Pagans and Christians: Religion and the Religious Life from the Second to Fourth Century A.D.
Robin Lane Fox
Number of quotes: 42
Book ID: 173 Page: 12
Section: 4B
Aurelius Longinus had been a high priest in the cult of the Emperor “with piety and honourable generosity” and during office he had won favor by making gifts to the councillors and citizens. He had paid for civic shows “with great munificence” during his priesthood. He had served “with dignity” as an official of the “festival known as the Apolline,” and then, too, he had given generously to the council and citizenry.
Quote ID: 3821
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 173 Page: 13
Section: 4B
This inscription belongs in the earlier third century, although its exact date is not certain. The games called Apolline are probably the “Pythian Gordianic games” which Gordian approved for the city, and if so, they place Longinus’s career in the years from c. 230 to 250, where his three “escorts of the sacred grain” belong neatly with the Roman campaigns which end in 244.{8}
Quote ID: 3822
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 173 Page: 14
Section: 4B
While these traditional benefactors still led their cities, another man, of similar culture and property, had abandoned the natural ambitions of his class and was rising to fame in a different community. Thascius Cyprianus, Cyprian in Christian tradition, had practised in Carthage as a public speaker, teaching Latin rhetoric and pleading as an advocate in the courts of law. In the mid-240s, he gave up his profession, sold the greater part of his property and gave the proceeds and most of his remaining income to help the Christian poor.
Quote ID: 3823
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 173 Page: 15/16
Section: 4B
Longinus and his class professed a “love of honour” in the many gifts which they made to their cities; Cyprian, by contrast, praised giving because it could buy forgiveness of sins.
Quote ID: 3824
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 173 Page: 18
Section: 2E2,4A
In Alexandria, Hilarion’s schoolmasters are said to have admired his gift for rhetoric, but before he could follow the usual career as a pagan speaker and public figure, he abandoned his school. Aged fifteen, he is said to have struck into Egypt’s desert to find Antony, the Coptic-speaking Christian hermit. After two months in Antony’s company, he is said to have returned to his home village and promptly given away his property.
Quote ID: 3825
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 173 Page: 20
Section: 2D3B,2E2
When the pagan Emperor Julian came to power, people in Gaza are said to have petitioned for the hermit’s prompt arrest: there was no love lost between a Christian holy man and pagans who still sat on the town council. However, Hilarion was away visiting Antony in Egypt. From there, he went by camel to Libya and by boat to Sicily, where he prophesied and caused great trouble to the local demons. Then he sailed slowly eastwards round Greece to Cyprus, where he died, aged eighty, to the usual Christian wrangle over his relics and the pieces of his body.
Quote ID: 3826
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 173 Page: 21
Section: 1A,4B
Christianity had never preached an outright social revolution. There was no “liberation theology,” no sanction for a direct assault on the forms of social dependence and slavery. In the Christian empire, the army still fought, and the soldiery did not intervene for one religion against the other. Distinctions of rank and degree multiplied and the inequalities of property widened.
Quote ID: 3828
Time Periods: 1234
Book ID: 173 Page: 27
Section: 4B
These arguments did not exclude change: new gods were accepted; old gods were welcomed in new manifestations; details of worship and ritual were added or forgotten. Although the last new pagan god, Mithras, was introduced to the Latin West by the late first century A.D., the pagan cults did not become static: even the old state priesthoods at Rome, the Arval Brothers and the Vestal Virgins, show lively changes of detail during the first half of the third century. {2}
Quote ID: 3829
Time Periods: 013
Book ID: 173 Page: 30/31
Section: 2C
In antiquity, pagans already owed a debt to Christians. Christians first gave them their name, pagani. The word first appears in Christian inscriptions of the early fourth century and remained colloquial, never entering the Latin translations of the Bible. In everyday use, it meant either a civilian or a rustic. Since the sixteenth century, the origin of the early Christians’ usage has been disputed, but of the two meanings, the former is the likelier. Pagani were civilians who had not enlisted through baptism as soldiers of Christ against the powers of Satan. By its word for non-believers, Christian slang bore witness to the heavenly battle which coloured Christians’ view of life.{11}
Quote ID: 3830
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 173 Page: 31
Section: 4B
By modern historians, pagan religion has been defined as essentially a matter of cult acts.{12} The definition has an obvious aptness. Pagans performed rites but professed no creed or doctrine.
Quote ID: 3831
Time Periods: 014
Book ID: 173 Page: 31
Section: 4B
There was also no pagan concept of heresy. To pagans, the Greek word hairesis meant a school of thought, not a false and pernicious doctrine. It applied to the teaching of different philosophical schools and sometimes to the medical schools too. Significantly, some pagans denied it to the Sceptics because they doubted everything and held no positive doctrine themselves: Sceptics, in turn, opposed them, wanting to be a hairesis, like other schools. Among pagans, the opposite of “heterodoxy” was not “orthodoxy,” but “homodoxy,” meaning agreement. {15}
Quote ID: 3832
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 173 Page: 34/35
Section: 2B
By the Imperial period, however, were pagans beginning to merge these multiple gods into a single whole a pagan “drift into monotheism” on which Christian teaching could capitalize?. . . .
However, it did not amount to monotheism, because it did not exclude worship for lesser gods too.
. . . .
Coexistence remained the hallmark of pagan divinities, from the age of Homer to Constantine.
Quote ID: 3833
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 173 Page: 43
Section: 4B
….in the Italian countryside, farmers offered daisy chains on plain turf altars to gods of the fields. These gods were not dignified by the traditions of classical art or a place in Greek mythology. There were the forces with which country people lived: these rural gods were “simpletons,” said urban authors, when compared with the gods of the towns.{57}
Quote ID: 3834
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 173 Page: 52
Section: 3B
….different penalties were being defined for people of different status: essentially, “one law for the propertied, one for the poor” established itself in the Antonine age. Before these new categories, Roman citizenship lost its former legal value. In 212, when it had been emptied of this privilege, it was extended throughout the Empire, exposing its holders to further taxes.{17}
Quote ID: 3835
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 173 Page: 55/56
Section: 4B
In most cities the number of capable givers was very small indeed, perhaps three or four main families.. . . .
Style was the man, a mirror of his moral worth, and top people cultivated it keenly.
. . . .
As a result, the upper classes of the second and third centuries are modern sightseer’s best friends. They liked to hear their city’s buildings praised in speeches, and the Emperor and his governors shared the same concern: governors were encouraged to see to the restoration of collapsing buildings.
. . . .
One very aristocratic donor in Ephesus, the orator and sophistic speaker Damianus, built a mile-long colonnade of marble from the city to the temple of “Diana of the Ephesians” so that visitors could attend in rainy weather: he gave the temple a banqueting hall of rare Phrygian marble; …..
Quote ID: 3838
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 173 Page: 73
Section: 2E5
A recently found inscription has revealed a “festival of disembarkation” for the goddess Athena, which was donated by one Audius Maximus to the “citizens of Side.” In another inscription, we find a “festival of disembarkation” for Apollo and “all the people of Pamphylia,” which was given by a man whose name points to a later date, after 212 A.D.
Quote ID: 3842
Time Periods: 0234
Book ID: 173 Page: 75
Section: 4B
In the second century flamboyant building for the gods succeeded an age of relative quiescence; it then slowed to a virtual halt in the mid-third century.At a general level, reasons for this new flamboyance are not hard to find. It belongs which the “love of honour” and the “love of the home town” which we traced among the cities’ benefactors.
. . . .
The home town was still a greater focus for these notables’ “love of honour” than a career in Roman service.
Quote ID: 3843
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 173 Page: 79
Section: 4B
In Ephesus (in 145) we see the problem: one Vedius had donated an impressive monument, but was then assailed for not having given games instead, and his munificence had to be commended by the Emperor. The stadium and the theatre were the major sources of instant popular honour.{35}
Quote ID: 3844
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 173 Page: 79/80
Section: 4B
Of the more practical gifts, harbours, aqueducts and new agoras were enormous projects, requiring space and joint subscriptions. For all but the very richest giver, the gods were an easier alternative. Temples could be large or small, and there were never too many for another to be unwelcome. They also allowed self-advertisement. “Who builds a Church to God, and not to Fame, Will never mark the marble with his name. . .” Not so the builders of pagan civic temples. In the classical democratic city, there had been firm restraints on inscribed dedications in the donor’s own name. In the Imperial period, by contrast, Emperors were required to rule that only the donors’ names, and no others, should stand on temples and civic buildings. Those who paid, therefore, were assured of an advertisement. {36}
Quote ID: 3845
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 173 Page: 80
Section: 4B,3B
In a famous text, Aristotle had once advised oligarchies to urge the holders of civic office to meet expensive undertakings as part and parcel of their job. {38} They should offer splendid sacrifices, he suggested, and prepare public monuments so that the people should enjoy the feasting and admire their city’s adornment. Then they would gladly “see the constitution persist.” In Aristotle’s own day, few cities, he complained, observed this advice: the notables of the Antonine age were wiser.
Quote ID: 3846
Time Periods: 02
Book ID: 173 Page: 84
Section: 4B
In the West, too, societies in honour of a particular god, or gods, grew like extended families beneath the presidency of the master or mistress of a household, like the four hundred worshippers of Dionysus who had grouped themselves beneath the patronage of one Agripponilla in second-century Tuscany. In the Latin-speaking towns, there were also groups of workers, associated by a common trade, who would meet and dine in honour of a divinity. They, too, were grouped beneath a richer patron’s care.In the West, religious associations tended to assume the character of extended families and hence, like the Roman family, they sometimes included slaves and freedmen among their membership. In the Greek East, slaves were rarely members beside free men: the sexes too, were almost always segregated. Women are sometimes found in a male club, but essentially as priestesses of a god who required female servants. Sometimes, too, they were honoured as benefactresses, but they were not therefore members of the club beside the men. Like men, they had religious clubs of their own.
Pastor John notes: used 2 phrases in 1st para dealing with kinds of clubs that existed.
Quote ID: 3850
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 173 Page: 85
Section: 4B
In these clubs, the patron, like the civic benefactor, exerted influence and earned praise in return. Roman law, therefore, was concerned to control the clubs’ orderliness, and in the Empire it attempted to rule that a person could not belong to more than one club at a time.
Quote ID: 3851
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 173 Page: 88/89
Section: 4B
In a passage of remarkable vehemence, the ageing Plato had denounced all private cults and proposed the death penalty for anyone in his ideal city who established a shrine on private ground or sacrificed to gods outside the city’s list. Private cults, he believed, would weaken a city’s cohesion and give individuals the means of pursuing success for their own selfish ends.. . . .
Yet, as often, Plato was out of tune with practice. In the Hellenistic period, cult societies had proliferated in many cities, giving citizens and non-citizens a focus for their loyalties and a non-political sense of community. By the early Empire, the household cults in cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum had confirmed Plato’s worst fears.
. . . .
Plato’s severity had found few supporters. Private associations flourished far and wide, from Gaul to Syria: ….
. . . .
Yet, in another sense, Plato was right, for these cult societies did represent a separate area of religious activity to which people turned specifically for religious ends. Some continued to turn to the Jew’s synagogues; rather more began to turn to the Christian community. It was through the household and the house church that Christianity and its otherworldly “assembly” first put down its roots then grew to undermine the old civic values and the very shape of the pagan city.
Quote ID: 3853
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 173 Page: 89
Section: 2A4
Pagans had their fixed patterns of prayer and hymns and their gods, too, received incense. These types of honour belonged to a “neutral technology” of worship which the Christians appropriated and set in a new context.
Quote ID: 3855
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 173 Page: 95
Section: 4A,4B
To “follow pagan religion” was generally to accept this tradition of the gods’ apeasable anger. A few philosophers argued against it, but the vast majority ignored them, and it was precisely this fear which impelled people to persecute Christian “atheists,” dangerous groups who refused to honour the gods.
Quote ID: 3856
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 173 Page: 95/96
Section: 2A4
In Plato’s Republic, the elderly Cephalus admitted that since he had been growing old, he had been troubled by the fear that he might have to expiate in Hades the faults which he had committed during the long life.Pastor John’s note: = Purgatory
Quote ID: 3857
Time Periods: 07
Book ID: 173 Page: 99
Section: 5D
….the visit of Paul and Barnabas to the Roman colony of Lystra, that “thriving, rather rustic market town” which had been founded some sixty years earlier in the Augustan age.{33}
Quote ID: 3858
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 173 Page: 168/169
Section: 2B
In the late second or third century, prayer to the east found an unexpected home which leads us directly to the language of the gods. The small city of Oenoanda lies in the Lycian uplands of southwestern Asia Minor….. . . .
In this primary home of Epicurean wisdom, we now have words from a god on the city wall, which run in hexameter verse as follows:
’Self-born, untaught, motherless, unshakeable,
Giving place to no name, many-named, dwelling in fire,
Such is God: we are a portion of God, his angels.
This, then, to the questioners about God’s nature
The god replied, calling him all-seeing Ether: to him, then, look
And pray at dawn, looking out to the east.’
The text had been carefully sited. It was carved high on the wall’s northeast aspect at a point which catches the first dawn sunlight along the rise and fall of the perimeter. The site was suited to the message of the god.
Quote ID: 3859
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 173 Page: 185
Section: 5D
Plutarch’s other Delphic tract was addressed to Serapion, a Stoic, and discussed the difficult meaning of the letter “E” which was inscribed so prominently at Delphi.
Quote ID: 3860
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 173 Page: 190
Section: 5D
At Didyma, Apollo called the highest god Aion, or Eternity, a versatile concept which was also connected with Ethereal Fire and this same idea of a cycle of the Seasons: again, Apollo was reflecting a theological fashion, for the concept Aion enjoyed a greater prominence in the art and theology of the Imperial period.{69}
Quote ID: 3862
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 173 Page: 199
Section: 3C2,4A
As Emperor, Julian took up the office of prophet at Didyma, and also stepped into its intellectual legacy. Like Theophilus, he believed that Apollo was the “master-founder of philosophy,” ….
Quote ID: 3863
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 173 Page: 199
Section: 3C2
Julian did not only live by the words of the pagan gods: he died to the sound of them. {99} In his last hours, he was consoled by a charming oracle from the Sun god, or Apollo, on the fate of his soul: it promised him deliverance from the sufferings of his mortal limbs and a place in the “Ethereal Light” of his father’s heavenly court, the place from which his soul had descended to human form.
Quote ID: 3864
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 173 Page: 244
Section: 4A
Lucian tells a brilliant story of the beginnings of the prophet’s fraud. Alexander “the false prophet,” he said, had left home as a young man and drifted through a dubious study of medicine and sham philosophy. When his good looks faded, he fetched up with Cocconas, a wretched songwriter from Byzantium, the first known melodist, then, in that city’s musical history. Together, they tricked a rich Macedonian woman, bought a huge, tame snake at Pella and decided, after a quarrel, that Abonouteichos was the best place for a fraud.. . . .
The earlier scenes in this story are probably pure satire: the Macedonian episode was devised to ridicule the prophet Alexander, namesake of Alexander the Great.
Quote ID: 3867
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 173 Page: 260
Section: 2B,4A
While art and the ancient cult statues continued to define people’s sense of the gods, philosophy continued to discuss the concept of a Supreme god, his qualities and relation to the other divinities. Oracles then made this language the language of gods themselves: ….
Quote ID: 3869
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 173 Page: 305
Section: 4A
In the early second century, the picture changes importantly.{37} A Christian, Aristides, addressed an “Apology” to the Emperor Hadrian and described himself specifically as “the philosopher from Athens.”
Quote ID: 3870
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 173 Page: 407
Section: 2D3A
From one of Montanus’s critics, we can perhaps deduce his original argument.{16}COPIED
Quote ID: 3871
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 173 Page: 409
Section: 2D3A
Its rebuff closed one option in the Spirit’s future and, in its wake, the third person of the Trinity went further into retreat. Random ecstasy was no longer a possible source of authority in the Church. The Spirit became a silent guiding presence, granted at baptism to each Christian and present, but not so vociferous, in Christian life.COPIED
Quote ID: 3872
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 173 Page: 428
Section: 4B
Jews, however, could not be brought to trial for their atheism, or their “name,” a fact whose explanation begins where Gibbon sought it, in the antiquity of the Jews’ worship. Romans respected the old and venerable in religion, and nothing was older or more venerable than Jewish cult: “the Jews were a people which followed, the Christians a sect which deserted, the religion of their fathers.”{24}
Quote ID: 3873
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 173 Page: 464
Section: 2C
Back in Rome, Manilius had already served as one of Rome’s board of “fifteen men” who had authority over new foreign cults and controlled the use of the Sibylline Books. In 203/4, Manilius is known as their Master. The year had not been idle. Yet another round of “secular games,” Rome’s seventh, had been announced amid the usual rhetoric of a new age. The “fifteen men” were at the heart of it, if only as consultants of their Books. From inscriptions, this husband of “lawless Politta” can still be followed as he made his speech to the Senate. He warmed to the usual themes, the pagan Sibyl, the passage of the years and the dating of the games: “For the security and eternity of the Empire,” he told the Senate, “you should frequent, with all due worship and veneration of the immortal gods, the most sacred shrines for the rendering and giving of thanks, so that the immortal gods may pass on to future generations what our ancestors have built up and all which they have granted to our ancestors and to our own times too.”{5} This classic argument for pagan worship left no room for the new Christian faith.
Quote ID: 3874
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 173 Page: 490/491
Section: 5C
Eusebius refers to the “records” and “conspicuous confessions” of three martyrs at Pergamum and implies that they were martyred at the same time as Poinius. Two versions of their martyrdom survive and carry particular weight: one, an expanded Greek version, the other, a Latin translation which is nearer to the Greek original from which this expanded text developed. {83} The Latin text’s preface and prescript date the martyrs to Decius’s reign and refer correctly to the Emperor’s edict which ordered “sacrifice to the gods.” The governor is called “Optimus,” but no “Optimus” is known, and there is force in the old guess that the name is the Latin translation of his title in the Greek original: “Most excellent governor,” like “most excellent Theophilus.” His name, then, is recoverable. The earliest calendars of Christian martyrs place these Christians’ deaths at Pergamum on April 13. The year was 250, and if so, the “most excellent governor” was Quintilianus, processing north from Smyrna, having sentenced Pionius to death. In April, Pergamum was the assize tour’s next stop.In early March, Quintilianus heard from Pionius that Christians worshipped the Marker of the heavens. In mid-April, he was harangued by Christians in Pergamum’s amphitheatre, that huge arena which spreads across the natural backdrop to the upper city’s theatre, the steepest stage in the ancient world. The Latin version remarks that the crowds in Pergamum had been in a hurry. They had wished to light the Christians’ bonfire before it started to rain. Perhaps this detail is true to life, and so, perhaps, is the speech which the Latin gave to the martyr Papylus as they hurried to bring the fire: “Here the fire burns briefly, but there it burns for ever, and by it, God will judge the world. It will drown the sea, the mountains and the woods. By it, God will judge each human soul.”{84}
Quote ID: 3875
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 173 Page: 491
Section: 5C
Pionius and the martyrs of Pergamum had run into a staunch Eumolpid. Such men in Roman service still held to its traditions and fostered the pagan cults which had kept life going for so long. When times were hard, disaster reinforced the faith which they took for granted. The gods, they thought, needed to be honoured more vigorously until their anger passed away. For them, there was nothing which Decius had to revive. On circuit, the “most excellent Eumolpid” had made a brisk start: the Seven Sleepers were in their den; Pionius was on his cross; the local bishop of Smyrna had compromised and eaten meat for the gods; a bishop, a deacon and a Christian lady had been burnt in Pergamum….PJ: Does this mean Pionius was crucified?
Quote ID: 3876
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 173 Page: 500
Section: 3A1
It is here that the gift of discernment was most urgent. Paul had advised his Christians to take their disputes before fellow Christians, not before pagan courts of law: arbitration and conciliation became the formidable tasks of every bishop.
Quote ID: 3877
Time Periods: 134
End of quotes