"The best epic saga of the prewar period"
Czesław Miłosz: History of Polish Literature
Nights And Days
The Last Olympiad
by Aleksander Krawczuk
​
Let a legendary author tell you this fascinating story.
The four years 391-395 AD--corresponding to the 293rd Olympiad-- marked the end of Antiquity: wholesale destruction of pagan temples, the last pagan rebellion, the first murder of an emperor by his Germanic bodyguards, and finally the imperial edict forbidding on pain of death the practice of any religion other than Christianity.
This brilliant panorama of the Roman world during this juncture covers features:
​
-
the weird views of the doctors of the Church: Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine concerning baths and demons
-
the caustic view of his contemporaries of the dyspeptic historian Ammianus Marcellinus
-
three fanatic historians of the Church
-
the grumpy pagan rhetorician Libanius
-
character sketches of the blood-thirsty scholar-defenders of the Alexandrian Serapeum
-
the weird author of a rabid anti-Christian diatribe which somehow miraculously survived to our times ("The Lives of Sophists")
-
and the quirky and mysterious figure of Flavius Vopiscus, the "Jorge Luis Borges of ancient Rome"
For a limited time only, get it for just $0.99
Or, buy it from us for $0.99, and get a copy of
Jacek Bocheński's Divine Julius
absolutely free
Aleksander Krawczuk (died 2023) was a scholar, a professor at the Jagiellonian University and a best-selling European author of books on Graeco-Roman antiquity with an international cult following. His intimate and conversational style allowed him to talk about complicated subjects in an accessible way without dumbing them down in the process. His books remain in print in many languages across Europe. And now they finally appear in English.