same time, the rich pagan senator Vettius Agorius Praetextatus is
supposed to have quipped: ‘Make me bishop of the city of Rome
and I’ll become a Christian immediately’ (Jerome, Against John
of Jerusalem8). Power, as much as wealth, was a dangerous bless-
ing. As bishops became increasingly important public figures, for
example, so competition for bishoprics could be intense. At Rome
in 366, an episcopal election degenerated into mob violence in
which 137 people were killed (Ammianus Marcellinus 27.3.12).
A few years earlier, some Christians at Alexandria expressed their
disapproval of their unpopular bishop George by murdering
him and parading his mutilated corpse through the city streets on
the back of a camel (Ammianus Marcellinus 22.11.3; Socrates,
Ecclesiastical History3.2–3). Such developments are good exam-
ples of the complexity of the process sometimes still called ‘the
Christian triumph’. As Christianity became the dominant religion
of the empire, so it assimilated to itself certain Roman cultural
forms and social mores: the empire transformed Christianity as
much as Christianity transformed the empire (Salzman 2002:
200–19). Perhaps many at the time would have nodded in
sad agreement with the verdict of the monk Jerome who, looking
back over some eighty years of imperial Christianity, observed
of the church that ‘when it came under Christian emperors, its
power and wealth increased, but its virtues diminished’ (Life of
Malchus1).
If the teleological view of Christian triumph looks less than
positive when viewed from such perspectives, it is undermined
also by other vistas on the history of Christianity. To assert that
Christianity triumphed under Constantine is to adopt a view of
history that, like that of Eusebius of Caesarea, places Rome and
its empire at the heart of Christian history. Other narratives are
possible, of course, that present a very different picture. Beyond
the empire’s frontiers, among the Goths and Persians for example,
Christians continued to be persecuted long after Constantine
converted. Similarly, while Eusebius was convinced that the rise
of Christianity proved that God had forsaken the Jews, Judaism
continued to flourish, and even make gains: in the ninth century,
EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE1
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