Watercolor, charcoal and plaster on paper

Any opinion differing from the Church’s was heretical and evil, so pagan intellectuals were persecuted, schools were closed, books of the philosophers were burned, and temples destroyed. After years of demolishment, St John Chrystostom boasted, “Every trace of the old philosophy and literature of the ancient world has vanished from the face of the earth.” A historian wrote, as he watched this, that the Roman Empire was being taken by a “fabulous and faceless darkness mastering the loveliness of the world.”

-- Walker, Barbara G., The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1983. Pages 208-209.