Still, contrary to Nixey, there was not utter but rather partial destruction of the classical world. The vigorous debates in Byzantine cultures about whether, for example, magical texts were demonic suggest that these works continued to have influence in Christian Europe. It seems that off the page there was a little more continuity than Christian authorities would like to admit. Intellectuals in Antioch (again in Syria) were tortured and beheaded, as were the statues around them. Her sympathy, corruscatingly, compellingly, is with the Roman orator Symmachus: “We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same world surrounds us.

Source: New York Times June 08, 2018 09:00 UTC