This article seeks to define a theoretical framework for the study of the relation between religion and the political community in the Roman world and to analyze a particular case in point. The first part reviews two prominent theories of religion developed in the last fifty years through the combined efforts of anthropologists and classicists, arguing for their complementary contribution to the understanding of religion's political dimension. It also provides an overview of the approaches of recent scholarship to the relation between religion and the Roman polity, contextualizing the efforts of this article toward a theoretical reframing of the political and institutional elements of ancient Christianity. The second part focuses on the religious legislation of the Theodosian Code , with particular emphasis on the laws against the heretics and their performance in the construction of the political community. With their characteristic language of exclusion, these laws signal the persisting overlap between the borders of the political community and the borders of religion, in a manner that one would expect from pre-Christian civic religions. Nevertheless, the political essence of religion did also adapt to the ecumenical dimension of the empire. Indeed, the religious norms of the Code appear to structure a community whose borders tend to be identical to the borders of the whole inhabited world, within which there is no longer room for alternative affiliations; the only possible identity outside this community is that of the insane, not belonging to any political entity and thus unable to possess any right.

This article investigates the ideological dimensions of an expressly spatialized discourse of Christian heresy in late antiquity as articulated in the laws of the Theodosian Code . It argues that efforts to legislate heresy in spatial terms served both to reify its seemingly uncontrollable, protean nature, while also distinguishing heresy as a dangerous social contagion from heresy as a cognitive condition. To legislate heresy in the language of space and place was an attempt to regularize it, to subject it to conditions that could be usefully legislated against, maybe even with a modicum of tolerance in a narrowly defined spaced. The laws within the Code deployed different rhetorics and logics to describe and regulate the spaces of the heretics. The heretics were denied space altogether and thus exposed, permitted secluded spaces and contained, and pushed out of the world altogether and thus made oblivious. In these different rhetorical maneuvers, the Code produced a protracted struggle to define the very terms of its heretical control. In codifying efforts to manage such a diverse and diffuse mass of heretics, the Code produced not a singular orthodoxy, but various orthodoxies or strategies of heretical containment. Efforts to control the heretics, in short, produced competing and complementary orthodoxies.

This paper focuses on the justifications for feeding Rome as a case study for evaluating the transition from a classical model of civic euergetism to one of Christian charity. Civic euergetism, which customarily entails public philanthropy publicly directed toward one's city or fellow citizens, was a social transaction intended to gain personal glory. In Christian charity, the poor were now supposed to be the objects of acts of public giving. Based on my analysis, I propose that scholars who view this transition as either continuity or novel change are adopting flawed models. I offer an alternative model for this transition that stresses the dynamic, on-going interaction of civic euergetism and Christian charity. These two sets of ideas influenced one another even as they remained distinct components of justifications for the feeding of Rome well into the late sixth century.