Classical Rome has always been well liked and revered as the most interesting classical civilization. In any great civilization there must a natural order to things in all the aspects. Especially the civilizations’ society and similarly social structure. In classical Rome, the class system started off as 2 main branches that included regular day to day roles. There were the patricians in other words the elite and officials/higher ups that governed within the societies structure. With the second class being the plebeians also known as the commoners but in reality that branch included practically everyone else. The society’s class system was fairly egalitarian in the sense that women could have either name to themselves, therefore making the classes not gender specific. Within either of the classes, you could argue women fall differently in it for example a plebeian housewife would be viewed lower than a male merchant in the hierarchy but every person of any gender ideally had equal opportunities for acquiring a job. As many people know, Christianity originated in pockets of Rome. Christianity is now spread everywhere and is largely known around the world as a one of the 3 universalizing religion. Christianity originated as a small Jewish sect and it often thought of to be like a cult. As many people know to this very day, there still is a social class within the religion itself with the pope and his bishops. But the rise of Christianity in classical Rome while it may of made its own social class. It also affected the day to day hierarchy as a whole. This is shown throughout in classical Rome in many ways. Those that followed or practiced the then young religion were seen as scum, The persecutions that shaped religious history, those that were in power and Christians were not well received and how that changed, and the rise of a Christian officials branch within their social structure. During the first few centuries of Christianity the Roman Empire persecuted this new faith, but in retrospect the new religion of Christianity brought important social change to the Roman Empire.
The rise of Christianity was widely popular within the lower class of the plebeians. The appeal behind Christianity is that not much was needed to be set for success after your life was over you basically had guaranteed peace in your afterlife. As long as you pray and praised the one god every so often, you would practically be set. Because of this you would see a lot of the lower class practicing the sect of judaism, the laziness of Christianity angered those who practiced Paganism, the more widely known religion of Rome as that is known as Roman mythology. That religion held the gods at the same level of humans themselves as they were seen interacting with the common people of Rome all the time. So the very humanistic and individualistic religion of roman mythology often disliked Christians because of the difference in god to worshipper relation causing a cultural gap within the roman society. The non Christians saw all of those who practiced Christianity as scum and thought lesser of them since the religious intolerance within Rome was high and as a result you saw lots of false statements being brought out to shun Christians. For example, Nero blamed Christians for the great fire of Rome back in 64 CE Beard makes the effort of saying that this directly false statement that Nero made when blaming the Christians was used to put down the Christians and point the blame for a fire that they didn’t cause. The fact that Nero would go to this extent to put Christians down would make this an excellent example of how much hatred and disparities the roman mythology of Rome had for Christians further widening the divide between the two religions present in Rome. The roman mythology worshippers/practicers saw religion through a very binary scope. As they believed, it is my way or the highway. The general consensus of a Pagan worshipper was that Christians are bad, untrustworthy, and overall bad people to affiliate with. As a result the gap only widened between the two religions in society, one was still very large and much more respected in their society as a whole.
After Nero pointing fingers at the Christians for the Great Fire of Rome and further increasing the distrust Christians had already from the vastly bigger majority. They decided to take it one step farther after the light of the the news and the gap of non-Christians and Christians continued to widen for a while as they (Pagans) began to seek and persecute the Christians for 2 centuries just simply practicing the religion and worshipping one god instead of the many. . This widespread persecution came in about because of Christianity main rule, You are directly to worship 1 God not multiple which is something Pagans clearly disliked and left an awful impression on them about how conceited the Christians god truly was. The forms of persecution differed and took on many different but painful forms but the severity and high frequency of the persecution caused many of them to revert to roman mythology or go into hiding or secrecy about their religious beliefs. Christians were being killed across the board for simply being Christian and not accepting the polytheistic religion of Rome. Christianity were truly seen on the very bottom of the totem pole, this is shown through how if a Christian admit to practicing Christianity and only worshipping one god, then they would be executed on the spot. But as stated above, there were pockets of less severe punishments for being a Christian, Diocletian took on a later role to these persecutions, He made a impact in torturing Christians and co-ercing them to give up the faith of only one god. Things like taking away property from those who practiced the Christian faith, Burning scriptures and letter convincing to rebel or convert were also some lesser known punishments that would occur to superimpose or threaten the followers of Christianity to back off or go back into the gray area of religions as Christians were starting to gain some traction on the Pagan followers
Christian or Pagan rulers who worship Christ along with all the other gods were received and treated differently from those who ruled under strict roman mythology. A prime example of this could be Constantine prior to his battle called The Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine didn’t do much for the betterment of Rome but people still liked him and respected him because he was all around good ruler that kept the roman society stable and right where it needed to be in the eyes of the majority. But this battle changed him due to the experience he had, he dreamed
with god telling him use the cross in battle if he wanted to assure victory and sure enough Constantine listened and won the battle. Constantine attributed a lot of his success from that day and on because of god reaching out to him and and began to switch to a believer of Christianity. When Constantine began to open up about his new religion and did more than things like creating The Edict Of Milan for the religious tolerance of other religions in Rome and attempting to unite everyone under Christianity, people became more and more skeptical of him and began trusting him less. As a result of the non- Christians being more skeptical of him, he lost some power like most rulers did if they worshipped any sort of figure related to Christianity. Although the Christians obviously appreciated his efforts because after undergoing so much oppression and hatred from the non Christians. They were finally free to believe what they wanted to believe tipping out the scale from under the Non-Christians making the demographic of Christians to Non-Christians much more equal. As a result you saw Christians being treated better and much more fairer as now there was as many of them as there were Non-Christians. This jump in the demographic transition to Christianity made the empire much more unified and less at each other’s throats.
After Constantine passed the Edict of Milan, Christianity started booming because of this and how big it became over such a small period of time, Constantine decided to create a Council. The Council of Nicaea began to put rules and boundaries on the religion and how to practice the religion according to the state. Roles were created that fit very high on the social pyramid. The religious nobles were all bishops that eventually took on roles to further establish themselves as
nobles in the higher part of the the social class ladder. The Council of Nicaea had a evermost person in charge in case it was Constantine, similarly a council still exists today in the Vatican City with the Pope and his archbishops and bishops. They after creating statutes of how to be a good Christian and practice Christianity well. They over time began to convene about created the first place of worship that we now know to call a Church, The 1st Church of Rome. The church was made in modern day turkey and many more were to come with the rule of other emperors to come. For the first time ever, physical gathering places for specifically practicing the religion arose in the newly chosen capital Constantinople. The significance behind these churches and the council that set all this in motion is crucial to Christians becoming more prevalent in society.
As time went on Paganism faded and Christianity became more and more prevalent, the fact that Christianity got more prevalent also means that it ultimately had more followers practicing it on a consistent and steady basis. The empire became more and more Christian and religiously tolerant for that matter. As of all these developments, the Roman empire’s society got more much oriented towards the religion at the end of period 2, It basically did a swap in prevalence with Paganism. The empire’s society now saw more and more rulers that took all religions into consideration and The name Constantine was reused multiple times just because of how important the guy was to the development of the roman society as a whole. The society had developments and advances in their religious equality and social structure during the rise of Christianity because of the fact that people spoke up about how originally Christians were treated like scum and were practically lower than anything else within the social pyramid, how they were vigorously persecuted and forced to give up their religion through any means necessary, Their religion was constantly thwarted and rulers that did follow in the Christian faith or worshipped the god were often not well received or even payed attention to simply for just believing in the one god upon all the other ones, and lastly after the tolerance of Christianity and it becoming more acceptable in society, the creation of council of nicaea to create real undisputable statutes on how to worship the 1 god and be a good Christian in your society.