The reader of this history cannot fail to have noticed how in the later chapters more and ever more in detail the chief political events of the Empire are dwelt upon. In the earlier years of Christianity these details were unnecessary. For a very considerable period the religion of Jesus was generally ignored by the State, except when forced upon its notice. Gradually the position changed. In the third century, certainly, the Church had, through the vast numbers of its members, its influence, its wide-spread organization, become a power with which statesmen had to reckon. The policy which the Imperial Government at different times should elect to pursue in the case of these numerous dissenters from the State religion had become an anxious and debatable question, and we have seen how this policy was constantly changing. In the next period, the close of the third and the beginning of the fourth centuries, the great religious question, the relations of Paganism and Christianity, had become the most pressing, the most momentous, of all questions of State policy. Indeed, to use the words of a serious historian of our own day and time it would seem as though the scene of the world drama had been cleared of all other actors—only two of importance remained on the stage, the Pagan Empire and the Church.
Diocletian, the Emperor, whose policy changed the whole aspect of the Roman world, first comes before us as avenging the murder of the young Emperor Numerian, by slaying his father-in-law, Arrius Aper, the Praetorian Prefect. After the assassination of Carinus, the brother of the slain Numerian this Diocletian, a well known and popular general, who had lately filled the responsible post of captain of the Imperial bodyguard, was acknowledged universally as Master of the Roman world.
The son of slave parents, the new Emperor, whose talents were undoubted, had raised himself through the various military, grades, and had been successively Governor of Maesia,. Consul, and Commander of the Imperial guards. He had given ample proof of his capacity in the highest military and civil posts.
Lactantius, indeed, in some half-dozen passages, affirms that s a soldier he was somewhat timid and lacked daring. But as a statesman skilled in the choice of fitting instruments to carry out his policy, Diocletian was undoubtedly far-seeing and wise, whatever estimate may be formed of the policy itself. Unlike many of his predecessors, he inaugurated his reign, not by murdering or conniving at the murder of the reigning Emperor, but by slaying the murderer of the sovereign with his own hand. This act may be said to have won the people to his side.
Firmly seated on the world's throne, he resolved to break up in some degree the "unity" of the Empire, which he felt was becoming a constant peril to all settled government. There had been, as a rule, one Emperor on whom all depended, and one city which was the center of the Roman world. The successful revolts and assassinations in the thirty or forty years preceding the accession of Diocletian, had been terribly numerous. This danger he sought to avert by multiplying Emperors and by creating various cities which, in power and prestige, should rival the immemorial capital. By this means he proposed to render a successful revolt well-nigh impossible, and an Imperial assassination useless; and thus a security long unknown in the Empire would be provided for the existing government. He inaugurated his new policy by associating a partner with him on the throne, and subsequently by increasing the number of Imperial partners from two to four. Thus, if in one division of the Roman world an ambitious general or official proposed to seize the throne by the murder of its occupant, he would probably be deterred from his purpose when he remembered that three more partners in the throne in other parts of the Roman world, partners in the Imperial authority closely knit together by various ties, would have to be reckoned with.
Again Diocletian felt that the Empire was so enormous, and so dangerously threatened on all sides by barbarian tribes more or less powerful and numerous, that the constant presence of an Emperor on, or comparatively near, a frontier of the vast realm was needed for the public security. It was not sufficient that the chief of the State should successfully keep at bay the Persians on the banks of the Euphrates, when the Goths or the Alemanni, at an enormous distance from the Imperial headquarters on the Euphrates, might at any moment imperil the Empire on the banks of the Danube and the Rhine.
His first choice of a colleague, from these points of view, was successful. He associated with himself Maximian. The "associated" Emperor, like Diocletian, was of low birth and not an Italian. He was merely a rough soldier; but if he lacked the gifts of a really great general, it is certain that he possessed indomitable energy, conspicuous bravery, and splendid perseverance. His campaigns were generally successful, but he was known as a stern and cruel ruler, a curious contrast to his more courtly and gentle statesman-colleague, to whom, however, though so different in temper and character, he was ever loyal and devoted. Carrying out the spirit of his contemplated change in the administration of the Empire, Diocletian resided at Nicomedia, which became the center of the government of the East. The city was well chosen, on an arm of the sea of Marmora. It was a good place of arms in the neighborhood of the Black Sea, comparatively speaking within easy distance both of the Tigris and the lower Danube, the natural highways of approach for some of the more formidable of the restless enemies of the Empire. This city, as his chosen residence and the seat of his government, he lavishly adorned with costly buildings, such as befitted the capital of the Roman Empire of the East But the choice boded ill for the future of the Christians, since it was a famous and even a fanatical seat of Paganism. Maximian's metropolis was Milan, in North Italy; Rome was thus deserted by the Imperial Court, and lost its immemorial rank and much of its prestige, while the august Senate, which, even under the rule of the roughest military despots, retained at least the semblance of its ancient dignity and privileges, now sank almost into the position of the Municipal Council, of a city no longer the official metropolis of the Roman world. The associated Emperors assumed respectively the Pagan titles of Jovius and Herculius, investing themselves with the insignia of the King of the Gods, and of the strongest warrior in the ranks of the Immortals, an evil omen for their Christian subjects.
Another striking change in the Constitution of the Empire was carried out by the policy of Diocletian. The absolute masters of the Roman world who had preceded him had veiled their enormous power under the ancient titles belonging to the officials of the old Republic, carefully avoiding the title of king and rejecting the kingly ornament of the diadem, the ensign of royal sovereignty. The only special title which Augustus and his successors assumed was that of "Imperator," which was originally a military term denoting the highest rank in the army. Diocletian introduced the magnificent ceremonial of the Persian court, assuming the diadem of a king, an ornament obnoxious to the Roman spirit as an ensign of royalty. The mediaeval and modern idea of royalty in the nations of the West was really introduced by Diocletian, when "the organization which this sovereign gave to his new Court attached less honor and distinction to rank than to services performed towards the members of the Imperial family. The apologists of the revolution in the ancient Roman constitution worked by Diocletian are careful in their iteration that these changes were prompted, not by any love of ostentation or vain show, but by a persuasion that all this magnificence and adulation would promote obedience and order among the many peoples and nationalities grouped together under the name of Romans.
What, then, was the position of Christians, now so numerous, under this great statesman-Emperor, and what were the circumstances which gradually led up to that tremendous outburst of systematic persecution with which this reign will ever be associated? In the first place it is clear that the mind of the Emperor, for several years after his accession, was not made up as to the policy he should adopt towards this large and influential body of his subjects.
In these earlier years there is no doubt that great influence was exercised in the Court of Diocletian in favor of Christianity by a number of the Palace officials, who made no secret of their Christian profession. At the head of this Christian party were the wife and daughter of the Emperor, Prisca and Valeria, who were Christians, at least occupying the position of catechumens. Christian officials in the Palace were tolerated, and were possibly regard with some favor at first by Diocletian, who even nominated members of the "Sect" to governorships and important magistrates in the provinces, dispensing such Christian nominees from the necessity of sharing in the public sacrificial rites, as indeed some among his more tolerant predecessors had already done.
But alongside this toleration or even favor, there seems to have been instances early in the reign of Diocletian when the sovereign allowed the old laws of the State, still unrepealed, to be acted upon in the case of open hostility on the part of Christians to Paganism. The curious and interesting "Passion of S. Genesius," the scene of which was laid in Rome, belongs to the early years of Diocletian. If this piece be accepted as genuine, it indicates that the severest punishments were, at all events occasionally, still meted out to Christian professors. Whilst Diocletian in the first partition of the Empire took the Eastern division of the Roman world under his especial government, the Western provinces passed at once under the rule of his colleague, Maximian Herculius.
The kindly toleration, which perhaps save in a few instances in the beginning of his reign, was showed by Diocletian to members of the Christian sect does not appear to have been the policy of Maximian. Between the years 286 and 291-2 there was not indeed any general persecution of the "Sect," but the general testimony of ecclesiastical tradition preserved in the "Acts of Martyrs," treating of this period, tells us that in the provinces subject to Maximian, especially in that vast division of the West known as Gaul, much Christian blood was shed, and many sufferings were evidently endured.
In A. D. 286 a serious revolt broke out in Gaul; not a revolt in the ordinary sense of the word as usually understood in the Rome of that age, of legionnaires who had chosen some favorite commander to replace the reigning Emperor; but a general uprising of the peasants, the descendants of the old Celtic inhabitants of the land, against the oppression of the Gallo-Roman nobles who had gradually reduced these people into a state of miserable servitude. To restore this great division of the Empire once more to a state of law and order was Maximian's first important task. It was on his march from Italy to Gaul that the famous bloody episode of the Theban Legion is said to have taken place.
A portion of the army of Maximian on its march had encamped in the valley of Agaunum, some little distance from the Leman Lake, in the district now known as "Valais." A body of soldiers, called in the story "The Theban Legion," but probably, in fact, a cohort mainly recruited in the Thebaid district of Egypt and forming part of the Imperial forces, happened to be earnest Christians.
This Theban contingent declined to take part in a solemn sacrificial ceremony arranged by Maximian, who desired to propitiate the gods and to win their assistance in the dangerous campaign on which he was about to enter. The superstitious Emperor, bitterly incensed at this refusal of the Thebaid contingent to share in the solemn Pagan rites he had arranged, treated the refusal not only as an act of special impiety towards the gods of Rome, but as a grave infraction of discipline, and condemned the cohort in question to the terrible military penalty of decimation. The punishment had no effect. The Christian soldiers still resolutely refused to take part in the solemn idolatrous rites arranged by the Emperor. Again Maximian decimated the brave soldier-confessors. In spite of the chastisement they still stood firm. The cruel Emperor, upon their reiterated refusal, ordered a massacre of the whole band. Under the orders of their captain, a devoted Christian named Maurice, they offered no resistance, and the whole cohort was cut down.
The terrible story comes to us in a letter of Eucherius, Bishop of Lyons, A. D. 435-50, written to a brother bishop, one Salvius, scarcely a century and a half after the martyrdom. The letter of Eucherius is evidently an authentic document; the evidence upon which he bases his narrative is very definite. He had learned the story of the martyrdom from Isaac, Bishop of Geneva, who received it from Theodorus, Bishop (from A. D. 349) of Octodurum, a city only a few miles distant from Agaunum. Theodorus is a known personality in ecclesiastical history, and was present at the Council of Aquileia in A. D. 381. He, as Tillemont remarks, might well have learned the particulars of the dread event from eye-witnesses of the scene of carnage.
When Eucherius wrote, the basilica erected over the grave of these martyrs for the faith was still standing in Agaunum; numerous pilgrims from distant lands were still in the habit of visiting the shrine; and a tradition of miracles performed in behalf of these devout pilgrim-worshippers hung round the hallowed spot. The one debatable point in Eucherius' letter is that he placed the massacre of these Christian soldiers in the period of the great persecution of Diocletian, which burst out a few years later than the probable date of the occurrence.
But such a mistake of a very few years is easily accounted for. It would be natural enough for a non-critical writer to class such an event among the many awful incidents of the great persecution which harried the Christians in all parts of the Empire so soon after the Agaunum tragedy.
The authenticity of the story has been much contested by critics who have made much of the silence of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius, Lactantius, Sulpicius Severus, and Orosius, and of the Christian poet Prudentius. Of these, by far the most conspicuous, Eusebius, dwells in detail upon the martyrs of the Eastern portion of the Empire alone. Many scenes of martyrdom in the West are passed over in his history, for reasons to be discussed later. Lactantius again describes the persecutors rather than the persecuted, and gives us only a general picture of the persecution, indulging in comparatively few details. Sulpicius Severus and Orosius do not profess to treat of these events in detail. The Spanish poet Prudentius largely confines his hymns and poems to Spanish confessors, and a few of the more conspicuous Roman martyrdoms. The "silence" of these writers here cannot invalidate the clear simple testimony of Bishop Eucherius, supported as it is by a widespread tradition which has left its mark deep and broad in the country where the event is related to have taken place.
We have, therefore, treated it as actual history; with Tillemont, Ruinart, and many other serious writers. In later times Allard, the French scholar, in his learned and exhaustive "History of the Persecutions," writing in the last years of the nineteenth century, after a long and searching examination of the evidence for this tragic event, unhesitatingly accepts it as an important piece of authentic history; considering that the bitter animosity undoubtedly shown by Maximian to Christianity in Gaul in the years immediately following the Agaunum tragedy was largely owing to the bitter feeling excited in his mind by the Legion's resolute defiance of orders; implying in his view that the Christians were disloyal to the Empire and its immemorial policy. This animosity was displayed during his residence in Gaul between 286 and 292, while Diocletian in the East was still tolerating, if not favoring, the sect.
There are various "Acts of Martyrs" extant purporting to treat of this persecution. These "Acts," however, are not contemporary, and have suffered much from legendary interpolations, but they have a general value as proving that the Christians in Gaul did undergo considerable sufferings—fitfully, perhaps, and without the promulgation of any special edict. The existing edicts gave handles enough if the authorities chose to act on them.
The "Acts" in question speak of persecution under Maximian's authority in the districts round Paris (Lutetia), in the west at Nantes, in the north at Amiens and Beauvais, in the north-east at Soissons and Rheims, in the south at Agen and Marseilles. The traditional martyrdom of S. Alban in Britain belongs to this same date, and is usually placed circa A. D. 286.
In the Eastern provinces of the Empire, during these six years, the position of Christians was generally favorable. The influence of the Palace officials, and of the wife and daughter of Diocletian, no doubt contributed to this policy. Christianity in the districts directly under Diocletian's rule was exceptionally strong, both in the numbers and in the position of its votaries. As we have noticed in some of our earlier sections Asia Minor and its wealthy cities, from the last quarter of the first century onwards, was peculiarly the home of the worshippers of Jesus.
We have several times had occasion to dwell upon the fact that under the Emperors who were not unfavorable to Christianity many Christian citizens were permitted to fill various civic offices, every facility being given to them to discharge such functions without sharing in any public acknowledgment of the religion of the state; while the policy of the rulers of the Church generally made such a sharing in public duties easy and practicable to the members of Christian communities. The Canons of the well-known early Council of the Church, Tiberias (Elvira, in the province of Spanish Granada), throw considerable light on this point, and give us some definite information respecting the inner life of the Catholic communities at the time.
In this Council, Canons were passed in which the position of members of the community occupying various municipal offices of importance is gravely considered; without directly approving the undertaking the duties of such public functions the Church distinctly contemplates such cases as not of unfrequent occurrence, and is careful not to discourage them by too severe penalties. For instance, if the garlands and insignia of priests of the temple are required to be worn on certain occasions by the civic functionaries in question, these Christian office-bearers are to be separated from communion for two years, and during their year of office are not to enter a church. It is to be observed that the Christians who undertook municipal offices never actually sacrificed or gave public games, but instead defrayed the cost of some work of public utility, such as the building of a bridge or basilica, or the making of a road. In some cases the distribution of a sum of money was substituted for the costly show in the amphitheatre. It must be borne in mind, too, that the general temper of this Liberis Council in which nineteen Bishops and twenty-six priests sat, was most austere, resembling in the strictness of some of its Canons a Puritan or Novatian, rather than a Catholic Council; which renders the fact of the imposition of these comparatively light penances still more remarkable. The formal decisions arrived at in such a Council as that of Liberis emphatically show that, in the period immediately preceding the final terrible persecution, the general policy of the heads of the Church in relation to the State was still that which had been laid down by the Church of Rome in opposition to Tertullian and Hippolytus. The proceedings of this same famous Liberis Council give us various details respecting another phase of the inner life of the Church at the close of the third century. Historians have been too ready to attribute to the Christian communities a general spirit of laxity and worldliness at this particular period, basing their unfavorable conclusions chiefly on some expressions of Eusebius. But the careful enumeration of the faults and errors which existed in the Christian Society of the time, as reported in the proceedings of this austere Council, demonstrate to us how high was the ideal proposed and taught by responsible Catholic teachers. Such severity would not have been possible if the offenders particularized had been numerous in the communities, or if public Christian opinion had in any way countenanced such laxity in ordinary life. Indeed, the resolute and noble stand made by the Christians generally in the East and West when the persecution broke out in the first part of the fourth century is a plain contradiction to any such supposition.
In the earlier years of Diocletian's reign the Christian communities, apparently for the first time, ventured in many cities to build important churches, and to call in the aid of art to decorate and beautify their homes of prayer and praise. One of the Canons of the Spanish Council to which we have been referring alludes to this last somewhat novel innovation in terms of stern reprobation.
Whilst, however, in the provinces, and particularly in the Eastern cities, a false sense of security lived in the many communities, in Rome a haunting sense of the extreme precariousness of the position seems to have brooded over the Church. There, far more conspicuously than in any other center of the Empire, Paganism was a visible power, with its splendid ritual, its stately temples, its immemorial traditions. There the worship of the immortals preserved its time-honored intimate connection with the ceremonials of the Senate and the chief magistrates of the Empire, who were shorn of their ancient power, but who still preserved the outward and visible insignia of their long inherited dignity.
In Rome during the years of stillness which preceded the great storm, the chiefs of the Christian community, instead of erecting and adorning new and large churches, as seems to have been the case in many of the provincial centers, busied themselves rather in their subterranean city of the dead, preparing quiet sanctuaries where they might meet for prayer and communion in those darker times which they felt might and probably would soon come upon them again.
The attitude of Paganism when the last and most formidable attack ever made on Christianity was imminent, had greatly changed in the half century which preceded the accession of Diocletian. We have already called attention to the silent reformation which had permeated the old beliefs. There is no doubt that the new teaching was in large measure derived from Christianity, whose great influence had made itself felt in all the centers of the Empire; a strange and novel monotheism was gradually but surely taking the place of the multiplicity of objects of worship enshrined in the old college of immortals—"The Universal Deity of the East, the sun, to the philosophic was the emblem or representative, to the vulgar the Deity." "In some places the sun was worshipped under the name of Apollo, more frequently as Mithras, the purifying fire; in Egypt as Serapis, in Syria as Baal. The many gods of the older world were curiously placed in the new Pagan teaching on a lower platform, and, if adored at all, were worshipped as subordinate spirits or daemons. It is true that Diocletian clung outwardly to the old cult when he adopted the title of Jovius, and induced his colleague in the Empire to style himself after the hero-god as Herculius. But when in the famous scene in the camp of the murdered Numerian he slew the factious prefect Aper, it was to the sun-god he solemnly appealed when he asserted his innocence of the murder before the assembled army of Rome; and later we shall see, when the question of persecution or no persecution of the Christian peoples was in the balance, the same statesman-Emperor betook himself, not to the priests of Jupiter, but to the oracle of Apollo, the sun-god of Miletus, for advice upon the tremendous question at issue.
Nor was this Pagan Monotheism without its effect on Christianity; attempts seem seriously to have been made in various quarters to bring about an understanding between the two religions, and it is said that some Christians here and there were induced to make common cause with their Pagan foes and their new presentment of their cult. But only a very few were led into the devious paths of this new Paganism; the great majority were steadfast to the faith for which so many of their fathers had given up life and all that seems to make life pleasant and dear, and for which they too were soon to be called to make a like sacrifice.
In line with the Neo-Paganism, with the religion of the State, the cult professed by the bulk of the official classes, by the patrician order, and by the vast majority of the people in the years immediately preceding, and during the period of the deadly conflict, outwardly at least were ranged the philosophers of the time; not a very distinguished or powerful group, but one which, through their bitter and incisive writings against Christianity, exercised a not inconsiderable influence on the side of Paganism. This group of philosophers is generally known as the Neo-Platonists. They had existed as a school of teachers for some half a century when Diocletian ascended the throne of the Caesars, and their principal representative during Diocletian's reign was Porphyry.
Porphyry and his fellow teachers had really very little in common with the new Paganism of the day, still less were they in sympathy with the older Paganism of the Empire; indeed. Porphyry is reported to have said that "the older conceptions of God are such that it is more impious to share them than it is to slight the images of the gods." But in spite of such a contemptuous estimate of the old Roman cult, he supported the cause of every old national religion, and the ceremonial duties of its adherents. Of Christianity, however, there is no doubt that he was the sleepless opponent. He professed to admire the moral beauty and the holiness of the founder of Christianity, but he condemned with a tireless pen the people who worshipped Him as their God with what seemed to him a strange inexplicable passion of devotion. He was a great student of the sacred writings of the Old and New Testament, but with the one object of undermining their testimony and destroying their enormous and abiding influence. He failed completely, as we shall see, in all his efforts directed against Christianity; as others have in like manner signally failed who in later ages have been inspired by Porphyry's spirit, and have imitated Porphyry's methods.
Porphyry's example as a writer against Christianity was followed by other members of the school, whose works, as far as we are able to gage, were colored with an extraordinary bitterness against the religion of Jesus. Indeed, one of the most prominent of these philosophic scholars, Heracles, has been by some considered as the prompter of the great persecution.