mail: Bill Thayer

Help

Up

Home

Separation of Church and State
(CIL VI.31929)

No one should take the titles of my pages too seriously; years ago when I started this site, I had an idea that each page should have a title, so now they have titles. This being said . . . The fairly uncommon columnar format of this inscription does put all Praetextatus's religious posts on the left, and his secular positions on the right. Since it's clearly intentional, it becomes legitimate to ask why.

And here is where we have a piece of terrific good luck. We actually know who this man was, and the curious question solves itself.

Vettius Agorius Praetextatus was one of the political leaders of the pagan intellectual movement in an increasingly Christian late imperial Rome. Now while it was not quite as bad to be a pagan in Christian Rome as it had been to be a Christian in pagan Rome — not only you were not tortured or killed, but you could have the distinguished career we read in the inscription above — it did take courage. In the face of the Christian juggernaut, Praetextatus, his activist wife Fabia Aconia Paulina, and a circle of friends including the statesman and writer Symmachus, used mostly religious and cultural means to fight the rearguard battle for Roman classical religion and ideals: literary works, statues, the restoration of temples.

Vettius died in A.D. 384, and within a hundred years, everything he fought for would be lost: it was a different world. In the Saturnalia, a work published half a century later by Macrobius, we have a sort of an epitaph of Praetextatus and his group, in which they are presented as philologists and men of culture, which is very likely true.

St. Jerome's epitaph, maybe predictably, was less kind: in a letter to a friend, he said that the year's consul designate was now in hell.

With all those explosive passions on both sides, this inscription stands out as an example of pride but tolerance: despite their natural tendency to mix, keep the religion and the politics separate, folks. The first workable partial solution would not be institutionalized until 1787 and the United States Constitution.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
And thanks to John D Morgan II who corrected a mistake in my expansion of the inscription.
UP TO:	Palazzo Altemps	Rome	Italy	Home
SEE ALSO:	Latin Inscriptions		Roman Gazetteer	LacusCurtius
		OFF SITE:	Praetextatus: Mithraic inscriptions	Demise of Paganism (J. O'Donnell)	The End of Paganism (J. Grout)
A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information.

Accessibility