- The cult of Dionysus faced persecution. Reading Dionysus: Euripides’ Bacchae and the Cultural Contestations of Greeks, Jews, Romans, and Christians(Mohr Siebeck, 2015), Courtney Friesen, pg. 16-17, and 22-23: If Livy’s report of the events surrounding the Bacchanalia affair is historically problematic, it nevertheless reveals much about the official attitudes toward Dionysiac religion in the Augustan period. First, Livy represents it as a foreign threat to Roman stability. Although it is clear that the rites of Bacchus were already well known in Rome prior to 186 BCE, Livy depicts them as having been introduced for the first time by a Greek of low status (graecus ignobilis, 39.8.3). Dionysiac religion was, thus, fundamentally un-Roman; yet, it had attracted a multitude so large that “it now was nearly another nation” (alterum iam prope populum esse, 39.13.14). Consequently, the cult was put down by the Senate as a political conspiracy (coniuratio, 39.8.1–2), and resulted in the trials and executions of seven thousand (39.17–18). Indeed, the well-structured organization of the Bacchic cult that transgressed conventional boundaries of gender and class is precisely the aspect targeted in the senatus consultum. Second, from Livy’s perspective, Bacchic religion is morally suspicious. Not only did it involve mixings of genders, classes, and ages, it consisted of nocturnal rites and of all kinds of debauchery, drunkenness, and even murder, thus threatening “to extinguish every distinction of modesty” (discrimen omne pudoris exstinxissent, 39.8.6). Livy’s concern with the debauchery of Bacchic religion as symptomatic of the decline of Rome’s morality reflects popular stereotypes. In reality, however, the Senate’s actions did not arise from moral concerns but rather, as John North demonstrates, were aimed at the consolidation of its political power because the egalitarian structure of Bacchic groups “evades the normal basis of State control and supervision of religion at all levels.” Thus, in both Alexandria and Rome, legislation was enacted in order to exercise authority over the practice of Dionysiac religion. Underlying both decrees, so it would seem, is the anxiety that it was an inherently foreign and destabilizing threat. Its implicit promise of freedom in every aspect of human experience potentially conflicts with political authority and social hierarchy, a tension that will be evident at several places throughout this study…
- Pliny the Younger, for example, the earliest extant writer on Christianity, in his famous letter to Emperor Trajan in 112 CE (Ep. 10.96), describes Christian activities in Bithynia and requests the emperor’s advice on how to proceed. Robert Grant has argued that Pliny’s account is significantly shaped by the description of the Bacchanalia affair written by Livy, whom Pliny was known to have read and admired. As in Livy, the Christians meet at night, they sing hymns and take oaths, and they share a common meal (Ep. 10.96.7; Livy 39.8, 18). Moreover, contrary to accepted social and religious practice, as in Livy, participants include a mixture of class, gender, and age, and come from both the city and the country (Ep. 10.96.9; Livy 39.8-9). Jean-Marie Pailler builds on these observations, arguing that in addition to the verbal parallels adduced by Grant, there are wider similarities in the manner in which Pliny conducted his investigation. His request for direction in policy from the emperor is analogous to that of the consul’s relationship with the Senate in Livy; his question as to whether Christians should be punished because of the name itself (nomen ipsum) or only for offences committed (flagitia, 10.96.2) follows the distinction made by Livy in the prosecution of the Bacchanalia affair between those who were merely initiated (initiati erant) and those who committed actual crimes (39.18.3-4). In addition, Pailler argues that Pliny’s description of the Christians’ folly appears “bien ‘bachique’”: “Others were of the same madness” (Fuerunt alii similis amentiae, 10.96.4).
- Dionysos(Routledge, 2006), Richard Seaford, pg. 60: The cult combined relatively sophisticated organisation (including of economic resources) with secrecy, and with individual choice to be initiated (rather than adherence dictated by locality, family, patronage, tradition, authority, and so on), all of which was outside the control of the political authorities. According to Livy it was felt to constitute ‘almost a second people (or ‘alternative society’: alterum . . . popu-lum)’ and a ‘conspiracy’ (coniuratio) aiming to control the state. Individual choice seems to have been from the earliest evidence for mystery-cult a feature that distinguished it from many other rituals. It is interesting that a female associate of Spartacus in the slave revolt of 73 BC was said to have prophesied about him while she was ‘possessed by Dionysiac rituals’(Plutarch Life of Crassus 8.4). Moreover, in Dionysus – and especially in his mystery-cult – we have seen a tendency to destroy boundaries. The Roman authorities deplored the mingling of males and females in the cult, and indeed the effeminacy of male initiates. And the cult may have mingled adherents from very different social classes, thereby seeming to challenge the class structure of the Roman state. In Bacchae Dionysus is said to insist on having worship from everybody, without distinctions, and he himself is effeminate. The intensity of the cult, together with the secret initiation and oath of loyalty to which its members were subjected, may have been – or seemed to be – a focus of identity that transcended, and so threatened loyalty to, the existing structures of the Roman order. Young initiates were, it is claimed, unlikely to be good soldiers.
- Cassius Dio summed up the position on Roman “tolerance” as such: Therefore, if you desire to become in very truth immortal, act as I advise; and, furthermore, do you not only yourself worship the divine Power everywhere and in every way in accordance with the traditions of our fathers, but compel all others to honour it. Those who attempt to distort our religion with strange rites you should abhor and punish, not merely for the sake of the gods (since if a man despises these he will not pay honour to any other being), but because such men, by bringing in new divinities in place of the old, persuade many to adopt foreign practices, from which spring up conspiracies, factions, and cabals, which are far from profitable to a monarchy. Do not, therefore, permit anybody to be an atheist or a sorcerer.
- Candida Moss (2014) The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, HarperOne: In The Myth of Persecution, Candida Moss, a leading expert on early Christianity, reveals how the early church exaggerated, invented, and forged stories of Christian martyrs and how the dangerous legacy of a martyrdom complex is employed today to silence dissent and galvanize a new generation of culture warriors. According to cherished church tradition and popular belief, before the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal in the fourth century, early Christians were systematically persecuted by a brutal Roman Empire intent on their destruction. As the story goes, vast numbers of believers were thrown to the lions, tortured, or burned alive because they refused to renounce Christ. These saints, Christianity’s inspirational heroes, are still venerated today. Moss, however, exposes that the “Age of Martyrs” is a fiction—there was no sustained 300-year-long effort by the Romans to persecute Christians. Instead, these stories were pious exaggerations; highly stylized rewritings of Jewish, Greek, and Roman noble death traditions; and even forgeries designed to marginalize heretics, inspire the faithful, and fund churches.
- Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, p82. A large part of it was that Christians often refused to worship the Emperor. Since the Emperor was a living god to Roman citizens, this was seen as treasonous. They also did not participate in public religious festivals, and many Romans misunderstood the Eucharist (through anti-Christian propaganda), seeing it as actual cannibalism.