CHAPTER SEVEN
PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN MONARCHIANISM
Severan Universalism, the Imperial Cult, and Christian Apologists
The close of the second century and the beginning of the third was to see the final development of an ideology of imperial unity based upon a religious syncretism and expressed in the iconography applied to the emperor's person. The Constitutio Antoniniana, drawn up by Caracalla, gave citizenship generally throughout the Empire to all inhabitants of towns and villages beyond the cities. 1 The motive for the policy cannot simply have been the extension of taxation2 or an attack upon the senatorial aristocracy. 3 One inscription makes it clear that the primary motivation was religious, and that it was an exten sion of the Imperial Cult.4 The emperor and his consort were to possess the religious function of effecting sacramentally the unity of the empire for which the extension of citizenship contained the hope. Caracalla appears on coins as the Lord of the world and the reflection of the divine light of the sun, permeating all things and creating uni versal order. 5 In this respect we shall see, in Chapter 8, that what Elagabalus
1 Justinian Ulpian, Dig. I,5, 17: "Idem (sc. Ulpianus) libra vicensimo secundo ad edictum. In orbe Romano qui sunt ex constitutione imperatoris Antonini cives Romani effecti sunt." Cf. S.N. Miller, Caracalla, in CAH xii, pp. 45-4 7. 2 F. Millar, The date of the Constitutio Antoniana, in ]EgArch 48 (1962), pp. 124-131. 3 Cf. M. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History qf the Roman Empire, (Oxford: Clarendon 1957), pp. 418-428. 4 A.H.M. Jones, Another Interpretation of the Constitutio Antoniana, in ]RomS, 26,2 (1936), pp. 223-225; J. Stroux, Die Constitutio Antoniana, in Phil 88 (42) (1933), pp. 272-295, inscription cited p. 294: 'totyapouv VOJ.ltsro o1hro i-!E [yal.onpen&c; Kat 8eocref3Jroc; Ouvacr8m 'tft i-!EYAurelian (270-275) was continued too by his successor Probus (276-282), whose coins exult his person as soli invicto comiti. 6 But pre viously, from Marcus Aurelius onwards, we shall find a general assim ilation of certain oriental cults with the imperial iconography in order to service an ideology of imperial unity. The Severan policy of incor porating all cultures within the one empire found religious expres sion in the Imperial Cult, and the syncretistic association with it of such universalistic cults as Isis and Sarapis, of Mithras, and of the Unconquered Sun. In support of the imperial ideal was an important religious phi losophy of a Platonism that was to develop into the Nco-Platonism of Plotinus, that stressed against Gnostic individualism the unity of Man, the Cosmos, and society, and the derived being of each from an ultimate principle of unity that was the highest good. The iden tification of such deities with the Sun was reinforced by a Neoplatonic understanding of the ultimate principle of reality in the One reflected in diverse appearances. The corresponding political expression of that cosmic unity was in the emperor's person and that of his consort. Thus the iconography of power and authority was duly assimilated to a religious iconography evocative of such underlying philosophi cal assumptions. It is with the development of such syncretistic themes in the practice of the Imperial Cult that we shall be concerned in Part A, which will lead us, in Part B, to consider the underlying pagan, philosophical ontology. We shall trace the correspondence between the political sense of f.tovapxia and the ontological significance of this term. Gnosticism was refuted by later Nco-Platonism by means of an ontology which reduced the cosmic chaos of Gnosticism to an order generated by an ultimate and final good first principle. There was a counterpart to this ontological refutation in political ideology according to which the chaos of individual kingdoms was reduced to a single united empire. In the context of a sociology of knowledge, we shall argue that
6 RIC 5,2, p. 108 no. 829 and W.C.H. Frend, The Rise qf Christianity, (London: Darton, Longman and Todd 1984), p. 440.
