The city of Rome plays a significant part in the plot of Middlemarch. That Rome was the scene of the Casaubons’ doomed honeymoon was not simply an occasion to indicate the failure of Mr Casaubon's libido to rise to his romantic surroundings; it also served to remind some of Eliot's more cerebral readers of the position Rome had occupied in the literature of mythography. An allusion of this sort might now seem too recondite for a general audience. However, the central allegation of pagano-popery (that Roman Catholicism derived in its essentials from classical paganism) was once a familiar trope of popular anti-Catholicism in early modern England, notwithstanding its more specialised function as a tool of mythographical speculation. Indeed, the claim that there had existed a sinister and depraved continuity between ancient pagan Rome and historic Roman Catholicism would remain a vivid element in Protestant polemic well into the middle of the nineteenth century.

Moreover, the supposed continuity between pagan and Christian Rome had also inspired a subtle and insinuating subversion in the hands of two of the most controversial figures of the English Enlightenment: Conyers Middleton – to whom Eliot explicitly refers in Middlemarch – and Edward Gibbon, whose shade lurks in the recesses of the novel's Roman section. Both Middleton and Gibbon seemed to extend the similarity between paganism and popery into a more general conflation of paganism and Christianity, Protestantism included. Was Christianity, they seemed to suggest, basically a reworking of a heathen original?

British culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, of course, immersed in the classics. In spite of their pagan associations, ancient Greece and Rome occupied a central place in English life. Future Anglican clergymen learnt as much – probably more – at school and university about the language, literature and history of the ancient Greeks and Romans as they did about the Hebrews from whom the scriptures derived. Rarely did this tension between classical paganism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition become so overt or threatening as to suggest an impasse.