About as beautifully (and concisely) written as you can get for a history book. Fabulous stuff. Some fav lines:
—Augustus revived a thing that had barely been invented in his own time: “old-time religion,” rather like the nearly postmodern version of Christianity invented in nineteenth-century America and called “fundamentalism.” Both offered fresh and tendentious packaging of carefully selected older beliefs and practices mixed with others as new as next week.
—Use a word often enough, and you begin to think it is describing reality.
—Christianity’s claim to unique truth was plausible because only Christians made that claim.
—Until that label [Christianity] was created, pagans didn’t exist.
—Outside Christian imagination, there was no such thing as paganism, only people doing what they were in the habit of doing.
—We have mostly forgotten to be surprised that a street preacher’s followers discovered, several hundred years after his death, how to be a regimented multinational corporate enterprise.
—A story that neat deserves our suspicions.