It is often stated that religious violence in Roman Antiquity did not pre-date the third century, barring such exceptional cases as the three Jewish rebellions against Rome (66–70, 115–17 and 132–35). By comparison with the cataclysmic, if intermittent, physical violence since 249–51 (the rule of Decius), which is often believed to have arisen in part from religious motivations, earlier incidents of violence against dissident religious groups seem to pale into insignificance. A causal link has therefore been established between the rise of religious violence and the emergence in later Antiquity of increasingly discordant and monothetic religious world views, Christian monotheism being one salient representative.1