And Along Came Constantine…

In order to understand what happened to medicine for the next 1500 years, a little understanding of Roman politics is in order.

Rome, by the third century, was HUGE. It had extended to Britain in the north, Africa in the south, eastward as far as parts of Armenia. If there hadn’t been a big ocean in their way, they might have made it to the Americas.

No one man could rule it all. Even they understood that.

The custom by Constantine’s time was to have four men in charge of the Empire, two in the eastern, and two in the western half. But when Constantius Chlorus, Constantine’s father, died in Britain in 306 CE, Constantine decided he wanted it all.

He spent the next twenty years killing off everyone who got in his way, including most of the male members of his own family. In 326, he even killed off his oldest son and his second wife, in a soap opera worthy of prime time television.

But being the only guy in charge of the biggest empire EVER had its challenges. As in, he simply couldn’t do it alone. Having killed off everyone who could have possibly helped him, he had to find another solution.

That solution presented itself in the already established hierarchy of the budding Christian Church. Bishops, prelates and congregations, already organized, and just waiting for a supreme leader to tell them what to do.

Constantine, like most of the Roman army, was a Mithraist, a devotee of the cult of the Undying Sun. Basically, a sun god. Like all good sun gods, Mithra died every year at the winter solstice (Dec 21-22, BTW), and was reborn the next morning when the sun came up again.

So, one dead and resurrected god is as good as any other, right?

Declaring himself to be a passionate believer, Constantine coopted the Church and its resources. He declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire, and even held a conference (at Nicea, for those of you who read The Da Vinci Code) to decide on “official” policy (dictated, largely, by Constantine).

What he didn’t do was convert. He saved that for his deathbed, taking full advantage of that little loophole that promised conversion wiped out old sins. He really needed that loophole, since he was still murdering his way into power by the time he reached that deathbed.

The Catholic Church made this man a saint.

At any rate, the pagan Roman Empire gradually became more and more Christian.

The final blows were delivered by Theodosius I. In a series of laws between 381 and 384, he banned pagan ritual. In 388, he sent a delegation to Alexandria to destroy the great Serapeum, which also housed the great Library. It was torched.

The great Temple of the Vestal Virgins was desecrated in 391, and its eternal flame, the fire which had protected Rome for eight centuries, was extinguished. A few years later, the Olympic Games, that bastion of international peace and friendship, were disbanded after over a millennium of history.

With no protection from the sacred flame, the Roman empire soon collapsed. With Theodosius’ death, the Empire was divided into Western and Eastern halves. The Western Roman empire slowly disintegrated, officially ending in 476 CE.

With the end of Roman law came chaos. Europe descended into feudal states. Commerce and even communication was disrupted. Law, learning, scholastic activity, knowledge and medicine just faded away.

The loss of the great Library at Alexandria was only a part of the massive loss of knowledge that accompanied the collapse of the Roman empire. With paper and papyrus in short supply, any documents that were still around were turned into prayer books and bibles.

Schools of philosophy and science were considered pagan by nature, and were closed all over the world. The last scholar of the greatest school, the Museo at Alexandria, was torn to pieces in the streets by a Christian mob in 415. Her name was Hypatia. She was 62.

Most of what we know of the knowledge of antiquity comes from the Byzantine world, where the new religion of Islam actively preserved the works of the classical cultures of Greece and Rome. The works of Galen and Hippocrates, for instance, were not reintroduced to the West until the 12th century, by a traveler from the Middle East.

If this sounds depressing, well, it was. This is why these days are called the “Dark Ages.”

In 1906, a Danish book expert discovered a prayer book in Constantinople that appeared to be written atop a work in Greek. He recognized the work as that of Archimedes, and made several translations of what he could read. The book disappeared again until 1998, when it was purchased by an anonymous buyer for $2 million, and immediately handed over to a team of art historians and document recovery experts.

The “Archimedes Palimpsest,” as the document is now known, contains the only extant copy of Archimedes’ “On the Method of Mechanical Theorems,” generally simply referred to as the Method. As the researchers tease out the secrets of the book, one thing has become very clear:

Archimedes was within a hand’s grasp of modern calculus, way back in the 3rd century BCE.

This is the math that put man on the MOON, people.

Herodotus had demonstrated both a steam engine and an analog computer in Alexandria in the 3rd century. Democritus had developed the basic idea of atoms. Eratosthenes had calculated the circumference of the earth (and yes, the Greeks knew it was round) to within a 1% error. Soranus had defined gynecology and obstetrics.

And it was all tossed. Torched. Burned. Lost.

For over a thousand years.

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