21 - Christianization and religious conflict

Summary

At some time in the fourth century, Annianus, son of Matutina, aggrieved at the theft of a purse of six silver coins, placed a leaden curse tablet in the sacred spring of Sulis Minerva at Bath. The traditional list of antithetical categories that was held to constitute an exhaustive description of all possible suspects – ‘whether man or woman, whether boy or girl, whether slave or free’ – begins with a new antithesis: seu gentilis seu christianus quaecumque, ‘whether a gentile or a Christian, whosoever’. It is a sign of the times that the practitioner who prepared this tablet should have included a further division of the human race according to purely religious criteria, ‘Christian’ and ‘gentile’ – a dichotomy whose awesome generality could only have originated among Christians. Yet it is equally revealing that, at the temple of Sulis Minerva, an entirely new way of compartmentalizing Roman society should serve to emphasize the power of the local deity: ‘Christian’ and ‘gentile’ alike remained subject to the vengeful scrutiny of the ‘lady goddess’.

In the period from the death of Constantine in 337 to the accession of Valentinian III at Ravenna in 425, a considerable section of the population of the Roman empire, at all social levels, remained largely unaffected by the claims of the Christian church. They were impenitently polytheistic, in that the religious common sense of their age, as of all previous centuries, led them to assume a spiritual landscape rustling with invisible presences – with countless divine beings and their ethereal ministers.