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otherworldly outlook and the stolid practicality of Rome crystallized in the interrogation that Pontius Pilate, a prefect known for his ruthlessness and legal acumen, conducted of the obscure Jewish prophet Jesus of Nazareth.
    The world knows the story. Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?”
    “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus replied.
    “Are you a king, then?”
    “You say I am a king,” Jesus replied. “To this end was I born, and for this cause I came into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone that is of the truth hears my voice.”
    “What is truth?” asked Pilate. 9
    Jesus said nothing, and was led off to execution, and his few followers dropped from sight. Yet within two centuries his eloquentsilence had swallowed up the words of the law, and Christianity had become the state religion of Rome.
    Science, however, fared no better in Christian than in pagan Rome. Christianity, in its emphasis upon asceticism, spirituality, and contemplation of the afterlife, was inherently uninterested in the study of material things. What difference did it make whether the world was round or flat, if the world was corrupt and doomed? As Saint Ambrose put it in the fourth century, “To discuss the nature and position of the earth does not help us in our hope of the life to come.” Wrote Tertullian the Christian convert, “For us, curiosity is no longer necessary.”
    To the Christians, the fall of Rome illustrated the futility of putting one’s trust in the here and now. “Time was when the world held us fast to it by its delight,” declaimed Pope Gregory the Great, seated on a marble chair amid the flickering candles of the chapel of the Catacomb of St. Domitilla in Rome at the close of the sixth century (by which time the city had been sacked five times). “Now ’tis full of such monstrous blows for us, that of itself it sends us home to God at last. The fall of the show points out to us that it was but a
passing
show,” he said, advising the somber celebrants to “let your heart’s affections wing their way to eternity, that so despising the attainments of this earth’s high places, you may come unto the goal of glory which ye shall hold by faith through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” 10
    Christian zealots are alleged to have burned the pagan books in the library of Alexandria, and Muslims to have burned the Christian books, but the historical record of this great crime is subject to dispute on both counts; in any event, the books went up in smoke. The old institutions of learning and philosophy, most of them already in decline, collapsed under the rising winds of change. Plato’s Academy was closed by Justinian in A.D . 529; the Sarapeum of Alexandria, a center of learning, was razed to the ground by Christian activists in A.D . 391; and in 415 the geometer Hypatia, daughter of the last known associate of the museum of Alexandria, was murdered by a Christian mob. (“They stripped her stark naked,” an eyewitness reported. “They raze[d] the skin and ren[t] the flesh of her body with sharp shell, until the breath departed out of her body; they quartered] her body; they [brought] her quarters unto a place called Cinaron and burn[ed] them to ashes.” 11 )
    Scholars fled from Alexandria and Rome and headed forByzantium—followed closely by the Roman emperor himself, after whom the city was renamed Constantinople—and the pursuit of science devolved to the province of Islam. Encouraged by the Koran to practice
taffakur
, the study of nature, and
taskheer
, the mastery of nature through technology, Islamic scholars studied and elaborated upon classics of Greek science and philosophy forgotten in the West. Evidence of their astronomical research is written in the names of stars—names like Aldebaran, from
Al Dabaran
, “the follower;” Rigel, from
Rijl Jauzah al Yusra
, “the left leg of the Jauzah;” and Deneb, from
Al Dhanab al Dajajah
, “the hen’s tail.”
    But