The theme of the colloquium borrowed from Santo Mazzarino a concept which should be put back into its proper context before we seek to establish its validity and its fruitfulness. The aspects of ‘positive democratization’, moving upwards from the lower to the higher levels of society, which Mazzarino observed in certain developments in the third-century Roman world, in particular the assertion of local cultures in their religious and linguistic manifestations, were placed in opposition to theories of ‘decline’which ascribed the decadence of the ancient world to a ‘catastrophic democratization’, which had a levelling effect, in which Christianization, as the promotor of a culture of populism, and barbarization, as the destroyer of the superior cultural achievements of the classical tradition, were allocated a crucial share of responsibility. In this perspective, everything sank to a level characterised as ‘uncultured’ or vulgar’: artistic output, jurisprudence, religious belief. With or without reference to Mazzarino, it appears that historical scholarship of the past half-century has, in a major respect, deepened and widened the area of relevance of the paradigm of democratization, understood in its positive sense (independently of any political democratization which was, obviously, inexistant). It has led us to recognise new categories of cultural catalysts, new agents of social communication; it has abandoned the prejudices of academic and of puristic discourse in the history of art and of language; it has refused to see in the rise of Coptic and of Syriac – late phenomena, moreover – a lowering of the level of culture, as it also has in the case of the rise of Christianity; with Peter Brown, it has rejected the two-level model, which posits an irreducible polarisation of an ‘elitist’ culture and a ‘popular’ or ‘vulgar’ culture. It has ceased to identify the affirmation of cultural and religious identity in terms of secessionist movements. No more could the ‘democratization of culture’have been a phenomenon of ‘deromanization’than ‘romanization’could have entailed a policy of cultural eradication in a colonial mould. The need for a wider form of communication was manifested just as much in technical writings, or in material for popular consumption, as in the various forms of Christian teaching: catechetical works, sermons, hagiography. Artistic production, as much literary as figurative, developed forms which responded to the needs of a ‘mixed’ public, greedy for expressivity, and which rode roughshod over the traditional hierarchy of cultural values in the same way as Christian discourse threw the established social values into disorder, forcing the cultural elite to assume a schizophrenic persona. The Christian pastoral ministry presents not so much a ‘democratization of culture’as a partial unification of culture around a common core, as well as putting in place ‘democratized’ modes of communication which were able to facilitate access to that core. If ‘democratization’ took place it was a democratization imposed from above, one which was ideologically and consensually conceived by the elites and to which the masses were receptive in a variety of ways.