Review

Author(s): Gail Paterson Corrington

Review by: Gail Paterson Corrington
Source: The Classical World, Vol. 79, No. 5 (May - Jun., 1986), p. 348
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Classical Association of the
Atlantic States
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4349920
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348 CLASSICAL WORLD

Stephen Benko. Pagan Rome and the Early Christians. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984. Pp. xi, 180. $20.00.

As Benko points out in the preface, this volume is an expansion of an earlier

article, "Pagan Criticism of Christianity During the First Two Centuries A.D.,"
in ANR W II.23.2 (1980). The present volume, in fact, resembles a collection of
articles on the same topic, with some further relevant texts, translated from
Greek and Roman critics of early Christianity, from the younger Pliny to Celsus.
Along with other recent similar works, such as Ramsey MacMullen's Christian-
izing the Roman Empire (1984) and Robert L. Wilken's The Christians as the
Romans Saw Them (1984), Benko's book has the laudable aim of showing yet
again that the early Christians must be understood within the framework of their
own society (p. 163). However, Benko assumes that Christianity's pagan detrac-
tors may have been right (pp. ix-x), although certainly their charges of cannibal-
ism, sorcery, and libertinism against the Christians had a long tradition of use
against alien religions in general (e.g., Livy's account of the Bacchics, p. 12).
Most fascinating (although perhaps extraneous) is the discussion of the Chris-
tian practice of the "holy kiss" (Ch. IV) and its possible role in charges of sexual
license. Less convincing is Chapter III on "The Charges of Immorality and Can-
nibalism", which makes a tenuous connection between Epiphanius' questionable
account of the practices of the gnostic Phibionites (pp. 68-69) and the Romans'
perception of typical Christian practices.
Benko frequently seems to accept the evidence of one author as a reliable wit-
ness: a risky assumption in the case of ancient authors. For example, in Chapter
V on "Magic and Early Christianity", he relies over-much on Apuleius, while
using too little direct evidence, such as the Greek Magical Papyri, which would
certainly reinforce his claim that Christians practiced forms of magic. His choice
of Lucian of Samosata's portrayal of Peregrinus Proteus for the "Portrait of an
Early Christian" in Chapter II is similarly one-sided, since Lucian's satire is as
much a critique of Cynicism as it is of Christianity. Further, one could scarcely
call Suetonius a "painstaking researcher" (p. 14), nor claim that Celsus' True
Word, reconstructed only from Origen's Against Celsus, is "on the whole free of
mistakes and misconceptions (p. 148)."
Nevertheless, despite the number of books emphasizing the Christians as
"children of their milieu" (p. 163), one more is not unwelcome: the point is
worth the emphasis.

The Pennsylvania State University GAIL PATERSON CORRINGTON

CW 79.5 (1986)

Akiko Kiso. The Lost Sophocles. New York: Vantage Press, 1984. Pp. xii, 161.
$11.95.

Dana F. Sutton. The Lost Sophocles. Lanham, MD: University Press of Ameri-
ca, 1984. Pp. xvii, 190. $24.50 (hb.), $9.75 (pb.).

On the grounds that most of the fragments of lost Sophoclean plays are but
gnomes or single words, a cynic might have advised the authors of these
homonymous books to abandon one subject: quod vides perisse perditum
ducas. But they do succeed in showing that in some measure the fragments
broaden our understanding of the poet's oeuvre. We profit from awareness of

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