"It was a sport and pastime to humble those exalted heads." ~ The Damnatio Memoriae and the relatively commonplace destruction of monuments during the Roman Empire.

The Darkening Age tells only a small part of the story.

If you follow Roman history interest groups on various social media platforms, you are guaranteed to encounter posts bemoaning the supposed destruction of Classical Greco-Roman civilization by Christians. These posts are normally as sensationalistic as they are lacking in any kind of historical context. They nearly always feature shout-outs to journalist Catherine Nixey’s 2017 polemic entitled The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. 

The comments following such posts are predictable—semi-literate laments about the vast unknown knowledge lost when Christians [sic] burned the Library at Alexandria; bitter tears for all the wonderful art that was destroyed by barbaric Christian mobs rampaging through the cities of the empire; and of course, angry denunciations of the murder of Hypatia of Alexandria – who has been raised to the secular altars as a proto-martyr of feminist scientism thanks to the propaganda film, Agora. This act is presented as the ultimate evidence of Christianity’s brutal, gritty embrace of wholesale ignorance.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly already knows that the above narrative is false and is fairly easily contradicted by the actual primary sources from antiquity. All that is needed to dispel the above slanders is context. Alexandria was historically a very violent city, and mob violence was perpetrated by every faction of her citizens at one time or another, whether they be pagans, Christians or Jews. Numerous Christians of various stripes were victims of pagan mobs, including George, the Arian bishop of Alexandria, who was beaten to death by a pagan mob in the city. The difference was that the Christian recorders of history deplored such violence and often condemned their co-religionists when they were responsible for it. Julian the Apostate, on the other hand, tended to excuse such excesses when committed by his favored factions, while at the same time coveting George's extensive library. 

If there are instances when Christians burned pagan literature, they did no worse than the pagan emperors who sponsored the wholesale destruction of Christian literature throughout the Empire. And indeed, it appears that the great persecutor of Christians, Diocletian himself, was responsible not only for the burning of Christian books, but for the utter annihilation of works on chemistry (alchemy) in Alexandria. 

Though presenting itself as history, Nixey's book is in reality a litany of carefully curated and manicured factoids. Taken as a whole, it is a naked, partisan attack on Christianity, which cherry-picks evidence in favor of its thesis while ignoring evidence to the contrary. The Acton Institute review by Josh Herring slammed the book, calling it “a love letter for paganism." As Herring further opines: "Nixey condemns Late Antique Christianity for not practicing twenty-first century cultural relativism….Her book does not increase understanding, but instead reveals the difficulty with which a twenty-first century secularist examines a faith-filled past.” The review concludes with the caveat that although The Darkening Age “is sold under the guise of popular history, treat it as an insight into how a secular journalist views Christianity in the year of our Lord 2017.”

An even more damning critique of The Darkening Age may be found on the blog of Roger Pearse, that tireless curator of the hugely useful website, Tertullian.org. In this post, Mr. Pearse provides a helpful translation of a review originally written in German by Prof. Dr. Roland Kany of Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, München that appeared in Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung. Prof. Kany concluded his critical review by saying that Nixey’s book lacks “factual competence, a sense of proportion, an effort for appropriate representation and contextualization. Nixey…ignores what does not fit into the junk, putting together true, half-true, and false claims into a construct that is not just one-sided, but an excessive falsehood.”

But rather than simply compile a list of the negative scholarly reviews of this work—and there are many—let's investigate the commonly-heard claim that Christians were somehow unique or excessive in destroying or vandalizing works of art from the Classical period. The cover of The Darkening Age features a statue of the pagan goddess Aphrodite sporting a cross on her forehead (see image at the top of this post). This is one of many statues, we are told, which have been defaced in this way by iconoclastic Christians intent on blotting out the Classical pagan past. In fact, the number of statues defaced in this way is vanishingly small – a tiny percentage of the total number of statues which have survived antiquity. According to Prof. Steven Fine of Yeshiva University, the carving of a cross into the statue may have served to Christianize it, indicating that the subject had been “neutralized” or baptized into Christianity, thus helping to preserve a work that might otherwise have been destroyed. [See Fine: The Menorah and the Cross: Historiographical reflections on a recent discovery from Laodicea on the Lycus, page 36, note 14]

Beyond this, let’s add a some context. Christians in Late Antiquity existed within a culture that had a long history of destroying images of individuals who had fallen into disrepute. Much like modern activists who have taken upon themselves the destruction of all images depicting Christopher Columbus, politicized Romans often had a visceral reaction to the fall of defeated generals, politicians, emperors and members of the imperial family that frequently involved the destruction of statues, the defacing of coins, and the erasure of inscriptions. Furthermore, it sometimes became a matter of imperial policy for newly-elevated emperors to call for the annihilation of all images of their opponents, the melting of imperial coinage bearing the likeness of the disgraced, and even making the utterance of the disgraced person's name a crime worthy of severe punishment. This is known by the more modern term damnatio memoriae, and it was a reasonably common feature of Roman political life. Though the phrase itself was not used in antiquity, damnatio memoriae has come to encompass the variety of censures that a disgraced individual might posthumously suffer.

In an article entitled “Portraits, Plots and Politics: Damnatio Memoriae and the Images of Imperial Women,” Eric R. Varner notes that images of those figures who had been formally condemned usually show the same characteristics. “Intentional defacement…is almost always concentrated on the sensory organs, destroying the eyes, nose, mouth, and sometimes the ears, but leaving the rest of the image intact and still legible.”

Here are just a few examples from the ancient historical sources of how damnatio memoriae was put into practice, both informally and formally, after the fall of a particularly hated person. This list was compiled quickly and is in no way comprehensive. Note well that none of these events described below were religious in nature. All were political:

• After the Battle of Actium, Octavian chased Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra (30 BC) back to Alexandria where they both perished by suicide. Plutarch records that when Antonius died, his monuments and Cleopatra's suffered differing fates: "Antony was fifty-six years of age, according to some, according to others, fifty-three. Now, the statues of Antony were torn down, but those of Cleopatra were left standing, because Archibius, one of her friends, gave Caesar two thousand talents, in order that they might not suffer the same fate as Antony's." [Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Antony, Chapter 86] In his Life of Cicero, Plutarch also records that Antonius received the following censures voted by the Senate at Rome: "It was in his [Cicero's son] consulship that the senate took down the statues of Antony, made void the other honors that had been paid him, and decreed besides that no Antony should have the name of Marcus." [Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Cicero, Chapter 49]. Interestingly, Antony would eventually be rehabilitated by future emperors including his grandson, Claudius, who became emperor in AD 41.

• 

  Bust of Caligula recut to
  resemble his successor,
  Claudius.

  Following the assassination of Gaius Caligula (AD 41) Cassius Dio relates: “Now he was spat upon by those who had been accustomed to do him reverence even when he was absent; and he became a sacrificial victim at the hands of those who were wont to speak and write of him as “Jupiter” and “god.” His statues and his images were dragged from their pedestals, for the people in particular remembered the distress they had endured.” [Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book LIX, Chapter 30]

• 

  Defaced bronze as of Nero. 

  From the Octavia, a play by pseudo-Seneca written shortly after the death of Nero in AD 68, there is the following scene of the Roman populace attacking the statues of Poppaea, the wife of Nero: “This excessive uncontrollable fury springs out of the indignation, to which these nuptials have given rise, and it is that, which is urging them on with headlong rashness, into this display of madness. Whatever statue of Poppaea, sculptured out of the purest marble stood in their way, or whatever brazen monument was shining forth and revealed the likeness of Poppaea, was ruthlessly dashed to the ground by the infuriated hands of the populace, and lies there broken up, by means of hammers wielded by savage arms; they then dragged the pieces of the statues, which had been pulled down from their standing place, trailed them along the streets, with cords, and after kicking them about for some time in an angry fashion, they would plaster them all over with filthy mud! And the swearing, and cursing, that went on, and their obscene language was quite in keeping with their acts, and which was so bad that I should be afraid to repeat it; they are, now preparing to surround, the Palace with flames, unless Nero surrenders this new wife of his…” [Octavia, Act IV]

• 

  Damaged bust of Domitian.

  Pliny the Younger in his Panegyricus to Trajan, describes the destruction of the images of Domitian who was assassinated in AD 96: “Of your [Trajan's] statues therefore we see but one or two, and those of mean brass, placed outside the Capitol, whereas but a little while since, every passage, every ascent, every corner of the Temple was decked, or rather defiled, with cast gold and silver, when the shrines of the gods were debauched with the intermixed statues of an incestuous prince [Domitian]. However, your few brazen ones stand inviolate, and will so remain as long as the Temple itself endures, while theirs of gold and such like precious metals are, all the legions of them, rudely battered down, and made a sacrifice to public joy. It was a sport and pastime to humble those exalted heads, to make them prostrate and kiss the ground, to maul them with hammers, to hew them with hatchets, as if at every stroke blood and pain might follow. None was so moderate in the venting of his raptures, none so sober in his overflowing joys, but that he thought it a luscious piece of revenge to see their mangled limbs, their severed joints, and finally their grim and ghastly images devested of all their borrowed majesty and thrown into the flames to be melted down into better use and service.” [Pliny’s Panegyricus as translated by White Kennett]

• 

  Defaced medallion of Commodus.

  The Roman people vented their rage on the images of Commodus following his assassination and the elevation of Pertinax (AD 193), as per the account of Cassius Dio: “In this way Pertinax was declared emperor and Commodus a public enemy, after both the senate and the populace had joined in shouting many bitter words against the latter. They wanted to drag off his body and tear it from limb to limb, as they did do, in fact, with his statues; but when Pertinax informed them that the corpse had already been interred, they spared his remains, but glutted their rage against him in other ways, calling him all sorts of names. [Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book LXXIV, Chapter 2]

• 

  Roundel showing the family of Septimius
  Severus. Caracalla is at bottom right.
  Geta's face has been erased at bottom left. 

  Cassius Dio further describes Antoninus Caracalla’s vengeance upon his brother Geta’s memory (AD 211), whom he had slain with is own hands: “He exhibited his hatred for his dead brother by abolishing the observance of his birthday, and he vented his anger upon the stones that had supported his statues, and melted down the coinage that displayed his features. And not content with even this, he now more than ever practiced unholy rites, and would force others to share his pollution, by making a kind of annual offering to his brother's Manes.” [Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book LXXVIII, Chapter 12]

• Rome riots when a rumor is spread that the hated emperor Maximinus Thrax (AD 238) had been assassinated on the frontier, according to the historian Herodian: “When these reports became known, the people milled about as if possessed. The fact is that all peoples are eager for a change of government, but the Roman mob, because of its tremendous size and diverse elements, is unusually prone to instability and vacillation. Therefore the statues, paintings, and all of Maximinus' emblems of honor were destroyed, and the hatred which fear had hitherto suppressed now poured forth without hindrance, freely and fearlessly. The senators met before they received accurate information concerning Maximinus and, placing their trust for the future in the present situation, proclaimed Gordian Augustus, together with his son, and destroyed Maximinus' emblems of honor.” [Herodian, History of the Roman Empire, Book VII, Chapter 7]

• 

  Damaged bust of Maximian.

  Lactantius, in his work On the Deaths of the Persecutors, describes how Diocletian (AD 311) lived to see his own statues destroyed: “At this time, by the command of Constantine, the statues of Maximian Herculius were thrown down and the portraits removed. And, as the two old emperors were generally delineated in one piece, the portraits of both were removed at the same time. Thus Diocletian lived to see a disgrace which no former emperor had ever seen and under the double load of vexation of spirit and bodily maladies, he resolved to die.” [Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors, Chapter XLII]

Put into this context, the vandalism so breathlessly portrayed in The Darkening Age as somehow an unavoidable and unique aspect of ignorant and barbarous Christianity, looks instead like a simple extension of a traditional political behavior of Classical pagan Romans emulated by later Christian Romans who were, by and large, recent converts from paganism themselves.

So much for the facile thesis offered in The Darkening Age, which should not be confused with a serious work of history by anyone.