Primary source · Latin

The Gesta apud Zenophilum, with the Acts of Munatius Felix

Municipal and court records of Cirta; preserved in the appendix to Optatus of Milevis · The seizure 19 May 303; the trial 13 December 320

What this text is

Two Roman documents welded into one. The first is the municipal record of 19 May 303, when Munatius Felix, perpetual flamen and curator of Cirta, searched the church and then the lectors’ houses for Scriptures under Diocletian’s edict — naming the bishop, three presbyters, two deacons, four subdeacons, six gravediggers, six lectors, two laymen, two notaries and a public slave, and inventorying the church’s plate and clothing item by item. The second is the transcript of 13 December 320, when the deacon Nundinarius prosecuted Bishop Silvanus of Cirta before Domitius Zenophilus, consularis of Numidia, and had the acts of 303 read back into evidence. Between them they supply the fullest surviving picture of a provincial church’s staff, property and internal politics in the Great Persecution, and the documentary origin of the Donatist schism. The manuscript breaks off mid-examination of the subdeacon Januarius.

Public-domain translations

O. R. Vassall-Phillips, The Work of St Optatus against the Donatists (London, 1917)

Editions & scholarship

Critical editions and standard translations behind the text above.

Figures named in this text (48)

A court transcript. On 13 December 320 the consular Zenophilus sat at Thamugadi and put witnesses under oath about who had handed over the Scriptures during the persecution seventeen years earlier; the record includes the municipal inventory of the seizure at Cirta on 19 May 303. It is the most damaging document in the Donatist controversy precisely because it is neither side’s propaganda — it is the state’s own paperwork, and both parties had to argue around it.

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