Quote image editor
“Today, in a world in which the very word ‘classical’ hints at something revered to the point of dullness, it is hard to understand quite how alarming many of these works were to the Christians. But to Christian eyes the classical canon had the power to horrify. It was replete with sins of every kind. Open Homer’s Iliad and you might find your eyes falling on a passage about how the god Ares seduced golden Aphrodite – and how they were both then caught in flagrante delicto. Open Oedipus the King and you might find a declaration that ‘the power of the gods is perishing’. Even works by the most stuffily august of authors were not without danger: open a work by the tediously virtuous Virgil, and you might find Dido and Aeneas up to no good in a cave in a rainstorm. Idolatry, blasphemy, lust, murder, vanity – every sin was there. That was what made them so enjoyable and, to the Christians, so damnable.” — Catherine Nixey