Roman anti-pagan legislation in theory and practice
By Edward Watts.
Paper presented to the Indiana University Law and Society Workshop (2011)
Introduction: My paper today concerns the Christianization of the Roman Empire, one of the big issues with which historians of the later Roman world must grapple. For those of you unfamiliar with this process and its timeline, a brief summary might be useful. Christianity, of course, emerged in the first decades of the first century as a movement that began among Palestinian Jews but quickly spread among urban, Greek-speaking populations across the Roman world. Some of its central tenets conflicted with established Roman practices and, for this reason, its adherents sometimes found themselves subject to judicial proceedings. In some cases, these proceedings resulted in execution.
This was by no means the average Christian experience, however. The cities of the Roman world were diverse religious marketplaces and the absence of an individual or individual family from civic religious activity was seldom noticed and even less frequently a cause for concern. Many people skipped the religious festivals and public sacrifices that crowded the calendar for a range of reasons (one devout pagan teacher, for example, tells of requiring his students to skip a festival for Artemis because their declamations needed work). Christianity then represented but one of an infinite number of possible explanations for one’s absence.
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