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There are differences as well as parallels between Roman and post-enlightenment imperial experiences. Romans had many shared assumptions in common with those they colonized. Later strife between Christianity and Rome was not because Christians were or were perceived as political rebels. It was about religion. Romans accused Christians of superstitio and meant it. Pax Romana depended upon pax deorum. Rome’s part was pietas — honoring the gods. Christians (atheoi), by refusing to honor the gods, endangered the empire. Roman imperium was often violent and exploitative, though not more so than other polities of its time; it also had positive elements, notably a measure of peace and security. Men like Pliny, Virgil, and P. Petronius regarded defense of Roman peace as a matter of honor. We must beware of colonizing the past. Jesus, Josephus, Romans, and Jews should be listened to for their own sake before we attempt to apply what they say to ourselves.

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’.

There are obvious similarities between Roman laws against superstitio—defined as excessive religious credulity, hence magic and private divination, and then paganism—and Roman laws against heresy: both sets of laws represent attempts by the state to define and prohibit religious behaviors. Yet for all their similarities, justifications for laws against heresy were significantly different from those against superstitio. Heresy laws prohibited not just behaviors but beliefs. A comparison of laws on superstitio and heresy in the early fifth-century Theodosian Code shows how heresy laws were directly tied to a Christian tradition of divine law that focused on the precepts and rules laid down by the Christian God himself—God’s law—in a way that was not the case for laws on superstitio. This chapter thus elucidates a fundamental shift in the nature of imperial authority as emperors aligned themselves with a new, unassailable source of power.