Decius and the First Empire-Wide Christian Persecution
The emperor Decius required every inhabitant of the empire to sacrifice to the gods in 250 and produced the first universal persecution of Christians. The edict did not name Christians. It ordered a general supplication for the safety of the empire — sacrifice, a libation, tasting the meat — performed before a commission that issued a certificate, a libellus, confirming it had been done. Forty-six such certificates survive on papyrus from Egypt, in a standard form, sworn to by people including a priestess of a traditional cult. The context was crisis. The empire was losing on the Danube and in the east, plague and inflation were general, and the traditional explanation for such things was that the gods had been neglected. For Christians the requirement was impossible, and the response varied enormously. Some sacrificed; some bought certificates without sacrificing; some fled; some refused and died, including the bishops of Rome, Antioch and Jerusalem. The persecution lasted about eighteen months and ended when Decius was killed fighting the Goths at Abritus in 251, the first Roman emperor to die in battle against a foreign enemy. What it left was a church argument more damaging than the deaths. What to do about the lapsed — those who had sacrificed and wanted to return — split the communities of Rome, Carthage and elsewhere for decades and produced rival bishops and the first serious theology of penance. Valerian persecuted again in 257 and Diocletian more systematically in 303. The certificates are also a reminder of what the state was actually asking. Sacrifice was a civic act rather than a confession of belief, and the Roman authorities found it genuinely difficult to understand why anyone would die rather than perform a formality.
- Year: 249 CE
- Category: Political
