The Diocletianic Persecution

The persecution that opened on 23 February 303 was the last and most systematic the Roman state launched against the Church — four imperial edicts in barely a year, the demolition of churches, the burning of the Scriptures, and a general demand to sacrifice on pain of death. It had been prepared by an earlier and less noticed measure: the purge of Christians from the army between roughly 299 and 302. This is the only securely documented historical world in which a soldier-martyr named George could have died, and our contemporary witness to it, Eusebius of Caesarea, names many of its victims but never George.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; the Trophy-Bearer)

The Tetrarchy and the Long Peace Before It

By the close of the third century the Church had enjoyed roughly four decades of relative quiet. The last general assault, under Valerian, had ended in 260; the so-called “Little Peace of the Church” that followed allowed Christianity to grow conspicuous — owning property, raising buildings, and reaching into the imperial household and the army. The empire that Diocletian reorganized after 284 into the Tetrarchy — two senior emperors (Augusti) and two juniors (Caesares) — was a state bent on restoration: of the frontiers, of the currency, and of the pax deorum, the peace with the gods that traditional Roman religion held to be the guarantor of imperial fortune. It is against this restorationist temper, and not against any sudden Christian provocation, that the persecution must be read (Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 2; de Ste. Croix, Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy, 2006, on the structural causes of persecution).

Diocletian himself, our sources agree, was reluctant. The driving force was his Caesar in the East, Galerius, whom both the Christian apologist Lactantius and Eusebius single out as the architect of the policy (Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 10–11; Eusebius, HE 8, praef.–2; Barnes 1981, 18–20). Lactantius reports a series of conferences at Nicomedia over the winter of 302–303 in which Galerius pressed an unwilling Diocletian toward a general edict, an oracle of Apollo at Didyma being consulted to settle the emperor’s hesitation (Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 10–11). Whatever the exact share of each man’s responsibility, the persecution issued from the eastern court, and it was in the East — in Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Egypt — that it fell hardest and lasted longest.

The Army Purge, c. 299–302

The general persecution did not come without warning. Several years before the edicts of 303, the imperial government moved against Christians specifically within the armed forces, and this earlier measure is of direct relevance to the figure of a soldier-martyr.

Eusebius reports that the assault on the Church “had its beginning” in the army, and that the persecution proper was preceded by the cashiering of Christian soldiers (Eusebius, HE 8.1.7–8, 8.4). Lactantius locates the precipitating incident at a sacrifice — variously placed in the East and dated to about 299 — at which the rites were disrupted, the failure blamed on Christians present who had crossed themselves, and an order issued that all in the palace and then in the army should sacrifice or be discharged (Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 10). Eusebius’s own Martyrs of Palestine and Ecclesiastical History describe officers being given the choice between sacrifice and loss of rank, with some put to death (Eusebius, HE 8.4.2–4). Modern reconstruction, following Lactantius and Eusebius, places this military purge in the years roughly 299–302, as a discrete and earlier phase distinct from the general edicts (Barnes 1981, 18–21; de Ste. Croix 2006).

The significance for George is contextual, not biographical. The army purge demonstrates that the most exposed Christians at the turn of the fourth century were precisely soldiers, who were required by their office to participate in the sacrificial and oath-bound rites of the state religion; a Christian officer confronted with a sacrifice-test, refusing, and suffering for it is not a legendary archetype but a documented historical type of the period (Eusebius, HE 8.4; Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 10). The traditions that make George a soldier — in some versions an officer of high rank — fall squarely within this documented setting, whatever the worth of the later narratives that fill it in (see The Confession before Diocletian; The Historical Core).

The Four Edicts of 303–304

The general persecution unfolded through four successive edicts, whose sequence Timothy Barnes has reconstructed from Eusebius and Lactantius (Barnes 1981, 22–24; Eusebius, HE 8.2, Martyrs of Palestine, praef.; Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 13–15).

The First Edict, posted at Nicomedia on 23 February 303 — the feast of the Terminalia — ordered that churches be razed to the ground, that copies of the Scriptures be surrendered and burned, that Christians be stripped of rank and legal standing, and that those in imperial service lose their freedom (Eusebius, HE 8.2.4–5; Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 13). Eusebius, an eyewitness in Palestine, describes “the imperial edicts everywhere published, ordering that the churches be leveled to the ground and the Scriptures destroyed by fire” (Eusebius, HE 8.2.4). The cathedral of Nicomedia, in plain sight of the imperial palace, was demolished first; a Christian who tore down the posted edict was executed at once (Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 13). The handing-over of sacred books created the category of the traditores — those who “handed over” the Scriptures — whose later consequences would convulse the African church.

The Second and Third Edicts, both of 303, narrowed and then sharpened the attack. The second ordered the arrest of the clergy — bishops, presbyters, and deacons — filling the prisons so full, Eusebius says, that there was no room left for criminals (Eusebius, HE 8.2.5, 8.6.8–9). The third, issued in connection with an amnesty marking the imperial vicennalia (the twentieth anniversary of Diocletian’s reign), offered the imprisoned clergy release if they would sacrifice, and authorized compulsion — including torture — to obtain it (Eusebius, HE 8.2.5, 8.6.10; Barnes 1981, 23–24).

The Fourth Edict, issued in 304 (and in Barnes’s reconstruction the work of Galerius and Maximinus Daia rather than of the now-ailing Diocletian), universalized the demand: every inhabitant of the affected provinces, not only the clergy, was commanded to assemble and offer sacrifice to the gods on pain of death (Eusebius, Martyrs of Palestine 3.1; Barnes 1981, 24). It is this final, general sacrifice-test that produced the largest number of martyrs in the East and that frames the standard hagiographic scene of a confessor commanded to sacrifice and refusing (see The Tortures and the Threefold Death).

The Mechanics of the Test

The persecution did not, for the most part, seek out Christians to kill so much as to compel them to conform. The instrument was the sacrificium — a required act of offering: burning incense before an image of the emperor or a god, pouring a libation, or tasting sacrificial meat — together with the oath “by the genius of the emperor.” Refusal, persisted in, was construed as contumacia, obstinate defiance of lawful authority, and it was for this, as much as for the name of Christ as such, that the magistrate condemned (de Ste. Croix 2006, esp. the essays “Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?” and its sequels; Barnes 1981, 24–27).

This explains both the violence and its limits. Governors offered repeated opportunities to sacrifice, and the public record of the acta — the genuine ones — shows magistrates often pressing the accused to comply rather than rushing to execute. Those who sacrificed went free; those who refused were tortured to break their will and, failing that, put to death by sword, fire, or beast (Eusebius, HE 8.6–9; Martyrs of Palestine, passim). The recurring motif in George’s developed passion — repeated tortures, repeated demands to sacrifice, repeated refusals — is, in its bare structure, an accurate memory of how the sacrifice-tests worked, however much the later embellishment exaggerates the wonders (see The Acta and Their Condemnation).

Eusebius as Contemporary Witness — and His Silence on George

For all that follows in this collection, one fact about the sources must be fixed at the outset. Our one contemporary, eyewitness account of the Great Persecution in the East is Eusebius of Caesarea, who lived through it in Palestine and devoted the eighth book of his Ecclesiastical History and the whole of his Martyrs of Palestine to it (Eusebius, HE 8.1–9; Martyrs of Palestine). Eusebius names many martyrs of Palestine and the East by name, town, and manner of death, and he writes from Caesarea, less than a day’s journey from Lydda, the very town that would become George’s cult center.

Eusebius does not name George. Neither the Ecclesiastical History nor the Martyrs of Palestine mentions him, and no other source contemporary with the persecution does so (Walter, The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition, 2003, 109–113; Delehaye, Les légendes grecques des saints militaires, 1909, on the lateness of the George dossier). This silence is not proof that no such martyr existed — Eusebius’s lists are selective, not exhaustive, and many genuine martyrs went unrecorded — but it is the central source-critical fact governing the whole question. The earliest secure trace of George is not a contemporary narrative but the cult itself, surfacing in inscriptions and shrines a century or more after the persecution (see The Historical Core; The Earliest Evidence).

The Palestinian and Cappadocian Setting

Two regions anchor the geography of George’s veneration. The first is Palestine, and specifically Lydda (Greek Diospolis, modern Lod), where the principal early shrine of George stood and where the relic tradition was localized from at least the late fourth or early fifth century (Walter 2003, 110–112; see Lydda and the Relics). Lydda lay within the province whose persecution Eusebius chronicled, and it is in this Palestinian setting that the historical core of the cult is most defensible. The second is Cappadocia (and the wider Syro-Anatolian world), which the developed traditions name as George’s homeland and which became a secondary focus of his veneration; some early traditions also tie his passion to Nicomedia, the eastern imperial capital where the persecution began (Delehaye 1909; Walter 2003). The relation among these locales — homeland, place of martyrdom, place of the shrine — is unsettled in the sources and is treated where the evidence is weighed.

[Disputed: the place of George's martyrdom is variously given — Nicomedia, the eastern capital where the First Edict was posted and where many of the first martyrs died (so some Greek passion traditions; cf. Delehaye 1909); Lydda/Diospolis in Palestine, the site of the principal early shrine and relics (Walter 2003, 110–112); and other locations in the developed *Acta* (see [The Acta and Their Condemnation](../02-the-soldier-martyr/the-acta-and-their-condemnation.md))]. What is not in dispute is the persecution itself, its mechanics, and its severity in the East — the firm historical ground on which the figure of a soldier-martyr stands (Eusebius, HE 8.1–9; Barnes 1981, 18–27).

Why the Context Matters

The discipline of this section is to separate what the period securely supplies from what the later legends invent. The Diocletianic persecution supplies a great deal: a precisely dated outbreak (23 February 303), a documented sequence of edicts, an earlier purge that targeted soldiers specifically, a sacrifice-test that generated exactly the confess-or-comply scenario the hagiography reuses, and a contemporary historian who establishes the texture of the martyrdoms even as he omits George’s name. On this ground a Christian soldier could have refused the sacrifice and died — and the early and tenacious cult at Lydda gives reason to think one named George did (Eusebius, HE 8.4; Walter 2003, 109–113). What the period does not supply is George’s biography; for that, the sources turn legendary, and the line between the two is the subject of the companion file and of the source-critical sections beyond (see The Historical Core; What Can Be Known; Martyr and Myth).

References

Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History (HE), Book 8, and The Martyrs of Palestine. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. New York, 1890. (The army purge at HE 8.1.7–8 and 8.4; the edicts and the burning of churches and Scriptures at HE 8.2; the prisons filled with clergy at HE 8.6; the general sacrifice-test of 304 at Martyrs of Palestine 3.1; Eusebius names no George.)
Lactantius. On the Deaths of the Persecutors (De mortibus persecutorum). Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 7. (Galerius as instigator at 10–11; the disrupted sacrifice and army purge at 10; the First Edict and the cathedral of Nicomedia at 13; the sequence of measures at 13–15.)
Barnes, Timothy D. Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. (The Tetrarchy and the persecution at chs. 2 and 11; the reconstruction of the four edicts and their dates, 18–27; the army purge of c. 299–302.)
de Ste. Croix, G. E. M. Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy. Ed. Michael Whitby and Joseph Streeter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (The legal and structural mechanics of persecution; the sacrifice-test and contumacia; the collected essays “Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?”)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes grecques des saints militaires. Brussels: Bureaux de la Société des Bollandistes, 1909. (The lateness and legendary character of the George dossier; the Nicomedia and eastern passion traditions.)
Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. (Eusebius’s silence on George; the Lydda/Diospolis shrine; the early cult, 109–113.)