ter, in 476, the last emperor of Rome, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by Odoacer, who became the first "barbarian" king of Italy. In spite of this disaster, the Pagans made one last attempt to revive the Pagan rites. In 484, the Magister militum per Orientem, Illus, revolted against Eastern Emperor Zeno and raised his own candidate, Leontius, to the throne. Leontius hoped to reopen the temples and restore the ancient ceremonies; as such, many Pagans joined in his revolt against Zeno. Illus and Leontius were compelled, however, to flee to a remote Isaurian fortress, where Zeno besieged them for four years. Zeno finally captured them in 488 and promptly had them executed.
Following the revolt, Zeno instituted a harsh persecution of Pagan intellectuals. With the failure of the revolt of Leontius, some Pagans became disillusioned and many became Christian, or pretended to do so, in order to avoid persecution. The subjugation of the Roman Empire to Christianity became complete when the emperor Anastasius I, who came to the throne in 491, was required to sign a written declaration of orthodoxy before his coronation.
Appropriation by Pope Gregory I
The caverns, grottoes, crags and glens that had once been used for the worship of the Pagan gods were now appropriated by Christianity: "Let altars be built and relics be placed there" wrote Pope Gregory I, "so that [the pagans] have to change from the worship of the daemones to that of the true God."
Pagan persecution in "barbarian" monarchies
"The triumph of Catholic Christianity over Roman paganism, heretical Arianism [and] pagan barbarism," asserts Hillgarth "was certainly due in large part to the support it received, first from the declining Roman state and later from the barbarian monarchies."
Evaluation and legacy
Except for the most recent literature, for at least the last 200 years historical scholarship has followed a conceptual scheme in which the persecution of those Mediterranean religions that we now label "paganism" was seen as the result of the religious intolerance inherent in the monotheistic Christian faith. By the very nature of their belief in a single almighty God, so it is concluded, Christians were unable to tolerate the existing beliefs in a variety of Gods. The classic expression of this view occurs in the work of Edward Gibbon, who, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, equated Christianity with intolerance and paganism with tolerance. "It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Gibbon's interpretation on subsequent scholarship."
However, "while there is obviously some truth in the proposition that intolerance follows from the rejection of other gods that lies at the core of monotheistic belief," this alone could neither explain why pagans had previously persecuted Christians, nor why there were "important voices for moderation in the early Christian community." As H.A. Drake writes: "Gibbon skirts a serious problem: for three centuries prior to Constantine, the tolerant pagans who people the Decline and Fall were the authors of several major persecutions, in which Christians were the victims. ...Gibbon covered this embarrassing hole in his argument with an elegant demur. Rather than deny the obvious, he adroitly masked the question by transforming his Roman magistrates into models of Enlightenment rulers — reluctant persecutors, too sophisticated to be themselves religious zealots."
Peter Garnsey strongly disagrees with those who describe the attitude of the "plethora of cults" that are labelled 'Paganism' as "tolerant" or "inclusive." What Ramsay MacMullen wrote, that in its process of expansion, the Roman Empire was "completely tolerant, in heaven as on earth" (with the notable exceptions of the Jews, Christians and Druids), is for Garnsey a simple "misuse of terminology." The foreign Gods were not tolerated, but made subject together with their communities when they were conquered. The Romans "cannot be said to have extended to them the same combination of disapproval and acceptance which is toleration."
Legacy for Christianity
The example