Diocletianic Persecution

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 23rd of February 303, the Diocletianic Persecution began not with soldiers in the street but with a building coming down. Diocletian ordered the newly built Christian church at Nicomedia to be razed, its scriptures burned, and its treasures seized. The day was chosen deliberately: it was the feast of Terminalia, the festival of Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries. The emperors would terminate Christianity. What followed was the last and most severe campaign against Christians in the history of the Roman Empire, driven by four co-emperors with wildly different levels of commitment to the cause. It stretched across more than a decade, fractured the Church from within, and ultimately failed to accomplish what it set out to do. How did the most powerful state in the ancient world bring such force to bear against its own people, and why did it still lose?

• 2. Before the Storm

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  For the first two centuries of Christianity's existence in the Roman world, no emperor issued general laws against the faith. It was popular hostility, not imperial policy, that drove the earliest persecutions. Around 112, Pliny, the governor of Bithynia-Pontus, received long lists of denunciations of Christians from anonymous citizens; Emperor Trajan advised him to ignore them. In Lyon in 177, it was only the intervention of civil authorities that stopped a pagan mob from dragging Christians from their houses and beating them to death.

  Christians were deeply suspect to their neighbors. They rejected public festivals, avoided the imperial cult, refused public office, and publicly criticized ancient traditions. Tacitus recorded that Romans accused them of what he called "hatred of the human race", odium generis humani. Among the more credulous, they were thought to practice incest and cannibalism. Justin Martyr recorded a pagan husband who denounced his Christian wife to authorities; Tertullian described children disinherited for converting.

  The pattern shifted in the 3rd century. Under Decius, who ruled from 249 to 251, the empire demanded that all inhabitants sacrifice to the gods, eat sacrificial meat, and testify to these acts. Church leaders were arrested and executed: Fabian, bishop of Rome, and Babylas, bishop of Antioch, both died. Origen was tortured and died about a year later from his injuries. The Decian persecution was a grave blow, but Decius died in battle in June 251, leaving it unfinished. Valerian picked up the task in 257 and 258, but his own capture in battle in June 260 ended that effort too. His son Gallienus ended the persecution and inaugurated what Eusebius called the "little peace of the Church", a period of freedom from official sanctions lasting nearly 40 years.

• 3. Diocletian's Religious World

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  Diocletian, acclaimed emperor on the 20th of November 284, was a religious conservative who remained faithful to the traditional Roman cult. Unlike his predecessor Aurelian, he did not promote any new cult of his own. He associated himself with Jupiter, the head of the Roman pantheon; his co-emperor Maximian associated himself with Hercules. This connection between god and emperor helped legitimize their authority and tied imperial government to the traditional cult.

  A panegyrist to Maximian captured the theological project in language the court approved: "You have heaped the gods with altars and statues, temples and offerings...whose sanctity is increased by the example you set, of veneration for the gods." Diocletian built temples for Isis and Sarapis at Rome and a temple to Sol in Italy, but he favored gods that provided for the safety of the whole empire over local provincial deities.

  Diocletian's governing philosophy went further than religion. He styled himself a "restorer" in the tradition of Augustus and Trajan, presenting his rule and his system of four co-emperors, the Tetrarchy, as a renewal of Roman values after the chaos of the 3rd century. Under his rule, coinage, taxation, architecture, law, and history were all radically reconstructed. He was willing to reform every aspect of public life to satisfy his goals, something that set him apart from most earlier emperors who preferred to work within existing structures. In 295, either Diocletian or his subordinate emperor Galerius issued an edict from Damascus forbidding incestuous marriages and affirming Roman law's supremacy over local law, with a preamble declaring that the gods would favor Rome if its subjects "led a pious, religious, peaceable and chaste life in every respect". The logic, extended to its conclusion, demanded religious conformity.

• 4. The Men Who Pushed for War

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  Within Diocletian's court, the push for persecution had a face. Galerius, the lowest-ranking of the four emperors, was a devoted and passionate pagan. His mother, Romula, had been a pagan priestess in Dacia and loathed Christians for avoiding her festivals. Newly prestigious after victories in the Persian War that ended in 299, Galerius was eager to exploit his position. Lactantius records that he hungered for a higher rank in the imperial hierarchy. At Antioch, Diocletian had once forced him to walk at the front of the imperial caravan rather than ride inside it, a public humiliation he did not forget.

  Diocletian was surrounded by an anti-Christian intellectual circle. Porphyry of Tyre, the philosopher, wrote a fifteen-volume work called Against the Christians around 290, in which he expressed shock at Christianity's rapid expansion and accused Christ's followers of being "arrogant". He unfavorably compared Jesus to Apollonius of Tyana and held that Christians blasphemed by worshiping a human being and behaved treasonably by forsaking the traditional Roman cult. Porphyry asked: "To what sort of penalties might we not justly subject people who are fugitives from their fathers' customs?" Sossianus Hierocles, governor of Bithynia, thought Christian beliefs absurd and argued that Apollonius's miracles were far more impressive than anything in the Gospels. An unidentified philosopher who dined repeatedly at the imperial court published a pamphlet attacking the Christians in the early 4th century.

  Pagan priests had their own financial anxieties. The Christian writer Arnobius, writing during Diocletian's reign, recorded their complaints: augurs, dream interpreters, soothsayers, and priestlings feared that their arts would "be brought to nought" as Christian growth thinned the crowds at temples. They cried that "the gods are neglected, and in the temples there is now a very thin attendance".

  The historian Keith Hopkins estimated that the Christian community grew from about 1.1 million people in 250 to about 6 million by 300, roughly 10 percent of the empire's total population. Large churches were prominent in certain major cities. The church in Nicomedia sat on a hill overlooking the imperial palace. In the winter of 302, Galerius urged Diocletian to begin a general persecution. Diocletian was wary and asked the oracle at Didyma for guidance.

• 5. Four Edicts, Four Emperors

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  The first edict, published on the 24th of February 303, targeted Christian property and leadership. It prohibited Christians from assembling for worship and ordered the destruction of their scriptures, liturgical books, and places of worship across the empire. Christians were stripped of the right to petition courts, making them vulnerable to judicial torture. Christian senators, equestrians, decurions, veterans, and soldiers were deprived of their ranks. Christian imperial freedmen were re-enslaved. Diocletian requested that the edict be pursued "without bloodshed", against Galerius's demand that all who refused to sacrifice be burned alive. Local judges frequently chose execution anyway, as capital punishment was among their discretionary powers.

  The edict's first martyr made his feelings plain. A man named Eutius tore the edict from the wall in Nicomedia, ripped it up, and shouted "Here are your Gothic and Sarmatian triumphs!" He was arrested for treason, tortured, and burned alive. The provisions reached Palestine by March or April 303 and were in use in North Africa by May or June. In Gaul and Britain, Constantius did not enforce the edict at all.

  In the summer of 303, following rebellions in Melitene and Syria, a second edict ordered the arrest and imprisonment of all bishops and priests. Prisons could not handle the volume. Eusebius writes that so many priests were imprisoned that ordinary criminals were crowded out and had to be released. On the 20th of November 303, in anticipation of his twentieth anniversary as emperor, Diocletian declared a general amnesty: any imprisoned clergyman could go free by agreeing to sacrifice. Wardens were eager to clear their cells. Eusebius records the case of one man who had his hands seized and was made to complete a sacrificial offering, then was told his sacrifice had been recognized and summarily dismissed.

  In 304, a fourth edict ordered every person in the empire, men, women, and children, to gather publicly and offer collective sacrifice or face execution. It was probably issued in January or February 304. It was not enforced at all in Constantius's domains and was applied by Maximian only until his abdication in 305. In the East, it remained in force until 313.

• 6. A Church Divided

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  The persecution did not destroy the Church, but it tore it apart from within. The key fracture was between the traditores, those who had handed scriptures over to Roman authorities, and those who refused any compromise with imperial power. The word traditor, "one who hands over", is the root of the English word "traitor".

  Africa became the epicenter of this conflict. Africa had long had what the sources describe as a particularly intransigent and legalistic variety of Christianity, one in which martyrs held more religious authority than the clergy. For Numidian Christians, surrendering scriptures was an act of terrible apostasy. Governor Valerius Florus enforced what he called "days of incense burning" in the summer or autumn of 303: sacrifice or lose your life. The African martyrs included Saturninus and the Martyrs of Abitinae, a group martyred on the 12th of February 304 in Carthage.

  A decisive moment came in 304 in Carthage. Christians from Abitinae had been imprisoned. When friends and relatives came to visit, they encountered a mob sent by Mensurius, the bishop of the city, and his deacon Caecilian, for reasons that remain obscure. The visitors were harassed, beaten, and whipped, and the food they had brought for prisoners was scattered on the ground. When Caecilian was elected bishop of Carthage in 311, his opponents charged that his surrendering of scriptures made him unworthy of office. They declared for a rival candidate named Majorinus. Majorinus's successor Donatus gave the dissident movement its name: the Donatists. They would not be reconciled to the Catholic Church until after 411.

  In Rome, the bishop Marcellinus died in 304 during the persecution under disputed circumstances. Eusebius wrote that he was "brought away by the persecution", an obscure phrase that scholars have argued over ever since. Within forty years, Donatists were spreading rumors that Marcellinus had been a traditor and had even sacrificed to pagan gods. The tale grew further in a 5th-century forgery called the "Council of Sinuessa". His successor Marcellus I was not consecrated until November or December 308, leaving the Roman Church without a bishop for years. Street fights and riots erupted between those who had complied with the edicts and those who refused any compromise. Marcellus, a rigorist, was banished from the city and died in exile on the 16th of January 309.

• 7. The East's Long Nightmare

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  When Diocletian and Maximian resigned on the 1st of May 305, the persecution in the West began to wind down. In the East, it intensified. Maximinus, the new junior emperor governing Egypt and the Levant, issued his own persecutory edicts in 306 and 309. His innovations went further than any previous emperor. He required food sold in marketplaces to be covered in libation. He sent sentries to bathhouses and city gates to ensure that all customers sacrificed. He issued copies of fictitious Acts of Pilate to encourage popular hatred of Christ. He appointed high priests for each province, men required to wear white robes and supervise daily worship.

  The punishments recorded by Eusebius in his Martyrs of Palestine were extreme. In the spring of 308, 97 Christian confessors arrived from porphyry mines in the Thebaid. The governor Firmilianus cut the tendons on their left feet, blinded their right eyes, and sent them to the mines of Palestine. On a single day, the 2nd of November 307, the previous governor Urbanus sentenced a man to be burned alive, three youths to fight as gladiators, a priest to be exposed to a beast, some young men to be castrated, and three virgins to be sent to brothels.

  On the 26th of November 311, Peter of Alexandria was beheaded. Lucian of Antioch was executed in Nicomedia on the 7th of January 312. Maximinus issued a rescript published in Sardis on the 6th of April 312 and in Tyre by May or June, encouraging every city to expel its Christians. Three surviving copies of this rescript exist, in Tyre, Arycanda, and Colbasa, all essentially identical. Even after Galerius issued his edict of toleration in 311, Maximinus resumed persecution within seven months. He only issued his own comprehensive edict of toleration in May 313, hoping to persuade Licinius to stop advancing against him. It changed nothing. Licinius defeated Maximinus at the Battle of Tzirallum on the 30th of April 313, and Maximinus committed suicide at Tarsus that summer.

• 8. The Aftermath

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  Galerius, the man most responsible for starting the persecution, ended it in the East from his deathbed. The Edict of Serdica, issued on the 30th of April 311 in Serdica (present-day Sofia, Bulgaria), gave Christians the rights to exist freely under law and to hold peaceable assembly. Even then, Galerius never admitted wrongdoing. His edict admonished Christians for their nonconformity and framed toleration as the state's act of "mild clemency". The 17th-century historian Tillemont called it "insignificant". Timothy Barnes, writing in the late 20th century, cautioned that its novelty should not be overestimated, noting it only brought Eastern Christians rights they already had in Italy and Africa.

  Constantine had taken a different path from the beginning. When he succeeded his father Constantius on the 25th of July 306, he immediately ended ongoing persecutions and offered full restitution to Christians. At the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on the 28th of October 312, Constantine confronted Maxentius outside Rome. Maxentius retreated to the Tiber and drowned. Constantine entered the city the next day but declined to ascend the Capitoline Hill to the Temple of Jupiter in the traditional fashion. His army had advanced under a Christian sign. On the 9th of November 312, the old headquarters of the Imperial Horse Guard were razed to make way for the Lateran Basilica.

  At a meeting in Milan in February 313, Constantine and Licinius drafted the terms of what later ages called the Edict of Milan. Licinius posted the terms at Nicomedia on the 13th of June 313. The document offered comprehensive religious freedom to all faiths, not only to Christians.

  By 324, Constantine was sole ruler of the empire and Christianity had become his favored religion. The persecution had failed. But the Church it left behind was fractured in ways that would take centuries to heal. The Donatist schism in North Africa was one of the lasting wounds, and the question of how to treat those who had compromised under pressure would shadow Christian communities long after the emperors who demanded those compromises were dead.