David Riggs: “Our City’s Forum Hosts a Multitude of Salvific Deities”: Disputing Christianising Interpretations of Late Roman Africa

In recent decades, historians have well interrogated traditional narratives of the “triumph of Christianity.” Indeed, scholars often now dispute the legitimacy altogether of studying late-antique society according to categories such as “pagan” and “Christian.” Rather than fixating on religious conflict, it has become increasingly common to search for a shared “secular” space in civic life that assimilated most people into cultural pursuits with little regard for the “religious” concerns of intolerant bishops. For such historians, Christianisation of the Roman Empire tends to be a story of uncompromising bishops and iconoclastic gangs of Christian plebs undermining the shared “secular” culture of late-antique cities. One conventional assumption has remained steadfast and fundamental amidst these developments: historians continue to operate as though the “religious” vitality of the empire’s traditional cults was in steep decline by the fourth century and, thus, this muscular Christianity filled something of a religious vacuum. Augustine’s sermons are frequently cited in support of such scholarship. This paper will dispute the value of both the secularizing interpretation of late-antique civic life and notions of a muscular Christianity for making proper sense of the evidence for religious life in late Roman Africa. Through revisionist readings of Augustine’s Sermones 24 and 62, which carefully employ literary and archaeological testimonies for Romano-African civic life to contextualize their situations and rhetoric, this study will highlight the persistent vitality, pervasiveness, and influence of the traditional gods and the broad range of cultic pursuits that bound Africans to their divine patronage in daily life.