The Master gave this year's Syme Lecture at Wolfson College, Oxford on Thursday 7 November.

The Syme Lecture is the most prestigious annual lecture in ancient history in the University of Oxford. It is named for Sir Ronald Syme (1903–1989) the most influential Roman historian of the twentieth century. You can watch the Lecture below.

Confronting the Past: Christianity and the Classics in Late Antiquity

For Christians in late Antiquity the past was never neutral territory. The embrace of Christianity by the emperor Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century AD disrupted any simple narrative of a persecuting Roman Empire; and, in any case, the seemingly pre-destined conjunction of Christ and the emperor Augustus complicated any straightforward imperial critique. So too readings of the classical past, especially as imagined by its greatest poets such as Virgil. Should Christians read Virgil? Should Christian poets write hexameter verse dense with Virgilian allusion? How was a pagan past to be set against the Christian alternative of the Old Testament? And, above all, how was this to be worked out in a world where, for Christians and non-Christians alike, knowledge of the classics was still a hard-won mark of social prestige and superiority? 

This lecture confronts these challenges head on and explores a range of contested approaches to Roman history and the reading of classical texts. For all that human progress might be presented as a providential prolegomenon to Christ (and, more recently, Constantine), Christians remained apprehensive of a past that, like some postwar landscape, was cratered with error. One key question troubled the educated in late Antiquity: what were the possibilities and limits of converting the classical past to Christianity?