The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World | Catherine Nixey

The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages

In this journey Catherine Nixey takes us into the early Church and to the very heart of the Roman Empire.

From fanatical zealots attacking and destroying temples to harsh laws put in place by theocratic officials we see the origin and destruction of not just the classical world, but classical civilization itself.

In Harran, the locals refused to convert. They were dismembered, their limbs hung along the town’s main street.

In Alexandria, zealots pulled the elderly philosopher-mathematician Hypatia from her chariot and flayed her to death with shards of broken pottery. Not long before, their fellow Christians had invaded the city’s greatest temple, smashing its world-famous statues and destroying all that was left of Alexandria’s Great Library.

Today we refer to Christianity’s conquest of the West as a “triumph.” But this victory entailed an orgy of destruction in which Jesus’s followers attacked and suppressed classical culture, helping to pitch Western civilization into a thousand-year-long decline.

From exploring her work and research to discussing how her work was received we cover a vast array of topics and viewpoints.

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About the author : CATHERINE NIXEY is a journalist and a classicist. Her mother was a nun, her father was a monk, and she was brought up Catholic. She studied classics at Cambridge and taught the subject for several years before becoming a journalist on the arts desk at the Times (UK), where she still works. Author of The Darkening Age, which won the Jerwood Award from the Royal Society of Literature, she lives in London with her husband (the journalist and author Tom Whipple) and their two children.

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