Athens

This is a book about the christian destruction of the classical world.

In a spasm of destruction never seen before - and one that appalled many non-christians watching it - during the fourth and fifth centuries, the christian church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and burned to the ground. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was levelled. Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off and gods were decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off then ground into rubble that was then used to build churches. Books - which were often stored in temples - suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.

One can achieve a great deal by the blunt weapons of indifference and sheer stupidity.

The violent assaults of this period were not the preserve of cranks and eccentrics. Attacks against the monuments of the "mad", "damnable" and "insane" pagans were encouraged and led by men at the very heart of the catholic church. — The great St Augustine himself declared to a congregation in Carthage that "that all superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what god wants, god commands, god proclaims!" — St Martin, still one of the most popular French saints, rampaged across the Gaulish countryside levelling temples and dismaying locals as he went. In Egypt, St Theophilus razed one of the most beautiful buildings in the ancient world. In Italy, St Benedict overturned a shrine to Apollo. In Syria, ruthless bands of monks terrorized the countryside, smashing down statues and tearing the roofs from temples.