interpreting this as a signal of implied approval of Christianity:
later in his reign Aurelian also resorted to persecution of the
Christians, showing that imperial attitudes towards Christianity
could be ambivalent. Indeed, detailed understanding of Chris-
tianity did not necessarily imply approval. In the years leading up
to Diocletian’s persecution, for instance, the philosopher Porphyry
penned a detailed rebuttal of the Christian faith based on a
thorough knowledge of both the Old Testament and the New.
Variations in the attitudes of the imperial authorities, and
even of individual emperors, could be matched by the behaviour
of Christian communities. In the mid-250s, when Gothic pirates
sailed across the Black Sea and ravaged areas of Cappadocia and
Pontus in Asia Minor, it seems that they received some assis-
tance from local Christians. Such actions might well have been
regarded as treachery by pagans. At the time, it also drew a
stinging rebuke from the Christian bishop of the Cappadocian city
of Neocaesarea, Gregory Thaumaturgus (the ‘Wonder Worker’).
In his Canonical Letter, which set down prescriptions for the
behaviour of Christians on a number of matters, Gregory con-
demned those who had assisted the barbarians and called on them
to repent (Heather and Matthews 1991: 1–12).
Such instances of imperial and ecclesiastical conduct
remind us that the history of early Christianity in the Roman
world is not one that can be reduced to a simplistic narrative of
an ‘age of persecutions’. The imperial authorities and pagans in
general could be by turns tolerant or hostile, but there is no easy
formula by which such activities can be explained. Two instances
from the archaeological record are suggestive of the curious
relationship between emerging Christianity and the culture that
surrounded it. At some date in the early third century, the Chris-
tians of Dura Europos, a city on the empire’s eastern frontier,
adapted a building for use as a church. The renovations were quite
substantial: two rooms were knocked together to form a meeting
hall; another was provided with a baptismal font and decorated
with frescos showing scenes from the New Testament. More-
over, the Christians were not the only inhabitants of Dura to be
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