Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine: By E. R. Dodds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1965. 144 pp.

This small and superb book is a further indication of the vitality and fruitfulness of classical scholarship in Europe. The author is

Regius Professor (Emeritus) of Greek at Oxford University. The book is based on four lectures delivered in 1963 at The Queen's University, Belfast.

Readers of Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) are familiar with his vast erudition and his mastery of English prose. In this volume, Dodds charts the socipsychological history (and supernatural beliefs) of the Greco-Roman world during the third century A.D. He delineates the attitudes and sentiments which were common to paganism and to Christianity, also the differences between them which made them polemical, and sometimes cruel, antagonists. Dodds is eminently fair in his estimation of pagan and Christian attitudes, and in his analysis of the psychological aspects of the victory of Christianity.

Dodds does not make any simplistic comparisons between our age and the decline of the Roman Empire, for there are profound differences. At the very least the frames of reference in our culture are broader, whether in science, technology, economics, social structure, or politics. His quotation, however, of Auden's phrase, 'an age of anxiety', makes certain similarities tempting: social alienation and death wishes; rivalry among religious and political ideologies; recurrent wars and uncontrolled economic inflation; material and moral instability; debasement of the coinage; contrasts between poverty and wasteful luxury, urban slums and lawlessness, benevolence and cruelty; demagogic struggles for central and provincial power; the sense of siege during times of great military strength and huge military expenditures; the latifundia and absentee ownership; the impotence of the Roman Senate and the corruption of the law; brutalized citizens and rootless aliens; the barbarian at the gates; the mercenary troops; and the retrospective longing, often among the emperors themselves, for the Ro