In a previous blog, Elsa mentioned that Thursdays were court holidays (Latin: feriae) in the early fourth century CE, until the emperor Constantine famously declared Sundays to be the new weekly feriae in 321, a decision that still affects us until today. This famous piece of legislation did not immediately affect the entire Empire, though: in 321 Constantine only ruled the West, whereas his colleague Licinius ruled the East, and he stuck to the Thursday. Indeed, the joint rule of Constantine and Licinius was no harmonious cooperation. The relation between the two emperors got increasingly sour, until Constantine conquered his colleague in battle in the autumn of 324. Only in the months after this final victory, Constantine’s Sunday legislation took effect in the Eastern half of the Roman Empire. In today’s blog, I want to focus on the effect this had on the Roman Empire in the years 321-324: for almost four years, the two halves of the empire were literally out of sync.
So far, most of the discussion on Constantine’s Sunday legislation has focused on religion. The preserved extracts of the law document a language adapted to a pagan audience: Sunday is referred to as the Dies Solis or Day of the sun god Sol. The imperial imaginary around Constantine frequently refers to Sol Invictus, who was a popular god at the time, and a clear favorite of Constantine’s. At the same time Constantine was developing an interest in Christianity, and was well-aware that the weekly holy day of the Christians, their Day of the Lord, coincided with the Dies Solis. In the light of the later history of the Sunday, one cannot but ask whether, underneath the pagan language of the law, it does not attest to active support for the Christian way of life. This pro-Christian aspect of the legislation was indisputably important for the law to gain long-term traction. This does not automatically mean that it was also the dominant motivator behind this change in policy. To really understand why Constantine came up with this new temporal rhythm, we shouldn’t focus on its actual long-term effects, but on all the possible effects Constantine and his advisors could have considered in 320.
Fritz Mitthof has recently reminded us of the importance of interpreting Constantine’s policies in their immediate political context: his declining relation with his co-emperor Licinius. Mitthof rightly points out that this political context is important also for pro-Christian measures. As an emperor who aspired to sole rule, he would not have implemented measures that would endanger his political goal. Around 320, however, support of the Christians was an effective manner to increase support among the population in the Eastern part of the Empire, the domain of his competitor, where Christianity much better represented. In this blog, I want to further develop the importance of the immediate political context for the Sunday legislation. This involves placing Constantine’s responses to Licinius’ policy and imperial self-representation in a somewhat broader context: the relation of both emperors to their predecessor Diocletian, the founder of the tetrarchy.
When Diocletian came to power in 284 CE, the odds were against him. For many decades, the Roman empire had been characterized by political instability. The empire was large and unwieldy, and Diocletian realized he needed reforms, and more than anything else, help. He had no son, so in 286 CE made a trusted general, Maximian, his co-ruler in the West. Raising someone as co-ruler in a junior position (expressed with the title Caesar) was by then an established practice, but Diocletian quickly gave Maximian the higher-ranking title of Augustus, and started expressing his own seniority in a different, more imaginative way. Diocletian took the title Iovius and Maximian Herculius, after the divine father-son couple Jupiter and Hercules. By choosing these divinities as their divine patrons, Diocletian legitimized their rule and internal hierarchy ideologically.
I believe that this Iovian ideology is the historical background in which Thursday (dies Iovis) became a weekly public holiday, a feria in its strict contemporary meaning of a day free of litigation in court. It fits both Diocletian’s reliance on Jupiter as his divine patron and his reform ethos. Diocletian in many ways tried to increase the efficiency of the Roman administration (tax reforms, smaller provinces, etc.). The plurality of calendars and festivals across the Roman Empire was another cause for regional differences and irregularities for the administration. Ilaria Bultrighini, who was the first to systematically study this topic, did not date its introduction. She suggests “that Thursday gradually became the most important and sacred day in the Roman planetary seven-day week by virtue of being the day dedicated to the chief god of the Roman pantheon … this circumstance may have led official bureaux in third-century Oxyrhynchus to remain closed regularly on Thursdays”. Indisputably, feast days can organically grow in importance, but what we see is not a popular feast day, but a legal feria, which must, at some point, have been formally instituted by law.
The earliest source (P.Oxy. XXII 2343) documents the cessation of judicial activities on Thursday at the court of the governor at Alexandria in December 287. The content of this petition could have been written by Franz Kafka: Septimius is unlawfully nominated for a liturgy, and sends a written petition to the governor to appeal to this nomination. The reply from the governor’s office tells him to present his case directly at the governor’s court in Alexandria. Nemesianos, who travels there as his representative, has to jump through several hoops. On the first day, when he attempts to present the case, he cannot meet the governor because it is a Thursday. On the second day, the governor fobs him off because he is too busy. Only on the third day, he gets an official reaction of the governor: please submit a written petition, bringing him right back to where Septimius started…
What is interesting in the petition – the preserved one is the second one, dictated at Alexandria by Nemesianos – is that Nemesianos clearly had no clue about courts closing on Thursdays. He had already gone to instruct a lawyer when he heard the case could not be presented that day. He did not even seem to have been familiar with the concept of Thursday. He does not use any of the normal expressions for weekdays, but instead says that the case could not be presented “on account of the second (of that month) being a hieromenia of Zeus”. Hieromenia is a fairly rare term, and is used here as a Greek translation of feria; it relates to the cessation of legal transactions during religious feasts. This is no doubt how it was explained to him. All this confusion on Nemesianos’ part suggests that this was a very new practice, which a provincial like Nemesianos had not yet encountered in December 287. This dating also supports my suspicion that the measure was connected to Diocletian’s Iovian ideology, introduced shortly after the elevation of Maximian in 286.
Fast-forward now to the reign of Licinius, which started in 308 and ended in 324. The next explicit evidence for Thursday as holiday is the previously discussed daybook listing, day by day, legal cases dealt with by an anonymous Oxyrhynchite official. It stems either from 313 or 324 CE. 313 is the commonly accepted date, as it was written on a piece of old paper first used in 313, but this is far from certain, since there are good parallels for Oxyrhynchite administrators of the mid 320s reusing papyri of ten years back (e.g. the scroll used for P.Oxy. LIV 3758). The specified calendrical dates were Thursdays in 324 too. No matter which of the two dates is correct, the text proves that the practice of Thursday as closing day of the courts continued into the reign of Licinius. This fits with his imperial self-representation as being the next in the Iovian line of Diocletian (Diocletian was succeeded as Augustus by his Caesar in the East, Galerius, who was in turn succeeded by Licinius). For Licinius’ self-representation, therefore, continuity with Diocletian and his Iovian was positive. On the image here, one can see a coin of Licinius, dedicated ‘to Jupiter conservator’ and minted in Nikomedia, the city which Diocletian had elevated to and Licinius preserved as the main seat of government in the East.
Constantine, other hand, wanted to break out of Diocletian’s shadow. As soon as he could, he pointed moved the seat of government to the other side of the Bosporus, where he founded Constantinopolis in 324 and could start his monumental self-representation from a clean sheet. As successor to his father Constantius, who had been Caesar to Maximian, Constantine automatically followed in the Herculian line of Maximian. To underline his legitimacy, he occasionally used this image in his self-representation in the early phases of his reign, but only sparingly, as going along with this ideology automatically implied accepting the seniority of ‘Iovian’ Licinius, something the ambitious Constantine was not ready to do. Sol Invictus offered a much more flexible divine patron for an ambitious emperor than Hercules, as he was also as a supreme deity. The role of Sol for Constantine has been extensively discussed elsewhere. Here it suffices to point out that unlike Hercules, Sol also had its own planetary day.
In the context of his imperial self-promotion, accepting Thursday as a public holiday was problematic for Constantine, and Sunday was the attractive and the only logical alternative. But it was also an alternative that Licinius was never going to accept. Introducing it unilaterally would mean that the western and eastern halves of the Empire would literally follow a different rhythm, something Constantine cannot have been unaware of. Making this change hence meant making a very strong political statement that could cause an irrevocable break with Licinius. It cannot have been a decision Constantine took lightly. But in 321, he did, and the two halves of the Empire fell out of sync. It cannot be a coincidence that in exactly the same year, Constantine and Licinius stopped acknowledging each other’s consuls. Up to 320, East and West identify the year with the same consular dating formula. But from 321 on, for four years, each half uses their own consular formula, and followed its own imperial time. For everyone concluding contracts on the other side of the east-west border, the political tension would have been obvious, and the military conflict resolving it did not come as a surprise.
Sofie Remijsen