49 On Theodora see Volker-Lorenz Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Chapter 5 below.
50 Procopius, Secret History 17.5; cf. Buildings I.9.2; she is presented sympathetically by the Mia-
physite writer John of Ephesus, see Menze, ibid.
51 See Virginia Burrus, ed., Late Ancient Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005); Derek
Krueger, ed., Byzantine Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), vols. 2 and 3 in the
series A People’s History of Christianity; cf. Kimberley Diane Bowes, Private Worship, Public
Values and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008),
focusing on private chapels and places of worship.
52 John of Ephesus, HE III.3.36.
53 Sardis VII, no. 19.
54 The extent to which the secondary literature has tended to be coloured by confessional
approaches and assumptions of the ‘triumph’ of Christianity makes it diffi cult to deal with
this issue, but see Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization, c. 370–529; T.E. Gregory,
‘The survival of paganism in Christian Greece: a critical survey’, American Journal of Philology
107 (1986), 229–42; G.W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990); Neil McLynn, ‘Pagans in a Christian empire’, in Rousseau, ed., A
Companion to Late Antiquity, chapter 38, 572–87.
55 F.W. Trombley, ‘Religious transition in sixth-century Syria’, Byzantinische Forschungen 20
(1994), 153–95; Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, 35–40. Pagan cult seems to have
been continuing at Philae in Egypt in the 560s (P. Cair. Masp. I. 67004).
56 For Hellenism and the continuance of classical iconography, especially on mosaics, see
Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity; below, Chapter 7.
57 Against the older notions of a ‘pagan reaction’, in late fourth-century Rome, and another
in the 430s, see the powerful rebuttal by Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), with discussion of patronage and iconography at
691–742.
58 Rita Lizzi Testa, ‘Augures et pontifi ces: public sacral law in late antique Rome (fourth-fi fth
centuries AD’, in Andrew Cain and Noel Lenski, eds., The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 251–78; pagan priesthoods: Cameron, Last Pagans, 132–72.
59 Cyril Mango, ‘Discontinuity with the classical past in Byzantium’, in Margaret Mullett and
Roger Scott, eds., Byzantium and the Classical Tradition (Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine
Studies, University of Birmingham, 1981), 48–57, at 57.
60 See the Life of Isidore, by the Athenian Neoplatonist Damascius, trans. P. Athanassiadi,
Damascius, The Philosophical History (Athens: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999); Zachariah
of Mytilene, Life of Severus, trans. Lena Ambjörn (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008).
61 CJ I, 5, 18.4; 11, 10 (‘the sacrilegious foolishness of the Hellenes’).
62 Evagrius, HE V.18; cf. John of Ephesus, HE III.27–35, V.37; Bowersock, Hellenism in Late
Antiquity, 35ff.
63 See R.A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 202–11, emphasizing the fact that what Caesarius called ‘pagan’ was often simply
a matter of custom and habit. For the process of evangelization in northern Italy at the
beginning of our period: Rita Lizzi, ‘Ambrose’s contemporaries and the Christianization of
northern Italy’, Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990), 156–73.
64 See Ian Wood, The Missionary Life. Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050 (Harlow:
Longman, 2001); Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe. From Paganism to Christianity,
371–1386 AD (London: Fontana, 1998).
65 See Caner, History and Hagiography from the Late Antique Sinai, 14–15.
66 The Last Pagans of Rome, 25–32.
67 Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, 224–26 (an ‘epistemological excision’, a ‘drainage of
secularity’).
68 See Guy G. Stroumsa, ‘Christianity contested’, in Casiday and Norris, eds., Cambridge
History of Christianity 2, chap. 5. A key work arguing for a late ‘parting of the ways’ is
Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines. The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3