Book Club: The Final Pagan Generation
Madonna voice: "God?"
This is the first post of two on Edward Watts’s fantastic book The Final Pagan Generation. It covers the book’s structure, the four men who are its main subject, Rome’s traditional religion, and Constantine. The second installment will address the careers of its subjects, the end of paganism, and lessons for our time. Hope you enjoy this post, and live in anticipation until the next one!
[Ed. note — I initially intended to finish the review in two posts, but was having too much fun and reverted to the rule of three! Check out the second post here.]
Why did Augustus tell the world that he “found Rome built of bricks; [and left] it clothed in marble”[1]? It’s a nice bon mot, in which the PR savvy and would-be poet emperor would have taken pride. It also happens to be true. Augustus, along with his colleague Agrippa, really did beautify Rome on a grand scale. But beneath the terse, yet elegant, self-promotion is a hint of insecurity.
The Rome of Augustus’s forebearers—the Rome that smashed Carthage, conquered the remnants of Alexander’s empire, and subdued Gaul—wasn’t a pretty place. It was a filthy, chaotic, mess of a city, to which Roman elites “paid but little attention.”[2] The republic, and the men who served it, needed no airs. The world would remember Rome not through the grandeur of its buildings, but from the awesome, often brutal, deeds of its people.
Augustus would have been familiar with this mindset—and would have also been familiar with the elder Cato’s summation of it: “I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one.”[3] In this light, Augustus’s statement seems less of a boast and more a confession of self-doubt. The city, clad in a gleaming edifice, came to mirror his regime: an outward restoration of republican glory that concealed a rotten tyranny within.
The last relic of that republican glory, however, didn’t need any sprucing up. The Curia Julia—home of the Senate and built by the actual (Julius) Caesar—was already grand enough. But here, too, Augustus left his mark. On the Senate floor, soon after his final triumph over Marc Antony at Actium, he installed an altar in front of a statute of the goddess Victory. A physical reminder of Augustus’s achievements, she would oversee the proceedings of the Senate for eternity.
But things didn’t work out that way. While Victory—and ultimately Augustus himself—were gods, they didn’t anticipate that an even bigger entity—capital-G God—might displace them. This He did, becoming a legitimate object of worship and state patronage with Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 and his later conversion. Constantine’s son, Constantius II, removed the Altar from the Senate in 357. Though briefly restored by Julian in 361, it was removed again soon thereafter and never returned, as the Christian emperors suppressed the traditional Roman religion and persecuted its adherents.
What did these adherents think about this rapid reversal in fortune? How did a religion many Romans perceived as a pseudo-Jewish death cult manage to sweep away traditional rites that had been observed for millennia?
Edward Watts, a classics professor at UC San Diego, tries to answer both questions in The Final Pagan Generation. The result is one of the best books on Roman history written in the past twenty years. An academic monograph that never feels like one, The Final Pagan Generation is by turns insightful, funny, innovative, and unsettling.
The World of the Gods
The Final Pagan Generation follows the lives of four Romans, all born in the 310s: Libanius (a rhetoric professor and social climber from Antioch), Themistius (a, for lack of a better term, public intellectual turned imperial courtier, who lived in Constantinople), Ausonius (another rhetoric professor, from Gaul, who became tutor to the future Emperor Gratian), and the fabulously named Praetextatus (a member of the Senatorial aristocracy, who served as prefect of Rome and governor of Achaea). While professing different beliefs—Libanius and Praetextatus followed the traditional Roman religion; Themistius and Ausonius believed in Christianity—each came of age in a thoroughly pagan empire, in which Christians made up only 15 to 20 percent of the population.[4]
The Christians of the 310s and 320s would have very much felt like the minority they were. Traditional Roman religious practice permeated every aspect of life. Worship was not limited to the privacy of the home (at small altars devoted to the household, ancestral gods) or large-scale public displays (at the massive temple complexes located in the center of most Roman cities). It was constant and inescapable.
The streets of urban centers and rural crossroads featured makeshift shrines to various deities, some attended by priests and others not, where passerby could pray and leave offerings. On festival days—of which there were many; a Roman calendar from 354 “classifies fully 177 days of the year as holidays or festivals”[5]—believers would appear in holy dress, playing instruments and carrying statues and images of the celebrated god as they marched through town. Traditional rites, as Watts astutely notes, even “provided some of the olfactory backdrop to Roman life”[6] in the massive amounts of incense burned at all hours, for reasons both practical (to mask the smells of “animal waste, trash, sewage and general rot”[7]) and transcendent (“to create a distinctive environment that indicated the special status of the god [being celebrated]”).[8]
Everyone throughout the Roman world thus experienced the worship of the traditional gods. For believers, Roman religious practice was simultaneously quotidian and sublime. It offered its adherents both a daily routine and opportunity to experience the divine around every corner. For Christians, traditional rites were incessant offenses to be grudgingly endured. The sensory bombardment inherent in those rites also posed a constant temptation to revere false idols.[9]
Neither adherents to the traditional religion nor their Christian counterparts had any reason to believe this state of affairs would ever change. The four men profiled by Watts spent their childhood in this environment, and accordingly shared this understanding. The empire had been dominated by pagan rites for centuries—and it always would be.
As it turned out, everyone was lacking in imagination.
Constantine
Despite its similarity to classical Rome in religious matters, the Empire of the early 300s had a markedly different political organization. After the Crisis of the Third Century, the Emperor Diocletian came to the conclusion that the Empire was too big and unwieldy for one man to rule. He appointed three colleagues to serve as co-emperors—two junior (the Caesars) and two senior (the Augusti)—in the West and the East. While this system, called the Tetrarchy, provided stability during Diocletian’s reign (from 284 to 305), his erstwhile colleagues didn’t share his belief that an empire could be run by committee. Soon after Diocletian’s death, renewed civil wars broke out as each emperor tried to supplant the others as sole ruler.
Into this chaotic environment stepped Constantine. The son of a co-emperor who ruled Britain, Gaul, and the northern provinces, Constantine inherited his father’s title by acclamation of his troops. Soon after, he went to war against his fellow co-emperor in the West, Maxentius, who held Italy and Rome, in 312. Upon invading Italy, Constantine had a dream in which a divine being instructed him to paint the sign of Christ (the Chi Rho) on the shields of his legionnaires. He did so, and defeated Maxentius’s armies in a string of victories, first in northern Italy, and then outside Rome itself, where Maxentius drowned in the Tiber as his army fled.
While it is unclear when Constantine actually converted to Christianity, he must have felt grateful to God. In 313, he and his co-emperor issued the Edict of Milan, which permitted Christians to openly practice their religion throughout the Empire. Later in his reign, Constantine also gave the Church financial support, building churches, paying clerical salaries, and granting bishops special legal privileges. Constantine’s promotion of Christianity also involved some anti-pagan elements: he issued an imperial letter that seemingly banned sacrifices and also ordered the destruction of certain temples.
Watts rightly observes that traditional believers and Christians interpreted Constantine’s actions in different ways:
The later 310s and early 320s saw Constantine continue to occupy a unique position where Christians understood him to be a transformative religious figure, while most non-Christians saw nothing threatening in his behavior.[10]
Radical Christians, who previously couldn’t conceive of a Christian Empire—holding out for the Kingdom of Heaven as the only possible Christian polity—began to envision a de-paganized Roman state that mandated Christian belief and persecuted non-believers. For ideas about how to suppress non-Christian rites, they looked to the Bible. Watts cites the Bishop Eusebius’s ideas on how to proceed with a campaign against the traditional religion:
Eusebius drew on two strands of thought. The first was the long-standing Christian abhorrence of sacrifice, a view laid out in depth by numerous second- and third-century Christian authors. The second strand was far older and evoked the only case Eusebius knew about in which a religious group claimed to have successfully suppressed an established traditional religion. This was the account of the Israelite conquest of Canaan in Deuteronomy, a story in which God commanded his people to “demolish completely all the places where the nations whom you are about to dispossess served their gods.” Eusebius imagined that Roman paganism would die away in the same way that traditional Canaanite religion did if sacrifice was restricted, temples torn down, and the emperor readied churches for the new Christians his policies would create. A Christian empire filled with churches and believing congregations would naturally emerge, but only as a result of Roman de-paganization.[11]
While Christians like Eusebius thought of ways to use a newly sympathetic state to suppress and ultimately eliminate pagan rites and belief, traditional believers seem to have given little if any thought to Constantine’s pro-Christian policies. Insofar as they did, they explained them away. Temples regularly fell into disrepair and out of use. So why was it remarkable that Constantine closed a few and recycled their building materials? The ban on sacrifices didn’t seem like much of a ban—it didn’t specify any enforcement mechanisms or penalties. So why worry about it? Besides, was Constantine really a Christian? His coinage, one of the most important propaganda vehicles for the Roman emperors, left things ambiguous:
Non-Christians . . . could look at Constantinian coinage from the [310s and early 320s] and see Sol Invictus, the sun god who had once graced the coins of Maximinius, still depicted on the reverse.[12]
As a result, adherents of the traditional religion did little to push back against Contstantine’s religious edicts, or the agenda of his Christian courtiers. It’s easy to understand their cost-benefit analysis. In an overwhelmingly pagan empire, Constantine’s changes—or the rantings of an unhinged radical like Eusebius—seemingly would have little to no long term impact. Why risk life and career over something that amounted to an imperial vanity project, as opposed to a religious revolution? As Watts notes, this tendency of pagan believers to explain away the increasingly pro-Christian (and anti-pagan) turn of Constantine and his successors, to find comfort in historical analogies to the policies of prior emperors, and to take no action against the emperor and Christian church, would ultimately result in their destruction.
For the immediate subjects of The Final Pagan Generation, however, this benefit of hindsight would have been dour and unappealing. Libanius, Themistius, Ausonius, and Praetextatus had their salad days during Constantine’s reign. The first three attended academies in Greece and Gaul, where they formed lifelong friendships, got drunk, and engaged in pranks and criminality that would put a modern fraternity man to shame.
The relative stability of Constantine’s empire—and his other vanity project, the construction of a lavish new capital at Byzantium—offered great opportunity for wealth and power in the imperial service. Obsessing over the seemingly eccentric religious beliefs of the sovereign was the stuff of losers and bores. When Constantine died in 337, the final pagan generation was ready to make its mark on the Roman world.
[1] As quoted in Suetonius, Divus Augustus, part 28.
[2] Strabo, Geography, 5.3.8.
[3] As quoted in Plutarch, Marcus Cato, part 19.
[4][4] Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation (Oakland: University of California Press), p 46.
[5] TFPG, p 24.
[6] TFPG, p 25.
[7] TFPG, p 25.
[8] TFPG, p 26.
[9] Watts notes that Clement of Alexandria, a Christian philosopher, “expressed a general suspicion about the soul being carried away by pleasant odors. He called for Christians to smell ‘not of perfume but of perfection,’ while acknowledging that aromatic products could still be used because they were essential for health and hygiene.” TFPG, p 28.
[10] TFPG, p 44.
[11] TFPG, p 47.
[12] TFPG, p 44.
Great read!