204 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
There have also been recent attempts to exploit religious texts of the Second
Sophistic in relation to wider issues in imperial religion, for example Aelius Aristides’
Hieroi Logoi (Petsalis-Diomidis 2010, Downie 2013), memorialization in Pausanias
(Alcock et al. 2001), journeying as an allegory of dynamic religious experience
(Elsner 1997, cf. Elsner and Rutherford 2005) and the textual and art- historical
exploitation of epiphany as a sophisticated means of realizing divine presence (Platt
2011). The development of a philosophical discourse about religion already in the
early empire has been seen as a node that Christians could exploit and intensify as
well as anyone (Van Nuffelen 2011; cf. Bowersock 1990 on ‘Hellenism’); by contrast,
the revived discussion of ‘pagan monotheism’, for all that it is presented as ‘cutting
edge research’, has provided few new insights (Mitchell and Van Nuffelen 2010a and
b; compare e.g. Belayche 2005, Bendlin 2006). The complete publication of the Nag
Hammadi texts has allowed us to appreciate the extraordinarily intense elaboration
of Christian and non-Christian gnosis in the confi nes of a single ‘library’ (Filoramo
1990), which can stand as an emblem for the density of the now largely lost religious
imaginaire of Late Antiquity (cf. Fowden 2005).
The fl ood of work on early Christianity is overwhelming. The liberal conviction
that America has come to represent an evil empire has led to a revival in some
quarters of the old idea that early Christians defi ned themselves in opposition to the
Beast. Against that view, it is increasingly recognized that early Christianity was
inextricably a product of empire, even in its negotiation with specifi c neuralgic
points (e.g. Maier 2013). The extreme diversity of early Christianity, even after the
Council of Nicaea, is also now well established (MacMullen 2009). The ‘identity’ of
Christians can thus be only provisionally determined, in effect as an ideal type (Lieu
2004). There have been excellent studies of early communities in individual cities,
drawing upon archaeological as well as literary evidence, for example in Thessaloniki
(Nasrallah et al. 2010). The applicability of Rational Choice Theory to the
explanation of the relative success of Christianity, at any rate in the eastern empire,
as developed by Rodney Stark (e.g. Stark 2011) has been subjected to fairly withering
criticism (‘the rhetoric of science’) (Clark 1998); but it did prompt an essay by an
experienced demographer arguing for a total of 200,000 Christians by AD 200
(Hopkins 1998). The varied grounds of hostility to this group have been carefully
documented (Engberg 2007) and the probable aims of Decius’ edict of late 249,
whose historicity now seems beyond doubt, intelligently scrutinized (Rives 1999).
Apart from their infl uence on the study of Christian asceticism (e.g. Clark 1986,
Brown 1988), the second and third volume of Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité
stimulated an interesting refl ection on the value accorded to the endurance of pain
in IV Maccabees , the Testament of Job and early Christian martyrdom (Shaw 1996b;
cf. already Perkins 1995). As usual, of course, what we encounter here is a literary
trope whose relation to actual bodies and experiences is unknowable.
Having got rid of one grand narrative, there is no hurry about fi nding a new one;
and anyway, no such thing is in sight – I earlier noted the ‘marked fragmentation of
current work on religious change’ in the empire. If there is a long- term shift, it is
towards a relative disengagement of religious practice from other social practices,
the gradual formation, through the play of differences within civic religion, the
increasing importance of small- group practice, the appropriation and exploitation
by ‘small entrepreneurs of the holy’ of new ideas communicated through the
‘hodological space’ of the empire, the emergence of new narrative forms, of what
Bourdieu termed a champ , a fi eld of action, a practice, characterized by the pursuit