I have referred on this blog several times to the dispute between the Roman noble Symmachus and St. Ambrose. It was one of the last public disputations between the paganism of classical Rome and the rising Christian confession, after this point (the late 4th century), classical paganism lost any eloquent partisan who could argue for it in the public sphere (the isolated intellectuals at The Academy in Athens do not count), and the next century witnesses the slow fixation of Christianity as an endemic trait of European high culture. I think about this as I see an advert over at Skeptic for Jonathan Kirsch's new book, God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism (details of his lecture at CalTech later this month). When I selected the link for Amazon I was surprised to see that the Publisher's Weekly thought that Julian was Constantine's son (he was Constantine's half-nephew)-but I was not surprised to see some reviewers point to pagan treatment of Jews & Christians as examples of religious persecution. A reading of the history seems to show Jewish & Christian tensions with the pagan Roman state were rooted in religio-political differences, and its more appropriate analogy is with political dissidents, not religious heretics.