Silvanus tried before Zenophilus, AD 320

**The trial that turned an archive of confiscation into evidence against the confiscated.**

In 320 the deacon Nundinarius, in dispute with his bishop, brought Silvanus of Cirta before the consular **Zenophilus** on the charge that he had himself been a *traditor* — one who handed over the scriptures in 303. **The minutes of that hearing are the *Gesta apud Zenophilum*, and they quote the 303 minutes verbatim.**

## Why this document is doubly valuable

**It preserves the earlier record.** The inventory of the church at Cirta — the chalices, the lamps, the eighty-two women's tunics and forty-seven pairs of women's boots — survives **because it was read out in evidence seventeen years later.** The archive holds AD 303 as its own event, and that record exists only through this one.

**And it catches a party in its own claim.** The Donatists' position was that clergy who surrendered scripture had forfeited their orders. Silvanus was a Donatist bishop, and the charge was that he had done exactly that. **The evidence for it was the state's own paperwork**, produced by a Catholic deacon in a Roman court.

## What the archive states carefully

**The transmission is partisan.** The *Gesta* survive appended to the manuscripts of **Optatus**, an anti-Donatist writer with every reason to preserve a document damaging to Donatism. That does not make the minutes false — they are court records, and their internal detail is mundane in the way forgeries are not — but the archive records that **the reason they survive is that someone found them useful.**

And the charge itself was never conclusively resolved in the sources. **The archive records the accusation, the evidence produced, and the interest of the man who preserved it, and does not deliver a verdict.**