Other
Review of The Last Pagans of Rome
(2015)
Abstract
Alan Cameron, Emeritus Professor of Latin at Columbia University, has been one of the most prolific and distinguished scholars in Roman imperial and early Byzantine history and culture for the past fifty years. In his recent book The Last Pagans of Rome, he has produceda massive and career legacy-making tome which challenges a century and a half of scholarship that supported the idea that there was a strong and final “pagan revival” in the last decade of the fourth century led by a pagan elite at Rome which opposed the victory of Christianity in Roman society through political and military resistance, and literary and artistic propaganda. In almost 900 pages of very detailed and carefully argued discourse, he takes on some of the most important scholars in late antiquity studies from Mommsen, Alföldi and Bloch through Chastagnol, Paschoud and Bleckmann to Barnes, Salzman and Ando, and tries to overturn--or, at least, alter--some long held perceptions about the persistence of paganism in the late Roman Empire.
Disciplines
Publication Date
2015
Citation Information
Book Review of Alan Cameron, "The Last Pagans of Rome," Oxford, 2011, in The Ancient World, vol. 46, 1 (2015), pp. 97-99