I THE LIMITS OF RELIGION: ROBERT MARKUS’ CONCEPT OF THE ‘SECULAR’

In a series of publications, Robert Markus painted the late Roman city as a basically ‘secular’ landscape, in which pagans and Christians shared customs, festivals and even what might once have been seen as cults.Footnote ¹ As he put it in The End of Ancient Christianity:

After the emperors had banned sacrifices, civic festivals remained pagan only in the eyes of bishops. The reality, revealed in occasional acknowledgements in otherwise rigorist sermons, is that there was no substantial religious content to the festivals, which the bishops were endeavouring to ‘paganise’.Footnote ³ The two centuries from Augustine to Gregory the Great saw the expansion of a specifically Christian sacred and concomitant ‘drainage of secularity’ from both Christian discourse and the surrounding world.Footnote ⁴

Markus’ vision of a ‘secular’ late Antiquity has exercised great influence, not least through its elaboration by Claude Lepelley and by Peter Brown, whose early work had deeply influenced Markus.Footnote ⁵ By the 380s, pagan devotion had disappeared from official inscriptions erected in African cities, but Christianity remained totally absent. These trends seemed to Lepelley to confirm the religious neutrality of civic culture.Footnote ⁶ Brown, in turn, has referred to the ‘massive middle ground that could hold the hearts of pagans and Christians alike. … Sacrifice was not central to all pagan rituals … In a late Roman city … the venerable town hall, the Forum, the circus, and the triumphal avenues that passed beneath ancient arches could be the scene of ceremonial occasions quite as heavy with the thrill of worship as was any Christian basilica.’Footnote ⁷

Framed against proper Christian belief or practice, the idea of ‘secularity’ can both include and exclude aspects of traditional, polytheistic religion. Like ‘paganism’ itself, the ‘secular’ is, in any of its varying formulations, a modern concept that imperfectly systematises the often inchoate ways in which ancient Christians thought and talked about human beings and the world they inhabited.Footnote ⁸ For Augustine, in whom Markus found both a critic of contemporary mores and a proponent of a relatively broadminded Christian ideal, the saeculum was ‘the world’, often in the negative sense of 1 John 2:15 or James 4:4, or the present ‘age’.Footnote ⁹ Even a career ‘in the world’, though allowed to Christians, might not be fully innocent; thus, one of Augustine's close colleagues describes a young man, who had been working on the proconsul's legal staff, as ‘sinking in the world’ before he entered the monastery.Footnote ¹⁰ Though it did not bear connotations of the worship of ‘pagan’ gods, the saeculum was not a neutral sphere shared by pagans and Christians (as in The End of Ancient Christianity) or the present state of ‘mixture’ of the earthly and heavenly cities (as in Markus’ earlier, equally influential monograph, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine).Footnote ¹¹ For Augustine, it was all that belonged to this world, and not the service of God. ‘Secular’ is, however, also an empirical description of a late Roman society in which traditional cult had, by the early fifth century, been extensively curtailed.Footnote ¹² To study the ‘secular’ is thus to get at real social changes through the thinking of late antique authors who understood them in different terms.

In this paper, I suggest that Markus and his successors have drawn the sphere of the ‘secular’ too widely and too starkly. One consequence has been a relative neglect for the attitudes of convinced non-Christians and for the fears and ambitions that could shape Christians’ approaches to civic tradition. As Markus recognised in one of his last articles, his concept of ‘secularity’, which had taken on subtly different nuances over the years, was coherent from ‘the Christian and perhaps the Jewish perspectives’, but not necessarily from those of others, such as ancient polytheists.Footnote ¹³ There were, after all, people who wanted to maintain the worship of the gods despite imperial hostility, and these, the remaining pagans, might, as Markus once remarked, still have taken part in ‘festivities to express their own religious loyalties through them’.Footnote ¹⁴

To point out this gap is not simply to suggest, with Claire Sotinel, that a ‘neutral’ civic space could be filled with different meanings by different actors.Footnote ¹⁵ It is to challenge a growing body of scholarship that has seen the ‘pagans’ of Christian preaching and apologetic as rhetorical constructs, mirrors for Christian self-definition and tools by which to denigrate diverse local traditions and ordinary, but in fact Christian, behaviour.Footnote ¹⁶ If (as Markus thought) there was nothing substantively ‘pagan’ about civic life, we can never be sure whether a reference to a thing or person as ‘pagan’ was not, in fact, a slur against Christians who deviated from their bishops’ expectations. To deal with every aspect of a vast and ramifying scholarly literature would be impossible.Footnote ¹⁷ A question nonetheless remains, even when one has called the language of the ‘secular’ into doubt: where did Augustine, or his interlocutors, put the boundary between pagan religion (‘idolatry’) and mere ‘worldliness’, and what do their perceptions tell us about the cultural meaning of civic rites in a Christianising Roman Empire? As I will argue through a targeted study of an Augustinian sermon, a festival that can appear, at first glance, to have been unproblematically ‘secular’ could still form a part of pagans’ own inherited worship, of what they themselves saw as the traditional rites of their city. To define proper Christian behaviour was at least sometimes, therefore, to demarcate it from a living, distinctively traditionalist alternative.

II ‘IT'S NOT A GOD, BECAUSE IT'S THE GENIUS OF CARTHAGE’

In a sermon delivered before a feast of the genius of Carthage, Augustine gives his most sustained homiletic treatment of the dangers of civic ‘idolatry’.Footnote ¹⁸ He also sketches a layman's perspective that seems, at first glance, to approximate to the ‘secularity’ Markus thought typical of ordinary Christians. Placed in April 399, just after an imperial ban on idolatry at Carthage, Sermo 62 stood at a vital juncture in Markus’ narrative of changing Christian attitudes toward the secular.Footnote ¹⁹ ‘A masterpiece of crowd management’, in which Augustine defused mounting tensions within the congregation, it marked the point at which Augustine began (or so Markus thought) to take a newly hard line against festivals he had once tolerated.Footnote ²⁰ Denouncing a feast that had ‘lost most of its religious associations’,Footnote ²¹ the sermon showed Augustine, who had once articulated something near to Markus’ ‘secular’ regard for civic life, both acknowledging the ‘secular’ mentality of many Christians and turning toward a lastingly rigorist attitude.

The narrative is compelling, but does not withstand scrutiny of the underlying chronology or of the sermon's content. The dating to April 399 is little more than an educated guess. Scholars have ordinarily put Sermo 62 in 398 or 399, depending on whether they think it must predate or soon follow the arrival of the imperial comites Gaudentius and Jovius in Carthage on 19 March 399 to ‘overthrow the temples and break the images’.Footnote ²² Augustine, however, only insinuates in passing that sacrificing might take place during the feast,Footnote ²³ and, though cult-images were supposed to be removed after 399 and temples closed, he acknowledges that the genius could be considered a civic ‘ornament’.Footnote ²⁴ That could have spared the image of the Carthaginian genius from destruction, since the emperors approved of statues’ ‘ornamental’ quality and were favourable to feasts.Footnote ²⁵ The concluding sections presuppose landholders’ control over shrines on their own estates; a plausible, but not a certain, terminus ante quem is thus a law, posted in Carthage on 5 June 408, that commanded every altar to be destroyed.Footnote ²⁶

Even more importantly, the sermon is unrepresentative of Augustine's preaching, before or after 399 (some 800 sermons in total, though still only a fraction of those preached).Footnote ²⁷ Though Augustine often condemns as demonic or idolatrous the consultation of diviners, astrologers and other magical specialists, he still distinguishes such acts from the worship of idols in pagan temples.Footnote ²⁸ They may all be idolatrous, but they do not present exactly the same problem. Civic festivals, by contrast, he may call ‘pagan’ or criticise for their worldliness, but (as we will see in a few particularly revealing examples below) he almost never suggests that they are meant to honour pagan gods.Footnote ²⁹ Even in a sermon on John, for example, where he warns against participation in a traditional rite whose focus on blood bears (to him) a suspicious resemblance to Christian teaching on Christ, his chief worry is about divination and magical cures.Footnote ³⁰ In Sermo 62, by contrast, he frames the feast – and only the feast – as an act of worship for a pagan divinity.

Sermo 62 was the second element in a homiletic campaign of at least two parts. Augustine had come from Hippo Regius to Carthage and preached at the Mappalia, the church located at the burial-site of St Cyprian.Footnote ³¹ Evidently a blast against idolatry, this sermon, now lost, had centred on a text that he quotes, with imprecision, from Deuteronomy: When the land has been given into your power, you will destroy their altars, cut down their groves and break up all their epitaphs.Footnote ³² Later, in another church at which some of the same congregants were present, he delivered Sermo 62, which, though it began with what seems a routine exhortation to humility (Sermo 62.1–6), turned soon to idolatry. Some of the Christians of Carthage have been invited to attend a feast in honour of the city's genius, and Augustine is intent to dissuade them (Sermo 62.7–16). This, he warns his listeners, is what St Paul had in mind when he warned against ‘reclining at an idol’ in 1 Cor. 8:10–11. In a fictive dialogue, Augustine rebuts the arguments that might encourage Christians to attend, above all, that they are only trying to please their superiors and do not mean to worship anything. Finally, he turns, in a sudden about-face, to pagan anxieties over Christian hostility toward their cult-images, citing the Deuteronomic text on which he had preached at the Mappalia and warning the congregation against destroying the idols of those who have not yet converted (Sermo 62.17–18). Now, he reveals that the church of Carthage had, in fact, destroyed a shrine on a recently donated estate, unnerving local pagans.

The line of argument that Augustine's sermon appears to be following thus shifts twice. The first shift is smoothly orchestrated, the second abrupt. Similar manoeuvres occur in other sermons that blend topical exhortation with devotional and theological edification. It was, perhaps, an attempt to conciliate an audience before hard words, but also a mark of Augustine's improvisational method.Footnote ³³ Augustine's listeners, aware of local politics, might have anticipated both shifts. To the modern reader, the second, in particular, is startling. I will thus track the sermon's flow until section 16, the conclusion of Augustine's exhortation not to attend the feast, before discussing the political and cultural background, to which the final two sections offer important clues.

For the first third of the sermon (62.1–6), Augustine expounds the intertwined needs to have humility and a heart receptive to Christ. Neither his opening words (‘We heard, when the Gospel was read, that our faith is praised in humility’) nor the day's text – Matt. 8:5–13, the pericope of the centurion and his servant, to which Augustine adds the parallel Luke 7:1–10 and surrounding passages – hints at the feast or the problem of idolatry.Footnote ³⁴ They do, however, introduce the theme of proper potestas, which will recur throughout the sermon, and allow Augustine to introduce an idea programmatic for his exhortation against idolatry: only those who have made proper room for Christ, by humble submission to him, will be saved. In the centurion and the woman with the flow of blood, who was healed when she touched the fringe of Christ's garment (Luke 8:43–8; cf. Matt. 9:19–22), Augustine finds a type of the gentile church. He also marks another, more troubling divide. ‘For the faith of the few touches it [that is, Christ's body], the crowd of the many presses it. That the body of Christ is the church, its sons, so to speak, you have heard and know; and, if you will, you yourselves are they.’Footnote ³⁵ Augustine's listeners are the gentile church, those summoned ‘from east and west’ to the table of Abraham, but they must guard their humility and will to obey God.Footnote ³⁶

‘Pay attention therefore, brothers!’ Augustine says.Footnote ³⁷ To touch the fringe and be healed – from the ‘flux’, that is, ‘of carnal pleasures’ – is to heed the words of ‘the newest and least’ of apostles: For if someone sees him, who has knowledge, reclining at an idol, will his conscience, since it is infirm, not be built up for eating things sacrificed to idols? And, brother, the infirm, for whom Christ died, will perish in your knowledge (1 Cor. 8:10–11). In the words of Paul, Augustine finds a starkly literal, present-day referent, as he turns at last to the feast of the genius. ‘How’, asks Augustine, ‘do you think that men can be deceived by images, which they think are honoured by Christians? But, says someone, “God knows my heart.”’ It is the answer one would expect, after Augustine's preparation, and, of course, he has a reply: ‘But your brother does not know your heart!’ The danger, he warns, is grave, as the ‘infirm’ brother will be led to want ‘not just to eat there, but also to sacrifice’.Footnote ³⁸ Those who fail to heed Augustine's words and, after reclining at an idol, return to the church, will destroy the faith of their fellow Christians. ‘“But I am afraid”, you will say, “to offend a superior”’, a maior.Footnote ³⁹ Augustine approves the principle: ‘Certainly, do not offend a superior; this rule is laid on you.’ But, he says, one must consider the hierarchy of superiors. Your parents are your first maiores, but God is still greater, and so, even, is your patria. He hints, therefore, at the feast's purpose – celebration of the greatness of the city of Carthage – but shies away before naming it.

The danger, Augustine suggests, is not just to fellow Christians. ‘We want the remaining pagans to be gathered up; you are stones in their path; wishing to come, they stumble and go back. After all, they say in their hearts: “Why should we leave behind our gods, whom the Christians themselves worship with us?”’Footnote ⁴⁰ But, Augustine acknowledges, his listeners are not actually worshipping a pagan divinity. ‘“Far be it from me”’, Augustine imagines one saying, ‘“to worship the gods of the nations. I know, I understand, I believe.”’Footnote ⁴¹ Yet, Augustine answers again, the ‘infirm’ person does not. Before, the infirmus was the feast-goer's Christian frater. Now, Augustine applies the word to the pagans who would, absent the heedlessness of the Christian listeners, be converted. The weak would-be Christian and the weak Christian blend together, in Augustine's rhetoric as for a long tradition of scholarship that has sought to explain the behaviour of half-converted pagans or semi-pagan Christians, or whichever categories seem most apt.Footnote ⁴²

Having blurred the lines, Augustine now draws them more sharply again: ‘Do you dare to deny that Christ is God? Do you learn anything else, when you recline at an idol? Their teaching does not admit the teaching of Christ. Ask where you have learned that Christ is not God: pagans are accustomed to say this.’ The feast-goers will, Augustine asserts, hear their fellow attendees talking about idols and questioning Christ's deity, in a scene not unlike the dinner-party depicted in the famous letter sent, after Alaric's sack of Rome, by the pagan aristocrat Volusianus to Augustine. There, a nameless friend questioned whether Christ's deity was compatible with his incarnation as a baby, in the womb of a virgin left intact by the birth.Footnote ⁴³ Augustine's imagined pagan party-goers are blunter, pointing to the crucifixion to deny Christ's deity at its (to human eyes) weakest moment.Footnote ⁴⁴ To go and ‘learn this from pagans’ is to ‘lose salvation’; the cure, to ‘touch the fringe in this situation also’.

Augustine repeats the Christian feast-goer's response: ‘“It is not a god”, he says, “because it is the genius of Carthage.”’Footnote ⁴⁵ Here we have slight puzzle. Throughout the sermon, Augustine uses the neuter ‘genium’, a form attested on rare occasion from the first century onward. When rebutting Varro's theological ideas in City of God, however, Augustine uses the ordinary ‘genius’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Why he adopts the neuter here, he does not explain, and such parallels as there are shed no light.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is, however, noteworthy that the first instance is in the voice of the Carthaginian layman. Perhaps the neuter acknowledges the ordinary Christian's desire to downplay the divinity's personality; perhaps it makes clearer, for a general audience, the learned bishop's identification of the genius with a (neuter) daemonium;Footnote ⁴⁸ perhaps, more simply, it reflects current colloquialism in Carthage. Whatever nuance the unusual gender imparts (if any) must be slight, as Augustine does not mark the form as salient. The key point would hold good, whether Augustine had spoken of a ‘genius’ or a ‘genium’: the Christian conviction that the city's guardian spirit is not a god does not mean that others do not think it a god. ‘As if’, Augustine exclaims, ‘if it were Mars or Mercury, it would be a god!’ He homes in on the practical sociology of pagan cult: ‘But pay attention to how they consider it, not to what it is. For I also know, with you, that it is a stone. If the genius is a kind of ornament, let the citizens of Carthage live well, and they themselves will be the genius of Carthage! If, however, it is a demon, you have also heard there, What the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God’ (1 Cor. 10:20).Footnote ⁴⁹

If Augustine were offering a learned critique of pagan beliefs, as in City of God, he might have extrapolated from Apuleius’ identification of a human's mind, his genius, as a daemon to an identification of the city's spirit as a similarly demonic power.Footnote ⁵⁰ If Augustine were a modern historian searching for a contemporary parallel, he might have quoted Symmachus’ defence of the Roman priesthoods in Relatio 3, sent to Valentinian II at Milan in 384: ‘the divine mind has distributed to the cities various guardians, their cults; as souls to those being born, so the genii of destiny are imparted to peoples.’Footnote ⁵¹ Augustine was a preacher, seeking an argument persuasive to a general audience, and so he pointed, as Honorius would in the law promulgated in Africa in June 408, to the statue's cultic setting.Footnote ⁵² Augustine says:

‘What they do there’: quid ibi faciant. Augustine has already suggested that a weak Christian might be tempted not just to eat, but to sacrifice. This is the closest he comes to making the same accusation a second time. The altar, and pagan talk, are all that he points to with any conviction. The danger, one infers, lies not in a particular practice, since sacrificing is probably absent and moderate dining not a problem in itself, but in the commitments and beliefs attendance would express. To go is to accept (or at least seem to accept) that the genius is indeed, as the pagan sponsors think it, a divinity. ‘Would, brothers, that the body of Christ were to be pressed by pagans, by whom it is used to being pressed; let Christians not press the body of Christ!’Footnote ⁵⁴ Pressura, by which Augustine elsewhere denotes the strain brought by the many disasters of the early fifth-century Roman world, refers here to the religious ‘pressuring’ of Christians.Footnote ⁵⁵ To convert the pagans, he says, ‘desert their festivals, desert their trifles; and, if they do not agree with our truth, let them blush at how few they are’.

It is a hopeful thought, in the mouth of a Christian bishop.Footnote ⁵⁶ Augustine does not dwell on it. ‘If the one who is over you is good, he is your nourisher; if he is bad, he is your tempter.’Footnote ⁵⁷ The Christians, he says, are to be like gold in the fire, not chaff that burns away; to be rich from God, in the age to come. Now he works his way back around to the problem that sparked off the imagined dialogue: the Christian's duty to his maior.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is not pride, he says, that he is counselling, a contempt for rightful potestas, but rather a proper appreciation for the hierarchy of powers: one does not obey a curator over a proconsul, or a proconsul over an emperor, and God is to be obeyed above all.

‘But a powerful man plots against you … he has sharpened his razor, to shave your hair, not to cut off your head.’Footnote ⁵⁹ An allusion to the day's Psalm (51:4 lxx), it is also a recognition that no one was going to die for resisting modern-day pagans. The danger, which Augustine elaborates at length, is that the angered maior will destroy the Christian's financial well-being. ‘He removed your poverty; does he also remove your riches?’ The martyrs, Augustine reminds his listeners, held even this present life ‘superfluous’. Shall Christians really ‘fear the injuries of Christian times’? The pagan's wiles are now indirect. ‘He does not say openly, “Come to an idol.” He does not say openly, “Come to my altars; feast there.”’ Nor, when the Christian has refused, does he put his real complaint into a lawsuit: ‘“He was unwilling to come to my altars, he was unwilling to come to the temple which I venerate.”’Footnote ⁶⁰ No, says Augustine, no one ‘dares to say this’; instead, ‘he works other things deceitfully’. But what of it? A thief, a burglar, a brigand, a fever, a scorpion, a poisonous mushroom – all of them can bring a person's life to an end. Why fear a powerful man, therefore? Those tempted by the feast have gained their money ‘with great labour’; coming to ‘eternal life’ will also require ‘great labour’, and, if they find their earthly possessions dear, how much more the life that will last forever?Footnote ⁶¹

One could make more observations about the fine details of Augustine's arguments. It is the overall tenor of the sermon that is most striking, especially when it is set alongside the sermon that has become, since publication of its full text in 1992, Augustine's most famous homiletic critique of pagan thought and Christian misbehaviour. Delivered in opposition to the ongoing New Year's celebrations of, most likely, the year 404, the massive Sermo Dolbeau 26 begins, after a brief address to the congregation, with a full-bore assault on the ongoing festival of the Kalends of January.Footnote ⁶² Again and again, Augustine bids that congregation – Carthaginians again, probably – be separate from the gentes.Footnote ⁶³ ‘You are going to celebrate gift-giving today with a pagan, you are going to play dice with a pagan, you are going to get yourself drunk with a pagan: how do you believe something else, hope for something else, love something else?’Footnote ⁶⁴ In its vigorous rebukes, Sermo Dolbeau 26 resembles those sermons in which Augustine attacks the immoralities of his listeners or of absent ‘bad Christians’, which form as high a barrier to their salvation as does the worship of demons or idols.Footnote ⁶⁵ Illustrative examples include Sermo Denis 17, delivered at Bulla Regia to oppose a theatrical performance that featured mimes and prostitutes, and Sermo 9, which exhorts the men of Chusa to leave behind their habitual adultery and fornication.Footnote ⁶⁶ All of these sermons show the preoccupation with a worldly sinfulness that is typical of Augustine's criticism of civic life.Footnote ⁶⁷ Not so Sermo 62, where the only hint of moral impropriety comes in a few bland allusions to ‘carnal pleasures’ and sinful ‘luxuries’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In other expositions of the story of the woman with the flow of blood, Augustine finds vices, alone or together with the religious errors of the gentiles before their calling by Paul.Footnote ⁶⁹ In Sermo 62, by contrast, Augustine focuses on one particular, present festival at Carthage, eschewing general accusations of both immorality and idolatry.

Not even the exhortation against idolatry at the opening of the great sermon on the Kalends offers a real parallel for what Augustine is doing in Sermo 62. Leaving behind the celebrations that preachers such as Peter Chrysologus found a pageant of idolatry,Footnote ⁷⁰ he dwells on a philosophical paganism that seeks another mediator with God than Christ.Footnote ⁷¹ Though he associates the Kalends festival with pagans, he does not make it an occasion for worship, except in a transferred sense. He glosses Paul's saying, What the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God; I do not want you to be associates of demons (1 Cor. 10:20), as a condemnation of the raucous excitement and partisan rivalries of the theatre, the circus and the amphitheatre. ‘Those who do these things offer incense, so to speak, to the demons from their hearts’ – not, signally, on actual altars.Footnote ⁷² Even that accusation is a rare deviation from his ordinary practice.Footnote ⁷³ He had left the spectacles of theatre, amphitheatre and circus out of the ‘arts marked by trifling or noxious superstition’ in De doctrina christiana, treating the theatre, with mythology, as one of the ‘superfluous and luxurious’ institutions of mankind.Footnote ⁷⁴ In his sermons, he treats absorption in beast fighting or chariot racing as disordered love: damning, yet not worship in any ordinary sense.Footnote ⁷⁵ Though he might remind converts in passing, as he does in his instructions for the deacon-catechist Deogratias, that the theatrical ludi took place on pagan holidays, and could say that spectacles made their watchers ‘similar to demons’, he ordinarily did not place the theatre within pagan religion proper, as he would in De ciuitate dei 2.Footnote ⁷⁶ Other festivals he will call ‘pagan’, even ‘superstitious’, yet he has little to say about the worship of gods or idols by the participants.Footnote ⁷⁷ In Sermo 62, by contrast, Augustine quotes 1 Cor. 10:20, the same passage he had used in Sermo Dolbeau 26, to prove that the genius, whose statue is still accompanied by an altar, is in fact a demonic power to which the pagans are offering their worship.Footnote ⁷⁸

The difference from the regular pattern of the sermons is a serious problem for a ‘secular’ interpretation of Sermo 62. By Markus’ reading, Augustine's views were hardening at precisely this moment. Even if one calls the dating into question, a scholar suspicious of bishops’ rhetoric, as many have been, might still see the charge of ‘idolatry’ as a tool of control or (more positively) of moral suasion, a way to ‘paganise’ the worldly living of their congregations and so render it unacceptable. Augustine does make accusations of idolatry regarding divination and ‘magical’ rites. He does not normally do so when warning lay Christians against the moral dangers of civic festivals. A different conclusion is therefore possible: that this feast, if not others, was still a rite of what the pagan grandees of Carthage saw, and practised, as their ancestral religio.

III PAGANS AND PATRONAGE: THE DESTRUCTION OF A LOCAL SHRINE

Even if the feast had religious overtones, ‘pagan’ was (virtually) no one's self-description. In worrying about the hostility of ‘pagans’, was Augustine simply warning against a rhetorical bogeyman? Scepticism about the durability and importance of pagan devotion extends beyond the ‘secularity’ model, and has endured even in the most thoroughgoing critique of ‘secularity’ to emerge in recent scholarship. Drawing on sociological studies of ethnicity, Éric Rebillard has argued that ordinary Christians in Antiquity had many overlapping identities, and sometimes ‘activated’, sometimes switched off, their ‘Christianness’. By this view, Christians and pagans wished to express their civic allegiance and mutual respect by attending the feast, which, if not necessarily ‘secular’, need not have had much to do with religion.Footnote ⁷⁹ Rebillard's emphasis on the flexibility of individual attitudes and the possibility of inconsistent behaviour is an important refinement to Markus’ ideas.Footnote ⁸⁰ He nonetheless reads against the grain of Augustine's rhetoric in much the same way that Markus does. For Markus, the Christian feast-goer has a clear conscience, and ‘might … plead that the festivities are harmless’; for Rebillard, he may not view the feast as ‘a secular event’, but is nevertheless unconcerned about God or gods, wishing chiefly to celebrate his city.Footnote ⁸¹ The bishop, Augustine himself, remains the protagonist, the laymen are active chiefly in their resistance to his entreaties, and the opinions of the third party, the great pagan men of Carthage, are either pushed to the side or assumed to be innocuous to ordinary Christian sensibilities.

This is not quite right, I think. Augustine, by referring to ‘pagans’ without further qualification, is glossing over important differences among non-Christians.Footnote ⁸² Under other circumstances, those differences could be more salient even for him. In City of God, for example, he draws a programmatic distinction between people who worship the gods for temporal success and people who worship them for immortal blessing.Footnote ⁸³ Still, it is clear from his correspondence that there were devoutly non-Christian, even anti-Christian, traditionalists to be found in the cities of North Africa. Maximus, the grammarian from Madauros who extolled public sacrifices and insulted the martyrs, is a case in point.Footnote ⁸⁴ Longinianus, the only man to call himself paganus homo, is another. Priest, theurgist and worshipper of gods he identifies with Christians’ angels, he was confident in his traditions but laudatory of Augustine himself as a man striving toward the Creator.Footnote ⁸⁵ We can, therefore, imagine many shades of conviction or flexibility behind Augustine's undifferentiated pagani. However, the really important question, in matters like the feast, is not religious ‘identity’, the sense of belonging to one group of worshippers or another. It is whether the actions of particular persons were motivated by what they thought about God or the gods (or their desire to worship them and see them worshipped). To apply Rebillard's framework to sentiments, rather than identities: at the feast of the genius, were the pagans ‘activating’ a piety that fused the civic and the religious, as traditional piety long had?

It is a problem in two parts. First, is Augustine's construal of the feast as an occasion for worship of a pagan divinity, a numen, coherent with what we know about contemporary polytheistic religion, and, second, are his insinuations of pagan hostility plausible? The first question is easier to answer. The crucial moment comes in section 10, where Augustine imagines the laymen saying, ‘It is not a god, because it is the genius of Carthage.’ They were wrong. As I have already noted, one of the few Latin works by a late antique pagan on his own religion, Symmachus’ Relatio 3, identifies the worship of genii with the inherited polytheistic religion of the world's many cities. Though we know little about the genius Carthaginis, it must have been worshipped since the re-foundation of the city as colonia Concordia Iulia Carthago.Footnote ⁸⁶ Abundant inscriptions attest to the worship of civic genii in Africa, and to their identification with great gods such as Hercules, Mercury and Caelestis.Footnote ⁸⁷ Augustine does not suggest such an identification here, but, as he objects, it would not matter for his purpose anyway: Mars and Mercury are not gods from a Christian perspective, either.Footnote ⁸⁸ One inscription, from a city to the south of Carthage, records the establishment of a fund that would disburse interest to the city's decurions on the ‘birthday’ of the genius (that is, the anniversary of the colony's founding).Footnote ⁸⁹ That city was the colonia of Sufes and its genius, the god Hercules. In roughly the same period in which Augustine delivered this sermon, its rioting citizens would, to the acclaim of its city council, massacre sixty Christians for destroying the god's statue.Footnote ⁹⁰

In early fifth-century North Africa, therefore, pagans did rank genii among the gods of their cities. The worship of all such gods, however, was being confined within narrow limits. As I suggested when discussing the sermon's dating, both the genius of Carthage and this particular feast fell into a legal grey area. In August 399, Honorius reiterated long-standing provisions authorising civic festivals, including feasts, so long as they did not involve sacrifices or superstitio.Footnote ⁹¹ ‘Superstition’, however, meant more to a Christian such as Augustine than just sacrifice: it was, as the apologist Lactantius had put it nine decades before, ‘worship of the false’, in all its permutations.Footnote ⁹² How Augustine's pagan contemporaries reshaped their religious beliefs, let alone their practice, to suit the new situation is less clear. The core claim of Sermo 62 is simply that pagans did want to see one of their gods honoured at this particular festival. An altar and image were symbols and, perhaps, objects of their devotion in what might, to evade laws against temples, have been an open-air precinct.Footnote ⁹³ The incident at Sufes and a parallel, less violent, conflict over a statue of Hercules at Carthage confirm pagan regard for statues in an Africa where sacrifices, at least those held in public, were disappearing.Footnote ⁹⁴

While it is clear, therefore, that there was a distinctly non-Christian devotion to the gods (especially, but not exclusively, the divine personifications) of North African cities, the ritual outworking of that devotion can no longer be seen. What is on occasion evident, as at Sufes, is the potential for pagan attachment to the symbol and guardian of a city to harden into overtly anti-Christian fervour.Footnote ⁹⁵ In Sermo 62, Augustine suggests that it could do so, in a more muted way, if his listeners did not attend the feast of the genius of Carthage. Is it plausible, however, for him to assume that the feasts’ sponsors would construe Christian failure to participate as an insult against their gods, and not just themselves? The vengeance he imagines them taking is at least within the politically possible, unlike the martyrdom he envisions in a sermon on Ps. 96 (lxx).Footnote ⁹⁶ In Sermo 62, he hints only at veiled enmities, a career ending rupture in the bonds of amicitia that enabled capable but ill connected men, like his younger self, to rise in the world.Footnote ⁹⁷

In these enmities, historians have been reluctant to believe. Alan Cameron is blunt: bishops’ assertions ‘that Christians were “forced” to take part’ in civic banquets were ‘absurd’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Granted, not all laymen will have welcomed Augustine's strictures. Yet if one did agree with the visiting bishop, he might well have seen his patron's invitation to the feast as a burden on his piety toward God. Every indication is that Augustine is speaking to men of substance, but less wealthy than the feast's sponsors. They are maiores, the Christians lesser men, clients who owe their elevation out of paupertas – a condition, like that of Augustine's own father, more genteel than ‘poverty’ – into real wealth.Footnote ⁹⁹ Even if the meal was restricted, as Lepelley has suggested, to the decurions of Carthage, the distance in status among them is unambiguous,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and the Christians are thus in a delicate position between bishop and non-Christian betters. A devout pagan, after all, might not be expected to have much liking for a bishop (nor, one supposes, for the Christians who followed a bishop's strictures too religiously). Thus Symmachus notes, in a letter to his brother, the pontifex Celsinus Titianus, that Celsinus might be surprised to find him recommending a bishop, but he has done so out of respect for the man's patriotism, not his religion.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The question is not, then, whether a Christian would feel under unwanted pressure to go, but whether Augustine is right in making that pressure an expression of pagan devotion, rather than an innocently non-cultic expression of ordinary civic pride.

The final two sections may hold the key. ‘Do not believe their words’, Augustine says, ‘do not be afraid. They call us enemies of their idols. If only God would offer and give all of them into our power, as he gave what was broken!’Footnote ¹⁰² He exhorts the congregation not to take the destruction of more shrines into their own hands, as the ‘crazy circumcellions’ do, but reminds them of his sermon on Deuteronomy at the Mappalia and bids them only act when they have the proper potestas. ‘We act first’, he says, ‘to break the idols in their hearts. When they themselves have also been made Christians, either they invite us to so good a work or they anticipate us. Now, we need to pray for them, not get angry at them.’

Augustine portrays an unholy ‘unity’ of ‘heretics, Jews and pagans’ standing against the ‘unity’ of the Church, in their shared anger over the laws that have been advanced against them.Footnote ¹⁰³ But ‘we’, the Christians, are not to break the idols, though ‘the places are before us, in which they are … because God has not given them into our power’. Idols were standing, he says, on a property belonging to the church (in re ecclesiae). ‘Brothers, behold what displeases the pagans. It is too little for them that we do not remove them from their villas, that we do not break them; they want them to be preserved in our villas, too! Against idols we preach, from their hearts we lift them; we are persecutors of idols, we profess it.’

The transition is abrupt. But potestas, appearing in slightly different guises across the sermon, gives its superficially disparate subsections a deep thematic unity.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Read as a genuine conclusion to the first sixteen paragraphs, the final two help to explain Augustine's approach to the intertwined issues of the feast and of Christian duty. Not only has he tiptoed, over the first third of the sermon, toward the feast of the genius, he has avoided mentioning, until he has done his best to persuade his listeners to do what he sees as their duty toward God, just what might have given a Christian cause to fear the wrath of a powerful pagan, were he not to show up at the feast. If Augustine really is speaking in the aftermath of the destruction of a pagan shrine – or at least of the images held within the shrine, as ‘idols’, not a building, seem to be the main concern – then the leading pagan men of the city have received a stark reminder of the vulnerability of the traditions they held dear.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ ‘They call us’, Augustine says, ‘enemies of their idols’: not, presumably, in those words, any more than they were going to complain in like terms of a Christian who refused an invitation to a grand meal, but it would still be clear, in the pressure of the moment, who had taken which side. Whether planned for the purpose or not, the feast of the genius – unambiguously divine, yet no easier for a Christian to attack openly than the personified Victoria had been in Symmachus’ Italy in the turbulent early 380s – was an excellent opportunity to make those sides apparent.

I use the language of confessional opposition, but that implies too neat a symmetry between Christianity, which required formal religious adherence through enrolment in the catechumenate and, eventually, baptism, and the varied devotion to the gods of city, family, empire and personal predilection that modern scholars often, and ancient Christians only rarely, call ‘paganism’. Some pagans might have been understanding. The key point, and for Augustine's laymen the overriding worry, was that some were not. Indeed, the proportion of such people among the feast's sponsors is secondary: the inflexible conviction of a few can often draw the less rigorist after them, as ancient bishops knew so well.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The feast was an opportunity for good civic men to see whether Christians, whose bishops and scriptures commanded them to place something else above city and tradition, would prove themselves, as Symmachus once said of a bishop, ‘praiseworthy in the estimation of all sects’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Augustine's prototypical Christian listener, then, is under pressure, not simply to make his neighbours happy by proving himself a good sport, as at the Kalends, but to show that he is the kind of person who can live and let live, who is willing to let old traditions be his own, whatever a bishop might say, and who will nod when a cultured man muses about the incongruities of Christian doctrine, beneath the handsome face of the city's divine ornament.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Christian's participation is not, as John North has said of the offering of sacrifices under Decius, ‘an act of pagan profession’, but a recognition that ties to patron and patria – ties still bound up, for the pagan, with his ancestral forms of worship – mattered as much as the claims of the Christian's God, in whose name a shrine had just been destroyed.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

What Augustine is doing, therefore, is not denying the obvious, accepted ‘secularity’ of the feast, but denying that his Christian hearers are acting responsibly in treating it as ‘secular’ (the term, as always, is ours, not his or theirs). It has religious meaning, not for them or for him, but for the pagans and, Augustine suggests, for many other Christians. The laymen's desire to participate is not a sign that they simply found their Christian adherence irrelevant to participation in the feast (as Rebillard, for example, suggests despite his criticisms of ‘secularity’), or so Augustine's prolonged exhortation to resist the fear of powerful pagans makes it clear that he believed.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Rather, the laymen were caught in a web of social obligations that bound them to please their social superiors by honouring the city's spirit, in a feast still marked by the material inheritance of the genius' ancient, now-restricted worship. To adapt Rebillard's language again, they were ‘activating’ their civic piety not innocently, as an allegiance alternative and parallel to their Christianity, but under duress.Footnote ¹¹¹ The feast's non-Christian organisers would have agreed with Augustine that it honoured a superhuman power. Whether or not the destruction of the shrine motivated their invitation to their Christian subordinates, it had disturbed them enough that those subordinates’ absence from the feast could well seem a declaration of hostility toward the traditions, and the gods, that they venerated.

IV BEYOND SECULARITY?

An exceptional sermon cannot offer a new vision of late Roman culture as a whole, nor do I suggest it should. However, it does allow us to calibrate our sense of the ‘secular’ against Augustine's sense, only implicit in most sermons, of what was and was not idolatrous. Revealing how both pagans and Christian laymen thought about an inherited custom of one of the Empire's great cities, it allows us to move closer to recapturing the fine gradations of local, even individual, experiences of religious change. As Markus recognised, the task of the historian of late Roman religion is not just to gauge the grand scale transformation, across two centuries, in the religious climate of Roman society and politics, but also to chart the ever shifting microclimates of belief and practice, of which that transformation was woven.Footnote ¹¹² Augustine himself had come to see ordinary civic festivals as distinct from pagan religion. To call his default conception of Roman society ‘secular’ is fair, though he did not use the word in quite Markus’ sense. To generalise from Augustine's example would, however, be a mistake: as he reminded his Carthaginian laymen, they knew the gods to be nothing, but others did not. As a bishop, he can be found not just trying to convince Christian laymen to acknowledge the spiritual dangers of a pagan feast, but also counselling a rural landholder not to worry too much about the spiritual dangers of pagan sacrifices that he has no power to stop.Footnote ¹¹³

A similar diversity of attitudes can be glimpsed in the empire-spanning ceremonies that are the main focus of the ‘secularisation’ narrative. Famously condemned by pre-Nicene apologists for their connection with the worship of the gods, the public ludi are criticised by later Christians chiefly for encouraging vice and distracting from the worship of God.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The difference need not involve a change over time: that implies that the ‘real’ problem underlying the apologists’ attacks was sacrifice, when they were concerned about the games’ names and origins, as well. The learned were still aware of both. In 342, a law of Constans referred to an otherwise unattested connection between public festivals and the temples outside the walls of Rome;Footnote ¹¹⁵ and a calendar commissioned by a Roman senator for 354 listed an abundance of pagan holidays.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Even in the 440s, the two perspectives can appear side by side. In his account of the sins for which God brought the barbarians upon the Roman world, Salvian of Marseille refers first to the offering of games as the ‘custom of the ancient pagans’, who ‘used to believe’ them pleasing to their gods, then accuses Christians of offering superstitious honours to the gods in whose ‘festivities’ they participate.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Decades before, Augustine himself had, when apologetic strategy demanded, departed from his ordinary homiletic practice to underscore the historical connection between theatrical ludi and Roman religion.Footnote ¹¹⁸ That does not overthrow the basic ‘secularity’ of his approach, since the contention of City of God 2 is not that the theatre has to do with paganism and is therefore evil, but the reverse. Only wicked, demonic gods could demand something so corrupt.Footnote ¹¹⁹ It is doubtful, therefore, whether we can trace any arc of evolution, across the fourth century or across Augustine's career, in Roman attitudes toward the games. Nevertheless, those who ignored the games’ religious associations had better cause. In the multitude of letters by which Symmachus arranged his son's games, he showed himself concerned chiefly (as Alan Cameron put it) ‘to make a splash’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Symmachus, a pontifex who left letters on the operations of his college, including sacrifices, a public festival and the oversight of the Vestal virgins, did not treat the games as an act of worship.Footnote ¹²¹

The Kalends of January offer a contrasting example. Enfolded, with wide swaths of ancient life, in the sin of idolatry by Tertullian, they were denounced by a host of later Christian writers.Footnote ¹²² Peter Chrysologus, for example, condemned the mummers’ parades as a continuation, by Christians, of an idolatry that ought to have died out long-since. He recognised, however, that his congregants did not mean to engage in pagan worship, while Augustine, as we have seen, locates the festival's danger in love of the world, figured as inner worship of demons.Footnote ¹²³ In turn, the orator Libanius, who saw no more religion in the games than Symmachus did, praised the Kalends in terms congruent with Markus’ vision of a ‘secular’ civic culture: through gift-giving and relaxation, they bring happiness and harmony to all.Footnote ¹²⁴ However, Libanius’ oration begins by calling the Kalends the ‘festival of the great daemon’ – possibly a reference to the emperor, but in decidedly un-Christian terms – and ends by recounting, wistfully, how the sacrifices, now banned, had once joined the gods, too, in celebration.Footnote ¹²⁵ The Kalends were not, for Libanius and presumably also for other pagans, devoid of religious meaning, even if the full ritual enactment of that meaning was now and for the foreseeable future a memory.

Sermo 62, which has helped to frame the narrative of ‘secularisation’ and episcopal efforts at ‘de-secularisation’, is in fact a particularly vivid testimony to the malleability and contingency of the ‘secular’, as well as the durability of religious conviction, in late Antiquity. Some festivals were now devoid of religious freight for most people, most of the time. Others, such as the feast of the genius of Carthage, held more ambiguous connotations, which could be ‘activated’ (to adapt Rebillard's language again) both by rhetorical effort and by the pressure of contingent circumstances, for example the expectations of bishops, friends and patrons or the concerns of ordinary Christians anxious to know what was pagan and what was not. Christian laity and devout traditionalists were not simply resting, confident, in their shared culture. They, like the bishops, were negotiating what that culture would mean, for themselves and for others, and had to reckon both with the inheritance of ancient, polytheistic religion and with opinions still vigorously opposed to their own.