I have two critiques, both of which are minor and have more to do with rhetoric than with scholarship:
First, the Christian claim that the Church preserved the culture of the classical world was itself a response to a widespread belief (the "academic consensus" well into the 20th century!) that Christianity had willfully and deliberately destroyed ALL classical knowledge (the "myth of the Dark Ages"), and only in the Renaissance did secular freethinkers redicover the classical heritage that Christians had done their best to wipe out. This belief may be old hat in the narrow halls of academia, but it's a live myth in the broader culture. Additionally, the Christian counter-claim is not just that Christians did preserve many classical texts, but that those texts would likely have perished during the Early Middle Ages had they not been preserved in monasteries, and given the enormous social disruptions that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire, that's a very plausible claim.
Second, having read basically everything on APD, I've noticed that your sympathy for classical culture and Roman cosmopolitanism often leads you into what strikes me as special pleading for the virtues of Roman culture (at least, pre-Christian Roman culture). The offending passage in this case was the one relating to humanism in the Roman Empire. Claiming that th Romans had an implicit (if narrowly exclusive) humanism just waiting to be democratized by Christianity seems to give a society whose very functioning rested on brutal hierarchies far too much credit. If the claim that "the Jim Crow South already believed in the dignity of humankind," and the African-American Civil Rights Movement "did was not so much to convince the [American South] of the value of humanitas as that more people were human than the [white supremacists] were accustomed to acknowledge," sounds like bizarre special pleading (and I think it does), then the same goes for the original argument. Every brutal empire belives its patrician class are humans with dignity; the Romans deserve no special credit in that regard.
I have two critiques, both of which are minor and have more to do with rhetoric than with scholarship:
First, the Christian claim that the Church preserved the culture of the classical world was itself a response to a widespread belief (the "academic consensus" well into the 20th century!) that Christianity had willfully and deliberately destroyed ALL classical knowledge (the "myth of the Dark Ages"), and only in the Renaissance did secular freethinkers redicover the classical heritage that Christians had done their best to wipe out. This belief may be old hat in the narrow halls of academia, but it's a live myth in the broader culture. Additionally, the Christian counter-claim is not just that Christians did preserve many classical texts, but that those texts would likely have perished during the Early Middle Ages had they not been preserved in monasteries, and given the enormous social disruptions that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire, that's a very plausible claim.
Second, having read basically everything on APD, I've noticed that your sympathy for classical culture and Roman cosmopolitanism often leads you into what strikes me as special pleading for the virtues of Roman culture (at least, pre-Christian Roman culture). The offending passage in this case was the one relating to humanism in the Roman Empire. Claiming that th Romans had an implicit (if narrowly exclusive) humanism just waiting to be democratized by Christianity seems to give a society whose very functioning rested on brutal hierarchies far too much credit. If the claim that "the Jim Crow South already believed in the dignity of humankind," and the African-American Civil Rights Movement "did was not so much to convince the [American South] of the value of humanitas as that more people were human than the [white supremacists] were accustomed to acknowledge," sounds like bizarre special pleading (and I think it does), then the same goes for the original argument. Every brutal empire belives its patrician class are humans with dignity; the Romans deserve no special credit in that regard.