Books, Arts & Manners: An Age of Transition

Pagans and Christians, by Robin Lane Fox (Knopf, 799 pp., $35)

Ages of great transition, whether they represent the birth or the death of something dear to posterity, hold out an irresistible appeal to the historical imagination. Christianity’s ascent from a small but enterprising offshoot of Judaism to a world religion is one of the great changes—some would say the single greatest change—in the history of the world. The age in which it arose is one to which