CHAPTER FOUR
DECIUS’ RELIGIOUS POLICY AND POLITICAL RHETORIC
Decius’ persecution and third century legitimation of power.
Let us begin first with a narrative of the historical events that led to the
accession of both Decius (AD 249) and later Valerian (AD 253)
(section A). We shall then be in a position to consider the character of
Decius’ response to such events by means of a unique and
unprecedented decree, inquiring whether his measures were focussed
on Christianity itself, and on what basis in existing legislation, or
whether they represented a new development in pagan religion as a
means to imperial unity (section B). Arguing that the latter was in fact
the case, we shall be able to examine, as the real context for
understanding that edict, the exercise of political power legitimated in
the light of a third century social construction of reality. The
participants in those events interpreted their significance in the
eschatological and millenarian terms that we described in the last
chapter. We shall see how each political contender legitimated his role
in terms of the cultic and religious responsibilities of the emperor to
secure the pax deorum in nature and in society (section C). Decius’
unique edict was therefore his original contribution to a commonly
shared view of the emperor’s cultic responsibility for securing the
empire from metaphysical chaos and continuing disorder (section D).
A.
THE EMPIRE IN POLITICAL CRISIS
In AD 235 Alexander Severus and his mother Julia Mamaea were
found at Mainz, to where he had withdrawn from the Persian campaign
(AD 233) because of the threat of the Alemanni in the West, creating
an unwinnable war on two fronts. Alexander tried to buy off the enemy
with cash payments, and, in so doing, provoked a revolt amongst his
troops, lead by C. Julius Verus Maximinus, commander and trainer of
the Panonian troops, who were now to secure for him the empire. Both
Alexander and Mamaea were killed in Vicus Britannicus (Bretzenheim
near Mainz) in mid March.1
1 J. Drinkwater, ‘Maximinus to Diocletian and the “crisis”’, in CAH2, XII.1.1, pp.
38–9; R. Syme, Emperors and Biography (Studies in the Historia Augusta; Oxford:
Clarendon Press 1971); P. Romanelli, Storia delle provincie romane dell’Africa
(Studi pubblicati dall’Istituto Italiano per la storia antica 14; Rome: L’Erme di
Bretschneider 1959), p. 336.
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The revolt that was to overthrow Maximinus Thrax came from
Africa itself, provoked by the enforced collection of taxes by the
imperial procurator, who lost his life at the hands of the legions. These
now proceeded to proclaim M. Antonius Gordianus Sempronius
emperor. Gordian Ist thus with his son Gordian II as co-emperor
marched into Carthage in March AD 238. The Senate confirmed him
on his dies imperii, which was 2nd April, and at the same time also
proclaimed the deification of Severus Alexander. But such senatorial
legitimization held no sway with the Legio III Augusta under
Capellianus, governor of Numidia, who remained loyal to Maximinus.
It was against Capellianus that Gordian II was to fall in battle and his
father to commit suicide.2
Maximinus himself now had to face a new onslaught from the
senate, which elected as joint emperors M. Clodius Pupienus Maximus
and S. Caelius Calvinus Balbinus. Senatorial advocates of the dynastic
tradition forced these two Augusti to associate with them as Caesar, M.
Antonius Gordianus, a grandson of Gordian I. The Senate now deified
his father and grandfather. The deteriorating conditions of the German
campaign lead Maximinus’ own forces to finally murder both him and
his son on 10th May. Pupienus was now recognised by the legions. But
both he and his colleague were to be murdered by a Praetorian guard.
The latter had attacked the populace for their support for the two
Augusti during which large parts of the city had gone up in flames.
Thus Caesar Gordian III was proclaimed Augustus at the age of thirteen
(July 9th AD 238). But all hopes of a senate powerful enough to create
emperors were now dashed.
Timesitheus, the praetorian prefect, appears to have been the power
behind the throne. When he died of illness (in AD 243) at the height of
a successful campaign against Persia, which had freed Syria, M. Julius
Philippus, the son of an Arab sheikh named Marinus, succeeded him.
Philip became the emperor after the murder of Gordian III in Zaitha
early in March AD 244. The latter, now nineteen years old, had been
murdered after defeat of his army at Peroz-Shapor in 244, without any
evident plan to replace him, but as an act of revenge for a campaign
that had gone wrong.3 The Senate was informed of the emperor’s death
through illness, and Gordian was appriopriately deified. Philip entered
Rome on 23rd July 244 with an oration Ei)j basile/a dedicated to him
that is to be found as a pseudepigraphic piece amongst the orations of
Aelius Aristides.4
2
3
Drinkwater, ‘Maximus to Diocletian’, pp. 28–36; Sage, Cyprian, pp. 38–40.
D.S. Potter, Prophecy and History in the Crisis of the Roman Empire. A Historical
Commentary on the Thirteenth Sibylline Oracle (Oxford: University Press 1990), p.
14.
4 Drinkwater, ‘Maximinus to Diocletian’, pp. 36–8.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
103
Philip planned a new order, raising his son to the rank of Augustus
and making him Pontifex Maximus (June 247). He also celebrated the
one thousand year Jubilee of the founding of the Roman state on 21st
April, 248, to a closer consideration of the significance of which we
will later return (C.1.3). Ti. Claudius Marinus Pacatianus, an officer
probably of senatorial descent, now lead a revolt against him claiming,
as we shall see, Philip’s millinarian celebrations as his own.
The Goths could now invade an empire whose army was distracted
in the disarray of civil strife, with the Carpi, Taifali, Asdingian vandals
and Peucini following them in large numbers. Revolts too had already
broken out in the East. Jotapianus appeared between the border territory
of Cappadocia and Syria as another claimant of the purple. In Syria
Julius Aurelius Sulplicius Uranius Antoninus took to the field as a third
claimant. But Jotapianus and Pacatianus both met their end, the latter at
the hands of his own solidiers, following the election of Decius by his
legions in AD 249.5 Uranius was to hold out for a further four years
(until AD 253-4) before he fell, despite the prophecy of the first edition
of Sibylline Oracle XIII that he would as priest sent from the sun rule
victoriously in an empire centred upon Syria. We shall discuss this
oracle later (C.1.3.1).
Decius, the City Prefect, was given command in these hazardous
times over Moesia and Pannonia. He was very successful, and
supressed the Goths and their allies so that in consequence the legions
demanded that he became emperor in AD 249. His and Philip’s forces
clashed in September near Verona. Philip died in battle, or perhaps at
the hand of Decius himself.6
Thus Decius was to enter Rome, at the end of AD 249, as emperor
and victor over several rival claimants. He initiated a religious
programme that can be reconstructed only with difficulty from the
surviving fragmentary literary, epigraphical, and numismatic sources.
The focus of that program appears to have been a single edict, as we
shall argue, rather than two, that sacrifices be offered to the gods of the
Roman state throughout the empire by all Decius’ subjects. The edict,
moreover, included — rather than perhaps simply gave rise rise to —
the issuing of certificates (libelli) by a board of commissioners in each
locality, certifying that each individual had sacrificed.
It will be my argument that Decius’ programme had specific aims
that were directly related to the events of the third century, not
necessarily in terms of how they might seem ‘in reality’, or, to express
the matter better, ‘in our twenty-first century, post Enlightment
5
6
Drinkwater, ‘Maximinus to Diocletian’, pp. 38–41.
Ibid. p. 38; Sage, Cyprian, pp. 165–70; S. Dusanics, ‘The End of the Philippi’,
Chiron, 6 (1976), 427–39; H. A. Pohlsander, ‘Did Decius Kill the Philippi?’ Historia,
31 (1982), 214–22.
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construction of reality’, but in terms of how those events were
perceived by the third century inhabitants of such a world view. We
have sketched in detail that social construction of reality in our last
chapter in terms of a Stoic eschatology of decline and renewal: events
were experienced, by Pagans and Christians alike, as indicative of a
world that had reached its senectus as the final stage in its progress
towards final break-up and then renewal. We shall need to locate
Decius’ religious policy within the discourse of the political theology
of his third century predecessors and successors, by means of which
each rival claimant sought to legitimate his claims.
Decius’ religious policy is to be understood as directly addressing
that situation of metaphysical collapse through the traditional religious
role appropriated by emperors since Augustus himself. The religious
role of the emperor was seen as that of the agent of destiny, who was to
transform what had become the age of iron into the age of gold. The
emperor, as pontifex maximus, presided over sacrificial rites, whose
object was to achieve the ‘peace (pax)’ in place of the ‘anger (ira)’ of
the gods in both nature and society, in terms of a world view in which
both were seen to be part of one complete metaphysical whole.
Through the office of the augur he could determine whether or not that
pax had been achieved. Decius’ program is to be read in the light of
that role, and its extreme uniqueness an indication of the gravity of the
perceived state of metaphysical decline that it addressed. In the next
chapter we shall see how a detailed examination of the surviving texts
of the Egyptian libelli reflect specifically a sacrificial rite or supplicatio
with such intentions.
But at the outset we must seek to answer questions that have been
raised regarding how justified is the attribution of such definite
intentions to Decius. Rives is the most recent critic to claim that ‘we
can only speculate on Decius’ motivations’. He concludes that ‘it is
possible that the edict on universal sacrifice was a relatively
spontaneous measure and perhaps not very well thought out: Decius’
intention to require some kind of certification may in fact have been
simply a whim.’7
A description of what was ‘going on in Decius’ mind’, would in
any case ‘in reality’ be a picture of electro-chemical impulses, and not
the product of an historical inquiry. A historian of ideas rather
approaches the recorded remains of individuals, making their claims in
a historical context, rather like an anthropologist observing a tribe
playing a game that is strange to him. By observing the regular moves
that each person makes in a sufficient number of instances, he then
formulates the rules that his subjects are following, and that are
7 J.B. Rives, ‘The Decree of Decius and the Religion of the Empire’, Journal of
Roman Studies, 89 (1999), 151.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
105
presupposed by the regular recurrence of such moves. His formulation
of such a system of rules not only enables him to undertand further
actual and observed moves whose purpose was not immediately
apparent, but also to hypothesise new possible ones of which he has no
actual observed instances. It is by working out such new, possible
moves that he comes to an understanding of the meaning of the actual
moves his subject has in fact made.
Thus, in order to guage Decius’ intentions in an historical study,
we must look to their context in the discourse of the third century, the
socio-historical language game that he was playing with his
contemporaries. We infer the principal concepts and logic of that
‘game’ from linguistic marks left on parchment, stone, or coins, and
what we can deduce from these regarding what such marks meant in
the context of such a ‘game’. Here the objectivity of such claims can be
read in terms of the intersubjective agreement between participants in
the language game on how the validity of any particular claim was to
be assessed. Decius, as we shall see, was arguing the claims for the
validity of his religious program, and indeed the legitimacy of his own
office, against the backcloth of the rival political claims made by his
opponents: Philip, Pacatianus, Uranius Antoninus etc. regarded
themselves too as also the agents of destiny in restoring a collapsed
metaphysical order of things.
Decius’ policy in issuing an edict with its command for universal
sacrifice was unique, as was its demand for written certification from
local boards of officials that this had been completed,. But we shall
argue that the building bricks for the construction of that policy and its
implementation were to be found in the prevailing discourse of political
legitimation. Here we find already existing concepts, with their own
compulsive and continuing logic, such as the concept of an edict
granting almost universal citizenship, like that of Caracalla, or of a
taxation return to which it gives rise, or that of the restauration of the
saeculum aureum with millennial games, etc. Wittgenstein’s moral
rebel arose with his novel moral solution within an existing form of
life, using its fundamental rules in order to commend novel moves
according to the logic that his fellow game-players accepted. Decius is
using his agreement on the fundamental concepts within that form of
life to construct and communicate his disagreement in opinion with his
contemporaries.
Before, however, we develop this positive part of our argument,
there are some important objections with which we must first deal. Is
such a tight connection to be drawn between Decius’ aims, and an
eschatological background in popular Stoicism in the way that I am
suggesting?
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Cyprian, Novatian, Dionysius of Alexandria, and the Passio Pionii
all inform us that Decius issued a ‘decree’, and perhaps, as some have
argued, more than one.8 The precise contents of that decree (or
‘decrees’) have now been lost, but some of its (or their) provisions can
be inferred from what the surviving Egyptian papyri tell us about the
contents of the libelli or ‘certificates of sacrifice’ that were issued in
connection with the decree or decrees. But there remains some
argument amongst scholars as to whom the decree or decrees were
directed, and, indeed, what their precise relationship were to the libelli
discovered in Egypt.
Supposing, for example, that a contrary claim could succeed,
namely that the prime focus of Decius’ decree was specifically antiChristian, as contemporary Christian writers assumed? If, additionally,
his measure had the justification of a law that had specifically outlawed
Christianity from Nero’s time, then Decius’ edict can considered as a
tidying up measure, an afterthought which attracted little attention from
the particular authors that have left us our admittedly fragmentary
remains. Decius will then, in assuming the name ‘Trajan’, have in view
a general and unspecified policy of re-asserting lost imperial order. One
item on his checklist will be to implement laws against Christianity
itself that his predecessors have ignored through lethargy or positive
connivance. Such would, on such an assumption, have been how he
would naturally regard, as a conservative restorer of an allegedly ‘past
order’, those rivals and predecessors whose lines of genealogical
inheritance had displaced his own.
If, therefore, Christianity as such was already illegal in terms of a
law or entrenched customary procedure that dates from Nero, then his
motives need not be represented as we have suggested. Decius’ decree
is simply directed against an already existing illegal cult, and we need
no further justification in terms of a pagan, political theology of which
Decius’ and his associates may have been personally convinced. Even
if the edict involved a general invitation issued by local magistrates to
local populations to join in festively with a suppicatio to the gods, its
real intention was to single out one group alone, the Christians: pagans
would have been glad of a festive holiday and have readily complied
without regarding it as any great burden. Decius, on such a reading,
would emerge, contrary to my claim, as a figure with no particular or
unique intentions in framing his edict.
Let us begin therefore with a consideration of these objections.
8 Cyprian, De Lapsis, 27 (532–3: edictum); Epistulae, LV.9.2 (158: edicta); Cyprian
(Novatian), Epistulae, XXX.3.1 (56–57: edicta and leges); Cyprian (Roman
Confessors), Epistulae, XXXI.3 and 5.1 (53–54 and 85: leges); Passio Pionii, 3.2
(dia/tagma); Eusebius (Dionysius of Alexandria), Historia Ecclesiastica, VI.64.1 and
10 (pro/stagma).
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
107
B. DECIUS’ PROVISIONS AS AN ANTI-CHRISTIAN POLICY.
Keresztes and Frend, supported in part by Molthagen and Sordi, argued
that Christianity, to adapt Tertullian’s term, a religio illicita, was the
primary focus of Decius’ edict (Keresztes), or perhaps two edicts
(Frend), or one edict with other, either preliminary (Sordi) or
subsequent (Keresztes) legal processes.9
Keresztes is clear that Decius so behaved in the light of specifically
anti-Christian legislation that had endured from the time of Nero
himself. If this were to have been the case, then Decius’ intentions, in
so far as we are able to infer them from surviving texts and artifacts,
need not be as clear as we are claiming. Decius Trajan would have had
a vaguer and more imprecise aim, directed generally to reasserting
traditional Roman religion and values, against the multicultural
religious syncretism developed tentatively by Hadrian, and then, more
positively, in the period of the Severans.
Any more specific intention, self-consciously to fulfil in practice
the emperor’s religious function in holding various priesthoods in order
to secure the pax deorum on both nature and society, would be
considerably less apparent. It would not be necessary to explain
Decius’ motives as traditional sacral functions developed within a new
focus, that of the emperor acting as restitutor sacrorum under pressure
of the perceived cosmic decline of the world into its senectus. Decius’
persecution will simply be caused by the revival of Nero’s enduring
anti-Christian legislation, as one item on a checklist of measures, with
the less precise aim of reviving generally traditional practices, values,
and moral standards.
Let us, therefore, consider the case for Nero’s general and
continuing law, and the way in which such a case has influenced both
Keresztes and Sordi in reconstructing Decius’ policy from the evidence
of the Egyptian libelli.
B.1. The legal position of Christianity before Decius.
Earlier Borleffs and others had argued that there had been a formal law,
an institutum nerionianum that was aimed specifically at the followers
of Christ.10 Keresztes is the contemporary proponent of such a thesis.
He believes that Tacitus’ story of Christians convicted because of the
P. Keresztes, ‘Rome and the Christian Church I’, in ANRW, II.23.1, pp. 247–315;
P. Keresztes, The Decian libelli and Contemporary Literature, Latomus 34.3 (1975),
761–81; Molthagen, Römische Staat, chapter 3; M. Sordi, ‘I rapporti fra il
Cristianesimo e l’impero dai Severi a Gallieno’, in ANRW, II.23.1, 340–74; M. Sordi,
‘La data dell’edito di Decio e il significato della persecuzione anticristiana’, Rivista di
storia della chiesa in Italia, 34 (1980), 451–61.
10 J.W.P. Borleffs, ‘Institutum Neronianum’, Vigiliae Christianae, 6 (1952), 129–
45. For further bibliography see Keresztes, ‘Rome and the Christian Church I’, p. 279,
his footnotes 179 and 182.
9
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fire has mislead us. No other writer, whether Christian apologist
(Eusebius, Jerome), or pagan writer (Suetonius, Sulpicius Severus),
mentions anything other than the charge of ‘hatred of the human race
(odium humani generis)’.11 Thus it was the nature of Christianity itself,
as it appeared to the Romans, that led to a conviction for professing the
religion itself. Thus, though Keresztes falls far short of supporting a
formal law, he finds no problem with a legal process, directed
specifically again Christianity itself, enduring from Nero’s time.
But his argument will rely for its security on clear evidence for the
continuity of such a measure subsequently. In Domitian’s time, for
example, Flavius Clemens and Flavia Domitilla were condemned,
according to Suetonius and Dio Cassius, as ‘following Jewish customs’.
Even if Eusebius were to be correct, as is questionable, in claiming
them as Christian martyrs, this would not necessarily mean that only
Christians were so involved in Domitian’s persecution, and thus
references to them would not indicate a law specifically against
Christianity.12 Keresztes’ appeal to the Apocalypse in the New
Testament is tenuous since, granted, that document is Domitianic,
doubt may be expressed on whether such a general persecution over
which the Seer’s imagination agonized ever materialized in fact.
Barnard was sceptical about the occurrence of such a persecution.13
Indeed Keresztes himself expressed scepticism about Domitian’s
persecution as general and specifically against Christianity: he
describes it as ‘a matter of speculation whether or not it was all started
by a special Imperial Order of Domitian as opposed to that emperor’s
desire to extend the cult of Roma and Augustus throughout Asia’.14 In
consequence, he has to rely even more strongly on the existence of
Neronic legislation in order to make his case that the correspondence
between Trajan and Pliny necessarily implies such a general law.15
Mommsen had many followers when he modified the general law
thesis by claiming that it was not a formal law under which early
Christianity was persecuted. Rather it was the case that a magistrate
with imperium, such as a praetor or pro-consul, would simply exercise
his power of coercitio against a cult offensive to Roman religious
11 Keresztes, ‘Rome and the Christian Church I’, pp.
12 Suetonius, Domitian, 15.1, cf. Dio Cassius,
252–57.
LXV.7.2; LXVII.14.1–2), cf.
Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, III.18.4. See also Keresztes, ‘Rome and the
Christian Church I’, pp. 262–4; Brent, Imperial Cult, pp. 141–2.
13 Keresztes, ‘Rome and the Christian Church I’, 270–71, cf., 177–90 and L.W.
Barnard, ‘The Persecution of Domitian’, in Studies in the Apostolic Fathers and their
Background (Blackwell: Oxford 1966), pp. 9–15, and earlier version of which
appeared in New Testament Studies, 10 (1963–64), 251–60; Brent, Imperial Cult, pp.
177–90.
14 Keresztes, ‘Rome and the Christian Church I’, 271–2.
15 Ibid. 280–82.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
109
custom. Garnsey has pointed out that coercitio would have been
exercised by a magistrate with imperium, from Augustus onwards, in
contrast to the process under the republic, through a procedure known
as cognitio. Previously, under the republic, the praetor, for example,
adjudicated between the parties to a trial assisted by assessors or jurors
(iudices). But under the new arrangement there were to be no iudices,
with the result that the role of the judge became inquisitorial rather than
adjudicatory: he was able to act ‘within limits defined by reason and
not by law’. In consequence, when he was not ruling directly on the
law, his cognitio was described as extra ordinem.16
Thus Keresztes rejected Mommsen’s thesis on the grounds that the
cognitio as the due process for the exercise of coercitio was always
extra ordinem: specific charges were required from private persons: the
magistrates did not simply demand on the basis of their imperium
conformity with the state religion at this time. But it does not therefore
follow that there must have been definite anti-Christian legislation
when persecutions occurred. There is the alternative thesis that has
arisen from that rejection, and first propounded by Conrat, namely that
Christians were persecuted on general charges amounting to treason,
magic, illegal assembly, incest, infanticide etc., and not for simply
being Christians.17
Keresztes’ grounds for rejecting Conrat’s proposal seem to me
frankly weak. Since he finds Domitian ambiguous on the issue, in order
to continue the chain of evidence he must cite as a witness to the
enduring Neronian general law the correspondence between Trajan and
Pliny. But he does so because ‘it is indeed hard to believe that Pliny, or
any other governor before him, would have acted in the way that he did
without a general directive that told him at least that Christianity was a
capital crime’.18
But Keresztes’ problem here is that Pliny’s correspondence is
normally held up as evidence that Christianity in itself was not illegal
before Trajan’s rescript. Here it could be argued that, whereas before it
had been ‘crimes associated with the name (flagitia cohaerentia
nomini)’ that had been punished, from now onwards it was the ‘name
itself (nomen ipsum)’ so that now, as a result of Trajan’s rescript,
Christianity was by name an illegal religion.19 Could not therefore
Keresztes have argued instead that it is here, and not with Nero, that we
16 P. Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire (Oxford:
Clarendon Press 1970), p. 6.
17 M. Conrat, Die Christenvergfolgungen im römischen Reiche vom Standpunkte
des Juristen (Leipzig: Hinrich 1897).
18 Keresztes, ‘Rome and the Christian Church I’, 285–6.
19 Pliny, Epistulae, X.96.3
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have the origin of a general law against Christianity that was to persist,
and to be revived by Decius Trajan as indeed Trajan’s namesake?
However, the real parallel with Trajan’s Rescript, as SherwinWhite pointed out, was the senatusconsultum of AD 14 against the
Magi and Chaldeans, making the practice of magic or prophetic arts
illegal. Like Pliny, the question arose as to whether mere knowledge or,
in addition, professio, and then, in consequence, practice were to be
punished. Professio as well as practice was implied by a series of
rescripts issued to individual governors, who complained of insolence
(contumacia) in public displays of those who professed such arts.20
Therefore, in reply to Pliny’s query about the nomen ipsum, Trajan
was neither simply responding with an affirmative regarding existing
legislation, nor of a new legal position that he was creating with his
rescript. His formal, legal definition of why they must be punished was
for their contumacia. Indeed we might well conclude that Trajan’s very
hesitancy in replying that ‘it is impossible to prescribe any general rule
as if the matter possessed a definite procedure (certam formam)’
strongly implies that there was no general, anti-Christian law on which
he could rely. Hence his ambivalent attitude to punishing Christians if
formally charged, but not actively seeking them out. 21
Thus both De Ste Croix and Sherwin White were agreed, despite
their other differences, that it was for disobedience (contumacia) to the
legitimate command of a governor, and not for being adherents to a
named, proscribed religion, that Trajan had ordered them executed.22
As Barnes pointed out:
Pliny, when trying the Christians before him, had no need to rely on any law
that made Christianity a capital crime: indeed he appears not even to know
whether there was one.23
Barnes claims that it was a mos maiorum that the gods of the Roman
state should be worshipped, and that practitioners of magic arts who
did not do so would disturb the pax deorum. It was this that was the
source of persecution.24 Rives furthermore follows Barnes in
20 Cassius Dio, LVII.15.8; Tacitus, Annales, 2.27–32; Suetonius, Tiberius, 36. See
also A.N. Sherwin-White, ‘The Early Persecutions and Roman Law Again’, Journal
of Theological Studies, 3.2 (1952), 211–12.
21 Trajan (Pliny), Epistulae, X.97, cf. Tertullian, Apologia, 2.6–10.
22 Trajan (Pliny) Epistulae, X.97 cf. Sherwin-White, ‘Early Persecutions’, 210–13;
Keresztes, ‘Rome and the Christian Church I’, p. 278 citing. G.E.M. De Ste. Croix,
‘Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?’, Past and Present, 26 (1963), 6–38. See
further, A.N. Sherwin-White, ‘Why were the Early Christians Persecuted?– An
Amendment’, Past and Present, 27 (1964), 25–6; G.E.M. De Ste. Croix, ‘Why were
the Early Christians Persecuted?– A Rejoinder’, Past and Present, 27 (1964), 28–33.
23 T.D. Barnes, ‘Legislation against the Christians’, Journal of Roman Studies, 58
(1968), 36.
24 Barnes, ‘Legislation’, p. 50.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
111
concluding that there was no precise definition of the legal position of
early Christianity.25
It does not necessarily therefore follow that, because Christians
were required by magistrates to participate in public sacrifices, under
pain of penalty, they were a cult specifically banned by law: they could
be just one of a number of such cults, not specifically singled out, but
failing to show the festive behaviour on a public holiday when their
fellow citizens were publically engaged in sacrifice and procession.
Their stubborn refusal seemed theatrical, so that contumacia was their
offence: their behaviour was interpreted as a proud and ostentatious
self-assertion against the traditional worship of the gods. Keresztes
seems to be held back from such a conclusion himself only by an over
reliance on Christian sources that constantly interpret such general
legislation as having particular and intentional reference to themselves
alone. ‘The cumulative effect of this tradition is strongly in favour of a
Neronian action that made it a capital crime to be a Christian.’26 But we
return with a dubious circularity to where Keresztes’ argument began,
with a similar questionable assumption about the character of Nero’s
persecution.
Thus we have sketched the general background to what Keresztes
will argue specifically in connection with Decius’ edict, and without
which his specific interpretation, regarding against whom this
legislation was directed, will seem implausible. In fact the assumption
of a Neronian law conditions critically his interpretation of the libelli
themselves, in which Sordi will partially follow him in her
interpretation of the scope and intention of the Decian legislation.
It is to a consideration of that interpretation that we now turn. We
shall examine, firstly, the Christian sources for Decius’ specifically
anti-Christian intentions with regard to Philip, his immediate
predecessor (B.1.1). We shall then see how the libelli themselves
represent a serious challenge to Keresztes’ argument from the
‘cumulative effect’ of the Christian evidence (B.1.2).
B.1.1. Philip’s alleged Christianity.
Undoubtedly Keresztes’ strongest support comes from the Christian
literature itself. In addition to Dionysius of Alexandria, we may cite the
Passio Pionii, Sibyline Oracle XIII, Lactantius, Sulpicius Severus, and
Orosius.27 But as Molthagen pointed out, such Christian writers were
25
Rives, Religion and Carthage, pp. 242–5 citing Barnes on p. 242, his footnote
145.
26 Keresztes, ‘Rome and the Christian Church I’, p. 286.
27 Eusebius (Dionysius of Alexandria), Historia Ecclesiastica,
VI.41–41 and 44;
43.3–22; Passio Pionii; Oracula Sibyllina, 13.87–8; Lactantius, De mortibus
Persecutorum, 4.1; Sulpicius Severus, Chronica, II.32.3, and Orosius, VII.21.2, cf.
Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, p. 140.
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not interested in drawing an objective picture of the policy of the state
and its motives, but only how that policy affected their own group.28
Eusebius claimed that Philip and his son, as Decius’ immediate
predecessors, had been Christians. He claims that Origen wrote him a
letter as well as one to his wife Severa. His grounds appear to be a story
that Philip had sought to enter a church during the paschal vigil to join
in the prayers of the gathered people, but was prevented until he made
his confession. From this he concludes that Philip was a Christian, and
that Decius’ personal hostility towards him led to his persecution of the
church.29 Eusebius’ alternation between good and bad emperors is,
however, notorious as part of a suspect historiography that regarded all
good emperors as clandestine Christians.
Philip’s alleged Christianity, if true, would render plausible what
Keresztes is to argue regarding Decius’ specific targeting of
Christianity.30 But as Sage and Pohlsander have pointed out, there is no
evidence outside Eusebius, and later writers who are in any case
dependent on his account, of Philip’s conversion.
According to Dionysius of Alexandria, in his letter to Fabius of
Antioch, Philip’s reign had been ‘kindlier towards us’, but this does not
necessarily prove his Christianity. When we compare this statement
with what Dionysius writes to Hermammon regarding the later
persecution, we find that Valerian too is described as initially ‘kindly
towards us’, but in his case as one of those ‘openly Christian’, unlike
the less committed description of Philip.31 This description is equally
fictitious, but it is significant that he gives the ‘kindly’ Philip no such
explicit identification with Christianity, despite Lane Fox’s contrary
assessment of these passages.32 Dionysius mentions, in his letter to
Fabius, the pogrom at Alexandria in Philip’s reign, a year before
Decius persecution (in 248), that he attributes to the hatred of a rabble
rousing ‘prophet and poet’.33 But, as Pohlsander points out, Philip did
nothing to punish the perpetrators, or to alter the legal status of
Christianity.34
28 Molthagen, Römische Staat, p. 64.
29 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, VI.34; 36.3; 39.1.
30 Keresztes’, Decian libelli’, 764. See also
A. Alföldi, ‘Zu den
Christenverfolgungen in Mitte des 3. Jh.’, Klio 31 (1938), 328–9 where he
nevertheless dismisses the claim as a ‘Wunschtraum.’
31 Dionysius of Alexander (Eusebius) Historia Ecclesiastica, VI.41.9; VII.10.3.
32 I cannot therefore concede with R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (Middlesex:
Penguin 1986), p. 454: ‘He must be alluding to Philip whether or not he believed the
story’ or with his foonote 13 that describes this passage as ‘a very telling aside.’
33 Dionysius of Alexandria (Eusebius), Historia Ecclesiastica, VI.41.1–2.
34 H.A. Pohlsander, ‘Philip the Arab and the Christians’, Historia 29 (1980), 468;
Molthagen, Römische Staat, pp. 59–60.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
113
Philip’s coinage, as Sage indicates, is pagan and, as we shall
shortly see in detail (C.1.3), records his pagan celebration of Rome’s
millennial games. Pohlsander points to the elaborate pagan character of
those games, involving sacrifice of exotic animals, one thousand
gladiators, and the emperor functioning in his sacerdotal capacity as
pontifex maximus and celebrated as such on his coinage.35 We will
argue that such a millenarian celebration in its particular historical
context presupposed a distinctly pagan political theology that was about
the emperor as restitutor mundi, against a Stoic backcloth of cyclical
decline and renewal that we outlined in chapter 3. As Rives points out,
the Christian sources write for Christian audiences, with no sense of
outrage for what may be required of idolatrous pagans.36
Thus the initial motive of Decius to suppress Christianity
specifically is made no more plausible by what a Christian writer says
about his predecessor, given that the case for enduring anti-Christian
legislation has also failed. The Christians in this case were just one
more cult that had grown as one more threat to public order. But simply
because Decius’ hostility to Philip’s Christianity may be fictional does
not mean that there might not be other grounds for seeing his
legislation directed specifically at Christianity as an already an existing
illegal cult.
Nevertheless, Keresztes’ account, once deprived of any
‘cumulative effect’ of evidence for specifically anti-Christian concerns,
will make considerably less plausible his argument for the libelli as
having a specifically anti-Christian focus, as we shall now see.
B.1.2. Decius’ legislation in the light of the libelli.
The Egyptian libelli, that now number forty-four, were to prove the
crown witness for the alternative case regarding the character of
Decius’ edict as addressed to Pagans as well as Christians, and not
directed intentionally and specifically against the latter.37 None of them
require the renunciation of Christ as such, and one is the libellus of
35 Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Gordiani, 33.1–3; Eusebius-Hieronimus,
Chronica, Olymp. 256 (Fotheringham, 299); Aurelius Victor, Liber de Caesaribus,
28; Eutropius, 9.3. For coinage see Cohen, V. 93–180; RIC IV.3 no. 50; Sutherland,
Roman Coins, nos 448–51. See also Sage, Cyprian, pp. 173–4; Pohlsander, ‘Philip the
Arab’, 465–7.
36 Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, p. 140.
37 F. Krebs, ‘Ein Libellus eines libellaticus vom Jahre 250 n. Chr. Aus dem Faijûm’,
Sitzungsberichte der preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophische –
historische Klasse, 48 (1893), 1007–14. Others that followed in 1894, 1900, 1904,
and in 1907 first appeared with nineteen others whose discovery was recorded by
P.M. Meyer, in Sitzungsberichte, Philosophische-historische Klasse, XLVIII (1910),
p. 949. For full details of 41 see, Knipfing, ‘Decian Persecution’, 345–6, and his
footnotes 4–18. For the subsequent three, see PSI VII.78; SB VI.9084; P.Oxyr.
XLI.2990. See also Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, p. 136, his footnote 4.
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Aurelia Ammonous, who is a priestess of the crocodile-god
Petesouchos.
In the light of that discovery, Alföldi, Molthagen, and Clarke,
amongst others, argued for a single edict directed generally and
indiscriminately to all citizens throughout the Roman Empire.38 Decius’
edict was not directed specifically against the Christians: no specific
denial of any religion was demanded but simply, and in addition,
participation in a supplicatio in honour of the divinities of the Roman
state. Molthagen originally pointed out, despite his belief (in my view
wrong) in an enduring, Neronian anti-Christian law, that the edict
represented a new religious policy and not the continuation of an old,
specifically anti-Christian one that he believed to have pre-existed
Decius’ legislation.39
Attempts, nevertheless, have been made to salvage the thesis of
Decius’ specifically anti-Christian intentions according to which there
were two edicts of Decius (Frend), or one edict, but with earlier,
preceding, or later and subsequent, legal measures nevertheless directed
particularly against Christian clerics (Keresztes and Sordi), as in the
case of a putative, formal first edict. The case for Decius’ specifically
anti-Christian intentions was conditioned by a persisting assumption
about a continuing Neronian law. Once such an assumption is denied,
then the case for Decius’ specifically anti-Christian intentions loses
considerably its force.
Sordi argued that initially Decius persecuted only Christian clerics
with confiscation of goods and exile, and under existing anti-Christian
legislation. Torture and capital punishment generally were only later
applied, following a formal edict, with libelli offered in exchange for
money as an escape. Alternatively Keresztes argued there was an initial
general edict directed specificially against Christianity, with provision
for libelli for a small group of (mainly) Christian recusants issued later
that are simply false declarations of sacrifice obtained through bribing
the official witnesses.
Keresztes’ general view was commonly accepted before the
papyrus discovery of the libelli, and indeed from the time that Krebs
published only the first of them (in 1893). Decius’ legislation was
considered to be directed specifically against Christians, rather than
issued as a universal command for everyone to offer sacrifice
throughout the Roman Empire, on which our alternative interpretation
Alföldi, ‘Christenverfolgungen’, 323–48; Molthagen, Römische Staat, pp. 68–70;
G. Clarke, ‘Two Measures in the Persecution of Decius? Two Recent Views’, Bulletin
of the Institute of Classical Studies, 20 (1973)’, 118–23.
39 Molthagen, Römische Staat, p. 63. For his opinion of the legal position under
Nero see pp. 23–4.
38
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
115
of its significance will be based.40 Keresztes remains of this opinion,
which he advances in support of analyses of the libelli to be found also
in Schoenaich and Bludau.41 But his account relies for its initial
plausibility on his belief in an enduring and previous interest by the
imperial power in Christianity as such, and immediately, in Decius’
case, against the positive interest of the emperor whose place he took,
namely Philip. We shall see that this is true also in Sordi’s case.
B.1.3. The pagan libellus of Aurelia Ammonous.
As Clarke has pointed out, Cyprian’s letters give a strong impression,
quite contrary to Eusebius’ assumption, that all the inhabitants of the
Roman Empire were to be involved in Decius’ sacrifice, and not
simply Christians. If, as we shall see later in closer detail, not simply
heads of households, but ‘freedmen (liberti) and domestic slaves
(domestici)’ as well were involved in sacrificing, including for
example pagan nurses, then it would appear to be the case that a far
larger number of people than simply Christians were covered by the
edict.42 Such an impression seems to be confirmed by the evidence of
the libelli that assume a universal sacrifice by all, without reference to
any particular religious adherence.
Keresztes argues in reply that the issuing of a certificate to every
citizen throughout the empire would have resulted in an administrative
nightmare. The Decian libelli do not therefore imply what was
demanded of every citizen but of Christians alone against whom
Decius’ edict was therefore specifically directed.43 It may have been
such considerations that lead Clarke to exclude from Decius’
provisions the use of census returns, and, therefore, any thoroughgoing
procedure for determining who had and who had not sacrificed.44 It is
indeed here that Keresztes’ case is at its strongest, and we shall need to
return to a detailed consideration of this point (in Chapter 5, section
A.2). In this respect he followed Krebs, who also believed when the
first papyrus fragment was found that it was that of an apostate
Christian who had bribed an official for a certificate of sacrifice
(libellaticus).45
40 Krebs, ‘Libellus’, 1009–10.
41 Keresztes, ‘Decian libelli’, 775–8;
cf. A. Bludau, Die ägyptischen Libelli und die
Christenverfolgung des Kaisers Decius, Römische Quartalschrift, suppl. 27 (1931),
32–40.
42 Cyprian, Epistulae, 15.4; 55.13.2 cf. G.W. Clarke, ‘Some Observations on the
Persecution of Decius’, Antichthon, 3 (1969), 69–70.
43 Keresztes, ‘Decian libelli’, 763.
44 Clarke, ‘Some Observations’, 70–3.
45 Pap. Berol. 7297 (BUG 287), in Knipfing, ‘Decian Persecution’, no. 1; Krebs,
‘Libellus’, 1009–10.
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Keresztes’ hypothesis is that each of the names on the forty-one
libelli known to him (that have subsequently, with more recent
discoveries, become forty-four) were in fact Christians, and were only
required in the case of a Christian. But Krebs had thus responded with
a single libellus to hand, and not with the 44 now available to us. One
of these provides us with an obvious objection, namely the libellus of
Aurelia Ammonous who is a priestess of the crocodile-god
Petesouchos.
It was the discovery of Ammonous’ libellus that had originally
convinced scholars generally that the edict had not been directed
against Christians alone.46 For Knipfing, as for Roasenda, it had been
decisive in favour of the universal requirement to sacrifice not being
confined only to Christians.47 Keresztes’ reply is that ‘the fact that she
states that at the time of her petition she was a priestess does not prove
that she had always been a priestess and never a Christian’.48 To such
an extent is he still haunted by the continuing spectre of the institutum
Neronianum!
The further grounds for his insistence on this point seems to be
that, if Ammonous had never been a Christian, there would have been
no need for her written insistence that she had always ‘all her life’
sacrificed to the gods.49 The ex tempore addition of ‘all her life’ to the
pro-forma language in her case is telling because it is not found as an
emphasis in any other of the libelli: she clearly had something to prove,
and was protesting too much in order to prove it. Unfortunately it could
also be argued that the adherent of a local, non traditional eastern cult
may have had equal need to emphasise her adherence as well to the
traditional gods of the Roman state, given Decius’ traditionalist and
conservative approach to Roman religion, and given his need for a
completely universal, supplicatio.
Notwithstanding, Keresztes argues that all the libelli are in fact
concessions made to Christians, who were allowed to make a statement
rather than perform any actual sacrifice.50 Their general production by
every citizen throughout the empire was an administrative
impossibility. Thus they must be in each case a ‘private petition
(libellus, bibli/dion)’ with an official attestation. They were not
documents issued generally and universally, but only to individual
Christians: anything further would have been practically impossible
and a veritable bureaucratic nightmare.
46 Molthagen, Römische Staat, p. 71.
47 Knipfing, ‘Decian Persecution’, 361–2; Roasenda, ‘Libellatici’, 40.
48 Keresztes, ‘Decian libelli’, 763.
49 P. Alexandrin. (1900), Knipfing, ‘Decian Persecution’, no. 3; Roasanda,
‘Libellatici’, no.32.
50 Keresztes, ‘Decian libelli’, 777–8.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
117
With this conclusion Lane Fox concurs.51 Decius’ edict therefore
simply commanded universal sacrifice, and people gathered at their
local shrines throughout the empire for the celebration of a supplicatio.
Commissioners simply superintended the universal sacrifice in which
the pagan majority and lapsed Christians participated without
certification. The libelli were simply granted to many Christians who
were allowed to sign a petition in which they said that they had always
been adherents of traditional pagan religion, and had participated in the
sacrifice, even though they had not. It was only administratively
practical to so issue them because only a minority of the population
were involved, namely Christians who had, like Tertullian’s soldier,
stood out grimly as non participants in a festal sacrifice for which
almost the whole populations of their city had otherwise turned out.52
Thus there is a direct connection between the Egyptian libelli and the
libellatici of Cyprian’s letters, who had obtained fraudulently a
certificate for a sacrifice they had never performed.53 The imperial
commissioners acquiesced, with or without bribes, in what they knew
to be untrue, because the true purpose of the edict had been to
undermine the Christian profession.
Such an interpretation of the context in which a libellus was issued
does not accord with what we shall see in detail in the next chapter to
have been the stereotyped wording of the libelli themselves. The
assertion by the signatory of always having worshipped the gods would
hardly apply to a Christian who had never done so before this moment.
Furthermore, if only a Christian needed a libellus, Aurelia Ammonous
would certainly not have required one. If only Christians needed this
method of circumventing the requirements of the edict, she would have
no need of a libellus to excuse her previous Christianity. Her daily
sacrifice to her new god Petesouchos would have ruled out any such
requirement, since, as Foucart pointed out, it would have thereby given
a convincing demonstration that she was no longer a Christian and had
complied with the edict.54
Sordi has, therefore, rightly objected that the requirement that the
person certify that they had ‘always sacrificed’ could only be fulfilled
by pagans, to whom it was primarily directed in order to secure their
participation in the supplicatio.55 An escape clause for Christians would
require a quite different form, such as that allowed by Pliny when he
pardoned those who had admitted being Christians in the past. There
51 Lane Fox, Pagans, pp. 455–6.
52 Tertullian, De Corona, 1.2.
53 Cyprian, De Lapsis, 27; Epistulae, LV.13.2; 14.1; 17.3; 26.1.
54 P. Foucart, Les certificates de sacrifice pendant la persecution
de Decius (250), in
Journal des Savants, 6 (1908), 172, quoted in Knipfing, ‘Decian Persecution’, 362.
55 Sordi, ‘La data dell’edito’, p. 453.
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was no such request to deny what they had been in the past. We shall
need to consider more closely the implications of the stringency of this
part of the declaration for the character of the sacrifice when we come
later (chapter 5) to examine the specific details of the libelli.
But although Sordi rejects the notion that the edict was specifically
aimed against Christianity, she does support Foucart’s original
contention that Decius’ persecution, like that of Valerian later, was in
two stages. Foucart also found overriding the claim that the
certification of the general population for a universal sacrifice was an
administrative impossibility. What certificates were therefore issued
had been those of one group within the community, but not, as
Keresztes was to claim, to Christians alone. They had been issued only
to those who, for one reason or another, had not been present on the
date stated for the original sacrifice under the terms of a second edict.
Ammonous had been one of those who, as pagans, inadvertently
had not attended, and those whose names are on the libelli were in the
same position as herself: they were simply trying to put things right.
Foucart’s argument here makes a further assumption that we shall need
to investigate further in depth later (chapter 5, section A.2), namely the
role of taxation registers as a means to checking who had sacrificed,
and the identification of those who had to be tracked down because
they had not. If this assumption were justifiable, then clearly the act of
checking against a census list for everyone universally was an
administrative possibility, whereas the issuing of a certificate for
having done so to a few recusants on his view was not.
But Foucart’s account was now to open up a further possibility that
Keresztes was able to exploit, namely a gap in time between when
those libelli that were issued, and the actual proclamation of the edict
itself.56 Keresztes therefore was able to claim, in addition to the
sacrifices required ‘by the initial Imperial edict’, that there were
‘possibly follow up edicts or imperial instructions’ needed for the for
him additional requirement for recusants to make a written declaration
before a duly constituted commission.57 Some support for Keresztes’
isolated position has therefore been derived from the argument that
there were two edicts in the Decian legislation, paralleling Valerian’s
two later edicts in which they were reflected.
B.1.4. Two edicts of Valerian reflected in Decius’ provisions?
According to this view, the general decree to sacrifice did not initially
demand certification. It was only later, when some groups had proved
dilatory (or recalcitrant), that a compulsive device was required. Thus
the problem of universal certification by conformists and non56 Foucart, ‘Certificates de sacrifice’,
57 Ketesztes, ‘Decian libelli’, 772.
176–7.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
119
conformists alike was resolved: the libelli were required only for nonconformists. Were this to be the case, then a weaker version of
Keresztes’ case might become more plausible: the Christians were the
most prominent and numerous non-conformists so that, though some
pagans might be included, they were nevertheless the chief suspects
against whom both measures were directed.58
Molthagen believed, like Keresztes, that Christianity had been
illegal since Nero. He nevertheless rejected the hypothesis of two
edicts, even though he believed in a modified thesis that Decius had
issued a general edict for sacrifice that had included pagans as well.
Decius had decided on a fundamental change in policy that required an
edict, having persecuted Christians at first under a general law that
needed no such edict. That changed policy did not focus particularly on
Christians: its intention was far more general in its scope.59 Yet Frend,
whilst rejecting a legal tradition dating back to Nero for specifically
Christian persecution, was to argue against the view of a single edict.60
He asserted that there was an interval of time between two phases of
the Decian persecution, one aimed, like that earlier of the emperor
Maximinus Thrax (AD 235-238), specifically against Church leaders,
and the second requiring a general sacrifice from the Christian laity and
pagans alike.61
Both phases were initiated by separate edicts. It was the second
edict (whose date must have been subsequent to the martyrdom of
Pionius on 12th March, 250) that had taken place presumably under the
first edict. It was this second edict that had set up the commissions to
examine those that had not joined the emperor, who had ordered his
subjects perhaps to follow the example that he had set in offering the
imperial uota at the sacrifice to Juppiter Capitolinus on 3rd January.62
Sordi, somewhat lamely, accepts the thesis of two phases differing in
the severity of the sanctions, but rejects the notion of two initiating
edicts: the one edict out of whose provisions the libelli arose was issued
at a later date.
Clarke’s response to Frend was that Dionysius of Alexandria
mentions the ‘royal edict (pro/stagma basiliko/n)’ in the singular:
Cyprian’s plural edicta and leges are rhetorical flourishes rather than
testimony to two edicts whose publication was separated by some
58 Keresztes,
‘Decian libelli’, 763–4; 768–71.
pp. 65–8.
Römische Staat, in Classical Review, 22
59 Molthagen, Römische Staat, pp. 21–33;
60 W.H.C. Frend, Review of Molthagen,
(1972), 394.
61 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, VI.28.
62 W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd
1984), pp. 319–20.
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months.63 Sordi was to propose, following Réveillaud and Duquenne,64
the weaker thesis that there had been only one edict, but she claimed
that its date was not 3rd January but nearer to the dates of the libelli, the
earliest of which that remains was issued 12th June, 250.65 Decius’
single edict was issued at Rome ‘towards the end of March’, and was to
arrive in Africa ‘around the middle of April’.66 It was then that the
scene took place as described by Dionysius at Alexandria and by
Cyprian in the forum at Carthage.67
Thus Sordi also, whilst rejecting Keresztes case that there were two
edicts directed specifically to the destruction of Christianity,
nevertheless argued that there were two stages in Decius’ persecution
reflected in Cyprian’s writings. In its mild phase, the persecution began
Autumn-winter 249 or January 250. Only a bishop such as Fabian will
suffer death since he is a clerical leader, but his death is the result of
mob agitation: the initial attack upon Church leaders involves at first
exile and confiscation of goods, but no official penal sanctions. This
situation is reflected in the case of Cyprian’s exile, and also later in in
that of Valerian’s first edict. Thus we can explain Cyprian’s references
to ‘exiles (extorres)’ as a punishment in some earlier letters,68 but to
torture and death in other, later ones, where ‘tortures (tormenta)’ are
mentioned, and martyr is used in additon to confessor.69 Thus Cyprian
will go into hiding assured that hitherto the laity and minor clergy are
safe. The introduction of commissioners, certifying libelli and
otherwise punishing with torture and death indiscriminately, mark the
second phase of the persecution, that initiated by an edict and that
commenced in summer 250.70
Sordi will, in addition to opposing the thesis that the edict was
specifically directed at Christianity, also deny that the libelli were
simply afterthoughts against Christian recusants. Rather for her the
Dionysius of Alexandria, apud Eusebius Historia Ecclesiastica, VI.41.9 cf.
Cyprian, Epistulae XLIII.3 (43). See also Molthagen, Römische Staat, p. 68, cf.
Keresztes, ‘Decian libelli’, p. 772 and his footnotes 92–93.
64 M. Réveillaud, Saint Cyprien. L’Oraison dominicale (Études d’histoire et de
philosophie religieuses 58; Paris 1964), pp. 32–3; L. Duquenne, Chronologie des
Lettres de S. Cyprien: Le dossier de la persécution de Dèce (Subsidia Hagiographica
54; Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, Boulevard Saint-Michel, 24, 1972), p. 166ff.
cited in Clarke, ‘Two Measures’, 120–21, and his footnote 18. See also Sordi,
‘Cristianesimo e l’impero’, 361 cf. Duquenne, Chronologie, p. 102.
65 Pap. Hamburg. (1910) =Knipfing, ‘Decian Persecution’, no. 6.
66 Sordi, ‘La data dell’edito’, 455.
67 Eusebius (Dionysius of Alexandria), Historia Ecclesiastica, VI.41.11; Cyprian,
De Lapsis, 8 (147–69).
68 Cyprian, Epistulae, XX.2.1 (18), referring to the first Roman confessors.
69 Cyprian, Epistulae, X.1.1–2.1 (8-33) and XII.1.2 (18-20), see Sordi, ‘La data
dell’edito’, p. 451.
70 Ibid., p. 452.
63
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
121
persecution began with a mild phase in which measures were taken
against Christians, against whom she believes (with Keresztes and
Molthagen) that there was a specific law from Nero’s time. There was
no need of a special edict, as Molthagen also had said, to legalise such
measures that were at all events non penal. It was the popularity of
these measures against Christian leaders, and the mob outbursts to
which they lead, that encouraged and emboldened Decius to issue his
edict requiring a certified act of sacrifice by the general population with
penal sanctions.71
Yet curiously on such a view, and quite unlike Keresztes, Sordi
believed that the edict itself was not directed specifically at Christians,
though these may have been firmly in mind. Thus her argument
becomes somewhat paradoxical since, if Decius was focusing upon the
leaders, then he must have had in mind a particular group that he knew
to be governed by bishops, priests and deacons and, therefore, have
indeed had Christianity in mind. But the actual words of the libelli
seem to require a quite different objective, namely a general supplicatio
whose intention was to secure the pax deorum through a general
sacrifice. The major flaw in her later date for Decius’ edict is that the
martyrdom of the presbyter Pionius in Smyrna is clearly dated 12th
March, his trial having commenced on 23rd February. Sordi’s account,
therefore, requires two formal edicts. But how was the first one at all
necessary if Christianity was already illegal and its suppression the
exclusive objective of such an edict?
Sordi needs, therefore, to date Pionius execution on 12th May
following the Acts of Maximus, parts of which she claims to be
somehow relevant for Pionius’ later date.72 But the problem for her
case cannot be so easily disposed of on what appear to be in any case
quite flimsy grounds. And without so disposing of it, the clear evidence
of the basis for for Pionius’ trial is ‘the decree (dia/tagma) of the
emperor that orders you to sacrifice to the gods’.73 This is clearly an
edict of Decius, and the one that arguably dated from the 3rd January
and that had taken until around this date to reach Smyrna. If indeed this
edict is a first edict different from that instigating the libelli, then it is
an edict ordering general sacrifice and not one directed at the clergy of
the Christian church alone. Pionius, a presbyter, was in any case
accompanied in his martyrdom by Sabina who was a lay ‘confessor’, as
were presumably Asclepiades and Macedonia. Only the name of
71 Sordi, ‘Cristianesimo e l’impero’, 341–374: 359–360.
72 Sordi, ‘La data dell’edito’, 455, her footnote 16, cf Passio
Pionii. 2.1 and 23, cf.
L. Robert, G.W. Bowersock, and, C.P. Jones, (eds.), Le martyre de Pionios, prêtre de
Smyrne, Édité, traduit et commenté (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks 1994), p. 50 and
p. 121.
73 Passio Pionii, 3.2.
122
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Limnos is given the title ‘presbyter’ in the singular immediately
following his name.74 Clearly the clergy alone were not the sole objects
of this dia/tagma.
It was in the light of this and other counter examples from Cyprian
of lay confessors suffering death that Sordi had to claim in defense of
her thesis that such deaths, like Fabian’s martyrdom, arose from
popular riots in the wake of Decius’ ordinary legal process. Such riots
encouraged Decius to proceed with his formal edict creating
commissions and demanding libelli.75 But as we have seen, the
presbyters Pionius and Limnos and their lay companions were not
convicted as the result of a popular riot that brought them to the
attention of the authorities, but in consequence of a definite edict, and
this as early as February 250.
But the chronological basis for two edicts separated by a space of
time is also difficult to establish.
B.1.5. Chronological issues for the claim for two putative edicts.
Clarke will now raise in criticism two points against both the stronger
thesis (two edicts) of Keresztes and Frend that will also therefore have
implications for Sordi’s weaker thesis that there was only one edict, but
with preceding anti-hierarchical, non punitive measures. Against the
former he argues that, by the time of letters written in March 250, there
were already large numbers of libellatici, whose number had built up
over the three months from Decius’ 3rd of January edict. Thus the libelli
were a feature of the implementation of the edict from the first: there is
no time gap that separates a first and alleged second decree. Against the
weaker thesis Clarke shows that there were laymen and women present
amongst the confessors from the very beginning, so that there were no
separate initial anti-clerical measures, with the laity only included later
when punitive sanctions were applied.
Celerinus was a young confessor at Rome, who, according to
Clarke, had appeared before the emperor Decius himself.76 Cyprian has
preserved for us a letter that Celerinus wrote to the confessor, Lucianus,
asking for absolution for his two sisters who had succumbed. As
penance, they were caring for the imprisoned confessors from Carthage
whom they had escorted from Portus into Rome itself.77 Although one
sister, Candida, had offered sacrifice, she could not be regarded as
having done so willingly under a putative first edict that lacked penal
sanction. Her sister, Numeria, had ascended the Capitol as far as the
74 Passio
Pionii, 2.1.
Sordi, ‘Cristianesimo e l’impero’, 362–4. See also G. Clarke, ‘Persecution of
Decius’, in CAH2 XII.18.B (2005), p. 625.
76 Clarke, ‘Some Observations’, 64–65.
77 Cyprian (Celerinus), Epistulae, XXI.2.2 (37–44); 4.1 (68–73).
75
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
123
shrine of the Three Fates, and then came down again and simply paid a
bribe.78
Numeria was, therefore, in receipt of a certificate of sacrifice
granted to her after threats of penal sanction had been applied.
Celerinus describes how he had spent his Easter mourning the fall of
both sisters. Easter that year had fallen on 7th April.79 Their penance,
already therefore well organised and in progress, implies some time
before this date. In consequence, the time gap required to make
plausible the thesis of two edicts, only the later of which was punitive
for the entire Christian community, becomes narrowed into almost nonexistence. As Clarke says, ‘the timetable’ between 3rd January and May
‘is in some embarrassment’.80
In a letter written before April, AD 250, we find Cyprian writing to
imprisoned confessors in Carthage:
There can be no more joyful experience for which I have prayed than that I
should enfold those hands of yours in mine that are pure and innocent, and that
have spurned complying with sacrilegious orders (sacrilega obsequia).81
The phrase sacrilega obsequia occurs in the context of imprisonment
and not simply threat of confiscation and exile. We find that phrases
abound such as ‘the enduring of suffering (tolerantia passionis)’, with
the strong implication that ‘tortures (tormenta)’ are involved, ‘which
consecrate’ —not merely confessors but — ‘martyrs of God and
sanctify them by the very test of suffering’.82
We have reference here to ‘punishments at this time (praesentia
supplicia)’, where supplicia indicates both legal punishments and ones
that are physical.83 The recipients of this letter are exhorted ‘to endure
every pressure and persecution (persecutiones)’.84 Here is the language
of pressure, involving physical punishment, as the outcome of a legal
process. Read also in the context of Numeria, as an early apostate who
had receive through bribery a certificate (libellus) that made her a
libellatica, we have already evidence, at an early stage, of the whole
apparatus of sacrificing under pressure to conform to sacrilega
obsequia being recorded by commissioners, who accordingly issued a
libellus to that effect. Thus the two alleged decrees can be separated
neither by time, nor by those to whom it was directed (clergy as
opposed to laity), nor by the distinction between non-penal
78 Cyprian (Celerinus), Epistulae, XXI.3.2 (50–57) .
79 Cyprian (Celerinus), Epistulae, XXI.2.1 (32–36).
322, his footnote 15.
80 Clarke, ‘Two Measures’, p. 119.
81 Cyprian, Epistulae, VI.1.1 (6–9).
82 Cyprian, Epistulae,, VI.2.1 (25–26).
83 Cyprian, Epistulae,, VI.2.1 (40).
84 Cyprian, Epistulae, VI.2.2 (59–60).
See also Clarke, Letters, I, p.
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punishments such as confiscation and exile, and penal ones such as
torture or death.
The weaker thesis espoused by Sordi was that of a single edict
following an initial, non penal persecution under allegedly existing and
enduring present legislation applied only to church leaders. But here
too the evidence of Cyprian points in a different direction. We find in
the earlier letters women and children amongst the imprisoned
confessors:
There are blessed women, who are with you sharing in the same glory of
confessing and who hold to our master’s faith, and, being more brave than
their sex allows, are very near to their garland-crown and provide other
women with a model from their own constancy. And that nothing should be
lacking in the glory of your whole number, God’s approval joined to your
company in glorius confession in order that every sex and age should share
your honour, even young boys ...85
These clearly are not bishops and other clerical grades: they are
laypersons under immediate threat of imprisonment and torture for
which Cyprian believes that nature has ill endowed them. At the same
time Cyprian addresses a letter to the Carthaginian presbyterate and
deacons, but with instructions not to succour simply those in their own
ranks but confessors, not all of who were ordained, but who are the
kinds of people that we have just mentioned.86
Molthagen, who supported a single edict, had originally made the
point that from the beginning a layman such as Celerinus had been
numbered amongst the first confessors, and was, before his
confessionship, unable to claim any clerical status.87 We shall argue
later (chapter 6, section B.2) that Celerinus could only make his claim
to confessorship as a qualification for ordination because his sufferings
had been very physical, and not simply a ‘domestic’s beating
(castigatio domestica)’.88 Sordi’s weaker version had demanded an
ordinary judicial process against Church leaders that grew into a formal
edict for general sacrifice, non-compliance with which was noted
initially only on the part of bishops and clergy and then only punished
with exile and confiscation.89 The libelli and other matters were the
creation of an edict that marked a tightening and extension of the
persecution of church leaders to all members of the Christian
community, and to torture and death in place of confiscation and exile.
Clarke will allow for a gradual tightening in the progress of the
85 Cyprian,
86 Cyprian,
Epistulae, VI.3.1 (62–78).
Epistulae, V.1.2 (9–15).
87 Molthagen, Römische Staat, p. 67.
88 Pseudo Hippolytus, Traditio Apostolica, 10–13 and A. Brent, ‘Cyprian and the
question of ordinatio per confessionem’, Studia Patristica, 36 (2001), 323–37.
89 Sordi, ‘Cristianesimo e l’impero’, 362–4.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
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implementation of Decius’ measures, but in consequence of a single
edict issued on 3rd January.90
It is interesting that Sordi will seek to understand her two phases of
Decius’ persecution, as do Keresztes and Frend their two Decian edicts,
as parallels with the two edicts of Valerian. But she perceptively notes
a fundamental distinction between the policies of these two emperors.
Decius desired the apostasy of insignes personae, such as senators,
equites, caesarani, and local magistrates. Valerian simply required their
punishment.91 Not only did Valerian’s two decrees single out Christians
by name, but were specifically directed against the ecclesiastical
hierarchy and its property, both house churches and cemeteries.92 The
church as a corporate body was therefore now recognized in law as a
legal fact, regardless of whether its status was legal or illegal.
The cessation of a particular persecution could not now of itself
change that position: only a specific edict recognizing it legality could
now accomplish the end of that hostility.93 But if that was the case, then
the systematic persecution of Christianity specifically in terms of
Valerian’s edicts was not a continuation of Decius’ policy, but a
reflection of a new situation that it had created: Decius had created the
legal fact of a corporate body, with officials now clearly recognized by
the Roman civil power that had not been so before.
Sordi’s argument thus seems otherwise inconsistent with this
conclusion. Like Keresztes, Frend, and others, her argument seems to
require that Decius’ measures form part of a pattern that begins
allegedly with Maximus, and ends with Valerian and with Diocletian,
in which the leaders of the church are first attacked and only afterwards
the general Christian body. But against Keresztes, and following
Molthagen, she has, as Rives points out, insisted that Decius’ edict was
not directed primarily at the structure of the Christian Church, nor at
particular individuals who were Christians, but to all members of the
empire: Christians were not singled out.94
Rives accepts Sordi’s contention that, if there had been, as
Keresztes suggests, an edict deliberately set up specifically against
Christians from the very first, with commissions issuing libelli to
secure large numbers of apostates, then the wording of the libelli would
have to have been quite different than to imply that the sacrificer had
aways adhered to the pagan state religion.95 Thus at this point her
90
G. Clarke, ‘Persecution of Decius’, pp. 626–7.
367–8.
91 Sordi, ‘Cristianesimo e l’impero’,
92 Ibid., 370–71.
93 Ibid,, 371.
94 Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, 142.
95 Ibid., 140.
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126
argument, taken from Molthagen whom she follows, betrays a certain
lack of consistency.
Molthagen was more consistent than Sordi because he recognised
that, if Christianity had been from Nero’s time an already named illegal
institution, then this would be inconsistent with any view of Decius’
edict as having the objective of a general participation in a universal
supplicatio. Since he adhered strongly to the latter, Decius’ edict had to
mark a fundamental change in religious policy to cease persecuting by
law the Church as such, but instead to require generally everyone to
participate in the worship of the gods of the state. Decius’ edict was
novel also, therefore, in this particular respect, in that it sprung from the
forces that were creating a positive pagan universalism, as a change
from simply negatively reacting to eastern religious cults such as
Christianity. For Molthagen, there had been one edict, with a
corresponding set of measures not separated from each other, whether
by time or by purpose: Decius’ could have persecuted Christianity itself
under existing legislation, in whose existence Molthagen had
believed.96 Rather Decius’ purpose in framing his edict had been quite
different from simply following a traditional policy.
If the edict was not specifically directed against Christianity, then
Decius’ purpose was not to oppose and crush the Church as though it
had an institutional form that it did not possess in Roman eyes before
Valerian. Decius’ persecution does not reflect the previous accusations
of what he believes to have been a religious crime allegedly levelled
specifically against the Christians. Now that a definite and positive
policy on the religion of the state had developed in the middle of the
third century, Christians were no longer brought to court for
contumacia, but because of their refusal to participate in a now
centrally organized cult for worshiping the divinities of the Roman
state.97
Thus Molthagen’s claim that Christianity, as an institution, was
already illegal from Nero’s time, could be reconciled with the universal
and indiscriminate character of an edict that all, including pagans, were
to participate in Decius’ sacrifice. Molthagen conceded that that
Decius’ edict marked a fundamental change in religious policy that
presupposed the creation of a positive, pagan universalism, and not
simply a negative reaction to eastern religions such as Christianity.
Valerian’s two edicts, followed by those of Diocletian, were the
inheritance issuing from this change: they were not, as Sordi implies,
the continuation of a pre-existing pattern. Rives points out that there are
no real Decian parallels with Valerian’s attack upon church property,
nor did Decius forbid the celebration of rites in prison nor attack the
96
Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, 141.
Römische Staat, p. 84.
97 Molthagen,
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
127
church’s hierarchy in specific measures: his desire was participation of
all in the worship of the gods of the state, without insisting that they
deny any particular religion in the process.98
Decius’ action was, therefore, unique and novel, with no previous
parallels, though it clearly developed out of pre-existing practices, of
which one was the supplicatio, and another the kind of declaration one
would make for a tax return, both of which were to be reflected in the
detail of the libelli themselves. His action too also reflected the belief in
a crisis in the metaphysical order that combined both nature and
society, and the duty of emperor, whether as Pontifex Maximus, or
more directly as augur, to secure the pax deorum. The libelli and the
universal supplicatio were to the novel means of achieving these
traditional ends, as we shall observe from a close examination of the
text of the former in chapter 5. But, for the moment, let us consider, in
general terms, the reason for the fundamental change that Molthagen
detected in Decius’ action.
B.2. Decius’ edict: a fundamental innovation.
Molthagen regards Decius’ innovation as the product of a positive
movement to achieve a universal pagan religion throughout the empire
that would re-enforce a political unity that was disintegrating.99 And
Rives has sought further to explain that point with his more detailed
and original explanation, in which he perceptively links the disparate
elements of Caracalla’s decree on citizenship with both the character of
a census and of a universal sacrifice.100
Rives’ thesis is that, before Decius, the cultic emphasis of imperial,
pagan religion was on the community as a whole and its relationship
with the divine. After Decius, the emphasis was instead on the
worshipper’s participation as an individual. Before, the individual had
participated by following with his community in a tradition, but not by
obeying a solemn obligation enshrined in law.101 Furthermore,
previously, the cultic celebrations were locally organized even in the
case of identical deities: there was no central organization of cult, but
simply a convergence of sentiment on the part of the local hierarchs
who administered them. But, in the case of Decius, there was to be a
supplicatio, universally celebrated throughout the empire, as a result of
an edict from the centre that specified the setting up of local
committees to require libelli, whose terms were prescribed centrally.102
98 Ibid., 93–6.
99 Molthagen, Römische Staat, pp. 73–4.
100 Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, 152–4.
101 Ibid., 146–7.
102 Ibid., 144–5.
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128
But even so, Decius’ centralizing arrangements had some previous
precedents on which to draw, however novel his application of them.
Rives is conscious of the fact that, even before Decius, and particularly
in connection with a supplicatio— and one that was incorporated into
the ritual of the imperial cult—, there were instructions from the centre
on how to proceed. In the Feriale Cumanum all imperial anniversaries
were celebrated as supplicationes. Total local populations had
previously been called on to wear garlands, and to offer wine and
incense to the gods, as at Eretria in honour of Dionysus, or at
Lampsacus in honour of Asclepias.
But on the point of the individual participating in a cult, we find
the army officers celebrating, with ordinary soldiers included as
spectators, in the Feriale Duranum that was a cult commemorating
imperial anniversaries. Furthermore, the use of small altars with
imperial dedications used on such occasions have been discovered in
Athens, Sparta, Mytilene and Pergamon, which would be indicative of
the individual participating as such, and not simply as part of a
collective whole.103 Rives nevertheless considers that, before Decius,
there was no legal compulsion on an individual, even though refusal to
participate in an imperial celebration might excite charges of
conspiracy. Thus he can maintain the distinction that his argument
requires between the collective and local emphasis before Decius, and
the universal and individual emphasis after Decius that made the act of
sacrifice at a supplicatio a kind of sacrament of imperial unity.
The distinction between an individual being legally coerced into
participation, as opposed to simply as a result of social pressure
reinforced by the prospects of related criminal charges, seems to me to
be highly tendentious. Rives’ distinction seems too reflective of the
Enlightenment notion of religion as an issue of individual conscience in
relation to one’s association with the collective whole. We need an
alternative description of the nature of the change in the light of which
to examine precisely why such a decisive shift in policy took place.
Rives has argued that Roman religion had hitherto been organised
on a civic model, in which the function of religion was to achieve civic
but not imperial unity beyond the individual cults of individual cities.
As a result, general Roman cults such as that of the Capitoline Triad or
the imperial cult, failed to create consensus on a general imperial and
Roman religious identity. The individual civic focus reacted against
any general imperial identity because such Roman deities became
synthesised with local, civic ones. This was particularly true of North
Africa, where festivals honouring the Capitoline Triad and the imperial
103 Ibid.,
p. 146.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
129
family were juxtaposed, in the annual calendar, with the cults of
Aesculapius, Ceres, and Caelestis.104
Furthermore, ‘Caelestis’ was clearly a Roman divine name applied
to what was the traditional divinity of Punic Carthage, namely Tanit,
whereas Saturn, who devoured his own children, was associated with
Baal, and the child sacrifice that had accompanied his cult.105
Moreover, Juno amongst the Capitoline Triad, otherwise supposed to
unite Roman Carthage with Rome in a common identity, has Caelestis
as an epithet in some African examples.106 Clearly the appropriation of
Juno is working in favour of the creation a local and civic identity
against identity with the imperial whole rather than the reverse. Thus
traditional cults failed to provide the means for imperial unity because
native deities, in continuing to perpetuate local identity, prevailed over
the form given to them by the interpretatio Romana.
Pavis d’Escurac had claimed that a dedication to Caelestis from
Thamugadi was made pro salute imperatoris. The addition of such a
prayer, however, revealed a local cult whose original function was to
assert local identity now being re-adapted so as to make participation in
it an act of identifying collectively with the empire as a whole. But
Rives will point out that the same dedicatory formula is applied to
Saturn, Caelestis, and many others. If we see these as examples of ‘a
general identification with the empire, manifested in a myriad of
individual variations’, it was nevertheless the case that ‘all these people
determined for themselves the nature of that identification’. There was
no ‘loosely defined group norm that moulded the religious identity of
those in the empire’.107
Rives saw the origin of this phenomenon of local and civic identity
in the fact that new cults were introduced by particular individuals with
a personal interest in them, who accordingly petitioned for them from
the Carthaginian authorities. The latter accepted them in order to
increase the prestige of their city. But those authorities did not, as a
result, control the sacra publica, so that the distinction between public
and private cults could no longer be maintained. In this way, local
interests created civic identities through local religious cults.108 Decius’
legislation, therefore, decreeing a cultic act, a supplicatio, and the
details of its implementation, that was also from the centre, was to
reverse fundamentally the situation: there was to be an imperial
religion based upon common divinities throughout the empire with a
104 Rives, Religion and Carthage, pp. 170–1.
105 Ibid., p. 65,
106 Ibid., pp. 151–2 and his footnote 82; p. 189.
107 Ibid., pp. 248–9.
108 Ibid., p. 177; pp. 184–6.
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centrally defined identity that could not be blurred by local, civic
identities.
Rives can thus see the decisive stage on the road to Decius’ edict
in Caracalla’s citizenship law, and the universal taxation census to
which it gave rise, at which we shall look more closely (in chapter 5,
section A.2.1).109 He has endeavoured to describe a process that is
sociological, and in which he identifies a perceived need for imperial
order that requires a new re-orientation of social arrangements for its
successful achievement. As such his account is neither without interest
nor indeed cogency. But the kind of question that I would like to ask
and answer reflects a different perspective that does not rely on
contemporary sociological models.
Rives’ sociological approach may help us to understand the
historical process that we observe, in terms of our twenty-first century
universe of discourse, in which we construct social reality in the light
of Enlightenment materialism: societies are described on the analogy of
either natural organisms or artificial machines, with needs and drives
towards order that require satisfaction if they are to function healthily
or mechanically. As such Rives must be credited with assisting ‘our’,
twenty-first century understanding within the terms of reference of our
contemporary language game. However, those who participated in
those third century events neither understood nor sought to describe
their dynamic in such terms.
My question therefore is: ‘How, in the context of a third century
construction of reality, can the Decian events and their outcomes be
interpreted?’ How did third-century participants in their symbolic
universe of meaning see what was happening to themselves and their
societies? Such an account is an integral part of historical inquiry that
requires, not simply explanation, but understanding, as Weber pointed
out when he outlined the role of Verstehen in relation to the possibility
of historical objectivity.110 Any account of an historical past can only
achieve objectivity by including in its description of events the
subjective standpoint of the historian in making the observations that
he does. As Weber’s translator put it in his introduction:
In order to establish a meaningful connection between the performance of an
act and its underlying motive, the observer must be able to project himself
intellectually and emotionally into the same situation, with the knowledge that
under similar conditions he would behave in the same way. To actually
understand the meaning of a familiar form of conduct is merely an exercise in
109 Ibid., pp. 250–1;
110 R. Aron, Main
Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, 149–50.
Currents in Sociological Thought (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson 1968), Vol. II, pp. 184–7.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
131
deduction. But to explain the motives behind it will always be a difficult and
fundamental question in the methodology in the social sciences.111
Rives’ sociological understanding of an empire developing towards the
achievement of its social ends cannot thus neatly avoid questions of
how any individual participant such as Decius and his entourage saw
their particular intentions, at the cost of fully explaining them. A fully
historical explanation requires us to identify those intentions. We
cannot, as Rives thinks, explain the Decian events ‘in reality’, whether
or not participants in those events understood them in those terms.
Indeed Rives is quite indifferent to questions of the intentions of
Decius as the major participant in those events. As he says:
In the end, of course, we can only speculate on Decius’ motivations. We
should also remember that the edict on sacrifices probably did not loom nearly
so large in his mind as it has in modern scholarship. Decius was a busy man:
he came to the throne in difficult circumstances, and within a year of his
succession was faced with a serious barbarian invasion. It is unlikely that he
had much time to devote to long terms statesmanship... he had no large scale
and coherent programme ... In short it is possible that the edict on universal
sacrifice was a relatively spontaneous measure, and perhaps not very well
thought out.112
But surely, given the results of our discussion, such a picture of
Decius’ indifference is highly questionable in itself, quite apart from
what Weber has taught us about the distinction between our
understanding of an event, and an explanation that requires reference to
the motives of those who participate in it?
Decius’ edict was not simply a measure passed by a busy man
with other things on his mind. Had it been, it would have been a piece
of legislation dealing with run-of-the-mill issues for which there had
been customary legal and other procedures for their implementation.
We have seen that it was not so. His edict for a universal sacrifice, and
the means to its implementation, were unparalleled previously, and we
can neither justify them in terms of, nor fit them into the context of,
some putative enduring Neronian anti-Christian legislation. Decius’
edict, and the libelli that formed part of the process of their
implementation, reflect so many practices that are only in some way
normal, but not in others, and certainly not when each individual
practice is combined into his particular configuration of them.
We have still to discuss in detail how the implementation of the
edict, under which the libelli were issued, resembled only in part the
taking a tax census. The universal supplicatio was like the object of
Caracalla’s citizen law, but not exactly so. As a command from the
111 M. Weber, Basic Concepts in Sociology, trans. H.P. Secher (Peter Owen:
London 1962), para 1.A.3, pp.30–3, and pp. 18–19.
112 Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, 151.
132
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imperial centre, commanding that a rite celebrating imperial unity be
conducted in a prescribed way, the edict represented a reversal of the
customary practice of such rites being organized locally. The ordering
of such a universal sacrifice cannot be fitted adequately into any of the
usual occasions for cultic acts ordered pro salute imperatoris.
Scholars in consequence have proposed a variety of possible
occasions on none of which we have convinced agreement. On the one
hand we have, speculatively, according to Clarke, the edict issued on
the 3rd January, as this was when the annual sacrifices (uota solemnia)
were offered together with the swearing of an oath pro salute
imperatoris.113 But these sacrifices and oaths were taken and offered
by officials, and, as Selinger points out, the general population only
participated as bystanders.114 Potter, acknowledging the uniqueness of
its provisions, simply dated it immediately consequent to Philip’s death
around 27th November, 249. Alföldi, followed by Selinger, dates the
edict on the dies imperii, or the date on which the Senate recognized
officially Decius’ accession to power.115 But if that had been the
occasion, the interpretation and significance of a decree, whether by
the emperor or by the senate for a universal supplicatio, was radical
and new.
Rives’ explanation of that uniqueness in terms of Decius’ belief
that it was ‘necessary to call people back to traditional forms of piety
by ensuring everyone in the empire at least acknowledge the
importance of sacrifice’ is, in my judgment, lacking in precision. I
therefore propose examining the character of a supplicatio, and how
the form of the libelli both exemplify but re-apply this concept of the
religious and cultic responsibility of the emperor for securing the pax
deorum in nature and in society to the perceived metaphysical collapse
into the age of iron and its remedy.
I must emphasise that my account will not be concerned with how
sincere Decius was in his personal beliefs, and how much he himself
might or might not have therefore believed in his program. What went
on in Decius’ head is as irrecoverable as that of anyone else. I am
concerned to analyse the discourse of political legitimation of which
Decius availed himself, and therefore the persuasive effect that he and
his spin-doctors had within the linguistic register of the inhabitants of
the third century Roman Empire and their construction of social reality.
113 Clarke, Letters, I, pp. 25–26; Clarke, ‘Persecution of Decius’, 625.
114 R. Selinger, The Mid-Third Century Persecutions of Decius and
Valerian
(Frankfurt: Peter Lang 2002), p. 33.
115 Ibid., 42–4; R. Selinger, Die Religionspolitik des Kaisers Decius: Anatomie
einer Christenverfolgung (Frankfurt: P. Lang 1994), pp. 57–62.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
133
C. POLITICAL RHETORIC IN THE CONTEXT OF PAGAN ESCHATOLOGY.
The ideological response on each side in these pagan conflicts and
crises was, for one contender to the purple after another, to claim, like
Augustus, to be the effective sign of the transformation of the age of
iron, in all its decay and senectus, into the returning saeculum aureum.
Fortuna redux is a fairly standard message of the imperial coinage, and
carries on as such a tradition of political rhetoric begun by Augustus.
But new epithets come to be employed, which express the new urgency
for the renewal of an age grown weak and old. In the case of Decius’
immediate predecessors, and the situations that they addressed, each of
the conficting claimants in an armed political struggle for the mastery
of the Empire had attempted to appropriate the eschatological rhetoric
of the other, in order to legitimate their case in terms of a shared
language game in which each had partipated.
As such a rhetorical context is, I believe, critical for understanding
what Decius was claiming in his edict, I propose first examining the use
of a pagan eschatological rhetoric by claimants for the imperial purple
both before and after Decius. We shall see how such eschatological
rhetoric is related also to the cultic responsibility of the Emperor,
acknowledged from Augustus onwards, to secure through augural acts
the pax deorum. Thus we shall establish the general assumptions of the
discourse, shared by both himself and his rivals, in terms of which his
acts are to be understood.
C.1. Pre Decian eschatology of Gordian III, Pacantianus, and Philip.
We begin with Philip’s anonymous rhetor, whose panegyric gives us a
clear literary statement of the heightened eschatological claims that
revived those of Augustus (C.1.1). We shall then show how this
revived Augustan ideology is reflected both in the ideological claims of
both Philip’s predecessors and contemporary rivals (C.1.2), and in his
own coinage (C.1.3), as well as in that of his successors (C.1.3). Thus
we shall establish the pattern of legitimation into which Decian claims
fit rather than from which they logically disjoin (C.2).
C.1.1. Philip’s rhetor and the revival of the Augustan ideology.
The Augustan ideology had continued generally, from the time of that
emperor, in the iconography of the Roman coinage. The inscribed title
of each emperor as ‘Augustus’, which Octavian had adopted originally
as his changed, sacred name, testified to that ideology. At Carthage the
enduring monument that, as we saw, was its own Ara Pacis provided a
continuing material representation of Augustan eschatological themes
(chapter 2, section B.2). A further invariable title on coins was that of
pontifex maximus and of augur, reminiscent too of the augural act
134
CHAPTER FOUR
consecrating the original Ara Pacis at Rome, the augurium pacis from
which Augustus derived his name, and that had proclaimed
iconographically the returning saeculum aureum.
Beard has pointed out how critical was the title of pontifex
maximus, and it conjunction with the title of augur, for the ideology of
the Principate. In Republican times, the concept of what we would
describe as ‘priesthood’ was highly diverse and elusive. The supreme
body claiming the ability to mediate between human society and the
gods was the Senate, which could declare whether an augur’s statement
about the auspicia was valid or invalid, unlike the case of other
constitutional bodies, whose proceedings could be suspended if the
auspicia were declared to be unfavourable.116
The pontifices and the augures were two distinct colleges, the
former of which had ‘no direct access to ... the divine’. Their power
‘consisted in mediation between the centre of Roman religion in the
form, principally, of the senate and the individual citizens as they lived
their lives’.117 The augures, however, ‘had a direct link with the divine
not possessed by the pontifices. But both were subject to the divine
authority of the Senate, to which they were kinds of subcommittees.’118 When Augustus, in 12 BC, assumed the title of pontifex
maximus and augur, he was to combine two distinct offices into one,
and thus changed the structure of Republican religious authority:
The emperor, as focus of political authority, became also a focus of priestly
authority — with a hierarchy of major and minor priests radiating outwards
from his centre.119
Thus Decius’ concept of religious authority was a direct trajectory from
the ideology of the Principate that we shall argue that he revived.
It is of course prima facie questionable as to what extent such
numismatic legends, even if associated with enduring monuments,
continue to maintain their original significance with the passage of time
as part of the collective memory of those who read and viewed them in
the course of their everyday lives. To what extent had they become
simply stereotypes, whose original meaning and cogency have become
diminished or even lost? We have one piece of evidence of a clear
revival, if it had been lost, from the reign of Philip the Arab (AD 244249), where such eschatological imagery is clearly renewed and
seriously used in claims to political legitimacy.
A rhetor of Philip the Arab, in a panegyric in his honour, gives us
clear evidence of the association of the return of the golden age with his
116 M. Beard, ‘Priesthood in the Roman Republic’, in M. Beard and J. North (eds.),
Pagan Priests. Religion and Power in the Ancient World (London: Duckworth 1990),
33–4.
117 Ibid., 36.
118 Ibid., 38–40.
119 Ibid., 48.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
135
sacred office as emperor. The speech Ei)j Basile/a has been
convincingly argued by Swift to have been addressed to Philip.120 The
author of this work, included pseudepigraphically in the works of
Aelius Aristides, described the shaking of the fabric of empire in terms
of storm and earthquake.121 We saw that such images of catastrophe
were paralleled in Cyprian’s Christian paraenesis (Chapter 3, section
B). But just before this baleful description, we are assured that the new
emperor is to be a remedy for this decline, and willed to be such by
providence:
… the providence (pro/noia) that administers the universe and orders it has
also caused this man to sit on the royal throne as the most righteous and holy
of kings.
Thus under his rule there was the enjoyment ‘of good fortune (tu/xh)
from him and from providence (pro/noia)’.122
The ‘true emperor is like the emperor of the universe’.123
Furthermore:
Every continent enjoys peace, and land and sea garland their patron
(prosta/thj) … what better and more profitable condition is there than
this?124
Philip is thus represented as ‘the light of blessed humanity’.
It has unfortunately become common to dismiss such language of
the panegyrists as the empty rhetoric of flattering courtiers. But even if
this were true, the reality behind the rhetoric must be viewed in the
perspective of a possible third century social construction of reality,
and not that of Post Enlightenment Europe. If one strips away third
century rhetoric, one is left, not with post-Enlightenment realism, but
metaphysical assumptions about nature and society that was the
‘realism’ of the third century, and that we have reconstructed in terms
of a popular Stoicism. All political ‘spin’ is ultimately parasitical upon
fundamental collective assumptions on which it feeds in order to make
its persuasive point. In order to have ‘disagreement in opinion’, as
Wittgenstein pointed out, we must have achieved a prior agreement,
agreement ‘in form of life’.
‘The Providence that administers the universe (pro/noia)’, of
which the anonymous third-century panegyrist has spoken, had a clear
120 E. Croag, ‘Die Kaisarrede des Pseudo-Aristides’, Wiener Studien, 40 (1918),
20–45; L.J. Swift, ‘The Anonymous Econium of Philip the Arab’, Greek, Roman and
Byzantine Studies, 7 (1966), 267–89; H. Oliver, ‘The Piety of Commodus and
Caracalla, and the Ei)j Basie/a’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 19 (1978),
386–8.
121 See above, chapter 3, footnote 88 and associated text.
122 Pseudo Aristides, Ei)j Basile/a, 35.14.
123 Ibid., 35.24.
124 Ibid., 35.36.
136
CHAPTER FOUR
reference in Stoic philosophy as had universal peace in terms of a
returning golden age in Stoic eschatology. It was, moreover, a phrase
that had occurred before in Roman political rhetoric with Augustus at
the very origins of the Principate. Thus Philip’s panegyrist represents at
least a revival of such an ideology that had originally justified
Octavian’s succession, represented as occurring as a remedy of
providence for a world perceived to be in a state of metaphysical
decline:
The Providence (pro/noia), that has divinely ordered our life has… arranged
our life with perfect goodness when it brought to us Augustus, whom
Providence has filled with virtue for the benefit of mankind and granted both
to us and to those after us as our saviour (swth/r), who has made war to cease
and ordered the world with peace (ei)rh/nh).125
Thus Augustus, as he who would, in the words of Vergil’s Sibyl,
‘found the golden age’,126 is here the agent of providence (pro/noia) as
the panegyrist claims Philip now is. The latter has been responsible for,
according to his panegyrist, peace for which ‘land and and sea garland
their patron’.
Augustus too claimed that victories ‘by land and by sea’ had
produced universal peace marked ‘by favourable omens (auspiciis/
ai)si/oij oi)wnoi~j)’, in the inscription recording his achievements on
two bronze columns associated from the reign of Tiberius onwards with
the frescoes of the Ara Pacis set up in the Campus Martius in Rome (9
BC).127 Here prominence is given to Augustus and Agrippa, as veiled
sacerdotes, portrayed as about to preside over the sacrifice as part of
the augurium pacis that provided the pax deorum. The iconography of
the Ara associated these cultic acts with the beginning of the saeculum
aureum.
Philip’s panegyrist too points to his sacerdotal significance as ‘the
most holy of kings’ that reflects an Augustan augural role in bringing
about the returning golden age. The title ‘Augustus’ had originally
evoked ideas of sanctity as well as those of augury. That the first state
before the world’s decline is to be restored is now declared in the coins
of Philip’s reign, whose reverse depicts a hexastyle temple, with a
statue of Roma in the centre of its columns, with the inscription
SAECVLVM NOVVM S.C, as well as others that we shall shortly
explore (Plate 6.2).128 But first of all let us look at the coinage of
Philip’s immediate predecessor, Gordian III, in order to see how the
125 Ehrenberg and Jones, Documents, no. 98.8–10.
126 Virgil, Aeneid, 6.792–3.
127 Augustus, Res Gestae, 4.2. For a more detailed
Cult, pp. 50–1.
128 RIC IV.3, p. 71 nos 25 (a) and (b).
discussion see Brent, Imperial
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
137
former’s rhetor had developed themes that were also present
embryonically in the legitimation of the latter’s claims.
C.1.2. Gordian III as Philip’s ideological predecessor.
Although we have no panegyrist for Philip’s predecessor, Gordian III,
we nevertheless have on his coinage the heightened millennarian
themes that indicate a case for political legitimacy made within a
shared discourse. Gordian issued coins (AD 243-4) celebrating
FORTVNA REDVX, along with FELICITAS TEMPORVM. The first
of these, ‘Fortune returning (fortuna redux)’, is depicted seated on the
left, holding the rudder of the ship of destiny, with a depiction of the
wheel of fate under her chair.129 It had been a constant theme of the
imperial coinage, in perpetuation of the Augustan ideology of the
Principate.
Sometimes Fortuna holds a cornucopia with a rudder.130 Philip
continued this theme,131 as would, after his successor Decius’ death, the
contender Uranius Antoninus (AD 253-4).132 It was one rhetorical
theme that was to be appropriated, amongst several others, by
Pacatianus (AD 248-9).133 It was a theme that had appeared before,
particularly under Elagabalus,134 and once or twice in subsequent coins
of the Severan dynasty.135 We shall see that this is not unsurprising,
given the revival of Elagabalan themes in such rhetoric, in particular by
Uranius Antoninus (Plate 7.2).
The second theme, ‘blessedness of the times (felicitas temporum)’
also occurred on the coinage of Gordian III, in which Felicitas is
depicted standing left and holding a long caduceus and cornucopia.136
It was a theme continued in the issue of coins made on the marriage of
the daughter of Timesitheus, Sabina Tranquillina (AD 242).137 Again it
is a theme that Philip I was to continue.138 Again it was a theme used
earlier, though not before Dio’s imperial decline from gold to bronze
and iron had set in, in the revolt of Pescenius Niger (AD 193-4)
onwards.139
129 RIC
130 RIC
131 RIC
132 RIC
133 RIC
134 RIC
135 RIC
IV.3 p. 31 nos 143–4; p. 32 nos 160–1; p. 51 no. 331.
IV.3 p. 37 no. 210.
IV.3 p. 75 no. 63; p. 90 no. 174.
IV.3 p. 205 no. 4*.
IV.3 p. 104 no. 4.
IV.2 p. 34 no. 81; p. 43 no. 189; p. 56 no. 348.
IV.2 p. 49 no. 252 (Julia Maesa); p. 85 no. 196 (Severus Alexander); p. 100
no. 368 (Julia Mamaea).
136 RIC IV.3 p. 30 nos 140–2; p. 51 nos 328–30;
137 RIC IV.3 p. 53 no. 342*.
138 RIC IV.3 p. 90 no. 169*.
139 See amongst several examples RIC IV.1 p. 25 nos 13–17; see also Caracalla
(AD 201–6), p. 231 no. 126. Immediately after the latter’s murder we have Macrinus
(AD 217–218) RIC IV.2 p. 9 no. 57; p. 10 no. 60; p. 19 nos 172–8, followed by his
138
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But we have for Gordian III a new claim that takes us beyond the
commonplace of these themes on the imperial coinage, and that Philip
was to appropriate and contintue, namely, the claim the be
RESTITVTOR ORBIS (‘restorer of the world’). Elagabalus (AD 218222) had sought a universal pagan monotheism, centred on the black
stone of Edessa, with which the Graeco-Roman pantheon could be
syncretized. Uranius was to continue the iconography of him whom he
claimed as his predecessor, in justification of his own claim to the
purple, as we shall see (C.2), by seeking a universal pagan monotheism.
The legend, though found only on the coinage from Valerian Ist
time, nevertheless appears epigraphically on stone from the reign of
Severus Alexander.140 It is particularly in evidence for the reign of
Gordian III, and the Philippi. Of Gordian III we have three epigraphs,
one of which is from the castle at Ain Mellul that states that repairs
were provided:
From the bounty of the new age (indulgentia noui saeculi) of Emperor Caesar
Marcus Antonius Gordianus, unconquered, dutiful, blessed Augustus, restorer
of the world (restitutoris orbis).141
We see here the claim that Gordian is the agent that brings about the
nouum saeculum as its restitutor.
The attestation of the legend RESTITVTOR ORBIS is therefore no
accident when it occurs later on one of Valerian’s coins that has an
image of Gordian III on the obverse. Valerian is using Gordian’s die in
order to appropriate the imagery of the latter’s political legitimation.142
In Rome, moreover, a marble base discovered in the Forum between
the temple of Faustina and the arch of Titus near the House of the
Vestals bears the inscription of a dedication of the city of Tarsus in
Greek to Gordianus as ‘benefactor of the wide world (to\n eu)erge/thn
th~j oi)koume/nhj)’.143 Ruggiero rightly considered these two
epigraphical terms (restitutor and eu)erge/thj) as cognate with a third
by which we find him honoured as ‘saviour of the wide world (swth/r
th~j oi)koume/nhj)’.144
son Diadumenian p. 14 no. 118; Severus Alexander (AD 231–235), p. 92 no. 277*; p.
96 no. 317; Severus Alexander and Julia Mamaea, p. 123 no. 661;
140 CIL VIII.8797a but damaged and uncertain.
141 CIL VIII.20487.1–3: INDVLGENTIA NOVI SAECVLI IMP CAES M
ANTONI GORDIANI INVICTI PII FELICIS AVG RESTITVT[ORIS] [O]RBIS....;
XIII, 9119: IMP CAES M AN GORDIANO PIO...RES ORBIS. See also VI.1092.
142 RIC IV.3, p. 41 no 246.
143 CIL VI.31128.
144 R. Cagnat and M. Besnier, ‘Revue des publications épigraphique relatives à l’
antiquité romaine’, Revue archéologique, (1899), 502 no. 71, cf. E. De Ruggiero,
Dizionario Epigrafico di Antichità Romane (Rome: ‘L’Erma’ di Bretschneider 1962),
III, p. 557.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
139
We also have a further epigraph of Gordian III, unearthed near the
gates of Tivoli from the temple of Magna Mater, which honours him
also as ‘the kosmocrator most beloved of God (to\n qeofile/staton
kosmokra/tora)’.145 We find, moreover, an association between the
theme of restitutor/swth/r, to whose eschatological significance we
have already pointed, with the cult of ‘the Unconquered Sun (Sol
Inuictus)’, in a dedication to (Hli/w| Swth~ri at Hieropolis-Kastabala
in Cilica, early third century.146 The former theme was not taken up by
Gordian’s successors, though the latter was by Uranius Antoninus. We
have a dedicatory inscription in which Gordian is, furthermore,
described as ‘great unconquered (magnus inuictus)’ on one epigraph,
and on another as ‘the greatest unconquered one (inuictissimus)’,
epithets that were found also in the cult of the divinity Sol Inuictus.147
Furthermore, as de Blois pointed out, we have an inscription from
Ephesus honouring Gordian III as Neo\j H
3 lioj, and Philip was to
appropriate this title as that of his own son who bore his name.148
Swth/r is an epithet regularly used of the protecting deities of
various cities. But in connection with the imperial ideology, it was from
Augustus’ time used specifically in terms of the returning golden age.
We have already seen in connection with Philip’s panegyrist parallels
between the expectations of his reign and that of Fortuna Redux (Tu/xh
Swth/rioj), whose altar was erected at Porta Capena (in 19 BC).149 In
9 BC the province of Asia had decreed a new Calendar beginning with:
‘... the birthday of the most divine Caesar which we would justly
consider to be a day equal to the beginning of all things ...’.150
It is in connection with this nouum saeculum that the title swth/r is
claimed for Augustus whom Providence (Fortuna/ Tu/xh) ‘granted both
to us and to those after us as our saviour (swth/r)’.151 swth/r here
therefore has, as its Latin counterpart, restitutor, an eschatological
significance, since it is about restoring the metaphysical decline and
even collapse as the age of gold succeeds the age of iron in the endless
cyclical progression of history. August is swth/r or restitutor precisely
because: ‘… there is nothing in a fallen condition and changed into an
unfortunate condition that he has not set right’.152 Furthermore we have
145 CIG 5892.
146 SEG XXXIX.1502.
147 CIL VIII.10079 and
11160. See also L. Cerfaux and J. Tondriau, Le Culte des
Souverains dans la Civilisation Gréco-Romaine (Tournai: Desclée 1956), p. 374 to
whom I am indebted for these references.
148 L. de Blois, ‘The reign of the emperor Philip the Arabian’, Talanta, 10–11
(1978–1979), 37–8. For Gordian III, see SEG IV.523.1, and Philip II, IGRR I.1480.
149 Augustus, Res Gestae, 11.
150 Ehrenberg and Jones, New Documents, nos 98.1–6 (= OGIS 458; SEG 4,490).
151 Ehrenberg and Jones, New Documents, nos 98.35.
152 Ehrenberg and Jones, New Documents, nos 98. 6–9.
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an inscription honouring Trajan (AD 102-17) from Ilistra in Lykaonia
as swth/ri th~j oi)koume/nhj in continuation of that eschatological
ideology, as we do also for Antoninus Pius.153
We thus see that the ground for the renewal of the Augustan
ideology in the panegyric of Philip’s rhetor had been well prepared by
the coinage of his predecessor. Once again, we see each side making its
claim to legitimacy against the other by drawing on a shared discourse
of political legitimation. Let us now look, therefore, at how those
millennial concepts are now further developed in Philip’s coinage.
C.1.3. Philip’s coinage and the celebration of the millennial games.
We have already mentioned a coin of Philip with the legend saeculum
aureum.154 Even before Philip’s celebration of the ludi saeculares, the
millennial games, we have seen (in our last section) eschatological
themes within the discourse of imperial political legitimation employed
in connection with his young predecessor, Gordian III. Philip is arising
within a tradition, and appropriating his predecessors’ images of
eschatological legitimation for himself
But Philip, as I have said, produces a theme of the ‘new age
(saeculum nouum)’ that has no previous examples. We have numerous
coins reflecting the theme of both the panegyrist’s ‘most holiest of
kings’, and of Philp performing Augustus’ act of augury producing the
golden age that had been originally commemorated on the reliefs of the
Ara Pacis. Philip is depicted (AD 249), like Augustus on the Ara, as
veiled for the sacrifice that he offers over a tripod and holding his
augur’s wand.155 Where SAECVLVM NOVVM occurs specifically,
the theme of the hexastyle temple with the statue of Roma continues,156
as it does with Philip’s wife, Otacilia Severa (Plate 6.2). She is depicted
on one coin with the legend PIETAS AVGG, raising her right hand
over an altar with an incense box.157 Another coin proclaims
SAECVLVM NOVVM.158
We are thus seeing, marked by this new concept, the emergence of
a discourse in which older, traditional themes, expressing a general
hope for the future such as felicitas temporum or fortuna redux, and
153 Trajan: SEG XLII.1261.9–10; Antoninus (inscription on limestone statue base
from Kodrula in Pisidia.): XLIV.1107: sebastw|~ swth~ri th~~j oi)koume/nhj; (From
Sparta) XLI.316: ‘To Zeus Eleutheros Antoninus Saviour (Zani\ )Eleuqeroi/oi
)Antwni/noi Swth~ri)’.
154 See above, footnote 128 and associated text.
155 RIC IV.3 p. 78 nos 79*–80, for Augustus cf Brent, Imperial Cult, Plate 7.
156 RIC IV.3 p. 81 no. 108*; p. 89 no. 163 as corrected p. x and p. 99 no 244. Banti,
Bronzi imperiali, IX p. 30 no 52.
157 RIC IV.3 p. 82 no 115.
158 RIC IV.3 p. 82 no. 118; Banti, Bronzi imperiali, IX p. 41 no 8. See also her son,
Philip II, ibid. p 72 no 19.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
141
expressed within the context of the ideology of the Principate, are now
crystallizing into a definite eschatological pattern demanding
immediate realization. That immediate realization is marked by the use
of new terms, such as restitutor orbis or nouum saeculum, which create
a new and immediate, eschatological frame of reference. We will now
also see how political legitimation for each leader of a faction in
conflict with others relied on an argument that appropriates this
eschatological narrative: each rival claimant justified his own position
within such a frame of reference.
There is but one previous example of a claimed eschatological
fulfillment, and that is in a coin from Dio’s claimed golden age of
empire. Here we find a coin of Hadrian (AD 119-22) that depicts him
as the spirit of the golden age (saeculum aureum), proclaimed in the
inscription SAEC AVR, as he emerges from an oval frame holding the
phoenix on a globe.159 Philip, in AD 248, was to celebrate the return of
the golden age by celebrating the one thousand years of Rome’s
founding, the MILIARIVM SAECVLVM.160 On one such coin he has
the inscription SAECULUM NOVVM under which there is depicted
Roma in a hexastyle temple (Plate 6.2). He was to associate his family
with him in this project when he issued coins with this inscription for
his wife, Otacilia Severa,161 and his son, Philip II.162
Philip celebrated the millennium of Rome’s founding with lavish
games.163 We have a number of coins celebrating these games minted
by Philip I, and inscribed SAECVLARES AVGG.164 Many of these are
decorated with stag, lion, and other animal motiffs indicative of games
(Plate 6.3). However some depict the she wolf nursing the twins
Romulus and Remus, and thus found the iconography securely in the
first founding of Rome (Plate 6.1).165 One coin, inscribed IMP
GORDIANVS PIVS FEL AVG, bears Philip I on its reverse, and
presumably reflects the former’s divination post mortem, since the
reverse is inscribed SAECVLARES AVGG, an event which took place
in 248, some four years after the death of Gordian III (AD 244),
perhaps at Philip’s hand.166
159 RIC IV.2 p. 356 no. 136.
160 RIC IV.3 p. 88 no. 157.
161 RIC IV.3 p. 93 no. 199.
162 RIC IV.3 p. 103 no. 271*.
163 Potter, Prophecy and History, p. 39.
164 RIC IV,3 p. 70–1 nos 12*–24; p.
81 no 107 and no 111 (with a reverse of
Otacilia Severa); p. 89 nos 158–62 and164 and p. 104 no. 272; p. 97 nos 224–5; p.
102 nos 264–265; Otacilia Severa p. 82 nos 116–17; p. 93 nos 200–2; p. 27–30 nos
45–51; p. 41 no. 7. Philip II, Banti, Bronzi imperiali, IX p. 71 nos 17 and 18.
165 RIC IV.3. p. 70 nos 15–16 and Plate 6.9.
166 RIC IV,3 p. 39 no. 238; p. 89 no. 159; Banti, bronzi imperiali, IX, p. 27 nos 46–
7.
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The articulation of such a political ideology, at least in its
expression of immediate regeneration, was not the idiosyncratic
product of Philip and his spin-doctors. We see this clearly in the way in
which Philip’s enemies and successors argue the legitimacy of their
role and acts in similar terms. Although the legends on Pacatianus’ few
coins are mostly non-descript, and might be characteristic of any
period, we have one that clearly shows his appropriation of the radical
form of the imperial claim to be the restitutor of the saeculum novum.
We have a silver antoninus (Plate 5) with IMP TI CL MAR
PACATIANVS AVG on the obverse but with, on the reverse, Roma
seated on the left on her shield, holding Victory and a spear, and the
legend ROMAE AETER AN MILL ET PRIMO (‘to Rome eternal, year
1001’).167 Clearly Pacatianus, in dating the first and only year of his
short reign (AD 248-9) as year 1001, intended to appropriate the
Philippian ideology that the saeculum nouum had been inaugurated,
and that he, as resitutor, was to complete the work.
We recall that the coinage of Gordian III had also regarded this
emperor as restitutor/swth/r, as well as Helios/swth/r or Sol Invictus,
with which Uranius Antoninus was also to associate his claims to
legitimacy (C.1.4). Once again, Philip was to appropriate the claims of
Gordian’s images in this legend, as with the others. We find an
epigraph on stone from Recka in Dacia honouring Philip along with his
wife Otacilia Severa and his son Philip II. Collectively they are called
‘restorers of the whole world (resitutores orbis totius)’.
Here Philip himself is described, not only with frequently used and
stereotyped epithets such as ‘dutiful (pius)’ and ‘blessed (felix)’, but
also as ‘unconquered (inuictus)’, as had been Gordian’.168 The latter
term clearly presupposed the iconography of the divinity Sol Inuictus,
since Philippopolis in Thrace was to honour Philip II as ‘the new Sun
(to\n ne/on 3Hlion)’.169 Thus the eschatological concept of swth\r th~j
oi)koume/nhj is being reunited with that of magnus inuictus and
inuictissimus, and thus of the cult of Sol Inuictus. The emperor
Elagabalus had associated this cult with the deity of which he had been
high priest, and upon which he had made an abortive attempt to found a
universal monotheism as an expression of the unity of a universal
Roman empire.170
167 RIC IV, p. 105 no. 6.
168 CIL III, 8031= ILS,
510: IMP CAESAR M [I]VL[I]VS [PHILIP]PVS PIVS
F[E]LIX INVI[C]TVS [A]VG[VSTVS].... M IVL[IVS] P[H]ILIPPVS [I]VNIOR
IMP[ERATOR] ..... ET M[ARCIA] OTACILIA SEVERA SANCTISSIMA
AVG[VSTA] N[OSTRA] [R]ESTITVTORES ORBIS TOTIVS....
169 IGRR I.1480. See IL VIII.8809.
170 Brent, Imperial Cult, pp. 310–28.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
143
It has been a fundamental part of our argument that the age of
Cyprian and Decius reflected such an eschatological context (Chapter
3, section A.2). We are now seeing, from the epigraphy and coinage of
both Gordian III and Philip the Arab, that the same eschatological
imagery, legitimating imperial rule, is re-appearing in the politics of the
crisis of the mid-third century. We have found these themes continued
after Decius both by Valerian and by Antoninus Uranius. Thus we shall
show that Decius does not inhabit, as it were, an isolated island in the
midst of the currents of a third-century development of political
theology, and insulated from whole areas of the discourse of his
immediate predecessors and successors, as Rives implies.171
Rives’ complaint about the lack of evidence that Decius
understood the significance of the millennial games claimed both by
Philip and Pacatianus will thus prove highly unfortunate.172 Our
argument is that, if the fragmentary evidence only records the use of
some of the concepts by some of the claimants and not others, those
that are used, because their logic forms part of the logic of a language
game that they share, imply those that are unused. Decius, we shall
argue, was very much ‘on message’ with his contemporary, rival
claimants to political power.
For the moment let us note that Quintus Decius Valerianus, shortly
as emperor to take the additional name of Trajan, crushed Pacatianus
and, on 28th May 249, the legions had proclaimed him emperor.
Consequently he defeated Philip, on whose orders he had originally
marched, near Verona.173 Jotapianus met his end at the hands of his
own soldiers.
We leave aside for the moment Decius’ religious program and its
ideology, which we shall need to discuss in greater detail, within the
context that we are drawing between his predecessors and successors,
and within which his own claims are to be understood (C.2).
Let us therefore pursue next the eschatological claims of Decius’
immediate successors, in order to reconstruct the rhetorical context in
which that program is to be placed, and with which we shall argue a
logical consistency.
C.1.4. Post Decian eschatology of Uranius Antoninus and Valerian.
Following Decius’ death at the hands of the Goths at Abrittus in June
251, his surviving second son, Hostilian, was not to succeed him:
Trebonius Gallus was instead proclaimed emperor by the legions. He
adopted Hostilianus as caesar, a title that he gave to his own son,
Volusianus too. Hostilianus died in the plague in 251. Gallus and
171 Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, 151–2.
172 Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, 148.
173 Potter, Prophecy and History, pp. 40–1.
144
CHAPTER FOUR
Volusianus reigned only until 253. It was in that year that P. Licinius
Valerianus was proclaimed emperor on the Rhine. The third contender
from this period to the purple, Uranius Antoninus (248-254), was to
survive Decius, only finally to be put down by Valerian when he
marched East and recovered Syria in 254.174
Both Trebonius Gallus, the contender Uranius Antoninus, and their
final successor, Valerian, were to continue to claim legitimacy in terms
of the rhetoric of a political eschatology that they combined with the
cultic significance of the emperor in the context of that ideology. The
common, third century themes were continued, in which the figure of
the emperor was seen to have a central, cultic role, as augur and
Pontifex Maximus, of setting right the metaphysical order in its last age
of decline before renewal, as restitutor or swth/r. This had been, as we
have argued, a common theme from the beginning of the third century,
to which both Dio and Herodian bear witness. But it had its roots in the
original, Augustan project of the princeps a diis electus as the sign and
seal of the saeculum aureum.175
But clearly the expectations and claims of the Philippi have
developed further this theme, and made the expectation of the renewal
more immediate, and its fulfillment more specific. The celebratory
games of the 1000 year old history of Rome are to mark the beginning
of a saeculum nouum, in which the metaphysical order is set right by
the emperor as restitutor: the fulfillment was pressing and immediate.
The title restitutor orbis unites the coinage of Valerian Ist with the
epigraphy of Gordian III and Philip, and with their general imperial
program of the renewal of the saeculum experiencing its final
senectus.176 Valerian is hailed, in a marble fragment found at Rome in
the Forum of Clodius, as ‘blessed unconquered Augustus (felici inuicto
Augusto), Pontifex Maximus (Pontifici Maximo) … restorer of public
security and liberty (restitutori publicae saecuritatis ac libertatis)’.177
But on the coinage we have the by now usual eschatological reference
to restitutor orbis.178 Thus both the claimant Uranius Antoninus, as
well as Trebonius and Valerian, were to continue the ideology of the
saeculum nouum.
174 CAH
XII, 165–9.
J.R. Fears, Princeps a diis electus: The divine election of the Emperor as a
Political Concept at Rome (Papers of the American Academy at Rome, 26; Rome:
1977).
176 For a further discussion and bibliography regarding these references and those of
the last two footnotes, see G. Alföldy, ‘Die Krise des Imperium Romanum un die
Religion Roms’, (=Alföldy, Augewählte Beiträge, pp. 349–87), pp. 352–9.
177 CIL XI.3310: FELICI INVICTO AVG PONTIFICI MAXIMO ... RESITVTORI
PVBLICE SAECVRITATIS.
178 RIC V,1 p. 42 no. 50; p. 47 nos 116–9;p. 50 no. 149; p. 51 no. 171.
175
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
145
Let us now see the details of these claims and the presuppositions
with which they are made.
C.1.4.1. Uranius Antoninus and eschatological prophecy.
We find on coins of Trebonianus Gallus and Volusian the legend
SAECVLVM NOVUM along with the more customary ROMAE
AETERNAE and PAX AETERNA.179 Julius Aurelius Sulplicius
Uranius Antoninus, before his defeat by Valerian in 254, portrays an
eschatological ideology too that is clearly continuous with that of Philip
and his successors. He too lays claim to the SAECVLARES AVGG
(Plate 7.2).180
We have, furthermore, since the beginning of 1970, a new hoard of
‘reformed’ Syrian Tetradrachmas of Uranius Antoninus.181 His coins
here continue the themes of FORVNA REDUX, with a star on her right
arm and a horn of plenty on her left, seated on a throne.182 This
eschatological theme is associated with combined Roman and Syrian
deities. Thus we have images on the reverse of coins depicting Tyche
Atargatis also, like Fortuna Redux, with a star on the right and a
cornucopia on her left, or Minerva-Allath and a throne with lance and
shield in her right and left hands, and wearing a Macedonian helmet.183
We have also depictions of Sol-Elagab radiate, with a crescent and two
small horns.184
This iconography is also significant in view of the fact also that
Uranius attempted to revive Elagabalus’ cult of the sun god of Syrian
Emessa, where he based the centre of his abortive empire. We have on
one coin the legend SOL ELAGABALVS, and which depicts an altar
with a jug below, parasols on right and left, and on the left an eagle on
a sacred stone.185
The legend is significant since there are no such legends in
Elagabalus’ own coins, but if they were, the reference would surely
have been to sol Elagab, with reference to the god and not the emperor
179 RIC IV,3 p. 169 nos 90–1 cf. no. 89 and p. 166 no. 71; p. 184 no. 222; p. 186
nos 235–6. See also p.172 no. 120; p. 174 no. 137 ; p. 180 no. 196; p. 185 nos 234 (a),
(b), (c); and Banti, Bronzi imperiali, IX, p. 148 no. 29; p. 172 no. 23 (ROMAE
AETERNAE), p. 180 no. 194; p. 182 no. 211; p. 183 no. 221 (PAX AETERNA).
180 RIC IV,3 p. 205 no.7 and Pl. 15,18.
181 In addition to those published by R. Delbrück, ‘Uranius of Emesa’, Numismatic
Chronicle, 8 (1948) 11–29, see H.R. Baldus, ‘Die ‘reformerten’ Tetradrachmen des
Uranius Antoninus’, Chiron, 5 (1975), 452–5.
182 Baldus, ‘Uranius Antoninus’, 454 i and p. See also RIC IV.3 p. 205 no. 4*.
183 Baldus, ‘Uranius Antoninus’, 453 and 454 j, jj, m; p. 455 q, s, and t.
184 For several examples see references in H.R. Baldus, Uranius Antoninus:
Münzprägung und Geschichte, (Antiquitas 3.11; Bonn: Habelt 1971), p. 274 no. 56.
185 RIC IV,3 p. 206 no. 8, see also Baldus, Münzprägung, 144, St. 6–7 and taf.
VI.53–54 cf. taf. V.43.44.
146
CHAPTER FOUR
who bore his name as his high priest.186 Undoubtedly, whilst
identifying himself with the Severi through his name Antoninus,
Uranius was also indentifying himself with Elagabalus who, as Marcus
Aurelius Antoninus Pius Augustus, also bore that name.187 There is
some evidence that he may have been related to Elagabalus, since he
was of the sacerdotal dynasty of Edessa.
But Uranius’ intentions went, I believe, more deeply. The
identification of Elagabalus with Sol is a testimony to the desire of
Uranius’ regime to achieve the post-mortem, imperial divinization of
this emperor that he had originally been refused by the damnatio
memoriae of his historical contemporaries. Uranius shared, in common
with his contemporary political opponents, a similar ideology in terms
of which he justified his political claims. His opponents were not
advocates of an ideology in conflict with his own: they rather shared
the same religious and political discourse in terms of which they argued
their own claims. Elagabalus, because of his damnatio memoriae, did
not enjoy divinization, nor was he thus to appear in Decius’ coin series
of the imperatores diui. Uranius accepted the Decian principle of the
inauguration of the saeculum nouum through the renewal of the
worship of the gods of the empire in the context of the imperial cult. He
simply wished to include his own Syrian sun god.
Uranius is, furthermore, in such a mid-third century context, giving
Sol Elagabalus an eschatological context beyond the original
significance of that earlier attempt to produce a universal monotheism,
uniting a disparate empire under a single emperor.188 This iconography
might not of itself suggest an eschatological significance for the sun
god, though the return of the kingdom of Saturn with the golden age
186 For examples from Elagabalus’ reign, see RIC IV,2 p. 44 no. 198 SOLI
PROPVGNATORI, where Sol radiate wlaks with flowing coat and thunderbolt, and
no. 200 and p. 38 no. 146 (SVMMVS SACERDOS AVG.), where Elagabalus is
depicted sacrificing over a tripod, holding a patera in his right hand and a club in his
left, with a star. We have also with a similar motiff involving Elagabalus, RIC IV,2 p.
43 no. 191 (INVICTVS SACERDOS AVG.), no. 192–193 (RECTOR ORBIS), no.
194 and p. 37 nos 131–135 (SACERDO. DEI SOLIS ELAGAB.), nos 195–7 and p.
37 nos 143–4 (SANCT. DEO SOLI ELAGABAL).
187 PIR, I.196. Sage, Cyprian, p. 165 cites PIR II.195.
188 For the definitive account of Elagabalus’ abortive reforms, see G.H. Halsberghe,
The Cult of Sol Inuinctus (Études Préliminaires aux Religions Orientales dans
L’Empire Romain 35, eds. J. Maarten and M.J. Vermaseren; Leiden: E.J.Brill 1972),
Chapter 4, cf. Brent, Imperial Cult, pp. 311–13. My reservations here is that he does
not connect Antoninus Uranius, whom he mentions on pp. 106–7, with the ideological
use by his contemporaries, in particular Gordianus III and Philip.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
147
had played a part in the Augustan ideology, and the civil war that
preceeded it.189 Thus in the Messianic Forth Eclogue, Vergil claimed:
The great order of the ages is born again afresh,
Now is returning both the Virgin and the kingdom of Saturn;
Now a child new born descends from highest heaven,
You only you, chaste Lucina, be gracious to your child that is born,
Through whom the age of iron shall at last cease,
And a golden race arise throughout all the world…190
But where the iconography of the coinage might fail for an
eschatological significance for Sol Inuictus, and the evidence from the
origin of the Principate might seem too remote, we have, in the case of
Uranius Antoninus, documentary evidence for a connection with an
eschatological kingdom of the sun associated with Sol Inuictus. We
have, furthermore, clear definition given to this picture by the
description of Philip in his rhetor’s panegyric, as we have seen (C.1.1),
and which thus unites both Philip and Antoninus as participants in a
common discourse of political legitimation.
We have, in the thirteenth Sibylline Oracle, a significant testimony
to a common eschatological backcloth in which Uranius shared. The
original version of this oracle is written from a Syrian perspective. It
promises a future hope, both against Rome and against Persia, that is
the figure of Uranius Antoninus, whose figure is built up into
eschatological proportions.191
Potter concludes from his definitive study that the present edition of
Sibylline Oracle 13 is composite. In the first edition, we are lead from
the chaos, bloodshed and death of the reign of Decius Trajan until the
rise of Uranius in AD 253, with the result that Potter not unreasonably
concludes that originally this Oracle finished there: there is no account
of Uranius’ demise, so that this fragment must have been composed
before 253-254.192 Thus Uranius was the original active agent of divine
salvation. Describing Decius’ reign, to which the author of the first
edition was clearly hostile, we read:
189
For the Augustan ideology, see Vergil, Georgics, 4 cf. A. Alföldi, ‘Redeunt
Saturnia regna, IV: Apollo und die Sibylle in der Epoche der Bürgerkriege (mit Taf.
18–39)’, Chiron 5 (1975), 165–92.
190 Vergil, Eclogue 4.5–10, cf Aeneid 6.792–4: ‘Augustus Caesar, offspring of a
god (diui genus), shall found the golden age (aurea condet saecula) once more in
Latium over the fields where Saturn ruled of yore.’
191 Syria is central to the oracle and Uranius is the savious figure from which we
can infer that the author lived in northern Syria. Valuations of Gordian, Philip, Decius
and Trebonius is the extent to which they protected Syria from hated Persians, see
Potter, Prophecy and History, pp. 151–4.
192 Sibylline Oracle 13. 89–154.
CHAPTER FOUR
148
Again with the world becoming disordered with its men destroyed in plague
and war, the Persians will again rush to the toil of Ares raging against the
Ausonians. Then there will also be a rout of the Romans...193
But then we are assured:
... but immediately thereafter a priest will come, the last of all sent from the
sun, appearing from Syria, and he will do everything by craft; the city of the
sun will arise, and around her the Persians will endure the terrible threats of
the Phoenicians.194
‘Phoenicians’ well described the inhabitants of Emessa.
Clearly we have reflected in this Oracle the Sol Egabalus and the
Sol Elagab of the coinage that we we saw blending with the imperial
discourse of the fortuna redux, saeculares augusti and saeculum
nouum, as represented by Philip Ist and his contemprorary rivals, and
continued by Valerian. It was here that the original edition of the oracle
ended: it was only after Uranius’ defeat that a substitute hero,
Odenathus was introduced into the text, by a second and later writer,
who was to bring the text up to date with his name in substitution.195
Finally we come to Uranius’ conqueror and successor, Valerian.
C.1.4.2. Valerian, restitutor orbis, sol inuictus and saeculares augusti.
On the accession of Valerian and his son Gallienus, the ideological
message remained, in continuity both with Decius and with that of his
opponents. We have, in continuity with Philip and Trebonius Gallus,
RESTITVTOR
ORBIS,196
ROMAE
AETERNAE,197
and
SAECULARES AVG (Plate 7.3).198 As such Valerian’s coins had
advanced the restitutor theme to ‘restorer of the human race (resitutori
generis humani (RESTITVT or RESTITVTI GENER HVMANI))’,
with a depiction of the emperor walking, with raised right hand, and his
left hand holding the globe.199 So too those of his son, Gallienus, were
to repeat this same theme.200 But we also have, in continuity with
Uranius dedications in honour of Gallienus, ‘to the unconquered Sun
193 Sibylline Oracle 13, 147–50.
194 Sibylline Oracle 13, 150–4.
195 Sibylline Oracle, 13.155–7.
196 RIC V.1 p. 47 no. 119, see
also p.42 no. 50; p. 47 nos 116–18 (perhaps
RESTITVTORI ORBIS as no. 119; p. 50 nos 149–150; p. 51 no. 171). (Gallienus) p.
75 no. 91; p. 82 no. 164; p. 86 no. 234; Banti (1987) 1, p. 203 no. 20; Banti, Bronzi
imperiali, 1, p. 252 no. 55–6.
197 RIC V,1 p. 42 no 51; p. 44 no 65; p. 47 no 120; p. 53 no 199; p.55 no. 221; p.59
no. 275; (Gallienus) p. 91 no 297; p. 102 no 432; p. 103 no. 449; p. 153 no. 252; p.
188 no. 654; (Salonina) p. 114 no. 62; p. 115 no. 67.
198 RIC V,1 p. 155 no. 273; p. 189 no. 656
199 RIC V,1 p. 55 no. 220.
200 RIC V,1 p. 91 no. 296.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
149
(SOLI INVICTO)’,201 and also ‘to the companion of the Sun (soli
comiti Augusto (SOLI CMTI AVG))’, with Pegasus galloping.202
There is, however, with Valerian, a new element introduced into
the discourse of political legitimization that adds the emperor’s divinity
to the political eschatology. In pursuance of what we shall see to be a
Decian theme, we have a consecratio legend commemorating the
ceremony of the divinization of an emperor after he has died, with an
eagle depicted bearing the emperor’s genius to heaven.203 Valerian II
was to have coins bearing the legend CONSECRATIO, with the
obverse showing his dead father bare headed, and draped on the
obverse with the legend there DIVO VALERIANO CAES.204 Valerian,
in AD 256, has coins inscribed CONSECRATIO in celebration of the
divinization of his second wife, Mariniana: DIVAE MARINIANAE.205
These have various depictions of the peacock as a symbol of
immortality.
Furthermore, during Gallienus’ later, sole reign, we have DEO
AVGVSTO,206 for the emperor himself, and for his son, Aurelian, we
have on the obverse of a coin ‘to the emperor god and lord Aurelian
Augustus (IMP DEO ET DOMINO AVRELIANO AVG)’, and ‘to
Aurelian having been born god and lord (DEO ET DOMINO NATO
AVRELIANO AVG)’.207 At this point, clearly, there is no longer a
distinction between the word for ‘god (deus)’, and that for a divine or
divinized person, a diuus. But along with this increased emphasis on
the divinity of the emperor went a continuation of the eschatological
themes of restitutor orbis, which the coins just mentioned bear on their
reverse along with others.208
Thus the pagan, eschatological themes unite the coinage of both
Decius’ predecessors and successors with both epigraphical remains
and, in two cases, literary sources, in the case of Philip, his rhetor, and
that of Uranius Antoninus, Sibylline Oracle 13. The difference between
these two groups is the theme of consecratio, and therefore of the
emperor’s divinity. As the origin of this difference is clearly Decius’
reign and its ideology, which clearly has left its mark on this critical
difference, it is to this reign that we must now turn our attention. When
201
RIC V,1 p. 140 no. 119; p. 156 no. 286; p. 185 no. 611; p. 186 no. 620 cf. p. 187
no. 640 INVICTVS with Sol running left holding a whip, or INVICTO or INVICTVS
AVG. with the same decoration; p. 189 no. 658.
202 RIC V.1 p. 182 no. 583.
203 RIC V.1 p. 38 no. 4.
204 RIC V.1 pp. 116–17 nos 7–10. Cf also pp. 118–19 nos 24–8 and no. 31; p. 120
no. 35; p. 121 nos 41–3; p. 160 no. 337; Banti, Bronzi imperiali, 1, p. 293 nos 1–4.
205 Banti, Bronzi imperiali, p. 220 nos 1–5.
206 RIC V.1 p. 133 no. 28.
207 RIC V.1 pp. 299 nos 305 and 306.
208 RIC V.1 pp. 297–9 nos 287–306.
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Valerian and his successors added particular this feature to the rhetoric
of political legitimation, he was developing further the theme of a
series of coins that had been issued by Decius, to the details and
significance of which we must now turn.
C. 2. Decius’ political rhetoric.
I have chosen to consider the ideology of Decius’ successors as well as
his predecessors before considering Decius himself for a reason,
namely the skepticism of Rives regarding our ability to recover Decius’
motives for his religious policy in view of the paucity of sources. Both
Herodian and Dio Cassius end their accounts before his reign, and the
ms. transmission of the text of the dubious Scriptores Historiae
Augustae has left us with a gap between Maximus (Pupienus) and
Balbinus, who attempted to succeed the three Gordians, and Valerian.
Dio ended his work with his second consulship (AD 229), and
Herodian, in AD 238, with his account of the succession of Gordian III.
In order to interpret his intentions it may therefore be thought that we
are simply thrown back on the iconography of the coinage, some
inconclusive monuments, and the general character of a sacrifice on the
accession of an emperor known as a supplicatio.
But Decius’ evidence, though fragmentary, nevertheless, I
maintain, does allow us to construct his real intentions. The
iconography and inscriptions that have survived yield concepts that are
intelligible in the context of a lanuage game whose logic can be
observed from the way in which his contemporary rivals were also
playing that game with their iconography and inscriptions too. Such
iconographical and epigraphic material should not be understood apart
from each other, and each given an isolated and particular meaning of
the particular ‘mind’ of their historical possessor. The remains of the
Gordians, Philip, Pacatianus, Uranius Antoninus, and Valerian form a
pattern of meaning that underlies a shared discourse in which they as
individuals participated: we see a clearly constructed and developing
agenda of political legitimation to which Valerian, moved by its logic,
succeeded.
Apart from the coinage, artefacts indicative of Decius’ religious
policy that remain are unfortunately sparse. We have an inscription
unearthed (in 1953) in the course of American excavations at Cosa in
southern Etruria near Rome. Babcock deciphered this inscription from
the base of a statue that had been cut off and reused in order to
construct a narrow platform built along the back wall of a cella of a
Pagan temple on the northeastern side of the Forum of this town.209 The
name of the imperator to whom the statue is dedicated has been
209 C.L. Babcock, ‘An Inscription of Trajan Decius from Cosa’, American Journal
of Philology, 83 (1962), 147–58.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
151
obliterated, but Babcock restored the name as that of Caius Messius
Quintus Traianus.
One of his other titles, commonly shared with most emperors, is
that of Pontifex Maximus, high priest of the state religion and thus of
the acts of augury by which the pax deorum was to be secured.
Furthermore, that the statue was originally dicata numini maiestatique
eius (‘dedicated to his divine numen and his majesty’). Numen is an
epithet also already used in the Severan era, and common throughout
the third century. Restitutor is a typical title, as we have seen, used by
Decius’ contemporary rivals, and the addition of libertatis is also a
feature shared with many of the soldier emperors. But in this case we
have the unique epithet: restitutor sacrorum et libertatis.210
Thus we have what I have described as the language game of
political legitimacy being played out between Decius and his rivals. He
will use some of the concepts and their logic already used in the
‘game’, but will develop new applications and new usages. Here the
restitutor is to be ‘of sacred rites (sacrorum)’. But in view of what and
to what purpose? The context, as we have argued, is eschatological, and
Decius’ intentions must be discerned against that third century
backcloth unfolded in chapter 3.
Rives doubts the possibility that Decius, by his edict, could have
had ‘in mind’ the celebration of Rome’s first millennium, and the
nouum saeculum being inaugurated, as had Philip and Pacatianus.
‘There is not’, he claims, ‘the slightest scrap of evidence to suggest that
interest in Rome’s millennium carried over into his reign.’211 But
Decius’ fragmentary remains, expressing thus a fraction of the
discourse that he used, do contain appeals to the nouum saeculum of the
restitutor sacrorum, as well as pax Augusti. Each of these terms and
others will exhibit his playing of a language game, whose logic
portrayed the intention of Philip and Pacatianus in those celebrations,
and were evocative of similar images. Decius’ participation in that
language game will thus reveal a program with similar intentions as
theirs, and was expressed within the same conceptual pattern.
C.2.1. The ideology of the coinage.
Decius issued an edict for sacrifices to the gods of the Roman state, and
also issued a series of coins celebrating the dead and deified emperors
that were his predecessors, with the exception of those who had
suffered a damnatio memoriae. But were those coins, issued probably
from the mint of Milan,212 of particular significance for Decius’
210 Babcock, ‘Inscription’, 153.
211 Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, 148.
212 As argued by Mattingley in RIC
IV.3 p. 107–8.
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religious policy, or were they minted in such a western military outpost
to emphasise the soldier’s oath to the emperor?
I make no claim to be able to interpret the inner ‘mind’ of Decius
who has left us no personal, literary reflections on the events of his
time. The ‘mind’ of Decius, like any other individual mind, is hardly
accessible in any case to anyone in any straightforward way. But in
examining the iconography of his predecessors and his successors, I
have sought to bring out the interpersonal, conceptual backcloth to the
discourse exhibited by him and his contemporaries. We cannot,
therefore, interpret his behaviour in the light of an alleged political
‘realism’ based upon our post Enlightenment assessent of the
‘mechanism’ of politics and the ‘levers’ of power that he might possess
beyond ‘hypocritical spin’, or of his materialist drives whose
motivation was ultimately economic. The context in which his acts had
meaning both for him and for his contemporaries, both his predecessors
and successors, was in a pagan and popularly Stoic eschatology about
the decline of the golden age into iron that necessitated a restitutor
orbis or swth/r th~j oi)koume/nhj, who would be the agent of Fortuna
redux. Thus a SAECVLVM NOVUM would be born along with a PAX
AETERNA. Public sacrifices and other festivities would mark this
event, such as had been the case in the millennial games
(SAECVLARES AVGG) of Philip and Pacatianus.
The restitutor orbis would be a new Sun god (neo\j H
3 lioj),
bringing back the kingdom of Saturn, as predicted in the first edition of
Sybiline Oracle 13, written in the apocalyptic genre of a prophecy from
the past in which the chaos and decline of the present would be
transformed in the felicity of a coming reign. Clearly we have reflected
in this Oracle the Sol of the coinage of Uranius, which blends with the
imperial discourse of the saeculares augusti that his coins share with
those of Philip Ist. Clearly it was the role of Uranius as the priest to
order ‘the world without order’.
Decius Trajan was to perpetuate this pagan, millennialist
expectation. His own version was to see the foundation of the saeculum
nouum, not in his own individual person, but in the persons of the dead
and deified emperors of the imperial cult. Thus he issued images of the
divine emperors (diui) that were on the famous series of coins from the
mint of Antioch. Tiberius, Nero, Domitian, and Elagabalus are omitted,
having been considered generally as bad emperors.213 Elagabalus,
furthermore, was the role model and putative ancestor of his Syrian
rival, Uranius Antoninus. On the reverse of each coin, there is an altar
with an eagle that is the characteristic sign of the divination of the dead
emperor on his funeral bier. Each of these images includes the
descriptive word, CONSECRATIO, which is the Latin word for
213 RIC
IV.3 pp. 130–2 nos 77–99.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
153
‘deification’. The series ends with Severus Alexander, and thus agrees
with Herodian, who saw the ‘transformation (metabolh/)’ of the
Empire from the usurpation of Maximinus rather than after Commodus,
as Cassius Dio had claimed.
We must emphasise that Decius was intending more than a vague
deference to past ‘good’ emperors, any more than his title, as restitutor
sacrorum, should be understood in terms of a similar vagueness. It is
not simply that he omitted those emperors who had suffered damnatio
memoriae such as Nero, Domitian, and Elagabalus. As Potter has
pointed out, Decius was rewriting the past in the issue of the diui, but
with a far more immediate purpose. Not only are Claudius and Pertinax
omitted, but so also are the three Gordians and Philip. He is claiming
by this list legitimacy that he is seeking to deny to his immediate
predecessors and rivals.214
Additionally his coins celebrate the PAX AVGVSTI,215 the
VIRTVS AUGUSTI,216 FELICATIS SAECULI217 as well as
SAECVLVM NOVVM.218 We have also a reminted coin of Philip II,
young son of Philip Ist, with the name of his own elder son and heir on
the obverse side, Herennius Etruscus, who died with him in battle in
251. Accompanying Philip’s image we have SECULARES AVGG.219
Decius thus appropriates and uses generally the political discourse that
he shares with his rivals, but develops that discourse in his own unique
way. The sign and seal of the return of the golden age, and the
restitution of the world from the chaos of iron, does not come from the
act of a single divine emperor, like Philip (or Pacatianus), commencing
the second millennium of Rome’s foundation (or continuing it) with
games and sacrifices. Rather, the sign and seal of his title to be emperor
is that he reigns in succession to the dead and deified emperors, the
diui, who patently produced the pax deorum before the age of gold had
degenerated into decline. In this way they were nevertheless associated
with the gods of the Roman state and their expiation.
We must now ask what specifically Decius’ empire wide decree to
all imperial subjects to make a sacrifice (supplicatio) had to do both
with the revival of the imperial cult as witnessed by the diui-coinage,
and with the sacramental means to achieving the general eschatological
goal of bringing back the golden age.
214 D.S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, A.D. 180–395 (London: Routledge
2004), p. 244.
215 RIC IV.3 p. 134 no. 107; p. 136 no.125.
216 RIC IV.3 p..134 no. 109; p. 136 no. 127*.
217 RIC IV.3 p. 135 no. 115*.
218 RIC IV.3 p. 128 no. 67; p. 148 no. 205*.
219 RIC IV.3 p. 141 no. 162.
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C. 2.2. Supplicatio as a model for the sacrifice of Decius’ edict.
Selinger has persuasively argued that Decius’ edict was modeled on,
and reflected, the time-honoured procedure and ceremonies for the
accession of an emperor to the Principate, the dies imperii. Rives
shared Frend’s skepticism regarding such as the occasion for Decius’
decree: he objected that the evidence of the libelli ruled out a specific
date and time for the sacrifices.220 However, it is to be emphasized that
such ceremonies, known as supplicationes, would not necessarily take
place at a fixed date or time. They would follow the recognition of an
emperor’s succession, so that, if the succession were disputed, such
recognition would take place at different times in different places.
Some places came under control of the successful contestant sooner
than others, who might still be backing his rival, whether freely or
under duress.221 The date of the election by the legions, or some of
them, would be quite different from the date on which the Senate
finally acknowledged the accession as the dies imperii. Thus Decius
was summoned to the purple by the legions in Donau in June 249. The
Senate only recognised him following his victory over Philip in
September/October.222
What, therefore, was a supplicatio, and what did it involve? In
Republican times, the Senate decreed a supplicatio on its own
initiative, with letters sent to the provinces publishing this act. Under
the Empire, progressively, it became a personal initiative by the
reigning Emperor, duly rubber-stamped by the Senate. In the provinces,
proconsuls issued edicts proclaiming a lawful accession, with
magistrates in local towns conducting celebrations on their own
initiative, or sometimes instructed by the proconsul’s letter enclosing
the decree. Free cities sent ambassadors with letters containing their
decrees, which drew forth letters of thanks with renewals of
privileges.223 In this respect a supplicatio was part of the process of
both publishing and legitimating the accession of an emperor to power.
A supplicatio involved sacrifices, along with gifts such as the
presentation of golden crowns, processions, games etc. But what
specifically were such sacrifices meant to achieve? They were
thanksgivings for deliverence from political disorder and strife that
220
W.C.H, Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Oxford:
Blackwell 1965), p. 407; Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, 147 and his note 73.
221 Selinger, Mid-Third Century Persecutions, pp. 42–4; Selinger, Religionspolitik,
pp. 57–62.
222 Selinger, Religionspolitik, pp. 41–2.
223 For full bibliography and a collection of primary sources, see Selinger, Mid–
Third Century Persecutions, pp. 36–9 and pp. 108–36 documents nos 1–44. See also
Selinger, Religionspolitik, pp. 43–51 and pp. 183–211, documents 1–32.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
155
were considered part of the metaphysical disorder of the natural world,
for reasons that we have shown (Chapter 3, section A). If not atropaic
in function themselves, they were therefore at least re-assurances that
the ‘peace of the gods (pax deorum)’ had replaced their ‘anger (ira)’,
which was no doubt established by a different rite performed by the
augures.224
Let us look first at an account of a supplicatio and its purpose in a
less specific context than the accession of an emperor.
In 181 BC, during a minor conflict with Carthage involving
Massinissa, a plague had broken out, accompanied by such portents as
showers of blood, in the precinct of the temple of Vulcan and Concord.
In consequence:
Being caused anxiety by these portents (prodigia) and casualties, the Senators
decreed both that the consuls should offer in sacrifice full-grown animals to
whosoever gods they felt fit, and that the decemuiri should consult the
Sibylline Books. By the terms of the latter’s decree (decretum), an offering
(supplicatio) for one day was declared around all the cushioned images
(puluinaria) of the gods at Rome. Also at their instigation the Senate made
their decision, confirmed by a consular edict, that there should be throughout
all Italy for three days both an offering (supplicatio) and a religious festival
(feriae).225
I have translated supplicatio here neutrally as ‘offering’, even though in
this passage it clearly has an apotropaic function that is far closer to the
meaning of a ‘propitiatory sacrifice’. When applied to a celebration
following a military victory, as in the case of an accession, it is usually
translated ‘thanksgiving’, without such an apotropaic meaning. Indeed
the concept of obtaining ‘peace of the gods (pax deorum)’, both in
nature and in political society, was tied to the offering of a supplicatio
in some of Livy’s examples. In 208 BC, following a number of
portents, the consuls were detained in Rome:
On account of these prodigies (prodigia), a propitiatory sacrifice (supplicatio)
took place for one day. For many days full-grown animals were sacrificed
without obtaining propitiation (litatio), and for a long time the peace of the
gods (pax deum) was not secured.226
The distinction that Halkin sought to make between supplicatio as
‘thanksgiving’, and as ‘sacrifice’ I believe therefore to be
fundamentally false. Such a distinction arises only in our post
Enlightenment context, in which we see celebrations for victory as
prayers of thanksgiving that have no sacramental aims in effecting what
224 Brent, Imperial Cult, pp. 41–63.
225 Livy, XL.19.4–5
226 Livy, XXVII.23.4. See also Livy,
III.7.7–8.1.
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they symbolize and symbolizing what they effect.227 Certainly, in the
third-century cultural context, that distinction is not maintained: the
emperor, as restitutor or swth/r, was part of the process of
metaphysical transformation from iron to gold: supplicatio, as
thanksgiving/propitiation, was the consummation of a process that
involved also military victory, in which a natura discors was set
right.228
Initially, at an earlier period, a supplicatio that later followed the
recognition of an emperor’s dies imperii differed from what Livy has
just described in that the gods to whom the supplicatio were offered
were more clearly defined. A supplicatio involved, at least on some
occasions, the taking of an oath. That oath in Caligula’s case was at
Athos made to ‘Zeus the Saviour (Di/a Swth~ra)’, and ‘[Athena] the
ancestral chaste Maiden’, but the dead and deified Augustus was also to
be included (kai\ qeo\n Kai/sara Sebasto/n).229 Furthermore, the
decree that includes the oath links the supplicatio with the
eschatological aims of the imperial cult: it hails divine Caligula with
the words: ‘Every nation is eager to behold the face of the god, feeling
that the most delightful age for mankind has now begun.’230
At Aritium, the oath is to ‘Juppiter Optimus Maximus, Divus
Augustus, and all the remaining immortal gods (ceteri(que) omnes di
immortales)’.231 The Rhodian ambassadors were to perform their
sacrifices in Rome on Nero’s accession simply to Juppiter
Capitolinus.232 Delphi, in Hadrian’s case, offered their supplicatio to
Apollo.233 The Egyptians, on the other hand, prescribe no particular
gods in their decree where they are: ‘… praying to all the gods that his
enduring reign will be preserved eternally for us’.234 Similarly the
Achaean League records, on the accession of Marcus Aurelius, that
they are ‘making a thanksgiving offering to the gods (xaristou~ntej
227 L. Halkin, La supplication d’actions des grâces chez les Romains (Bibliothèque
de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège, 128; Paris: Les Belles
lettres 1953), pp. 9–13.
228 For this term see Lucan, De Bello Ciuili, I.640–70 and Brent, Imperial Cult, pp.
46–50.
229 I.Assos 26.19–20 reproduced as no. 3 on p. 185 in Selinger, Religionspolitik, and
discussed by him on pp. 43–4. See also Selinger, Mid-Third Century Persecutions,
pp. 39–40 and p. 185 no. 3.
230 I.Assos 26.8–9 (= Selinger, Religionspolitik, p. 185 no. 3).
231 CIL II.172
232 Syll.3 810.14–16 (=IGRR IV.1124); Selinger, Mid-Third Century Persecutions,
p. 119 no. 15: peri\ tw~n qusiw~n e)dh/lwsan a4 e)nte[i/]lasqe au)toi~j u(pe\r th~j
panoiki/ou mou u(gei/aj kai\ th~j e)n th|~ h(gem[o]ni/a| diamonh~j e)pitele/sai tw~| kat )
e)xoxh\n par ) h(mei~n teimwme/nw| qew~| Dii\ Kapetwli/w|/ …
233 Fouilles de Delphi III.4 no. 301 (=Selinger, Religionspolitik, p. 191 no. 9.
234 P. Oxy. LV.3781.10-13; Selinger, Religionspolitik, p. 189 no. 7.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
157
toi~j qeoi~j), and beseeching good things for his house’.235 At the
beginning of Maximinus’ reign the Egyptians made their offering to
unspecified goddesses.236
The tendency that we note here of avoiding the name of any
particular god is not accidental, and confirms the decidedly apotropaic
character of the supplicatio as the ceremony that confirms an accession.
The principle of suppressing the names of particular gods or goddesses,
whether traditional, or dead and deified emperors associated with them,
is well described by Gellius in his comment on earthquakes. In
decreeing a holy festival for sacrifices of propitiation:
They used to command a holy festival in an edict (edictum) on account of the
event but they became very quiet as a general rule about stating or publishing
the name of the god in whose honour the festival was to be observed, lest they
might involve the people in a false observance (falsa religio) by naming one
god instead of another.237
Thus the omission of particularly named gods was an apotropaic
strategy aimed at maximizing divine protection afforded by all the
gods: the danger of the anger of any god that is overlooked is to be
avoided.
It should be noted, moreover, that a supplicatio was also
appropriate when an emperor changed his name. Antoninus
Diadumenianus was the son of Macrinus who had had organized
Caracalla’s assassination in AD 217 and claimed the purple for himself.
Both father and son were killed, and Elagabalus subsequently became
emperor. Macrinus:
… gave the name ‘Antoninus’ to his son, this boy of his … When he had done
all in this fashion, he gave orders that ‘Antonine’ standards (signa) should be
made in the armed forces and on their banners as well (in Castris et uexilla),
and he made images of Bassianus (simulacra) from gold and silver and a
propitiary sacrifice (supplicatio) was celebrated for seven days in honour of
the naming of Antoninus.238
Bassianus was Caracalla’s original name.239 The supplicatio was not in
this case for the accession of an emperor, but for the naming of the
child of an emperor as Caesar and Augustus, and thus being given a
dynastic name. Here, I would suggest, the apotropaic character of the
supplicatio is once again affirmed: at a critical point in events, where
235 IG V.1.1451.3–6; Selinger, Religionspolitik, p. 194 no. 14.
236 See X. Loriot, ‘La date du P. Reinach 91et les dies Caesaris
de Maxime’,
Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 11 (1973), 153, footnote 26 = Selinger,
Religionspolitik, p. 207 no. 28.
237 Gelius, Noctes Atticae, 28.2, quoted and discussed also in Selinger,
Religionspolitik, p. 71–3.
238 Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Diadumenus Antoninus, XVI.1.3 and 3.1. See
also Selinger, Religionspolitik, pp. 54–5.
239 Herodian, III.10.5.
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new directions are to be pursued, it becomes necessary to confirm that
the gods are favourable and that destiny is on one’s side. This becomes
particularly appropriate when one’s rivals for political power are
operating with the same strategies of legitimation, and within the same
political discourse.
The frequently unreliable account of the Scriptores Historiae
Augustae is contradicted in one detail here by Cassius Dio (Xiphilinus),
who claims that Macrinus rather destroyed statues of Caracalla.240 But
the fictitious ‘correction’ confirms in one way an apotropaic
interpretation of the supplicatio. In this writer’s mind, Macrinus should
have erected rather than destroyed images of the emperor that he has
murdered in order to propiate his numen, and secure his son’s
succession under the most favourable auspices.
When we approach the reigns of Decius’ immediate predecessors,
we find a marked return to the religious significance of supplicatio and
the ideology of what Dio considered to be the golden age of the
Principate.241 As Freyburger pointed out, descriptions of the supplicatio
were treated with ridicule by writers of the Julio Claudian period, from
Trajan’s time onwards. But particularly in the third century, and from
the time of Severus Alexander onwards, the ceremony was taken
seriously as religiously significant.242 In a world declining into its old
age, the atropaic and restitutive character of the sacrifices became
increasingly important, along with the pagan eschatological
considerations that we have argued accompanied them. Consequently,
the supplicatio that took place under Gordian III is described by
contemporary historians in highly traditional language, which suggests
that its ceremonial performance was evocative of conceptions of
earlier, traditional religion.243
Thus we are now in a position to consider the character of Decius’
decree.
D. DECIUS’ EDICT.
As Selinger points out, Decius’ decree was a unique event, but
nevertheless modeled on customary practice regarding a supplicatio.
Rives also argues that the consequence of the decree was a ‘radical
restructuring of the religious organization of the Roman world’.244 It
was not the act of acknowledging the legitimacy of his accession: acts
of recognition had already taken place, at local initiatives, since the
240 Cassius Dio, LXXIX.19.2.
241 G. Freyburger, ‘La supplication
d’action des grâces sous le Haut-Empire’,
ANRW, II.16.2, pp. 1430–31. See also Selinger, Religionspolitik, pp. 36–8.
242 For example, A. Cornelius Palma, a general of Trajan, in CIL VI.1386 (=Desau
1023), see Freyburger, ‘Supplication d’action’, pp. 1427 and 1435.
243 For primary documents see Freyburger, ‘Supplication d’action’, pp. 1428–9.
244 Rives, ‘Decree of Decius’, p. 135.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
159
defeat of Philip at Verona in September 249, and at different times.
Indeed, the Cilician cities had recognized him even before this event.245
The fact, therefore, that the edict of Decius required a repetition of such
a supplicatio was innovative. Thus far I follow Selinger. It is with the
object of clarifying an intention that he regards as ‘far from clear’ that I
now procede.246
I will deal with two features of the adaption of this customary
practice, namely (i) the apotropaic emphasis of Decius’ supplicatio,
given the perceived metaphysical condition of the empire, and (ii) the
apotropaic significance in this new context of bearing in procession the
images of the gods of the Roman state.
D. 1. Decius’ supplicatio as the sacrament of millennial restoration.
Decius made his new and special imperial call for a supplicatio because
he took seriously the claim of his rivals to have inaugurated the
saeculum nouum with the millennial ludi saeculares, as we saw in our
examination of his coinage in comparison with his predecessors
(section B.3.1). The games, and other lavish displays and processions
that usually accompanied a supplicatio for an imperial accession, had
now become, in terms of the eschatological discourse of the time,
games that celebrated the returning golden age. The purpose of the
decree that all citizens should sacrifice in an empire, whose citizenship
Caracalla’s law (AD 212) had made almost universal, was to obtain the
pax deorum following the collapse of the world into its senectus in
order to set right a nature as variance with itself (natura discors).
It was essential to perform, as strongly as possible, with universal
participation, a rite whose function was atropaic, and intended to
achieve the pax deorum. Decius required of all citizens of the empire
that they unite with him in a rite that was to achieve the decisive return
of the nouum saeculum, decreed by Fate and the stars, in opposition to
the failure of his rival contenders. That decisive change in fortune was
to be marked, as had been the claim of Diadumenianus when
‘Antoninus’ was added to his name, by means of a supplicatio.
Now Caius Messius Quintus Decius was to add to his names that
of ‘Trajan’ as he entered Rome in late AD 249. We have seen that such
an act made the atropaic rite of a supplicatio appropriate, but also
associated his accession with eschatological hopes of a saeculum
nouum: Cassius Dio had seen the reign of Trajan as part of the last,
Antonine golden age before Commodus marked the conversion of the
empire into an age of iron. The decisive test for the success of the
supplicatio, as producing the pax deorum, was no doubt an act of
245 Selinger, Mid-Third
246 Ibid., p. 45.
Century Persecutions, p. 45 and note 140.
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augury certifying that the supplicatio had achieved its apotropaic
purpose.
Indeed, that apotropaic purpose had informed the ideology of the
Principate from the first. Lucan began his epic poem on the civil war
with an augural rite that failed to achieve the pax deorum.247 The
accession of Augustus had been about a ‘nature (natura) at variance
with itself (discors)’.248 The chaotic world before Augustus, conceived
by Lucan in terms of the Stoic metaphysics that I have already
described (chapter 3), was not unlike the conception of a saeculum that
had declined into senectus that prevailed in the mid-third century, as I
have shown elsewhere.249
Furthermore, the very name ‘Augustus’ that Decius along with all
other emperors had inherited was connected with an apotropaic rite of
augury. Suetonius connected Augustus’ name at the second founding of
Rome to its first, ‘founded by an august augury (Augusto augurio…
condita)’.250 Dio (Xiphilinus) describes the taking of the augurium
salutis, unsuccessfully performed during civil war, as now succeeding
so that the gates of the temple of Janus could be closed since peace had
been secured by land and by sea.251 The writer of the Scriptores
Historiae Augustae clearly shared a perspective filled with such
imagery. Gordian:
Opened the twin door of Janus, which was a sign of war being declared, and
set out against the Persians with a considerable army and so much gold that
either with its help, or due to the soldiers, he easily overcame the Persians.252
I have argued elsewhere that the message of the iconography of the Ara
Pacis was what had ensued from Augustus’ performance of the
augurium pacis successfully.253 A pagan millennium had resulted, in
which the earth gave forth its abundance one hundred fold, in the
gigantic proportions shown by the products of the fruitful earth in the
Ara’s reliefs, and where the reign of Pax by land and sea is celebrated.
The Augustan ideology had originally regarded fortuna redux in
the context of the returning golden age, however much its usage may
have become simply nominal and commonplace in the imperial
coinage. However, Augustus had made great play on the closing of the
temple of Janus following peace by land and by sea,254 to which
Philip’s panegyrist had also alluded (section C.1.1). The iconography
247 Lucan, De Bello Ciuili, 1, 522–605
248 Lucan, De Bello Ciuili, 1, 589–90.
249 Lucan, De Bello Ciuili, 1.641–72; Brent, Imperial Cult, pp. 48–50.
250 Suetonius, Augustus, 7, cf. Brent, Imperial Cult, p. 38.
251 Dio (Xiphilinus) LI.20.4, cf. Brent, Imperial Cult, pp. 38–41.
252 Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Gordiani Tres, XX.26.3.
253 Brent, Imperial Cult, pp. 34–5.
254 Augustus, Res Gestae, 12–13, with which cf. Livy, 1.19.1–3.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
161
of the Ara Pacis shows in one panel the peace and super fertility of the
earth, symbolized by the fecund Tellus or Venus, with her
accompanying suckling babes, and behind whom are the two nymphs,
one with a swan and the other a dragon, the Aurae Velificantes, who
symbolise air and water respectively.255 The peace ‘by land and by sea’
is characteristic of the return of the saeculum aureum as is the closing
of the gates of the temple of Janus.
But however commonplace or stereotyped the theme of fortuna
redux might have become, it cannot have had a merely formal
significance in the coinage of Gordian III. We have seen, in the last
quotation, a writer claiming that the Temple of Janus was re-opened in
the former’s reign, and then closed again, in direct parallelism with
Augustus’ claim. It was an event in both cases of a hoped for future
rather than a present reality, that peace by land and sea would not be a
temporary aberration, but would be permanent and enduring. Whether
what is described is fact or fiction, the writer clearly felt the
persuasiveness of the Augustan ideology in making this claim to his
contemporaries.
In a further claim, the same writer also reveals, in the fourth
century, the third century perspective on Gordian’s reign, as I described
it (chapter 3). Before the opening of the gates of the temple of Janus, he
describes a natural catastrophe and what it indicates regarding the
metaphysical stability of the cosmos. He describes the ‘sickness of the
universe (mundanum malum)’, witnessed in a gigantic earthquake, in
propiation for which ‘large sacrifices were offered’, on the instruction
of the Sibylline oraces, not only in Rome itself but ‘throughout the
whole wide word’.256
Thus Decius’ edict was of such an apotropaic character, and, as
universal, represented his attempt to secure something equivalent to
Augustus’ augurium pacis, or, as Suetonius describes it, an augustum
augurium, in order to produce the pax aeterna of a nouum saeculum. A
new Trajan would issue in a new golden age, after that of iron, as an
Augustus performing the augural function to which his name pointed.
Such a supplicatio, like that recorded for Gordian, would be conducted
‘throughout the whole wide world’ by all citizens.
If we follow the model of a supplicatio on an emperor’s accession,
there is some evidence that an oath was involved to the emperor as
255 G. Sauron, ‘Le Message symbolique des rinceaux de l’Ara Pacis Augustae’,
Comptes Rendus des Séances. Académie des Inscriptions et belles-lettres, 126 (1982),
81–101; P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, translated A.
Shapiro, (Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press 1990), pp. 172–83; K. Galinsky, ‘Venus,
Polysemy, and the Ara Pacis Augustae’, American Journal of Archeology, 96.3
(1992), 458–68. For full commentary see Brent, Imperial Cult, pp. 60–2 and Plates 1–
5.
256 Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Gordiani Tres, XX.26.1–2.
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diuus, along with the other gods, accompanied by the offering of
incense.257 We have seen that an oath was sworn at the accession of
Caligula, from decrees from Assos and from Aritium. The former
included the emperor and was sworn to Zeus Soter and Athena, and the
latter to Juppiter Capitolinus, as well as in both cases ‘all the gods’.258
Furthermore, we are informed reliably at least about the general
character of that oath swearing in the Scriptores Historiae Augustae.
After the deaths of Maximinus and his son on 10th May at the siege
of Aquileia in AD 238, it is recorded that the soldiers were admitted
‘on the condition that they pay homage before the images (imagines) of
Maximus (Pupienus) and Balbinus and Gordianus’, on account of their
divinization. ‘They all swore the words of an oath to Pupienus and
Balbinus addressing, Gordian I and II as divine (diui).’259 Here we note
that we do not simply have a soldier’s oath, delivered along with other
magistrates and officials, in the nuncupatio uotorum on 3rd January.
The townsmen of Aquileia require specifically the oath from the
soldiers now that their former commanders, the Maximini, had been
destroyed. Specifically, amongst the gods in general, those whose
authority they had opposed, the two Gordians, Maximus (Pupienus) and
Balbinus, received homage.
We should note that in this passage the dead and deified emperors
(diui) are not offered sacrifice apart from the general pantheon. We
should also note that, although not recorded as formally part of the
supplicatio on this occasion, the writer here connected it with what
immediately followed. It was in response both to the death of the
Maximini, and of the army’s submission to himself, that Maximus
(Pupienus) sent his ‘letters proclaiming victory (laureatae litterae)’ to
Rome, where Balbinus ordered a general supplicatio throughout all the
cities.260
Decius’ edict was, then, a unique event, but composed of elements
clearly derived from such ritual practices. As a supplicatio, the
universal act of animal sacrifice was intended to secure the peace of the
gods in a world breaking up under the weight of its own senectus. But it
will be interesting to examine a further feature to be found in the ritual
of making sacrifice as part of a public act of expiation, namely the
images before which such sacrifices were made.
D.2. Divine images in the supplicatio and in the oath to the emperor.
We saw in our last section that the offering of incense that
characteristically accompanied the taking of an oath to the genius of
257 Selinger,
Religionspolitik, pp. 66–7.
258 See above, footnotes 228–9 and associated text.
259 Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Maximini Duo, XIX.24.1–3.
260 Ibid., XIX.24.5–8, cf. Maximus et Balbinus, XXI.11.4–6.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
163
Caesar before images of the dead and deified emperors had been
required in the case of Gordian I and II, and in that of Pupienus who
was still alive. In that case the process of oath taking had been,
according to our post Enlightenment way of thinking, a way of
changing the habit of obedience of rebel soldiers to a new authority.
But according to the perspective of the third century, it was part of the
sacramental means of re-integrating behaviour symptomatic of a
cosmic loss of metaphysical order into that of a nouum saeculum of a
returning golden age and its new metaphysical order: the universe
(mundanum) had been sick (malum).
Pliny, in his letter to Trajan, had mentioned the offering of incense
before a statue of the Emperor as a means of securing the loyalty of a
subject.261 Though the pagan references to the association of an oath to
the emperor’s Genius might be sparse, Cyprian attests to the connection
of such an oath with the sacrifices of Decius’ edict. Cyprian refers
consistently to two groups, ‘those who sacrificed (sacrificati)’, and
‘those who offered incense (turificati)’. Cornelius was to be defended
for having received back, after due penance, Trophimus and his group
who had been turificati, in contrast to the sacrificati, despite what had
come from ‘the fictional rumours of the apostates’.262 Thus some
Christians, though refusing to offer or to eat of animal sacrifices, were
prepared to offer incense and swear by the Genius of Caesar, the usual
minimal demand in martyr acts.263 In the Martyrdom of Pionius the city
clerk tries to persuade him to offer incense to the living emperor, whilst
the bishop, Euktemon, who had also made the sacrifice of a lamb,
swore by the Genius of the Emperor and the goddess Fate.264
It would be a mistake to regard the turificati as simply in some side
corner, offering incense to the images of the divinized emperors in
isolation. The ceremony of the supplicatio on this occasion, and
probably upon others, involved oath takings to the genius of the
emperor along with so many other rituals in the processions, sacrifices,
and games to all the gods, and at many altars as the procession reached
them in its circumrotation of the city. As Andreas Alföldi originally
pointed out:
Near the images of the gods of the Capitols and in fortified military
encampments between the consecrated military standards had already long
261 Pliny, Epistulae,, X.96.5 and Brent, Imperial Cult, pp. 110–11; pp. 143–4.
262 Cyprian, Epistulae, LV. 2.1 (15–17); 11.1–3 (177–93); 12.1 (194–96);
17.3
(286–7); LIX.10.3–11.1–3 (274–301).
263 Clarke, Letters, I, p. 31.
264 Martyrium Pionii, 8.4 and 18.4. For earlier examples, see Pionius, Passio
Polycarpi, 8.2; 9.2; 10.1; Armitage Robinson, Acts of Scillitan Martyrs, pp. 112, 9–
11, cf. Origen, Exhortatio Ad Martyrium, 7.17.32.40. See also Selinger, Mid-Third
Century Persecutions, p. 46.
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stood the images of the Caesars, which overshadowed the old objects of
religious veneration, as happened in the formula for oath taking.265
Thus it would be wrong to claim that a supplicatio to the genius of
Caesar could take place in isolation from the worship of the gods of the
state. Rather the involvement of imperial images in the rite of
supplicatio must necessarily have been consistent with what we
otherwise know of the integration of imperial images into processions,
where the traditional images of traditional deities had their timehonoured place.
Polemon, the famous sophist, presided over the martyrdom of
Pionius and his companions in AD 250. He was Neokorus or ‘temple
keeper’ of the Imperial Cult in Smyrna. But that cult was there in
association with — and not in separation from— Nemesis, the ancestral
goddess of the city, in a way that was quite general and characteristic of
the Imperial Cult. As Alföldi pointed out, the images of deified
emperors stood on their banners alongside those of the traditional gods,
and religious veneration was directed particularly to the former when a
military oath was taken.266
Furthermore, divine images were carried in procession, but not in
isolation from one another. Since Alföldi’s time, we have learned from
at least one epigraph, from Hadrian’s time, that of Julius Demosthenes
(19th August AD 124), that there were both image bearers of the gods
(qeofo/roi) and image bearers of Augusti (sebastofo/roi) in such
processions.267 Images of deities were also worn in coronae
(stefa/noi), where they were called tu/poi rather than ei)ko/nej.268 Here
an imperial priest would wear images of the imperial house, as the
priest of Juppiter Capitolinus would wear those of Capitoline Triad
(Juppiter, Juno and Minerva). Suetonius claimed that Domitian, as
Pontifex Maximus, wore in his corona images of the Capitoline Triad
along with the other pontiffs. But into the coronae of the latter had
My translation, Alföldi, ‘Christenverfolgungen’, p. 334.
See Passio Pionii, 3.1 and the commentary thereon in Robert, Pionios, pp. 52–3.
See also A.D. Nock, ‘Su/nnaoj qeo/j’, Harvard Studies, 41 (1930), 1–62 reprinted in
Z. Stewart (Ed.), Arthur Darby Nock: Essays on Religion and the Ancient World
(Oxford: Clarendon Press 1972), I, 202–51.
267 SEG XXXVIII.1462.C.61–3. For an alternative English translation, see S.
Mitchell, ‘Festivals, Games, and Civic Life in Roman Asia Minor’, Journal of Roman
Studies, 80 (1990), 183–7. For a full discussion of this epigraph see Brent, Ignatius,
pp. 156–8; pp. 292–6.
268 See e.g. J. Inan, and E. Alföldi-Rosenbaum, Roman and Early Byzantine
Portrait Sculpture in Asia Minor (London: Oxford University Press/British Academy
1966), 178, cat. No. 228, plate No. CXXVI Geyre (Aphrodisias Depot) Excavation
Inv. No. 63–65. Negs. E.R. XXII,2–3). See also E. Kenan, Illustrated London News,
Archaeological Section no. 2163, December 21, 1963, fig. 9.
265
266
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
165
been inserted, in addition to the Triad, this emperor’s own image as a
fourth deity.269
Certainly Demosthenes’ epigraph shows that images were born of
the imperial family (sebastofo/roi) along with the traditional deities
of the state (qeofo/roi). Such images, carried in the processions and
games associated with a supplicatio, were not therefore to be found by
themselves in a corner for a quite separate taking of an oath. Incense
burned on altars to images of the gods, along with the imperial ones, as
those images passed or lead the way to the Capitol, either worn in the
coronae or carried in the hands of the qeofo/roi and sebastofo/roi.
As those images passed in the procession, incense was clearly offered
to them collectively. The worshipper who burned incense to passing
images in such a context could not simply be venerating the divine
emperors alone to the exclusion of others of the gods in general, even if
there was no participation in animal sacrifices.
Undoubtedly such images did prefigure in Christian descriptions of
persecution over the refusal to participate in such rites. Though dead
and deified emperors’ images may be carried along with several other
deities, it is on such an imperial image that the Christian consciousness
focused. In the course of his martyrdom in the Decian persecution,
having made his speech in his defence, Pionios can only once again
refuse the request of Polemon, the Neokoros of the Imperial Cult, to
sacrifice with the words; ‘Your gods we do not reverence, and the
golden image (ei)kw/n) we do not worship.’ Robert took this ‘image’ to
refer directly to those on the diui coins.270 Thus the ‘image of the beast
(imago bestiae)’, used of an imperial image in Apoc. 14.9, is directly
related by Cyprian to Decius (and Valerian) who issue ‘sacrilegious
edicts’:
He says that also all live and reign with Christ, not only those who have been
slain, but also those who stand on the firm foundation of faith and the fear of
God and who do not reverence the image (imago) of the beast, nor submit to
his death bringing and sacrilegious edicts (edicta).271
Thus Cyprian focuses on the image of the beast in the Apocalypse, and
associates this with the Christian experience of the Decian supplicatio
that involved the presence of imperial along with, and not apart from,
other divine images in its ritual.
Following Andreotti, it is in the context of the bearing of images in
procession inclusive of emperors in the number of traditional deities
269 Suetonius, Domitian, 4. 4, cf. Brent, Imperial Cult, pp. 175–7. See also Brent,
Ignatius, pp. 160–64 and Plates 1–18,
270 Robert, Martyrium Pionii, p. 62.
271 Cyprian, Ad Fortunatum, 12 (56–9).
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that I believe the issue of the diui series of coins is to be understood.272
The only examples of such images that have survived for Decius Trajan
are those of the diui on his coins, the Greek word for which is also
tu/poi. tu/poj, in addition to being an image on a coin, also describes a
portable image carried publically in a procession or worn as a
medallion in a crown, or privately in order to ward off evil spirits. 273
Images born or worn in the procession of the supplicatio relate,
therefore, amongst other aspects, to its apotropaic character.
We could of course read the significance of such coins in the light
of our post Enlightenment perspective and claim, with Selinger, that
they need only amount to a dynastic claim of Decius to be, like
Augustus, genus diuorum.274 In terms of a pre Enlightenment
perspective, it is surely impossible to distinguish religion from politics
in this way. Pohlsander was surely correct in understanding the issue of
the diui series ‘in the context of a general revival of pagan religion’.275
Decius’ issue of the unique series of coins, dedicated to all the
‘good’ emperors from Augustus to himself as diui, is indicative of an
emphasis upon the imperial cult as a particular focus of his decree that
an act of worship be made to the gods of the Roman state. Thus he
issued images of the divine emperors (diui) that were on the famous
series of coins from the mint of Antioch, beginning of course with
diuus Augustus (Plate 7.1).276 Tiberius, Nero, Domitian, and Elagabalus
are omitted, as bad emperors.277 Elagabalus, furthermore, was the role
model and putative ancestor of his Syrian rival, Uranius Antoninus. On
the reverse of each coin, there is an altar with an eagle that is the
characteristic sign of the divination of the dead emperor on his funeral
bier. Each of these images includes the descriptive word,
CONSECRATIO, which is the Latin word for ‘deification’.
We have argued that the concept of the supplicatio contained a
strongly apotropaic element, and that processional images were
involved in such a celebration. Indeed, the presence of sebastofo/roi
carrying ‘the imperial images (ta\j sebastika\j ei/ko/naj)’, and the
qeofo/roi carrying ‘the image of our ancestral god Apollo, and the …
holy altar’,278 represented an integration of reverence paid to the
traditional gods with imperial order represented by the Emperor Cult.
Small images in the form of tu/poi were also involved in that they were
272 R. Andreotti, ‘Religione Ufficiale e culto dell’imperatore nei «libelli» di Decio’,
in Studi in onore di Aristide Calderini e Roberto Paribeni (Milan: Ceschina 1956), I,
p. 373 ff.
273 Brent, Ignatius, pp. 72–4; pp. 158–164 and Plates 1–18; pp. 207–8.
274 Selinger, Mid-Third Century Persecutions, p. 28.
275 H.A. Pohlsander, ‘The Religious Policy of Decius’, ANRW II.16.3, p. 1831.
276 RIC IV.3 p. 130 no. 77.
277 RIC IV, 3 pp. 130–132 nos 77–99.
278 SEG XXXVIII.1462C.51–4; 56–9; 61–4.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
167
worn, like medallions, in the headdress or corona of a high priest,
whether of the traditional deities of a city or of the imperial cult. In
Demetrius’ procession, a headdress (ste/fanoj) was worn by the
agonothete who lead the procession, and such medallions, embedded in
the headdress, are called ‘relief portraits (e1ktupa pro/swpa)’.279
Those tu/poi, worn as medallions in the headdress, were not unlike
coins. They also were not unlike portable images that went by the same
name, as Robert pointed out, such as Rachael’s teraphim.280 Such
portable images had an atropaic function when carried on the person,
and were also used to found a cult.281 They thus made the deities whom
they represented present in power. The image on a coin is also called a
tu/poj, and we appear to have, in the Homonoia coinage, such a
sacramental intention.282 Kampmann claims that the bearing the images
of the deities representative of the city, with whom such a treaty of
reconciliation was being concluded, was carried by ambassadors as
collective symbols of their cities now at peace from the strife and
jealousy of rivals.283
When, therefore, Decius issued his coinage in the context of a
supplicatio, he can be seen as adding to the apotropaic imagery of the
occasion that of the Imperial Cult. His was an Augustan act of augury
in which the emperor, who held this office as rector orbis, produces the
nouum saeculum of peace and plenty. He is seeking to secure the pax
deorum in the context of a world that has now declined into its
senectus, just as Augustus had ‘set right a world’ prieviously whose
‘form had changed into an unfortunate condition’.284 And like
Augustus, he is legitimating his claims against those of his rivals on
such a metaphysical basis that promises the returning golden age.
279 SEG XXXVIII.1462.C.52. See also Brent, Ignatius, pp. 156–8.
280 Josephus, Antiquitates, 1.310–311 (19.8) and 322 (19.10), discussed
fully in the
light of classical and epigraphical examples in Robert, ‘Le Serpent Glycon
d’Abônouteichos à Athénes et Artémis d’Éphèse à Rome’, OpMinSel, V (1989), pp.
750–769 (= Comptes Rendus des Séances. Académie des Inscriptions et belles-lettres,
(1981), 516–535).
281 Philostratus, Vita Apollonii, V.20.
282 For an account of these coins, see Franke and Nollé, Homonoia-Münzen. See
also J.-P. Lotz, Ignatius and Concord: The Background and Use of the Language of
Concord in the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch (London: Peter Lang 2007).
283 U. Kampmann, Die Homonoia-Verbindungen der Stadt Pergamon oder der
Versuch einer kleinasiatischen unter römischen Herrschaft eigenständige Politik zu
betreiben, (Saarbrücker Studien zur Archäologie und alten Geschichte, 9; Saarbrücker
Druckerei und Verlag, 1996), p. 18–19; M.K. and J. Nollé, Vom feine Spiel
städtischer Diplomatie zu Zeremoniell und Sinn kaiserlicher Homonoiafeste, in
Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 102 (1994), 253–5 with which cf. D.
Kienast, ‘Die Homonoia Verträge in der romischen Kaiserzeit’, Jahrbuch für
Numismatik und Geldgeschichte, 14 (1964), 51–64.
284 See above, footnote 120 and associated text.
CHAPTER FOUR
168
Thus we have seen, reflected in the ideology of the contenders of
power within the mid-third century, the ideology of the principate that
had replaced republican government in the events of Augustus’
accession to power. Philip’s rhetor had pointed out the way for us to
understand the ideology of the coinage, and the other sparse
monumental remains in terms of a revival of such a perspective (section
C.1.1). Just as the eclipse of the Republic had been understood in terms
of a cyclic view of history, in which decline into the age of iron was
superseded by a returning golden age, so too the events of the third
century between Maximinus and Gallienus were to also be understood.
The pagan prodigies indicated such a decline on both occasions in
the course of a cyclic historical development. Part of the Augustan
ideology, represented generally in the historiography, was that, in the
century preceeding the Principate, the cultus superintended by
Republican magistrates was believed to have failed to secure the pax
deorum. According to Dio, Augustus succeeded by his act of augury in
performing the augurium pacis where republican magistrates had
previously failed. Prodigies had increased towards the end of the
republic, as Livy claimed, with records of unsuccessful auguria. Vergil,
moreover, regarded such events as indexes of eschatological cyclic
decline before the return of the saeculum aureum. Certainly Lucan
works with the aid of a Stoic eschatology when he describes the civil
war reflected in natura discors, reflected in haruspicia which turn out
hostile, which the principate had restored to divinely predestined
order.285
Cassius Dio himself, as I have argued, had such a cyclic theory of
history and believed his own epoch to be part of a cyclic decline. So,
interestingly enough, both Cyprian and Dionysius of Alexandria shared
partly in such a view of decline, as we saw in Cyprian’s case in chapter
3 (section C.2.1). Dionysius of Alexandria informs us that Decius, on
his succession, or very soon after, issued a decree that testified to a
metaphysical shift in the order of history:
Immediately there was an announcement of a change (metabolh/) of the
rulership that had treated us kindly and the great fear of what threatened us
hung over us. And of course the edict arrived (to\ pro/stagma) …286
Thus Philip’s ‘kindly’ reign was at an end, with a radical change in the
situation (metabolh/) on his defeat and possible murder by Decius.287
285 Brent,
Imperial Cult, pp. 69–70.
286 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica, VI.41.9–10.
287 For a discussion of the doubtful claim of Philip’s
supposed Christianity, see J.M.
York, The Image of Philip the Arab, in Historia, 21 (1972), 324–6; H. Crouzel, Le
christiansime de l’empereur Philppe l’Arabe, in Gregorianum 56 (1975), 545–50,
Pohlsander, ‘Philip the Arab’, 463–73; Potter, Prophecy and History, p. 267. For
Decius and the death of Philip, see Chapter 3, footnote 7.
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
169
The term for ‘change (metabolh/)’ in this passage has, as we saw
from the examples of Cassius Dio and of Herodian, a metaphysical and
eschatological significance in contemporary historiography: it pointed
to a predestined moment in the historical process, when the age of gold
turned into that of bronze or of iron. Dionysius, too, is an example of
Wittgenstein’s moral rebel, arising within a ‘form of life’, and
deploying the logic of the fundamental assumptions of his
contemporary discourse to argue his ‘disagreement in opinion’ with his
pagan contemporaries. Dionysius thus claims that the metaphysical
shift was not, as Decius’ claimed, a metabolh/ from decline and
senectus to millennial renewal, but rather the reverse. It was as thus that
this Christian writer parodied Decius’ claim.
Cyprian’s response was equally eschatological, and reflected
earlier Christian apocalyptic. The faithful martyrs, Cyprian assures us
in his own exhortation on the subject, ‘have not adored the image
(imago) of the beast, nor have agreed to his death bringing and
sacrilegious edicts (edicta).’288 Cyprian condemns someone who lapsed
in the persecution on the grounds that: ‘… he has served the Lord of
this age, he has obeyed his edict (edictum), he has rather submitted to a
human political authority (imperium) rather than to God’.289
We saw in our last Chapter that Cyprian shared with his
contemporaries a belief that the world was in a state of senility awaiting
metaphysical transformation (the senectus mundi). That transformation
was to be understood in terms of a Stoic metaphysic that justified belief
in portents, whether in pagan superstition, or in the signs of Christian
Apocalypse, witnessing the break-up of the natural order. We thus see
that Decius edict is to be read in the context of a development of
traditional, religious ideas in general, and of pagan political theology in
particular, in application to a new situation regarding new procedures.
The bearing of various sacred images, imperial as well as traditional,
are now adapted to serve a universal sacrifice or apotropaic supplicatio
as the cultic means of securing the pax deorum in nature and society
that will mark, and in some sense secure, the returning golden age. We
shall see in our next chapter how specifically that apotropaic function
of the developing ceremonial in an eschatological context is reflected in
the text and implementation of the libelli themselves.
For the moment, let us summarise where this chapter has taken us.
E. IN CONCLUSION
There was no existing, specifically anti-Christian legislation against
which we could interpret Decius’ intentions in framing his edict. There
288 Cyprian,
289 Cyprian,
Ad Fortunatum, 12 (58–9).
De Lapsis, 27 (531–3).
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was no specific law emanating from Nero, Domitian, or even Trajan in
terms of which Decius’ edict might be understood, as Borleffs,
Keresztes and Lane Fox had been the latest to argue. Nor was there a
due process of coercitio suggest by Mommsen. We have thus followed
Sherwin White, De Ste Croix, and Barnes to the effect that it was for
the contumacia indicative of any cult threatening the pax deorum that
constituted the legal grounds for persecutions of the Christian Church
that were at all events spasmodic (section B.1).
In one way, if there had been previous legislation aimed specifically
at Christianity, our case for the different and more general intentions of
Decius’ edict would be strengthened. If there had been a previous edict
or edicts against Christianity, then no new one would be required. But
whether or not there was already such existing and enduring legislation,
Decius’ intentions in issuing his edict had a quite different focus. Even
Molthagen, who, as we saw, had accepted the case for for previous
anti-Christian legislation, had regarded Decius’ edict for a universal
sacrifice that could include within its scope a priestess of Petesouchos,
a distinctively new policy (section B.1.3-4).
We have argued, against Rives, that it is possible to discern
Decius’ particular intentions in the innovations that he made, apart
from a sociological explanation that the latter and his contemporaries
would not have understood (section B.2). We have sought to discern
Decius’ intentions by looking at the concepts and vocabulary of
political legitimation found on his fragmentary coinage, and other
artifacts, in order to establish the logic of the language game that he
was playing with his opponents. The ‘disagreement in opinion’ with
them was against the background of ‘agreement in a form of life’,
which had also been the essential precondition to the developing
Christian-Pagan dialogue. As we have seen, the senectus mundi, and
the metaphysic of decline according to the lex divina, were agreed
upon: the conditions and means for its renewal in a returning saeculum
aureum were not. We have seen that such an eschatological context that
we witnessed in Cyprian’s Christian writings (chapter 3, section C.2-3)
was reflected, in a pagan form, in the political rhetoric of his
contemporaries.
Decius’ act in issuing both his decree for a universal supplicatio,
and his series of diui coins, fitted well into the pattern of legitimation
established by the pagan eschatological discourse of his contemporaries
(section C.1-2). It is in the light of that discourse that we can
understand Decius’ policy as deeply religious, and penetrating to the
roots of how he and his contemporaries understood both the natural
world, and social and historical development and change.
In our post- seventeenth century perspective, we see the decline
marked by political upheaval and unrest to have economic causes, with
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
171
implications for the strengths and weaknesses of both sides. We use,
therefore, a form of explanation that implies that such events can be
understood in terms of a machine driven by material causes, such as
purely psychological drives of greed and ambition, without reference to
any divine order or destiny. We have seen, however, in our third
chapter, that such social and political decline was viewed by the
inhabitants of the social construction of reality of the third century as
rather an index of a general and cosmological, metaphysical decline. As
we saw, Dio Cassius had dated the decline from a golden age to one of
iron from the reign of Commodus (AD 180). Herodian had seen in
Maximinus accession in AD 235 a metabolh/ into tyranny. Clement of
Alexandria dates the metabolh/ from the change from the reign of
Philip to that of Decius Trajan (AD 249).290 At all events, the years
between the reign of Maximinus until the accession of Diocletian were
to provide a period of extreme political instability
We have argued that Decius’ supplicatio continued such imperial
themes, and embodied such imperial claims about the metaphysical
character of political order (section D). I had argued (in chapter 3) that
the perceived crisis facing the empire was one of cosmic collapse at the
end of a process of metaphysical decline in nature and society, to which
a Christian writer such as Cyprian can also bear witness. As such
Decius’ intentions were to establish his case for the legitimacy of his
accession in terms of the traditional ideology of political legitimacy
that had endured since Augustus and the inauguratio of the Ara Pacis.
Like Augustus, following the age of decline and chaos that reflected the
‘anger (ira)’ and not the ‘peace (pax)’ of the gods, he was to seek that
pax by supernatural and even sacramental means (section D.1).
But Decius performed no augurium pacis as Augustus had. Rather
he developed a new sacramental means to this end, suggested by
Caracalla’s law making almost all members of the Roman Empire its
citizens. His legislation aimed at achieving a universal sacrifice, in
which all such citizens participated, that was at once a thansgiving for
his accession, and an apotropaic rite banishing the forces of disorder
and chaos both in nature and in society (section C.2.2). Thus Decius
proposed a universal cult, now organized by his edict, centrally and not
locally, superintending a rite whose purpose was to avert the forces of
metaphysical chaos and to re-establish the pax deorum, in a returning
saeculum aureum. Decius’ policy, like that of Philip and Pacatianus
before him, and Valerian and Gallienus after him, had this purpose, and
its universalistic and indivualizing tendency is but an index of the
extent of the metaphysical decline, and the drastic measures needed to
remedy it: no source anywhere of such decline in the universal and
290 Eusebius,
Historia Ecclesiastica, VI.41.9 and also above, section 3A.2.
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social imperial order (that the natural order would of course reflect
sympathetically) must be left unaddressed and unreached: every
individual must be shown positively in participation in the supplicatio
to be co-operating in the act of achieving the pax deorum (section D.2).
Decius thus shared in the imperial ideal, whose iconography we
saw to have been displayed on the Ara Pacis at Rome, and in its near
replica at Carthage, along with the associated imagery of the altar of the
Gens Augusta (chapter 2, section B.3). The divine images, both of the
ancestral gods of the state, and of the dead and deified emperors, born
in the procession of his supplicatio, possessed the apotropaic power
that was at the heart of that rite: to produce the pax deorum in nature
and society (section D.2). Thus he could do what the Gordians and
Philip had failed to do, and what the Antoninus Uranius of the original
version of Sibylline Oracle 13 was still trying to do, namely as rector
orbis, to banish the forces of disorder and chaos of a ‘nature at variance
with itself (natura discors)’, by achieving the pax deorum (section
C.1.3.1). Thus he could achieve, with his supplicatio, the saeculum
nouum in the millennial anniversary of Rome’s foundation that Philip,
no more than Pacatianus, had achieved, for all their rival claims to have
celebrated the millennial games (section C.2).
Rives, as we saw, was skeptical about Decius’ acknowledgement
of the eschatological significance of those games in claims to political
legitimacy (section B.2). But the reminting of a coin of Philip in honour
of his young son (Philip II) with Decius own elder son, Herennius
Etruscus showed that at least those who reminted such a coin firmly
believed that the prerogative to hold such games, and to achieve what
they celebrated, belonged by right to Decius and not to Philip (section
C.1.3). We have insisted that Decius shares with his contemporaries a
common language game, in which he argues his position against his
imperial legitimacy against theirs.
When, therefore, the inscription at Cosa referred to him as
restitutor sacrorum, or when his equally fragmentary coinage makes
reference to his reign as the pax augusti, or the felicitas saeculi, or as
the saeculum nouum, we are met with terms that cannot have a merely
idiosyncratic meaning for Decius alone (section C.2). These words
from his discourse imply a connected, logical pattern with those that
both his predecessors and his successors, used in terms of a shared
common discourse, with a shared pattern of meaning. We witnessed, in
the ideological conflict between Philip, Pacatianus, Uranius Antoninus,
Trebonius Gallus, and Valerian, the generation of a new theology of
political legitimacy and its accompanying Pagan, religious rituals
nevertheless crafted from older materials (section C.1.3.2).
Decius was thus celebrating an apotropaic supplicatio, whose aim
was to produce the pax deorum at a particular stage in the metaphysical
DECIUS AND THIRD CENTURY POLITICAL RHETORIC
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decline of the cosmos, particularly associated with the cultic office of
the emperor himself and his dead and deified legitimate predecessors.
Let us now examine how the unique arrangements for the
implementation of the supplicatio, and the underlying purpose that we
have described, are reflected in the duly analysed texts of the libelli
themselves.