The case of an African soldier who served with distinction in the Roman army and who retired to his highland home town prompts a consideration of the problems of identity and behavior as they were shaped by an empire with its own fiscal, administrative, and military categories and demands. The question considers the negotiated aspects of identity in which local attachments of language, kinship, and place were made to merge with the categories of name, military rank, language, and armed service imposed by an imperial regime. Rather than one element effacing the other, it is shown how they could coexist in a split sense of identity through many generations over the height of the empire. Perhaps more than is often imagined, it seems that the structure of the empire was itself bifurcated and capable of sustaining such split identities all the way down to the most localized levels of the imperial social order.

The case of an African soldier who served with distinction in the Roman army and who retired to his highland home town prompts a consideration of the problems of identity and behavior as they were shaped by an empire with its own fiscal, administrative, and military categories and demands. The question considers the negotiated aspects of identity in which local attachments of language, kinship, and place were made to merge with the categories of name, military rank, language, and armed service imposed by an imperial regime. Rather than one element effacing the other, it is shown how they could coexist in a split sense of identity through many generations over the height of the empire. Perhaps more than is often imagined, it seems that the structure of the empire was itself bifurcated and capable of sustaining such split identities all the way down to the most localized levels of the imperial social order.

The narrow belt of habitable lands that lines the southern shores of the Mediterranean – between Libya in the East and Morocco in the West – has always been an insular world. From their perspective, the Arab geographers logically named these lands the Jazirat al-Maghrib, the “Island of the West.” The countries that make up North Africa today are thus collectively called “the Maghrib.” The flow of sea currents and the predominant winds, the hard and rugged barrier formed by the coastal mountains, and a location between the world’s largest desert and its largest inland sea, have produced a peculiar mix of connectivity and isolation that has affected both ideas and economies. While moderating the exposure of its inhabitants to influences from elsewhere in the Mediterranean, these same forces have also promoted the rapid development of outside ideas and practices once they have entered North Africa.

One result of this double heritage of relative isolation and internalized intensity was the emergence of a bewildering variety, range, and localized identity of religious ritual and practice among Africans before the arrival of Christianity. In an area larger than that of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas combined, every environmental niche as small as a village or a valley came to have its own spirits, deities, rituals, and festivals. The practices and beliefs were so integrated into the life of each ethnic people, village, cultural or occupational group that they formed an almost out-of-mind part of daily routine. On the other hand, amid all this fragmentation and multiplicity, there was sufficient contact to encourage the formation of strands of unity that can be traced between Africa and the Mediterranean world of which it was part. When a Christian empire during the later fourth century CE began to threaten the local festivals, pilgrimages, parades, and other performances, it was apprehension over the loss of this vital core of everyday life that provoked distress as much as any danger to deeply held beliefs.

Ritual chanting, singing, rhythmic shouting, metrical voices accompanied by bodily gestures like clapping and dancing involved members of Christian congregations in common ritual practices. These types of bodily participation were also an important part of traditional non-Christian sacred ritual and ceremony in Africa. One such performance had imprinted itself vividly on Augustine's memory. As a young man at Carthage he had heard the chanting and singing of songs at a festival for the goddess Berecynthia – the Mother of Everything – songs that he later castigated as grossly obscene, even if quite effective. Among African Christians it was the same. They knew that song had the power to transform hearts and minds. Their leaders, the bishops, knew from their own personal experiences how much song mobilized emotions by appealing to what they called “pleasure,” or voluptas, and that singing did this so strongly that they feared its effects, knew its dangers, and were aware of the subversive threats that it posed, especially to the minds of “the weak.” They wished, if possible, to ban singing and chanting from the church. But they knew that this was not possible. They knew that this power would have to be managed and controlled.

The unifying and mobilizing drive of chants and songs suggested their utility in sustaining crowd actions, sometimes violent ones. The use of rhythmic repetition and exhortations repeated in unison produces group unity and energy. To understand some of the effects, we might begin by retelling the model horror story of the savage beating inflicted on the Catholic bishop Maximianus of Bagaï, a small town in southern Numidia, around the year 403. One day, as Maximianus stood at the altar in his basilica, sectarian enemies rushed at him with what is described as “a terrifying force and a furious cruelty.” His assailants repeatedly struck him with clubs and other makeshift weapons, including jagged pieces of wood that they had broken off the altar when they smashed it to pieces over his head. The terrified bishop had taken refuge underneath it. Getting to him, one of the attackers stabbed the bishop in the groin with a dagger, presumably cutting a femoral artery since he began to bleed profusely.

Fascination with bad people has its own fashions. Two centuries before Augustine's time, African Christians had an obsession with the enemies of true belief who obstinately chose their own perverted way to the truth: “heretics” as they had come to be named. These early heretics, however, had a style of their own. The writings of Tertullian, the pre-eminent Christian ideologue in the Africa of his age, a stern Catonian moralizer, are focussed on his struggles with the enemies of true belief. The names that he provides for them are a guide to identifying the most dangerous of these hostiles as they were perceived at the time. Apart from external non-Christian threats like diviners, fakirs, false seers, astrologers, and Pythagoreans, the most threatening internal enemies of the church were heretics who advocated gnostic versions of Christian truth. Like those of other orthodox activists of the time, Tertullian's battles were waged against dangerous persons who advocated a less material and tangible, a less fleshy nature of the Christian deity. The rather satisfying frisson to this story, in the eyes of some, came when the obstinate and feisty Tertullian was caught in his own ideological trap. He was branded a Montanist, an adherent of one of the other big heresies of his age. Then nothing.

A long and strange interlude extended over the remainder of the third century and most of the fourth when this first fascination with heretics faded. New concerns, such as local and then state-driven persecutions, and the forging of a harder ideology of martyrdom, came to the fore. But in the decades of the 370s and 380s, there was a resurgence of interest in heresy and heretics, and this time it amounted to something more than an obsession. In the world of western Mediterranean Christianity, the general history of writings attacking heresies and heretics can be divided into two broad periods. The first great anti-heretical movement, which included the writings of Irenaeus in Gaul, Hippolytus in Rome, and Tertullian at Carthage, as we have noted, was directed against gnostic attacks on the real material substance of Christ's body. After this initial spate of anti-heretical action, the urgent interest in heresy went dormant for over a century. Then, with sudden force, a second great wave of interest in heretics resurged in the third quarter of the fourth century. Very few of the specifics of the first obsession with heretics made it across the great divide between the two movements. In his treatise written in the mid-360s, Optatus, the Catholic bishop of Milevis, accused Parmenian, the dissident bishop of Carthage, of having introduced into his jeremiad many strange ideas and names of men long forgotten and currently unknown in Africa – men like Marcion, Praxeas, Sabellius, and Valentinus. Optatus was right. These men were long forgotten. The reason for their presence in Parmenian's writings was his use of old literary texts to construct his attack on the Catholics as the “real heretics” of his age. In consequence, as Optatus claimed – scoring a direct hit on his hated rival – Parmenian had dragged a lot of long-forgotten episodes from ancient history, like so many dead fish, into his argument.

The primal crimes that were the grounds of the division between the two Christian communities – the betrayals during the Great Persecution – remained the lifeblood of sectarian conflict throughout the fourth century. What African Christians at the end of the century knew about this early history of theirs, however, was rather limited. Their evidence was largely confined to the stories and the archival documents that had been assembled between the 340s and the 360s. These writings and the annual replaying of the stories of the martyrs who had died in the onslaught of the Great Persecution formed the basis of their knowledge. Even so, the dissidents shared a special sense of past events that defined their existence. The most explicit short statement of this history was read aloud to the conference at Carthage in 411 by Habetdeum, the bullish dissident bishop of Aurusuliana. After quoting a barrage of biblical texts to prove that bad Christians should be separated from good ones, not just in spirit but also in body, he continued:

The “hundred years and more” marked out a century of remembered history that had a precise beginning – “their damnable betrayal” – and a long series of events that consisted of the use of the state by the Catholics – “these traitors and our persecutors” – in an attempt to murder the Church of the Truth. And it culminated, in reality and rhetoric, in the slaughter at Bagaï.

Modern historians have placed the men and women known as circumcellions at the heart of a rural rebelliousness – I purposefully use general words – a movement of resistance which, it has been claimed, swept through the African countryside in the fourth and fifth centuries. For centuries by now, beginning before any modern historical interest in them, their violent activities have been catalogued, analyzed, and theorized. Most of the earliest interest in the circumcellions, going back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was generated by the Protestant Reformation and the interest of its theologians and churchmen in the early history of resistance to the Catholic Church. Works by Friedrich Staphylus, Gustavus Dietz, and others, published in the course of the Lutheran movement in Germany, marked the modern origins of this research. As a result, many details have been assembled and overwrought narratives written about them, but these efforts have not led to much understanding. In a review of the methodological and factual difficulties that bedevil analyses of the circumcellions, Joachim Diesner, an historian of late antiquity who devoted much time and effort to understanding their activities rightly remarked that the circumcellions are “one of those historical phenomena of which we know many things, but about which we really don't know very much.” Because of the peculiar condition of the evidence, this precarious state of affairs remains true. Partly for the same reasons, there have been a number of basic shifts of perspective on the circumcellions, as one dominant historical paradigm has succeeded another in interpreting them, including Marxist approaches that highlighted the “rebels” as prime bearers of the class conflict in late Roman Africa.

If there is any one thing that has fundamentally shifted our understanding of the circumcellions in more recent years, however, it is not any of the new interpretive paradigms about them as such, but rather our profoundly altered knowledge of the general economic circumstances in which their violent actions occurred. Among the continuing verities, there is still no real disagreement with the basic fact that over the long fourth century the Roman empire, especially its western parts, was caught up in a process of military and political disintegration.