from PART II - GOVERNMENT AND INSTITUTIONS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
INTRODUCTION: BISHOPS AT COURT
To the experienced and observant eye of Ammianus Marcellinus, composing his history at Rome in the 380s, the Christian church and its institutions were an unremarkable component of his contemporary world. Christian buildings had come to share the urban landscape with the rest of the public architecture of the age, and Christian leaders were recognizably prominent in the affairs of their communities and of the empire at large. In an often quoted observation on the hectic ecclesiastical politics of the reign of Constantius II, Ammianus (XII. 16.18) noted the strains to which the cursus publicus was subjected in having to provide for bishops summoned to a succession of church councils at the emperor's bidding. Despite its element of satirical exaggeration – most of Constantius' councils (save the ‘universal’ gatherings at Sardica and, jointly, at Rimini and Seleucia) were modest affairs, and the travelling bishops must have been outnumbered many times on the road by secular officials going about the emperor's business – the historian's comment none the less captures a vivid snapshot of Christian bishops now participating in the public life of the Roman empire, and sharing the privileges and precedence accorded to the emperor's own subordinates. For the 170 or so bishops who came to Sardica in 343 this public profile itself contributed to the political division between east and west which paralysed the council. The easterners complained of wasted journeys which diverted the attention of state officials required to look to the needs of the bishops and, in a foretaste of Ammianus' later criticism, exhausted the resources of the cursus, while western bishops took issue with the prevailing tendency for ecclesiastical matters to have become the public business of the empire.
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