Sacrilege and Panic

Wikipedia tells us that in Lyon in 177, the martyr Blandina met her end because "The fanaticism of the Roman populace in Lyon had been excited against the Christians so that the latter, when they ventured to show themselves publicly, were harassed and ill-treated."

Is that like the fanatical Iranian population has been excited against their dictatorship? It seems pretty facile, doesn't it?

Marcus Aurelius was emperor during this time, pretty busy with the Parthian Wars. Also from Wikipedia:

The returning army carried with them a plague, afterwards known as the Antonine Plague, or the Plague of Galen, which spread through the Roman Empire between 165 and 180. The disease was a pandemic believed to be either of smallpox or measles, and would ultimately claim the lives of two Roman emperors—Lucius Verus, who died in 169, and Marcus Aurelius, whose family name, Antoninus, was given to the epidemic. The disease broke out again nine years later, according to the Roman historian Dio Cassius, and caused up to 2,000 deaths a day at Rome, one quarter of those infected. Total deaths have been estimated at five million.

In The World of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown writes that in the second and third century, the average Roman was pretty content with the "homely figures" of the gods of traditional belief. (Sounds like saints, doesn't it?) Statues of the gods were everywhere, and the gods they represented busily did the work of "the One High God who was quite inexpressible and thus 'above' everything."

These gods were believed to care for mankind in general, and for cities and individuals in particular.... people expected direct personal attention. Throughout the Roman world, cities and individuals were giving the old gods every opportunity to look after their worshippers: the second century saw a remarkable revival of the traditional oracle-sites of the Greek world.

This care was obtained by following rites regarded as being as old as the human race itself. To abandon such rites provoked genuine anxiety and hatred. Christians were savagely attacked for having neglected these rites whenever earthquakes, famine or barbarian invasion betrayed the anger of the gods.

This is one of the enjoyable parts of research - what didn't make sense now does for me. The population of Lyon may have been "excited" against the Christians, but if there was a plague that had decimated families then people would have been grasping for reasons for the disaster.

And so Blandina is martyred, to the pleasure of the crowds and to the satisfaction of many Christians who actively sought martyrdom - as Christ had been martyred.

Evocative graves in Turkey

Ben Wirthington, an evangelical writer who blogs at beliefnet, posted some evocative photos today of a second-century headstone in Turkey. He writes:

Now the third line in the inscription has the word CHRESTOS which was sometimes mistaken for CHRISTOS, but it appears often enough in ancient inscriptions and has a meaning range from upright to worthy to anointed. ... The last line of the inscription is more mundane--- 'to those passing by, Greetings!' As you know however, the word 'grace' is in fact a modified form of the word greetings, and when one couples this with the double entendre CHRESTOS it is more than possible that this is a Christian inscription made generic enough that the casual observer would see this as a normal grave inscription, but the Christian might well make more of it. It is of course odd to us that a deceased person would be portrayed as greeting the passerby, but a Christian might well think of a grace wish to passersby.

... The early second century was a dicey time for Christians in western Turkey as is evident from reading Pliny's letter to Trajan asking what to do with Christians handed over for practicing a 'superstition'.