Hellenistic religion
After the death of the “philosopher-king” Marcus Aurelius in ad 180, his son Commodus became emperor, and a period of political instability began. The dominant feature of the concluding period of Hellenistic influence—and shortly thereafter—was the rapid growth of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, culminating in the conversion to Christianity of the emperor Constantine in 313 and the religious legislation of the emperor Theodosius affirming in 380 the dogmas of the Christian Council of Nicaea—which had been convened in 325 under the auspices of Constantine—and prohibiting paganism in a decree of 392. In this period the various Hellenistic cults were victims of active hostilities, which were expressed through prohibition, acts of violence, and theological polemics between “pagans” and Christians (e.g., the pagan philosophers Maximus of Tyre and Celsus, and the Christian philosophical theologians Irenaeus, Tertullian, and St. Clement of Alexandria, all of the 2nd century); but there were also brief periods of Hellenistic revitalization. The Neoplatonic school (based on a complicated system of levels of reality) of the 3rd-century philosophers Plotinus and Porphyry represented the culmination of Hellenistic religious philosophy. The Syrian solar cults of Sol Invictus (the ... (200 of 3,806 words)Religion from Commodus to Theodosius I: ad 180–395