Martyrdom in the Roman Empire: Christians, Persecution, and Memory
Christians, persecution, and the making of collective memory
This course revisits the classical narrative of Christian persecution in the Roman Empire with the tools of contemporary source criticism. We read the earliest Acts and Passions alongside Roman administrative texts and inscriptions, ask how martyrdom accounts were composed and re-composed across generations, and follow the martyr into the fourth century and beyond — into liturgy, architecture, and the polemics of orthodoxy. The aim is neither to defend nor debunk, but to understand how a community built durable meaning out of violence.
- 01Week 1 — What we mean by 'persecution'
Sporadic, local, imperial: the shape of Roman action.
- 02Week 2 — The earliest acts
Polycarp, Perpetua, Lyon: reading the sources critically.
- 03Week 3 — Roman law and Christian bodies
Pliny, Trajan, and the legal question.
- 04Week 4 — The Great Persecution
Diocletian and the crisis of the fourth century.
- 05Week 5 — After Constantine
Martyr cults, basilicas, and liturgical memory.
- 06Week 6 — The martyr as argument
Orthodoxy, dissent, and the long afterlife.
Zoe Tsiami works at the intersection of religious history and social history in the late antique and Byzantine Mediterranean. Her scholarship attends to the everyday textures of Christian life — persecution, memory-making, liturgy, and civic identity — from the age of the martyrs through the middle Byzantine centuries.