When the Romans became pagani

This contribution is the first chapter of a book in English which I edited, and for which I also wrote the Preface. The volume collects in twelve chapters the opinions of as many scholars about the new historiographical model of the end of paganism in ancient Rome, which Alan Cameron proposed in his The Last Pagans of Rome, Oxford 2011. According to the structure I chose for the volume, and which all other authors follows, my essay confronts two chapters of LPR (the first two: ‘Pagans and Polytheist’; ‘From Constantius to Theodosius’), where the author describes his theme in terminological sense and framing it chronologically. Using any sources – also those which the author neglected -, I discuss A. Cameron’s solutions to both problems, because they seem to me only partially shareable. The first aspect is when the term paganus acquired the now current meaning of 'non-Christian'. The opinion that paganus, before to having a religious sense, was a term and a relational concept, which was defined in relation to its antonym, is a now stable search result, neither it appears more disputable that it was and it has long been a word of popular use (this does explain its absence in Christian literary sources of the third century). It's not sure at all, however, that paganus assumed its religious sense only in the age of Constantine, as Alan Cameron would like: the analysis of Catania’s inscription – CIL X, 7112 (today at Louvre Museum) = ILS 1549 = AÉ 1959, 23, p. 12 – is central for that. Nor is so confident that the term was originally devoid of any polemic nuance: to define someone by saying what it is not, and affirming his/her strangeness to the entity or group to which the subject of definition belongs, that in itself does denounce the state of inferiority of the other; depending on the context, it may sound more or less strong, but the valuation is implicit in the concept of otherness. The second aspect is the question of chronology, that is, until when it is possible to speak of pagans and Christians. It is connected with the reconstruction of the evolution of the term paganus but it also regards the main conception of the book. The second chapter of LPR, in fact, provides a really distinctive picture of the progress of Christianity in the fourth century and of the end of the paganism in Rome between Constantius II and Theodosius I. Through the discussion of the main topics covered in this second chapter of LPR, I tried to show that the development of Christianity and, therefore, the end of paganism - even that of Roma Urbs - were concurrent processes, articulated and complex. Alan Cameron has imagined them as a result of a too much simple evolution, because they can not be said concluded by the Theodosian laws of the late fourth century. Even on the application of the antipagan laws, discontinuous but not ineffective, one can measure the persistence of the confrontation/conflict between pagans and Christians throughout the entire fifth century.