Jaime De Miguel López: Leonid Empresses' attitude towards Paganism within Christian sources

The Edict of Milan in first place and the Edict of Thessalonica in second, represent the definitive insertion of Christianity in the society and institutions of the Empire, leaving the paganism in a second place, even being pursued by the Roman law. Despite this and the political rise of the various Christological doctrines –facing each other for the control of the Church-, we know that at the end of the Vth century, important redoubts of paganism are still remaining inside the Roman World, showing themselves especially in the most important knowledge centres in those moments, like the Schools of Alexandria, Athens and Syria.
Being conscious of this continuity of the Paganism in the Eastern Roman Empire, in this paper we aim to study the attitude towards this former religion kept by the Empresses Verina and Ariadne (and other women of the Imperial family) and their interactions with this forbidden practices. These interactions are especially interesting if we consider that during the reigns of these Empresses the Empire suffered several convulsive moments with different political and religious confrontations. To do that, we will focus especially in how the Christian sources reproduced this attitude of the Leonid Empresses towards the traditional paganism.