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For all the hyperbole, as Edward Gibbon crushingly put it, the average "annual consumption" of martyrs in Rome during the persecutions was no more than one hundred and fifty per year during years of persecution.32"
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Catherine Nixey |
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I]n the years that followed the persecutions, Christianity came to see itself, with great pride, as a persecuted Church. Its greatest heroes were not those who did good deeds but those who died in the most painful way. If you were willing to die an excruciating end in the arena then, whatever your previous holiness or lack thereof, you went straight to heaven: martyrdom wiped out all sins on the point of death. As well as getting there fast..
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madness
equality
christianity
sacrifice
monotheism
martyrdom
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Catherine Nixey |
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Democritus's atomic theory did, however, come down to us--but on a very slender thread: it was contained in one single volume of Lucretius's great poem, which was held in one single German library, which one single intrepid book hunter would eventually find and save from extinction. That single volume would have an astonishing afterlife: it became a literary sensation, returned atomism to European thought, created what Stephen Greenblatt ha..
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Catherine Nixey |