In this superb work of painstaking scholarship, Anthony Kaldellis has advanced a bold argument—that Athens' Parthenon was more revered after its conversion into a Christian church in late antiquity than it had ever been as a temple in the Classical era. Although Kaldellis often advances his arguments with a vehemence that some readers might find distracting, his overall aim is to challenge the conventional perception of the Parthenon as the preeminent symbol of a lost Classical culture by exposing long-neglected evidence for the Parthenon's continued existence as an important religious and pilgrimage center in the Middle Ages and Byzantium. In this signally important building, Kaldellis finds both focus and means for undermining the academically entrenched, but now questionable, view of the Classical world as being one side of a divide “with Christianity and all that is medieval or Byzantine on the other” (3).

With this passionately expressed (and fully acknowledged) agenda, Kaldellis then lays out his evidence for the Parthenon's continuing significance in the center of Athens, even as it was transformed into a shrine to the Christian Parthenos—the Virgin Theotokos. The evidence Kaldellis presents is not only plentiful and persuasive, but it also presents a rich collection of nearly unknown materials from this too often overlooked era of Christian history (especially by Western scholars). Specialists may debate Kaldellis's assessment of different textual sources, but historians of Christian late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Byzantium will be grateful he gives attention to them. Finally, although Kaldellis's work should be recognized for its contribution to our knowledge regarding this time and place, it should also be counted among important paradigm-shifting studies.