Sticking with the Pagans

• Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire by Peter Brown
  Wisconsin, 192 pp, £36.00, December 1992, ISBN 0 299 13340 0

In AD 362 – only fifty years after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity – the pagan Emperor Julian, hoping to undermine the privileged position of this new religion, banned Christian rhetoricians from teaching the pagan Classics. In a spectacular act of literary futility, the Syrian poet Apollinaris and his son, determined to retain a Classical gloss to Christian education, at once translated nearly the whole of the Bible into Greek epic verse.