“Not Easily Were Stones Joined by the Strongest Bonds Pulled Asunder”: Religious Violence and Imperial Order in the Later Roman World
Journal of Early Christian Studies, (2007)Abstract
Modern studies of religious violence in late antiquity have frequently mined
Libanius’s Oratio 30 for images to dramatize the advent of militant forms
of political Christianity in the last decades of the fourth century. Indeed, the
vivid and disturbing imagery with which Libanius described the raids on
pagan temples and holy sites resonates conveniently with modern narratives of
the advance of an increasingly aggressive strain of Christianity at the end of
antiquity. Less frequently examined is the strategy with which Libanius sought
to persuade his emperor that protection of the temples and art treasures of
the Syrian cities and countryside was imperative. In his oration, Libanius
illustrates the close intersection of communal narratives, individual and insti-
tutional identity, and political necessity in the later Roman world. Indeed, at
the core of the Oratio 30 is evidence of a struggle over the defining narratives
of the fourth-century Roman world. At stake in this struggle was the fate of
religious tolerance in the political life of the Roman world and the place of the
Roman emperor within the world he ruled.