open-mindedness did not seem unreasonable.
The Symmachus who has been taken in many modern accounts to be the die-hard opponent of Christianity disappears from view when we look at him squarely. He emerges as a man of his time, calm, reasonable, with no great ambitions beyond those of a gentleman and father looking to secure a place for himself and his family. He made himself, inadvertently, into the ideal target for people whose religious enthusiasms he did not understand. These opponents were not all Christians by any means.
Symmachus will have known a good many Christians for whom the zealotry and antipagan ideology of Ambrose and Prudentius were undesirable. This was not because they were “lukewarm Christians.” Rather, the votaries of Christ showed in that time as many different dispositions as they show today. The people whom zealots thought lukewarm thought themselves quite reasonably faithful and privately believed that they were showing better manners than some of their coreligionists. Symmachus corresponded with some such people, like the poet of Bordeaux, Ausonius, who had turned his academic career into a path to the praetorian prefecture a few years earlier, under Gratian. Christian in every way, Ausonius was not a man for confrontations or ostentation. The Symmachus who corresponded with a few such men formed his judgment of what Christianity might be from those who would be distressed by Ambrose’s vehemence; but he would accept that distress and go back to his life sadder and wiser and fundamentally unmoved.
In that way, Symmachus was the perfect servant of Christianity. He gave them their whipping boy, but no opposition. They were the ones who profited from dramatic tales of duels with pagan madness—not least by the way they made those tales live on into our own time.