himself to determine which dissenting opinions were or were not acceptable within
the Christian community. Religion in the ancient world had always been a local affair,
and at the end of the fourth century, it was the bishop who took the lead concerning
such matters in local contexts.
The growing authority of the bishop over local and urban religious matters was
also the direct result of the gradual abandonment of the western empire in the fifth
century by the eastern emperors. As the bishop became, increasingly, the sole advo-
cate for the city in the face of attack, the possibilities for religious dissent were increas-
ingly limited. What had once been accepted as civic and traditional, like the festival
of the Lupercalia, was denied validity by late fifth-century Christian bishops who desired
to secure their authority in the western empire. In the east, too, the need to unify
the populusbehind the bishop and the emperor undercut any positive views of a reli-
gious koinethat was anything other than imperial Christianity, even as such unity
simultaneously destroyed traditional tolerance for religious dissent. One could say
the Middle Ages had begun.FURTHER READINGFor a deeper understanding of the role of individual fourth-century emperors in shaping
religious koineand religious dissent, a reader should look at the works devoted to individual
emperors. For Constantine, see especially Drake (2000). For the impact of the emperors Julian
through Theodosius II on fourth-century religiosity, a good introduction is to be found
in Fowden (1998). The essays in Athanassiadi and Frede (1999) shed much light on this
particular component of the religious koine. For further reading on funerary rituals and tomb
monuments of pagans and Christians, see Jon Davies (1999), and for more on the church’s
attitudes in particular, see Rebillard (2003a). On religious koinein the fourth century as reflected
in pagan festivals and Christian attitudes to these, see Markus (1990) and Salzman (1990).
On the role of the bishop, see Rapp (2005).
Religious Koineand Religious Dissent 125