Βιβλία στὴν πυρά

 

Βλ. J. Hahn, Public Rituals of Depaganization in Late Antiquity, στό: A. Busine (ἐκδ.), Religious Practices and Christianization of the Late Antique City (4th - 7th cent.), Leiden 2015, σ. 133:

In Rome, such a procedure may have been applied for the first time in 181 BC when the senate ordered the burning of several newly discovered religious books, supposed to be writings of legendary king Numa, because they threatened to “dissolve religion”. Various other instances of public bookburning are on record in Republican and Imperial times. In all cases the public rite of burning was made a spectacle and represented a ritual at a chosen public place, sometimes underlined as a religious one by the use of ritually significant material for the pyre like fig wood, or the participation of sacrificial attendants to kindle it. The destruction of divinatory and astrological writings or magical handbooks of various sorts clearly required such distinctive ritual treatment in order to give a forceful public statement of power by the perpetrators, state officials, and to prove the powerlessness of the beliefs, prophesies, incantations and charms that were being burnt. Later, Diocletian proscribed Manichaean books as a threat to society and the same happened to Christian books after the edict which started the Great Persecution.

This well established tradition was kept up by Constantine. But his first documented measures now enforced decisions of church councils. Following the renewed condemnation of the Montanist and Gnostic sects by the council of Nicaea, he suppressed their assemblies and ordered that their books should be hunted out. The wording of his rescript commanding to search for and burn the books by the pagan Porphyry and Christian Arius has survived. However, most imperial initiatives against dangerous books after Constantine apply to magical works. More remarkable is that the initiative to search for ‘heretical’ as well as magical books passes over to the Christian ecclesiastical hierachy. And it is they who most often stage the books’ public burning..