Besant lament

So low, under the influence of Christianity, had sunk the literature of Greece-

Greece Pagan, which once brought forth Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Zenophon, and many another mighty one, whose fame rolls down the ages—
that Greece had become Greece Christian, and the vitality of her motherhood had been drained from her, and left her without strength to conceive men.

In the West - things were yet worse -
instead of Rome Pagan, that had spread light and civilization—the Rome of Cicero, of Virgil, of Lucretius—
we have Rome Christian, spreader of darkness and of degradation, the Rome of the Popes and the monks.
The Latins “were, almost without exception, sunk in the most brutish and barbarous ignorance, so that, according to the unanimous accounts of the most credible writers, nothing …