Scott Alexander (author/host)

Welcome to the Astral Codex X podcast for the 1st of August 2025.

Title, Your Review, Joan of Arc, finalist number 6 in the review contest.

This is an audio version of Astral Codex X's Scott Alexander Substack.

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This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done.

I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months.

When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favourite, so remember which ones you liked.

When the prefect of Alexandria's daughter converted to Christianity, nothing in particular happened.

It wasn't as though the laws outlawing the cult would be enforced against her.

She was smart, she was pretty, beautiful even, and she had connections.

So long as she kept quiet, Catherine could have a comfortable life.

She didn't keep quiet.

When the emperor arrived in Alexandria for a festival, this festival included gladiatorial games and chariot races and feasting and drinking, and of course the best part, feeding Christians to lions.

The prefect's daughter telling the emperor he was wrong to feed Christians to lions might have been pardonable soft-heartedness if it was just that she disliked watching slaves fed to lions, but her telling him that he was wrong because the Christians were right and he was wrong was flatly unacceptable.

He had no more interest in offending her parents than anyone else, though, and in fact he was considering putting his wife aside and marrying her, a useful alliance, and she had brains and guts.

So instead he called on his top 50 philosophers to out-argue her.

Instead she converted half of them to Christianity, so he had to have them killed.

That was the point where he threw her in prison, hoping she'd change her mind and be sensible.

Instead, she converted everyone who showed up to argue with her in prison.