The legate is mentioned in a passage of
Tertullian's
Address to Scapula Tertullus: during his governorship of
Cappadocia and supposedly angry at his wife's conversion to Christianity, he brought (in
Tertullian's words) "much ill to the Christians" there. His own
pagan religious views are expressed in a dedication stone from
York (
Eboracum) in which he is named as the benefactor of a freshly re-built
Roman temple dedicated to the god
Serapis.
Temple to Serapis at York , recording the rebuilding of a temple to
Serapis by the Legate of the 6th Legion The dedication bearing his name was found in 1770 in Toft Green,
York. A report in the 1775 edition of
Archaeologia reports its discovery: In August 1770, a stone was found in digging a cellar at York, at a place called the Friar's-Garden, one of the highest parts of the city. The workmen, in their progress, came to the foundation of an old building of Roman brick, the mortar or cement of which, was so hard as not to be penetrable by the Sharpest tools, the bricks breaking before the mortar... In digging the ground a little further, within the segment of the circle abovementioned, the men found a large gritstone, three feet long, two feet one inch broad, and eight inches thick. The stone inscription reads: To the holy god Serapis Claudius Hieronymianus, legate of the Sixth Legion Victrix, built this temple from the ground.
Severus is known to have been a prominent follower of
Serapis; Hieronymianus was thus demonstrating his close connection to the Emperor and his
Romanitas. ==References==