“ [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 th… Catherine Nixey
“ 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, whi… Catherine Nixey
“ 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 per… Catherine Nixey
