All judges and city people and the craftsmen shall rest upon the venerable Day of the Sun. Country people, however, may freely attend to the cultivation of the fields, because it frequently happens that no other days are better adapted for [pg 285] planting the grain in the furrows or the vines in trenches. So that the advantage given by heavenly providence may not for the occasion of a short time perish.
(h) Codex Theodosianus. VIII, 16, 1. Cf. Kirch, n. 750.
Celibacy was favored by the Church. By the Lex Julia et Papia Poppea it had been forbidden under a fine and loss of rights under wills. Childless marriages also rendered the parties liable to disabilities.
Those who are held as celibates by the ancient law are freed from the threatened terrors of the laws, and let them so live as if by the compact of marriage they were among the number of married men, and let all have an equal standing as to taking what each one deserves. Neither let any one be held childless; and let them not suffer the penalties set for this. The same thing we hold regarding women, and freely to all we loose from their necks the commands which the law placed upon them as a certain yoke. But there is no application of this benefit to husbands and wives as regards each other, whose deceitful wiles are often scarcely restrained by the appointed rigor of the law, but let the pristine authority of the law continue between such persons.
§ 60. The Repression of Heathenism under Constantine
Constantine's religious policy in respect to heathenism may have been from the first to establish Christianity as the sole religion of the Empire and to put down heathenism. If so, in the execution of that policy he proceeded with great caution, especially in the period before his victory over Licinius. It looks at times as if for a while he aimed at a parity of religions. Certain is the fact that only as conditions became more favorable to active measures of repression he increased the severity of his laws against what was of doubtful legality in heathenism, though he was statesman enough to recognize the difference in the religious conditions between the East and the West, especially as to the hold which Christianity had upon the mass of the people. While his measures in the East [pg 286] became constantly harsher, in the West he tolerated heathenism. The commonly received theory is that Constantine changed his policy. All the facts can be as easily understood on the hypothesis that as a statesman he had constant regard to the advisability of drastic execution of a policy which he in theory accepted and would have carried out in its entirety everywhere if he had been able.
Additional source material: Eusebius, Vita Constantini (PNF), II. 44 f., 47 f., 54 ff.