Ambiguities of religious practice and belief are a crucial feature of the religious transformation of the late Roman world. Recent scholarship on the limits of Christianization has focused, above all, on the tension between the lifestyles of ordinary Christians and bishops’ normative standards. This article turns attention to a different set. As Charles Guignebert suggested in a seminal article (1923), some traditionalists may have embraced Christian ideas without joining Christian churches. This article teases out Christian elements in the thinking of two traditionalist Latin intellectuals. Often identified as a lax Christian, Augustine’s correspondent Nectarius was in fact a Ciceronian pluralist who rejected traditional cults, yet he had not followed his father in embracing Christian practice. A loose parallel can be found in the Platonist commentator Calcidius (most likely active in the early fourth century). Definitely not an adherent of Christianity, Calcidius nonetheless endorsed key Christian ideas, including the Incarnation, the notion of a singular “true god,” and association between primordial floods and the invention of idolatrous cult. To add new terms (such as Guignebert’s semi-pagans) to an already problematic division among pagans, Jews, and various sorts of Christian would only complicate an imperfect model. However, as these examples illustrate, it is necessary to reckon, when analyzing the complex reality of late antique religion, not just with pervasive deviation from Christian norms but also with potential influence of Christian thought on people, otherwise traditionalist in their thinking, who did not belong to Christian churches.

Building on Jewish precedent, ancient Christians divided the human race into four groups distinguished by their beliefs and object of worship: gentiles, who worshipped many gods; Jews, who worshipped one God but not Christ; heretics, who believed wrongly about God or Christ; and orthodox Christians.1 That division was a momentous innovation in Greco-Roman reflection on gods and their cults. Though previous thinkers had recognized differences among local or national religious practices, they had not treated adherence to a particular cult or worship of a particular god (or set of gods) as primary human distinguishers in their own right. By the late fourth century, the inhabitants of the Roman world were marked out, in imperial legislation and not just the preaching of Christian bishops, by the object and manner of their worship; and the ancestral rites of the cities, which emperors had denounced as superstitio as early as Constantine, were both banned with increasing frequency and explicitly attributed only to a diminishing subsection of the population, the “gentiles” or “Hellenes” or “pagans.”2

This redivision of the world’s population is an essential aspect of the Christianization of the Roman world, of the cultural shift that saw the worship of many gods cease to be a natural, commonsense feature of day-to-day life and Christian ways of acting, worshipping, and thinking become ordinary.3 The fourfold division is also a simplification, rooted in a distinctively Christian way of viewing the world through scripture and theology, of a complicated social reality. The problems surrounding the term pagan have attracted particular attention,4 but much of the difficulty really lies with Christian. While we can propose alternatives to pagan,5 Christian is the accepted denotation for adherents of the world’s largest religion, in all its many branches. We are stuck with the term. It can be used, however, both as a neutral descriptor of adherence (Does a particular person call himself or herself a Christian? Has that person undergone the boundary rituals imposed by a particular Christian community?) and as a sharply qualitative assessment of someone’s belief or devotion (Does that person live up to the theological and moral standards held, by a community or wider tradition, to mark out a true Christian?). If the division among pagans, Jews, and various Christian groups is used simply to parse out religious adherence, as it sometimes was by ancient observers and still often is by historians seeking a broad but low-resolution view of late antique society,6 the categories are coherent enough. In practice, the data are often obscure or lacking.7 Still, it is possible to associate many people with a particular church and to identify others who both knew they were not Christians and offered worship to the gods according to traditional forms. Though significant theoretical limitations remain,8 I will in that light continue to refer, throughout this article, not just to “Christians” but also to “pagans.” The mere fact of adherence says little, however, about depth of devotion, and it certainly does not show that any particular Christian accepted the theological formulations or expectations for behavior advanced by clergy and committed laity. Despite their efforts, neither emperors nor bishops could impose the exclusive devotion demanded by the prophets, apostles, and—according to the canonical Gospels—Jesus himself. In the backdrop of ancient preaching stands a multitude of people who continued, in myriad ways, to invoke powers other than the one God, to honor him or his saints in ways many bishops found improper, or to embrace what seemed to those bishops to be morally and spiritually dubious features of ordinary life.

These “semi-Christians,” as Charles Guignebert labeled them in a seminal article, are a fixture of scholarship on late Roman society, which still struggles, as he did, to find an adequate framework for categorizing and thinking about their religiosity.9 Whether we characterize the less rigorous Christians as participants in a broadly “secular” culture or as members of a lay, lower-class “second church,” describe their practices as “syncretism,” or try to parse out their overlapping, situationally contingent “identities,” these people make it impossible to divide Roman lifestyles and beliefs into neat “pagan” and “Christian” categories.10 “Christianization” was not merely a steady political and legal rise, impeded briefly by the opposition of the Emperor Julian and complicated by internal Christian disputes over doctrine. It was a messy tangle of changes, always under negotiation, that never resulted in a society that was consistently and coherently Christian by the standards of the devout.11

My aim in this article is to draw renewed attention to a neglected phenomenon within the changing intellectual world of Late Antiquity. Occupying prime places in both the written and archeological data, the less devout Christians have tended to crowd out other ambiguous or ambivalent people: devout but nonascetical laity, potential converts, and, perhaps most elusive, those who did not join a Christian church but were influenced by Christian practice or belief.12 Scholars’ attention has most often been turned toward the ways in which traditional customs were absorbed into the devotion of an ostensibly Christian world or paralleled within it. Suspicion that our generally devout informants (often bishops or monks) were setting up overly neat religious divisions has meant that those who were neither devoutly Christian in the way bishops hoped nor firmly devoted to ancestral traditions tend to be seen, by default, as laissez-faire Christians.13 Here, earlier scholarship was more flexible. Alongside his “semi-Christians,” Guignebert placed those whom he called semi-pagans, people who were drawn to Christ or Christians without taking identifiable steps to join a church.14 The term is a bit unfortunate. The ancient, fourfold division poses problems enough, and little will be gained by inventing yet more labels for yet finer categories.15 Some of Guignebert’s examples may be challenged too.16 Still, the point is valid. We know that there were ambiguous non-Christians.17 We simply tend, when confronted with anyone ambiguous, to assume that they were basically Christian.18

One could try to trace out involvement by non-Christians in churchly rituals or the invocation of Christian names and spiritual powers by non-Christians.19 Here, I will focus on an intellectual side of the problem: ways in which Christian teaching shaped the thinking of non-Christians who held a broadly traditionalist outlook. One of the many changes brought by the political rise of Christianity was a need to be able to speak about Christianity in a way that would credit its potential access to the divine without denying the validity of traditional cults or offending Christian emperors and officials. Precisely this issue is at stake in three famous attempts to uphold traditional cults in the face of Christian opposition. Themistius, in Oratio 5 on the consulship of Jovian, articulated a principled pluralism not seen in high Roman politics since the edict of Milan in 313.20 Writing two decades later, when the Roman emperors had become more strongly anti-pagan, Symmachus in Relatio 3 and Libanius in Oratio 30 did not follow Themistius’s pluralism. Each acknowledged the emperors’ allegiance to Christianity, but each also asserted the primacy of traditional cults in the divinely established order.21

These are tactical moves by politicians and public intellectuals, but like all good tactics, they acknowledge and so reveal the actual lay of the land. Adherents of ancestral cults would have to think in this way about their traditions if they were to speak to present political reality. The worship of the gods had become one option in a plural field, one “sect” (as Symmachus could call it) alongside at least one other.22 Now, we know that Christians could respect traditional cult, even to the point of participating in it themselves. Some Christians continued not only to think that the daemones were real beings with genuine power but also to invoke them.23 Others thought, or were tempted to think, that the worship of the traditional gods had been valid in its own time and place and that perhaps someone ought still to worship them, even if they did not get involved themselves.24 Christians, in other words, could hold that traditional rites were efficacious, possibly even necessary, at least for certain temporal purposes. We also know that there were converts from traditional religion to Christianity—people who had honored the gods and then come to see them as malevolent. Can we expect to find something like Guignebert’s semi-pagans, as well? Can we identify people who admired Christianity, who might even have thought it superior to traditional cults, and yet did not actually embrace it (or, since modern biographical reconstructions are always built of approximations and snapshots, had not embraced it at the time we see them)?

I suggest that we can. I will focus on two examples, both from the Latin world. The first is a man who has often been seen as a laissez-faire Christian, Augustine’s correspondent Nectarius. A mention in an early letter, sometimes taken as evidence of his involvement in church affairs, in fact only attests to acquaintance with Augustine. To judge from what the two men wrote to each other later, Nectarius was not a Christian but also not an adherent of traditional cults. A defender of something not entirely unlike Themistius’s pluralism, he believed in a single supreme God and expected to get to him through a virtuous life, defined in Ciceronian terms. The second example is the Platonist commentator Calcidius, taken by his most recent interpreter to be a non-Christian writing at least in part for Christians. Gretchen Reydams-Schils’s case is entirely persuasive but overlooks some strikingly Christianized aspects of Calcidius’s thinking. Unlike Nectarius, he does not appear to approve of the abolition of traditional cults, but he does cast Christianity as the best religion and describes angelic mediation in distinctly Christian terms. Finally, I will return, by way of the long scholarly debate over Calcidius’s religion, to the methodological problem with which we began: how to approach such religious ambiguities amid the empire’s Christianization.

Behind our first example lies a sudden eruption of religious violence. On 1 June 408, clergy in the North African city of Calama (modern Guelma, Algeria) interrupted a parade featuring pagan images that was passing in front of their church. A little over a week later, after the city council blocked the bishop Possidius’s attempt to invoke a recent imperial law, rioters burned down the church and killed a monk. An eminent local citizen, Nectarius, interceded with Possidius’s mentor, Augustine, to ward off punishment. Augustine demurred. A silence of some eight months followed, until a new law arrived, provoked by an embassy by Possidius and other bishops to Honorius’s court in Ravenna.25 Nectarius, whose friends now faced confiscation of their wealth, tried again. Augustine had asserted the superiority of the heavenly city of God to all earthly cities. Nectarius offered an extraordinary reply. Not only did he assert, in a fashion familiar from Symmachus, Libanius, and Themistius, that “all laws” led, each in its own way, to that city; he expressed his admiration for the way in which Augustine had “demolished the cult of idols and the ceremonies of the temples.” Here, he said, was a genuine philosopher, a new Cicero who had answered the “parricides of the republic” and was now turning to philosophy. “Therefore, when you pressed us toward the worship and religion of the Utter-Highest God, I willingly heard it; when you urged us to look to the heavenly fatherland, I received it gratefully.”26

What are we to make of these statements? First, that they are not mere rhetoric. Nectarius occupies a peculiar position in Augustine’s letters too. In his first reply, Augustine says, “One must not give up on the hope that you can acquire that fatherland [i.e., the city of God], or most prudently think now that it ought to be acquired, to which your father also, who begat you in this city, preceded you.”27 The characterization is subtle: Nectarius is a person who knows the right path and might be moving toward it, but Augustine does not believe he is firmly on it yet. Nectarius’s appearance in another letter, written about fifteen years earlier, has led Erika Hermanowicz, in the most important study of the riot, to suggest that Augustine is trying to manipulate a man he knew to be actually Christian.28 That suspicion can, I think, be allayed. The letter, Epistula 38, focuses chiefly on an internal church affair, the succession to Megalius, deceased bishop of Calama. At the end, Augustine mentions that “the grandee Nectarius” has been begging for his help.29 The issue troubling Nectarius is also known to a clergyman named Victor (apparently the letter’s bearer) but not to the addressee, Profuturus of Cirta, and Augustine seems reluctant to describe it in writing. It must, therefore, be distinct from the question of the episcopal succession and need have nothing to do with Christian doctrine or institutional order at all. While the letter confirms Augustine’s long familiarity with Nectarius, it does not show Nectarius to have been involved in local Christian affairs and so says nothing one way or another about his adherence to Christianity. We can only fall back on the later letters, and there Augustine, however rhetorically unfair to Nectarius and his friends, is unlikely to have obscured Nectarius’s basic religious allegiances. In hundreds of extant homilies, he virtually never calls professed Christians “pagans,” no matter how heavily they have become involved in traditional rites.30 Here, though he foregrounds Nectarius’s familiarity, as the son of a Christian, with Christian doctrine and spiritual hopes, he does not shape his appeal to the duties of a catechumen (that Nectarius must progress through baptism to the attainment of those hopes) or of the baptized (that, as a faithful Christian, Nectarius really owes his support to Possidius). Though he expresses tactful uncertainty, Augustine had lately visited Calama and interviewed both the clergy and the local leadership—to exhort them to convert, rather than to discuss the practical matters at hand—and so he will have known whether Nectarius had, by that point, joined himself to the local church.31

Nectarius can hardly be a Christian in a formal sense. Yet Augustine does not straightforwardly characterize him as a pagan, either. He never insinuates that he worships the gods or wants to see them worshipped by others, and he does not rank him among “the pagans themselves, the head and cause of this great evil.”32 In context, those are the local non-Christian elites with whom Augustine met, but he says ipsos paganos, not illos paganos or the like. Culturally, Nectarius belongs on the other side—Vergil is the preeminent poet “of your literature”—but he is not aligned with Augustine’s opponents.33 Nectarius is neither Christian nor pagan in Augustine’s eyes but stands somewhere to one side not only legally, because he does not appear to be one of the current town councilors implicated in the affair, but also morally and religiously.34

That is exactly the position that Nectarius’s own address to Augustine carves out for himself. He is ready to praise Augustine for “demolishing” both temples and rites and to cast that praise in the most laudatory terms. To call Augustine a new Cicero might seem a cliché (the poet Prudentius, for example, heaps the same praise on Symmachus for Relatio 3), but it is in the Ciceronian vision of a heavenly afterlife for the devoted statesman that Nectarius locates the consummation of his own hopes.35 He could hardly exalt Augustine more highly. His words also suggest a striking realignment of traditional civic values, against traditional religion and toward a vague but pro-Christian theological consensus. In Nectarius’s mini panegyric, the Augustinian Cicero, having saved the lives of the citizens and inveighed “with righteous indignation” against the enemies of the res publica, has turned his eloquence to philosophy. This characterization applies, in some sense, to the whole of Augustine’s first letter: It is philosophy, not forensic rhetoric. Still, it contains a distinctly political, even forensic, element in its account of the riot, as well as the more purely philosophical assault on the worship of the gods (which in fact comes first). Nectarius’s description of the Catilinarian conspiracy also bears an unavoidable resonance with the local situation. As he pointedly reminds Augustine, Cicero saved the lives of “countless” citizens. The other half of the description ought to have its contemporary analogy too. Who, then, are the “parricides”? Nectarius will be referring not to his friends, whom he still hopes to defend, but to villains on whose iniquity he and Augustine are agreed. Nectarius does not blame the riot on nameless rabble-rousers or other convenient scapegoats, and so only one set of potential enemies is in view: “the worship of idols and the ceremonies of the temples,” for which he voices not one word of defense.36

What is Nectarius, then, in our terms? He is not an adherent of a Christian church, but he is not exactly a pagan, if by “pagan” we mean a person both distinctly non-Christian and committed to the worship of the traditional gods. His theology is monotheist, acknowledging a being he calls, with Apuleius and the pseudo-Apuleian Asclepius, the Utter-Highest God (exsuperantissimus deus).37 However, unlike so-called pagan monotheists, who could join their belief in a single high or ultimate deity with ardent support for polytheistic worship, Nectarius displays no interest in the worship of the gods.38 For him, the city, still profoundly connected with its leading citizens, is detached from its inherited gods—and this troubles him not at all. Instead, he shows a broadly pluralist respect for different ways of living and, perhaps, of approaching the divine. Here again, however, he is ambiguous. Leges, in later Latin, often refers to systems of religious devotion, but less directly than sectae or religiones might.39 Perhaps we should render the word as personal codes: Nectarius may have in mind different philosophical lifestyles and ways of thinking about the divine, as well as (or rather than) different cults. His own hopes are, at any rate, profoundly Ciceronian, although the author of De legibus and De natura deorum never contemplated actual abandonment of the gods in whose cult he found the bulwark of the Roman social order.40 Nectarius is, in short, the kind of person whose convictions are basically traditionalist, but noticeably shaped, when it comes to traditional religious practice, by Christian sensibilities.

Nectarius was a Latin speaker for whom Cicero was still the “supreme philosopher,” as Lactantius, the empire’s preeminent Latin professor, had called him a century before.41 By now, however, the dominant strain of Latin philosophical thinking was Platonist, usually though not exclusively under the influence of Plotinus and Porphyry.42 Neoplatonism proper had “arrived” in the Latin world in the 350s, when another African rhetorician, Marius Victorinus, translated libri Platonicorum (certainly Plotinus and possibly Porphyry) into Latin.43 Victorinus himself stood, for a time, in an interestingly ambiguous position. He had been a practicing pagan and perhaps, like many senators at Rome, where he now dwelled, had been a devotee of the arcane knowledge transmitted through the mysteries.44 As an old man, he came to study the scriptures and Christian literature and concluded, after a time, that he was now a Christian. That, or so Victorinus was told by the priest Simplicianus (Augustine’s informant, and so ours), would require a decisive entry into the church. Perhaps intentionally, Victorinus mistook Simplicianus to be referring to mere physical presence in a building: “Do walls make Christians, then?”45 Eventually, however, Victorinus’s fear of divine judgment overcame his fear of his friends’ judgment, and he appeared in church for a very public baptism.

After Constantine and Augustine, Victorinus is surely the most famous Latin-speaking convert of the later Roman Empire. Perhaps Victorinus had been impressed, as Pierre Hadot suggests, by the philosophical resonances of John 1 and of Paul’s letters.46 We can say very little, however, about his thinking during the process of conversion. To watch a Latin Platonist dabble in Christianity, we must turn to a more problematic author. For a man whose book would help set the understanding of Platonism for centuries of Western European intellectuals, Calcidius says remarkably little about himself in his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. Where and when he lived, for whom exactly he was writing, and what he had been reading all remain controversial. The authoritative mid-twentieth-century critical edition by J. H. Waszink put Calcidius in Milan at the beginning of the fifth century and credited much of his learning to Porphyry’s lost commentary on the Timaeus.47 Now, Reydams-Schils has argued forcefully for seeing Calcidius’s commentary as a product of Middle Platonic rather than Neoplatonic thought, under the influence of Numenius, not Porphyry.48 That conclusion suggests a dating before Victorinus’s day. Notes in five manuscripts from the eleventh century onward make out Calcidius’s addressee, a Christian named Osius, to be the Ossius (or Hosius) who, as bishop of Cordoba, was involved in religious politics from Constantine’s victory over Maxentius down to the late 350s.49 Some of these notes even cast Calcidius himself as a deacon or archdeacon. As their form varies widely, none is likely to be a direct survival from a subscription recorded early in the manuscript tradition. At most, they reveal that some medieval scholars had come to believe that Calcidius’s Osius ought to have been the Ossius (as the bishop will have seemed, granted the later obscurity of the high officials who shared his name).50

Even those who credit the connection with Ossius of Cordoba have had to soften the implications of Calcidius’s alleged diaconate. As Reydams-Schils has shown in trenchant detail, the philosophy of the Commentary owes little to Christian thought, despite occasional references to Hebraic teaching or (mostly Old Testament) scripture and avowed reliance, in a few chapters (276–78), on Origen’s now lost Genesis commentary.51 At the apex of Calcidius’s world is a Platonist triad of gods, ruling through both good and bad daemones (133); he denies creation ex nihilo (23, 293, 313); he is anxious to explain and defend divination, and, in so doing, he sets scriptural authorities alongside Homer and literary oracles of the gods (153–54, 169–71, 185–86). It is hard to imagine that Ossius, participant and possible motive force in the Council of Nicaea, an acquaintance and allegedly a key ally of Arius’s superior and nemesis Alexander of Alexandria, would have been pleased to receive so theologically dubious a book from one of his subordinates, let alone have contemplated translating Timaeus himself.52 We can speculate, with Reydams-Schils, that Calcidius was actually living in the East and met Ossius there (though he seems quite possibly to have learned Latin in North Africa);53 we can suggest, with John Dillon, that he was a philosopher who found “shelter in the household of the Bishop of Corduba”;54 we can hypothesize that he was still on his way to Christian conviction and only became a deacon later on. But each scenario entails inventing a just-so story to rescue dubious data. Better simply to set them aside.

Especially after Reydams-Schils’s arguments, it will be hard to maintain that Calcidius was a Christian. Nothing, except the dubious manuscript data, implies formal adherence to Christianity, and his use of Christian ideas is both limited and freewheeling.55 Viewed from a traditionalist perspective, however, he looks little less strange. Here is a devotee of Plato who not only cites Moses in support of his Platonic doctrines but even illustrates the significatory power of stars with the Matthean story of the magi. He avows that the star, by a “holier and more venerable history” than Homer’s, proclaimed “the descent of the venerable god in order to preserve mankind and mortal beings.”56 Confirming Osius’s deep knowledge of the story and so his Christianity, the passage veers close to making Christ’s incarnation a thing graspable by astrology. Though that would no doubt have offended devout Christians, Calcidius’s praise for Christianity also sets him at odds not just with anti-Christian Neoplatonists such as Porphyry and Julian, whose works he may well not have known, but also with early fourth-century Latin devotees of Numenius, who numbered among the opponents of the apologist Arnobius.57 Although Numenius had expressed his respect for Moses and the Hebrews, probably without studying them in great depth,58 reliance on Numenius did not lead automatically to respect for Christianity. Neither can Calcidius’s appreciation for scripture, which leads him to attribute the story of Adam’s creation to a “holier and more prudent sect,” be credited simply to regard for Jewish thought, since he does cite Matthew, too, and in much the same terms.59 This is exactly what we would expect a man writing for a Christian audience to do, and in fact for a Christian reader accustomed to seeing the patriarchs as forerunners of the apostolic teaching, everything Calcidius says in praise of the Hebrews would have applied to his own religion, one of whose central tenets Calcidius explicitly endorses.60

Such statements surely do aim, in part, to appeal to Christian readers. To see them only as rhetorical concessions, however, downplays too far their implications for Calcidius’s own thinking.61 Calcidius really is claiming that Christianity and its Hebraic roots are somehow wiser and holier than the alternatives, without altering the generally non-Christian tenor of his commentary to match. Rather than adjudge Calcidius decisively non-Christian, we might see in him someone who is (as Reydams-Schils suggests in an earlier article) “neither a Christian nor a pagan,” but in fact “a serious and very interesting challenge to our categories of ‘Christian’ and ‘Platonist’, or ‘pagan’ in general.”62 Christianity left its most pronounced impact on the area of his thought that holds the most important implications for practical cult: his theory of intermediary spirits. Here, in another nod to “the Hebrews,” he identifies the benevolent, aethereal daemones as the “holy angels” who “stand before contemplation of the venerable god.”63 With Calcidius’s other references to the Hebrews (for example, an allusion to God’s establishment of the sun and moon in Genesis 1:14), this passage has been cited in debates over Calcidius’s religion for centuries.64 What has gone with remarkably little discussion are the marks of Christian influence on the surrounding passage.

Expanding on the brief remarks in the Timaeus, Calcidius credits his theories to a Platonic Philosophus, the book that we call the Epinomis.65 However, the section that immediately follows that statement has no analogue in that probably pseudo-Platonic work. Calcidius describes the invention, in the distant past, of mistaken forms of polytheistic worship. “The race of ancient men,” he alleges, judged all those beneficial things imparted to them by divine providence to be gods, “because the enquiry after the true god had not yet occupied their untutored minds.” Calcidius appears to include among the erroneously deified not just natural benefits, but the powers (potentiae) and principles (rationes) by which those benefits are imparted (here presumably not including the stars, which he does see as divine).66 This mistaken deification was possible, Calcidius explains, because early men “were shepherds, woodcutters, and others of that sort without humane learning,” whose “opportune habitation had made them survivors” of storms and deluge. The poets’ blandishments later added corruption to their initial error, endowing “things shaped and sculpted limb-by-limb” with names, until they bestowed the names of gods “subject to passion” on human vices. Thus sacrilege and error sprang up, in place of “the thanks that men owed to divine providence.”67

A genuinely Platonic narrative does lie in the background. Plato alludes to the survivors of ancient deluges in the Critias and in the passage of the Timaeus on which Calcidius is commenting.68 However, Plato’s postdiluvians are distinguished, in the full narrative in Laws 3, by their simplicity.69 They believed “the things said about gods and men” without, like present men, suspecting falsehood. A reader alert to ironies could find both implied criticism of contemporary Athenian intellectuals and recognition of the ancients’ vulnerability to deception, but Plato’s account has no parallel to Calcidius’s dismissal of early polytheism as untutored error. Neither does Plato join this narrative, as Calcidius does, to the errors of the poets, which Calcidius casts in terms closer to those scouted by Cicero’s interlocutors in De natura deorum than to the denunciations in Republic 2.70 That deviation could reflect Calcidius’s reading of some intermediary text dismissive not just of anthropomorphism but also, as Cicero and his friend Varro were not, of Stoic attempts to identify the gods with natural phenomena.71

However, one remarkable feature cannot be explained simply as a product of Calcidius’s philosophical reading or, still less, of a misunderstanding of the contents of the Epinomis.72 Calcidius explicitly credits the initial deification of natural phenomena to the failure of primitive men to seek the uerus deus. Rooted in the Hebrew scriptures (e.g., Isaiah 65:16), the idea of a singular “true god” appears to be exclusively Jewish and Christian. In pre-Christian, Greco-Roman authors, even the phrase ἀληθὴς/ἀληθινὸς θεός or uerus deus is highly unusual. In the singular, I have been able to identify three instances, except from Jews, Christians, and the Emperor Julian, who was raised as a Christian.73 One is a predicative phrase from the Ion of Euripides: ὁ θεὸς ἀληθὴς ἢ μάτην μαντεύεται (Does the god prophesy truthfully or falsely?).74 A more theologically laden usage appears in a Hellenistic Greek text. This is the famous Hymn to Demetrius Poliorcetes preserved by Athenaeus in the Deipnosophistae. Exalting the Macedonian king, son of Alexander’s successor Antigonus I, when he visited in 291/290 BCE, the Athenians proclaimed that Demetrius was present, unlike other, absent and inattentive gods—and not just present, but “genuine” (ἀληθινόν), being “neither wood nor stone.”75 Rooted in previous philosophical critiques of image worship, the passage may evoke Epicurean philosophy, with its conception of the gods as distant and unconcerned with human affairs.76 The hymn held, at any rate, a frisson of atheism for the historian Demochares, Athenaeus’s source, who claimed that the singers were treating Demetrius “as if he were the only genuine god” (καὶ ἐπᾴδοντɛς ὡς ɛἴη μόνος θɛὸς ἀληθινός).77 That is strictly incorrect. Demeter has come along with Demetrius, and the king is praised as the son of Poseidon and Aphrodite: surely an imputation of genuine deity to both those Olympians too.78 The class of “genuine gods” must have multiple members, and neither in Demochares’s comments nor in the hymn is there any suggestion that there might be some particular θεὸς ἀληθινός who rules the cosmos. The third passage, meanwhile, appears in a Latin discussion that opposes divine reality both to the kind of cult that exalted Demetrius and to the worship of the images to which the Athenians preferred him. Augustine says that the Republican pontifex maximus Scaevola declared “that cities do not have true images of those who are gods, because a true god does not have sex or age or distinct bodily limbs.”79 Here, as in the Hymn and Demochares’s comment, uerus deus is generic: “a real” (or a genuine) “god,” rather than “the true god.”80 It refers to a class of being.

The same generic usage appears in the more numerous plural instances from late Republican or imperial literature on religion.81 But we will look in vain for an absolutely singular, monotheistic, “true god,” until we turn to the apologetic tradition.82 Calcidius’s probable contemporary Lactantius uses the concept to demarcate religio, which he redefines in a forceful departure from his Ciceronian model as “worship of the true,” from superstitio, which he redefines as “worship of the false.”83 Calcidius’s uerus deus could conceivably be translated with an indefinite article—“enquiry after a true god”—but, however we render it, the phrase implies that there is a singular true god to be found, that he is distinct from the natural powers over which he providentially rules, and that failure to acknowledge him led to the errors of traditional cult. Calcidius even hints at a link, like Lactantius’s, between false divinity and erroneous worship in his description of the “shepherds and woodcutters”: They were made “survivors,” superstites, by their fortunate choice of a (presumably) mountaintop abode.

In this portrayal of early, postcataclysmic humans, Calcidius is again in seeming contact with Christian thinking. A common Christian narrative linked the origin of idolatry to the errors of mankind after the Noahic Flood. Ignorance of God, cultural simplicity, and the “vanity” of images recur in apologetic and heresiology. Lactantius places the origins of human ignorance of God in the de facto atheism of Ham’s descendants; the Greek heresiologist Epiphanius sees in the invention of idols a first division of the culturally simple, monotheist culture of the postdiluvian world; and Ambrose’s ally Filastrius of Brescia connects image worship with a postmortem deification of Deucalion’s son.84 Calcidius names neither Noah nor classical parallels, such as Deucalion and Ogygus, and has nothing to say about the precatastrophe religion. He does share with these Christian writers the belief that an important strand of traditional polytheism, including the images, names, and presumably the myths of the gods, arose out of the errors of postdiluvian men, in which he finds “vanity,” a failure to acknowledge the “true god,” and a suggestion, at least, of superstitio.

Such broad resemblances do not suffice to make Calcidius a Christian. He has, however, embraced the distinctly Christian idea of a uerus deus and linked ignorance of him, in a second distinctly Christian move, to primitive religious error arising among postdiluvian humans. Calcidius envisions a “supreme and ineffable god” from whom the lesser members of his triad, Providence and the Second Mind, are derived.85 That he can denote the summus deus a uerus deus need not alter his philosophical theology—his understanding of the nature of the supreme Godhead—as such. By introducing the idea of strict falsity in matters of worship, the term could, however, have momentous implications for his understanding of practical theology, of the way in which humans interact with the divine. The Latin apologists used the idea of a uerus deus to exclude the worship of daemones or any other being inferior to the supreme God. What does Calcidius make of traditional and Christian worship?

Calcidius avoids polemical judgment or defense, so an answer has to be worked out of what he does say. His catastrophe narrative offers a rationale for rejecting the claims of ancient authorities (he names Orpheus, Musaeus, and Linus) to tell the truth about “the powers which are thought to be gods.”86 He does hold the stars, which follow providence unerring, to be divine by nature, but the designation need not imply that they are to be worshipped.87 After all, even so acute an antipolytheist thinker as Augustine could refer to the obedient servants of the one God as “true and holy gods.”88 The key question is not the language Calcidius uses but what he thinks of worship, and so of those intelligences, located between the divine triad and human beings, that definitely are involved in cult. In the sections that follow the catastrophe narrative, he describes the mediation of the benevolent daemones, whom he has just identified as the Hebrew “holy angels.” He will shortly distinguish these angels, as “servants of god,” from the “minions (as you know very well) of the hostile power.”89 The language is shared with Porphyry (whether Calcidius knew his works or not), but the concept has even deeper Christian resonances, as Calcidius signals with his nod to Osius.90 “Some properly term such and suchlike polluted and tainted daemones ‘deserter angels,’” a label, of loosely biblical origin, that Calcidius shares with Tertullian and Augustine (either, depending on the date, conceivably lying behind the unspecified “some”).91

The division between angels obedient to God and angels obedient to an adversary is neatly in line with Christian thinking, even if the application of the name daemon to both classes would sit poorly with ancient churchmen.92 What Calcidius says about the role of the angels in worship is more extraordinary:

We should think that the daemones were put over the sensible cosmos, first indeed to express a kind of alternation—as god is, relative to an angel, so an angel is, relative to man—and, next, because they would be for our benefit, interpreting and announcing to god our prayers and, likewise, intimating to men the will of god, bringing to him our need, to us divine help; for which reason they are called angels because of their diligent duty of making message. Witness to this benefit is the whole of Greece, all Latium, and all Barbaria, and the thanksgivings of peoples in books laid up for the memory of perpetuity. The nature of mankind, being exceptionally weak, needs the aid of a better and more outstanding nature; for which reason god the creator and preserver of all things, wanting the human race to exist, put over them the ones through whom they might rightly be ruled, the angels (or daemones).93

Daemonic mediation is, again, genuinely Platonic, but there are two signal departures from Plato’s own thinking as relayed in his Symposium (Epinomis is terser and focused on prayer to the daemones).94 The first, shared with the Porphyry of De abstinentia, is the absence of sacrifices and other rites from the human pole of the process of mediation. The second, which sets Calcidius apart from Porphyry, too, is that their mediation connects humans directly to the supreme divinity. For Plato and Porphyry, the daemones communicate with “gods,” plural.95 Here, as for the Jewish Platonist Philo, it is simply “god.”96 In a later passage, Calcidius places the daemones, with natura, fortuna, and casus, among the “servant powers” (ministras potestates) below the Second Mind.97 Earlier in the discussion of daemones, Calcidius had, similarly, made the stars the inhabitants of the uppermost, heavenly layer of the cosmos.98 Now, however, even the lesser members of the divine triad are elided, so that the angeli or good daemones communicate directly with god, bearing to men not just help but news of his “will.” Him Calcidius explicitly names creator, here only in the work.99 The description as “preserver” or indeed “savior” (conseruator) can, in context, only echo the nod to the Incarnation and the star of Bethlehem a few sections before. The description of practical religion is fitted, in short, to a Christian sensibility in essentially every particular—and, as with the catastrophe narrative, Calcidius is saying that this is genuine Platonic doctrine, the way the universe really works.

What, then, about the testimony of Greece, Latium, and Barbaria? Calcidius’s description leaves the means of angelic communication thoroughly vague. Books of thanksgiving for perpetual memorial sound vaguely biblical, and Christians had long claimed that their doctrine was accepted throughout the world.100 However, the lengthy treatise on fate and providence (Commentarius 143–90), which soon follows, implies that Calcidius does have traditional cult in mind. He does not discuss the validity of sacrificing, the use of images, or the worship of many gods as such. He does repeatedly assert the validity of divination in its various forms (including astrology, augury, extispicy, and oracles). Astrology works, it seems, by human estimation of the stars’ significations, the other methods by the intimation of a “propitious daemon.”101

What Calcidius says about such daemonic divination does not self-evidently match his earlier description of angelic communication. There, the good daemones bring down from the supreme god the message of his will. Here, the benevolent daemones predict the future by their own skillful estimation of the signs, like a doctor predicting the outcome of a case or a helmsman a storm.102 Those analogies, traditional within philosophical discourse on oracles, are perfectly compatible with denial of daemonic connection to the supreme divinity (Augustine uses them so),103 and Calcidius certainly does not sound like he is referring to the bearing of messages he had described earlier. His language slips around, attributing Delphic oracles variously to Apollo and “(a) propitious divinity” and biblical oracles to “god” (deus), without explicitly inserting angelic intermediaries. These latter oracles, too, are explicitly contingent, warning against outcomes of human actions that are not themselves bound to take place by inalterable necessity.104 Apollo might conceivably be a daemon, as might propitia diuinitas; the deus of Deuteronomy hardly could be, however, and, even if Calcidius knew of the belief that the Mosaic law had been communicated by angels,105 he does not say so here. Daemonic predictions are contingent, in a way that the discussion of daemonic mediation did not note, but so (it seems) are at least some predictions offered by, or carried down from, the summus deus.

So long as one makes allowances for imprecision of language, Calcidius’s statements are more coherent than they may seem. In the treatise on fate, Calcidius declares providence to be the Divine Intellect (νοῦς)—second to the summus deus—and the dei uoluntas itself.106 Fate, in turn, “follows” providence, and is “the divine law promulgated by the wise administration of intelligence for the government of all things.”107 That administration proceeds, however, according to each thing’s own nature, which means (as Calcidius explains) that contingent things are truly contingent, to such a degree that the supreme god’s own knowledge of mortal choices is knowledge of them as uncertain things (though Calcidius still shies away from terming the supreme god’s knowledge of them uncertain).108 Calcidius also recognizes a moral dimension to fate: As divine law, it not only stipulates the consequences that follow human choices, just as human laws do, but “makes honorable things known to men and prohibits their contraries” (sciscens hominibus honesta, prohibens contraria).109 Prediction of contingencies and communication of right and wrong are both directly tied, therefore, to divine law, and so to the hypostatized Will that is the Divine Intellect. Though they may express different aspects of daemonic superintendence over the human race, they are still intimately related within Calcidius’s understanding of the cosmic order.

A problem nonetheless remains: What is the source of daemonic foreknowledge? Since both the summus deus and the daemones know contingent things as contingents, daemonic prognostication, made according to the daemones’ own skill, will not be identical, only analogous, to the supreme god’s. Thus, Calcidius appears to leave open the possibility that prediction of the future does not come from the summus deus, while moral instructions do. However, in the section on dreams, he includes “truth-telling prophecy,” prodigies, divination, and dreams among the “benefits” communicated to humans by god through the “divine powers.”110 Most likely, Calcidius simply did not try to ensure absolutely airtight agreement among ideas he had reworked from prior philosophical tradition.111 It is at least possible, however, that we are meant to infer that some modes of divination rest on daemonic prognostication, while others communicate the supreme god’s own perspective. If so, the difference does not correspond to any difference in rite or deity, as it would for a devout Christian trying to explain what sets the daemones’ predictions apart from scriptural prophecy. Calcidius draws no apparent distinction among the predictive oracles recorded in Greece, Latium, and (Hebrew) Barbaria. The oracles of Apollo to Laius and of Thetis to Achilles appear before God’s commandment, “according to Moses,” on eating from the trees (plural) of the knowledge of good and evil.112 Likewise, the Herodotean oracles of the destruction of Croesus’s empire and the Argive war with Persia parallel the punishments and rewards threatened by God in Deuteronomy.113 Nowhere is there a trace of discomfort with either the theory or the practice of divination as it had always been done in the Greco-Roman world. Greece, Latium, and Barbaria thus testify not just to the benevolence of the summus deus imparted through the Bible or the spread of the Christian religion but also to his workings in aspects of traditional cult.

What vision of practical religion results, then? In a passage largely consonant with philosophical criticism but tinged with Christian language, Calcidius has dismissed important features of the traditional cults, including the names and images of the gods. He adopts the Christian idea of a uerus deus but implies that the “true god” superintends not just, as the Christian apologists argued, over their own cult but also over the oracles and other divinatory rituals of the wider world. He is, in other words, adopting a polytheistic universalism similar to that articulated by Symmachus, for example, but reinterpreting it in partially Christianized language. His is a pluralistic vision, undergirded by an articulate if sometimes murky conception of a Platonic divine hierarchy, that does not reject the worship of the gods in at least some of its forms. In calling the story of Adam’s creation “a doctrine of a sect holier and in understanding of the divine more prudent” and praising the story of the magi as “a holier and more venerable history,”114 however, he implies that when it comes to religious teaching, the Christians are somehow better than the rest—so much so, in fact, that he has adopted some of their language to describe how the supreme god works within the world. We learn nothing from the translation or commentary about his religious adherence and, once the manuscript data are set aside, have little reason to think him a Christian in any formal sense. Still, he makes a strange pagan. He is a non-Christian who has not simply allowed a place for Christianity in a basically traditionalist order, as Libanius and Symmachus did, or given Christianity an equal place at the pluralist table, as Themistius did. He has made Christianity the preeminent cult in the pluriform order of religion that stretches between the human race and the summus deus.

Ancient historians are often in danger of reinventing the scholarly wheel. Three hundred years ago, Calcidius seemed a Christian, on the authority of a critical edition and survey of Latin literature by the great Johann Albert Fabricius.115 In the notes to his Latin translation of Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe, the Lutheran church historian Johann Lorenz von Mosheim rebutted the case for Calcidius’s Christianity.116 The grounds named by this massively erudite scholar were largely the same theological and cosmological points on which modern debate still turns. In Calcidius, he found someone who was “not indeed a gentile (ethnicus), nor a Christian entirely, but a man in between.”117 As von Mosheim elsewhere put it, Calcidius seems “neither to have agreed entirely with Christians nor to have spurned all that was taught by them, but…to have wanted to construct a certain new kind of religion out of the opinions of the common crowd, the philosophers, and the Christians.”118

Von Mosheim relied on a precise definition of Christian and gentile.119 The Christian believes in Christ as sole redeemer, accepts the scriptures common to all Christian divisions, and rejects any teaching at odds with basic Christian doctrine. The gentile believes in many gods, wants them to be worshipped, denies that Christ is savior of mankind, and rejects the Christian scriptures—or, in a significant proviso, “inculcates things of the kind from which something of this sort is unable not to follow.”120 Nowadays, a definition of such admirable clarity is more difficult to sustain. At the very least we would have to mark out different aspects of religiosity: doctrinal assent (von Mosheim’s definition), actual inner belief (often irresolvably ambiguous), membership in a religious community (Victorinus’s “walls” but also Augustine’s bottom line), intensity, frequency, scope of ritual activity, and so forth. Adding new terms to the old religious typology can thus seem like adding yet more epicycles to an already overgrown cosmos (and all the more so if some of those epicycles look suspiciously familiar). It is, after all, the actual ancient people we need to understand, and if anything can be said about Nectarius and Calcidius—or indeed about Marius Victorinus, a few years before his baptism—it is that they represent three different ways of not being quite one thing or another.

I do not suggest reviving Guignebert’s concept of the semi-pagan, therefore. The term is too imprecise, apt to lump together people whose historical interest lies, in no small measure, in their individuality. The basic theoretical point remains vital nonetheless. In thinking about religious difference in the rapidly changing Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries, we need to keep clearly in view the complicated ways in which people could draw near to Christianity without necessarily accepting it, alongside the multitude of Christian deviations that loom so large in homiletics, hagiography, church history, and imperial law. Men such as Nectarius and Calcidius occupy an essential part of a variegated intellectual and ritual landscape not at all reducible to a simple opposition between Christians and pagans, nor to an opposition between the devout and laissez-faire. There were traditionalists who were firmly not Christian and knew why. There were Christians who were devoted to their churches yet still found it expedient to invoke spiritual powers opposed, as both Platonists and bishops agreed, to the supreme God.121 There were Christians who disagreed sometimes with their bishops but still respected them and their beliefs about what made a good Christian.122 There were also people who, while they held themselves aloof from outright Christian commitment, found something useful or attractive in Christian beliefs or were willing to entertain Christian condemnations of traditional rites. We will gain more from describing such people in their idiosyncrasies than from proposing overarching categories to contain them, but we must first be alert to their existence, alongside and sometimes in place of the lax Christians to whom we have become so attuned.

This article was substantially written during a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. A draft was presented at the Society for Classical Studies annual meeting in 2022. I thank the participants and the anonymous SLA readers for their comments, as well as Angelos Chaniotis, Georgy Kantor, and Aaron Beek for their expertise on Hellenistic religion.

1.

The divisions can be parsed further, for example by addition of Samaritans and schismatics (Augustine, Epistulae ad Romanos inchoata expositio 15, in Augustine d’Hippone: Commencement de commentaire sur l’épître aux Romains, ed. Daniel Hadas, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Extra seriem [De Gruyter, 2019], 174–78). Background in Georg Bertram and Karl Ludwig Schmidt, ἔθνος, in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 2, Δ—Η, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromley (Eerdmans, 1964), 364–72.

2.

Superstitio was rejected by Constans in 341, in an echo of a lost law of Constantine, at Codex Theodosianus 16.10.2, in Theodosiani libri XVI cum Constitutionibus Sirmondianis et leges novellae ad Theodosianum pertinentes, ed. Theodor Mommsen and Paul M. Meyer, 2 vols. (Weidmann, 1905), 2:897; cf. Constantine, Oratio ad sanctum coetum 11.7, in Eusebius Werke, Bd. 1, Über das Leben Constantins. Constantins Rede an die heilige Versammlung. Tricennatsrede an Constantin, ed. Ivar A. Heikel, Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der erstern Jahrhunderte 7 (Hinrichs, 1902), 167. The first extant law referring to pagani is Codex Theodosianus 16.2.18, from 370 (Mommsen and Meyer, Theodosiani libri XVI, 840–41).

3.

Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 53 (University of California Press, 2015), 17–36. For the concomitant changes in Christian values, see esp. Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michele R. Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire (Harvard University Press, 2002), 200–19.

4.

On the word’s history, see now Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford University Press, 2011), 14–32; Mattias P. Gassman, Worshippers of the Gods: Debating Paganism in the Fourth-Century Roman West, Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2020), 76–81. Paganus is basically synonymous with gentilis and by no means replaces it. Ἕλλην, commonly used of worshippers of many gods in the Greek-speaking world, continued to bear ethnic connotations: Aaron P. Johnson, “Greek Ethnicity in Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica,” American Journal of Philology 128 (2007): 95–118.

5.

None in my view is a firm improvement. Polytheist is the obvious replacement, but, as Cameron (Last Pagans, 25–32) observes, it bears potentially pejorative connotations and fails to capture the henotheistic strains prominent within late antique traditionalist thought (a theoretical discussion in Peter Van Nuffelen, “Beyond Categorization: ‘Pagan Monotheism’ and the Study of Ancient Religion,” Common Knowledge 18 [2012]: 451–63).

6.

Thus, for example, when trying to quantify the growth of Christianity from prosopographical data. See now Mark Depauw and Willy Clarysse, “How Christian Was Fourth Century Egypt? Onomastic Perspectives on Conversion,” Vigiliae Christianae 67 (2013): 407–35, and their theoretical remarks in “Christian Onomastics: A Response to Frankfurter,” Vigiliae Christianae 69 (2015): 327–29. For Augustine’s focus on adherence, see my note 30.

7.

Debate over the adherence of high-ranking imperial officials has been especially intense; see, with extensive prior scholarship, Michele Renee Salzman, “Constantine and the Roman Senate: Conflict, Cooperation, and Concealed Resistance,” in Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome: Conflict, Competition, and Coexistence in the Fourth Century, ed. Michele Renee Salzman, Marianne Sághy, and Rita Lizzi Testa (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 11–45, and Cameron, Last Pagans, 173–205.

8.

The most important, in my view, is the asymmetry between Christian and pagan adherence. We can speak of traditionalist non-Christians as adhering to particular gods or cults, or to the gods in general, but not as adherents of a congregation or a (potentially) world-spanning organization comparable to Christian churches.

9.

Charles Guignebert, “Les demi-chrétiens et leur place dans l’église antique,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 88 (1923): 65–102; further adapted by Gerald Bonner, “The Extinction of Paganism and the Church Historian,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1984): 339–57.

10.

For these approaches, see Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, 107–35; Ramsay MacMullen, The Second Church: Popular Christianity, A.D. 200–400, Writings from the Greco-Roman World Supplements 1 (Society for Biblical Literature, 2009); David Frankfurter, Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity, Martin Classical Lectures (Princeton University Press, 2018); Éric Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 CE (Cornell University Press, 2012). The last of these books offers theoretical refinements to a burgeoning scholarship on identity shaped, in particular, by Isabella Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity: Greeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Out of concern for space and theoretical clarity, I omit the question, no less complex than those broached here, of interaction between Jews and Christians; for a recent overview of the vast scholarship on one important set of texts, John Chrysostom’s anti-Judaic homilies, see Wendy Mayer, “Preaching Hatred? John Chrysostom, Neuroscience, and the Jews,” in Revisioning John Chrysostom: New Approaches, New Perspectives, ed. Chris de Wet and Wendy Mayer, Critical Approaches to Early Christianity 1 (Brill, 2019), 58–136.

11.

On ongoing religious debate, see Averil Cameron, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity, Hellenic Studies 65 (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2014). Late antique practices—and attendant anxieties—are still mirrored in early modern Europe: a brief sketch in Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard University Press, 1990), 7–36.

12.

For the first two groups, see now Mattias Gassman, “A Late Antique Preacher in Action: Augustine, Ep. 29,” Journal of Late Antiquity 15 (2022): 130–59; Gassman, “The Ancient Readers of Augustine’s City of God,” Augustinian Studies 52 (2021): 1–18.

13.

Alan Cameron’s treatment of the religiosity of Volusianus and Macrobius in Last Pagans, 196–97, 231–72, is a case in point.

14.

Guignebert, “Les demi-chrétiens,” 83–85 (“demi-païens”)—acknowledging, however, that both his categories were too schematic (99).

15.

Semichristianus is a rare but genuine ancient term, used to imply excessive nearness to Jews. Examples appear in the Manichaean Faustus, as quoted by Augustine, Contra Faustum 1.2, in S. Aureli Augustini opera, pars I: De utilitate credendi…contra Faustum, ed. Joseph Zycha, CSEL 25.1 (Tempsky, 1891), 251; Jerome, In Abacuc 2.3.10–13, in S. Hieronymi presbyteri opera, pars I: Opera exegetica 6: Commentarii in prophetas minores, ed. M. Adriaen, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 76A (Brepols, 1964), 641; In Epistolam ad Galatas 2.3:13–14, in S. Hieronymi presbyteri opera, pars I: Opera exegetica 6: Commentarii in Epistulam Pauli Apostoli ad Galatas, ed. Giacomo Raspanti, CCSL 77A (Brepols, 2006), 90. Semipaganus is used only in its etymological connection to pagus, a rural district, by the early imperial poet Persius. Jennifer L. Ferriss-Hill (Roman Satire and the Old Comic Tradition [Cambridge University Press, 2015], 56n46) surveys explanations of Saturae, prol. 6–7 (in Saturarum liber, praecedit uita, ed. Dominicus Bo, Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum Paravianum [Io. Bapt. Paravia, 1969], 12): ipse semipaganus | ad sacra uatum carmen adfero nostrum.

16.

Guignebert named the Severus Alexander of the Historia Augusta, Commodus’s concubine Marcia (Cassius Dio, 73.4.7, as relayed by the epitome of Xiphilinus, in Dio’s Roman History with an English Translation, vol. 9, ed. Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library 177 [Heinemann, 1927], 78; Hippolytus, Refutatio omnium haeresium 9.12.10–12, in Hippolytus Werke, Bd. 3, Refutatio omnium haeresium, ed. Paul Wendland, GCS [Hinrich, 1916], 247–48), and the “worldly” friends who tried to intervene on behalf of Cyprian before his execution in 258 (Pontius, Vita Cypriani 14.3, in Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vita di Agostino, ed. A. A. R. Bastiaensen, Vite dei santi 3 [Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 1975], 38). The example of Severus Alexander must be held in doubt: for only the latest challenge to the reliability of the Historia Augusta, see Justin Stover and George Woudhuysen, “The Poet Nemesianus and the Historia Augusta,” Journal of Roman Studies 112 (2022): 173–97.

17.

For discussion of both pagan and Christian ambiguity, see Cameron, Last Pagans, 176–77, Maijastina Kahlos, Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures c. 360–430, Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies (Ashgate, 2007), 29–34.

18.

At an unconvincing extreme, even the Emperor Julian: Douglas Boin, “The Maccabees, ‘Apostasy’, and Julian’s Appropriation of Hellenismos as a Reclaimed Epithet in Christian Conversations of the Fourth Century CE,” in Rhetoric and Religious Identity in Late Antiquity, ed. Richard Flower and Morwenna Ludlow (Oxford University Press, 2020), 48–64.

19.

For one important aspect of the interreligious milieu, see Ra‘anan Boustan and Joseph E. Sanzo, “Christian Magicians, Jewish Magical Idioms, and the Shared Magical Culture of Late Antiquity,” Harvard Theological Review 110 (2017): 217–40.

20.

Edict has been a controversial term: for a defense, with extensive prior scholarship, Noel Lenski, “Il valore dell’Editto di Milano,” in Costantino a Milano: L’editto e la sua storia (313-2013), ed. Riccardo Macchioro, Biblioteca Ambrosiana: Fonti e studi 28 (Biblioteca Ambrosiana and Bulzoni, 2017), 5–58. How much of the position articulated by Themistius is his own, and how much is calibrated to Jovian’s expectations, is unknowable; on the oration’s pluralism and the contrast with Symmachus, see Ilaria Ramelli, “‘Vie diverse all’unico mistero’: La concezione delle religioni in Temistio e il suo atteggiamento verso il Cristianesimo,” Istituto Lombardo: Rendiconti, Classe di lettere e scienze morali e storiche 139 (2005): 455–83.

21.

Peter Van Nuffelen, “Not the Last Pagan: Libanius Between Elite Rhetoric and Religion,” in Libanius: A Critical Introduction, ed. Lieve Van Hoof (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 293–314 at 309–14; Gassman, Worshippers of the Gods, 118–28. Further intellectual context in Clifford Ando, “Pagan Apologetics and Christian Intolerance in the Ages of Themistius and Augustine,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 171–207.

22.

Symmachus, Relatio 3.3, in Q. Aurelii Symmachi quae supersunt, ed. Otto Seeck, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi 6.1 (Weidmann, 1883), 281: certe dinumerentur principes utriusque sectae utriusque sententiae. On sectae, see Gassman, Worshippers of the Gods, 6–13; Pascal Boulhol, “Secta: De la ligne de conduite au groupe hétérodoxe. Évolution sémantique jusqu’au début du Moyen Âge,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 219 (2002): 5–33.

23.

So, in principle, by any involvement in divination or sacrifice. For comments from a bishop with a sophisticated demonology—on which, see Gregory D. Wiebe, Fallen Angels in the Theology of St Augustine, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford University Press, 2021)—see Augustine, Enarratio I in Psalmum 34.6–7, in Sancti Aurelii Augustini Enarrationes in Psalmos I–L, ed. Eligius Dekkers and Johannes Fraipont, CCSL 38 (Brepols, 1956), 303–5.

24.

The former case is presented, seemingly in devil’s advocacy, by Augustine’s lay interlocutors in De diuinatione daemonum 1.1–2.5, in Sancti Aureli Augustini De fide et symbolo…, ed. Joseph Zycha, CSEL 41 (Tempsky, 1900), 599–602. Symmachus staked his case for traditional cults on the latter possibility: Relatio 3.19 (Seeck, Q. Aurelii Symmachi, 283): uos defendant, a nobis colantur.

25.

The letters are Augustine, Epistulae 90–91, 103–4, in Sancti Aurelii Augustini Epistulae LVI–C, ed. K. D. Daur, CCSL 31A (Brepols, 2005), 153–59; Sancti Aurelii Augustini Epistulae C–CXXXIX, ed. K. D. Daur, CCSL 31B (Brepols, 2009), 34–48. For analysis, see Erika T. Hermanowicz, “Catholic Bishops and Appeals to the Imperial Court: A Legal Study of the Calama Riots in 408,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 12 (2004): 481–521; Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira, Potestas Populi: Participation populaire et action collective dans les villes de l’Afrique romaine tardive (vers 300–430 apr. J.-C.), Bibliothèque de l’antiquité tardive 24 (Brepols, 2012), 253–74.

26.

Nectarius, Epistula 103.1–2 (Daur, Sancti Aurelii Augustini Epistulae C–CXXXIX, CCSL 31B:34–35).

27.

Nectarius, Epistula 91.2 (Daur, Sancti Aurelii Augustini Epistulae LVI–C, CCSL 31A:154).

28.

Hermanowicz, “Catholic Bishops,” 498; thus also, e.g., Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities, 82–84; James J. O’Donnell, Augustine, Sinner and Saint: A New Biography (Profile Books, 2005), 185–88. Contrast Magalhães de Oliveira, Potestas Populi, 255n7, and Brent Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 252.

29.

Nectarius, Epistula 38.3, in Sancti Aurelii Augustini Epistulae I–LV, ed. K. D. Daur, CCSL 31 [Brepols 2004], 157): Peto autem ut apud eundem fratrem nostrum Victorem, cui ago etiam apud tuam sanctitatem gratias, quod Constantinam cum pergeret indicauit petendo adiuues, propter negotium quod ipse nouit, de quo grauissimum pondus pro ea re multum deprecantis Nectarii maioris patior, per Calamam remeare ne grauetur; sic enim promisit mihi. For complete clarity, I offer my translation of a convoluted sentence: “But I ask you to help me by asking the same brother of ours, Victor—to whom I also give thanks before Your Sanctity, because he made known when he was going to Constantina [i.e., Cirta]—that he not feel it an inconvenience to return by way of Calama, because of the business he himself knows, about which I endure the weightiest burden from the grandee Nectarius, who is making much entreaty concerning this matter; for so Victor promised me.”

30.

Even a baptized astrologer remains a Christian: Enarratio in Psalmum 61.23, in Augustinus: Enarrationes in Psalmos 61–70, ed. Hildegund Müller, CSEL 94.2 (De Gruyter, 2020), 74–76. Augustine veers close to accusing Christians of remaining pagans in Sermo 26.4 (François Dolbeau, ed., “Nouveaux sermons de saint Augustin pour la conversion des païens et des donatistes (IV),” Recherches augustiniennes et patristiques 26 [1992]: 69–141 at 94): si autem nec timetis nec amatis…adhuc enim gentes estis, iugum ducentes cum infidelibus. Here, however, the sin is not idolatry but unbelief and apathy, leading to refusal of generosity to the poor.

31.

Augustine, Epistula 91.10 (Daur, Sancti Aurelii Augustini Epistulae LVI–C, CCSL 31A:159).

32.

Augustine, Epistula 91.10 (Daur, Sancti Aurelii Augustini Epistulae LVI–C, CCSL 31A:159).

33.

Augustine, Epistula 91.2 (Daur, Sancti Aurelii Augustini Epistulae LVI–C, CCSL 31A:154).

34.

In Epistula 90 (Daur, Sancti Aurelii Augustini: Epistulae LVI–C, CCSL 31A:153), Nectarius implies that he has performed all legally required services to his hometown; from Augustine’s manner of address, Hendrik Huisman (Augustinus’ Briefwisseling met Nectarius: Inleiding, Tekst, Vertaling, Commentaar [Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam, 1956], 9–13) infers a lofty imperial career, as proconsul or vicarius of Africa.

35.

Nectarius, Epistula 103.2 (Daur, Sancti Aurelii Augustini Epistulae C–CXXXIX, CCSL 31B:35) credits the sentiment to doctissimi homines. Prudentius, Contra Symmachum 1.632–35, in Aurelii Prudentii Clementis Carmina, ed. Maurice P. Cunningham, CCSL 126 (Brepols, 1966), 207. On Cicero’s role in the exchange, see Margaret Atkins, “Old Philosophy and New Power: Cicero in Fifth-Century North Africa,” in Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-Roman World: Essays in Honour of Miriam Griffin, ed. Gillian Clark and Tessa Rajak (Oxford University Press, 2002), 251–69.

36.

Nectarius, Epistula 103.1 (Daur, Sancti Aurelii Augustini Epistulae C–CXXXIX, CCSL 31B:34): sumptis litteris eximietatis tuae, quibus idolorum cultum et templorum caeremonias destruxisti, audire mihi uisus sum philosophi uocem…plane excitatus oratione tua ante oculos stetit M. Tullius consularis, qui innumeris ciuium capitibus conseruatis forensis campi signa uictricia stupentibus Graeciae scholis laureatus inferret tubamque illam canorae uocis et linguae, quam in criminum reos et rei publicae parricidas spiritu iustae indignationis flauerat anhelus, inuerteret togamque ipsam rugarum paginis resolutis palliorum imitatus speciem retorqueret.

37.

On the exsuperantissimus deus, see Nicole Méthy, “Deus Exsuperantissimus: Une divinité nouvelle? À propos de quelques passages d’Apulée,” L’Antiquité Classique 68 (1999): 99–117; Emmanuel Bermon, “Le Songe de Scipion dans la correspondance entre Saint Augustin et Nectarius de Calama (Ep. 90–91; 103–104),” Les Études philosophiques 99 (2011): 521–42 at 534–35.

38.

A particularly neat contrast is afforded by Maximus of Madauros, whose mini apology for the Roman cults of his African colonia is transmitted among Augustine’s letters, as Epistula 16 (Daur, Sancti Aurelii Augustini Epistulae I–LV, CCSL 31:38–39). Discussion and prior scholarship in Mattias Gassman, “Debating Traditional Religion in Late Fourth-Century Roman Africa,” Journal of Late Antiquity 11 (2018): 83–110.

39.

Cf., e.g., Ambrosiaster, Quaestiones Veteris et Noui Testamenti 114.8, in Pseudo-Augustini Quaestiones Veteris et Noui Testamenti CXXVII, ed. Alexander Souter, CSEL 50 (Tempsky, 1908), 306; Symmachus, Relatio 21.1 (Seeck, Q. Aurelii Symmachi, 295); or the law provoked by Possidius’s embassy to Ravenna, Constitutio Sirmondiana 14, which calls bishops “Christianae legis antistites” (Mommsen and Meyer, Theodosiani libri XVI, 1.2:897).

40.

Cicero, De natura deorum 1.3–4 (in M. Tulli Ciceroni Scripta quae manserunt omnia 45, ed. O. Plasberg and W. Ax, Teubner [De Gruyter, 2008 (1933)], 2–3) explicitly wards off an atheist reading of the Sceptic Cotta’s speech at De diuinatione 1.8 (in M. Tulli Ciceroni Scripta quae manserunt omnia 46, ed. O. Plasberg and W. Ax [Teubner, 1965 (1938)], 4–5). See still Mary Beard, “Cicero and Divination: The Formation of a Latin Discourse,” Journal of Roman Studies 76 (1986): 33–46.

41.

Lactantius, Diuinae institutiones 3.14.7, in L. Caelius Firmianus Lactantius: Diuinarum institutionum libri septem, ed. Eberhard Heck and Antonie Wlosok, 4 vols., Teubner (De Gruyter, 2005–11), 2:246.

42.

Ilsetraut Hadot (Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique: Contribution à l’histoire de l’éducation et de la culture dans l’antiquité, 2nd ed., Textes et Traditions 11 [Vrin, 2005], 334–36, 372–73) offers a trenchant statement of the primacy and ubiquity of Platonist thought in the late Roman West.

43.

Augustine, Confessiones 8.2.3, 7.9.13, quosdam Platonicorum libros ex graeca lingua in latinam uersos (in S. Aureli Augustini Confessionum libri XIII, ed. Martinus Skutella, H. Jürgens, and W. Schaub, 2nd ed., Teubner [De Gruyter, 2009 (1981)], 154–55, 137), with James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 1992), 421–24. Against arguments for substantial influence from Porphyry on earlier Latin writers, see John M. Rist, “Basil’s ‘Neoplatonism’: Its Background and Nature,” in Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic: A Sixteen-Hundredth Anniversary Symposium, ed. Paul J. Fedwick, vol. 1 (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), 137–220 at 141–51. The Neoplatonists were not, of course, the only source of Platonist knowledge in North Africa. For the importance of the homegrown Middle Platonist Apuleius—known, as we have seen, to Nectarius—see now Brent D. Shaw, “Two Africans: Augustine and Apuleius,” Studies in Late Antiquity 8.4 (2024): 596–642.

44.

Confessiones 8.2.3 (Skutella et al., S. Aureli Augustini Confessionum, 154–55); on contemporary Roman senatorial paganism, see Gassman, Worshippers of the Gods, 83–106.

45.

Philosophical background and Christian parallels in Pierre Courcelle, “Parietes faciunt christianos?” in Mélanges d’archéologie, d’épigraphie et d’histoire offerts à J. Carcopino, ed. J. Heurgon, G. Picard, and W. Seston (Hachette, 1966), 241–48.

46.

Pierre Hadot (Marius Victorinus: Recherches sur sa vie et ses oeuvres [Études augustiniennes, 1971], 237–46) sketches a theological trajectory out of Victorinus’s comments as a Christian.

47.

J. H. Waszink, with P. J. Jensen, ed., Timaeus a Calcidius translatus commentarioque instructus, Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevii: Plato Latinus 4 (Warburg and Brill, 1962), ix–xvii. Cf. Pierre Courcelle (“Ambroise de Milan et Calcidius,” in Romanitas et Christianitas: Studia Iano Henrico Waszink A.D. VI Kal. Nov. A. MCMLXXIII XIII lustra complenti oblata, ed. W. den Boer, P. G. van der Nat, C. M. J. Sicking, and J. C. M. Van Winden [North-Holland, 1973], 45–54), who suggests ca. 380, due to similarities with Ambrose.

48.

Gretchen Reydams-Schils, Calcidius on Plato’s Timaeus: Greek Philosophy, Latin Reception, and Christian Contexts (Cambridge University Press, 2020), esp. 163–90; cf. John Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 80 B.C. to A.D. 220, 2nd ed. (Cornell University Press, 1996), 401–8; Rist, “Basil’s ‘Neoplatonism,’” 151–55; Claudio Moreschini, “Calcidius Between Creatio Ex Nihilo and Platonism,” in Light on Creation: Ancient Commentators in Dialogue and Debate on the Origin of the World, ed. Geert Roskam and Joseph Verheyden, Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 104 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 259–76 at 261–67.

49.

Waszink, Timaeus, x–xi (with a full survey and stemma in cvii–clvii; the earliest manuscripts date from the ninth century).

50.

That the manuscripts are found across Europe and in separate traditions (Peter Dronke, The Spell of Calcidius: Platonic Concepts and Images in the Medieval West, Millennio Medievale 74, Strumente e studi, n.s., 17 [Galluzzo, 2008], 4–5) carries less force than it might seem. A line of biographical detail is easy to insert. Other (H)osii are identified by A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris, The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, 3 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1971–92), 1:445 (Hosius 1), 2:572 (Hosius 2).

51.

Reydams-Schils, Calcidius, esp. 191–220; for his use of Origen, cf. Waszink, Timaeus, cii–civ. David T. Runia (Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey, Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum, section 3, Jewish Traditions in Early Christian Literature 3 [Van Gorcum and Fortress Press, 1993], 281–90) summarizes and discusses the passages with Judeo-Christian reference. Possible Christian influences on Calcidius’s translation of the Timaeus are traced by Christine Ratkowitsch, “Die Timaios-Übersetzung des Chalcidius: Ein Plato christianus,” Philologus 140 (1996): 139–162. Any Gnostic connection is tenuous, despite B. Bakhouche, “Les Hebraica dans le commentaire au Timée de Calcidius,” in Plato Latinus: Aspects de la transmission de Platon en latin dans l’Antiquité, ed. Jean-Baptiste Guillaumin and Carlos Lévy, ΗΦΡ: Philosophie hellénistique et romaine (Brepols, 2018), 207–32.

52.

Or so Calcidius insinuates in the introductory epistle (Waszink, Timaeus, 5). At Commentarius 126 (Waszink, Timaeus, 169–70), descensum dei uenerabilis ad humanae conseruationis rerumque mortalium gratiam, Calcidius may allude to the creed (Reydams-Schils, Calcidius, 195). For doubts, against earlier scholarship, about Ossius’s importance at Nicaea, see R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318–381 (T. & T. Clark, 1988), 198–201.

53.

Reydams-Schils, Calcidius, 219–20. John Magee, ed. and trans., On Plato’s Timaeus: Calcidius, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Harvard University Press, 2016), xiv–xv, compiles an impressive body of linguistic evidence that Calcidius’s “dominant” language was Greek. Two expressions in the passages I discuss are paralleled only in African texts (to judge from searches in the Brepols Library of Latin Texts and Electronic Monumenta Germaniae Historica—a wide but incomplete sampling—and the Epigraphik-Datenbank Clauss/Slaby). Ad memoriam perpetuitatis (Calcidius, Commentarius 132, quoted in my note 93) is paralleled (as ad perpetuitatis memoriam) on fourth-century inscriptions from Timgad (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 8.17896) and Lepcis Magna (Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania 566, https://inslib.kcl.ac.uk/irt2009/IRT566.html), while the use of desertores angeli for the evil daemones is shared by Tertullian and Augustine (see my note 91).

54.

Thus Dillon, Middle Platonists, 408.

55.

For Calcidius as a Christian “free-seeker,” see Dronke, Spell of Calcidius, xiv–xviii. Cf. Ratkowitsch, “Timaios-Übersetzung”; Moreschini, “Calcidius,” 275–76.

56.

Calcidius, Commentarius 126 (Waszink, Timaeus, 169–70): est quoque alia sanctior et uenerabilior historia, quae perhibet ortu stellae cuiusdam non morbos mortesque denuntiatas sed descensum dei uenerabilis, ad humanae conseruationis rerumque mortalium gratiam. My translation is shaped by that of Reydams-Schils, Calcidius, 194–95.

57.

Arnobius, Aduersus nationes 2.11, in Arnobii Adversus nationes libri VII, ed. C. Marchesi, 2nd ed., Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum Paravianum 62 (Paravia, 1953), 76.

58.

Mark J. Edwards, “Atticizing Moses? Numenius, the Fathers and the Jews,” Vigiliae Christianae 44 (1990): 64–75.

59.

Calcidius, Commentarius 55 (Waszink, Timaeus, 103): quod quidem uerum esse testatur eminens quaedam doctrina sectae sanctioris et in comprehensione diuinae rei prudentioris. Cf. Moreschini, “Calcidius,” 270. Secta can still mean a philosophical “school” in contemporary Latin, as at Commentarius 343 (Waszink, Timaeus, 335), multae quippe sectae sunt philosophorum, but often it means “religion,” as in the example from Symmachus quoted in my note 22.

60.

For this idea in (possibly) contemporary Latin literature, see Lactantius, Diuinae instutiones 2.13.8, 4.10.5, 14, (Heck and Wlosok, L. Caelius Firmianus Lactantius, 1:184; 2:338, 340).

61.

Reydams-Schils, Calcidius, 214: “In sum, the commentary was probably written with an audience in mind that also included Christians; it made some concessions to his addressee and that audience, but shows no strong effort to accommodate such sensitivities.” Cf. Anna Somfai, “The Nature of Daemons: A Theological Application of the Concept of Geometrical Proportion in Calcidius’ Commentary to Plato’s Timaeus (40D–41A),” in Ancient Approaches to Plato’s Timaeus, ed. Robert W. Sharples and Anne Sheppard, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 78 (Institute of Classical Studies, 2003), 129–42 at 138.

62.

I combine two scattered characterizations in Gretchen Reydams-Schils, “Calcidius Christianus? God, Body, and Matter,” in Metaphysik und Religion: Zur Signatur des spätantiken Denkens. Akten des Internationalen Kongresses vom 13.–17. März 2001 in Würzburg, ed. Theo Kobusch and Michael Erler with Irmgard Männlein-Robert, Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 160 (Saur, 2002), 193–211 at 195 and 209.

63.

Calcidius, Commentarius 132 (Waszink, Timaeus, 173): quos Hebraei uocant sanctos angelos stareque eos dicunt ante dei uenerabilis contemplationem. For Calcidius’s sources, see J. den Boeft, Calcidius on Demons (Commentarius Ch. 127–136), Philosophia Antiqua 3 (Brill, 1977). On Calcidius’s conception of daemones, see Somfai, “Nature”; Béatrice Bakhouche, “Anges et démons dans le Commentaire au Timée de Calcidius (IVe siècle de notre ère),” Revue des Études Latines 77 (1999): 260–75.

64.

As by von Mosheim, in my note 116; Calcidius, Commentarius 130 (Waszink, Timaeus, 172–73).

65.

Calcidius, Commentarius 128 (Waszink, Timaeus, 171, whose commentary follows B. W. Switalski, Des Chalcidius Kommentar zu Plato’s Timaeus: Eine historisch-kritische Untersuchung, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters: Texte und Untersuchungen 3.6 [Aschendorff, 1902], 17–18n1).

66.

Calcidius, Commentarius 128 (Waszink, Timaeus, 171): priscorum hominum genus omnia quae ad usum hominum uitaeque agendae facultatem diuino consilio prouidentiaque demanant auxiliantibus atque operantibus tam potentiis quam rationibus, haec ipsa quae auxiliantur deos existimasse, propterea quod rudibus animis nondum insedisset ueri dei sciscitatio. Stars: Commentarius 131, 174 (Waszink, Timaeus, 173, 202).

67.

Calcidius, Commentarius 128 (Waszink, Timaeus, 171): erant enim pastores et siluicaedi ceterique huius modi sine studiis humanitatis, quos cladis publicae superstites fecerat opportuna habitatio ex tempestatum atque illuuionis incommodo. Quae poetae postea blandientes humanis passionibus propter cupiditatem lucri uersibus suis formata membratimque effigiata amplis et reconditis nominibus exornauerunt usque adeo, ut etiam uitiosas hominum illecebras turpissimosque actus deos cognominarent obnoxios passioni. Itaque factum ut pro gratia, quae ab hominibus debetur diuinae prouidentiae, origo et ortus sacrilegio panderetur; cuius erroris opinio creuit inconsultorum hominum uanitate.

68.

Plato, Timaeus 22c–e, Critias 109d–110a, in Platonis opera, ed. John Burnet, vol. 4, Oxford Classical Texts (Clarendon, 1902).

69.

Plato, Leges 677a–680e, esp. 679c, in Platonis opera, ed. John Burnet, vol. 5.1, OCT (Clarendon, 1907): ἀγαθοὶ μὲν δὴ διὰ ταῦτά τɛ ἦσαν καὶ διὰ τὴν λɛγομένην ɛὐήθɛιαν…ψɛῦδος γὰρ ὑπονοɛῖν οὐδɛὶς ἠπίστατο διὰ σοφίαν, ὥσπɛρ τὰ νῦν, ἀλλὰ πɛρὶ θɛῶν τɛ καὶ ἀνθρώπων τὰ λɛγόμɛνα ἀληθῆ νομίζοντɛς ἔζων κατὰ ταῦτα.

70.

Plato, Res publica 377b–378e, in Platonis Rempublicam, ed. S. R. Slings, OCT (Clarendon, 2003), 73–76; Cicero, De natura deorum 1.38, 2.70, 3.63 (Plasberg and Ax, M. Tulli Ciceroni Scripta quae manserunt omnia 45, 16, 77, 143), with den Boeft, Calcidius on Demons, 17.

71.

For Varro’s ideas and their intellectual roots (most likely in Antiochus of Ascalon), see Peter Van Nuffelen, “Varro’s Divine Antiquities: Roman Religion as an Image of Truth,” Classical Philology 105 (2010): 162–88; Marianne Wifstrand Schiebe, Das anthropomorphe Gottesbild: Berechtigung und Ursprung aus der Sicht antiker Denker, Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 69 (Franz Steiner, 2020), 138–98.

72.

Pace den Boeft, Calcidius on Demons, 15.

73.

Working, that is, from searches in the Brepols Library of Latin Texts and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. Julian, Contra Heracleum Cynicum 7, 211d, in L’Empereur Julien: Œuvres complètes, ed. Gabriel Rochefort, vol. 2.1, Collection des universités de France (Belles Lettres, 1963), 53: πότɛρον οὖν οὐχ ὁ Πύθιος ἀληθής τέ ἐστι θɛός, καὶ Διογένης τοῦτο ἐπέπɛιστο σαφῶς.

74.

Euripides, Ion 1537, in Euripidis Fabulae, ed. J. Diggle, vol. 2, OCT (Clarendon, 1981), 369.

75.

Hymn to Demetrius Poliorcetes ll.15–19, in Studies in Graeco-Roman Religions and Gnosticism, ed. Miroslav Marcovich, Studies in Greek and Roman Religion 4 (Brill, 1988), 9: ἄλλοι μὲν ἢ μακρὰν γὰρ ἀπέχουσιν θɛοὶ | ἢ οὐκ ἔχουσιν ὦτα | ἢ οὐκ ɛἰσὶν, ἢ οὐ προσέχουσιν ἡμῖν οὐδὲ ἕν, | σὲ δὲ παρόνθ’ ὁρῶμɛν, | οὐ ξύλινον οὐδὲ λίθινον, ἀλλ’ ἀληθινόν. Biographical background in Pat Wheatley and Charlotte Dunn, Demetrius the Besieger (Oxford University Press, 2020), 345–58.

76.

Epicureanism: See the detailed commentary in Marcovich, Studies, 13–17.

77.

Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 6.62–63, in Athenaei Naucratitae Dipnosophistarum, ed. Georg Kaibel, libri 15, vol. 2 (Teubner, 1887), 64–66. The hymn is listed as “Duris of Samos, 76 F 13,” and the historical comment as “Demochares of Athens, 75 F 2,” in the standard collection of historical fragments and testimonia: Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, vol. 2, Zeitgeschichte, A: Universalgeschichte und Hellenika (Weidmann, 1926), 134–35, 141–42.

78.

Hymn to Demetrius Poliorcetes ll.1–6, 13–14 (Marcovich, Studies, 9); see further Angelos Chaniotis, “The Ithyphallic Hymn for Demetrios Poliorketes and Hellenistic Religious Mentality,” in More Than Men, Less Than Gods: Studies on Royal Cult and Imperial Worship, Proceedings of the International Colloquium Organized by the Belgian School at Athens (November 1–2, 2007), ed. Panagiotis P. Iossif, Andrzej S. Chankowski, and Catherine C. Lorber, Studia Hellenistica 51 (Peeters, 2011), 157–96 at 179–80, who questions, accordingly (180n93), whether the passage is really Epicurean.

79.

Augustine, De ciuitate dei 4.27, in Sancti Aurelii Augustini De civitate dei libri I–X, ed. Bernhard Dombart and Alfons Kalb, CCSL 47–48 (Brepols, 1955), 121: Quod eorum qui sint dii non habeant ciuitates uera simulacra quod uerus deus nec sexum habeat nec aetatem nec definita corporis membra. The text is identified, speculatively, as a fragment of Varro’s Curio de cultu deorum, in Varros Logistoricus über die Götterverehrung (Curio de cultu deorum): Ausgabe und Erklärung der Fragmente, ed. Burkhardt Cardauns, (Konrad Triltsch, 1960), 5.

80.

Cf. J. A. North, “The Limits of the ‘Religious’ in the Late Roman Republic,” History of Religions 53 (2014): 225–45 at 233.

81.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.272–73, in P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoses, ed. R. J. Tarrant, OCT (Clarendon, 2004), 103: pars omnia ueros | posse deos memorant; sed non et Bacchus in illis. Cicero, De natura deorum 2.2 (Plasberg and Ax, M. Tulli Ciceroni Scripta quae manserunt omnia 45, 49): Tum Balbus: ‘Eundem equidem mallem audire Cottam, dum qua eloquentia falsos deos sustulit eadem ueros inducat.’ Varro, Antiquitates rerum diuinarum fr. 225, in M. Terentius Varro: Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum, T. 1, Die Fragmente, ed. Burkhart Cardauns, 2 vols. (Franz Steiner, 1976), 96 = Augustine, De ciuitate dei 7.5 (Dombart and Kalb, Sancti Aurelii Augustini, CCSL 47:190): animam mundi ac partes eius, id est deos ueros; Antiquitates rerum diuinarum fr. 22 (Cardauns, 24 = Arnobius, Aduersus nationes 7.1 [Marchesi, Arnobii Aduersus nationes, 343]): dii ueri neque desiderant ea [sc. sacra] neque deposcunt, ex aere autem facti, testa, gypso uel marmore multo minus haec curant. Perhaps also Seneca, Troades 644–45, in L. Annaei Senecae Tragoediae, ed. Otto Zwierlein, OCT (Clarendon, 1986), 76: testor immites deos | deosque ueros coniugis manes mei. In Greek, cf. Lucian, Deorum concilium 14, in Luciani Opera, ed. M. D. MacLeod, vol. 3, OCT (Clarendon, 1980), 156: τοὺς παλαιούς τɛ καὶ ἀληθɛῖς θɛοὺς.

82.

Tertullian, Apologeticum 24.2, edited by E. Dekkers in Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani Opera I, CCSL 1 (Brepols, 1954), 133, is programmatic: ueram religionem ueri dei. On the idea of a uera religio, closely intertwined (as Tertullian’s statement reveals) with that of a uerus deus, see Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 2nd ed., reprinted with a foreword by John Hick (Harper and Row, 1978; reprinted Fortress Press, 1991), 27–31.

83.

Lactantius, Diuinae institutiones 4.28.11 (Heck and Wlosok, L. Caelius Firmianus Lactantius, 2:427), reworking Cicero, De natura deorum 2.71–72 (Plasberg and Ax, M. Tulli Ciceroni Scripta quae manserunt omnia 45, 77–78).

84.

Lactantius, Diuinae institutiones 2.13.5–7 (Heck and Wlosok, L. Caelius Firmianus Lactantius, 1:183–85); Epiphanius, Panarion 1.1–3, in Epiphanius, vol. 1, Ancoratus und Panarion haer. 1–33, ed. Karl Holl, Marc Bergermann, and Christian-Freidrich Collatz, GCS, n.s., 10.1 (De Gruyter, 2013), 172–79; Filastrius, Diuersarum hereseon liber 111, edited by F. Heylen in Eusebius Vercellensis, Filastrius Brixiensis…, CCSL 9 (Brepols, 1957), 276–77; see further Mattias Gassman, “An Ancient Account of Pagan Origins: Making Sense of Filastrius, Diuersarum hereseon liber 111,” Revue d’études augustiniennes et patristiques 67 (2021): 83–105.

85.

Calcidius, Commentarius 188 (Waszink, Timaeus, 212–13).

86.

Calcidius, Commentarius 127 (Waszink, Timaeus, 170): de his potestatibus quae dii putantur, 128 (Waszink, Timaeus, 171): at uero in eo libro…omnes exequitur huius modi quaestiones.

87.

Calcidius, Commentarius 177 (Waszink, Timaeus, 206).

88.

Augustine, De ciuitate dei 11.1 (in De civitate dei libri XI–XXII, ed. Bernhard Dombart and Alfons Kalb, CCSL 48 [Brepols, 1955], 321), in reference to righteous humans and angels. Unlike Origen—for whose views see Alan Scott, Origen and the Life of the Stars: A History of an Idea, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford University Press, 1991), 113–49—Augustine was uncertain whether the heavenly bodies were endowed with sensation and reason: Enchiridion 15.58, edited by E. Evans, in Sancti Aurelii Augustini De fide rerum inuisibilium…, CCSL 46 (Brepols, 1969), 81.

89.

Calcidius, Commentarius 133 (Waszink, Timaeus, 174): cum angeli partim dei sint ministri—qui ita sunt, sancti uocantur—, partim aduersae potestatis satellites, ut optime nosti.

90.

Porphyry, De abstinentia 2.39, in Porphyre: De l’Abstinence, ed. Jean Bouffartigue and Michel Patillon, vol. 2, Collection des Universités de France (Belles Lettres, 1979), 105, linking the evil daemones to τῆς ἐναντίας δυνάμɛως; den Boeft, Calcidius on Demons, 33–34.

91.

Calcidius, Commentarius 135 (Waszink, Timaeus, 176): hos quidam et huius modi daemonas proprie uocant desertores angelos. Den Boeft (Calcidius on Demons, 45) and Waszink (Timaeus, 176) find resonances in the Bible and Philo, De gigantibus, but for the exact phrase see Tertullian, Apologeticum 35.12 (Dekkers, Tertulliani Opera I, CCSL 1:146); De idololatria 4.2, 9.1, edited by A. Reifferscheid and G. Wissowa, in Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani Opera II, CCSL 2 (Brepols, 1954), 1103, 1107; Augustine, In Iohannis euangelium tractatus 79.2, in In Iohannis Euangelium tractatus CXXIV, ed. Radbod Willems, CCSL 36 (Brepols, 1954), 527; Enchiridion 8.26 (Evans, Sancti Aurelii Augustini, CCSL 46:63); Augustine, De ciuitate dei 13.24, 16.17 (Dombart and Kalb, Sancti Aurelii Augustini, CCSL 48:413, 521).

92.

Thus, for an influential Latin example, Augustine, De ciuitate dei 9.19 (Dombart and Kalb, Sancti Aurelii Augustini, CCSL 47:267).

93.

Calcidius, Commentarius 132 (Waszink, Timaeus, 173): quos quidem praefectos sensili mundo primo quidem uicem imitari aliquam putandum—ut enim deus iuxta angelum, sic angelus iuxta hominem—, dehinc quod usui nobis sint interpretantes et nuntiantes deo nostras preces et item hominibus dei uoluntatem intimantes, illi nostram indigentiam, porro ad nos diuinam opem deferentes; quam ob causam appellati angeli ob assiduum officium nuntiandi. testis est huius beneficii cuncta Graecia omne Latium omnisque Barbaria gratulationesque populorum libris conditis ad memoriam perpetuitatis. indiget quippe natura generis humani nimium imbecilla suffragio melioris praestantiorisque naturae; quam ob causam creator omnium et conseruator deus uolens esse hominum genus praefecit his, per quos recte regerentur, angelos siue daemonas.

94.

Epinomis 984d–e (in Platonis opera, ed. John Burnet, vol. 5.2, OCT [Clarendon, 1907]) is terse and focused on prayer to the daemones themselves.

95.

Porphyry, De abstinentia 2.38.3 (Bouffartigue and Patillon, Porphyre, 105); Plato, Symposium 202e, in Platonis opera, ed. John Burnet, vol. 2, OCT (Clarendon, 1901).

96.

Philo, De gigantibus 4.16, in Philonis Alexandrini Opera quae supersunt, ed. Paul Wendland, vol. 2 (Reimer, 1897), 45. Calcidius cites Philo at Commentarius 278 (Waszink, Timaeus, 282–83).

97.

Commentarius 188 (Waszink, Timaeus, 213).

98.

Commentarius 129–30 (Waszink, Timaeus, 171–73).

99.

Calcidius seldom uses creare (Reydams-Schils, Calcidius, 197), once in quotation of Prov 8:22 (Commentarius 276 [Waszink, Timaeus, 281]).

100.

Cf., e.g., Exod 3:15, 12:14. Tertullian, Aduersus Iudaeos 7.4, ed. Aem. Kroymann, Tertulliani Opera II, CCSL 2:1354) already boasts that Christians are found throughout the world. The ablative absolute in Commentarius 132, libris conditis ad memoriam perpetuitatis (quoted in context in my note 93), leaves the meaning even more obscure: Are these books established by all peoples throughout Greece, Latium, and Barbaria, or only by some?

101.

Commentarius 157, 185–86 (Waszink, Timaeus, 191, 211–12).

102.

Commentarius 185 (Waszink, Timaeus, 211).

103.

Augustine, De diuinatione daemonum 5.9–6.10 (Zycha, S. Aureli Augustini, CSEL 25.1: 607–9). Cf. Cicero, De diuinatione 1.14.24 (Plasberg and Ax, M. Tulli Ciceroni Scripta quae manserunt omnia 46, 12–13); Maximus of Tyre, Dissertatio 13.3–4, 7, in Maximus Tyrius: Dissertationes, ed. Michael B. Trapp (Teubner, 1994), 110–13, 115.

104.

Commentarius 169–71 (Waszink, Timaeus, 199–201).

105.

E.g., Acts 7:53.

106.

Commentarius 176 (Waszink, Timaeus, 204–5): principio cuncta quae sunt et ipsum mundum contineri regique principaliter quidem a summo deo…deinde a prouidentia, quae est post illum summum secundae eminentiae, quem noyn Graeci uocant…hanc igitur dei uoluntatem, tamquam sapientem tutelam rerum omnium, prouidentiam homines uocant…et est mens dei aeterna: est igitur mens dei intellegendi aeternus actus.

107.

Commentarius 177 (Waszink, Timaeus, 206): sequitur hanc prouidentiam fatum, lex diuina promulgata intellegentiae sapienti modulamine ad rerum omnium gubernationem.

108.

Commentarius 162 (Waszink, Timaeus, 195); see further J. den Boeft, Calcidius on Fate: His Doctrine and Sources, Philosophia Antiqua 18 (Brill, 1970), 54.

109.

Commentarius 179–80; cf. 189 (Waszink, Timaeus, 207–9, 213).

110.

Commentarius 255 (Waszink, Timaeus, 264): nec uero dubitare fas est intellegibilem deum pro bonitate naturae suae rebus omnibus consulentem opem generi hominum, quod nulla esset sibi cum corpore conciliatio, diuinarum potestatum interpositione ferre uoluisse; quarum quidem beneficia satis clara sunt ex prodigiis et diuinatione uel nocturna somniorum uel diurna fama praescia rumores uentilante, medelis quoque aduersum morbos intimatis et prophetarum inspiratione ueridica.

111.

Copious documentation, on the whole of Commentarius 143–90, in den Boeft, Calcidius on Fate, 40–42, 112–16. A later passage, Commentarius 256 (Waszink, Timaeus, 264–65), distinguishes five kinds of dreams. Somnium derives simply from the “residual commotions of the soul,” while uisum, “the sort that is selected by divine might” (quod ex diuina uirtute legatur), appears to denote a mode of communication rather than a specific kind of content. Admonitio, “when we are ruled and admonished by councils of angelic goodness,” and spectaculum, a waking vision of a “heavenly power” (caelestis potestas) making a positive or negative commandment, correspond to the angelic communications of the angelological passage, and reuelatio, the intimation of an impending future event, corresponds to daemonic prognostication. J. H. Waszink, “Die sogenannte Fünfteilung der Träume bei Chalcidius und ihre Quellen,” Mnemosyne 9 (1940): 65–85, suggests a Philonic background, by way of Numenius and Porphyry; doubts in Runia, Philo, 286.

112.

Commentarius 153–54 (Waszink, Timaeus, 188–89).

113.

Commentarius 169–71 (Waszink, Timaeus, 199–201).

114.

Commentarius 55, 126 (Waszink, Timaeus, 103, 169).

115.

Fabricius, Bibliothecae Latinae Sive Notitia Auctorum Veterum Latinorum, qvorumcunqve scripta ad nos pervenerunt, distributa in libros IV, 5th ed., vols. 2–3 (Vidua Benjamini Schilleri, Jo. Christoph. Kisnerus, 1721–22), 2:554–61, 3:88–90, citing the edition appended (at 225–420, with title pages and endmatter) to S. Hippolyti episcopi et martyris operum, vol. 2 (Christian Liebezeit and Theodor Christoph. Felginer, 1718), e.g., 327nB, 330nT. On his life and times, see Mathilde Verner, “Johann Albert Fabricius, Eighteenth-Century Scholar and Bibliographer,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 60 (1966): 281–326.

116.

See esp. n113, stretching across nine pages (732–732a, per an idiosyncratic numbering system), in Johan Lorenz von Mosheim, Radulphi Cudworthi, theol. d. et in Academia Cantabrigiensi professoris Systema intellectuale huius universi, seu De veris naturae rerum originibus commentarii, quibus omnis eorum philosophia, qui deum esse negant, funditus evertitur, vol. 1 (Vidua Meyer, 1733). Cf. the succinct chap. 16 of von Mosheim’s De turbata per recentiores Platonicos ecclesia (Sebastian Bucholtz, 1725), 30–33.

117.

Von Mosheim, Systema intellectuale, 732n113: nec prorsus ethnicum, nec Christianum ex toto, sed hominem medium fuisse Chalcidium, apparebit.

118.

Von Mosheim, De turbata 33: haec mihi nascitur sententia, nec consensisse eum prorsus cum Christianis, nec sprevisse quae ab illis docebantur omnia, verum…novumque quoddam religionis genus ex vulgi, philosophorum et Christianorum scitis compositum exstruere voluisse.

119.

Cf. E. P. Meijering, “Mosheim on the Difference Between Christianity and Platonism: A Contribution to the Discussion about Methodology,” Vigiliae Christianae 31 (1977): 68–73.

120.

Systema intellectuale, 733n113.

121.

Porphyry, De abstinentia 2.39–43 (Bouffartigue and Patillon, Porphyre, 105–10).

122.

Gassman, “Late Antique Preacher.”

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