What is a Dark Age?

In historiography, the term “Dark Age” may describe intervening centuries for which we have little or no documentary evidence. Accordingly, the time period between the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization to the birth of the polis is known as the Greek Dark Ages by historians, simply because there are no contemporary written sources. In this essay, the term Dark Age will be used to designate a period of civilizational decline, with particular reference to Western Europe’s Dark Ages (c. 500—1000 AD). This was quite possibly the worst period of civilizational decline in Western history, but is important because it shows us that civilization is separated from the worst bestial depravity by a thin line. What George Santayana wrote is instructive: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Although this adage has become a cliché, it bears repeating since it’s well-supported by past experience. If we must focus on the Old Dark Ages, it is because we risk forgetting how fragile civilization really is. If this is the case, we are in danger of rushing heedlessly into a New Dark Age—if we have not already entered one—since we have failed to internalize the lessons of the past.

The causes of the Dark Ages in Western Europe are considered complex and multifaceted by modern historians. The barbarian successor states that replaced the Imperium Romanorum lacked the ability and competence of the Imperial government. The result was inevitable. Under barbarian rule, there were “very substantial simplifications in post-Roman material culture in the fifth to seventh centuries.”[1] Among these “simplifications” were the collapse of the empire’s infrastructure, the decline in the production of manufactured goods and use of coinage, widespread depopulation and de-urbanization and, most devastating of all, the loss of much of the ancient world’s cultural and intellectual patrimony. Although some contemporary historians stress continuity between Rome and the barbarian kingdoms, this is contradicted by the extensive archaeological record. From 500—700 AD, there was a massive decline in European living standards since Roman times, when the Dark Ages had reached their lowest point.

As terrible as these Dark Ages were, it is not the only dark period in Western history, nor will it be the last. A New Dark Age has returned, more terrible than the first. We are its passive witnesses, confident that nothing can be done to stop it. The West is crumbling because the White race has collectively decided—at the instigation of a hostile Jewish-dominated globalist elite—that White racial suicide is a moral imperative. The visible signs of this deterioration are so obvious they can no longer be ignored, at least by those who can see beyond the smoldering ruins of this decaying civilization.

A New Dark Age?

The signs of an emerging New Dark Age are fourfold, affecting the biological, intellectual, demographic and economic spheres of Western man’s existence. This decline is apparently unstoppable; as time goes by, the darkness over Europe will only become darker. In the biological and intellectual sphere, we have seen IQs steadily decline since mid-19th century. This has no doubt been masked to a considerable extent by improvements in nutrition and healthcare, resulting in longer lifespans. On the other hand, feminism and women’s sexual liberation have aggravated the decline: Low-IQ women breed prolifically, while high-IQ women influenced by feminism delay marriage for the sake of careers and education. It does not take a fertile imagination to realize the kind of dysgenic effect this has on society. In the largest North American and Western European urban centers, we see the crumbling infrastructure and growing social decay that comes with overcrowding and mass Third World immigration. More non-Whites shoveled into Western cities by globalist elites, many with anti-White ethnic agendas, means lower average population IQ, followed by a corresponding decline in quality of life as low-IQ people become an ever-increasing burden on society in terms of homelessness, drug addiction, lack of education, lack of work ethic, etc. In the absence of a technologically sophisticated elite able churn out inexpensive consumer goods, this would result in increasing “simplification” of post-Western material culture, analogous to the kind of “simplifications” archaeologists say occurred during the Old Dark Ages. Given declining IQs and racial hygienic standards, life will inevitably become a much simpler, but more brutal Darwinian struggle for survival, just as it was over a thousand years ago.

The West’s declining IQs have led to declining educational standards. The universities are no longer bastions of intellectual inquiry, like they were during their heyday, i.e., La Belle Époque, but liberal indoctrination centers with little intellectual content. In this respect, they are similar to the late medieval universities that once policed orthodoxy and discouraged freedom of thought (i.e. the Catholic Aristotelians of the medieval arts and theology faculties who opposed the new astronomy of Galileo). The people who run them, far from being interested in knowledge for its own sake, are there to reap the rewards of an easy, well-paying job where they are able to spew leftist propaganda—at the expense of their students, who still believe—albeit naively—that degrees are needed for good jobs. Mass education, far from being a benefit to anyone except the system’s architects, has lowered curricular quality and increased prevalence of grade inflation across the board.

On a side note, Western philosophy—the most important intellectual endeavor beside theoretical physics—has been particularly hard hit by PoMo relativism. From the empyrean heights of Plato and Aristotle, it has descended to the low level of a feces-encrusted cesspit. The writings of Martin Heidegger—liberal academia’s biggest superstar—are considered holy writ by his legions of adoring fans, even though they are pretentious, rambling, jargon-laced diatribes only famous because they can be interpreted to mean anything to anyone. Far from being a means of defining terms and refining methods to achieve greater clarity and understanding—the way Socrates intended—modern (especially continental) philosophy seeks to feign profundity through an unnecessarily turgid and obscure prose. Meanwhile, impenetrable jargon has become the trademark of the rest of the humanities, personified by academic superstars like Judith Butler.

White populations worldwide are hurtling toward demographic free fall. The declining birth rates in virtually all White Western Hemispheric nations are symptomatic of the collapse of the monogamous family, the result of decades of indoctrination in feminist ideology and women’s sexual liberation. Since women are no longer expected to settle down and marry, the worst aspects of female nature are now on full display. Student debt incurred by buying largely worthless (for many) college degrees is affecting the decision to marry.  If there are no traditional values—and Western society has done its best to jettison these in the name of fatuous “human rights”— society will not adequately replenish itself, eventually withering away and dying.

Finally, Western economies are being undermined from within by their own elites. Outsourcing by multinationals has decimated manufacturing sectors in all White Western countries, worsening the lives and prospects of the White middle- and working-class majority populations. Chinese goods have been allowed to flood Western markets, often with the collusion of domestic manufacturers who are able to outsource their labor costs. Real wages have stagnated and affordable housing has become increasingly scarce, as excess Third World immigrant demand places home ownership beyond reach of the ordinary citizen, particularly in the large urban centers.

Moreover, the importation of this cheap, non-White labor has a contraceptive effect, putting downward pressure on real wages which, in turn, put downward pressure on White fertility rates; working-class wages have stagnated since the 1970s.  In the West, the growing reserve army of labor disincentivizes industry from rationalizing production and channeling surplus profits into research and development. Far from getting better, the economy worsens as wealth accrues to the top 1 percent of the population; meanwhile, the middle class shrinks and poverty becomes more widespread.

Because of all of these factors, life in most of the White Western countries has progressively worsened, only made tolerable—but just barely—by the superabundance of inexpensive Chinese-made goods. That the majority of Whites and their globalist elites interpret these signs of deterioration as “progress” and “improvement” is just more evidence we really are in a Dark Age. 

Old and New Dark Ages Compared

The similarities and differences between New and Old Dark Ages may be grouped under the following headings: (a) the reasons for demographic decline; (b) Western man’s conscious decision to abandon his own civilization vs. Roman decline due to internal civilizational weaknesses, and; (c) the role of Christian ideology in the decline of Rome and Jewish ideology in modern Western culture.

First, we begin with Rome’s decline, which had a demographic dimension. After Hadrian had abandoned the territories conquered by Trajan—for administrative and fiscal reasons, the quest for new land and new bodies to rule over ground to a halt. This precipitated a crisis. The number of bodies left to till the fields and man the auxiliary forces along the frontiers declined as the vices of civilization took root. Because of the dearth of bodies and taxable wealth, the empire lacked the capacity to control its vast territories. To remedy this, the Romans recruited barbarians from burgeoning migrant populations along the frontiers or from the armies of the defeated. The historian Cassius Dio says Marcus Aurelius, after defeating the barbarians in the Marcomannic Wars, would either send them on military campaigns or settle them on land in Dacia, Pannonia and elsewhere.[2]

By the fourth century, barbarian recruitment into the armies had increased; by the mid-5th century, the ranks of the army were largely occupied by Germanic and Hunnish mercenaries, at which point even the military chain of command was thoroughly barbarized. The magister militum, the most important position in the empire after the emperor himself, was occupied by Romanized Germans for most of the fifth century. These men were more powerful than the succession of weak emperors they could make or break with a single utterance. According to the “barbarization thesis”: “Rome was fatally weakened when, in the fourth and fifth centuries, her army largely made up of foreigners no longer represented the people.”[3]

The Imperial administration’s need for barbarians was in some ways similar to Western elite demand for non-White immigrants. Like immigrants, the barbarians were cheap and expendable. Non-Whites are imported by globalists to do the work “White men don’t want to do.” Similarly, the barbarians were recruited into the armies and allowed to settle Imperial lands because fourth- and fifth-century Romans had become the “soyboys” of antiquity—soft, effeminate, milquetoast, peace-loving and totally lacking in all of the warrior virtues. Finally, like Western elites, the Imperial administration was a tax-hungry beast; but Roman justification for taxation was pragmatic, not ideological. This difference is best illustrated by the Western neoliberal economic model; predicated on perpetual growth, it serves as pretext for the White majority’s suicidally impulsive need for never-ending supplies of non-White “fresh meat.” In the Roman case, a constant stream of bodies was needed to maintain an empire overextended beyond its logistical and financial capacities. By late antiquity, this state of affairs had become militarily and financially unsustainable. The barbarian invaders were simply kicking in the doors of an old house that was rotten to the foundation.

The inevitable result of Imperial greed for taxes and manpower was ethnic demographic replacement of the Roman population across wide swathes of Imperial land. This wasn’t a conscious decision on the part of the Roman aristocracy. Given the empire’s multi-ethnic character, the Imperial administration could not refuse entrance to barbarian migrants on ethnic grounds. The problems that afflicted the Imperium during late antiquity were the outcome of earlier expansionist policies that overextended the boundaries of empire, making it difficult to maintain and control without a constant supply of warm bodies and a steady flow of taxes. Population replacement by large numbers of foreigners, the end result of failed Imperial expansionist policies and Volkerwanderung, led to the alienation of the citizenry from the institutions from their own government. The more Germanized the empire became, the less people identified with it. In time, too much Germanization meant very little patriotism; no loyalty to Rome meant no desire to prevent the barbarian invasions from overrunning much of the Imperial territories. When Africa was lost to the Vandals, there was hardly any will to recapture the territory, despite its status as breadbasket of the empire. It even meant Roman contempt—and sometimes outright ethno-racial hatred—for the Germanic and Hunnish invaders. The second time Rome was sacked in a millennium—by Alaric’s Goths in 410 AD—the underlying reason was contemptuous treatment of her barbarian auxiliaries and their sacrifices by the Romans, the outcome of reliance on cheap and expendable foreign labor.

The Volkerwanderung is not the cause of the empire’s collapse, as its internal weaknesses date from the civil wars, natural disasters and barbarian invasions of the third century; however, Germanization, combined with lack of identification with Romanitas, played a role in hastening its decline. The barbarian successor states that replaced the Imperial administration lacked the know-how to run a civilization as sophisticated and as advanced as Rome, resulting in barbarism replacing civilization in most of Western Europe.

Even though the causes of the Dark Ages in Rome and the modern West are different, it is instructive to note the final outcome in both cases was ethnic replacement by hostile foreigners, none of whom possessed the ability to maintain the civilizations they acquired either through force or by invitation. Among the main differences, the barbarians who terrorized Rome were mostly White, whereas the ones being imported by Whites into their own Western countries are overwhelmingly non-White. Unlike Rome, which at least valued Romanitas to the bitter end, the contemporary “West” aggressively pursues its own racial demise at the hands of its non-White colonizers. While Rome’s decline was the outcome of events rotting the Imperium from within, the collapse of modern Western societies and their descent into the New Dark Ages is entirely the fault of Whites being dominated by a hostile ruling elite.

Many Whites, under the influence of an alien Jewish-dominated media elite, encourage their own women to prostitute themselves to non-White foreigners, while making it harder for men of their own race to reproduce by implementing aggressively feminist, women’s liberationist and multicultural policies. This is a reason why fertility has declined to below replacement levels since the beginning of the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. Homosexuality, transgenderism and miscegenation have become the new Western values of the emerging post-Western cultures of Western Europe and North America, thanks to elite manipulation of White racial consciousness. As a result, the traditional values embodied by the institutions of monogamous marriage and the nuclear family unit are no longer influential. The image of the White woman in the minds of the non-White males encouraged by globalists to invade White-majority countries, is of a promiscuous and nymphomaniacal slut who will bed any man who desires her. This image has been exported abroad by Hollywood, but it is far from the truth, since women everywhere are biologically hypergamous. But there is no doubt this is a powerful draw for the Third World’s oversupply of single males, who cannot afford wives for themselves in their own native countries. These policies are prudishly justified as much needed “civil rights legislation” and “multiculturalism,” but more appropriate labels would be pathological ethnomasochism and delusional racial self-hatred.

Lastly, the state religion of Rome had become Christianity in the fourth century. This deprived the Imperium of her ablest and most talented men. This late classical “brain drain” further hastened a process begun during the crisis of the third century, when the Roman empire was divided between warring factions.

Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano writes:

“The Church attracted the most creative minds—St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, Hilarius of Poitiers, St. Augustine in the West; Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil of Caesarea in the East: almost all born rulers, rulers of a type which, with exception of the scholarly emperor Julian, it was hard to find on the imperial throne. …

Gibbon was simplifying a very complicated issue when he insinuated that Christianity was responsible for the fall of the empire, but he perceived that the church attracted many men who in the past would have become excellent generals, governors of provinces, advisers to the emperors. …

People escaped from the state into the Church and weakened that state by giving their best to the Church. This is a situation which in its turn requires analysis and explanation. But its primary importance cannot be overlooked. The best men were working for the Church, not for the state.”[4]

The rise of Christianity did not cause the Dark Ages—an event without any single underlying cause—but it did not help matters either. As the Christian church increased in wealth and power, more people took an active interest in pursuing clerical careers. Under the pagan emperors, familiarity with the classics was mandatory for those who wanted to work for the state, but it wasn’t necessary for those who worked for the church. There was a “reduction in the number of administrative posts in the Roman empire’s Western successor kingdoms because taxation was simplified and some administrative levels … disappeared entirely. This rendered classical culture less attractive, because the effort and investment necessary to master it became less socially profitable.”[5] As a result, the classical curriculum declined in importance, becoming no longer necessary for secular advancement. In the early medieval period, the “clericalization of the culture became the sociological norm after 550.”[6] In the late sixth to seventh centuries, the classical education system was either replaced by monastic training or the study of patristics. This development negatively affected the survival of the ancient world’s secular knowledge. Dirk Rohmann writes:

Many early Christian clerics and ecclesiastical authors felt that the pagan texts of the past were completely unnecessary to lead a Christian life-style. … As classical education came to be less and less important for worldly career paths, and clerical career paths became more and more attractive, the preservation of the works of old was endangered.”[7]

Somehow these writings had become so “endangered” that almost none of them survived the sixth and seventh centuries, when Western man had sunk to the lowest depths. How could such an enormous loss occur in so brief a period of time (relatively speaking)? In the standard work on classical and medieval textual transmission, scholars Reynolds and Wilson write:

There can be little doubt that one of the major reasons for the loss of classical texts is that most Christians were not interested in reading them, and hence not enough new copies of the texts were made to ensure their survival in an age of war and destruction.[8]     

The growth of the Christian church meant loss of interest in the ancient world’s greatest achievements. Works of secular poetry, philosophy, science, and mathematics were left to rot on Western Europe’s bookshelves. Reynolds and Marshall write: “The copying of classical texts tapered off to such an extent during the Dark Ages that the continuity of pagan culture came close to being severed.”[9] The monks who dominated the medieval apparatus of textual transmission made sure to preserve thousands of copies of Greek and Vulgate New Testaments, but rarely copied the classics. According to Rudolf Blum:

Of the Greek literature created before 250 B.C. we have only a small, even though very valuable, part. We do not even have the complete works of those authors who were included in the lists of classics compiled by the Alexandrian philologists. Of all the works of pagan Greek literature perhaps only one percent has come down to us.[10]

Rohmann wrotes: “It is estimated that for Latin literature less than one per cent of titles survive in total.”[11] Because of its indifference to the achievements of the past, the Christian church had inadvertently prolonged the Dark Ages for centuries. It wasn’t until the rediscovery of classical literature—Aristotle, Plato, Euclid and so on—beginning in the twelfth century, that Western man was able to free himself from the brutal indifference and crass superstitions of the Christian church.

Like Christianity, cultural Marxism has played a similar role in the New Dark Ages, but with an important difference. Christianity did not cause the empire’s disintegration, but only hastened its decline, whereas cultural Marxism is a central causal factor in Western decline. Under Cultural Marxist influence, globalist elites have aggressively promoted feminism, multiculturalism and mass immigration. Homosexuality, transgenderism and miscegenation have become enshrined as the new values of a decaying post-modern civilization. The church did not need to suppress classical culture to ensure Christian hegemony in Western Europe; there were a few skirmishes here and there, but indifference was more than enough. Cultural Marxists, unlike Christians, actively suppress knowledge of racial and sexual differences using social pressures, i.e., ostracism and shaming language (“You racist! You sexist!”); economic pressures, i.e., depriving right-wing dissidents of their livelihoods, and; legal pressures, i.e., hate speech and anti-Holocaust denial legislation. On top of this, the globalist elites even have the power to shape the consciousness of the masses. By altering human perception of objective reality through control of mass media, such as newspapers, television, radio and billboards, they seek to neutralize the opposition, while proclaiming their new religion of liberal egalitarianism.

Like Christianity, cultural Marxism has its own belief system. “There is no such thing as race or sex,” proclaims the new religion, “all cultures are the same.” These beliefs are impervious to reason, just like the beliefs of the devout Christian. Like Christian religious epistemology, cultural Marxist epistemology is faith-based. This does not bode well for the survival of our current, albeit degenerate post-Western civilization. As Edmund Burke pithily observed: “A state without the means of some change, is without the means of its own conservation.”

Christian indifference prolonged the Dark Ages and the suffering of the people of Europe, until what remained of ancient secular knowledge was recovered between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, giving Europeans a solid foundation upon which to build. Without the rediscovery of the writings of Aristotle and others, the modern world would have taken much longer to emerge, assuming it would have emerged at all. The cultural Marxists, far from being indifferent to the Western intellectual tradition, draw much of their inspiration from the liberal Enlightenment, especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and various Marxist heterodoxies, like the Frankfurt School. Unlike the church, which has never actively suppressed any branch of human knowledge, cultural Marxist fanatics go out of their way to suppress the West’s accumulated knowledge of race and sex differences, including the role of evolutionary biology in their origin and development. Although cultural Marxism is not an attack on all Western knowledge, its attempt to eliminate knowledge of racial and sexual differences will have the same effect as centuries of Christian indifference to the intellectual achievements of antiquity.

Because of the diligent efforts of cultural Marxists, few Westerners are aware of the size and extent of racial and sexual differences between populations, or even that such differences exist. This is not unlike the Christian theologians of the Old Dark Ages who hoarded what little remained of ancient philosophy, science and mathematics among themselves, while the populace remained totally ignorant of the intellectual achievements of classical antiquity. Cultural Marxism, unlike the Christian church, has not yet resulted in the loss of almost all branches of human knowledge, but its willful suppression of knowledge of race and sex differences is just as devastating, if not more so. At least there were still men of ability after the long, dark night of Christian indifference, able to rebuild on the wisdom of the past after the recovery of Aristotle in the twelfth century. With the abandonment of all knowledge of race and sex differences, the West’s vast storehouse of knowledge will be lost because of the biological degeneration and extinction of the original populations of Western Europe and North America. Whites will always be able to abandon crass superstitions—even if it takes centuries—but a gene pool, once contaminated by an inferior population’s low-quality genes, may never recover.

Will Western Man Survive The New Dark Ages?

The Romans of late antiquity were oblivious to the fact their now moribund Western empire was slipping into the Dark Ages, although a few were prescient enough to notice the extent of the rot before it was too late. One such prescient Roman was the fourth-century pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who wrote:

At the time when Rome first began to rise into a position of world-wide splendour, in order that she might grow to a towering stature, Virtue and Fortune, ordinarily at variance, formed a pact of eternal peace; for if either one of them had failed her, Rome had not come to complete supremacy. Her people, from the very cradle to the end of their childhood, a period of about three hundred years, carried on wars about her walls. Then, entering adult life, after many toilsome wars, they crossed the Alps and the sea. Grown to youth and manhood, from every region which the vast globe includes, they brought back laurels and triumphs. And now, declining into old age, and often owing victory to its name alone, it has come to a quieter period of life.[12]

Only Ammianus’s belief in an eternal Rome prevented him from swallowing the ultimate blackpill and taking his observations to their logical conclusion: Rome’s days as a civilization were numbered. The Christians and the Germanic barbarians would be more interested in wielding their swords and chanting Christian hymns than rescuing the decaying Imperium Romanorum from oblivion.

Even a few late-ancient Christians were not oblivious to the impending collapse of Rome. In a letter of 396, St. Jerome wrote:

My heart sickens when I go over the catastrophes that have happened in our time. For more than twenty years, not a day has gone past between Constantinople and the Julian Alps without the shedding of Roman blood. How many matrons, how many virgins dedicated to God, how many free-born women of noble blood, have fallen into the hands of those wild beasts, … bishops imprisoned, priests slaughtered, churches defiled, horses tethered to altars. … The world of Rome is falling to pieces.”[13]  

The pattern is the same with the New Dark Ages that have blanketed all of Western Europe and North America. Few notice what has happened before voices of protest are silenced indefinitely. As always, the masses carry on as if nothing has changed. No one ever knows they have really gone through a Dark Age until it has been pointed out to them centuries after the fact. It was over 300 years after the “official” end of the Old Dark Ages when the fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch first noticed the lights had entirely gone out in Western Europe for over a thousand years, beginning with the crisis of the third century and continuing until his own day. He had a special term for these intervening centuries: aetas tenebrae or “age of darkness.”[14]

Ages of darkness, like the one first recognized and described by Petrarch, are necessarily characterized by regnant ideologies that reflect the general ignorance and stupidity of the masses. Medieval man fervently believed in this child-like superstition despite the pointless suffering it caused all around him. Our own day is no different; in our New Dark Age, race and sex are believed to be illusions invented by racists and sexists to oppress and marginalize what cultural Marxists believe are “disadvantaged minorities.” These beliefs are just as silly, but potentially more destructive than simple Christian beliefs. As religious or quasi-religious beliefs, they are impervious to reason because they are derived from faith-based epistemologies, which do not allow for the revision of the belief-system itself in light of new evidence.

There are no real solutions to the problems that confront what’s left of Western societies. Only seismic shocks like what led to the Renaissance and Reformation were able to awaken medieval man from his “dogmatic slumbers,” to use Kant’s phrase. With the end of ecclesiastical authority in Europe, medieval man was able to wean himself from his crass superstitions and singlehandedly create the modern world. On the other hand, it seems unlikely a new Renaissance will be enough to jolt Western man—if indeed we can even call him that—from his own “dogmatic slumbers,” given his newfound faith entails mental and biological degeneration of his own subspecies.

Our only hope lies, not with any White awakening—a totally unrealistic fantasy at this point—but with natural selection. If even a few Whites can resist the poison of cultural Marxism, by breeding selectively among themselves and preserving their own bloodlines from non-White intermixture, they may be able to give future Whites the opportunity to rebuild a society of their very own upon the ashes of post-Western degeneracy.

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[1] Wickham, Chris. The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000. London ; Penguin, Allen Lane, 2010, p. 7. ‌

[2] “Cassius Dio’s Roman History.” LacusCurtius, Uchicago.Edu, 2019, penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/home.html. Accessed 2 June 2019, LXXII.11. ‌

[3] Speidel, Michael P. Riding For Caesar: The Roman Emperor’s Horseguard. Routledge, 2011, p. 65. ‌

[4]Momigliano, Arnaldo, ed. “Judeo-Christianity and the Decline of the Roman Empire.” The Conflict Between Paganism and Judeo-Christianity in the Fourth Century, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963, pp. 79—99.

[5]Inglebert, Hervé. “Introduction: Late Antique Conceptions of Late Antiquity” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity. edited by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, Oxford University Press, 11 Oct. 2012, www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195336931.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780195336931. Accessed 2 Nov. 2019, p. 11 (PDF version). ‌

[6]Ibid., p. 12.

[7]Rohmann, Dirk. Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity: Studies in Text Transmission. Waco, Baylor University Press, 2017, p. 198. ‌

[8]Reynolds, L. D., and N. G. Wilson. Scribes and Scholars a Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, p. 34. ‌

[9]Reynolds, L. D., et al. Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983, p. xvii. ‌

[10]Blum, Rudolf. Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography. Madison, Wis., The University Of Wisconsin Press, 2011, p. 8. ‌

[11]Rohman, Christianity, p.8.

[12]“The Roman Antiquities of Ammianus Marcellinus.” LacusCurtius, Uchicago.edu, 2011, penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Ammian/14. Accessed 18 Jan. 2020, Book XIV.6.3-4. ‌

[13]Letters, 60, in Patrologia Latina, vol. 22, p. 600. Quoted by Lidia Storoni Mazzolani, The Idea of the City in Roman Thought, trans. S. O’Donnell (London:1970), p. 235.

[14]Lynch, Jack, and John T. Lynch. The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2010, p. 21. ‌