32 Murder in the cathedral
In theory, the situation that Flavius Aetius had to manage in Gaul was quite calm, partly thanks to the work of Priscus Attalus, who although not enjoying a good reputation among late ancient historians, due to his opportunism, his collaboration with Alaric, with Paulus Orosius who defines it
"the most unfortunate Attalus, mime and plaything of the empire, vain image of imperial dignity"
while Anicius Severus criticized him several times for his corruptibility and sybarite lifestyle, he had, with his undoubted diplomatic skills, progressively eliminated the causes of potential conflicts. To this were added two objective data: the first linked to the fact that the
foederati stationed on the limes, Burgundians, Franks and Alemanni, were well aware of the fact that Octar's raids had been prevented only by the political and diplomatic pressure of the Empire, for which, at least in the medium term, they intended to respect the pacts with Ravenna, to avoid being targeted by the Huns again.
The second is the economic changes introduced by the stabilization of Britain and the creation, by the Suebi, of a commercial circuit, which we will talk about in future chapters, which involved the Atlantic coasts, in which both the Alans and the Bagaudes, who for example , had begun to export cider, apple cider vinegar and beer, they had entered easily: [1] the
foederati elites knew well how this trade and the wealth it brought were the result of the stability guaranteed by the Empire, which no one had any interest in disturbing.
The only ones who were worried were the Goths, due to the effects of the centralization policy undertaken by Athaulf, who they believed unfairly favored their brothers in Italy. The
Comes Gothorum Gundrid found himself between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand as Athaulf's devoted son, he did not want to go against his father's will, on the other he was well aware that the discontent of his people, if neglected, could lead to another revolt.
Therefore, to get out of the ford, he decided on a formally indisputable action, given that he fully respected the words and substance of the foedus between the Goths and the Romans, that is, he asked for an audience with the new
Praefectus praetorio Galliarum, in the hope that unlike Priscus Attalus, that he owed his position and his daring career to Athaulf, was above the parties. In the meeting, which was held on 3 March 43, in Arleate, Gundird clearly said that the Goths, very loyal to the Empire, would fight tooth and nail to defend Gaul, but being farmers, they did not like being sent to fight in distant and unknown lands, abandoning their fields. Furthermore, Comes expressed the fear that the policies of Athaulf, who through the influence of Galla Placidia were increasingly moving closer to Nicean Christianity, would force the Goths, through flattery and threats, to abandon the faith of their fathers.
If Honorius had been in place of Flavius Aetius, he would probably have rubbed his hands with satisfaction, in seeing his enemies close to breaking, and would have added fuel to the fire, but the purpose of the
Praefectus was to heal fractures, not create them. Consequently, after long reflections, with the
Decretalia Arleanensi of 12 April 425 [2], after a long preamble in which it was reiterated that, following the laws desired by Valentinianus I and Valentinianus II and confirmed by Honorius, the Empire guaranteed freedom religious of all his subjects, both Romans and
Foederati, unless they believed in
superstitio condemned by human and divine laws, a preamble that ended with a cultured Ciceronian quote
There is nothing higher, purer, more venerable and more sacred than the worship of God as long as he is venerated with purity, rectitude and integrity of mind and speech.
and then address the crux of the questions posed by Guntrid. First of all, all the
foederati, in case they were summoned to fight a war outside Gaul, instead of making their warriors available, could instead, for the entire duration of the war, pay an extraordinary tribute proportional to the number of troops which they would have made available and which would have been distributed among their
cives in proportion to their income. In order for this to happen effectively, Roman officials regained the right, lost in the
foedus, to take a census of the men and goods of the
foederati every five years. Second point, so that the Goths could, to quote the
Decretalia
enjoy the benefits of trade, which is the basis of civil life and relationships
gave them the opportunity to use the port of Burdigala [3] so that
could sell the grapes and the wine produced with the sweat of their brow to the fearless Suebi merchants, who sold it as far away as wild Hibernia and distant Scatinavia [4]
Which provides us with two pieces of data, which we will explore in the future, confirmed by archaeology: the resumption of viticulture in the Garonne valley and the extension of the Suebi trade network, which reached as far as distant Scandinavia, known to the Romans since the time of Pliny the Elder who describes it thus in the
Historia Naturalis
Moving away, we enter the land of the Ingævones, the first of Germany. In their country there is an immense mountain called Sevo, no smaller than the Riphæan range, and forming an immense gulf along the coast as large as the Cimbrian promontory. This gulf, which has the name 'Codanian', is full of islands; the most famous of these is Scandinavia, of an uncertain size: the only known part is inhabited by a state of Illevioni, forming 500 villages, and is called a second world: The island of Eningia is believed to be of size not less
Finally, to speed up the economic recovery of the port of Burdigala, he halved the duties for the next fifteen years. [5] If the
Decretalia was seen by Flavius Aetius as an honest compromise and by Gundrid as a political victory, which strengthened his position among the Goths, temporarily putting discontent to rest, it instead unleashed a storm in the court of Ravenna, splitting the council in half of Regency. If Galla Placidia and the
Questor thesauroum Flavius Iunius Quartus Palladius, who saw the extraordinary tribute arriving from Gaul as a panacea for imperial finances and by Flavius Castinus, seeing that it allowed the imperial army to be made increasingly independent from the contingents of the f
oederati, Athaulf he saw Flavius Aetius' decision as an offense to his prerogatives as
Magister foederarum and to the authority of Gothic king, so much so that he asked for the removal of the
Praefectus praetorio Galliarum.
The diatribe unexpectedly took a back seat on 9 June, when an even more serious crisis broke out in Gaul, totally unexpectedly.
That morning, after celebrating mass, Bishop Patroclus of Arles was killed by four assassins on the altar of the basilica of Saint Stephen, [6] located near the city forum: a cathedral that was only known from sources until the discovery of the remains of the apse, occurred in 2003 during construction works on the Hauture hill. The remains include a vast apse, polygonal on the outside and semicircular on the inside, which encloses an ambulatory paved with polychrome mosaic, around a smaller apse, with a raised floor and covered in marble.
According to the
Cronica Arleatensis, [7] the bishop, before mass, was approached by four men, who threatened him, accusing him of having betrayed the teaching of the Gospel with his ambition and his hunger for power and earthly goods. A presbyter, realizing that the men were armed, tried to convince Patroclus to move away and take refuge in the
Praefectus palace or at least ask for the intervention of the guards. The bishop refused and, celebrating mass, recited an erudite homily on the spiritual value of the legacy left to Christianity by his martyrs, quoting Tertullian
The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the new Christians
Then, once the ceremony was over, the four assassins approached, stabbing Patrocolus to death. The scandal caused by his death outraged all Gaul. Some, loudly, again according to the
Cronica, accused the Arians of having been the instigators of this murder and in several cities of Gaul there were clashes and lynching attempts between the two Christian factions. Others, however, tried to tarnish the bishop's memory by saying that he had been killed by the relatives of a virgin he had raped.
Faced with a situation that risked becoming explosive, Flavius Aetius intervened decisively to re-establish public order, arresting and condemning the most troublesome people to
relegatio in insulam [8] and intervening publicly by first declaring that Patroclus, a true Christian, followed the Pauline indication
I am referring to the fact that each of you says: "I am of Paul", "I am of Apollos", "And I of Cephas", "And I of Christ!". Was Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you, or was it in Paul's name that you were baptized?
Going beyond the doctrinal divisions between Arians and Nicaeans, he being the good Shepherd of all the flock of Christ. Furthermore, his morality was crystal clear and always oriented to the teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles, when he wrote to the Ephesians
Know this well, no fornicator (pòrnos) or impure (akàthartos) or covetous, that is, no idolater, will inherit the kingdom of Christ and of God
In reality, as Anicius Severus added when telling the story in his own way, in his
Commentarii,
Bishop Patrocloa was too busy accumulating as much power as possible that he didn't care about minutiae like theology or lust.
In any case, Flavius Aetius managed to calm and reassure the public opinion of Gaul and began his investigation to discover the culprits and instigators of the murder of the bishop of Arleate, which objectively described in a rather synthetic way in the
Commentarii, has always been more fictionalized and expanded by posterity, so much so that it became the subject of successful novels, films and comics. The interesting thing in the story of Anicius Severus is that the assassins are defined as
Parabolani, the same ones who were involved in the lynching of Hypatia in Alexandria. A law of 416, preserved in the
Codex Theodosianus, specifies their functions of burial of the dead and care for the sick, direct dependence on episcopal authority and the need to be recruited from among the humblest classes of society in relation to a total number which should not exceed 600 in the cities where bishops were located. [9]
According to Bonavilla Aquilino their name can have three distinct references with which the prefix para (near, beside, inherent) is linked. First of all, the term bolos is suggested, as serfs, referring to the harshness of the work to which they were called upon to respond, and also referring to the world to which they provided assistance and from which they themselves came. In favor of this first definition there is also the testimony of Curzio Sprengel who states that the enrollment of
parabolani in the classes of curials or
honorati was not allowed, because these could have too much influence on the population. The second interpretation considers the term dance as a function of the verb to throw, to represent the image of someone who is willing to throw away their life in order to care for others. Similar meaning, also considering the Greek term parabolos, designates one who is bold, and leads back to the military function. The last explanation - perhaps the least plausible - considers the noun parable linked to the narrative of the Good Samaritan whose deeds of care and assistance are emulated. Silvia Ronchey in her book on Hypatia, writes that the term
parabalani (which she preferred to
parabolani) probably derives from parabalaneus, from the Greek
balaneion, and again from the Latin
balneum, to designate the person who in the classical age provided care to the guests of the spa and already then he was assigned the duties of a nurse; a fact also reiterated during the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Ronchey also focuses on the character of the parabolani, referring to Suda, the medieval encyclopedia, which describes them as real beasts, due to the rudeness of their ways and social origin, and the choice of monastic life which, outside the dimension of city life, brought them closer - according to the Byzantine approach of the time - either to the gods or to beasts.
Their presence in Gaul, in addition to testifying to the continuity of commercial and cultural relations between Provence, Egypt and Asia Minor, via the port of Marseille, indicated that in the
Pars Occidentis, both the Nicean and Arian churches, it was taking on welfare tasks, progressively replacing public authority in this field. As proof of this, we have a law by Galla Placidia also from 425, which lists them together with other ecclesiastical categories, the
spoudaioi, the zealous and serious, the
lecticarii, the litter bearers, the
philoponoi, the friends of those who suffer, the lay people who took vows of chastity - or if married of continence - and dedicated themselves to the care of the suffering. In this law, issued at the request of the
collegia medicarum, [10] these ecclesiastical orders, not having medical training, were firmly prohibited from administering medicines to the sick, even if they provided shelter, hygiene, food, clothing and assistance to the destitute sick in large areas urban. Furthermore, to testify to the fact that the habit of using them as the bishops' "armed wing" was not limited to Alexandria alone, they punished their participation in riots with the damnatio ad metalla.
Flavius Aetius, after having captured the four
Parabolani and having adequately tortured them, obtained the name of the instigator of the murder: as the
Praefectus suspected, he was Bishop Proculus of Marseilles, Patroclus' great rival for the primacy over the church of Gaul. Without asking himself too many problems, given the chaos that the murder had unleashed, Flavius Aetius had Proculus arrested on 17 September 425. The affair, already regrettable in itself, degenerated further, when on 3 October, the bishop of Rome, Coelistinus, who although condemning the murder of Patroclus, deeply detesting the bishop of Arleate, he was not particularly saddened by his death, he appealed to the court of Ravenna, accusing Flavius Aetius of having violated ecclesiastical prerogatives.
After a couple of weeks of somewhat awkward discussions, on 20 October 425 Galla Placidia issued a decree which was a sort of compromise between the positions of Coelestinus and Flavius Aetius; the ecclesiastics who had committed crimes outside the sphere of the sacred, whatever their obedience, Nicean or Arian, would have been judged by the secular tribunal, but they would have been excluded from the most infamous
summa supplicia. [11] Therefore, as a consequence of this law, on November 1st Proculus of Marsilia, he was condemned to perpetual
deportatio ad insulam in Lipari.[12]
Now, the new problem that Flavius Aetius posed was how to replace the deceased Patroclus and the guilty Proculus. If in Arleate, the faithful chose a rather dull figure as the new bishop, the sickly Euladius, in Marseille, the community, full of shame, replaced the murderer with a saint, the monk Iohannes Cassianus, who had moved to Marseille in 415, after having lived in the Thebaid in a monastery and shared the life of the anchorites in a cell in the middle of the desert.
An apocryphal letter from the 5th century reports that he founded "
two monasteries, that is, one of men and the other of women", which would be the abbeys of San Vittore and that of San Salvatore, while Anicius Severus tells how
“The bishop of Marseille, Proculus, entrusted Cassianua with the monks that the latter would gather around himself"
Therefore, beyond the hagiographic stories, it is very probable, even if neither the documents nor the archeology allow us to identify it, that Cassianua founded at least one monastic community, in which the rules of the eastern cenobites were followed. In support of this thesis there is the testimony provided by Gennadius, priest of the church of Marseilles who lived at the time of Pope Gelasius 1st (492-496), on the activity of Cassianus in Marseilles, in his
De viris illustribus - which gives a brief information on all the Christian writers of the 5th century:
"Cassianus who was of Shiite origin was ordained a deacon by John the Great (Chrysostom), bishop of Constantinople. Near Marseille, he founded, after his priestly ordination, two monasteries, one for men, the other for women. Both still exist. Guided by experience and as an informed man, or rather, by finding the right words and translating his intentions with example, he wrote everything that is useful and necessary for the profession of all monks. In three books he discussed the monks' habit, the way of praying and chanting at regular hours, as is respected day and night in Egyptian monasteries. He wrote a book concerning the origin and nature of monastic life; finally, eight books concerning the eight remedies for the eight deadly sins; each book is about a remedy. He wrote down in order the meetings he had with the Fathers of Egypt on the project and the purpose of the monk, on discernment, on the three vocations to the service of God; on the warfare of the flesh against the spirit, and of the warfare of the spirit against the flesh; on the nature of all vices, on the death of saints and the inconstancy of the soul, on the quality of prayer, perfection, chastity, on divine protection, on spiritual science, divine charisms, on friendship, on what is definable and what is not, on the three types of monks in antiquity, on the four new types, on the commitment of the cenobitic and hermitic life, on the reparative value of penance, on the rest of Pentecost, on the nocturnal angels, on the words of Paul : "I do not do what I want, and the evil that I do not want, I do" (Rm 7,19) and on mortification"
As soon as he was appointed bishop, Cassianus dedicated himself to his most important theological work, the Conferences, in which, starting from the teaching of the Eastern church fathers such as John Chrysostom or Gregory of Nyssa and the Greek Fathers, he exalts free will, trying to combine the ideas , both considered correct by the Nicean Church, by Augustine and Pelagius. [13]The Greek Fathers had an optimistic vision of man: freedom, which creates the beauty and greatness of man, was given by God and cannot be lost by man. They do not deny the weakening of freedom due to sin, but this is not the point that primarily attracts their attention. As John Chrysostom said
“Since grace does not destroy nature but reveals it to itself, it is perfectly legitimate to discover and preach the presence and positive action of a humanity that remains itself (and isn't this the grace of graces?), but in the light and plan of God"
Starting from this principle, Cassianus underlined these two points
A. After Adam's sin and before the coming of Christ, man has a certain autonomy. The entire Old Testament testifies to the existence of our free will after the fall of Adam. The Jews were naturally capable of discerning what is right as Scripture shows it to us. The Greek Fathers had the profound conviction that the image of God in man was tarnished and not destroyed. Even before redemption, God's grace is at work and the desire for good exists in man. The Jews carried natural law within themselves:
“That man received from the moment of creation the infused knowledge of all the law is evident from the fact that before the written law, and before the flood, righteous men already observed the commandments of the law.”
The Decalogue was written in their hearts. The written Law was given to Moses only later: he needed external help, as the natural law had been altered. It is the pure and simple replication of Irenaeus' doctrine.
b. The man liberated by Christ can promote good, even if he needs God's help to bring his good work to its completion.
Consequently, for Cassian, the grace of Christ brings man to life, liberates his freedom, even if human nature remains vulnerable, prey to the influence of passions. The free will is, in fact, inclined to evil, both through ignorance of good and through the seduction of passions, but grace prevents, directs and supports man's will, bringing him closer to the Supreme Good which is God. These reflections together with pastoral experience of the new bishop of Marseille, will contribute to the definition of the theology of Salvation of both the Arian church and the Nicean church.
[1] Given the greater social and political stability, an economic phenomenon is anticipated that OTL occurs in the Merovingian age
[2] Totally invented law
[3] The Latin name for Bordeaux
[4] Our Scandinavia
[5] Having suffered fewer lootings, the city's economic recovery will be much faster
[6] What will become our Church of St. Trophime
[7] Invented book
[8] Being sent into exile in an inconvenient and distant place, without confiscation of assets and loss of citizenship rights
[9] Inspired by an article by professor Guido Borghi
[10] Doctors' trade association
[11] the sentences for what Roman law considered the worst crimes
[12] Being sent into exile in an inconvenient and distant place, with confiscation of assets and loss of citizenship rights
[13] Obviously ITL Cassianus will not suffer the accusation of being semi-Pelagian
