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

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