The triumph of paganism ceased with the death of Julian; but his
successor Jovian, though he ordered the Church of the Virgin to be
erected at Corfù out of the fragments of a heathen temple opposite the
royal villa[23], proclaimed universal toleration. His wise example was
followed by Valentinian I, who repealed Julian’s edict which had made
the profession of paganism a test of professorial office at Athens, and
allowed his subjects to approach heaven in what manner they pleased.
The Greeks were specially exempted from the law forbidding nocturnal
sacrifices because it would “make their life unendurable.” The Eleusinian
mysteries were permitted to be celebrated, and Athens continued to
derive much profit from those festivals. It was fortunate for the Greeks
that, at the partition of the Empire between him and Valens in 364, the
Prefecture of Illyricum, which included the bulk of the Greek provinces,
was joined to the Western half, and thus fell to his share. His reign
marked the last stage of that peaceful development which had gone on in
Greece since the Gothic invasion of the previous century. A few years
after his death the Emperor Theodosius I publicly proclaimed the Catholic
faith to be the established creed of the Empire, and proceeded to stamp
out paganism with all the zeal of a Spaniard. The Oracle of Delphi was
closed for ever, the temples were shut, and in 393 the Olympic games,
which had been the rallying point of the Hellenic race for untold
centuries, ceased to exist. As a token of their discontinuance the
statue of Zeus, which had stood in the temple of the god at Olympia, was
removed to Constantinople, and the time-honoured custom of reckoning
time by the Olympiads was definitely replaced by the prosaic cycle of
Indictions. Yet Athens still remained a bulwark of the old religion, and
the preservation of that city from the great earthquake which devastated
large parts of Greece in 375 was attributed to the miraculous protection
of the hero Achilles, whose statue had been placed in the Parthenon by
the venerable hierophant of the Eleusinian mysteries.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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