Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed. - Thomas Cahill

The five-hundred-bushelers... were on average five, at most ten, times as rich as the thetes, the lowest grade of citizen. ...Today, the gap between, say, a municipal bus driver and a Fortune 500 CEO approaches infinity.

The pages of most books were of mottled parchment, that is, dried sheepskin, which was universally available—and nowhere more abundant than in Ireland, whose bright green fields still host each April an explosion of new white lambs. Vellum, or calfskin, which was more uniformly white when dried, was used more sparingly for the most honored texts.

Just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheistic.