Piercing the mysteries
Peter Levi
PAGANS AND CHRISTIANS by Robin Lane Fox
Viking, £17.85
It is not so often that one gets the chance to review a full and nourishing book about an important subject only beginning to be understood, a book crammed with un- familiar grains of truth, and shot through with scholarly intuition. Theology has faded away into the history of theology, Which has somehow revived the centre of the subject itself and the history of theology in part of history. The area where this is most so is that little known age where Pagans and Christians meet at the end of classical antiquity. It is an age that touches us more closely than we know, and Gib- bon's record of it is inadequate. Gentle- men are on the whole on the side of the Pagans, for a number of reasons not all sinister. Robin Lane Fox shows predictable gentlemanly and Christian spirit in giving everyone concerned a good run for their money. Historians may differ here and there, but I thought this a substantial and mature work, which will be read and admired for a hundred years. There was certainly nothing as good on the subject available in 1886, nor in 1966. E. R. Dodds would have relished it, and I imagine G. E. M. de Sainte Croix will be impressed by an old pupil who has mastered his own mas- sive technique. He has sandblasted the subject.
Little by little a generation of scholars from Dodds and Henry Chadwick to the incisive T. D. Barnes has removed the study of emerging Christianity in the second, third and fourth centuries from the propagandists and intuitive generalisers into the vast available storehouse of histor- ical facts, biographies and inscriptions, so that it no longer need be mysterious. From being a poor sister of late Roman imperial history, Christianity has become one phe- nomenon among others, and now they fit together at last. In this book, with its gentle snowstorm of detail, one can see what really did happen. When Mr Lane Fox produces his final ace from up his sleeve, by redating Constantine's Oration to the Assembly of Saints to the Good Friday of 325, at Antioch, his argument is compelling, and much that had puzzled about Constantine falls into place. What is fascinating throughout this hefty volume is to see detail after detail in its context. Some of these I had forgotten and many more I never knew. I had forgotten that the hermit Hilarion cured a crazy Bactrian camel that had to be held down by 30 men, and an upper-class lunatic who was brought to Cyprus in chains from the Red Sea. I had never known that the Christians of Ancyra were given to bugger- ing sheep and goats. This odd habit always has been strictly local though, and surpris- ing to outsiders, let alone bishops. I never knew the tusks of the elephants of Diony- sus were preserved at Lindos either, but it explains why the tusks of the Calydonian boar, stolen from Arcadia by the Romans, were put in a temple of Dionysus in Caesar's garden at Rome: being in fact mammoth tusks they must have been reassigned to the Indian triumphs of the god. This brings me to the end of useful marginalia: the rest of my review will have to be pure admiration.
The publisher deserves sincere grati- tude, but I wish we had some illustrations: Mani's drawings of the Manichean uni- verse and its underworld for example, and the second-century Herstal vase with philo- sophers in hot pursuit of a likely youth, and the mosaic floor from Dorset now in the British Museum that shows Christ, or could it after all be a Christlike Constan- tine? I would also have liked a long note about the work of Joseph Bingham (1708) on Christian antiquities, which Mr Lane Fox rates so extremely highly, and a much longer discussion of the Greek translation of Virgil and the Greek commentary on it that Constantine apparently used in the Oration. Was it only of the fourth eco- logue, or more extensive? That gets called Latin's loveliest ecologue,' a view I am not quite able to share. Mr Lane Fox very occasionally reveals traces of an old- fashioned' view of antiquity, (Pan on a `noonday hillside', and the Christianised Ara Coeli said to 'loom' over Rome), but no doubt the pendulum has swung too far recently in the opposite direction, and sensibility of any kind is charming in a classical scholar. He is good on the subject of trees and sacred woods.
He covers the provinces of empire in amazing and beguiling detail, without ever losing sight of the sinewy questions he is really asking. Astrampsachus is his wash- pot, and over astrology he has cast his shoe. He discovers a Christian bishop in Egypt carried away under guard by the military who was rescued by a passing wedding party of Pagans and set at liberty on a donkey, and an Egyptian village where a crocodile had festivals on 150 days in the year. Not everyone attended them all he says, but permanent priests make work for themselves, religious bureaucracy being like any other. One might think of counter-examples to that. He makes mod- erate and sensible use of the word 'over- achievers' when speaking of Christians, and produces some cool and rational dis- tinctions that must command assent from historians and theologies alike. His parti- cularly dispassionate account of the re- barbative ritual of eunuchisation made my blood run cold.
What all this adds up to is not so frivolous a catalogue as I have presented, but a serious study of popular history and the history of ideas and religion in these years, deeply based on archaeological knowledge and strongly tinged with some- thing like the humane curiosity of a social anthropologist. This brilliant book is a wholly unexpected and central contribu- tion to its subject, a boulder flung in the pond. What is more it is readable and rereadable, even gripping, and it has the humble virtue of usefulness, which is all that makes academic books live. I hope it may raise up a generation of scholars worthy of it. I take off my small hat to it.
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