Beginning in 302 CE, the four emperors of the Roman tetrarchy collectively issued a series of edicts that decreed severe penalties against the Empire’s Manichaean and Christian subjects. These decrees constituted the most widespread and systematic religious persecutions in imperial history. In this chapter, I explore these edicts and their consequences in the context of a global history of genocide. I argue that, while these persecutions may not satisfy modern juristic definitions of genocide, which tend to emphasize physical violence, they nonetheless suggest that the emperors aimed to eliminate alternative systems of knowledge, to remove particular religio-cultural populations from the civic collective, and to prevent these groups’ social reproduction. I suggest the tetrarchy’s edicts comprise something akin to a “cultural genocide” by the Roman government. I conclude with some brief reflections on the use of cultural genocide as an interpretive tool for understanding ancient acts of community violence.

Genocide has a way of imposing silence. Part of its purpose is to erase history, and human voices. This series of three volumes aims to contribute to breaking the silence that so often follows genocidal outbreaks. These volumes attempt to document and understand this global phenomenon. The term “genocide,” as a way of describing the “practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups,” was coined in 1943, when Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) penned the preface to his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Five years later the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the Genocide Convention. But Lemkin considered genocide to have much older roots. He had set about writing – but did not complete before his death – a three-volume history of genocide from ancient times, in which he argued that the phenomenon had “followed humanity throughout history.”

In the postscript, I remark on the tenacity of the narratives of regional linguistic identity that were produced in the early twentieth century and the way in which elite justifications for a homogenous, Odia-speaking community came to transcend the sites of their production to take a central place in the nation’s imagination. Through a discussion of contemporary adivasi activism as part of the Maoist movement, adivasi opposition to economic liberalization as well as the controversies about Christian conversion of adivasis in Odisha, I show how the Odia appropriation of adivasi pasts remains the central problematic through which the struggles between the Odia mainstream majority and the adivasi minority are enacted.