On the whole, the usual verdict of tradition respecting the condition of Christians under the Antonines must be reversed. The reign of Antoninus Pius is commonly represented as a period of peace for the Church, and little is said about the treatment of Christians under the government of Antoninus Pius and of Marcus Antoninus. This favourable view and usual reticence concerning any Christian sufferings during these reigns is largely owing to the high estimation in which the two Antonines as rulers are universally held;—that these great and good Emperors could persecute and harass the followers of Jesus has been usually deemed unlikely if not impossible.
To regard such men as persecutors would be to inflict a stigma on the character of the two most perfect sovereigns whose lives are recorded in history. The first Antoninus received his beautiful title “Pius” at the urgent wish of the Senate, a wish that was universally endorsed by the public opinion of the Empire; by this title he has been known and revered by all succeeding generations.
Marcus, his adopted son and successor, who, if possible, held a yet more exalted place in the estimation of men of his own generation, and who has handed down to posterity a yet higher reputation for virtue and wisdom, tells us in his own glowing and striking words that he owed everything to the noble example and teaching of his adopted father Antoninus Pius. To this Marcus, when he died, divine honours were voluntarily paid with such universal consent that it was held sacrilege not to set up his image in a house.
To brand such men as persecutors, for centuries would have been for any historian, Christian or pagan, too daring a statement, and such an estimate would have been received with distrust, if not with positive derision; nor is it by any means certain that even now such a conclusion will not be read by many with cold mistrust and even with repulsion. But recent scholarship has clearly demonstrated that the Antonines were bitter foes to Christianity, and that during their reigns the followers of Jesus were sorely harassed. Under the Emperor Marcus the persecutions extended throughout his reign; they were, as Lightfoot does not hesitate to characterize them, “fierce and deliberate.” They were aggravated, at least in some cases, by cruel torture. They had the Emperor’s direct personal sanction. The scenes of these persecutions were laid in all parts of the Empire—in Rome, in Asia Minor, in Gaul, in Africa.
The martyrdom of Justin and his companions as told in the Acts of the Martyrdom of the great Christian teacher, an absolutely authentic piece, was carried out in Rome under the orders of Rusticus the city prefect, the trusted friend and minister of Marcus, under the Emperor’s very eyes; while the persecutions at Vienne and Lyons were the most bloody persecutions on record up to this date, except, perhaps, the Neronian; and for these Marcus Antoninus is directly and personally responsible.
The Madaurian and Scillitan (proconsular Africa) martyrdoms apparently took place a few months after the death of Marcus, but these martyrdoms were certainly a continuation of the persecuting policy of Marcus. And these awful sufferings to which the Christian communities were exposed during these two reigns are not only learned from the few authentic Acts of Martyrdom preserved to us, but from various and numerous notices of contemporary writers which we come upon—embedded in their histories, apologies, and doctrinal expositions. Some of these are quoted[37] verbatim. The testimony we possess here of this continuous and very general persecution during these reigns when carefully massed together is simply overwhelming.[38]
Nor is the behaviour of the two Antonine Emperors, who ruled over the Roman Empire for a period of some forty-two years, towards their Christian subjects in any way at variance with their known principles. Such men, with their lofty ideals, with their firm unyielding persuasion that Rome owed her grandeur and power, her past prosperity and her present position as a World-Empire, to the protection of the Immortals whom their fathers worshipped, could not well have acted differently.
We have seen what was the unvarying policy of Pius in his earnest efforts to restore the purer, simpler life led by the old Romans who had built up the mighty Empire; how faithfully he had followed in the lines traced out by Vergil, who, as we have already quoted, wound up his exquisite picture of the ancient Roman life with the solemn injunction “in primis venerare deos.”