A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

I
DISASTER
THE Roman empire must rank as one of the most extraordinary political
achievements history has recorded. The small city of Rome had expanded from a
frontier city in a vulnerable position on the river Tiber in the centre of an open
plain, to control of the entire Mediterranean world. Each of its victories gave the
city the confidence and manpower to search for the next. Italy, of course, was the
first territory to come under Roman rule, though the mountainous central core of
the Apennines made control of the peninsula a formidable challenge. Then there
was Sicily and the beginnings of a provincial empire. Spain and North Africa
followed as the Carthaginian empire was defeated in the third century BC, then
Greece in the second century and much of the Ancient Near East, including
Egypt, in the first. In this same century Julius Caesar conquered Gaul and so
extended the empire up to the Rhine and Germany, while in the first century AD
much of Britain came under Roman rule. 1
By now the relentless expansion of Roman power was beginning to falter. The
republic, in which elected magistrates ruled the growing empire, had fragmented
under the destructive ambitions of competing generals. The assassination of the
last of these, Julius Caesar, in 44 BC led eventually to the emergence of his
great-nephew Octavian as the emperor Augustus (27 BC), and republicanism
never returned. Emperors continued to rule until the collapse of the western
Latin-speaking empire in AD 476 and the fall of Constantinople in the east in
1453. (The eastern and western empires were divided administratively for the
first time in the late third century, and permanently from 395.) Without the
conflicting ambitions of commanders to drive it, conquest was more piecemeal,
and emperors such as Hadrian (AD 117-138) favoured the consolidation of the
empire within its existing borders over expansion. However, wherever the
borders were drawn, there were always hostile outsiders, and by the second
century these were gaining the confidence to attack.
By the late fourth century, the period that is the focus of this book, the empire
had been under severe pressure for almost two hundred years. On the northern