Religious Intolerance in the Later Roman Empire - Bad request ...

matters of ecclesiastical discipline, Damasus would do it for him. The petition also
asked that Damasus, if he were to have such authority over his equals should not be
judged by them, and that instead he should be tried by the emperor himself rather than
the Church courts. 265
The letter was a severe dressing down for Aquilinus for his apparent failure to
take action against religious dissidents in Rome and also against other officials in Italy
who had apparently failed in this account. Gratian accused Aquilianus of trying his
patience by disregarding his orders and thus allowing the dissidents in Rome to
flourish. 266 Gratian also questioned whether the Ursinians were effectively more
powerful than he was in Rome. 267 Despite this implied threat to his authority, Gratian
simply continued the policy of Valentinian and ordered that they should be expelled to
beyond the one hundredth milestone from Rome.
Gratian appears to depart from the normal and accepted means of performing
Imperial business by telling Aquilinus that he would not issue any further legislation
on the issue and that Aquilinus should read the orders Gratian had sent to his
predecessor Simplicius “and cease to expect a repetition of the mandate, because our
Clemency’s propriety should disdain to repeat an instruction.” 268 Possibly Gratian
decided this was a more efficient means of executing government business, in which
case he would have been presaging the motivations for the Theodosian Code itself by
almost fifty years. He, and his government may also have thought that such a
procedural change would make the government appear more powerful because
whatever it decided would be permanent. But whatever the motivations, this change
may well have rendered the government less powerful by making it less prevalent
265 Damasus’ petition is at PL.13.575-584, Stevenson (1966) 89-91 provides a translation.
266 nostra praecepta per v estram neglegentiam destituta quae tan dem poterit ferre patientia? Quam quidem
dum despicitis excitatis, ut longae tolerantiae desperatos sum at accentus et officium m etu cogat agnosci
267 etiam ne v iv idius est, quod Ursini inv ssit am entia, quam quod serenitas nostra m itibus persuasit edictis
268 Flavius Simplicius 7 PLRE 1.844; et desinat iteration em sperare m andati, quia pigendus m ansuetudinis
nostrae pudor est instaurare praeceptum
161