Philosophy and Religious Politics in Damascius’ “Philosophical History”

In the paper, I consider some aspects of religious politics in late antiquity on the basis of select fragments from Damascius’ “Philosophical History,” translated into Russian for the first time. I also observe that the archeological finds, often better than the biased literary evidences, show both the different strategies of interaction between the adherents of pagan cults and official Christianity in late antiquity and, more importantly, the non-linearity of the paths by which Christians advanced towards their goal, without ever reaching it. We see that the church authorities often permitted the total destruction of pagan sanctuaries, as happened in 392 with the Serapeum, by initiating the full-scale persecution of pagans and their physical elimination, as Damascus testifies in many sections of his history. On the contrary, in some cases they sought only to "neutralize" the pagan cult, depicting crosses on statues and using ancient temples as churches and, accordingly, to attract the pagan intellectual elite to their side. All in all, this material allows us to take a more comprehensive view of history, reconstructing a complex cultural context.