From our pictures of the inner life of the Christian Church .about the close of the second and earlier years of the third century, we must pass to a rapid survey of the Imperial history of this period. Roughly, for the first 150 years of its existence, the story of Christianity is the story of a separate people: of something apart from the Empire. But after the death of Marcus their numbers and influence brought the Christians into daily contact with the Government in Rome or in one or other of the provinces. The story of the Church can no longer be kept quite separate from the story of the Empire.
On the last night of the year 193, Commodus, the unworthy son of Marcus Aurelius, perished in a palace intrigue, assassinated by members of his own household; foremost among whom was Marcia, who once loved him, and who in everything, save possessing the official name, was Empress; to this Marcia we have already referred as the warm friend of the Christian community. The conspirators had seen many of their friends and companions in the Imperial household put to death, owing to the mad caprice of the wicked and suspicious Commodus, and, naturally dreading a like fate, determined to forestall him.
The conspirators persuaded Pertinax, a distinguished senator, to occupy the vacant throne. Their sudden choice was speedily ratified by the Senate, who rejoiced to acknowledge as Emperor one so distinguished. He had been a Minister of Marcus, and in the course of a long and busy life had successfully discharged the duties of many of the powerful offices, military and civil, of the Empire. After a reign of barely three months, before he had had time to justify his sudden election, Pertinax was murdered in a military revolt of the Praetorian Guards, who formed the standing garrison of Rome; with whom the newly-elected Emperor was unpopular, owing to his strictness in enforcing discipline.
These powerful and insolent guards, numbering at this time probably not more than some sixteen thousand men, but perfectly trained and armed, feeling that they were in a way masters of the metropolis, positively offered the Imperial purple to the highest bidder. An elderly Senator, possessed of great wealth, one Didius Julianus, only known in history through the infamous bargain he concluded with the Praetorians, for a brief period was reckoned among the Roman Emperors. The election, however, of the Roman Guards, far from being confirmed in the provinces, was pronounced null and void by the three powerful armies stationed on the frontier provinces of the Empire, each of which at once saluted its own general as Emperor of Rome. Severus, the commander of the Pannonian Legions—Pannonia with Dalmatia was a vast region situate between the Danube and the Adriatic—after a contest lasting some three years, eventually succeeded in overcoming his competitors, and was acknowledged universally as Master of the Roman world. A native of North Africa, Severus was a great and successful soldier, and reigned from A. D. 193 to A. D. 211, transmitting the Imperial succession to his sons, Caracalla and Geta; indeed, his family, with but a brief interlude, occupied the throne until A. D. 235.
SEVERUS. Bust from the Palatine Hill, Rome.
An eminent and trusted general, and owing his position solely to his legions, he regarded the mighty Empire over which he ruled as his own possession, to be held, as it had been won, by the power of the sword; but in spite of the military despotism of his reign, he occupies in the judgment of posterity a very different position to that filled by many of the tyrants who had preceded him. Though occasionally harsh and cruel, he was on the whole a just and impartial sovereign; and Rome, when once he was firmly seated on the throne, enjoyed, under his military rule, a period generally of internal peace and prosperity.
We have seen that in the days of Commodus, particularly during the latter years of the reign, when Marcia, the favorite of the Emperor, exercised great influence, the Christians of the Empire enjoyed a period of comparative stillness. Marcia if not a Christian herself, was very favorably disposed to them, and largely, no doubt, owing to her influence with Commodus, not a few out of the Christian community occupied positions of power and influence at Court. For several years after the accession of Severus to supreme power, this state of things continued, and the military Emperor evidently, during the earlier years of his reign, looked kindly upon the sect which had been so harshly treated under his great predecessor, Marcus. This period of "stillness" was enjoyed by the Church until about A. D. 202, when a great change for the worse came over her fortunes.
Tertullian, who was the contemporary of Severus, expressly tells us that in the wars of the Succession which Severus waged between A. D. 193 and A. D. 197, no Christian of any note was found among the adherents of his competitors, Niger and Albinus, the generals respectively of the formidable Roman armies stationed in Syria and Britain. Indeed, it seems that the general feeling and probably the quiet influence of the Christians of the Empire were in favor of Severus during that anxious period. This would, partially at all events, account for the evidently favorable disposition of the stern soldier-emperor towards the Christians during the first ten years of his reign. But it must be borne in mind, that kindly as were the feelings of Severus towards Christians, no change was made in the oppressive laws which existed; none of the fatal rescripts or edicts of former Emperors were rescinded or even modified. But the effect of the known goodwill of the Sovereign was felt far and wide, and the provincial governors and magistrates generally discouraged all persecution and interference with the widely-spread communities of Christians, whom the Emperor, during the first half of his reign, was pleased at least to tolerate, if not to favor.
At the very end of the century (the second) a change began to pass over the Emperor's feelings and the policy of the government with regard to the Christians, materially affecting the position of the many communities of the worshippers of Jesus of Nazareth in Rome and in the provinces; and very early in the third century the persecution seems to have become general and even bitter.
It is not too much to say that one of the reasons which largely contributed to this persecution was the provocation of the extreme and austere party among the Christians themselves. We shall dwell at some length on the teaching of this school under such masters as Hippolytus of Rome and Tertullian of Carthage.
There was always a large and hostile section of the Pagan population in every great center of the Empire; a section made up of men who hated the followers of Jesus for various reasons, some based on self-interested motives connected with trades and industries which suffered gravely under Christian influences, some on motives connected with the ancient superstitions of Rome, some on purely patriotic fears. A very small spark would at all times kindle this latent hostility into a blaze. The actions of the extremists among the Christians were often eminently calculated to excite this hostile section of the population; popular tumults often compelled the provincial governors and magistrates to take action against the Christians when they would willingly have let them alone.
Such actions of the extreme party are vividly pictured by Tertullian in his well-known treatise, De Corona Militis ("The Soldier's Crown"). The incident upon which this treatise is based is a good example of the imprudent zeal which the teaching of the extremists among the Christians had inspired in many earnest though mistaken men; a zeal, of course, calculated to inflame the passions of the already hostile people, who looked upon them as enemies of the State, and as opposed to all established Roman customs. The incident, as related by Tertullian, was as follows.
The Emperors—Severus and his son Caracalla, who had been associated with him in the Imperial dignity in the year 198—had directed a largesse to be distributed to the soldiers in one of the North African military centers. On such occasions it was customary for the soldiers to appear with crowns of laurel on their heads, the largesse being given to celebrate some successful feat of arms lately performed in one or other of the frontier wars, which were ever being carried on. On this particular occasion the soldiers, laurel-crowned, were marching past. "One of them," so writes Tertullian in admiring language, "more a soldier of God, more steadfast than the rest of his brethren, who had imagined that they could serve two masters, marched past, his head uncovered, the useless laurel-crown in his hand. Thus nobly conspicuous, all began to mark him out, jeering at him from a distance, railing at him near at hand. The murmur is wafted to the Tribune. He puts at once the question to him, Why are you so different from others in your attire?' The soldier answers that he had no liberty to wear the crown with the rest, and on being pressed for his reasons, he declared, 'I am a Christian.' "
The offender was conducted to the Prefects, and eventually taken to prison, where, to quote Tertullian's words, "crowned more worthily with the white crown of martyrdom, he awaited the largesse of Christ" (i.e. a martyr's death).
In a fine peroration the great Christian writer bids Christians "keep for God what is His own, untainted. He will crown it if He choose. Nay, then He does choose, He even calls us to it. To him who conquers He says, 'I will give you a crown of life.' " Then, after picturing the glorious crowned ones, described in John's grand Apocalyptic Vision, he says to Christians, "Look at those crowns; inhale those odors; why should you condemn to a little chaplet, or to a leaf-twined coronal," the brow which has been destined for a diadem? For Jesus Christ has made us kings to God and His Father. What have you in common with a flower which is to die?"
Such acts as that related above by Tertullian were doubtless of no uncommon occurrence under the fiery, uncompromising teachings of this extreme school; and were eminently fitted to excite the fury of the Pagan populace, and gravely to influence the procedure of the Imperial magistrates in their dealings with Christians.
Statesmen might well argue that it was impossible to ignore such overt acts of contumely directed against all that Rome prized and held dear. It availed little that the great majority of Christians gravely disapproved such exaggerated and useless manifestations as the one related, and praised so very emphatically, in the De Corona Militis of Tertullian. The few irreconcilables were too often regarded as fair examples of the many; and there is little doubt that the teaching of the extremists, and its disastrous results, were among the causes which led to the bitter persecution that broke out after the close of the second century, and weighed so heavily on the Christian communities generally throughout the Empire during the ensuing years.
But although a section—a party numerically small it is true—had by their conduct gravely compromised the whole body of Christians, and had made themselves painfully conspicuous by their determined refusal to conform even in non-essential particulars with the time-honored customs of the State, still it does not seem that this unwise conduct, this obstinate behavior of the extremists, was the only cause of the change in the policy of the Emperor Severus in his dealings with his Christian subjects. It was evidently something deeper, something more far-reaching; something which frequently affected the Emperor and the statesmen who were at the head of public affairs at this juncture.
It was the rapidly increasing numbers of the Christians, drawn from all sorts and conditions of men, in the army and in civil professions, their perfect organization, their strange and unexplained unity, which struck with fears for the present, and still more with apprehensions for the future, the minds of Severus and the Pagan statesmen of his time; who were persuaded that the weal of Rome depended upon the strict maintenance of the traditional uses and customs which had helped to build up the great Empire. Tertullian gravely, not boastingly, notices this enormous and unexampled increase in the numbers of the Christian subjects of the Empire when he speaks of the universal cry complaining that the State was literally occupied, crowded out by these folk.
Severus and his advisers felt that a new policy must be adopted without delay towards these strange enemies who had grown up in their midst, who had effected a lodgement in every city, in every village, even in the unconquered army of Rome, in the crowded homes of the poor, in the luxurious villas and palaces of the rich, in the Senate, and in the very household of the Emperor, whose numbers were multiplying with such alarming rapidity, and whose power and influence undoubtedly were daily increasing.
The old edicts and rescripts proscribing this strange religion, as interpreted by the magistrates of the Empire, were manifestly insufficient adequately to check the rapid increase of the converts to the new religion.
There is abundant testimony to the fact that a terrible and general persecution raged in the earliest years of the third century, and probably continued without intermission all through the remainder of the reign of Severus, who died at York A. D. 211. Eusebius, writing in the first half of the fourth century, thus begins the sixth book of his "Ecclesiastical History." And when Severus raised a persecution against the Churches, there were everywhere in all the Churches glorious martyrdoms of the champions for religion, but especially were they numerous at Alexandria; to which city, as to the noblest stadium of God, were brought the most eminent champions from the Thebais and from all Egypt, that by invincible patience under various torments and divers sorts of death, they might obtain from God a glorious crown. And again he writes a little further on, "a that time many thousands were crowned with martyrdom." Sulpicius Severus specially mentions this as a time of severe trial, styling it the sixth persecution. The references in the words of Tertullian, a contemporary writer and teacher, to the bitter sufferings of Christians at this period are innumerable.
There is, however, some diversity of opinion among scholars as to whether a new and more rigorous legislation was adopted by the State in its dealings with the now numerous and powerful sect, or whether the old machinery of the earlier edicts and rescripts was made more effective. Those who favor the former view refer to the words of Spartianus, one of the writers of the "Augustan History," who, in his account of Severus' progress through Palestine in the year 202, mentions that among many other laws which the Emperor promulgated was one which "forbade under grave penalties that anyone should become a Jew, and the same law was to be enforced in the case of Christians." Spartianus gives no further details here, but his words apparently point to some fresh and sterner legislation; and as the cruel persecution of the Christians immediately followed, it may be presumed that the persecution was embittered by some fresh legislation.
"In itinere Palsestinis plurima jura undavit, Judyeos fieri sub gravi poena vetuit, idem etiam de Christianis sanxit."—Spartianus: Severus, 17.
Alexandria, the great and world-renowned capital of Egypt, is especially noted by Eusebius in the above quoted passage as a center of this persecution. For some time it had been a famous home of Christian teaching, and the persecution there was evidently especially hard. It seems probable that Severus, who about A. D. 202 spent some time in this great Egyptian city, was disturbed and alarmed at the influence exercised by the brilliant and popular teaching of Clement, the head of the famous Catechetical School of that city, whose lectures were attended by vast numbers, including not only Christian students but distinguished Pagans of both sexes. Hence many martyrs suffered at this time in Alexandria, although the teaching of Clement, while exalting the value of the witness of these sufferers for the Faith, discouraged all presumptuous daring on the part of Christians, and counselled them rather to avoid than court danger.
In Rome and Italy documents such as "Acts and Passions" of martyrs connected with the persecution of Severus are almost entirely wanting. The destruction of the Christian archives, including any memoranda of proces verbaux of trials and the like which could be discovered in the time of the "terror" of Diocletian—a destruction, of course, naturally more vigorously carried on at Rome, the seat of the Government, than in any other center—accounts for this. But recent archaeological investigations in the great catacombs of the Appian Way partly supply the want of these lost documents.
The corridors and funereal chambers of the important catacomb over which Callistus the Deacon was appointed by Pope Zephyrinus, and which apparently was largely his design and to this day bears his name, show that something had rudely and suddenly interrupted the regular plan of the decorative and other works which were proceeding in that famous subterranean cemetery. Evidently, new entrances and new passages were at that time contrived opening into neighboring sand pits; narrow stairs were devised, the old communication and flights of steps were partly destroyed or concealed. Clearly these arrangements were made to facilitate escape for the harassed Christians who might be tracked into the sacred places, used especially in times of persecution as meeting chapels for worship, and for the celebration of the Eucharist.
It appears that at this particular period, when the important catacomb generally known as that of S. Callistus was in process of being made and decorated, interments were not forbidden, but anything like assemblies of Christians for religious worship was strictly interdicted. Everything points to a vigorous persecution going on at Rome. Driven from their customary meeting places in the city, the harassed communities no doubt assembled secretly in these crypts and sepulchral chambers, which were more or less arranged for this purpose. Tracked by the police of the Emperor into these gloomy refuges, they sought to render them comparatively safe by blocking up some of the corridors, by destroying the usual staircases of approach, and by providing secret means of egress when so tracked.
In the great pro-consular province of North Africa, ample written materials are extant bearing testimony to the ravages of the same terrible persecution of the Christian citizens of Carthage and other North African centers.
In the wide district generally known as Asia Minor, where, as we have had already occasion to remark, the number of men and women who professed the Faith of Jesus from the earliest times was very great, the victims of the persecution of Severus were numerous, but details are lacking. The troubles of Christians in these provinces especially were not a little increased by the rise and progress of the heresy known as that of Montanus. The extravagance of these Montanists, their resolute refusal to conform in any way to Roman customs and practices, which they associated with idolatry, and their habit of positively courting martyrdom, seemed often seriously to affect the position of the quiet, earnest Christian folk, and to bring them into useless conflict with the Imperial authorities.
In the last years of his reign, so disastrous a period for his Christian subjects, the great soldier-emperor especially devoted himself to the metropolis of the world. After some seventeen centuries of wear and tear, of devastation and invasion in Rome, mighty ruins bearing the name of Severus are among the more prominent features even in the city of ruins. His great arch still dominates one end of the storied forum, while a vast and shapeless pile of remains on the south of the hill of Imperial palaces marks the site of the gorgeous house of Severus looking over the sad Campagna to Ostia and the sea.
His building work in Rome was enormous; palaces, baths, temples, huge granaries, such as even Rome herself with her magnificent record had never seen before, signalized the closing period of his career. It was, as regards noble buildings, the most brilliant period the world-capital had known. And while new stately temples were rising, and ancient fanes were being magnificently restored, while the grandest palace among all that marvelous group of palaces was being erected on that hill where the "divine" Caesar dwelt, overlooking the immemorial Forum, the center of all Pagan worship, the Christians of the Roman community, as irreconcilable enemies of the State, were being hunted down as they gathered in silence and in secret for prayer and praise in the sombre corridors and sepulchral chambers of their cemeteries beneath the vineyards and gardens just outside Rome. As we have already noticed, much of the work of destruction carried out with the hope of concealing these meeting-places in the great cemetery beneath the gardens which fringe the Appian Way, dates from the period of this persecution.
History relates one more campaign undertaken by Severus in the far north of distant Britain, where the wild mountaineers of Caledonia persistently refused to recognize the majesty of Rome. Probably the worn-out Emperor undertook the conduct of this last war in person in order to remove from the seductive pleasures of the capital his two sons, Caracalla and Geta. But the fatigue of the war was too much for the toil-worn soldier; for on his return from a successful campaign in Caledonia he expired at York, leaving the tremendous inheritance of the Empire to his unworthy sons.
Among the many tragedies which stained the Imperial purple, the story of the brother-Emperors, the sons and successors of Severus, stands out conspicuously. Caracalla and Geta hated each other, and the Roman world was soon appalled at hearing that the younger brother, Geta, had been assassinated at his brother's suggestion in his mother's arms.
The fears which were entertained by Severus that his sons would prove themselves unworthy of their great inheritance, when he took them from Rome on his last campaign into Britain, were unhappily too well founded. Little is known of the younger, who was foully murdered, as we have said, in A. D. 212, the year following Severus' death; but the elder, Caracalla, ranks among the vilest of the Emperors.
In cold-blooded cruelty he even surpassed Nero and Domitian. It is said that above twenty thousand persons of both sexes, some of them of the highest rank, were put to death early in his fatal reign under the vague charge of having been friends of the murdered Geta. Gibbon does not hesitate to style him "the common enemy of mankind."
The year after the death of Geta, Caracalla left Home never to return to it, and spent the remaining four or five years of his life in moving about through the various provinces of his immense Empire; and in the course of his imperial progresses "every province was by turn the scene of his rapine and cruelty." He perished by an assassin's dagger in A. D. 217, universally feared and execrated.
Historians have noted as a curious fact that in the long line of the masters of the greatest Empire the world has ever seen, those princes who were born, so to speak, in the purple, with perhaps one or two exceptions, were detestable tyrants, while the wiser and better Emperors were all of them raised to the throne by adoption or by election. Among the first Caesars, from Julius to Nero, a family connection more or less close existed; and, with the exception of Augustus, they were all crime-stained tyrants. The wise Vespasian was elected, but of his two sons Titus died all too soon, and Domitian was a monster of vice. Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, the two Antonines, between whom no blood-relationship existed, were on the whole great and generally loved princes. But unfortunately, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was followed by his son, the execrable Commodus. After Commodus came the "elected" Severus, who, although a military despot, takes rank among the eminent Emperors of Rome; but he was succeeded by his wretched son Caracalla, who, as we have seen, too well maintained the unvarying tradition of the character of the princes born in the Roman purple.
The question arises, how came it to pass that in the Roman Empire, in the matter of the succession to the throne a completely different experience presents itself from that which we are accustomed to in medieval and modern times?
Now it is in an hereditary throne that people find the greatest security for the maintenance of internal peace and prosperity. The idea of an elected sovereign is well nigh impossible; the experiment would be, by universal opinion, too hazardous. Many of the reasons for this curiously different experience are not hard to find. The Roman Empire was made up of various nationalities; a loyal attachment to an Italian family or dynasty, natural enough in Italy, would find no place in Gaul, in North Africa, or in Syria. But a deeper reason existed in the antecedents of the sovereigns of the Roman world. The "elected" was chosen for some distinguishing qualities, for some conspicuous abilities; in many cases he had been a soldier, and when called to rule was usually long past the age of youthful passion and prejudice. Trained generally in the stem discipline of a Roman place of arms, he brought with him to the throne the virtues peculiar to the camp—courage, endurance, self-restraint, and the habit of commanding. The "born in the purple," on the other hand, was brought up in the often enervating atmosphere of a Pagan court, surrounded from youth with obsequious flatterers, unaccustomed to self-denial or self-restraint. The Roman Prince "born in the purple," unlike the Prince of medieval and modern times, lacked in any education which he received that Christian training which, since the religion of Jesus has become the religion of the Western world, forms so marked a feature in the education of a Prince born to an hereditary throne.
The general persecution which weighed so heavily on the followers of Jesus in the latter half of the reign of Severus, continued, but more languidly, during the early portion at least of his successor, Caracalla's, rule. Probably the deeper political or patriotic reasons which moved Severus and his advisers to persecute were absent from the counsels of the more careless Caracalla. This Emperor is, however, generally now credited with the passing of an edict which had far-reaching consequences in the Empire, and which evidently affected adversely certain of the Christian subjects of Rome. The edict to which we refer extended the privileges and responsibilities of the citizenship of Rome to dwellers in the provinces, carrying therewith a great increase in the taxation, to which provincials, who previously did not possess the rights of Roman citizens, were now liable. It was for this reason that this far-reaching edict was passed.
It curiously affected accused Christians, who, when charged with the crime of "Christianity," had not infrequently pleaded before the provincial magistrates their Roman citizenship, and claimed the right of appeal to the supreme Imperial tribunal of Rome, as, in fact, we see Paul did (Acts of the Apostles xxii. 25-9, xxiii. 27, xxv. 10-12). This right of appeal was also claimed by the Bithynian Christians when accused before Pliny the pro-praetor, by the martyr Attains at Lyons in the persecution in the days of the Emperor Marcus, etc. But after the edict of Caracalla we find in the various Acts of the martyrs no more instances of such appeals.
The new edict gave a provincial official, if ill-disposed to Christianity, increased power; for his decision in the case of accused Christians was henceforth final. No Christian could any more plead the special right of citizenship as a reason for appeal in cases of condemnation.
It was no doubt with the view of raising the Imperial revenue that this change in the constitution of the Empire was made. When the privilege of the Roman citizenship was so indefinitely multiplied, the value naturally became practically nil. A citizen of Rome was liable to a special heavy tax on legacies and inheritances, on the act of manumission of slaves, etc. Such a tax imposed on provincials (for as Roman citizens they would henceforth be liable) would of course largely increase the revenue receipts; but in the long run it would serve to undermine the old foundations on which the Empire was built up.