Lizzi-Testa Rita (ed.) The Strange Death of Pagan Rome: Reflections on a Historiographical Controversy

Brepols Publishers, 2014. — 198 p. — (Giornale Italiano di Filologia - Bibliotheca 16).An extended and multiperspective critical review of Alan Cameron's monumental 2011 The Last Pagans of Rome.The end of paganism in antique Rome strongly involves the nature of the relations between pagans and Christians in the fourth century AD. The historical paradigm of conflict has been disseminated by scholars as the Hungarian András Alföldi, who in 1934 presented a Christian Constantine in irreconcilable conflict with a pagan Rome, and by H. Bloch, who consolidated the idea of a conflictual model in which the aristocracy of Rome, faced with a tightening of measures against traditional cults, realized a real ‘pagan revival’ and led against Theodosius I «the last pagan army of the ancient world». This model was subjected to a massive critique by Alan Cameron in his The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford 2011), but in less than two years' time Cameron’s publication has aroused a strong response, especially on the part of European scholars, and the debate has gained new, effervescent relevance.This volume collects the reflections mainly of Italian scholars, who do not not only take Alföldi’s and Bloch’s model as their dialectic reference, but rather Alan Cameron’s, which is the more insidious in its paradoxical nature. For the English scholar the concept of conflict is a pure historiographical construct because no real pagans remained in Rome when Theodosius issued laws against paganism. They were not pagan but classical élites, people totally soaked in classical culture, who accepted Christianity when it became compatible with classical culture and the imperial institutions. In his monumental book, Alan Cameron argues his position through learned demonstrations and the review of a vast amount of literary, archaeological, epigraphic and even artistic documentation. Nevertheless, much of this evidence can be read again from very different perspectives, and this is what the contributors to this volume try to do.