Final Pagan Generation, The
Edward J. Watts
Number of quotes: 34
Book ID: 384 Page: 4
Section: 3A2,4B
This Alexandrian event, however, seems to have fundamentally changed many people’s awareness of the threat to traditional religious institutions. For the first time, pagans understood that Christian attacks could reach the most permanent and impressive elements of the urban religious infrastructure. Christians now saw temple destructions, both within and outside of cities, as a realistic way to remake the religious topography of the empire.….
Older men did not see the world in this way. They generally shared neither their junior’s interest in creating sharply defined religious identities nor their tendency toward violent religious confrontation.
Quote ID: 8296
Time Periods: 45
Book ID: 384 Page: 17
Section: 4B
The Roman Empire was full of gods in 310. Their temples, statues, and images filled its cities, towns, farms, and wildernesses.
Quote ID: 8297
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 18
Section: 4B
A short fourth-century catalog of the types of buildings found in the city of Alexandria offers a window into this environment. It lists almost 2,500 temples in the city, nearly one for every twenty houses.{2}
Quote ID: 8298
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 19
Section: 4B
The Roman countryside housed an even greater array of sacred sites. These included large temple complexes,{8} grottoes and other rustic sacred locations,{9} and a large category of rural structures that served, in effect, as temples run by the household that controlled the land.
Quote ID: 8299
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 29
Section: 4B
These high rates of mortality meant that the modern ideal of a nuclear family did not reflect the realities of Roman domestic life.{67} Composite families were instead the norm. First, marriages typically joined a woman in her teens to a man in his late twenties and lasted about fourteen years.{68} Many widowers remarried, and it was assumed that children of both marriages would live together in the father’s home and be brought up as part of one family unit with him as its head.{69}
Quote ID: 8300
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 384 Page: 36
Section: 4B
Idolatry, he claims, is “a crime so widespread,…[that] it subverts the servants of God.”{127}….
Tertullian warns that Christians must be “fore-fortified against the abundance of idolatry” and not just its obvious manifestations.{128}
….
At the center of the work, however, Tertullian pauses to try to answer an interesting rhetorical question. If all this is prohibited, he asks, “How is one to live?”{131}
Quote ID: 8301
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 384 Page: 39
Section: 2D3B,3B
…selected Christians faced persecution and death because of their failure to participate in traditional Roman sacrifices. More would be caught in 250 when the emperor Decius issued an edict requiring every person in the empire to offer a public sacrifice to the gods. Even this produced relatively few victims.{4} As Éric Rebillard has recently shown, most Christians would likely have obeyed the emperor’s order without seeing a particular conflict between compliance and their Christian identity.{5}
Quote ID: 8302
Time Periods: 23
Book ID: 384 Page: 39
Section: 4B
Many people, both Christian and pagan, skipped the religious festivals and public sacrifices that crowded the calendar, for a range of reasons. Libanius [PJ: 314–393], for example, once required his students to skip a festival for Artemis because their declamations needed work.{6}
Quote ID: 8303
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 40/42
Section: 3C2
A panegyric delivered in Gaul in 310 even presented to its audience a fictitious genealogy that tied Constantine to the popular later third-century emperor Claudius Gothicus, a laughable idea that Constantine’s court seems nevertheless to have encouraged.{19}
Quote ID: 8304
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 384 Page: 51
Section: 3C
Similarly, around 330, the Athenian pagan Praxagoras composed a thoroughly conventional history of Constantine’s reign that celebrated his virtues and made no mention of either his Christianity or his religious policies.{84}
Quote ID: 8305
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 384 Page: 59
Section: 3B
Nearly six emperors and imperial pretenders had paraded through in the five decades between the death of Alexander Severus in 235 and the accession of Diocletian in 284.
Quote ID: 8306
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 384 Page: 87
Section: 3C
Constantius then felt free to break with the precedents set by Constantine. Instead of just starting imperial disapproval of sacrifice, Constantius elected to give his anti-pagan policies some teeth. In 356, he took the important legislative step of prescribing actual penalties for sacrifices. Theodosian Code 16.10.6, a law of February 20, 356, proclaimed, “If any persons should be proven to devote their attention to sacrifices or to the worship of images, We command that they be subjected to capital punishment.”….
Theodosian Code 16.10.4
Quote ID: 8307
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 384 Page: 90
Section: 3C2
Constantius in 347.{39}....
In it, Themistius first defined himself as a politically impartial philosopher who, because of his commitment to philosophical truth, would speak only as reason dictated.{40} He then proceeded to praise Constantius as an ideal ruler who embodied philosophical virtues and whose policies reflected the principles of Plato and Aristotle. It was a masterful performance that immediately seems to have earned Themistius the gratitude and trust of the emperor.
Quote ID: 8308
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 384 Page: 92
Section: 3C2
He begins by characterizing the speech as one “freed from suspicion” because it is delivered by a philosopher “who must speak the truth.”{56}….
“You are,” Themistius tells Constantius, “lenient in victory, you lead your life with more self-control than the most moderate of private citizens, you set the highest value on education,” and you embody all the attributes that Plato claimed a philosopher-king possessed.{59} Most importantly, Themistius continued, “you accept these words from a philosopher while philosophy accepts the truth from you and your thanks for her praises because she does not lie.”{60}
While philosophy may not lie, its spokesman here stretched the truth considerably.
Quote ID: 8309
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 92
Section: 4D
Themistius may have been uncomfortable with some of Constantius’s actions, but, in 357, he swallowed these feelings in exchange for rich rewards.
Quote ID: 8310
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 384 Page: 94
Section: 3C2
In 349, Libanius delivered a panegyric of Constans and Constantius that so pleased the emperors that Constantius summoned him to Constantinople to take a publicly funded teaching pos in the city.{73}
Quote ID: 8311
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 101/102
Section: 3C
By the time of his death in 361, Constantius had mandated the death penalty for those who sacrificed, and tried to cut off access to pagan temples.….
Themistius and Libanius embody the spirit of the times. Both men had serious reservations about aspects of Constantius’s reign, but each of them put those reservations aside and delivered glowing panegyrics of the emperor that greatly pleased him. And both were richly rewarded for this.
….
Other members of this generation obviously did less well. Ausonius seems to have had a quiet decade, and Praetextatus likely did too, aside from a governorship of Lusitania.{135}
Quote ID: 8312
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 384 Page: 117
Section: 3C2
When Julian was appointed Caesar, Themistius sent a message of congratulations that apparently repeated many of his standard lines about the philosophical nature of a good king, Julian’s embodiment of all the best philosophical virtues, and the divine nature that Julian possessed. Julian responded by calling Themistius’s rhetorical bluff.{81} Julian both denied that he possessed any divine nature and argued that Themistius was either misunderstanding or misrepresenting the ideas expressed by Plato and Aristotle.{82} He went further than this, however, and calling into question the very conceit that Themistius repeatedly exploited when praising emperors. “I am sure,” Julian writes, “that it was unlawful for you as a philosopher to flatter or deceive, but I am fully conscious that by nature there is nothing remarkable about me.{83}
Quote ID: 8313
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 148
Section: 3C
The Pannonian emperors thrust the final pagan generation into a period of uncertainty and opportunity, but the Roman world remained largely governed by the same basic social rules that they had learned as children. These men knew how to adapt, survive, and even thrive despite these very real changes.Both Valentinian and Valens had grown up within the system that framed elite life for the final pagan generation. They were, however, to be the last emperors who shared this idea about the need to work within the social consensus that the post-tetrarchic system had created.
Quote ID: 8314
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 384 Page: 149/150
Section: 3A1,4B
The final pagan generation brought up their children expecting that they would similarly embrace and thrive in this system. Many of their children did, but, by the 360s, it was becoming clear that some children of the post-Constantinian empire did not react to these opportunities in the way that their parents hoped. Unlike their parents, some elite youth of the 350s, 360s, and 370s came to suspect the rewards secular careers promised, and sought opportunities outside of them. In increasing numbers, they turned their backs on the lucrative jobs for which they were training, and embraced either service in the Christian church or, more controversially, a type of Christian ascetic life.
Quote ID: 8315
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 151
Section: 3A1,4B
Beginning in the 370s, however, men who had once served as teachers, advocates, and even imperial governors entered into bishoprics, a trend that accelerated as the fifth century approached.{4}Ambrose offers perhaps the most familiar example of this new breed of bishop.{5} Ambrose came from a wealthy, senatorial, Christian family that owned extensive property and had built its fortune through service within the Constantinian imperial administration.{6}
Quote ID: 8316
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 152
Section: 3A1,3A3B,4B
Ambrose himself notes that this was not the career that many would have envisioned for a former governor and the son of a prefect,{16} but the resources and social obligations of a late fourth-century bishop would have resembled those available to a member of the imperial elite.….
The Christian tradition of charitable contributions further augmented the material resources a bishop controlled.{21}
Quote ID: 8317
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 384 Page: 153
Section: 3A1,4B
Many of the middle-class bishops of the early fourth century managed to do this, but as Ambrose’s later career shows, the elite bishops of the late fourth century could do far more than their predecessors.….
These elite church officers sought a type of success that depended only somewhat on the imperial system. This and their higher social status meant that they were less easily cowed by emperors than some of their socially middling predecessors had been.
….
If they proved too problematic, emperors could marginalize bishops by separating them from all of these resources and supporters.{29} Emperors still possessed some tools to control the conduct of these men.
Quote ID: 8318
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 154
Section: 2E2
…significant numbers of elites do not seem to have embraced Christian ascetic practices before the mid-fourth century.{30}
Quote ID: 8319
Time Periods: 234
Book ID: 384 Page: 154/155
Section: 3C1
In the Life, Athanasius claims a personal relationship with Antony, who had come to be seen as solitary monasticism’s founder, and uses this to show Antony’s endorsement of Athanasius’s theological orthodoxy and institutional authority.{37} The Life structurally mimics earlier philosophical biographies in order to argue that the Christian ascetic pursuits of Antony represent a practical philosophy that surpassed both traditional Hellenic philosophy and, by implication, the Platonically tinged theology of Arius.{38}
Quote ID: 8320
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 160
Section: 4A
In 365, he responded to a letter sent by the bishop Eusebius of Caesarea that summoned him to a synod. Gregory thanked the bishop for the invitation but claimed that he could not “tolerate the insult that came, and which still comes, from your reverence against the most honorable brother Basil, whom from the beginning I have adopted and still have now as a partner in life, word, and the most exalted philosophy—and I find nothing at fault in my own judgment of him.”{88}
Quote ID: 8321
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 161
Section: 2E2,3A1,4A
Parents sometimes charged sons who entered the episcopacy with a betrayal of their obligations to their families.Pg.163 4A, 2E2- …from 358 until 362 and had built up a substantial family fortune.{107} While Urbanus lived, his son “bid complete farewell to his studies in the schools” and retreated to the mountains to pursue “Christian philosophy.”
Quote ID: 8322
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 163
Section: 2E2
There were many more men who, like Theodore and this Phoenician youth, abandoned their postadolescent flirtations with an ascetic life in the 370s when their parents left them the family property. This may, in fact, have even been true of the vast majority of the dropouts of the 370s. But their friends and peers often did not let them go easily.
Quote ID: 8323
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 164/165
Section: 4A,4B
By the 380s, the growing interest in ascetic circles and Episcopal service among young Christians created two subgroups of curial and senatorial figures over whom imperial officials had limited influence.{117} The young men who entered church offices remained somewhat engaged with the wider world. They were uninterested in offices and honors defined by the imperial system, but they remained plugged into elite social and cultural networks. They also depended on imperial resources and approval in order to effectively do their jobs.….
These were the first elites of the fourth century who immunized themselves against the rewards that imperial officials could offer and the punishments they could inflict.{118}
….
As more people came to accept the authority that these young Christian bishops and ascetics claimed, the Roman social and administrative system needed to find ways to contain their influence and direct their energies. As the 380s will show, the empire was not always successful.
Quote ID: 8324
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 181
Section: 3A1,4B
Gregory was replaced as bishop of Constantinople by Nectarius, a Constantinopolitan senator and former government official who, like Gregory, traded his career within the imperial system for a position of honor in the church.{86}
Quote ID: 8325
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 181
Section: 3A1
Both Gregory and Themistius presented, defended, and implemented imperial policies, but each worked on a different part of Theodosius’s agenda and defined a different part of his public persona.
Quote ID: 8326
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 189
Section: 3A1
The fall of Gratian in 383 saw the wall between the Christian dropouts and elite establishment figures collapse. The frenzied attempted to quickly assemble an effective governing structure around Valentinian II indebted the new regime to a range of Italian and Illyrian military, senatorial, and ecclesiastical figures. When the immediate threat posed by Maximus had subsided, these men scrambled to seize as much power and influence as they could without regard for the lines that once separated ecclesiastical, military, and administrative rewards. Ambrose’s assertion of an ecclesiastical veto over imperial policy represented only the most brazen attempt to redefine these boundaries in the leadership vacuum that surrounded the child emperor.
Quote ID: 8327
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 215
Section: 2A3
The philosopher Antoninus once predicted that “the temples would become tombs” because of the move by Christians to place the bones of martyrs on former cultic sites.
Quote ID: 8328
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 384 Page: 220
Section: 4B
The fourth century has come to be seen as the age when Christianity eclipsed paganism and Christian authority structures undermined the traditional institutions of the Roman state. Modern historians have highlighted the rising influence of bishops, the emergence of Christian ascetics, the explosion of pagan-Christian conflict, and the destruction of temples. This is one fourth-century story, but it is neither the story that the final pagan generation would have told nor the one that later generations told about them. Their fourth century was the age of storehouses full of gold coins, elaborate dinner parties honoring letter carriers, public orations before emperors, and ceremonies commemorating officeholders. These things occurred in cities filled with thousands of temples, watched over by myriads of divine images, and perfumed by the smells of millions of sacrifices.
Quote ID: 8329
Time Periods: 4
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