1. Statius, Thebaid 10.899ff. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
2. If we’re wrong, the novel Gods Behaving Badly (New York, 2007) by Marie Phillips imagines their story: overthrown and disregarded, aging ex-celebrities, they live more or less incognito in London. A promised film will relocate them to New York and cast Sharon Stone as Aphrodite.
3. The latest survey of the whole story, concise and spare, two volumes, 1,000 pages, $250, is outstanding, and it can offer barely a snapshot: M. Salzman, ed., The Cambridge History of Religions in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 2013). A fuller scholarly inventory is being built by the Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum (Los Angeles, 2004).
4. Just in English: S. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Roman Empire (London, 1899); A. Alföldi, The Conversion of Constantine and Pagan Rome (Oxford, 1948) and A Conflict of Ideas in the Late Roman Empire (Oxford, 1952); A. Momigliano, ed., The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1963); J. Geffcken, The Last Days of Greco-Roman Paganism (New York, 1978; trans. from German original of 1920); and P. Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
5. E.g., Lawrence Wright, Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom & the Water Closet, and of Sundry Habits, Fashions & Accessories of the Toilet, Principally in Great Britain, France, & America (London, 1960).
1. Ovid, Fasti 2.131ff.
2. P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, 1988), reveals Augustus’s mind by showing how he consciously used the visual arts to consolidate his power and make his story prevail.
3. Standard study: B. Schnegg-Köhler, Die augusteischen Säkularspiele (Munich, 2002).
4. Athletic triumph in Fenway Park in 1918 and 2013 and none between had something of the flavor, as does the singing of the Mallard song once a century at All Souls’ College, Oxford.
5. E. Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford, 1957), 364–82, for his study of the carmen saeculare; see now M. Putnam, Horace’s Carmen Saeculare (New Haven, 2000).
6. G. S. Aldrete, “Hammers, Axes, Bulls, and Blood: Some Practical Aspects of Roman Animal Sacrifice,” Journal of Roman Studies 104 (2014), is astute and even entertaining in working through the gorier bits of this procedure.
7. Colleagues who very much prefer to remain anonymous observe that the absence of leavening would produce something perhaps flatter and drier, like a galette in the original sense; one even suggests a comparison to Cheez-Its. Cupcakes would have done the job perfectly.
8. Not only the impertinent will think of The Dinner Party of Judy Chicago as a modern equivalent for its forthright celebration of womanhood in ritual.
9. This may be our earliest surviving mention of the seven hills of Rome, a more modest and apposite name than the “mountains” or “summits” or “citadels” commonly spoken of before.
10. Zosimus, New History 2.1–7.
1. Plutarch, Cicero 49.
2. Plutarch, Cicero 19.
3. Cicero, Laws 2.15–21 for these quotations.
4. Ammianus 21.1.14; he’s remembering something from Cicero’s The Nature of the Gods 2.12, where it is the Stoic speaking, not Cicero.
5. Cicero, Academica posteriora 1.9.
1. I follow Michael Lipka, Roman Gods: A Conceptual Approach (Leiden, 2009); for a measured review by D. Quinn see Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2010.5.48. I have adopted and expanded Lipka’s taxonomic approach here.
2. Franz Cumont, Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain (Paris, 1906), was the classic statement, by a very great scholar.
3. Rilke, Duino Elegies 1.7; Acts 17.23ff. The Christian deity is remarkably without a proper name himself. To many an ancient, a god named God would seem as odd as a dog named Dog.
4. Caesar, Gallic War 6.13ff.
5. E. Sanzi, Iuppiter Optimus Maximus Dolichenus: un “culto orientale” fra tradizione e innovazione: riflessioni storico-religiose (Rome, 2013).
6. Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (second edition, Cambridge, 1908), 164.
7. His most influential book may be his Homo Necans (Berkeley, Calif., 1983; orig. 1972: a witty title: “man the killer”), but his Greek Religion (Cambridge, Mass., 1985) is the standard survey. The passage here comes from his “Sacrifice, Offerings, and Votives,” in S. I. Johnston, ed., Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 325. I choose so eminent a scholar and cite so magisterial an article precisely to show that this easy slide into error is absolutely central to the way we have all learned to think about these subjects.
8. For Firmicus, G. Stroumsa, La Fin du Sacrifice (Paris, 2005), 179; his reviewer, M. Gaulin in Bryn Mawr Classical Review (2006.05.09).
9. H. Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley, Calif., 1971), and B. Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), explore Greek morality in this sense. Every generalization here is subject to exceptions, and so there were places and times when people wrestled with ideas of divine disciplinarians. Orphic religion, in particular, a breed of classical Greek practice we have learned much more about in recent years and whose tenets are still in hot scholarly debate, did seem to emphasize the underworld as a place of reward. Plato mocked Orphism (Republic 2.363c) by observing that their view seemed to assume that a life of eternal drunkenness was the chief blessing awaiting the just.
10. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 1.101; always an outlier and relatively little read in antiquity, Lucretius had a more interesting modern history. See G. Passanante, The Lucretian Renaissance (Chicago, 2011).
1. See, e.g., 1 Corinthians 8.
2. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/hindu-sacrifice-gadhimai-festival-nepal; consulted January 1, 2014.
3. On sacrifice, see Harrison’s Prolegomena and Burkert’s Homo Necans; new and important: F. S. Naiden, Smoke Signals for the Gods: Ancient Greek Sacrifice from the Archaic Through Roman Periods (Oxford, 2013); and Aldrete, “Hammers, Axes, Bulls, and Blood,” cited above on the ludi saeculares.
4. Sallustius, Concerning the Gods and the Universe 15–16; trans. A. D. Nock.
5. Isaiah 1.11–14 (King James Version).
6. Burkert, Homo Necans 7ff.
7. Lucian, On Sacrifices 9.
8. C. Bennett Pascal, “October Horse,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 85 (1981): 262–91.
9. Festus, On the Meaning of Words 178.
10. R. Duthoy, The Taurobolium (Leiden, 1969).
11. Prudentius, Peristephanon (“On the Crowns of Martyrs”), 10.1006–1050.
12. Tertullian, Apologeticum 7.
13. Plutarch, Themistocles 13.2–3, translated by J. Mikalson in his Herodotus and Religion in the Persian Wars (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), 78–79.
14. Pliny the Elder, Natural History 30.3.12.
15. For the site and its history and rituals, see C. M. C. Green, Roman Religion and the Cult of Diana at Aricia (Cambridge, 2007).
16. Servius Aen. 6.136, trans. C. M. C. Green.
17. For further history and reflections on this theme, see Stroumsa, La Fin du Sacrifice, and S. Bradbury, “Julian’s Pagan Revival and the Decline of Blood Sacrifice” Phoenix 49 (1995): 31–56.
18. P. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (New York, 1995), trans. from French original (Paris, 1981).
19. The best study of the practice documents its powerful survival among followers of Jesus: Ramsay MacMullen, The Second Church (Atlanta, 2009).
20. Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 10; Porphyry’s vegetarianism is outlined in his On Abstinence from Animal Food.
21. Quoted from an inscription in Didyma in Bradbury, “Julian’s Pagan Revival,” 336.
22. R. MacMullen, Roman Government’s Response to Crisis (New Haven, 1976); D. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay: AD 180–395 (London, 2004).
23. See again Potter (preceding note) and T. D. Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
24. A. Frantz, Late Antiquity, AD 267–700 (Princeton, 1988).
1. Livy 5.52.
2. J. Lightfoot, The Sibylline Oracles (Oxford, 2008); D. Potter, Prophecy and History in the Crisis of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1990).
3. I. Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique (Paris, 1984; rev. 2005), meticulously shows how the “liberal arts” in antiquity offered a discipline for would-be philosophers seeking to cleanse their minds of the confusions of the world of matter as preparation for spiritual ascent to union with the divine. “Liberal arts” in modern academic discourse have very little to do with those ancient roots.
4. Josephus, Against Apion 1.201–04. The Against Apion is Josephus’s defense of Judaism against the charges of Greco-Roman traditionalists that it is not a real religion. He argues for its greater antiquity and authenticity on quite traditionalist terms.
5. Of many studies, perhaps the best way into the magical thickets of antiquity is C. Faraone and D. Obbink, Magika Hiera (New York, 1991), supplemented by the texts translated in G. Luck, Arcana Mundi (2nd ed.; Baltimore, 2006). V. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, 1994), shows how the rise of Christianity not only did not derail but even reinforced these pratices.
6. See J. Gager, ed., Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (New York, 1992).
1. For the early Christian, to “believe in God” was not a matter of crediting the deity’s existence, but of expressing trust, reliance, and confidence in that deity’s saving power. C. Mohrmann, “Credere in Deum: sur l’interprétation théologique d’un fait du langue,” Mélanges J. de Ghellinck (Gembloux, 1951), 1.278ff.
2. The French priest Jean Meslier (d. 1724) is widely credited as the first outright proponent of disbelief in any and all gods. See A. C. Kors, Atheism in France 1650–1729, volume 1, The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (Princeton, 1990).
3. So the Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.2 (“Away with the atheists!”) depicts a common attitude, dated sometime between late-second and mid-third century (for the late dating, see now C. Moss, “On the dating of Polycarp,” Early Christianity 1 [2010]: 539–74).
4. Celsus as quoted in Origen, Contra Celsum 8.2 (translated by Henry Chadwick; Cambridge, 1953); all quotations from Celsus from this edition.
5. Heraclitus, fragment B5 (ed. Diels).
6. Herodotus 2.122.
1. See concisely Burkert, Greek Religion 115f; M. Scott, Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World (Princeton, 2014).
2. Pausanias 10.7ff.
3. Tacitus, Histories 4.81.84; Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris; the Christian Clement of Alexandria a few decades later corroborates their story.
4. Fantasies about the library at Alexandria are easier to come by than facts; L. Canfora, The Vanished Library (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), has a higher ratio of information to rumor than most other accounts. One common line of fantasy has Christian zealots destroying the library as a by-product of the destruction of the Serapeum. It is more likely that ordinary mischance and neglect had let it fade many years earlier. The death of the philosopher Hypatia in 415 (see M. Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria [Cambridge, Mass., 1996]) is also instanced as antipagan violence.
5. Maria Grazia Lancellotti, Dea Caelestis: studi e materiali per la storia di una divinità dell’Africa romana (Rome, 2010); see also the review at Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2011.09.48 by L. Grillo.
6. Augustine, City of God 2.4, 2.24.
7. For a concise picture in this spirit, see J. Collins in S. I. Johnston, Religions of the Ancient World, 181–89; see also S. Schwartz Imperialism and Jewish Society 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton, 2001).
8. A non-Jew in the region might have had a very different and less dramatic reading of that revolt and its outcome from the traditional Jewish one: see John Ma’s articles, “Relire les institutions des Séleucides de Bikerman,” in S. Benoist, ed., Rome, a City and Its Empire in Perspective (Leiden, 2012), 59–84, and “Notes on the Restoration of the Temple,” in R. Oetjen and F. X. Ryan, eds., Seleukeia: Studies in Seleucid History, Archaeology, and Numismatics in Honor of Getzel M. Cohen (Berlin, 2014).
9. That story is seen through the story of the Jewish books and their fate in Alexandria and beyond: T. Rajak, Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora (Oxford, 2009).
10. See again Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society.
1. See E. D. Digeser, A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution (Ithaca, 2012), and A. P. Johnson, Religion and Identity in Porphyry of Tyre (Cambridge, 2013).
2. The entry in Plotinus’s name in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus/) may suffice for most readers curious for an orientation. L. Gerson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge, 1996), is best then for those looking to go further.
3. J. P. Kenney, Mystical Monotheism: A Study in Ancient Platonic Theology (Hanover, N.H., 1991).
4. “[The gods] resided at a great distance from the One, who was their source at many removes” (Johnson, Religion and Identity 82).
5. See D. Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, Mass., 2010).
6. R. Lamberton, Homer the Theologian (Berkeley, Calif., 1986).
1. “Christ” more than “Jesus”: writers of this age refer to “Christ” or the compound “Jesus Christ” very much more often than they speak of “Jesus.” The narrative figure of the gospels receded behind the theological figure of interpretation. “Jesus” preponderates in the gospels, “Christ” takes the lead in Paul, but the trend grew much stronger still for many centuries.
2. Egypt is often exceptional in the Roman world as here: its wealth and the relative standing of its wealthy men remained much as before.
3. R. MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (New Haven, 1984), 50.
4. Herodian 5.6, with some paraphrase.
5. Hence the abundance of Christian stories of martyrdom and the paucity of evidence to suggest that such things happened very often at all. See now C. Moss, The Myth of Persecution (New York, 2013).
6. Digeser, A Threat to Public Piety, persuasively explores the philosophical backstory to this moment, seeing the influence of Porphyry, whom we have met before and will see again, in demonizing the Christians as part of his competing philosophical project; see also Johnson, Religion and Identity.
7. Lactantius, The Deaths of Persecutors 33.7–8: “The stench didn’t fill just the palace, but pervaded the whole city. And no wonder, since the places where feces and urine came out of him had merged into one opening. He was being devoured by worms and his body was melting into a stinking mass and he suffered unbearable pain. ‘He lifted up at once horrid cries to the stars, like the bellowing of a bull fleeing from the sacrifical altar.’” (The concluding quotation is Vergil’s rendition, Aeneid 2.222–24, of Laocoon’s death agonies.)
8. Lactantius, The Deaths of Persecutors 34.1–5.
1. Michael Sommer, “‘Sick not only in body…’: Apollo Grannus and the emperor enchanted,” unpublished paper at http://www.academia.edu/288221/Apollo_Grannus (as of 9 June 2014).
2. Panegyrici Latini 6.21.3ff. Translation here and below draws on C. E. V. Nixon and B. S. Rodgers, In Praise of Later Roman Emperors (Berkeley, Calif., 1994). T. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 36, insists that “it is not necessary to believe that Constantine ever saw such a vision,” missing the point. Constantine clearly had visited the shrine, a very public gesture, and was happy to have it known that the god had favored him and that he himself had been seen to resemble the god.
3. Panegyrici Latini 12.25.
4. Nixon-Rodgers, In Praise of Later Roman Emperors, 14.
5. Zosimus 29.5—the same historian who had reliable information about the ludi saeculares of Augustus’s time.
6. “By divine inspiration”: instinctu divinitatis, the word specific for imperial godliness again.
7. Lactantius, The Deaths of Persecutors 44. This symbol is a combination of the chi and rho letters that began the name of Christos in Greek, but as given in Lactantius, the appearance is that of a cross made up of vertical and horizontal crossbars (the X twisted to stand on one end) and the topmost bent around to look like an English P or Greek rho. Later versions will have the chi as an X shape and the rho imposed on it. The combination of letters may have been recognizable from other uses before Constantine, but none is securely identified as Christian (see note in A. Cameron’s translation of Eusebius’s Life of Constantine [Oxford, 1999], 210–12).
8. The senators were likely the quindecemviri sacris faciundis, still in business three hundred years after Augustus’s ludi saeculares.
9. Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.27ff.
10. The Theodosian Code (trans C. Pharr, Princeton, 1952), 9.16.3.
11. The Theodosian Code 16.10.2.
12. S. Bradbury, “Constantine and the Problem of Anti-Pagan Legislation in the Fourth Century,” Classical Philology 89 (1994): 120–39, makes a serious argument for accepting the evidence that I reject, following on and modifying the more vigorously credulous case made by T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 210. Barnes has renewed his case in his Constantine: Dynasty, Religion and Power in the Later Roman Empire (London, 2011), drawing in part on K. W. Wilkinson, “Palladas and the Age of Constantine,” Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009): 36–60, who redates to Constantine’s time verse complaining of antipagan terrorism. My own view is that the most that can be proven is that Constantine’s support for the new god unleashed outbursts of remarkably bad behavior by other followers of that god, but the issue will remain controversial.
13. F. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (Ithaca, 1977), shows in handsome detail what emperors actually did for a living.
14. Libanius, Oration 30.6.
15. Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle (Princeton, 2012), describes how a flood of wealth astonished the churches of the fourth and fifth centuries.
16. Those followers of Christ who were distressed by the materiality and anger of the god of the Jews and would either dispense with the writings of the Jews entirely or would make various provisions to choose which teachings they could accept. Acceptance of the Jewish past remained the predominant view, but the story is complex. See Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews (New York, 2008).
1. There is no entirely satisfactory history of the formation of Christian doctrine and its controversies in this period: the best are still written by scholars with too much invested in the consequences of the debates. The most traditional account in one volume is J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, volume 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago, 1971).
2. With common acceptance of the Old and New Testament books of what would come to be called the Bible, these debates drew on a wide variety of disparate texts; so e.g., Proverbs 8.22–29 was broadly agreed to be a text about the Christ who would come and thus a focus of debate (did it imply creation and subordination or eternal coexistence?) and a source of ammunition for debates very nearly equal in force to texts of Gospels or Paul.
3. Pope Benedict XVI sanctioned restoration of “consubstantial” from the long-used Latin consubstantialis; the importance assigned to the change is a mark of continuing uneasiness about getting this essential point unambiguously right.
4. For the dynamics of these processes, see R. MacMullen, Voting about God (New Haven, 2006).
5. Life of Constantine 2.63–72.
6. T. D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
7. R. Van Dam, The Roman Revolution of Constantine (Cambridge, 2009), 23ff, takes up this episode and documents the history of debate.
8. By the seventh century, the author of the Paschal Chronicle, devoutly Christian, thought it flattering to claim that Constantine had transferred to his new capital from the old the palladium, the same venerable image we saw Elagabalus trifling with.
1. Cicero, On His House 74.
2. I outlined the evidence and history in my “Paganus,” Classical Folia 31 (1977): 163–69, now at http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/paganus.html.
3. A handful of inscriptions on stone from earlier in the century show the first reappearances of the word. The first surviving writers are Filastrius of Brescia and Marius Victorinus, both Italian intellectual Christians.
4. Herodotus 2.52 thought theos came from the Greek for setting/establishing, and so made the theoi the givers of themis (law). The idea made perfect sense but, like a great many ideas that make perfect sense, did not happen to be true.
5. English “heathen” gets rewritten in popular imagination in a comically similar way. It comes from the Greek ethne through German Heide, but is often written of as though it were a “calque” on paganus from the highlands of Scotland, where a heath-dweller would be prone to polytheism just as a pagus-dweller might have been. It has been common to say that paganus had an extra charge of pejorative implication, something like “hick” or “rube,” but it’s now clear that we needn’t and shouldn’t draw that conclusion.
6. Self-identifying pagans are a much later development, indeed a modern invention. Michael York, Pagan Theology (New York, 2003), is a forthright statement of the claims of that approach. To my eye, modern pagans tend to mix together things nobody would have thought to combine until somebody else slapped the same label on them.
7. Analogous in a different way is the term jahiliyyah in Arabic, literally “ignorance,” but used specially of the religious condition of pre-Islamic Arabs, associated with idolatry.
8. P. Gay, The Enlightenment, volume 1: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York, 1966), tells the story of paganism’s rise to prestige; J. Fleming, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment (New York, 2013), makes the picture a little less inspirational.
1. Gore Vidal, Julian (New York, 1964): Vidal read widely and well in the ancient sources, and the book he wrote reflected the best current scholarship. Its picture of the period is partisan and old-fashioned now, but still well worth reading.
2. J. Bregman, Synesius of Cyrene, Philosopher-Bishop (Berkeley, Calif., 1982).
3. Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 3.20
4. Some think him the “Sallustius” who wrote Concerning the Gods and the Universe, which I quoted above on the issue of ancient attitudes to sacrifice.
5. Ammianus 22.10.7; “overwhelmed in eternal silence” comes very close to the language of the old Roman custom of damnatio memoriae, “condemnation of the memory,” when names of disgraced officeholders would be physically obliterated from stone inscriptions and every other record. This is strong stuff. R. Cribiore, Libanius the Sophist (Ithaca, 2013), 229–36, observes the reservations traditionalist intellectuals had with the same decree, seeing it as excessive. For contrast, Julian’s fellow student from Athens, Basil, in his “Address to Young Men on Greek Literature,” demonstrated by precept and example how a Christian would read the Greek classics—primly enough, but in a way that would not seem offputting to many Platonists and other philosophical readers untouched by Christianity.
6. Ammianus 23.1.
7. The scholars’ Julian wars are lively. For the standard view see G. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), and P. Athanassiadi, Julian and Hellenism: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1982), Freudian and romantic in interpretation respectively; the reformed view depends on J. Bouffartigue, L’Empereur Julien et la culture de son temps (Paris, 1992), and R. Smith, Julian’s Gods (London, 1995). A superb new reading of Julian comes from S. Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church (Berkeley, Calif., 2012), who offers a close comparison of Julian and his fierce Christian rival, acquaintance, and critic Gregory Nazianzen, emphasizing how much the two had in common in their contest to be seen as the legitimate interpreter of the heritage of Greek thought.
1. Samuel Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (London, 1906), 166.
2. The collapse occurred over the last generation. See my “‘The Demise of Paganism,” Traditio 35 (1979): 45–88, and “The Career of Virius Nicomachus Flavianus,” Phoenix 32 (1978): 129–43; for full current treatment, see Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (New York, 2011).
3. Best now: C. Sogno, Q. Aurelius Symmachus: A Political Biography (Ann Arbor, 2006).
4. See J. Matthews, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court AD 364–425 (Oxford, 1975); for a long time, moderns took the family of the Anicii as paragons of lineage and dignity; see now A. Cameron, “Anician Myths,” Journal of Roman Studies 102 (2012): 133–71.
5. Cameron, Last Pagans, is more skeptical than even I about some of the elements of the traditional narrative that I retain here.
6. Symmachus’s words appear in his Relatio 3.10, cf. Augustine, Soliloquies 1.13.23, “sed non ad eam [sapientiam] una via pervenitur” (“not by a single path does one arrive at wisdom”) regretted by him in his old age at Reconsiderations 1.4.3; the other echo appears at True Religion 28.51. Plato likely to become a Christian: True Religion 3.3.
7. N. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan (Berkeley, Calif., 1994).
8. Ambrose, Letter 17.4.
9. Letter 17.16.
10. Letter 18.1.
11. R. Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City 312–1308 (Princeton, 1980): Constantine’s basilica in honor of Saint Peter stood where the present basilica rises, but was on a much more modest scale.
1. N. Lenski, The Failure of Empire (Berkeley, Calif., 2002).
2. O’Donnell, Ruin of the Roman Empire (New York, 2008), 87–88.
3. No sharp line separates the period we speak of as Roman from that we call Byzantine, but this effective confinement of the emperor to capital and palace makes 395 one good place to draw the line. Justinian’s reign of ruinous grandeur (527–565) is another.
4. Jason BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma (Philadelphia, 2009–, two volumes with a third on the way), has made this point well. The use may have originated in Africa a few years earlier, among the faction that Augustine would come to lead: see my Augustine: A New Biography (New York, 2005), 358n.
5. Scholars debate just how much violence there was and how much credit it deserves for turning practice and sentiment permanently away from the old ways; MacMullen’s Christianizing the Roman Empire made it impossible to think any longer of a mainly benign and voluntary “triumph” of Christianity.
6. J. F. Matthews, Western Aristocracies 110–11, 140–44.
7. Theodosian Code 16.10.12pr.
8. R. MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire 59ff.
9. The best account to date is K. Harl, “Sacrifice and Pagan Belief in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Byzantium,” Past and Present 128 (August 1990): 7–27.
10. Jerome, Letter 107; M. Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).
11. R. von Haehling, Die Religionszugehörigkeit der hohen Amtsträger des Römischen Reiches seit Constantins I. Alleinherrschaft bis zum Ende der Theodosianischen Dynastie: 324–450 bzw. 455 n. Chr. (Bonn, 1978).
12. Jörg Rüpke, Fasti sacerdotum: A Prosopography of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian Religious Officials in the City of Rome, 300 BC to AD 499 (Oxford, 2008), catalogs every known holder of traditional priesthoods over eight centuries to the year 500. After 400, Albinus and Longinianus, attested no later than 406, are the only two listed.
13. See L. J. Thompson, The Role of the Vestal Virgins in Roman Civic Religion (Lewiston, N.Y. 2010).
1. See again my “Demise of Paganism,” Cameron, The Last Pagans, and D. Boin, “A Hall for Hercules at Ostia and a Farewell to the Late Antique ‘Pagan Revival,’” American Journal of Archaeology 114 (2010): 253–66. We respond particularly to an influential article built on slight evidence: H. Bloch, “A New Document of the Last Pagan Revival in the West,” Harvard Theological Review 38(1945): 199–244.
2. Posthumously condemned for his revolt, Flavianus was rehabilitated almost forty years later at the request of his son, by then well along in his own dignified career, and with the approval of the emperors Valentinian III and Theodosius II: see (with more “paganism” than I would accept) C. W. Hedrick Jr., History and Silence (Austin, 2000).
3. Carmen contra paganos, ed. T. Mommsen, “Carmen codicis Parisini 8084,” Hermes (1870): 350–63; the quotation is from lines 91–111 (my translation).
4. Ammianus 27.9.8.
5. Jerome, Against John 8.
6. Cameron, Last Pagans 273–319.
7. M. Salzman, On Roman Time: The Codex-Calendar of 354 (Berkeley, Calif., 1990).
8. Claudian, Carmina minora 32, “de Salvatore.”
9. The “golden age” doesn’t quite fit in a Christian version of history but is a traditional, indeed trite, image in classical Latin poetry.
10. A. Cameron, Claudian (Oxford, 1970).
11. R. Shorrock, The Myth of Paganism: Nonnus, Dionysus and the World of Late Antiquity (London, 2011).
12. There is still a tendency among Byzantinists to seek evidence of underground pagan sentiments across many centuries, but a clearer understanding is slowly emerging: see A. Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium (Cambridge, 2008).
13. Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990); see also my Augustine: A New Biography, 171ff.
14. S. Bradbury, Severus of Minorca: Letter on the Conversion of the Jews (Oxford, 1996).
15. See my Augustine: A New Biography, 296–300, on the origins of the doctrine.
16. See P. Brown, The Body and Society (New York, 1988).
1. Survival happened (see again Harl, chapter 16, n.9) but survival is not always easy to interpret, as in a letter by a late-fifth-century pope about the “Lupercalia,” on which see N. McLynn, “Crying Wolf: the Pope and the Lupercalia,” and N. McLynn and J. North, “Postscript to the Lupercalia,” in Journal of Roman Studies 98 (2008): 161–81.
2. Augustine, Letters 90, 91, 103, 104; see my Augustine: A New Biography 184ff. Things got uglier in Sufes, another modest city in north Africa, when local Christians in 399 had torn down a statue of Hercules; in the ensuing riot, sixty people were killed. In his angry Letter 50, Augustine says he will restore the statue if the city fathers can restore all those lives. We don’t hear anything of the other side in that case, but on Augustine’s own evidence have to assign the origin of the violence to Christian action.
3. Augustine, Letter 103.
4. See now BeDuhn’s Augustine’s Manichean Dilemma, the best fresh work on Augustine’s life and conversion in at least twenty years.
5. Never? A decisive moment in his Confessions comes when he seeks divine guidance by opening a manuscript of Paul at random and letting the first passage on which his eyes fell speak to him. In later writings he shows bad conscience about this and deplores Christians adopting a practice familiar from ancient use with classical texts like the Aeneid. Compare Confessions 8.12.29 with Augustine’s Letter 55.20.37.
6. Augustine, Against Faustus 14.11.
7. Pliny the Younger, Letter 10.96.
8. MacMullen, The Second Church.
9. E. Rebillard, Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa 200–450 CE (Ithaca, 2012), is excellent on the diversity that persisted among Christians and between Christians and their neighbors, friends, and relatives.
10. The well-known Christian Latin writers before the late fourth century are few and relatively isolated: Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, Hilary of Poitiers.
11. That moment now has a sympathetic and vivid portrayal in Garry Wills, Font of Life: Ambrose and Augustine in Milan (New York, 2011). The following paragraphs draw on my Augustine: A New Biography.
12. P. Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (Madison, Wisc., 1992); many sermons survive from the period, east and west. The public speaker in Latin antiquity who left behind the largest number of surviving orations is Augustine; in Greek, John Chrysostom, the fifth-century bishop of Constantinople.
13. R. MacMullen, “The Preacher’s Audience,” Journal of Theological Studies 40 (1989): 503–11, impertinently and trenchantly asked whether that audience, given the modest size of church buildings, could contain very much more besides the best people and some of their retainers. It’s consequently a very open question just how many Christians actually went to church regularly.
14. M. Gleason, Making Men (Princeton, 1994), deftly reads the history of these performers as a narrative of Roman masculinity in anxiety and action.
15. The classic account is W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford, 1951), now magnificently complemented by B. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge, 2011).
1. For “barbarians,” the new arrivals in the Roman empire in this period were remarkable for having been converted decades earlier to the imperial religion, at a time when it was more Arian than Nicene; P. Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy (Cambridge, 1997), 235–76, shows how easily they fit in with the still-surviving communities of old-fashioned Latin Arianism even a century later.
2. G. O’Daly, Augustine’s City of God: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford, 1999), introduces the work and the scholarship; R. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine (Cambridge, 1969), views the issues more broadly. An older and very ambitious survey of the movement of ancient social thought culminating in Augustine is C. N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford, 1939).
3. Augustine, Letter 154.2.
4. O’Daly, City of God 22.28: “Cicero touched on this in his books about the Republic—you’d think he was just trifling rather than saying something seriously, for he brings back to life a dead man and makes him say things very similar to Plato’s arguments.”
5. In a way, O’Daly’s City of God is also Augustine’s Confessions writ large. The earlier book had told the story of an individual’s sin, redemption, and progress toward the afterlife and ended with a vivid anticipation of everlasting praise in heaven; City of God tells the same story about humankind, not just a single human.
6. O’Daly, City of God 19.21, picking up the argument from 2.21–24; see J. Adams: The Populus of Augustine and Jerome (New Haven, 1971).
7. O’Daly, City of God 4.4.
8. O’Daly, City of God 5.26, a passage some of Augustine’s friends have found embarrassing for its fawning enthusiasm.
9. The Czar of Russia, the Kaiser of Germany, and the Kaiser und König of Austria-Hungary all claimed the inherited prestige of the Roman Empire as their own, while the Ottoman sultan ruled the realm based in Constantinople that had emerged from late antiquity, with what we would now call a hostile takeover in 1453.
10. Cameron, Last Pagans 231–72.
11. For a sniffier aristocratic response, heavily veiled, see A. Cameron, “Rutilius Namatianus, St. Augustine, and the date of the De Reditu,” Journal of Roman Studies 57 (1967): 31–39.
12. I. Kajanto, “Pontifex Maximus as the Title of the Pope,” Acta Fennica 15 (1981): 37–52. See also Cameron, Last Pagans 51–56 and, in response, L. Cracco Ruggini, “‘Pontifices’: un caso di osmosi linguistica,” in P. Brown, R. Lizzi Testa, eds., Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire: The Breaking of a Dialogue (ivth–vith Century A.D.) (Zürich/Münster, 2011), 403–23.
1. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (London, 1920); R. Nisbet, The History of the Idea of Progress (New York, 1986).
2. E. Watts, “Justinian, Malalas, and the End of Athenian Philosophical Teaching in A.D. 529,” Journal of Roman Studies 94 (2004): 168–82; cf. his The Final Pagan Generation (Berkeley, Calif., forthcoming 2015).