“Not Easily Were Stones Joined by the Strongest Bonds Pulled Asunder”: Religious Violence and Imperial Order in the Later Roman World

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 institutional 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.

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