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

uprising or a raid over the border until it was over, and so he was very dependent
on the initiative of his local officials. Yet their independence allowed them to
build their local power bases outside the reach of the emperor. In theory, the
emperor had absolute power embedded in his quasi-divine status and his role as
supreme commander of the armies. In practice, policy-making could easily be
confused by the immediate pressure of events and the strengths and weaknesses
of the praetorian prefects, the senior administrative officials, and their
subordinates. In remote areas the emperor might not even be known of at all.
One of the most interesting intellectuals of late antiquity, Synesius of Cyrene,
claimed that for his fellow Libyans ‘the emperor, his close advisers, and the
wheel of fortune ... are just names that, like flames, have been kindled up to the
height of splendour and then quenched’. For all they might know, he went on,
the mythical king Agamemnon was on the throne and the Homeric Odysseus still
alive as one of his advisers. 6
It was, in fact, extraordinary that the Roman Empire had survived as a
cohesive unit at all. The secret was the Roman openness to the integration of
local peoples. In the short term, conquest could be exceptionally nasty. Often a
city was taken and razed to the ground as an example to its neighbours. Revolts
were brutally crushed, as the Jews found when three uprisings between AD 66
and 135 led to the destruction first of the Temple in Jerusalem and then of the
whole city itself, which was later reconstituted as a Roman colony. Well might
the historian Tacitus record (or perhaps make up) a British chieftain’s cynical
remark that the Romans created ‘a wasteland’ in conquered territory and called it
‘peace’. 7 It was in the aftermath that local elites were drawn into Roman
civilisation. The key was the city. In the east, cities had been the core of civilised
life for centuries, and it was the imposition of the Pax Romana that allowed them
to transfer their resources from defence into self-glorification. ‘Under you all the
Greek cities emerge ... all other competition between them has ceased, but a
single rivalry obsesses every one, to appear as beautiful and attractive as
possible’ was how the Greek orator Aelius Aristides put it in a panegyric to
Rome in AD 150. 8 In the west, among the Celtic peoples, urban life was
rudimentary at first, but Tacitus, who maintained an ironic detachment from
what his fellow Romans termed ‘civilisation’, tells of Britons speaking Latin,
appearing in togas and being ‘seduced’ by bathhouses, arcades and banquets.
Local gods would be merged into the Roman pantheon - a provincial god of
thunder could simply be seen as Zeus or Jupiter in a different guise - with the