The-history-of-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire-edward-gibbon-2-5-philadelphia

OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 43
First attacked the temples and mutilated the statues of the
city ; that, by the command of the Barbarian, the Palatine
library was reduced to ashes, and that the history of Livy
was the peculiar mark of his absurd and mischievous fanaticism.
The writings of Gregory himself reveal his implacable
aversion to the monuments of classic genius ; and
he points his severest censure against the profane learning
of a bishop, who taught the art of grammar, studied the
Latin poets, and pronounced with the same voice the
praises of Jupiter and those of Christ. But the evidence of
his destructive rage is doubtful and recent : the Temple of
Peace, or the theatre of Marcellus, have been demolished by
the slow operation of ages, and a formal proscription would
have multiplied the copies of Virgil and Livy in the countries
which were not subject to the ecclesiastical dictator. 62
Like Thebes, or Babylon, or Carthage, the name of Rome
might have been erased from the earth, if the city had not
been animated by a vital principle, which again restored her
to honor and dominion. A vague tradition was embraced,
that two Jewish teachers, a tent-maker and a fisherman, had
formerly been executed in the circus of Nero, and at the
end of five hundred years, their genuine or fictitious relics
were adored as the Palladium of Christian Rome. The
pilgrims of the East and West resorted to the holy threshold
; but the shrines of the apostles were guarded by miracles
and invisible terrors ; and it was not without fear that
the pious Catholic approached the object of his worship. It
was fatal to touch, it was dangerous to behold, the bodies of
the saints ; and those who, from the purest motives, presumed
to disturb the repose of the sanctuary, were affrighted by
visions, or punished with sudden death. The unreasonable
request of an empress, who wished to deprive the Romans
of their sacred treasure, the head of St. Paul, was rejected
with the deepest abhorrence ; and the pope asserted, most
probably with truth, that a linen which had been sanctified
in the neighborhood of his body, or the filings of his chain,
which it was sometimes easy and sometimes impossible to
obtain, possessed an equal degree of miraculous virtue.