The fall of the Roman empire fascinates me.
I have read more about it than a normal person should. I only wish evernote had existed back when I first started studying the subject. Just started reading another book about history’s most famous collapse.
Charles Norris Cochrane wrote Christianity and Classical culture back in 1944.
Before getting out of the introduction, I discovered this paragraph. I am afraid we moderns could use a good dose of ancient thinking.
To them (the early Christians under the government of Rome) the state, so far from being the supreme instrument of human emancipation and perfectibility, was a straight-jacket to be justified at best as a ‘remedy for sin’. To think of it otherwise they considered the grossest of superstitions.
– Charles Cochrane in ‘Christianity and Classical Culture’
