Christian History Home > Issue 44 > Preaching to Dread and Panic
Preaching to Dread and Panic
ROBERT PAYNE (d. 1983) was the author of highly praised histories and biographies, including Fathers of the Western Church (1951) and The Holy Fire: The Story of the Early Centuries of the Early Christian Churches in the Near East (1957), from which this article is adapted with permission. | posted 10/01/1994 12:00AM
In Antioch the edict was proclaimed during the morning of February 26, 387. When the proclamation was read outside the praeto-rium, it was received for a moment in stunned silence, broken by the wailing of women.
In the crowd were some professional agitators, the same men who were hired by the officials to applaud them during processions and by actors to applaud them on the stage. The crowd was surging against the praetorium when one of these agitators, or perhaps an officer of the guard (for no one knew exactly what happened) uttered the cry, "To the bathhouses!" Immediately the mob surged in the direction of the Baths of Caligula. In their rage, the crowd smashed everything they could lay their hands on, cutting the chains which held the bronze lanterns and then letting them crash on the stone floor, and hacking down the trees in the gardens.
The mob swung back to the praetorium, rushed past the guards and demanded the abrogation of the levy. There was no sign of the prefect [territorial ... To view this item, you must be a member of ChristianHistory.net.
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