The thesis of this book is that, if a ‘wide definition of censorship’ is adopted (p. 301), Christian censorship did more injury to the classical tradition than we have been wont to imagine. The first chapter finds little evidence that imperial measures against magicians, astrologers and philosophers were reinforced by the burning of their books before the age of Constantine. Such bonfires accompanied the persecution of both Christians and Manichees in the reign of Diocletian, and Constantine avenged the Church in a similar manner not only on the pagan Porphyry but on the heretic Arius, thus equating schism with persecution. A disputed passage in Chrysostom is understood to refer to the destruction of Porphyry's writings rather than the mere obsolescence of works by his predecessors. Julian is shown to have passed censure on the works of Epicurus, and of course to have suffered the obloquy of Christians after his death. Here, however, we seem to cross the line between destruction and mere desuetude: we cannot blame either Julian or his critics for declining to promote the circulation of unwholesome texts in an age of scant materials. While Rohmann is aware that such distinctions ought to be drawn, and often applies them, it seems to me that his book would be more perspicuous if different chapters had been assigned to censorship, obsolescence and private acts of recantation.

The second chapter reviews the harsh enactments of Theodosius and Justinian, the suppression of magic by Valens and other emperors, and allusions to the recent incineration of magical writings in Augustine and Prudentius. The last section is devoted to the hitherto untranslated life of Simeon, the pillar saint from Antioch who prompted a local magistrate to make an auto-da-fé of the works of Manichaeans, astrologers, ‘automatists' (here said to be Epicureans) and other egregious heretics. These examples of censorship are once again mingled with literary denunciations of the Greek philosophers, in which (according to Rohmann) Plato is spared and Epicurus is criticised with particular severity. The centrepiece of chapter iii, in which the protagonists are Christian holy men, is the life of Severus of Antioch, also untranslated at the time when Rohmann submitted his monograph to the publisher. In this, as in a number of other texts cited in the chapter (including the Acts of the Apostles), combustion is a voluntary act which follows the renunciation of magic. It is no surprise to learn that demons were thought to be patrons of sorcery, which indeed is the common denominator of magic, heresy and persecution. It is hard to judge, however, whether belief in the instrumentality of demons was a cause or an effect of the detestation which the legislators express when they proclaim their remedies for these distempers.

The same question arises when chapter iv substantiates the claim, already made more than once in passing, that Christians entertained a peculiar horror of magic because it was underwritten by a materialistic philosophy which acknowledged no benign governance of the cosmos. We may wonder why any Christian should have felt the need of a philosophical warrant for the suppression of practices which had already been condemned in Scripture; it is all the more surprising that the system which associates with magic is that of the Epicureans who, in contrast to the Stoics, had made no attempt to align their teaching about the origin and ordering of the cosmos with any popular superstition. Epicurus had denied the gods any providential interest in our affairs, but, far from abandoning the human will to automatic forces, he had argued for its freedom in terms that were later borrowed by Origen in his own critique of astrology. Neither the demonic nor the daemonic, so far as we know, played any role in Epicurus' concept of nature. His disciples in the fourth century were less formidable in numbers than the magicians, and the rarity of Christian allusions to them confirms their insignificance. Even in the texts adduced by Rohmann, no more prominence is accorded to them than to any other school: to take an example, they merit less attention than the Stoics, let alone the Platonists, in Augustine's ep. cxviii, which is here displayed as evidence of the anxiety that they were capable of exciting in the fifth century. Where they might appear to be the object of particular odium (as, for instance, in Origen's work Against Celsus), the reason is that, being already little more than a byword, they served the rhetorical purpose of rendering anyone who could be attached to their number both contemptible and abhorrent to readers of every other persuasion. Epicureanism survived as a trope when it was no longer a living sect.

Chapter v collates triumphant sermons by John Chrysostom on the decline of Greek philosophy with laments by the sophist Libanius over the (temporary) desertion of the schools and Jerome's shallow pretence that he was no longer a Ciceronian. Noting that Prudentius, Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria all deprecated the reading of pagan literature, Rohmann adds that Prudentius none the less desired that the eloquence of his enemy Symmachus should ‘rest unharmed’. In chapter vi he records the deliberate burning of a library at Antioch by Jovian, insinuates that the Palatine collection perished through an act of arson, and, while preserving an open mind as to whether the remains of the Alexandrian library suffered with the rest of the Serapeum, deduces from a letter of Synesius to Hypatia that certain books could be passed on only by subterfuge in Egypt. Evidence for deliberate (as opposed to collateral) burning of books in the Gothic sack of Rome proves to be weaker than the evidence for the burning of Christian tomes by the iconoclasts of Constantinople in the eighth century. Book vii examines reports of confiscation, destruction and denunciation in the centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire; as in the rest of the book, one observes a tendency to conflate mere attrition with purposeful exclusion from the canon, and both with active censorship.