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Books > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
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Worshippers of the Gods - Debating Paganism in the Fourth-Century Roman West (Hardcover)
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Worshippers of the Gods - Debating Paganism in the Fourth-Century Roman West (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity
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Worshippers of the Gods tells how the Latin writers who witnessed
the political and social rise of Christianity rethought the role of
traditional religion in the empire and city of Rome. In parallel
with the empire's legal Christianisation, it traces changing
attitudes toward paganism from the last empire-wide persecution of
Christians under the Tetrarchy to the removal of state funds from
the Roman cults in the early 380s. Influential recent scholarship
has seen Christian polemical literature-a crucial body of evidence
for late antique polytheism-as an exercise in Christian
identity-making. In response, Worshippers of the Gods argues that
Lactantius, Firmicus Maternus, Ambrosiaster, and Ambrose offered
substantive critiques of traditional religion shaped to their
political circumstances and to the preoccupations of contemporary
polytheists. By bringing together this polemical literature with
imperial laws, pagan inscriptions, and the letters and papers of
the senator Symmachus, Worshippers of the Gods reveals the changing
horizons of Roman thought on traditional religion in the fourth
century. Through its five interlocking case studies, it shows how
key episodes in the Empire's religious history-the Tetrarchic
persecution, Constantine's adoption of Christianity, the altar of
Victory affair, and the 'disestablishment' of the Roman
cults-shaped contemporary conceptions of polytheism. It also argues
that the idea of a unified 'paganism', often seen as a capricious
invention, actually arose as a Christian response to the eclectic,
philosophical polytheism in vogue at Rome.
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