Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (3 page)

Diocletian was no coward, but the incident in 299 was alarming. Visiting Antioch, he had participated in a sacrifice that failed. Priests slaughtered the animal, and the haruspex, a soothsayer who foretold the future by reading entrails, stepped forward to take the liver from the hands of the servant. Planting his left foot on the ground, he raised his right foot on a stone and bent low to examine the liver.4
He found none of the usual indicators. They slaughtered another animal, and another. Nothing. Plutarch had written centuries before about the silencing of the oracles, and the same was happening to Diocletian. His recovery of the Pax Romana was, Diocletian firmly believed, the product of a pax deorum, the peace of the gods. Roman sacrifice was at the center of that peace. It was the chief religious act, the act by which Romans communicated and communed with the gods, keeping the gods happy so Romans could be happy.'
If the gods stopped talking with the emperor, what would happen to Rome? Did the failed sacrifice in Antioch foretell the end of sacrifice? Did it foretell the end of Rome?

What had gone wrong? The presiding diviner investigated and concluded that "profane persons" had interrupted the rites, and attention focused on Christians in Diocletian's court who had made the sign of the cross to ward off demons during the proceedings. Diocletian was outraged and demanded that all members of his court offer sacrifice, a test designed to weed out Christians. Soldiers were required to sacrifice or leave the sacred Roman army.'
At least at the heart of the empire, in the court and in the army, sacrifices would continue without being polluted by Christians. At the heart of the empire, where it really mattered, gods and men would remain in communion. With the purge of Christians, the problem seemed solved. The miasma was expelled and the gods were satisfied. Diocletian was secure.

The problem, however, had not been solved. An imperial letter probably issued in March 3027
to the proconsul of Africa confronted another threat to the empire, the dualistic religion of Manichaeanism. Mani was a Persian teacher whose religion, along with other Eastern religions, had been seeping into the Roman Empire and undermining traditional Roman pieties. Diocletian's letter was filled with encouragement of "Roman virtue" and condemnation of "Persian vice," and ended with an exhortation to preserve the tranquillitas of the empire by suppressing dangerous Oriental innovations.'
Diocletian insisted that "it is wrong to ... desert the ancient religion for some new one, for it is the height of criminality to try and revive doctrines that were settled once for all by the ancients."9
This "superstitious doctrine of a most worthless and depraved kind" must be stopped?
Manichaean leaders were to be burned along with their books, their dis
ciples decapitated or sent to the mines."

The parallels with Christianity were not lost on Diocletian. Like Manichaeanism, Christianity had come from the East and was non- and perhaps anti-Roman; its unpatriotic teachings undermined civic virtue. As the protector of the empire, Diocletian felt as bound to fight off an invasion of Christians and Manichaeans as he did to turn back attacks from Persians and Goths.12

Still the problem was not solved. Several years after the failed sacrifice, Diocletian was back in Antioch when a Christian deacon, Romanus, burst in on another imperial sacrifice loudly denouncing the worship of demons. Diocletian ordered that his tongue be cut out and sentenced him to prison, where he was executed,13
but the emperor knew something more needed to be done. Wintering in Nicomedia the following year, Diocletian consulted with his Caesar Galerius about the problem. "Arrogant and ambitious" and a "fanatical pagan,""
Galerius urged Diocletian to issue a general order against the Christians. Diocletian hesitated. He needed divine guidance, but when he consulted Apollo's oracle at Didyma it informed him that "just ones" had silenced the prophecy."
Years later Constantine recalled the incident, which he witnessed while serving in Diocletian's court. Calling on God as a witness, Constantine remembered how the "unhappy, truly unhappy" Diocletian, "laboring under mental delusion, made earnest enquiry of his attendants as to who these righteous ones were" and learned that "they were doubtless the Christians." Diocletian lost no time in issuing "those sanguinary edicts," which Constantine said were "traced, if I may so express myself, with a sword's point dipped in blood
.1116

For the Latin Christian rhetorician Lactantius and Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, the Caesar Galerius-who was, to refined Romans like Lactantius, a brutal, pagan, barely Romanized barbarian17-was
the evil genius
behind the edict. Many modern historians discount the tale,18
but there is evidence that the more tolerantly pagan Diocletian was persuaded by his junior colleague to initiate the general persecution. Galerius had never quite sung in harmony with the other rulers of the empire, as Julian the Apostate was later to say. His triumphal arch that still stands in Thessaloniki highlights his personal exploits in his war with the Persians. One panel shows him "defeating the Persian king in direct hand-to-hand combat."19

In 303, Galerius was at the height of his power. It had been a long recovery. Seven years earlier, in 296, he had lost a battle to the Sassinid Persian king Narseh, and Diocletian had added to his humiliation by forcing him to walk for a mile in front of Diocletian's carriage, vested in his imperial robes.20
Two years later, Galerius recovered his honor by defeating the Persians in another campaign. His victory gave him considerable weight, and Diocletian, though senior emperor, had come to fear his junior colleague. The gods must be with Galerius, Diocletian thought. Galerius decided to capitalize on his recovery of ethos by jockeying for advantage. When the persecution began, Galerius held the second position in the Eastern empire. In the West, Maximian was the chief, with Constantius, Constantine's father, his imperial lieutenant. If Diocletian died before Maximian, Galerius reasoned, Galerius would be marginalized; it would be the two Western emperors against him. He needed to protect his power, and he discerned that the Christian problem could be turned to his advantage. He hated Christians, while Constantius was sympathetic to them. If he could
persuade Diocletian to attack the church, Galerius would be on the majority side of imperial religious policy and his rival Constantius would be mar- ginalized.21
So at that private conference in 302, the vigorous Galerius had firmly nudged the vacillating Diocletian toward persecution.22

Diocletian himself believed he had plenty of reason to mount his offensive. Not only did Christians silence the oracles, but they, along with eunuch sympathizers in court, seemed to have been behind the fire that roared through Diocletian's palace in Nicomedia several days after the first edict was issued. More deeply, Diocletian shared with many Romans the deepening suspicion that Christians were not quite Roman; their refusal to sacrifice could mean nothing else.23

He began on February 23, 303. Dates meant everything to Diocletian. February 23 was the festival of Terminalia (Limits). Established by Numa in the distant Roman past, Terminalia was a festival of boundaries. Neighbors would gather at border stones consecrated to Jupiter, offer sacrifice, and share a meal to maintain friendly relations across property boundaries. Good fences make good neighbors, and good fences, to the Romans, were best secured by sacrifice. Rome had been founded when Romulus traced the pomerium and killed his brother to protect the sacred space of the city from violation. Roman homes were sacred, and as the pater patriae, the emperor was the guarantor of the sanctity of the great house that was the city and empire.24
Terminalia was also part of the public cult, an annual reconsecration of the boundaries that separated the sacred Roman from the profane non-Roman world.25
As Jupiter's incarnation on earth, Diocletian was especially charged with guarding the frontiers, maintaining the sacredness of Rome and its empire, and expelling any pollution that might infect it and bring down the wrath of the gods. As the high priest of the empire, he had purged the Manichaean contagion. Now he needed to deal with the Christians, who posed an even more serious threat. The sect of Christianity had grown out of Judaism, but Diocletian was perfectly tolerant of Jewish citizens. They had their own traditions and had the emperor's
permission to check out of the imperial cult. But at least they had the sense to keep to themselves. These Christians were everywhere. They mixed with other Romans in the markets and even at the court and in the army. Jews could be kept in place, but it would take some fine-grained surgery to remove the cancer of Christianity.26
Rome would be saved by a baptism in blood, a sacrifice of Christian blood.

On Terminalia in A.D. 303, Diocletian issued the first of what would become four decrees of persecution.27
The first edict prohibited Christian assemblies and required that churches be razed, Scriptures seized and burned, and Christians expelled from high positions in government and the army. Christians had no recourse. Christians with legal rights lost them, and Christians who were imperial freedpersons reverted to enslavement.28
Over the next year, three further edicts expanded the scope of the persecution. During the summer of 303, Diocletian ordered the arrest of Christian clergymen, and in November of that year, with prisons bursting with arrested Christians, he issued a constitution at the celebration of his vicennalia, the twentieth anniversary of his rule, offering clergy freedom for the price of sacrifice. Early in 304, the emperor demanded that all citizens of the empire sacrifice on pain of imprisonment or death.29
Over the year this turned into a general persecution, as the bloodshed spread from the emperor's capital at Nicomedia, modern Izmir, on the Sea of Marmara, to Egypt, Phrygia and Palestine. Instead of focusing on the emperor's court, it included, at least theoretically, every resident of the empire. The edicts, particularly the fourth, were unevenly enforced. Even
a single emperor was always dependent on the reliability and energy of provincial rulers, and by 303, four emperors split the empire among themselves; not all of them were as eager to persecute Christians as Diocletian was. Still, sporadic as it may have been in many places, the persecution created an "atmosphere of constant menace
.1130

There had been general persecutions before. Fifty years earlier, Decius had been the first emperor to require universal sacrifice,31
and a few years later Valerian had launched a general persecution. After Valerian's capture and humiliating execution by the Persians, though, his son Gallienus recognized the church as a legal corporation, and thereafter emperors refrained from attacking the church for nearly a half century.32
The year 303 was different. Diocletian returned to persecution, with unprecedented ferocity. When the Romans put their minds to it, their tortures could be exquisite.

After the palace fire, Christians in Nicomedia "perished wholesale and in heaps, some butchered with the sword, other fulfilled by fire." Some Christians were so eager to share in martyrdom that they leaped into the flames. Some were tied up, placed in boats, and thrust out from the beach. A Christian named Peter refused to comply with the order to sacrifice. Soldiers stripped him, hoisted him naked, and whipped him until his body was a bloody pulp, his bones sticking through the flesh and skin. Still he refused to sacrifice. The soldiers brought vinegar and salt from the mess and poured it over his wounds. Finding raw meat unappetizing, even when spiced up, they decided to cook him, slowly roasting parts of his body while trying to keep him alive. He was still refusing to sacrifice when he died.33

In the Thebais, Christians were "torn to bits from head to foot with potsherds like claws." In the same place, a woman was hung upside down, completely naked. Others were torn in two: each leg was tied to a bent tree, and then the soldiers would let the boughs "fly back to their normal position; thus they managed to tear apart the limbs of their victims in a moment." A Christian woman in Antioch convinced her daughters that
they should preempt the persecutors by seeking safety in death, and they threw themselves into a river.34

Sharp reeds were pounded into the fingers and under the nails of Christians in Pontus; molten lead was poured down their backs, "roasting the vital parts of the body"; their bowels were sliced open and sexual organs cut off. It was almost a "prize competition." Eventually the authorities determined that shedding the blood of citizens was in poor taste, a pollution of the city, and resorted to more humane methods. Eusebius's description drips with irony: "The beneficence of the humane imperial authority [ought] to be extended to everybody, no one henceforth being punished with death; they had already ceased to impose this penalty on us, thanks to the emperor's humanity." Yet imperial humanity left something to be desired: "orders were then issued that the eyes should be gouged out and one leg maimed," so that "as a result of this `humanity' shown by God's enemies, it is no longer possible to count the enormous number of people who first had the right eye hacked out with a sword and cauterized with fire, and the left foot rendered useless by branding-irons applied to the joints."35
Eusebius's catalog of maimings at Pontus seems morbid to many today, but for him it was the Christian equivalent to Coriolanus's displaying the scars he suffered for the sake of Mother Rome. Even the apostle Paul had boasted to the Galatians that he bore the stigmata of Christ.

To individual martyrs were added towns of Christians. Roman soldiers attacked a village of Christians in Phrygia, killing every citizen and burning houses along with women and children. The city was razed, Eusebius claimed, because "all those who inhabited the town without exception, the curator himself and the magistrates and everyone else in office and the whole people, professed themselves Christians."36

The total number of martyrs is impossible to determine.37
In the West, the persecution ran out of energy a few years after it began, as Constantius refused to comply and then Constantine overturned the persecution edict in 306-7. In the East, things were different. In the Thebaid, years went by
when Christians were regularly put to death in groups of ten, twenty, or thirty. "At other times a hundred men would be slain in a single day."38
Despite the warnings of their bishops and priests, many actively sought martyrdom by offering themselves to provincial governors, ostentatiously tearing up imperial decrees, or otherwise calling attention to themselves. Few were chased down and arrested, and many complied quietly to protect themselves.39
Because Christianity had expanded to the countryside, however, it was no longer possible to arrest its growth. Christians in villages resisted valiantly, and the church had simply become too scattered to suppress.40