Prior to 3 January AD 250 the imperial approach to religion was live and let live, pax Romana in action. By and large the central government permitted provinces to keep their religions unless things got ugly.
On 3 January, an edict issued by the Emperor Decius came into effect. He ordered everyone in the empire except Jews to take what we would call a loyalty oath.
Why the Jews were omitted is not entirely clear. Judaism had often but certainly not always benefitted from an idiosyncratic approach. Anyway, by this stage in Roman history it had been described as the empire’s only religio licita or approved religion.
As for all other religions, the effect of the oath was that everyone had to go before the local magistrate, to make a sacrifice to their gods, and to get a libellus or certificate.
One well known example from Egypt says:
To the commission chosen to superintend the sacrifices. From Aurelia Ammonous, daughter of Mystus, of the Moeris quarter, priestess of the god Petesouchos, the great, the mighty, the immortal, and priestess of the gods in the Moeris quarter. I have sacrificed to the gods all my life, and now again, in accordance with the decree and in your presence, I have made sacrifice, and poured a libation, and partaken of the sacred victims. I request you to certify this below.
A number of Christians including Pope Fabian refused to comply. He was killed later in the month.
Neither the text of the Edict nor its reasoning survives.
There are two schools of thought.
The first, favoured by Christians, is that Decius being challenged by Christianity instituted the first empire-wide persecution of it. In aid, some Christian scholars have long asserted that Philip the Arab whom Decius had usurped and killed was the first Christian emperor.
The second is that Decius wanted calm. Rome was still coming off its own millennium conspiracy theories – the event having been celebrated a couple of years before – and still settling down after Decius’s usurpation. In aid, these scholars point among other things to the actual words of the above libellus: the person making the certificate was herself a priest of a pagan cult and no mention of Christianity is had.
Whichever school is correct, the underlying theme is a transition from the local to the universal.
For Decius, gods were local things and Caesar trumped gods. The most politically astute way to have his subjects reach the required conclusion that each premise depended on the other was by having each of them acknowledge by a libellus Caesar’s power to issue the edict.
For Christians, there were no local gods and God trumped Caesar. The most effective way to assert the result was by declining to certify any conclusion at all.
And whichever school is correct, there is Constantine’s conversion of self and empire to Christianity a mere 60 or so years later. I wonder whether that master statesman considered the Decian experience with a view to modifying both means and goal: if Caesar asserted that there was but one God, then surely the priesthood of that God had a vested interest in maintaining the earthly rule of that Caesar?
