Title is misleading, it's not what you get. I stopped 25% in because it got so tedious. How are you going to understand and convey understanding of religion when you spend all of your time arguing that gods did not and do not exist? Obviously religious people believe(d) their gods exist and the only way to understand their conception of the world is to acknowledge that. Reading other reviews, I think the main point may end up being that the concept of Pagan religion was a construction of the Christian other, and that for ancient religionists, "pagan" was just the fabric of reality, the water the fish are swimming in. That all makes sense. I'm just not going to be able to read any more tripe to get to that point.

Give me that old time religion! The kind with bloody sacrifice, sacred groves, portents and oracles. By Jove! And Athena, and Serapis, and Ba'al, give me that old time religion.

In Pagans, O'Donnell tackles the question of what happened to the traditional religion of the Mediterranean. How, in the 4th century, did the rites of the old gods up and vanish? The mundane argument is pretty simple. The Emperor Diocletian (284-305) massively reformed the civil service, centralizing power and finances at the expense of local elites. Money, which used to support local civic rites across the Empire, was distributed from Constantinople to new Christian leaders via the mechanism of the military and the Church.

That, of course, is a paltry explanation. Belief that exists only in the presence of cash subsidies is a paltry belief indeed. But that may have been enough. O'Donnell argues that the old religions were transactional. A sacrifice to a god was the human side of a deal, the divine side of which was victory in battle, prosperity in trade, or healthy children. Gods which lost the support of human emperors were no longer worthy of emulation by the masses. 4th century Christians had a number of rhetorical and technological advantages, as their doctrine combined the sophisticated philosophy of the neoplatonists, a strong tradition of public oratory and writing, and the political power of the assembled congregation (Oh, and the True Gospel of Christ's Love). Against this, the old religion had the obscurity of signs and portents, the spectacle of rite and sacrifice, and Bronze Age traditions that seemed sclerotic and obsolete.

O'Donnell writes clearly for the new reader, while placing this work in an ongoing scholarly dialog about the Classics that I don't know enough about to criticize. His most original argument is that pagans as such did not exist. Augustus would never have used the word to describe his beliefs. Rather, paganism was constructed as an opponent by the early Church, a specific kind of rhetorical move to distinguish 'soldiers of Christ' from the ignorant superstitions of the countryside, which is the root word of 'pagan'. Similarly, one should not speak of belief in Jupiter, but rather an assemblage of practices and images relating specific human beings to a common vision of a 'heavenly father'. There's a frustrating skipping around in the arguments and primary sources. These are very much O'Donnell's interpretations, and I'm not convinced they are the interpretations. Still, this is an interesting book for a modern atheist who loves Rome, but knows relatively little about the end of the Empire.

It was interesting to find out how we went from what would be considered traditional religion to Christianity. It also explains on why we have Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity.

I enjoyed the history I learned in this book but I thought it would talk more about pagan religions rather than the history of the Roman Empire.

Ann Miner Collection: "Life is too short for bad books" May you find justice.

Okay, I got through chapter one, all the while going "Whiskey tango foxtrot?" The author talks a lot of smack on the Roman empire. Like A LOT. I picked up this book because I wanted to know more about ancient paganism. I could be wrong because I haven't laid my filthy little raccoon hands on books with the information I'm looking for, but I am under the impression that the people who referred to themselves as pagans first were the celts. So why are we talking about Rome?
I get it, Greece is cooler. So are their Gods. But! Istanbul was Constantinople. You can't go back to Constantinople. I just want to know why you'd spend all your time learning about Rome just to write books about how much you hate Rome. What a miserable existence!
It also kinda came off as a put down to The Old Gods and why Christianity took over and is definitely superior. Kinda like I should be shelved next to A Case For Christ. Which, more power to you. If studying the fall of Rome solidifies your faith more power to ya! However, putting people down who are different from you isn't exactly "loving your neighbor as yourself." The Old Gods are dead to you. Stop taking pot shots.
On a personal note, some of my religious friend are modern pagans. I picked this up because I want to understand them better. Talking smack on someone else's Gods is exactly why people assume I'm hateful when they meet me and I say I'm Christian.

This is a relatively short book by the author of the excellent The Ruin of the Roman Empire, but one which is densely multi-layered and so deceptively easy to read. O'Donnell begins with the ludi saeculares of Augustus in 17 BC - the multiday "games of the century" that featured games, horse races, religious pageants, hymns to the gods and vast numbers of animals sacrificed in bloody rituals. He ends in 417 AD with the completion of Augustine's rhetorical and theological masterpiece, The City of God, which was written in the style of Cicero, but responded to the fall of Rome in 410 by detailing two types of conceptual city - that of man and the city of God - bridging the Roman world and what was to become the Christian Middle Ages.

O'Donnell is an entertaining guide and chats to the readers as he leads them through 400 years of historical transition from the classical world of Augustus' temples and sacrificed bulls to the pre-medieval world of Augustine's churches, heresies and doctrinal wrangling, answering the question of how one world became the other. He's even handed, judicious and careful, though sometimes provocative and contrarian. Most of all, he does what the best historians should do - explain why things happened as they did, and without judgement of the past by the standards of the present. He shows that the pagans and Christians of his story, for all their frequent conflicts and disputes, were much more like each other than they are like us.

This is an excellent overview of a complex and often controversial subject. And it is a good alternative to or perhaps antidote for the recent Catherine Nixey book The Darkening Age which is everything O'Donnell's book is not: clumsy, biased, poorly researched and tendentious. Highly recommended.

This is an odd book. For one thing, it starts out by saying how annoying tour guides in Rome can be, and it presents itself as an alternative to the standard story of paganism and Christianity that those tour guides repeat. Yet with his flippant, chatty style, O'Donnell becomes nothing other than a slightly annoying tour guide.

Academia has been undergoing a shift in thinking about paganism and Christianity for more than 40 years, and O'Donnell wants to convey that revised viewpoint to a wider audience. A few ideas stand out as most important, though it takes him a while to get around to them. First, "pagan" is an insulting blanket label for anyone who was not a Christian or a Jew, and it lumps together people who had nothing in common and never thought of themselves as being part of a unified group. Second, although Christians portrayed their conversion of the Roman Empire as a grand struggle, the pagans after Constantine's conversion never organized resistance to Christianity, even though several points in history have traditionally been interpreted as signs of such resistance. Emperor Julian tried to restore state support for traditional cults but did little more than that; a handful of Roman officials at the end of the fourth century happened to be pagan but did practically nothing to advocate their beliefs; the Battle of the Frigidus, part of a typical Roman succession dispute, had nothing to do with paganism. Third, the distinction between Christian and pagan could be very blurry well into the fourth century. Finally, Christianity reinvented itself as it rose to preeminence, so that a lot of the traits we take for granted (e.g., communion as a formal ceremony rather than just a shared meal) developed in the fourth and fifth centuries, not earlier. An increasingly hard division between Christian and non-Christian was one of those developments.

All those points are generally supported by the recent scholarly work that O'Donnell is distilling, in books such as [b:The Last Pagans of Rome|9238885|The Last Pagans of Rome|Alan Cameron|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1288185934l/9238885._SX50_.jpg|14119184]. However, his attitude toward the traditional cults rather undermines his credibility. He spends several chapters describing these cults, but he can't fully grasp the mindset of the ancient "pagans". Neither can any modern person, really, but many scholars have attempted to do so. O'Donnell's iconoclastic approach and his flippant style make him seem to dismiss those attempts. For instance, when discussing polytheistic offering rites, it's worth pointing out that the food didn't vanish from the altars and there's no empirical reason to believe the gods interacted with it in any way. But O'Donnell hammers at that point insistently. It comes across as incredulity that anybody believed this stuff. If you see it that way, you won't be surprised that the traditional cults crumbled with barely a whimper. While he may not intend it, O'Donnell feels like he's slipping into the old assumption that Christianity succeeded because the traditional cults were unappealing and moribund. That assumption has also been challenged in recent decades, starting with [b:Paganism in the Roman Empire|559800|Paganism in the Roman Empire|Ramsay MacMullen|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328870830l/559800._SY75_.jpg|546965] and [b:Pagans and Christians|37839|Pagans and Christians|Robin Lane Fox|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1210123406l/37839._SX50_.jpg|37633] in the 1980s.

O'Donnell is no Christian partisan and seems to be an all-around skeptic. He points out, for instance, that all forms of Christianity today are so different from the Christianity of the fourth century that it's strange to even call them the same thing. But even there, he notes that one of the things that distance ancient Christians from us is that they believed the pagan gods were real—they just called them demons. That's perfectly true, yet it gives the impression that ancient Christianity is alien to modern Christianity because it was more like paganism, with the implication that paganism is even more alien to modern people than ancient Christianity.

Thus, even though O'Donnell is often quite insightful about how Christianity evolved and triumphed, his attitude distances us from polytheism rather than helping us grasp the way polytheists thought. And if we don't understand that, we don't have the whole picture. Mediterranean peoples worshipped multiple gods for thousands of years. Millions of modern people in places like India and Japan have loosely similar customs. Polytheism appeals to people, for whatever reason. If O'Donnell dismisses it so blithely, how far can we trust his account of its disappearance from the Mediterranean?

A fascinating but occasionally confusing work that tries to understand what we now call "paganism" (one of his main points is that pagans had no idea of the existence of such a thing as "paganism" as such, and that we moderns can hardly avoid thinking about things in terms that would have been unrecognizable then). Fairly neutral in tone for the most part (though some hostility to the ideas of ancient cultus do come through, especially in ch.4 where scholarly agnosticism gives way to bold assertions that the gods "never existed" and that all ritual was "in vain" . . . but despite these failings, it is an enjoyable and scholarly book, for all that . . .

Absolutely fascinating!Presented in a very story like atmosphere and very understandable. I came away with a great respect for traditional religion and in no small way greater understanding of the Christian church's beginnings. I would love to see a work from him on northern Europe and one on the church. I even have a better understanding of Islam.

This was an... Absurd waste of my time and a completely disrespectful view of both ancient and modern paganism. This entire book can be summed up if the author just said "Can you believe they believed this?! Of course they joined the path of our Christian God!!!" It's theological nonsense packaged to look like a historical study of ancient religions. Oddly missing? Any mention of Christian warfare followed by the arrival of missionaries offering food in exchange for conversion. Can't imagine why he'd leave out details like that. Avoid, avoid, avoid!!