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. The classic expression of this view occurs in the work of Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. As historian Herbert Drake puts it, "It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Gibbon's interpretation on subsequent scholarship."[123]