To Ourselves, To New Paganism

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To New Paganism

This is a side project of mine I’ve been working on for a little while now. My goal was to release it around the time of the White Huns Intermission, but as you can see I got it finished a little bit early. Over the next month or so I mean to finish it up.

Unlike the White Huns, it will have a smaller scale and I have no intention of taking it more than a few centuries in time, and will generally present snapshots rather than a coherent timeline. Also unlike the White Huns, the focus is more on culture and society than politics and the rise and fall of empires, although the two obviously are intertwined.

My aim is to make a snapshot of a timeline very different from our own, but again unlike the White Huns, rather than starting with the premise that the Sasanian dynasty loses a battle, the change is a little more personal.

The basic question of the timeline is simple: what would a Roman world without Christianity look like?

What follows is my (hopefully) unique answer to that question.

P.S. I apologize for using BCE and CE dates despite the lack of Jesus. I’d go insane otherwise, and I imagine my poor, poor readers would do the same.

Setting the Stage

Beginning early in the second century the religious life of the Mediterranean began to change. For centuries the traditions of Hellenic thought and faith had drawn on the eclectic and the exotic. The conquests of Alexander had pressed a veneer of Hellenism across much of the near East and the Roman Empire had made it seemingly permanent, providing a unifying force which allowed her subjects and citizens both great opportunity and great anxiety alike.

The world of the “educated pagan” had long been one of well-regulated superstition, governed by ritual and mediated through public life. And so long as traditional social structures endured, every member of society could feel not incorrectly that there was a proper place and order to things. It was only as the social structures of the Roman and Hellenic world began to show cracks that new anxieties boiled up and made fissures in the spiritual world.

Traditional paganism was in many ways impersonal – it sought to describe the world through analogy and symbol. Accordingly, it made sacred countless objects and places – temples and oracles, idols and icons. However, this was distinctly unfulfilling when compared with the new strains of religious thought which were emerging across the Roman world and the near east. New religious expression promised personal stakes, personal struggle and a distinct way of life which could be fulfilling on a local level. Thus the decline of traditional paganism is entirely explicable – indeed it was in many ways inevitable. Sooner or later a period of disruption or uncertainty would combine with radical new religious thought and open the door to wild new possibilities which would send tremors through the Roman world.

The unified and cosmopolitan nature of the new Empire allowed for unprecedented travel, much of it from the east to the west. This travel allowed the spread of ideas and of philosophies but also allowed the well-off commoner to see for the first time the particularism and the disunity of his fellow citizens. Mystery cults provided a first panacea to that feeling of isolation and dissolution – providing a sense of the sacred and the familiar for those who travelled far from home. However, the mystery cult was also fundamentally provincial and exclusive – it did not necessarily hail universal conversion as a goal, and generally each cult sought out a specific niche rather than a general one.

It was through the lingua franca of Koine Greek that the radical ideas of the second century achieved universal consideration. Even as the aristocratic elite retreated into esoteric classicism, the urban “middle class” was able to break free of these bonds and begin to contemplate new and vibrant ideas that simultaneously provided relief from the anxieties brought about by cosmopolitanism and allowed them to embrace it fully. That these ideas were often subversive to the authority of the state and traditional social circles brought them only further appeal.

During plagues and riots, during unrest and disorder, the new cults and religions of the second century provided much needed social order and communities away from home. And while certain cults remained exclusive, esoteric, or simply inaccessible to the vast majority (Mithras and Cybele being primary examples) many others reached out with a sort of radical egalitarianism, seeking an unprecedented universality that was only possible in a world where the Roman Empire had provided such precedent.

Judaism in the Roman Era

On the death of Herod “the Great,” his sons Alexander and Aristobulus inherited his kingdom as equal client-kings of the Roman Empire. Educated and raised amongst the Romans and yet legitimate descendants of the Maccabean line, the two heirs wasted little time in engaging in the typically cutthroat politics of their regime. Not several years previously, they had been targets of the schemes of a significant faction of Herodians – and only their father’s illness and death had saved them from his paranoia. Instead, their father, who had left no clear will, would have his lands divided by two of his least favorite sons, and the remainder of his vast family either placed under virtual arrest or executed.

This state of affairs would not last forever. In 34 CE, Alexander would pass away, and Aristobulus would follow him some three years later. By all accounts they had been good monarchs. Alexander was handsome and frank, Hellenized but still fully Jewish and with significant legitimacy. Their legacy, however, would be slowly yielding to encroaching Roman power, a force they had neither the means nor the will to fight, having been thoroughly inculcated into Roman culture. They supported the powerful Sadducee faction, a group which remained power after their deaths by accommodating (if uneasily) the arrival of Roman governance after the 37 CE annexation of Judea into the Empire overseen by Caligula.

This annexation saw major changes in the province – the capital was located at Caesarea Maratima, and the province was overseen by a Prefect, although at certain times, such as between 43-51 CE, there are records of client Kings being given limited authority, perhaps to quell dissent. However, ultimately the rebellious Zealot movement would result in the growth of Jewish-Greek tensions in Alexandria and elsewhere – local pacification efforts eventually escalated into a brutal war in which little quarter was given. The Jewish people were scattered and sold into slavery, with many abandoning their traditional religion and culture. Those who retained their faith were a majority, but one who, with the destruction of the temple in 74 CE, were bereft of a center of faith and meaning.

It would be centuries before the Jewish identity truly recovered, and with the destruction of records and sacred texts, in many senses it never did – what came after the destruction of the temple was fundamentally dissimilar from the religion that preceded it, and sought to totally isolate itself from Hellenic thought and culture in a way which prevented its mass appeal. Conversion to Judaism was made impossible for outsiders and the faith turned inwards, seeking answers for the vast calamities that had afflicted it much as they had centuries ago during the Babylonian Captivity. While this was a time of transcendent expression and beautiful elegiac mourning, it also represented an abandonment of the possibility for Judaic and Hellenic thought to merge and create something greater. Apart from a few scattered gnostic movements, Judaism retreated from the public eye.

In Syria Palestinia, their ancient homeland, they became a minority, outnumbered by transplanted Syrians and Nabataeans, a still-thriving Samaritan community, and even those who identified as Helleno-Roman. Those Jewish communities which endured were scattered across the empire, in many senses no different than many of the exclusive oriental mystery cults which would become vogue.

Fire and Truth

Almost nothing is clearly known about Adurnarseh, the founder of the religion Ardayasna or Aletheismos. Unlike his successors and those who would spread his word, the hagiography surrounding his life is sufficiently vague and is largely manufactured by both his partisans and detractors. What is known that he was born into lofty circumstances into the Arascid Empire during the reign of Tiradat. Assuming that the tales of his virgin birth and improbable childhood are false, commonalities in the varying accounts of his life suggest that from a young age he was wracked by seizures and visions. While as an adult these problems seem to have gone away to some degree, they left him with a distinct fascination with religion.

As most educated Parthians of his day, he had great knowledge of the Hellenistic and Mazdayasna traditions that informed his people’s largely acquired culture, and over time he renounced his privileged upbringing and lived as an ascetic, preaching to the common people a radical message. Much of what he supposedly sought to do was to divest the preaching of Zarathustra from its Iranian origin and make a compelling case for the equality of the faithful. He encouraged his believers to hold all property in common and give generously to charity. Any quest for the historical Adurnarseh must contend with the clear Hellenization of his teachings, and the ways in which many statements attributed to him seem to come out of the mouths of a Neoplatonist philosopher rather than a Parthian aristocrat-turned radical populist lay preacher.

Notably, Adurnarseh’s conception of the religion felt there was no cause for the veneration of any deity but Zeus-Ahuramazda, with whom the devotee was expected to have a personal and private relationship. As the ultimate force of Truth (but not the creator) Ahuramazda was to lead individuals through their daily struggle with evil. Adurnarseh attributed evil not to an equivalent (if inevitably doomed) cosmic force but rather the actions of spirits or “demons.” His religion acknowledged reincarnation to varying worlds and levels depending on actions in this life, with the lowest level being reborn as a demon and spitefully seeking to drag other lost souls further into the great Lie. By abandoning any sense of orthodoxy he supposedly made enemies of the priesthood, and ultimately fled into Syria and there, in the Roman Empire, left the world in a gout of flame – a true miracle.

Like the multitude of cults, the key feature that enabled the endurance of Aletheism was its strong sense of community. Even before the establishment of a codified priesthood, when the movement was still largely underground and subject to sporadic persecution and general distrust for its foreignness and iconoclasm (in a manner not wholly dissimilar to that faced by Judaism) Aletheist communities delivered their wealth to the community and shared what they had in a model of “divine charity” whose communalism provided great security for Roman citizens during times of civil unrest. In 254, when barbarian raids took many captive Romans, the Aletheists of Illyria paid many ransoms and forgave all the debts of the captives – an act which earned them great loyalty and many new converts. The plague of Cyprian was met with enthusiastic donations and hospital services from many cults, but the Aletheist movement once again provided a critical foundation of support for many who felt abandoned and powerless.

The religion would only be properly codified during the expansive conquests of the Osrhoene Empire, when the cult became briefly the religion of their Emperors, including the legendary conqueror Antiochus Avadius, who for a moment seemed posed to be a new Alexander, uniting the Near East and the Mediterranean worlds under a single imperial title. Ironically, this was to some degree what prevented further growth and widespread acceptance for the movement. The Osrhoene Empire was powerful and expansive, and in many ways claimed to be the successor to Rome – but it was living on borrowed time. Eventually Roman power would re-assert itself and with the fall of Edessa in 284, Aletheism was reduced to one of many cults, and one whose rivals were increasingly adapting to its success.

Despite this setback, Antiochus Avadius at the council of Apamea in 273 codified the Book of Revelations and established the hierarchy of priests, creating the office of Praeses which survived the fleeting period of state religion and became local hierophants with broad administrative powers over the affairs of their congregation. Post-Apamea, the Aletheist religion was a permanent part of the cultural life of the Roman world, and a generation of persecution would be followed by several decades of benign neglect as a series of martial Emperors were unable to take their eyes off the Danube and Rhine frontiers for the strength of the barbarians at the gates. By the time an Emperor would again be able to focus on the heartland of the Roman world, the situation had fundamentally changed beyond any need to persecute the faith directly.
 
I'm guessing the Oshroene Empire is this timeline's equivalent to the Palmyrene Empire (though it seems more expansive than the Palmyrene Empire)? Interesting, timeline, I'll be following it.
 
Interesting premise. It will be interesting to see the religious makeup of Eurasia when this is finished. Please continue!
 
Thanks guys! Osrhoene is indeed a more successful alt-Palmyrene Empire whose longer lifespan will have major ramifications for the near east.

Founded in 258 by the ambitious Edessene lord Lucius Aurelous Abgarus and his sixteen-year old son Antiochus, the Osrhoene Empire lasted until 284, conquering Asia Minor, Syria, Palestinia, and much of Mesopotamia by warring alternately against the Romans and the declining Parthians.

Ultimately it was brought down by the Roman Emperor Claudius Valerian, who would reunify the Empire. The Mesopotamian provinces of the Osrhoene Empire were not reintegrated into Rome, and accordingly they would be in a state of relative anarchy until the Kushan warlord Sakassak Apairig seized them almost a decade later.
 
Kushan? Cool! But warlord? So the great Kushan Empire still falls apart.

The Afairian/Apairig dynasty are ambitious satraps that eventually gain independence after conquering Iran. The Kushan Empire survives far longer on account of the Sassanids being butterflied, and indeed outlives the scope of the timeline.
 
Anagogism and the “Barbarian” Philosophies

The great philosophies and religious revelations of the second century were often heavily influenced by Hellenism but generally were not native to it. Despite or perhaps because of the economic prosperity of the era, there was a general feeling of melancholy and intellectual retreat. Many thinkers among the dislocated middle class saw asceticism as holy, saw the body as a sinful machine and the pure spirit as the only meaningful thing in this world.

This was not, of course, uniform. Many movements, particularly the “mystery cults” frequently repudiated such philosophies, but they did not write letters and treatises, did not give great speeches and in their own way contributed to this sense of retreat by their isolation and exclusivity.

However, one of the most notable trends of the second century was the rise of asceticism in Egypt and North Africa. Where mystery cults used social exclusivity, the monastic movements of the second century used physical exclusivity, retreating from civilization entirely, taking vows of silence or chastity, retreating from the world and its many sinful guises.

It is unclear where monasticism and the new asceticism of the second century originated from. Some recent scholars have attributed it to the spread of Indian religious philosophy via Egyptian trade lanes and far later, the Kushanite Afairian dynasty. Others argue that as early as the first century asceticism was becoming vogue. Jewish mystics and those inspired by them would wander into the desert in search of spiritual meaning. Ascetic movements also frequently took on elements from Zoroastrian heresy, identifying a single powerful creator deity, or demiurgos, with the evil and material aspects of the world. However, these disparate movements gained their primary inspiration from adaptations of Pythagorean or Platonist teachings. Evil was an emanation from the monadic force of the demiurgos, and was placed into sharp contrast with Sophia, the immaterial force of goodness, frequently associated with Athena.

The movement, which became known as Anagogism, was most popular in Syria and Egypt, and to some degree predates the Aletheist movement and provided some of the inspiration for its more radical notions. Anagogism was not, of course, exclusively monastic. It was supported by small but growing groups of lay devotees, and frequently came into conflict with the Roman authorities and the mob alike for its repudiation of traditional paganism. Many contemporary scholars have also argued that Anagogism did not come to prominence until far later than the common historical narrative suggests – that early Anagogic preachers were very much solitary ascetics with lay congregations, and that monasticism did not settle in any coherent form until the fourth century. There is significant archeological evidence that few to no Anagogic monasteries actually existed until far later than the Anagogic tradition suggests.

After 170, there are many reports of Anagogic communities coming under attack and being blamed for plagues, famines, and barbarian invasions. The country mob blamed the Anagogic schools and their repudiation of the gods for even the slightest divine disfavor, and this as much as chastity and other strict vows limited the scope of the Anagogic movement.

Anagogism should, perhaps, have found common ground with the Aletheist movement. As a substantial cultic movement with powerful enemies, the two religions had much in common with each other, particularly in their early incarnations before Aletheism would gain an organized church under the praeses. However, Aletheism glorified the divine creator while Anagogism repudiated it, and preachers from both movements found every reason to fight. Like the Sophists of the Aegean cities, Aletheists and Anagogic preachers debated frequently in the public square, spreading their ideas to eager throngs of onlookers seeking their own personal otherworldly experience.

Beyond Anagogism and the early Mystery Cults, there were two other major teachers whose rhetoric would inspire future generations of philosophers. The first was Sakkas Aidesios, an Indian merchant from the Indus River Valley who spent some twenty years in Alexandria, surrounded by learned sophists. He gained a familiarity with Greek, Jewish, and Iranian philosophy in addition to his own Buddhist upbringing, and after some time he abandoned his mercantile pursuits to instead reconcile these disparate philosophies.

Writing in the reign of the Emperor Titus Vitalius, his philosophy blended Greek notions of the ineffable transcendent One God with a host of sub-deities, notably including those of classical religion and the mystery cults, who were to be understood as aspects or fragments of the divine impulse. This notion more than any other ensured the success of Aidesios’ teachings – it made classical religion and new paganism entirely compatible. Aidesios would introduce many of the ideas which the Neoplatonists would popularize – he celebrated the material world, and took joy in the notion of its “elegant and cycling form.” The soul was born and reborn to experience the world in a sense which was almost hedonistic. The body was a tool to experience the world – the art Aidesios would inspire continues the Hellenic concerns of physicality and realism, but adopts a new focus on the eyes as an expression of the ever-changing soul.

The other major philosopher was Yamliku or Iamlikhos, an Aramaic speaking Syrian who also repudiated the Anagogic schools. Born late in the second century, he was originally a devotee of a mystery cult of Atargatis, but eventually founded his own religion. While most of what we know of this movement comes from its detractors, it seems to have been a radical new religious movement which claimed that any man who participated in a certain ritualistic oil-baptism might take the God into themselves, and in doing so become immortal in spirit – to become part of the God directly.

Like many of his contemporaries, including Bar Kokhba, he was influenced to no small degree by Jewish messianism, and indeed Yamliku did find others giving him this title. But the purpose of his movement, it seems, was not about his personal glory or any sense of political rebellion against the authorities – although it took on qualities of both almost immediately. Rather, displeased with the exclusivity and cliquishness of the Atargatis cult he sought to democratize messianic thought. A radical egalitarian in the mold of the Aletheists, he offered freely to all men the chance to become divine.

The movement started as an open and public phenomenon, but it did not take long before it incensed many more classical worshippers. Yamliku claimed that all men could become Kings by accepting the divine into themselves and saying a few words, and that was the sort of blasphemy that would see him beaten to death by roof-tiles thrown by an angry mob and many of his supporters torn limb from limb in what his supporters would call the “Emesa Martyrdoms” and his detractors would call “good riddance.”

The Third Century and Beyond

The intelligentsia of the Roman world endured even the great reversals of their Empire’s public fortunes. Despite the rise of Osrhoene, barbarian raids, and military anarchy, clustered around the Aegean schools of philosophy and great rhetors still lived surrounded by tangible memories of their civilization. In response to the “oriental mysteries” and superstitions of the time they argued and published great treatises, defending a school of thought that would eventually be called Neoplatonic.

However, Neoplatonism in the era of its genesis was not the same thing as what it would eventually become. There was no clear consensus of what it should mean. Compared to the cults, for whom heresy was often a matter of splitting hairs, herding philosophers into any sort of orthodoxy was akin to herding cats.

The two great schools of Neoplatonism can roughly be divided into the Soptarian and Herakleitan. Both men were students of men who had been students of Sakkas Aidesios, and both men, despite their upper-class pretensions and refusal to admit it, were actively responding to the frightening growth of the Aletheist and Anagogic religious trends. Unlike many of their contemporaries, they did not fear barbarian incursions on the frontier or any of the numerous calamities that afflicted the Roman world. They were inculcated against such threats by virtue of their location – they toured the Aegean and remained safe from the distant worries of an empire that more often than not teetered on the brink of military anarchy.

Their philosophies accordingly might have been broadly ignored except for the fact that collapsed at the end of the third century and in the aftermath of his victory of Osrhoene, the competent Emperor Aurelian established himself as Dominus in the west and Basileos in the east. He favored Nicomedia as the Imperial capital and established a secondary capital at Mediolanum for his friend Constantius, who ruled as Junior Emperor and successor. Aurelian like no other ruled as a semi-divine despot, and facilitated the eastward shift of the Roman Empire. A Neoplatonist and a Hellenophile, Aurelian was primarily concerned with restoring control over the lost Eastern provinces, and even later in his reign when that was complete he largely ignored affairs in the West.

Aurelian brought peace, stability, and an eastern focus to the Empire that allowed Neoplatonism to thrive and grow as a philosophy. However, it was divided into two. Sopatros of Magnesia and his disciples argued that Neoplatonism should divest itself from the worship of lesser gods to various degrees – the other gods were important, but primarily as a way to apprehend the greater divine that lay beyond all gods and souls rather than as distinct divinities. Herakleitos of Caesarea disagreed strongly, and while he had fewer disciples, his worldview would influence the development of latter mystery cults – for whom their chosen god or goddess could represent the God entire. Herakleitos himself was a fan of Zeus Serapis, who he worshipped as the Lord of Totality along with his consort Isis, who in Herakleitos’ conception was more of a Sophia-type figure than a simple fertility deity, a spiritual being who provided intercession with the loftier and more abstract Serapis.

While Neoplatonism gained ground at the end of the Third Century, it did so in competition with the Anagogic and Aletheist schools, and some context is necessary. The great religious movements of the Roman world were distinct urban and distinctly concentrated in the East and North Africa (where Anagogism had caught on like wildfire). Urbanism was only ever a thin veneer over the Roman world, particularly in the West, where military anarchy and barbarian invasions had seen a revival of antique pre-Roman cults. The civilized Neoplatonist gentleman in Roman Gaul would look out and see his supposed countrymen as a people with whom he shared no culture or traditions.

Frontier religion was very much traditional and folkloric, and Romanization had only represented a glossing-over and a syncretization. The religion of divine Emperors and great temples was in many ways tangential to the folk observances and small family shrines of the frontier citizen, and many of the new religions repudiated both. Of the various movements, however, only Neoplatonism promised to let the frontiers keep their own observances and offered benign neglect.

The army was drawn from the frontiers, from Moesia and the Danube, from Gaul along the Rhine. While certain mystery cults, such as Mithras and Sabazios, had made substantial inroads among the military elite, the army in general was a distinctly provincial institution defending a vast “civilized” world with whom they had little in common. It was only with Aurelian that this rift would begin to close – he recruited his army from the East, to defend the East. He knew that the provincial armies were a threat – they had ensured his rise to power, after all. The only solution was to raise forces who resembled the culture he wished to propagate, and accordingly he levied soldiers from Syria and Anatolia, and the new military bureaucracy of the Empire would resemble the middle-crust elites.

As a Neoplatonist, Aurelian engaged in spasms of vicious persecution against the Aletheists between 312 and 324. These persecutions were largely ineffective, but they did serve one specific goal – of eliminating from the scholarly governing classes any substantial cult affiliations. Obedience was to the Emperor and the Emperor alone, and the alternative was grisly indeed. Aletheism was the religion of Osrhoene and thus the enemy. That Aurelian could not eliminate it entirely however, was in many senses a foregone conclusion. Aletheism had gained far too much ground in the third century, and critically had begun to make gains among the rural population as charismatic preachers began to make headway while the loftier Neoplatonists rarely left their urban forums.

It might even have triumphed, had it not ultimately been subverted.

[Just trying to do some broad overview stuff before I focus in on anything in more detail.]
 
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I have little to say, other than this is fascinating and I look forward to reading more of your very individual and dry (in the sense of like a serious history book, not a flight of fancy) style ;):p:p
 
This is very well done, and I have subscribed.

I am reminded a bit of the Fascist International TL, which focused on a particular element of history, revealing the general history of the period only in side references.
 
“Alexander cuts off [his] testicles to worship his goddess.”

- caption on anonymous vulgar graffiti found outside the city of Ephesus, mocking a devotee of the god Cybele

"Behold, Lucius. . . moved by your prayer I come to you--I the natural mother of all life, the mistress of the elements, the first child of time, the supreme divinity, the queen of the underworld, the first among those in heaven--I, whose single godhead is venerated all over the earth under manifold forms, varying rites, and changing names. . . . Queen Isis.

"Behold, I have come to you in your calamity. I have come with solace and aid. Away then with tears. Cease to moan. Send sorrow fleeing. Soon through my providence shall the sun of your salvation rise."


- Apuleius, Metamorphoses

"This is a good country. The Gods have yielded it to us. We shall take from it all that we desire, and in it we shall abide, and our sons shall abide, until the ending of the world."

- attributed to King Gundmar of the Alemanni

The Goddesses

The prominence of Isis by the second century was extraordinary. Brought into prominence as part of a Ptolemaic re-invention of the Egyptian pantheon, her cult had a strong appeal to the downtrodden which reached far beyond the primarily middle-class presumptions of the Aletheists. Combined with her omnipotent husband Serapis, the divine pair was worshipped by everyone from the Imperial family to the lowliest slaves. The cult combined both compassion and justice, a revolutionary paradigm where the deities presided over both heaven and interceded to grant mercies and miracles. Compared to the martial, dualistic rhetoric of the Aletheists, the Isis cult did not offer cosmic battle against the forces of evil but rather safety and comfort against the forces of hardship and the promise of a better life beyond this one.

Over time, the cult of Isis embraced Neoplatonist beliefs as well – reincarnation in particular was gaining headway among a certain intellectual crowd – but most importantly to the apologists of the religion it was critical to cast the creation of the universe on a more primordial deity. Neither Isis nor Serapis were the creators, merely the custodians seeking to bring harmony and blessings in manifold forms to the world. The abstract Theos who gave birth to the world was simply divine energy, purely creative, neither good nor evil. Theos created demons and favorable spirits alike, pestilence and bounty.

Other notable feminine cults, notably that of Cybele and Atargatis, despite local variations and cultural differences, adopted similar rhetoric. The feminine divine was an intercessor, a bringer of positive fortunes and a protector, and all of these notions appealed massively to the common man and woman. Because female priesthoods were commonplace, these cults also allowed women to gain social influence that they otherwise might have been denied – helping the cults to spread among the upper classes whose female half often felt shut out from avenues of legitimate power.

During the great struggles between Aletheist and Neoplatonic thought, the feminine cults were the secret weapon of the Neoplatonists – making the lofty philosophies of the elite palatable to those who had little, priming them to accept a more Neoplatonist worldview and condemn the absolutist teachings of the Aletheists, for whom there was no god but Zeus-Ahuramazda. Aletheism was accordingly foreign and strange, and thus the preachers who enjoyed success were those who were willing to compromise, to keep the feminine. Heretical teachers spoke of a Sophia, Epona, or Isis, a feminine force that provided a merciful protector which contradicted the warrior justice of Zeus.

These heresies ensured that rural Aletheism would be fundamentally heretical and contradict the established teachings of the distant oriental Praesides whose commands to ignore all gods but the God fell on the deaf ears of particularistic congregations. Preachers who tried to reprimand errant congregations for their sinful heresy were often beaten viciously by angry mobs of peasants who didn’t want to abandon their protector deities and denounce their local spirits as demons. These attacks were described by the Aletheists as persecutions by the pagan Roman state, but the reality is often far more complex – as often as state persecutions may have occurred, attacks by heretics were almost as common.

The spread of Anagogic mystics was far less hindered by heresy or Neoplatonic thought. They came without a strict orthodoxy or a close knit community. Wandering mendicants and miracle workers, they laid hands on enthusiastic crowds and drove out illnesses, speaking in tongues and dancing to better approach holy Sophia. When they formed a strong community of disciples, they immediately retreated from the sinful face of the imperfect world and contemplated pure spirit in intellectual refinement – making a scene which had a great impression on those who saw it. They did not need to convince the world of their truth because only a few realized the error that was flesh.

This is not to say that the Neoplatonists did not attack them, and that these attacks did not often land home. A pupil of Sakkas Aidesios’ disciple Nikodemos, Auxentios of Rhodes, famously asked the Anagogic scholars why they did not simply commit suicide, if the world were so sinful and they were so eager to escape it. While so many apologetics of the third century wrestled with the problem of evil, the Anagogic schools wrestled with the problem of joy, struggling to explain away the good parts of life.

The dour Anagogic schools struggled also against an archetype of the Hellenic world which was reborn under the Neoplatonists: that of the itinerant philosopher who was also a thaumaturgist, or perhaps himself an incarnate god. The deification of great men continued. The Pythagorean Apollonios of Tyana represented a first century example, but the latter Neoplatonists had such rabble-rousers among their ranks, and so long as the common people believed that men could be gods, the exclusionary philosophies which denied the divinity of mere men struggled to achieve universal acclaim.

God King of the East

Perhaps we should not be amazed that no one religion came to dominate the Mediterranean world in late antiquity. Perhaps it would have been more amazing had a singular faith, born of a single foreign culture and molded by Hellenism as Aletheism was, had come to gain the universal acclaim of the masses and Imperial favor. The veneer of Roman civilization was after all thin and accustomed to allowing cosmopolitan regionalism to prosper under its auspices. Assimilation was a slow process, and the Koine-speaking East never accommodated the Latin West – even until the end of the united Empire it refused to bow and held the weight of its traditions and the hoary grandeur of its cities up as a bulwark against barbarianism and changing times. Nicomedia became the Second City of the Empire and later, as the Empire collapsed into anarchy, the Ruling City, a metropolis of vast palaces and bureaucratic offices.

It was the scholar gentry of the Mediterranean, of Egypt and the Aegean, who filled out the bureaucracy even as the army was drawn from Anatolian freemen and Syrian auxiliaries. In this way, this “New Empire” was Hellenized. The Emperor became the Great King of Kings, with the greatest among them being deified in death or, in the case of a select few, in life. Kyriakos the Arab, for example, was deified as a son of Zeus Apollo after his sweeping (if ultimately ephemeral) conquest of the Afairian Empire, a conquest which brought him as far east as the Khyber Pass. Urban life in the East was only ever briefly threatened – the defenses of Anatolia remained strong against an abortive Alan invasion and Hellas itself was never meaningfully attacked beyond the capacity of its walled cities to resist. If urban life contracted in some places, it was in the face of plagues and uncertainties which were only temporary.

It is not incorrect to look at this new Empire as a successor to Osrhoene more than the Roman state that it notionally succeeded. Founded by a conquering mercenary general named Philipos Artavasdos, from the beginning it had an oriental character even if its citizens would often define themselves as “Roman.” The center of the Imperial world was in the East and the South. Indeed, it is shocking the speed with which the Empire divested itself of its western, and particularly northern obligations. The wealth and civilization of Persia made a better, more ancient enemy and its conquest allowed the Emperors to ape the glories of Alexandros. It also brought the Mediterranean world into more constant, substantial contact with the deities and philosophies of India – bringing new life to Neoplatonism.

The character of this new, Eastern Empire, was different in more than just culture. No longer was the Empire the sole true power in the world, even if it was, as some historians wrote, seated at the omphalos, the beating heart of civilization. The Latin speaking Danubian frontier seemed far indeed from Nicomedia – defended by a class of people who had no identity in common with the civilized urban populations of the coastal interior. Even their Aletheism, which might have otherwise unified them with the Syrians and Osrhoeneans, was a heretical variant which acknowledged a multiplicity of gods and was led by a false Praeses in Sardike. However, these Roman soldiers faced down, with the help of adept Nicomedian diplomacy, the threats posed by sprawling steppe Empires and the German migrants alike.

It was armies drawn from Illyria who, augmented with nomadic mercenaries, were dispatched to prop Emperors up on the Western throne. Eastern fleets kept safe the Mediterranean even as Western coffers became too impoverished to sustain their own maritime ambitions.

Maintaining unity through compromise became the watchword of the administrations of these new Eastern Emperors, though they themselves were ‘godlike’ military men who took retinues of martial companions and male lovers. They waged war while their palaces were overseen by career bureaucrats and resident sophists, and it was these bureaucrats who kept the machine of state running. The dizzying multitude of cults and cultures which made up their empire demanded a stable, sober administration which operated nigh independently of the head of state. While Emperors often appointed the upper rungs of their departments and made personal friends into satraps (and even in the case of Maurician, moved the capital to Tesifon briefly) the deputies and core civil service remained untouched. Local governments were allowed to govern as they saw fit in many cases – Mesopotamian shrines and coins dutifully avoided images of gods or kings, and Egyptian estates were allowed to pay their taxes in grain. Arab princes were raised as hostages and companions in Nicomedia, and Armenian soldiers were allowed to make their oaths to Mithra, rather than the Emperor.

However, these changes that empowered the East and gave it a new identity came at the same time as the West was collapsing into military anarchy. Usurping Emperors became a regular facet of political life and by the fifth century the East was thoroughly distracted with her own concerns, preventing them from stabilizing and propping up the West with money and soldiers as they had done effectively since the reign of Aurelian. In 402, the Eastern Basileus Anastasios Julianos withdrew his support from Valentinus, his previously preferred candidate for Emperor, in the wake of an attempted Gothic invasion across the Danube. His generous support would never return, and consequently Valentinus was one of many Emperors who would both be killed by his own soldiers and would recruit extensively from among Germanic tribesmen.

Some sixty years later, the East would send troops to reinforce North Africa and Sicily, but apart from such stabilizing missions, there was little resolve to restore Imperial control over her far-flung Gallic borders. The transition of the Roman Empire from a universal European polity to a Near Eastern one was complete.
 
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Oooh, shiny! Hey, if you want a somewhat plausible if completely arbitrary dating point that comes close to coinciding with the BCE/CE split so you can make a case for your particular dating convention, why not use the inauguration of the Forum of Augustus? IOTL that happened in 2 CE, so it wouldn't be that far off. Who knows, maybe something else was just different enough in your ATL that it might have pushed the date up by a couple of years anyway? Just a thought.
 
I'm sure this will provide for an excellent reference spot for pioneering writers on future ancient timelines. Keep it up.
 
Oooh, shiny! Hey, if you want a somewhat plausible if completely arbitrary dating point that comes close to coinciding with the BCE/CE split so you can make a case for your particular dating convention, why not use the inauguration of the Forum of Augustus? IOTL that happened in 2 CE, so it wouldn't be that far off. Who knows, maybe something else was just different enough in your ATL that it might have pushed the date up by a couple of years anyway? Just a thought.

Hmm. I prefer to think of it as a translation convention. I think that the actual dating system of the latter Roman Empire would probably just use Regnal years, although the Aletheists might have their own religious calendar dating from the death of their prophet, and I'm sure there'd be a multiplicity of other regional systems much as in actual antiquity.

The Panhellenic Games continue to be a major dating system in the the Hellenic world, by the way.

I'm sure this will provide for an excellent reference spot for pioneering writers on future ancient timelines. Keep it up.

Thank you!

The next post will focus I think on the late Western Empire in the absence of Christianity.
 
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Detachment and Loss – The Western Roman Empire

To the Latin-speaking Soldier-Emperor, drawn from the Danube or northern Gaul, the West was the strong bulwark of the Empire. It was the East, decadent and refined, swollen cities fat from trade, that seemed the weakest frontier. Eastern Emperors did not last long in the West, after all. They quickly retired to estates in Anatolia or Syria, and after Aurelian the Great passed away in 331, these Eastern Kings were foreigners in much of their own Empire.

Since the third century crisis and the prolonged anarchy which saw the rise of Osrhoene and a succession of weak Emperors, the army had ruled the West. Holding court from fortified cities such as Trier, Milan, and Sirmium, the court and army were synonymous. The Emperors spoke the Latin of the camps, and that language was ubiquitous. Regardless of origin and faith, the army spoke a single language and represented the wellspring of experience and talent from which the entire Imperial administration was drawn. Even Aurelian, Hellenophile to the end, did not seek the change the primacy of Latin in the army – he was himself a Soldier-Emperor. However, Aurelian did introduce the scholar-bureaucrats of the Hellenic world to his new administration, weakening the monolinguistic foundations of the government, setting the stage for the radical transformation a century later. Under Philipos Artavasdos (345-362), the army would fracture on linguistic lines – increasingly the Eastern army was drawn from Eastern soldiers, and these new middle-class officers from the cities preferred to speak Koine rather than the “crude” Latin of their predecessors.

The division into Western and Eastern armies was fundamentally weakening to the Empire as a whole, because it made permanent the division between Western and Eastern. Post Aurelian, there were two Emperors, two bureaucracies, and two Empires, and of the two the Western was poorer in all respects. In 392, when the Emperor Ammianos[1] entered Milan, he did so as a conqueror. Nothing in the extensive dairy the Emperor kept indicated he saw himself as anything less. He treated the senatorial class of the west with poorly disguised contempt, despite his own humble origins. To men like Ammianos, the Greek world had always been the giver, the Latin world the receiver of accumulated wisdom, religion, and culture. A century later, when Kyriakos the Arab conquered much of Iran, the captured Afairian Shah of Shahs, themselves recipients of Hellenic (and Indian) knowledge, would be treated with greater respect than Ammianos treated his “fellow Romans.”[2]

The aristocracy of the West had always isolated themselves from that which they saw as base and provincial in the world around them. They lived a life of intellectual leisure and detachment, emulating the scholarly classes of the East while consciously avoiding anything that might be distinctly urban or middle class in their received philosophies. For this aristocracy, there was no crisis of the third century, there was no military anarchy or barbarian invasion. The uncertainties and dislocations of the past happened to other people. Generally, they lived far from the frontier and far from army. They spoke a more refined version of Latin, and they lived in primarily in Italy, maintaining a private and secluded existence. They built opulent villas and employed vast armies of servants and fieldhands to support their luxurious existences. By the late Empire, this model for living had been studiously emulated by the junior aristocrats Gaul and Spain.

This commitment to isolation from the wider world was a commitment to the creative life, by for the West Roman aristocrat there was no cause to join a mystery cult or the Anagogic schools. Their detachment was classical in its pretensions, and accordingly the art and writing that came out of the Western aristocracy was a beautiful expression of something that was very traditionally Roman, atavistic in its glorification of ancient heroes and outdated moralities. Ironically, however, to maintain this high standard of culture they were forced to constantly innovate, patronizing artists who could adapt their slavish imitations of Vergil to the cause of romantic nature scenes or whatever new vogue struck.

This decadence and detachment essentially went unseen to the Western Emperor at large and the train of armed men which followed him around. As for the East, if Ammianos or his successors noticed it, they viewed the Western aristocracy as a colonial elite – their sort of people, people who could speak the antiquated Greek of their favorite classics and were as much devoted to proper culture as any Eastern landholder or sophist.

The Western elite created a mythologized, idealized Rome that hardly matched the Rome of the army. They longed for one of their own to take the reins of state, not comprehending that one of their own could not take the reins of state from the army because they didn’t have the strength or potency to do so. What the aristocrats did instead was perpetually undermine the Empire – they controlled, in no small way, the economy of the state and the West was dependent on their taxes and recruits to defend the state.

The Army had been what kept the elite in the check. The aristocracy lacked their own armies and the Roman Army as an institution was strong. However, the meddling of the Eastern Emperors and the fact that any powerful general could raise a claim to the Imperial throne ensured that by the fifth century the army was exhausted and crippled. The Western elite gained more power and began finding ways to avoid taxes and accumulate ever more wealth to themselves. They disdained the “barbarian” mercenaries who the Emperors had come to rely upon as their own reserves of manpower were diminished.

These barbarians, however, were themselves divided. On one hand, the average barbarian simply wanted a life of relative comfort and a chance to own land within the Roman Empire. On the other, a small elite, the warrior-cliques who first migrated into the Empire, desired nothing less than to become Roman. They integrated smoothly and seamlessly into the martial elite. They were induced through ritual into the mystery cults. They learned Latin and their children spoke it as a first language. The idea of the Western Empire was resilient, and if its army lacked the manpower to defeat the barbarians in battle, its court could charm them into abandoning their culture. It was, all in all, easier than it seemed. The barbarian gods were often tied to shrines in long abandoned homelands, and in any case the cults designed in the competitive arena of Roman religious politics were far more resilient than what the barbarians brought. Worship of Wotan and Tyr persisted, but it did so as a religion of the common people. The warlike Germanic princes who became generals and officers took to Mithras and the Unconquered Sun with alacrity.

However, this was never enough for the senatorial aristocratic class. Barbarians were barbarians. Inviting them in was tantamount to betrayal. Settling their families on Roman soil, as increasingly happened after 402, was the greatest betrayal of all. Attacks on aristocratic villas saw the aristocratic class hire armed guards and fortify their estates. The Roman Empire was divided. It would be a generation between Gallo-Roman manpower was on the rise again, and by that time the political situation had changed utterly. Valentinus, Western Emperor, was assassinated by his court in 402, and for once the aristocratic classes got their man. Arcadius Flavius, a landholder of no little wealth, ascended to the Imperial throne and quickly alienated his Magister Militum and all who might have supported him even cautiously. He fled to Ravenna with a loyal army of (largely North African) mercenaries, and in Gaul a new Emperor, Constantinus II, was crowned.

These divisions would become ever more permanent. Groups of Goths and Alemanni were settled in Gaul and Spain, pushing out Roman aristocrats, who in response became all the more militant. Emperors were cheap and reigns could often be measured in the timeframe of years. At any given moment, there might be two or three pretenders, and the dizzying array of factions and forces that supported them were fickle and prone to changing allegiances rapidly. The whole fifth century seemed to be building to a conflict between the increasingly barbarian army and the increasingly detached senatorial class – and yet midway through, an existential crisis emerged which would throw the entire paradigm into chaos. The arrival of steppe nomads on the doorstep of the Empire united Senate and Army as nothing had previously. Unfortunately, it was too late.

[1] Ammianus was an Eastern general brought to power by his own troops after defeating a full scale Afairian invasion. He proved incapable of solving the fourth century military anarchy which had beset the west, and a decade later the floodgates would open and barbarians would pour into an exhausted Empire.

[2] The Afairian Shahs had a curious relationship with the Eastern Empire. From early in their rise until their fall, they were often seen as honorable foes and noble enemies, honest, just, and worthy. By contrast, the West was often seen by contemporary Easterners as a nest of barbarians and warlords.

The Western Huns

In the East, when Emperor Anastasios II was overthrown after a failed war against the Huns in 432, the resulting Hunnic invasion would see the devastation of the Danubian frontier. Anastasios’ death would lead to the ascension of Herakleitos, a general whose reforms furthered the orientalization of the Empire. The Imperial court began to speak Greek, and with the damage done to the Danube, the Latin influence on the Eastern army entered into irreversible decline. However, the East was wealthy as well as martially skilled. Herakelitos was able to hire steppe cavalry in great numbers to augment his own army. He was able to adapt and reform the military to fight off future Hunnic invasions, and pay those rulers he could not defeat in battle. His long reign was also the beginning of a dynasty – the first dynasty in some time that passed from father to son. Where the Danube had been penetrated, the new Emperor settled Syrian and Armenian soldiers.
The West was not so lucky. They lacked the resources to raise new armies, resettle populations, or pay off barbarians. Instead, they faced the Hunnic threat head on, and were found more than wanting. The nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe had previously only had minimal contact with the Roman Empire and accordingly were not easily co-opted by the military establishment. Romanization held no appeal for them compared to the wealth of a weak, disunited Empire.

At the time of the Hunnic invasion of 458, the Roman Empire was divided into a Gallic, Italian, and British Empire, each with their own pretender and mercenary armies. The Huns accordingly only had to face those troops which could be drawn from Illyria and Italy on short notice – and they defeated these forces with relative ease. Shortly thereafter, the Hunnic leader Uldin demanded an enormous, but manageable tribute, which the Emperor, Constantius, was perfectly willing to pay, but for the emptiness of his coffers and the refusal of the aristocracy to “bow to the whims of a barbarian despot” and provide the money he would need to buy off the Huns.

Instead, the Hunnic army marched into Italy the following year, sacked Rome, and did not leave until the aristocracy gathered a sum three times what they had originally been requested to pay.

The sack of Rome was a blow which changed the perspective of the Italian elites. The glory of their Empire had been tarnished, and it seemed as if the world was ending. Suddenly, expediency demanded that stronger armies be raised. Their detachment vanished overnight as the shockwaves of the attack on their Eternal City resonated through the Roman world. For a brief moment, they supported Constantius wholeheartedly and poured out enough money to allow him to rebuild the army. However, the time for senatorial support was passed. Constantius’ former soldiers were barbarian mercenaries, and they resented the notion that they would be easily replaced by the fresh new levies. Furthermore, these new soldiers were of vastly inferior quality and thus when the Emperor’s Gothic Magister Militum, Aldaric, assassinated Constantius and replaced the Emperor with a tractable noble named Avitus, these soldiers had no option but to fall in line behind “barbarian” officers.

Aldaric now ruled Italy in all but name. In Gaul and Spain, there were countless tribes settling down amongst the ancient Roman villas. The Roman aristocrats paid them for their protection and in return were allowed to keep their lives of quiet detachment and artistic refinement. Britain and North Africa remained bastions of Roman statehood, but the latter was quietly annexed into the East in 462 at the request of local officials. Herakleitos, the Basileus responsible, would go on to use North Africa as a springboard for establishing his navy in the western Mediterranean and securing islands such as Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica.

The tangible power of the Roman elites was diminished, but they were not gone. They preserved classical culture and pretensions of grandeur that had always to them signified Romanness. In time, they even bit their tongues and intermarried with the new, martial, barbarian ruling class. It was a new era, after all, and what other way was there to preserve their elevated status?

The Huns, meanwhile, reached the apex of their power with remarkable swiftness. Their Pannonian empire allowed them to strike with ease against Italy, Illyria, and Thrace, but their ability to dominate the Germans was limited, and despite a major campaign against Gaul in 468, they were largely incapable of threatening the Romans after the dawn of the sixth century. In turn, they would be dispersed by a fresh wave of steppe invaders, and the cycle would continue. What they did show the Romans of both East and West, however, was that steppe peoples remained perhaps the most potent danger to the civilized world - a lesson that the East in particular would not forget when it came to managing its far flung Iranian provinces.

The role of the Huns in the collapse of the Western Empire and the rise of the barbarian polities such as Viennensis, is often overstated. The main flaws of the Empire were internal and its collapse is more aptly attributed to social, economic, and political factors. The rise of barbarian Prefects to control of whole Dioceses, and the eventual irrelevancy of the rank of Emperor as anything other than a symbolic figurehead ensured that the Imperium would broadly lose its ties to the west. Urban centers declined as centuries of uncertainty and turmoil took their toll. The aristocratic elite ultimately proved incapable of preserving their traditional culture in the face of the barbarian influx and the Romanism that survived was unrecognizable and fundamentally local.
 
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