They will certainly be inspired by it and it is much to be hoped that they will debate its perspective, its methods, and its implied conclusions with the same degree of transparent engagement and good sense that the author shows throughout its 681 pages of text. The learned will undoubtedly quarry its formidable erudition for decades to come. The cultivated reader can wander in it with ever renewed pleasure and with the guarantee of reliable and up-to-date guidance.

He was historical advisor to Oliver Stone on the making of Stone's film Alexander, for which he waived all his fees on condition that he could take part in the cavalry charge against elephants which Stone staged in the Moroccan desert.This open-hearted and learned book is one that any scholar of the ancient world and of early Christianity would be proud to have written. His other books include The Classical World, Alexander the Great, Pagans and Christians and The Unauthorized Version. 1946) is a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and a University Reader in Ancient History.

What is more it is readable and rereadable, even gripping' Peter Levi, Spectator 'Important and learned' Financial Times 'A massive and humane study.On my shelf it will rest with pride between Edward Gibbon and Peter Brown' Telegraph 'On the one hand a magisterial analysis and reconstruction of an apparently remote and alien society, on the other a detailed study of the single most significant process in our history' The Times Robin Lane Fox (b. 'This brilliant book is a wholly unexpected and central contribution to its subject. Leading up to the time of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, the book aims to enlarge and confirm the value of contemporary evidence, some of which has only recently been discovered. How did this monumental conversion come about? How did Christianity compare and compete with the pagan gods in the Roman Empire? This scholarly work, from award-winning historian Robin Lane Fox, places Christians and pagans side by side in the context of civic life and contrasts their religious experiences, visions, cults and oracles.

The transition from pagan to Christian in the ancient Mediterranean world was a process whose effects we still live with today. From the second century AD to the conversion of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World gives a fascinating new perspective on an extraordinary era.

Pagans and christians by robin lane fox