The author has read the vast new literature in his fast-moving field. If the bare facts are familiar, this big (784 p.) book has special features. There were other tensions: in an age of great brutality, the Church preached love and at a time when the range of sexual practice was wider indeed, the Christian ideal was virginity while pagan cults had adherents, Christians made converts. A major problem for the Church was to find a way to deal with its many adherents who just went along when faced with the possibility of execution. Here the new Christianity and the old Paganism collided.
Hence, participation became a proof of loyalty that was, at times, insisted on. Pagan festivals were seen by the rulers as a way of maintaining the fabric of law and order.
Fox is a classicist and historian whose last book was the successful Alexander the Great (1980). It is soon placed side by side with the story of the emerging Christian movement, and the growing pains of the latter take center stage increasingly as the book moves to its conclusion around the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in A.D. This begins as a description of pagan cult, festival and oracle in the civic order of the Roman world.
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