Astral Codex Ten

emperor

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emperor

Article

emperor is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between November 12, 2024 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “the demand to sacrifice to the emperor”; “‘produced dozens of close church councils which the Emperor tried to shape’“. It most often appears alongside Alexandria, Christ, Christ.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: November 12, 2024
  • Last seen: August 01, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
November 12, 2024 · Original source
…and 5 “really serious” famines …for an average of one catastrophe per fifteen years. The Romans rebuilt the city each time because it was strategically important. Stark focuses on one of these disasters: plague. The Roman Empire suffered two major plagues during this era: the Antonine Plague of 165 AD and the Cyprian Plague of 251 AD . He theorizes that Christians made it through these plagues much better than pagans, gaining an additional population boost. Time for some game theory: when a plague comes, you can either defect (flee / self-isolate / hide) or cooperate (altruistically try to help nurse other victims). An individual does better by defecting, but a community does better if all its members cooperate. Stark thinks the pagans defected and the Christians cooperated. Here is Thucydides’ description of a plague in pagan Athens (admittedly ~500 years before the time we’re studying). People quickly got an instinctive proto-knowledge of how contagion worked, after which: [People] died with no one to look after them; indeed there were many houses in which all the inhabitants perished through lack of any attention…the bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around the fountains in their desire for water. The temples in which they took up their quarters were full of the dead bodies of people who had died inside them. For the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law. Compare the Christian writer Dionysius’s description of a plague afflicting his own community: Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy, for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead. The best of our brothers lost their lives in this manner, a number of presbyters, deacons, and laymen winning high commendation so that death in this form, the result of great piety and strong faith, seems in every way the equal of martyrdom […] The heathen behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them in the roads before they were dead and treated unburied corpses as dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease. Could Dionysius be embellishing matters to make his friends look good and his enemies bad? Maybe, but: There was compelling evidence from pagan sources that this was characteristic Christian behavior. Thus, a century later, the emperor Julian launched a campaign to institute pagan charities in an effort to match the Christians. Julian complained in a letter to the high priest of Galatia in 362 that the pagans needed to equal the virtues of Christians, for recent Christian growth was caused by their “moral character, even if pretended,” and by their “benevolence toward strangers and care for the graves of the dead”. In a letter to another priest, Julian wrote, “I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence.” And he also wrote, “The impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.” Did this matter? It might have! “Modern medical experts believe that conscientious nursing without any medications could cut the mortality rate by 2/3 or even more.” (if this sounds implausible, keep in mind that “nursing” here includes things like “bringing water from the public well to bedridden people who are too weak to go out and get it themselves”.) Stark believes that plagues helped the Christians in multiple ways: The obvious way: 30% of pagans died during the plague, but only 10% of Christians, making Christians proportionally more of the population.
Perhaps above all else, Christianity brought a new conception of humanity to a world saturated with capricious cruelty and the vicarious love of death. Consider the account of the martyrdom of Perpetua. Here we learn the details of the long ordeal and gruesome death suffered by this tiny band of resolute Christians as they were attacked by wild beasts in front of a delighted crowd assembled in the arena. But we also learn that had the Christians all given in to the demand to sacrifice to the emperor, and thereby been spared, someone else would have been thrown to the animals. After all, these were games held in honor of the birthday of the emperor's young son. And whenever there were games, people had to die. Dozens of them, sometimes hundreds.
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
She didn’t keep quiet. When the Emperor arrived in Alexandria for a festival, this festival included gladiatorial games and chariot races and feasting and drinking, and, of course, the best part - feeding Christians to lions. The prefect’s daughter telling the Emperor he was wrong to feed Christians to lions might have been pardonable softheartedness if it was just that she disliked watching slaves fed to lions, but her telling him that he was wrong because the Christians were right and he was wrong was flatly unacceptable. He had no more interest in offending her parents than anyone else, though (and, in fact, he was considering putting his wife aside and marrying her - a useful alliance and she had brains and guts) so instead he called on his top fifty philosophers to outargue her.
Instead she converted half of them to Christianity, so he had to have them killed. That was the point where he threw her in prison, hoping she’d change her mind and be sensible. Instead she converted everyone who showed up to argue with her in prison; when he deprived her of food she was fed by a dove, when he had her tortured her wounds miraculously healed. When his wife tried to talk sense into her, she converted and the Emperor had to have her killed, too, so since the slot was empty he, as a final try, proposed marriage to Catherine. She told him she had a better husband - Christ - and at that insult he condemned her to death. The first try failed when the breaking wheel shattered at her touch; the second try employed an axe, but though the blade struck true milk flowed from the stump instead of blood.
Basilica: I'm a Christian and I don't buy it. Brilliant people in the fourth century and in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth century study their Bibles, read theologians, and come up with heresies conclusively condemned by Athanasius. Indeed, we observe that all these brilliant people assembled in the fourth century produced dozens of close church councils which the Emperor tried to shape to whatever was most politically useful, and then later centuries saw hundreds of extremely corrupt papal elections between would-be Popes where the Cardinals were paid vast sums to vote for the candidate who paid most, some of which produced Popes who made historically-vital rulings for utterly cynical reasons. If God is real, maybe the Council of Nicaea was divinely inspired; but if God isn't real, theology is men looking at their reflection, quarreling about it, and then voting to decide who to kill for being in the minority. If everyone who doesn't study theology in the twelfth century is a heretic, and everyone who doesn't study theology in the twentieth century is a heretic, shouldn't Joan have just been a heretic?