The Jews of the Graeco-Roman Diaspora This co-existence was first of all, as already indicated, a literal co-existence
within the bounds of countless towns, large and small. Secondly, it was an
uneasy co-existence, where competition might take peaceful forms, as in
Jerome’s marvellous story of how the hermit Hilarion secured by the ap-
plication of holy water the victory of a Christian racing chariot in games
held at Gaza: so much faster was the Christian-owned chariot that oppo-
nents hardly glimpsed the horses’ backs as they sped by.^26 But it was also a
co-existence which could at any time break out into communal violence,
sometimes prompted by, and often going beyond, the explicit wishes and in-
tentions of the emperors. Far too little has been made, in the religious history
of the fourth century, of the evidence for local Christian attacks on temples.^27
Such attacks began already under Constantine (ruling in the East –)
and continued under Constantius (–).^28 Theresponsewasawaveof
pagan violence unleashed by the arrival on the throne of a self-professed and
militant pagan, Julian, in . Julian himself explicitly intended not to cre-
ate Christian martyrs. His pagan subjects, however, had other ideas and had
local scores to settle. To take only two examples, at Heliopolis in Phoeni-
cia a Christian deacon, Cyrillus, had taken part in the smashing of idols as
early as the reign of Constantine; when Julian came to the throne the local
pagans killed and disembowelled him.^29 Then, under Constantius, at Are-
thusa in Syria the bishop Mark went about the conversion of pagans ‘‘with
more spirit than caution’’ and destroyed a magnificent temple; under Julian
he was publicly tortured, thrown into a sewer, and tossed in the air, to land
on the upturned styluses of the local pagan schoolboys.^30
The main significance of this very clear evidence for underlying com-
munal-religious tensions for the position of Judaism is its relevance to similar
conflicts in the period of overt Christian militancy in the s and after, of
which more below. But it should be noted that Ambrose of Milan, in his
famous Letter of (one of the prime testimonies to the Christian anti-
Jewish militancy of that period) claims that under Julian not only pagans but
also Jews had been active in destroying Christian churches:
And to be sure if I were to talk in terms of the law of peoples [iure gen-
tium] I would say how many basilicas of the Church the Jews burned. Jerome,Life of Hilarion.
. The evidence is collected by G. Fowden, ‘‘Bishops and Temples in the Eastern Roman
Empire,’’JThSt (): .
. See the important paper by Barnes (n. ).
. Theodoret,Church History, .
. Sozomenus,Church History, .