Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

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* A letter from Julian to Basil would subsequently be forged, in which the emperor expressed his admiration for the recipient.

* The reliability of this particular story, which was written two centuries after the events it describes, is hard to gauge. For what it is worth, a contemporaneous account makes no mention of the contest between the men of Poitiers and Tours.

* Assuming, that is, that the dome which in the tenth century was reported to have ‘glittered in the sun like a mountain of gold’ had already been gilded by the sixth century.