Raphael, The Sacrifice at Lystra, 1515. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
By the middle of the third century, the Roman state was closer to collapse than at any point in its history. Between 235 and 284, more than twenty men claimed the title of emperor, the frontiers came under sustained pressure from the Alemanni, the Franks, the Goths, and the Sasanian Persians, and the fiscal system that had sustained the Pax Romana ceased to function. The emperor Diocletian, who came to power in 284, stabilised the empire through reforms that amounted to a refounding of the state: a division into four administrative regions under the Tetrarchy, a doubled army, and a new tax system to fund it. Rome itself was no longer the administrative capital. Diocletian governed from Nicomedia, and the other tetrarchs from Milan, Trier, and Sirmium.
The religious world of this restructured empire was complex and deeply rooted. The traditional Roman state religion, organised around public sacrifice and the worship of the Capitoline gods, had been the formal framework of civic life since the early Republic. Alongside it, the mystery cults of the eastern Mediterranean had spread across the empire: the Eleusinian mysteries from Greece, the cults of Isis and Cybele from Egypt and Anatolia, and the cult of Mithras. A single individual could hold priesthoods in several of these cults simultaneously, and frequently did. Christianity had been growing within this landscape for two centuries, but its adherents remained a minority, concentrated in the eastern provinces and the larger cities.
The Edict of Milan in 313 extended legal toleration to Christians and ordered the return of confiscated church property. By 380, the Edict of Thessalonica had made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman state. By 392, the Theodosian decrees had prohibited pagan sacrifice, closed temples, and ended the institutional life of the mystery cults, including the Eleusinian mysteries, which had been conferring initiations for nearly two millennia. Within the span of a single lifetime, a religious world in which multiple traditions had operated alongside one another gave way to one in which a single tradition held the authority of the state.
The forms through which the new religion organised itself were drawn from the Roman institutions it inherited. The basilica, the standard civic hall of the Roman city, became the architectural model for the Christian church. The ecclesiastical hierarchy organised itself along the administrative geography that Diocletian had established, adopting the terms diocese and province for its own structures. The calendar absorbed Christian feast days alongside the older Roman ones. The rhetorical training of the elite, and the habit of close reading of canonical texts, carried over into the intellectual life of the early church.
The literary dimension of this continuity is visible in the work of Faltonia Betitia Proba, a Roman aristocrat from one of the most powerful senatorial families. Around the middle of the fourth century, Proba composed the Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi, a poem of 694 lines drawn entirely from the works of Virgil, the poet whose Aeneid had served as the founding epic of Roman civilisation for four centuries. Proba extracted his lines from their original contexts and rearranged them to narrate the Christian story from Genesis through the Gospels, demonstrating that the most authoritative poetic voice of pagan Rome could carry the central narrative of the new faith. The work circulated widely across the empire and was preserved in more than a hundred medieval manuscripts.
Much as the basilica kept its columns when it became a church and the diocese kept its boundaries when it passed from imperial to ecclesiastical governance, Proba’s Cento kept the language of the old tradition intact while placing it in the service of the new. Her poem remains one of the most precise records of how the fourth century absorbed the civilisation it inherited.
The Proba Blazer
Selected Reading
- Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750. London: Thames & Hudson, 1971.
- Watts, Edward J. The Final Pagan Generation. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.
- Lane Fox, Robin. Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World from the Second Century AD to the Conversion of Constantine. London: Viking, 1986.