What Diocletian failed to do, his Christian successors accomplished in reverse. They soon wiped paganism out, by methods no less intolerant and brutal.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, March 30, 2018
Wiped Out
M.I. Finley (1912-1986), "The Emperor Diocletian," Aspects of Antiquity: Discoveries and Controversies, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 137-145 (at 142):