This is an advance reading from Magna Mater, Paulianity, and the Imperial Church
©2024 Max Dashu. All Rights Reserved; not for reproduction without written permission from the author. The book is Vol V in the Secret History of the Witches series, and will be published open access in its final, illustrated form on the Suppressed Histories Archives website.

The War On Pagans

In spite of Constantine’s interventions [see reading on The Imperial Church], pagans were still a strong majority within the Roman empire in the 4^th century. The bishops fought hard to suppress omnipresent pagan influences on their congregations. They indulged in extremes of invective, calling the old religions wicked, disgusting, horrible, insane, impiety and perfidy. Eusebius thundered against “the corrupt and abominable incantations.” [Historia Ecclesiastica XI: 10] Firmicus Maternus exhorted the emperor to suppress “the lethal infection of a vanquished idolatry.” [MacMullen, 13] A law of Theodosius inveighed against “the madness of Jewish impiety or the error and insanity of foolish paganism.” [Cod Theod. 15. 5. 1]

Chistian zealot attacks on pagan sanctuaries in Spain had already begun in the early 300s. In 306 the Spanish Council of Elvira targeted popular religious observances, prescribing penalties for nominal Christians who openly paid reverence to the old deities and shrines. They forbade people to paint murals on church walls, fearing (or rather knowing) that backsliders would smuggle those deities into the church itself. They forbade marital and business relations with pagans and Jews. [Elvira Canons 34-36; 40-41; 62, in Hefèle, I.1, 239-56; McKenna, 35]

    The bishops at Elvira debated whether a Christian killed in the act of destroying an idol was a holy martyr. By mid-century, pagans began to react in kind to these desecrations. One priest wrote that they broke down the church doors “and what is horrible to relate, took the altar from the church and placed it before an idol of the temple.” [McKenna, 45] But this time, the church was backed up by the power of the state, and pagan holy places had no protection.

When Constantine died in the year 337, his inner circle covered up his death for three months while his sons hurried to the capital. Ministers and generals came for audiences, petitions were read out in the presence of the body, and edicts were issued in the emperor’s name. Finally, the eunuch Eusebius put a forged will into the corpse’s hand when they were ready to announce the emperor’s death. It claimed that his half brothers had conspired to poison him, and on this pretext had them tried and executed. This was the signal for Constantine’s sons to unleash a bloodbath, liquidating his six nephews, along others allied to them or to his brothers. 

There were now three emperors: Constantius II in the East (who waa an Arian Christian, still the dominant tendency in his region) and Constans and Constantine II in the west (both Catholic). Constans ambushed and killed his brother to become the sole western emperor. He decreed the death penalty for gay sex, although he was himself notorious for having affairs with his bodyguards and with Germanic male captives and hostages. [Zosimus, online; Kirsch, 196-7] His homosexuality was certainly a factor in his downfall, but so was his cruelty. [According to Zosimus, 2:42]

In 341, Constantius issued a decree attempting to abolish pagan religion entirely: “Let superstition come to an end, and the insanity of sacrifices be abolished.” [Chuvin, 36] But he was unable to enforce the law, due to resistance from pagan governors in the provinces, and the fact that pagans were still the great majority of the population. The Vestals continued their rites, and the temples continued as before. [Kirsch, 200-201]

In 349, a pagan revolt broke out in the western empire. The troops acclaimed the Germanic legion commander Magnentius as emperor. Abandoned by all but a few of his supporters, Constans fled but was captured and killed. Magnentius triumphantly entered Rome, where he reopened the temples and restored the ceremonies. His extension of religious toleration to pagans and Christians alike lasted only as long as his rule—three years. Constantius hurried back from the Persian front, and after a terrible battle in which both sides lost tens of thousands, forced the rebel army to retreat into Gaul. Trapped, Magnentius committed suicide rather than being turned over to the tender mercies of Constantius. [Kirsch, 199-206]

Persecutions under Constantius II

The bloody struggle between Constantine’s sons over the imperial throne had somewhat braked the religious repression. Constantius II prevailed by having his brothers murdered. He took the title “His Eternity,” and declared, “What I will should be the law of the Church.” [Kirsch, 208] Now that he was sole emperor, he escalated his attack on the old religions. His law of 352 called for closing the temples and banned sacrifices. It targeted pagan governors, ordering their subordinates to inform on them. [Cod. Theod. 16. 10. 4, in MacMullen, 175 n. 78] Governors who did not enforce the religious repression would lose their office and pay a huge fine of 20 pounds of gold, while local officials were to be exiled and their property confiscated. Yet the periodic repetition of these laws shows that they were not being uniformly enforced, whether because of personal loyalties, friendship, bribes, or local political considerations, including personal safety. It would be another century before the state was able to mobilize fully effective repression. [MacMullen, 24; 30; Kirsch 208-210]

Constantius escalated the persecution of pagans to unprecedented levels. The years 354-358 have been described as a time of “religious fury.” [Chuvin, 39] In 354 the emperor issued an order to close the temples and confiscate their treasures. He outlawed public sacrifice; if anyone who dared to make offerings to the old gods, “let him be stricken by the avenging sword,” and his property confiscated. [Cod. Theod. 16. 10. 4] Diviners were to be burned, and sorcery and astrology fell under the ban: “... let the curiosity to know the future be silenced for all forever.” [Chuvin, 39; 42]

In 356, Constantius outlawed pagan worship outright, ordering the death penalty for those who paid reverence to statues or offered sacrifices. [Cod. Theodos. 16. 10. 6] Constantius warned that high rank would no longer afford protection against arrest and torture. No limits remained; neither innocence nor courage nor rank would deter the emperor from his judicial atrocities: “If the accused withstands torture but witnesses incriminate him, let him be tied to a horse and his sides torn with iron claws.” [Cauzons, 46; Lea, 397; Chuvin, 40]

    In 357, Constantius expanded the penalty of burning at the stake—to which diviners, magicians and dream-explainers were already subject—to anyone who consulted them, or received them as guests. Henry Charles Lea observed that the mass hunts of early modern times were foreshadowed by this emperor’s “active persecution throughout the East, in which numbers were put to death upon the slightest pretext...” Some of the most revered pagan clergy were now targeted for persecution under this law. The church historian Eusebius indicated that the imperial courts tortured pagan prophets from the sanctuaries of Didyma and Daphne in an attempt to force “confessions” that the oracles were based on trickery. [Fontenrose, 201] Sages faced the same dangers; the philosopher Demetrius Cythras was tortured on the rack on bogus charges of performing divination. [Chuvin, 39-40] The Syrian Neoplatonist Sopater, a former favorite at Constantine’s court, later fell prey to rivals who accused him of being a magician, and he was put to death. [Chuvin, 45] 

Julian’s Pagan Restoration

The pagans had one last card to play: Constantine’s nephew. In 361 the pagan philosopher Julian took the purple, after years of wondering whether he would be murdered (like the rest of his family) by his cousin Constantius II—or be crowned as his successor. Palace eunuchs had educated Julian as a Christian, and he and his brother spent their youth in under strict surveillance in a remote location. Julian later called it a “glittering servitude.” [Kirsch, 205] However, Julian pursued the study of Hellenic philosphy and religion in secret. When his ferocious relative Constantius somewhat loosened his leash, Julian journeyed to Eleusis and other pagan sanctuaries to be initiated into the Mysteries. A bishop who loved the old culture gave him tours of temples in Asia Minor. Julian observed precautions of utmost secrecy, giving no hint of his pagan allegiance. His life depended upon it.

Emperor Constantius had killed his own brothers and Julian’s family in the bloodbaths with which he secured his throne. Now, with conflicts erupted on the borders, Constantius realized that he needed a trustworthy ally to help him control his vast empire. His only remaining kinsmen were his nephews Gallus and Julian. In 351, the emperor sent for them. He elevated Gallus to the imperial rank of Caesar, but soon had him killed. Julian was liberated from his confinement, but also at greater risk than ever.

Dispatched to Gaul, Julian proved to be a skilled general. (As admirable as Julian was in other respects, his tactics were the usual imperial Roman methods of pillage, burning villages, and taking captives.) It wasn’t long before Constantius felt threatened by his cousin’s success, and it became clear to Julian that his life depended on seizing control of the western empire. His troops in Gaul hailed Julian as emperor and, with no diadem to hand, crowned him with a brass torque. [Kirsch, 230-34] His pagan contemporary Ammianus Marcellinus recounted how the Gauls of Vienne welcomed him with elation: “And a blind old woman, when in reply to her question ‘Who was entering the city?’ she received for answer ‘Julian the Cæsar,’ cried out that “He would restore the temples of the gods.” [Historia, XIV, viii, 22] And he did—for the short years remaining to him.

Constantius reproached Julian as a traitor for taking the purple, after all his generosity toward him when he was a poor orphan. Julian retorted, “Orphan! Does my father’s murderer reproach me with being an orphan?” [Kirsch, 237] It turned out that he never had to face the armies of Constantius. A precognitive dream told him that the emperor would die before he reached Constantinople, and that happened. [Zosimus, online] He became sole emperor, and immediately came out as a pagan. He revoked all the decrees against pagans, lifted the ban on the temples, and proclaimed a policy of religious tolerance and liberty. Like most of his writings, it has not survived, but Ammianus Marcellinus tells us:

Although Julian from the earliest days of his childhood had been more inclined towards the worship of the pagan gods, and as he gradually grew up burned with longing to practise it, yet because of his many reasons for anxiety he observed certain of its rites with the greatest possible secrecy. But when his fears were ended, and he saw that the time had come when he could do as he wished, he revealed the secrets of his heart and by plain and formal decrees ordered the temples to be opened, victims brought to the altars, and the worship of the gods restored.

And in order to add to the effectiveness of these ordinances, he summoned to the palace the bishops of the Christians, who were of conflicting opinions, and the people, who were also at variance, and politely advised them to lay aside their differences, and each fearlessly and without opposition to observe his own beliefs. [Ammianus, Res Gestae 22. 5. 1-3 ]

Julian’s Edict of Tolerance in 360 was destroyed, but he said of Christians: “I declare by the gods that I do not want them to be put to death, or unjustly beaten, or to suffer anything else.” He ended state stipends and tax exemptions for churchmen, and lifted the exile imposed on heterodox Christians. This last pagan emperor was friendly to the Jews, who he felt had much in common with pagans, except for monotheism. (There were also the matters of dietary law and circumcision.) “We have all else in common—temples, sacred precincts, altars for sacrifices, and purifications, in all of which we do not differ from one another.”

Julian told the Jewish people that “everywhere, during my reign, you may have security of mind.” He threw denunciations against Jews into the fire. He promised Jews that he would remove the extra taxes that had been imposed on them, allow them to return to Jerusalem, and authorize the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem. [Kirsch, 259-261; Geger, 94] Imagine, if that had been allowed to happen, how different the world would be today.

The new emperor dismissed the old guard of the imperial palace and the secret police. He became notorious even among pagans for his classical piety, as he offered hecatomb after hecatomb (sacrifices of one hundred animals) in thanks for his deliverance, and that of the pagan cause. He regarded Christians as “atheists” (they returned the favor) and deplored the custom of cherishing the relics of martyrs, or as he put it, “corpse pieces.” His book Against the Galileans was destroyed; as with so many other pagan works, only a few excerpts were preserved in Christian responses. [Kirsch, 279] Some of Julian’s writings on pagan religion have survived, including his Oration to the Mother of the Gods:

Who then is the mother of the Gods? She is indeed the fountain of the intellectual and demiurgic [creative] Gods who govern the apparent series of things: or certainly a deity producing things, and at the same time subsisting with the mighty Jupiter; a Goddess mighty, after one mighty, and conjoined with the mighty demiurgus of the world. She is the mistress of all life, and the cause of all generation, who most easily confers perfection on her productions, and generates and fabricates things without passion, in conjunction with the father of the universe. She is also a virgin, without a mother, the assessor of Jupiter, and the true parent of all the Gods: for receiving in herself the causes of all the intelligible supermundane Gods, she becomes a fountain to the intellectual Gods. [in Julian, Taylor translation 1797: 114-15, online]

As emperor, Julian tried to organize and systematize pagan religion in order to compete with the church hierarchy and its scriptural canons. He ordered a theological compilation to be assembled—“On the Gods and the World”—and sought a unified pagan clergy that could withstand attacks from the ranked organization of the church. John Chrysostom assailed Julian for concealing his true beliefs during Constantius’ reign of terror, and called him a “sorcerer and blackguard.” He claimed that a host of magicians, enchanters, and diviners descended from all corners of the empire when Julian took the throne. [Kirsch, 255; 241; 244] Once more Chrysostom was wielding the sorcery charge against pagans. This tactic gained force as it proved to be highly effective in eroding support for religious freedom. It fueled fear that could easily be turned to aggression.

Orthodox Christians called this emperor “Julian the Apostate,” and were convinced that he would slaughter them. Instead, as it became clear that the pagan emperor was not set on vengeance, bishop Gregory of Nazianzus complained that he had deprived them of “the honor of martyrdom.” [Holland-Smith, 87ff; 102] But Julian maintained that the Christians owed more to him than the preceding Christian emperor, since during the reign of Constantius “many of them were banished, persecuted, and imprisoned, and many of the so-called heretics were executed... all of this has been reversed in my reign; the banished are allowed to return, and confiscated goods have been returned to the owners.” He added that he would not coerce anyone to religious belief or actions: “we allow none of them to be dragged to the [pagan] altars unwillingly...” Christians were free to meet and pray according to their custom “and for the future, let all people live in harmony.” [Bettenson, 20]

But the pagan restoration of religious toleration was short-lived. The signs were evil. Julian sent an emissary to the oracle of Delphi, who returned with an unenigmatic message:

Tell the king, dirt lies heavy on Daidalos' hall
Phoebus has no cell, nor mantic laurel, nor place to speak
Even the speaking spring is choked and dead. [Holland-Smith, 101]

Eunapius, Julian’s pagan biographer, recorded a prophecy by the last high priest of the Eleusinian temple of Demeter. He foretold the overthrow of the temples and of Hellenic religion:

And he also said that during his own times the temples would be ruined and sacked...
The worship of the goddesses would come to an end. [Holland-Smith, 179. Full text at www.tertullian.org/fathers/eunapius_02_text.htm ]

Although the goddesses referred to here are specifically Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis—whose sanctuary was sacked by the Goths in 396—the prediction also foretold the suppression of goddess veneration across western Asia, north Africa, and much of Europe.

In 363, Julian's reign was ended by a spear as he led troops into battle in Persia. (Both ancients and moderns have speculated that the spear had been wielded by a Christian legionary rather than a Persian.) The legions now raised Jovian to the purple. He precipitously ceded extensive territories to Persia so that he could hurry back to Rome to secure his position. Jovian quickly revoked Julian’s edicts, once again decreeing Christianity as the state religion. His first edict promised toleration, but left “magical rites” outside the circle of legal religion (again implying that pagan religion was “sorcery.” Soon Jovian ordered the burning of the great Library of Antioch. Next, he proclaimed the death penalty for people who made offerings to their ancestral gods. And finally he decreed that anyone who took part in a pagan ceremony, public or private, would be put to death. [“Jovian.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jovian_(emperor)]

Jovian never made it back to Rome. He was succeeded by Valentinian, who appointed his brother Valens as co-emperor and ruler of the eastern empire. Valens faced numerous challenges to his power, and reacted with vicious repression against anyone who might threaten it. Such fears had prompted earlier imperial edicts against divination, astrology, and magic, even in pagan times, but Valens took the repression to new, unheard-of extremes. Ammianus Marcellinus recounts how officers searching through the papers of a high-ranking citizen found an astrological chart labeled Valens. They accused the man of having designs on the emperor, while he protested that the chart belonged to his own deceased brother. He offered to prove it, but never got the chance. The judges “put him to the torture and cruelly slew him.” [Historia, 29. 22. 7]
 

The First Mass Persecutions of Pagans

The persecutions resumed with greater ferocity under the eastern emperor Valens (364-74). One incident involved a divination intended to discover who the successor to Valens might be. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, the first prosecution unfolded from an arrest of the commoner Palladius on unrelated charges. To take the heat off himself, he offered up allegations about the divination, precipitating the arrest of several other men. Under brutal torture, these men said that the name spelled out was “Theod,” and that they settled on the eminent Gaul Theodorus as the likely candidate. (His prominence gave they a likely name to put forward, someone prominent they had heard of; as it happened, it was Theodosius who succeeded Valens.) The emperor ordered Theodorus brought from afar, as “the racks were made taut, the leaden weights were brought out along with the cords and the scourges.” [Ammianus, Historia 29. 1. 23] They tortured many prisoners, then put them all to death by strangling—except for the young philosopher Simonides, who was burned.

And after him, in the days that followed, a throng of men of almost all ranks, whom it would be difficult to enumerate by name, involved in the snares of calumny, wearied the arms of the executioners after being first crippled by rack, lead, and scourge. [Historia 29. 1. 38]

Ammianus recorded a long list of magnates who were tortured, burned, beheaded, or exiled. Zosimus tells us that their number swelled as opportunists gained a foothold and made their fortunes through denunciations and persecutions: “All that they accused were either put to death without legal proof, or fined by being deprived of their estates; their wives, children and other dependants being reduced to extreme necessity.” [Zosimus, Historia Nova 4. 14. 4]

The account of Zosimus, two hundred years on, is somewhat different. He says that Theodorus was tricked by men posing as sage magicians, who induced him to participate in a divinatory ritual to discover who the successor to emperor Valens would be. They set up a tripod in which the letters Th E O D appeared, and gave Theodorus to understand that he would be the next emperor. He got excited and blabbed, which doomed him. But John Holland Smith thinks that this whole affair was a setup cooked up to entrap the sophist Maximus, who had been a teacher and advisor to emperor Julian. They called him in as an expert witness when Theodorus was arrested and tortured. Maximus knew his goose was cooked, so he let out all stops and prophesied Valens’ death. He was taken to Ephesus to be executed, for fear of an uproar in Antioch. [Holland-Smith, 139] They also burned the philosophers Patricias the Lydian, Hilarius of Phrgyia, and Andronicus of Caria. [Zosimus; [Eunapius, 453-7; Chuvin, 50-2] Another wave of persecutions was propelled by the imperial treasurer Fortunatus, starting with the torture-trial of a soldier for sorcery.

The prisons were so packed that guards feared they would not be able to prevent a breakout. [Zosimus 4. 14. 3] The evil of torture trials cut a swath like those of later witch hunts, but with this difference: a large number of the victims came from the ranks of elite men. The eastern empire was swept by arrests, torture, property seizure and executions. The wearing of amulets or possession of books written by pagans counted as sufficient evidence of magical activity. [Lea, 398] As the pagan historian Zosimus wrote, “the Emperor became suspicious of all individuals known to be philosophers or have any kind of culture.” [Holland-Smith, 137-9]

Informers ran no personal risk, but were rewarded. Zosimus wrote, “All that they accused were either put to death without legal proof, or find by being deprived of their estates, their wives, children, and other dependents, being reduced to extreme necessity… A universal confusion was occasioned by these proceedings, which prevailed to such a degree, that the informers, together with the rabble, would enter without control into the house of any person, pillage it of all they could find, and deliver the wretched proprietor to those who are appointed as executioners…” The leader of these hunts was the imperial proconsul Festus, described by Zosimus as expert “in every sort of cruelty,” who killed many people without trial, and forced others to flee for their lives.

The hunt reached such a frenzied pitch that even senators were being accused and tortured. The sorcery charge had become a political tool, carrying the penalty of death or exile. [Flint, 16] The corrupt tax collector Maximinus was able to ruin uncooperative senators by accusing them of patronizing magicians and poisoners. He and others were busy confiscating estates and wealth from very wealthy men. The emperor denied any knowledge of these goings-on, but eventually was obliged to kick Maximinus upstairs. By 371 Valens was executing and imprisoning multitudes of philosophers, sophists, astrologers and pagans with real or imagined ties to the late emperor Julian. The charge was sedition, but accusations of magic figured in heavily. Antioch was turned into a “slaughterhouse.” [Chuvin, 50-2]

Terror reigned throughout the East; all who had libraries burned them. The prisons were insufficient to contain the prisoners, and in some towns it was said that fewer were left than taken. [Lea 1957: 398]

These severe persecutions appear above history's water line only because so many prominent men were involved. The fates of ordinary pagans and street diviners remain untraceable, unseen. One exception was an old healer that Ammianus Marcellinus mentions. It was her misfortune to have treated the child of Festus, the proconsul of Asia and a leader of the persecutions: “There was a certain simple old woman who was wont to cure intermittent fever by a gentle incantation, whom he put to death as a witch, after she had been summoned, with his consent, to his daughter, and had cured her.” [Historia, 29. 2, 26] For this good deed, the old woman had to die.

Ammianus described how extreme the official repression of magic and amulets had become: “if anyone wore on his neck a charm against the quartan ague or any other disease, or if by any information laid by his ill-wishers he was accused of having passed by a sepulchre at nightfall, and therefore of being a sorcerer... he was found guilty and condemned to death.” [Historia 19. 12. 14] Any person known to have consulted the oracles was at risk of being tried and tortured on charges of seeking to overthrow the emperor, as happened to the consul Simplicius.

The philosopher Demetrius Chytras, who managed to gain release by withstanding long bouts of torture. “But as accusations extended more widely, involving numbers without end in their snares, many perished; some with their bodies mangled on the rack; others were condemned to death and confiscation of their goods; while Paulus kept on inventing groundless accusations...” One such unfortunate was the philosopher Caeranius, who was tortured and executed for writing a letter to his wife that included the phrase, “Take care and adorn the gate.” [Historia, XIX, xii, 9 and 12-13]

And that wives too might not have leisure to weep over the miseries of their husbands, officers were sent at once to seal up the house of any one who was condemned, and who, while examining all the furniture, slipped in among it old women's incantations, or ridiculous love-tokens, contrived to bring destruction on the innocent; and then, when these things were mentioned before the bench, where neither law, nor religion, nor equity were present to separate truth from falsehood, those whom they thus accused, though utterly void of offence, without any distinction, youths, and decrepit old men, without being heard in their defence, found their property confiscated, and were hurried off to execution in litters. [Historia 29. 2. 3]


Amulets and charms

The church hierarchy was fighting a losing battle everywhere to suppress the widespread use of amulets and charms. In Syria, John Chrysostom fulminated against the custom of “periapts [protective amulets] and bells hung from the hand and the scarlet thread.” [Cheetham and Smith, 991] He “praised as a martyr a steadfast Christian mother who would prefer to see a sick child or husband die rather than use an amulet.” [Meaney, 8?] In Anatolia, Gregory of Nazianzen condemned the wearing of periammata, “the bits of colored thread round wrists, arms and necks; and moon-shaped plates of gold, silver or cheaper material which foolish old women fasten upon infants.” [Select Orations of St Gregory Nazianzen, in Meaney, 28] (In the long run, the old women won this battle, because they are still tying red threads to infants’ wrists to this day.)

Women would fasten amulets or herbs on their children or relatives with praecantatio, “enchantments,” as Augustine, Quintillian, Isidore, and Pelagius attest. In Algeria, Augustine disparaged “amulets and cures” involving incantations or writing characters, or “hanging or tying on or even dancing in a fashion certain articles... and these remedies they call by the less offensive name of physica, so as to appear not to be engaged in superstitious observances, but to be taking advantage of the forces of nature.” He gave examples of amulets such as “earrings on the top of each ear, or the rings of ostrich bones on the fingers,” or actions such as holding the left thumb in the right hand to stop hiccups. [De Doctrina Christiana, II, 20.30] In the end, the clergy had to yield to the demand for protective amulets, devising images of saints or other Christianized adaptations of ancient customs.

Bishops had been preaching and publishing diatribes against pagan magic since the 3^rd century. Tertullian called it “deception.” The polemic of Minutius Felix against the “deceit” of the spirits within consecrated statues still wafts a faint fragrance of lost culture: “They inspire the breasts of the soothsayers by breathing on them; they quicken the fibres of entrails; they govern the flights of birds; they rale lots, they give out oracles; they are always confounding false things with true...” [Cheetham and Smith, 1076] Cyprian of Carthage went so far as to accuse healers of sending diseases to “obtain credit for a cure simply by ceasing to afflict.” [Cheetham and Smith, 1076] The sorcery charge again.

Already in 315, the Council of Ankara issued a decree against “those who profess soothsaying” and follow pagan customs, such as bringing magical specialists into their houses to “discover remedies or perform lustrations.” [Cheetham and Smith, 1076] In 387, Gaudentius of Brescia denounced a whole range of customs as “idolatry.” These need to be broken down a bit. The first is Veneficia, which my source translates as “witchcrafts,” though it literally means “poisoning.” But the word was broadly used to refer to any ceremonial use of herbs, and for medicinal, contraceptive, abortifacient uses—as well as actual poisoning. Needless to say, those are all very different things. But in tme the meaning of “poisoning” overshadowed any medical connotation, and led to the meaning of “sorcery.”

Praecantatio means incantation, “singing before, or over.” Suballigature are ceremonial knots tied on the body, for protective or curative purposes. Vanitates, explained as “phylacteries,” must have been amulets or talismans that were worn. Gaudentius lists various kinds of divination: “auguries, lots, the observing of omens.” Finally, “parental obsequies” encompassed more than simply funerals, probably referring to offerings, lights, traditional feasts at graves, and other ritual observances for the dead. [Cheetham and Smith, 1076; 991] Ancestor veneration had religious roots of great antiquity, and people were simply unwilling to give it up, as will be discussed later.

"Pagans" and "paganism"

Animacy thrived in the countryside, since Christianity was still mainly an urban phenomenon. The very name “pagan” comes from a Latin name for rural people, whose adherence to the local deities made the word synonymous with “non-Christian.” So Valens' co-ruler Valentinian condemned the religio paganorum: “religion of the countryfolk.” [McNeill and Gamer, 39; Kelly, 364] Paganus first carried a connotation of “local,” from the administrative term pagus as “district,” and an even older usage, a “boundary stake.” Pagani meant “people of the place,” or “peasants,” and was “consistently pejorative.” [Chuvin, 7-9] “In military terminology, paganus meant “civilian.” [Kirsch, 15] Under the Christian empire, the word acquired a new meaning, designating all others than Christians and Jews. [Hyde, 221]

Another word for “pagan,” gentile, was derived from the Latin word for clan, gens, in an allusion to ancient traditions handed from one generation to the next. “Gentiles took a new direction in the Vulgate translation of Hebrew goyim, the (non-Jewish) “nations,” so that for Christians it came to connote pagan Others. (I seem to remember that Marvin Harris pointed out that in the time of Yeshua, people referred to the Galilee as “Galil ha-Goyim” because so many pagans lived there.) “Hellene” was used for those who followed Greek religion, especially for the educated papan elite. [Chuvin, 7. He contrasts (9) the pagani as “people of the place” to the “increasingly Christian” alieni, those who came from elsewhere.] That included philosophical schools such as Stoics, Neoplatonists, and Epicureans.

Valentinian banned the worship of Kybele and visits to her temple. [Conner, 125] He decreed the death penalty for “wicked prayers or magic preparations or funereal sacrifices” by night, including invoking spirits through chant. [Kelly, 50] Again, graveside observances by families came under fire. The pagan proconsul Praetextatus courageously protested that this law threatened “the most sacred mysteries” of Eleusis and other pagan colleges. But the reprieve he won was only temporary. [Zosimus, in Holland-Smith, 124]

Gratian ordered the Vestal fire extinguished, again. Soon Romans were blaming outbreaks of famine, plague, war, and deaths in the emperor's family on this destruction of Rome’s national hearth. In 384 a famous debate took place before Valentinian II over a proposal to restore the altar of Dea Victoria in the Senate (which Constantius had removed in 357). The pagan orator Symmachus said, “To be held in friendship, honor and love is better than to dominate.” He spoke for many in attributing Rome's misfortunes to the outlawing of the old rites: “And what has followed from that? General starvation.” [Holland-Smith, 152]

Symmachus pleaded before the Senate for a return to religious tolerance, saying that the divine mind gave different traditions to various places and peoples, who have a great love for their customs. He described Rome as an old woman who was defending the right to religious freedom, to “the ancestral ceremonies.” It is no matter what path is taken in seeking the truth, said Symmachus: “one cannot reach so vast a Mystery by one way alone.” [Peters 1977: 69]

Archbishop Ambrose retorted, “They speak of God and worship idols.” He declared that the pagan gods had not protected Rome from barbarian raids (a failing soon to be surpassed by the Christian god when the Goths took Rome and sacked it). And why had it taken the gods so long to avenge the closing of the temples? If ancient custom was so excellent, there was no reason for Romans to adopt “the foreign rites of an alien superstition,” by which Ambrose meant not Christianity, but the adopted veneration of Cybele and Caelestis. As for the altar of Victoria, “Is it to be borne that a heathen should sacrifice and a Christian be present?” All this is an attack on “the faith,” which would tolerate no others. Unsurprisingly, the archbishop prevailed. [“Ambrose: Dispute with Symmachus,” online]

The high clergy's embrace of state control of religion should not tempt us to forget that pagan imperial Rome was an authoritarian system built on patriarchy, colonialism and slavery. Symmachus’ defense of paganism was couched in the old assumptions of Roman superiority over “barbarians,” patricians over slaves. Similar ideas were expressed by other elite pagans such as Celsus and Eunapius, who mocked Christians for worshipping slaves and criminals that had been condemned by the empire. Elite pagan men also made contemptuous reference to the supersititio of “silly women” and “peasants.” [MacMullen, 99] Class faultlines cut through both the pagan and Christian worlds. On both sides, it was the views of the literate elite that were recorded, and should not be mistaken for the whole.

In an earlier volume, I show that pagan Rome was profoundly patriarchal, and how women had managed to breach many of the old strictures and structures of male privilege by imperial times. [Vol IV, Ancient Italy, forthcoming] Later, however, women lost ground to a backlash, as the (pagan) emperor Diocletian reinstated the old norms of male tutelage and female legal minority. By the late 4^th century, the momentum of patriarchal retrenchment clearly lay with the emerging institutions of the Church. These were themselves shaped by a revivification of the old sexual double standard, grounded in conservative Roman codes of female veiling, silence, obedience, and the univira (one-man woman). Now these codes would govern Christian women, especially nuns and the wives of priests. The demand for priestly celibacy was seven centuries in the future.
 

Destruction of the Temples

Toward the end of the 300s, the Church was in a position to stage a full-scale attack on the temples. Bishops took a leading role in inciting destruction of the ancient Mediterranean heritage. John Holland Smith documented this process in detail: “The monks and hermits formed the spearhead of the Christian revolutionary army. Often, they were invited into new areas by local bishops especially to undertake the ‘depaganisation’ of the place.” [Smith 1976: 162] They were backed up by government officials and soldiers. The Syrian orator Libanius described how “men in black”—monks—“rush upon the temple, carrying baulks of timber, stones, and fire,” and knock down roofs, undermine walls, throw down altars. “They go about in gangs, attacking each village in turn.” He describes their pillage of wealth and of land. [Smith 1976: 66]

Archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria moved to demolish the great temple of Serapis in Egypt, but popular resistance prevented it for three years. The Syrian bishop Marcellus and his monks tried to level the temples of Apamea and Edessa. Both these attempts were met with resistance from the common people, who were eventually “silenced by the name and authority of the emperor.” [Gibbon, 263] In real terms, they were restrained by the presence of troops and the threat of being proscribed: declared enemies of the state whose property could be confiscated, and who might be executed. [Smith 1976: 173] Monks moved in to occupy the sites, to prevent people from carrying out any ceremonies there.

In 385 emperor Theodosius sent the praetorian prefect Cynegius to stamp out sacrifice and divination in the Eastern empire. Cynegius exceeded his orders, demolishing temples in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. [Holland-Smith, 163] He demolished most of the massive Syrian temple at Apamea. Its columns were so colossal—26 feet in diameter—that he was only able to overturn them by undermining the bases of three of them with wood beams and burning them. When these columns fell, they caused the structure to collapse with a deafening crash. [Theodoret, Historia Ecclasiastica, V. 21] Cynegius also demolished all the temples at Palmyra in the Syrian desert, among which would have been the temple of Atargatis. He tore down the temple of Apollo at Didyma, where Artemis Pythia was worshipped, and where female oracles (at this place sometimes called “the Grunters”) went into shamanic states. [Holland-Smith, 31; for more detail see Dashu 2023]

In Syria and Phoenicia, the monk-turned-archbishop John Chrysostom led the charge. In 386 he preached 21 sermons against pagan statues and temples. Although he was a notorioius misogynist, he got wealthy women to donate money for the demolition of the temples of Antioch, which had so far remained intact. He attacked Artemis of Ephesus, Phrygian Kybele, and also shut down the city’s synogogues. [Smith 1976: 174-75]

A few braved the danger of speaking up for the pagans, whose cause was clearly lost. In his Defense of the Temples (circa 386) the Syrian orator Libanius pleaded with emperor Theodosius to spare the legacies of the ancients. He went to great lengths to placate the Christian emperor, “for I fear lest I should offend,” but he risked speaking, because this was the moment that would make or break the ancient heritages. Libanius lamented that black-garbed monks “who eat more than elephants, and demand a large quantity of liquor,” were demolishing the temples: 

these men, O Emperor, even whilst your law is in force, run to the temples, bringing with them wood, and stones, and iron, and when they have not these, hands and feet. Then follows a Mysian prey, the roofs are uncovered, walls are pulled down, images are carried off, and altars are overturned: the priests all the while must be silent upon pain of death. When they have destroyed one temple they run to another, and a third, and trophies are erected upon trophies...

They, therefore, spread themselves over the country like torrents, wasting the countries together with the temples: for wherever they demolish the temple of a country, at the same time the country itself is blinded, declines, and dies. For, O Emperor, the temples are the soul of the country; they have been the first original of the buildings in the country, and they have subsisted for many ages to this time; and in them are all the husbandman's hopes, concerning men, and women, and children, and oxen, and the seeds and the plants of the ground. Wherever any country has lost its temples, that country is lost... [Libanius, Pro Templis, online]

The countryside resisted. In the provinces, people rose up in protest against their demolition.

Libanius lets us in on the disputes raging in the wake of laws forbidding pagan sacrifice, which usually involved feasting at the end of the ceremony. These feasts continued, although they now had to be done without altars, or burnt offerings so as to avoid the harsh legal penalties. The orator shows the objection of Christian officials that “oxen have been killed at feasts and entertainments and merry meetings.” Libanius replies that the people do not break any of the emperor’s laws when “meeting together in some pleasant field kill a calf, or a sheep, or both, and roasting part and broiling the rest, have eaten it under a shade upon the ground... though they should have feasted together with all sorts of incense, they have not transgressed the law, even though in that feast they should all have sung and invoked the gods.”

The Syrian orator carefully constructed a hypothetical debate so as to avoid the impression of directly challenging the emperor. One character asks, “Why then do you run mad against the temples? When you cannot persuade, you use force. In this you evidently transgress your own laws.” And: “How can these men reject their fellow-subjects, differing from them in this matter? By what right do they make these incursions? How do they seize other men's goods with the indignation of the countries? How do they destroy some things, and carry off others? adding to the injury of their actions the insolence of glorying in them.”

Libanius appealed to the value of the art being destroyed, saying that such fine works of sculpture and architecture, could be used for other public purposes by the emperor. He even characterized the temples as the property of the emperor, hoping he might then protect them. 

____________________________________________________________

   KEY EVENTS IN THE WAR ON PAGANS

319-20  Divination banned, punishable by burning at stake

321         First perecution of Donatist Christians

324         Outlawing pagan sacraments (and again in 352, 356, 451)

328         Constantine strips temples of gold, silver, statues to adorn his city

333         Constantine orders courts to enforce judgments of bishops

337           Emperor baptized on deathbed

340          Constans outlaws pagan religion (Cod Theod. 16.10.2)

346           Ban on public sacrifice; imperial edicts close temples

349            Pagan revolt led by Magnentius

355            Constantius proposes death penalty for idolatry and sacrifices, temple closures

356           Sacrifice forbidden again; sack of the great temple of Serapis, Alexandria

357-58  Constantius orders burning of people who consult diviners, astrologers

361-63   Julian, last pagan emperor, attempts to restore tolerance

364           Valens persecutes ritual, philosophy; forbids night sacrifices

364            Emperor Jovian orders the burning of the great Library of Antioch

367-74  Imperial terror persecuting magic, learning; Maximus the Sophist executed

370            Book burnings across the Eastern Empire

375            Aesclepion of Epidauros, a famous healing and dreaming temple, closed down

380            Decree to hand over all heterodox church buidings to the orthodox priesthood

380s          Nemeton at Argentomagus in the Cotswalds, Britain, destroyed and descreated

380s           North Italian bishops raged against Diana

381            Sacrifice banned at all shrines. Christians converted to pagans to be punished

381            Constantinople: temple of Aphrodite is made a brothel, those of Sun and Artemis, stables.

382            Divination at shrines banned. Temples surveilled for any “surreptitious oracles’

384-88  Cynegius destroys temples in Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt

386             Libanius appeals to the emperor “In Defense of the Temples”

387             Pagan Alexandria rises up to defend the beseiged Serapeum; street battles

390             The Goths sack Rome

391              Temple sacrifices and prayers prohibited, again. Symmachus exiled for defending pagans.

391               Oracle of Delphi shut down. Seige of the Serapeum in Alexandria; demolished, with its library

392              Prohibition of private sacrifices, home rites. Mysteries of Samothrace closed.

393              Altar of Victory temporarily restored in the Senate.

383              Theodosius bans Olympics, Pythian Games as pagan; temples of Olympia sacked

394              Hasty conversion of the Roman Senate

395              Emperor Honorius bans pagan sacrifices, again

396              Greek Mysteries halted; Goths sack Eleusis and many other Greek temples

396              Arcadius decrees that paganism is high treason; priesthoods imprisoned

398               Order for destruction of all temples; eastern counts to use stones for roads, bridges, ramparts

399               Temples destroyed in north Africa

401              Temples in Carthage destroyed, pagans killed

405-6           Demolition of the great temple of Artemis of Ephesus

405               Temple destruction in Palestine, especially Gaza, and in Cyprus

400-46  Monks cut down sacred trees in Bithynia (NW Turkey)

407                Burning of the Sibylline Oracles (not the originals, which were long gone)

409               Honorius banned astrologers

410                 Paganism outlawed completely (Cod Theod. 16. 10. 20-21)

414                  Cyril of Alexandria destroyed Isis temple at Menouthis and christinized site

415                   Mob of fanatics assassinate eminent pagan philospher Hypatia of Alexandria

416                   Repetition of edict outlawing paganism (Cod Theod. 16. 10. 22)

423                   All pagans in the Eastern Empire proscribed

429                   Theodosius II declares pagan religion “demon worship,” prison for pagans

429                   Sack of the Parthenon

435                  Edict orders city senates to demolish temples and all remnants of paganism in the East

435                   Theodosius II decrees death penalty for pagans and heretics 
                 
448                   Porphyry’s critique of Christianity burned by the emperor’s decree

450                   Destruction of the temples at Aphrodisias, renamed “City of the Cross”

480                   Colossal statue of Athena in the Parthenon destroyed. Later renamed as Church of the Theotokos

482-84  Pagans participate in the Isaurian rebellion of Illous, put down in 497

486                   Hunt for underground pagans in Alexandria, arrests, torture, executions; statues burned in Menouthis; a huge pyre of them burned in Alexandria

500                   Zosimus writes Historia Nova, last surviving pagan book

523                   Justinian closes the Academy of Athens (other sources give 531 or 532)

527                   Justinian burns Manichaeans at the stake in Constantinople

537                   Provincial governor of Nubia closed the temple of Isis at Philae, sent statues to Byzantium

542                   John of Ephesus authorized to forcibly convert pagans in Lydia, Caria, Phrygia, destroying temples, paying converts in gold to be baptized and help destroy temples, icons, altars, trees

580           Tiberius puts down Jewish rising; hunts pagans in Bekaa valley: killings, torture, crucifixions

589                   Council of Toledo: priests and magistrates to search out pagans and shrines

609                   Pantheon made into a church, Sancta Maria ad Martyres

 

THE THEODOSIAN LAWS

The appeal of Libanius to the emperor failed. Under Theodosius, the Church's triumph was complete. A 391 edict from Milan decreed, “No one is to go to the sanctuaries, walk through the temples, or raise his eyes to statues created by the labor of man.” Another edict the following year forbade veneration of the old gods and the ancestors. [Chuvin, 65] Theodosius halted pagan sacrifices in Rome, though not yet in the provinces, and seized public funds set aside for them. His prohibition of pagan worship defined offerings of incense, lights, garlands, wine libations or animal sacrifices as high treason against the state, to be penalized by confiscation of the house or estate where they were performed. [Holland-Smith, 183-4]

But if any person should venerate, by placing incense before them, images made by the work of mortals… or should bind a tree with fillets, or should erect an altar of turf that he has dug up… this is a complete outrage against religion. [Theodosian Code, law of 392, in Pharr 1952]

Theodosius made it a crime to visit the oracles, and halted the Olympic Games. He ordered courts to overturn pagan wills, giving preference to Christian relatives, and stripped all legal rights from ex-Christians who returned to paganism. [Holland-Smith, 184] The emperor felt personally threatened by the diviners. In 385 he promised them that “more bitter punishment than used to hang over him tortured by crucifixion awaits those who contrary to justice try to explore the truth of present and future things.” [Holland-Smith, 161] (The terrible irony of making such a threat in the name of the crucified Yeshua escaped him.)

The favored legal terminology was shifting from magia, which had some prestige, to maleficium, meaning “evildoing,” now increasingly being used as a synonym for “sorcery.” (The Latin root word sortilegum originally meant divination by “casting lots”—literally “reading or gathering lots”—and even connoted “prophetic, oracular.”) [Dashu 2016: 62; https://latin-dictionary.net/definition/35394/sortilegus-sortilega-sortilegum] A gloss in the Theodosian Code interpreted the word diviner as “the invoker of demons.” [Flint, 17]

             In 394 Theodosius called on the Senate to decide whether Christianity or paganism would be the empire's official religion. He had already forced the pagan spokesman Symmachus into exile. Gibbon described the “hasty conversion of the Senate,” with sympathizers of the old religion under heavy pressure to vote with the emperor. Aristocratic Romans rushed to convert, “impatient to strip themselves of their pontifical garment, to cast the skin of the old serpent, to assume the snowy robes of baptismal innocence.” [Prudentius, in Gibbon, 247-8] Their motivation was not religious conviction, but the urgent imperative to preserve their status and wealth. The political and economic costs of acting otherwise were only too clear.

A German commander fomented yet another a pagan revolt in the west, appointing a puppet emperor Eugenius to proclaim the end of Christian domination. In 394 the armies of Theodosius defeated the insurgents at the Frigidus river in northeastern Italy. After that, the crackdown on pagans grew even more severe. This was one of four known failed pagan revolts mounted between 360 to 470. [MacMullen, 25] In Asia Minor, many pagans rallied to the rebellion of Illous (482-84), but they too were crushed. [Chuvin, 96-7]

In 397 the emperor ordered the eastern counts to take stones from demolished temples to build roads, bridges, and fortifications. [Chuvin, 75] The following year, the Edict of Damascus decreed that all temples in the empire “be razed... thrown down and annihilated...” [Holland-Smith, 195] First in the eastern, then in the western empire, the state destroyed consecrated images, seized temple property, burned “Sibylline” books. (These were not the legendary books of the Cumaean Sibyl, lost in a long-ago temple fire at Rome, but much more recent Greek divinatory texts.) The emperors suppressed the Eleusinian Mysteries and silenced the Oracle at Delphi (as one of the last Pythias had foretold) and the oracles of Dodona and other sanctuaries. Church fathers converted old temples into sepulchres for Christian martyrs, or desecrated them by making them into stables and latrines.

Anticipating a violent reaction in Spain, co-emperors Arcadius and Honorius decided it would be unwise to destroy pagan temples and statues there. In 399 they issued a special edict sparing the Spanish sanctuaries, and allowing demolition of temples to go forward only where it was possible to do so “without uproar and tumults.” [McKenna, 42-3] Then they are to be “thrown down and annihilated,” so that “superstition” can be eliminated.” [Smith 1976: 195. He gives 398 as the year, not 399. He also mentions that an oracle had foretold that 398 would be the year that Christianity would end; didn’t work out that way.]

Bishop John Chrysostom systematically tore down the temples of Artemis, Kybele, and other deities, as well as Syrian synagogues. Syrians and Lebanese rioted in protest. Fanatical monks played a leading part in these attacks, and in repressing pagan religion in general. [Holland-Smith, 168-75] They led mobs in attacks on pagans in Italy, North Africa, especially Egypt, Thrace, Syria and around the eastern empire. [MacMullen, 31] In 401 came the demolition of the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient Mediterranean. John Chrysostom, the patriarch of Constantinople, had its fine marbles burned to produce lime for cement, and robbed its great stones to construct other buildings. Around the same time came reports of monks pillaging temples in the hills of Lebanon. Some of them were killed by the outraged peasantry. [Chuvin, 75; “The Destruction of Pagan Temples”: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/greece/paganism/temple.html]

Gaza was another pagan stronghold. When the bishop visited, the populace burned noxious substances and scattered thorns and garbage on the road. In 402 the bishop called in imperial troops to destroy the city's eight temples. [Chuvin, 77] He ordered their stones to be used to pave a highway, but pagans refused to walk on them. [Moore, 47] Gaza “long remained a pagan city,” keeping up old festivals such as the Rosalia. [Chuvin, 20, 78] The Brumalia festival was still being celebrated in the year 700. [MacMullen, 39]

In Tunisia, the temples of Carthage were destroyed in 399, all except the mile-long temple of Tanit Caelestis. The bishop of Carthage sat on the throne of Caelestis and declared that her temple was now a cathedral. But the pagans clung to a prophecy that the goddess would restore her temple. Augustine marveled, “How great was the power of the goddess Caelestis in Carthage!” [Chuvin, 73] The people revered her as the “Lady,” “Most Holy,” “Eternal,” “Mother of Heaven.” It proved impossible to convert her temple to a cathedral. The bishop discovered that large numbers of those attending church services were actually there to worship Caelestis, as Salvian of Marseilles related. So in 421 the bishop finally ordered the building to be razed, a task that required calling in armed imperial troops to quell popular resistance. [Chuvin, 73-5; Holland-Smith, 229; MacMullen, 25; 53; 176 n. 83.]

Egyptians mounted the stiffest resistance to the Roman edicts. They fought bloody street battles to defend the temples of Alexandria against mobs led by bishop Theophilus. The greatest was the battle for the Serapium, whose defenders held out for three years. In 391 soldiers read an imperial order for its destruction but, still fearing divine retribution, they hesitated to begin demolition. Their commanders prevailed and the Serapium was razed, but only after stiff opposition. The pagan Eunapius raged against “the abominable ones” who destroyed the temples and stole the statues and offerings. “For among them, every man is given the power of a tyrant who has a black robe and is prepared to behave badly in public.” He wrote that only the floors remained, because the stones were too heavy to move. [Eunapius, 421-3; Smith 1976: 170-73] Monks took over the ruins of the Serapium to prevent people from worshipping there.

One of the defenders of the Serapium was Antoninus, son of the philosopher and seeress Sosipatra of Pergamum, in northwest Asia Minor. He “foretold to all his followers that after his death the temple would cease to be, and even the great and holy temples of Serapis would pass into formless darkness and be transformed, and that a fabulous and unseemly gloom would hold sway over the fairest things on earth.” [Eunapius, 416-7]

Sosipatra of Pergamum

When she was five years old, according to her biographer Eunapius, two aged travellers took over care of the vineyard at her family's country estate near Ephesus. The prodigious harvest they produced earned them an invitation to the family table. The mysterious wanderers said that what they had done with the grapes was as nothing compared to what theycould achieve with young Sosipatra in five years, if the father consented. So he gave the child into their custody, “and into what mysteries they initiated her no one knew, and with what religious rite they consecreated the girl was not revealed...”

When her father returned, Sosipatra was able to tell him all that had happened on his journey, even what had been said, “as though she had been driving with him.” The astonished father asked the old men who they were. They replied that they were Chaldeans (which had become a synonym for magi, astrologers and diviners). Casting a sleep on the father, the teachers gave Sosipatra garments of initiation and a chest of books, and departed. This would have been in the early 4^th century.

Sosipatra learned all “the works of the poets, philosophers, and orators,” and was able to explain the most difficult works with ease and clarity. Her fame spread, and students flocked to her. She married the eminent Eustatius, who although a pagan, had been appointed as ambassador to the king of Persia. Eunapius observed, "Sosipatra... by her surpassng wisdom made her own husband seem inferior and insignificant." She foretold to Eustatius that she would bear three children, who would attain divine but not worldly happiness, and predicted how many years he himself would live. The biographer added that “her words had the same force as an immutable oracle,” since everything turned out as Sosipatra had predicted. (This emphasis on seership is not characteristic of classical philosphers.)

In her later years, Sosipatra married another eminent philosopher, Aedesius. “In her own home Sosipatra held a chair of philosophy that rivalled his... [and the students] positively adored and revered the woman's inspired teaching.” Like Hypatía, Sosipatra had to fob off an inflamed student, Philometer, who was suspected of using love magic on her. The famous theurgist Maximus performed a counter-ritual. Though no one else had been present, Sosipatra was able to describe his ceremony and the omens it revealed. Maximus was awestruck at “the woman's divine nature.”

Some time after, Sosipatra was delivering an inspired discourse on the soul. She suddenly broke off, exclaiming that Philometer had been in an accident. Her description of the overturning of his carriage and his injuries also proved accurate in every detail. [Eunapius, 395- 415] Little more information about Sosipatra survives beyond these admiring stories from Eunapius. Her prophecies were so famous that a generation later, the Algerian bishop Augustine still struggled to account for them. [Lupher, online] Augustine struggled to explain away the known accuracy of pagan prophecies, including that of the destruction of the Serapeum, as “the divination of demons.” [Flint, 152]

The Serapium was razed in 391, the year after Antoninus died. The truth of his predictions was striking even to Christians. Augustine struggled to explain its accuracy in his essay On the Divination of Demons. [Flint, 152] These events were not forgotten; centuries later, John of Niku wrote: “And in those days the orthodox inhabitants of Alexandria were filled with zeal and they collected a great quantity of wood and burned the place of the pagan philosophers.” [Chronicle 84.45] After demolition of the Serapeum, Rufinus tells us, the bishops called for temples and shrines to be destroyed “throughout every Egyptian city, fort, village, rural district, riverbank, even the desert, wherever shrines could be found...” [MacMullen, 53]

In 414 bishop Cyril of Alexandria ordered destruction of the famous Isis sanctuary at Menouthis. Recognizing that people streamed to this shrine for healing, he set up a substitute shrine to Christian martyrs. Cyril made this displacement strategy explicit in his dedication of the new martyrion. People were telling him they wanted guidance: “No one dreams for us, no one says to those who come, ‘The Mistress has said, do thus and so.’” [Oratiunculae, in MacMullen, 123-4] But the devotees of Isis were not so easily lured away. A secret new shrine sprang up, with statues rescued from another suppressed temple, the Iseum of Memphis. The sanctuary was hidden behind a wall, before which a lamp and incense and sweets were laid out. Pagans managed to keep it secret for seventy years.

But spies were everywhere. In 486, a gang of monks broke into the shrine, heaped the wooden images of Isis in a huge pyre and burned them, along with statues they had looted from homes and public baths. This act of obliteration caused a certain amount of anxiety for the perpetrators, who sat up singing psalms all night to ward off the wrath of the goddess. Some twenty camel loads of confiscated stone or metal statues were sent to Alexandria, along with the arrested pagan clergy. [Chuvin, 107-9; Moore, 22]

Two or three centuries before, an Egyptian prophecy had lamented the coming destruction of the ancient religion in the “land of sanctuaries and temples.” It said, “Oh Egypt, Egypt, nothing will remain of your cults but fables, and later, your children will not even believe them!” [Chuvin, 68] Another hermetic text foretold that Egypt would be “widowed of its gods and left destitute.” The country would be filled with strangers, and “it will be laid down under so-called laws, under pain of punishment, that all must abstain from acts of piety or cult towards the gods...” [Bernal, 129] Clement of Alexandria had also referred to these prophecies in his Exhortation to the Heathen. Now they were coming true.
 

Pagan Resistance and Persistance

At this point we have to stand back to observe that after seventy years of increasingly harsh imperial edicts, paganism had not gone away. Contrary to the old schoolbook cliché that a superior creed was universally embraced on its merits, peacefully and as a matter of course, people held to their beliefs in spite of state repression, threats, violence, and economic pressure. In some regions, they attempted to revive sanctuaries closed by imperial order, in spite of the military force arrayed against them. Processions of Isis worshippers are recorded in Rome itself as late as 394. [Cumont, 85] A 5^th century inscription still refers to an “initiate of Ceres.’ [Spaeth, 30]

Pagan festivals continued in Alexandria, where people celebrated the Night of Kore. In Edessa, although its majestic temple was demolished, Syrians continued to enact pagan myths in song and dance up to the year 500. [MacMullen, 185 n. 47; 181 n. 22] Pagan processions still moved through the marketplace in Antioch. Syrian churchmen lamented the persistence of pagan rites, especially the laying of tables for the Gadde or Tyche, the goddess of Fortune, and the lighting of torches above springs. The customs they condemned resemble the pagan observances catalogued in western European penitential books: prophecy, augury, ritual bathing, dancing, libations, and sacrificial feasts. [MacMullen, 145; 182 n. 30 and n. 28]

North Africa remained a pagan stronghold in the 4th and 5th centuries, as its rich inscriptions demonstrate. Yvon Thébert observes that Christianity had barely touched the region before the 5th century. He adds, “The extreme scarcity of overtly Christian motifs in the late mosaics is striking.” [Thébert, 397] Leading citizens continued to sponsor pagan rites and festivals. People lit lamps for Aphrodite and celebrated the solstices. Augustine, the archbishop of Hippo in Algeria, lived surrounded by pagans. He fought their influence on his own congregation, who consulted soothsayers and went to pagan temples. They participated in the festivals of Kybele, and went to the sea for ritual immersions on the summer solstice. [MacMullen, 5-6 (“Augustine did not live in a Christian world.”); 146; 175 n. 76]

Augustine inveighed against the ritual bathing of Kybele, the lavatio Berecynthiae. [Grimm, 1319] Even Christians attended her festival, in Hippo itself. The archbishop was upset that many women of his own church skipped its services to go to the celebration of Kybele. [MacMullan, 241 fn 149] He chided his congregation in revealing words: “Holding to the mother, you offended the father.” [MacMullen, 241 n. 154] Augustine preferred to offend the mother; he called Kybele “the harlot mother” and “mother, not of the gods, but of the demons.” [Vermaseren, 181] Nevertheless her worship continued throughout the provinces, and there too Christian militants assailed it.

Rural areas remained the pagan heartland: “The final retreat for the remnants of Roman paganism was largely in remote country districts where Christianity progressed slowly and ancient customs endured longest.” [Hyde, 221] In Gaul, farmers went on yoking their oxen to the ceremonial cart of Kybele for processions through their fields. [Cumont, 85, 57] Biographies of the missionaries Symporian and Simplicius show that Gaulish peasants carried goddess images in a stately procession through the fields, singing and dancing. Simplicius staged a confrontation with people walking behind a statue of Berecynthia in an ox-drawn wagon. His priestly biographer claimed that by making the sign of the cross he caused the oxen to halt and the image to fall, and the worshippers to renounce their goddess. [Berger, 34-36] The people were less easily convinced than he claimed, since they were still revering Berecynthia a century later. [McCullogh, 14]

This goddess, an avatar of Kybele brought from Anatolia via Rome, was a hardy survivor who became very popular in Gaul. In Autun and Lyons, the temples of Kybele endured as foci of pagan memory. As late as the 11th century, she is still pictured in a manuscript riding in a cart drawn by lions. People said that she streaked through the skies during storms. [Cumont, 49; Vermaseren, 72] This theme persisted into the later middle ages, when people said the same of the witches’ goddess.

Imperial officials levied heavy fines on those refusing to inform on pagan worshippers—and on authorities that would not punish them. Pagan sympathies ran deep, and the emperors found resistance to enforcing their intolerant decrees. Many people were repelled by the idea of enforcing belief and informing on neighbors' religious practices. So they engaged in passive resistance. Augustine knew of heathen landowners who encouraged pagan rites. Zeno of Verona condemned Christian landowners who winked at the ceremonies of the common folk. In many places, pagans continued their worship under the pretense of social gatherings, away from the temples:

On the days of solemn festivals they assembled in great numbers under the spreading shade of some consecrated trees; sheep and oxen were slaughtered and roasted; and this rural entertainment was sanctified by the use of incense and by the hymns which were sung in honor of the gods. [Gibbon, 260]

Maximus of Turin exhorted landowners to suppress what he called the “great evil” of idolatry on their estates and to “remove all pollution of idols from your properties.” There were to be no excuses along the lines of: “But I didn’t know about this, did not order it, had nothing to do with it.” Maximus preached that anyone who sees his tenant sacrificing, and does not prevent it, sins: “The peasant's offering defiles the lord of the land.” [Hillgarth, 54]

The second Council of Arles tried to get domini aut ordinatores (“lords or authorities”) to suppress pagan acts, destroy temples, cut down sacred trees, and beat or flog whoever resisted. [MacMullen, 68] The bishop of Arles, Caesarius, complained that members of his congregation did not want to destroy shrines, and even helped to rebuild them. He exhorted landholders to threaten their pagan tenants to cease their devotions, and if this did not stop them, he told the lords to shave their peasants’ heads, put them in manacles, and flog them. More than a century later, pope Gregory I instructed estate owners in Sardinia to incarcerate free pagans, and to flog and torture those they held in slavery. [MacMullen 199, n. 127-128, citing Caesarius Sermo 53.1 and 54.5] Using landowners to police the religion of the peasantry would continue to be a key strategy in the medieval European war on pagans.

The End of the Western Roman Empire

Gibbon identified 390-420 as the crucial years of transition, when public expressions of pagan culture were stamped out one by one by one. The laws concentrated on suppressing the outward signs of the old religions rather than explicitly requiring people to convert. Pagans continued to speak and write, where possible. “Yet the pagans of Africa complained that the times would not allow them to answer with freedom The City of God; nor does St Augustine [V. 26] deny the charge.” [Gibbon, 265] An imperial edict of Honorius (410) illustrates the danger they faced in speaking out:

Let all who act contrary to the sacred laws know that their creeping in their heretical superstitions to worship at the most remote oracle is punishable by exile and blood, should they again be tempted to assemble at such places for criminal activities.... [Holland-Smith, 218]

     Many blamed the suppression of the old deities for Rome's decline. A resurgence of pagan feeling swept Roman society in the years 392-94. The old ceremonies and sacrifices resumed in public, appealing night and day for delivery from the approaching Gothic armies. In 408 the pagan prefect of Rome performed rites to ward off the invaders. [MacMullen, 22] People vented their resentment of the state religion. Remarking on the masses' hostility to the Church—“with their ceremonies and sacrifices continually going on, the whole city was full of blasphemies”—Osorius observed that not only did pagans want to “restore the worship of idols, but the Christians also became dangerously confused.” [Chuvin, 70; Holland-Smith, 203]

     Germanic armies had been pushing back the Roman borders decade by decade. In 395 the Gothic general Alaric advanced on Athens. According to Zosimus, he saw the goddess Athena walking along the city walls, and because of this did not invade but sent peace emissaries. The city capitulated, paying tribute, and was spared being sacked. [Zosimus, online] When the Goths sacked Rome in 410, people saw the colossal goddess Roma Dea walking the city's streets, as Augustine related. [Holland-Smith, 214]

     After this event, pagan colleges made a comeback in Rome. Processions with dragon-flags and dancers of Cybele moved through the city's streets, and soothsayers and storytellers plied their crafts in the open. All this was suppressed once the military crisis had passed. [Chuvin, 84] But it was not to be the last resurgence. During a period of crisis in the 6th century, another pagan revival swept the eastern empire. [Procopious, De Bell. Goth., in MacMullen, 175 n. 72]

The Sorcery Charge

     In 409 emperor Honorius issued a new law against “sorcerers,” authorizing bishops to take part in their prosecution. [Lea, 398] He also empowered them to suppress pagan ritual meals in conjunction with imperial officials, [MacMullen, 16] The emperor followed up in 415 with a more comprehensive law against pagan religion, calling it superstitio —a term previously used against magic and foreign religions, including Judaism. [Russell, 301] After so many other decrees, it was this edict that conclusively succeeded in closing the public altars, destroying the statues, and appropriating the temples for the Christian state. [Hyde, 220] As the historian Zosimus tells us, “ the priests of both sexes were dismissed and banished, and the temples were deprived of sacrifices.” [Zosimus, online]

With the physical foundations of pagan veneration torn away, and pagan leaders in hiding, church and state law increasingly conflated the old religion with magic and sorcery. The persecution of magic, soothsaying, and amulets escalated. Around 500 a great hunt “drove all the sorcerers from Rome.” The magus Basileus was burned after returning from exile. [Lea 1957: 399] Meanwhile, the Roman model of the evil-doing strix / stria / striga was spreading to former provinces of the empire. The Franks had begun to say that striae overwhelmed men and consumed their vital essence.

     Charges of witchcraft motivated by sexual politics persisted and may have increased during Rome's decline. Even the niece of emperor Theodosius, Serena, was accused. Zosimus recounted rumors that she had hired a witch to prevent emperor Honorius from consummating his marriage with her under-age daughter, thinking that “to submit so young and tender a person to the embraces of a man was offering violence to nature, she had recourse to a woman who knew how to manage such affairs, and by her means contrived that Maria should live with the emperor and share his bed, but that he should not have the power to deprive her of virginity.” [Zosimus, online] This daughter “died a virgin,” after which Serena married her other daughter to emperor Honorius. But she too died.

     Around 400, this same Serena went to a temple of the Mother of the Gods that had somehow escaped plunder during the closing of the temples. She took a necklace from a statue of Kybele and placed it around her own neck. An old woman, who Zosimus claimed “was the only one remaining of the Vestal Virgins,” berated her for the theft. But the princess just walked off with an obscene retort. The old priestess called down the wrath of the goddess on Serena and her family for her impiety. After that, Serena began to have inauspicious dreams and apparitions, according to Zosimus, and she came to a bad end, along with her husband, the powerful barbarian-Roman general Stilicho.

     As Alaric was laying siege to Rome, the Senate blamed Serena for the Gothic invasion. Rumors accused her of plotting with Alaric, and people actually clung to the impossible belief that removing her would cause him to retreat. The senate condemned Serena to death, and had her strangled. (That did not prevent Alaric from sacking Rome in 410, after enslaved people opened the city gates to the Gothic armies.) Emperor Honorius betrayed his own name by beheading Serena’s husband Stilicho, who had fought and negotiated so loyally to save the Roman empire. [Zosimus, online; Vermaseren, 43]

     After this killing, Honorius “passed the famous decree which, unlike the ineffective one of Theodosius in 392, really outlawed paganism for it ordered all surviving temple images to be destroyed, all temples to be appropriated to public purposes, the closing of all altars and services in honor of pagan gods, and Christian bishops to enforce the decree.” [Hyde, 220] The decrees of successive emperors over the course of fifty years had failed to wipe out all temples, statues, and ceremonies underlines the the fact that the people were stubbornly resisting.

     So much of the written record relates only to the elites. Ramsey MacMullen explains that “paganism was dismantled from the top down,” with rural persecutions following later. [MacMullen, 64; 73] He has tracked some of the effects on the common people, among whom women were prominent in the now-outlawed customs and observances, such as paying attention to omens in every day life. He writes of “the ubiquitous resort to less well accredited and even commercial prophets known in their localities as ‘wise women,’ seers, and so forth. Against all these, so commonly sought out by their flock, the bishops spoke very harshly.” [MacMullen, 139] A 409 constitution of Honorius and Theodosius banished mathematici (astrologers) unless they gave up their books to be burned in the presence of the bishop.

     As Christians consolidated their control of officialdom, new laws barred pagans from state offices, the army and judiciary (in 415, and repeated in 425 and 468). [Chuvin, 91; MacMullen 22] In the 420s, an imperial decree mandated church attendance on pain of exile and property confiscation. A law dated 423 (Cod Theod. 16.10.22) states that “regulations... shall suppress any pagans who survive, although We now believe that there are none.” [Urbainczyk, 29 n.65] Really? then why did you issue another law (16.10.24) that same year? and a harsher one (16.10.25) in 435, and yet another in 438? [Urbainczyk, 29 n.65] In the 420s, an imperial order decreed that all citizens must attend church with their families, or have their property confiscated and go into exile. [MacMullen, 58] While animal sacrifice was already punishable by death, in 451, offerings of wine and incense were declared capital offences. A few decades later, the state confiscatedd gifts and bequests to pagan shrines. [MacMullen, 57-8, 192 n. 85]

Even at this point, many imperial officials were still reluctant to enforce the draconian laws against pagans. A law of 451 stiffened penalties against them, fining governors who tolerated pagans a whopping fifty pounds of gold. To prevent officials from claiming ignorance of pagan activities, around 472 a new law called for bishops to inform governors about “crimes” against religion. [MacMullen, 175 n. 78; 172 n. 52] The state gave free rein to Christian extremists who destroyed pagan shrines and images, or who committed violence against pagan leaders. They attacked people at pagan services and destroyed their temples. Arson was a favorite tactic. 

From the late 300s on, monks stand out as the primary aggressors in the battle to suppress pagans in the eastern empire. Even Christian documents describe them as violent and crime-prone, beating people they considered sinful, and stirring up sectarian strife. [MacMullen, 171-2] The pagan Eunapius remarked that these monks looked like men but lived like pigs, "and openly did and allowed countless unspeakable crimes." [Eunapius, 423] He added bitterly, “For among them, every man is given the power of a tyrant who has a black robe and is prepared to behave badly in public.” [Hollland-Smith, 170] And some were not above murder. 

HYPATÍA OF ALEXANDRIA

One eminient target of the fanatical monks was Hypatía, an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher of international renown. Socrates Scholasticus wrote that “she far surpassed all the philosophers of her time,” and was greatly respected for her “extraordinary dignity and virtue.” [Ecclesiastical History, online] Hypatía’s house was an important intellectual center in a city distinguished for its learning. Damascius described how she “used to put on her philosopher's cloak and walk through the middle of town” to give public lectures on philosophy. [Life of Isidore, online]

Admired by all Alexandria, Hypatía was one of the most politically powerful figures in the city. She was one of the few women who attended civic assemblies. Magistrates came to her for advice, including her close friend, the prefect Orestes. In the midst of severe religious polarization, Hypatía was an influential force for tolerance and moderation. She accepted students from all religious backgrounds, who came to her “from everywhere,”

Hypatía was a Neoplatonist, and headed the school in Alexandria, which had become the leading center of Hellenic thought. This has led to claims that she does not really qualify as a “pagan,” only as a rationalist philosopher. But this description is misleading and inaccurate. First, by late antiquity the meaning of “philosopher” had changed considerably, encompassing even Christian ascetics. [MacMullen, 205 n. 24] Second, a over-narrow definition of “pagan” fails to recognize, as its enemies did, that it filled a much broader cultural spectrum than temple rites and theurgy. The sacred books of the Neoplatonists were Hellenic—not just into Plato and Homer but also Orphic texts and the Chaldean Oracles. They embraced “the esoteric doctrines of the mysteries.” [Cumont, 202] Third, Neoplatonist philosophers were persecuted as pagans, and acted as such in the struggle over the temples. They joined and even led in the pagan defense of the Serapium in Alexandria. One of these leaders, Antoninus, had been initiated by his mother, Sosipatra of Pergamum, the philosopher and mystic seeress.

Hypatía's father Theon was an astronomer and mathematician devoted to divination, astrology, and the pagan mysteries. He wrote commentaries on the books of Orpheus and Hermes Trismegistus, and poems to the planets as forces of Moira (destiny). Nothing indicates that Hypatía departed from the culture of her upbringing. Like her father, she saw astronomy as the highest science, opening up knowledge of the divine. Letters of her student Synesius indicate that the Chaldean Oracles and Pythagorean numerological mysticism figured in her teachings. [Dzielska, 54-55] CHECK

The surviving fragments of Hypatía's teachings indicate a mystical orientation. Glimpses of her spiritual views survived in the letters of her disciples, which speak of “the eye buried within us,” a “divine guide.” As the soul journeys toward divinity, this “hidden spark which loves to conceal itself” grows into a flame of knowing. Hypatía's philosophy was concerned with the “mystery of being,” contemplation of Reality, rising to elevated states of consciousness, and “union with the divine,” the One. [Dzielska, 48-50] Check!

Hypatía’s disciples certainly regarded her in as a spiritual leader. Synesius of Cyrene called her “the most holy and revered philosopher,” “a blessed lady,” and “divine spirit.” Though a Christian, he refers to “her oracular utterances” and writes that she was “beloved by the gods.” [Dzielska, 47-8; 36] She spoke out against dogmatism and superstition: “To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world, is just as base as to use force.” [Partnow, 24] Hypatía's teaching unquestionably represented a challenge to church doctrine and authority. The destruction of her philosophical books underlines the point. Her mathematical works survived, however, and remained popular into the next century.

Damascius wrote, “The whole city rightly loved her and worshipped her in a remarkable way...” He related that her popularity galled Cyril, the new bishop of Alexandria, who “was so struck with envy that he immediately began plotting her murder...” [Damasius, in Dzielska?] The bishop's enmity was also fueled by political motives: the politics of religious intolerance and domination.

When Cyril became bishop in 412, he began pushing to extend his power into the civic sphere. His enforcers were the parabalanoi, extremist thugs who had been the shock troops of bishop Theophilus' war on pagans and Jews. Bishop Cyril persecuted heterodox Christian groups, closing their churches and expelling them from the city. He spread rumors of a Jewish conspiracy to murder Christians and instigated a brawl between Jews and Christians at a theater. The Jews protested that the bishop's agents had provoked the fight. The prefect Orestes (himself a Christian) heard out their grievances and arrested one of the bishop's allies. In 414, armed conflict broke out between Cyril's supporters and the embattled Jews. It ended with the looting and seizure of synagogues, and the bishop expelled the ancient Jewish community from Alexandria.

Many Christians in the city sided with Orestes and put pressure on Cyril to desist. Instead, he escalated the conflict, calling in hundreds of monks from the desert. They mobbed Orestes in the streets, calling him a “sacrificer” and “Hellene”—in other words, a pagan. [Chuvin, 87-9] The monks hurled stones, wounding him in the head. The prefect's bodyguards fled, but a crowd of bystanders jumped in to save his life.
 

Hypatía as “Witch”

Realizing that he was losing on public relations, the bishop of Alexandria changed tactics. His next move was to attempt to turn the people against Hypatía, a powerful woman, by accusing her of harmful sorcery. A later church chronicler, John of Nikiu, explained that “she beguiled many people through satanic wiles.” It was Hypatía's “witchcraft” that kept the prefect Orestes away from church and caused him to corrupt the faith of other Christians—by defending Jews. Further, she was involved in divination and astrology, “devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music.” [John of Nikiu, Chronicle 84. 87-103] How devilish they are, those musical instruments.

In March of 415, Peter the church lector led a mob that attacked Hypatía as she rode through the city in her chariot. Socrates Scholasticus wrote that “rash cockbrains” dragged her into the Caesarion church, stripped her naked, and tore into her body with pot-shards, cutting her to pieces. Then they hauled her dismembered body to Cinaron and burned it on a pyre. [Alic, 45-6] John Malalas accords with Socrate's statement that the mob burned Hypatía's remains. Hesychius' account agrees that the mob tore Hypatía to pieces, but simply says that "her body [was] shamefully treated and parts of it scattered all over the city." [Dzielska, 93]

In John of Nikiu’s version, centuries after the fact, men came for “the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the prefect through her enchantments.” They found her sitting in a chair and dragged her through the streets until she was dead, then burned her body. [Chronicle, 84. 87-103] After the assassination of Hypatía, Orestes disappeared. Did he flee for his life, into exile; or was he secretly assassinated? Cyril prevailed, covering up the assasination of Hypatía by insisting that she had moved to Athens. His parabalanoi were never punished for her murder.

No one was fooled. The nearest contemporary sources agree that the bishop was behind the witch-rumors and the killing, and that his men carried them out. Public opinion may be measured by the fact that Christian city officials continued appealing to imperial officials to curb the parabalanoi, to bring them under secular control and restrict them from public places. They were only partially successful, since the imperial court itself was in the midst of a crackdown on pagans. As for Cyril, whom John of Nikiu credits with destroying “the last remnants of idolatry in the city,” he was later declared a saint of the church. [Dzielska, 97-8; 104; 94]

Contrary to popular belief, Hypatía was not targeted only as a pagan. Her courage in opposing the escalating anti-Jewish violence and her moral stance against religious repression were the factors that precipitated her assassination. Other pagans—men, and less politically bold—continued to be active at the university of Alexandria for decades after her death. The fact is that Hypatía's femaleness made her a special target, vulnerable to the accusation of witchcraft. In defending the assault on the philosophical tradition of tolerance, Hypatía had everything to lose, yet she acted boldly. 

     Later in the century, her pagan male counterparts also came under attack. By the mid-400s, pagan professors were being sentenced to death in Syria. Sometime after 480, a Christian society called the Zealots hounded the pagan prefect of Alexandria and his secretary out of office, forcing them into exile. The Zealots capped their triumph with a burning of “idols.” Two of them moved on to Beirut, where they incited more hunts to bring down leading pagans. They formed a group to collect denunciations, using informers, and brought names and accusations to the bishop. He then held joint hearings with city officials, which led to more bonfires and more exiled pagans. [MacMullen, 26; 194 n. 95]

     The extreme cultural repression used to forcibly Christianize the Roman empire was unprecedented anywhere in the world, in its extent, duration, and geographic scale.