Religious Diversity 521
In 551, over a decade after Belisarius had recaptured Ravenna from the Goths,
the indebted clergy of the Gothic cathedral in that city sold some marshland
to a defensor named Peter, likely a Catholic clergyman.96 This particular sale
represents the last written record of a non-Nicene Gothic church in Ravenna.
That the Gothic cathedral was forced to sell its property in order to pay its
debts is an obvious indication that it was in deep financial distress.97 And
when Justinian’s general Narses completed the conquest of Italy in 554, it was
only a matter of time before the non-Nicene churches would be suppressed in
territories controlled by the empire.98 But even in its final days, there are hints
that the divisions between the two churches were not as definite as we might
expect. The ecclesia legis Gothorum, as the Gothic cathedral is described in the
Ravenna papyri, was in fact repaying a debt it had taken from Peter sixteen years
early—that is, in 535 at the beginning of the conflict with the east. Despite the
rising tensions a Gothic church could (and did) borrow from Catholics, and
after years of conflict, which devastated Italy, the loan was repaid.
‘Pagans’, Pelagians, and Manicheans
As we have already seen in the case of Ostrogothic ‘Arianism’, the categories
of heresy and orthodoxy were not always clearly defined nor do they repre-
sent distinct and self-contained groups engaged in inevitable theological
conflict with each other. This same view can be extended to our references
to the remnants of traditional Roman polytheism in Ostrogothic Italy. Once
we set aside essentializing definitions for religious identities that emerged
in explicitly polemical contexts, the divide between ‘paganism’ (the word
itself was a convenient term invented by Christians to describe and deni-
grate a wide range of beliefs and practices) and Christianity no longer seems
absolute.99 For instance, traditional rituals and practices could continue in a
Christian context, although often stripped of any particular ‘pagan’ religious
96 Tjäder, Die lateinischen Papyri, pp. 98–104. Peter (Petrus) as a Catholic: Tjäder, p. 93 and
Scardigli, Sprache und Kultur, pp. 282–3.
97 On the potential value of this marshland see Squatriti, “Marshes and Mentalities”, pp. 10–3.
98 This occurred after 565. On the date of the suppression of the ‘Arian’ Church see
Deliyannis, Ravenna, p. 146 and n. 42.
99 On the invention of the term ‘paganism’ and for an overview of the traditions and prac-
tices it is meant to cover see Fowden, “Late Polytheism: the World-view”, p. 521; Bowersock,
Hellenism in Late Antiquity, pp. 5–6. The distortion caused by emphasizing conflict
between Christians and ‘Pagans’, heretics and the ‘orthodox’, is succinctly addressed in
Sandwell, Religious Identity, p. 10; Lyman, “Hellenism and Heresy”, especially pp. 209–11.