SPECIAL RELIGIOUS STATUS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
In AD 177, a group of Christians from the city of Lyons in southern Gaul was forced into the arena to die, facing wild animals and all sorts of other horrific tortures. The story of their final hours, as transmitted in the fifth book of the Ecclesiastical History by the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, contains an important number of elements that will be familiar to many: brave martyrs willing to die for their beliefs, a hostile Roman governor who was determined to make them suffer, and gruesome public executions that turned the victims into examples for all future Christians.
Stories like this one joined the foundational narratives of the church, and also continue to shape our perception of Christianity's legal position within the ancient world to this very day. Christian martyrs have been depicted in paintings and films, are referenced in political debates, and have given their names to streets, squares, churches, and schools all over the world. It is hardly surprising, then, that early Christians are still overwhelmingly seen as a profoundly marginalized group facing a unique degree of active persecution by the Roman state, which is otherwise said to have been almost proverbially tolerant in religious matters. The Roman Empire, it has been argued, was not normally in the habit of strictly regulating religious life within its borders, and the cults of deities such as Isis, Magna Mater, and Mithras were all easily incorporated in the highly diverse religious landscape.
