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Rome's government, politics and religion were dominated by an educated, male, landowning military aristocracy. Approximately half of Rome's population were slave or free non-citizens. Most others were plebeians, the lowest class of Roman citizens. Less than a quarter of adult males had voting rights; far fewer could actually exercise them.
The Religio Romana (literally, the "Roman Religion") constituted the major religion of the city in antiquity.The first gods held sacred by the Romans were Jupiter, the highest, and Mars, the god of war, and father of Rome's twin founders, Romulus and Remus, according to tradition.
Roman historians, such as the classicist J. A. North, have written that Roman imperial culture began in the first century with religion embedded in the city-state, then gradually shifted to religion as a personal choice. [32] Roman religion's willingness to adopt foreign gods and practices into its pantheon meant that, as Rome expanded, it also ...
Even the most skeptical among Rome's intellectual elite such as Cicero, who was an augur, saw religion as a source of social order. For ordinary Romans, religion was a part of daily life. [16] Each home had a household shrine at which prayers and libations to the family's domestic deities were offered. Neighborhood shrines and sacred places ...
380: Theodosius I declared Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. 381: The second ecumenical council (the First Council of Constantinople) reaffirmed and revised the Nicene Creed, repudiating Arianism and Pneumatomachi. 381 – 391: Theodosius outlaws paganism within the Roman Empire. Laws enacted requiring death penalty ...
On the contrary, "in the East Roman or Byzantine view, when the Roman Empire became Christian, the perfect world order willed by God had been achieved: one universal empire was sovereign, and coterminous with it was the one universal church"; [18] and the church came, by the time of the demise of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, to merge ...
As the Roman Republic, and later the Roman Empire, expanded, it came to include people from a variety of cultures, and religions. The worship of an ever increasing number of deities was tolerated and accepted. The government, and the Romans in general, tended to be tolerant towards most religions and religious practices. [1]
A. N. Sherwin-White records that serious discussion of the reasons for Roman persecution of Christians began in 1890 when it produced "20 years of controversy" and three main opinions: first, there was the theory held by most French and Belgian scholars that "there was a general enactment, precisely formulated and valid for the whole empire, which forbade the practice of the Christian religion.