in its civic and public religious spaces. They also, as we shall see, shared private reli-
gious space and ritual in Rome as in the Mediterranean world at large.
The official calendar for the city of Rome in the year 354 ceis perhaps the best
source for the public religious koine. This calendar attests to the continuing pro-
minence of the pagan state cults and ceremonies; it included holidays and festivals
in honor of the pagan gods and goddesses, as well as those to celebrate the ruling
imperial house and the cult of the deified emperors (Salzman 1990: 16 –19; 116 –92).
Because the holidays and ceremonies recorded in the public calendar were for the
benefit of the people as a whole, they were funded by state monies (Festus 284 L;
Macr. Sat.1.16.4 – 8). So too did public monies support the public games or Ludi
held in conjunction with these holidays and festivals, be they circus games, gladia-
torial combats, beast hunts, or theatrical performances in honor of the gods or the
emperors (living and deified). At the games in particular, but so too at imperial cult,
civic, and traditional pagan holidays, pagans and Christians rubbed shoulders with
one another in a shared religious space and time.
The religious koinereflected in the public calendar of Rome had, however, come
under attack from Christian clergy even before Constantine’s well-known conver-
sion near the Milvian Bridge in Rome in 312 ce; the third-century Christian father
Tertullian decried these venues and what happened there: “We have, I think, faith-
fully carried out our plan of showing in how many different ways the sin of idolatry
clings to the shows, in respect of their origins, their titles, their equipments, their
places of celebration, their arts; and we may hold it as a thing beyond all doubt,
that for us they are utterly unsuitable” (Tert. Spect.13.1). Christian clergy focused
their attacks on blood sacrifice performed in front of the temple of the divinity by
the priests of the pagan cults in conjunction with religious holidays and/or public
games. So Tertullian specifically noted these practices: “I shall break with my Maker
by going to the Capitol or the temple of Serapis to sacrifice or adore, as I shall also
do by going as a spectator to the circus and theater” (Tert. Spect. 8.3). For
Tertullian, the sacrathat “preceded, intervened in, and followed” the games (Tert.
Spect.8.3) were idolatry, and so Christians should not attend either the games or
the pagan ceremonies.
Constantine’s open support for Christianity and his public unwillingness to
sacrifice (Curran 2000: 178) may well have altered that element of pagan ritual in
certain public settings; there is no evidence for animal sacrifice in conjunction with
the Pompa Circiin the fourth century, for example, and scholars dispute whether or
not Constantine actually legislated against blood sacrifice, as Eusebius of Caesarea
claimed he did in 324 in the east (Eus. V. Const.2.45; Bradbury 1994: 120 –39;
Salzman 1987: 172– 88). Even if Constantine did legislate against blood sacrifice as
a “deterrent designed principally to clear public spaces of that aspect of pagan cult
considered most unacceptable in the eyes of Christians” (Bradbury 1994: 138), he
nonetheless continued state support for the ceremonies, rituals, and games of the
pagan religious holidays and civic festivals noted in public calendars.
Constantine’s support for the state cults was potentially problematic, since not
just the public holidays but also the spectacles attached to them had retained their
essentially pagan religious meanings in the eyes of many fourth-century Romans. This
Religious Koineand Religious Dissent 111