Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

BOOK REVIEWS 105
Some minor quibbles: A thin volume obviously must be highly selective, but a
sketch of the Christian influence upon Roman economics and Roman family life would
have been valuable. Clark masterfully communicates the literary evidence, but a few
epigraphical, papyrological, or numismatic sources would have elucidated the
discussions. Clark’s reference to an “episcopalian” polity in the Pauline epistles is
misleading (28). Clark maintains that “language barriers” between “Latin- and Greekspeaking
churches” exacerbated the “long-lasting divisions” after Chalcedon, and she
also refers to the modern reevaluation of “monophysitism” (34). But recent scholarship
has reevaluated so-called “Nestorianiasm” as well; and inter-Greek confusion
(concerning terms such as prosopon and phusis) and Syriac and Coptic barriers
complicated the post-Chalcedonian divisions. Clark also mentions, without further
comment, H. A. Drake’s simplistic assessment that “the martyr and the apologist” are
“representative of an internal tension in Christianity, ‘the martyr standing for rigor and
exclusion, the apologist for cooperation and inclusion’” (48). Clark maintains that
“[there] is very little evidence for what happened” in the Decian persecution “with one
exception,” that of Cyprian’s Carthage (49). However, other evidences come to mind,
such as the treatment of Dionysius of Alexandria and Origen. She states that Augustine
preferred the representation of the church as a net, since the Donatists employed the
image of the ark (97). But compare City of God XV.26-27. Both the ark and the church
house represent the “clean and the unclean,” until the “appointed end.”
Clark has attempted to make contemporary academic scholarship available to a
broad audience and especially students. Her opening pages appropriately quote Phocas:
“Long books scare students. This is one for them, and anyone who likes some serious
thoughts concisely said” (vii). Clark fittingly explains important Greek and Latin terms
within the text and without breaking the flow of thought. On the other hand, the book is
inconsistent in its references to primary sources, confusingly so for non-classicist
undergraduates. The Bibliographical Essay at the end of the book overlooks pertinent
volumes in the Loeb Classical Library and the Penguin Classics Series. The essay further
discusses a certain “Hall (1991),” but this citation cannot be tied to any work in the
reference list. Nevertheless, the Bibliographical Essay and the reference list will be useful
resources for undergraduate and graduate research. All in all, Clark’s small volume has
assembled an amazing quantity of scholarship into a small package and is highly
recommended as a supplemental textbook.