52 | CHAPTER 3
us’s (d. c. 395) Nuptial cento.^6 With similar ingenuity, Homer might be
transmuted—with minor but cunning adjustments—into a life of Christ.^7
Aristotle did not lend himself to this particular form of perversion; but
Porphyry’s (d. c. 305) Introduction (Isagoge) made his logic universally ap-
plicable, to audiences Christian or—eventually—Muslim too, and was one
of the most read books over the thousand years following its composition. It
and related commentaries were still being laboriously copied out in Syriac in
the monasteries of Kurdistan—and used—into the first decades of the
twentieth century.^8 Aristotle’s own writings also possessed much of this
passe- partout quality, as I shall show in chapter 5. And then there was that
great ocean of necessary knowledge, the Bible, which besides its salvific mes-
sage conveyed all one needed to know about the ancient Near East, plus—in
its Vulgate version largely by Jerome—a model of Latinity for those not up
to Cicero.
In the face of this and—as we saw in discussing Liebeschuetz on eastern
urbanism—much other evidence for gradual, discriminating transformation
of the ancient world,^9 those who emphasize decline have to be selective and
either (1) classicist/purist, or (2) antimonotheist in their orientation, or (3)
materialist in their choice of evidence. Classicists and purists deplore the
coarsening of an ancient and paradigmatic aesthetic. Antimonotheists see
Christianity and Islam as offending the Greco- Roman tradition’s essential
rationalism (though the aggressive vigor of patristic Christianity hardly sug-
gests decline). As for materialists, even those who grant that aqueducts and
drains were but a means to a more comfortable and possibly reflective life do
not necessarily show much interest in ideas—at least not ancient ones (such
as Aristotle’s notion, revived at the end of the First Millennium by the Arabic
philosopher Fārābī, that city life is essential to the development of the human
intellect).^10 All are so sure of their priorities that they miss a great deal else
that was going on. But at least they have a clear vision of how the world ought
6 M. Bažil, ‘Centones christiani’ (Turnhout 2009); S. McGill, “Virgil, Christianity, and the Cento
Probae,” in J. H. D. Scourfield (ed.), Texts and culture in late Antiquity (Swansea 2007) 173–93; Ausonius,
Nuptial cento [ed. R. P. H. Green, Decimi Magni Ausonii opera (Oxford 1999) 145–54; English version
D. R. Slavitt, Ausonius: Three amusements (Philadelphia 1998) 41–75].
7 R. Schembra, Homerocentones (Turnhout 2007); Mary Whitby, “The Bible Hellenized,” in
Scourfield (ed.), Texts and culture [3:6] 195–231.
8 H. Hugonnard- Roche, La Logique d’Aristote du grec au syriaque (Paris 2004) 95, 187 (on ms.
Mingana syr. 606); H. Takahashi, Aristotelian meteorolog y in Syriac (Leiden 2004) 68.
9 On the tendency in modern discourse to regard transformation as gradual not sudden, see R.
Markus, “Between Marrou and Brown: Transformations of late antique Christianity,” in P. Rousseau and
M. Papoutsakis (eds), Transformations of late Antiquity (Farnham 2009) 3.
10 Of course, materialism too is a concept, and D. Graeber goes so far as to argue that money, spe-
cifically debt, has molded civilizations and even theologies: Debt: The first 5000 years (New york 2011) (I
was alerted to this by Anthony Kaldellis). For criticism of decline analysis from a materialist perspective
see Wickham, Framing [2:114] 672–74.