Edward J. Watts. The Final Pagan Generation

Although the “last pagan generation” contained non-pagans, everyone was conditioned by the world full of gods into which they were born in the early years of Constantine’s reign (312–337 a.d.). In this stimulating and scholarly analysis of a century of fundamental religious change, Edward J. Watts abandons history based on the politics, institutions, or economy of late antiquity to focus on the lived experience of four prominent figures born in the 310s and dead by the 390s: Libanius, the pagan sophist of Antioch; Themistius, the courtier-philosopher; Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, illustrious Roman senator and one of the last role-models for paganism; and the “middle Christian” Ausonius of Bordeaux, tutor to the emperor Gratian and short-lived but effective power-broker in the late 370s. Watts also sustains a sympathetic focus on the personal, as well as the career, effects of the late antique elite life-cycle. Starting with the cities that the elites were born into, crowded as they were with statues and temples, Watts traces the education, early careers, problems of middle age (which could see the deaths of both parents and young children), and the strategies employed to gain and then retain influence and access to the powerful in unstable times. This was a period of great flux as the pagan Julian briefly threatened the Constantinian order and the new dynasty of Valentinian I imported a whole new ruling class. By the time the next, more extreme and more Christian, generation came of age in the 380s and 390s, Praetextatus had died in 384, to be vilified by the semi-literate author of the Carmen contra paganos, and the others had dwindled into a relatively silent old age, uncomprehending of the “Young Man’s Empire” (chapter 9) around them.

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