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Prelude to the Great Persecution: The Propaganda War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

W. H. C. Frend
W. H. C. Frend
Affiliation:
Barnwell Rectory, Peterborough PE8 5PG
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Extract

The victory of Christianity in the last years of Constantine's was graphically described by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Life of Constantine. Clearly in Phoenicia, where he had excellent sources of reign information, the heart had gone out of the old religion. Every class in the community was prepared to accept Christianity and even to deride the deities that once they had held in awe. The victory there and ultimately over nearly the whole empire was so decisive that one is inclined to forget the tremendous struggle for the hearts and allegiances of the provincials that preceded it. Though in retrospect one might agree with von Harnack's view that even without Constantine's conversion Christianity would have triumphed, this was not how it appeared to most contemporaries. Down to the time of his victory over Licinius (September 324), Constantine seems to have aimed only at securing for Christianity the legal equality with the traditional cults, as envisaged by the Edict of Milan. The Council of Nicaea, however, summoned by the emperor in 325, proved to be decisive both for the establishment of orthodoxy and the victory of Christianity itself. Thenceforth, the history of the empire would also be the history of the Church.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 1987 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 , Eusebius, Vita Conslanlini (ed. Heikel, I. A., GCS, Eusebius I, Leipzig 1902), iv. 39. Compare iv. 37-8 and iii. 54.Google Scholar

2 Harnack, Adolf von, Mission and Expansion of Christianity, during the First Three Centuries, trans. Moffatt, J., London 1908, ii. 465.Google Scholar Von Harnack was thinking in particular of the situation in Asia Minor.

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5 See Acta Purgationis Felicis, CSEL xxvi (= Appendix ii to Optatus, De Schismate Donatistarum), 199. ‘Scripturae legis vestrae’ (i.e. ‘of the Christians’) and compare , Hennas, Similitudes viii. 3. 2Google Scholar.

6 , Eusebius, HE vii. 30. 19.Google Scholar

7 Ibid.

8 Porphyry, cited by Theodoret of Cyrrhus, De Curatione Graecorum Affect., xii (end), lxxxiii. 1151, and also, as cited by , Augustine, De Civitate Dei, xviii. 53.Google Scholar Also, Optatus of Milevis, De Schismate Donalistarum, ii. 4, mentioning that c. AD 314 there were forty Christian churches in Rome.

9 For the evidence, see , Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church, Oxford 1965, 450–2Google Scholar.

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12 For an example of urban loyalty to the Tetrarchy from Egypt (Oxyrhynchus) see Jones, A. H. M., The Later Roman Empire, Oxford 1964, ii. 722Google Scholar.

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15 Lepelley, op. cit. 347.

16 The vice-prefect of Egypt, Aemilian, addressing Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria in 257. See Eusebius, HE vii. 11. 7. For a similar view of the Roman deities some thirty years before, see Felix, Minucius, Octavius, 8. 1Google Scholar.

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20 The Edict of Prices dates to November-December 301. Fragments survive from more than forty different cities, but none has so far been found in the West. The commentary of the governor of Caria, Fulvius Asticus, quoted here from Aezani, goes a little further than the Edict itself in claiming that the emperors desired ‘a plentiful livelihood for all’, but it interpreted the spirit ofthe Edict. See Crawford, M. H. and Reynolds, Joyce, ‘The publication of the Prices Edict: a new inscription from Aezani’, JRS lxv (1975), 160–4;Google Scholarand , Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 10–11, 290 for other referencesGoogle Scholar.

21 I.e. the clash between the Northern and Southern states of the United States leading to the Civil War (1861-5).

22 The only surviving piece of Christian philosophical apologetic from the period 260-95 is a long fragment of Dionysius of Alexandria's ‘Against the Epicureans’ quoted by , Eusebius, Praeparalio Evangelica, ed. Gifford, E. H., Oxford 1903, xiv. 23–7Google Scholar.

23 Chadwick, H. (trans, and ed.), Origen: ‘Contra Celsum’, Cambridge 1953.Google Scholar

24 Contra Celsum iv. II, viii. 41; also v. 14.

25 Ibid. iv. 36.

26 Ibid. viii. 24, 35. Lesser gods were ‘satraps and subordinate governors’.

27 Ibid. ii. 79. Compare i. 69 and ii. 31, Jesus ‘arrested most disgracefully and crucified’.

28 Ibid. ii. 24.

29 Ibid. i. 28 (gained his knowledge of magic in Egypt). Compare ii. 49, and 55; also, below II. 103.

30 Ibid. ii. 33-5.

31 Ibid. i. 62) 68; and ii. 55 (Celsus on the resurrection).

32 Ibid. i. 1 and viii. 17.

33 Ibid. ii. 1, 4.

34 Ibid. iii. 55.

35 , Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, ed. Conybeare, F. C. (Loeb Library 1926), i. 3.Google Scholar

36 Apollonius' mother was visited by an apparition of Proteus who promised that her child would himself be Proteus, ‘the god of Egypt’, Life i. 4-5.

37 Life i. 15 (indicts rascally corn-merchants).

38 Life i. II (insistence on morality in religion), iv. ii (Apollonius' sacrifices at Ilium were ‘of a pure and bloodless kind’). For lack of serious studie s connected with temples,Ibid. i. 6.

39 , Cyprian, Ad Demetrianum, CSEL iii. 1, 351–70. Demetrian complained that the world was being shaken to its foundations, and that every type of disaster, natural, physical and moral was due to the failure of the Christians to give due worship to the gods. For similar views a generation before,Google Scholarsee , Tertullian, Apology xl. 2Google Scholar.

40 Thus, the citizens of Ansedonia (Cosa) in Italy praised the emperor Decius as ‘restorer of the sacred rites and liberty’, see Annie Epigraphique, 1973, 63Google Scholar; while those of Aphrodisias in Caria offered prayers and sacrifices ‘through their solidarity with the Romans’, Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antigua viii. 424 (Oct-Nov. 250).

41 The pagan authorities laughed openly at the confesser Pionius and asked him, ‘What god do you worship?’, and on his confession of faith replied, ‘You mean then the one that was crucified?’ The answer was received with loud guffaws. Acts of Pionius, 16, ed. Musurillo, H., Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford 1972, 156–8.Google Scholar Compare Ibid. 9, ‘Which Church do you belong to?’ addressed to Pionius.

42 Thus, Galerius Maximus, proconsul of Africa, addressing Cyprian when he sentenced him to death on 14 September 258. Cyprian was ‘an open enemy of the gods’ and a ringleader of ‘an unlawful association’, Acta Proconsularia, CSEL iii. 3, cxii-xiii.

43 , Eusebius, Praep. Evangel, x. 3, xi. 6 and xiii. 3 as examples.Google Scholar

44 Ibid. xi. 6.

45 Ibid. iii. 6 (Christ's teaching superior), iii. 15 (contradictions among philosophers about the gods). See MacMullen, R., Paganism in the Roman Empire, New Haven 1981, 71. 179Google Scholar.

46 , Eusebius, HE ix. II. 6, derided as ‘charlatans’.Google Scholar

47 Enneads, ii. 9. 6 and 9. 14. See Vogt, J., ‘Zur Religiositat der Christenverfolger im romischen Reich’, Sitzungsberichte Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. (1962), 23–4Google Scholar and Armstrong, A. H., Plotinus (Loeb Library 1979), ii. 220Google Scholar.

48 , Lactantius, De Morlibus Persecutorum (ed. Moreau, J., Sources Chretiennes, Paris39) 34.2. Galerius berates the ‘folly’ of the Christians in rejecting the ‘constitutions of the ancients’, which ‘perhaps their own ancestors first established’. For Christianity as a revolt against the ‘traditional religion’, see Eusebius, Praep. Evangel., preface to bk. ii.Google Scholar

49 See Macmullen, Ramsey, Christianizing the Roman Empire, New Haven 1984, 20. For martyrs and martyrdom as a spur to conversion to Christianity, see Justin, ii Apol. 13 and Tertullian, Apol., 50. 15.Google Scholar

50 An interesting example is provided by Amelius (flor. c. 265), who clearly knew the first chapter of the Fourth Gospel well, but does not mention John by name, simply referring to him as ‘the barbarian’, in contrast to Heracleitus whom he names immediately after (, Eusebius, Praep. Evangel, xi. 18. 26, 19. 1 ff.)Google Scholar.

51 Cited from Labriolle, P. de, La Réaction Paienne, Paris 1950, 312 = Pap. Land. 987.Google Scholar

52 , Eusebius, Praep. Evangel. xi. 19Google Scholar; also , Augustine, De Civitate Dei x. 29 (end)Google Scholar.

53 The relationship of these two works to each other is discussed by O'Meara, J. J., Porphyry's Philosophyfrom Oracles, Paris 1959. For his view that all the surviving fragments belong to one book, see p. 145Google Scholar.

54 , Augustine, De Civitati Dei x. 29.Google Scholar ‘a body of every kind is to be escaped from’, and compare,Ibid. xxii. 25.

55 Ibid. x. 29.

56 De Civ. Dei xix. 23. Porphyry only ‘recognised Christ as a man and not as God’. Compare also De Consensu Evangelistarum i. 11: ‘Christ was the wisest of men, but they deny he is to be worshipped as God.’

57 Ibid. xix. 23. This oracle ma y have been known to Lactantius, Div. Inst., CSEL xix, iv. 16. 1.

58 Ibid. xviii. 53; compare xix. 23 and xx. 24. 1.

59 , Lactantius, De Mortibus xiii. 7–8.Google Scholar

60 See Hanson, R. P. C., ‘The Christian attitude to pagan religions’, in Studies in Christian Antiquity, Edinburgh 1985, 190–1.Google Scholar

61 , Lactantius, Div. Inst. i. 6, iv. 18.Google Scholar

62 For instance, books iv and v of the Praeparatio are directed very largely against the Philosophy from Oracles.

63 , Eusebius, Praep. Evangel, iv. 1-4 and v. 3–4 (citing Plutarch on The Cessation of Oracles), compare iii. 16 (oracles not fulfilled).Google Scholar

64 The dating is very carefully worked out by Barnes, T. D., ‘Porphyry against the Christians’, JTS, NS xxiv (1973), 424–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The difficulty in pushing the data much beyond 290, however, is the statement in the Souda that Porphyry ‘flourished in the reign of Aurelian and survived until that of Diocletian’. This does not suggest vigorous literary activity much later than the first half of that reign. Harnack's dating is c. 270.

65 Cited by Augustine, De Civ. Dei xix. 23; and for pagan anxiety at the continuous growth of Christianity,Ibid. xviii. 53.

66 Fragment 13 cited by Harnack, A. von, ‘Porphyrius gegen die Christen, 15 Bücher; Zeugnisse, Fragmente und Referate’, Abhandlungen der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil. Hist. Kl, Nr. 1, Berlin 1916. Compare also Frag. 1Google Scholar.

67 Frag. 76, tons megistous oikous. Compare Eusebius, HE viii. 1.5, ‘vast and great churches rising up in every town’; for Rome itself, , Arnobius, Contra Gentes ii. 12,Google Scholar and Optatus of Milevis, De Schismale ii, 4.

68 , Theodoret, Grace, affect, curatio xiiGoogle Scholar (PG lxxxiii. 1151), and , Eusebius, Praep. Evangel.Google Scholar v. 1 (both citing Porphyry).

69 Frag. 97. See de Labriolle, op. cit. 284-5.

70 , Theodoret, Hist. Ecd. (ed. Scheidweiler, F., GCS, Berlin 1954), ii. 7. 4.Google Scholar

71 , Gelasius, Hist. Ecd. ii. 36. Compare Socrates, HE 1.9.30.Google Scholar

72 Codex Justinianus 1. 1. 3.

73 See Barnes, art. cit. 428-30, on the relationship between Porphyry and the pagan critic quoted in the Apocritus. Some fragments, however, are quoted elsewhere as from Porphyry.

74 Frag. 15. See P. de Labriolle, Réaction paienne, 251-62, for discussion of this and similar fragments.

75 Frag. 11.

76 Frag. 55.

77 Frag. 15.

78 Frag. 10, a criticism known to Jerome, Comment, in Ps. 87, PL xxxvi. 1045.

79 Frag. 9, see Wilcken, R. L., The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, New Haven 1984, 145–6Google Scholar.

80 Frag. 25. Also known to Jerome, Ep. cxxx. 14. 4, as was Frag. 55.

81 Frag. 34; compare 31 and 33.

82 Book xii ‘Against the Christians’, cited by Jerome in the prologue to his Commentary on Daniel, see Wilcken, op. cit. p. 140.

83 Frag. 49.

84 Frag. 58. See de Labriolle, Réaction paienne, 280.

85 Frag. 60 and 63. There must have been more detailed comparisons. During the Great Persecution, Eusebius devoted practically the whole of his answer to the writer of the tract Philalethes ad Christianos (Lover of Truth, to the Christians) who was almost certainly Sossianus Hierocles, to refuting this comparison. The writer drew on ideas popularised by Porphyry, if not the latter's actual work (Philostratus, Loeb edn, ii. 485-603).

86 Frag. 15.

87 Frag. 63; and for his failure to make a spectacle out of his Ascension, Frag. 65, and compare Contra Celsum ii. 53 and 63.

88 Frag. 64, as ‘mpious persons who denied the common belief’.

89 Frag, i, lines 14-15. ‘What punishments are too severe to inflict on individuals who desert the laws of their fathers?’

90 , Lactantius, Div. Insl. v. 2.Google Scholar

91 For Hierocles' career, see Jones, A. H. M., Martihdale, J. R., and Morris, J., Prosopog-raphy of the later Roman Empire, Cambridge 1971, i. 43aGoogle Scholar.

92 Thus, Lactantius, Div. Inst., v. 2, 12, CSEL xix. 403. For Diocletian's policy in 303, see De Mart. Pers. xi. 8.

93 Div. Inst. v. 2, 3. According to Eusebius, Contra Hieroclen i, the theme of Hierocles' Philalethes was the comparison between Jesus and Apollonius.

94 Div. Inst. v. 3. The idea of Jesus being a robber leader, but not the alleged size of his band is also found in Celsus, see Origen, Contra Celsum ii. 44.

95 Though it seems clear that Augustine must have had a Latin translation of Porphyry's work when he came to write On the Harmony of the Gospels (De Consensu Evangelistarum). See also , Wilcken, Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 144–7Google Scholar.

96 For Arnobius' career, see Jerome — Eusebius, Chron. ad ann. 2342. Also Frend, W. H. C., The Rise of Christianity, London 1984, 450.Google Scholar For the suggestion that Hermetic oracles allegedly referring to Christ had some influence on his conversion, see Carcopino, J., Aspects mystiques de la Rome paienne, Paris 1942, 293Google Scholar.

97 , Arnobius, Contra Gentes, i. 24,Google Scholar CSEL iv; and compare iii. 24 and vii. 48.

98 Ibid. i. 25.

99 Ibid. i. 1, i. 9. Compare i. 13, ‘Because of the Christians the gods inflict on us all calamities’ (Demetrianus' argument half a century before).

100 Ibid. i. 3.

101 Ibid. ii. 2.

102 See n. 68 above.

103 Contra Gentes i. 43, and compare Contra Celsum i. 28.

104 Ibid. i. 59, as asserted by Porphyry, Frags. 35 (line 9), 4 and 6.

105 Ibid. i. 60.

106 Ibid. ii. 63. Porphyry puts the question to Jesus' late arrival on earth in much the same way. Why had Christ allowed humanity to be deprived of his revelation for so long a space of time, and thus caused the destruction of countless souls? Frag. 81, and compare Contra Celsum iv. 7.

107 , Arnobius, Contra Gentes ii. 15.Google ScholarSee Fortin, E. L., ‘The viri novi of Arnobius and the conflict between faith and reason in the early Christian centuries’, Orientalia Christiana Analecta cxcv (1973), 197–236Google Scholar.

108 , Arnobius, Contra Gentes ii. ii.Google Scholar

109 Ibid. ii. 15. A soul 'not within reach of the body by contact’; see above, n. 54.

110 Ibid. ii. 14. Arnobius' anger at the scorn of his opponents, seeIbid. ii. 13-14, 34. In general, see Courcelle, Pierre, ‘Anti-Christian arguments and Christian Platonism: from Arnobius to St Ambrose’, in The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. Momigliano, A., Oxford 1963, 151-92, especially pp. 154–5Google Scholar.

111 For example, Alfius Caecilianus, the Duumuir ofApthungi and Bishop Felix, whom he addresses as Parens; see Acta Purgationis Felicis, (= Appendix ii to Optatus of , Milevis, De Schismate Donatistarum, CSEL xxvi. 199)Google Scholar.

112 Contra Gentes ii. 11.

113 Ibid. 1.43 and following chapters, where Arnobius develops his argument with examples.

114 Ibid. ii. 10.

115 Ibid. i. 28.

116 Ibid.

117 Ibid. i. 43.

118 Ibid. i. 46.

119 Ibid. ii. 12. Arnobius shows he was acquainted with the apocryphal Acta Petri.

120 Contra Gentes i. 49-50.

121 Above n. 38.

122 , Porphyry, De Abstinentia,Google Scholar quoted by , Eusebius in Praep. Evangel, iv. 14Google Scholar.

123 Contra Genles vii. 9.

124 , Lactantius, Div. Inst. vi. 2.Google Scholar

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126 Alexander of Lycopolis, De Placitis Manichaeorum, PG xviii. 411-48, ch. i. He also pays tribute to the Christian aim of directing the moral standard of individuals.

127 Alexander,Ibid.

128 Ibid. 24.

129 On the relatively small number of educated Christians, especially in the west, c. 300, see , Lactantius, Div. Inst. v. 1. 22–7Google Scholar.

130 De Mortibus Persecutorum xxiii. 8, ‘homo pius’ (Diocletianus). Compare vii. 1.

131 Ibid. xxiii. 1-7. See , Jones, Later Roman Empire i. 42–4Google Scholar.

132 Ibid. vii. 9. The corvées needed for the work would be provided by the cities from among the peasants in their territory.

133 Ibid. xiii. 2.

134 Thus, the confessor, Procopius of Gaza quotes a tag from Homer, Iliad iii. 204, ‘The Lordship of many is no good thing. Let there be one lord and one king.’ This was regarded as a treasonable statement. See , Eusebius, Martyrs of Palestine i. 1Google Scholar.

135 , Arnobius, Contra Gentes ii. 5, 12.Google Scholar

136 , Theodore, Life of Pachomius iii, PL lxxiii. 231–2.Google Scholar

137 Thus, Arnobius, Contra Genles vii. 34, especially important at festival times in the agricultural year.

138 Garnsey, P., review of Frend, The Rise of Christianity: Times Literary Supplement, 5 04 1985, 380.Google Scholar

139 Thus, Culcianus, the vice-prefect of Egypt to the confessor Bishop Phileas at the latter's trial in 306, Ada Phileae, iii (ed. , Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 246)Google Scholar.

140 , Arnobius, Contra Gentes ii. 77, and compare v. 30.Google Scholar