The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus
So, there's a story of these seven guys in ancient Ephesus who slept for 200 years. They were Christians at a time when it wasn't a good idea to be a Christian, and their refusal to sacrifice in the Imperial Temple got them labeled as enemies of the state, so they ran off into the nearby caves to form a plan. They laid down to take a nap and when they woke up to get some bread from the city, they discovered that it was 200 years later and Christianity was now the religion of the whole empire.
This is all well and good and I bet they were pretty happy to hear they wouldn't be tortured anymore, but my question is this; if someone had fallen asleep in a cave in 1808 and woken up today, a change in state religion would be the least of the shocks in store for them, but intuitively we don't see there being that big of a difference in daily life between 250AD and 450AD. Is that wrong or has the rate of change in the world been radically accelerated in the last few centuries?
It's very easy to say that it has, that technological development is the most important driver of change and that having a new kind of well is not the same as having the cars, iPhones, hospitals and readily accessible pornography but that kind of presentism (is that a word?) makes me nervous. Historians may quibble over the effect of Constantine and later Christian emperors, but there would definitely have been a marked difference in life between 250 and 450; would people at the time have felt it the same way as we do today?
This is far more interesting than writing my papers.
This is all well and good and I bet they were pretty happy to hear they wouldn't be tortured anymore, but my question is this; if someone had fallen asleep in a cave in 1808 and woken up today, a change in state religion would be the least of the shocks in store for them, but intuitively we don't see there being that big of a difference in daily life between 250AD and 450AD. Is that wrong or has the rate of change in the world been radically accelerated in the last few centuries?
It's very easy to say that it has, that technological development is the most important driver of change and that having a new kind of well is not the same as having the cars, iPhones, hospitals and readily accessible pornography but that kind of presentism (is that a word?) makes me nervous. Historians may quibble over the effect of Constantine and later Christian emperors, but there would definitely have been a marked difference in life between 250 and 450; would people at the time have felt it the same way as we do today?
This is far more interesting than writing my papers.