Martyrs or Laborers? Sources and Scholarship on Circumcellions

Abstract

The issue (or even the riddle) of Circumcellions, rebels and persecutors of Roman landowners and Catholic priests, had long attracted the scholarly attention. Deriving their views from the writings of Optate, Augustine and later authors, and also from a fragment of the Theodosian Code, modern historians perceive Circumcellions in different ways. Their treatment depends much on their actual research field and their source priority. For example, Ch. Saumagne, preferring the legal source, considered Circumcellions as a certain social group - agricultural wage laborers; some later scholars, like T. Büttner and E. Tengström, based their research on the same concept. Others regarded Circumcellions as an issue of the Church history and precisely of the Donatist schism (W. H. C. Frend). Modern historians view the stories of Optate and Augustine from more unexpected perspective: as a form of rural Christianity (L. Dossey) and popular asceticism (B. Pottier). B. Shaw made an attempt to revive Saumagne’s theory. Today our notion of Circumcellions is more complex. They seem to be a certain mixture of lower-class rural population and a certain form of popular Christianity, manifesting itself in ways proper for that crowd: asceticism, martyrdom, and “righteous” violence.