[1] He discussed the possibility of a career as a comedian with Jerry Lewis,[2] but then decided to study journalism and history at the University of Southern California as an undergraduate where he was editor-in-chief of the Daily Trojan from 1962 to 1963.
[4] Although he impressed Professor Thomas Africa with his performance in Roman history classes,[5] Drake initially decided to seek a career in journalism after graduation and worked as a reported for United Press International.
[6] He then pursued graduate study in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he wrote a master's thesis on “The Great Vaccination Campaign: How Public Opinion was used in Early Modern Britain” in 1966.
After working on a collaborative volume on a Coptic source (Eudoxia and the Holy Sepulchre: A Constantinian Legend in Coptic (Milan: Cisalpino, 1980), he produced a series of important articles such as “Eusebius on the True Cross,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985): 1-22; “Suggestions of dates in Constantine's Oration to the Saints,” American Journal of Philology 106 (1985): 335–349; “Athanasius' first exile,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 27 (1986): 193–204; “What Eusebius knew: The genesis of the Vita Constantini,” Classical Philology 83 (1988): 20–38; “Policy and belief in Constantine's Oration to the Saints,” Studia Patristica 19 (1989): 43–51; “Constantine and Consensus,” Church History 64 (1995) 1-15; and “Lambs into Lions: explaining early Christian intolerance” Past &Present 153 (1996) 3-36.
He has also co-edited Violence in Late Antiquity with Routledge in 2006 and The City in the Classical and Post-Classical World: Changing Contexts of Power and Identity in 2014 with Cambridge University Press.
"[18] Some of his former students co-edited a Festschrift to him in 2010 entitled The Rhetoric of Power in Late Antiquity: Religion and Politics in Byzantium, Europe and the Early Islamic World (with I.B.