ABSTRACT
The crowd which had watched St Perpetua and her companions die in the amphitheatre at Carthage had been hostile to them. Half a century later, the crowd which escorted St Cyprian to the scene of his martyrdom outside the capital had almost rioted in support of their bishop. For by the middle of the third century Christianity had become the dominant religion of the urban poor. During the half-century after the persecution in which Cyprian died, it became the religion of the poor in the depths of the countryside also. It spread from the romanized cities of the wheatlands to the olive country of the plains of Numidia and the semi-desert of the south, and to the tribal interior of the Mauretanias. Very little is known of this change, except that it was paralleled in other provinces in the Eastern Roman Empire, where, as in north-west Africa, it coincided with the survival of a native language; but, to judge from inscriptions, it occurred with startling suddenness. Within a generation, much of the African peasantry was converted from Saturn to Christ. The last securely dated dedication to Saturn in Numidia and the Mauretanias is for AD 272, less than a century after the deaths of the martyrs of Scilli.
