Abstract
The Legend of Arius' Death: Imagination, Space and Filth in Late Ancient Historiography
Highlights
In the last forty years, research in the history of early Christianity has broadened considerably in scope
Whereas an earlier generation of historians focused its attention on those figures deemed foundational, even ‘orthodox’, by later Christian tradition, in more recent times historians have taken up the task of reconstructing the lives and thoughts of other figures from the early Christian past
Historians’ new inclusivity has extended even to the figure identified by Christian tradition as the father of all heretics, Arius, the fourth-century Alexandrian presbyter whose teaching about the Christian god sparked a local theological controversy that eventually spread so far as to involve the emperor Constantine and to inspire the first imperially sponsored Christian council, at Nicaea in 325 CE
Summary
NUMBER 227 other ancient Christians.[2]. Yet even such historically minded reconstruction has left one infamous part of Arius’ life unexamined, namely, its end in 336 CE.[3]. The questions that drove Rufinus, Socrates and Sozomen certainly interrogated issues of orthodoxy and imperial power, for they all opened their histories with commentary on the career of Constantine, placing his embrace of Christianity to the fore alongside the stories of those Christians whose theologies deviated from Constantine’s approval, first among them Arius The framing they chose revealed that they were motivated not just by the issue of the imperial support of Christian religion, but the imperial support of the correct Christian religion, as it was practised in Constantine’s new city.[23] For Theodosius, the correct religion was Nicene Christianity; he went out of his way to support and expand the minority Nicene Christian community in Constantinople when he began to rule in 379 CE. The success, of the story of Arius’ death, was an emergent phenomenon that depended upon the imaginative faculty cultivated by late ancient Christians
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