Beginning in 302 CE, the four emperors of the Roman tetrarchy collectively issued a series of edicts that decreed severe penalties against the Empire’s Manichaean and Christian subjects. These decrees constituted the most widespread and systematic religious persecutions in imperial history. In this chapter, I explore these edicts and their consequences in the context of a global history of genocide. I argue that, while these persecutions may not satisfy modern juristic definitions of genocide, which tend to emphasize physical violence, they nonetheless suggest that the emperors aimed to eliminate alternative systems of knowledge, to remove particular religio-cultural populations from the civic collective, and to prevent these groups’ social reproduction. I suggest the tetrarchy’s edicts comprise something akin to a “cultural genocide” by the Roman government. I conclude with some brief reflections on the use of cultural genocide as an interpretive tool for understanding ancient acts of community violence.

The bitter division in Alexandria that led to the Council of Nicaea began as a theological dispute between Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, and a significant number of his clergy, including a presbyter Arius, and quickly overflowed into a feud among eastern bishops. “Arianism” was assumed by scholars and theologians to be a coherent set of heretical teachings embraced by a succession of followers. Historians have now identified sets of alliances rather than genealogies as well as the polemical construction of “Arianism” by Athanasius and Marcellus. This separation of Arius from later “Arianism,” together with the continuing lack of consensus with regard to theological or philosophical genealogies as the source of his thought, encourages another look at the particular social and religious context of the initial local controversy. The central issues of monotheism, apophatic theology, incarnation, and changeability in fact map over traditional Christian apologetic theology and the literary and ecclesiastical legacies of the Great Persecution. Arius’s insistence on divine monotheism and transcendence together with his defense of a “living image” may echo the contemporary arguments with Celsus and Porphyry in Eusebius and Athanasius as well as a refutation of polytheism.