Alice Roberts, like all authors, brings her own perspectives and interests to her subject. A patron of Humanists UK, she’s unable or unwilling to countenance the spiritual appeal of Christianity to the people of late antiquity.

Domination: The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity
ALICE ROBERTS

(SIMON & SCHUSTER, 432 PP, £10.99)
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In the early years of the fourth century, the Emperor Diocletian initiated Rome’s last and greatest persecution of Christianity. Its victims included martyrs whose feasts remain in the church calendar to this day: Agnes, Pancras and Sebastian, to name but a few. Fast forward to AD 380 and Emperor Theodosius the Great declared Christianity the official religion of the Empire.

Ten years after that, St Ambrose, high-born erstwhile imperial administrator turned Bishop of Milan, excommunicated Theodosius who, in a fit of political pique, had ordered a massacre that claimed thousands of lives.

Just how and why Roman emperors went from persecuting Christian clergy to kneeling in penance before them, and the reasons why men of high birth and talent opted to become bishops, provide subjects for Alice Roberts’ Domination. It tells a lively story that unfolds over almost seven centuries, from the time of St Paul to the age of Anglo-Saxon missions. Along the way, we encounter a monastery on a windswept Welsh headland, hermitages in the burning sands of Egypt and Syria and the imperial capitals at Rome and Constantinople.

The argument of the book can be summed up thus: Christianity was never really the religion of the poor and peaceful, and its rise to dominance in the late Roman world was all down to a thirst for power and wealth. Roberts tells us that she was “astonished by the answers she found”, of the “many myths” that she “uncovered, exposed and pierced”. Evidence for all this – both archaeological and documentary – was “hidden in plain sight”. Despite Roberts’ evident excitement in piecing together her argument, little she says is new.

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