The best analysis of the numbers of bishops who represented both sides at the Conference of Carthage in 411, and of the total number of dioceses that each church had in Africa in the first decades of the fifth century, has been provided by Lancel. The treatment of the same subject here is offered as an exposition and extension of his data, with a few minor modifications and additions. The record of the conference, however, is only a partial guide to the numbers of bishops and bishoprics in Africa at the time: it only records the count of the bishops who happened to be alive, healthy, and able to make it to the conference site at Carthage. It cannot therefore be taken to be a complete report that would permit the reconstruction of distribution maps that neatly contrast “Donatist” as opposed to Catholic sees. Quite apart from the problem of the not insignificant number of dioceses whose location is not even approximately known and which therefore cannot be put on any map, there is the persistent problem of the existence of an opposing religious community that is simply not mentioned in the record. It is difficult to believe, for example, that there was no Catholic community whatsoever at Lepcis Magna, Sabratha, and Oea, especially since we know from Augustine's letters that, as we would expect, they did in fact exist. There were simply good reasons why Catholic bishops from these places did not make it to Carthage in May and June of 411. Secondly, there are many cases where there might not exist an bishop from the opposing side present in Carthage, but where the internal record of the conference proceedings attests the existence of an opposing community, often headed by a priest in the absence of a bishop who was ill, recently deceased, or otherwise not able to be declared at Carthage. Then again, it was occasionally the case that a recent act of “betrayal” suddenly left no head for one of the two communities to declare their presence at Carthage. The existence of a sole declarant in such a case surely does not mean that there did not exist a Catholic or dissident community in the town. When all these factors are taken into account, the actual number of cases where neither church had any representation in any given African community is appreciably reduced. The map then looks rather different from the conventional ones that signal the presence (or not) of bishops at the meeting of 411.

If violence and hatred were as ordinary and as old as Africa itself, they were now urged along in new modes by the novel figure of the Christian preacher. The preacher's sermon is one of those mundane things that is so ordinary in our experience that its invention and impact has often flown beneath the level of our attention. In communicating a mass of new ideas, the Christian sermon had no precursor or equal. Nothing like it had existed. It had to be created. The need for the new vehicle was considerable since in the mass popular communications of the time there was necessarily a constant interplay between the written text, the iconic picture, and the spoken word. There were numerous ways in which these different media could be connected and negotiated, but it was usually assumed that they would somehow be linked. In a world where most persons were illiterate, it was everyday knowledge that there would have to be a constant transcription of the fixed written text, through various channels of oral transmission, to listeners. It was at the critical juncture between the Holy Scriptures of the faith on the one hand and their transmission and interpretation to large numbers on the other that the figure of the preacher was situated.

To succeed, the preacher had to be an attentive listener, carefully attuned to his audience. It must have been a difficult task in some cases, with an audience so varied and complex in its makeup. In the case of the rules or canons decided upon by African church councils, for instance, it was assumed that the main audience for the decisions would be listeners who would acquire knowledge of the new rules by hearing them. Despite other types of teaching, preaching was the main means by which such important things were to be heard. In speaking of the ways in which the behavior of widows and widowers might be controlled, Gratus, the Catholic Primate of Africa in the mid-350s, remarked that the rules governing these vulnerable women and men were enforced within the Christian community “by unrelenting preaching and by constant verbal warnings.” The powerful impact of sermons ran deeper than any text. Even imperial laws had to be proclaimed. No matter how widely distributed and publicly posted, and occasionally read aloud on market days, they were still written texts whose base was the transcribed form. The Christian sermon was a far more effective means of bridging the running space between written and oral. Even when based on written texts, the whole aim of the sermon was focussed on oral delivery. In his letter to the imperial official Bonifatius in 417, Augustine remarked that the sermons of Catholic preachers were trying to persuade in the same manner as imperial laws were trying to convince. The sermons, both Catholic and dissident, were achieving this persuasion in a fundamentally different manner.

Migration patterns have been shaping the geopolitics of the Mediterranean for centuries. New populations bring with them their customs and their skills, their languages and their religions. Many factors have an effect on the type of relationship that develops between the newcomers and the original inhabitants and on the cultural transfers that may occur in both directions. Ancient historians have investigated the impact of most of the relevant factors: power relations, cultural and socio-economic differences, and technological achievements. But the impact of immigrants in these various domains is of course also very much dependent on the size of their group as compared to that of the total population. The fundamental need for the quantification of immigrant population shares, however, is often neglected in ancient history because of the scarcity of the sources. This chapter tries to fill part of this gap by focusing on a group of immigrants that has been considered particularly important in Hellenistic history: the Greeks who migrated to Egypt in the late fourth and third centuries bc.

Populations in the past behaved in diverse ways in terms of fertility, mortality and migration – the key elements of demographic dynamics. There are many variables which influence these dynamics, including environment and epidemiology, economic activity, urbanisation, reproductive decision making and war. These variables are socio-economically and culturally specific, and are therefore likely to impact differently on populations across time and place. Population historians of most periods in European history have long acknowledged such specificity and diversity in population dynamics and behaviour; in fact, established models that suggest ‘regional’ patterns of demographic behaviour and fail to take diversity into account have recently been challenged with data from a range of populations. Similarly, the notion that all pre-modern populations can be grouped together and be seen to behave in the same way as one another is no longer tenable. Accordingly, ancient historians must view the populations of the Graeco-Roman world against the backdrop of their environmental, socio-economic and cultural diversity. The populations of the areas discussed in this volume – Athens, Rome, the metropolises and villages of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, and the rural and coastal demes in Attica – all existed within specific contexts determining, at least in part, the variables shaping their population dynamics. For this reason we cannot categorise the range of populations of the Graeco-Roman world along with all pre-modern European populations, nor can we see them as making up one distinct and homogeneous category of their own. On the other hand, there are lots of commonalities between the populations of the ancient, pre-modern and more recent past. The value of comparative research on population lies in establishing what these common relationships are, and the ways in which an understanding of one population in its particular context can help to develop a fuller picture of another. For the ancient historian, for instance, a study on population in early modern England can suggest not only the differences but also the similarities in the ways in which individuals, families and populations influence and respond to social and economic change.

After following a long and sometimes contradictory path, Augustine was finally to condemn the taking of one's own life as an absolute sin, an inexpiable crime against God. Born at Mondovi, a village only some 12 miles south of Augustine's Hippo Regius, Albert Camus began his Le mythe de Sisyphe with the declaration:

But Camus’ suicide was very different from Augustine's. For Camus, suicide is provoked, ultimately, by a growing sense of the absurdity of existence. He construed a typical scenario as follows. The stage props of a person's life are present on each ordinary day: “Get up, catch the train, four hours at the office or workshop, dinner, streetcar, four more hours of work, eat, sleep, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, according to the same rhythm. This path is easily followed most of the time. Only, one day, a ‘why’ arises.” A process of the disintegration of the familiar stage-sets of one's life begins, life becomes a stranger to the one living it, and all normal meaning drains from existence.

This is the pathology of one type of self-killing – a peculiar kind of modern despair. But it is not my suicide problem. Nor was it Augustine's. Camus, who wrote his master's dissertation at the University of Algiers on Augustine and Plotinus, examined by no less a figure than Louis Gernet, knew this too. His novel La mort heureuse – A Happy Death – shows that he was alert to these differences, indeed opposites, between his world and that of Augustine – the contrast with the latter's De beata vita. Perhaps because of this awareness, Camus appended a footnote to his text, admitting that his problem of suicide was, after all, historically contingent: “We will not miss the opportunity,” he says, “to note the specific character of this essay. Suicide can in fact be linked to more honorable considerations. One example: political suicides of protest.” It is precisely this type of suicide, relegated by Camus to a footnote, that is our concern here: a kind of honorable self-killing that was motivated not by a sense of “the absurd” or by the meaninglessness of existence, but rather by the precise opposite. It was a self-inflicted death that was interpreted as full of meaning and one that embraced life, indeed a better one without end.

Locked inside the world of the Christian texts of the later empire, a reader can easily lapse into the assumption that Christians and their affairs defined and dominated the world in which they lived. From a Christian perspective, there were good grounds for this happy view. They now lived in a Christian state in which they formed a growing part of the whole population. Regions in Africa populated mainly by non-Christian peoples were limited to its “barbarian” peripheries: the marchlands to the south along the edge of the Sahara and, even more so, the mountainous highlands of the Mauretanias to the west. Even so, there were still large and important groups of non-Christians – “pagans” as they had come to be called by Christians – in every town and rural landscape in the heartlands of its most Roman regions. As Christian bishops never tired of reminding these hostile others in their midst, sometimes in a threatening language, the emperors were now Christian. But the impression of a Christian domination of society at large that is suggested by their writings is certainly misleading. Although the imperial state was Christian in the sense that the emperors and the imperial family, as well as significant numbers of appointees to high offices, were Christian, the rulers of the state were driven mainly by a secular agenda and by terrestrial concerns. Emperors, even Christian ones, were primarily concerned with the proper regulation of society, with the revenues of the state, with stabilizing the material and ideological basis of their power, and with the exercise of armed force. As in any other age, imperial rule in Late Antiquity often required the use of brute physical power – the massed deployment of the armament of the state against both external “barbarian” threats and internal enemies.

Outside the realm of the imperial court and its officialdom, matters were sometimes different – certainly in Africa. An important social stratum in which traditional non-Christian values predominated was that of the highly cultured notables, the ruling classes of the numerous towns and cities that made up the urban mosaic of local government in the African provinces of the empire. Beyond the confines of the municipal elites, these power networks included local nobles and wealthy grandees on their rural domains outside the cities. The men who made up the curial class – the men who were the town councilors or decurions in the colonies and municipalities – were wedded to a traditional high culture of classical learning. Undergirding it was a professional network of education that was firmly grounded in the complex written codes and spoken discourses of Roman social elites. While it is true that this civic culture was religious because it was seamlessly integrated with a polytheistic world of gods, in practice it was secular in the sense that the pre-Christian social world was firmly anchored in basic and unquestioned assumptions of multiplicity and difference. It is no surprise that in the formal public inscriptions set up by municipal councils in post-Constantinian Christian Africa the Christian religion is simply not mentioned; it is a make-believe as if world in which Christians, along with their manifold divisions and disputes, simply do not exist. All of this official public writing “reveals a universe that was worldly, profane, and, as we would say today, secular.” It was its own self-contained world in which daily behavior and decisions were not subject to the dictates of the monist religious ideologies of the masses.

The history of the ancient family has focused principally on two central questions: how can we classify the structure and formation of the ancient family within a historical framework, and what were the obligations of its members towards one another within that structure? For the first of these questions the issue is one of continuity, or otherwise, from family forms in pre-modern populations through to modern, western European populations; this is an issue of precisely when and where what we now refer to as the nuclear family came into existence. The appearance of the nuclear family in European history is tied to the theory of a European demographic transition: a widespread fertility decline associated with industrialisation, which was in large part a consequence of the tendencies of married couples to delay marriage and/or to consciously limit their family size through means of birth control. This theory, though widely criticised for its inability to explain the socio-economic and cultural aspects of human reproductive behaviour, is one that remains central to many studies of family formation. Yet research has suggested that a number of historical populations for which demographic data are abundant deviated significantly from the patterns this theory predicts.

Should we care about the size of the population of classical Athens? And if so, why? To what extent can we quantify it, and how best should we attempt such quantification? In this chapter I consider both some influential answers to those questions that have been provided by ancient historians in the past, and some reasons for questioning and rethinking those answers.

Most fundamentally: should we care? Some historians at least would answer quite positively ‘yes’, for basically two reasons. First, we are interested in classical Athens today partly, even principally, because of its dēmokratia. How we understand the operation of Athens’ political institutions depends to an extent on how many citizens there were. If, for example, an ‘average’ meeting of the assembly had an attendance of about 5,000, what proportion of the total citizen body was that? If it was only possible to serve twice on the boule, how many citizens would have experience of working in this important body in their lifetimes, and so how knowledgeable and experienced might those assembly-goers be? Second, population size is obviously relevant to discussions of the Athenian grain trade, where a key issue of debate has been the extent to which Athens had (or did not have) a structural need for imported food because it had more people than its own agricultural resources could support. While there is some intrinsic interest in this question it has fairly obvious wider implications for the development of economic institutions in Athens, for the interconnectivity of the Greek world (and beyond), for Athens’ external relations and foreign policy, and for its internal politics.

A primordial evil lay at the base of the conflict: an act of betrayal. And no one doubts that deep perfidy generates irreconcilable hatred. Betrayal moves and it paralyzes. It was not for any trivial offense that Dante placed Brutus and Cassius, along with Judas Iscariot, in the ninth circle of Hell, freezing on eternal ice, being ripped apart by the maws of Satan himself. It was for the sin of betrayal. And the betrayal at the heart of the sectarian conflict in Africa was not a personal betrayal of the usual kind. The betrayal was permanently branded by the handing over or traditio of the Holy Scriptures, the Words of God Himself, to secular authorities by Christian collaborators during the Great Persecution of 303–05. The history of this betrayal was incessantly asserted and denied, extended and elaborated by both dissidents and Catholics. It called out for explanatory storytelling, and a lot of it. The traitors, the traditores, were at the heart of their mutual hatreds and fears. The universal conviction was that certain detestable men had betrayed God Himself. In handing over His holy words to earthly officials to be destroyed, they deserved their notorious status as agents of the Devil and of the Antichrist. But real ambiguities about who precisely had done what meant that no one could let the question fade or slip from knowledge or from endless debate.

The act of faithlessness was meditated upon and condemned by the dissident Christians. They felt that their enemies were not just personal sectarian foes: they were the betrayers of God's words, traitors to his divine laws. The acts of betrayal were a common currency. They became a creative seedbed, causing a new community to come into existence whose members identified themselves as “not them,” not the traitors. In the eyes of dissident Christians in the age of Augustine, their Catholic enemies were genetically descended from the original collaborators. They had inherited the primal sin. And no one, not even the sometimes innovative Augustine, doubted the African conviction that primal sin was inherited – passed down from one generation of sinners to the next. He himself was made to face his inheritance. At the great conference at Carthage in 411, the dissident bishop Petilian from Constantina verbally challenged him: “Who are you? Are you a son [sc. of that traitor] Caecilian or aren't you?” “Was Caecilian your daddy, or your mommy?” Petilian then goaded, to which Augustine replied “He's my brother.” Which only provoked the acidic counter from Petilian: “The person who procreates children is not a brother.” The answer, to Petilian, was manifest. All the talk about kinship was because the great sin was inherited, and to show who had acquired it. On these grounds, the Catholics were not just any congregation of bad Christians. They were a segregated and polluted church of traitors. This much was stated frankly in the programmatic statement about “who we are” enunciated before the conference of Carthage by the belligerent dissident bishop of Arusuliana who bore the wonderful name Habetdeum (“He-Hath-God”). Habetdeum read aloud a statement on behalf of “the bishops of Catholic Truth: the church which is suffering persecution – not the one that is conducting it.” In it, the collected dissident bishops stated bluntly: “Our adversaries are traitors and they are our persecutors.” Habetdeum's statement advanced to link the Catholics closely with the arch-traitor Judas, going so far as to say that Judas was their patron, the one whose example they were following.

The bishops who directed the affairs of each church presented themselves in public by drawing on images from humble figures of daily life. Among the Christian decorative motifs found on the utility oil lamps that provided household lighting is one such image. It is the picture of a man perched on a platform high up in a tree overlooking a grain field or an orchard. The figure is one drawn from everyday experience. He was the guardian of the cereal crops, the custos fructuum, or he was the watchman of the vineyard high up in his speculatorium vinitoris. This image of the good guardian was often evoked by bishops. In his abortive debate with Emeritus, the dissident bishop of Caesarea, Augustine defined who a bishop was: he was a man chosen by the people to lead them. Like the Lord himself, the bishop is stationed in a high lookout where he can see everything, high over the vineyards to guard the harvest. The elevated image of the lookout could be linked to the title of episcopus given to the bishop, which literally meant someone who oversees the welfare of others. In considering the term, Augustine explains:

The theme is elaborated again and again whenever the duties and the powers of a bishop are considered: he is a watchman, a guardian, and a lookout who protects his people and warns them about the dangers that threaten them.

The pace and the order in which events occurred that led to the emperor Constantine's intervention in the affairs of the African church, and the ensuing permanent division in the Christian community in Africa, are matters of dispute. The differences can be outlined briefly. Traditionally, a “compressed” chronology has been preferred. The compressed chronology places most of the significant causal steps close in time to the emperor Constantine's involvement in the dispute that led to the separation of the two churches. This chronology compacts the events leading to the division within the church in Africa into the years between 311 and 313. By contrast, others have argued for a “long” chronology that spreads these events out over a greater span of time, in some cases to years well before the time of Constantine's intervention. The long chronology is clearly to be preferred. In fact, I shall argue for a slightly longer chronology than that proposed by some revisionists. Here are the facts.

events at carthage before and during the persecution of 303–305

We might begin with a brief mise-en-scène. Events involving Mensurius, the bishop of Carthage, just before and during the years of the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian in 303–05, are essential to an understanding of the sordid infighting that erupted within the church immediately after the end of the persecution. Of the many events, there is one that is central to what happened afterwards. It involved three actors: Mensurius, the bishop of Carthage, an old trusted woman who was a parishioner of the church, and, finally, the powerful body of Elders or seniores. The church of Carthage possessed not only many landed properties and buildings, but also valuable chattels in the form of thesaurized wealth, including a large number of objects in gold and silver. As the persecution began, it was Mensurius’ reasonable fear that the authorities would begin to seize church property, not just taking copies of scriptures or seizing its fixed assets in churches and basilicas.

Who are you? The question had been at the center of the crisis in African Christianity, as bishops and priests, deacons and lay persons, landowners and tenants, fishermen and money-changers, craftsmen and civil servants, and itinerant gangs of young men and women mobilized the full panoply of memory, knowledge, and emotion that guided their actions as Christians. As the partisans of each side exerted themselves to enforce their communal identities, specific types of violent acts were excited at the peripheries of the struggle, creating more particulars of the world in which they lived. But given the plurality of identities from which an individual might choose or have activated in a given situation, being Christian was only one. And certain elements of identity were more permanent and powerful than others; some of the most important, like language, were fixed at a very early age. Identity, in itself, is not an adequate approach to the problem. In the sectarian confrontations of the long fourth century, the reported incidents of violence rarely, if ever, emerged from identity alone. There were the additional, and necessary, elements of the mobilizing powers and capacities of large formal organizations like the Roman state and its armed forces, municipal councils and law courts, local and provincial church hierarchies, and the patronal resources of large landowners.

What is more, in disputing and defining their individual and collective identities, the Christian dissidents and Catholics behaved in certain ways, but mostly in stable normal day-to-day relations, only occasionally breaking into episodes of violence against each other. All of these behaviors, including the violent acts, were a game played according to certain rules. The elaborate conventions depended on the continued existence of a complex set of social behaviors and institutions which required deliberation, constant attention, and energy to keep in place. Then, suddenly, almost everything in this set of social regulations was irrevocably changed by a massive armed incursion. In the spring of 429 – or was it 428? – a large war band, whose leadership and ethnic core were composed mainly of Germanic Vandals, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from southern Spain into the isolated remnant of Roman rule in the far west of Africa around the town of Tingi. Gaining a foothold in north Africa through its vulnerable back door, they began making their way eastward in fits of plundering and killing that forever changed the economic, social, political, administrative, and religious face of lands that had been among the most important provinces of the Roman empire.

The Council of the Catholic Church held at Carthage under the aegis of Gratus, the bishop of Carthage and primate of Africa, has been variously dated to years between 345 and 348. Cross and Crespin, indeed, have argued for a date as early as 345. A rather different construction of the date has been proffered that rejects the corrected reading of “Constanti” for “Constantio” in the manuscripts, which would therefore open the possibility of a date after Constans in the reign of Constantius.

1. The acts of the conference refer to current acts of the emperor Constans; therefore the latest possible date is 349. Because of the pragmatic reason of Constans’ death in January of 350, that year is ruled out. Therefore, one of the years between 345 and 349.

2. Importantly, the first words of the council that are recorded attribute the move to unity and the dispatch of the emissaries Paul and Macarius to the emperor Constans: “qui imperavit religiosissimo Constantio [corr: Constanti] imperatori, ut votum gereret unitatis et mitteret ministros operis sancti, famulos Dei Paulum et Macarium.”

3. In Canon 5 of the proceedings of the conference, Gratus mentions an earlier decision that had been taken at the Council of Serdica: “Gratus episcopus dixit: Haec observata res pacem custodit; nam et memini sanctissimi concilii Sardicensis similiter statutum ut nemo alterius plebis hominem sibi usurpet…” (CCL 149: 6). The Council of Serdica most probably took place in the late summer or autumn of 343 (see Appendix E). This is of little help in dating our conference, however, since, despite repeated claims to the contrary, Gratus does not indicate how long before the conference of Carthage the Council of Serdica took place. He merely refers to it as antecedent and no more.

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