Stephenson’s does a superb job of explaining the impulse beyind the Diocletian persecution, which, he says, came from Diocletian and not, as Christians were inclined to say, from Galerius. At the heart of the persecution was an effort to revive romanitas , understood in the narrow sense that Diocletian took the term. Diocletian “had only a poor, perhaps no, knowledge of Greek, the language spoken by citizens of his capital at Nicomedia and the lingua franca throughout the eastern provinces... Read more

Stephenson’s discussion of the “pacifism” of the early church is balanced. “One cannot overstate,” he begins, “the essential messiness of early Christianity, which was not a monolithic set of beliefs but countless local sets of ideas and practices. Moreover, we know primarily the views of an elite group of scholars whose writings have been preserved, most frequently because they suited later tastes for reasons of style and theology. Therefore, to attempt to discern one coherent Christian attitude to warfare in... Read more

In his fine recent biography of Constantine , Paul Stephenson explains the growth of Christianity as a result of “sex, health, and arithmetic.” The sex part has partly to do with abortion and infanticide, but more deeply with the basic family structure of ancient Rome: “If the population of the Roman Empire was sixty million at the time of Constantine’s birth, only around twenty-four million of these were women. Given that boys are more problematic in the womb, more sickly... Read more