The rich and complex golden age enjoyed by the empire girded by that wall continued long after Hadrian’s death in 138. Under the emperor Antoninus Pius there was further peace and stability, but in the rule of Marcus Aurelius, another bearded philosopher-emperor, the pax Romana was thrown into jeopardy by waves of German invaders. Aurelius’s story is full of bitter irony: the man of peace found that in order to save his empire, he had to be almost continuously at war with barbarian armies attacking from the north. The succession of his son Commodus, an indigent, flighty emperor more interested in games and gladiators than Roman security, only saw his father’s success in the German wars collapse. In 193 the dynasty founded by Rome’s first African emperor, Septimius Severus, ensured that Hadrian’s golden age was revived once again. But it was not enough to halt an inevitable slide into decline. By the middle of the third century AD Rome was catapulted into a new period of total crisis and near collapse.
To pull the empire back from the brink, the man responsible for Rome’s next great revolution needed, above all, martial prowess and the assured ability to command armies. With his rise to power, one fashion among emperors died abruptly. Beards were out. The clean-cut, close-shaven soldier-emperor was back in style.
V
CONSTANTINE
In the distant province of Bithynia-Pontus a trial was causing the Roman governor a headache. Pliny the Younger was a wealthy senator, a refined man of letters, and an enthusiastic gardener. Back in Italy he owned three beautiful villas set amid ideal countryside (two near Lake Como and one in Umbria), and he was considered an enlightened master of no fewer than five hundred slaves. However, now, in AD 111, in the backwaters of Asia Minor close to the Black Sea, those delights of home must have seemed a lifetime away. The tricky case brought before him was proving quite a nuisance.
While Pliny was touring the province to hear legal cases, a group of people had been brought before him and denounced by some locals. Their alleged crime? Being Christians. Pliny gave them every opportunity to prove their innocence. When he interrogated them, however, some confessed that they were followers of Christ. So he gave them another chance after reminding them that the punishment for their crime was death. Again, after the second and third interrogations, they showed not repentance but ‘stubbornness’ and an ‘inflexible obstinacy’. Their faith, he concluded, was ‘madness’.1 The governor was left with no choice: of the guilty, those who were Roman citizens were sent to Rome for an official court hearing, while the non-citizens were executed there and then. If Pliny the Younger thought that would be the end of the matter, however, he was to be sorely disappointed.
News of the case spread around the province. Pliny soon received an anonymous letter listing the names of hundreds of others apparently guilty of the same crime. To make matters worse, when they were brought before him they denied it. The governor, however, was not to be defeated in administering Roman justice. To weed out the guilty from the innocent, he came up with an ingenious solution. He dictated a prayer invoking the pagan Roman gods, asked the accused to repeat it, and requested that they offer up wine and incense to the emperor. The final part of the test was to curse Christ. Some of those who denied being Christian duly followed Pliny’s orders. Others revealed that they had been Christians in the past but were no longer and therefore they too agreed to do what Pliny asked of them. Even so, the test had not produced a conclusive verdict. Although some said that they were no longer Christian, did once having been a Christian constitute guilt? To get to the bottom of the crimes they had committed in the past, Pliny’s next move was to torture two female attendants of the early Christian Church, known as deaconesses. He found not stories of lechery and cannibalism, as his prejudices might have led him to expect, but only ‘depraved, excessive superstition’.2 What to do with these people? Were they guilty or not? Drawing a blank, Pliny wrote to the emperor Trajan for advice.
The emperor replied that even if there had been suspicions about their past, they should be pardoned. In addition, Pliny was urged not to conduct witch-hunts, not to deliberately seek out Christians. This decision would set the legal standard for ‘good’ emperors who followed after Trajan. However, the extraordinary exchange of letters between emperor and governor reveals much more. It shows that in AD 111 trials and executions of Christians were an accepted, if legally knotty, procedure.
Persecution of Christians had begun approximately fifty years earlier with the trial in Rome of St Paul, the great first missionary who had taken the message of Christianity to the Roman east. Not long afterwards, the emperor Nero had made scapegoats of the growing community of Christians living in the imperial capital. Looking to take the sting out of the accusation that he himself had started the great fire of Rome in order to build a new palace, Nero famously had them crucified or burnt in the gardens of his residence. The emperor Domitian was accused of similar treatment of the Christians. Although Trajan was lenient in his judgment of Pliny’s case, the fact remained that the Christians posed a problem for the Romans. Banding together, worshipping the Christian God to the exclusion of traditional Roman gods was simply intolerable. Trials were brought against them and, if found guilty, the unfortunate believers in this alien religion were treated no better than criminals and prisoners of war. Indeed they often met a similar end – a gruesome death in the Roman arena.
In spite of the hostility and penalties it provoked, Christianity grew and grew. By the beginning of the fourth century, it was an empire-wide phenomenon. It is estimated that at that time perhaps ten per cent of the Roman world was Christian; there were a growing number of churches to be found in all parts of the Roman world; a hierarchy of Christian bishops, presbyters and deacons was developing; and a significant variety of people – from slaves and the poor to the upper classes – were converts to the Christian faith.3 As a result of this increasingly strong organization, in 303 the Christians faced their greatest persecution yet. The emperor Diocletian issued an edict ordering churches to be destroyed, scriptures to be burnt, some Christians to be stripped of their offices and others to be made slaves.
And yet, within twenty years of Diocletian’s persecution, all this changed. Christianity went through a revolutionary transformation in status, rising from being the most despised religion to the most favoured. By 324 it had become the official religion of the Roman world. Devotion to the traditional Roman gods had not disappeared, but, incredible as it would have seemed to people at the time, that religion was no longer a requisite part of what it meant to be a Roman.4