Acceso usuarios
Gianluca Zarro
It is known that the hostile attitude of Marcus Aurelius towards Christianity has even an autograph attestation in a famous fragment of Marc. Aur. Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν 11.3, based on this testimony the princeps philosophus, on the one hand reproached the Christians for their lack of reasonableness, on the other the obstinate theatricality with which they faced martyrdom. At the end of an analysis aimed at retracing the testimonies of the acts of the Martyrs, apologists and historians and writers, it was decided to 'drop' the individual episodes attributable to the twenty years of the Aurelian principality in the broader context of administrative and legislative reforms of the princeps . What emerged was the absence of an ad hoc regulatory provision and more generally a hostile attitude of administrators and officials, which also reflected a hostility of the ‘intellighenzia’ of the time. In essence, more elements, local – such as the gladiator shows – and global, such as the plague and religious and normative conservatism, as well as the administrative reorganization, contributed, perhaps beyond an ill-concealed antipathy of the princeps, conservative both in the legislative and in the religious one, to create unfavorable conditions for Christians, during the Aurelian age.
