This site uses cookies to offer you a better browsing experience.
Find out more on how we use cookies in our privacy policy.

 
Enter
Support The New Mithraeum The New Mithraeum is an independent, non-profit project dedicated to Mithraic studies, ancient religions and classical culture. Developed and maintained independently since 2007, the site exists without advertising, paywalls or institutional funding. If you have found value in its articles, interviews, photographs or database, please consider supporting the project with a contribution. Every contribution helps keep The New Mithraeum open, free and alive. Thank you.
Support us →
Tractatus

Oracle against the Christians under Galerius

Theophanes Confessor

In the eighteenth year of Diocletian’s reign, Galerius Maximianus, persuaded by the sorcerer Theoteknos, consulted demonic oracles in a cave and was urged to initiate the persecution of the Christians.
Galerius Valerius Maximianus, Roman emperor from 305 to 311.

Galerius Valerius Maximianus, Roman emperor from 305 to 311.
Unknown

[AM 5794]. In the eighteenth year of Diocletian’s rule, persuaded by the magician Theoteknos, Galerius Maximianus was sacrificing to demons. Having crept into his cave, Theoteknos gave him an oracle to raise a persecution of Christians. He invented the Memoirs of Christ and sent these everywhere as an insult and ordered school-teachers to teach them to their pupils.

—Theophanes the Confessor, Chronographia, AM 5794; ed. C. de Boor; trans. C. Mango & R. Scott.


Cumont argues that inasmuch as Galerius was an adherent of Mithraism the priest referred to must have been a priest of that religion. Theophanes, a Christian abbot in the second half of the seventh century, wrote a chronicle of events from the accession of the Emperor Diocletian, 277 A.D., to the year 8n, four or five years before his own death in banishment in Samothrace. The chronicle is arranged according to years anno mundi, of which the extract as given by Cumont is 5794.

—A. S. Geden, 1925

 
Back to Top