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When Christianity became the state church of the Roman Empire, it came to accept that it was the Roman emperor's duty to use secular power to enforce religious unity. Anyone within the church who did not subscribe to catholic Christianity was seen as a threat to the dominance and purity of the " one true faith " and they saw it as their right ...
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.
In the eastern Roman empire, the official persecution lasted intermittently until 313, while in the western Roman empire the persecution went unenforced from 306. [45] According to Lactantius's De mortibus persecutorum ("on the deaths of the persecutors"), Diocletian's junior emperor, the caesar Galerius (r.
[340] After Constantine, the Christianization of the Roman empire continued apace. Under Theodosius I (r. 378–95), Christianity became the state religion. [341] By the 5th century, Christianity was the empire's predominant faith, and filled the same role paganism had at the end of the 3rd century. [342]
[18]: 137 Except for a few rare exceptions, such as the Persian empire under Cyrus and Darius, [19] Denis Lacorne says that examples of religious tolerance in ancient societies, "from ancient Greece to the Roman empire, medieval Spain to the Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Republic", are not examples of tolerance in the modern sense of the term.
The Roman Empire expanded to include different peoples and cultures; in principle, Rome followed the same inclusionist policies that had recognised Latin, Etruscan and other Italian peoples, cults and deities as Roman. Those who acknowledged Rome's hegemony retained their own cult and religious calendars, independent of Roman religious law. [168]
Religious toleration has been described as a "remarkable feature" of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia. [4] Cyrus the Great assisted in the restoration of the sacred places of various cities. [ 4 ] In the Old Testament , Cyrus was said to have released the Jews from the Babylonian captivity in 539–530 BCE, and permitted their return to their ...
Roman religion's characteristic openness has led many, such as Ramsay MacMullen to say that in its process of expansion, the Roman Empire was "completely tolerant, in heaven as on earth". [ 17 ] : 2 Peter Garnsey strongly disagrees with those who describe the attitude concerning the "plethora of cults" in the Roman empire before Constantine as ...