p. 18 But however alarming the demons of fornication may have been, the most fearsome demons of all were to be found, teeming like flies on a corpse, around the traditional gods of the empire. Jupiter, Aphrodite, Bacchus and |Isis, all of them in the eyes of these Christian writers, were demonic. In sermon after sermon, tract after tract, Christian preachers and writers reminded the faithful in violently disapproving language that the ‘error’ of the pagan religions was demonically inspired. … As Augustine thundered: ‘All the pagans were under the power of demons. Temples were built to demons, altars were set up to demons, priests ordained for the service of demons, sacrifices offered to demons, and ecstatic ravers were brought in as prophets for demons. The demons’ motivations in all of this was simple: if they had human followers, then they would have sacrifices, and these sacrifices were their food. To this end, Christian writers explained, demons had created the entire Greco-Roman religious system so that ‘they may procure for themselves a proper diet of fumes and blood offered to their statues and images’.”
p. 19 Christian preachers began to exhibit a new, almost hysterical, desire for purity … one had to avoid all contact with the blood, smoke, water and even the smell of other people’s sacrifices. .. At the close of the 4th century, a fitful Christian wrote an anxious letter to Augustine. May a Christian use baths which are used by pagans on a feast day, he asked, either while the pagans are there or after they have left. May a Christian sit in a sedan chair if a pagan has sat in that same chair during the feast day celebrations of an ‘idol’? If a thirst Christian comes across a well in a deserted temple, may they drink from it? If a Christian is starving, and on the point of death, and they see food in an idol’s temple, may they eat it?
p.44 “There was a strong strain of scepticism in Greek and Roman thought. As Pliny the Elder put it: “I deem it a mark of human stupidity to seek to discover the shape and form of God. Whoever God is – provided there is a God … he consists wholly of sense, sight and hearing, wholly of soul, wholly of mind, wholly of himself.” Pliny suggested that what divinity there was, was to be found in humanity itself: “God,” he wrote, “is one mortal helping another.” Rome was not an empire of atheists, emperors were even deified after their death and their ‘genius’ (divine spirit) then worshipped. Nevertheless, even the emperors themselves didn’t always take this too seriously. The emperor Vespasian is said to have announced the severity of his final illness by declaring: ‘Gah, I think I’m turning into a god.’ But Romans were not all cynics… it was a commonly held belief that Rome’s great success depended on the goodwill of the gods. As a character in a Roman history observed: “All went well so long as we obeyed the gods, and ill when we spurned them… Religious they may have been: dogmatic and unbending they were not. Like the Roman Empire, the Roman pantheon could happily expand. Rome was not a paragon of religious pluralism. It had no scruples about banning or suppressing practices – whether Druidic or Bacchic or Manichean – that seemed for any reason pernicious. But equally it could admit foreign gods – though as with so much else in Rome a bureaucratic process had first to be observed. To ignore this process and worship a foreign god that had not been accepted was a socially unacceptable act; it risked upsetting the contract with the incumbent gods and spreading disaster and pestilience.”
p. 68 Pliny (governor in Bithnyia under Trajan) letter 10.96 is nothing less than the very first record of the Christians by a Roman writer… Pliny’s problem with all of this is not religious. He is not upset because Jupiter has been neglected, or Hera has been slighted: he is upset because the citizens of his province are becoming disgruntled by the Christian’s behaviour. Anonymous pamphlets, containing the names of local Christians, have started to appear. Whoever it is who has been writing these, Pliny is now obliged to react. Not because he is fervently religious – he is not – but because it is his job as governor to keep the province calm .. Discontented locals had to be taken seriously; if they were not listened to, a situation might develop where riots could break out – for which Pliny would be held responsible. Pontius Pilate might have been the first official to be reluctantly pressed into action against Christians by local agitators – but he was certainly not the last. Even the locals who were forcing Pliny’s hand might not have been complaining about Christians for religious reasons. It has been speculated …Local tradesmen were angry because this surge in Christian sentiment had led to a drop in the sales of sacrificial meat and their profits were suffering: anti-Christian sentiment caused less by Satan than by a slow trade in sausage meat.”
p. 70 “all over the empire, Romans were frustratingly unwilling to play their role as bloodthirsty martyr-makers. Many even refuse to execute Christians when they arrive in front of them. Arrius Antonius was a Roman governor of Asia who in the late second century had executed a number of Christians in his province. He was perhaps unprepared for what came next. Instead of fleeing, local Christians suddenly turned up and , in one large mob, presented themselves before him. Antonius did indeed dutifully kill a few (presumably there is only so much temptation a Roman can stand) but rather than despatching the rest of pleasure, he turned to them with what, even with the passage of almost two millllennia, sounds unmistakeably like exasperation: ‘Oh you ghastly people,’ he said. ‘If you want to die you have cliffs you can jump off and nooses to hand yourself with….
Other Christians who were deprived of execution turned instead to suicide. In 4th-century North Africa, locals watched in horror as faithful and ‘deranged men, … because they love the name martyr and because they desire human praise more than divine charity, they kill themselves’. The methods of suicide varied but drowning, setting oneself on fire and jumping off cliffs were among the most popular. Whatever the method, the aim was always the same: martyrdom,l eternal glory in heaven and eternal fame on earth – or so it was hoped.”
p. 74 “When a young girl called Eulalia presents herself before a governor he struggles to dissuade her. Think of your future marriage, he begs. ‘Think of the great joys you are cutting off … The family you are bereaving follows you with tears .. you are dying in the bloom of youth…your rash conduct is breaking their hearts.’ Eulalia…ignores him. … Realizing that Christians found full meat sacrifices repellent, officials also tried to tempt them with smaller acts of obedience. Just put out your fingers, Eulalia’s judge begs her, and just touch a little of that incense, and you will escape cruel suffering.”
p. 76 “Maximus, having offered that bribe to the soldier and soon-to-be martyr Julies and been rebuffed… comes up with an almost Jesuitical solution to the problem. ‘If you think [sacrifice] is a sin,’ he suggests, then ‘let me take the blame. I am the one who is forcing you, so that you may hot give the impression of having consented voluntarily. Afterwards you can go home in peace, you will pick up your ten-year bonus and no one will ever trouble you again.”
p. 119 “At the end of the 4th century, the orator Libanius looked out and described in despair what he observed. He and other worshippers of the old gods saw, he said, their temples ‘in ruins, their ritual banned, their altars overturned, their sacrifices suppressed, their priests sent packing, and their property divided up between a crew of rascals.. It is thought that when Constantine had come to the throne, 10 per cent of the empire, at most, were Christian… by the end of that first, tumultuous century of Christian rule, estimates suggest that this figure had been reversed: now between 70 and 90 per cent of the empire were now Christian. One law from around that time declared, entirely untruthfully, that there were no more ‘pagans’. None. The aggression of the claim is remarkable. Christians were writing the wicked ‘pagans; out of existence…. If some of these millions were converting not out of love of Christ but out of fear of his enforcers? No matter, argued Christian preachers. Better to be scared in this life than burn in the next.”
p. 142 “it was felt that Greek and Roman authors should be ignored when they talked about their gods ‘and especially when they represent them as bring many’ – which was basically all of the time… Better, Basil wrote, to avoid dangerous works altogether. “Just as in culling roses we avoid the thorns, from such writings as these we will gather everything useful, and guard against the noxious’. As Basil explained, such ecclesiastical censorship was not illiberal; it was loving. Just as Augustine advocated the beating of heretics with rods out of fatherly care, so Basil advocated the removal of great tracts of the classical canon as an act of ‘great care’ to ensure the soul was safely guarded.”.. Later generations would present Basil as a liberal intellectual.. That is nonsense. Supremacy was precisely what Basil wanted – and he got it.”
p. 146 “This was a new literary world and a newly serious one… The power of this Christian talk was produced by many things, among them a remorseless horatory pedagogy, a hectoring moralising of the individual, and a ceaseless management of the minutiae of everyday life. Above all, it was a form of speech marked by an absence of humour. It was a morose and a deadly serious word.
p. 147 “For many hardline Christian clerics, the entire edifice of academic learning was considered dubious. In some ways there was a novel egalitarianism in this: with Christianity, the humblest fisherman could touch the face of God without having his hand stayed by quibbling scholars. But there was a more aggressive and sins=ter side to it, too. St Paul had succinectly and influently said that ‘the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God’.”
p. 148 “Heretics were intellectual therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect.”
p. 152 In the third century their had been 28 public libraries in Rome and many private ones. By the end of the 4th they were, as the historian Ammianus Marcellinus observed with sorrow, “like tombs, permanently shut”. Was Christianity’s rise cause or mere correlation in this? Christian emperors would later struggle to increase literacy to ensure that the state even had enough literate functionaries. Certain fields of enquiry start to become not only off-limits but illegal. As a law of AD388 announced: “There shall be no opportunity for any man to go out to the public and to argue about religion or to discuss it or to give any counsel’… Philosophers who wished their works and careers to survive in this Christian world had to curb their teachings… Any theories that stated that the world was eternal – for that contradicted the idea o Creation – were, as the academic Dirk Rohmann has pointed out, also suppressed. The stated aim of historians also started to change too. … the last of the pagan historians, Ammianus Marcellinus.. posterity ought to be an “impartial judge of the past”. Christian historians took a different view. As the influential Christian writer Eusebius – the ‘father of Church history’ – wrote, the job of the historian was not to record everything but instead only those things that would do a Christian good to read.”
p. 153 “the shocking death of Hypatia ought to have merited a goo deal of attention in the histories of the period. Instead, it is treated lightly and obliquely, if at all. In history, as in life, no one in Alexandria was punished for her murder… Some writers were highly critical – even to fervent Christian eyes this was an appalling act. But not all: as one Christian bishop later recorded with admiration, once the satanic woman had been destroyed, then all the people surrounded Cyril in acclamation for he had ‘destroyed the last remains of idolatory in the city’.”
p. 162 One of the most infamous assaults on books and thinkers tool place in Antioch. Here, at the end of the 4th century, an accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals… As Ammianus describes it [he was there], “the racks were set up, and leaden weights, cords and scourges put in readiness. The air was filled with the appalling yells of savage voices mixed with the clanking of chains, .. A noble of ‘remarkable literary attainments was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded… the burning of books on bonfires of volumes were used as post-hoc justification for the slaughter .. they were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence. Many intelllectuals started to pre-empt the persecutors and set light to their own books.”
p. 127 Hypatia .. always dressed in the austere and concealing uniform of a philospher’s cloak. .. It is said one of her students fell in love with her and ‘not being able to control his passion, confessed his feelings’. Hypatia responded briskly ‘ She brought him some of her sanitary towels and threw them before him, and said. ‘You love this, young man, and there is nothing beautiful about it.
By the early 5th century AD, Hypatia had become something of a local celebrity. Alexandria was a city that had, for hundreds of years, been in thrall to its intellectuals…. ..
p. 129 Library … the number of scrolls that it held is contested, .. there were perhaps as many as 500,000 scrolls…. Even the major monastic libraries of the 12th century contained no more than 500 or so… by 1338, the library of the Sorbonne in Paris, the richest in the Christian world, offered a theoretical 1,728 works for loan – 300 of which as its registered noted, it had already managed to lose. t wasn’t only books that Alexandria collected but intellectuals. Scholars here were treated with reverence and to some marvellous facilities. .. the Great Library and the Musaeum provided them with a charming existence: there were covered walkways to stroll through, gardens in which to rest and a hall to lecture in. .. academics were also given a stipend from public funds, board and lodging, and meals in an elegant, domed-roofed dining hall. There may also have been, somewhat incongruously, a zoo.”
p. 131 y Hypatia’s time the library had gone, the last of it with the Christian destruction of the great temple of Serapis. “Whenever anyone new and notable visited Alexandria, one of the first things they did was to pay Hypatia a visit. Orestes, the aristocratic governor of Alexandria, and on eo fthe most important men in the city, had become a confidant, friend and a powerful ally – and, as it would turn out, a dangerous one. In a world that was becoming increasingly riven along sectarian lines, Hypatia was determinedly non-partisan in her behaviour, treating non-Christian and Christian with meticulous equality.
p. 132 “In the spring of the year 415, relations between Christians and non-Christians in Alexandria were tense. … the city had a new bishop, Cyril. After the zealot Theophilus, many Alexandrians must have hoped that their next cleric would be more conciliatory … he was, after all, Theophilus’s nephew. And true to family form, her was a thug…
p. 134 “the numbers of Cyril’s militia swelled. Around 500 monks descended from their shacks and caves in the nearby hills, determined to fight for their bishop. Unwashed, uneducated, unbending in their faith, they were, as even the Christian writer Socrates admits, men of a very fiery disposition.” Confrontation between them and the governor…
p. 135 “And then the whispering began. It was Hypatia’s fault, said the Christians, that the governor was being so stubborn… Fanned by the parablani, the remours started to catch and flame. Hypatia was not merely a difficult woman, they said. Hadn’t everyone seen her use symbols in her work, and astrolabes? The illiterate parabalani (‘bestial men, truly abdominable’ as one philosopher would later call them) knew what these instruments were. They were not the tools of philosophy and mathematics, no: they were the work of the Devil. Hypatia was not a philosopher: she was a creature of Hell.. She was ‘atheizing’ Alexandria. One day in March AD 435, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a ‘multitude of believers in God’. They ordered her to get down from her chariot … the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter – a ‘perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ’ surged round and seized ‘the pagan woman’. They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the cloths from her body then, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say, that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the ‘luminous child of reason’ onto a pyre and burned her.
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