Event · AD 384 · Rome and Milan — the Senate house and the court

The Altar of Victory petition, AD 384

Symmachus petitions for the Altar of Victory — Ambrose answers, and the Senate’s last pagan appeal fails

The Altar of Victory petition, AD 384 — illustration 1
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The Altar of Victory petition, AD 384 — illustration 1

The Altar of Victory petition, AD 384 — illustration 1Public domain · Commons

**Two documents, argued against each other, both surviving — and the archive holds the reply as a text and the plea as its occasion.**

The Altar of Victory had stood in the Senate house since Augustus. Constantius II removed it in 357; Julian restored it; **Gratian removed it again in 382**, along with the state subsidies, the revenues of the Vestals and the priestly colleges — and refused even to receive the senators' deputation. **He also renounced the title *pontifex maximus*.** In 384 the Senate tried again, and **Quintus Aurelius Symmachus**, prefect of the city, put the case in his third *Relatio*.

## The plea

**Twenty short paragraphs, addressed to three emperors** — Valentinian, Theodosius and Arcadius — and argued not from theology but from custom, prosperity and the record of the Roman past. Its most quoted sentence is the one the fourth century is remembered by: ***uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum*** — “by one road alone men cannot come to so great a mystery.”

**The argument is conservative, not confessional.** Symmachus asks that the ancestral rites be left as they were found, and warns that the state's fortune was bound up with them. **He does not attack Christianity**, and the archive notes that: the Senate's last public case for the old religion is a plea for continuity, not a counter-creed.

## The answer

**Ambrose replied twice** — Letter 17 before he had seen the petition, demanding to see it and warning the emperor that granting it would be sacrilege; **Letter 18 after, answering Symmachus paragraph by paragraph.** He turns the appeal to the past against itself: Rome changed her rites before now, and prosperity did not follow the altars. **He also raises the stakes to the emperor personally**, telling a Christian prince what his communion depends on.

**And there was a counter-petition.** Ambrose could point to Christian senators who denied that the Senate had spoken for them — a claim about the composition of the House itself, and the point on which the plea failed.

## ⚠ Three cautions the record states

**The petition failed, but the altar's fate is not certain.** Symmachus's plea was rejected in 384; **whether the altar was ever returned to the Senate house afterwards is not established**, and the archive does not assert an ending it cannot document.

**The archive holds one side as a text and the other by report.** Ambrose's letters are in this library; **Symmachus's *Relatio* is not** — it is quoted here from the standard Latin, with the translation the archive's own.

**And the debate outlived the decision by twenty years.** Prudentius answered Symmachus in verse in about 402, and Libanius had made the pagan case in the East in the same year as the *Relatio*. **The archive records the exchange as the opening of a long argument, not as its conclusion.**

The sources for this event

Every source the record rests on, with what it says and what it cannot carry.

Ambrose of Milan, Letters 17 and 18

c. AD 384

Letters 17 and 18 (to Valentinian II)

[**Letter 17** is written before Ambrose has seen the petition: he demands a copy, and tells the young emperor that to restore the altar would be to make him a party to sacrifice — with his standing in the church at issue. **Letter 18** answers the *Relatio* section by section: that Rome had changed her rites before and prospered; that the Vestals' privileges are not a measure of piety; that the appeal to antiquity proves nothing, since **antiquity itself changed.** ⚠ **The bishop is answering a document he obtained by demanding it**, and the archive notes the asymmetry: one party had the emperor's ear as a matter of course.]

*The Letters of Ambrose* — held in this library. English: H. de Romestin, NPNF 2nd ser. 10 (1896), public domain. ⚠ Letter 18 quotes Symmachus in order to refute him, so **the archive's access to the plea runs partly through its opponent.**

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Symmachus, Relatio 3 — the petition for the Altar of Victory

c. AD 384

Relatio 3, addressed to Valentinian II, Theodosius and Arcadius

“**Uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum.**” [“By one road alone men cannot come to so great a mystery.” Twenty paragraphs, addressed to three emperors, arguing from custom and the fortune of the state rather than from doctrine: that the rites under which Rome grew should be left as they were found, that the Vestals and the priesthoods should keep their revenues, and that **the ancestral practice of a city is not a thing a generation may cancel.** ⚠ Symmachus does not argue against Christianity; the archive records the plea as conservative rather than polemical, which is what makes its failure significant.]

**Not held in this library.** Latin: O. Seeck, *MGH Auctores antiquissimi* VI.1 (1883); the modern English of R. H. Barrow (1973) is in copyright. The rendering below is the archive's own.

Paulinus of Milan, The Life of Ambrose

c. AD 397

The Life of Ambrose

[The biography that frames Ambrose's career as a series of confrontations with power — the Altar of Victory, the basilica crisis of 386, Thessalonica in 390. **The archive uses it for sequence rather than for judgement**, and notes that its author served the man he is describing.]

*The Life of Ambrose* — held in this library, written c. AD 422 by Ambrose's own notary. ⚠ A memoir by a subordinate: hagiography in form, and used here only for the shape of the bishop's public interventions.

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Figures in this event (6)

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