The Darkening Age by Catherine Nixey

Pan Macmillan, 352 pages, £9.99

The 18th-century excavators who unearthed Pompeii were shocked to find that the respectable classes of the Roman world were not so respectable after all. Houses were adorned with sexually charged decorations – erotic frescoes, for example, or lamps in the shape of winged genitalia. If this was surprising, suggests Catherine Nixey, it was because ancient open-mindedness had been snuffed out by the prudery of Christians who, from the fourth century onward, became the new masters of Rome.

Nixey’s lively study decries the efforts of Christian preachers to brand pagan culture as sinful and idolatrous. Lamentably, certain bishops used their eloquence to stir up restless crowds against their rivals. Where the book disappoints is in its analysis of how the battlelines were drawn in fourth and fifth-century cities. Nixey seems to believe that Christianity, rather than demagoguery and personal ambition, was the cause of all this. Yet mob violence was by no means an exclusively Christian phenomenon.

Nixey’s confusion here is jarring because her theme is so timely; understanding the cause of populist anger could not be more important in our own age. But the impulse to lay blame for populism at the door of a people or faith, rather than of populism itself, can only be part of the problem, never the solution.

Professor Kate Cooper is head of history at Royal Holloway, University of London