“It was language itself – the forceful, lurid language of a handful of elite males – that stoked the fires of Christian rage against its enemies, fires that blazed for a millennium: the intellectual foundations for a thousand years of theocratic oppression were being laid.” Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age
The violent overthrow of the Hellenistic world is well documented, though historians (mostly male and Christian) tend to depict it as a gradual turning to a better, wiser, kinder theology, supported by dedicated monks who tried to salvage as much ancient wisdom as possible. The real story, of course is far more complicated. There are ways in which all versions of the story can be true to some degree and still not create a complete picture. There were Christian monks who were helpful; there were also Christian monks who were vicious. There is no doubt, though, that the overthrow was not gentle, but violent. There is also no doubt that Christians would not have prevailed without this violence. Christians were not winning the minds and hearts of the people until they began to murder priests and priestesses, and destroy temples, libraries and shrines. After the violence, in many places there was a rash of converts. Were these people suddenly convinced - or terrified? All this violence was stoked by the rhetoric of the elite against the idea of elitism, much as it is today.
In my depiction of the end of Eleusis I have strung together several stories that could be true. I relied on the prophecies of the last true hierophant (religious leader of Eleusis) as described by the ancient historian, Eunapias, who predicted that the destruction of Eleusis would be preceded by a usurper hierophant who was not an Athenian, and was “consecrated to the service of other gods.” Eunapias also related the tale that the last true hierophant had gained such prophetic power “that he prophesied that in his own lifetime the sacred temples would be razed to the ground and laid waste” (Eunapias, The Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists). I tried to imagine how seeing the terrible violence in advance like that would have felt.
For the purposes of storytelling I changed some details, but in the main, I have tried to breathe life into Eunapias’ description.
