Egypt and the Great Persecution

The world that produced the soldier-martyrs of the late-Roman East: third-century Roman Egypt and its church; the Roman army and military service as a sphere of acute conflict between imperial cult and Christian confession; and the Diocletianic (“Great”) Persecution of 303–311, the most severe and systematic the Church had yet faced, which fell with especial ferocity on Egypt and gave the Coptic Church the epoch — the Era of the Martyrs, reckoned from Diocletian’s accession in 284 — by which it still counts its years. This file sets the historical stage for St. Menas without asserting the particulars of his legendary biography.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Coptic (Great Martyr; Wonderworker)

Roman Egypt at the Turn of the Fourth Century

By the late third century Egypt had been a Roman province for three hundred years, governed from Alexandria — the second city of the empire, a Greek metropolis grafted onto an ancient Egyptian hinterland, and the seat of a patriarchate that, with Rome and Antioch, ranked among the first sees of the Christian world (see Orthodoxy: The Church of Alexandria). The country was the empire’s granary, its administration intricate and its wealth great, and the Nile valley supported a dense population whose native language, Coptic — the last stage of Egyptian, written in Greek characters with a handful of Demotic letters — was by this period a literary and increasingly a Christian tongue. The Christianization of Egypt was already far advanced. Alexandria had been a centre of Christian learning since at least the time of the catechetical school of Clement and Origen in the late second and early third centuries, and Christianity had spread up the Nile into the chora, the countryside, where it took root among a Coptic-speaking population that would in time make Egypt one of the most thoroughly Christian lands of the Mediterranean (Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991, s.vv. “Egypt, Christianity in”; “Copt”).

It was in this same generation that Egyptian monasticism was born. St. Antony the Great withdrew to the desert in the years around 270–285, and by the end of the persecutions the eremitic and, under Pachomius, the cenobitic life had begun to populate the Egyptian deserts with ascetics (see St. Antony the Great; Orthodoxy: Monasticism). The desert as a place of Christian withdrawal — to which the Passio of Menas will have its soldier retreat during the persecution — was thus a living reality of late-third-century Egypt, not a literary fiction. The same decades that produced the desert fathers produced the martyrs, and the two were understood by the Egyptian church as a single witness: the ascetic and the martyr both gave their lives to Christ, the one by daily dying and the other by dying once (a connection the Life of Antony itself draws, when Antony goes down to Alexandria during the persecution longing for martyrdom; Athanasius, Life of Antony 46–47).

The Roman Army and the Christian Soldier

The dominant tradition makes Menas a soldier of the Roman army, and the army of the late third century is essential context for understanding why a Christian soldier was a figure of acute tension. The army was the backbone of the empire and the chief instrument of its unity; it was also a deeply religious institution, bound together by oaths, standards, and a cycle of sacrifices to the gods and to the genius of the emperor. To serve was to be enmeshed in the imperial cult at every turn — the military oath (sacramentum), the offering of incense, the veneration of the standards and the imperial images. For a Christian, military service therefore posed in concentrated form the central conflict of the age: the demand to honour the emperor as a god, refused by Christians as idolatry (Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, 1965, on the army and the imperial cult; de Ste. Croix, “Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?” in Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy, 2006).

Christians had nonetheless served in the army in considerable numbers by the late third century, and the soldier-martyr is one of the characteristic types of the persecution literature. Whether a Christian could serve at all was debated — Tertullian had argued in the early third century that the soldier’s oath and the cross of Christ were incompatible (On the Crown; On Idolatry) — but the existence of a wide cult of soldier-saints shows that many did serve, and that the crisis came not at enlistment but at the moment when service required an act of idolatrous sacrifice. The great soldier-martyrs of the Diocletianic age — George, Demetrios, Theodore, Sergius and Bacchus, and Menas among them — share a common narrative shape: a man already in imperial service who, when the demand to sacrifice comes, refuses, confesses Christ, is tortured, and is put to death (see St. George the Great Martyr; St. Demetrios of Thessaloniki). The Menas Passio belongs to this type, and its reliability as history cannot be separated from the conventions of the type, a problem reserved for The Passio.

The legendary tradition places Menas in the Rutilian (Rutiliacan, or Rutilica) legion, stationed at Cotyaeum in Phrygia, from which, during the persecution, he is said to have withdrawn to the desert before returning to confess Christ publicly at the games (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946, on the Coptic Passio; see The Confession in the Amphitheatre). The unit name and the Phrygian station belong to the legend and to the parallel “Phrygian Menas” tradition, and are reported here as the Passio gives them, not as documented facts of the saint’s career: [Disputed: the Egyptian Abu Mena martyr is held by his dominant tradition to have been Egyptian by birth, his relics translated to Egypt (Drescher, *Apa Mena*, 1946); a parallel tradition makes a Menas a Phrygian, born or martyred at Cotyaeum (the so-called Menas Kallikelados), and many scholars hold the two to be distinct or conflated figures (Papaconstantinou, *Le culte des saints en Égypte*, 2001; cf. Atiya, ed., *Coptic Encyclopedia*, 1991, s.v. "Menas the Martyr, Saint")].

The Tetrarchy and the Coming of the Persecution

The empire into which Menas was born had nearly destroyed itself in the chaos of the third century — the half-century of usurpation, invasion, plague, and inflation conventionally called the “crisis of the third century.” Its recovery was the work of Diocletian, who came to power in 284 and reorganized the empire from top to bottom: he divided rule among a college of emperors, the Tetrarchy (two senior Augusti and two junior Caesares), reformed the coinage, the taxation, and the provincial administration, and pressed for a restoration of the old Roman religion as a guarantor of the empire’s renewed stability. Egypt was reorganized along with the rest, and Diocletian himself campaigned there, suppressing a revolt at Alexandria in 297–298.

Diocletian’s religious policy was conservative and increasingly aggressive. Already in the 290s he had moved against the Manichaeans, and a purge of Christians from the army and the court preceded the general persecution. The army was, in fact, the first sphere in which the conflict came to a head: Christians who refused to sacrifice were cashiered or executed, and the soldier-martyrs whose acta survive belong in part to this preliminary military purge rather than to the general edicts (de Ste. Croix, “Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution,” 2006; Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, 1965).

The Edicts of 303 and the “Great” Persecution

The general persecution — the most severe, systematic, and empire-wide the Church had yet endured, and the one the tradition simply calls the “Great” Persecution — opened in February 303. The first edict (Feb 303) ordered churches to be demolished, the Scriptures to be surrendered and burned, Christians of rank to be degraded, and Christian gatherings to be forbidden. Further edicts followed in the same year, escalating to the imprisonment of the clergy, and in 304 a fourth edict (in the eastern provinces) required all inhabitants to offer sacrifice on pain of death (de Ste. Croix, “Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution,” 2006; Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, 1965). The demand to sacrifice — to burn incense, to pour a libation, to taste the sacrificial meat — was the hinge on which everything turned: compliance was apostasy, refusal was death, and the whole drama of the martyr-acts is the drama of that refusal.

The persecution was uneven across the empire. In the West it was relatively brief and, in the realm of Constantius in Gaul and Britain, barely enforced; in the East under Diocletian, and after his abdication in 305 under Galerius and especially Maximinus Daia, it was prolonged and ferocious. It dragged on in the East until Galerius, dying, issued an edict of toleration in 311 that grudgingly recognized the Christians’ existence and asked their prayers; Maximinus Daia renewed persecution briefly thereafter, but the cause was lost, and the Edict of Milan of 313 — the agreement of Constantine and Licinius — secured toleration and the restoration of confiscated Christian property (Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, 1965; de Ste. Croix, 2006). Menas, who died c. 309, falls within the years of this persecution at its eastern height.

Egypt as the Land of Martyrs

Nowhere was the Great Persecution more savage than in Egypt. Eusebius of Caesarea, who travelled in the Thebaid, gives a famous and harrowing account of the Egyptian martyrs, describing executions so numerous that “the murderous axe was dulled and, worn out, was broken in pieces,” and the persecutors themselves grew weary of killing — Christians, he says, going to their deaths by tens and hundreds in a single day, “received the final sentence of death with gladness and laughter and cheerfulness” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.9; trans. NPNF II/1). Eusebius’s numbers are rhetorical and not to be pressed as statistics, but his testimony as an eyewitness to the special ferocity of the persecution in Egypt is firsthand and weighty (Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, 1965, citing Eusebius HE 8).

This Egyptian experience left a permanent mark on the self-understanding of the Coptic Church, which came to define itself as, above all, a church of martyrs. The clearest sign of this is the calendar. The Coptic Church reckons its years in the Era of the Martyrs — the Anno Martyrum (A.M.) — an epoch dated not from any single martyrdom but from the accession of Diocletian on 29 August AD 284, the persecutor whose name became, for the Egyptian church, the marker of the age of the martyrs (Atiya, ed., Coptic Encyclopedia, 1991, s.vv. “Era of the Martyrs”; “Calendar, Coptic”). That a church should date its very calendar from the accession of its great persecutor is a remarkable theological statement: it makes the age of suffering the foundation of its history, and the martyrs the measure of its time. The Coptic Synaxarion — the church’s calendar of saints — is correspondingly dense with the martyrs of this period, and Menas stands among the greatest of them, commemorated on Hathor 15 (corresponding to 11 November) (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; see Feast and Cult).

The World That Produced Menas

The stage, then, is set. Late-third-century Egypt was a heavily Christianized province with a great patriarchal see at Alexandria, a Coptic-speaking countryside increasingly Christian, and a desert that was filling with ascetics even as the persecution gathered. The Roman army demanded of its soldiers an idolatrous loyalty that placed the Christian soldier in irreconcilable conflict with the imperial cult, and the moment of that conflict — the demand to sacrifice — is the moment around which every soldier-martyr’s acta are built. The Diocletianic persecution, opening in 303 and lasting in the East until 311, fell on Egypt with a ferocity that Eusebius records and that the Coptic calendar memorializes in its very epoch. Out of this world came the soldier-martyrs of the East, and out of it, by the dominant tradition, came Menas.

What can be said with confidence is the world; what cannot be asserted as documented fact is the particular biography. The Passio of Menas — the soldier of the Rutilian legion, the withdrawal to the desert, the public confession at the games, the tortures, the beheading — is a legendary text of uncertain date, and its narrative is pinned to its source and weighed in The Passio, not asserted here as history. What this file establishes is only the plausibility and intelligibility of such a figure in such a time: a Christian soldier of the Great Persecution, of whom the firmest evidence will turn out to be not his vita at all but the great shrine and cult that grew over his relics — the subject of the companion file, The Historical Core.

References

Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History, Book 8. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1890. (The Egyptian martyrs and the special ferocity of the persecution in Egypt at HE 8.8–9.)
Athanasius of Alexandria. The Life of Antony. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 4. (Antony’s desire for martyrdom during the persecution at chs. 46–47.)
de Ste. Croix, G. E. M. Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy. Ed. Michael Whitby and Joseph Streeter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (Collected essays, including “Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted?” and “Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution”; the edicts of 303–304 and the conduct of the persecution.)
Frend, W. H. C. Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus. Oxford: Blackwell, 1965. (The army and the imperial cult; the course of the Great Persecution; Egypt as a land of martyrs.)
Atiya, Aziz S., ed. The Coptic Encyclopedia. 8 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1991. (Articles on Coptic Christianity, the Era of the Martyrs, the Coptic calendar, the Diocletianic persecution, and Menas the Martyr.)
Drescher, James. Apa Mena: A Selection of Coptic Texts Relating to St. Menas. Cairo: Société d’archéologie copte, 1946. (The Coptic Passio and Miracles; the Rutilian legion, the desert withdrawal, the public confession; the feast on Hathor 15.)
Papaconstantinou, Arietta. Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides. Paris: CNRS, 2001. (The documented cult of Menas; the Egyptian-vs-Phrygian and identity questions.)