EPILOGUE 785
put on the robes of a Christian prelate and preached to the high clergy. Igno-
rant of Greek, he wrote his sermons in Latin and had them translated into
Greek words written in the Latin alphabet, so he could preach his sermons in
Greek to his audiences. Nevertheless, Constantine held together Rome and
Constantinople as the twin pillars of the empire. With a Latin-speaking em-
peror in Byzantium, the West and East, Rome and Greece, were at last one, po-
litically and religiously—at least for a while.
With Christianity now the state religion of the Roman Empire, there
seemed a chance for religious and political stability in Christendom. The
Christians were no longer persecuted by Rome. Rather, a new theocracy set
out to combat heretics within the empire, and the war against the gnostics was
waged from the top. The long campaign was only partially successful. Hel-
lenism was in tatters, the marble Roman gods of the pantheons crushed, and
the parent religion Judaism disenfranchised and insignificant, but the faith
was still caught up in doctrinal struggles. The foremost enemy remained the
great gnostic heresy. The gnostics in Alexandria were early on fiercely perse-
cuted by a church tolerated by Rome. When the Roman Empire under Con-
stantine became both the political as well as the religious master of the ancient
world, the destruction of the "acosmic heresy" seemed to be nearly total.
Christian clerics burned the writings of the heretics. The light people buried
many scrolls of their scripture, which in at least one Egyptian site, at Nag
Hammadi, was to be discovered sixteen hundred years later. The gnostics
themselves were killed or hounded out of one place but would appear else-
where, even in Constantinople nearly a thousand years later as the Slav Bo-
gomils, and gnostic speculation would outlast the Roman Empire, the Eastern
Roman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire.
A few gnostic texts survived, quoted at length in the diatribes of their ac-
cusers. But though Alexandria, North Africa, and Syria ceased being gnostic
centers, the religion of light persisted in other areas, mainly remote ones: in
western China, in pockets of Mesopotamia, and in the Balkans and south-
western Europe until well into the fifteenth century. But after repression by
early Catholic heresy hunters and a Persian king, by later crusaders and in-
quisitors in France and Italy, and finally by conquering Mongol and Turkish
armies, their light was put out and their dominion of influence a memory.^22
- In about 276 the Persian king Shapur I, at the behest of Zoroastrian clerics who felt threat-
ened by the rise of Mani and the Manichaean gnostics, had Mani tried and executed. Yet some
villages of Mandaeans survive even today in remote areas of Iran and Iraq.