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

The previous law against these four named heresies, CTh. 16.5.12 of six weeks
earlier, had been directed against their meetings and their clerics and with the probable
intention of ‘strangling’ them. Much of this latest law repeats the previous provisions
of expelling clerics and extended it to teachers of the faiths. However, this law only
ordered that they should be expelled from “this city” whereas the previous law had
ordered their expulsion from all cities and returned to their home regions. In that
sense therefore, the law was less intolerant than the previous, but it was equally
intolerant in terms of requiring the addressee to actively identify the “hiding places” of
the clerics and teachers. Again, like the previous law, this one contained no
punishments for the heretics, other than that they be expelled from the city.
There was now a gap of over three and a half years until the next Theodosian
law affecting heretics and to have had nine laws or rulings on heretics in three years
and then none for almost four requires some explanation. Magnus Maximus had been
proclaimed emperor by his troops in Britain in summer 383 and had secured the
western portion of the emperor with the murder of Gratian in August 383 until he was
himself defeated by Theodosius' forces and killed on 28 August 388. However, this
important event does not appear to have left any impact on the laws themselves nor
even on the pattern of legislation since laws were issued at the beginning of the
Maximus’ revolt and at the end, periods which must have been the most uncertain and
busy for Theodosius' government during this revolt.
Perhaps more convincing is the suggestion that the legislation was considered
by contemporaries to amount to a whole; to an homogenous unit of work, at least in
retrospect, that is at the beginning of 384, if that had not been the actual intention of
Theodosius' legislators at the beginning of his reign in 379. It has been noted that two
of these nine laws have an air of permanence to them (CTh. 16.5.6 of 10 January 381,
Theodosius' first law on heresies, and CTh. 16.5.12 of 3 December 383) and there
appears to be a unity of purpose and intent behind these nine laws passed at the
233