ABSTRACT

This chapter is about persistence and change and about (some of) the historiography of the End of Greco-Roman Paganism. It explores the Romantic concept of the Twilight of the Gods in the cruel fluorescent illumination of modern revisionist history that seeks to downplay the resistance and indeed existence of pagans in the fourth century CE and later. It begins with general questions and problems before moving on to places and praxis and evidence for Late Antique nostalgia. It then explores the fate of animal sacrifice in missionary strategies attested from Gaul and Asia Minor. It ends with two case studies. The first critically explores possible continuities of blood sacrifice at the shrine of Saint Felix at Nola in the Natalicia of Paulinus. The second turns to the hagiographical dossier of Saint Julianus of Brioude (Auvergne) to make a case that he may be no bona fide martyr, but a transformed god, whose lineaments can be discerned in the twilight of the early medieval evidence.