This chapter sets out a taxonomy of late ancient approaches to Christian political service. Historians of the Christianization of the Roman world have tended to take at face value the (oft-repeated) contemporary assertion that a traditional public career was irreconcilable with Christian piety and the true form of service: militia Christi. Yet as ch. 4 shows, this was just one of many ways in which late ancient observers thought through the compatibility (or otherwise) of officeholding and Christian commitment. Drawing inspiration from recent work which has read between the lines of ascetic texts to reconstruct the character of a more moderate ‘respectable’ Christianity, this chapter delineates the ways in which Christian officials could reconcile their careers and religious identities. Through this holistic account, I argue that there were numerous ways for individual officeholders to be presented, perceived—and indeed, to understand themselves—as virtuous political actors, according both to traditional Roman political assumptions, and to the more distinctly Christian norms which appropriated, problematised, and reframed them in late antiquity.

This chapter treats a selection of divine responses to impiety recorded in historiography, oratory, and letters from the late Republic. Considering influential claims for the stability of certain theological tenets regarding divine justice, the chapter examines the question of how and when gods punish individuals rather than communities. In this period, formulaic calls for the gods to punish the guilty individual rather than the state became weaponized. Although such utterances conformed superficially to normative theology, they undermined the traditional perception of the gods as concerned primarily with the welfare of the community as a whole, and as reacting to impiety in a consistent manner. The period of the late Republic thus sees the emergence of perceptions of the gods as being less predictable, stable, or moral than in the traditional scholarly view.

The notion of belief is often seen as central to Christianity, whilst ancient religions have been seen as ritualistic in nature. This chapter casts doubt on that dichotomy, by analysing how Roman writing on religion, as well as early Christian texts (exemplified in Augustine) rely on a shared set of assumptions about what religion was. This went back to philosophical expectations about the coherence between religious practice and theology, which Christianity, at least as argued by Augustine, achieved better than Greco-Roman religions. In their own perception, Christians and pagans parted ways not on matters of the conceptualisation of the divine but on that of which deity one had to worship.

This conclusion brings together the main arguments of the book regarding Christian expectations of officials in the fifth and sixth centuries. It draws these together to suggest a holistic picture of late and post-Roman service aristocracies whose practices and self-representation were shaped, in part, by the demands of Christian commitment. It recapitulates the two central strands of argument in the book. Some officials sought to present—and likely understood—their role in governance as linked to their exceptional fulfilment of such requirements on members of the church: church attendance and patronage, adherence to orthodoxy, morality, and even asceticism. At the same time, the changing culture of late ancient political institutions meant that (almost) all those who served imperial and post-imperial regimes were subject to distinctly Christian expectations: from rulers, superiors, colleagues, churchmen, holy people, and—last but not least—their subjects. It concludes by suggesting that the survey conducted here should not be the end of this line of inquiry. The implication of this book is that the peculiar character of the Christianity envisaged and practiced within late ancient states should be the subject of further study.

This chapter approaches the archaic philosopher-poet Xenophanes of Colophon both as a distinctive religious agent and as an instructive interpreter of traditional religious attitudes and practices. Xenophanes develops a category of belief (dokos) and employs it not only to express the status of his own theological and cosmological views but also to conceptualise traditional, panhellenic religious attitudes as a cohesive system of beliefs. This system of beliefs comprises the interrelated and mutually reinforcing views that the gods are fundamentally human-like in biological, physical, cognitive, behavioural, moral, and political respects. The chapter explores Xenophanes’ critique of the different aspects of this system of beliefs, as well as the sources and grounds that underpin it. Finally, the chapter considers how Xenophanes closely relates expectations for veracity, propriety, and socio-political benefit in a way that suggests a requirement for harmony between religious belief and practice and, therefore, a conception of religious practice as theologically loaded. In the final analysis, Xenophanes teaches the modern student of Greek religion that a Greek thinker of the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE had the conceptual and expressive resources to articulate a conception of traditional, panhellenic religious attitudes as, at bottom, a system of beliefs.

This chapter examines a selection of ‘confession inscriptions’ from Asia Minor. These inscriptions attest to a religious hermeneutic or diagnostic practice through which individuals sought to discover which past transgression might have been the cause of divine punishment in the form of a present illness. Even a small childhood incident could set in motion a train of events leading to illness and even death. In retrospect, the initial event needed to be pinpointed: only then could one take part in the ‘juridical procedure’ in which one could atone for one’s transgression and be forgiven by the god(s). The conception of illness in terms of a divinatory sign attests to individuals’ ‘omen-mindedness’, a term denoting a perpetual state of receptiveness to possible supernatural signs. Omen-mindedness implies a set of beliefs in and about the gods. These inscriptions preserve individual accounts of a person’s intimate relationship with the divine – the belief that the gods punished when angered and were forgiving when an individual made amends. The seriously ill interacted with their gods to find a cure; those who were successful recorded the process and thus reveal the character and depth of their belief and the important part of it that was omen-mindedness.

Chapter 1 considers the evolving significance of a putative ideal of religious uniformity for the makeup of political institutions in late antiquity. It suggests that we have the chronology of the Christianisation of late ancient bureaucracies back to front. It was only when those elites became predominantly Christian that religious uniformity within the state became a feasible goal for individual regimes. In that sense, for the Christianisation of the Roman state, the conversion of the Roman aristocracy only represents the beginning of the story. This chapter thus pursues the question of religious uniformity further into late antiquity, by considering the developing understanding of what was required to ensure an appropriately (orthodox) Christian state in the fifth and sixth centuries. It argues that requirements for (orthodox) Christian administrators were not simply an axiomatic assumption of late (and post-)Roman regimes, but a product of shifts in institutional norms and wider cultural assumptions across the fourth to sixth centuries.

Part III of this book reconstructs expectations of official churchgoing and entanglements with churchmen and Christian institutions in select political environments across the fifth and sixth centuries. Ch. 6 pursues this problem in the best attested of these: the Eastern imperial capital of Constantinople. It begins by charting norms of imperial religious observance. Eastern emperors seem to have attended public churches at major festivals and special occasions. Various reports suggest that when the emperor went to church, those who served them (and the senatorial aristocracy as a collective) were supposed to go too. Within these politics of church attendance, the bishop of Constantinople represents a surprisingly peripheral figure. Although some courtiers and bureaucrats were regular attendees at Hagia Sophia, they seem to have kept themselves at a critical distance from the bishop’s pastoral authority. As with other members of the Constantinopolitan elite, many imperial officials focused their Christian identities on activities within their own households, whether these were dynastic commemorations, building projects, patronage arrangements for clerics, monastic start-ups, or their own ascetic practices. This chapter shows how the religious practices and affiliations of these ‘over-mighty congregants’ were also shaped by the corporate Christianity of the imperial palace, consistory, and Senate.

This chapter examines the ancient school fable as an introductory exercise in fiction. I argue that Imperial educators framed fables (especially animal fables) as paradoxically overt fictions that nonetheless model real-world hierarchies and social behavior. Drawing on Greek and Latin rhetorical treatises, such as Quintilian and the progymnasmata, I show that school fables were designed to teach students how to decode enigmatic speech, distinguish credible from incredible fiction, and conform rhetorical speech to “natural” character types. But verse fabulists like Phaedrus and Babrius weaponize this pedagogy, challenging the premise that fiction can be safely decoded. Through close readings of fables like “The Wolf and the Lamb” and “The Lion in Love,” I show how the verse fabulists subvert the educational aims of the fable, reconfiguring it as a vehicle for disillusionment rather than instruction. In doing so, they reveal the fragility of pedagogical ideals in the face of rhetorical deception. The chapter thus situates the school fable at the intersection of fiction, power, and reader competence in the Roman world.