A divided city: the Christian Church, 300–460

Abstract

The Sack of Rome in 410 may have caused a sense of profound shock in many of the intellectual circles of the Latin-speaking half of the Empire, but it seems to have aroused little recorded comment in the predominantly Greek East. Equally uncertain was the attitude towards the disaster and its implications of the leaders of Christian thought. From Bethlehem in a letter written in 412, the priest and monk Jerome (331–419), a westerner and formerly an habitué of some of the most exalted Christian aristocratic circles in Rome, showed how the twin literary heritage of Classical and Christian learning could be combined in lamenting this disaster, by quoting from the Psalms: ‘O, God, the heathen have come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have made Jerusalem (i.e. Rome) an orchard’ and then following it by a passage from Book Two of the Aeneid: ‘The ancient city that for many a hundred years ruled the world comes down in ruins’.¹