(July 5, 2015 at 3:18 pm)loganonekenobi Wrote: thank you for the history lesson. I love learning. I was always taught that the catholic church attempted to preserve the roman knowledge unless it contradicted the bible.
Hey, my pleasure! They did preserve a few things but when it came to written works the Early Church had a rather interesting habit of repurposement.
Sometimes If they found something truely beautiful and of great artistic merit, such as Ovid's Metamorphoses (a long poem narrating the history of Earth from time imemmorial to Ovid's day through Hellenistic myths) they would edit it. They'd take out all the smut, or introduce new features to the plot to give the tale a moral spin.
Several of Ovid's works were known to Medeval Christians, but rather than knowing him as the lecherous aristocratic love poet we do now that we've got access to his Art of Love collection they thought (our main evidence of this is a work called Ovide Moralise from 1340 which is an edited version of Metamorphoses compiled by a French Monk) written by he was a Catholic Bishop who denounced the Roman world and wrote stories using pagan allegory to demonstrate Christian morals. Which is impossible, he died before Jesus began preaching.
It did preserve a couple of things, but it often edited them changing their meaning and purpose entirely. That and it did destroy a lot of our material culture too.
