The Ancients - The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

Episode Date: May 1, 2022

The rise of Christianity in the first few centuries AD is one of the most significant stories in world history. But it’s also an incredibly turbulent one. It’s a story filled with (in)famous episodes of conflict with the Roman state. It’s a story of co-existence, but also one of intolerance and of violence.From martyrdom to monasticism; from Celsus to Hypatia; from the Emperor Constantine hedging his divine bets to early Christians burning down one of the greatest architectural wonders of the ancient Mediterranean World. In today’s episode Tristan chats to author and journalist Catherine Nixey about the rise of Christianity and the sometimes-violent interactions that early Christians had with the Classical World.This episode contains mentions of religious violence.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, we're talking about one of the most significant, one of the most important topics of ancient history,

which still has ramifications arguably to this day. Because we're talking to an author and a journalist who a couple of years back wrote a book entitled The Darkling Age, The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Her name is Catherine Nixey. She's currently a journalist at The Economist in London. And a few months back, I headed over to The Economist HQ to interview Catherine all about her book. It's fair to say it's had quite a lot of reaction over the past few years. And today in this podcast, we're going to be really delving into this part, into the evidence for this violent aspect of the story of the rise of Christianity in the fourth and and say 5th centuries AD. We've done a podcast similar to this in the past when we chatted to Dr Amelia Brown

about how Corinth became Christian and there seems to be a violent element in that story. And today we're going to be looking at cities, at settlements such as Alexandria, the destruction of a building called the Serapaeum. We're going to be talking about figures such as Hypatia, such as Julian the Apostaeum. We're going to be talking about figures such as Hypatia, such as Julian the Apostate, and we're going to be exploring this destructive element in the rise of Christianity and how it did affect certain bits of art and architecture from the classical world, from the ancient Mediterranean Greco-Roman world. So without further ado, to talk through all of this and so much more, here's Catherine. Catherine, it is great to have you on the podcast today.

Oh, well, thank you very much for having me. You're very welcome. I'm so glad that we could do this podcast. This whole topic of Christians in the classical world in the late antique period, because the Roman Empire embraced many different religions over its time, didn't it? But it's embracing of when it embraced Christianity, everything seemed to change. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we'll probably talk later about the word embracing. There was there was some who gave it a warmer hug than others. But yeah, everything did seem well, an awful lot seemed to change and change really very quickly indeed. And if we let's delve into the background, first of all, because I like to talk first of all,

like when we first hear of the Christians mentioned in non-Christian writings. So when's the first time that a Roman writer mentions the Christians as of such? So we're really lucky because one of the first writers who mentions them is one of the best Roman writers. He's called Pliny the Younger. Most people know him because he also was the only eyewitness to the eruption of Vesuvius. So if you ever do Latin at school, you know Pliny. But the other thing that he is our first eyewitness for is the Christians. It's the first time they appear in Roman writings. And he comes across them because he's a governor in an Eastern Roman province of Turkey. And he starts to notice that there's some kind of problem in the area. There's some kind of

dispute. People are getting annoyed. There's a bit of kind of argy-bargy among the people in his province. And he looks into it, and what he finds is this new religion, Christianity. And he doesn't know what to do with it. So he writes to his emperor, Trajan, and he says, I don't know what to do. There's this new religion, what's going on? So is there this element, I guess, of mystery, of not quite knowing what they are at this moment in time. Absolutely. And that continues for quite a long time. It's a long time before, perhaps another 50 years before Romans really start reading Christian writings and understanding what they are, who they are,

what they stand for, and what their intentions are, in a sense. Because as the second century progresses, this mystery, I guess this worry among certain writers towards the Christians, it seems to emerge with this particular figure who I know you've done a lot of work on in your book. And forgive me if I say it wrong. Celsus? Celsus? I think you can say it pretty much any way you like. I think this is the good thing about pronouncing Roman names. They think we were all wrong. So Cicero, Cicero, Cicero. I say Celsus, you say tomato.

Okay. sounds good. So Celsus is fascinating. He is pretty much the first writer who really gets to grips with the Christians. And he reads all of their holy books. Probably he's reading something pretty close to what Christians would read today. And he is not impressed. He is more than not impressed. He is absolutely contemptuous of Christianity.

And it's interesting because Christians would later say, the historian Edward Gibbon would say, when Christianity arrived in the Roman world, instantly the Romans started believing because they knew that they had come across a religion that was superior to their own. Now, that's what Gibbon thought in the 18th century. When you read Celsus, there is absolutely no sign that he thinks that he's seen a religion that is superior to his own. On the contrary, he finds Christianity almost laughably simplistic and ridiculous. And I still remember where I was in the library when I first read Celsus. It was an kind of autumn afternoon. The light was dimming.

People were putting on the lights above their reading stations. their reading stations. And it struck me as so immediate because it is so powerful and so, frankly, rude and so abrasive that 2,000 years almost afterwards, you cannot help but be struck by it. He feels so modern. It feels like the past has reached out a hand and touched you on the shoulder. What are some of the parts of his work that he, you know, these rude parts, how does he target Christianity in his work? Well, one of the most famous things that he takes issue with is the virgin birth. So he says, the Christians all believe that Jesus was born of a virgin. And then he says, I hardly think that that's likely. He says, you know, God is a God. He could have any woman he likes. Roman gods were famous for taking whichever mortal woman they

wanted. Why on earth would God go for this complete nondescript nobody in some complete nondescript town in the middle of the east of the Roman Empire? I mean, you know, he says he'd have gone for a queen at least. I mean, she's hardly likely even to have been attractive. And then he goes on and then he picks it apart and he says, there was no virgin birth. There was just a woman who got knocked up by her boyfriend, who was a Roman soldier. And this is a rumor that was really rife at the time. It appears in Jewish writings, it appears in other critiques of Christianity. And then pretended that she had been made pregnant by a god because she didn't want to

be shamed in front of her family. And then he fits it all together in the Christian story. So he says, he says, then that's why she left her home. That's why you have this story about her leaving, going to Bethlehem. And then that's why you get the story about him being in Egypt. And then he kind of takes on the story from there. So he says, you know, these miracles that Jesus does, absolutely nothing about that. Making magic food appear, making people appear to be alive when they're not alive. This is absolutely standard stuff that you can see in any marketplace in the east of the empire. It's quite a damning attack, isn't it? But soon enough, it seems like there is this fight back, some pushback is there from a more pro-Christian figure against Celsus and his

writings. Yes, yes. Well, the reason we have Celsus at all, so Christianity, I grew up, my parents were a monk and a nun, and I grew up very much believing that they had left, obviously, by the time they had a family. But I grew up believing much believing that they had left, obviously, by the time they had a family. But I grew up believing the line that they'd been taught at school, which is that Christianity had preserved and celebrated the texts of the classical world. This is why we have them. And you know, that's partly true. The reason we have most classical texts, apart from those that were preserved in the Arab world, is that Christian monks copied them out. However, they didn't copy out very many

of them. So we've got pretty much 1% of all classical writing as a rough guesstimate. And one of the things that they didn't hurry to copy out, and you can see why, is the writings of Celsus, because he was incredibly rude, incredibly critical, and perhaps most crucially of all, better educated than they were. And one of the things he did was he sneered at the kind of lack of Christian education. So what you get again and again in writings of both Christians and non is this sense that their writings are simplistic, idiotic, badly spelt. Even the Bible itself is written in poor grammar. I mean, it was embarrassing to Christians for centuries. It's hard to imagine now because when we think

of Christian writings, we think of the King James Bible and this sort of august, these glowing texts that we've been brought up with. But in those days, they had no such antique grandeur. They were just written in the local vernacular and they were written in a very low level of local vernacular. I mean, it was supposed to be the word of God and God doesn't seem to be able to grasp grammar. Absolutely. And it feels like from this period and from what we mentioned in your book and going on,

like Celsus, he's a big figure in this but he's not the only figure who launches this tirade against Christianity at this time. There are these other figures who then follow him, do they? Yes. But we don't have much of their work surviving compared to that of Celsus. Exactly. Porphyry, who launched an 11-book attack on the Christians, we have even fewer scraps. And

the only reason we have scraps either of Celsus or of Porphyry is because they appear in these great Christian counterblasts to them. So when Christianity became more confident, more articulate, when it got more kind of intellectuals on board, it would start to push back against what they saw as the pagan criticisms. And the way it would do it is someone would copy out a line of Celsus. He says that the Virgin Mary can't have been very attractive. And then you get a long contradiction from a writer called Origen saying, well, in fact, she probably was because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And this is how, you know, you get the same with the letters of Julian the Emperor, who we now call Julian the Apostate. Again, his criticisms are also preserved in that kind of Christian counterblast. Well, let's focus in on Julian the Apostate for a bit then. I know we're jumping a bit forward in time, but I want us to get to the fourth century because this seems very important in our discussion today. I know we're kind of delving into the middle with Julian, but he seems a really remarkable figure, even though he doesn't seem to be around for that long. But at the time, I mean, who was he? Why is he so significant in this story? He is an incredibly remarkable figure and really likeable. He's so young, for one thing, and he ruled for such, he was 31, I think, when he died.

He ruled for only a couple of years. He gets killed in the East on a campaign, a really ill-advised campaign. But you read his writings today, and there's something very almost, you can almost feel him. Again, he's one of those real personalities who just leaps off the page. He's argumentative. He's passionate. He hates Christianity with a passion. He's a nephew of Constantine. He was brought up Christian. He was brought up in a very restricted kind of atmosphere. He could only really read certain books. He was brought up to be the good Christian in the imperial family. Lots of his relatives had been killed.

And it goes disastrously wrong because he turns against Christianity with an absolute passion. And he attacks it for all the same reasons that others had attacked it. For being, as he saw it, unintellectual, for being absurd. He hates the way that Christians – Christians didn't – in this period, there was a general – and actually for centuries, there was a sort of Christian suspicion of philosophy. So there were Christians who read philosophy. There were other Christians who saw it as dangerously mind-opening. You know, they don't like words like philosophy, curiosity. The word heresy itself comes from the Greek word that means choice. Anything that opens your mind and opens possibility is seen as dangerous.

So it's almost this worry amongst these people that the Christians, they weren't open to having their minds changed, to being shown these works as well, to being, in a weird way, enlightened. Exactly. Well, interestingly enough, the term Dark Ages is really contentious today, because it's seen as a kind of sort of unpleasant slur on the world of Christianity. And it's seen, you know, when you talk about those middle centuries, there's sort of from the sixth to the, I mean, it varies, but that sort of middle millennium, and to call it the Dark Ages, academics and particularly Christians get cross, because they say it's a kind of gross simplification of a very rich and complex period, which is, of course, all true. However, it's not very often remembered that it was Christians themselves who came up with the term Dark Ages because they said that the time before Christ's coming was the true Dark Ages.

This is when people lived in a benighted Christian world. And then it was the coming of Christ that created a light, an enlightenment, a kind of light ages. And it was only in the Renaissance that a scholar, Petrarch, turned it on its head. And he said the true dark ages was the dark ages of ignorance. It was not the dark ages of Christ. It was the ages when we forgot classical learning. And Petrarch's version stuck. But it had been at the, a Christian slur.

How interesting. I did not know that at all. It's so interesting to learn that. I mean, as we delve into the 4th century, a little bit more context around this time, because you mentioned, of course, we've got Jesus and this figure, his importance, but also, by the time of the 4th century, with these early Christians, there are these other figures who seem to become figureheads for them. And I'm thinking the word martyrs, because Catherine, by this time, what are these martyrs? And who are these martyrs? Yes. So in its early centuries, Christian was what's kind of called an illicit religion. It was not one of the approved religions of the Roman Empire. So the Roman Empire had a kind of

pretty wide marketplace of religions is how they often refer to it. You could follow the Egyptian goddess Isis, you could follow this god, you could follow that god, more or less, you were sort of left to your own devices, as long as you didn't do certain things, which the Roman Empire found annoying. And Christianity was one of those things that the Roman Empire found annoying. It's you see it in the letters of Pl pliny they're annoying for two reasons one is because they're so fervent and there's a sort of general feeling that it's not that roman to be that fervent pliny sort of grumbles that the more is singing hymns and and sort of banging on about it is the general feeling and they also refused to sacrifice to the emperor so the reason that

christianity came into conflict with the roman powers was not so much because, as later people believe, this is the sort of line you get in Hollywood films, that they feared Christ. It was that they just were doing something which was closer to treachery. In Rome, you believed that Rome had become great, conquered Europe, because the gods loved it. If you annoy the gods by not sacrificing to them, the Roman Empire is in peril. And so that's how Christianity comes into conflict with Rome. It's something closer to an academic likened it to not standing up when the national anthem is played in the cinema. That was the sort of thing. It was a sort of irritation. And then, of course, worse. So some of them were executed, but not nearly as many as was later thought.

I mean, absolutely, because our sources for these martyrs and these figures, are they largely these later Christian writings in which, can we say they perhaps distort the portrayal of the Romans themselves? Yes, there is a book called The Myth of Martyrdom. And it wasn't a total myth. There were martyrs, the Romans. I mean, they were Romans, right? Nobody's ever said they were nice. They could execute with the best of them. And in the case of the Christians, they occasionally did, but they did it much less than later numbers of martyrs would think. So the numbers of martyrs absolutely ballooned because Christians like to venerate them and you would get relics and pilgrimages and stories and they were told again and again. But the vast majority of

those stories had very little basis in historical reality. And when they started to look at them, which they did relatively earlier, a Jesuit priest, I think, was the first centuries ago to start to look at them. He found that lots of martyrs had two dates, lots of martyrs seemed to be the same person, lots of martyrs couldn't possibly have been killed by the emperor. There were some that were very accurate. But what's interesting is when you think of the Romans persecuting the Christians, and by the way, it's so entrenched in our idea that the Romans persecuted the Christians, what they did was closer to prosecuting them. And if you type the Roman prosecution of Christians into Google,

it will give you a squiggly underline and suggest that in fact you mean... Did you mean this? Yes. Did you mean the Roman persecution? But it was much less than that. And they did it much more infrequently. And when they did it very often, what you see in some of the earliest and most reliable martyr accounts is you get the Roman judges trying not to execute the martyrs. They keep saying things like, you know, do you really want to die for this? I don't want to stop you worshipping your God. Just do a little pinch of incense. Then you can walk free. Worship your God.

Worship my God. Just worship them both. I'm just asking for you not to commit an act of treachery, is more or less what they're saying. And you get there's a wonderful one, one of the earliest and one of the most reliable. You get these sort of stenography court transcripts. And it's assumed that that was perhaps what was used or certainly imitated in the recording of this particular martyr. You get the judge saying, the Roman governor saying, but it's a lovely sunny day outside. You're really young. Think of your mum. Don't do this.

You know, they are trying to give them a way out. They are not the ferocious Roman emperor of later fiction who is hunting and hounding Christians. They gave them every opportunity to escape and to get out of punishment. The Christians, granted, could not take this if they were to be true to their religion. It's not an option for a true Christian. But the Romans, as they saw it, bent over backwards to be lenient. It's so interesting, that Roman viewpoint. And actually, Catherine, just a quick tangent, but we did a podcast quite recently on St. Valentine. And what are the stories behind

St. Valentine? And it's so interesting there, it's almost you get that similar case with whether it's Claudius II, or maybe it was Gallienus, one of those two emperors. And it's, I think it's a similar case. It's just like, please don't do this. It's almost like, please, you kind of get that Roman perspective there. And it's just like, you know, what are you doing? Come on, think. But I guess it's also important to realize the mindset of those Christians as well, whether it's truth, whether it's fiction. The power of the story is how it survives to those people who learned about those stories,

who were told those stories later on. It's that obstinance, which then I guess it gets ingrained, can we say, in many people? Absolutely. And I grew up, I mean, I grew up as a sort of very faithful Catholic, believing it all. It was a total, it took a real wrench of my brain. You know, I would go to churches in Italy with my parents, we'd kiss the feet of a crucifixion. I believed all this stuff. And then it took a real effort of will to change my mind to see the Romans not as being tricky and trying to damn these Christians forever, which is what you would see it as a Christian, because it was your immortal soul, which is much more important than your body, which is going to burn in the fire. Then it took a real effort of will to see that they were actually perhaps not being devious. They weren't trying to damn you forever.

They just didn't particularly want to execute someone. damn you forever. They just didn't particularly want to execute someone. There's a wonderful account of one of them who says, you could get the real sense of a bureaucrat being bothered. He says, what's the matter with you? Haven't you got cliffs you can jump off? Haven't you got rope you can hang yourselves with? If you want to die to yourself, don't bother me. I mean, let's talk about another aspect of this, which seems to really puzzle the Romans at this time. And this is the rise of monasticism and monks, because was this certainly a thing which many Romans, they couldn't get their heads around? Yeah, it was. So Romans knew ascetics. There had always been oddities in the Roman Empire. Philosophers were always banging on about how you shouldn't eat too much and shouldn't drink too much.

But what was new about monasticism was, again, it's fervor, really. It's the intensity with which these people will give up the good life, the Roman life, and they'll set off to the hills. You know, they'll sell their family estates, they'll dress themselves in rags, and then they'll go and stand on a pillar until, in the case of Simeon Stylites, so it says, his feet exploded with the pressure and his spine dislocated. Believe what you will. But these people became objects of fascination for both those who believed in them and also used the spec for those who didn't. But there was also not just these ascetics who stood on pillars. And there was an amazing one who built himself a kind of hamster wheel that he stood in forever so that he was always bent over and they would eat one grain a day and stand in

the Egyptian desert. It was a huge movement in around the sort of third to fourth century of people leaving the cities, Christians leaving the cities, going out into the desert, worshipping God. And particularly, it increased after Christianity came to power because they couldn't die as martyrs in the arena any longer. They had to go and torture themselves in the desert. So it was seen as white martyrdom without the blood. But you still had a terrible time. And Romans just look on with kind of total bafflement but also more than a small element of fear because for the Romans, the city is the civilized place. So if you have lots and lots of people leaving the city to go and lurk in the rocks around the city and then kind of come out and they're often dressed badly, they're often very smelly, beardy.

They saw them as a real threat to their way of life, what they saw as a civilized life. The word civilized comes from the Roman word kiosk, meaning town. Then these people are alarming. And indeed, in the fourth century, as Christianity gained power, they committed horrendous acts of violence. We'll definitely get into those very, very quickly. Indeed, I have in my notes here, Saint Antony mentioned Saint Antony. What about Saint Antony? So actually, I'm going to ask you about Saint Antony. Now I was thinking about it, I'm going to ask you about it. Tell me the story about Saint Antony, because he is another of these interesting figures, shall we say. He's fascinating. He's very likable in a funny way. A friend of my father's was a hermit,

and he slightly reminds me of him. My father's friend went and lived in a pigsty for a few years, and then he was sort of taken back to his monastery. But Saint Anthony is an affluent Roman who hears, as he's walking past a church one day, hears the words, if thou shalt be perfect, it's something along the lines of give away everything and follow God. And he decides to do it. He takes it absolutely literally. He gives away everything. That's somewhat one imagines to the distress of his sister, who he was supporting at the

time. But then he goes and he lives in, first he lives in a pigsty at the end of his garden. Pigsty, it's not wholly clear what that means. Pigsty is how it's normally translated. And then he goes a bit further and he lives in various times that there's sort of in a deserted Roman fort and then he moves off to a mountain. And all the while that he's there, he is wrestling these demons. So one of the things that we forget when we think of early Christianity, and when we think of this world in general, for both Christians and Romans, is that it was a world seething with the supernatural. So we think of the Romans as

these sort of super rational people. And in a sense, some of them were, but many of them weren't. And so pretty much everything you touched, everything you did in your life, from going to war, to having a meeting in the Senate, to having sex, there were deities and gods there. And for Christians, these deities and gods all became demons. So they lived in a world where to help Christianity and to fight the Christian fight, what you do is you go into the desert. And this is what they saw themselves as doing in the desert, as well as, you know, torturing their own souls, as well as being these athletes of austerity, they were also fighting demons. And so Antony would go and he'd fight demons. And you have these fantastic descriptions of him sitting in his cave and seeing the walls of the cave dissolve and lions come rushing through and wolves come rushing

through and they tear at his body and they lacerate his skin and they leave him kind of completely unconscious on the ground at various times. And Christians thought, you know, this is a mark of his holiness. Look how holy he is. He's being attacked by demons. And so Christians in this period would speak and write quite openly about their tortures with demons. But the writings are amazing because some of their demons go into what we would mean almost when we say, oh, I've got demons or he's got his own demons. And it would be things like one of them sees visions of naked boys that keep appearing to him and dancing before him and then saying, master, do I dance well? And that's a monk. And then

others of them are tortured by these incredibly sexual images of naked ladies who come and sit down next to them and and what you get is the sense of people who are starving themselves in the desert and leading these incredibly austere lives and having something close to what non-religious person would call hallucinations or at least very extreme mental events it's extraordinary how these people became so powerful, especially, I'm guessing, in the fourth century and from then on for these early Christians. I mean, if we therefore, okay, let's delve into the fourth century. I mean, we have mentioned the name earlier in the discussion. I feel we need to talk a bit about Constantine. Constantine, the first Constantine, the great. But Catherine, when you look at Constantine's life and the whole

events around it, it kind of feels as if until the very end of his life, this is a man who's hedging his divine bets, so to speak. Yeah, absolutely. And it's hard to, we've kind of forgotten Constantine a little bit in the West. He's still a saint in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. But he was so important. He was, I think, more than anyone else, the most important Christian figure. People talk about St. Paul as the second founder. I mean, Constantine is the one who mattered. And he thought he mattered. He called himself Constantine equal to the apostles. So he knew it. He was the man who, when he gained power in Rome, made Christianity illicit and allowed religion.

And he said, he issued the Edict of Milan, which wasn't an edict and didn't come from Milan. It gets everyone very cross. It's one of those things that historians like to like to huff about. But it basically said, you can be Christian from now on. It was interesting because he didn't instantly turn the Roman Empire Christian. For a long time, everything else kind of rumbles on as it was. Christians get a few handouts. They get a few churches. Constantine demolishes the odd temple here and there, robs some others. He doesn't stop other religions yet. And he himself has had a very interesting religious past. Sometimes he talks about a great deity, but it's not clear which one. Earlier in his life, he seemed to have seen a vision of Apollo. Earlier in his life, he seemed to have seen a vision of Apollo. The moment he becomes Christian is this famous moment before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. No one's quite sure precisely when it happened.

Different accounts seem different. But it's the moment, the famous moment when he sees the flaming cross in the sky and the sign, in this sign you shall conquer. I mean, it's not, you have to say, the most Christian of Christian messages. But it worked for Constantine. He goes into battle. He wins. He thinks that this is the God who is going to support him and give him victory evermore. And frankly, you know, seems to work for him. He lives a long life and a successful life. But it's unclear that he is wholly Christian, even at that point, I mean, to say the least. And it's very clear that he had seen another almost identical vision of Apollo before on another road trip that he had been on previously. And he'd previously issued medallions with himself next to Apollo's face.

So he is a definite bet hedger. He is a general. He knows how to play his troops, whether they're mortal or divine, to the best advantage. I think you're absolutely right. I think, if I remember correctly from my discussion with Dr. David Potter about it so long ago, but he was saying how there was one statue in Constantinople which showed Constantine in heroic nudity as the sun god Apollo. Yeah. Which is quite a striking image, I must admit know, his importance in the rise of Christianity at this time, too, isn't it? It's extraordinary. Yeah, with the kind of crown with the solar halo with

this sort of rays shooting out. Yeah, it is. He's a fascinating figure and much more interesting, I think, than he's often given credit for. Absolutely. Well, if we move on from that, let's, as we go through the fourth century, because I'd love us to get to the 390s, because this seems to be a really chaotic time, shall we say. But what would you say are some of the key events of the 4th century from the various emperors that seem to really help in the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire? So are there any key laws that are passed or key events, would you say, in the 4th century that really help in the rise of Christianity so that by the time we get to the 390s, you have laws about Christianity and the prominence of Christianity is clear to see in the Roman Empire. Some of these laws come early. I mean,

Constantine was a hedger of bets, but he was also Julian the Apostate. His nephew described him as a tyrant with the mind of a banker. And one of the things that he does is he robs the ancient temples. So he sends, it's not clear. You don't get much of a report on how exactly this is done or what extent to it's done. But he seems to send two men off to get the wealth of the temples. Now, two men, a lot of Roman temples, they're not going to carry it all back. But you don't know what that meant on the ground. And the descriptions that are given in the main history that we have for this, Eusebius, is that the roofs are stripped of the precious metals are brought out from within

the gold is scraped off the statues and the wealth of the ancient religion is poured into the imperial coffers. Now that is in itself incredibly important. It's important partly because it just gives Constantine lots of money and then he funnels money towards Christianity and he builds churches such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And partly it's because it's emotionally a huge blow for those who supported the old gods because there was a sense that if there really was a god in a temple, it would protect it. And in fact, what you get is Constantine's men just come in, they take the money, they take the roofs, they take the

doors in some cases, they take everything that's of wealth. And it denudes the old gods. It's a terrible, terrible blow to any temple to which it happened. But then you gradually, you get more laws. You get laws saying that it's going to be illegal to do a sacrifice, that any man who performs a sacrifice will be struck down with an avenging sword. You get laws that say that no stone in temples should stand upon another one. The Roman law books are amazing. If you only read one book from Rome, I would recommend reading the law books because you get a sense from them. You just feel the muscle and the might of an empire moving. And as you read through, in the last decades of the first century of

Christian rule, it turns on all other religions with an astonishing ferocity. Hi there, I'm Kate Lister, sex historian and author, and I am the host of Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society, a new podcast from History Hit. Join me as I root around the topics which have been skipped over in your school history lessons. Everything from the history of swearing to pubic hair, satanic panic, cults, there is nothing off limits. We'll be bed hopping around different time periods, from ancient civilisations to the Middle Ages, to Renaissance and early modern, right up to now.

Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Well, let's kind of delve into that ferocity now. So we're going to the 390s and we're going to Alexandria. Because at that time, Catherine, in the early 390s, there seems to have been one temple that outshone all others in the ancient Mediterranean world. Now, what was this temple? So nobody knows about this temple now. And it feels funny when you think of temples of the ancient world,

you think of the Parthenon or you think of the Pantheon in Rome or you think of other ancient buildings when you want to be staggered by the empire, you know, the Colosseum. Nobody talks about them when they're talking about the most amazing building in the world. They talk about this temple, the Temple of Serapis in Alexandria. And it is supposed to have surpassed them all. It stands at the top of a flight of almost 100 marble steps. It's in Alexandria, which is in itself an incredibly beautiful city, beautifully laid out. They say that the sky is blue always,

but there's still breezes on the streets. It's a wonderful city. It smells of incense. It's a cosmopolitan, exciting city where there are a thousand fires burn on a thousand altars when the sun goes down. And you can smell the air is thick with incense because it was all being traded through that city. And above them all is Serapis. So Serapis was this kind of funny amalgam god, a bit of Greek god in there, a bit of Roman god in there. And this was Serapis' temple. And it was, when you read descriptions of the wealth, it was staggering. So if you went up those marble steps, you'd find yourself first in a kind of

precinct. Roman temples were kind of surrounded by walls and there was other stuff going on in there. There would be libraries and scholars, philosophers, people would be working there and at the heart of it was the temple and it was inlaid with precious metals and it was also inlaid with marble and it was so, at the very heart of the temple would be this giant crucellophantine, it's called, sort of golden ivory statue of Serapis. So huge, hollow, sitting down, they were all sitting down, you know, it was always the thing that if a god had stood up in their temple they would raise the roof and this is what you would go and see

and it was designed so beautifully, this temple, that at a certain point in the year, there was a window and the sun when it rose would come in and they said it would kiss the lips of Serapis. So it was astonishing. And more than one writer says this is the most beautiful temple in the ancient world. And you get one writer who says in the 390s, so Christianity hasn't even been in power for a century. You get one writer because he's sort of seen the writing on the wall. He says, I hope that when Christians are attacking temples, they never attack the temple of Serapis. Oh dear, a bit of a foreboding sign there, I must admit. But I mean, I think it's really important to stress, as you've brilliantly said there, Catherine, isn't it?

That this amazing temple full of monumental architecture, but not just architecture, as you've highlighted. There's scholarship here. There's lots of books. There's lots of scholarship. There are people working here. And also that other key thing, there's lots of art here too, isn't there? I really want us to convey this before we get to the grand climax, that this is a place, it's a temple, it's architecture, it's art, it's literature. It's a hub for all of

these things. Yeah, I mean, temples were incredibly important. And they were practical in a way that we don't think of them, they were often kind of where you'd store the treasury as well. Because they were the biggest, strongest, most stable buildings in any town. So if you have something precious, like a library, like money, that's where you put it. Okay. So what happens to the Temple of Serapis in the 390s? Well, then it goes wrong. And then. So there was a bishop in Alexandria called Theophilus. He was extremely hardline. I mean, there were moderate bishops in this period, you tend not to hear about them. History doesn't record the actions of good and moderate men as well as those of zealots. And there is enormous amount of tension in Alexandria at the time between Christians and what they call pagans. The word pagan, by the way,

is not one that any ancient person would have ever used to describe themselves. It's a Christian innovation to give your religion sort of upfront like that first and foremost. You would never have split the world in that way before. But there's tension. The Christians defiled a pagan ceremony in a pagan religious shrine. And then there was fighting. And then the pagans attacked some Christians. There was violence.

Some people died. I think some Christians died. And then on this morning, on this day, Theophilus, at the head of a group of Christians, decides that comes to the temple of Serapis. And he leads a mob of Christians up the steps and they demolish the temple of Serapis. And it's not enough that they demolish it. After these Christians, and it's hard to imagine how they do this. Exactly, yeah. This Christian accounts for them trying to demolish temples in other places and completely failing.

You know, a temple's a really big thing. You don't know how they do it. It's clear there's accounts of them trying to demolish temples in other places and completely failing. You know, temples are a really big thing. You don't know how they do it. It's clear there's accounts of this and this reverberates through the literature of the ancient world. This is a profound shock. It's more than destroying St. Paul's Cathedral. It's more than destroying St. Peter's in Rome. It is greeted with utter horror internationally, not just in Alexandria. And then after these Christians have finished destroying this temple, they take the statue of Serapis and they drag it in a sort of symbolic act. They take its torso to a local stadium and then they burn it. They kind of destroy it so that everyone can see the overthrow of the old gods.

So this sounds like an international crisis in the ancient Mediterranean world at that time. I mean, okay, first of all, the viewpoint to this, how do non-Christian writers react to this event? They're horrified. So the best accounts come from a particular writer, and he is writing in Constantinople, where he moves around. But he writes a whole speech called Against the Temples. And he writes about how these monks have habitually been coming in. They've been making incursions, these bearded, black-robed monks. He describes them very carefully. He says they're pallid, they're unwashed, they're kind of stinking. And they sort of swarm into a city.

They attack the temples with iron bars, he says, or with, if they have nothing else, or with their hands and their feet. So you get this real sense of horror, just horror at the vandalism that is being conducted against civilized Roman buildings, ancient Roman buildings, sacred Roman buildings, by people who are essentially thugs. And they say that they are Christians, but this writer, he says, I don't think that they're Christians, you know, or he Christians, but this writer, he says, I don't think that they're Christians. You know, he doesn't say I don't think. They pretend to piety, but he thinks that they're drunk all the time. He thinks that they're stealing the food that they find as they come in.

He treats them with the utmost cynicism. And it's seen as assault, an assault, not merely on Roman temples and Roman ways of life, but on civilization itself. And then on the other hand then, how do Christian writers then portray this act? Well, to Christian writers, they're thrilled. I mean, there are, you get occasional moments, there's a law that says you should stop destroying the temples in the cities because the city is starting to look bad. That's in Spain. But the general one is one of celebration there's an account of Augustine writes about a temple in in North Africa the temple to a sky goddess which is a mile long and they destroy it and he celebrates you know look at the goddess she you worshipped her as a goddess couldn't even defend her own temple it was a mile long the temple is now gone and it's a sense

of this is our victory and we trample on your gods. They encouraged it. Saint Augustine encouraged people to destroy temples because he says that the old gods, that the temples should be destroyed, is what God wants, what God wishes, what God wills. You know, Catherine, there's such an interesting parallel there, focusing in on Alexandria at the end of the fourth century. And some people probably know I'm going to go over this, but the tomb of Alexander the Great, the last mentions of it in the end of the fourth century, and then it disappears. And they're very serious about perhaps it was because, like the Temple of Serapis, it was this place of pilgrimage almost for many people.

They went to the tomb of Alexander the Great to pay homage to this figure who died centuries before but it was also said this powerful place and then like you were talking about that those christian writers later who were almost celebrating it i think it's dio chrysostom i might have got the words wrong there spelt his name wrong but he says something a bit later not too much later which is like where tell me now is a Alexander's tomb? And it's like that kind of that boasting atmosphere you kind of get from those sources later on, from the Christian sources. We don't know if Alexander the Great's tomb was destroyed by Christians, but it seems likely.

But it's so interesting. It seems in various places in the empire at this time, you have Christian writers writing later, slightly later on, and they're celebrating this destruction of these buildings, these places that they saw as completely opposite to what they believed in. Absolutely, because if you truly believe that there is only one God, and that if you don't

worship this God, you're going to burn in hell forever, then this is the minimum you should be doing. You are saving people. And this is what you get. You get these wonderful speeches from Augustine. Wonderful, depends on how you... But where he says, merciful savagery. He writes about merciful savagery. And he says, if you saw someone in a building that was burning, wouldn't you run in and get them?

Or if you saw someone in a building that was about to fall down, wouldn't you go in and pull them out? And if they tried to resist, wouldn't you pull them? And if you hurt them a bit, wouldn't you still do it pull them out and if they tried to resist wouldn't you pull them and if you hurt them a bit wouldn't you still do it and you get these extraordinary passages where Christians liken what they are doing to somebody who has to create a little bit of discomfort in the time maybe you have to beat people maybe you have to torture them but you're saving them in eternity and I mean in truth if it is true that you will burn in eternity right I would take a little bit of torture in this life to escape that.

But what is, it's just the case that people now find that mindset, that degree of belief, that fervor hard to understand. And you get the most, to us, alarming writings from people like St. Augustine, where he describes the good Christian as being like a doctor who cuts out a gangrenous section of flesh. And the violence, I mean, the violence, he knew exactly what he was doing, Augustine. He used these metaphors carefully. He is saying that violence is acceptable. And they called him later, they called him the prince and the patriarch of the persecutors. Augustine would be used later and pointed to to say, it is all right to torture people in the name of Christianity, because we are not harming them. We are saving them. And in terms of the violence, people are often surprised. They

think of Christianity as a pacifist religion. And there are lots of reasons why it is. But there are many, many reasons why that's not right. You just have to look at Constantine's conversion to see that he wasn't turning to Christ for pacifist reasons. But one of the interesting things is the term, the triumph of Christianity. Now, that is a Roman term, a triumph, and it was a military term. And it was used to describe the moment when one army had so totally, not just beaten, but annihilated the enemy. They had taken their goods. They had captured their generals. They had humiliated them and paraded them through Rome. A triumph wasn't a nice word. It was an absolute, total, utter defeat of your enemy. And I think you kind of staged that quite nicely at the start of your

book where you start opening, not in Alexandria, but in Palmyra. And this approach of people in the fourth century, probably before the events in Alexandria. But in Palmyra. And this approach of people in the fourth century, probably before the events in Alexandria. But does this feel like one of those events where you have this force, as it were, descending on cities such as Palmyra in Syria at that time? Yes, yes. So I start in Palmyra. There's a statue, there's a very beautiful statue that was in Palmyra

that was unearthed in an archaeological dig in around the 80s and when they found it they found it's a statue of Athene, Athene Allat so she was one of the goddesses. Palmyra is called Palmyra because it had lots of palm trees and it was a sort of trading post on the Silk Route it was very rich this is why it's got so many amazing ruins why why it had so many amazing ruins, still has most of them, thank goodness. But it was also a kind of a place where religions came and mingled and met. So there was a temple to Athene Allat, and there's this statue of Athene that they found in the 80s,

and it would have stood once in a temple. It's called a colossal statue, which doesn't mean it's that big. It just means it's sort of bigger than life size. And it's one of those Roman ones where you could almost pinch her cheeks. The sculpture is so good. You know, her lips are plump, very beautiful face. But when the archaeologists found it, it had clearly been attacked. Their assumption was that it had been hit on the back of the head with a sword and then the head had kind of decapitated, fallen down. and then the torso had fallen, been toppled down, and the arms had been cut off. And the dates, you can date these things by coins that you find in the temple

and things like that. It seems to have happened at this point when the Temple of Serapis, around the Temple of Serapis, at the end of the Roman Empire, when we know from accounts, eyewitness accounts, that monks were coming into cities and attacking statues. It seems to have happened then. And this beautiful statue of Athene had exactly the same treatment. And what was interesting for the book was one of the ways I would have loved to do this book is as a travelogue to kind of go and see these places. And I write this in the introduction, but it became impossible because war broke out. And in the course of when I was writing the book, this statue, which had been standing in a museum in Palmyra, Isis came and it was attacked in exactly the same way. Again, she was toppled, her arms were pulled off, her head was decapitated. It was extraordinary,

2000 years on or so. Those parallels that you could see, that you could definitely see, couldn't you? And for the same reason, you know, she was an idolatrous statue. That's so interesting. And I guess it's keen to mention here before we move on we're going to go back to alexandria because this figure of hypatia we've got to talk about in a second but it's also interesting because this examples of this evidently occur across the roman empire and we did one recently a podcast about corinth in late antiquity and how this city once called sin city that now that you do find similarly at this time or a bit later, near the arrival of the Goths' time,

that you have, like, once again, you have these statues decapitated. And a key emphasis is on decapitated. And then the heads thrown down sewers or something like that. So it's almost like they're walking on top of the heads of these gods. Like, I have triumphed over these pagan, in quote marks, I have triumphed over them, as the Christians were saying, because I can now walk over them too. That's absolutely what they were saying, because people believed that there was a kind of supernatural power in the statue. But statues, we see this to this day, have a kind of peculiar power over people.

But there are amazing descriptions of how you can defile a statue. And it come from, this particular description came from Jewish practice, but it was exactly what was taken up by Christianity. You know, you can cut its arms off, you can cut the nose off, you can piss on it. You know, you are humiliating it as though it were a person. And if you believe that there's a demon in it, you feel that there is good reason for doing this. But yeah, they would throw them in sewers, decapitate them. They would often use bits of temples to build roads. You are humiliating the old gods in every way possible. And it's not the case that every temple had this happen to them.

This was kind of terrorism. It was particular acts carefully chosen to convey a message and did so. You don't have to destroy every temple to make the pagans afraid of your religion. You just have to destroy a few and the big ones. And then people are afraid. Because many others, shall we stress here that many others were converted into churches, not all of them were destroyed, as you say. Yes, many were. No, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not all were destroyed. Terrorism is the closest way to see it. Single dazzling acts that would have shocked an empire. And they had their effect. They were written about, they were spoken about. And then

there were less acts of aggression. So you could just sort of, one of the things after the Temple of Serapis was destroyed, people went through Alexandria that night, carving crosses and painting crosses onto things in an act of, you could just deface a statue, you didn't have to destroy it. There were many ways of doing this. Absolutely. A couple of questions before we start wrapping up. And talking about another, you know, shocking event that happens if we go into the fifth century. Now, if we go back to Alexandria, and it centers around this remarkable figure called Hypatia. Now, Catherine, who was Hypatia? So Hypatia is fascinating. You might have seen, people might have seen the film Agora. So she's played by Rachel Weisz very well, I think, in that. It's great, great fun. But she

was a mathematician. She's kind of hard for us to pigeonhole. She's somewhere between a mathematician and a philosopher. She sort of, in the way that ancient figures do, she's over lots of different subjects. But chiefly, I think maths and also astronomy were her specialisms. Her father was another brilliant mathematician. And it was said that until the 1960s, he had transcribed Greek maths, maths of Euclid. And he had sort of, I don't understand, I don't know maths, but he had produced the most reliable kind of book on it. And it was said that until the 60s, if you studied it at school, you were studying from the book that he had produced. So she was from a very intellectual, very grand, very aristocratic Alexandrian family. And she was hugely charismatic. So people would come to see her

lecture. She didn't take part, interestingly, in any of the spats between religions. She sort of stayed above it all. She was not sectarian. But she was hugely popular in Alexandria at this difficult time. And it was almost inevitable that she was going to draw attention to herself. I mean, she did in various other ways as well. She had a pupil who fell in love with her and she came into this class the next day and threw a sanitary towel, we don't know what she meant by that, at him and said, you love this and there's nothing beautiful about it. So she was a sort of aesthetic tough nut. So how does she therefore come into contact, as you said, with the Christians? Partly, it seems to be that she wouldn't play any of these games, any of these kind of religious

games and these religious, horrible, horrible religious games is probably to make too little of them that were happening at the time. She taught Christians and pagans alike in her lectures. But she was friends with the governor in Alexandria, who's called Orestes. And he starts to come into conflict with the Christians. And it's kind of long and complicated. But essentially, there's a day when Orestes is out and his chariot becomes surrounded by monks. So one of the important things about Alexandria is that it is absolutely surrounded by the hotbed of Egyptian monasticism. So there are monks everywhere around it in the deserts, and they can seem to be able to have been summoned. And this is what happens with Alexandria. So it also has Christians who are used within the city to do good works.

They're called the Parabalani, which means sort of the risky ones, the risk takers. They're these young men and the Christians use them as stretcher bearers and they use them to kind of carry away dead bodies. A lot of people die in big cities. You need someone to move the bodies. And these are the men who do it. So you have two kind of de facto bodies of men who can be called upon. two kind of de facto bodies of men who can be called upon. And what happens with Hypatia is that despite the fact that she's not taking part in these Christian and pagan kind of sectarian battles, she becomes a figure of suspicion. And there start to be rumors. People start to say she's atheizing the people of Alexandria. So she's turning them against Christianity. And then they look at her work. They look at her astrology and they look at her maths and they say,

look at those strange symbols. What is she doing? She's not doing maths. Look at her astrolabes. She's not doing astronomy. She is doing witchcraft. She is a figure who is from hell and she is working against Christianity in Alexandria. And then what happens on a spring day in 415 AD, she's setting out in her chariot and she is surrounded by Christians. They pull her from her chariot and in this case it's the Parabalani, it's the young Christian men. They pull her from her chariot and then it's not quite clear what happens next but most probably they flay her alive. And then it's not quite clear what happens next. But most probably they flay her alive. And then accounts differ as to what happened next. Some have

accounts of her having her eyes gouged out, other that she's sort of dismembered, other that her body is sort of thrown on the local rubbish heap to sort of burn. But again, it is those one of those horrifying moments of Christian terrorism. And it's so shocking that Christian accounts are themselves aghast. Nobody wanted this. I was going to ask about what the sources were for this. Was there any, because compared to the burning of the Temple of Serapis, you know, where they obviously there's this boasting almost of this, as you say there, even among Christian writers, and I'm guessing Christian writers are our main sources for Hypatia by that time, there is shock and terror saying that this is almost, I guess, this is too far.

Yeah, this is too far. This is, there is a definite sense. I mean, they don't kind of go into it at length. They describe it in kind of relative detail, and their condemnation is brief, but it is clear that there is a sense among Christian scholars, and scholars will naturally feel it when a scholar, another scholar, another scholar is attacked, that there is a sense that this was, this should not have happened. Absolutely, absolutely. I think one other area I'd love to ask about just before we really start wrapping up is this whole sanctuaries.

Now we think of sanctuaries such as Delphi, you know, the belly button of the ancient world and all that, you know, for centuries, it was so important. What happens to Delphi? Does it almost kind of get deconstructed? A deconstructed? Do we not really know? Is it one of those things that just kind of disappears from existence? I don't know. So I don't know about Delphi in particular. What you get with a lot of these temples and famous pagan sites is that they get converted into Christian churches or Christian sites. And there's a long period where people don't seem to be wholly sure what. So, you know, you'll get pagans who are worshipped or assumed to be, you get blendings, really.

You get kind of moments where the religions don't so much crash against each other as intermingle. But a lot of them get converted. The Parthenon was converted into a church, famously, and its statues also suffered. It's suggested that that was at the hands of Christians. I remember walking around the British Museum with Ian Jenkins, the man who used to be in charge of that section of Greece and Rome. And I said, oh, could they not have just been damaged by accident? And he said, you don't accidentally have your head cut off

if you're 60 feet up in the air. No, absolutely not. That's a lot of time and effort gone into that. Well, he also, it wasn't a cost-free thing, converting something into a church. I mean, you see it in Istanbul with the Church of the Korah. You know, when a church is converted into a mosque, you sense that there is a charge there to this day, even though people aren't that Christian. So when people converted, or vice versa, if a church is converted into a mosque or a mosque into a church,

that is felt in communities. You know, that is a, it's not a power game, but that is felt in communities you know that is a it's not a power game but that is a shift in power when that happens and so when people say you know oh they were just converted into churches for many of those who are watching it happen there was no just to being converted into a church well let's keep on Athens then you mentioned the Parthenon let's keep on Athens then because we're going to jump forward to the 6th century, Catherine, because Athens, in the year 529, why is this year so significant in the whole discussion that we've been talking about today? At this time, there was what you call the school in Athens.

And when you think of Athens, obviously you think of philosophy. And in this time, there were philosophers who saw themselves as preserving Greek philosophy in what they called a golden chain from the age of Plato. So they felt they were the true inheritors of Plato, and that Greek philosophy, in their mind, had kind of not missed a beat from Plato to them. I mean, Gibbon said, well, I'm not quite sure what Plato would have thought of them. And he's quite right. Their philosophy had changed a lot. It was much less what we would call rational. It was much more spiritual. It was much more connected with religion. But they were nonetheless doing philosophy and doing philosophy

probably better than pretty much I would say anyone else at the time. And they were in Athens. But it was the 6th century. So it was a nasty time not to be a Christian. So you had to convert by this time. There was no question about it. Even at the end of the fourth century, you had had forced conversions and you would see thousands of people at one time being converted in mass baptisms. If you had held out as a pagan, as these philosophers had till then, you were pretty much in danger. And they lived in, if not in fear of their lives, then they were definitely aware that there were many threats

that they had to be careful of. So fellow philosophers had been captured, hung up, tortured. They had been beaten. Their houses had been ransacked. Books had been taken by monks, burned outside. You were fearful. And in Athens in 529 AD, the Emperor Justinian gives a ruling and he says, this must end. Paganism must end. And at this moment, these philosophers decide that after over almost a millennium of philosophy in Athens, it is time to go. And they leave. They take what they can and they go. They leave Athens. And they're described as the flower of Greek philosophy. So this is the moment. And, you know, there's lots of reasons you can say this isn't true. Philosophy continued, Christianity continued. But what continued was Christian philosophy, which I would argue is something different. This is the moment that pagan,

as you would call it, free philosophy ended in Europe, and they left and they went to Persia. I mean, it's so interesting. These are almost, can we say, the opposite of the martyrs that we were discussing earlier, you know, the martyrs who were, you know, stubborn in their belief in Christianity at a time when Christianity wasn't dominant. So these figures were stubborn in what they believed in at a time when Christianity was dominant. Yeah, it's remarkable. And oh, man hands on inhumanity to man. When one gets the upper hand, the same thing seems to happen again. And they were, they, like the Christians, as the Christians had hated the Romans, they hated the Christians. They tried to not to refer to them at all. But

they saw them as rapacious tyrants who were stealing everything that was of importance to them. Catherine, this has been an absolutely incredible conversation. I mean, just as we wrap up, why do you think it's so significant, so important for us to be discussing this topic today, the destruction of so much at the end of the classical period by Christians and how it fits in into the whole rise of Christianity at this time? I think it matters because it's not very often talked about. When I was writing this book, I struggled to find the papers I wanted. I was emailing academics. It matters. It's important.

Everyone knows what the Christians think of the Romans. Nobody really stops to think that often what the Romans thought of the Christians, not to hear it from their own mouths. I mean, history is about trying to hear the past through the past's own mouth. And there are so many voices from this period who haven't been listened to for centuries, who are still hard to hear. You know, so many of these authors were destroyed almost totally or partially. And so many of them, so many of them, even those who weren't destroyed, are barely studied. And they're fascinating. and often, and I think this

is an underrated quality, they're funny. They are funny, indeed. Especially Celsus. Especially Celsus. Very interesting, isn't he? Catherine, this has been a really great chat. Last but certainly not least, your book on this topic is called? At the Darkening Age, The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Fantastic. Catherine, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you for having me. Catherine, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you for having me.

Well, there you go. There was Catherine Nixey, the author and journalist. Her book is called The Darkening Age, The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. I hope you enjoyed the episode and hearing Catherine's viewpoint on this incredibly important, incredibly significant topic of ancient history. Now, last thing from me, if you'd like more ancient history content in the meantime, well, you can subscribe to our Ancients newsletter via a link in the description below. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on either Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts from,

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