Contra Galileos: The Last True Roman Emperor's Fight Against Dark Ages (Lingua Latina)

Rome's last true emperor wrote a book against Christianity. Even though the Church burned every copy of it they could not help themselves but quote so much of it that we can still read it today. And now you can you can too - in Latin, for beginners!Antioch, winter A.D. 362. While a Christian city mocks his beard in the streets, the emperor Julian - philosopher, general, and the last man to rule Rome under the old European gods - is writing the most dangerous book of his age: Contra Galilaeos, "Against the Galilaeans." Every independent copy eventually would vanish. But seventy years later a bishop found the book still shaking his flock, and to refute it he had to quote it at length - argument by argument. His refutation, luckily, survived. Inside it, like an insect in amber, so did the emperor who was fighting the dawn of a dark age of ignorance and superstition.This volume retells that whole extraordinary story in clear, graded Latin in the beloved "natural method" tradition of Ørberg's Lingua Latina: - Julian's own case, fairly presented: the sun he loved, the gods of the nations, his nine sharpest arguments against Genesis, the prophets, and the new God - each given honestly, at full strength, in gold-framed panels rendered from his Greek- The answers kept visible: what Christians actually replied, from the Church Fathers to Cyril of Alexandria's ten-book rebuttal - in its own crimson panels - with the verdict always left to you: iūdicā ipse- The eyewitness on the scale: Ammianus Marcellinus' real, unaltered Latin - verified word for word - on the reopened temples, the school edict he condemned, the tolerance he suspected, and the midnight deathbed where no one cried "Vīcistī, Galilaee"- The full aftermath: the pagan church that failed, the ridicule of Christians who had burnt down Alexandria's library and the legend of the dying cry with sixteen centuries of verdicts from Cyril to Voltaire to Swinburne- Every hard word explained in Latin in the margin - 300+ glosses in Latin itself - plus a full cast of characters and alphabetical indexWhy this book is differentMost books about Julian take a side. Our book presents his arguments; his insults are flagged as insults and his best points conceded as his best points. You leave having heard the last great debate of the ancient world - from inside, in its own language.Who this book is for- Readers of the IVLIANVS trilogy (GALLIA, IMPERIUM, PERSIA) - this is the companion: the mind behind the life- Self-learners and homeschool families at intermediate level (or about two years of Latin)- Teachers seeking connected, argumentative Latin prose - rhetoric, philosophy and history in one text- Anyone drawn to the great questions - one God or many, old ways or new, persuasion or force - argued for real stakes by people who died over themFrom the publisher of the Dē Bellō Gallicō and Stratēgēmata graded readers. Lībra in manibus tuīs est.