The Sacking of Classical Greece and Rome

I was reading about the influence of Greek culture on the Christian Church and came across the fact that during the fourth and fifth centuries AD, the Christians went about eradicating traditional Greek influence (the classics). We tend to think that, because the classics were so much of higher education, there was quite a lot of it around. The fact is, that scholars calculate that only about 1% has survived (and that is being driven out of our universities). We know this by references made by that which is left and the Christian writings which rebutted them. I was surprised to read that the ancient Greek medical texts haven’t been translated into English because the dual competencies of medicine and classical Greek studies haven’t combined to do that. This means that we know far less about the knowledge of the time in which modern society was forming than we thought, and the church had seen to it, that it retained the upper hand until the enlightenment. What the Church deemed unfit, we never got to see. It is surprising how much has been weaned from the little we have, but the great philosophers like Plato wrote far more than we have today. Perhaps the Vatican Secret Archive contains some unknown cultural artefacts, but I’m sure people have looked into that. The thing that interested me is what was in circulation amongst the educated before Christ, who they say, brought a new era.

When you consider Epicurus (c. 341-270 BCE) even though he is believed to have written 300 works, almost none of his writings are known to have survived. He is one of the youngest philosophers, and obviously a thorn in the eye of Christianity. Going further back to Aristotle (c. 384-322 BCE) who was a student of Plato and the teacher of Alexander the Great, Aristotle is considered one of the world’s greatest ancient philosophers. Aristotle studied a wide variety of subjects, including science, ethics, government, physics and politics, and wrote extensively on them. Although a few books of his were translated back then, the “Restoration of Aristotle” was conducted centuries later.

Probably the most important philosopher Plato (c. 428-348 BCE), famously said, “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” In the first century AD, Thrasyllus of Mendes had compiled and published the works of Plato in the original Greek, both genuine and spurious. While it has not survived to the present day, all the existing medieval Greek manuscripts are based on his edition. Without Plato, we wouldn’t have known about Socrates (c. 469-399 BCE), who’s legendary trial and death at the altar of the ancient Greek democratic system has influenced the academic view of philosophy as a study of life itself.

Democritus (c. 460-370 BCE) said, “Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion” and was called the “laughing philosopher”. He was one of the first advocates of democracy, equality and liberty. He was also the first person, along with his mentor Leucippus, to advance the hypothesis that all matter is composed of small invisible particles called atoms. Many consider Democritus to be the "father of modern science”.

These few examples of ancient Philosophy show just how far these people were, and even if it was only amongst relatively few educated people, they had a say in the developments of society. But they were outlawed in the fourth and fifth century and open discussion was no longer allowed. People were only to talk about Christian ideas and neighbours were to denounce those people who didn’t comply. Laws were passed that gave people the freedom to desecrate Temples, which they obviously did. This has a particularly modern touch about it, considering the last 500 or so years. Luther didn’t do much to sustain the cohesion of the church. Since his intervention, the church has continually split into ever more separate churches, despite having the same creed. Greek philosophers in the first centuries mused that Christians, despite having one God, seemed to be very aggressive towards each other. That hasn’t changed, despite the social appearance of local parishes with their jumbo sales and tea-parties.

I knew that the story of Christianity wasn’t smooth, which I could gather from a book on Christian history that I have, but the effect of Greek and Roman society was devastating. It also threw us back and marked the beginning of the dark ages. There still were people trying to further knowledge of course, but they had to have the permission of the church to spread their findings. This is why it was such a liberation when the Enlightenment came along. The oppressive nature of church ruling shouldn’t hide the fact that it was in itself a motor of learning, but it restricted the development of science. Once free of that, the Enlightenment has improved lives progressively up until today. The disadvantage of the development is that people have lost the source of meaning in its widest sense and fall back on themselves to find meaning, which in certain circumstances is difficult. In poverty, people have at least had their faith in many cases, and the church was influential in caring for the sick. Of course, it isn’t so simple to take apart, but it seems that the church was its own worst enemy.

Lol. If you think this is big, wait until your autistic son shows you the Jews did 9/11 to claim insurance

This curiously doesn’t address the other areas where Christianity went to town, namely in the burning of books. Also on Wikipedia, the entry is quite tame:

Dullard, stop PMing me and explain to me how did Christians destroy the Ancient Greek civilization if they only appeared at the end of the Roman civilization? And why stop at only Romans and Greeks???why not go add Jainism, Manichaeism, European Heathenism in its tenfold manifestations and types, Zoroastrianism, Mesopotamian culture, Judaism, Islam and so on to the list??? are you some kind of spokesperson for the human rights of Ancient Greeks and Romans??? and tell me…how did Ancient Greeks treat females???

The subject is a result of my reading: Nixey, Catherine. The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World . Pan Macmillan. Kindle-Version.

Nice piece of ass, I’d definitely take her from the back and slip the condom off at some point.
Lets take a look at Wikipedia:

My advice???Don’t read anything written by journalists and humanists who are not historians; they, unlike historians, stand to gain from lying and politicizing. You can read genuine sociological or economic work that attempts to explain the dynamics behind things but the kind of quasi-sociological commentary that is written as if it is simply telling the actual history(like Zizek, Bouldillard, Focault and the rest of the degenerates) is just plain dishonest manipulation and deserves a slap in the face. You want to tell a story then find out what happened(and if there are multiple scenarios then show them all and weigh the likelihood of each), you want to provide a theory of why it happened???well…provide a theory???

I think that Professor Tim Whitmarsh of Cambridge University description of the book is fitting: “a finely crafted, invigorating polemic against the resilient popular myth that presents the Christianisation of Rome as the triumph of a kinder, gentler politics.”
Christianity had its ISIS and Taliban phase in the fourth and fifth century, which is also upheld by other books on the subject. There is a tendency in the book to tell the story in personalised narratives, revealing her intentions to show up the fact that the Greeks and Romans were not just ruthless vandals, but were working at developing a society in which debate is open and ideas were being exchanged. The idolatry that Christians took offence to was tradition in their minds, that had withstood the test of centuries and the general feeling was that many gods meant that everyone could find their own devotion.
Of course, if one comes and demands that there is only one jealous God, who demands that people believe the doctrine of the church to be saved, then the idols were a problem. What seems to be apparent is that there was also a great deal of hysteria. The zealousness of the martyrs is well documented and would be considered very strange by today’s standards.

David Bentley Hart is an American Orthodox theologian and philosopher. His areas of specialisation are philosophical theology, religious studies, Christian metaphysics, Asian religions, patristics and aesthetics. He writes further in the essay: “The New Testament emerges from a cosmos ruled by malign celestial principalities (conquered by Christ but powerful to the end) and torn between spirit and flesh (the one, according to Paul, longing for God, the other opposing him utterly). There are no comfortable medians in these latitudes, no areas of shade. Everything is cast in the harsh light of final judgment, and that judgment is absolute. In regard to all these texts, the qualified, moderate, common-sense interpretation is always false.”

I think it is quite in harmony with these words that Nixey portrays the Christians of the day. It also explains why the scenes she so aptly describes go against what we would like to believe. I would agree that the book does tend to only mention the cruelty of the Romans as an aside, but she takes it as already well proven.

The end of Classical civilisation and the beginning of the Christian middle ages is perhaps best symbolised by Hypatia. For many years she was a leading figure in philosophical and scientific circles in Alexandria, and was widely admired for her learning and tolerance, until she was ambushed and hacked to death by a Christian mob in 415 AD.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia

And? What does Hypatia have to do with Middle Ages you spook? Who hacked down Pythagoras? Who killed Socrates and why??? You kooks are an example of why not everybody should receive an education beyond the basics. How were females viewed and treated in Ancient Greece??? What about slavery???Was there slavery in Middle Ages or was it the first historical period without it? What about the caste system? Were the Christian monasteries not the first institutions which offered education to people of low origin and to females??? If you lived in Ancient Greece, you would be a property of a man who would be completely illiterate by the law and would be treated like a property…or not???

youtube.com/watch?v=MQ2S4o5-lBE

"… monasteries and convents became centers for learning, and it was mostly the privileged—young men from nobility and the upper middle class—who were able to receive a thorough education. During this time, women’s education was not a priority, as women were believed to be intellectually inferior.

Affluent women were required to have some literacy during the Middle Ages, but their learning was intended only to prepare them for being respectable wives and mothers. Higher learning for nuns, on the other hand, was encouraged because they were required to comprehend biblical teachings. So it was no coincidence that many of the earliest female intellectuals were nuns.

Some convent offerings included reading and writing in Latin, arithmetic, grammar, music, morals, rhetoric, geometry and astronomy, according to a 1980 article by Shirley Kersey in (Vol. 58, No. 4). Spinning, weaving and embroidery were also a large part of a nun’s education and labor, writes Kersey, particularly among nuns who came from affluent families. Nuns who came from lesser means were expected to do more arduous labor as part of their religious life."
history.com/news/women-educ … uns-church

She does not mention the cruelty of the Romans and their ruthless culture with its caste system, slavery, extremely violent military conquest and cultural subjugation, and frequent usage of mass rapes, mass genocides and mass torture not because it is taken as well proven but because she is writing a hit-piece against Christianity and these facts would ruin her argument and make her bias obvious you lying dullard. Tell me she is not portraying the Classical period as much more civilized and humane??? Answer me, is she saying that the Ancient Greeks and Romans were more tolerant and civilized than Medival European Christians? Yes or no???

This disqualifies you from the discussion … sorry!

What disqualifies you from any discussion is your brain.

It seems that unless we take up the issue directly by exhaustive first person research, we are at the mercy of dueling historians whose propositions we evaluate through the lens of the presuppositions we come to the subject with due to our childhood indoctrination.

As early as I can remember I was taught about the evils of state religion and the virtues of the separation of church and state over the state religion that led to the dark ages. So what’s new here?

The consensus among most academic historians seems to be that the so-called dark ages is a actually unsupported myth.

I found this article helpful:
bu.edu/religion/files/pdf/La … -lions.pdf

It may not be new (the article is from 2001) but it is an interesting look at the age in the form of a book review.

“MORE CHRISTIANS WERE persecuted by the Roman Empire after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity- in 312 than before. Within a century of that momentous event, bishops had become the impresarios of urban violence, directing
the Christian mob’s destruction of synagogues and great pagan temples from Minorca to the edges of Persia, while the imperial government shut down traditional public cults in North Africa and in Rome itself.”

History is a violent process??? :astonished: :astonished: :astonished:

Just this morning I serendipitously was listening to three medieval scholars debunking the dark ages as a myth on the NPR show 1A. So I ask what in this moment of the culture wars would motivate a journalist to resurrect the theory that Christianity caused a dark age in the medieval period? And with that question I raise the suspicion that motivated reasoning may be involved.

The state moloch wants to monopolize morality and religion for itself; it wants to replace Christian churches and Christian morality and culture with its own, self-serving morality and culture. Its priests are the psychologists like Peterson, its revelatory moment was the Holocaust, its preachers are the teachers, humanists and police, its greatest sin is racism and antisemitism, its heaven is a multicultural society guarded by human-rights, its inquisition are the journalistic dogs and their newspapers and the justice warriors, its confession is in bowing your head for the things you have not committed in front of people who never experienced them(American whites and American negros)…and so forth. What makes the injustice towards the American negro any different that the injustice towards the Poles, Hungarians, the Dutch and so forth committed by the Germans and so forth???The only difference is the racism and racism is this religions greatest sin and you must seek retribution for your sins, so that even the most intelligent of Yanks are mindlessly following this insanity and confessing their guilt and bowing their heads.

this idea of a “Dark Ages” being the middle ages also allows a narrative…

if Greece and Rome were days/ages of “enlightenment” where the age might
be called an “age of light” then it follows that we can also think of modern times,
our modern era as being one that an “age of light”… we can hold to the belief
that we moderns live in an age that is “progressive” “enlightened”
not held down by “ancient” prejudices and superstitions that the Medieval man
was forced to suffer through…

in other words, we were somehow superior to the medieval man because
we don’t exists in the “dark ages”…it helps our ego to think that we have somehow
have progressed beyond those “dark ages”…that we have overcome those “dark ages”…

and in a few hundred years, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves, people will
likely be laughing at us for living in the “dark ages”…
and just as likely cursing us for our blindness on climate change
and the damage that such ism’s and ideologies did to the planet Earth…
ism’s like capitalism… which one day will be cursed as we curse those who
tried to wipe out “Pagan” Greece and Rome…with the destruction of
the ancient writings like Plato and Aristotle and the Greek plays that
once numbered in the thousands, now only a handful exists… having survived
the long years of attempted destruction… as we try to edit and destroy texts and writings
that are “subversive” to the current order of things…
we are just as ignorant about existence as the “dark ages” were, we just
don’t have the courage to admit it…

Kropotkin