IV Reasons of the Persecuting Policy of the Antonines
Among the subjects of the Empire only one group stood persistently aloof from the crowds of worshippers who again thronged these time-honoured shrines; this group refused to share in the ancient Roman cult which the Antonines had once more made the vogue in Rome and in her provinces, a cult to which these great pagan Emperors ever referred the glories of the past, and on which they grounded their hopes of a yet more splendid future for Rome.
The solitary group was indeed a strange one. To a Roman like Antoninus Pius it appeared to be composed of a sect, comparatively speaking, of yesterday; for when his predecessor Augustus reigned and Vergil wrote, it had no existence. It was a sect professing, as it seemed to the Emperor, a new religion—a religion which claimed for the One it worshipped a solitary supremacy—a religion which regarded the awful gods of Rome as shadows, as mere phantoms of the imagination. Well might sovereigns like the Antonines shudder at a teaching which would appear to a true patriot Roman, whose heart was all aflame with national pride, to involve the most daring impiety, the most shocking blasphemy; which would threaten a tremendous risk for the future of her people, if this fatal teaching should spread.
And this strange sect of yesterday, the Emperors would hear from their officials, was multiplying to an enormous extent, not only in Rome but in all the provinces.
They would receive reports from all lands how the new community called Christian was daily adding fresh converts to its extraordinary and dangerous belief,—converts drawn from the ranks of the humblest traders, from slaves and freedmen—converts drawn, too, from the noblest families of the Empire.
They would hear, too, from their responsible officials that the new sect, from its great and ever-increasing numbers, its striking unity of belief, its perfect organization, had already become a power in the State,—a real power with which the imperial government sooner or later would have assuredly to reckon, for it was a power which every day grew more formidable.
And for the first time, too, the pagan Emperors learnt from their officials that this new sect was not made up of Jews, as had been hitherto generally assumed, but that its members were something quite different—far, far more formidable and dangerous. It was true that there was no suggestion of any open revolt on the part of this strange group of subjects, such as Vespasian and Hadrian had to meet and to crush at Jerusalem and in Palestine in the case of the Jews; the danger to be feared from the Christians was that they were gradually winning the people’s hearts; that they were turning the people’s thoughts from the old gods of Rome to another and far greater Being, whom they averred was the loving Lord of all men, the supreme arbiter of life and death.
And to Emperors like the Antonines, whose devout minds ever loved to dwell on the constant protection of the Immortals, who they were persuaded had loved Rome from time immemorial, in whom they strove with sad earnestness to believe, to whom they prayed and taught their people to pray,—to Emperors like Pius and Marcus these Christians, with their intense faith, a faith for which they were only too ready to die, were indeed abhorrent; in their eyes they constituted an ever-present, an ever-increasing danger to Rome, her glorious traditions, her ancient religion, her very existence.
This was the secret of the new policy pursued by the State in its treatment of the Christians. It began to be adopted in the last years of Hadrian after the close of the great Jewish war in A.D. 134–5, when the Christian sect was discovered to be utterly separate from the Jews—distinct and even hostile to the Jewish race, with other and far more dangerous views and hopes; and when Antoninus Pius set himself to reform his people by reminding them of the manners and customs of their ancestors, by impressing upon them the duty of a more earnest worship of the old gods of Rome, he found in the Christians his most dangerous opponents; hence the stern treatment which the new sect received at his hands; hence the policy of persecution which gathered strength during his reign, and was intensified in the days of his adopted son and successor Marcus.
On the whole, the usual verdict of tradition respecting the condition of Christians under the Antonines must be reversed. The reign of Antoninus Pius is commonly represented as a period of peace for the Church, and little is said about the treatment of Christians under the government of Antoninus Pius and of Marcus Antoninus. This favourable view and usual reticence concerning any Christian sufferings during these reigns is largely owing to the high estimation in which the two Antonines as rulers are universally held;—that these great and good Emperors could persecute and harass the followers of Jesus has been usually deemed unlikely if not impossible.
To regard such men as persecutors would be to inflict a stigma on the character of the two most perfect sovereigns whose lives are recorded in history. The first Antoninus received his beautiful title “Pius” at the urgent wish of the Senate, a wish that was universally endorsed by the public opinion of the Empire; by this title he has been known and revered by all succeeding generations.
Marcus, his adopted son and successor, who, if possible, held a yet more exalted place in the estimation of men of his own generation, and who has handed down to posterity a yet higher reputation for virtue and wisdom, tells us in his own glowing and striking words that he owed everything to the noble example and teaching of his adopted father Antoninus Pius. To this Marcus, when he died, divine honours were voluntarily paid with such universal consent that it was held sacrilege not to set up his image in a house.
To brand such men as persecutors, for centuries would have been for any historian, Christian or pagan, too daring a statement, and such an estimate would have been received with distrust, if not with positive derision; nor is it by any means certain that even now such a conclusion will not be read by many with cold mistrust and even with repulsion. But recent scholarship has clearly demonstrated that the Antonines were bitter foes to Christianity, and that during their reigns the followers of Jesus were sorely harassed. Under the Emperor Marcus the persecutions extended throughout his reign; they were, as Lightfoot does not hesitate to characterize them, “fierce and deliberate.” They were aggravated, at least in some cases, by cruel torture. They had the Emperor’s direct personal sanction. The scenes of these persecutions were laid in all parts of the Empire—in Rome, in Asia Minor, in Gaul, in Africa.
The martyrdom of Justin and his companions as told in the Acts of the Martyrdom of the great Christian teacher, an absolutely authentic piece, was carried out in Rome under the orders of Rusticus the city prefect, the trusted friend and minister of Marcus, under the Emperor’s very eyes; while the persecutions at Vienne and Lyons were the most bloody persecutions on record up to this date, except, perhaps, the Neronian; and for these Marcus Antoninus is directly and personally responsible.
The Madaurian and Scillitan (proconsular Africa) martyrdoms apparently took place a few months after the death of Marcus, but these martyrdoms were certainly a continuation of the persecuting policy of Marcus. And these awful sufferings to which the Christian communities were exposed during these two reigns are not only learned from the few authentic Acts of Martyrdom preserved to us, but from various and numerous notices of contemporary writers which we come upon—embedded in their histories, apologies, and doctrinal expositions. Some of these are quoted37 verbatim. The testimony we possess here of this continuous and very general persecution during these reigns when carefully massed together is simply overwhelming.38
Nor is the behaviour of the two Antonine Emperors, who ruled over the Roman Empire for a period of some forty-two years, towards their Christian subjects in any way at variance with their known principles. Such men, with their lofty ideals, with their firm unyielding persuasion that Rome owed her grandeur and power, her past prosperity and her present position as a World-Empire, to the protection of the Immortals whom their fathers worshipped, could not well have acted differently.
We have seen what was the unvarying policy of Pius in his earnest efforts to restore the purer, simpler life led by the old Romans who had built up the mighty Empire; how faithfully he had followed in the lines traced out by Vergil, who, as we have already quoted, wound up his exquisite picture of the ancient Roman life with the solemn injunction “in primis venerare deos.”
The pupil and successor of Pius, the noble Marcus, was if possible more “Roman” than Pius; and his devotion to the gods of Rome was even more marked. As a boy he was famous for his accurate knowledge of ancient Roman ritual. When only eight years old he was enrolled in the College of the Salii, reciting from memory archaic liturgical forms but dimly understood in his days.39
Before his departure for the dangerous war with the Marcomanni, he directed that Rome should be ceremonially purified according to the ancient rites; and for seven days the images of the gods were feasted as they lay on their couches in the public streets.
But it is in his private life that the intense piety of the second Antonine emperor comes out with ever startling clearness. It was no mere State reasons which prompted Marcus to uphold the ancient cult of Rome. He evidently believed with a fervent belief in these old gods of Rome. For instance, if his dear friend and tutor Fronto was ailing, he would pray at the altars of the gods that one very dear to him might be eased of his pain.
In that exquisite volume in which in the form of private and secret memoranda he recorded his inmost thoughts and hopes,—that little volume which amid the wreckage of contemporary literary remains has come down to us intact,—again and again we meet with words telling of his trust in the loving care of the Immortals revered in the Rome of old days, but in whose existence in the later times of the Republic few seem to have believed.
Out of a host of such memoranda scattered in the pages of the Meditations we will quote two or three of his words here.
“With respect to the gods, from what I constantly experience of their power, I am convinced that they exist, and I venerate them” (xii. 28).
The whole of the first book of the Meditations is, in fact, a hymn of gratitude to the gods for their loving care of him.
“Live with the gods,” he writes (v. 2–7); “and he who does live with the gods constantly shows to them that his own soul is satisfied with the (lot) which is assigned to him.... Zeus has given to every man for his guardian and his guide a portion of himself.”
And again (v. 33), “Until that time (thy end) comes, what is sufficient? Why, what else than to venerate the gods and bless them?”
“If the gods have determined about me, and about the things which must happen to me, they have determined well, for it is not easy even to imagine a deity without forethought” (vii. 4. 4).
That the Antonine Emperors knew little really of Christianity is almost certain. The name of Jesus was probably unknown to either Pius or Marcus, and the canonical Gospels evidently had never come before them, although these writings were generally current among the Christian congregations at that time. Once only in his Meditations does Marcus refer to the sect, and then it was clearly with a feeling of dislike and repulsion; their extraordinary readiness to give up their lives for their belief, misliked the calm, stoic Emperor. “The soul,” he wrote, “should be ready at any moment to be separated from the body; but this readiness must come from a man’s own calm judgment, not from mere obstinacy and with a tragic show, as with the Christians” (Meditations, xi. 3).
Marcus before all things, it must ever be remembered, was a Roman. To the Emperor, the tradition of Rome was a dogma. “Every moment,” he wrote, “think ever as a Roman and a man; do whatever thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity” (II. 5).
That he abhorred the Christian sect who poured scorn upon the traditions he loved, and contempt upon the gods whom he adored, was perfectly natural; and it must be remembered that not only before the judge when they were arraigned did the Christians express utter disbelief in the gods of Rome, but not unfrequently the more fanatical Christians went out of their way to insult these deities in whom Marcus believed with a real intensity.
When the noble Emperor had passed away, the leniency with which his evil successor Commodus treated the Church was owing largely to his dislike and jealousy of his father and his policy. In the following century (the third) the gentleness of the treatment of Christians in the reigns of Alexander Severus and Philip the Arabian was mainly owing to the fact that these Emperors had little sympathy with the Roman tradition; they were certainly foreigners: the first of them, Alexander Severus, was a Syrian pure and simple. The name by which Philip is always known tells us of his foreign nationality. The famous persecutors of the third century, Decius, Aurelius and Diocletian, were believers in the Roman tradition, and adopted as the groundwork of their policy here, the principles of Trajan and the Antonines.
No crime was necessary to be proved in these reigns when one of the sect was arraigned. The mere fact of the accused being a Christian ensured at once condemnation. Christianity was utterly incompatible with the ancient traditions of Rome.