ABSTRACT
Late Antique competition between pagans and Christians for control of the Panhellenic sanctuaries has been neglected or denied in most modern scholarship. Survey works on the Christianization of pagan sites rarely describe any sites in Greece outside Athens, while more detailed examinations of specific sites in Greece postulate little conflict, competition, or even continuity in the transition between sites of pagan festivals and ordinary Christian villages.1 While the violence of the struggle over public religious sites is becoming increasingly clear for a few Late Antique cities like Rome and Alexandria, the Roman province of Achaea, where the Panhellenic sanctuaries were located, still suffers from a lack of evidence and detailed study.2 At the end of the third century CE, most Panhellenic sanctuaries were still sites of pagan celebration for Greeks and Philhellenes from all over the Mediterranean, as well as a keystone of their cultural identity. Yet by the end of the fifth century CE, every major sanctuary in Achaea contained at least one Christian basilica.3
