Jonathan Kieran

The discovery of this apparent pagan temple structure in the Roman suburb of Spello does not shed any “new light” whatsoever on the supposed transition that some believe to have occurred immediately after Constantine the Great lifted sanctions on the Christian religion early in the Fourth Century CE.

Contrary to general thinking on the matter, the Constantinian watershed did not result in a prohibition of the old polytheistic cults of the Empire. These various cults continued to be practiced from city to city and village to village without interruption. Constantine himself enacted no great laws restricting the established polytheistic worship of the State. Temples and shrines to the old gods continued to be built under his reign throughout the Empire and the Emperor himself was still considered a deity requiring worship on behalf of those imperial citizens inclined to do so.

Constantine, having supposedly experienced some manner of Christian visionary experience early in the Fourth Century, took it upon himself to lift all persecutory laws and other obstructions to public Christian worship—prohibitions that had been famously established by his predecessors. While it is true that State-sponsored polytheistic cults were on the decline among the populace and even among certain factions of the diehard aristocracy, sacrifices continued to be offered to “pagan” deities at their temples. Mystery religions, such as those that celebrated the exotic deities Isis, Mithras, Cybele, Attargatis, and Dionysius, were practiced with much fervor in almost all imperial cities throughout Constantine’s dominion and with his approval.

When Constantine began to build his glorious “New Rome” (the city of Constantinople) the planning commissions made ample room for polytheistic temples and statuary glorifying established urban deities like Tyche and Jupiter. The new difference was that Constantine made ample room for Christian communities to emerge from the relative shadows of systematic oppression and establish their own houses of worship, integrating Christianity more powerfully into the cultural equation. This eradication of persecution coincided with a rise in the popularity of Christianity that was already taking place in the late Third and throughout the Fourth Century. Constantine—further influenced by his devoutly Christian mother, the Augusta Helena—simply accelerated the process by which Christian practice became a legal, protected part of the public landscape.

One would have to look to the reign of the late-Fourth Century Theodosian Dynasty of Emperors to identify the moment when the State took legal action to prohibit polytheistic cults, adopt Christianity as the official religion of the State, and formally begin the process of closing “pagan” temples and shrines. Even then, it took a long while for polytheistic practices to disappear entirely, especially on the frontiers and margins of the declining Empire. Certain frontier temples of Isis and Ammon in Egypt, for example, were not officially closed until the reign of Justinian in the late Sixth Century. By that time, however, Christianity was so well-established that polytheism was but an ember of its former blazing glory and most temples to the old gods had been torn down, abandoned, or repurposed.

There’s a little history lesson for you. Newsweek isn’t reporting anything new or remarkable.

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