Vol. 5 in the series Secret History of the Witches

Magna Mater, Paulianity, and the Imperial Church

©2024 Max Dashu (Published Oct. 3, 2024)

Chapter 8. The War on Pagans

Smashed goddesses, from upper left and around: Gaulish goddess; fragmented Iberian head; Isis temple ruins at Palmyra; column remnants of the Artemision of Ephesus; beheaded goddess figure at Petra; decapitated Hellenistic Isis; broken Gaulish goddess statue with cornucopia; defaced Cumbrian Matres relief; and a deeply gouged relief of Isis and statue of Mut

In spite of Constantine’s interventions, the great majority within the Roman empire was still pagan in the 4th century. The bishops fought hard to suppress omnipresent pagan influences on their congregations. They indulged in extreme invective, calling the old religions wicked, disgusting, horrible, insane, impiety, perfidy. Eusebius thundered against “the corrupt and abominable incantations.” [Historia Ecclesiastica XI: 10] Firmicus Maternus exhorted the emperor to suppress “the lethal infection of a vanquished idolatry.” [MacMullen, 13] A law of Theodosius inveighed against “the madness of Jewish impiety or the error and insanity of foolish paganism.” [Cod Theod. 15. 5. 1]

Christian zealot attacks on pagan sanctuaries in Spain had already begun in the early 300s. In 306 the Spanish Council of Elvira targeted popular religious observances, prescribing penalties for nominal Christians who openly paid reverence to the old deities and shrines. They forbade people to paint murals on church walls, fearing (or knowing) that backsliders would smuggle their deities into the church itself. They forbade marital and business relations with pagans and with Jews. [Elvira Canons 34-36; 40-41; 62, in Hefèle, I.1, 239-56; McKenna, 35]

Christian fanatics had begun to attack old religious sanctuaries and statues. The bishops at Elvira debated whether a Christian killed in the act of destroying an idol was a holy martyr. By mid-century, pagans began reacting in kind to these desecrations. One priest wrote that they broke down the church doors “and what is horrible to relate, took the altar from the church and placed it before an idol of the temple.” [McKenna, 45] But by that time, the church was backed up by the power of the state, and pagan holy places had no protection.

When Constantine died in the year 337, his inner circle covered up his death for three months while his sons hurried to the capital. Ministers and generals came for audiences, petitions were read out in the presence of the body, and edicts were issued in the emperor’s name. Finally, the eunuch Eusebius put a forged will into the corpse’s hand when they were ready to announce the emperor’s death. It claimed that his half brothers had conspired to poison him, and on this pretext they were tried and executed. This was the signal for Constantine’s sons to unleash a bloodbath, liquidating his six nephews, along with others allied to them or to his brothers. 

There were now three emperors: Constantius II in the East (who was an Arian Christian, still the dominant sect there) and Constans and Constantine II in the west (both Catholic). Constans ambushed and killed his brother to become the sole western emperor. He decreed the death penalty for gay sex (even though he himself was notorious for having affairs with his bodyguards and with Germanic male captives and hostages). [Zosimus, 2:42; Kirsch, 196-7] His homosexuality was a factor in his downfall, but so was his cruelty.

In 341, Constantius issued a decree attempting to abolish pagan religion entirely: “Let superstition come to an end, and the insanity of sacrifices be abolished.” [Chuvin, 36] But he was unable to enforce the law, due to the fact that pagans were still the great majority of the population, as well as resistance from pagan governors in the provinces. The Vestals kept on with their rites at the hearth of Rome, and the temples continued as before. [Kirsch, 200-201]

In 349, a pagan revolt broke out in the western empire. The troops acclaimed the Germanic legion commander Magnentius as emperor. Abandoned by all but a few of his supporters, Constans fled but was captured and killed. Magnentius triumphantly entered Rome, where he reopened the temples and restored the ceremonies. His extension of religious toleration to pagans and Christians alike lasted only as long as his rule—three years. Constantius hurried back from the Persian front, and after a terrible battle in which both sides lost tens of thousands, forced the rebel army to retreat into Gaul. Trapped, Magnentius committed suicide rather than being turned over to the tender mercies of Constantius. [Kirsch, 199-206]

The bloody struggle between Constantine’s sons over the imperial throne had somewhat braked the religious repression. Constantius II prevailed by having his brothers murdered. He took the title “His Eternity,” and declared, “What I will should be the law of the Church.” [Kirsch, 208] Now that he was sole emperor, he escalated his attack on the old religions. His law of 352 ordered the temples to be closed and banned sacrifices. It also targeted pagan governors, ordering their subordinates to inform on them. [Cod. Theod. 16. 10. 4, in MacMullen, 175 n. 78]

Governors who did not enforce the religious repression would lose their office and pay a huge fine of 20 pounds of gold, while local officials would be exiled and their property confiscated. Yet the periodic repetition of these laws shows that they were not being uniformly enforced, whether because of personal loyalties, friendship, bribes, or local political considerations—including personal safety. It would be another century before the state was able to fully mobilize effective repression. [MacMullen, 24; 30; Kirsch 208-210]

Whoever dared to make pagan offerings, said the law, “let him be stricken by the avenging sword.”

Constantius escalated the persecution of pagans to unprecedented levels. The years 354-358 have been described as a time of “religious fury.” [Chuvin, 39] In 354 the emperor issued another order to close the temples and confiscate their treasures. He outlawed public sacrifice; if anyone dared to make offerings to the old gods, “let him be stricken by the avenging sword,” with the state confiscating his property. [Cod. Theod. 16. 10. 4] Diviners were to be burned, and sorcery and astrology fell under the ban: “... let the curiosity to know the future be silenced for all forever.” [Chuvin, 39; 42]

In 356, Constantius outlawed pagan worship outright, ordering the death penalty for those who paid reverence to statues or offered sacrifices. [Cod. Theod. 16. 10. 6] Constantius warned that high rank would no longer afford protection against arrest and torture. No limits remained; neither innocence nor courage nor rank would deter the emperor and his abettors from their judicial atrocities: “If the accused withstands torture but witnesses incriminate him, let him be tied to a horse and his sides torn with iron claws.” [Cauzons, 46; Lea, 397; Chuvin, 40]

In 357, Constantius expanded the penalty of burning at the stake—to which diviners, magicians and dream-explainers were already subject—to anyone who consulted them, or even received them as guests. Henry Charles Lea observed that the mass hunts of early modern times were foreshadowed by this emperor’s “active persecution throughout the East, in which numbers were put to death upon the slightest pretext...”

Some of the most revered pagan clergy were now targeted for persecution under this law. The church historian Eusebius testified that the imperial courts tortured pagan prophets from the sanctuaries of Didyma and Daphne in an attempt to force “confessions” that the oracles were based on trickery. [Fontenrose, 201] Sages faced the same dangers; the philosopher Demetrius Cythras was tortured on the rack on bogus charges of performing divination. [Chuvin, 39-40] The Syrian Neoplatonist Sopater, a former favorite at Constantine’s court, later fell prey to rivals who accused him of being a magician, and he was put to death. [Chuvin, 45]

Julian’s Pagan Restoration

The pagans had one last card to play: Constantine’s nephew. In 361 the pagan philosopher Julian took the purple, after years of wondering whether he would be murdered (like the rest of his family) by his cousin Constantius II—or be crowned as his successor. Palace eunuchs had educated Julian as a Christian, and he and his brother spent their youth under strict surveillance in a remote location, in what Julian later called a “glittering servitude.” [Kirsch, 205]

Julian pursued the study of Hellenic philosphy and religion in secret. When his ferocious relative Constantius somewhat loosened his leash, Julian journeyed to Eleusis and other pagan sanctuaries to be initiated into the Mysteries. A bishop who loved the old culture gave him tours of temples in Asia Minor. Julian observed precautions of utmost secrecy, giving no hint of his pagan allegiance. His life depended upon it.

Emperor Constantius had killed his own brothers and Julian’s family in the bloodbaths by which he secured his throne. Now, with conflicts erupting on the borders, Constantius realized that he needed a trustworthy ally to help him control the vast empire. His only remaining kinsmen were his nephews Gallus and Julian. In 351, the emperor sent for them. He elevated Gallus to the imperial rank of Caesar, but soon had him killed. Julian was liberated from his confinement, but was at greater risk than ever.

Dispatched to Gaul, Julian proved to be a skilled general. (As admirable as Julian was in other respects, his tactics were the usual imperial Roman methods of pillage, burning villages, and taking captives.) It wasn’t long before Constantius felt threatened by his cousin’s success, and it became clear to Julian that his survival depended on seizing control of the western empire. His troops in Gaul hailed Julian as emperor and, with no diadem to hand, crowned him with a brass torc. [Kirsch, 230-34]

His pagan contemporary Ammianus Marcellinus recounted how the Gauls of Vienne welcomed him with elation: “And a blind old woman, when in reply to her question ‘Who was entering the city?’ she received for answer ‘Julian the Cæsar,’ cried out that “He would restore the temples of the gods.” [Historia, XIV, viii, 22] And he did—for the short years remaining to him.

Constantius reproached Julian as a traitor for taking the purple, after all his generosity toward him when he was a poor orphan. Julian retorted, “Orphan! Does my father’s murderer reproach me with being an orphan?” [Kirsch, 237] But Julian never had to face the armies of Constantius. A precognitive dream told him that the emperor would die before he reached Constantinople—and that is what happened. [Zosimus, online]

Julian became sole emperor, and immediately came out as a pagan. He revoked all the decrees against pagans, lifted the ban on the temples, and proclaimed a policy of religious tolerance and liberty. His Edict of Tolerance did not survive, no more than most of his writings, but Ammianus Marcellinus fills in some details:

Although Julian from the earliest days of his childhood had been more inclined towards the worship of the pagan gods, and as he gradually grew up burned with longing to practise it, yet because of his many reasons for anxiety he observed certain of its rites with the greatest possible secrecy. But when his fears were ended, and he saw that the time had come when he could do as he wished, he revealed the secrets of his heart and by plain and formal decrees ordered the temples to be opened, victims brought to the altars, and the worship of the gods restored. And in order to add to the effectiveness of these ordinances, he summoned to the palace the bishops of the Christians, who were of conflicting opinions, and the people, who were also at variance, and politely advised them to lay aside their differences, and each fearlessly and without opposition to observe his own beliefs. [Ammianus, Res Gestae 22. 5. 1-3 ]

Julian’s Edict of Tolerance in 360 was destroyed, but he said of Christians: “I declare by the gods that I do not want them to be put to death, or unjustly beaten, or to suffer anything else.” He ended state stipends and tax exemptions for churchmen, and lifted the exile imposed on heterodox Christians. This last pagan emperor was friendly to the Jews, who he felt had much in common with pagans, except for monotheism. (The dietary law and circumcision did not matter to him.) “We have all else in common—temples, sacred precincts, altars for sacrifices, and purifications, in all of which we do not differ from one another.”

Julian told the Jewish people that “everywhere, during my reign, you may have security of mind.” He threw "into the fire" denunciations against Jews. He promised them that he would remove the extra taxes that had been imposed on them, allow them to return to Jerusalem, and authorize the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem. [Kirsch, 259-261; Geger, 94] Imagine, if that had been allowed to happen, how different the world might be now.

The new emperor dismissed the old guard of the imperial palace and the secret police. He became notorious even among pagans for his classical piety, as he offered hecatomb after hecatomb (sacrifices of one hundred animals) in thanks for his deliverance, and for the pagan cause. (By custom these animals were roasted and given out to people in attendance. He regarded Christians as “atheists” (they returned the favor) and deplored the custom of cherishing the relics of martyrs, or as he put it, “corpse pieces.”

Julian's book Against the Galileans was destroyed. As with so many other pagan works, only a few excerpts were preserved in Christian responsae. [Kirsch, 279] Some of Julian’s writings on pagan religion have survived, including his Oration to the Mother of the Gods:

Who then is the mother of the Gods? She is indeed the fountain of the intellectual and demiurgic [creative] Gods who govern the apparent series of things: or certainly a deity producing things, and at the same time subsisting with the mighty Jupiter; a Goddess mighty, after one mighty, and conjoined with the mighty demiurgus of the world. She is the mistress of all life, and the cause of all generation, who most easily confers perfection on her productions, and generates and fabricates things without passion, in conjunction with the father of the universe. She is also a virgin, without a mother, the assessor of Jupiter, and the true parent of all the Gods: for receiving in herself the causes of all the intelligible supermundane Gods, she becomes a fountain to the intellectual Gods. [Julian, in Taylor translation 1797: 114-15, online]

Cybele with her drum, Roman bronze (not shown is her cart drawn by lions)

As emperor, Julian tried to organize and systematize pagan religion in order to compete with the church hierarchy and its scriptural canons. He ordered a theological compilation to be assembled—“On the Gods and the World”—and sought a unified pagan clergy that could withstand attacks from the ranked church hierarchy. John Chrysostom assailed Julian for concealing his true beliefs during Constantius’ reign of terror, calling him a “sorcerer and blackguard.” He claimed that when Julian took the throne, a host of magicians, enchanters, and diviners descended from all corners of the empire. [Kirsch, 255; 241; 244] Chrysostom was wielding the sorcery charge against pagans. This tactic gained force, proving to be highly effective in eroding support for religious freedom. It fueled fear that could easily be turned to aggression.

Orthodox Christians called this emperor “Julian the Apostate,” and were convinced that he would slaughter them. Instead, as it became clear that the pagan emperor was not set on vengeance, bishop Gregory of Nazianzus complained that he had deprived them of “the honor of martyrdom.” [Smith 1976:  87ff; 102] But Julian maintained that the Christians owed more to him than to the previous, Christian emperor, since during the reign of Constantius “many of them were banished, persecuted, and imprisoned, and many of the so-called heretics were executed... all of this has been reversed in my reign; the banished are allowed to return, and confiscated goods have been returned to the owners.”

He added that he would not coerce anyone to religious belief or actions: “we allow none of them to be dragged to the [pagan] altars unwillingly...” Christians were free to meet and pray according to their custom “and for the future, let all people live in harmony.” [Bettenson, 20] But the pagan restoration of religious toleration was short-lived. The signs were evil. Julian sent an emissary to the oracle of Delphi, who returned with an unenigmatic message: [Smith 1976: 101]

Tell the king, dirt lies heavy on Daidalos' hall
Phoebus has no cell, nor mantic laurel, nor place to speak
Even the speaking spring is choked and dead.

Julian’s pagan biographer Eunapius recorded a prophecy by Nestorius, the last high priest of the Eleusinian temple of Demeter. He foretold the overthrow of the temples and Hellenic religion: [Smith 1976: 179. See www.tertullian.org/fathers/eunapius_02_text.htm]

And he also said that during his own times
the temples would be ruined and sacked...
The worship of the goddesses would come to an end.

Although the goddesses referred to here are specifically Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis—whose sanctuary would be sacked by the Goths three decades later, in 396—the prophecy also prefigured the suppression of goddess veneration across western Asia, north Africa, and much of Europe. In 380 a Christian mob tried to kill this last hierophant of Eleusis, who was then 95 years old. He was compelled to end the Mysteries due to “the predominance of mental darkness over the human race.” [www.hellenicgods.org/eleusinian-mysteries---eleusinia-mysteria ]

Modern peasants at Eleusis continued to revere this battered colossus of Demeter as St. Dimitra

In 363, Julian's reign was ended by a spear as he led troops into battle in Persia. (Both ancients and moderns have speculated that the spear had been wielded by a Christian legionary rather than a Persian.) The legions now raised Jovian to the purple. He precipitously ceded extensive territories to Persia so that he could hurry back to Rome to secure his position.

Jovian quickly revoked Julian’s edicts, once again decreeing Christianity as the state religion. His first edict promised toleration, but left “magical rites” outside the circle of legal religion (again implying that pagan religion was “sorcery.)”  Soon Jovian ordered the burning of the great Library of Antioch, which Julian had generously stocked with classics and rare books. Next, the emperor proclaimed the death penalty for people who made offerings to their ancestral gods. And finally he decreed that anyone who took part in a pagan ceremony, public or private, would be put to death. [“Jovian.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jovian_(emperor)]

Jovian never made it back to Rome. He was succeeded by Valentinian, who appointed his brother Valens as co-emperor and ruler of the eastern empire. Valens faced numerous challenges to his power, and reacted with vicious repression against anyone who might threaten it. Such fears had prompted earlier imperial edicts against divination, astrology, and magic, even in pagan times, but Valens took the repression to new, unheard-of extremes.

Ammianus Marcellinus recounts how officers searching through the papers of a high-ranking citizen found an astrological chart labeled Valens. They accused the man of having designs on the emperor, while he protested that the chart belonged to his own deceased brother. He offered to prove it, but never got the chance. The judges “put him to the torture and cruelly slew him.” [Historia, 29. 22. 7]

The First Mass Persecutions of Pagans

The persecutions resumed with greater ferocity under the eastern emperor Valens (364-74). One incident involved a divination intended to discover who the successor to Valens might be. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, the first prosecution unfolded from an arrest of the commoner Palladius on unrelated charges. To take the heat off himself, he offered up allegations about the divination, precipitating the arrest of several other men.

Under brutal torture, these men said that the name spelled out was “Theod,” and that they settled on the eminent Gaul Theodorus as the likely candidate. (His prominence gave they a likely name to put forward, someone they had heard of.) But it was Theodosius who succeeded Valens.) The emperor ordered Theodorus brought from afar, as “the racks were made taut, the leaden weights were brought out along with the cords and the scourges.” [Ammianus, Historia 29. 1. 23] They tortured many prisoners, then put them all to death by strangling—except for the young philosopher Simonides, who was burned.

And after him, in the days that followed, a throng of men of almost all ranks, whom it would be difficult to enumerate by name, involved in the snares of calumny, wearied the arms of the executioners after being first crippled by rack, lead, and scourge. [Historia 29. 1. 38]

Ammianus recorded a long list of magnates who were tortured, burned, beheaded, or exiled. Zosimus tells us that their number swelled as opportunists gained a foothold and made their fortunes through denunciations and persecutions: “All that they accused were either put to death without legal proof, or fined by being deprived of their estates; their wives, children and other dependants being reduced to extreme necessity.” [Zosimus, Historia Nova 4. 14. 4. If you can bear it, thi page looks at the depraved Byzantine methods of torture: https://byzantium-blogger.blog/2019/06/27/byzantine-life-crime-punishment-heresy-and-medical-practice/]

Zosimus, two hundred years on, gives a different account. He says that Theodorus was tricked by men posing as sage magicians, who induced him to participate in a divinatory ritual to discover who the successor to emperor Valens would be. They set up a tripod in which the letters Th E O D appeared, and gave Theodorus to understand that he would be the next emperor. He got excited and blabbed, which doomed him.

But John Holland Smith makes a case that this whole affair was a setup cooked up to entrap the sophist Maximus, who had been a teacher and advisor to emperor Julian. They called him in as an expert witness when Theodorus was arrested and tortured. Maximus knew his goose was cooked, so he let out all stops and prophesied Valens’ death. He was taken to Ephesus to be executed, for fear of an uproar in Antioch. [Smith 1976: 139] They also burned the philosophers Patricias the Lydian, Hilarius of Phrgyia, and Andronicus of Caria. [Zosimus; Eunapius, 453-7; Chuvin, 50-2] Another wave of persecutions was propelled by the imperial treasurer Fortunatus, starting with the torture-trial of a soldier for sorcery.

The prisons were so packed that guards feared they would not be able to prevent a breakout. [Zosimus 4. 14. 3] The evil of torture trials cut a terrible swath, as in later witch hunts, but with this difference: a large number of the victims came from the ranks of elite men. The eastern empire was swept by arrests, torture, property seizure and executions. The wearing of amulets or possession of books written by pagans counted as sufficient evidence of magical activity. [Lea, 398] As the pagan historian Zosimus wrote, “the Emperor became suspicious of all individuals known to be philosophers or have any kind of culture.” [Smith 1976: 137-9]

Informers ran no personal risk, but were rewarded. Zosimus wrote, “All that they accused were either put to death without legal proof, or fined by being deprived of their estates, their wives, children, and other dependents, being reduced to extreme necessity… A universal confusion was occasioned by these proceedings, which prevailed to such a degree, that the informers, together with the rabble, would enter without control into the house of any person, pillage it of all they could find, and deliver the wretched proprietor to those who are appointed as executioners…” The leader of these hunts was the imperial proconsul Festus, described by Zosimus as expert “in every sort of cruelty.” He killed many people without trial, and forced others to flee for their lives.

The hunt reached such a frenzied pitch that even senators were being accused and tortured. The sorcery charge had become a political tool, carrying the penalty of death or exile. [Flint, 16] The corrupt tax collector Maximinus was able to ruin uncooperative senators by accusing them of patronizing magicians and poisoners. He and others busied themselves confiscating estates and wealth from very wealthy men. The emperor denied any knowledge of these goings-on, but eventually was obliged to kick Maximinus upstairs. By 371 Valens was executing and imprisoning multitudes of philosophers, sophists, astrologers, and pagans with real or imagined ties to the late emperor Julian. The charge was sedition, but accusations of magic figured in heavily. Antioch was turned into a “slaughterhouse.” [Chuvin, 50-2; Quote below from Lea 1957: 398]

"Terror reigned throughout the East; all who had libraries burned them.
The prisons were insufficient to contain the prisoners, and in some towns
it was said that fewer were left than taken."

These severe persecutions appear above history's water line only because so many prominent men were involved. The fates of ordinary pagans and street diviners remain untraceable, unseen. One exception was an old healer mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus. It was her misfortune to have treated and healed the child of Festus, the Roman proconsul of Asia who led the persecutions: “There was a certain simple old woman who was wont to cure intermittent fever by a gentle incantation, whom he put to death as a witch, after she had been summoned, with his consent, to his daughter, and had cured her.” [Historia, 29. 2, 26] For her good deed, the old woman had to die.

Ammianus described how extreme the official repression of magic and amulets had become: “if anyone wore on his neck a charm against the quartan ague or any other disease, or if by any information laid by his ill-wishers he was accused of having passed by a sepulchre at nightfall, and therefore of being a sorcerer... he was found guilty and condemned to death.” [Historia 19. 12. 14] Any person known to have consulted the oracles was at risk of being tried and tortured on charges of seeking to overthrow the emperor, as happened to the consul Simplicius.

The philosopher Demetrius Chytras managed to gain release by withstanding long bouts of torture. “But as accusations extended more widely, involving numbers without end in their snares, many perished; some with their bodies mangled on the rack; others were condemned to death and confiscation of their goods; while Paulus kept on inventing groundless accusations...” One such unfortunate was the philosopher Caeranius, who was tortured and executed for writing a letter to his wife that included the phrase, “Take care and adorn the gate.” [Historia, XIX, xii, 9 and 12-13] Even to hang seasonal garlands was incriminating.

And that wives too might not have leisure to weep over the miseries of their husbands, officers were sent at once to seal up the house of any one who was condemned, and who, while examining all the furniture, slipped in among it old women's incantations, or ridiculous love-tokens, contrived to bring destruction on the innocent; and then, when these things were mentioned before the bench, where neither law, nor religion, nor equity were present to separate truth from falsehood, those whom they thus accused, though utterly void of offence, without any distinction, youths, and decrepit old men, without being heard in their defence, found their property confiscated, and were hurried off to execution in litters. [Historia 29. 2. 3]

The church hierarchy was fighting a losing battle everywhere to suppress the widespread use of amulets and charms. In Syria, John Chrysostom fulminated against the custom of “periapts [protective amulets] and bells hung from the hand and the scarlet thread.” [Cheetham and Smith, 991] He “praised as a martyr a steadfast Christian mother who would prefer to see a sick child or husband die rather than use an amulet.” [Meaney, 8?]

Lunulae amulets. Top, Judaean girl's necklace. Below, Roman lunulae in bronze and gold.

In Anatolia, Gregory of Nazianzen condemned the wearing of periammata, “the bits of colored thread round wrists, arms and necks; and moon-shaped plates of gold, silver or cheaper material [lunulae] which foolish old women fasten upon infants.” [Select Orations of St Gregory Nazianzen, in Meaney, 28] (In the long run, the old women won this battle, because they still tie red threads to infants’ wrists to this day.) Women would bind amulets or herbs on their children or relatives with praecantatio, “enchantments,” as attested by Augustine, Quintillian, Isidore, and Pelagius.

In Algeria, Augustine disparaged “amulets and cures” involving incantations or writing characters, or “hanging or tying on or even dancing in a fashion certain articles... and these remedies they call by the less offensive name of physica [“natural thing”[, so as to appear not to be engaged in superstitious observances, but to be taking advantage of the forces of nature.” His examples of amulets were “earrings on the top of each ear, or the rings of ostrich bones on the fingers,” or actions such as holding the left thumb in the right hand to stop hiccups. [De Doctrina Christiana, II, 20.30] In the end, the clergy had to yield to popular demand for protective amulets, and they devised christianized adaptations of ancient customs, usually involving saints.

Bishops had been preaching and publishing diatribes against pagan magic since the 3rd century. Tertullian called it “deception.” The polemic of Minutius Felix against the “deceit” of the spirits within consecrated statues still wafts a faint fragrance of lost culture: “They inspire the breasts of the soothsayers by breathing on them; they quicken the fibres of entrails; they govern the flights of birds; they rale lots, they give out oracles; they are always confounding false things with true...” Cyprian of Carthage went so far as to accuse healers of sending diseases to “obtain credit for a cure simply by ceasing to afflict.” [Both quotes from Cheetham and Smith, 1076] It was the sorcery charge again.

Already in 315, the Council of Ankara had issued a decree against “those who profess soothsaying” and follow pagan customs, such as bringing magical specialists into their houses to “discover remedies or perform lustrations.” [Cheetham and Smith, 1076] In 387, Gaudentius of Brescia denounced a whole range of customs as “idolatry.” These need to be broken down a bit. The first is Veneficia, which my source translates as “witchcrafts,” though it literally means “poisoning.” But the word was broadly used to refer to any ceremonial use of herbs, and for medicinal, contraceptive, abortifacient uses—as well as actual poisoning. Needless to say, those are all very different things. But in tme the meaning of “poisoning” overshadowed any medical connotation, and led to the meaning of “sorcery.”

Praecantatio means incantation, “singing before, or over.” Suballigature are ceremonial knots tied on the body, for protective or curative purposes. Vanitates, explained as “phylacteries,” must have been amulets or inscribed talismans that were worn. Gaudentius lists various kinds of divination: “auguries, lots, the observing of omens.” Finally, “parental obsequies” encompassed more than simply funerals, referring to offerings, lights, traditional feasts at graves, and other ritual observances for the dead. [Cheetham and Smith, 1076; 991] Ancestor veneration had religious roots of great antiquity, and people were simply unwilling to give it up, no more than their seasonal festivals or ways of blessing and healing.

Religio Paganorum

Animacy thrived in the countryside, since Christianity was still mainly an urban phenomenon. The very name “pagan” comes from a Latin name for rural people, whose adherence to the local deities made the word synonymous with “non-Christian.” So in 368, Valens' co-ruler Valentinian condemned the religio paganorum: “religion of the countryfolk.” [Cod. Theod. 16. 2. 18, in McNeill and Gamer, 39; Kelly, 364]

Paganus first carried a connotation of “local,” from the administrative term pagus as “district,” and an even older usage, as a “boundary stake.” Later, pagani meant “people of the place” (especially peasants) in contrast to the “increasingly Christian” alieni, those from somewhere else. The term pagani became “consistently pejorative.” [Chuvin, 7-9]

In the 1890 A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, old-school classicists provide more detail on the social meaning of the pagus, which “resembled in many respects village communes,” or cantons. Every year they elected a magister or aedile “with priestly functions, to look after the sacred rites of the pagus,” as well as to oversee roads and the water supply, “and a common council for such local business.”

But this administrative side “dwindled to almost nothing—to nothing in fact, apart from the religious rites… but to a late period it remained as a geographical term for the district of woodland and tillage outside a town…” [www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0063:entry=pagus-cn ] (It is easy to see how the subjugation of farmers into coloni caused the management aspect of the pagus to wither away.) But it was the religious significance of these districts that lasted the longest:

"PAGANALIA—The Italian pagi had their tutelary deities and sanctuaries, which are mentioned even in Christian times… Here were celebrated in January at the end of seed-time, “semente peracta,” the country paganalia, which corresponded to the feriae sementivae [“sowing festival”] …An offering was made to Tellus [“Earth”] (in later times to Ceres) of cakes of meal and a pregnant sow. At this festival also masks or small images were hung up [OSCILLA], and there were games and rustic songs. (Ov. Fast. 1.667 ff.; Dionys. A. R. 4.15; Verg. G. 2.385; Hor. Ep. 1.1, 49; 2.1, 140.) The lustratio pagi at this festival was a rustic Ambarvalia, which, besides its religious significance, had the advantages of fixing the boundaries of the pagus. At the festival of the Paganalia the magister pagi presided, and his wife (magistra) assisted." [Smith et al. ]

Lustratio was a ceremony of purification, blessing, and protection by pouring water, burning herbs or sulfur, or animal sacrifice. People hung oscilla (“little faces,” usually masks of deities or protective spirits) on trees during festivals, including the Paganalia: “As the oscilla swung in the wind, oscillare came to mean to swing, hence in English oscillation, the act of swinging backwards and forwards…” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscilla ]

These same authors add, “We find pagani used in contradistinction to milites or to armati…” meaning soldiers and armed men. More recent sources agree: “In military terminology, paganus meant “civilian.” [Kirsch, 15] Under the Christian empire, the meaning of pagani changed to a designation of all others than Christians and Jews. [Hyde, 221]

Another word for “pagan,” gentile, was derived from the Latin word for clan, gens, alluding to ancient traditions handed from one generation to the next. “Gentiles” took a new direction when the Vulgate used it to translate Hebrew goyim, the (non-Jewish) “nations.” (In Yeshua’s time, Judaeans called his region of Galilee “Galil ha-Goyim” because so many pagans lived there.) Christians were gentiles, not being Jews, but they began to use the word to designate pagan Others. (This usage carried along into medieval literature.) “Hellene” was used for those who followed not just Greek religion, but any of its philosophical schools— Stoics, Neoplatonists, Epicureans, etc. It was a term for the educated papan elite. [Chuvin, 7] But it too acquired the meaning of non-Christian, and by the 5th century it had become a dangerous appelation.

Hellenic goddess mosaic at Sepphoris, near Nazareth in Galil-ha-Goyim (Galilee)

Valentinian decreed the death penalty for “wicked prayers or magic preparations or funereal sacrifices” by night, and for chanting invocations. [Kelly, 50] Again, graveside observances by families came under fire. This emperor banned the worship of Kybele and visits to her temple. [Conner, 125] . The pagan proconsul Praetextatus courageously protested that this law threatened “the most sacred mysteries” of Eleusis and other pagan colleges. But the reprieve he won was only temporary. [Zosimus, in Smith 1976:  124]

In 382, Gratian ordered the removal of the statue of Dea Victoria from the Altar of Victory. (This was the second time; Constantius II had the altar removed in 357, but the Senate restored it.) Victoria was a goddess, but also the icon of Roman conquest and domination, and of the suffering inflicted by the legions vaunting themselves over each subjugated province. Gratian also ended state support for the pagan priesthood, including the Vestals.

Soon Romans were blaming outbreaks of famine, plague, war, and deaths in the emperor's family on this destruction of Rome’s national hearth. A pagan delegation went to the emperor, but he refused to even see them. Within the year, he was assassinated. [Sheridan, 187]

In 384 a famous debate took place before the new, young emperor Valentinian II over a proposal to restore the altar of Dea Victoria in the Senate. The apokesman of the pagans was the famous orator Symmachus, prefect of Rome. His opponent was Ambrose, bishop of Milan. Symmachus said, “To be held in friendship, honor and love is better than to dominate.” He spoke for many in attributing Rome's misfortunes to the outlawing of the old rites: “And what has followed from that? General starvation.” [Smith 1976:  152]

Symmachus pleaded before the Senate for a return to religious tolerance, saying that the divine mind gave different traditions to various places and peoples, who all have a great love for their customs. He described Rome as an old woman who was defending the right to religious freedom, to “the ancestral ceremonies.” It is no matter what path is taken in seeking the truth, said Symmachus: “one cannot reach so vast a Mystery by one way alone.” [Peters 1977: 69]

"One cannot reach so vast a Mystery by one way alone. "

Archbishop Ambrose of Milan retorted, “They speak of God and worship idols.” He declared that the pagan gods had not protected Rome from barbarian raids (a failing soon to be surpassed by the Christian god when the Goths sacked Rome). And why had it taken the gods so long to avenge the closing of the temples? If ancient custom was so excellent, there was no reason for Romans to adopt “the foreign rites of an alien superstition,” by which Ambrose meant not Christianity, but the adopted veneration of Cybele and Caelestis. As for the altar of Dea Victoria, “Is it to be borne that a heathen should sacrifice and a Christian be present?” All this is an attack on “the faith,” which was willing to tolerate no others. [“Ambrose: Dispute with Symmachus”] With the weight of the emperor behind him, the archbishop prevailed.

The high clergy's embrace of state control of religion should not tempt us to forget that pagan imperial Rome was an authoritarian system built on patriarchy, colonialism and slavery. Symmachus’ defense of paganism was couched in the old assumptions of Roman superiority over “barbarians,” patricians over slaves. Similar ideas were expressed by other elite pagans such as Celsus and Eunapius, who mocked Christians for worshipping slaves and criminals that had been condemned by the empire. Elite pagan men also contemptuously dismissed the supersititio of “silly women” and “peasants.” [MacMullen, 99] Patriarchal and class faultlines cut through both the pagan and Christian worlds. On both sides, it was the views of the literate elite that were recorded, which should not be mistaken for the whole.

In an earlier volume, I show the profound patriarchy of pagan Rome, and how by imperial times women managed to breach many of the old strictures and structures of male privilege. [Vol IV, Ancient Italy, forthcoming] But a male backlash soon manifested in the Lex Julia (its namesake was exiled by her father Augustus for defying the sexual double standard). Later, women lost more ground, as emperor Diocletian reinstated the old norms of male tutelage and female legal minority.

By the late 4th century, the momentum of patriarchal retrenchment clearly lay with the emerging institutions of the Church. These were shaped by a revivification of the old sexual double standard, grounded in conservative Roman codes of female veiling, silence, obedience, and the univira (one-man woman). Now these codes were to govern Christian women, especially nuns and the wives of priests (since the rule of priestly celibacy lay seven centuries in the future).

Destruction of the Temples

Toward the end of the 300s, church and state were in a position to stage a full-scale attack on the temples. Bishops took a leading role in inciting the destruction of the ancient Mediterranean heritage. John Holland Smith has documented this process in detail: “The monks and hermits formed the spearhead of the Christian revolutionary army. Often, they were invited into new areas by local bishops especially to undertake the ‘depaganisation’ of the place.” [Smith 1976: 162]

The religious militants were backed up by government officials and soldiers. The Syrian orator Libanius described how “men in black”—monks—“rush upon the temple, carrying baulks of timber, stones, and fire.” They knocked down roofs, undermined walls, stripped metals from the great doors, threw down altar,s and smashed statues. Libanius describes how these monks pillaged the wealth from local temples: “They go about in gangs, attacking each village in turn.” [Smith 1976: 66]

Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria, destroyer of the Serapeum and other temples

Archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria moved to demolish the great temple of Serapis in Egypt, but popular resistance prevented it for three years. The Syrian bishop Marcellus and his monks tried to level the temples of Apamea and Edessa. Both these attempts were met with resistance from the common people, who were eventually “silenced by the name and authority of the emperor.” [Gibbon, 263] In real terms, they were restrained by the presence of troops and the threat of proscription: declared civilly dead, enemies of the state whose property could be confiscated, and who could be exiled, even executed. [Smith 1976: 173; Chuvin, 134] Monks moved in to occupy the sites, to prevent people from carrying out any ceremonies there.

In 385, emperor Theodosius sent the praetorian prefect Cynegius to stamp out sacrifice and divination in the Eastern empire. Cynegius exceeded his orders, demolishing temples in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. [Smith 1976:  163] He demolished most of the massive Syrian temple at Apamea. Its columns were so colossal—26 feet in diameter—that he was only able to overturn them by undermining the bases of three columns with wood beams and burning those. When these columns fell, they caused the structure to collapse with a deafening crash. [Theodoret, Historia Ecclasiastica, V. 21]

Ruins of the temple at Apamea, with its glorious spiral columns

Cynegius also demolished all the temples at Palmyra in the Syrian desert, among which would have been the temple of Atargatis. He tore down the temple of Apollo at Didyma, where Artemis Pythia was worshipped, and where female oracles went into prophetic ecstasies. [Smith 1976:  31; for details see Dashu 2023]

The monk-turned-archbishop John Chrysostom led the charge in Syria and Phoenicia. In 386 he preached a series of 21 sermons against pagan statues and temples. Despite being a notorious misogynist, he convinced wealthy women to donate money for the demolition of the temples of Antioch, which had so far remained intact. He attacked Artemis of Ephesus, Phrygian Kybele, and also shut down the city’s synogogues. [Smith 1976: 174-75] In the 5th century, Demeas “destroyed a deceitful image of demonic Artemis” in Ephesus and set up a cross. [Budin, Artemis, 2018: 161] However, the countryside resisted. In the provinces, people rose up in protest against the destruction of their cultural treasures.

A few pagans braved the danger of speaking up for their almost-lost cause. In his Defense of the Temples (circa 386) the Syrian orator Libanius pleaded with emperor Theodosius I to spare the legacies of the ancients. He went to great lengths to placate the Christian emperor, “for I fear lest I should offend,” but he took the risk of speaking, at this make-or-break moment for the ancient heritages. He said that black-garbed monks “who eat more than elephants, and demand a large quantity of liquor,” were demolishing the temples: 

these men, O Emperor, even whilst your law is in force, run to the temples, bringing with them wood, and stones, and iron, and when they have not these, hands and feet. Then follows a Mysian prey, the roofs are uncovered, walls are pulled down, images are carried off, and altars are overturned: the priests all the while must be silent upon pain of death. When they have destroyed one temple they run to another, and a third, and trophies are erected upon trophies...

They, therefore, spread themselves over the country like torrents, wasting the countries together with the temples: for wherever they demolish the temple of a country, at the same time the country itself is blinded, declines, and dies. For, O Emperor, the temples are the soul of the country; they have been the first original of the buildings in the country, and they have subsisted for many ages to this time; and in them are all the husbandman's hopes, concerning men, and women, and children, and oxen, and the seeds and the plants of the ground. Wherever any country has lost its temples, that country is lost...  [Libanius, Pro Templis, online. Source for quotes that follow.]

Libanius lets us in on the disputes raging in the wake of laws that forbade pagan sacrifice, which usually involved feasting at the end of the ceremony. These feasts continued, although they now had to be done without altars, or burnt offerings so as to avoid the harsh legal penalties. The orator cites objections from Christian officials that “oxen have been killed at feasts and entertainments and merry meetings.” Libanius replies that the people do not break any of the emperor’s laws when “meeting together in some pleasant field, kill a calf, or a sheep, or both, and roasting part and broiling the rest, have eaten it under a shade upon the ground... though they should have feasted together with all sorts of incense, they have not transgressed the law, even though in that feast they should all have sung and invoked the gods.”

The Syrian orator carefully constructed a hypothetical debate so as to avoid the impression of directly challenging the emperor. One character asks, “Why then do you run mad against the temples? When you cannot persuade, you use force. In this you evidently transgress your own laws.” And: “How can these men reject their fellow-subjects, differing from them in this matter? By what right do they make these incursions? How do they seize other men's goods with the indignation of the countries? How do they destroy some things, and carry off others? adding to the injury of their actions the insolence of glorying in them.”

Libanius appealed to the precious value of the art being destroyed, saying that such fine works of sculpture and architecture, could be used for other public purposes. He even characterized the temples as the property of the emperor, hoping this might lead him to protect them. But in spite of his eloquence, the appeal of Libanius to the emperor failed.

KEY EVENTS IN THE WAR ON PAGANS

319-20    Divination banned, punishable by burning at stake
321         First perecution of Donatist Christians
324         Outlawing pagan sacraments (and again in 352, 356, 451)
328         Constantine strips temples of gold, silver, statues to adorn his city
333         Constantine orders courts to enforce judgments of bishops
337         Emperor Constantine finally baptized on his deathbed
340          Constans outlaws pagan religion (Cod. Theod. 16.10.2; to be repeated many times)
346          Ban on public sacrifice; imperial edicts close temples
349          Pagan revolt led by Magnentius
355          Constantius proposes death penalty for idolatry and sacrifices, temple closures
356          Sacrifice forbidden again; sack of the great temple of Serapis, Alexandria
357-58    Constantius orders burning of people who consult diviners, astrologers
361-63     Julian, the last pagan emperor, issues a new Edict of Tolerance (soon overturned)
364          Valens persecutes ritual, philosophy; forbids night sacrifices
364           Emperor Jovian orders the burning of the great Library of Antioch
367-74     Imperial terror persecutes diviners, magic, learning; Maximus the Sophist executed
370           Book burnings across the Eastern Empire
375           Aesclepion of Epidauros, a famous healing and dreaming temple, closed down
380           Decree handing over all heterodox church buildings to the orthodox priesthood
380s         The nemeton at Argentomagus (Cotswalds, Britain) destroyed and desecrated
380s          North Italian bishops raged against Diana
381            Sacrifice banned at all shrines. Christians who convert to pagan to be punished
381           Constantinople: Aphrodite temple made a brothel, those of Sun and Artemis, stables.
382           Divination at shrines banned. Temples to be surveilled for any “surreptitious oracles’
384-88     Cynegius destroys temples in Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt
386           Libanius appeals to the emperor “In Defense of the Temples”
387           Pagan Alexandria rises up to defend the beseiged Serapeum; street battles
390           The Goths sack Rome
391           Temple ceremonies prohibited, again. Symmachus exiled for defending pagans
391           Oracle of Delphi silenced. Alexandria: Serapeum beseiged, demolished, library too
392           Prohibition of private sacrifices, home rites. Mysteries of Samothrace shut down.
393           Altar of Victory temporarily restored in the Senate.
383           Theodosius bans pagan Olympics, Pythian Games; temples of Olympia sacked
394            Hasty conversion of the Roman Senate
395            Emperor Honorius bans pagan sacrifices, again
396            Greek Mysteries halted; Goths sack Eleusis and other Greek temples, no legions
396            Arcadius decrees that paganism is high treason; priesthoods imprisoned
398            Order to destroy all temples; Eastern counts use stones for roads, bridges, ramparts
399            Temples destroyed in north Africa
401            Temples in Carthage destroyed, pagans killed
405-6         Demolition of the great temple of Artemis of Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders
405            Temple destruction in Palestine, especially Gaza, and in Cyprus
400-46    Monks cut down sacred trees in Bithynia (NW Turkey)
407            Burning of the Sibylline Oracles (not the originals, which were long gone)
409            Honorius banned astrologers
410            Paganism outlawed completely (Cod Theod. 16. 10. 20-21)
414            Cyril of Alexandria destroyed Isis temple at Menouthis and christinized site
415            A mob of fanatics assassinate the eminent pagan philospher Hypatia of Alexandria
416            Repetition of edict outlawing paganism (Cod Theod. 16. 10. 22)
423           All pagans in the Eastern Empire proscribed
429           Theodosius II declares pagan religion to be “demon worship,” pagans imprisoned
429           Sack of the Parthenon
435           Edict orders city senates to demolish temples and all remnants of paganism in East
435           Theodosius II decrees death penalty for pagans and heretics                  
448            Porphyry’s critique of Christianity burned by the emperor’s decree
450            Destruction of the temples at Aphrodisias, which is renamed “City of the Cross”
480           Colossal statue of Athena in the Parthenon destroyed. Later Church of Theotokos 
482-84    Pagans participate in the Isaurian rebellion of Illous, put down in 497
486          Hunt for underground pagans in Alexandria, arrests, torture, executions;
                 statues burned in Menouthis; a huge pyre of them burned in Alexandri
500   Zosimus writes Historia Nova, the last surviving book by a pagan author
 523         Justinian closes the Academy of Athens (or in 531 or 532, dates vary)
527         Justinian burns Manichaeans at the stake in Constantinople
537         Provincial governor of Nubia closed temple of Isis at Philae, statue sent to Byzantium
542         John of Ephesus forced conversions in Lydia, Caria, Phrygia. Destroys temples, groves
580         Tiberius crushes Jewish rising; hunts pagans in Bekaa valley: kills, tortures, crucifies
589         Council of Toledo: priests and magistrates to search out pagans and surviving shrines
609         Pantheon made into a church, Sancta Maria ad Martyres

  [Compiled from various sources, especially Smith 1976, MacMullen, Chuvin, Kirsch, Lea]

The Theodosian Laws

Under Theodosius, the Church's triumph was complete. A 391 edict from Milan decreed, “No one is to go to the sanctuaries, walk through the temples, or raise his eyes to statues created by the labor of man.” The following year, an edict forbade veneration of the old gods and the ancestors. [Chuvin, 65] In 392, Theodosius halted pagan sacrifices in Rome, though not yet in the provinces, and seized public funds set aside for them. His prohibition of pagan worship defined offerings of incense, lights, garlands, wine libations or animal sacrifices as high treason against the state, to be penalized by confiscation of the house or land where they were performed. [Smith, 183-4]

But if any person should venerate, by placing incense before them, images made by the work of mortals… or should bind a tree with fillets, or should erect an altar of turf that he has dug up… this is a complete outrage against religion. [Theodosian Code, in Pharr 1952]

It was in fact religion as practiced across much of the world, but under the imperial church, only the state religion was allowed. All others were demonized, unlawful, and targeted. Centuries ago, Nero had declared Christianity to be religio illicita. Now it was pagans who were under fire. Theodosius made it a crime to visit the oracles, and halted the Olympic Games. He ordered courts to overturn pagan wills, giving preference to Christian relatives, and stripped all legal rights from ex-Christians who returned to paganism. [Smith, 184]

The emperor felt personally threatened by the diviners. In 385 he promised them that “more bitter punishment than used to hang over him tortured by crucifixion awaits those who contrary to justice try to explore the truth of present and future things.” [Smith, 161] The terrible irony of making such a threat in the name of the crucified Yeshua escaped him.

The favored legal terminology was shifting from magia, which had some prestige, to maleficium, meaning “evildoing,” which was now increasingly being used as a synonym for “sorcery.” The Latin root word sortilegum originally meant divination by “casting lots”—literally “reading or gathering lots”—and connoted “prophetic, oracular.” [Dashu 2016: 62; see also https://latin-dictionary.net/definition/35394/sortilegus-sortilega-sortilegum] But by late antiquty "sorcery" had become thoroughly demonized. A gloss in the Theodosian Code interpreted the word diviner as “the invoker of demons.” [Flint, 17]

 In 394, Theodosius called on the Senate to decide whether Christianity or paganism would be the empire's official religion. He had already forced the pagan spokesman Symmachus into exile. Gibbon described the “hasty conversion of the Senate,” with sympathizers of the old religion under intense pressure to vote with the emperor. Aristocratic Romans rushed to convert, “impatient to strip themselves of their pontifical garment, to cast the skin of the old serpent, to assume the snowy robes of baptismal innocence.” [Prudentius, in Gibbon, 247-8] They were not motivated by religious conviction, but by the imperative of preserving their status and wealth. The political and economic costs of acting otherwise were clear.

A German commander fomented yet another a pagan revolt in the west, appointing a puppet emperor Eugenius to proclaim the end of Christian domination. In 394 the armies of Theodosius defeated the insurgents at the Frigidus river in northeast Italy. After that, the crackdown on pagans grew more severe. This was one of four failed pagan revolts (that we know of) mounted between 360 to 470. [MacMullen, 25] In southern Asia Minor, many pagans rallied to the rebellion of Illous (482-84), but they too were crushed. [Chuvin, 96-7]

In 397 the emperor ordered the eastern counts to take stones from demolished temples to build roads, bridges, and fortifications. [Chuvin, 75] The following year, the Edict of Damascus decreed that all temples in the empire “be razed... thrown down and annihilated...” [Smith 1976:  195] First in the eastern, then in the western empire, the state destroyed consecrated images, seized temple property, and burned “Sibylline” books. (These were not the legendary books of the Cumaean Sibyl, lost in a long-ago temple fire at Rome, but much more recent Greek divinatory texts.)

The emperors suppressed the Eleusinian Mysteries. They silenced the Oracle at Delphi (as one of the last Pythias had foretold) and the oracles of Dodona and other sanctuaries. Church fathers converted old temples into sepulchres for Christian martyrs, or desecrated them by making them into stables and latrines.

Anticipating a violent reaction in Spain, co-emperors Arcadius and Honorius decided it was too risky to destroy pagan temples and statues there. In 399 they issued a special edict that spared the Spanish sanctuaries, allowing demolition of temples to go forward only where it was possible to do so “without uproar and tumults.” [McKenna, 42-3] Then they are to be “thrown down and annihilated,” so that “superstition” can be eliminated.” [Smith 1976: 195. He gives 398 as the year, not 399. He also mentions that an oracle had foretold that 398 would be the year that Christianity would end; but things did not work out that way.]

Bishop John Chrysostom systematically tore down the temples of Artemis, Kybele, and other deities in Syria, along with synagogues there. Syrians and Lebanese rioted in protest. Fanatical monks played a leading part in these attacks, and in repressing pagan religion in general. [Smith 1976:  168-75] They led mobs in attacks on pagans in Italy, North Africa, especially Egypt, Thrace, Syria and around the eastern empire. [MacMullen, 31]

The Artemision of Ephesos was demolished; much later, remnant drums were piled up into one lone pillar

In 401 came the demolition of the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient Mediterranean. John Chrysostom, the patriarch of Constantinople, had its fine marbles burned to produce lime for cement, and robbed its great stones to construct other buildings. Around the same time, monks were pillaging temples in the hills of Lebanon. Some of them were killed by the outraged peasantry. [Chuvin, 75; “The Destruction of Pagan Temples”: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/greece/paganism/temple.html]

Another pagan stronghold was Gaza. When the bishop visited, the populace burned noxious substances and scattered thorns and garbage on the road before him. In 402 the bishop called in imperial troops to destroy the city's eight temples. [Chuvin, 77] He ordered their stones to be used to pave a highway, but pagans refused to walk on them. [Moore, 47] Gaza “long remained a pagan city,” keeping up old festivals such as the Rosalia. [Chuvin, 20, 78] The Brumalia festival was still being celebrated in the year 700. [MacMullen, 39]

Juno Caelestis, great goddess of Carthage, riding a lion over the seas

In Tunisia, the temples of Carthage were destroyed in 399, all except the mile-long temple of Tanit Caelestis. The bishop of Carthage sat on the throne of Caelestis and declared that her temple was now a cathedral. But the pagans clung to a prophecy that the goddess would restore her temple. Augustine marveled, “How great was the power of the goddess Caelestis in Carthage!” [Chuvin, 73] The people revered her as the “Lady,” “Most Holy,” “Eternal,” “Mother of Heaven.”

It proved impossible to convert her temple to a cathedral. The bishop discovered that large numbers of those attending church services had actually come there to worship Caelestis, as Salvian of Marseilles relates. So in 421 the bishop finally ordered the building to be razed, a task that could only be accomplished by calling in armed imperial troops to quell popular resistance. [Chuvin, 73-5; Smith 1976:  229; MacMullen, 25; 53; 176 n. 83.]

Egyptians mounted the stiffest resistance to the Roman edicts. They fought bloody street battles to defend the temples of Alexandria against mobs led by bishop Theophilus. The greatest was the battle for the Serapeum, whose defenders held out for three years. In 391 soldiers read an imperial order for its destruction but, still fearing divine retribution, they hesitated to begin demolition. Their commanders prevailed and the Serapium was razed, but only after stiff opposition.

The pagan Eunapius raged against “the abominable ones” who destroyed the temples and stole the statues and offerings. “For among them, every man is given the power of a tyrant who has a black robe and is prepared to behave badly in public.” He wrote that only the floors of the Serapeum remained, because the stones were too heavy to move. [Eunapius, 421-3; Smith 1976: 170-73] Monks took over the temple ruins to prevent people from worshipping there.

One of the defenders of the Serapeum was Antoninus, son of the philosopher and seeress Sosipatra of Pergamum, in northwest Anatolia. He “foretold to all his followers that after his death the temple would cease to be, and even the great and holy temples of Serapis would pass into formless darkness and be transformed, and that a fabulous and unseemly gloom would hold sway over the fairest things on earth.” [Eunapius, 416-7]

Sosipatra of Pergamum

When she was five years old, according to her biographer Eunapius, two aged travellers took over care of the vineyard at her family's country estate near Ephesus. The prodigious harvest they produced earned them an invitation to the family table. The mysterious wanderers said that what they had done with the grapes was as nothing compared to what they could achieve with young Sosipatra in five years, if the father consented to let them teach her. So he gave the child into their custody, “and into what mysteries they initiated her no one knew, and with what religious rite they consecreated the girl was not revealed...”

When her father returned, Sosipatra was able to tell him all that had happened on his journey, “as though she had been driving with him,” even what had been said. The astonished father asked the old men who they were. They replied that they were Chaldeans (a term that by this time had become synonymous with magi, astrologers and diviners). Casting a sleep on the father, the teachers bestowed on Sosipatra initiatory garments and a chest of books, and departed. This would have been in the early 4th century.

Sosipatra learned all “the works of the poets, philosophers, and orators,” and was able to explain the most difficult works with ease and clarity. Her fame spread, and students flocked to her. She married the eminent Eustatius, a pagan who had been appointed as ambassador to the king of Persia. Eunapius observed, "Sosipatra... by her surpassing wisdom made her own husband seem inferior and insignificant." She foretold to Eustatius that she would bear three children, who would attain divine but not worldly happiness, and predicted how many years he would live himself. The biographer added that “her words had the same force as an immutable oracle,” since everything turned out just as Sosipatra had predicted. (This emphasis on seership is uncharacteristic of classical philosphers, but common in late antiquity.)

In her later years, Sosipatra married another eminent philosopher, Aedesius. “In her own home Sosipatra held a chair of philosophy that rivalled his... [and the students] positively adored and revered the woman's inspired teaching.” Like Hypatía, Sosipatra had to fob off an inflamed student admirer. Her students suspected Philometer of using love magic on her, and the famous theurgist Maximus performed a counter-ritual. Though no one else had been present, Sosipatra was able to describe his ceremony and the omens it revealed. Maximus was awestruck at “the woman's divine nature.”

Some time after, Sosipatra was delivering an inspired discourse on the soul. She suddenly broke off, exclaiming that Philometer had been in an accident. Her description of the overturning of his carriage and his injuries proved accurate in every detail. [Eunapius, 395- 415] Little more record of Sosipatra survives beyond these admiring stories from Eunapius. But her prophecies were so famous that a generation later in Algeria, Augustine of Hippo still struggled to account for their accuracy. [Lupher 1999] He tried to explain awaythe reputed veracity of pagan prophecies, including that of the destruction of the Serapeum, as “the divination of demons.” [Flint, 152]

The Serapium was razed in 391, the year after Antoninus died. The truth of his predictions was striking even to Christians. Augustine attributed it to the devil in his essay On the Divination of Demons. [Flint, 152] These events were not forgotten; centuries later, John of Niku wrote: “And in those days the orthodox inhabitants of Alexandria were filled with zeal and they collected a great quantity of wood and burned the place of the pagan philosophers.” [Chronicle 84.45]

After the demolition of the Serapeum, along with other temples in Alexandria and Canopus, Rufinus tells us that the bishops called for temples and shrines to be destroyed “throughout every Egyptian city, fort, village, rural district, riverbank, even the desert, wherever shrines could be found...” [MacMullen, 53; Chuvin, 69]

In 414 bishop Cyril of Alexandria ordered the destruction of the famous Isis sanctuary at Menouthis. Recognizing that people streamed to this shrine for healing, he set up a substitute shrine to Christian martyrs. Cyril made this displacement strategy explicit in his dedication of the new martyrion. People were telling him they wanted guidance: “No one dreams for us, no one says to those who come, ‘The Mistress has said, do thus and so.’” [Oratiunculae, in MacMullen, 123-4]

Hellenized Isis cameo of the Ptolemaic era

The devotees of Isis were not so easily lured away: “Those who call on you in faith behold you.” [MacMullen, 54] A new, secret shrine sprang up, with statues rescued from another suppressed temple, the Iseum of Memphis. The sanctuary was hidden behind a wall, before which a lamp and incense and sweets were laid out. Pagans managed to keep it secret for seventy years. [MacMullen and Chuvin both describe this hidden shrine.]

But spies were everywhere. In 486, a gang of monks broke into the shrine, heaped the wooden images of Isis in a huge pyre and burned them, along with more statues that they had looted from homes and public baths. This act of obliteration caused considerable anxiety for the perpetrators, who sat up singing psalms all night to ward off the wrath of the goddess. Some twenty camel-loads of confiscated stone or metal statues were sent to Alexandria, along with the arrested pagan clergy. [Chuvin, 107-9; Moore, 22]

Two or three centuries before, an Egyptian prophecy had lamented the coming destruction of the ancient religion in the “land of sanctuaries and temples.” It said, “Oh Egypt, Egypt, nothing will remain of your cults but fables, and later, your children will not even believe them!” [Chuvin, 68] It says that they will only be recognized as Egyptians by their language, since their manners will be those of another people. (This came true, although the language was mostly lost too, only surviving in liturgical Coptic, which was heavily hellenized.)

 A hermetic text foretold that Egypt would be “widowed of its gods and left destitute.” The country would be filled with strangers, and “it will be laid down under so-called laws, under pain of punishment, that all must abstain from acts of piety or cult towards the gods...” [Bernal, 129] Clement of Alexandria had also referred to these prophecies in his Exhortation to the Heathen. Now they were coming true.

Pagan Resistance and Persistance

At this point we have to stand back to observe that after seventy years of increasingly harsh imperial edicts, paganism had not gone away. Contrary to the old schoolbook myth that a superior creed was universally embraced on its merits, peacefully and as a matter of course, people held to their culture and beliefs in spite of state repression, threats, violence, and economic pressure.

In some regions, they attempted to revive sanctuaries closed by imperial order, despite the military force arrayed against them. As late as 394, processions of Isis worshippers are recorded in the streets of Rome itself. [Cumont, 85] A 5th century inscription still refers to an “initiate of Ceres.” [Spaeth, 30]

Pagan festivals continued in Alexandria, where people still celebrated the Night of Kore. In Edessa, although its majestic temple was demolished, Syrians continued to enact pagan myths in song and dance up to the year 500. [MacMullen, 185 n. 47; 181 n. 22] Pagan processions still moved through the marketplace in Antioch. Syrian churchmen lamented the persistence of pagan rites, especially the laying of tables for the Gadde or Tyche, the goddess of Fortune, and the lighting of torches above springs. The customs they condemned are similar to the pagan observances catalogued in western European penitential books: prophecy, augury, ritual bathing, dancing, libations, and sacrificial feasts. [MacMullen, 145; 182 n. 30 and n. 28]

North Africa remained a pagan stronghold in the 4th and 5th centuries, as its rich inscriptions demonstrate. Yvon Thébert observes that Christianity had barely touched the region before the 5th century. He adds, “The extreme scarcity of overtly Christian motifs in the late mosaics is striking.” [Thébert, 397] In Algeria, leading citizens continued to sponsor pagan rites and festivals, and went to the sea for ritual immersions on the summer solstice.

Augustine, the archbishop of Hippo, constantly fought pagan influence on his own congregation, who consulted soothsayers and went to goddess temples. [MacMullen, 5-6; 146; 175 n. 76] In the City of God, he wrote of “the lamps still lit in the Aphrodite temple.” [Civitas Dei 21.6] As Éric Rebillard wrote, “Augustine did not live in a Christian world, but in a world in which Christians and non-Christians shared the city—both its space and, for the most part, its values.” [Rebillard, 62]

“Holding to the mother, you offended the father.”

Augustine inveighed against the people’s participation in the festivals of Cybele, her ritual bathing in the lavatio Berecynthiae. [Grimm, 1319] Even Christians attended her festival, in Hippo itself. The archbishop was upset that many women of his own church skipped its services to attend the celebration of Kybele. [MacMullan, 241 fn 149] He chided his congregation in revealing words: “Holding to the mother, you offended the father.” [MacMullen, 241 n. 154] Augustine preferred to offend the mother; he called Kybele “the harlot mother” and “mother, not of the gods, but of the demons.” [Vermaseren, 181] Nevertheless her worship continued throughout the provinces—not only in Phrygia and Thrace, but in Hispania, Gaul and Italia—and was assailed by Christian militants.

Rural areas remained the pagan heartland: “The final retreat for the remnants of Roman paganism was largely in remote country districts where Christianity progressed slowly and ancient customs endured longest.” [Hyde, 221] In Gaul, farmers went on yoking their oxen to the ceremonial cart of Cybele for processions through their fields. [Cumont, 85, 57] Biographies of the missionaries Symporian and Simplicius show that Gaulish peasants carried goddess images in a stately procession through the fields, singing and dancing. Simplicius staged a confrontation with people walking behind a statue of Berecynthia in an ox-drawn wagon. His priestly biographer claimed that by making the sign of the cross he caused the oxen to halt and the image to fall, and the worshippers to renounce their goddess. [Berger, 34-36]

The people were less easily convinced than he pretended, since they were still revering Berecynthia a century later. [McCullogh, 14] This goddess, an avatar of Cybele brought from Anatolia via Rome, became immensely popular in Gaul. In Autun and Lyons, the temples of Kybele endured as foci of pagan memory. As late as the 11th century, she is pictured in a manuscript riding in a cart drawn by lions. People said that she streaked through the skies during storms. [Cumont, 49; Vermaseren, 72] This theme of celestial flight persisted into the later middle ages, when people said the same of Diana, Holle, Dame Habonde, and other forms of the Witches’ Goddess.

Imperial officials levied heavy fines on people who refused to inform on pagan worshippers—and on authorities that would not punish them. Pagan sympathies ran deep, and the emperors found resistance to enforcing their intolerant decrees. Many people were repelled by the idea of enforcing belief and informing on neighbors' religious practices. So they engaged in passive resistance. Augustine knew of heathen landowners who encouraged pagan rites. Zeno of Verona condemned Christian landowners who winked at the ceremonies of the common folk. In many places, pagans continued their worship under the pretense of social gatherings, away from the temples:

On the days of solemn festivals they assembled in great numbers under the spreading shade of some consecrated trees; sheep and oxen were slaughtered and roasted; and this rural entertainment was sanctified by the use of incense and by the hymns which were sung in honor of the gods. [Gibbon, 260]

Maximus of Turin exhorted landowners to suppress what he called the “great evil” of idolatry on their estates and to “remove all pollution of idols from your properties.” There were to be no excuses along the lines of: “But I didn’t know about this, did not order it, had nothing to do with it.” Maximus preached that anyone who sees his tenant sacrificing, and does not prevent it, sins: “The peasant's offering defiles the lord of the land.” [Hillgarth, 54]

The second Council of Arles tried to get domini aut ordinatores (“lords or authorities”) to suppress pagan acts, destroy temples, cut down sacred trees, and beat or flog whoever resisted. [MacMullen, 68] The bishop of Arles, Caesarius, complained that members of his congregation did not want to destroy shrines, and even helped to rebuild them. He exhorted landholders to threaten their pagan tenants to cease their devotions, and if this did not stop them, he told the lords to shave their peasants’ heads, put them in manacles, and flog them.

More than a century later, pope Gregory I instructed estate owners in Sardinia to incarcerate free pagans, and to flog and torture those they held in slavery. [MacMullen 199, n. 127-128, citing Caesarius Sermo 53.1 and 54.5] Using landowners to police the religion of the peasantry would continue to be a key strategy in the medieval European war on pagans.

End of the Western Empire

Gibbon identified 390-420 as the crucial years of transition, when public expressions of pagan culture were stamped out one by one by one. The laws concentrated on suppressing the outward signs of the old religions rather than explicitly requiring people to convert. Pagans continued to speak and write, where possible. “Yet the pagans of Africa complained that the times would not allow them to answer with freedom The City of God; nor does St Augustine [V. 26] deny the charge.” [Gibbon, 265]

An imperial edict of Honorius (410) illustrates the danger they faced in speaking out:

Let all who act contrary to the sacred laws know that their creeping in their heretical superstitions to worship at the most remote oracle is punishable by exile and blood, should they again be tempted to assemble at such places for criminal activities.... [Smith 1976:  218]

Many people blamed the suppression of the old deities for Rome's decline. A resurgence of pagan feeling swept Roman society in the years 392-94. The old ceremonies and sacrifices resumed in public, appealing night and day for delivery from the approaching Gothic armies. In 408 the pagan prefect of Rome performed rites to ward off the invaders. [MacMullen, 22] People openly vented their resentment of the state religion. Remarking on the masses' hostility to the Church—“with their ceremonies and sacrifices continually going on, the whole city was full of blasphemies”—Osorius observed that not only did pagans want to “restore the worship of idols, but the Christians also became dangerously confused.” [Chuvin, 70; Smith, 203]

Zosimus (5.41-2) has a strange story of Etruscan priests offering to help the Romans on the eve of the sack by Alaric—their activities had driven the enemy from the gates of Narnia. The pope Innocent I permits a secret performance of the rites, but the priests insist on proper public performance, and no-one has the courage for that. The story raises the question as to whether there was more local performance than the sources give credit for—and maybe the insistence of the legal texts on private haruspices (CTh IX.16) is telling. [Smith 2017. Haruspices = diviners. People kept what worked for them.]

Germanic armies had been pushing back the Roman borders decade by decade. In the east,  the Gothic general Alaric advanced on Athens in 395. According to Zosimus, he saw the goddess Athena walking along the city walls, and because of this did not invade but sent peace emissaries. The city capitulated, paying tribute, and was spared being sacked. [Zosimus, online] Augustine related a similar story: when the Goths sacked Rome in 410, people saw the colossal goddess Roma Dea walking the city's streets. [Smith 1976: 214]

After this traumatic event, pagan colleges made a comeback in Rome. Processions with dragon-flags and dancers of Cybele moved through the city's streets, and soothsayers and storytellers plied their crafts in the open. All this was suppressed once the military crisis had passed. [Chuvin, 84] But it was not to be the last resurgence. During a period of crisis in the 6th century, another pagan revival swept the eastern empire. [Procopious, De Bell. Goth., in MacMullen, 175 n. 72] But it was ferociously suppressed.

The Sorcery Charge

In 409, emperor Honorius issued a new law against “sorcerers,” authorizing bishops to take part in their prosecution. [Lea, 398] He also empowered them to suppress pagan ritual meals in conjunction with imperial officials, [MacMullen, 16] The emperor followed up in 415 with a more comprehensive law against pagan religion, calling it superstitio —a term previously used against magic and foreign religions (including Judaism). [Russell, 301] After so many other decrees, it was this edict that conclusively succeeded in closing the public altars, destroying the statues, and appropriating the temples for the Christian state. [Hyde, 220] As the historian Zosimus tells us, “ the priests of both sexes were dismissed and banished, and the temples were deprived of sacrifices.” [Zosimus, online]

With the architectural foundations of pagan veneration torn away, and pagan leaders in hiding, church and state law increasingly conflated the old religion with magic and sorcery. The persecution of magic, soothsaying, and amulets escalated. Around 500 a great hunt “drove all the sorcerers from Rome.” The magus Basileus was burned after returning from exile. [Lea 1957: 399]

As usual, the written record only alludes to what was happening to elite men, and even that not in great detail; but what about women? The myth of the maleficent witch, propagated by Horace and Augustan writers had not gone away. In fact, the Latin model of the evil-doing strix / striga was spreading to provinces of the empire. The Franks had begun to say that striae overwhelmed men and consumed their vital essence.

Charges of witchcraft motivated by sexual politics persisted and may well have have increased during Rome's decline. Even Serena, the niece of emperor Theodosius, was accused. Zosimus recounted rumors that she hired a witch to prevent emperor Honorius from consummating his marriage with her under-age daughter, thinking that “to submit so young and tender a person to the embraces of a man was offering violence to nature, she had recourse to a woman who knew how to manage such affairs, and by her means contrived that Maria should live with the emperor and share his bed, but that he should not have the power to deprive her of virginity.” [Zosimus, 5.38] This daughter “died a virgin,” after which Serena married her other daughter to emperor Honorius. But she died yoo.

Around 400, this same Serena went to a temple of the Mother of the Gods that had somehow escaped plunder during the closing of the temples. She took a necklace from a statue of Kybele and placed it around her own neck. An old woman, who Zosimus claimed “was the only one remaining of the Vestal Virgins,” berated her for the theft. But the princess just walked off with an obscene retort. The old priestess called down the wrath of the goddess on Serena and her family for her impiety. After that, according to Zosimus, Serena began to have inauspicious dreams and apparitions, and came to a bad end, along with her husband, the powerful barbarian-Roman general Stilicho.

 As Alaric was laying siege to Rome, the Senate blamed Serena for the Gothic invasion, the one her husband had staved off for so long. Rumors accused her of plotting with Alaric, and people actually clung to the impossible belief that removing her would cause him to retreat. The Senate condemned Serena to death, and had her strangled. (That did not prevent Alaric from sacking Rome in 410, after enslaved people  opened the city gates to the Gothic armies.) Emperor Honorius betrayed his own name by beheading Serena’s husband Stilicho, who had fought and negotiated so loyally to save the Roman empire. [Zosimus, online; Vermaseren, 43]

After this killing, Honorius “passed the famous decree which, unlike the ineffective one of Theodosius in 392, really outlawed paganism for it ordered all surviving temple images to be destroyed, all temples to be appropriated to public purposes, the closing of all altars and services in honor of pagan gods, and Christian bishops to enforce the decree.” [Hyde, 220] The decrees of successive emperors over the course of fifty years had failed to wipe out all temples, statues, and ceremonies; which goes to underline the the stubborn resistance of the common people.

So much of the written record relates only to the upper classes. Ramsey MacMullen explains that “paganism was dismantled from the top down,” with rural persecutions following on later. [MacMullen, 64; 73] He has tracked some of the effects on the common people, among whom women figured prominently in the now-outlawed customs and observances, such as the attention to omens. He writes of “the ubiquitous resort to less well accredited and even commercial prophets known in their localities as ‘wise women,’ seers, and so forth. Against all these, so commonly sought out by their flock, the bishops spoke very harshly.” [MacMullen, 139]

 A 409 constitution of Honorius and Theodosius banished mathematici (astrologers) unless they gave up their books to be burned in the presence of the bishop. As Christians consolidated their control of officialdom, new laws barred pagans from state offices, the army and judiciary (in 415, and repeated in 425 and 468). [Chuvin, 91; MacMullen 22]

In the 420s, an imperial order decreed that all citizens must attend church on pain of exile and property confiscation. MacMullen, 58] While animal sacrifice was already punishable by death, in 451, offerings of wine and incense were declared capital offences. A few decades later, the state confiscated more substantial gifts and bequests to pagan shrines. [MacMullen, 57-8, 192 n. 85]

A law dated 423 (Cod Theod. 16.10.22) states that “regulations... shall suppress any pagans who survive, although We now believe that there are none.” [Urbainczyk, 29 n.65] Really? then why did the emperor issue another law (16.10.24) that same year? and a harsher one (16.10.25) in 435, and yet another in 438? [Urbainczyk, 29 n.65]

Even at this late stage, many imperial officials were still reluctant to enforce the draconian laws against pagans. A law of 451 stiffened penalties against them, fining governors who tolerated pagans a whopping fifty pounds of gold. To prevent officials from claiming ignorance of pagan activities, a new law around 472 called for bishops to inform governors about “crimes” against religion. [MacMullen, 175 n. 78; 172 n. 52]

The state gave free rein to Christian extremists who destroyed pagan shrines and images, or who committed violence against pagan leaders. They attacked people at pagan services and destroyed their temples. Arson was a favorite tactic. 

From the late 300s on, monks stand out as the primary aggressors in the battle to suppress pagans in the eastern empire. Even Christian documents describe them as violent and crime-prone, beating people they considered sinful, and stirring up sectarian strife. [MacMullen, 171-2] The pagan Eunapius remarked that these monks looked like men but lived like pigs, "and openly did and allowed countless unspeakable crimes." [Eunapius, 423] He added bitterly, “For among them, every man is given the power of a tyrant who has a black robe and is prepared to behave badly in public.” [Hollland-Smith, 170] And some were not above murder.

Hypatía of Alexandria

One eminent target of the fanatical monks was Hypatía, an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher of international renown. Socrates Scholasticus wrote that “she far surpassed all the philosophers of her time,” and was greatly respected for her “extraordinary dignity and virtue.” [Ecclesiastical History, online] Damascius described how she “used to put on her philosopher's cloak and walk through the middle of town” to give public lectures on philosophy. [Life of Isidore, online] One writer says that she wore a short tunic “and was not ashamed to mingle with men.” [Chuvin, 86]

Hypatía (©2011 Max Dashu)

Admired by all Alexandria, Hypatía was one of the most powerful political figures in the city. She was one of the few women who attended civic assemblies. Hypatía’s house was an important intellectual center in a city distinguished for its learning. Magistrates came to her for advice, including her close friend, the prefect Orestes. In the midst of severe religious polarization, Hypatía was an influential force for tolerance and moderation. She accepted students from all religious backgrounds, who came to her “from everywhere.”

Hypatía was a Neoplatonist, and headed the school in Alexandria, which was now the leading center of Hellenic thought. This has led to claims that she does not qualify as a “pagan,” only as a rationalist philosopher. But this description is misleading and inaccurate. First, by late antiquity the meaning of “philosopher” had changed considerably, encompassing both mystical theurgists and Christian ascetics. [MacMullen, 205 n. 24]

Second, a over-narrow definition of “pagan” fails to recognize (as its enemies did) that it filled a much broader cultural spectrum than temple rites and theurgy. The sacred books of the Neoplatonists were Hellenic—not just Plato and Homer but also Orphic texts and the Chaldean Oracles. They embraced “the esoteric doctrines of the mysteries.” [Cumont, 202]

Third, Neoplatonist philosophers were persecuted as pagans, and acted as such in the struggle over the temples. They joined and even led in the pagan defense of the Serapeum in Alexandria. One of these leaders, Antoninus, had been initiated by his mother, the philosopher Sosipatra of Pergamum.

Hypatía's father Theon was an astronomer and mathematician devoted to divination, astrology, and the pagan mysteries. He wrote commentaries on the books of Orpheus and Hermes Trismegistus, and poems to the planets as forces of Moira (an old Greek goddess of destiny). [See Dashu 2023: 35-40] Nothing indicates that Hypatía departed from the culture of her upbringing. Like her father, she saw astronomy as the highest science, opening up knowledge of the divine. Letters from her student Synesius indicate that the Chaldean Oracles and Pythagorean numerology figured in her teachings. [Dzielska, 54-55]

The surviving fragments of Hypatía's teachings indicate a mystical orientation. Glimpses of her spiritual views were preserved in the letters of her disciples, which speak of “the eye buried within us,” a “divine guide.” As the soul journeys toward divinity, this “hidden spark which loves to conceal itself” grows into a flame of knowing. Hypatía's philosophy was concerned with the “mystery of being,” contemplation of Reality, rising to elevated states of consciousness, and “union with the divine,” the One. [Dzielska, 48-50]

Hypatía’s disciples certainly regarded her in as a spiritual leader. Synesius of Cyrene (who later became a bishop) called her “the most holy and revered philosopher,” “a blessed lady,” and “divine spirit.” Though a Christian, he refers to “her oracular utterances” and writes that she was “beloved by the gods.” [Dzielska, 47-8; 36] She spoke out against dogmatism and superstition: “To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world, is just as base as to use force.” [Partnow, 24] Hypatía's teaching unquestionably represented a challenge to church doctrine and authority. The destruction of her philosophical books underlines the point. Her mathematical works survived, however, and remained popular into the next century.

Damascius wrote, “The whole city rightly loved her and worshipped her in a remarkable way...” He related that her popularity galled Cyril, the new bishop of Alexandria, who “was so struck with envy that he immediately began plotting her murder...” [Damasius, in Dzielska?] The bishop's enmity was also fueled by political motives—the politics of religious intolerance and domination—and a desire for power. He seemed to feel it was owed to him, as the nephew of Theophilus, the previous Patriarch of Alexandria and destroyer of the Serapeum.

When Cyril became bishop in 412, he began pushing to extend his power into the civic sphere. His enforcers were the parabalanoi, extremist thugs who had been the shock troops of bishop Theophilus' war on pagans and Jews. Bishop Cyril persecuted heterodox Christian groups, closing their churches and expelling them from the city. He spread rumors of a Jewish conspiracy to murder Christians, and instigated a brawl between Jews and Christians at a theater. The Jews protested that the bishop's agents had provoked the fight. The prefect Orestes (himself a Christian) heard out their grievances and arrested one of the bishop's allies.

In 414, armed conflict broke out between Cyril's supporters and the embattled Jews. It ended with the looting and seizure of synagogues, and expulsion of the ancient Jewish community from Alexandria, on orders from the bishop. Many Christians in the city sided with Orestes and put pressure on Cyril to desist. Instead, he escalated the conflict, calling in hundreds of monks from the desert. They mobbed Orestes in the streets, calling him a “sacrificer” and “Hellene”—in other words, a pagan. [Chuvin, 87-9] The monks hurled stones, wounding the prefect in the head.  His bodyguards fled, but a crowd of bystanders jumped in and saved his life.

Hypatía as “Witch”

Realizing that he was losing on public relations, the bishop of Alexandria changed tactics. His next move was to attempt to turn the people against Hypatía, a powerful woman, by accusing her of harmful sorcery. A later church chronicler, John of Nikiu, recorded the accusation: “she beguiled many people through satanic wiles.” It was Hypatía's “witchcraft” that kept the prefect Orestes away from church and caused him to corrupt the faith of other Christians—by defending Jews. Further, the claim went, Hypatía was involved in divination and astrology, “devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music.” [John of Nikiu, Chronicle 84. 87-103] Those devilish musical instruments still irritated the priesthood.

Accounts of the assassination of Hypatía vary considerably. In March of 415, Peter the church lector led a mob that attacked Hypatía as she rode through the city in her chariot. Socrates Scholasticus wrote that “rash cockbrains” dragged her into the Caesarion church, stripped her naked, tore into her body with ostraca (broken pot-sherds), and cut her to pieces. Then they hauled her dismembered body to Cinaron and burned it on a pyre. [Alic, 45-6] John Malalas accords with Socrates’ statement that the mob burned Hypatía's remains. Hesychius' account agrees that the mob tore Hypatía to pieces, but simply says that "her body [was] shamefully treated and parts of it scattered all over the city." [Dzielska, 93]

Century-old picture of assassins attacking Hypatía

The violence against Hypatia has been relentlessly sexualized ever since, most intensely in 19th century paintings and sculptures. They depict her as a naked maiden-in-distress, her arms thrown up in supplication. [See paintings by Charles William Mitchell and Richard Belt. Odoardo Tabacchi (specializing in female nudes) sculptured the astronomer as crouching fearfully (but oh so prettily) bound to a post.] As Pierre Chuvin points out, “It was not a child prodigy or a young girl who was tortured in 415, but a mature lady.” [Chuvin, 89] Hypatía would have been in her 50s or 60s when they murdered her. More recently in the 2009 movie Agora, she is against sexualized (and nearly raped at one point). [See Dashu 2011]

In John of Nikiu’s version, centuries after the fact, men came for “the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the prefect through her enchantments.” They found her sitting in a chair and dragged her through the streets until she was dead, then burned her body. [Chronicle, 84. 87-103] After the assassination of Hypatía, Orestes disappeared. Did he flee for his life, into exile; or was he secretly assassinated? Cyril prevailed, covering up the assasination of Hypatía by insisting that she had moved to Athens. His parabalanoi were never punished for her murder.

No one was fooled. The nearest contemporary sources agree that the bishop was behind the witch-rumors and the killing, and that his men carried them out. Public opinion may be measured by the fact that Christian city officials continued appealing to imperial officials to curb the parabalanoi, to bring them under secular control and restrict them from public places. They were only partially successful, since the imperial court itself was in the midst of a crackdown on pagans. As for Cyril, whom John of Nikiu credits with destroying “the last remnants of idolatry in the city,” he was later declared a saint of the church. [Dzielska, 97-8; 104; 94]

Contrary to popular belief, Hypatía was not targeted only as a pagan. Her courage in opposing the escalating anti-Jewish violence and her moral stance against religious repression were the factors that precipitated her assassination. Other pagans—men, and less politically bold—continued to be active at the university of Alexandria for decades after her death. The fact is that Hypatía's femaleness made her a special target, vulnerable to the accusation of witchcraft. In defending the assault on the philosophical tradition of tolerance, Hypatía had everything to lose, yet she acted boldly. 

Later in the century, her pagan male counterparts did come under attack. By the mid-400s, pagan professors were being sentenced to death in Syria. Sometime after 480, a Christian society called the Zealots hounded the pagan prefect of Alexandria and his secretary out of office, forcing them into exile. The Zealots capped their triumph with a burning of “idols.” Two of them moved on to Beirut, where they incited more hunts to bring down leading pagans. They formed a group to collect denunciations, using paid informers, and brought names and accusations to the bishop. He then held joint hearings with city officials, which led to more bonfires and more exiled pagans. [MacMullen, 26; 194 n. 95]

Other Persecutions

The extreme cultural repression used to forcibly christianize the Roman empire was unprecedented anywhere in the world, in its extent, duration, and geographic scale. The only thing that even approximates this scale of repression is the Chin emperor's attacks on scholars, in which he burned their books and buried them alive. But this took place in a much shorter timespan, and in a considerably more limited geographic region.

In Iraq, two Islamic persecutions (mihna, literally "ordeal") against heretics (zanadaq) were carried out in the early Abbasid period. The first was led by al-Mahdi in 780 CE and another by al-Ma'mun in 832. [https://law-journals-books.vlex.com/vid/inquisition-zanadiqa-abbasid-caliphate-53436210 ]

The two succeeding caliphs, al-Muʿtasim (r. 833–842) and al-Wathiq (r. 842–847), continued the policy with varying degrees of intensity, threatening at times opponents to the doctrine with whipping or execution. All told, the mihna lasted about fifteen years. [www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195390155/obo-9780195390155-0205.xml

Again, these Muslim persecutions were of much shorter duration than the Christian ones that began in the late Roman empire—which actually never ended. The Chruch carried on with those models of repression: in early medieval persecutions of pagans and heretics, in the papal Inquisition, in the European witch hunts, and their ideologies and methods which proved to be equally useful in European colonialism.

Other Muslim persecutions did follow, for example of Ismailites and Shi'a. But the larger pattern was of warring on kufir (singular kafir), "infidels" / "unbelievers," with Quranic authorization to enslave them. Christians did the same, fighting medieval Crusades against Pagans under the principle of Cujus baptisatio, ejus regio ("Who baptizes, his the rulership / region").

The Franks targeted the Saxons, who once converted did the same to the the Slavic Czechs and Wends in Central Europe; then the Brotherhood of the Sword and Teutonic Knights went after the Baltic peoples: Livonians, Old Prussians, Lithuanians. Both Christian and Muslim colonizers asserted a religious mandate for conquest, designating targeting Indigenous regions as the "Land of War" (Dar al-Harb in Arabic; the Spanish used this phrase for Nicaragua and Yucatán).

The Spanish Inquisition did not end until 1820, just as the California Mission system was getting started. Its founder, Junípero Serra had first conducted a suppression of the religion of the Pames people in Sierra Gorda, Veracruz. He triumphantly carried away an image of Cachum, "Mother of the Sun," to the college of San Fernando in Mexico City.

On the Protestant side, the English Puritans were convinced of the superiority of their religion, and they waged war against the Wampanog and Pequots. But John Winthrope attributed the ease with which the English colonized seized Massachusetts to divine providence: "For the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox, so the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess." ["John Winthrop describes life in Boston," letter of 1634]

As the Anglo-American conquest of North America proceeded westward, settlers attacked Indigenous religion and medicine people, destroying masks, sacred bundles and consecrated places. Behind them came missionaries who founded “Indian boarding schools” to “civilize the heathens.” Religious authoritarianism is closely intertwined with imperial colonization—and continues to be.

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