The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

I've enough of a classical background (my latin is rusty, but decades ago I could read all the Silver Latin authors, except the slang words in Petronius and Catullus!) to lament losses, know what I've lost, but this book makes you FEEL the losses even more, and will be an eye-opener for those who do not have a classical background as to just how much was destroyed, and how much the poorer we are, because of the likes of Theodosius. It is important because we face the same threat today, not just to antiquities from fundamentalist islamists across the near and far east, but because of anti-science fundamentalists in power in the west - it is easy enough for a modern theodosius to withdraw government agency website data from scientists because it conflicts with the notions of supporters, easier, indeed, than it is for theodosius to let his christian supporters destroy the serapeum, final repository of the great Library of Alexandria, with incalculable losses to human civilization. While well-researched, it has the virtue of being passionate about the objects that were lost. Imagine if you loved Shakespeare's Macbeth, and you enjoyed half of Romeo and Juliet (the other half missing), had snippets of Hamlet (and reviews of how great it was), a couople of sonnets, Troilus and Cressida, a scene of Midsummer Night's Dream, and Timon. And had a list of Shakespeare's other plays. Saying how good Julius Caesar was, but you had nothing, just a review and maybe a summary of the plot. How would you write of the loss? And if that destruction had been pretty much planned, systematic? That is how the author feels for the losses of antiquity, and she puts that feeling into her book, makes you feel the loss too, understand the impact. You get an understanding of the weight of it, not a dry catalog. We face the same destruction of civilization again - and this book, showing how it happened, waking people up to it, might help us avoid similar destruction, by the modern generation of christian fundamentalists - who only need to push a few buttons rather than weild thousands of hammers and torches.

magic book