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Post by timoneill on Sept 17, 2017 20:12:30 GMT
A review in the Sunday Times by Peter Thonemann, author of The Hellenistic Age and who teaches at Oxford: www.thetimes.co.uk/article/darkening-age-catherine-nixey-review-crbc0n2np Statues were smashed, temples toppled and manuscripts burnt, as the early Christians tried to wipe out all traces of classical civilisation, claims this polemic
He briefly summarises the polemic and then rather takes it apart. Nixey vividly evokes the fundamentalist bonfires that 'blazed across empireas outlawed books went up in flames'. Inconveniently, we have no evidence for a single poem by Ovid or Catullus having been put to the flames... Ovid, she grudgingly notes, continued to be copied and read enthusiastically during the medieval period.
Nixey dedicates many horrified pages to the destruction of the temple of Seraphis, "the greatest building in the world' by a Christian mob at Alexandria in Ad 392" Again, the truth is more complex. ...Of some 700 known temples to the old gods in Roman Gaul, only 10 (1.4%) seem to have met a violent end in the fourth or fifth century (not certainly at the hands of Christians).
No doubt Augustine and Jerome are less in tune with 21st century sexual mores than Catullus or Ovid. But intolerance comes in more than one flavour.I noted Thonemann's wryly critical review on Twitter and had someone called George Morley replied "Peter Thonemann also says it's sardonic, well-informed and 'brilliantly evokes all that was lost with the waning of the classical world.'". To which I responded "You can be 'sardonic' and 'well informed' and still unbalanced and relying on cherry-picked evidence. This book is bad historical analysis." But then I wondered who George Morley might be. It turns out he's a non-fiction editor at PanMacmillan. Got to protect the investment I suppose.
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Post by sandwiches on Sept 19, 2017 18:35:13 GMT
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Post by timoneill on Sept 19, 2017 19:19:35 GMT
Yes, it seems the editor is a she. Perhaps she's a fan of the Famous Five. History writer Tom Holland contacted me over my latest History for Atheists post and is encouraging me to write a book. He's offering to introduce me to his agent who, as it turns out, sold Nixey's book to PanMacmillan. Holland thinks if his agent sells a book by me it will be penance for loosing Nixey's monster on the world. I've also just had another encounter with the still slightly crazy Charles Freeman, who accused me of being a sockpuppet for another poster, claimed I had slandered him by noting public information available on his own books and his Wiki page and came out with a paranoid fantasy about me "blogging against [him] under various names". Apparently I am a many-headed Hydra and so if anyone criticises him it must be me in disguise. I generally don't see Freeman's book getting cited much by the Gnu Atheist types these days, but it's only a matter of time before we see Nixey becoming their "historian" du jour. I wonder how long before Carrier starts going into raptures over her.
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Post by jamierobertson on Sept 19, 2017 21:35:54 GMT
I generally don't see Freeman's book getting cited much by the Gnu Atheist types these days, but it's only a matter of time before we see Nixey becoming their "historian" du jour. I wonder how long before Carrier starts going into raptures over her. Presumably he'll book her for an atheist conference, attempt to seduce her with his polyamorous ukelele, and end up being accused of sexual harassment before suing her for defamation.
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Post by timoneill on Sept 19, 2017 23:24:02 GMT
I generally don't see Freeman's book getting cited much by the Gnu Atheist types these days, but it's only a matter of time before we see Nixey becoming their "historian" du jour. I wonder how long before Carrier starts going into raptures over her. Presumably he'll book her for an atheist conference, attempt to seduce her with his polyamorous ukelele, and end up being accused of sexual harassment before suing her for defamation. We've all seen that sexy photo of him in ancient Greek half-undress leaning seductively against a column. What woman could resist?
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Post by humphreyfmclarke on Sept 20, 2017 17:28:35 GMT
Hmmm - that's interesting. Gerard DeGroot tutored me for one module at St Andrews - a course on 'The Life and Times of the A-Bomb'. It was quite enjoyable if I recall, although truth be told he wasn't the best teacher. Gerard asked us (not expecting much of a response) whether anyone could think of a strategy for a winnable nuclear war that might have worked in the 80s. Then this girl who hadn't said very much till that point came up with this brilliant plan - it involved inviting the leadership of the various powers to some kind of detente / nuclear disarmament conference - murdering them and then launching a massive preemptive strike. It was met with stunned silence but I remember Gerard being fairly impressed at how well thought out it was. Anyway his area is modern British and American history and he clearly doesn't know a lot about late antiquity. He seems to think the Serapeum was 'the world’s first public library, with perhaps 700,000 books'! and that 'Galen’s brand of empirical learning could not withstand the force of blind Christian faith' (wasn't it Christians who preserved two million words of the Galenic Corpus). Seems this book will be very deserving of the Tim O Neill treatment - not least because a few people who should know better seem to be giving it good reviews.
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Post by sandwiches on Sept 21, 2017 21:11:38 GMT
There is already a review on Amazon by a reviewer called Jane Roberts (she does not seem to be a 'verfied purchaser' as Amazon calls them) and does not seem to have a previous review history. She does not actually refer specifically to anything in the book. She gives a five star review and says:
Beautifully written and fascinating. A real page-turner with many wonderfully funny anecdotes. It is clearly very thoroughly researched but wears this lightly - it's very easy to read.
I must say it's fascinating to look at a particular example of a book and how it gets published and promoted.
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Post by James Hannam on Sept 22, 2017 12:19:21 GMT
I must say it's fascinating to look at a particular example of a book and how it gets published and promoted. I've only seen the book in the shop, and had a flick through. If it takes off, I'll probably read it but for the moment I'm looking forward to Tim's review. It is worth noting that publishers want to sell stuff rather than educate. A book gets published because an editor likes it and thinks it will make money, not because it is accurate. As screenwriter William Goldstein said of Hollywood, no one knows anything.
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Post by sandwiches on Sept 22, 2017 21:31:32 GMT
I suppose it helps if it gets funding?: www.jerwoodcharitablefoundation.org/2015/11/20/winners-of-rsl-jerwood-prize-for-non-fiction-announced/The 2015 RSL Jerwood Awards for Non-Fiction, now in their twelfth year, are judged byJonathan Beckman, Jonathan Keates and Kate Summerscale. The three awards, one of £10,000 and two of £5,000, are presented to authors engaged on their first commissioned works of non-fiction
Catherine Nixey, £5,000 for The Darkening Age, (Macmillan, early 2017). This account of early Christians, from the Roman viewpoint, is, for Jonathan Keates, ‘a powerful corrective to our view of Christianity as a religion of peace, showing how it triumphed through violence, philistinism and wholesale barbarity’ and Kate Summerscale thought it ‘a riveting story’
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Post by timoneill on Sept 26, 2017 3:07:15 GMT
And here's someone else who has drunk Nixey's Kool Aid: " Blazing saddles dim memory in new dark age of censorship, witch-hunts" This guy somehow manages to make the leap from Mel Brooks saying his Blazing Saddles couldn't be made today to a garbled and mostly distorted account of left-wing censoriousness on US campuses and finally an acrobatic jump to Nixey's shrieking neo-Gibbonism. A performance worthy of a gold medal in mental gymnastics. The more quotes from Nixey's book I read the crazier it gets. "Monasteries start to erase the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Archimedes. ‘Heretical’ — and brilliant — ideas crumble into dust. Pliny is scraped from the page. Cicero and Seneca are overwritten. Archimedes is covered over. Every single work of Democritus and his heretical ‘atomism’ vanishes. Ninety per cent of all classical literature fades away.” So I wonder who preserved all those copies of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Seneca Pliny and Archimedes that lead to the editions I have in my library. Magical book elves perhaps. One of the times reviews talks about the marvelous anatomical work done by Galen and notes that it was not improved on until Vesalius. But neglects to mention that this was largely because Galen was preserved and was so revered by medieval scholars that he was usually not questioned. The same one also said that the Serapeum contained 700,000 books - an inflated figure usually claimed for its much larger predecessor. Nixey and her agent are merrily tweeting links to these clueless reviews, heaping praise on their wise and learned reviewers. Ye gods ... In better news, Australia Post informs me that my copy of her silly book arrives today.
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Post by fortigurn on Sept 26, 2017 14:49:38 GMT
"Every single work of Democritus and his heretical ‘atomism’ vanishes. Ninety per cent of all classical literature fades away.” Maybe Plato was successful. After all, Diogenes Laërtius tells us ""Aristoxenus in his Historical Notes affirms that Plato wished to burn all the writings of Democritus that he could collect".
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Post by unkleE on Sept 26, 2017 21:53:14 GMT
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Post by timoneill on Sept 27, 2017 0:33:44 GMT
I'm thinking of using an analysis of Photios' Bibliotheca to illustrate why saying "ninety per cent of all classical literature fades away" because of naughty Christians is so silly. About half the works Photios mentions are lost and most of those are Christian. While it would be a lot of work, I'm thinking of putting those works into a spreadsheet, marking which are Christian and which are pagan and then noting which survive and which don't. The idea is to see if the proportions are markedly different. But does anyone know if anyone has already done this analysis? I'd rather not spend several days mapping all this info if some industrious nineteenth century scholar has already done it for me.
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Post by humphreyfmclarke on Sept 27, 2017 17:15:07 GMT
Had a quick skim of an e-copy.
Pros - well written. Hard to argue with the 'fanaticism and close-mindedness = bad' subtext.
As a work - it's an admixture of Greenblatt and Freeman with a sprinkling of Carrier for good measure.
It's a sort of travelogue of late antiquity which makes it accessible but hard to follow the wider context.
Once again you would think that the early Christian authorities who decried Pagan literature were the one who won the argument.
Where we get onto wider context we get stuff like this:
'Much classical literature was preserved by Christians. Far more was not. To survive, manuscripts needed to be cared for, recopied. Classical ones were not. Medieval monks, at a time when parchment was expensive and classical learning held cheap, simply took pumice stones and scrubbed the last copies of classical works from the page. Rohmann has pointed out that there is even evidence to suggest that in some cases ‘whole groups of classical works were deliberately selected to be deleted and overwritten in around AD 700, often with texts authored by [the fathers of the Church or by] legal texts that criticised or banned pagan literature’.28 Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy and many, many more: all were scrubbed away by the hands of believers'
'Much was preserved. Much, much more was destroyed. It has been estimated that less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era.35 For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains.36 If this was ‘preservation’ – as it is often claimed to be – then it was astonishingly incompetent. If it was censorship, it was brilliantly effective.'
The writings of the Greeks ‘have all perished and are obliterated’: that was what John Chrysostom had said. He hadn’t been quite right, then: but time would bring greater truth to his boast. Undefended by pagan philosophers or institutions, and disliked by many of the monks who were copying them out, these texts start to disappear. Monasteries start to erase the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Archimedes. ‘Heretical’ – and brilliant – ideas crumble into dust. Pliny is scraped from the page. Cicero and Seneca are overwritten. Archimedes is covered over. Every single work of Democritus and his heretical ‘atomism’ vanishes. Ninety per cent of all classical literature fades away.'
She seems to borrow heavily from Dr Dirk Rohmann's (Sheffield Uni)'Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity'. This argues that 'in addition to heretical, magical, astrological and anti-Christian books, other less obviously subversive categories of literature were also vulnerable to destruction, censorship or suppression through prohibition of the copying of manuscripts. These include texts from materialistic philosophical traditions, texts which were to become the basis for modern philosophy and science'. It would be worth checking this out but getting hold of a copy is very expensive.
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Post by timoneill on Sept 27, 2017 18:45:06 GMT
She seems to borrow heavily from Dr Dirk Rohmann's (Sheffield Uni)'Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity'. This argues that 'in addition to heretical, magical, astrological and anti-Christian books, other less obviously subversive categories of literature were also vulnerable to destruction, censorship or suppression through prohibition of the copying of manuscripts. These include texts from materialistic philosophical traditions, texts which were to become the basis for modern philosophy and science'. It would be worth checking this out but getting hold of a copy is very expensive. Unfortunately my university library doesn't have a copy. But a review by Mark Edwards in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2017, Vol.68(4), pp.825-827 indicates not everyone was as enamoured of Rohmann's book. It seems he conflates the regular censorship and destruction of books of magic and divination with that of books of philosophy. He emphasises the usual quotes from Tertullian and Chrysostum about the unsuitability of "pagan" learning while playing down its defence by Augustine and Clement of Alexandria (in fact, he marshals the latter two as enemies of pagan learning, though how I'm not sure). He also makes a case that the Epicurians were particular targets of Christian censorship and that the destruction of magical texts was due to magic being underpinned by Epricurian-style materialism. Edwards finds this pretty hard to swallow, given that the Epicurians seem to have had little interest in magic at all and they barely feature in Christian polemic (seemingly because they were not as prominent in the ancient world as people like Greenblatt, Nixey and, it seems, Rohmann would like to believe). Apparently he also puts emphasis on Jovian's burning of the library at Antioch, makes a case for the Palatine Library being a victim of Christian arson and notes a reference to "the temple of Serapis" holding books by John Chrysostom in 386 as evidence it still held a library when it was destroyed. Having just read parts of Rohmann's book on Google Books, he seems rather more circumspect than Nixey (not that this would be hard), but in places this he gets pretty fanciful. Some commonplace comments by Synesius in his letters about keeping certain neo-Platonic ideas from the hoi polloi somehow gets worked up into speculation that Hypatia was teaching her students about the earth being in motion and not the centre of the cosmos - a strange thing for an editor of Ptolemy to be doing. From what I've read so far Rohmann's book veers from cautious (he's not convinced about the Jovian/Antioch story) to a bit weird. It will be interesting to see how Nixey uses him. I think I can guess.
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