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For too long, the study of religious life in Late Antiquity has relied on the premise that Jews, pagans, and Christians were largely discrete groups divided by clear markers of belief, ritual, and social practice. More recently, however, a growing body of scholarship is revealing the degree to which identities in the late Roman world were fluid, blurred by ethnic, social, and gender differences. Christianness, for example, was only one of a plurality of identities available to Christians in this period. This book explores how Christians in North Africa between the age of Tertullian and the age of Augustine were selective in identifying as Christian, giving salience to their religious identity only intermittently. By shifting the focus from groups to individuals, the book more broadly questions the existence of bounded, stable, and homogeneous groups based on Christianness. In emphasizing that the intermittency of Christianness is structurally consistent in the everyday life of Christians from the end of the second to the middle of the fifth century, the book opens a whole range of new questions for the understanding of a crucial period in the history of Christianity.

Libanius of Antioch was a rhetorician of rare skill and eloquence. So renowned was he in the fourth century that his school of rhetoric in Roman Syria became among the most prestigious in the Eastern Empire. This book draws on the entire body of Libanius's vast literary output—including 64 orations, 1,544 letters, and exercises for his students—to offer the fullest intellectual portrait yet of this figure whom John Chrystostom called “the sophist of the city.” Libanius (314–ca. 393) lived at a time when Christianity was celebrating its triumph but paganism tried to resist. Although himself a pagan, Libanius cultivated friendships within Antioch's Christian community and taught leaders of the Church including Chrysostom and Basil of Caesarea. The book calls him a “gray pagan” who did not share the fanaticism of the Emperor Julian. The book considers the role that a major intellectual of Libanius's caliber played in this religiously diverse society and culture. When he wrote a letter or delivered an oration, who was he addressing and what did he hope to accomplish? One thing that stands out in Libanius's speeches is the startling amount of invective against his enemies. How common was character assassination of this sort? What was the subtext to these speeches and how would they have been received? The book restores Libanius to his rightful place in the rich and culturally complex world of Late Antiquity.

This book re-examines the origins of the Great Persecution (AD 303–313), the last eruption of pagan violence against Christians before Constantine enforced the toleration of Christianity within the Empire. Challenging the widely accepted view that the persecution enacted by Emperor Diocletian was largely inevitable, the book points out that in the forty years leading up to the Great Persecution Christians lived largely in peace with their fellow Roman citizens. Why, the book asks, did pagans and Christians, who had intermingled cordially and productively for decades, become so sharply divided by the turn of the century? Making use of evidence that has only recently been dated to this period, the book shows that a falling out between Neoplatonist philosophers, specifically Iamblichus of Chalcis and Porphyry of Tyre, lit the spark that fueled the Great Persecution. In the aftermath of this falling out, a group of influential pagan priests and philosophers began writing and speaking against Christians, urging them to forsake Jesus-worship and to rejoin traditional cults while Porphyry used his access to Diocletian to advocate persecution of Christians on the grounds that they were a source of impurity and impiety within the empire. This book revises our understanding of the late third century period by revealing the extent to which Platonists and Christian theologians came from a common educational tradition, often studying and teaching side by side in heterogeneous groups.