ABSTRACT
Although the scope of imperial persecution of Christians was more limited in Late Antiquity than scholars long envisioned, it was nonetheless troubling and disruptive to those who lived through it. Indeed, the stories that Christians told themselves about the experience of state violence suggest that its rending of normative social bonds and social expectations could be as traumatic as the torture and execution of physical bodies. Focusing on late Roman Africa, Conant argues that the choices Christians made about how to remember the Great Persecution of 303–4 CE reinforced the trauma of that experience for generations to come.
