How Christianity came to dominate the Roman world
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Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. What if the fall of Rome wasn't a collapse, but a rebrand? Well, in today's episode, Alice Roberts delves into the dramatic transformation of the Roman world and the rise of Christianity, from cliffside burials in Wales to imperial politics in Constantinople. Speaking to Danny Byrd, she reveals how early Christianity wasn't a grassroots movement of the poor, but a strategic shift embraced by elites, bishops and emperors. Alice, what drew you to this particular moment in history, the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity?
This is a particular period in history that I've been interested in for a long time. I think the main attraction for me is that, particularly in Britain, it's a period where we don't have much history. Sounds like an odd choice to write a history book about a period where you don't have much history, but it means that archaeology really comes to the fore and it kind of forces us to look at that archaeology, the material culture of the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries and try to understand what's going on. And
Really this book came out of a a fascination with with burial archaeology, which is has been something that I've been researching and writing about for many years. And it takes me back to particular burials that I was excavating on a cliff in in Wales 20 years ago. And we were excavating these burials because there were bones eroding out of a cliff falling onto the beach below. And we wanted to establish how big the cemetery was. There wasn't a church associated with it, it was just on its own.
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