Defiance... the 14th century Byzantine chapel of the Transfiguration of the Saviour in Thessaloniki, compassed about by the high-rise flats of post-war Greece. It was in this city that Theodosius’s dreadful crime was committed, a thousand years before this chapel was built.
Introduction
Theodosius I ruled the Roman Empire from 379 to 395. He was the first to adopt Christianity as the State religion, and an Orthodox believer who rejected Arianism, a heresy that Bede described as a ‘high-road of pestilence’ for every other. But Theodosius was also an absolute ruler, whose word was law, and to be a Bishop in his Imperial Church demanded a great deal of courage.
TO rebuke a mighty prince is to take one’s life into one’s hands. When David, King of Israel, contrived the death of Uriah so he could steal the poor man’s wife, Nathan rebuked him, and watched as David wept. But when Zechariah rebuked the idol-worship of Joash, King of Judah, he was put to death by stoning; and when John the Baptist rebuked Herod Antipas for marrying Herodias, Herod’s own sister-in-law, the prophet was beheaded.*
In 390, there was no mightier prince in all the world than Theodosius, ruler of the Roman Empire from his throne in Constantinople. His realm stretched all the way to Greece; so when angry fans in Thessalonica killed the Governor of Illyria, Butheric, for jailing a celebrity chariot-racer and ruining their sport, it fell to the Emperor to do justice. His response was to fly into a rage, and order seven thousand Thessalonians to be rounded up, and butchered in a theatre.* After his wrath had cooled, he cancelled the instruction, but it had already been carried out.
See David and Bathsheba, and 2 Samuel 11-12. For Zechariah and Joash, 2 Chronicles 24; and for John the Baptist, Matthew 14:1-12.
Even in the Christian era, Roman Emperors still justified capital punishment, but Vladimir II Monomakh, Grand Prince of Kiev from 1113 to 1135, told his children in his famous Testament: ‘Take not the life of the just or the unjust, nor permit him to be killed. Destroy no Christian soul even though he be guilty of murder.’ Vladimir nonetheless conducted eighty-three military campaigns by his own proud admission. See also Gytha and Vladimir.
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