Incense for the Genius: A Magistrate's Judgment Call in Bithynia
In 112 CE a duumvir in a town in Bithynia faces a problem. A cloth merchant, Gaius, has been denounced anonymously: he refuses to pour a libation of wine before the emperor's image at the annual festival for Trajan's accession, and he has stopped attending the guild's sacrifice to the city's Tyche. Gaius says he will swear by the city's gods but will not burn incense to the emperor's genius, because he worships one God. The festival procession is in three days. The guild is angry, since his absence insults its patron; a rival has begun spreading a rumour that Gaius's people hold incestuous nocturnal meetings. The duumvir has no legal training, a copy of the governor's edict, and a letter from a friend in Rome mentioning that the emperor recently wrote to a governor about precisely this sort of case.
1. Explain why Gaius's refusal is treated as a public danger rather than a private opinion, and why the charge is framed in terms of impiety rather than belief.
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Roman religion is primarily a matter of correct practice rather than correct doctrine. The city's wellbeing depends on maintaining the pax deorum, the proper relationship with the gods, and that relationship is sustained by ritual performed on behalf of the community. A refusal is therefore not an opinion but an act with consequences for everyone.
Within that logic, the emperor's genius - the divine power associated with him, distinct from the man himself - is one of the powers on which the city's fortune rests. Withholding incense is a public breach. It also reads as civic withdrawal: Gaius has left the guild's sacrifice and insulted its patron, so the guild sees not theological scruple but contempt. Roman usage calls this impietas, and Christians were also labelled 'atheists' in the sense of denying the gods their cult, not in the modern sense of holding no beliefs. The rumour of incestuous nocturnal meetings fills the gap that refusal creates: a group that will not show its rites must be hiding something monstrous. That is the mechanism by which private conviction becomes a charge of public danger.
2. Apply the relevant imperial ruling to Gaius's situation: what should the duumvir do, and what should he not do?
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The relevant document is Trajan's reply to Pliny, who was governing Bithynia-Pontus at this time. Its rules are procedural and narrow: Christians are not to be sought out; if they are accused and convicted, they are to be punished; but anyone who denies the charge and demonstrates it by supplicating the gods is to be pardoned for repentance, however suspect his past; and anonymous denunciations are to carry no weight at all.
So the duumvir should first discard the anonymous denunciation as a basis for action - Trajan's rule is explicit and it is also his own protection against informers. The guild's anger is not itself an accusation. If the matter proceeds, it proceeds because the refusal is a public act against the civic cult within the duumvir's competence: he should have Gaius brought, explain the requirement plainly, and give him a genuine opportunity to comply - a libation and a word to the gods would end it. He should not seek out Gaius's associates, should not investigate the rumoured meetings on the strength of gossip, should not extract a confession by coercion, and should not pronounce a capital sentence on his own authority, since the power of the sword belongs to the governor. If Gaius persists, the file goes to the governor.
3. A colleague says the case is simply one of religious persecution, and another says it is simply a matter of public order. Assess both readings.
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Both are anachronistic in different ways, and the better judgment holds them together.
The persecution reading imports a modern settlement in which religion is a private, interior matter that the state may not touch. That settlement is real and hard-won, but it is not available as a description of 112 CE. Rome did not police belief; it policed cult, and it normally tolerated ancestral rites of subject peoples. Christians were not persecuted for monotheism as such - Jews had a comparable exclusive loyalty and were generally left alone. What made the difference was refusal of the civic cult combined with a stubbornness that struck officials as contumacy.
The public-order reading captures the Roman self-understanding but can become an apology: 'order' is doing a great deal of work when the disorder consists of one man's absence from a procession. The sharpest description is that Roman religion had no category for loyal dissent. Gaius's own self-description - worship of one God - is not a modern invention either; Pliny records Christians singing to Christ 'as to a god.' The examinable point is that the same act is impiety and civic danger in Roman terms and faithful witness in Christian terms, and that describing it in only one vocabulary conceals the conflict rather than explaining it.