Rome, Religion, and Christian Emperors

The controversy over the altar of Victory shows how pagans and Christians expressed competing ideas on the public role of religion in an increasingly Christian empire. In 382, Gratian revoked funding from the Roman state priesthoods and removed the altar from the Senate house. Following Gratian’s death in 383, the Senate appealed to his brother, Valentinian II, through the urban prefect, Symmachus, whose communiqué was successfully countered by Ambrose of Milan. Recent scholarship has favoured Symmachus’ account, which it sees as an appeal for religious tolerance, and argued that the affair was decided by the power politics of a child emperor’s unstable court. In response, this chapter argues that Symmachus was actually trying to exclude the emperor’s Christianity from public decision-making. All religions may, for Symmachus, lead to God, but the old cults are Rome’s divinely appointed defence, as well as the bond between Senate and emperors. Ambrose put Valentinian’s duty to God at the heart of his appeal. Ambrose’s Senate contained many Christians, and Ambrose was bound to resist an emperor who endorsed pagan sacrifices (the closest either work comes to explicit political gamesmanship). Together, their works show how malleable Rome’s public religion still was, more than seventy years after Constantine embraced Christianity.

Commemorating Vettius Agorius Praetextatus

Late in 384, a leading pagan senator and priest, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, died shortly before he was to take up the consulship. Senatorial aristocrats produced epigraphic and literary monuments that reveal the continued vitality of pagan religious discourse after the final separation of the traditional cults from Roman imperial power. As urban prefect, Symmachus negotiated one commemorative campaign between the Senate and Valentinian’s court, upholding Praetextatus as a model of non-sectarian civic virtue. This stance brought Symmachus into disagreement with the Vestals and Praetextatus’ wife, Paulina. As an initiative of an ancient Roman priesthood, the Vestals’ now-lost commemoration likely highlighted Praetextatus’ involvement in the civic cults. For Paulina, religion had indeed been her husband’s most important pursuit, but it aimed, beyond the well-being of Rome, at immortality. Attacking Paulina, Christians such as Jerome promoted an alternative aristocratic devotion focused on ascetical humility, rather than on the religious virtuosity, paralleled by political success, of which both pagan and Christian senators boasted. In his first book of Epistles, which was likely published some years later, Symmachus foregrounded Praetextatus’ expertise as a pontifex but ignored his private religious pursuits. For Symmachus, public religion was vital to Praetextatus’ legacy and to the aristocratic world they had shared.

‘The Manifold Divinity of the Gods’

The idea of a unified ‘paganism’ is usually taken to be an intentional Christian distortion of the true diversity of ancient polytheism. This chapter presents a different view. Inscriptions recorded by antiquarians and archaeologists at Rome since the fifteenth century document fourth-century senators’ participation in a vast range of priesthoods and mystery initiations. These inscriptions include epitaphs, senatorial résumés, and especially altars commemorating performance of the taurobolium, a sacrifice of a bull to the Magna Mater. The (admittedly fragmentary) evidence reveals a philosophical theology that united all the gods into a single divine reality. It also suggests, contrary to recent scholarship, that the senators’ religious involvement was driven by a desire not just for personal prestige but also (and sometimes more important) for divine favour and mystical insights. When this polytheistic religiosity is set alongside the polemical ‘paganism’ of Firmicus Maternus and ‘Ambrosiaster’, a new picture takes shape. The Christian polemicists’ sharp opposition between ‘pagans’ and ‘Christians’ is an oversimplification of a religious situation whose tensions were generally less overt. Nevertheless, the idea of ‘paganism’ is not polemical invention but a Christian theorisation of a prominent contemporary approach to polytheism.

On the Error of Profane Religions

In the mid-340s, Firmicus Maternus, a pagan astrologer turned Christian polemicist, became the first-known author to ask the emperors to abolish traditional cults. This chapter sets On the Error of Profane Religions in the context of Constantinian legislation and of the urban Roman religious milieu to which Firmicus had previously belonged. Often (and too quickly) dismissed as a self-serving work by an ill-tutored convert, Firmicus’ polemic aims not just to spur Constantine’s sons towards greater zeal but to end the Devil’s dominion over mankind. In the work’s first half, Firmicus targets the cults most popular in the city of Rome. Dismissing philosophical allegories, he argues that traditional rites teach their worshippers immorality. Juxtaposing Christian scripture and pagan ritual formulas in the work’s second half, he depicts polytheistic cults as a unified religious system counterfeited by the Devil from the Christian truth—a major departure from earlier polemicists’ conceptions of polytheism. Firmicus’ appeals to the emperors were rooted in the fundamental Christian conviction that idolatry would someday be abolished; that victory had, however, come much closer to realisation, in the years after Constantine’s endorsement of Christianity, than Lactantius had thought possible.

Conclusion

Fourth-century writers dealt with traditional religion and its shifting place in Roman society with the help of myth, philosophy, and observation of cultic practice. These were not mere ‘antiquarian’ endeavours but resources that fleshed out a picture of traditional religion whose frame was set by each author’s social situation and theological convictions. The diversity of the resultant texts precludes a grand narrative of pagan evolution, or even of the formation of a new conception of ‘paganism’ or of ‘religion’. Nevertheless, the long arc of polemical discourse from Diocletian to Valentinian II testifies to the importance of the changing legal and political context that framed each author’s approach to pagan cult. It also makes clear the abiding differences that separated Christians from pagans, despite shared civic space and social ties. Much the same remained true, after decades of anti-pagan legislation, in Augustine’s early-fifth-century North Africa, where devout Christians struggled (sometimes violently) with influential pagans. Faced by the fall of Rome, Augustine produced City of God, whose only ancient Latin rival for breadth and theological vision is Lactantius’ Divine Institutes. Traditional religion was a still-potent reality in a Roman Empire that was no longer definitely pagan but not yet definitively Christian.

‘Like a Stream of Tullian Eloquence’

Formerly professor of Latin in the court of the emperor Diocletian, Lactantius responded to the Tetrarchic ‘Great Persecution’ with the most extensive defence and exposition of Christianity written in Latin before Augustine’s City of God. His seven-book Divine Institutes, the last Christian apology written before Constantine’s rise to power, credited the invention of pagan cults to a historical King Jupiter. Building on this euhemeristic narrative, Lactantius reinterpreted the philosophical theories surveyed in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods to attack polytheism as an irrational display of empty religiosity. With the help of Christian cosmology and eschatology, he set the present sufferings of Christians in a grand historical context, predicting the final victory over paganism at the return of Christ, a few centuries after his own day. Lactantius later hailed the victories of Constantine and Licinius as a divine vindication of persecuted Christians. Nevertheless, he still expected pagan domination and persecution to continue until Christ’s return. His eschatology, not the experience of imperial politics, set his basic approach to paganism before and after the ‘Constantinian revolution’.

Introduction

Recent scholarship on Roman religion has emphasised the ‘secularity’ of late antique culture and treated Christian polemics (the main accounts of fourth-century polytheism) as exercises in constructing artificial boundaries between ‘pagans’ and ‘Christians’. Neither approach does justice to the dynamic interaction between Christian writers and traditional religious thought. Pagan, philosophical henotheism and the anti-Christian legislation of Decius, Valerian, and the Tetrarchs paralleled the common Christian division between ‘gentiles’ or ‘pagans’ and ‘Christians’. Christian thinkers, in turn, developed new ways of thinking and talking about ‘religion’ (using such terms as religio, superstitio, and secta) over the course of the fourth century. Religious polemic thus saw productive intellectual activity on religion, while ancient society was not religiously neutral: modern concepts of ‘secularity’ give too little room to the convictions of the devout pagans. This book offers a fine-grained account that reflects the complexities of both Christian and pagan ideas on traditional religion across the fourth century. To maintain its tight focus, it deals exclusively with the Western, Latin-speaking culture that has driven much modern scholarship on late antique paganism.