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

August 339. The language of the law is not as vitriolic as previous laws although the
phrase “avenging sword” (gladio ultore) is somewhat dramatic and may indicate that the
punishment is in revenge for an insult against the true god.
However, and more importantly, CTh 16.10.4 indicates a depth of intolerance
through what it implied as well as through what it did actually say. The law seems to
take it for granted that the mere presence of temples was a danger to public welfare
since they were an opportunity (licen tia) for the morally depraved (perditis) to commit
an offence (delin quen di). The law does not mention whether any sinful religious
activity was actually taking place and therefore the law was taking the stance it did in
order to curtail the possibility of any activity taking place in the future, which would
at least be possible because the temples were still in existence. As such the law was
unusually proactive, not so much by specifying what people were to do or were not to
do in the future, but simply by closing the means through which they would be able to
‘commit sin’. The law also took an unprecedented step in implicating governors in
any offence that took place in their province by prescribing the same punishment for
them as for the actual offenders, if, that is, the governors had failed to deliver a
punishment. Effectively the law said that failure to punish a crime was as wrong as
committing the original offence itself. The law did not make the proviso often found
in later legislation which provided for collective culpability, that is, in order to be
liable, the governor had to know that the offence was being committed and had
wilfully ignored it.
The particularly severe injunction against governors may be due to the fact that
Constantius had only recently taken control of Italy from the usurper Magnentius
after a fairly long civil war, and therefore as a new, albeit legitimate emperor,
Constantius had to firmly stamp his authority on his new territory and to demand
obedience from officials who may still have been attached to the old regime or even to
that of Constans. We know that the addressee of CTh 16.10.4, Taurus, was a
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