OF ROMAN SENATORIAL PAGANISM David M. Gwynn Abstract

THE ‘END’ OF ROMAN SENATORIAL PAGANISM

David M. Gwynn

Abstract

The last decades of the 20th c. witnessed a seismic shift in how scholars approached the study of paganism in the increasingly Christian Roman Empire of the 4th and early 5th centuries. Older models which empha- sised decline and conﬂict were challenged by a new awareness of the vitality and diversity of Late Roman paganism and its religious and social interaction with Christianity. The purpose of this short paper is to reassess the impact of this new scholarly approach, particularly upon our understanding of the paganism of the western senatorial elite, and the role that material culture has played and will continue to play in revealing the complex religious world of late antique Rome.1

Introduction

That Roman paganism did in some sense ‘decline’ in the 4th and 5th centuries is impossible to dispute. The great State cults of the Roman Republic and the Early Roman Empire continued to receive State support from Constantine and his immediate Christian successors, but this support ceased under Gratian and Theodosius I at the end of the 4th c. In the same period, the Christian Church increased dramati- cally in numbers and in status, changing the urban landscape and rais- ing to prominence a new elite of clerics and ascetics. By the death of Theodosius I in 395 Christianity had become the ofﬁcial religion of the State. Pagans and pagan beliefs survived, and remained a concern for Emperors down to Justinian in the 6th c. and beyond. But the Roman empire was now a Christian empire. Such religious and social change could not occur without conﬂict. Even under the generally tolerant regime of Constantine a few select temples were destroyed and the legal status of paganism began to

1 For the vast bibliography on paganism in Late Antiquity consult the bibliographic essay earlier in this volume.

L. Lavan, M. Mulryan (edd.) The Archaeology of Late Antique ‘Paganism’ (Late Antique Archaeology 7 – 2009) (Leiden 2011), pp. 135–161 136 david m. gwynn come under attack. Further laws against pagan shrines and practices followed under Constantine’s sons, but the death of Constantius in 361 led to the accession of the pagan Julian whose immediate Christian successors Jovian, Valentinian I and Valens took little action against established pagan cults. Tension increased significantly, however, in the final two decades of the 4th c. Temple destruction in the Greek East in the early 380s aroused the anger of the Antiochene sophist Libanius, but more important at an official level were the actions of Gratian, the young emperor in the West. In 382 Gratian was the first Christian emperor to reject the title of pontifex maximus, the chief priest of Roman State paganism. He withdrew the funding for pagan priest- hoods, notably the Vestal Virgins, and he ordered the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate House which had previously been removed by Constantius but then restored. Upon Gratian’s murder in 383, the efforts of the pagan senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus to convince his young brother and successor Valentinian II to restore the Altar were defeated by the powerful bishop Ambrose of Milan. In 391–92 Theodosius I in the East passed a series of laws that sys- tematically outlawed pagan cult, and 391 also saw the destruction of the great Serapeum of Alexandria. There was a short-lived revival of political support for pagan cults in Rome under the usurper Eugenius in 393–94, but at the Battle of the River Frigidus in September 394 Eugenius was defeated. His leading pagan senatorial supporter Virius Nicomachus Flavianus committed suicide, taking the cause of Roman State paganism to his grave. This is the narrative that underlies the older vision of the 4th c. as an age of pagan decline and religious conflict. Paganism, it was argued, was already in decay during the 3rd c. and could not chal- lenge the rise of Christianity. “In the fourth century paganism appears as a kind of living corpse, which begins to collapse from the moment when the supporting hand of the state is withdrawn from it”.2 The course of that collapse is then traced through the sequence of ‘turn- ing points’ summarised above. Geffcken and Alföldi popularised this approach,3 and so perhaps most influentially did Herbert Bloch, who in two famous articles laid down the argument for a ‘pagan revival’ in the 380s and 390s that sought to reverse the inexorable collapse

2 Dodds (1965) 132. 3 Geffcken (1920), Alföldi (1948, 1952).