This chapter examines the transition of pagan architecture and religious practices in Late Antiquity, focusing on the treatment of Roman temples under Christian emperors. Drawing on legal texts, literature, inscriptions and archaeological findings, it evaluates whether temples were preserved, repurposed or destroyed. Challenging the common assumption of widespread temple destruction, it argues that such actions were neither systematic nor state-enforced. Instead, the chapter presents a nuanced perspective, demonstrating that many temples remained intact and were gradually adapted for secular or Christian purposes. Archaeological evidence suggests that abandonment and natural decay played a greater role in their decline than deliberate demolition. It also highlights how Christian emperors often sought to suppress pagan rituals while preserving architectural heritage, with legal measures typically prohibiting sacrifices rather than mandating temple destruction. By emphasising regional variations in temple transformations and critically assessing sources that exaggerate instances of destruction, the chapter challenges traditional narratives, offering a more complex understanding of religious and architectural change in Late Antiquity.

These sermons were aimed at inspiring believers to imitate the martyrs, who themselves imitated Christ, their archetype. Christ’s voluntary suffering and self-sacrifice defeated the devil and death, expiated our sins, and restored to believers the possibility of eternal happiness, with God’s grace. Augustine modifies the traditional definition of “martyr” as “witness” to make martyrdom contingent on suffering and self-sacrifice: the essence of martyrdom and mandatory for all who would be Christian. He provides examples of this ideal behavior, such as calmly accepting the loss of one’s property. Suffering proves the cause for which martyrs died is true; otherwise they would have failed their ordeals. Augustine draws on Cyprian, recognizing a literal martyrdom in times of persecution, and in times of peace, a spiritual martyrdom fought daily against temptation and sin. These sermons also document the obstacles Augustine faced when preaching: not only correcting the errors of the Donatists, Manichees, and Pelagians, but also accommodating his flock’s limitations. He thus presents an inclusive church, a concord of different levels of expertise ordered hierarchically.

Let us return to eternity, which in truth we have not ever fully left since the opening chapter.

Chapter one defines and historically situates the intersections among decadence, ecology, and the pagan revival in literature and art. Noting ecological, scientific, classist, nationalist, and imperialist aspects of decadence in its earliest articulations, focus is given to the shifting formulations of modern decadence in particular by such influential writers as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Bourget, and Max Nordau, the chapter offers close analyses of works by Algernon Swinburne such as his poem ‘The Leper’ (1866) and the Pre-Raphaelite artist Frederick Sandys such as his painting Medea (1868) that demonstrate the complex interplay across these concepts.

The introduction raises the intricate cross-influences among ninetheenth-century science, paganism, and the arts by noting the many renowned experts whose bodies are buried at Holywell Cemetary, Oxford. These include Walter Pater, Kenneth Grahame, botanist George Claridge Druce, zoologist George Rolleson, Celtic scholar John Rhys, Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith, and comparative philologist Max Müller. This intermingling of earth sciences, paganism, and the arts, I argue, captures the ecological foundations of decadence, despite its more popular conception as defined by artifice, dandyism, and shocking non-conformity. The final section of the itnroduction summarizes the monograph’s chapters.

Apocalyptic literature of the early fifth century demonstrates renewed awareness of impending catastrophe, divine judgment, and a wide variety of possibilities for sociopolitical and cosmic transformation or restoration (apokatastasis). This chapter focuses on specific cases of systems-collapse in North Africa and southern Gaul.