The Last Olympiad

The Serapeum destroyed, the emperor murdered, pagans raise a revolt!

The six years 389-395 AD were a turning point in the Mediterranean world. They saw many dramatic historical developments:

• the destruction of the temple of Serapis in Alexandria
• the first excommunication of an emperor ever (many more to come)
• the first murder of an emperor at the hands of his Germanic bodyguards (many more to come)
• an imperial edict prohibiting all practice of any and all pagan rites
• the last significant rebellion of pagans against Christian rule
• the end of the 1200-year tradition of the Olympic Games

The best-selling European author of books on Greaco-Roman antiquity paints a rich and highly readable panorama of the intellectual life of the Roman Empire of the period. Here they are, debating topics ranging from the moral consequences of bathing and chariot races to national character and demon possession:

• the zany, crafty, and weird doctors of the Church: Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine
• the dyspeptic historian Ammianus Marcellinus
• three fanatic historians of the Church
• the grumpy rhetorician Libanius
• the blood-thirsty pagan scholar-defenders of the Alexandrian Serapeum
• the author of a rabid anti-Christian diatribe which somehow miraculously survived to our times (The Lives of Sophists)
• and the quirky and mysterious figure of “Jorge Luis Borges of ancient Rome” (Authors of Imperial History)

Quoting richly from many curious, entertaining, and beautiful texts from the period, Professor Krawczuk gives us a broad intellectual survey of the Roman Empire and its leading personalities at the time of the last revolt of the ancient gods.

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