1.1 Patronage and Preference: Religious Affiliation and Office-Holding from Diocletian to Theodosius I

The last years of the third century and the first of the fourth saw a pronounced shift in the religious policies of Diocletian (r. 284–305).Footnote ³ A series of episodes and enactments document a turn towards efforts at uniformity to restore the favour of the gods towards the empire. One aspect of this new-found embrace of coercion was the exclusion of nonconformists within the palace and imperial service more broadly. The first attested indication of a hardening of attitudes towards Christians comes with reports regarding the failure of acts of prophecy at the imperial court at Antioch in 299. In the account of Lactantius, the inability of haruspices to interpret the entrails of sacrificial animals in the presence of Diocletian and his caesar Galerius (r. 293–311) was understood to result from Christian courtiers crossing themselves at a key juncture. Diocletian ordered all his palace attendants to sacrifice or be flogged and sent letters telling military commanders to do the same with their subordinates.Footnote ⁴ Concern for conformity amongst those in imperial service likewise featured in the anti-Manichaean edict that the emperor promulgated either in 297 or 302. As part of a series of enactments designed to tackle a sect perceived as ‘Persian’ (and thus, dangerously ‘foreign’), office-holders (qui … honorati aut cuiuslibet dignitatis) and other elite people who converted to Manichaeism were to be condemned to the mines and have their property confiscated.Footnote ⁵ The next spring, seemingly at the urging of Galerius, Diocletian promulgated the first of a series of systematic anti-Christian edicts, which set in motion the events known to posterity as the Great Persecution. While the major targets of enforcement were bishops, clerics, and the communal property to which they had access, the removal of ‘all honour and dignity’ from Christians was once again a central provision.Footnote ⁶ The exclusion of nonconformists from the palace, army, and civil administration was a critical part of the Tetrarchic push for religious uniformity.

These laws and episodes of enforcement neatly encapsulate why late ancient emperors might prefer to be served by co-religionists and seek to exclude those with views incompatible with their sense of the social contract between humans and the divine. The effective performance of correct cultic practices was central to the good order of the empire.Footnote ⁷ As the failure of the haruspices at Antioch vividly demonstrates, it was seen as all the more crucial that those serving the state contributed to such observances. The repeated references to the insanity of Manichaeans and Christians in Tetrarchic legislation underscore that the religious affiliations of office-holders could also be seen as a reflection of their character. As Galerius noted in a tolerance edict made just before his death in 311, the point of the original laws had been to recall Christians to ‘a sound frame of mind’ (bonas mentes).Footnote ⁸ The irrational impiety of Christians both harmed the well-being of the state and called into question their competence. Such rationales would continue to feature when Christian regimes excluded those who disagreed with the ruler’s chosen understanding of and relationship with the divine.Footnote ⁹

A desire to appoint co-religionists could be seen as a commonsensical part of late ancient political culture. Yet no law remotely comparable to Diocletian’s ban on Christians in imperial service survives until the reign of Theodosius I. Given the make-up of the empire’s service aristocracy in the fourth century and the turmoil set in train by the Great Persecution, it is perhaps unsurprising that Christian emperors took so long to imitate their Tetrarchic predecessors.Footnote ¹⁰ In the absence of a specific legal framework establishing the necessity of officials practising or avoiding particular forms of observance, such concerns as we can see were expressed in terms of individual emperors’ preferences.Footnote ¹¹ The degree to which religious affiliation mattered to Christian emperors in their appointments was, of course, the central question of the prosopographical studies of Raban Von Haehling, Timothy Barnes, and Michele Salzman.Footnote ¹² All three argued (to differing degrees) that Christian emperors were far from upholding a theoretical ideal of Christian uniformity in practice. What is perhaps more surprising is the absence of evidence for these emperors even expressing such abstract preferences for co-religionists as their subordinates.Footnote ¹³ This is not to suggest that such affiliations were irrelevant to appointments in this period but rather that religious uniformity does not seem to have been a goal. Insofar as contemporaries thought being Christian mattered under Christian emperors, it was seen an issue of individual advantage and ambition as opposed to systematic policy.

Only two emperors between Diocletian and Theodosius are recorded making such choices in a programmatic manner: Constantine and Julian.Footnote ¹⁴ In the Life of Constantine, Eusebius of Caesarea portrayed his protagonist taking this approach after the defeat of Licinius (r. 308–24) at Chrysopolis in 324 CE. Amongst various measures to support Christian communities and discourage traditional cultic practice, Eusebius highlighted Constantine’s appointment of Christian governors and prefects and his attempt to regulate the forms of religious behaviour practised by pagan appointees.

Unlike many of Eusebius’ sweeping pronouncements regarding the measures of the first Christian emperor, his assertion regarding the appointment of Christians can be substantiated: the majority of Constantine’s known office-holders in the later 320s and 330s were Christians.Footnote ¹⁶ Constantine’s supposed ban on sacrifice remains a subject of considerable debate. Its prohibition for prefects and governors has generally been seen as the most plausible part of Eusebius’ account, given the routine involvement of office-holders in traditional cult and the use of requirements to sacrifice to exclude Christians from the public sphere during the Great Persecution.Footnote ¹⁷ Constantine’s measures facilitated Christian political service and set the terms upon which pagans could take office without seeking further uniformity.

The next emperor who is explicitly reported to have adopted such a policy is Julian. Eusebius’ fifth-century correctors and continuators, Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret suggest that those who served in civil administration and the army were required to sacrifice and that Julian did not permit Christians to be governors because of their moral qualms regarding execution.Footnote ¹⁸ Various scholars have reconstructed how, as part of their efforts to portray Julian as a persecutor – if a devious one – all four ecclesiastical historians mislead regarding the character of the emperor’s policies.Footnote ¹⁹ As opposed to concrete legal enactments regarding the church and Christians, Julian seems to have circulated general statements of his views and made vague calls to action, so as to encourage autonomous decisions on the part of his agents and subjects.Footnote ²⁰ Rather than requiring sacrifice, Julian seems to have encouraged it, while conducting political business in settings that posed dilemmas for the unwilling.Footnote ²¹ Contemporary evidence for the emperor’s approach to appointments again suggests general and informal indications of his preferences. In a letter of 362 to Atarbius, the governor of Euphratensis, Julian expressed that ‘god-fearing’ men and cities should be preferred to the ‘Galileans’.Footnote ²² In the second of the orations that cemented Julian’s reputation amongst late ancient Christians, Gregory of Nazianzus similarly suggested that ‘there was one choice to gain office’ (mia psēphos ēn eis archēn) during his reign.Footnote ²³ These indications of potentially preferential treatment map onto what is known about Julian’s appointments to high office. Those appointees whose religious affiliations are identifiable are almost exclusively pagans.Footnote ²⁴

Of course, the absence of even qualified statements of intent from Constantine II (r. 337–40), Constans (r. 337–50), Constantius II (r. 337–61), Jovian (r. 363–4), Valens, Valentinian I (r. 364–75), Gratian or Valentinian II (r. 375–92) may be, in part, the result of accidents of survival and, in particular, the choices made by the compilers of the Theodosian Code.Footnote ²⁵ The paucity and extreme brevity of mid-fourth-century constitutions in section 16.10 ‘on pagans, temples, and sacrifices’ – and indeed, the absence of any such constitutions in section 16.5 ‘on heretics’ – should give pause.Footnote ²⁶ These omissions include measures as fundamental as, for example, Gratian’s laws of 382 removing the Altar of Victory from the Senate House and dismantling the funding mechanisms for public cults in the city of Rome.Footnote ²⁷ It is possible that the original versions of prohibitions regarding ‘superstitious’ sacrifice – and indeed, other laws that are simply not preserved – contained clauses aimed at the emperor’s subordinates.Footnote ²⁸ All that can be said is that when we can see (contextual) articulations of the fundamental dependence of the Roman state on correct (Christian) religion, a connection is not made to that state’s personnel.Footnote ²⁹

It does not seem a coincidence that preferences for co-religionists are associated solely with Constantine and Julian. Both emperors were, after all, seeking to reverse course by promoting practices, institutions, and communities that had been at best tolerated by their predecessors. Effective implementation of these religious policies required the active co-operation of officials at court and in the provinces, which was less likely forthcoming from those who did not share the emperor’s religious leanings. As a result, it is easy to see how each regime would feel the need actively to reshape political institutions whose personnel had been influenced by emperors who supported cult practices and institutions that they saw as harmful to the state.Footnote ³⁰ Certainly, this is the context in which Eusebius and his fifth-century successors set Constantine’s choice: as a signal break with the (persecutory) past of his imperial predecessors and a new beginning for the church in the Greek East. Against the breathless write-ups of Sozomen and (especially) Theodoret,Footnote ³¹ Constantine’s appointment of Christians may, in the first place, simply have returned the Eastern court to its situation before Licinius’ measures to exclude Christians from imperial service c. 323–24.Footnote ³² Such direct intervention was not required from most members of the Constantinian and Valentinianic dynasties, wherever we choose to place them on spectra of more or less active support for the church and tolerance for non-Christians.Footnote ³³ As already noted, the emperor often played only a limited role in this process, rubberstamping recommendations provided by his agents and subjects; further down the imperial hierarchy, the probability of his direct influence (of course) rapidly shrunk.Footnote ³⁴ Outside of moments of deliberate course correction,Footnote ³⁵ emperors may not have felt the need to intervene personally in the mechanisms of appointment.

Part of why fourth-century regimes rarely advertised the appointment of Christians as such may be the lack of official duties that would have specifically required the distinct expertise or sensitivities of Christians. This is (ironically) best demonstrated by the difficulties that modern scholars have found in identifying official acts from which to backform the religious affiliations of specific office-holders. Particular pious Christian individuals – as, too, their pagan counterparts – can be seen to bring their understanding of the nature of the divine to their agency within the state, using the latitude afforded them to shape and interpret policy.Footnote ³⁶ Yet few aspects of imperial administration in the middle decades of the fourth century seem to have specifically required an official to be Christian. Bishops were the chosen religious experts of fourth-century emperors (as they would continue to be throughout late antiquity);Footnote ³⁷ the formulation and implementation of religious policies was not infrequently outsourced to them (provoking accusations of inappropriate proximity to power).Footnote ³⁸ Provincial governors occasionally received laws prohibiting specific pagan practices, and in particular blood sacrifice, but recent work has stressed the lack of a centralised drive to enforce such rulings.Footnote ³⁹ Of course, we can already see under the Constantinian and Valentinianic dynasties one of the long-term implications of Constantine’s conversion: that is, the entanglement of the imperial state and its representatives with Christian communities, institutions, and disputes. But even those imperial directives that involved dealings with representatives of the institutional church – such as the carrying of letters to bishops or the building of a church – did not always necessitate a particular religious affiliation on the part of the emperor’s agent.Footnote ⁴⁰ Those that might require a Christian, like the resolution of complex doctrinal disputes, were normally the preserve of specially appointed commissioners.Footnote ⁴¹ Given the lack of imperial attendance at public episcopal churches before the 370s, those who did not share the emperor’s mind could perhaps stay under the radar at court.Footnote ⁴² This is not to say that particular appointments cannot plausibly be associated with an intentional choice based on the specific religious affiliation of the recipient, but they are more easily identified for those that went against the emperor’s own beliefs. Wider patterns have been isolated in the appointment of pagans to high office along with likely causes: the demands of areas that retained substantial pagan populations; a need to conciliate and reward the notoriously conservative elements in the senatorial aristocracy at Rome; even, counter-intuitively, the utility of pagan governors when dealing with the violent doctrinal disputes within the church of Alexandria.Footnote ⁴³ Yet again, these rationales are rarely stated by contemporary observers. More than that, in the absence of an identifiable impact on the formulation or implementation of imperial policy, the significance of an individual’s publicly attested reverence for the gods is effectively a proxy for qualities and social connections that were not intrinsic to their religious affiliation.

Surviving texts present few explicit statements suggesting a regime’s requirement of, or even preference for, co-religionists as officials. Instead, contemporary observers generally saw the potential impact of the emperor’s religious policies and publicly stated sentiments in a more diffuse way. The significance of religious affiliation for office-holding was characterised in terms of the possibility of individual advancement. A series of fourth-century commentators critiqued contemporaries for their insincere conformity.Footnote ⁴⁴ Eusebius suggested many had ‘slipped into the church’ in the last years of Constantine’s reign to signal their loyalty. The emperor’s generous (naïve?) nature meant he did not inquire too closely; individuals of poor character were rewarded.Footnote ⁴⁵ In his commentary on Psalm 118 (from c. 386–390), Ambrose conjured a scenario of a man coming to church, ‘while pursuing office under Christian emperors’ (dum honorem affectat sub imperatoribus christianis) and paying outward (but not inward) obeisance to God.Footnote ⁴⁶ The bishop’s contemporary, Symmachus, noted in a letter (c. 360–84) that ‘now to desert the altars is, for Romans, a kind of careerism (genus ambiendi)’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Gregory of Nazianzus suggested that the reverse was the case under Julian.Footnote ⁴⁸ Addressing Jovian on the occasion of his consulship on 1 January 364, Themistius portrayed this phenomenon as the result of the chopping and changing of imperial religious policy over the previous decades. In his praise of the new emperor’s policy of religious toleration, the orator bemoaned a mindset he diagnosed as a direct result of the implementation of fourth-century emperors’ proscriptive (but often short-lived) cultic policies on their subjects. ‘Now all men are turncoats … the same people are seen at votive altars and sacrifices, at shrines of the gods and altars of God.’Footnote ⁴⁹ It should be noted that three (and plausibly four) of these authors were writing under or regarding emperors with attested preferences for co-religionists (Constantine, Julian, and Theodosius).Footnote ⁵⁰ It is likely that such conformism was seen to convey advantages in the context of other mid-fourth-century regimes who were keen (like Diocletian and Galerius) to signal their dependence on the gods (or God), and to stress the significance of religious uniformity in preserving the unity and stability of the empire.Footnote ⁵¹ It is nonetheless significant that this religious adherence was understood as a strategy for individual advancement as opposed to a necessary response. In that sense, it was one of many forms of careerism – to steal Symmachus’ phrase – which some elite men deployed to attain the honour of imperial service (and others could deplore or disdain).

1.2 Regulating Religious Behaviour: The Theodosian Turn

The absence of any broad or systematic preference for Christian officials maps onto the wider picture of ad hoc and partial efforts by mid-fourth-century regimes to advance Christianising agendas.Footnote ⁵² The reign of Theodosius I has often been seen to mark a sharp break from these conciliatory approaches.Footnote ⁵³ Such evaluations have stemmed from various aspects of his regime’s conduct: a new-found concern to define orthodoxy in Roman law and to proscribe specific named heretical groups; detailed laws against pagan practice in the early 390s; the enthusiastic actions of its more zealous representatives above and beyond the terms of those laws; and, above all, the perception of a pagan ‘last stand’ under Eugenius (r. 392–94) defeated at the Frigidus in September 394.Footnote ⁵⁴ The aftermath of this defeat has sometimes been seen as the moment when the western senatorial aristocracy became definitively Christian.Footnote ⁵⁵ Certainly, there was a perception among early fifth-century Christians that Theodosius had sought the conversion of Roman senators after Eugenius’ defeat and advanced the careers of those who did so. In the City of God, Augustine praises Theodosius’ mercy towards the sons of Eugenius’ supporters when they sought asylum. ‘He wanted them to become Christians on account of this pretext and, loving them with Christian charity, he did not deprive them of their property, and increased their honours.’Footnote ⁵⁶ The Christian poet and polemicist Prudentius – in his Against Symmachus, written in 402 – similarly has his ‘Theodosius’ exhort the (personified) city of Rome as a whole to convert after Eugenius’ defeat; the poet then traces the enthusiastic response of the old families of the Senate.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is perhaps in response to such claims that the pagan historian Zosimus, writing a century later, constructed a (most likely) fictitious meeting between Theodosius and the Senate in Rome in 394, where the emperor ‘addressed it, calling on the senators to cast off their previous error, as he called it, and choose the Christian faith’. In Zosimus’ version, ‘no-one obeyed his summons or chose to abandon those ancestral rites handed down to them since the founding of the city’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Recent work has rightly deflated the triumphalism of contemporary Christian observers and delineated a more minimalist account of the intentions and impact of Theodosius’ broader policies and individual enactments.Footnote ⁵⁹ These revisionist accounts rest, in part, on the appointments made by his regime, which continued long-term trends of including conservative members of the senatorial elite within the most restricted circles of government.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this context, the reports of Augustine and Prudentius most likely have a more limited frame of reference. As Alan Cameron has persuasively argued, Augustine seems to capture a specific policy towards the relatives of Eugenius’ senior officials in the difficult transition after his failed coup.Footnote ⁶¹ It is likewise noteworthy that Prudentius has the emperor explicitly permit those of the (cartoonishly) pagan senators of Rome who decided not to convert to attain the ‘highest offices’ (summos honores).Footnote ⁶² Nevertheless, that Theodosius seems to have expressed a preference for Christian subordinates, even in this limited regard, remains significant. Whatever its actual practical impact on the personnel of the state or the makeup of the senatorial aristocracy, Theodosius’ reign does represent a major shift in its public communication of the significance of the religious loyalties of office-holders. The emperor’s enactments betray the beginnings of a concern to regulate the religious behaviour of subordinates, both for its own sake and for its bearing on the effective implementation of his laws on correct religion.

Critical to revisionist accounts of Theodosius’ religious policies has been the realisation that the main targets of his prohibitions of religious non-conformity were not his subjects in general, but rather his appointees, and the service aristocracy from which they were drawn. In 391–92, Theodosius’ regime set out a series of increasingly detailed laws against sacrifice and other ‘pagan’ practices. These laws have often been characterised as ‘comprehensive’ anti-pagan legislation. Yet, even in the (most likely) expurgated summaries of the Theodosian Code, the focus of their drafters’ attention seems to be this aristocracy (in general) and provincial governors and their staffs (in particular).Footnote ⁶³ Edicts directed to the urban prefect of Rome in February 391 and the comes Aegypti in June of the same year singled out iudices as individuals who should be fined (6/4lb and 15lb of gold, respectively) for entering temples to perform (unspecified) acts of religious observance; their staffs should receive the same punishment for covering their backs.Footnote ⁶⁴ This scrutiny of the actions of governors and staffs was extended in a further law of 8 November 392, which added a fine of 30lb of gold for a failure to act on reports of pagan veneration, whether they resulted from corruption or laxity. This latter law has a much greater claim to a universal force, as set out by the rhetorical flourish with which it opens.

The drafter of this law clearly sought to stress that it applied to all the emperor’s subjects.Footnote ⁶⁶ Nevertheless, it seems revealing that he chose to single out individuals of rank and authority to illustrate that universal applicability and to harp on the manner in which aristocratic birth and current or former imperial office might otherwise help them escape justice. This listing of various qualifications for social clout might, again, point to the real focus of its attention. Such a concern was more directly expressed in a law from May/June of the previous year, categorised in the section ‘On Apostates’ in the Theodosian Code. Theodosius removed ‘any conferred splendour’ or ‘inherited dignity’ from ‘those who have deviated from the faith and … have deserted the cult and worship of sacrosanct religion, and have given themselves over to sacrifices’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This law plausibly stemmed from one or more cases of elite individuals who had outwardly presented as Christians (however sincerely) but had been accused of performing some form of pagan veneration.Footnote ⁶⁸ If Theodosius’ regime pushed for clearer prohibitions of specific aspects of traditional Roman religious practices, it was motivated (in the first place) by a new-found concern to regulate the religious behaviour of his subordinates.

The more stringent anti-heretical legislation produced earlier in Theodosius’ reign does not have the same salience for those who served the state. This is understandable given the usual context of its production: requests from bishops and ecclesiastical factions seeking rulings through which to establish their own legitimacy as Catholic or orthodox Christians as against rival clerics and communities.Footnote ⁶⁹ The unnamed individuals who were the subjects of these laws against named groups were thus less likely to be imperial office-holders. Theodosius’s reign nevertheless provides the first extant law that specifically targets heretics amongst the emperor’s subordinates. This edict was promulgated in Milan in May 389 but directed to Tatianus, the praetorian prefect of the East, in reference to the court at Constantinople.Footnote ⁷⁰ The expurgated summary in the Code deprives ‘Eunomian eunuchs’ of the right to make or receive wills. If a later report from Philostorgius is to be believed, it should be tied to a purge of a group of Eunomians within the imperial bedchamber.Footnote ⁷¹ Theodosius’ laws against specific heresies had a greater impact on the personnel of the state in their reception by his successors: both as a direct response to the precedents he had handed down and as a result of the wider processes of Christian legal disputation that they set in train.

1.3 Exclusion and Enforcement: Law and Religious Uniformity after Theodosius I

In the months after the death of Theodosius in January 395 and the accession of his son Arcadius to the Eastern throne, the new regime promulgated a series of enactments on questions of correct religion. These laws summarised and reissued his father’s anti-heretical (and especially anti-Eunomian) legislation, while ordering more stringent application of his ban on forms of cult practice in public temples.Footnote ⁷² The latter enactment focused once more on the role of governors and their staffs in conniving at such pagan observance and prescribed (reduplicated) fines as punishment.Footnote ⁷³ By collating and strengthening these measures, Arcadius’ regime set the tone for the policing of correct religion under the Theodosian dynasty. The summaries of the Theodosian Code show how these central concerns recurred in numerous constitutions across the first half of the fifth century.Footnote ⁷⁴ Theodosius I’s legislation on religious uniformity provided a model for the anti-pagan, anti-heretical, anti-Jewish, and anti-Samaritan laws of his sons, Arcadius and Honorius, and his grandsons, Theodosius II and Valentinian III. As Arcadius’ order to his magister officiorum to root out heretics in his palace should suggest, these regimes also policed the religious affiliations of their office-holders at a more fundamental level. These laws did not just ban serving officials from (for example) pagan sacrifice but from being pagans, heretics, Jews, or Samaritans. Of course, these edicts flattened, and encouraged contemporaries to misrepresent, the actual affiliations, beliefs, and practices of those officials caught up in their implementation.Footnote ⁷⁵ Provisions to exclude nonconformists may sometimes have stemmed from incidents involving specific office-holders; the exceptionally terse summaries of the Code mean that such concrete scenarios often have to remain in the realm of the hypothetical.Footnote ⁷⁶ They also became part of a standard package of measures put in place whenever a regime was required to take action against members of a group that they considered not to be (orthodox) Christians.Footnote ⁷⁷ The presence of the emperor’s co-religionists within the state thus moved from being an indirect result of his preferences to a necessity for order within state and empire and potentially enforceable in practice (if only in specific and piecemeal terms).

At various moments, Theodosius I’s successors felt the need to issue laws excluding members of specified groups from the state.Footnote ⁷⁸ These laws were sometimes framed in terms of general bans from imperial service: of Eunomians and ‘heretics’ in general in the East (13 March 395, 24 November 395);Footnote ⁷⁹ of ‘enemies of the Catholic sect’ from the western imperial court (14 November 408);Footnote ⁸⁰ of Priscillianists and Montanists from Eastern imperial service (21 February 410);Footnote ⁸¹ of pagans from the Eastern court or administration or governorships (7 December 415/16);Footnote ⁸² of Jews in the West (issued to the praetorian prefect of Italy, 10 March 418);Footnote ⁸³ of heretics, pagans and Jews in the West (issued to the praetorian prefect of Gaul, 9 July/6 August 425);Footnote ⁸⁴ of heretics in general in the East (30 May 428);Footnote ⁸⁵ of Jews and Samaritans in the East (31 January 438);Footnote ⁸⁶ of Manichaeans in the West (issued to the praetorian prefect of Italy, 19 June 445).Footnote ⁸⁷ These laws frequently make an exception for forms of compulsory service, whether in the army or on gubernatorial office staffs: this was the case for a series of enactments addressed to praetorian prefects of the East regarding Priscillianists and Montanists (21 February 410); Eunomians (8 August 423); heretics in general (30 May 428); Jews and Samaritans (31 January 438); and Eutychians and Apollinarians (18 July 452).Footnote ⁸⁸ These laws also sometimes highlight specific offices as the site of prohibition. Such precision could have various causes: the case that provoked the emperor’s ruling, a proliferation of members of a specific group in a particular branch of the bureaucracy, the closure of an earlier exemption, or simply because the copy of a broader law preserved in the Theodosian Code was addressed to the high official with authority over those individuals. Jews and Samaritans were excluded from the role of defensor ciuitatis in the East in a law of 31 January 438; their general ban from entering western imperial service from 10 March 418 allowed current agentes in rebus and palatini to serve out their terms.Footnote ⁸⁹ This time-limited exemption likely stemmed from the agency of current Jewish officials in Ravenna.Footnote ⁹⁰ These laws could also single out for punishment those who had allowed the relevant individuals to enter into, and continue in, imperial service.Footnote ⁹¹ Whatever the specific details on a particular occasion, the overarching intent of these laws is clear. The regimes of Arcadius, Honorius, Theodosius II, and Valentinian III sought repeatedly to exclude those who were not Catholic Christians from participation at any level of the civil administration above that of office staffs or legal advisers.

It should be stressed from the outset that we cannot simply ‘read across’ from these laws to the consistent policies or attitudes of the emperors who promulgated them. These enactments may have portrayed religious uniformity as an ongoing, systematic problem on multiple fronts, but that does not mean that early fifth-century regimes consistently saw it in that way. To amalgamate their provisions is potentially misleading, at least before they were assembled and published in their current form in the Theodosian Code and the Novels that followed it. Recent work on late Roman law has stressed that imperial pronouncements need to be seen in the context of inciting incidents, petitions from subjects and/or requests from officials, and specific (and perhaps time-limited) goals for and contexts of application. Even once these enactments were ‘on the books’ as general laws, their applicability at any given moment would have been subject to specific conditions of enforcement.Footnote ⁹² In this context, what is presented in the surviving summaries as a general rule may simply have been used to remove a single ‘offender’. Of course, these laws could outlive that original function: ongoing discussions of the precise provisions attached to individual groups show how legal experts at court and elsewhere could refer back to previous enactments.Footnote ⁹³ Several laws regarding the exclusion of pagan, Jewish, or heretical officials preserved in the Theodosian Code were intended to clarify that certain posts were exempt from previous prohibitions. In some cases, the clear implication is that one of the emperor’s subordinates had sought guidance on whom they could appoint – or should remove – in a particular case.Footnote ⁹⁴ Still, where these original contexts are recoverable, they generally suggest a much greater contingency and fungibility than the more starkly expressed measures imply. So, for example, the so-called comprehensive ban on sacrifice of November 392 may simply have been a ‘blunt and brutal weapon’ designed by the praetorian prefect Rufinus to get rid of Tatianus, his rival and predecessor as praetorian prefect, and never actually intended for wider application.Footnote ⁹⁵ On a number of occasions, imperial lawgivers justified their new issues on the basis of recent complacency in the enforcement of pre-existing directives.Footnote ⁹⁶ Indeed, many of the laws that (in their preserved form) call for the prohibition of future appointments or removal of previous appointees are programmatic enactments made on the first legal pronouncement against a particular heresy, at the start of a particular emperor’s reign, or at a similarly symbolic moment like the promulgation of the Code itself. These were particular moments requiring a demonstration from the new broom that they intended to clear out religious dissidents who had previously been allowed to clutter up the imperial state.Footnote ⁹⁷ The repeated recourse of drafters to the language of renewed vigour accords well with extant references to episodic ‘purges’ of palace and provincial administration.Footnote ⁹⁸

These laws do not imply that fifth-century regimes were consistently concerned with, or practically effective at, ensuring uniformity within their state. They cannot be used to reconstruct a putative global view of who could or could not be appointed to imperial office at a given time. They were often originally intended as responses to specific problems and formulated in contexts where strict action against heterodoxy was deemed necessary. In that sense, they are better seen, not as the reflection of an inflexible requirement for the appointment of orthodox Christians, but rather as the expression of a particular set of attitudes that were invoked on occasions where the exclusion or punishment of religious nonconformists was seen as necessary. Collating them remains revealing, insofar as their specific provisions and (where it is preserved) their broader rhetorical framing are marked by the attitudes that shaped how regimes responded to the religious affiliations of their subordinates.Footnote ⁹⁹ These recurring stances and legal principles were worked out in dialogue with the officials and subjects who sought these rulings. The provisions and justifications that they present were a response to, and perhaps even sometimes a simple parroting of, the terms of those original requests.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Petitions were often themselves framed in terms that would appeal to the interests of the emperor and his close advisers. To take one well-documented example, African Caecilianist (‘Catholic’) bishops stressed the threat that their ‘Donatist’ rivals and their ‘Circumcellion’ allies posed to peace and order in the province.Footnote ¹⁰¹ These laws can thus be used to reconstruct how and why fifth-century regimes, officials, and subjects thought the religious affiliation of office-holders mattered.

That Theodosius’ successors began to prohibit certain religious affiliations as such demonstrates a major change in how these regimes conceived of religious plurality within the state. It suggests that adherents to traditional religion and members of Jewish communities were now seen as an inherent problem, overlaying and supplanting the distinct legal principles evident in previous legislation. Theodosius’ laws of the early 390s had banned cult practices and punished those who performed them (whatever their putative religious affiliation). While such prohibitions continued to be enacted, emperors from Theodosius II onwards also made laws regarding pagans as people, including efforts to exclude them from the state.Footnote ¹⁰² The novelty of this specific legal persona for adherents to traditional Roman religion contrasts sharply with the long-standing definition of Jews as a community with specific rights and privileges in Roman law. As Capucine Nemo-Pekelman has persuasively argued, this traditional sense of Judaism as ‘licit religion’ coexisted with a tendency visible from the reign of Constantine onwards to legislate against crimes specifically associated with Jews and to consider the Jewish identity of the accused as an aggravating factor in judgements.Footnote ¹⁰³ Notwithstanding repeated efforts to constrain the most zealous of the emperor’s Christian subjects, this marginalising interpretation became prevalent in the first decades of the fifth century. As Amnon Linder has noted, although Judaism is described as superstitio throughout this period, it is no longer called religio after 416.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Bans on Jewish officials from 418 onwards are thus best understood as the deployment of this strand of legislative thinking in a field of activity where more neutral approaches had previously prevailed. The location and prevalence of Jews in imperial service is unclear before these laws flag their presence in the lower ranks of the civil administration, but there is no reason to doubt that Jews sought such positions in proportion to their membership of civic and provincial elites.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Those accused of belonging to named heresies had, of course, previously been prosecuted and punished specifically for that reason, but only one report survives of action taken regarding heretics within the imperial administration itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As with the exclusion of pagans and Jews, the use of removal of imperial office as a standard punishment for heretics from the reigns of Theodosius II and Valentinian III represents a new-found attention to the religious affiliations of those who served the state.

This sense of heterodox officials as a basic problem owed much to a specific combination of traditional legal concepts and a Christian heresiological mindset, which began to shape imperial responses to problems of religious observance in the reigns of Theodosius I and his successors. Where bans on imperial service receive a specific gloss, they are situated within the measures developed by late fourth- and fifth-century legal experts to deal with those who did not adhere to true religion.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Alongside the closure of cult sites, confiscation of institutional property, and removal of priestly privileges, individual heretics, pagans, Jews, and Samaritans were deprived of their rights and privileges and isolated from the rest of society. Prohibitions of imperial service were part and parcel of these efforts to make Christian orthodoxy a precondition for the exercise of Roman citizenship. Legislators proceeded from the assumption that non-Christians and heretics represented a harmful presence that had to be removed from the state. Their banning from imperial service was sometimes paired with exile and expulsion from cities: the normative punishment for heretics who possessed some form of elite status or position of authority (at least until the moment of their conviction).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ A requirement to isolate non-Christians and heretics was also tied to the idea, present both in Roman legal thinking and Christian heresiology, that religious error was a form of pollution or disease.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ A connection to worries about ‘infection’ is most clearly articulated in a law issued by Theodosius II to his praetorian prefect of the East Florentius on 31 January 438. After a typically grandiloquent proem, the edict laid out a series of provisions regulating the activities of Jews and Samaritans in his empire, including the prohibition of service to the state.

The emperor’s quaestor Martyrius presented measures to prevent Jews and Samaritans from holding any civil office as a means of stemming the spread of the fatal and incurable malady of disbelief in the one true God.Footnote ¹¹¹ Bans on nonconformists in imperial service also reflected a sense that it was inherently wrong for the heterodox to receive such privileges. Caroline Humfress, Sarah Bond, and Robert Flierman and Els Rose (in particular) have traced the application of the status of infamia and the legal disabilities that went with it to heretics, pagans, and Jews.Footnote ¹¹² Such concerns had a particular valence for offices considered ‘honours and dignities’ in the traditional terms used by Martyrius.Footnote ¹¹³ Prohibitions of imperial service were representative of wider legal regimes against non-Christians and heretics and symbolic of their intent to reduce all these individuals to a status akin to criminals and other dishonourable people.

In aggregate, these measures suggest fundamental shifts in thinking about the policing of religious error and its significance for the state’s personnel. The increasingly generalising laws produced by Theodosius’ successors show a recurring tendency to group together all of those who were not orthodox Christians as proponents of religious error, which required the same forms of policing and deserved similar sorts of punishments. The imperial state conflated these forms of religious belief and practice as common ‘enemies of the Catholic sect’ and forms of ‘superstition’, despite their hugely differing observances, cultural traditions, and communal and institutional structures.Footnote ¹¹⁴ All of these groups were seen to require exclusion from imperial service. With this binary classification of people by their (fixed, stable, and straightforwardly definable) religious identities came a sense that those who did not subscribe to imperial orthodoxy were a problem within the state. A turn towards the policing of affiliations over specific acts or practices took the focus for the problem of heterodoxy away from a specific moment of transgression. By putting in place measures to prevent future appointments of heterodox individuals and to punish those who had allowed current officials to be employed, these laws backdated what was (presumably) a recently discovered offence to the moment a (supposed) pagan, Jew, Samaritan, or heretic entered imperial service. These laws made the entire careers of these appointees – and their mere presence within political institutions – an offence against imperial law and correct religious observance. The religious uniformity of the state, in the sense of a need to appoint co-religionists as office-holders, comes into focus as a problem at the turn of the fifth century.

The pattern set by the Theodosian dynasty would be taken up by their successors and continued to shape legislation on religious uniformity and the state for the next century. The laws of the dynasty began to act as precedents in themselves, especially once collected and published in the Theodosian Code. Later emperors could simply re-enact previous measures against now (supposedly) resurgent groups, as when Anastasius re-applied existing provisions against ‘Hellenes’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The legal principle could be extended to new heretical groups, as when Marcian (r. 450–57) banned Apollinarians and Eutychians (i.e. opponents of the Council of Chalcedon of 451) from imperial service in the East in 452 and 455, or the Vandal kings Geiseric (r. 428–77) and Huneric (r. 477–84) prohibited Homoousians (i.e. Nicene Christians) from their palace and administration.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In the edict of unity that he promulgated on 1 February 484, Huneric offered an explicit commentary on this aspect of the imperial anti-heretical legislation that he now intended to ‘turn around’ on the African Nicene Christians whom it had previously benefited.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The generalising approach of the Theodosian dynasty to religious deviance and the state was later appropriated by Justinian as part of his wider codification of earlier legislation. His regime produced a series of laws in the late 520s and early 530s, which offered systematic provisions on the exclusion of pagans, Jews, Samaritans, heretics, and Manichaeans.Footnote ¹¹⁸ These texts deployed the same framework and justifications for generalising prohibition while preserving earlier exemptions for compulsory service and some other low-level postings. This is not to suggest that such legislation was a necessary or constant recourse for problems of religious difference within political institutions in the wake of the Theodosian dynasty. The presence of fundamental doctrinal differences in both East and West led to a variety of other approaches (explored at greater length in Chapter 2). In some political environments, particular issues of religious diversity do not seem to have been treated as problems requiring legislation and exclusion. Yet on those occasions where a specific group was perceived to require exclusion from the palace and wider administration, fifth- and sixth-century regimes took a remarkably consistent legal approach modelled on the enactments of Theodosius and his successors.

1.4 ‘The Fear of God, the Law, and Ourselves’: Christianity as Requirement from Leo I to Justinian (and Beyond)

Late fifth- and sixth century Constantinople saw a further step change in the legal requirements regarding the religious beliefs and practices of officials. The legislation of the Theodosian dynasty shows an essentially reactive approach to non-conformity within the imperial state. These emperors sought to exclude heretics and non-Christians from office once they had been discovered, as well as ordering further investigations to root out other individuals disqualified by their heterodoxy. While it signalled that the original appointment was invalid, such an approach did not (at least explicitly) take steps to stop heretics, pagans, or Jews from entering imperial service in future. A series of laws preserved in the Justinianic Code show regimes from Leo I onwards implementing practical measures at the moment of appointment to certify that appointees to certain posts were orthodox.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The regime of Justinian sought to systematise these demands across the central and provincial administration while tying appointees to a decisively Christian understanding of their term of office. Notable ambiguities remain around the implementation and precise significance, both of the more specific provisions for oversight of appointments and of the more generalising providential framework of government.Footnote ¹²⁰ The impact of these laws – and of the institutional practices that they attested – can nevertheless be seen in the changing character of those individuals accused of crypto-paganism after 468. That even supposed ‘Hellenes’ were now baptised Christians who regularly attended church, founded martyr’s shrines, and consulted with bishops suggests a fundamental shift in expectations of imperial officials in the last decades of the fifth and the first decades of the sixth century. Those who pursued careers in imperial service were now expected to present themselves outwardly to the world as Christians.

A series of laws collated in the section of the Justinianic Code on the bishop’s court show emperors demanding that appointees be baptised. On 31 March 468, Leo I required that all advocates, whether in the court of the praetorian prefect, the courts of provincial governors, or any other court within the Eastern empire, should be ‘initiated into the sacrosanct mysteries of the Catholic religion’.Footnote ¹²¹ Whether already in post or merely seeking such appointments, unbaptised lawyers would forfeit them and receive ‘perpetual exile’. Provincial governors and the praetorian prefect’s office staffs were to be held responsible for such breaches: governors would lose half their property and be exiled for five years; the prefect’s bureau would be charged a collective fine of 100lb of gold. Although limited to the office of advocate, these provisions must be seen as significant for the staffing of the state as a whole given the importance of legal expertise as a route into the imperial administration.Footnote ¹²² Anastasius made the same requirement for those appointed to the post of defensor ciuitatis on 19 April 505. Once chosen by a group of electors including the city’s bishop, clergy, honorati, possessores, and curiales, the appointee was to swear an oath before the bishop that he had been ‘initiated into the sacrosanct mysteries of orthodox religion’.Footnote ¹²³ Justinian extended this requirement to all in imperial service in 527 or 528, now requiring three witnesses to go on record as to the orthodoxy of the appointee, before the head of the department in which they would serve.Footnote ¹²⁴ On 15 April 535, Justinian likewise ordered that gubernatorial appointees swear an (extended) oath at their initiation, including statements of their own orthodoxy and their vigilance on the behalf of correct Christian doctrine in office.Footnote ¹²⁵ If appointed in Constantinople, this oath was to be delivered before the emperor himself, or, if he was unavailable, before a group of the most significant officers of state. If appointed in the provinces, the oath would be sworn before the provincial capital’s bishop and leading men (primates).Footnote ¹²⁶ A requirement to establish the orthodox credentials of the emperor’s representatives became part of the wider routine of administrative business. In a passage of his On the Magistracies of the Roman State, John Lydus describes the process by which executors were chosen to carry out judgements made in the court of the praetorian prefect. John preserves a formula of appointment introduced under John the Cappadocian in the 530s to guard against corruption. Alongside prohibitions on public debts, direct descent from the individual who had brought the suit, and recent business in the province, the appointee was to swear an oath that they were ‘initiated into the divine mysteries of the orthodox faith’ (tēs orthodoxou pisteōs memuēmenos mystēriois): the same phraseology as the edicts of Leo and Anastasius.Footnote ¹²⁷ Employing orthodox Christians was now envisaged, not as an ideal to be achieved through the removal of nonconformists, but a basic starting point for an imperial career in Constantinople and the Eastern provinces.

All these laws departed from previously attested practice in seeking to ensure pre-emptively that the emperor’s appointees were orthodox Christians. Although the precise mechanisms that they envisaged differed, in each case responsibility was placed on those with direct or – in the case of the bishop and other notables in provincial cities – indirect administrative oversight over the appointee. It is, of course, possible that they simply codified in law practices that had already been adopted by some department heads keen to avoid punishments in the future.Footnote ¹²⁸ When Justin (r. 518–27) and Justinian (as co-rulers) sought to ensure the orthodoxy of their administrators in 527, they noted that this had previously been a requirement in certificates of appointment but one they claimed had been overlooked in recent times.Footnote ¹²⁹ As was the case for more targeted anti-heretical legislation, it is possible, at least in the case of the laws of Leo and Anastasius, that these systemic solutions were responses to specific incidents and requests. The harsh penalties envisaged in Leo’s prohibition of non-Christian advocates in March 468 may have stemmed from the high-profile case a year earlier in which the quaestor Isocasius was charged with paganism (at the emperor’s behest). That context might make sense of the law’s specific reference to weeding out unbaptised individuals in the courts of provincial governors and that of the praetorian prefect. Isocasius had originally been arraigned before the governor of Bithynia, before the case was transferred to the court of his erstwhile colleague, the praetorian prefect Pusaeus, who acquitted him.Footnote ¹³⁰ Likewise, Avshalom Laniado has persuasively set Anastasius’ edict in the context of petitions to court in the first decade of the sixth century regarding the precise electoral procedure for the appointment of a defensor ciuitatis. It is easy to imagine that a disputed election could have resulted in this particular clarification.Footnote ¹³¹ Even for these emperors, this basic requirement may have seemed more important at the moment of promulgation than at other times.

The impact of this step change in Christian expectations can nevertheless be seen in the discourse around official appointments in early sixth-century Constantinople. It is particularly obvious in the outward behaviour of those accused or convicted of ‘paganism’ after Isocasius. Swerving modern debates over the actual religious beliefs and identities of individuals like the praetorian prefects Phocas and John the Cappadocian, their attested practices suggest a higher bar for conformity in the age of Justinian.Footnote ¹³² Before he died by suicide in the context of a purge of pagans in the Constantinopolitan elite in 545/6, Phocas is recorded as funding the construction of a church at Pessinus in Galatia.Footnote ¹³³ Procopius, meanwhile, reports that John regularly attended nightly vigils at Christian shrines. The historian’s accusation of adherence to ‘Hellenic’ religion was rooted in the prefect’s supposed behaviour during these rituals, which included wearing the garb of a pagan priest and chanting curses aimed at maintaining his control over the emperor.Footnote ¹³⁴ A later purge of elite pagans in the East under Tiberius II (r. 574–82) in 579/80 pulled in both the bishop of Antioch and a provincial governor at Edessa who (apparently) sought to establish an alibi for attendance at a pagan feast by visiting the city’s bishop late at night to discuss the exegesis of a particular passage of Scripture.Footnote ¹³⁵ As in these cases, the legislation of Justinian and his successor Justin II (r. 565–78) show how anxieties continued over the actual sincerity of those who fulfilled these requirements for orthodox Christianity.Footnote ¹³⁶ That church donors, biblical exegetes, and regular attendees at Christian shrines might be accused of paganism says much for the level of outward conformity that was expected of those who pursued careers in imperial service.

Justinian’s measures to ensure orthodox Christian office-holders were also accompanied by a much more expansive legislative framing of the import of religious identity for imperial service. These laws suggested orthodox Christians were required, not only to ensure correct religion within the empire, but also correct administrative practice in general. This articulation of the centrality of a Christian cast of mind for ethical governance came as part of a series of laws that Justinian promulgated in 535–36.Footnote ¹³⁷ This reform legislation regulated aspects of bureaucratic procedure, defined the responsibilities of individual provincial governors, and made explicit what their subjects and, in particular, the bishop of the provincial capital and leading men of the province could expect from them. Justinian repeatedly stressed the three superior authorities that the governor had to keep in mind: God, the emperor, and the law. This trinity of higher powers is invoked to exhort governors to ensure justice and avoid corruption as, for example, in Novel 17 of 16 April 535, which presents a version of the imperial mandata, which they should receive on appointment.

Governors were to be mindful of God, emperor, and law when judging. ‘Office-holders who are refraining from all bribe-taking will not put anything else before the fear of God, the law and ourselves.’Footnote ¹³⁹ Such exhortations were paired with provisions that gave bishops an imperially sanctioned role in oversight of the governor’s behaviour.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Justinian’s laws on provincial governors have often been seen as part of a power struggle between centralising Christian emperor and traditionally minded Eastern senatorial aristocracy, as evidenced by treatises on political thought that avoided straightforward reference to Christianity and appear somewhat reserved in their references to the overarching authority of the Christian God.Footnote ¹⁴¹ This expansive framing of a Christian official morality, although (as far as can be ascertained) novel in imperial legislation, was a more banal facet of late ancient political culture than such accounts perhaps suggest. As I will discuss in Part II, various late fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-century Christian clerics and ascetics argued that office-holders could act like pious Christians by avoiding corruption and judging with an eye to their own, divine judge, and current officials applied such ideas to their own political agency.Footnote ¹⁴² The ‘totalising’ presence of Christian formation can also be overstated within reform legislation, which drew heavily on the archaic history of these provinces and in some cases simply presented a traditional picture of ethical governance.Footnote ¹⁴³ If the reign of Justinian was a ‘new era’ in terms of the religious demands made upon office-holders, it was more likely a result of the more systematic requirements for baptism discussed above, paired with periodically brutal purges of suspected pagans and Manichaeans.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Justinian’s laws of the mid-530s nevertheless marked a departure insofar as they defined the role of a Christian official in positive terms and not simply through the exclusion of heretics and non-Christians from the state. They moreover separated the necessity of a state staffed by orthodox Christians from the context of religious uniformity as a fundamental requirement for good governance in general.

Conclusion

Accounts of the Christianisation of the late Roman service aristocracy have generally focused on the period from Constantine to Theodosius I. Yet efforts by fourth-century emperors to push for the appointment of co-religionists appear only intermittently and exceptionally in surviving texts. The notion of a state staffed by adherents to true religion (whether Christian or pagan) was only rarely expressed. This absence contrasts starkly, both with Diocletian’s attempts during the Great Persecution to exclude those whose choice of cultic acts threatened the pax deorum, and with the proliferation of increasingly generalising laws excluding pagans, heretics, and Jews from imperial service in the fifth and sixth centuries. It jars with expectations of how self-consciously pious emperors would seek to stage their rule: perhaps part of the reason why later authors sought to retroject such intentions to emperors whose actual policies were much more complex.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Concerns regarding personnel seem to have been tied to contingent moments when religious uniformity aligned with or superseded other concerns. The presence of Christians within the state had seemed acceptable earlier in Diocletian’s reign, as it seems to have been for emperors since the Decian persecution.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The fundamental irony of (episodic) efforts to ensure such Christian uniformity in the fifth and sixth centuries is that they tend to provide our best evidence for religious diversity within the state and for its tacit acceptance by these regimes.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The absence of statements articulating an aspiration that the emperor be served only by his co-religionists underlines the extent to which, in the middle decades of fourth century, imperial measures to exclude prohibited groups and acts remained an occasional (and not particularly enthusiastic) recourse in response to specific requests. It is likely that the practical implications of elite religious pluralism dissuaded rulers from making such blanket pronouncements except when materially necessary.

Beginning with the sons of Theodosius, fifth- and sixth-century rulers did set out adherence to Christianity and orthodoxy within imperial service as an aspiration and, indeed, a necessity for good order within the empire. An orthodox Christian state doubtless seemed like a political possibility under the Theodosians in a way it had not under the Constantinian or Valentinianic dynasties. But this was not simply a self-evident aspiration deferred until its execution became feasible. The onset of attempts to ensure that political institutions were staffed exclusively by orthodox Christians form part of wider cultural shifts evident in the last decades of the fourth and first decades of the fifth century: the development of a concept of ‘religion’ as a ‘discrete category of human experience’,Footnote ¹⁴⁸ the imperial state’s increasing recourse to legal pronouncements to define and regulate correct religion, and (linked to both) the emergence of a basic assumption that the enjoyment of full Roman citizenship required adherence to correct Christianity. To put it a different way: only once regimes had joined contemporary heresiologists in dividing its subjects into religious communities – the orthodox or Catholic church as against its ‘enemies’ (most notably, heretics, Manichaeans, pagans, Jews, and Samaritans) – would it make sense to seek a Christian state by appointing ‘orthodox Christians’ and excluding members of the latter communities (as opposed to, say, banning those who were part of the imperial state from sacrificing to the gods or participating in Jewish festivals). This sense of religious affiliation as a systemic problem within imperial service also shows the influence of the increasing interest in legal collation and codification in the first decades of the fifth century, which encouraged drafters to imagine comprehensive solutions to generalised problems. The introduction of positive and pre-emptive requirements in the late fifth- and early sixth-century East plausibly stemmed from a similar combination of institutional and wider cultural change. Demands to prove orthodoxy at the moment of appointment seem like a natural development from punishments for department heads and colleagues for their complicity in the appointment of heterodox officials. These entry requirements also make sense amidst a societal shift towards adherence to Christianity as a default assumption, which shifted much of the focus of critiques of religious pluralism from the errors of outsiders to the defects of fellow Christians. While the pursuit of Christian uniformity within the state may have been latent in the decades after the conversion of Constantine, the form that such a pursuit took across the fifth and sixth centuries was a product of specific (and historically contingent) cultural shifts. It is through these changes that the appointment of orthodox Christians became part of the institutional culture of the state in late antiquity.

2.1 Sharing the Emperor’s Opinion: Christology and Appointments in the Eastern Roman Empire

On 30 March 428, the regime of Theodosius II issued an impressively comprehensive law against ‘the insanity of the heretics’.Footnote ² Theodosius’ drafter recapped previous measures against heresy and applied these to twenty-three sects; a reminder of prohibitions on imperial service topped and tailed the summary.Footnote ³ This encyclopaedic demonstration of the regime’s commitment to orthodoxy quickly went out of date, as the emperor’s recent pick for the bishop of Constantinople – who would later claim he had written this very law – became the subject of an empire-wide theological controversy.Footnote ⁴ Nestorius’ reluctance straightforwardly to adopt the term ‘Mother of God’ (Theotokos) as an epithet for the Virgin provoked a bitter dispute over the correct conception of the divine and human natures of Christ that would continue for centuries to come.Footnote ⁵ Attempted resolutions were central to the governance of the church in the Eastern Empire in this period. In the first place, Theodosius II’s regime tried the time-honoured strategy of an ecumenical council.Footnote ⁶ The emperor’s first go-round at Ephesus in 431 foundered on vague instructions and excessive trust in the capacity of an assembly of bishops to engage in open dialogue.Footnote ⁷ The attendees split into rival councils under Cyril of Alexandria (412–44) and Nestorius’ ally John of Antioch (429–41), which issued mutual anathemas and orders of deposition. As the pursuit of a resolution reverted back to imperial jurisdiction in discussions at Constantinople and Chalcedon, Nestorius chose retirement. The peace of the church was only salvaged by a new round of negotiations across 432–33, which resulted in the ‘Formula of Reunion’.Footnote ⁸ Both sides gave important ground: Cyril accepted an Eastern theological formula and most of the Easterners consented to Nestorius’ deposition. Nestorius himself would escape imperial sanction until the mid-430s, when the continued advocacy of his more avid supporters in Constantinople and the East required the formal condemnation and exile of the now heresiarch.Footnote ⁹ An uneasy peace held until a new round of controversy in 448 crystallised the basic theological conflict from then onwards.Footnote ¹⁰ The Formula of Reunion was pulled in one direction by Eastern bishops seeking a clearer statement of Christ as possessing two natures after the union and, in the other, by hardline supporters of Cyril pushing for the recognition of one nature (hence the modern scholarly terms ‘Dyophysite’ and ‘Miaphysite’). The next three years were marked by a series of dizzying U-turns. The condemnation of the archimandrite Eutyches at the Home Synod under Flavian of Constantinople (446–49) in November 448 – in part, for his refusal to recognise two natures after the union – was overturned the next year at the Second Council of Ephesus. In contrast to its previous ecumenical experiment, the regime of Theodosius II ensured that Ephesus II was tightly organised.Footnote ¹¹ The chairman Dioscorus of Alexandria (444–51) secured the condemnation and deposition of Flavian alongside the leading bishops of the East, much to the displeasure of Leo of Rome (who had his own version of the two natures) and the western imperial regime. The death of Theodosius II led to the accession of Marcian and an even more closely managed council to overturn the work of Ephesus II.Footnote ¹² A rotating team of current and ex-officials ran a series of assemblies in the autumn of 451 at Chalcedon, just across the Bosporus from the imperial palace. These senatorial chairmen helped to co-ordinate the condemnation of Eutyches and Dioscorus and the acceptance of a two-nature formula (predicated, in part, on Leo’s Tome), to the consternation of almost all the bishops present (who seemed to want anything but a new doctrinal statement). This combination of centralisation and coercion continued to mark Marcian’s ecclesiastical policy in the face of ongoing opposition to Chalcedon in the East.Footnote ¹³

The conflict that resulted between supporters and opponents of the council encouraged Marcian’s successors to seek new forms of compromise. The failure of consensus at Ephesus I (431), Ephesus II (449), and Chalcedon (451) – combined with an increasing sense amongst churchmen that their favoured council(s) represented the final word on the matter – resulted in a turn away from these meetings as an imperial strategy of dispute resolution.Footnote ¹⁴ Later fifth-century and early sixth-century emperors adopted even more centralised modes of doctrinal definition. Leo I (in 458), Basiliscus (twice in 476), and Zeno (in 482) circulated carefully worded position papers and invited the bishops under their authority to subscribe or lose their sees. The last of these documents (the Henotikon) sidestepped Chalcedon and thus sought to establish a broad consensus amongst moderate supporters and opponents of the council.Footnote ¹⁵ Although the Henotikon did not explicitly signal approbation or condemnation of the settlement of 451, it was increasingly interpreted in a Miaphysite or anti-Chalcedonian sense, especially in the last decade of the reign of Anastasius (r. 491–518). The Henotikon shaped the character of ecclesiastical politics in the East (and occasioned schism with the see of Rome) until the accession of Justin I in 518.Footnote ¹⁶ The new emperor pursued an ecclesiastical policy based on a return to Chalcedon and reconciliation with Rome.Footnote ¹⁷ Although support for Chalcedon was the basis of Eastern imperial governance of the church from this point onwards, it was not the end of the compromise politics that had encapsulated much of the previous eight decades.Footnote ¹⁸ Justinian, Justin II, and Tiberius II continued to seek a new doctrinal settlement – and an appropriate formulation of the patristic and conciliar past – which would reintegrate the (still numerous and vocal) opponents of Chalcedon into the mainstream imperial church.Footnote ¹⁹

This brief summary cannot do full justice to the complexities of these theological debates and ecclesiastical politics; it is also far from capturing the full extent of imperial involvement within them. The conciliar transcripts, imperial orders, and episcopal letters preserved in fifth- and sixth-century documentary collections (and now most frequently accessed through the Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum) make plain the involvement of all levels of the Eastern imperial state. It is thus striking that emperors in this period rarely seem to have decided that the implementation of these new formulations of orthodoxy required them to purge the state (as opposed to removing bishops from the ‘imperial’ church). In his fourth edict after Chalcedon (of 18 July 452), Marcian applied the normal legal measures against heretical sects to ‘those who are deceived by the madness of Eutyches in the manner of the Apollinarians’, with specific provisions for bishops, clerics, monks, and those in imperial service.Footnote ²⁰ These measures were reissued on 1 August 455 in a general law that nevertheless made specific and repeated reference to Egypt, Alexandria, and its Chalcedonian bishop Proterius (451–57): an obvious indicator that the failure of a recent mission to anti-Chalcedonian monks in the city had provoked its issue.Footnote ²¹ On other occasions when Christological error was treated as a subject of legal categorisation, extant constitutions do not discuss imperial service. It is plausible that this absence is exaggerated by the Justinianic Code, whose sections ‘On the Highest Trinity and on the Catholic Faith and that No-One Should Dare Dispute About it Publicly’ and ‘On Heretics, Manichaeans, and Samaritans’ skip straight from the pro-Chalcedonian Marcian and Leo to Justin and Justinian (with the exception of a short anti-Manichaean excerpt from Zeno (r. 474–91) or Anastasius).Footnote ²² The compilers would have been unlikely to include explicitly anti-Chalcedonian enactments within the new Code. It is likewise possible that earlier generalising edicts against heretics in service were understood to apply to those whose Christological views fell outside the preferred definitions of fifth- and early sixth-century emperors. Yet even beyond the realm of codified legislation, the absence of references to the removal of those who opposed the emperor’s preferred doctrinal and conciliar stance is striking. After Marcian’s edict of 455, the next mentions of orders to exclude supporters or opponents of Chalcedon are the expulsions of Miaphysite generals in Egypt by Justinian in 539 and of Miaphysite courtiers and high officials under Justin II in 571.Footnote ²³ It is perhaps telling that when Justin and Justinian issued a new generalising anti-heretical law (most likely in 527), they made the notable (if obviously self-interested) claim that prohibitions on heretics in the state had not been rigorously enforced in recent times.Footnote ²⁴ Excepting the measures of Marcian in the aftermath of Chalcedon, specific legal categorisation and exclusion does not seem to have been the approach taken by Eastern imperial regimes to ensure sufficient doctrinal conformity within the state. This is not to suggest that Christological orthodoxy was seen not to matter in appointments to the imperial state in the period from Theodosius II to Justin and Justinian. Rather, it is to argue that such demands for uniformity took a distinctive form as a result of imperial positioning and the character of ecclesiastical allegiances in these ongoing disputes.

The lack of extant legislation against, attested removal of, or definitive preferences for Chalcedonian or anti-Chalcedonian officials makes sense in the context of imperial policies towards complex Christological debates. Numerous emperors sought to maintain a fragile consensus through a studied doctrinal ambiguity. Even after the decisive turn back to Chalcedon under Justin, Eastern regimes continued to seek forms of accommodation with Miaphysite communities. The intractability of these disputes resulted in repeated attempts to secure common positions that would remain palatable to rival groups while excluding what the majority saw as clear and obvious errors.Footnote ²⁵ The maintenance of a balanced compromise was the default setting of imperial interventions, whether the relevant standard of orthodoxy was the Formula of Reunion, the Henotikon, or indeed Chalcedon itself. These attempts to delineate a broad spectrum of acceptable Christian interpretation did not lend themselves to the identification and removal of closely bounded groups. Even those heresiological labels created in the period did not effectively delimit those whom a conscientious emperor might exclude. Less charitable observers on either side applied terms like ‘Nestorian’, ‘Apollinarian’ and ‘Eutychian’ to those still within the bounds of an imperially sanctioned doctrinal consensus, whether it was accusing bishops in the diocese of the East in the 430s and 440s and supporters of Chalcedon from the 450s onwards of following the heresy of Nestorius, or suggesting that the Miaphysite doctrine favoured by hard-line supporters of Cyril in the 430s and 440s and opponents of the latter council had been condemned in the persons of Apollinaris and (after 448) Eutyches.Footnote ²⁶ In this sense, Marcian’s edicts against ‘Eutychians’ and ‘Apollinarians’ were the product of a moment of unusually confrontational delineation of the boundaries of the correct faith. Personnel policies that explicitly excluded those seen as doctrinally problematic could have undermined efforts to keep imperial orthodoxy within the parameters of a common ground.

The lack of what might be termed a ‘sectarian’ mindset is similarly evident from patterns of appointment. Later fifth-century emperors certainly showed favour to specific individuals committed to their vision of Christological orthodoxy. The personal doctrinal views of the Miaphysites Theoctistus (magister officiorum under Basiliscus) and Marinus (praetorian prefect under Anastasius) seem to have been a key part of the reason they were preferred as advisors.Footnote ²⁷ But these imperial preferences did not translate into a more systematic pursuit of Christological or ecclesiastical uniformity within the state. Across this period, representatives of various ecclesiastical factions sought to gauge and influence Christian loyalties within the palace and central administration. To these episcopal petitioners, the most notable feature of the Eastern court was the complexity of its ecclesiastical allegiances. Representatives of both the rival episcopal groupings at and after Ephesus I (431) found plausible indications of support amidst shifting currents of theological and ecclesiastical opinion.Footnote ²⁸ After Chalcedon (451) created a new fault-line in ecclesiastical politics, opponents of the council claimed similar sympathies in the Senate;Footnote ²⁹ once Zeno and Anastasius tacked towards a moderate anti-Chalcedonian stance, the council’s champions likewise found senators willing to act as patrons.Footnote ³⁰ The openness of palace, consistory, and administration even to ecclesiastical factions in imperial disfavour does not fit with a requirement that appointees adhere to an exclusive formulation of orthodoxy.

Part of the reason for this openness is the flexibility of the ecclesiastical affiliations of those appointed to high office. These sympathies could in fact be suspiciously pliable: the changing attitudes of key members of Theodosius II’s consistory during and after the Council of Ephesus (431) provoked numerous accusations of sharp practice.Footnote ³¹ Prosopographical studies of the Constantinopolitan senate across two major U-turns in imperial religious policy have highlighted the range of ecclesiastical connections and potential doctrinal affiliations present within the imperial state. The attendance, along with the emperor, of thirty-eight current and former imperial officials at the sixth session of Chalcedon on 25 October 451 to hear the new definition of orthodoxy represented a powerful symbol of Christian unity within the imperial establishment. This public demonstration of collective agreement overlaid a much wider spectrum of current and former opinion, as Geoffrey De Ste. Croix’s lucid presentation of the known ecclesiastical connections of these imperial commissioners demonstrates.Footnote ³² Several of these commissioners were likely sympathetic to the bishops from the East (and their dyophysite Christological position): most securely – and most notably – the effective president of the council, the magister militum Anatolius.Footnote ³³ The senatorial party also included (erstwhile?) supporters of Cyril and Eutyches, as well as two former officials who had been heavily involved in the conciliar activity just two years before, which had resulted in a Miaphysite formulation and the deposition of leading Eastern bishops.Footnote ³⁴ The split engendered by the council did not mean an end to this complexity. As Christoph Begass has persuasively argued, support for or opposition to Chalcedon did not become an organising principle in the factional politics of the senatorial aristocracy until c. 500. Even as pro- and anti-Chalcedonian groupings become more visible amongst the senatorial aristocracy in the first decades of the sixth century, ‘we are not dealing with solid blocs, which opposed each other irreconcilably and permitted no crossover – especially as the religious beliefs of the protagonists were not so rigid that they can always be fitted into distinct categories’.Footnote ³⁵ In fact, as Begass, Geoffrey Greatrex, and Mischa Meier have demonstrated, the allegiances of Anastasius’ and Justin I’s appointees are often difficult to pin down. Anastasius’ consistory included probable supporters of Chalcedon who facilitated anti-Chalcedonian religious policies and probable opponents who pivoted to a Chalcedonian line under Justin and Justinian.Footnote ³⁶ The continued service of the likes of Fl. Patricius, Fl. Probus, Fl. Hypatius, and Celer through the messy regime change from Anastasius to Justin is particularly telling.Footnote ³⁷ If late fifth- and early sixth-century rulers did not legislate against Chalcedonian or Miaphysite officials, it was (in part) because of the willingness of appointees to put personal beliefs to one side in service of the emperor and the (usually moderate) doctrinal stance that he sought to establish.

The capacity to enact the religious policies, both of an explicitly anti-Chalcedonian ruler and of an outspoken champion of Chalcedon suggests the capacity of careerists to ‘trim’ their sails to the prevailing Christological winds.Footnote ³⁸ Less cynically, these prosopographical analyses highlight how the actions taken by those within the imperial administration did not straightforwardly map onto their personal religious inclinations (and cannot always allow us to reconstruct them).Footnote ³⁹ Anastasius’ magister militum praesentalis Patricius and magister officiorum Celer represent a case in point. The confusion around their doctrinal affiliations results in large measure from their efforts to implement imperial policies. The case for Patricius as a ‘decisive supporter of Severus’ (so Christoph Begass) is based on his involvement in the downfall of Macedonius (496–511), as orchestrated by Anastasius, and hosting of discussions between the Miaphysite leader and John of Claudioupolis in his home in Constantinople sometime between 508 and 511, which took place (according to Severus) ‘by order of our pious king’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Likewise, his portrayal as a probable ‘pragmatic’ Chalcedonian (so Geoffrey Greatrex) stems from his facilitation of Justin’s pro-Chalcedonian turn through receipt of a request for help from Pope Hormisdas in January 519 and removal of Paul of Edessa for refusal to accept Chalcedon in November 519.Footnote ⁴¹ Celer’s conflicting interventions in ecclesiastical politics can similarly be tied to imperial orders and priorities: it is not clear how either the removal of Macedonius or the communication of the emperor’s request that Severus (as bishop of Antioch) reinstate Chalcedonian bishops can bear the weight of a confessional allegiance.Footnote ⁴² The presence of officials at church councils and their interventions to remove or reinstate particular bishops may have implicated their doctrinal and ecclesiastical loyalties. Their specific allegiances and facility in the relevant questions likely contributed to their selection for such missions. Yet these missions remained (in the first place) issues of policy and procedure.Footnote ⁴³ Where the affiliations and networks of imperial commissioners are identifiable, they seem (as at Chalcedon) to have subsumed these beneath the mandate which they had been entrusted.Footnote ⁴⁴ The public expression of their Christian identities was mediated by their implication in ecclesiastical policies determined by the palace and administration.

Personal favour shown to particular bishops and ascetics through the granting of audiences and access and the facilitation of their requests likely provides a clearer indicator of support for their doctrinal formula.Footnote ⁴⁵ At the same time, the provision of a certain degree of patronage to ecclesiastical dignitaries was part and parcel of the responsibilities of the emperor’s subordinates. So (for example), Theodosius II’s praetorian prefects Taurus and Florentius are known to have received requests from opposing ecclesiastical factions in the decades after Ephesus.Footnote ⁴⁶ Such accessibility was particularly important when regimes sought to keep open the possibility that marginalised bishops and communities might be reintegrated into the imperial church. It is important to note how much De Ste. Croix’s reconstruction of patterns of ecclesiastical allegiance at Chalcedon relies on the letters and patronage networks of Theodoret of Cyrrhus. That Theodoret sent missives to the praetorian prefect Protogenes and the patricius Senator in 448/9 asking for help in overturning his house arrest – and to the magister officiorum John Vincomalus in early 451 thanking him for his part in its cancellation – might suggest that he saw them as allies of the Dyophysite party.Footnote ⁴⁷ We might get a very different sense of the lay of the land if we could see the (almost certainly overlapping) requests made and allegiances claimed by other ecclesiastical petitioners in the late 440s and early 450s.Footnote ⁴⁸ If the Christian identities of fifth- and sixth-century Eastern officials often cannot be pinned down to a simple confessional allegiance, it is a result of not only personal but also institutional flexibility.

Personal adherence to a specific Christological interpretation seems to have been less important to imperial regimes than a willingness to maintain those emperors’ priorities in their interactions with representatives of the church. Regimes seem to have wanted to promote, not so much co-religionists, but rather those who were willing publicly to profess and support the (evolving) imperial line on orthodoxy. As Begass has suggested, the conformity that emperors sought from their officials (as from their bishops) was ‘public affirmation of the prevailing doctrine (that is, the one advocated by the emperor)’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such an approach makes sense, not only of the attested actions of known officials but also of extant late fifth- and early sixth-century legislation on the orthodoxy of appointees. The turn from the exclusion of heretics to pre-emptive requirements for Christian orthodoxy dovetails neatly, both with the absence of anti-heretical legislation and the pursuit of broad Christological consensus within the imperial church. As Michael Wuk has persuasively argued, the demands for witnesses and oaths made by Leo I, Anastasius, and Justinian left useful ambiguity over the contours of the orthodoxy to which the candidate subscribed. Even the more detailed oath for imperial governors issued by Justinian in 533 represented (in Wuk’s words) ‘a general affirmation of support for a sanitized version of imperial Christianity’, which skirted ‘problematic sectarian issues’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Ongoing efforts to ensure consensus and harmony likely precluded narrower restrictions of what ‘orthodoxy’ meant in practice, even as an imperial regime would inevitably expect its appointees to support its own definitions of the appropriate patristic and conciliar precedents.Footnote ⁵¹ Without the clear break of a historical separation of supposedly ‘heretical’ sects from the imperial church, demands for conformity had to be framed in different terms, even by emperors who issued laws to exclude named groups. For the purposes of office-holding, the personal affiliations of their subordinates were partially overwritten by their certificates of appointment, which (at some point before the 520s) began to specify their ‘orthodoxy’.Footnote ⁵² By requiring this minimal, public, and above all practical conformity, Eastern regimes could seek an ‘orthodox’ state while continuing to employ officials who personally adhered to a wide spectrum of Christological opinion.

2.2 ‘Your Religion and Ours’: Homoian Regimes and Nicene Christians in the Post-Imperial West

‘Therefore it is necessary and most just to turn round against them that which is contained in those laws, which, since the emperors of various times were induced to error with them, happened then to be promulgated.’Footnote ⁵³ On 24 February 484, the Vandal king Huneric published a systematic law against heresy within his kingdom. This edict was issued in the aftermath of a conference held in Carthage in February 484 that had failed to settle the central dispute splitting the North African church.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Huneric’s view, the proceedings had shown one party to be at fault. The ‘obstinacy’ of these ‘heretics’ in avoiding a proper debate and reopening their churches without permission demonstrated that they deserved to be punished.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Vandal king (and his drafter) thus turned to the appropriate legal provisions developed by later Roman emperors (and handily available in book 16.5 of the Theodosian Code). The resultant edict provided a detailed summary of the measures adopted in previous anti-heretical legislation. The details were drawn for the most part from an anti-Donatist edict promulgated by Honorius on 30 January 412: an unsurprising recourse insofar as that law had also followed a conference in Carthage between two conflicting church parties (which Huneric’s own meeting deliberately emulated). Amidst a recapitulation of how ‘the aforementioned emperors also raged similarly against the laity’, Huneric recounted how these provisions went so far that,

Alongside these punishments for palace officials and gubernatorial staffs, Huneric’s drafter reproduced Honorius’ graded financial penalties for unrepentant Donatists, starting with inlustres, spectabiles, and senatores.Footnote ⁵⁷ The conclusion of this law applied all these facets of late Roman legislation to any members of the relevant heretical sect who did not convert to orthodoxy by 1 June 484. Honorius’ fines were specifically assigned to ‘those who remain in the same error, whether they are occupied by service in our household or perhaps are in charge of various functions and offices’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In Huneric’s view, the application of such measures was particularly appropriate given the identity of those proscribed. For the group to whom the Vandal king gave three months to conform were ‘Homoousian’ heretics: that is, followers of the Nicene Creed (325) and adherents to the mainstream Catholic Christianity of the fifth-century West. It was representatives of this heresy who had persuaded Huneric’s imperial predecessors to implement coercive measures against their ecclesiastical opponents. Now those same Nicene Christians were the fitting recipients of their own ‘evil designs’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Huneric’s law of 25 February 484 captures a major reversal in the post-imperial West.Footnote ⁶⁰ The fifth and early sixth centuries saw the gradual establishment of new kingdoms as ‘barbarian’ warbands settled in the provinces of the (soon to be former) western Roman Empire. Not the least surprising aspect of this process of political disintegration and reformation was the religious affiliation of many of the new rulers. The leaders of several groups adhered to a Homoian form of Christianity, which understood the Son to be ‘like’ the Father (similis in Latin; homoios in Greek, hence ‘Homoian’), in contradistinction to the Nicene formula (‘of the same substance’, homoousios in Greek, hence the heresiological label of ‘Homoousian’). This doctrinal formulation had originally developed as a compromise solution within the fourth-century Trinitarian controversies; its high point was the promulgation of a Homoian creed by the twin councils of Rimini and Seleucia under Constantius II in 359–60. Already in the 350s, hardline supporters of Nicaea dismissed the ‘likeness’ of Father and Son as Arian heresy; over the following three decades, the rest of the mainstream imperial church came around to their way of thinking, and from the reign of Theodosius I onwards, proponents of this form of Christianity were excluded from the mainstream imperial church.Footnote ⁶¹ But this was not the end for this alternative orthodoxy. Through (often murky) processes of cultural contact, imperial diplomacy, and missionary activity, it became a favoured form of Christianity amongst several of the groups that went on to settle in the western provinces and form new kingdoms: the Visigoths in Aquitaine and Spain; the Vandals in Africa and across various Mediterranean islands; the Burgundians in the Rhône valley; and the Ostrogoths in Italy, Provence, and the Balkans.Footnote ⁶² Burgundian, Ostrogothic, Vandal and Visigothic kings patronised Homoian clerics and churches within their kingdoms. The result was a fundamental religious difference between the new rulers and the dominant ecclesiastical institutions of their territories – not to mention, most of their subjects.

This theological divergence provoked a spectrum of royal and ecclesiastical responses, of which Huneric’s edict of 25 February 484 represents one extreme.Footnote ⁶³ Vandal kings more generally were outliers in the post-imperial West for their willingness (at least on occasion) to make their support for Homoian Christianity a matter of strict religious uniformity and to do so with reference to the personnel of their households and administration. Even before his conquest of Carthage, Huneric’s father Geiseric had executed four elite Hispano-Roman followers apparently as a result of their Nicene Christianity.Footnote ⁶⁴ According to the (chronologically vague) reports of Victor of Vita’s History of the Persecution of the African Province, Nicene Christians were excluded from royal service on at least four occasions between the conquest of Carthage in 439 and the death of Huneric in autumn 484.Footnote ⁶⁵ At some point in the second half of his reign (c. 458–74), ‘Geiseric … decreed that only Arians were to be placed in the various offices (ministeria) within his and his sons’ court.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Victor of Vita followed this statement with accounts of the torture and punishment of three palace attendants framed as stories of martyrdom.Footnote ⁶⁷ Huneric himself twice sought Christian uniformity in royal service before the Conference of 484. Sometime between 478 and 480, the king removed the annonae and stipendia of those whom Victor described as ‘the people of our religion at his court’ before sending them into penal exile.Footnote ⁶⁸ At a later date (but before the spring of 483), a further order was made ‘that no-one could serve in his palace nor carry out public duties unless they made themselves Arian’; those who refused had their property confiscated and were sent to Sicily or Sardinia.Footnote ⁶⁹ This more systematic frame of reference to the civil administration of the kingdom was repeated in Huneric’s edict of 25 February 484, reflecting his regime’s intensive use of its mechanisms of government against the Nicene Church in this period.Footnote ⁷⁰ The proconsul Victorianus and the palace attendant Dagila (wife of the king’s cellarer) were amongst the Nicene victims whose sufferings in the spring and summer of 484 were recounted in the third book of Victor’s History.Footnote ⁷¹ The unusual intensity of religious coercion in the last year of Huneric’s reign seems to have abated after the king’s death.Footnote ⁷² Christian uniformity within the state remained a subject of potential concern. An allusion in the Abecedarium, a polemical poem written by Fulgentius of Ruspe at some point in the reign of Thrasamund (496–523), refers to a prohibition on Nicene Christians serving the king (militare).Footnote ⁷³ As part of their repeated recourse to legal categorisation and enforcement, Vandal kings sought to uphold (their) orthodoxy within the state.

It must be stressed that, as in earlier and parallel contexts, the articulation and practical enforcement of these (global and principled) requirements was intermittent and specific (as, more broadly, the use of religious coercion against Nicene Christians in the kingdom).Footnote ⁷⁴ Alternative rationales remained available: Victor of Vita portrayed some of Geiseric’s Nicene courtiers receiving royal entreaties to convert given their exceptional loyalty and expertise.Footnote ⁷⁵ The East Roman historian Procopius of Caesarea went so far as to claim that Thrasamund practised a pragmatic tolerance in such matters. ‘To be sure, he [Thrasamund] forced the Christians to change their ancestral doctrine … but he pretended not to know in the least what sort [of Christian] those who refused were.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Individual advantage was at play: ‘honours’ (timais) and ‘offices’ (archais) were on offer for those who conformed.Footnote ⁷⁷ In his deliberate myopia, Thrasamund was likely aided by the fuzziness of ecclesiastical affiliations in palace and wider political institutions, outwith the moments of stark clarity wrought by the enforcement of requirements to conform.Footnote ⁷⁸ It is by no means a certainty that those elites who served the Vandal kings saw or presented a specific form of Trinitarian doctrine as the definitive feature of their Christian identities in the manner assumed by royal edicts and Nicene polemics. Even those who we can be confident (eventually) did – the individuals spotlighted by Victor of Vita for their choice of punishment over conformity to Homoian Christianity – are notable for their capacity to serve those kings as Nicene Christians before the implementation of a royal edict forced their hands. As in parallel courtly contexts, the character of elite sociability could permit and encourage a more fluid approach, which allowed aristocrats to assert a Christian prestige that downplayed or transcended ecclesiastical differences.

The pursuit of religious uniformity on confessional lines was subject to the same practical limitations in Vandal Carthage as in other late ancient political environments. A requirement that those in royal service conform to Homoian Christianity was nevertheless understood as part of the culture of the palaces and administration beyond individual episodes of enforcement. Nicene polemical texts from across this period show an abiding concern for the conflicting demands of royal service and loyalty to (what they saw as) the true faith.Footnote ⁷⁹ The most referenced of these episodes are Victor of Vita’s exemplary stories of officials who, when given the chance to continue in post, decided instead to become martyrs or confessors. A series of invented dialogues between ‘Catholics’ and ‘Arians’ written under Vandal rule also show a notable interest in defining the doctrinal affiliation and ethical positioning with regard to ‘heretical’ rulership of the civil officials introduced as judge characters.Footnote ⁸⁰ The exclusion of ‘Homoousian’ heretics from Vandal palace and administration represented an ongoing legal and discursive framework with which the subjects of the Hasding dynasty felt the need to engage.

The Hasding dynasty’s sense of the theoretical necessity and potential implementation of Christian confessional uniformity within the state is notably absent elsewhere in the post-imperial West. The absence of such assertions and provisions is part of a wider dearth of anti-heretical legislation. By contrast to Huneric’s compendious citation of earlier imperial measures on correct religion, these prohibitions and punishments were entirely omitted from the fifth- and sixth-century legal codes and enactments of the Frankish, Burgundian, and Ostrogothic rulers.Footnote ⁸¹ The prudentes whom Alaric II (r. 484–507) commissioned to produce a compilation of Roman law for his kingdom (issued in February 507) did preserve Theodosius II’s novel against Jews and Samaritans from January 438 and that of Valentinian III against Manichaeans from April 445 (with their exclusions of those groups from imperial service). The Breviary of Alaric nevertheless excised the anti-heretical laws of book 16.5 from its reduced version of the Theodosian Code.Footnote ⁸² The pattern is similar in the canons of sixth-century Frankish and Visigothic church councils, which increasingly represented a forum for royal as well as ecclesiastical governance.Footnote ⁸³ As David Freidenreich has encapsulated, these Nicene episcopal assemblies foresaw notably differential treatment for Jews, as opposed to heretics and pagans within their respective jurisdictions. One of the specific guidelines that they repeatedly invoked was (as the bishops gathered at a Gallic council in 535 put it), ‘That Jews should not be placed above Christians as judges’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Concerns to exclude heterodox individuals from political service were thus still sometimes voiced but not in relation to ‘Homoousian’ (or indeed ‘Arian’) Christians.

The decisions of the compilers to omit such rulings are most easily comprehensible on the backdrop of wider attempts by Homoian rulers and their subjects to avoid pursuing the potential heresiological implications of contemporary doctrinal differences. With one dubious exception, there are no extant reports of Burgundian, Frankish, Ostrogothic, or Visigothic rulers pursuing the exclusion of Nicene appointees.Footnote ⁸⁵ The most obvious personnel policies of the first western successor kingdoms point in the opposite direction. The central problematic of modern scholarship on the post-Roman West has been increasingly detailed analysis of the manner in which these regimes appealed to the provincial Roman aristocracies whose collaboration was crucial to the viability of these new political arrangements. The provision of continued opportunities to display their status through office-holding has been seen as a key reason why Gallo-Roman, Hispano-Roman, and Romano-African elites turned away from the imperial centre to their ‘Rome at home’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The need to integrate these local and provincial powerbrokers into the palace and administration made personnel policies rooted in religious uniformity significantly less appealing. As I will discuss further in Chapter 7, similar relationships had to be built with Nicene bishops and churches given their basic expectations of patronage from Christian rulers. The seeming inevitability of both considerations is part of what makes the decisions of Vandal regimes to enforce their own orthodoxy so fascinating, especially as their own policy choices also seem often to have been driven by the same concerns. Like fourth-century emperors, post-Roman kings were able to stage themselves as pious Christian rulers and patrons of the church without pursuing uniformity within their political institutions.Footnote ⁸⁷

Such deliberate inattention was possible because of the cultivation of non-sectarian ways of thinking about religious identities and the differences between Nicene and Homoian Christians and churches. As part of polite discourse, regimes, appointees, and bishops alike seem to have tried to make Christian affiliation a non-issue. Sam Cohen has recently highlighted the use of ‘descriptive’ (as opposed to ‘accusatory’) language and terminology for Christian difference in Ostrogothic Italy.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Ostrogothic kings Theoderic (r. 493–526) and Athalaric (r. 526–34) and the bishops of Rome Gelasius and Vigilius chose terms that acknowledged their separate churches and religious loyalties without triumphalising or pathologising them: ‘the other communion’ (altera communio); ‘your religion and ours’ (vestra et nostra religio); ‘the other religion’ (aliena religio); ‘our church’ (ecclesia nostra).Footnote ⁸⁹ Avitus of Vienne could adopt similar language with reference to the Homoian churchmen patronised by the Burgundian Gundobad in Gaul.Footnote ⁹⁰ Gundobad’s attempts to bring together and support both Homoian and Nicene clerics suggest a similar desire to reduce the charge of mutual sectarian oppositions (even as heresiological antagonisms remain visible in both kingdoms).Footnote ⁹¹ As in the post-Chalcedonian Eastern Empire, the acceptance of Christian diversity within the state seems to have been keyed to wider policies of ecclesiastical consensus.

The rare moments in which uniformity amongst the king’s appointees comes close to being thematised outside of Africa occur when this pursuit of confessional consensus was no longer necessary. When post-Roman rulers converted to Nicene Christianity, they were portrayed as bringing their ‘peoples’ and households with them. The conversions of Clovis (r. 481–511), Reccared (r. 586–601), and Æthelberht (r. 589–616) were staged and received by contemporaries as the conversion of the Franks, Goths, and Angli (respectively).Footnote ⁹² These ethnic labels did not simply connote communities of descent but represented flexible and evolving frames of reference. Already in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, such terms could be understood to encompass a broad swathe of the king’s followers: both his warband (now settled on land as an army of service) and his courtiers and appointees (potentially even provincial Roman aristocrats).Footnote ⁹³ By the end of the sixth century, the increasing association of leadership of a privileged ‘people’ with rule over a kingdom meant that ethnic labels were increasingly used as shorthand for the political community in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain.Footnote ⁹⁴ It is thus plausible that these collective acts of conversion engendered particular expectations of the religious affiliations of those office-holders who called themselves, or were perceived as, ‘Franks’ or ‘Goths’ from then on. Events in 580s Spain provide the most clear-cut example of their salience for royal advisors and office-holders. In 580, the Visigothic king Leovigild sought a new compromise between the Nicene and Homoian churches in the kingdom, which was later portrayed by Spanish Nicene authors as an attempt to trick his Hispano-Roman subjects into accepting Arian heresy. Isidore of Seville’s suggestion that Leovigild used offers of gold and property to sweeten the deal is similar to the accusations of worldly advancement levelled against his earlier Vandal counterparts.Footnote ⁹⁵ Nine years later, Leovigild’s son Reccared choreographed the collective conversion of the Goths and Sueves as well as the ‘Arian’ clerics of his kingdom at the Council of Toledo (589).Footnote ⁹⁶ The seniores Gothorum who signed on behalf of their people likely represented prominent royal advisers and civil or military leaders. The implication of this abandonment of Homoian Christianity in a series of revolts against Reccared in the late 580s and early 590s suggests that conversion of the ruling elite was seen as particularly necessary.Footnote ⁹⁷ But it must be stressed that, at Toledo itself, those who specifically served the king were not marked out as a group whose conformity mattered. In his speech Reccared instead portrayed this as an act beneficial to his kingdom, his subjects (populi), and the ‘noble people of the Goths’ (gens Gothorum inclyta).Footnote ⁹⁸ The lack of references to service or office likely stemmed from changes to the character and perception of the state by the end of the sixth century: the militarisation of office and aristocratic status, the increasing overlap of the jurisdictions of civil and ecclesiastical office-holders, and a more direct association of ‘public’ authority and ‘private’ lordship.Footnote ⁹⁹ Although office-holders were still the subject of concerns for religious uniformity in kingdoms where rulership was staged in increasingly ministerial terms,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ these particular men had become less distinct as a group amongst the king’s elite subjects.

Conclusion

Fundamental doctrinal and ecclesiastical differences impinged on the religious policies of regimes and the religious identities of administrators in East and West; these latent differences and active controversies generally did not result in the identification and exclusion of heretics. The absence of laws against named groups and purges of nonconformists is startling on many levels. The exclusion of heretics from the state had become a basic feature of Christian rulership by the Theodosian dynasty; parallel concerns around non-Christians and other heretical groups continued in this period. Indeed, the Hasding dynasty in North Africa and the emperor Marcian in the aftermath of Chalcedon did pursue orthodoxy within their political institutions along these new fault-lines. The willingness of post-imperial kings and Eastern emperors to allow Homoousians, Nestorians, Eutychians, and supporters or opponents of Chalcedon to serve is an index of their desire not to make these differences into a black-and-white issue of orthodoxy and heresy. Eastern emperors repeatedly sought to include within the imperial church a broad swathe of Christological opinion and representatives of differing doctrinal traditions and ecclesiastical factions. Post-imperial kings attempted to maintain two parallel and implicitly legitimate churches within their spheres of authority. These policies of Christian consensus made the Christian beliefs and allegiances of their administrators less of a subject of scrutiny, so long as those appointees were willing to implement their rulers’ approaches to ecclesiastical politics. This pursuit of conformity over uniformity was made easier by the flexibility of these affiliations (especially in the East), which did not always straightforwardly map onto either ancient heresiological or modern analytical categories. The necessity of administrative neutrality in affairs of the church – as well as obedience to direct imperial commands – likely eased the dilemmas provoked by policies that did not match personal theological proclivities. When the patronage and even vindication of heretics could seem a matter of bureaucratic duty, it should not surprise us that (seemingly) Chalcedonian or anti-Chalcedonian office-holders could carry out disciplinary actions against their own apparent inclinations. Public conformity to the ruler’s religious policy seems to have been the basic requirement of Christians in these political institutions. In this way, self-consciously Christian rulers could seek to uphold Christian orthodoxy within their territories while employing officials who did not agree with them on what that meant.

3.1 Purge and Pluralism: Excluded Groups in Service

Fifth- and sixth-century regimes repeatedly asserted that they should not be served by heretics and non-Christians and required concrete steps to ensure the Christianity and orthodoxy of their representatives. These processes of exclusion had obvious limits that preserved spaces for those not in line with imperial orthodoxy. Numerous studies have sought to reconstruct the continued religious pluralism of political institutions in contexts across the Mediterranean world. Possible non-Christians and heretics within imperial service in the fifth and sixth centuries are attested in various ways. There are texts written by current or ex-officials that suggest reverence for the gods – as with Rutilius Namatianus’ On his Return, Olympiodorus’ History, Macrobius’ Saturnalia, and Zosimus’ New History – or a less than straightforward attitude towards prevailing Christian mores – as with the works of John Lydus.Footnote ⁷ Letters from bishops and monks identify their recipients as (at the very least perceived as) ‘pagan’, Jewish, or ‘heretical’.Footnote ⁸ The best evidence comes (ironically) on those occasions when specific regimes sought uniformity. Late ancient histories recount stories of individuals removed from office and punished because of formal accusations. Various modern treatments have used the purges of those suspected of paganism or Hellenism to show the continued presence of (perceived) adherents to traditional religion within the state.Footnote ⁹ Such accusations resulted in the removal from office of the praetorian prefect and urban prefect of Constantinople Cyrus by Theodosius II in 441 and the quaestor Isocasius by Leo I in 467.Footnote ¹⁰ Justinian’s wider efforts to remove pagans from the schools at Athens and from the Constantinopolitan elite in 529 led to the interrogation (but not conviction) of the silentiarius and patricius Phocas and the removal and possible execution of the quaestor Thomas in 529; Phocas would die by suicide in 546 during a further purge of elite pagans at Constantinople.Footnote ¹¹ Another investigation, which began at Heliopolis (Baalbek) in 579–80 under Tiberius II, led to the uncovering of various (supposed) crypto-pagans including the governor of Osrhoene, Anatolius, who was tortured and executed.Footnote ¹² Charges of heresy were the cause for the removal of office and punishment of a number of Homoousians (i.e. Nicene Christians) in North Africa under the Vandal kings Geiseric and Huneric, as well as Miaphysite generals under Justinian in 539 and courtiers under Justin II in 571.Footnote ¹³ The presence of Jews and Samaritans is likewise revealed by moments of conversion in the early fifth and mid-sixth century, respectively, whose forced nature is barely concealed by the Christian texts that report them, alongside sceptical discussions of those who had converted.Footnote ¹⁴ As with laws on religious uniformity, these episodes suggest the ongoing presence within the imperial state of all of the groups that regimes explicitly set out to exclude.

It is not simply in moments of enforcement and investigation that (apparent) members of (supposedly) prohibited groups can be seen operating within late ancient political institutions. Formal accusations are reported alongside attributions of religious affiliation made by the historians themselves and used to burnish the reputation of co-religionists or blacken that of those they considered to be in error. Committed pagan, Eunomian, Nicene, and Miaphysite historians identify their co-religionists and especially those who heroically opposed religious policies disadvantageous to their communities. The pagan historians and biographers Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Damascius, and Zosimus single out individuals they saw as working actively to revive traditional Greek and Roman religion, or simply upholding it within an otherwise Christian imperial establishment. These figures included the urban prefects of Rome, Pompeianus and Priscus Attalus (and the latter’s appointees during his brief usurpation in 409–10), the generals Fravitta and Generidus under Theodosius, Arcadius and Honorius,Footnote ¹⁵ the governor Severianus under Marcian or Leo I,Footnote ¹⁶ as well as the general and (semi-autonomous) governor of Dalmatia Marcellinus and the prefect of the city of Rome Severus in the reign of the western emperor Anthemius (r. 467–72), himself characterised as a secret Hellene.Footnote ¹⁷ Damascius is more scathing regarding another individual secretly committed to restoring true religion: the quaestor (for Zeno) and praetorian prefect (for the usurper Leontius) Pamprepius.Footnote ¹⁸ Victor of Vita and John of Ephesus similarly single out fellow Homoousians who served Geiseric and Huneric and Miaphysites who served Justin II (respectively) with distinction before suffering persecution.Footnote ¹⁹ Historians in line with imperial orthodoxy were likewise eager to note the heterodox views especially of those who had acted against their own interests or fallen from favour. Supporters of John Chrysostom (bishop of Constantinople, 398–404) accused of paganism two imperial appointees who had maltreated the bishop’s followers during his downfall and exiles: the commander Lucius and the urban prefect Optatus.Footnote ²⁰ The Arian heresy of the powerful magister militum Aspar is stressed in numerous accounts of his downfall in the reign of Leo.Footnote ²¹ The historian known as the Anonymus Valesianus similarly noted that it was a Jewish scholasticus Symmachus who communicated Theoderic’s supposed order for the confiscation of Nicene churches, which was fortuitously (and suspiciously) averted by the Ostrogothic king’s death.Footnote ²² Such attributions slide into the even murkier territory of secret beliefs and plans. Militant pagan historians and biographers seem to have been keen to identify clandestine efforts to overturn the Christian imperial establishment, as when Damascius itemised the secret plots of which he was personally aware.Footnote ²³ More often, though, hidden heterodoxy was ascribed to hated individuals as part of character assassinations.Footnote ²⁴ Procopius, for example, claimed that the praetorian prefect John the Cappadocian dressed and acted more like a pagan in church and that his successor Peter Barsymes was a sorcerer and a supporter of the Manichaeans. John of Ephesus likewise suggested that the quaestor Anastasius, though outwardly a Christian, was really both a pagan and a Samaritan, as was proven when he suffered some form of fit in church.Footnote ²⁵

This apparent presence of heretics and non-Christians within the imperial bureaucracy in the fifth and sixth centuries has received considerable attention. Once prosopographical studies pass the reign of Theodosius I, it is precisely the presence of (supposedly) banned religious groups that dominates their analysis insofar as they are taken to require explanation, as against a now default Christianity.Footnote ²⁶ It has to be stressed that none of these reports can be taken as direct reflections of the ‘real’ religious views of these individuals. Alan Cameron has helpfully catalogued the problems while re-evaluating studies of fifth- and sixth-century pagans.Footnote ²⁷ Charges of ‘Hellenism’ were weaponised as part of factionalism within the Eastern imperial court.Footnote ²⁸ The less formal accusations made by late ancient historians attacked the character of officials otherwise depicted as immoral and incompetent. Their basic incoherence sometimes appears more closely wedded to heresiological logic than the actual makeup of an individual’s beliefs and practices, as with John of Ephesus’ double attribution of Anastasius as both a Samaritan and a pagan.Footnote ²⁹ They seem particularly suspect when used against individuals who had, for example, donated to a church, as was the case for the quaestor Thomas. It is likewise strange that an individual genuinely thought to be a ‘Hellene’ would be forcibly consecrated as bishop (as was the case for the Cyrus), not to mention his later emergence (in both imperial and episcopal retirement) as a generous patron for Daniel the Stylite.Footnote ³⁰ ‘Hidden’ or ‘secret’ views or plans are in any case impossible to substantiate or falsify whether suggested by supporters or enemies. Cameron has rightly noted the degree of wishful thinking in (for example) the attributions of militant paganism by Damascius to individuals like Anthemius or Severus.Footnote ³¹ Analogous problems can be identified for attributions of shared doctrinal or ecclesiastical affiliation. Representatives of disfavoured church factions were equally keen to claim that a significant group (or even the majority) within the court or Senate supported them.Footnote ³² This desire to claim prominent office-holders affects our interpretation even of the (potentially) more reliable knowledge of co-religionists. For all these reasons, reports regarding heretics and non-Christians in office are far from straightforward indicators of the actual religious makeup of political institutions.

Such problems undermine any attempt to quantify the extent of non-conformity amongst those who served fifth- and sixth-century regimes from partisan late ancient historiography. The reports they preserve are nevertheless revealing. They have rightly led various scholars to argue that the relationship between the laws discussed in Chapter 1 and the actual personnel policies of fifth- and sixth-century political institutions was more complex than has sometimes been appreciated.Footnote ³³ It is noteworthy that Cameron’s minimalist accounts of the numbers of self-expressed worshippers of the gods within fifth- and sixth-century elites relied on these laws – or, more accurately, the attitudes that they express – to argue that it was not possible or plausible for a specific imperial official to be a pagan under a decisively Christian emperor.Footnote ³⁴ In his concern to demolish interpretations of ‘crypto-pagans’ and ‘pagan reactions’, Cameron was perhaps too keen to dismiss the potential that individuals who were not militantly pagan or actively working against the Christian imperial establishment could still sincerely venerate the gods.Footnote ³⁵ Of course, Cameron was not alone in approaching these laws, and the requirements of religious uniformity that they reflect, in this binary fashion. Numerous other works portray the early fifth-century rescripts compiled in the Theodosian Code as the final word at the end of a process of conversion and thus (implicitly or explicitly) representative of a blanket requirement in place from then on. These (apparently) ‘pagan’ officials would then have been appointed in contravention of those laws (which were clearly not properly enforced).Footnote ³⁶ However they construe the implications for the religious affiliations of known appointees, these binary perspectives misunderstand the character, both of these laws and of imperial and royal attitudes towards uniformity within state. As discussed above, extant imperial constitutions later preserved as general laws were normally responses to particular problems and contexts: they did not necessarily have a consistent longer-term impact.Footnote ³⁷ They were promulgated when things were perceived to have gone wrong and a signal needed to be sent. Above all, they (by definition) represent the perceptions of regimes of what mattered in moments where religious uniformity seemed necessary. They cannot simply be treated as the ‘theory’ that might be discounted in practice (though as Chapter 1 showed, they do capture various key patterns of thinking about this problem); they are themselves evidence of legal and political ‘practice’ in specific moments of enforcement. Stories about nonconformists suggest that these were alternative logics at work within political institutions which led regimes and their legal advisers to issue reminders that those depicted as the ‘enemies of the Catholic sect’ should not be allowed to operate within the state.

3.2 ‘We Do Not Wish to Send Him Away’

Laws banning non-Christians and heretics from imperial service conflated adherence to correct religion with legitimate exercise of authority. The accounts of contemporary and near-contemporary historians suggest that rulers and their subordinates could disentangle the two and even prioritise the latter. Certainly, historians from various marginalised religious communities make this basic assumption when describing special offers of tolerance and career boosts from conversion supposedly made to their co-religionists. Eunapius and later Zosimus recount how, on his return to the court in Constantinople after defeating the rebel Gaïnas, the general Fravitta loudly attributed his victory to the support of the gods and even (in Eunapius’ version) asked openly for permission to worship them; Arcadius accepted and made him consul.Footnote ³⁸ As previously discussed, Zosimus suggested a similar exemption was offered by Honorius to the pagan general Generidus in 409; his refusal led to the withdrawal of a law against ‘enemies of the Catholic sect’ at court.Footnote ³⁹ In their accounts of the persecution of their co-religionists, Damascius, Victor of Vita, and John of Ephesus likewise present rulers attempting to persuade valued members of their administration to adhere to (their) true religion so as to keep them on staff. Damascius claimed to have heard Severianus read out the very letter by which the emperor Zeno had offered him ‘the greatest office after kingship’ (generally interpreted as the praetorian prefecture), ‘if he became a member of the establishment’ (tōn kratountōn; i.e. a Christian).Footnote ⁴⁰ Victor of Vita recounts similarly failed attempts by Geiseric and Huneric to persuade the comes Sebastian, a pantomime named Mascula, and the proconsul Victorianus to signal conversion to Homoian Christianity by rebaptism.Footnote ⁴¹ John of Ephesus, meanwhile, noted the repeated efforts of Justin II and Sophia to convince the empress’ primicerius Andreas to take Chalcedonian communion.Footnote ⁴² The essential premise of these stories is that regimes could value particular officials notwithstanding their suspect religious associations. These officials had, after all, been valued advisers and administrators for some time before it was decided that they needed to conform.

These stories offer one way to understand the presence of members of excluded religious communities within the state: through the provision of explicit exemptions for exceptional imperial servants. Their specific narration is (of course) implausible in various ways, not the least of which is the stagey nature of their reported speech. The central logic of these scenes required that their protagonists publicly communicate their beliefs to their ruler. Historians from marginalised religious communities used these scenarios to show their co-religionists refusing to convert for worldly gain. By professing their adherence to correct religion in public despite potential physical harm, they acted like true philosophers or confessors – and potential martyrs. These moments were also staged to stress that members of these groups were honourable, just, and effective servants of the state. In that way, they suggested rulers should rightfully change course, whether by overturning specific measures to exclude and punish their members, or – a more aspirational goal – by recognising what should be the true religion of the state. Above all, these episodes reduce an ongoing issue to a single moment of confrontation. It is unlikely that rulers and others who supervised the careers of officials were so starkly confronted with the heterodoxy of their subordinates on a regular basis: as discussed above, these religious affiliations could be much more ambiguous (especially in their public expression) than partisan historians make out. Yet even if their presentation is partial, this does not mean that the attitudes expressed within them are misleading. The basic situation that they discuss remains plausible, not least because it is documented in a less literary context. The minutes of the conversations between Chalcedonians and Miaphysites in Constantinople in 532 record an extraordinary moment where the president, the patricius, and comes sacrarum largitionum Fl. Strategius, made a personal appeal to the latter group of bishops on the basis of his father Fl. Apion’s own previous sympathy with their doctrinal position.

Strategius refers to a direct effort by the emperors Justin and Justinian to persuade Apion to switch from an anti-Chalcedonian to a Chalcedonian communion through an argument about conciliar history. As Christoph Begass has convincingly suggested, the most obvious context for this act of persuasion was Apion’s rehabilitation and brief appointment as praetorian prefect of the East by Justin in 518, eight years after he had been exiled by Anastasius and forcibly ordained at Nicaea.Footnote ⁴⁴ There is no reason to doubt that these were Strategius’ own words, presented in the stenographic record of the discussions taken by Innocent of Maronea. Of course, his speech is in its own way an exemplary narrative.Footnote ⁴⁵ Strategius’ retelling of his father’s confessional volte-face perhaps fifteen years after the fact is shaped by the goal of this personal digression: to convince the ‘Easterners’ that they, too, should follow the emperor’s lead and sign up to Chalcedon, once they had worked through their doubts in the safe space of this open discussion.Footnote ⁴⁶ Strategius’ speech nevertheless attests to what we might in any case expect: that emperors would seek to persuade potentially valuable administrators whose alternative religious leanings were known to change tack so as to facilitate their appointment.Footnote ⁴⁷

These special offers provide likely reasons why rulers would seek to keep in their service individuals who disagreed with them on correct religion. In the first place, they suggest the significance of inter-personal relationships and the perception of loyalty and trust. These emperors, empresses, and kings are portrayed intervening personally and leaning on their own connection with a prominent official to pressure him to conform. So, for example, in the court interview that Victor presents, Geiseric appealed to his long-standing friendship with Sebastian whose constancy rebaptism would confirm.Footnote ⁴⁸ These accounts suggest another fundamental consideration that might outweigh religious scruples. Central to their logic is that these individuals were exceptional generals or administrators whom rulers could not afford to lose. The significance of this effective exercise of power comes through clearly in the stories regarding the two generals. Fravitta’s public profession of faith and request for tolerance is set on his return from defeating a usurper; when addressing Generidus, Honorius specifically states that he should be exempt as ‘one who had borne the brunt of so many dangers for the state’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The most developed statement comes in John of Ephesus’ description of the emotionally wrenching process by which Justin II, Sophia, and the other chamberlains struggled to get Andreas to convert (and the primicerius Augustae argued that the true faith demanded he resist). As John described it,

The failure of this charm offensive led to a much more blunt choice to take communion or exit the palace; in John’s account, Andreas joyfully took the latter option and suffered three years of confinement and persecution as a result, before a return to freedom (if not office).Footnote ⁵¹ Three other anti-Chalcedonians in Constantinople did benefit from a relaxation of this demand for communion, and both attained high office and were entrusted with conduct of a prestigious embassy to the Persian court.Footnote ⁵² In all these cases, the waiving of strict requirements for religious conformity is seen to permit excellent elite individuals to attain their natural station as the ruler’s advisers and executors.

The considerations of expertise and loyalty signalled in these fabulous confrontations have rightly been adduced on numerous occasions as explanations for the continued presence of excluded groups in imperial or royal service.Footnote ⁵³ These accounts fit with more broadly attested tendencies on the part of rulers and officials alike. Caroline Humfress and Doug Lee have highlighted occasions where regimes and their legal advisers balanced the interests of the church and orthodoxy against what they saw as the common good: most notably, the safeguarding of tax collection and compulsory duties.Footnote ⁵⁴ Such concerns about strict demands for orthodoxy disrupting effective governance had an obvious significance for appointments. In an important recent survey of the involvement of fifth-century generals in religious politics, Hugh Elton has persuasively suggested that ‘both they and their emperors were more motivated by abstract virtues such as duty or loyalty than by personal belief’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such prioritising of trust, expertise, and competence has long been recognised as an explanation for the ongoing presence of pagans and heretics in the highest echelons of the fifth- and sixth-century imperial army.Footnote ⁵⁶ Similar rationales are evident for careers within the civil administration. Numerous prominent fifth- and sixth-century individuals are known to have entered imperial service after training in the schools of rhetoric, philosophy, and law. This was certainly the case for Cyrus and Isocasius, as a renowned sophist and rhetorical teacher, respectively. The interpenetration of the schools and the bureaux most clearly attested in the world of Libanius is obvious throughout the two centuries after his death, not least with the appointment of sophists, rhetoricians, and law professors to the high offices of state.Footnote ⁵⁷ These schools both educated the empire’s (increasingly Christian) elites and at the same time provided the most obvious social and institutional locations for continued reverence for the gods.Footnote ⁵⁸ Personal ties to the ruler and his family also appear central to the advancement of many of the contemporaries of these supposed heterodox outliers.Footnote ⁵⁹ The ability of particular individuals to command the loyalty and respect of emperors is evident from the frequent re-appointments and long terms of office that some advisers held (and the complaints about dominance of the court which sometimes ensued).Footnote ⁶⁰ What appear as extraordinary moments in these partisan histories could also be seen as facets of ordinary practice within late ancient political institutions.

The capacity for contemporaries to judge official aptitude separate from an individual’s forms of religious observance is obvious from numerous sixth-century texts produced within the milieu of political institutions. John Lydus, Procopius, and Cassiodorus praise or criticise office-holders on the basis of perceived competence or malpractice, filtered through the subjective lens of court factionalism, and almost exclusively rooted in traditional virtues and vices. Of course, the stress on such ‘classical’ notions of good governance in these texts has often been seen as deliberately out of step with prevailing norms at the imperial court: a subversive rejection of the decisively Christian framing of rulership in the reign of Justinian. It is possible that these emphases intended or simply took on such a charge within critiques of the emperor’s brand of autocracy and his attempts to monopolise interpretation of the Roman past.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet Justinian himself portrayed such qualities as essential qualifications for imperial service, as for example when justifying the composition of the working group for his Digest. The qualities attributed to the panel included eloquence, legal expertise, obedience, rank, lineage, and superlative recommendations; their religious affiliations, beliefs, or practices were simply absent.Footnote ⁶² Such criteria were fundamental aspects of conceptions of what qualified individuals for service – and what made for good and bad political actors – throughout this period. It is this bedrock of thought about governance and commonsensical praxis within political institutions that laws excluding religious nonconformists from entry into imperial service and punishing those complicit in their granting of office sought again and again to dislodge. All these authors show the capacity of regimes and their subordinates to evaluate how individuals used their authority and pursued their careers separate from their religious affiliation.

The laws that these regimes produced made the maintenance of religious uniformity within the state the singular priority of imperial officials in their relationships with other representatives of the emperor. They did so to the exclusion of other ways of thinking that were otherwise not only legitimate but essential to the functioning of governance. The practical impact of these laws was shaped by the willingness of key stakeholders to place the orthodoxy of appointees above these other considerations. Legislators thus sought to punish those who had permitted their appointment or tolerated their presence. When the magister officiorum Marcellus was ordered by Arcadius on 24 November 395 to investigate whether ‘heretics’ were present in the scrinia or amongst the agentes in rebus or palatini, he was also told to remove from imperial service and from the city of Constantinople the ‘accomplices’ (adfines) who had ‘turned a blind eye’ (coniventiam praestiterunt) to their crimes.Footnote ⁶³ An infamous anti-Manichaean law issued by Valentinian III on 19 June 445 likewise prescribed a fine of 10lb for the head of that part of the civil administration in which a Manichaean was uncovered.Footnote ⁶⁴ Justinian’s laws once again sought to systematise these punishments with fines meted out, not only to those directly responsible for making and registering appointments, and to those within the state who might have known about their affinities, but also to officers of the fisc if they did not collect those fines. Even bishops were told that they could expect punishment for inaction at the Last Judgement.Footnote ⁶⁵ These laws enjoin upon the emperor’s subordinates the need for constant vigilance regarding the religious beliefs and behaviours of their colleagues. The harsh punishments directed at those under whose watch heterodox individuals had entered imperial service would no doubt have concentrated minds. Of course, that it was deemed necessary to threaten those responsible with unpayable fines, loss of office, loss of property, and periods of exile is also an indication of the difficulty in getting high officials, office staffs, governors, advocates, officers of the fisc, and the leading men of provincial cities (among others) to prioritise this qualification for imperial service. As with laws against pagans and heretics in the provinces – whose likely failures of enforcement have received greater attention from modern historians – these prohibitions more readily convey an impression that officials were not predisposed to prioritise religious affiliation in their interactions with superiors, colleagues, and subordinates.

The contacts, clout, and competence of officials continued to shape their career paths notwithstanding their relationship (or lack thereof) to the Christian God. Such factors also helped to shape those occasions where their (apparently suspicious) religious affiliations were seen to matter. The moments of enforcement reported by late ancient historians suggest reasons why individual officials might be accused of heterodoxy and why those accusations might be pursued. The potential considerations were by no means exhausted by the pious rationales articulated in legislation; indeed, nakedly political motivations underlie many of these reports. As previously noted, charges of ‘Hellenism’ were deployed in the context of court factionalism in Constantinople.Footnote ⁶⁶ I have already discussed Rufinus’ use of anti-pagan legislation in an attempt to destroy Tatianus, his rival and predecessor as praetorian prefect of the East.Footnote ⁶⁷ Five decades later, the career of a figure of equally extraordinary power at Constantinople was arrested for the same reasons. Fl. Cyrus held a double prefecture when he was dismissed on the charge of being a ‘Hellene’ in 441 and exiled to Phrygia, where he was made a bishop. The Life of Daniel the Stylite indicates that the spatharius Chrysaphius played a key (if undefined) role in his fall.Footnote ⁶⁸ At the same time, connections and relationships within the state could enable individuals to mitigate such charges or make them go away. When the quaestor Isocasius was put under the same charge, the imperial doctor Jacob was able to act on his behalf to have the case transferred to the jurisdiction of the praetorian prefect Pusaeus. As Isocasius stressed in the (presumably imagined) speech preserved in John Malalas and the Chronicon Paschale, Pusaeus was his former judicial colleague and as a result potentially more disposed to clemency.Footnote ⁶⁹ Other standard methods of (sharp) official practice could also be employed, as when Justin II’s quaestor Anastasius (supposedly) used bribes to suppress accusations of Samaritanism and paganism.Footnote ⁷⁰ The social and political context of late Roman administration shaped the articulation and treatment of accusations of incorrect religion on the part of officials.

Similar calculations were presented as central to the decisions made by rulers regarding how to act on such accusations. Numerous reports suggested that they could be used to neutralise a powerful individual who might otherwise threaten the current ruler.Footnote ⁷¹ The fragmentary account of the fifth-century historian Priscus and the later histories dependent upon it stressed that Theodosius II had felt challenged by Cyrus’ popularity with the people of Constantinople and used his supposed ‘Hellenism’ as a pretext to get rid of him.Footnote ⁷² Contrariwise, the Chronicon Paschale noted that Leo I had Isocasius arrested because of recent rioting in Constantinople.Footnote ⁷³ Later accounts of other cases suggest that regimes might use religious affiliation to justify the removal of those excluded or punished for other reasons. As Philip Wood and Meaghan McEvoy have argued, the stress on the (supposed) Arian heresy of the generalissimo Aspar after his murder in the Senate on behalf of Leo plausibly stems from the public line taken by the emperor’s regime in explaining away a moment of brutal power politics.Footnote ⁷⁴ In all these cases, imperial disfavour is cited as central to these advisers’ loss of office (and, for Aspar, his life). These accounts thus imply (as might anyway be expected) that personal ties with superiors, colleagues, and subjects were critical for those heretics and non-Christians who were able to attain and continue to hold office.

Demands for religious uniformity within the state must be set within the context of the wider considerations of rulers and their subordinates. If supposedly non-Christian and heretical officials continued to find favour, it was, in part, because being an (orthodox) Christian remained just one recommendation for office. As the special offers and exemptions that opened this section show, those in charge of appointments from the emperor downwards could overlook issues of precise religious affiliation to prioritise the experience or expertise of the candidate, as well as their own personal relationships with them. The exclusively ‘secular’ retrospective recounting of particular careers underlines the extent to which even Christians generally seem to have been appointed, not because they were Christians but for these other reasons. On the one hand, this lack of explicit reference to religious beliefs and practices might be seen as a reflection of a requirement so basic it did not need spelling out.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the last decades of the fifth century and the first decades of the sixth in Constantinople, requests to establish Christianity became routine as part of appointment procedures; it is plausible that conscientious department heads in both East and West would have made such demands prior to that. Moreover, given that the elite population on which these political institutions drew for staffing purposes was now largely Christian, it could be argued that the imperial state could continue with business as usual except on rare occasions when something went wrong. But this is precisely the point. The absence of reflections on distinctly Christian moral characteristics of appointees, even from various laws of Justinian regarding the civil administration, shows how the implications of an individual’s religious affiliations could all too easily be discounted within the many routine acts that, in aggregate, structured the personnel of the state as a whole. This is part of why so many accounts stress the ‘secular’ or ‘classical’ worldview of those who served in imperial and post-imperial bureaucracies in this period. A need to appoint (orthodox) Christians was not always straightforwardly integrated into the patronage networks that led to individuals holding posts or gaining promotion or reappointment in particular bureaus, nor the arcane rules of precedence and procedure that were supposed to govern their careers within them. This was especially the case as, for much of this period, entry-level posts as advocates in the law courts of central or provincial judges and members of office staffs remained open to heretics, pagans, Jews, and Samaritans who were in some cases explicitly permitted to be exempted given the need to ensure such roles were performed. The practical effect on the global makeup of these political institutions should not be exaggerated. Nevertheless, the priorities signalled in the episodes discussed here show the limits to what demands for Christianity could mean in practice, when it was not understood as a holistic requirement for good governance.

3.3 ‘Lest Heretics Be Seen to Have Power over the Orthodox’

Adherence to orthodox Christianity was neither a sufficient nor, sometimes, a necessary, qualification for office in the fifth and sixth centuries. Stories of nonconformity from across the period suggest that demands for religious uniformity were not always easily incorporated into routine institutional practices. These recurring reports of ongoing religious pluralism could suggest that laws against nonconformists were overlooked and that the attitudes they represented had limited purchase on the personnel and functioning of the imperial (or post-imperial) state. After all, lawmakers often signalled, both that official nonconformity was a fundamental problem and that they thought it necessary to pre-empt the likely disregard of measures to prevent it in future. It could also result from the specific forms of religious uniformity that fifth- and sixth-century regimes pursued. Where these laws provide more specific rationales for these measures (in their extant form), they suggest that non-Christians and heretics were prohibited to ensure the enforcement of policies on correct religion. Such provisions imply that officials who did not act so crudely on the basis of their religious affiliations were less likely to be identified as a problem. Even in those moments where correct religion was at stake, the conformity that seems to have been prioritised was that of the functioning of an orthodox Christian state, over that of the specific religious affiliations of its personnel.

The presence of nonconformists in the state could be seen as an inherent problem: the result of a general principle, of fears of ‘pollution’ or ‘infection’, or of a sense that non-Christians and heretics were fundamentally unworthy of ‘honours and dignities’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The wider legal regimes and concepts applied to those categorised as pagans, heretics, Jews, or Samaritans also held specific resonance for those serving the state. Specific provisions hint at aspects of the practical business of governance that might trigger these concerns. Central to the anxieties of late ancient regimes was the possibility that office-holders might abuse the power granted to them: to spread heterodoxy within the state, to aid their fellow travellers, and (above all) to harm (orthodox) Christians. Provisions, not only to dismiss but to exile heterodox officials are a case in point.Footnote ⁷⁷ Measures physically to remove these men were (in part) the application of a standard response to the religious error of a (formerly) honourable individual. The exiling of heterodox officials was also seen to result from the potential that (in the words of Valentinian III’s anti-Manichaean Novel 18) ‘the company and society of such people’ might influence others to join their communities.Footnote ⁷⁸ Such worries about officials as agents of conversion were the central concern of Theodosius II in his attempts to regulate the activities of Jews and Samaritans on 31 January 438: the emperor closed the civil administration to these groups ‘lest deadly sects should spread more freely amongst the living as if by an indistinguishable mingling’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Such measures suggest that the problem with Jewish, Samaritan, or Manichaean officials was imagined to be their capacity to spread their religious error to those whom they encountered.

In the minds of fifth- and sixth-century drafters, these anxieties regarding conversion were also founded in the basic problem posed by non-Christians and heretics within the state: the authority they possessed over (orthodox) Christians while in office. Provisions against official heterodoxy formed part of a wider legislative concern for asymmetrical relationships between (Catholic) Christians and pagans, heretics, Jews, or Samaritans. Extant laws attempt to mitigate the potential impact of pagan or heretical landowners and patrons on their tenants and clients and to prevent Jewish or heretical ownership of enslaved Christians, for fear of religious coercion.Footnote ⁸⁰ Imperial office-holding was another form of authority over others whose exercise was understood to have dangerous consequences.Footnote ⁸¹ In Theodosius II’s law of January 438, Martyrius justified the prohibition of Jews and Samaritans acting as judges as ensuring they did not ‘have the power of judging and pronouncing what they wish against Christians, and especially the bishops of the holy religion, as if insulting our faith’.Footnote ⁸² Those who served on office staffs were only to be involved in private suits and could not take charge of prisons in case this provided them unchecked authority over Christians.Footnote ⁸³ These concerns about judicial authority recurred in the legislation of Justinian, as too the drafter’s specific anxiety around official duties that provided non-Christians and heretics with direct power over the physical bodies of Christians.Footnote ⁸⁴ Justinian’s Novel 37 of 1 August 535, which sought to reorganise the African church after the reconquest, set out this premise in forthright terms (while summarising the implications of the emperor’s recent religious legislation for the new prefecture).

The possibility that elites who had conformed to the Homoian orthodoxy of the Vandal kings might continue their administrative careers was clearly seen as a potential danger, both by Justinian’s regime and by the Nicene bishops who had sought the emperor’s intervention.Footnote ⁸⁶ The problem that they identified was, once again, one of the harming of orthodox Christians.

The potential for heterodox officials to abuse their power to overturn fundamental aspects of religious policy conditioned another primary justification for their exclusion. As Martyrius put it succinctly when framing Theodosius II’s ban on Jewish and Samaritan judges in January 438, ‘indeed we believe it wrong that enemies of the supernal majesty and Roman laws should also be the avengers of our laws by the obtainment of a surreptitious jurisdiction’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The sense that non-Christians and heretics as lawbreakers could not enforce imperial laws recurs in fifth- and sixth-century legislation. This theme was sounded when the regime of Theodosius II promulgated a law on 21 February 410 banning Montanists while exempting curial duties and office staffs.

Such concerns around the judicial authority of heterodox officials may have been framed as general judgements on their character, but they most obviously stemmed from their requirement to apply laws regarding correct religion. Similar sentiments were expressed by Zachariah Rhetor in an account in his Life of Severus of the aftermath of an assault on a Christian student in Alexandria by his pagan classmates in 486.Footnote ⁸⁹ Incensed by this maltreatment, a group of Christians including Zachariah visited the office of the augustal prefect but were fobbed off by an (apparently) pagan assessor. On a further visit, a group of clergy joined by the zealous ascetic Christians known as the philoponoi made to attack this attaché, denouncing him for his role in the frustration of justice. ‘It is not right for someone who belongs to the pagan religion to be an assessor of a person in high office, and to take part in governmental business: in this way the laws and edicts of the ruling emperors are rendered ineffective.’Footnote ⁹⁰ This explanation is particularly noteworthy given that at the time of writing Zachariah was a lawyer closely attached to members of Anastasius’ court at Constantinople with a career as a legal adviser in the bureaucracy ahead of him.Footnote ⁹¹ The articulate objection that the hagiographer and historian attributed to the angry shouts of these Alexandrian clerics and ascetics could just as easily have framed an enactment by an imperial quaestor.

All these provisions worked on the assumption that officials would act out of their religious convictions in office and, in particular, out of a basic animus against orthodox Christians. The contexts that the regimes of Theodosius II and Justinian identified as sites for this prejudicial treatment seem particularly telling. References to the abuse of Christians in prison and the issuing in court of ‘insulting’ verdicts against Christians ‘and especially the bishops of our holy religion’ hark back to dramatic narratives of pre-Constantinian persecutions.Footnote ⁹² The ubiquitous stereotype of the persecuting Roman official seems to have inspired these measures. This terrifying figure was never far from the minds of late ancient Christians. Fifth- and sixth-century Christian writers repeatedly depicted pagans, Jews, and heretics abusing the latitude granted to the emperor’s subordinates in the exercise of imperial authority to torment orthodox Christians.Footnote ⁹³ These stereotypes were not simply the preserve of lurid fantasies; they could affect actual contemporary perceptions of governance. The Christian congregants of Aurelius of Carthage put it neatly in the chant through which they voiced their protest against the potential appointment of the pagan Faustinus as a tax-collector in June 401: ‘Pagans should not be in charge! Pagans should not boss Christians around!’ (ut maiores non pagani sint; ut non dominentur pagani christianis)Footnote ⁹⁴ It is no coincidence that fifth- and sixth-century regimes consistently appointed individuals who were (to their way of thinking) ‘orthodox’ Christians to chair ecumenical councils and carry out church business. Such missions were the one context where regimes and officials alike regularly stressed Christian formation as a key criterion for appointment, as they sought to reassure the bishops involved that they would referee theological and disciplinary discussions in a spirit of appropriate piety and respect.Footnote ⁹⁵ Within these laws, the illegitimacy of heterodox appointees was similarly located in their propensity to act out of religious interest – and to do so with extreme prejudice.

This image of the persecuting heterodox official was a frequent recourse for regimes and churchmen alike. It was (of course) a stereotype belied by the actual experience of governance. Religious affiliation did not determine the attitudes that officials adopted and the decisions that they took with respect to particular groups of Christians, never mind their competence, praxis, or affect with regard to other groups of subjects or their wider remit. The high probability that non-Christian or ‘heretical’ officials would still be capable of carrying out their duties – and indeed, even with respect to church business – was recognised even by those most apt to perpetuate and appropriate discourses of persecution in the post-Constantinian empire. Representatives of various disenfranchised church factions were willing to accept the interventions, and even seek the aid, of powerbrokers whose religious affiliations they might otherwise have questioned.Footnote ⁹⁶ Ecclesiastical historians could likewise praise the surprisingly beneficial interventions of pagan or heterodox officials in protecting orthodox Christians in contexts of persecution.Footnote ⁹⁷ Contemporaries recognised that the presence of non-Christian and heretical officials did not necessarily result in ‘detriments’ to ‘orthodox people and the most correct worshippers of the omnipotent God’ (to return to Justinian’s prohibition on heretical officials in the reformed African prefecture).Footnote ⁹⁸ The rhetoric of these laws nevertheless suggests that this potential threat was a central justification on various occasions when regimes sought to remove those officials.

Laws against heterodox officials depended on a particular nexus of late ancient Christian ideas about the nature of religious error, its pernicious effects, and the measures needed to stamp it out. Those who drafted these laws on behalf of fifth- and sixth-century emperors – and, presumably, those who framed the requests to which they responded – fused heresiological and legal concepts of religious error with the essential priorities of (self-professedly) centralising late ancient regimes to prevent wrongful use of their authority by their subordinates. These laws sought to isolate heterodox officials from state and society and remove their status and privileges, to prevent the spread of their ‘disease’ and the ‘pollution’ of the palace bureaucracy and elite urban society. They tried to prevent these non-Christians and heretics from exercising power over Christians and protecting their co-religionists. In so doing, they present a caricature of the malign influence of heretics, pagans, Jews, and Samaritans whose actions as office-holders would inevitably represent the crude exercise of the interests of their religious communities and their supposed hatred of orthodox Christians. Rather, as in contemporary accounts of pagan revivals (and the twentieth-century historiography that amplified them), these laws present the religious diversity of empire and state as a zero-sum game in which heretics and non-Christians in power would inevitably seek to thwart and overturn an otherwise serene progress towards an orthodox Christian society. Of course, more recent work has shown that this model of mutual antagonism and irreducible conflict between Christians and pagans (in particular) was not what late ancient religious group membership tended to look like. Bella Sandwell, Maijastina Kahlos, Éric Rebillard, and Alan Cameron (among many others) have found various ways to characterise the middle ground that resulted from the normal sociability between members of these different groups.Footnote ⁹⁹ A central feature of Cameron’s work was a demonstration of how rarely (outside of later fantasies) pagan senators in the fourth and fifth centuries can be seen seeking actively to challenge the basic premises of religious policy under Christian emperors.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In that sense, the concerns of these laws for the implementation of those policies and the misuse of authority to benefit co-religionists seems telling. It suggests that part of the reason that non-Christians and heretics could continue to serve may be that they did not act like the stereotypical persecutors of late ancient Christian nightmares.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Conclusion: Joining the Establishment

Fifth- and sixth-century regimes may have sought the appointment of orthodox Christians, but these demands had obvious limits. Religious conformity was not a sufficient qualification for office; it was set alongside other relevant criteria (notably status, expertise, experience, and loyalty) in the estimation even of those regimes that articulated such demands. Stories about exceptional (but heterodox) administrators, though often tending towards the legendary, highlight the countervailing tendencies of these standard features of a good official. They suggest that, even with regard to Christian candidates for office, requirements of piety and orthodoxy were not straightforwardly integrated into the inter-personal relationships, patronage networks, and local rules regarding advancement and hierarchy that determined the course of individual careers and shaped the broader makeup of political institutions. This could be seen as yet another example of the constraints on the ability of late ancient rulers to effect change (religious or otherwise) by issuing laws (as well as the useful tendency of these texts to provide indications of the reasons why they would probably be ignored). I have argued that the specific framing and provisions of these laws suggests an alternative. Many of these laws justify the exclusion of heretics, pagans, Jews, and Samaritans from the state by alluding to their inevitable abuse of their power to undermine imperial religious policies, support their co-religionists, and (especially) to harm Christians. This implausible caricature is an obvious parallel to continued accusations of persecution made by (now dominant) Christians against (now marginalised) religious communities.Footnote ¹⁰² Like those claims of maltreatment, these laws present a disingenuous portrayal of the ordinary conduct (so far as it can be reconstructed) of members of those groups, which rarely seems to have involved the narrow pursuit of religious self-interest, and especially not the (substantially riskier) proposition of causing active harm towards orthodox Christians. Such rhetoric may simply represent the usual fulminations and exaggerations of legal drafters prone to violent verbal assaults even on those occasions where they issued supposed edicts of toleration.Footnote ¹⁰³ It might also suggest that those whom regimes targeted – or subordinates and subjects understood to be principally liable – were not just any pagan, Jewish, Samaritan, or heretical office-holders. Rather it was those ‘enemies of the Catholic sect’ who acted according to this stereotype of sectarian violence. Those who did not challenge ‘the establishment’ (in the sardonic phrasing of late ancient neo-Platonic philosophers) may not have been on the minds of those who framed these laws (even as their provisions made such individuals vulnerable to accusation). Whatever the original intent, members of (supposedly) excluded religious groups did continue to serve on these terms. Their ongoing presence suggests that the conformity required of appointees (Christian or otherwise) was as much a matter of upholding the regime’s religious policy as of individual religious beliefs and practices.