Quick Take
- Narration: David Drummond brings measured intelligence to O’Donnell’s dense, often digressive prose, his delivery is consistent but cannot fully compensate for the book’s demanding pace.
- Themes: Religious plurality versus enforced unity, the perspective of the defeated, tradition under revolutionary pressure
- Mood: Intellectually dense and occasionally combative, rewards patience but tests it
- Verdict: A genuinely original re-framing of Christianity’s rise through the eyes of those who lost, O’Donnell’s perspective is invaluable but the writing is difficult, and Drummond narrates what is legitimately a demanding listen.
I came to Pagans on a quiet Tuesday evening, having spent several weeks on early Roman imperial history, and found myself slightly startled by the opening chapters. James J. O’Donnell is not interested in making this easy. His prose is elliptical, referential, and assumes a level of familiarity with the period that places him closer to the academic end of popular scholarship than most audiobook listeners expect. David Drummond does his capable best with it. But the difficult moments are real, and the negative reviews that call the book laborious are not wrong, even if they are missing why the difficulty is there.
The central reorientation O’Donnell proposes is both simple and genuinely challenging: instead of narrating Christianity’s rise as a triumph of truth over superstition, he asks what the experience looked like from the perspective of those who found their world being dismantled. The Greeks, Romans, Syrians, and Gauls who had maintained the religious traditions of their ancestors for centuries were not, in their own self-understanding, pagans, that term was a later Christian coinage. They were pious people, honoring the gods who had been honored for generations, and what Christians represented to many of them was not liberation but atheism: a refusal to honor the divine in its proper plurality.
Constantine, Julian, and Augustine Through Unexpected Lenses
O’Donnell’s portraits of the major figures of the fourth century CE are where the book is at its most valuable and most original. Constantine, who legalized and then promoted Christianity, is read neither as a sincere convert nor as a cynical politician but as something more complicated: a man navigating an empire in which religious identity was increasingly contested, using Christian symbolism instrumentally while maintaining older practices in ways that are deeply ambiguous. Julian, the emperor who attempted to reverse Constantine’s religious settlement, is treated with sympathy and without nostalgia, a figure who genuinely believed he could restore the old order and was wrong about both the possibility and the desirability.
The Augustine portrait is arguably the book’s strongest section. O’Donnell is an Augustine scholar of the first rank, and his reading of the bishop of Hippo as someone who embodied the contradictions of the transition period, educated in the classical tradition, eventually its most effective critic, is subtle and compelling. Reviewer A. Reader notes that the book excels at opening the reader’s senses to a world that can’t be examined through today’s lenses, and the Augustine chapters exemplify this.
The Density Problem and Why It Is Built In
Reviewer James Kalomiris describes the book as laborious and notes that it plods along at an incredibly slow and overly deliberate pace. Reviewer funkendub came close to putting it down in the opening chapters before finding his footing. These responses are honest and worth taking seriously. O’Donnell writes for an audience that has already read a great deal about this period, and he is not particularly interested in orienting those who have not. The opening chapters are especially demanding because he is setting up a conceptual framework, multiple competing religious identities, the contingency of Christianity’s eventual dominance, that he will use throughout, but the setup requires following dense detail before the payoff arrives.
The book rewards persistence. But it demands more of its listeners than most popular history, and that demand is real rather than manufactured. David Drummond cannot fully compensate for prose that was written for the page rather than for sustained audio listening.
What the 3.9 Rating Actually Signals
The 3.9 rating across nearly 500 reviews is unusually low for a title from a respected academic press on a major historical topic. It reflects the book’s genuine difficulty rather than a quality failure. Readers who came expecting accessible narrative history found something more demanding. Readers who brought the background knowledge O’Donnell assumes found something genuinely illuminating. The gap between those two audiences is audible in the reviews, and calibrating your own position on that spectrum before you start is more useful than anything the average rating suggests.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listen if you have substantial background in late antiquity and find the question of what Christianity’s rise felt like to its opponents historically important. Also listen if you are interested in O’Donnell’s specific methodological approach, reading historical figures and events against the grain of the victors’ narrative.
Skip if you are coming to late Roman history for the first time, or if you expect the accessibility of popular history. The difficulty here is real and the 3.9 rating is a genuine signal. A solid background in the period through other texts first will make this significantly more rewarding.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Pagans anti-Christian in its argument or is it making a more neutral historical point?
O’Donnell is making a historiographical rather than theological argument, he wants to restore the perspective of those whose religious world was dismantled, not to reverse the verdict of history. He treats both Christian and non-Christian figures with complexity rather than sympathy or condemnation. Some readers experience the empathy for pagan perspectives as implicitly critical of Christianity, but that is a reading effect rather than the book’s stated purpose.
Does the book cover the persecution of pagans under Christian emperors or focus primarily on the fourth century?
The primary focus is the fourth century CE, the period of Constantine’s reign through the establishment of Christianity as the empire’s dominant religion. The later systematic suppression of pagan practice under Theodosius and beyond is touched on but not the book’s central subject.
O’Donnell is primarily an Augustine scholar, does his expertise show more in the Augustine sections than elsewhere?
Yes, noticeably. The Augustine chapters are among the book’s most penetrating. O’Donnell’s long engagement with Augustine produces readings that are more layered and confident than the treatments of other figures, and these sections tend to receive the most positive mentions from readers who find the book’s density rewarding.
How does Pagans compare to Peter Brown’s work on late antiquity?
Brown is a more accessible writer and his scope is broader, works like The World of Late Antiquity cover similar territory with more narrative momentum. O’Donnell is more focused and more combative. They complement each other well for readers who want to understand the period from multiple scholarly angles.
