Studies in Ancient Society (Routledge Revivals)

M.I. Finley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136505645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1978, this volume comprises articles previously published in the historical journal, Past and Present, ranging over nearly a thousand years of Graeco-Roman history. The essays focus primarily on the Roman Empire, reflecting the increase, in British scholarship of the post-war years, of explanatory, 'structuralist' studies of this period in Roman history. The topics treated include Athenian politics, the Roman conquest of the east, violence in the later Roman Republic, the second Sophistic, and persecutions of the early Christians. The authors have all produced original studies, a number of which have generated significant research by other ancient historians.

IX

WHY WERE THE EARLY CHRISTIANS PERSECUTED?^*1

G. E. M. de Ste Croix

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The persecution of the Christians in the Roman empire has attracted the attention of scholars of many different kinds. The enormous volume of literature on the subject is partly due to the fact that it can be approached from many different directions : it offers a challenge to historians of the Roman empire (especially of its public administration), to Roman lawyers, to ecclesiastical historians, to Christian theologians, and to students of Roman religion and Greek religion. In fact all these approaches are relevant, and they must all be used together.

The question I have taken as a title needs to be broken down in two quite different ways. One is to distinguish between the general population of the Graeco-Roman world and what I am going to call for convenience ‘the government’ : I mean of course the emperor, the senate, the central officials and the provincial governors, the key figures for our purpose being the emperor and even more the provincial governors. In this case we ask first, ‘For what reasons did ordinary pagans demand persecution?’, and secondly, ‘Why did the government persecute ?’. The second way of dividing up our general question is to distinguish the reasons which brought about persecution from the purely legal basis of persecution—the juridical principles and institutions invoked by those who had already made up their minds to take action.

But let us not look at the persecutions entirely from the top, so to speak—from the point of view of the persecutors. Scholars who have dealt with this subject, Roman historians in particular, have with few exceptions paid too little attention to what I might call the underside of the process : persecution as seen by the Christians—in a word, martyrdom, a concept which played a vitally important part in the life of the early Church.²

It is convenient to divide the persecutions into three distinct phases. The first ends just before the great fire at Rome in 64; the second begins with the persecution which followed the fire and continues until 250;³ and the third opens with the persecution under Decius in 250–1 and lasts until 313—or, if we take account of the anti-Christian activities of Licinius in his later years, until the defeat of Licinius by Constantine in 324. We know of no persecution by the Roman government until 64, and there was no general persecution until that of Decius. Between 64 and 250 there were only isolated, local persecutions; and even if the total number of victims was quite considerable (as I think it probably was), most individual outbreaks must usually have been quite brief. Even the general persecution of Decius lasted little more than a year, and the second general persecution, that of Valerian in 257–9, less than three years. The third and last general persecution, by Diocletian and his colleagues from 303 onwards (the so-called ‘Great Persecution’), continued for only about two years in the West, although it went on a good deal longer in the East.⁴ In the intervals between these general persecutions the situation, in my opinion, remained very much what it had been earlier, except that on the whole the position of the Church was distinctly better : there were several local persecutions, but there were also quite long periods during which the Christians enjoyed something like complete peace over most of the empire ;⁵ and in addition the capacity of the Christian churches to own property was recognized, at least under some emperors. But I agree with Baynes⁶ and many others that complete toleration of Christianity was never officially proclaimed before the edict of Galerius in 311.

The subject is a large one, and I cannot afford to spend time on the first phase of persecution (before 64), during which, in so far as it took place at all, persecution was on a small scale and came about mainly as a result of Jewish hostility, which tended to lead to disturbances.⁷ After the execution of Jesus, the organs of government come quite well out of it all : their general attitude is one of impartiality or indifference towards the religious squabbles between Jews and Christians. In consequence of riots provoked by Christian missionary preaching, action was sometimes taken by the officials of local communities. But any Christians who were martyred, like Stephen and James ‘the Just’ (the brother of Jesus), ⁸ were victims of purely Jewish enmity, which would count for little outside Judaea itself. The Sanhedrin acted ultra vires in executing James—and Stephen, if indeed his death was not really a lynching.

I do not intend to give a narrative, even in outline, of the second and third phases of persecution, which I shall mainly deal with together. The earliest stages of intervention on the part of the government, before about I I2, are particularly obscure to us. We cannot be certain how and when the government began to take action; but, like many other people, I believe it was in the persecution by Nero at Rome which followed the great fire in 64. The much discussed passage in Tacitus⁹ which is our only informative source leaves many problems unsolved, but I can do no more here than summarize my own views, which agree closely with those expressed by Professor Beaujeu in his admirable recent monograph on this persecution.¹⁰ In order to kill the widely believed rumour that he himself was responsible for starting the fire, Nero falsely accused and savagely punished the Christians. First, those who admitted being Christians¹¹ were prosecuted, and then, on information provided by them (doubtless under torture), a great multitude were convicted, not so much (according to Tacitus) of the crime of incendiarism as because of their hatred of the human race (‘odio humani generis’).¹² Tacitus, like his friend Pliny and their contemporary Suetonius, ¹³ detested the Christians; and although he did not believe they caused the fire¹⁴ he does say they were ‘hated for their abominations’ (‘flagitia’) and he calls them ‘criminals deserving exemplary punishment’.¹⁵ The Christians were picked on as scapegoats, then, because they were already believed by the populace to be capable of horrid crimes, flagitia: that is worth noticing. (Had not the Empress Poppaea Sabina been particularly sympathetic towards the Jews, ¹⁶ they might well have been chosen as the most appropriate scapegoats.) And once the first batch of Nero’s Christian victims had been condemned, whether on a charge of organised incendiarism or for a wider ‘complex of guilt’, ¹⁷ there would be nothing to prevent the magistrate conducting the trials (probably the Praefectus Urbi) from condemning the rest on the charge familiar to us in the second century, of simply ‘being a Christian’—a status which now neces sarily involved, by definition, membership of an anti-social and potentially criminal conspiracy.

I now want to begin examining the attitude of the government towards the persecution of the Christians. I propose to consider mainly the legal problems first, because although they involve some highly technical questions of Roman public law, the more important ones can, I believe, be completely solved, and we shall then be in a very much better position to understand the reasons which prompted the government to persecute; although before we can finally clarify these, we shall have to consider the other side of our problem : the reasons for the hatred felt towards Christianity by the mass of pagans.

The legal problems, ¹⁸ from which a certain number of nonlegal issues can hardly be separated, may be grouped under three heads. First, what was the nature of the official charge or charges ? Secondly, before whom, and according to what form of legal process, if any, were Christians tried? And thirdly, what was the legal foundation for the charges ? (For example, was it a lex, or a senatusconsultum, or an imperial edict specifically directed against Christianity, or some more general edict, or an imperial rescript or series of rescripts ?) I will deal with the first question now, and then the other two together.

First, then, the nature of the charges against the Christians. H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTRIBUTORS
• CONTENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• I. ATHENIAN DEMAGOGUES
• II. ARISTOTLE AND ECONOMIC ANALYSIS
• III. ROME AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN THE GREEK STATES 200-146 B.C.
• IV. THE ROMAN MOB
• V. ÉLITE MOBILITY IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
• VI. SOCIAL MOBILITY IN THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE: THE EVIDENCE OF THE IMPERIAL FREEDMEN AND SLAVES
• VII . LEGAL PRIVILEGE IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
• VIII. GREEKS AND THEIR PAST IN THE SECOND SOPHISTIC
• IX. WHY WERE THE EARLY CHRISTIANS PERSECUTED?
• X. WHY WERE THE EARLY CHRISTIANS PERSECUTED? AN AMENDMENT
• XI. WHY WERE THE EARLY CHRISTIANS PERSECUTED? A REJOINDER
• XII. THE FAILURE OF THE PERSECUTIONS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
• XIII. THE ROMAN COLONATE
• XIV. PEASANT REVOLTS IN LATE ROMAN GAUL AND SPAIN
• INDEX