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

does appear to be particularly intolerant. Although it should be noted that the worst
penalties in that law, i.e. death, was reserved, as normal, for divination; it dealt with
other offences less severely.
Overall, Theodosius' pagan legislation is more tolerant than his legislation on
heresy. Two heresy laws ordered the death penalty (CTh. 16.5.9 of 31 March 382 and
CTh. 16.5.15 of 14 June 388) as did two laws on paganism mentioned immediately
above, but Theodosius' legislation went to greater lengths to prohibit heresy. Not
only did it include a wide range of heretical groups, but in the latter years of
Theodosius' reign the legislation proscribed ceremonies performed by heretics. This is
not paralleled in Theodosius' legislation on paganism. The punishments for heretics
were also worse than for pagans; consistently the legislation sought to place heretics
beyond the bounds of society, either physically through expulsion or exile or more
symbolically (though no less practically) through depriving them of testamentary
power. Again, no such punishments were levelled against pagans. As such, it should
be concluded that heretics were considered to be worse than pagans.
The religions of addressees who may well have proposed the laws, does not
always appear to have been a significant factor as regards the nature of the law and its
degree of intolerance. That the addressee had some role in proposing the laws seems
certain at least in the case of Tatianus. Four of his fifteen laws (CTh. 16.2.27, 11.16.18,
16.3.1 and especially 9.40.15) are to a degree prejudicial to the interests of the Church,
or at least seek to portray it in a negative light. That they were prejudicial is borne out
by the repeal of two of them (CTh. 16.2.27 and 16.3.1); repeal is relatively unusual in
the Theodosian code. His law against Eunomian eunuchs (CTh. 16.5.17) was also
repealed (by CTh. 16.5.23), although it took five years for that to occur.
That repeal was addressed to the Christian Rufinus who also the recipient of a
further four (possibly five) laws. If, like Tatianus, he too was influential in the subject
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