WITH THE SPLUTTERING OF THAT COUP, WE ARE BACK FIRMLY in the realm of the ordinary events and mischances of emperors, generals, and those who played their hands wrong in seeking to influence imperial succession. These events of 393–94 have long been puffed up into that “last pagan revival,” with no more than shards of evidence and lashings of wishful thinking.1 The focus is on Flavianus. He was a friend of Symmachus around whom cling wisps of sympathy for traditional religious practices. He had literary pretensions and so wrote jejune history and translated the life of Apollonius of Tyana into Latin. Except that we know about him and that he came to a bad end, he is unremarkable.2
Just enough of the old school clung to him that a series of slanders exploded in a thunderstorm in the writings of Christian polemicists. Ambrose, first of all, lamenting the loss of Valentinian so lately joined to the church, took the indifference and traditionalism of the new regime and blew it up into accusations that the usurper Eugenius was “soft on paganism.” As imperial bishop and seasoned pamphleteer, he had an audience for his claims. From there exactly two other contemporary writers fluff the story up as much as they can. Augustine a generation later takes them seriously; and then a string of church historians follow who turn out to have no idea that there was supposed to have been a pagan revival. When a reactionary writer deliberately set out in 500 to tell a pagan history of Roman times down to his own, he too was unaware that there was ever anything pagan about this insurrection. When the evidence is sifted down, it turns out that the worst Ambrose can accuse Eugenius of is not being himself a pagan, but offering funds to support the traditional cult—banned only a year before his appointment. (Without knowing the circumstances, there could well have been a time and place where this would be a convenient way for a dodgy emperor-wannabe to purchase support for cold cash.) When Arbogast and Eugenius made rude remarks about Ambrose, moreover, their hostility was that of insurgents sneering at a courtier on the side they looked to overthrow. Religion had nothing to do with it.
The most dramatic event of this supposed revival is the final battle on the Frigidus. Statues of Jupiter and Hercules were erected by the insurgents—as would have appeared on battlefields for more than a century, since Diocletian associated those gods with the throne, and as would have been guaranteed to get the goat of the hyperreligious Theodosius. Then a wind miraculously blew up from behind Theodosius’s forces and hurled their own weapons back in the faces of the Eugenius/Arbogast party, turning the tide of battle. We are meant to be shocked and credulous. Dead rebels tell no tales.
This is also when the story of the taurobolium and other horrific tales of paganism were put abroad by Prudentius, even as the ceremonies were being suppressed. Now and in the century following, stories of Christian martyrs were written in abundance and circulated widely, with as little regard for fact as possible. The audience was invariably Christian, eager to oppose the demonic old world and to justify the suppression they now enacted in the name of truth and love.
The best marketing often consists of abusing your competition. A last example of contemporary Christian polemicists’ flair for such billingsgate can be found in a Latin poem attacking a leading citizen. The poem survives in a single manuscript in Paris, compiled in the 530s for a high-ranking Roman dignitary, descendant of some of the leading lights of the 380s, and including works of Prudentius and then this single poem standing alone appended. In other words, everything about the poem keeps it in the circle of elite Christian Latin literature produced and consumed in the city of Rome. The manuscript itself flattered the Christian self-esteem of its owner.
When the poem’s 122 verses attacking a consul and prefect who died a slow and painful death were forced to fit the life story of the rebel Flavianus (whom we saw die of battlefield suicide), it supported stories of pagan revivalism. No one now believes there was such a thing. So what is it?
It’s a fine poem, first of all, if perhaps a little over the top, taunting the followers of the old gods on the death of their elegant friend. “Oh, ye pagans, do you really believe that shameful story about Jupiter and Leda?” Then the poet interrogates the dead man: “So why do you go to the temple of Serapis by night? What has tricky Mercury promised you? What’s the use of worshiping the lares and two-faced Juno? What pleases you about Terra, the beautiful earth mother of the gods, or barking Anubis or wretched Ceres and her mother Proserpina below, or crippled Vulcan hobbling on one foot? Didn’t everybody make fun of your bald head when you went to the altar of the Egyptian gods? . . . Now you lie there in your pathetic tomb.”3 The deceased had even undergone the taurobolium.
To understand the contemporary jealousy that underlies this piece of defamation, we need to look back to the year 384, when the distinguished prefect Praetextatus was at the height of his power. Though we’ve tended to focus on his religious interests, we know much more about him. He was a senior aristocrat and serious official. His work in office had been, unlike that of his protégé Symmachus, successful and effective. His adroit handling of an urban riot—provoked by the election of a new bishop of Rome, Damasus—preceded his election to praetorian prefect and Ammianus describes his service thus: “He discharged the office of urban prefect in a lofty way, with many acts of uprightness and integrity. From earliest youth, he earned the unusual distinction of keeping the affection of the citizens while giving them cause to fear him. The unrest among the Christians he put to rest by his authority and his respect for the truth.”4 Everything we know suggests that he was a gracious and upright man, easily admired by many. He was praetorian prefect in 384, as we have seen, when he died, at an advanced age. It would be no surprise if he had a great funeral attended with real respect and mourning by people of every kind.
He had, yes, been a frank and continuing performer of the old rites, restoring a temple on the slope of the Capitoline Hill overlooking the forum, while serving as, among other things, priest of Vesta and a member of the still-functioning quindecemviri sacris faciundis. (But we have no reason to believe that his Christian enemies had actually seen him participate in all the rituals the poem lists.) He did as his fathers had done. Nothing suggests he was in any way inappropriate in his fulfillment of these offices, and he was clearly missed by many when he died.
Many were jealous of his success, in particular, Pope Damasus, who was eighty years old at the time of the prefect’s death. Though Praetextatus had supported him in office, they were old rivals. Damasus had a young cleric named Jerome on his staff, who had a long future of his own in front of him as translator of the Bible, and who in the late 390s would recall with his special nastiness an anecdote from the days of the Damasus riots. The city prefect, he said, looked at the contest for power (and wealth) that had grown up around the office that would become known as the papacy and quipped, “Make me bishop of Rome, and I’ll turn Christian right away.”5 Pope Damasus has now been revealed as the author of the vindictive poem as well, though he may have had help from his bitter young secretary.6
This stinging poem evaporates then as rebuke of rebellious pagans and reveals itself to be a piece of personally motivated invective by one angry old man against a lately deceased rival. The whole story becomes uglier and much less interesting.
The age in which this poem was written already presents to us many individuals who embody not the stern opposition between paganism and Christianity but a more amphibious world. Take Furius Dionysius Filocalus, a famous artist, who prepared a calendar book for the year 354 CE and dedicated it to a wealthy friend, Valentinus. Though the book is now lost, careful medieval copies allow us to reconstruct its contents and artistic program with great success.7 It was something like what moderns might call an almanac. Here is a rough list of what it contained.
º A dedication page by the artist addressed to his distinguished patron.
º Pictures of the patron goddesses of good fortune (Tyche) of four great cities of the Roman world: Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Trier. (Trier’s rank depended entirely on being in the mid-fourth century a regular imperial residence.)
º Dedication to the emperors with a list of the birthdays of the Caesars, from Augustus forward, arranged by months and days of the year, selectively omitting unsuccessful or unpopular emperors.
º The planets and their legends, followed by…
º . . . the pattern of the zodiac. Here we might think of the zealot Firmicus Maternus, whom we have met, author of two surviving books, one a treatise on astrology, the other a violent rant against “profane religions”—in other words, traditional practices. Modern readers have generally assumed that Firmicus converted to Christianity after writing the first of those books, but that’s not necessarily the case. Astrology was widely respected and studied, if not always by the most austere bishops. And not every pro-Christian ranter was himself the most consistently devout and orthodox of Christians in an age when it could be very lucrative to be on the right side.
º A calendar proper with illustrations of the months, all very traditional, with a list of public events by their annual dates, including the most traditional religious festivals.
º Portraits of the two consuls of 354, the emperor Constantius and his junior colleague, the Caesar Gallus.
º A formal list of the consuls of Rome, from the earliest in 509 BCE forward, punctuated by occasional brief historical notes of important events, a few of them Christian.
Then, with nothing to indicate a change in purpose, direction, authorship, or sensibility:
º The Easter Cycle—a list of the dates of Easter from 312 (because of Constantine’s “conversion” attributed to that year?) forward for a century to 411.
º A list of the prefects of the city of Rome from 254 to 354 CE.
º A list of the “depositions” (that is, deaths and burials) of bishops of Rome from 255 to 352 CE.
º Then the depositions of the martyrs of Rome. The two lists (of bishops and martyrs) are kept separate and each is arranged by month of the year. The year for the martyrs in particular begins with December 25, marked as the nativity of Jesus—and therefore this is a very early indication of celebration of that particular date. These two lists are very like the other festival lists already included in the calendar.
º A list of bishops of Rome, from Peter to the present, arranged chronologically. These last two sections (martyrs and bishops of Rome) are the earliest such documents surviving from the Roman church.
º A list of prominent buildings, followed by:
º An outline history of the world translated from Greek. These two sections may well not have been part of the original calendar book, but inserted after.
º A “chronicle of Rome”—outlining the history of the city and its successes from Romulus and Remus to the present, which undoubtedly was part of the original book.
What should we make of the tastes of the author and his intended readers? The central fact is a devotion to the city of Rome; the second fact is a desire to situate the Rome of the day in the history and geography of the traditional ancient world; the third fact is that consuls, bishops, and martyrs are all adduced as figures of power in that landscape.
Did the maker of this book and his wealthy customer just not know that pagans and Christians were supposed to be at one another’s throats? Unlikely. It’s fairer to say that it represents a long period of rapprochement, when many could appreciate old and new, people whose religious practices lie beyond our grasp. No one can know where Filocalus and Valentinus went or what they did to make their peace with divine power. They made their choices in a world in which traditional and novel forms of religion lived side by side, attracted adherents, and were far from persuading many people that exclusive choices had to be made. People trying to make that case had a long way to go yet.
If Filocalus and Valentinus were typical Romans of the mid-fourth century, their ilk continued to emerge in the decades to come. The poet Claudian, for example, was Greek and Egyptian by origins, but mastered Latin and appeared at Rome in the early 390s, putting himself at the service of Christian regimes of the time, praising child princes and heroic generals in equally elaborate, elegant, and traditional verse. A slightly naughty marriage song for a Christian emperor was all part of the job, and three fine mythological books on the rape of Proserpina were equally welcome to his audiences. He could also spin off this equally deft and elegant piece “On the Savior”:8
Christ, powerful over all,
founder of the golden age that will return,9
voice and mind of the highest god,
whom the father poured out from his lofty thoughts,
and made to be co-ruler in his kingdom:
you have subdued the wicked sins of our lives.
You have allowed godliness to be clothed in human shape,
and human beings to address you openly
and acknowledge you are a man.
He goes on to describe the annunciation, the virgin birth, the crucifixion, and the ascension into heaven. Then he ends with a different kind of piety:
Cherish our Augustus, that on all the sacred days
He may celebrate the annual feast days of the holy calendar.
As recently as forty years ago, the best book ever written on Claudian had to spend pages on the vexed question of whether Claudian was a pagan or a Christian or whether this poem is authentic.10 A simpler threefold truth is now unavoidable: we can’t know his beliefs; we know that if he were at court as successful poet in the 390s and afterward he surely made his peace with the outward forms of Christian worship; and the traditionalism, elegance, and polymorphousness of his poetry were to be expected given his circumstances.
There were other poets equally dexterous and amphibious, without any sense of controversy. Nonnus of Panopolis, also an Egyptian, lived around the same time. His two extensive surviving works are an epic about the god Dionysus and a verse rendition of the Gospel of John. The notion that he too must have converted midstream has been very tenacious, but now seems unlikely.11 The fifth century is the last century in the Latin west to see many elegant throwbacks, but Byzantine Greek culture would still see many assiduous students and imitators of ancient traditions.12
Certainly Christianity triumphed in a way. The Christianity-professing population of the empire had ballooned and emperors made sure that they mostly agreed with one another, in public at least, and that they organized their affairs consistently from place to place. We hear mainly from the leaders and enthusiasts on the Christian side, so it is worth pausing to remember that not everyone who showed up in a Christian church on Sunday felt the need to differentiate himself strongly from his neighbors who didn’t.
One of the wisest of modern readers of this period calls this time after the official establishment of Christianity and the official discorporation of paganism “the end of ancient Christianity,” for certainly things would never be the same again. Christianity as we know it was being invented in plain sight.13 It was acquiring its large buildings, elaborate services, elegant vestments, well-fed clergy, and enormous wealth.
Outside those buildings and away from those services, slaves and servants and tenants and dependents shifted religious allegiance sporadically and variously, often enough worshipping as they were told by their lords and masters. If the old shrines on a zealous Christian’s great estate were torn down and Christian chapels erected, most of what worship there was would be Christian, whatever anyone in those chapels believed or thought. If it took a generation or so before lingering old habits died mostly out, nobody much cared. Pockets of tenacity needed not be troubled over.
Clerical and official Christianity had its formalities of doctrine rigidly insisted upon—and just as rigidly attacked from within. The creation of an intellectual church in the east in the second and third centuries was now followed by the even more remarkable creation of another church in the much less promising lands of the Latin west. The western church, of course, built a stock of rich cultural capital on which Europe’s Christians would draw gratefully until our own times. The intellectual church created styles of spiritual experience, moreover, as calm, persuasive, and beautiful as any that human beings have known. Monks, first in the Greek east in the fourth century, then in the fifth and sixth centuries in Gaul, then Italy, then Ireland, then across the western and eastern worlds for hundreds of years more, wrote about and practiced a mode of life that cannot be denied its power and charm. The generosity of the rich to the poor was a fresh aspect of institutionalized altruism; prescribed humility provided a new dimension to religion as well.
True, Christianity had won these benefits by open alliance with the violence and threats of violence of emperors and soldiers, and true again, small choices made in those days offered large disastrous futures then unimagined. Wrestling with the nature of the relationship God had intended between Christians and Jews led some—not all—to tyrannies that were local at first, like the forced baptism of Jews,14 but baleful for the future on a much wider scale and to a higher degree. Similarly, the doctrine of original sin burgeoned from a logical necessity arising out of a spontaneous liturgical practice. Parents who feared perdition for their children, who often died very young, began to have them baptized, just to be safe; Augustine’s influential teaching arose from his attempt to put logic around a practice he initially mistrusted but could not stop, without imagining the theological battles that would be fought over his teaching centuries later.15 Doctrines about the human body and its fleshly appetites were worked out in a world where self-denial for the privileged had its own logic. But these would later make it difficult for some branches of Christianity to be credible witnesses in the very different cultures of gender and sexuality to follow.16
The hegemony of doctrine and practice would turn out to be a challenge—and a scandal—when the Jesuits imposed their religion upon China or the Franciscans imposed theirs upon the pueblos of northern New Mexico. The fundamentally countercultural spirit of the Gospels struggles incessantly in all forms of Christianity with routinization and legalism. Where it prevails (surprisingly often), it gives token of a kind of experience that finally eludes the historian.
What had changed and what did triumph was what may be the most successful and widely held doctrine of Christianity: that Christianity is fundamentally different from all other religions, that its rival paganism exists and is a meaningful category for a taxonomy of human experience. Once you accept that idea, you have allowed Christianity to define, defend, and declare itself in unique ways. Jewish exceptionalism had never dared claim as much. Christianity’s claim to unique truth was plausible because only Christians made that claim.