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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

> for the same reasons we preserve Victorian era buildings.

Not really, christians destroyed a huge amount and ruthlessly, and tons of marble was 'repurposed'. The best chance of a building to survive was being used as a church

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I recently found out about this sad column repurposed in 608 AD as an honor to the Eastern Roman Emperor, Phocas.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column_of_Phocas

The city had been sacked multiple times at that point and I suppose it was the best they could do.

What’s crazy there is that by the mid-1800s, sketches would only show a portion of the column due to the rise in ground level over the intermediate period.

Destroying symbols of a previous rule was (is) commons practice. Constantine realized that some building and monuments were worth preserving and repurposed them as "Christian", thereby ensuring their preservation for hundreds, or even a thousand of years.

The ruler did not change - the motive was religious

I suppose I just don’t find that substantially different than the National Trust repurposing say Ickworth into a hotel. I understand that contemporary society places a higher value on a certain type of “accurate” preservation than many societies that came before but if people had truly wanted historical Roman buildings gone, they would be.

tons of pagan roman and greek statues were destroyed. what's left today is only a tiny amount

I agree? My original reply’s point was we have a very small minority of what the empire constructed. And much of that is because it was purposely preserved, if for alternative reasons.

And basically all of them lost their paint. What we admire is only the shape of what the artists created, not the full creation.

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/gods-in-color-ancient-...

Those garish colors probably aren't the real colors either. The researchers found one speck of paint and assumed the whole surface was the same color, when in reality the paint probably had complex gradations of color, like any normal painting. There is no need to assume the painting was less sophisticated than the sculpture underneath it.

Yep, that was the first thing I noticed after visiting churches in Rome. All the columns were random.

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