Religion
In reply to the discussion: Should the Catholic Church Acknowledge the Destruction of Classical Pagan Culture? [View all]struggle4progress
(118,282 posts)The paganism of the Roman empire was a mish-mash, reflecting the wide variety of peoples Rome had conquered and enslaved: it included the strange magical views of some people, the rationalism of the Hellenistic philosophers, and a variety of other ingredients
We should expect the processes, by which such diverse views involved disappeared or evolved into other ideas, to be multiple and complicated, involving features including: propaganda associated with military conflicts, the natural human desire to retain ideas that seemed helpful and productive, self-serving opportunism, the use of surrogate issues in political struggles, demagoguery from every side, and other elements common to social change throughout history
The Greek golden age ended long before the Christians appeared. The culture of Rome was a culture of war, conquest, and spoil -- we don't find (for example) great mathematicians like Archimedes in the Roman tradition -- and that produced resentments across the western world. Rome also had serious recurrent internal problems: there were four different emperors in 68/69 CE, five in 168 CE, and something like six from the beginning to the end of 238 CE. This meant there were regular periods of chaos across the empire