SOURCE: Levine, Philip. “The Continuity and Preservation of the Latin Tradition.” In The Transformation of the Roman World: Gibbon's Problem after Two Centuries, edited by Lynn White, Jr., pp. 206-31. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.

In the following excerpt, Levine discusses the importance of Vergil and other Latin writers in fourth-century Rome as evidenced by Macrobius and others.

The long and notorious struggle of early Christianity for official recognition and ultimate ascendancy over traditional Roman paganism culminated during the fourth century in a series of momentous events. Historians of the period have carefully traced the course of this movement from the proclamation of the so-called Edict of Milan by Constantine in 312 or 313 on behalf of the Christians through the sequence of repressive measures instituted against the old religion by Constans and Constantius to the fatal thrust against the ancient state cult by Gratian in 382. It was in that...