Volume 20, Number 1 · February 8, 1973
Success Story
By W.H.C. Frend
Augustus to Constantine: The Thrust of Christianity into the Roman World
by Robert M. Grant
Harper & Row, 354 pp., $10.00
Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine
by Peter Brown
Harper & Row, 352 pp., $12.00
When in AD 229 the historian Dio Cassius died, the Greco-Roman world was still materially and spiritually secure. 'We live round a sea like frogs round a pond,' Socrates had told his Athenian friends, and seven centuries later this was still true. The outlying provinces of the Roman empire, Dacia and Britain, were anomalies, areas which had been conquered mainly for strategic reasons, where the army and the leading provincials tried to adapt Mediterranean styles of life to inhospitable climates. The frontiers were well guarded, and behind them stood the cities with their majestic temples, marble colonnades, and market places whose ruins still attract the annual pilgrimage of tourists to the Mediterranean.
Review, 2634 words
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