The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

In Harran, the locals refused to convert and were dismembered. In Alexandria, zealots pulled the elderly philosopher-mathematician Hypatia from he chariot and flayed her to death. Not long before, their fellow Christians had destroyed all that was left of the city's Great Library. As Catherine Nixey shows, such atrocities belie the so-called "triumph" of Christianity: its 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. The Darkening Age brilliantly resurrects this lost history, offering a wrenching account of the rise of Christianity and its terrible cost.