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Post by sandwiches on May 21, 2017 12:37:52 GMT
Did Christianity destroy the Classical World? A new book on the way. Were Christians destroying the classical world even in the first century A.D.? Would I be a tad cynical to suspect that 'Christians destroyed the classical world' sells better than 'A book about the classical world'? Not least because of the free publicity in newspaper headlines on the 'controversy' about how 'The Church' destroyed the classical world and suppressed the truth and delayed the advance of Western civilisation? Was 'the polytheistic world' so much more tolerant? www.panmacmillan.com/authors/catherine-nixey/the-darkening-ageThe Darkening Age The Christian Destruction of the Classical World Catherine Nixey The Darkening Age is the largely unknown story of how a militant religion comprehensively and deliberately extinguished the teachings of the Classical world, ushering in centuries of unquestioning adherence to 'one true faith'. Despite the long-held notion that the early Christians were meek and mild, going to their martyr's deaths singing hymns of love and praise, the truth, as Catherine Nixey reveals, is very different. Far from being meek and mild, they were violent, ruthless and fundamentally intolerant. Unlike the polytheistic world, in which the addition of one new religion made no fundamental difference to the old ones, this new ideology stated not only that it was the way, the truth and the light but that, by extension, every single other way was wrong and had to be destroyed. From the 1st century to the 6th, those who didn't fall into step with its beliefs were pursued in every possible way: social, legal, financial and physical. Their altars were upturned and their temples demolished, their statues hacked to pieces and their priests killed. It was an annihilation. Authoritative, vividly written and utterly compelling, this is a remarkable debut from a brilliant young historian.www.thebookseller.com/news/macmillan-buys-historical-title-nixey-304939Pan Macmillan has acquired a book about how the forces of Christianity destroyed the texts of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Darkening Age, by historian and journalist Catherine Nixey, will tell the story of how all over the ancient Roman world books were burnt, temples were thrown down and pagan priests were killed or exiled. Georgina Morley, editorial director of non-fiction at Macmillan, acquired the world rights from Patrick Walsh at Conville & Walsh. She said Nixey’s proposal was “one of the most exciting” she had seen in years. Macmillan will publish in 2017, with format and price to be decided, and has already sold rights to Hollands Diep in the Netherlands. US rights have been pre-empted by Alexander Littlefield at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Nixey studied Classics at Cambridge and worked as a teacher for several years. She is now a journalist on the arts desk at the Times. The Darkening Age is her first book.
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endrefodstad
Bachelor of the Arts
Sumer ys Icumen in!
Posts: 54
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Post by endrefodstad on May 21, 2017 15:06:03 GMT
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Post by sandwiches on May 21, 2017 16:58:08 GMT
Thank you, that was a revealing article, particularly the last line:
And I still can't point to Athens on the map.
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Post by peteri on May 21, 2017 20:07:32 GMT
Thanks,
I wonder how it is, in this anti-imperialist age, that people are prepared to accept the idea that Roman imperialism was some sort of force for good.
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Post by evangelion on May 22, 2017 5:26:56 GMT
...unless the dominant culture forced you to practice that religion under pain of death, as the Romans did to the Christians.
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Post by domics on May 22, 2017 7:28:43 GMT
...unless the dominant culture forced you to practice that religion under pain of death, as the Romans did to the Christians. also Manicheans or Isis worshippers or Druids would disagree.
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Post by domics on May 22, 2017 7:35:00 GMT
Their altars were upturned and their temples demolished, their statues hacked to pieces and their priests killed. It was an annihilation. [/i][/quote] If someone is interested in this topic I would suggest this article: Lavan, Luke A. (2011) The End of the Temples: Towards a New Narrative. In: Lavan, Luke A. and Mulryan, Michael, eds. The Archaeology of Late Antique 'Paganism. Late Antique Archaeology . Brill, Leiden. canvas.brown.edu/courses/981805/files/52318397/download?wrap=1
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Post by ignorantianescia on May 22, 2017 17:27:16 GMT
Their altars were upturned and their temples demolished, their statues hacked to pieces and their priests killed. It was an annihilation. If someone is interested in this topic I would suggest this article: Lavan, Luke A. (2011) The End of the Temples: Towards a New Narrative. In: Lavan, Luke A. and Mulryan, Michael, eds. The Archaeology of Late Antique 'Paganism. Late Antique Archaeology . Brill, Leiden. canvas.brown.edu/courses/981805/files/52318397/download?wrap=1Thanks for that. I've read books by Peter Brown and Peter Heather that occasionally touched on this, but I was looking for something specific on this subject.
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Post by James Hannam on May 22, 2017 19:30:55 GMT
If someone is interested in this topic I would suggest this article: Lavan, Luke A. (2011) The End of the Temples: Towards a New Narrative. In: Lavan, Luke A. and Mulryan, Michael, eds. The Archaeology of Late Antique 'Paganism. Late Antique Archaeology . Brill, Leiden. canvas.brown.edu/courses/981805/files/52318397/download?wrap=1Thanks for that. I've read books by Peter Brown and Peter Heather that occasionally touched on this, but I was looking for something specific on this subject. Yes, thanks. Really interesting article and a way into all sorts of other interesting stuff. J
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Post by sandwiches on May 22, 2017 20:31:31 GMT
domics
Thank you also. That was an interesting article. I have only skim-read it and will re-read it. Can't help suspecting that Hypatia will loom large in this new book by Ms Nixey, though without the nuances of an academic article like this, though maybe the publisher's blurb makes me unduly suspicious. I will look around for any more articles on the same theme.
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Post by timoneill on Sept 13, 2017 18:33:01 GMT
This book comes out next week and I just pre-ordered my copy. I'm very excited to learn, as the publisher's blurbs assure me I will, "how a militant religion comprehensively and deliberately extinguished the teachings of the Classical world". Though it's odd that this could have happened and yet I seem to be quite au fait with "the teachings of the Classical world", despite them being "comprehensively .... extinguished". So I'm fascinated to learn how it can be that the books I have on my shelves by Classical authors actually don't exist, because they were all "comprehensively .... extinguished". I can't wait ...
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Post by timoneill on Sept 14, 2017 8:33:58 GMT
While waiting for my copy of this book to arrive, I happened to find the first chapters are already available on Google Books (see HERE). I thought that perhaps the lurid and overstated publisher's blurbs may have been attempts at drumming up business and the fact that it was endorsed by Dan Jones, who is a good young historian of the later Middle Ages, was encouraging. Ye gods, was I wrong! It's way, way worse than I could have imagined. And I mean really, really bad. By the time I got to the bit where she assured us that Christians were too stupid to even vandalise pagan temples effectively - "many statues on many temples were saved simply by virtue of being too high for them, with their primitive ladders and hammers, to reach" - I was struggling to work out if this was even meant to be serious. It seems it is. We can only assume these idiot Christians managed to get some less primitive ladders and hammers when they built this. Maybe they found some pagan ladders and hammers lying around and used those. The first review that I could find was mostly laudatory and seemed amused at the "stupid Christians" anecdotes about sylites, dendrites and desert ascetics (allegedly) doing weird things. But even that reviwer could detect that Nixey was stretching things: "What should be presented as conjecture is styled as fact. And when conjecture is admitted, the reasons for uncertainty aren’t given or gone into. Visit the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum and you’ll see that the east pediment is particularly badly damaged — ‘almost certainly’ by Christians, the author tells us. But that’s about all she tells us, except to note that the marble was ‘likely’ ground down and used for mortar to build churches. This is a terrifically exciting aside: the greatest achievement in Greek art was pestled into cement for Christian construction work? How likely is this? How do we know? How could we know?" Ummm, yes. And the two chapters I read were stuffed full of this "conjecture styled as fact", and much worse besides. I asked Dan Jones why he endorsed such a terrible book and got a rather snotty reply. Perhaps they were flatmates when at Cambridge or something. I can't wait to eviscerate this one - it makes Charles Freeman's stuff seem wise and judicious.
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Post by fortigurn on Sept 14, 2017 15:59:43 GMT
By the time I got to the bit where she assured us that Christians were too stupid to even vandalise pagan temples effectively - "many statues on many temples were saved simply by virtue of being too high for them, with their primitive ladders and hammers, to reach" - I was struggling to work out if this was even meant to be serious. It seems it is. This is next level ignorance. That reviewer certainly has his own issues however, with lines like "Hypatia, the female Socrates, a heartbreaking early example of a woman who was killed for being clever". The female Socrates?
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Post by sandwiches on Sept 16, 2017 22:41:37 GMT
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Post by sandwiches on Sept 17, 2017 12:23:25 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.
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