UC Riverside

The social environment of the Carthage region of Africa Proconsularis at the conclusion and the aftermath of the Severus/Albinus civil war, was tense. Reprisals in the east after the Niger defeat (194) were severe, while loyalty was rewarded. Now (197), Gaul and Spain, which held many of Albinus’ loyalists, were undergoing reprisals, while senators in Rome, exposed by their correspondences, faced executions. Septimius Severus’s hometown was Leptis Magna, but Albinus haled from Hadrumetum only 70 miles (113 km) from Carthage. Many locals curried favor with the newly victorious African emperor, others feared him. At the same time, a persecution in Carthage inspired Tertullian to write: Ad Martyras, a tract of encouragement; Ad Nationes, to instruct and shore up Christians; and Apologeticum, written to local magistrates to initiate actual local social and political change. Tertullian, a member of the African elite, was aware of basic political and legal norms of local rule; he was also aware of the current crisis, and that striking changes underway across the empire. He wrote Apologeticum as a petition to the local magistrates who held jurisdiction as members of the Carthage city council, to move them toward tolerance of the illicit cult. No formal imperial law forbade Christianity specifically, including rescripts, and authority to allow local cult veneration lay with the local Ordo of the city. To this end, Tertullian repurposed several previous arguments made by previous apologists (including himself), shaping them rhetorically toward engendering tolerance by non-believing, and otherwise non-interested pagans. His final product does not resemble a standard Christian apology, nor a legal court case, but follows the rhetorical norms of a positive deliberative argument to convince a group in power to change its stance toward local Christians. No evidence exists that he ever delivered this tract to the Carthage City Ordo. However, he wrote it with an audience in mind made up of Roman-African elite council members, themselves enmeshed in the current turbulent milieu, who had the power to allow local private Christian veneration, to convince the magistrates to change their stance toward the illicit Christian cult.