Note 246 — Chapter VIII

Maximinus for this purpose placed military help at the disposal of the chief priest of the individual province (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. viii. 14, 9); and the famous letter of Julian (Ep. 49, comp. Ep. 63) to the Galatarch of the time gives a clear view of his obligations. He is to superintend the whole religious matters of the province; to preserve his independence in contradistinction to the governor, not to dance attendance upon him, not to allow him to appear in the temple with military escort, to receive him not in front of, but in, the temple, within which he is lord and the governor a private man. Of the subsidies which the government has settled on the province (30,000 bushels of corn and 60,000 sextarii of wine), he is to expend the fifth part on the poor persons who become clients of the heathen priests, and to employ the rest otherwise on charitable objects; in every town of the province, if possible, with the aid of private persons, to call into existence hospitals (ξενοδοχεῖα), not merely for heathens, but for everybody, and no longer to allow the Christians the monopoly of good works. He is to urge all the priests of the province by example and exhortation generally to maintain a religious walk, to avoid the frequenting of theatres and taverns, and in particular to frequent the temples diligently with their family and their attendants, or else, if they should not amend their ways, to depose them. It is a pastoral letter in the best form, only with the address altered, and with quotations from Homer instead of the Bible. Clearly as these arrangements bear on their face the stamp of heathenism already collapsing, and certainly as in this extent they are foreign to the earlier epoch, the foundation at any rate—the general superintendence of the chief priest of the province over matters of worship—by no means appears as a new institution.