Miltiades

Pope Miltiades (also known as Melchiades) was Bishop of Rome from 311 until his death in January 314. The Liber Pontificalis describes him as African by origin (natione Afer), but it gives no birthplace or birth year, and that work is only partly reliable for the personal backgrounds of the earliest popes; modern scholarship therefore treats his African origin as traditional rather than independently proven. His name is Greek in form. He succeeded Pope Eusebius, who had been sent into exile in Sicily during conflicts over the treatment of Christians who had lapsed in persecution and who died there in 310 or 311. After a vacancy, Miltiades was chosen bishop of Rome in 311, in the last years of the Diocletianic persecution and during the civil wars that ended with Constantine’s control of the western empire.

His short pontificate coincided with the legal turning point for the Roman church. In 311 the emperor Galerius issued an edict of toleration. In Rome the usurper Maxentius had already eased pressure on Christians and is reported to have restored confiscated church property. Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in October 312, and the agreement of Constantine and Licinius in 313 commonly called the Edict of Milan, confirmed toleration and provided for restitution of buildings and goods. Later tradition links Miltiades with the imperial grant of the Lateran palace (associated with the house of Fausta) as a papal residence and with the beginnings of the Lateran basilica as the cathedral of Rome. The exact date of those grants is debated, and many Constantinian endowments are more securely attached in the sources to his successor, Sylvester I; what is clear is that the bishop of Rome emerged during these years from a persecuted community into a publicly recognized institution.

The best-documented act of his episcopate is his handling of the Donatist dispute in North Africa. After Caecilian’s election as bishop of Carthage, opponents who would be called Donatists alleged that he had been consecrated by a traditor (one who had handed over the scriptures in persecution) and set up a rival bishop. They appealed to Constantine, who referred the case to Miltiades. In October 313 Miltiades presided at a synod in the Lateran, with a group of Italian and Gallic bishops (ancient notices often speak of nineteen besides the pope). The synod acquitted Caecilian and condemned Donatus. The Donatists rejected the result and appealed again to the emperor, who then called a larger council at Arles in 314; Miltiades died before that council met. The episode shows both the new public role of the Roman see under a sympathetic emperor and the limits of Roman arbitration when a schismatic party refused to accept it. Optatus of Milevis and Augustine of Hippo later used the 313 synod in their anti-Donatist writings.

Miltiades died in Rome in January 314, on 10 or 11 January according to the surviving notices, and was buried in the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia. He was succeeded by Pope Sylvester I. In later centuries his relics were translated; they have been associated with the church of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome. He has been venerated as a saint from antiquity, without a medieval or modern process of canonization. In the Roman tradition his feast was long kept on 10 December; after the 1969 reform of the General Roman Calendar he remains in the Roman Martyrology on that date rather than as a universal obligatory memorial. Almost nothing independently verifiable survives about his family, education, or routine pastoral work. His historical importance rests on the coincidence of his brief reign with the Constantinian settlement and on the Lateran synod of 313 in the opening phase of the Donatist schism.