No word is more associated with late antiquity than ‘transformation,’ a term signaling a departure from Gibbon’s melodramatic narrative of decline and collapse of the Roman empire, for which Christianity was partially to blame. But transformation has its own romances, not to mention its own exceptionalism, and so this lecture will offer an alternative approach to conceptualizing the landscape of the late Roman world, focusing on Christian ascetic practice and relic veneration as charged responses to it.