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The Forum, center of Roman Power
An artist's interpretation of Christian martyrdom
Emperor Decius
Plotinus, whose writings would inspire Christians, Jews and Muslims
Authority needed respect in order to rule effectively, but respect for authority was falling among Roman citizens, including among the empire's aristocracy and its tradesmen. This decline in respect was caused in part by armies on the move within the empire, armies plundering towns and farms, and it was caused by military-emperors sending tax collectors about the empire squeezing more taxes from people.
Disrespect for authority had developed also within the military. During the chaotic decades in the first half of the third century, discipline within the army continued to decline. The experienced soldiers who trained the army, the centurions, were often the victims of mutinies, and centurions began to disappear.
Meanwhile, the empire's economy had not been benefiting from advances in technology. A steam engine had been invented by a Greek named Hero of Alexandria during the rule of Augustus, but there had been no interest in saving labor. Producers had no vision of technological progress. They had been increasing production by using more labor by sweat and muscle. They used slave labor. The steam engine – which would lead an industrial revolution in the eighteenth century – remained unused.
During the first half of the 200s, economic activity in the empire declined, especially in the empire's western half, where roads deteriorated despite programs to restore them. Economics was little understood by what there was of government under the military-emperors, and governmental policies added to the decline, as did the continued imbalance in trade and the flight of the empire's bullion eastward. During the first half of the century taxation encouraged men of commerce to hoard their money rather than invest it. To pay soldiers, emperors debased money, and government began paying its debts in money that it would not accept from citizens as payment of taxes.
Prices skyrocketed. The middle class went bankrupt. More people had become beggars, and many others feared that they too would soon be impoverished. In Rome and other big cities, proletarians remained disinclined to organize themselves against authority, but here and there in the countryside desperate peasants did revolt, but their uprisings were not coordinated and not widespread enough to challenge the empire militarily. In various parts of the empire, bands of desperate people wandered the countryside, surviving by theft. In 235 - the year that Maximinus Thrax became emperor - bands of brigands swept through Italy. In Gaul, hordes of people roamed about, pillaging as they went. Piracy grew on the Aegean Sea, and tribal people from the Sahara attacked Roman cities along the coast of North Africa.
Disorders sometimes cut off trade routes. By 250, Rome's trade with China and India had ended. Agricultural lands in the empire were going unused. With the declining economy, people moved from cities and towns to rural areas in search of food. Cities began shrinking to a fraction of their former size, some to remain occupied only by administrators.
Agricultural lands went unused. With the declining economy, people moved from cities and towns to rural areas in search of food, and cities began shrinking. Where agricultural estates felt threatened by barbarian or Roman soldiers they protected themselves by fortification, and their neighbors surrendered their holdings to them in exchange for protection.
Having lost their faith in government, more people sought refuge in religions that promised them well-being. For some people the austere morality of the Christians - viewed as strange during prosperous times - became an attraction. Christianity's strict moral code appealed to moralistic Romans, as did Christianity's description of existing society as evil. Christianity offered saintly abnegation, a positive attitude toward humanity, a belief in the sacredness of human life, and communal love. And Christians could point to the absurdities in traditional religion, the same absurdities that Plato and Socrates denounced: the worship of gods whose antics made them no guide for morality.
Christianity benefited from worship of someone with a human face - easier to worship than a god that was vague, unseen, unspeaking or a creature other than human. Christianity benefited by Jesus having been a common man and a martyr with a message. They could see their own suffering in the suffering of Jesus. Some people were attracted by Jesus' words, by descriptions of his deeds, his belief in justice and his love for all people, and they were attracted by the promise of a new world that would offer them refuge from pain and suffering.
Christianity had an advantage in being organized and unified, and it benefited from its being open to people ignored or excluded by other religions: to women, non-citizens and slaves. In appealing to slaves, Christians claimed that although one would remain a slave in the material world, in God's eyes a good person was never a slave.
Christianity appealed to the poor, an appeal aided by the claim that poverty was an advantage in attaining salvation after death. And be-coming a Christian was less expensive than entering some other faiths. To be initiated into Great Mother Worship - a major rival to Christianity - one had to bear the great expense of a bull that had to be slaughtered. Conversion to Christianity, on the other hand, was a free immersion in water.
All were welcome to join the Christians, and Christianity appealed to some among the upper classes. More upper class women converted to Christianity than did upper class men, and unmarried upper class Christian women looked for Christian husbands among the poor, or even among slaves. The Bishop of Rome, Callistus, permitted such marriages, while these marriages remained illegitimate under Roman civil law.
When one became a Christian, he or she joined a community that looked after the welfare of its members. Christians shared their meals. They offered health care - as it was. They shared their wealth. They took care of the indigent among them, including widows, whom they called "Virgins of the Church."
Up to the middle 200s, the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire had been infrequent, the persecutions usually coming after a calamity, such as an earthquake, with people blaming the Christians for the anger of the gods. With the growth in Christianity, the Christians became more visible, and some Romans saw the Christian belief in an approaching Armageddon as support for an end to civilization. They continued to see the Christians as disloyal for not respecting Rome's gods. Rome continued to hold Christianity as illegal, and leading Christians complained publicly that authorities were justified in prosecuting Christians for real crimes but that Christians generally did nothing criminal.
The emperor from 244 was Philippus (Philip the Arab), a man of Arabian ancestry who looked with some sympathy upon the pleading for justice by the Christian writer Origen. Philippus had been a military leader who had plotted against the previous emperor, and, unfortunately for the Christians, in 249 it was his turn to be overthrown. Troops of an able general, Gaius Decius (pronounced Deck-ee-us), encouraged Decius to rebel against Philippus. Decius moved his army from Pannonia into Italy, defeated Philippus at Verona and became the eighth emperor since the death of Alexander Severus fourteen years before.
Decius wished to restore order and to lift the empire from economic ruin. As part of a thousand-year anniversary of Rome's founding, he ordered Romans to perform rituals to Rome's gods, hoping to put the empire in good stead with the gods and perhaps add to his legitimacy as emperor. The Jews, as before, were exempted from such rituals, but not the Christians, and Christian opposition to participation in the rituals drew new attention to them.
Decius acted against the Christians in a way he thought would please the gods most: he hoped for Christian conversions to the state religion. He ordered those suspected of being Christians to prove their loyalty by making sacrifices or libations to Rome's gods in the presence official witnesses. Those Christians who did so were to receive and carry on their person a paper document certifying that they had performed the required ritual. To escape persecution, thousands of Christians renounced their faith and performed the required ritual, and there arose a flurry of business in writing the special documents that they were required to carry. Some Christians of wealth gave bribes in exchange for anonymity and safety, and some, including bishops, went into hiding.
The government arrested some prominent Christians, among them the bishops of Rome, Jerusalem and Antioch, and they were executed, going to their deaths, it was said, zealously savoring their righteousness. The belief that catastrophe was a creation of Yahweh was alive among the Christians as it had been among the Jews, and the bishop of Carthage, Cyprian, saw the persecutions as God's punishment. In hiding, he wrote of Christians delighting the Lord with their martyrdom, and he wrote of the flow of blood as a "glorious flood to quiet the flames and fires of hell." The Christians, he claimed, were being persecuted because they had "not been doing the will of God" and had been "striving for property and profit." Each person, he wrote, had been "pleasing himself alone and displeasing everyone else." "And so," he added, "we are being given the thrashing which we deserve."
The executions brought still more attention to the Christians, and people were impressed by Christians willing to suffer and die for their beliefs. Some people saw the state as more of an enemy than they did the Christians. They preferred Christians in their communities to the usual abuses that came with the arrival of soldiers. And rather than the number of Christians diminishing with the persecutions, Christianity appears to have grown.
All the appeals to the gods which Decius had demanded appeared to produce no positive results for him or for the empire, for the Germanic Goths had begun storming southward across the Danube River - the Goths being pushed upon by the nomadic Alans. Decius went to do battle against the Goths, and in June, 251, the Goths lured him and his army into a swamp, destroyed his army and killed him and his son. And this to some was an indication that God was more angry with Decius than he was with the Christians.
Decius' aide, a military commander named Gaius Gallus, succeeded Decius, and he abandoned Decius' edict against the Christians. The threat to Christians subsided. Many who had left the Church wished to re-enter, and a debate arose within the Church whether this should be allowed. Those against re-entry argued that the baptism that made one a Christian cleansed one of all sins except for original sin and that once dirtied after having been baptized one stayed dirtied. The debate broadened into an argument over whether the Church was a gathering of sinners struggling for redemption or a society of the redeemed. Purity again lost to practicality, tolerance and compromise. A council of bishops met in North Africa in the late summer of 251 and decided that one could re-enter the Church so long as he had not actually offer-ed a sacrifice to a pagan god, in which case he would be excluded from the Church until he was on his death bed.
The deathbed for many came the following year with a plague that ran across North Africa. To many Christians, including Cyprian, this indicated that Yahweh was still angry with his fellow Christians. And to those loyal to Rome's gods it appeared that the gods were still insufficiently appeased.
In the spring of 252, while some pagans were again blaming Christians for the anger of the gods, a second Council of Bishops met, and to strengthen the Church in the face of the renewed threat they granted full re-admission to all who had lapsed under pressure of the recent persecutions - which left restless and displeased those who favored the Church as a society of the redeemed.
In 253, Emperor Gallus was murdered by his own troops, and soldiers chose another military commander as emperor: Valerian. Valerian won support from the Senate, and he managed to restore some discipline to Rome's military. He made his son, Gallienus, co-emperor and in charge of Europe. Then Valerian and Gallienus addressed the problem of the empire's frontiers. Border peoples had noticed that the borders could be easily crossed, and they were crossing again in great numbers.
From 254 to 256, Gallienus pushed back Germanic tribes called Alamanni. In 256 a newly formed and powerful coalition of Germanic tribes called the Franks stormed across the southern Rhine into Gaul. And those called Saxons crossed the English Channel in pirate cutters and invaded Britannia. It was now that Shapur I swept into Syria and Asia Minor, believing that the Roman Empire was weakened by these invasions. And by now the plague that had ravaged North Africa had moved north into Europe, and it was killing as many as five thousand a day in Rome. Valerian sought help from the gods and ordered Roman citizens throughout the empire to perform the requisite religious rituals. Having learned more about Christianity's hierarchy in the last persecutions, this time the emperor's edict took aim specifically against Church bishops and elders. In 257 and 258, leading Christians were rounded up, executed and their property confiscated. Among those martyred was Cyprian, his execution witnessed by thousands, some climbing trees for a better view, those near Cyprian throwing pieces of cloth to catch his blood.
Again the Alamanni pushed into the empire, and into Italy, and Gallienus defeated them near Milan. In Syria, Valerian's plague-ridden army drove Shapur's army back, but then Valerian lost a battle at Edessa, in Osroene. Valerian was captured, tortured and soon died. Franks obtained a permanent hold at spots in eastern and central Gaul and northeastern Spain. The empire's long-standing political instability made matters worse as the governor of Pannonia rose against Gallienus in an attempt to make himself emperor. Gallienus defeated him, and, in 260, Gallienus had to move against a second pretender.
The persecution of Christians had again failed to make any apparent difference in Rome's struggle to protect itself, and again Romans were impressed by the integrity of Christians willing to go to their death in behalf of their beliefs. Gallienus - now sole emperor - saw the persecutions of the Christians as a failure, and in need of peace and a greater unity within the empire he issued an Edict of Toleration, making Christianity legal and giving the Christians respite from what had been the terrible years of persecution.
Despite the Edict of Toleration, God remained unkind to Gallienus. A general in Syria, Macrianus, revolted against Gallienus, proclaiming his area independent of Rome. In Gaul a general named Postumus rebelled and proclaimed himself emperor, and from Gaul he took control of Britannia and Spain. From Syria, Macrianus invaded Europe, but Gallienus defeated him. Then in 267, Goths in large numbers again crossed the Danube and attacked Greece by sea and by land. By the year 268 Athens was overrun. As the Goths were moving to another target of opportunity, Gallienus and his legions attacked and defeated them. But while Gallienus was in Greece, another general revolted against him – in northern Italy. Gallienus rushed back to Italy, and, while besieging the rebel general at the city of Milan, he was murdered by a group of generals who believed that they could rule better than he. The leader of these generals, Marcus Claudius, became emperor and took the name Claudius II.
Claudius rallied what forces he could against the Goths. With skill he managed to defeat them and to pacify areas within the empire south of the Danube, a pacification that included allowing Goths to settle permanently on available land in Thrace and Macedonia. The upstart emperor who ruled over Britannia, Spain and Gaul, Postumus, had been cut down by his own soldiers, and contenders fought for control of what had been his realm. Claudius continued to reign only in the central part of the empire, including Moesia, where he defeated another in-vasion of Goths. Then in 270, while preparing to move against an invasion by a Germanic people called Vandals, bad luck caught up with him: he died of the plague.
Claudius' chosen successor was a tough-minded soldier, Aurelianus – one of those who had conspired with Claudius against Gallienus. Aurelianus became the emperor known as Aurelian. He ruled energetically and enforced army discipline. An outstanding general, he re-established Roman rule in the east, and, with the eastern front secured, he was able to regain the provinces of Britannia, Spain and Gaul, the upstart who had ruled these areas submitting peacefully to Aurelian's authority.
Aurelian earned the title “Restorer of the World.” He increased the amount of food distributed to the people of Rome. He tried to reform Rome's coins, and he tried to subordinate the worship of Rome's gods to the worship of the sun-god Sol Invictus. Then in 275, while on his way to another war against Persia, Aurelian was murdered by a group officers whom his secretary had misled into believing he had marked for death.
During the next nine years Rome had six more emperors. Alamanni again pushed into Gaul. More Franks came in boats along the channel coast and penetrated the heart of Gaul by way of its rivers. The Franks sacked northern Spain, and they sailed into the Mediterranean and to North Africa, where they established a pirate base.
Stoicism influenced Christianity, and so too did the neo-Platonism of Plotinus. Plotinus had studied philosophy at Alexandria. During a stint in the military in 243 and 244, he failed to meet eastern thinkers and to learn Persian and Indian philosophy as he had hoped. He returned from military service to Rome, where he spent much of the rest of his life teaching philosophy. He saw himself as a reformer of Plato's philosophy. It was the last significant development in philosophy before the triumph of Christianity, his views gaining a wide following among Romans. And it spread to influential Christians such as Basil the Great (330–379) and his contemporary Gregory of Nyssa in the east, and to Augustine (354–430) in the west. Had Christianity remained another Jewish sect rather than having spread to gentiles, neo-Platonism might have become the dominant faith in the western world - without any one church in authority worshipping a jealous god.
Like Christianity, neo-Platonism had appeal as an alternative to the Roman Empire's chaos and decadence. Whereas Plato wanted to put people into a perfect society, Plotinus called on people to withdraw from politics and from the world of the senses and to seek instead an awareness of and solidarity with God. It was withdrawal to the extent that it had no sense of belonging to the disreputable Roman state. Plotinus' religion was personal - without a sense of belonging to a community as did Christianity.
In the year 245, at age forty, Plotinus settled in Rome, and there he founded a school. He conducted friendly and informal discussions on commentaries that had been written on Plato and Aristotle, defending Plato against Aristotle's criticisms while making some concessions to Aristotle. Plotinus encouraged the discussions to continue until his students believed that the philosophical problems they had raised were solved.
As would Christian philosophers in the Middle Ages, Plotinus pondered what he saw as "the ordered universe," and he concluded that its "material mass" had existed forever and would "forever endure." He saw God as soul, as a supreme spirit, and he saw soul as primary in existence. He believed that all nature had been created by this supreme spirit. He saw soul not as intellect, as did Aristotle, nor as thought, pointing out that thought requires a subject, which would make soul a duality rather than primary. Nor, claimed Plotinus, is soul a plurality of things - as it is believed by those who see God as everything. Soul, believed Plotinus, is the source of plurality. But Plotinus saw himself as not having answers to everything. He confessed to not having an answer as to why God created the cosmos. Some questions, he believed, could not be answered.
Like the Manichaeans, Gnostics, Zoroastrians and others, Plotinus found evil in materiality. This was a time when there was widespread disgust with the human body, and Plotinus saw the body as a prison or tomb in which one's soul was trapped. He did not believe that salvation from this prison would come from outside oneself, as a struggle between Good and Evil or God and Satan. He saw salvation, or grace, in finding one's own pure spirit, one's own godly soul, by avoiding vain preoccupations with one's body and by avoiding exaggerated worries. Like the Stoics, he believed that suffering had no effect on one who had found grace. He believed in an inner freedom through indifference toward external circumstances.
Plotinus disagreed with the Gnostics that an evil power had created materiality. And, contrary to the Gnostics, he defended the notion of God creating all (including evil) by claiming that evil had a rightful place in the universe. Most or all forms of evil, he wrote, "serve the universe." Vice, he wrote, "stirs us to thoughtful living, not allowing us to drowse in security."
Like Plato, Plotinus believed that to find truth one had to look beyond materiality (the world known through the senses). Like Plato, he believed that through reason and knowledge one could work his way to a union with and an awareness of God. He believed in an ecstatic union with God that could not be adequately expressed with words. Plotinus described his own salvation in a way that is similar to ideas in India centuries before: contact with God through repose, meditation and renunciation. He believed in fleeing alone "toward the Solitary One."
Plotinus combined his search for salvation with acts of virtue. He wrote that "Without virtue, God is only a word." He believed that a part of the self, as soul, resides in the heavens, and, ascending to that level, one rests with the Divine and experiences a love of gentle Goodness. The Good, he believed, was always gentle. He claimed that the experience of being at this higher level could remain with one as one pursued his earthly living, looking after himself and others.
It was at this higher level, according to Plotinus, that one found love, which he saw as a part of any pursuit of virtue and unity with God. On love he was close to Plato, but different from Plato in that Plato believed that love is an achievement that begins with experience at the lowly, material level. Plotinus denied that love had any such lowly origins. Plotinus believed that love was an ingredient that added to the objects or person loved, making that object something that it was not before, love being superior to the object it is placed upon. Beyond this, Plotinus saw the question what is love as similar to questions why is there Soul and why does the Creator create: unanswerable.
Porphyry was born of Syrian parents in the city of Tyre. He studied philosophy in Athens. In 263, he went to Rome and studied there under Plotinus, and after Plotinus’ death, in 270, he took charge of the school. He arranged Plotinus’ lectures for publication, and he made it possible for neo-Platonism to spread throughout the Roman Empire.
Concerned about the growth of Christianity, Porphyry joined other pagan intellectuals in criticizing it. It was a criticism similar to what would eventually arise among Christians themselves. Porphyry studied both the Old and New Testaments, and he decided that the Book of Daniel had not been written when claimed but during the time of the Maccabaean revolts. He decided that rather than prophesying the future, including the coming of Jesus and the destruction of Jerusalem's temple, the Book of Daniel, described times and events that for its writer had already occurred.
Porphyry found that the genealogies of Matthew and Luke conflicted with each other, and he pointed to their conflicting descriptions of Jesus' infancy. Against the claim that the apostles were infallible, Porphyry asked why then did Peter and Paul quarrel. Believing in a God who was the author of good, Porphyry thought the idea of God's eternal punishment was nonsense. He believed that good came to people through their connecting themselves with God. He believed that people could see only a part of the whole but that it was their duty to wed their minds to God as best they could. Evil, he believed, came from people deviating from an awareness of God.
In the early 280s, commanders of rival Roman armies again fought for power, and a commander of humble birth from Illyricum emerged as the emperor. This was Diocletian, originally named Diocles. Diocletian went to Egypt and quelled a rebellion there. He restored Roman control in Britannia. And invasions by the Goths subsided, enabling him to devote attention to reconstruction. He saw uncontrolled activity as godlessness, and he moved to create order.
With the danger of more disturbances, Diocletian judged the empire too vast for any one emperor to rule effectively, and he divided the empire among four vice-emperors, who were military men like him, and he set himself up as the exalted supreme ruler of the empire. He dressed with the grandeur of an eastern emperor, and he proclaimed himself the earthly representative of Rome's supreme god, Jupiter. He claimed that he was responsible only to Jupiter. He surrounded himself with bureaucrats and a small army of bodyguards. And his court grew in size and did its business with elaborate ceremonies and fanfare.
Diocletian ran his government as a general runs an army, giving orders and expecting them to be carried out. He attempted to maintain what was left of Roman law and customs and tried to create order in the realm of ideas. He outlawed astrologers and the alchemists of Egypt and had their writings burned. He viewed Manichaeanism as a Persian religion and ordered its writings and the authors of those writings burned, and he ordered death for those of the Manichaean faith.
Diocletian tried to restore order in the ruined economy by governmental directives. He created a national budget that aimed at balancing expenses and revenues. In 301 he responded to rising prices by an edict that fixed prices on thousands of commodities and services. In response to soaring interest rates, he fixed these to between six and twelve percent, depending upon the amount of risk involved in the loan.
Diocletian brought peace and a greater degree of order to the empire. Impressed, some people looked to him with hope. But Diocletian's economic policies failed. Despite the death penalty for violations of his laws on prices, violations became so widespread that his government stopped trying to enforce these laws. Diocletian's increased taxation resulted in the great landowners producing less for the open market and more for their own estates, and these estates continued to expand and absorb poor peasants as laborers.
For the sake of law and order and collecting taxes, Diocletian renewed an attempt made earlier in the century to prohibit people from moving off the lands they worked. Everyone was ordered to remain at his present occupation and location. Tenant farmers were to inherit the obligations of their fathers and were becoming serfs, to be sold as property when the landowner sold his land.
By the beginning of the 300s, Christians in the eastern half of the empire had expanded to twenty or more percent of its Greek speaking population. North Africa had become largely Christian, the result of Christian evangelists having learned the Coptic and Berber languages. And Christians had also learned Syrian, Thracian and Celtic. Across the empire, Christians were around ten percent of the population - their number having doubled in about fifty years. Two kings had been converted: the king of Osroene in northeastern Mesopotamia and the king of Armenia. Christians were serving in Rome's armies, and they were working as civil servants in local government or in lowly positions on the imperial staff.
Trouble arose involving Christians during a religious ritual performed in the presence of Diocletian. One or more of Diocletian's Christian courtiers made a sign of the cross to ward off what they thought to be the demonic influences of the ritual. Afterward, the priests complained to Diocletian, and Diocletian ordered everyone in the palace to worship the gods or be beaten. Diocletian's vice-emperor in the east, Galerius, pursued the attack against Christians, demanding that the army there purge itself of all Christian officers. Galerius' palace was set ablaze, and Christians were accused of having set the fire. Galerius persuaded Diocletian to launch a drive to crush Christianity, believing that he and Diocletian could succeed where Decius and Valerius had failed. Again Christians were ordered to sacrifice to the gods of the state or face execution.
Christian assemblies were forbidden. Bibles were confiscated and burned, and churches were destroyed. But by now, Christians had become to numerous to be wiped out. Unlike Germany during World War II - the Roman state had not developed an efficient method for rounding people up and executing them. Moreover, because Christians could read and write - in an effort to study scripture - they had become an indispensable part of government. The purges slowly and intermittently dragged on into the year 305, when Diocletian retired because of ill-health.
The vice-emperor in the east, Galerius, began a joint rule of the empire with the vice-emperor in Rome and the west: Constantius. The following year, 306, Constantius was in Britannia commanding a force against incursions into Roman territory by the Scots, and there he died. His troops then chose his eighteen year-old son, Constantine, to succeed him - a youth who had served briefly in the army under Diocletian in Egypt and under Galerius. Constantine was to change the world by becoming the first Christian emperor.
Recommended Books
Roman Realities by Finley Hooper, 1979 (an easy read, and highly praised)
The Enneads, by Plotinus
Plotinus or the Simplicity of Visiont
The Religions of the Roman Empire by John Ferguson, 1988
Porphyry Against the Christians, edited and translated by R. Joseph Hoffman
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