198 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
was the traditional view that the welfare of the state and its subjects
depended upon divine favour, and that the pax deorum (peace with or from
the gods) was secured by the performance of established rituals and
jeopardized by their non- performance, with dire consequences. The gods
showed their anger by sending plague, famine and other natural disasters,
plus civil and foreign war – responsibility for which was sometimes
attributed to the Christians.
There was, however, no general persecution prior to the reign of Decius.
What had changed? According to the conventional view, the Decian
persecution took place against a background of political and military disaster.
The political order had all but collapsed, and enemies were invading on all
sides. The survival of the empire as an entity was at stake, and the emperor
in reaction sought to regain the favour of the gods by organizing a massive
demonstration of the loyalty of the empire. But we may question whether it
was so obvious to Decius that the empire was falling apart. The great
calamities, including the death in battle of Decius himself, lay in the future.
Decius, it might be argued, had restored the northern frontier and now set
out to strengthen his position by bidding for the support of the empire at
large. His imperial edict was a thoroughly old- fashioned gesture, to cap the
millennial games of his predecessor Philip: the people of Rome were
summoned to a supplicatio in the old style, an act of corporate veneration of
the tutelary gods of the state.^21 But in addition, Decius had the mentality of
an emperor from the Balkans. These were hard men with a narrowly realistic
view of the priorities of the imperial offi ce, and a fi rm determination to
impose order and discipline on the world. Diocletian is the model, and,
unlike Decius and Valerian, he persecuted from a position of strength.
Our major interest, given the chronological limits of our study, is in the
pre- persecution period, in which the church was permitted an extended
period of relatively unimpeded growth. Its rate of growth should not be
exaggerated; it was not suffi ciently fast or dramatic to raise concern in the
minds of emperors and other statesmen before the second half of the third
century. Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations mentions the Christians only
once, and not in such a way as to imply that he viewed them as a threat.
Marcus sanctioned minor persecutions of Christians, as at Lyon in AD 177
(Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 5.1.4ff.), but on request, and without departing from
the Trajanic directive. It is striking how little we hear about early Christianity
from non-Christian writers. In the Severan era alone, sometimes seen as a
period of signifi cant growth, Christianity is not mentioned in Cassius Dio,
Herodian or Philostratus, that is, the major historical and biographical
sources for the period.^22 Christians impinged more on the world by the time
of Decius, but were still a small minority, and predominantly of low or
modest status. It is not even clear that the original edict of Decius was aimed
at Christians as such, although the authorities would certainly have been
aware that there were ‘atheists’ abroad who would absent themselves from
the great religious jamboree planned by the emperor.