Search Results

This chapter reprints Ste. Croix's 1954 Harvard Theological Review article on the ‘Great’ Persecution of the early 4th century, when Diocletian and his imperial colleagues issued four edicts of persecution between 303 and 304. The thrust of these edicts was to reverse a generation of toleration which the Church had enjoyed, but their enforcement was patchy and needs to be understood within the context of the operation of Roman imperial administration, which depended to an extent upon the preferences of individual governors for the implementation of imperial legislation. The contrasting implementation of the edicts between the eastern and western halves of the empire is investigated, with particular reference to the evidence from North Africa and Eusebius' account of the Palestinian martyrs.

It is strange that historians of early Christianity and have not made more of this, but in the years before his death Rome’s last pagan emperor, Maximin Daia (or Daza), tried to halt Constantine’s Christian revolution by promulgating a text entitled Memoirs of Pilate. One of the last tactical moves of Rome’s last pagan emperor, therefore, centered on the figure of Pilate. What is more, Daia’s Memoirs of Pilate seem to have dramatized the Roman’s innocence. In a broad sense, we could say that the last political doctrine promulgated by Rome’s last pagan emperor was—the innocence of Pontius Pilate. It is Pilate’s name which seems to preside, in Daia’s eastern territories, during Rome’s final concerted persecution of the church. This chapter shows what we know about Daia’s Memoirs of Pilate, and why they are of world-historical significance.

The emperor Diocletian stabilized the Roman Empire in the 280s and early 290s by creating the tetrarchy, a system of shared imperial authority in which four emperors each operated in a different region of the empire. Panegyrists celebrated Diocletian, Maximian, and their colleague Constantius I for restoring Roman prosperity and peace. By the early 300s, imperial attention shifted to maintaining the new order. This change prompted a series of strong imperial interventions in Roman life that culminated with the Great Persecution of Christians. It ended just before the emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Christian authors like Eusebius and Lactantius celebrated this event, but Constantine nevertheless framed his new religious policies not as a break with the past but as a restoration of the worship of the one original God away from which Roman polytheism had drifted.

Formerly professor of Latin in the court of the emperor Diocletian, Lactantius responded to the Tetrarchic ‘Great Persecution’ with the most extensive defence and exposition of Christianity written in Latin before Augustine’s City of God. His seven-book Divine Institutes, the last Christian apology written before Constantine’s rise to power, credited the invention of pagan cults to a historical King Jupiter. Building on this euhemeristic narrative, Lactantius reinterpreted the philosophical theories surveyed in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods to attack polytheism as an irrational display of empty religiosity. With the help of Christian cosmology and eschatology, he set the present sufferings of Christians in a grand historical context, predicting the final victory over paganism at the return of Christ, a few centuries after his own day. Lactantius later hailed the victories of Constantine and Licinius as a divine vindication of persecuted Christians. Nevertheless, he still expected pagan domination and persecution to continue until Christ’s return. His eschatology, not the experience of imperial politics, set his basic approach to paganism before and after the ‘Constantinian revolution’.