I'd say both measures had less to do with 'traditional' religion or morality than with regulating the relations between the state, society and the individual. The reasons behind the various persecutions of Christians are debatable (and therefore very interesting!), mainly because most of the evidence for them comes from Christian writers - it does seem pretty clear, though, that Decius' edict on sacrifice was not specifically aimed at Christians, or at least was intended to involve everyone, whatever their spiritual persuasion. The assorted libelli found in Egypt and elsewhere testify that all citizens were required to sacrifice and get a certificate to prove it.
Previous to this, there had been no mandate for obligatory participation in religious rituals - actually 'cult acts' - and religion was seen as a matter of individual conscience (this is a generalisation, of course, but in principal this is how things seem to have worked). It has been suggested that Decius' edict was a new form of the traditional 'supplicatio', a sacrifice to the Gods to appeal for help in an unsettled time. Decius was an Illyrian, a soldier and an imperial adminstrator, and his more bureaucratic, 'militaristic' conception of the ordering of the state, and of religious observance, can be seen as part of the steady transformation of the Roman state from Principiate to Dominate. In other words, the edict was attempt to bring religion into the all-encompassing field of state power.
J.B Rives, in his article 'The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire' (JRS vol. 89, 1993) suggests that the edict was an aspect of the drive for unity in state religion that runs throughout the 3rd century - from Elagabalus' and Aurelian's attempts to institute a 'state cult' of Sol Invictus, through to the eventual adoption of the (already very hierarchical and centralised) Christianity by Constantine - a replacement of the old forms of individual and provincial worship, the mass of cults and local dieties, with a bureaucratically organised and central 'Roman religion'. I quote from the article:
Quote:Decius' decree on universal sacrifice... was in some ways the religious analogue to Caracalla's citizenship decree; while the latter replaced the mishmash of local citizenships with a universal and theoretically homogenised citizenship, the former summarised the huge range of local cults in a single religious act that signalled membership in the Roman empire... This inevitably resulted in the identification and punishment of deviants... it was only when a 'Religion of the Empire' had been defined and its boundaries set that there could be a systematic persecution of people who transgressed those boundaries.
Rives, 'The Decree of Decius...' JRS 1993
That this decree was framed as a return to or restoration of 'traditional values' seems to follow the pattern of many attempts to reinforce state power - some aspect of society previously held to be self-evident, be it religious observance, morality, personal liberty, citizenship or whatever is declared to be under threat, or to have slipped into disregard or decadance, and the state must therefore step in to 'uphold' it by enacting legislation.
Regarding Augustus and divorce, something similar might have been going on - in this case being an aspect of the change from Republican to Principiate conceptions of the state, rather than Principiate to Dominate. Again, we have an official ordinance set up to regulate a matter previously determined (largely and in practice) by individual conscience and morality, and again this is done in the name of tradition.
- Nathan
