Pierre Chuvin (1943–2016)

This short book does a marvelous job narrating the slow, inexorable death of classical civilization. Chuvin has full command of the original sources and weaves them into a threnody that is poignant (Justinian's closing the School of Athens and the quixotic departure of the philosophers for Persia), brutal (is there another religion besides Christianity that sends heretics to burn at the stake with such elan?), and occasionally absurd (Anatolias, the governor of Antioch, running away to the show more local bishop from a ceremony honoring Zeus when the Byzantine police closed in and pretending to be consulting the bishop on a matter of scripture). show less

Careful studies of the destruction of the Pagan religion of Rome and Greece, such as this one, make it clear that the decline was neither inevitable nor welcomed by the whole of society. The Sunday school vision of a world in which only ignorant peasants believed in the old gods while the philosophers merely pretended to a awaited the new faith is definitely destroyed by works such as this.