Julius Firmicus Maternus
Sicilian writer of senatorial rank who produced two works in different halves of his life. While still a pagan he wrote the Mathesis, the largest astrological handbook surviving from antiquity. After his conversion to Christianity he wrote On the Error of Profane Religions, an appeal to the emperors Constantius II and Constans to abolish pagan worship, which preserves details of the mystery cults found in no other source.
Biography
Julius Firmicus Maternus was born at Syracuse in Sicily and belonged to the senatorial class. His writings show a man trained in rhetoric and law who had practiced as an advocate before the courts, and who later withdrew from that work. Almost everything known about him comes from his own two books; no ancient biographer records his life, and even the years of his birth and death are unknown. He was active in the second quarter of the fourth century, under the sons of Constantine.
While still a pagan Firmicus wrote the Mathesis, a handbook of astrology in eight books composed around 334 to 337 AD and dedicated to Lollianus Mavortius, a Roman official of consular rank. It is the fullest treatment of astrology to survive from the ancient world, gathering Greek and Roman doctrine on the planets, the signs, and the casting of horoscopes into a single Latin work. The book presents astrology as a discipline and defends it as a source of knowledge about human life.
At some point after finishing the Mathesis, Firmicus converted to Christianity. Nothing in the record explains how or when the change came about, and he does not describe it himself. What survives is the contrast between the two works: the author who had systematized the reading of the stars became, in his second book, an opponent of the very piety and ritual he had once shared.
His Christian work, On the Error of Profane Religions (De Errore Profanarum Religionum), was written around 343 to 350 AD and addressed to the emperors Constantius II and Constans. In it Firmicus urges the rulers to use the power of the state to suppress pagan cult. To make his case he describes the rites and formulas of the mystery religions of his day, among them the cults of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras, quoting their sacred sayings in order to refute them. Because he reports these details to attack them, the book has become the best surviving source for the liturgy of the late mystery cults, preserving passwords and ceremonies recorded nowhere else.
Nothing is known of Firmicus's later life. On the Error of Profane Religions survives in a single manuscript held in the Vatican, and that copy is defective at the start, so the opening leaves of the work are lost. The two books together are the whole of what he left, and the whole of what can be said about him.
Why Maternus Matters
Firmicus is the only ancient author from whom both a major pagan religious work and a Christian polemic survive. The Mathesis and On the Error of Profane Religions bracket a conversion, so that a single writer can be read on both sides of the line between the old cults and the church. This makes his career an unusually direct record of a Roman intellectual moving from one religious world to the other, documented not by a later biographer but by the man's own two books.
On the Error of Profane Religions preserves material about the mystery religions that would otherwise be lost. In setting out to refute the cults of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras, Firmicus quotes their ritual formulas and describes their ceremonies, and several of these he alone records. Historians of ancient religion read the work less for its argument than for the evidence it keeps, since it is often the only witness to how these cults spoke of their own rites.
The book is also the first surviving Christian appeal to the Roman state to suppress paganism by law. Earlier apologists had asked for toleration or argued against pagan belief; Firmicus, writing to reigning emperors who were themselves Christian, asks them to use imperial power to end pagan worship outright. The argument that the state should act against the old religion, which later periods would take up, appears here in one of its earliest forms.
A notable part of the work is the section in which Firmicus takes up the "symbols" and sacred sayings of the cults and sets them beside Christian signs and sacraments. Here he treats the passwords and tokens of the mysteries directly, comparing them with Christian usage in order to distinguish the two. This part of the book carries much of its value as a source, because it records the cult formulas in the act of contrasting them with the practice of the church.
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