READING HALL

DOORS OF WISDOM 2022

A HISTORY OF THE LATE ROMAN EMPIRE FROM ARCADIUS TO IRENE(395 TO 800 AD)

BOOK ONE

INTRODUCTION

I

CHRISTIANITY AND PAGANISM

In the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. a great change came over the face of Europe; the political order of things was broken up. This movement ushered in the Middle Ages, and it presents a noteworthy parallel to that other great European movement which ushered out the Middle Ages, the movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by which the spiritual order of things was broken up. The atmosphere of the age in which the Empire of Rome was dismembered was the Christian religion; the atmosphere of the age in which the Church of Rome was ruptured was the Renaissance of culture. The formation of independent Teutonic kingdoms in the earlier period corresponds to the Reformation in the later; in both cases the German spirit produced a mighty revolution, and in both cases the result was a compromise or division between the old and the new. The Roman Empire lived on in south-eastern Europe, even as the Catholic Church lived on, confined to a limited extent of territory; and there was a remarkable revival of strength, or reaction, in the fifth and sixth centuries at Constantinople, which, following out the parallel, we may compare to the Counter-reformation. And this analogy is not a mere superficial or fanciful resemblance; the same historical principle is involved. Christianity and the Renaissance performed the same functions; each meant the transformation of the spirit of the European world, and such a transformation was a necessary precursor of the disintegration of European unity, whether political or ecclesiastical. In the strength of ancient ideas lay the strength of the Roman Empire; Christianity was the solvent of these ideas, and so dissolved also the political unity of Europe. In the strength of medieval ideas lay the strength of the Roman Church; the spirit of the Renaissance was the solvent of medieval ideas, and therefore it dissolved the ecclesiastical unity of western and northern Europe.

For the philosopher who looks upon the march of ideas over the heads of men the view of history is calm, unlike that of the troubled waters of events below, in which the mystic procession is often but dimly discerned. For him the spirit of old paganism departs before the approach of Christianity as quietly as the sun sinks before the sweeping train of night; and the dark glimmerings of the medieval world yield to the approach of the modern spirit as the stars "touched to death by diviner eyes" pass away before the rising sun. But to the historian who investigates the details of the process a spectacle is presented of contrast, struggle, and confusion; and its contemplation has a peculiar pleasure. For both the great periods, of which we have been speaking, were long seasons of twilight—the evening twilight and the morning twilight,—during which light and darkness mingled, and thus each period may be viewed in two aspects, as the end of an old, or as the beginning of a new, world. Now this double sidedness produces a variety of contrasts, which lends to the study of such a period a peculiar interest, or we might say an aesthetic pleasure. We see a number of heterogeneous elements struggling to adjust themselves into a new order—ingredients of divers perfumes and colours turning swiftly round and blending in the cup of the disturbed spirit. The grand contrast of the old and the new in the fourth and fifth centuries stands out vividly; old and new nations as well as old and new religions are brought face to face. We see civilized Greeks and Romans, semi-civilized or wholly civilized Germans, Germans uncivilized but possessing potentialities for civilization, Huns and Alans totally beyond the pale, moving to and fro in contact with one another. In the lives of individuals too we see the multiplicity of colours curiously reflected. St. Helena, the mother of an Emperor, makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, since Hadrian's time usually called Aelia Capitolina, and finds the relics of the true cross with a thrill of overpowering delight, something like the delight that was felt by Renaissance scholars when an old Roman corpse was disentombed. Or we see Julian, a pagan philosopher, a noble man and an enlightened Emperor, trying to dislodge Christianity from the position it had won, and yet unable to avoid borrowing hints from it for his own system; just as in the writings of his friend, the anti-christian professor Libanius, we occasionally find an unconscious echo of the new religion. While the pagan Neoplatonist Hypatia is lecturing in the Museum at Alexandria, her semi-pagan pupil Synesius is a bishop at Cyrene. At Athens, now a fossilized provincial town, but still the headquarters of learning, paganism has its last stronghold; and even from this camp of heathenism the most Christian Emperor, Theodosius II, obtains the daughter of a philosopher as his consort, and she, after her conversion to Christianity, writes religious poems composed of scraps of Homeric lines. St. Augustine, the poet Sidonius Apollinaris, and the poet Nonnus were, like Synesius, remarkable examples of persons who, born and reared pagans, turned in later life to the new faith; and the writings of these men illustrate the contrasts of the age.

The Christian Church itself, it may be added, was full of contrasts just then; for the Christian doctrine had not yet sunk, or risen, to the monotony of a formula. There were still many open questions, even for orthodox Athanasians; there was still room for the play of individuality. It has been noticed how heterogeneous in spirit were the writings of the Greek Church; we have the zelotic dogmatism of Epiphanius, the poetic speculation of Synesius, the philosophy of religion of Aeneas of Gaza and Nemesius, the sobriety of Theodoret, the mysticism of Pseudodionysios. Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus had been fellow-students of the pagan Julian at Athens; Chrysostom was a pupil of Libanius.

Thus the general impression we receive is one of contrast, and it is in the battle of conflicting elements that the keenness and quickness of life consist. But the conflict was carried on, and the quick life breathed in a gray, often murky, atmosphere, different from the brightness that lit up those other conflicts in Athens during the fifth century BC, and in Italy during the fifteenth century AD. There was a general feeling of misfortune; the world-sadness pressed on the souls of all; and books were written to account for the woes that had come upon the human race. Nature too seemed to have prepared a dark background for the enactment of the miseries involved in the break-up of society and the incursions of the barbarians; plagues and earthquakes seemed to be signs of the times—like the tempest in King Lear, a suitable setting for the tragedy. The pagans of course were fain to attribute the misfortunes of the time to the new religion, and the "pale cast" of the spirit to the victory of the "pale Galilean". But in history what men superficially connect as cause and effect are really both effects of some deeper cause. The world had grown gray independently of Christianity, and if it had not grown gray, Christianity would hardly have been possible—would not have had much meaning; it met the need of the world at the time.

For there are two ways in which we may intuit the world and avoid quarrelling with life. We can regard our experience as destiny—fortune and misfortune as alike determined for us by conditions beyond our control. It was in this objective way that the old Greeks regarded their experience, and in this way they were content; for it never occurred to them to exalt subjective wishes of their own in opposition to the course of destiny, and grieve because such wishes remained unachievable.

Otherwise we may feel our own subjective aims more keenly, and be unable to see them sacrificed without experiencing sorrow or even despair. In this case we shall need something in their stead to make us contented with life, we shall require a consolation. If circumstances render a man's life joyless and hopeless, it becomes endurable for him through the belief that another existence awaits him; the world is thereby rendered less unintelligible, or there is a hope of understanding it in due time; the heavy and weary weight seems less weary and heavy to bear; his belief is a consolation. The old Greeks needed no repentance and no consolation. The centuries from Alexander the Great to Marcus Aurelius were the time in which the thorns were penetrating. The ancient Greek spirit could indeed exclaim, “Oh, how full of briars is the working-day world!” but they were only burs thrown upon it in holiday foolery, burs upon the coat that could be shaken off. The spirit of the later ages said, “These burs are in my heart”. When Anaxagoras was informed that his son had died, he said, “I never supposed him to be immortal”; but a Christian hermit, on receiving similar news in regard to his father, rebuked the messenger, “Blaspheme not, my father is immortal”. The Christian had a compensation for death which the heathen did not require.

Christianity provided the needed consolation. But we must apprehend clearly the fact that the need had at one time not existed, and also the fact that it had come into existence in the regular course of the spiritual development of man. We are hereby reminded that if in one respect Christianity forms a new start in history, from another aspect it stands in close historical connection with the old Greek and Roman worlds; its philosophical doctrines are the logical end of the ancient Greek philosophy and the direct continuation of Stoicism and Epicureanism.

We may then first consider the connection of the new religion with the past, and its points of resemblance and contrast with the last form of pagan philosophy; and then, in another chapter, glance at the new departure made by Christianity and its most obvious influences on society.

The post-Aristotelian individualistic philosophies of Zeno, Epicurus, and the Sceptics were all characterized by the same motive. Their object was, not to understand the universe, but to secure for the individual the summum bonum; the end of philosophy was personal, no longer objective. It is from a similar cause that philosophizer and philosophical in colloquial English are used in a degraded sense; we talk of "bearing pain like a philosopher". We may contrast the apathy of Zeno, the freedom from affections which make us dependent on external things, with the metriopathy of Aristotle, who therein reflected the general spirit of the ancient Greeks. Epicurus placed the highest good in a deep haven of rest, where no waves wash and no sound is heard; his ideal too was mainly negative, freedom from bodily pain and mental trouble. These philosophies were over against the world rather than above it; the note of them was dissatisfaction with life and estrangement from the world.

This spirit, which set in as old Greek life was falling asunder, increased and became universal under the cold hand of Roman rule, which assorted well with the cold Stoic idea of coverts, nature. It has been said that the early Empire, up to the middle of the second century at least, was a golden age of felicity, and we may admit that in some respects it did approach more than other ages to the ideal of utilitarians; but for thinkers it was not an age of felicity or brightness, heaviness was hanging over the spirit and canker was beginning to gnaw. The heavy cloud soon burst, and after the reign of Marcus Aurelius, Europe was a scene of general misfortune.

The philosophical attitude of the Stoics, whose tenets were more widely spread than those of any other school, could not be final; it naturally led to an absolute philosophy. For it disparaged the world and isolated the soul; but the world thus disparaged was a fact which had to be explained, and reason was constrained to complete its dialectic by advancing to repose itself in the Absolute or the One, just as in the eighteenth century the system of Kant necessitated the absolute philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

Or, to put it from a religious point of view, the individual's own soul was not found a sufficiently strong refuge. Some stronger and surer resting-place was needed, something above the world and not over against it. And so the spirit endeavoured to grasp itself anew. The new idea was the Logos; the new world was the kingdom of the Son. A need was felt for mediation—for a place or mansion as it were for the soul to be near God. This was the positive idea that animated the age of the Roman Empire and tended to supersede Stoicism; it was common to the system of Philo, to Gnosticism, to Christianity, and to Neoplatonism. And in Christianity, especially, approach to God seemed a sort of refuge, and the negative tendency, derived from the apathy of the Stoics and the unsociability of the Cynics, to flee from the environments of life, was very strong, and found its expression in monastic ideals.

Thus these philosophies of the Infinite were the sphere to which the Stoic, Epicurean, and Pyrrhonic systems naturally led, by their own inherent defect. But we must now turn to the historical side and see how these late Greek thinkers prepared the way for the reception and spread of Christianity. It may be pointed out in a few words. In the first place, Epicureanism and Scepticism were atheistic and tended to discredit the popular beliefs in the pagan gods. In the second place, Epicureanism discredited devotion to one's country, and so, by uprooting patriotism, made the ground ready for the theory of universal brotherhood. In the third place, Stoicism, by its positive pantheistic theory and the surrender of the individual to the pulse of the universe, made a step towards the dependence of man on God's will or the doctrine of obedience, which is so cardinal in Christianity. And in the fourth place, the Stoic cosmopolitanism, combined with the Stoic theory of the law of nature, supplemented the non-patriotic sentiments of the Epicureans, and thus anticipated the Christian embrace of all humanity. The fact that this Stoic theory affected the theory and practice of the Roman lawyers, and transformed the meaning of the phrase jus gentium, was an advance of the greatest importance in the same direction.

The resemblance between Christianity and Stoicism, which is in many points so striking, is sometimes unduly dwelt on. For if the Stoic and the Epicurean systems correspond to two different types of human nature, if some men are naturally stoical and others naturally epicurean, Christianity contained elements which attracted men of both these natures; as well as a stoical it had an epicurean side, and the second side should not be lost sight of.

For one of the most important elements in Christianity was the weight it gave to the tender affections, and one of the most attractive incidents in a Christian life was the formation of a spiritual friendship or brotherhood. Now friendship and comradeship were regarded as most important elements in life by the Epicureans, beginning with the founder of the sect, who collected around himself a friendly society, while his disciples used to meet solemnly every month, and once a year in commemoration of his birth, in a manner which reminds us of the Christian apostles meeting to commemorate their master. Friendship was a feature among the Epicureans as it was among the Christians, but not so in the system of the independent and lonely Stoics.

And then we may say that the joint life of brethren in a monastery, which, in the western lands of the Empire, ultimately acquired in many cases a certain brightness and cheerfulness, corresponded to the Epicurean spirit; while the solitary life of hermits who fled from their fellows and mortified their bodies was derived from the spirit of Stoicism, tinctured with oriental asceticism, and sometimes degenerating into the life of Cynics, who were a sort of caricature of the Stoics.

A noteworthy difference between the two philosophies was that the Stoics looked back, while the Epicureans looked forward. The great poem of Lucretius is permeated with optimism, not indeed with the optimism which holds that there is more pleasure than pain in the world, but with an optimistic belief in human progress. The human race is represented as progressing, gradually freeing itself from the fetters of superstition and opening its eyes to a clearer view of truth. The Stoics, on the other hand, prefer to dwell on the glories and the heroes of the past, and care little to look forward; their pantheism did not lead them to an idea of progress. Now Christianity involved optimism in two ways. It not only involved happiness for believers in another life; it also involved the theory that the course of history had been one of progress, designed and directed by the Deity, and that the revelation of Christ had introduced a new era of advance for the world, just as the teaching of Epicurus was hailed by followers like Lucretius as ushering in a new age. It was believed indeed that at any time the end of the world might come, and that a great change might take place; but, allowing for all differences, we cannot help perceiving that in the idea of the world's progress Christianity approaches more nigh to Epicureanism than to Stoicism.

And, in general, the heroism of the Stoics, even of the later and milder Stoics, was not a Christian virtue; and man's dignity, which for Christians depended on his having a soul, was reduced by the feeling of his abasement before God. On the other hand, Christianity exalted the feminine un-Roman side of man's nature, the side that naturally loves pleasure and shrinks from pain and feels quick sympathy,—in fact, the Epicurean side; and thus Mr. Walter Pater makes Marius, a natural Epicurean, or rather a refined Cyrenaic, turn by the force of that very nature, anima naturaliter Christiana in Tertullian's words, to the new religion. This is the human, and to most men attractive, side of Christianity; it had another, an inhuman, side, of which I shall have to speak hereafter.

After the victory of Christianity, paganism was dying out, but even in the sixth century it was not yet dead. Towards the end of the fourth century Gratian gave up the title of Pontifex Maximus; the altar of Victory in the Senate House at Rome was removed, though Symmachus and the senators made an affecting appeal to spare it; the Olympic games were abolished, and the oracle of Apollo became silent. The effort of Julian, the last effort of the benighted faith, lured the exiled gods of Greece back for a moment to their ancient habitations. But the verses in which the Hellenic spirit uttered its latest breath, expressed the consciousness that the old things had passed away,—the laurel, the spring, and the emblems of paganism. "Tell the king, on earth has fallen the glorious dwelling"—the words have a dying fall; and with the song of Greece the gods of Greece also retreated down the vast and dreary edges of the world, which was no longer a meet habitation for the deities of Olympus. But the schools at Athens still flourished in the fifth century, and the pagans who taught there—as Leontius, Plutarch the philosopher, Proclus—were in no danger of suffering the fate of Hypatia at Alexandria. They were quietistic; they did not attempt to oppose the new faith, and the government wisely left them in peace.

The Christians themselves were not quite emancipated from the charm, or, as some thought, the evil glamour, of classical antiquity. The pagan rhetoric, with all its ornaments, was not dispensed with by the most learned Christian divines. It was as dear to the heart of Chrysostom as to that of Libanius, and Eusebius, the historian of Constantine, succeeded by its means in producing some effective passages. Similarly, Latin divines like Augustine and Salvian did not despise the science of style. But the art of the ancients had more than this external influence. Christians who had really a taste for art were, by embracing the new religion, placed in a spiritual difficulty. The new religion created a repugnance to the old fabulous mythology, as a sort of emanation from Tartarean powers, and to the old philosophies and modes of thought. There were not many like Synesius who could be both a Platonist and a Christian. There were not many even like Tertullian, who would admit that the best of the ancients possessed "a soul naturally Christian." And yet in spite of themselves they could not put away a hankering after the classical art whose subject-matter was pagan myth and pagan history, now to be replaced by the truths of the Old Testament. St. Augustine felt a thrill, and deemed the thrill wicked, at such lines as—

                                    infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae.

Jerome could not resist the fascination of Cicero. One Germanus, a friend of Cassian, had to confess with many tears that often, while he was engaged in prayer, the old heroes and heroines would pass into his soul, and the remembrance of the ancient gods disarrange his thoughts of God. Such asceticism as this was more common in the West than among the Greek-speaking Christians. It may be added that pagan symbols and mottoes were used on Christian tombs, and pagan ideas adapted in Christian art.

There is a legend which made its appearance about the fourth century, remarkable both in itself and as having been versified by the Empress Eudocia, the legend of Cyprian and Justina. It illustrates the thaumaturgy and the asceticism of the age as well as the conflict of Christianity and paganism, and is also interesting as presenting us with a prototype of Faust. Justina was a beautiful Christian maiden of Antioch, passionately loved by a pagan youth Aglaides, who, unable to win her affections which were given to Christ, determined to move Acheron. For this purpose he engaged the services of Cyprian, a powerful magician, learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and in the magic of the Chaldeans. But the demons of temptation that the wizard's art raised against Justina were repulsed by the sign of the cross. Whereupon Cyprian, moved by the firmness and power of her faith, became enamoured of her, abjured his magic arts, and was baptized a Christian. Both he and Justina suffered martyrdom in the persecution of Diocletian. The vanity of all his arts and lore is described by Cyprian in a manner which reminds us of the opening lines of Faust's soliloquy in Goethe's drama. Pagan learning is associated with magic and powers of evil, and opposed to the light of Christianity. Another point in the contrast is the conception of a purified spiritual love opposed to the love of the carnal man which enlists the powers of darkness.

Regarding the dealings of holy men with demons, a curious tale is told of St. Macarius of Alexandria. He conceived the idea of visiting the garden and sepulchre of Jannes and Jambros, magicians who had lived in the time of Pharaoh, that he might meet and make inquiries of the demons who had been lodged there by the art of the magicians. They had planted the garden with all sorts of trees, and surrounded it with a wall of square stones; they had built a tomb in it, wherein they placed rich treasure of gold, and had dug a great well—in hopes that after death they might luxuriate in this paradise. Macarius made his way, like a mariner at sea, by the guidance of the stars, and as he traversed the desert he stuck reeds in the ground at certain intervals to mark the way home. For nine days he crossed the desert, and as it was night when he reached the garden, he lay clown and slept. But meanwhile the "wild demon" collected all the reeds, and when the saint awoke he found them lying in a bundle at his head. As he approached the garden seventy demons met him, shouting and gesticulating, leaping, and gnashing with their teeth: flying like crows in his face they asked him, "What want you, Macarius? why have you come to us?" He replied that he merely wished to see the garden and would leave it when he had seen it; whereupon the demons vanished. In the garden there was little to see; a bronze cask hung in the well by an iron chain worn by time, and a few dry pomegranates. Having satisfied his curiosity, Macarius returned to his cell.

As there were two sides to the old Greek religion—the ridiculous side which Lucian brought out so humorously, and the ideal but human side which made it lovely—there were two sides also to the Christian religion. There was the ugly, inhuman side, from which the humanism of the fourteenth and fifteenth century revolted, manifested in extreme and grotesque asceticism, a sort of war with the instincts of humanity; and there was the consolatory side, the hopes which it offered to mankind, at that time almost weary of living. But in spite of the dismalness, as far as the world is concerned, of the Christianity of the time, when men even looked forward to a very speedy end of a universe which seemed a theatre of misery, we can see traces of cheerfulness and traits of human feeling in the Church, which had now outgrown the hopeful freshness that gave it such a charm in the first and second centuries. Christian women with gracious faces move before us, Olympias, Melania, Eudocia, though a lighter atmosphere seems to linger round the pagan ladies, Hypatia, Asclepigeneia, and Athenais. It might be asked, was no middle course open? could not the attractions of paganism1 be combined with the attractions of Christianity, and a new theory of life, combining the requisite consolation with the antique grace, be constructed? Neoplatonism might seem at first something of this kind. With a theology generically similar to the Christian theology, it taught a high ideal of ethics, the practical aim being to purify the soul from the thraldom of matter by an ascending series of cleansing processes, so that it might finally, by a sort of henosis or atonement, become conscious of the Absolute. But it is clear that Neoplatonism involved the same essential opposition which was involved in Christianity, the opposition of soul and body, and therefore must logically lead to the same cast of inhumanity, tinctured with cynicism. Theoretically, indeed, soul and body were two terms in a descending series, but practically they were opposed. And so, although the new philosophers, who studied Plato and Pythagoras and Aristotle and old Orphic mysteries, might invest their doctrine with an antique borrowed charm, they were really as much children of the gray time they lived in as the Christians. But they were recognized opponents; in such a spirit Augustine speaks of Plotinus and Porphyrius, and the massacre of Hypatia at Alexandria was a manifestation of the antagonism.

Proclus, the last original Greek philosopher, lived at Athens throughout the greater part of the fifth century (410-485). Born in Lycia, he was dedicated by his parents to Apollo, for it behooved (as we are told by his biographer Marinus, whose work is full of interesting incidents and traits) that one who was to lead all sciences should be reared and educated under the sod who leads the Muses. He studied rhetoric at Alexandria and philosophy at Athens, where, under the guidance of the old philosopher Plutarchus and his daughter Asclepigeneia, he was initiated in the mysteries of Platonism. We must glance at the system of Proclus, the last term in the history or chain of Greek philosophy. In a general history we cannot go into its difficult details, but we must take note of its leading features; for a historian of any particular state of the world is concerned with the way in which a thinker placed therein approaches metaphysical problems. It might even be said that we must go to the philosophers, as to mystics, in order to understand the real forces that underlie the history of a time, and determine even events like a war or a revolution. The men who act in history, the men who "make history," have only to do with this treasure, or this kingdom, or this woman; the philosopher has not to do with this and that, but has to become a witness of the processes of the spirit in which this and that are nothing more than this and that. So in reading a philosophy we are getting at the secret of the age, and learning the manner in which the spirit contemplated itself at the time.

Proclus understood Plato more thoroughly and worked more in his spirit than his great predecessor Plotinus, on whom he made a marked advance in many respects. If Plotinus is the Schelling of Neoplatonism, Proclus is its Hegel. There was an unreduced surd in Plotinus and a certain cloudiness in his system, a sediment as it were in the bottom of the cup which clouded the liquid to a certain degree. The sediment disappears in Proclus, the wine is strained and clarified; he presents us with a thoroughly articulated system, that bears a distinct resemblance in its method to Hegel’s Logic.

Proclus, like Plotinus, started with the One or the Absolute, that which cannot be called Being, for it is beyond Being, and cannot be called intelligent, for intelligence is too low a category to assert of it. It is the source of all things, and yet it would be improper to assert cause of it; it is a cause and yet not cause. Now from the One, according to Plotinus, emanates an image which, through and in the act of turning towards the One from which it emanates, is Nous or Thought. This is the point at which Proclus makes a new departure. The immediate procession of the Nous from the One rests on a confusion, a middle term is required, and Proclus interposed the Henads between them— a plurality of ones, whereby alone there can be participation in the One. The doctrine of the henads is the philosophical analogue of the famous filioque clause in the Latin creed; as the holy Spirit proceeds not from the Father alone, but from the Father and Son, so the Nous or Spirit proceeds not from the One directly, but from the One and the company of henads. The henads he terms Gods. Next to them, and third in the descending line, comes the sphere of Nous, differentiated into numerous categories arranged in triads. It is this triadic arrangement, of which we find the origin in Plato, that reminds us of the Hegelian system. From the intellectual world eman­ates the fourth term, Soul; and here he repeats his triple division, assuming three kinds of souls, divine, human, and demonic. Fifth and last in the scale comes Matter.

This process of development is one of descent from higher to lower. There is a reverse process, the epistrophe or turning back; and this process is performed by the soul, when in the study of philosophy it turns to the intellect from which it came forth, and in whose nature it shares. Thus it is the aim of the "musical" or cultured soul to retrace the world-process in which it is involved.

In the hymns of Proclus, which he wrote under the inspiration of older Orphic hymns, and in which he celebrated all kinds of strange deities—for he used to say that a philosopher should not confine himself to the religious ideas of one people, but be "a hierophant of the world,"—he emits some of that mystic emotion with which the philosophical writings of Plotinus are suffused, but of which we can find little in his own severe treatises. For Plotinus, like Empedocles or Spinoza, often seems in a sort of divine intoxication, and the severity which attends undisturbed contemplation was lighted up, shall we say, or shadowed, by his enthusiasm as a combatant against the new religion. In his time, before Christianity attained its dominant position, no thinker with native enthusiasm could fail to be drawn into the vortex of the contending theories of the world. But in the fifth century the only thing left for non-Christian philosophers was quietism. Out of the world, “a solitary worker in the vast loneliness of the Absolute”, Proclus was able to develop the timeless and spaceless triads, and study the works of Plato with a leisure and severity that Plotinus could hardly realize. Most of his works assume the modest form of commentaries on Plato.

The practical end of the Neoplatonists was, like that of the Stoics, ataraxia, freedom from disturbance; and this they thought was obtained by contemplation, herein agreeing with the Aristotelian ideal of the "theoretic life". Thus they differed from both Stoics and Christians. For the Stoic and the Christian, theorizing—the study of pure metaphysics—is valuable only as a means to right conduct, a sort of canonic for ethics; but for the Neoplatonist the practice of the ethical virtues is subsidiary to the contemplation of the metaphysical truth which is the end. And thus, although it had an atmosphere of religion about it, Neoplatonism was and could be strictly no more and no less than a philosophy. Stoicism had perhaps a larger number of the elements of a religion, and yet it too was only for the sage.

There is a certain contrast and there is also a certain analogy between the course of development of Christianity and that of Neoplatonism. As Christians had been divided into Athanasians and Arians, so Neoplatonism may be said to have fallen asunder into two divergent schools. There were the soberer and truer followers of Plotinus, among whom Hypatia may be mentioned, and there were the wilder mystical speculators like Iamblichus and the writer on Egyptian Mysteries. Thus the divergency from orthodox Neoplatonism was into the realm of the imagination; the divergency from orthodox Christianity was into the realm of the understanding. Among the new Platonists there were no rationalists like the Arians; and we may be sure that men of a cold logical temper, on whose faith the creed of Nicaea laid too heavy a burden, were more inclined to embrace the modified form of Christianity than any form of the new pagan philosophy.

Again, the minute determination of the nature of Christ in the fifth century, through the Nestorian and Eutychian controversies, was almost the last period in the development of Christian doctrine, just as the minute determination of the higher categories by Proclus was the final stage of the development of Neoplatonic thought. The first great inspiration, which in its ardour could not tolerate, or rather did not think of, precise analysis of ideas, had passed away, and men were able to reason things out more calmly and realize the subtler difficulties.

What, it may be asked, was the historical result for mankind of the new philosophy and the new religion? The presence of the Infinite, whether to an individual or a race, is bought at a great cost. Humanity seeks a deliverer; it obtains a deliverer and a tyrant. For the Infinite, having freed the human mind from the bonds of the finite, enslaves it unto itself, like a true tyrant; we may say, and the paradox is only apparent, that the human mind was cabined by the Infinite. Thought was rendered sterile and unproductive for centuries under the withering pressure of an omnipresent and monotonous idea. But through this selva oscura lay the path from ancient to modern civilization, and few will be disposed to assert with Rousseau and Gibbon that the cost was greater than the gain.

II

INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY ON SOCIETY

Having seen how closely Christianity was connected with the past ages of civilized Europe, whose beliefs it superseded, we must glance at its other historical aspect, in which it appears as a new departure. It has been said that the function of the German nations was to be the bearers of Christianity. The growth of the new religion was indeed contemporary with the spread of the new races in the Empire, but at this time in the external events of history, so far from being closely attached to the Germans, Christianity is identified with the Roman Empire. It is long afterwards that we see the mission fulfilled. The connection rests on a psychological basis; the German character was essentially subjective. The Teutons were gifted with that susceptibility which we call heart, and it was to the needs of the heart that Christianity possessed endless potentialities of adaptation. From the very first German princesses often embraced Christianity and adorned it, but it required many centuries for those nations to be regenerated by its influence. Yet even in the exclamation of the rude barbarian Chlodwig, when he heard the story of Christ's passion, "If I had been there with my Franks, I would have revenged his injuries!" we feel the presence of this heart, in its wild state, which Christianity was destined to tame. To an old Roman, like Aurelian or Constantine, such an exclamation would have been impossible. Christianity and Teutonism were both solvents of the ancient world, and as the German nations became afterwards entirely Christian, we see that they were historically adapted to one another.

This aspect of Christianity as the religion of the future has brought us to consider it as a religion rather than as a theology, in which light its connection with the past naturally exhibited it. As a religion it was a complete novelty, and was bound to displace Stoicism and Neoplatonism. Stoicism was indeed practical, but it could only be accepted by a man of more than average intellect, while Christianity descended to the dull and the uneducated. Stoicism aimed at stifling the emotions and repressing the affections; Christianity cherished the amiable affections, and was particularly suited to be understood and embraced by women and children who, according to Aristotle, are creatures of passion, as opposed to men who are capable of living by reason. We must now point out some of the leading changes which Christianity produced in society, having first considered why Roman society adopted it.

What induced the civilized world to be converted to Christianity is a question that naturally suggests itself. Mr. Lecky tells us that it was not from conviction after careful sifting of evidence that men believed it; it was rather because they wanted to believe something, and Christianity was the best they found. It was consoling; it had an oriental flavour, and yet was not wrapped in such an envelope of mystic theosophy as to preclude it from acceptance by European minds. But it was, above all, I think, the cheerful virtue of the Christian life that exercised a fascination on the cultured, and a passage in the Confessions of Augustine seems worthy of special remark. Having stated that the Christian life attracted him, he says:

"In the direction where I had set my face, and whither I was hastening to cross over, there was exposed to my view a chaste and dignified temper of self-restraint, serene and cheerful but never dissolute, honourably enticing me to come without hesitation, and holding out to embrace and receive me affectionate hands, full of good examples."

But beside this ideal of a calm and cheerful social life there was the ideal of the ascetic and unsocial life of the hermit, which exercised a sort of maddening fascination over countless men of high faculties. The object of the hermit was to free himself from temptations to sensuality; and thus the men who embraced such a life were probably, in most cases, men of strongly-developed physical passions, seized with a profound conviction of the deadliness of impurity. They were therefore generally men of robust frame, and this may explain how they could live so long under privations and endurances which seem sufficient to bring the life of an ordinary man to a speedy end. A rage for the spiritual life, far from the world, seized on individuals of all classes. In the sixth century an Ethiopian king, Elesbaa, abdicated his throne to retire to fast and pray in the desert, where he lived as a saint of no ordinary sanctity and power. In the reign of Theodosius the Great, a beautiful young man, who attained to the highest political offices, suddenly bade good-bye to his family and departed to Mount Sinai, stricken with a passion for the desert. But we need not enumerate here the countless disciples of St. Antony and St. Pachomius; they meet us at every page of history.

In the same way among women the horror of unchastity—of desecration of the body, the temple of the soul—which had taken possession of the age with a sort of morbid excess, led to vows of perpetual virginity, and even children were dedicated in their infancy with a cruel kindness to a life of monasticism. When we regard the effects of these habits, we observe, in the first place, that the great value set by the triumphant Church on the unmarried life must have conducted to depopulation; and in the second place, that the refusal of the most spiritually-minded in the community to assist  reproduction must have contributed to a decrease in really spiritually-minded persons, on the principle of heredity. If the best refuse to have children, the race must decline. It would be an error, of course, to insist too much on the distant effects of celibacy, but it cannot be overlooked that these were its natural tendencies. When Jerome remarked that in one respect marriage was laudable, because it brought virgins into the world, he did not see that the observation was really a retort upon his own position.

This unsocial passion invaded family life, and must have caused a considerable amount of suffering. Among the most pathetic incidents in the history of the growth of Christianity were those of the great gulf fixed between husbands and wives by the conversion of the latter. And after Christianity had prevailed, parents of average notions have been often filled with despair when a divine longing for the lonely life came upon their children.

The position of women was considerably changed by Christianity. Their possession of immortal souls equalized them with the other sex, and an emancipation began, which has since indeed progressed but slowly, by the recognition that they had functions beyond those of maternity and housewifery. In fact, those Christians who did not approve unreservedly of celibacy considered that the chief end of marriage was not production of children, but rather to be a type of the primitive union of human society. This theory set women and men on an equal footing. St. Chrysostom expressed himself strongly on this subject. In a letter to a Roman lady he said that nature had assigned domestic duties to women and external duties to men, but that the Christian life extended woman's sphere, and gave her a part to play in the struggles of the Church. This part was that of the consoler and "ministering angel". And thus, to use a cant phrase of the present day, woman was admitted to have a "mission". Olympias, the friend of Chrysostom, was a lady of the new type.

As in the present clay, the admiration of enthusiastic women for saints and priests was unbounded. Jerome had a spiritual circle of women about him in Old Rome, and Chrysostom was the centre of similar attentions from ladies in New Rome. The name auriscalpius, or ear-picker, was given to a priest who was noted for his successes in making such spiritual conquests. The new view of women's position must have tended to make them more independent, just as does nowadays the spread of more liberal theories on women's education; and old-fashioned people probably looked with horror on the life of deaconesses as implying an immodest surrender of female retirement. That many of these religious sisters did become really "fast" in dress and behaviour we know from the letters of Chrysostom.

One of the most far-reaching changes introduced by Christianity into the conduct of life was the idea that human life as such was sacred; an idea distinctly opposed to the actual practice of the pagans, if not quite novel to them. This idea, in the first place, altered the attitude to the gladiatorial shows, and although they were not immediately abolished on the triumph of Christianity, they became gradually discredited and were put down before the end of the fourth century. As these amusements were one of the chief obstacles to the refining and softening influences of Roman advanced civilization, we can hardly rate too highly the importance of this step. Again, the attitude towards suicide, which the pagans, if they did not recommend it, at least considered venal, was quite changed by the new feeling, and became a heinous crime, which was hardly condoned even to heroic Christian maidens, though it were the only means of preserving them from dishonour. Another corollary from the respect for inviolability of life was the uncompromising reprobation of all forms of removing unwelcome children by exposition, infanticide, or even abortion.

Along with this negatively working idea of the sanctity of life was the other idea which succeeded and elevated Stoic cosmopolitanism, the idea that all men are brothers bound by a common humanity. Besides softening to some extent the relation between the Roman world and the barbarians, this idea had a considerable effect within the Empire itself on the position of slaves, who as men and members of the Christian Church were the brothers of their masters and on an equality with them. This both improved the condition of slaves and promoted to some degree a decrease of slavery and an increase in the frequency of emancipation. Beyond this, it penetrated and quickened all the emotions of life and furthered the cultivation of the amiable side of human nature.

Yet we can hardly say that there was much altruism in early Christian society, in spite of the altruistic tendencies of Christ's teaching. There were abundant instances of self-sacrifice for others, but they were not dictated by the motive of altruism; they were dictated by the motive of a transfigured selfishness which looked to a reward hereafter, by the desire of ennobling and benefiting one's own soul. The impossible and, as Herbert Spencer has shown, undesirable aim of loving one's neighbour as oneself, in the literal sense of the words, was not attained or even approached by the saints. Many people in modern England come far nearer to the realization of the idea than they did. Alms, for example, were not given merely out of pure and heartfelt sympathy for the poor: they were given for the benefit of the giver's soul, and to obtain the prayers of the recipients who, just because they happened to be poor, were supposed to be not far from the kingdom of heaven.

The ideas of sin and future punishment, enforced by an elaborate legislature regulating degrees of sin and the correspond­ing penances, were another great novelty of Christianity, raising as it were the elaborate ritual of pagan ceremonies of purification into the spiritual sphere, where evil thoughts were wellnigh as black as evil acts. The tortures of hell gave a dark tint to the new religion, which to natures of melancholy cast made it a sort of haunting terror; while the claims of Christianity to dominate the most trifling deed and smallest thought, leaving almost no margin for neutral actions, tended to make the dread of sin constant and morbid.

And here we have touched on a side of Christianity which was distinctly unreasonable and would have revolted the clear intellect of a healthy Greek. The idea that God's omniscience takes account of the smallest and meanest details of our lives, and keeps, as it were, a written record of such nugatory sins against us, would have appeared utterly absurd, as well as a degradation of the Deity, to an old Greek possessed of the most elementary culture. It is an idea that cannot well be accepted by the reason of the natural man; and, like that other idea of extreme asceticism which led to a solitary life, equally repugnant to Hellenic reason, it was carried to excess by the Christians. For like all true lovers, the true lovers of God "run into strange capers". And while to many this idea was welcome, as bringing them into close and constant relation with the Deity, as making them feel his presence, to some Christians the divine supervision of trifles must have been felt as an oppressive tyranny. And the Church was able to enforce its moral laws by fear of the ultimate and dreaded penalty of excommunication which made the criminal an outcast from society, avoided and abhorred.

In forming an idea of the Christian society and sentiments of the early ages, we must not forget that the believers of those days realized far more vividly than the believers of our days the realities of their religion. While the conceptions of the saints were confined to a smaller sphere of observed facts, their imaginations had a wider range and a greater intensity. The realm of scientific knowledge was limited; and therefore the field of fancy which they inherited, the field of divine or automatons intimations, was all the more spacious. They were ever contending or consorting with the demons or angels of imagination, now uplifted and rejoicing in the radiant raptures of heaven, now labouring and heavy laden in the lurid horrors of hell. This variation between two extreme poles—between a dread of God's wrath and a consciousness of his approval— which produced the opposing virtues of Christian pride and Christian humility, was alien to the Hellenic instinct which clung to the mean. The "humble man" of the Christians would have been considered a vicious and contemptible person by Aristotle, who put forward the "man of great spirit" as a man of virtue.

This chapter may be concluded with the remark that a considerable change had come over Christianity itself since its first appearance. It had lost the charm that attended the novelty of the first revelation; the flower of its youth had faded. The Christian temperament could not be unaffected by the cold winter waves that washed over the world in the fourth and fifth centuries; and although the religious consolation remained, the early cheerfulness — cheerfulness even under persecution — and the freshness which contrasted pleasantly with the weary pagan society were no longer there.

III

ELEMENTS OF DISINTEGRATION IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The most obvious element of weakness in the Roman Empire was the increasing depopulation. The vitality of a state depends ultimately on the people, and from the time of Augustus, who was obliged to make special laws to encourage reproduction, to the time of Marcus Aurelius the population steadily decreased. In the reign of Aurelius the great plague inflicted a blow which the Empire was never able to recover, as it was involved in a continuous series of evils, the wars of the third century, until the time of Constantine. The original cause of depopulation in Italy was the slave system, which ruined the middle class of small proprietors and created a proletariat. A similar tendency manifested itself in the East under Roman rule, though in a lesser degree; and the financial policy of the later Empire, which maintained oppressive taxation by means of the "curial system", effectually hindered the population from recovering itself. Thus to the social cause which had operated for a long time was added in the fourth century a political cause, and just as the first was an indispensable element of Roman society, the second soon became indispensable to the Roman administration.

Moreover, the only remedy which the government could apply to meet the evil was itself an active element of disintegration. This was the introduction of barbarians as soldiers or agriculturists (coloni) into the Roman provinces.

Thus slavery and oppressive taxation, the causes of depopulation, and the importation of barbarians, the remedy of depopulation, may be looked on as three main elements of disintegration in the Empire. A fourth element was the Christian religion which, while it was entirely opposed to the Roman spirit which it was destined to dissolve, nevertheless was not theoretically opposed to the Empire and the imperial administration. We may take these four points in order:

(1) It was a consequence of the slave system that those great estates which, according to an ancient writer, ruined Italy were formed, and swallowed up the small proprietors. It is important to note precisely how this effect took place. In time of war all free proprietors, rich and poor alike, were obliged to take the field; but while the land of the rich, who employed slaves to cultivate it, was not affected by this circumstance, the lands of the small farmers, who had no staff of slaves, remained uncultivated during their absence. This fact, in a time when wars were frequent, tended directly to reduce the petty proprietors to beggary and add to the wealth of the rich capitalists. Another effect of wars, which conduced to the same result, was that the ranks of the small farmers were decimated, while the numbers of the slaves, who did not serve in the army, multiplied. We must also remember that a bad harvest raised prices then to an extent that appears now quite enormous; so that the small farmer was obliged to buy corn at an exorbitant price, and, if the harvest of the following year turned out very successful, prices descended so low that he was unable even to reimburse himself.

Besides destroying the middle class, the slave system facilitated and encouraged the unproductive unions of concubinage, and these to the self-indulgent were more agreeable than marriage, which entails duties as well as pleasures. This convenient system naturally confirmed and increased the spirit of self-indulgence, and also increased its psychological concomitant, cruelty or indifference, which tended to keep up the practice of exposing infants, a direct check on population.

Under the Empire even the number of the slaves decreased. For to purchase slaves in the markets of the East the precious metals were requisite, since the produce of the West did not readily find a sale in the East, and the supply of gold and silver was declining, especially after the time of Caracalla, as is proved by the great depreciations of coinage. This diminution in the number of slaves led to the rehabilitation of free labour; but the freemen were soon involved in the meshes of the caste system which reduced them not to slavery, but to serfdom.

(2) It was in the times of Diocletian and Constantine that the municipal institutions of the Empire were impressed with the fiscal stamp which characterized them henceforward. During the three preceding centuries the provinces had gone through much tribulation, of which Juvenal, for example, gives us a picture; but this oppression was at least mitigated by the fact that it was not legal, and it was always open to the provincials to take legal proceedings. Nor was extortion always countenanced by the Emperors; it is recorded that Tiberius found fault with the prefect of Egypt for transmitting to Rome an unduly large amount.

But at the beginning of the fourth century the old municipal curia or senate was metamorphosed into a machine for grinding down the provincial proprietors by a most unmerciful and injudicious system of taxation. The curia of a town consisted of a certain number of the richest landowners who were responsible to the treasury for a definite sum, which it was their business to collect from all the proprietors in the district. It followed that if one proprietor became bankrupt the load on all the others was increased. The provincials had two alleviations. The first was that a revision of taxes took place every fifteen years, the so-called indiction, which became a measure of time, and thus there was a prospect that an excessive burden might be reduced. The second consisted in the institution of the defensores, persons nominated to watch over the interests of the provincials and interfere in behalf of their rights against illegal oppression. On the other hand we must remember that, as Finlay noticed, the interests of the curia were not identical with those of the municipality, as the curiales were only a select number of the most wealthy.

This system tended to reduce the free provincial gentlemen to the state of serfs. They were enclosed in a cage from which there was almost no exit, for laws were passed which forbade them to enlist in the army, to enter the church, or go to the bar. They were not allowed to quit their municipality without permission from the governor, and travelling was in every way discouraged. Moreover, the obligations of the decurionate were hereditary, and exclusion from all other careers rigidly enforced. Thus a caste system was instituted, in which the individual life must have been often a hopeless monotony of misery.

The kindred institutions of serfdom and the colonatus gradually arose by a double process of leveling up and levelling down; slaves were elevated and freemen were degraded to the condition of laborers attached to the soil. The slave proprietors were called ascripticii; while the free farmers were known as coloni. Economic necessities naturally brought about this state of things, and then it was recognized and stereotyped by law. An account of the colonatus which, while it is concise, loses sight of no essential fact, has been given by Dr. Ingram in his essay on "Slavery," from which the following passage may be conveniently quoted: "The class of coloni appears to have been composed partly of tenants by contract who had incurred large arrears of rent and were detained on the estates as debtors, partly of foreign captives or immigrants who were settled in this condition on the land, and partly of small proprietors and other poor men who voluntarily adopted the status as an improvement in their position. They paid a fixed proportion of the produce to the owner of the estate, and gave a determinate amount of labour on the portion of the domain which he kept in his own hands. The law for a long time took no notice of these customary tenures, and did not systematically constitute them until the fourth century. It was indeed the requirements of the fiscus and the conscription which impelled the imperial government to regulate the system."

The caste system was carried out not only in the class of landed proprietors, to secure the land tax, but in all trades and professions whose members were liable to the capitation tax. Two other taxes were introduced at the same period, the chrysargyron, a tax on receipts which fell very heavily on poor people, and was afterwards abolished by Anastasius amidst general rejoicings; and a class tax on senators.

The uses to which a large part of the fiscal income was put gave the system an additional sting. The idle populaces of the great cities were supplied with corn—the drones fed on the labours of the bees. But this was only the unavoidable consequence of the economical relations of the ancient world, which led necessarily to pauperism on a tremendous scale. A more real grievance was the system of court ceremonial and aulic splendour, introduced by Aurelian, confirmed by Diocletian, and elaborated by Constantine, which consumed a vast quantity of money, and was ever increasing in luxury and unnecessary extravagance. As Hallam said, in speaking of the oppression under Charles VI of France, "the sting of taxation is wastefulness."

The principle of this system was to transfer to the imperial treasury as much as possible of the wealth circulating in the Empire. Want of capital in the provinces was a necessary result; there were no means to repair the damages of time, fire, or earthquakes save by an application to the central authority, which entailed delay and uncertainty, especially in distant provinces. A decrease in the means of life was soon produced, and thereby a decrease in the population.

The western suffered more than the eastern provinces, a fact which we must attribute primarily to a different economic condition, resulting from a different history. The distribution of property was less uneven in the East, and the social character of the people was different. For while the East was under the more genial and enlightened rule of Alexander's successors, the West was held by the cold hand of Rome. After the division of the Empire, 395 AD, the state of the West seems to have become rapidly worse, while the East gradually revived under a government inclined to reform. Of the misery to which the Occident was reduced by the middle of the fifth century we have a piece of incontestable evidence in the constitutions of the Emperor Majorian, who seems to have been inspired by the example of the government of Constantinople, and desired to alleviate the miseries that were produced by the curial institutions. He was perhaps animated by some faint reflection of the spirit of ancient Rome, if we may judge from the enunciation of his policy in the letter which he addressed to the senate on his accession. His short reign impresses us with a peculiar melancholy, a feeling of ineffectuality, and brings home to us perhaps more than anything else in the fifth century how fruitless it was to struggle against the doom which was implied in the circumstances of the Empire and therefore impended inevitably over it, and how impracticable any reformation was when the decay had advanced so far.

The language used in Majorian's constitutions of the state of the provincial subjects is very strong. Their fortunes are described as "wearied out by the exaction of diverse and mani­fold taxes". The municipal bodies of decurions, which should be regarded as the "sinews of the republic", have been reduced to such a condition by "the injustice of judges and venality of tax-collectors" that they have taken refuge in obscure hiding-places. Majorian bids them return, guaranteeing that such abuses will be suppressed. It is particularly to be noted that he abolished the arrangement by which the corporation was responsible for the whole amount of the land tax fixed at the last indiction ; henceforward the curia was to be responsible only for what it was able to collect from the tax-payers. He further discharged the accumulated arrears and re-established the office of defensor provinciae, which was falling into disuse.

We need not dwell on the extortions and oppressions of the officials—the governors of the provinces, the vicars of the dioceses, the praetorian prefects—which made the cup of misery run over. It is enough to call attention to a flagrant defect in the Roman imperial system—the fact that the administration of justice was in the hands of the government officials; the civil governors were also the judges. By a constitution of Constantine there was no appeal to the Emperor from the sentence of the praetorian prefect. Thus there was no protection against an unjust governor, as the offender was also the judge.

It follows from this that the interests of the government and the governed were in direct opposition; and it is evident that the sad condition of the provinces, depopulated and miserable, was a most serious element of disintegration, the full effects of which were produced in the West, while in the East it was partially cancelled by the operation of other tendencies of an opposite kind.

(3) The introduction of barbarians from Central Europe into the Empire was due to two general causes. They were admitted to replenish the declining population, or they were admitted from the policy that they would be less dangerous as subjects within than as strangers without. Even in the time of the Republic there had been instances of hiring barbarian mercenaries; under the Empire it became a common practice. Marcus Aurelius made settlements of barbarians in Pannonia and Moesia. It is probable that the barbarization of the army progressed surely and continuously, but this plan of settling barbarians as coloni within Roman territory was not carried out on a large scale until the latter half of the third century. Gallienus settled Germans in Pannonia, and Claudius, after his Gothic victory, recruited his troops with the flower of the Gothic youth; but Probus introduced multitudes of Franks, Vandals, Alans, Bastarnae; in fact, the policy of settling barbarians on Roman ground was the most important feature of Probus' reign. Thrace, for example, received 100,000 Bastarnae. Moreover, he compelled the conquered nations to supply the army with 16,000 men, whom he judiciously dispersed in small companies among Roman regiments. The marklands of the Rhine and Danube were systematically settled with Teutons. Constantius Chlorus continued the policy of Probus; his allocations of Franks in the neighbourhood of Troyes and in the neighbourhood of Amiens deserve special notice, for these colonists succeeded in Germanizing the north of France, so that they have been called "the pioneers of the German nations". The Carpi (perhaps Slaves), subdued by Diocletian and Galerius, were transported in masses to Pannonia. Constantine is said to have allotted lands to 300,000 Sarmatae, and he seems to have adopted a policy, perhaps received from his father, of treating the barbarians with great consideration. Ammianus says that Julian reproached his memory for having been the first to advance barbarians to the consulate. From the time of Constantine the importance of the Germans in the Empire increased rapidly. It became apparent in the revolt of Magnentius, which Julian regarded as a "sacred war in behalf of the laws and constitution". Magnentius himself was an "unfortunate relic of booty won from the Germans", and his standard was joined by the Franks and Saxons, "who were most zealous allies on account of kindred race ". In the days of Constantius "a multitude of Franks flourished in the palace". When Theodosius I subdued the Alemanni he sent all the captives to Italy, where they received fruitful farms on the Po as tributarii. Valens followed the same principle in 376, when he admitted the fugitive bands of West Goths into Thrace, an act which, owing to the avarice and rapacity of the Roman officials, had such disastrous consequences. The favour shown to Germans, especially to the influential Merobaudes, at the court of Gratian, led to the revolt of Maximus, which was a movement of old Roman discontent against the advances which the Germans were making.

The facts instanced are sufficient to show that a new element, the German nationality, was gradually fusing itself in the fourth century throughout the Roman world, especially in the West. It was plainly an element of disintegration. For, by the incorporation of barbarian elements, the wall of partition between the Empire and the external nations was lowered; it made the opposition between Rome and the barbarians somewhat less sharp; in particular, the bonds of a common nationality did not fail to assert themselves between the Germans in Roman service and the independent tribes; the Germans within had a friendly leaning to the Germans without. The rising of Magnentius exhibits this relation; and we shall see it repeated in the fifth century in the careers of Stilicho, Aetius, and Ricimer, of whom the first was a Vandal and the last a Sueve; Aetius was of barbarian descent, and, although a Roman environment for some generations back had served to identify him more thoroughly with Roman interests, he is always quite at home with the barbarians. Throughout the fifth century we can observe, in the dealings of Romans and Teutons in the West, that the line of demarcation is growing less fixed, and the process of assimilation advancing. We may remark the case of the Patrician Syagrius, who reigned as a sort of king in northern Gaul, and spoke German perfectly.

Jerome uses the word semi-barbarus of Stilicho, and we may conveniently adopt the word semi-barbarian to denote the whole class of Germans in Roman service. The significance of these semi-barbarians is that they smoothed the way, as we have already mentioned, for the invaders who dismembered the Empire; not being attached by hereditary tradition to Roman ideas and the Roman name, but having within them the Teutonic spirit of individual freedom, directly opposed to the Roman spirit of tyrannical universal law, they were not prejudiced sufficiently strongly in favour of the Roman Empire to preserve it, although they admired and partook of its superior civilization.

 (4) Christianity emphasized the privileges, hopes, and fears of the individual; Christ died for each man. It was thus opposed to the universality of the Roman world, in which the individual and his personal interests were of little account, and had in this respect a point of community with the individualistic instinct of the Germans—the attachment to personal freedom of life, which always struck the Romans as the peculiar German characteristic. In two ways especially the opposition of Christianity to the Roman Empire manifested itself—by the doctrine of a divine law independent of and superior to temporal law, and by the dissociation of spiritual from secular authority. For the spirit of Christianity was really alien to the spirit of Rome, though it appeared to blend with it for a while; and this alien nature was manifested in the position of the Church as an independent, self-constituted body existing within the Empire. But in the process of the dissolution of the Empire in the West the Church supported the falling State against the barbarians, who were Christians, indeed, but tainted with Arian heresy. And when we remember that in the East the Church allied itself closely with the imperial constitution, and that this union survived for many centuries, we must conclude that Christianity did not contribute to produce what is loosely called the Fall of the Western Empire. Its spirit revolutionized the condition of the whole Roman world; the Roman spirit was undergoing a change; but yet, as far as Christianity itself is concerned, there seems no reason why the Roman Empire should not have continued to exist in the West just as it continued to exist in the East. Christianity made the prevailing misery and oppression more tolerable by holding out the hopes of a future world. But thereby it tended to confirm the growing feeling of indifference; the political and social environment seemed an alien, unhomelike world; and this indifference, a natural outcome of the senility of the Empire, was as fatal in its effects as the actual risings of peasants. In a certain direct way, too, Christianity contributed to depopulation in the fourth and fifth centuries, namely, by the high value set on personal chastity and the ascetic spirit of monasticism, which discouraged marriage and caused large numbers to die without progeny.

These four elements undermined the Roman world, partly by weakening it, partly by impairing its Roman character and changing the view of life which determined the atmosphere of Roman society. Other less capital elements of disintegration might be mentioned, such as the depreciation of coinage; and elsewhere we shall have to notice the dislocating effects of geographical separation and national difference on the Empire.

We may close this chapter by considering the political situation of the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. We see at the first glance that there coexisted in it three separate organizations, representing the three ideas which were mixing and striving with each other, engaged in the process of producing a new world; and these were therefore the fundamental political forces of the age. The first of these was the civil service which was organized by Diocletian and Constantine in the form of a staircase or hierarchy, descending by successive grades from the highest ministers to the lowest clerks. With it the idea of the Roman Imperium was closely bound up, and it was the depository of the great product of the Roman spirit, the system of Roman law. Secondly, there was the army, which was Roman in its organization and traditions, but was the chief opening by which the Germans were able to gain influence and political power in the Empire; at this time it really represented the semi-barbarians. It has been often remarked that the old Roman spirit seemed to preserve itself best in the army, a result of observation which at first sight might seem to be curiously at variance with the most obvious fact that the army was recruited with Germans. And yet on looking deeper we see that these facts have a causal connection; it was just the fresh German spirit which was able to give some new life to the old forms and throw some enthusiasm into the task of maintaining the Roman name of which they were really proud. And it was this coalition of Roman and German elements in the army which made the dismemberment of the Empire in the West less violent than it might have been.

The army and the civil service were institutions produced by Rome herself, subject to the Emperor as the supreme head expressing the unity of the State. The third organization, the Christian Church, was in a different position, within the Empire and yet not of it, but in the fourth and fifth centuries closely connected with it.

The manner in which these three forces, the Roman system, the semi-barbarians, and the Christian Church, interacted and produced a new world was conditioned by two essential facts: (1) the presence of the German nations outside the Empire pressing on it as its strength declined; and (2) the heterogeneity of the parts of which the Roman world consisted. For the Roman world was a complex of different nations and languages, without a really deep-reaching unity, held together so long by the mere brute strength of tyrannical Roman universality, expressed in one law, one official language, and one Emperor—a merely external union. Naturally it fell into two worlds, the Greek (once the dominion of Alexander) and the Roman; and this natural division finally asserted itself and broke the artificial globe of the Roman universe.

But the globe was not burst asunder suddenly; it cracked, and the crack enlarged by degrees and the pieces fell apart gently. The separation of the eastern and western worlds  took place gradually, and the actual territorial division between the sons of Theodosius did not theoretically constitute two Roman Empires. The remarkable circumstance is that the name and traditions of Rome clung to the Greek more closely than to the Roman part of the Empire; and that the work of fusion wrought there by Alexander and his successors may be said truly to have contributed as much to the long duration of the Roman Imperium as the work of the Caesars themselves.

IV

THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE EMPIRE

The reader will remember that the new system instituted by Diocletian and developed by Constantine divided the Empire into a number of dioceses, each of which consisted of a group of adjacent provinces. The governor of a province was accordingly under the control of the governor of the diocese to which his province belonged; and in his turn the governor of the diocese was under the control of that praetorian prefect under whose jurisdiction the diocese happened to be. A hierarchy of officials was thus formed. The number of the prefects and the extent of the jurisdiction of each varied during the fourth century with the various partitions that were made by coregent sovereigns; but from the time of Constantine there was always a prefect of the Gauls, including Spain and Britain, and always a prefect of the East, while Italy and the Balkan lands were sometimes united under one prefect, and sometimes severed under two. But the final partition between the sons of Theodosius in 395 determined that there were to be four praetorian prefects, two in the East and two in the West; so that after that elate we may consider the Empire as definitely divided into four prefectures, each prefecture consisting of a certain number of dioceses, and each diocese of a certain number of provinces.

But to understand what the Roman Empire really was, we must penetrate behind these administrative divisions, and find in its origin the secret of its essence. It was mainly an aggregate of cities which were originally independent states, and which still were allowed to retain enough of independence and of their municipal government to stand in their old relation of exclusiveness towards one another. In England a resident of Leeds is at home in Manchester, and has judicially the same position as a citizen of Manchester, whereas in the Roman Empire a citizen of Thessalonica was an alien in Dyrrhachium, a citizen of Corinth was an alien in Patras. Thus the citizens of different provincial towns stood in a double relation to one another; they were all Roman citizens, subject to the same central authority, and herein they were united; but they were also severally citizens of some particular city, and herein they were politically severed from the rest of the Roman world. The Empire has been therefore compared to a federation of Swiss cantons, governed by an emperor and senate.

But there was one important sphere from which this double-sidedness was excluded, namely, the sphere of senatorial rank. When the member of a municipality, for example, became elevated to the senate, he was thereby withdrawn from the duties which devolved on him in his native place to participate in the privileges and obligations of a senator. The senatorial world was thus the undiluted atmosphere of pure Roman imperialism, in which the unity of the Empire is reflected. From this point of view we may regard the Empire as consisting of three parts, the Emperor, the senators, and the mass of Roman citizens. The personages of senatorial position formed a homogeneous society which, in the political structure, may be looked on as a mean between the unity of the imperial person and the heterogeneity of the general body of citizens.

It is of great importance to understand what the senate and the senatorial rank really meant. We must carefully distinguish senators in general from those senators who actually sat in the conclaves which were held in the “senate house of Julian” at Constantinople. To be a senator in the first sense meant merely a distinction of social rank which involved certain taxes and burdens, but implied no political action as a senator. On the other hand, this social distinction was determined by political position, and the aristocracy of the Roman Empire in the fifth century was an aristocracy of officials. This is a fact to be borne in mind, that social rank ultimately depended upon a public career, and to render it intelligible it is necessary to explain the constitution of the senate.

In the time of Constantine only those who had held the highest official rank, consuls, proconsuls, or prefects, were members of the senate. The new forms of court ceremony, which were instituted by Aurelian and Diocletian and elaborated by their successors, gave to such personages precedence over lesser dignitaries, and they were distinguished by the title of clarissimi, "most renowned." Social rank depended on precedence at court, and precedence at court depended on official position. Thus, under Constantine and his immediate successors, clarissimi and senators denoted the same class of persons, though regarded under different aspects. Officers of lower rank were grouped into two classes, the perfectissimi and the egregii, who were not members of the senate; these included the governors of dioceses and provinces, dukes, correctores, and others.

But in the course of time the senatorial rank was extended beyond these narrower limits and conferred upon the provincial governors and many subordinate officials. This involved the elevation of the 'perfectissimi and egregii into the class of the "most renowned." And this elevation necessitated a further change; for it would have been plainly incongruous to give to the governor of Helenopontus or Palestine the same title of honor as to the praetorian prefect of the East. Accordingly, while the class of "the most perfect" and the class of "the excellent" fell away because their members had become "most renowned", two new ranks of higher honour than the most renowned were created, namely the illustres and the spectabiles. Those who had been before clarissimi or perfectissimi were raised to a higher degree.

Thus in the reign of Constantine and at the beginning of the fifth century there were different sets of titles. Clarissimus, which was the greatest title at the earlier period, was the least title at the later period. The praetorian prefects, the prefects of Old Rome and New Rome, the masters of foot and horse, the quaestors, the masters of offices, the count of the exchequer and the count of the privy purse, were all addressed as "illustrious"; the vicars of the dioceses and others were known as “respectable”, while the provincial governors were “most renowned”.

Three important changes, then, took place between the reigns of Constantine and Arcadius. (1) The great mass of the civil and military officials were incorporated in the senatorial aristocracy; (2) as a consequence of this, there were formed three grades of senatorial rank, instead of three grades of official rank of which the highest alone was senatorial; (3) the highest class, the illustres, became larger than that of the clarissimi used to be, by the elevation of a number of officers to an equality with the prefects and consuls, namely the quaestor, the master of offices, the comes sacrarum largitionum, and the comes rei privatae.

The extension of the senatorial rank was probably made in the interests of the treasury. We have already remarked that this rank did not imply a seat in the senate house of New Rome or of Old Rome. The majority of the senatorial classes probably lived in the provinces,—not only the provincial governors whose duty compelled them to do so, but also a large number of retired officials, who were known by the name of honorati. All, except those who were specially excused in consideration of past services, were obliged by their nobility to heavy burdens and expenses. Like all others, they were liable to the property tax and to the burden of supplying recruits for the army and relays of horses in the imperial service; besides this they had three other sources of expense, a regular tax, an irregular tax, and an indirect burden. The regular tax was the follis or gleba, a tax on property, which the Emperor himself, as a senator, paid. The irregular tax was the aurum oblaticium, an offering in money, which senators were obliged to present to the Emperor on the fifth, tenth, and such anniversaries of his accession, or on occasion of a victory. The indirect burden consisted in the fact that any senator might be compelled to discharge the functions of a praetor, and expend large sums on the exhibition of games and shows; and thus a man of senatorial standing, living in the provinces, was sometimes compelled to reside temporarily in the capital in order to discharge this unwelcome duty.3 The praetors in Constantinople were at first two, but gradually reached the number of eight, but as the games and spectacles did not call the fortunes of all into requisition, some of them were compelled to contribute to the erection of public buildings. From this burden it was customary to exempt retired civil servants, and this exemption was called allectio.

This explanation of the position of the senators or aristocrats of the later Roman Empire will show how utterly mistaken was a celebrated German historian, when he characterized the aristocracy as resting on the principle of hereditary immunity from taxes. He misinterpreted the word immunitas, which is applied to the senators, and means merely freedom from municipal taxes. Only a certain number were admitted to the privileges and condoned the obligations of the class, namely the retired civil servants; curials who, having discharged their municipal burdens for many years, were in advanced age raised to senatorial standing; and professional men, such as court physicians and public professors and teachers licensed by the government.

From all this we may deduce with tolerable clearness the general social relations that existed in the fifth century. Between the Emperor and the mass of the subjects there existed an aristocracy, based on public service and consisting of three grades of nobility, the higher, the middle, and the lower aristocracy. In it were included some who would nowadays belong to the middle classes, statesmen, professors, physicians of distinction, such as in England might be honoured by knighthood, or exceptionally by a peerage. Between the aristocracy and the lower class of artisans and peasants may be reckoned a sort of middle class, including the decurions or provincial magnates who might look forward to elevation to the aristocracy if they lived long enough, and who in social position may be roughly compared to "county people" in England; rich merchants; young lawyers beginning their political career, who might look forward to winning a high position in the aristocracy. Hovering between this middle class and the lower strata were probably the physicians not patronized by the Emperor, and unlicensed teachers and rhetoricians, who depended on the patronage of the rich.

In this conspectus of society nothing has been said of the clergy. They formed a hierarchy by themselves, and their social position would correspond to their place in the hierarchy; although it must not be forgotten that the sanctity attaching to his office gave the humblest monk or deacon in those early days of piety an honourable position such as is hardly enjoyed by a curate of the English Church at present. The Patriarch of Constantinople was a peer of the Emperor, the bishops and archbishops may perhaps be considered peers of the aristocracy, while the mass of the clergy may be reckoned in the middle class.

Turning now from the social to the official side, we may briefly consider the position of the most important officers in the Roman system of administration, confining ourselves to the eastern half of the Empire. Highest in the first class of the aristocracy, the illustrious, stood the four praetorian prefects, of whom each exercised authority over about a quarter of the Empire. Under the praetorian prefect of the East were all the Asiatic provinces, as well as six European provinces in Thrace. This dominion was divided into five dioceses—Asia, Pontus, the East, Thrace, and Egypt; the governor of Egypt, however, was practically independent of the prefect of the East. Under the prefect of Illyricum, who resided at Thessalonica, were all the lands of the Balkan peninsula, except Thrace and the islands of the Aegean. These lands were divided into two dioceses, Dacia and Macedonia.

The functions of the praetorian prefect embraced a wide sphere; they were administrative, financial, judicial, and even legislative. In the first place, the vicars of the dioceses were responsible to him for their actions, and completely under his control. With him rested their deposition, as well as the deposition of the provincial governors; and it was at his recommendation that the Emperor appointed men to fill these posts. In the second place, he had an exchequer of his own, and the revenue accruing to the treasury from his prefecture passed through his hands; it was through him that the Emperor made known and carried into execution his financial measures, and it rested perhaps more with the prefect than with the Emperor whether the subjects were oppressed by taxation. In the third place, he was, as well as the Emperor himself, a supreme judge of appeal. An appeal from the decision of a vicar or a dux might be addressed either to the praetorian prefect or to the Emperor, but if it were addressed to the former there was no further appeal to the latter. In the fourth place, he was empowered to issue praetorian edicts, but they probably concerned only smaller matters of administration or judicial detail.

The exalted position of these ministers was marked by their purple robe, or mandye, which differed from that of the sovereign only in being shorter, reaching to the knees instead of to the feet. His large silver inkstand, his pencase of gold weighing 100 lbs., his lofty chariot, are mentioned as three official symbols of his office. On his entry all military officers were expected to bend the knee, a survival of the fact that his office was originally not civil but military. The importance of this minister is illustrated by Eusebius, who compares the relation of God the Son to God the Father with that of the praetorian prefect to the Emperor, and by the remark of Johannes Lydus that “the office of praetorian prefect is like the ocean, encircling all other offices, and ministering to all their needs”.

There was no prefect of the city of Constantinople until the close of the reign of Constantius (359 AD), and this fact alone shows that the equalization of New Rome and Old Rome, with which Constantine is credited, has been often exaggerated. On the illustrious prefect of the city devolved the superintendence of all matters connected with the city, the maintenance of order, the care of the aqueducts, the supervision of the markets, the census, the control of the metropolitan police, the responsibility of supplying the city with provisions. He was the supreme judge in the metropolitan courts.

The grand chamberlain, praepositus sacri cubiculi, was a functionary rendered necessary by the oriental tincture given to the imperial surroundings by the policy of Diocletian. He issued commands to all the officers connected with the palace and the Emperor's person, including the count of the wardrobe (comes sacrae vestis), the count of the residence (comes domorum), the officer of the bedroom (primicerius cubiculorum), and also to the officers of the palace bodyguard, called silentiarii. His constant attendance on the person of the Emperor gave this minister an opportunity of exercising a vast influence for good or evil, especially if the Emperor happened, like Arcadius, to be of a weak and pliable disposition.

We now come to the ministers of finance, the count of the sacred bounties (sacrarum largitionum), and the count of the private estates (rerum privatarum).

The count of the sacred bounties was the lord treasurer or chancellor of the exchequer, for the public treasury and the imperial fisc had come to be identical; while the count of the private estates managed the imperial demesnes and the privy purse. Thus in the fifth century the "sacred bounties" corresponded to the acrarium of the early Empire, while the res privatae represented the fisc.

The duties of the illustrious master of the offices, magister officiorum, were somewhat nondescript. He had control over the bureaux of imperial correspondence, over messengers dispatched on imperial orders, over the soldiers on guard at the palace, over manufactories of arms. He introduced foreign ambassadors to the imperial presence, and arranged for their entertainment. He superintended court ceremonies (officium ammissionum). Arcadius transferred to him the control of the imperial post or cursus publicus, which had been a function of the praetorian prefects; and if it were the policy of an Emperor to diminish the sphere of the prefects, it was the master of offices who was ready to take upon him new duties.

The second rank of the spectabiles, respectables, embraced all the governors of dioceses, whatever their titles; the count of the East, the augustal prefect of Egypt, the vicars of Asiana, Pontica, the Thraces, and Macedonia. It also included the governors of two provinces who had the privilege of not being subject to any vicar or prefect, the proconsuls of Asia and Achaia. The military counts and dukes were all of " respectable" rank, as well as some high officers in the palace.

To the third degree of the "most renowned" belonged all the governors of provinces who bore the title of praeses, corrector, or consularis, as well as a large number of subordinate officers in the imperial bureaux.

When we turn from the ministers and governors themselves to their staffs, we find that there was a great difference between the palatini, or servants of the higher bureaux, and the cohortalini, as the staffs of the provincial governors were called, this name being one of the many survivals of the military origin of the civil service. The chief officials in the bureau of the count of the sacred bounties or of the master of offices regarded the honours of their rank as privileges which they were glad to transmit to their children; and the same remark applies to the subordinates of the praetorian prefect or of the master of soldiers, although they were not palatine. On the other hand, the cohortalini considered it a great hardship that they were obliged to follow their fathers' profession. They were not allowed to obtain promotion into the higher civil service.

Promotion was strictly regular; and no one could reach the highest posts until he had filled in order all the inferior grades. This excluded the interference of influential friends to a considerable extent. At the same time every promotion depended on the Emperor, in whose hands all appointments rested; though in the majority of cases he was of course determined by the recommendation of the heads of the bureaux.

In many departments the officials were able to increase the fixed income which they received from the State by fees which were paid them for supplying copies of documents or signing bills. The highest official in a department was a general superintendent or chief, often more than one, under whom came the chiefs of special divisions. Thus, in the office of the praetorian prefect there were three chiefs, the princeps, the cornicularius, and the adjutor, whose duties were of a general character; and in the second grade the abactis, who presided over the civil department, the commentariensis, who, as a sort of chief of police or under-home-secretary, presided over the criminal jurisdiction, and the numerarius, who was a chief accountant. No one could hope for promotion to higher posts who had not the advantage of a good general education, but there were subordinate offices of a mechanical nature which could be filled by persons who had received only a primary education.

The support of higher education by the State deserves to be mentioned here, not only because some of the chief teachers were admitted to the ranks of the aristocracy, but because the schools of the sophists and rhetors were the nurseries of the statesmen. Hadrian had established an academy at Rome, called the Athenaeum, in imitation of the Museum at Alexandria, and Marcus Aurelius founded chairs (political and sophistic) at Athens, endowed with salaries paid by the State. But it was not only in large towns like Rome, Athens, or Alexandria, that there were licensed teachers publicly paid; in all provincial towns of any size there were a certain number of such school­masters. In small towns there were three sophists; in towns of medium size there were four sophists and four grammarians; in capital cities there were five rhetors and five grammarians. It is to be observed that the grammarians were not merely teachers of grammar; they were rather what we call philologists—they read and interpreted ancient authors. A distinction between sophists and rhetors is also to be observed; while both taught the art of style and oratory, the sophists only taught, while the rhetors also practiced publicly in law courts. Alexandria and Athens were in many ways privileged; for example, the philosophers (metaphysicians, not to be confounded with sophists) in those cities were exempted from public burdens, while in other towns they did not participate in the privileges of the rhetoricians and philologists. It is to be remarked that during the fifth century the study of rhetoric was probably declining, and that the law schools of Rome and Berytus were far more fully attended than the lecture-rooms of the sophists.

There were two great divisions of the Roman army in the fourth century, corresponding to two different kinds of military service. There were the soldiers who continually kept guard on the frontiers, and the soldiers who were stationed in the interior and were transported to the frontiers in case of a war. (1) The former were called limitanei, borderers, or riparienses, soldiers of the river bank. The latter term, which was originally applied to the men who guarded the Danube or the Rhine, was afterwards used in as general a sense as limitanei.

 (2) The latter were the soldiers of the line (numeri), and consisted of comitatenses and palatini. They correspond to the legionary soldiers of early times, who were drawn altogether from Italy, in contrast with the auxilia, who were supplied by the rest of the Empire, until the edict of Caracalla cast down the wall of privilege that encompassed Italy and thereby admitted non-Italian citizens to the legions. The palatini were properly those regiments which protected the imperial palace, and were under the command of the illustrious magister militum in praesenti; while other regiments were called comitatenses, a term derived from the retinue (comitatus) of a general. These soldiers were obliged to serve for twenty years, whereas the less favoured border troops were obliged to serve for twenty-four years. The position of the latter in respect to the comitatenses and palatini may be compared to the position of the auxilia in respect to the legions of the early Empire. The troops located in the East were commanded by the magister militum per orientem, those in Thrace by the magister militum per Thracias, and those in Illyricum by the magister militum per Illyricum. In all these armies the barbarian element was large during the fourth century and was continually increasing.

The limitanei were not only soldiers; they were tillers of the soil, who were settled on the limes or frontier territory, which they were allowed to cultivate for their own support and bound to defend. The warfare against the barbarians chiefly consisted in defending the forts, castra, which were built along the limes, whence they received the name castriani. This sort of life is an anticipation of the Middle Ages. Veteran soldiers used to receive lands, if they chose, on the limes; but care was taken that they should really cultivate their farms, as old soldiers were likely to bully their neighbours and levy black­mail if they were not looked after.

The separation of the civil from the military power by Diocletian, and the restriction of the praetorian prefect's functions to civil matters were attended by the disappearance of the praetorian guards, and the substitution of a new body of guards called scholares, who were under the supervision of the magister officiorum. This fact indicates that the magister officiorum corresponds to a considerable degree to the praetorian prefect of the third century; he was commander of the guards, and combined civil with military functions. The number of the scholarians in the fourth and fifth centuries was 3500. They received higher pay than the troops of the line, and had, of course, the prestige that is naturally attached to guardsmen. They were entitled to receive annonae civicae, which they could bequeath or sell.

There were also other guardsmen named domestici, of whom certain corps were called protectores, and these appear to have been superior in rank to the scholarians.

V

CONSTANTINOPLE

At the beginning of the fourth century it would have entered into the dream of no Roman, whether Christian or pagan, that the city of Byzantium, which, he chiefly associated with the commerce of the Euxine, was in a few years to receive a new name and become the rival of Rome. Still less could one have imagined that the city, which was almost immediately to over­shadow Alexandria and Antioch, was soon to overshadow Rome also, and that two centuries and a half thence the city on the Tiber would be desolate and the city on the Bosphorus the mistress of Europe and Asia.

Constantine thought of other sites for his new city before he fixed on the idea of enlarging and enriching Byzantium. Both Antioch and Alexandria were eminently and obviously unsuitable for his purpose. The great objection to both of those cities was that they were not sufficiently central; another grave objection was that the temper of the inhabitants of those once royal capitals would not easily endure the moulding and remodelling which the founder of a new imperial residence must wish to carry out.

The idea seems to have flashed across the mind of Constantine of choosing some Illyrian town, Sardica or his favourite Naissus; but, notwithstanding the prepossessions which as a native he naturally felt for those regions, he could hardly entertain the idea seriously. Their distance from the sea, their situation not readily approachable, even with good roads, put Sardica and Naissus at once away from the number of possible capitals; but it is interesting that there was just a chance that the capital of modern Bulgaria—Sofia is the old Sardica—might have been made the capital of the Roman Empire, and called Constantinople. Other places that might have claimed the honour were Thessalonica and Corinth; the city of the Isthmus especially would have been an excellent centre between East and West.

But Constantine did not desire a centre for the whole Empire; he rather desired a centre for the eastern half. As a centre for the whole Empire, the most suitable city would obviously have been Aquileia. But he did not desire to depress the dignity of Old Rome; his New Rome was to occupy the same position in the East as Old Borne occupied in the West. If the situation of Old Rome had been more central, it is probable that New Rome would never have been founded. This, too, formed a vital objection to Naissus, and even to Sardica; neither they nor Corinth nor Thessalonica were close enough to Asia. The same objection that told against allowing Rome to remain the sole centre of the whole Empire, told equally against choosing any city in Illyricum or Greece as the new capital. If there was any reason for a new capital at all, it must be geographically central for the eastern half of the Empire; in other words, it must be on the borders of the Illyrian peninsula and Asia Minor. Therefore neither Antioch nor Alexandria on the one hand, nor Sardica, Naissus, Thessalonica, or Corinth on the other hand, could become Constantinople.

It remained, then, for Constantine to choose some city close to the Propontis. The first name that would naturally offer itself was Nicomedia, the residence of Diocletian when he administered the eastern provinces. But the idea of Nicomedia could not be entertained long when its situation was compared with the city which dominates the Bosphorus. Constantine, however, seems to have hesitated for a time between Byzantium, Chalcedon, and the site of ancient Ilium. But it is obvious that Chalcedon could never have been a serious rival of the city on the hills which looked down upon it; and in spite of Homeric memories, associated with the example of Alexander the Great, the idea of a new Mysian city was soon abandoned for the place which commands the entrance to the Euxine and seems adapted by nature to be the key of Europe and the mistress of Asia Minor. And so it came to pass that the city which looks down upon the Chalcedonian sands became the rival of Rome.

Constantine, in the words of a chronicler, "decorated it, as if it were his native city, with great adornment, and desired that it should be made equal to Rome; and then, having sought citizens for it from all parts, he lavished great riches, so that he exhausted on it almost all the treasures and royal resources. There, too, he established a senate of second rank." In two respects, especially, the new city was not coordinate with the old city; the senate had not equal rights, and there was no praefectus urbis, but these differences were soon obliterated, the two capitals became politically peers before the death of Julian, though ecclesiastically Old Rome maintained the primacy. It was more, apparently, to have been called the city of St. Peter, than to have been the city of the Caesars.

The shape of Constantinople is triangular; it is bounded on two sides by water and on one side by land. At the east corner and on the south side it is washed by the Bosphorus, which flows at first almost from north to south and then takes a south-western course; on the north by the inlet of the Bosphorus, which was called the Golden Horn; and on the west by the wall of Constantine, protecting the enlarged city.

The eastern angle formed by the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, was dominated by the acropolis, on whose summit were situated the palace of the Emperors, the hippodrome, and the church of St. Sophia. The northern angle, formed by the Golden Horn and the land wall, was marked by the church and gate of Blachernae. In the south-western corner was the Golden Gate, by which triumphal processions used to enter Constantinople, and hard by was the Julian Harbour. If the relative positions of the Golden Gate, the region of Blachernae, and the imperial palace are remembered, it is easy to find one's way in the topography of Constantinople, as far as it concerns general history. The city was divided into fourteen regions, and, like Rome, was a city of seven hills; but it is unnecessary for us here, as we are not concerned with the topography for its own sake, to take account of these divisions. It is the great square on the acropolis, with the surrounding buildings, which demands our attention, as it was in that region that the political life of Constantinople was carried on.

A traveller coming (let us suppose about 600 AD) from Old Rome to New Rome, by Brundusium and Dyrrhachium, would proceed overland along the Via Egnatia, and, passing through the towns of Heraclea and Selymbria on the Propontis, would enter Constantinople by the Golden Gate, which was erected by Theodosius the Great. A long street, with covered colonnades —suggesting an eastern town—on either side, would lead him in a due easterly direction to the great Milion, the milestone from which all distances were measured. For since Con­stantinople had become the capital all roads tended thither; and the most recent explorers in Asia Minor are struck by the fact that, whereas in the early Empire all the roads led to Ephesus, at the time of Constantine this system was revolutionized and all tended to the new capital. But before he saw the Milion the traveller would be struck by the imposing mass and great dome of St. Sophia, the eternal monument of Justinian and his architect Anthemius. As he stood in front of the west entrance of the great church, the northern side of the hippodrome would be on his right hand.

Then passing on a few steps farther and standing with his back to the south side of St. Sophia, he would see stretching before him southward a long rectangular place, bounded on one side by the eastern wall of the hippodrome and on the other by the western wall of the imperial palace. This place was called the Augusteum or Augustaion, that is, the Place of Augustus or the Imperial Place. It is not clear, however, whether the name was chosen as a sort of renovation of Gusteon, vegetable market, the place having been used for that purpose in old Byzantium; or whether Gusteon was a corruption of Augusteon, and this gave rise to the derivation. The magnificence of Justinian had paved this piazza with marble, and the southern part was distinguished as the Marble Place,  while the northern part, near St. Sophia, was called Milion, from the building of that name, which the traveller, looking southward, would see on his right hand, close to the wall of the hippodrome.

The Milion was not a mere pillar; it was a roofed building, open at the sides, supported by seven pillars, and within were to be seen the statues of Constantine the Great and his mother St. Helena, those of Justin the Younger and his wife Sophia, those of Arabia, Justin's daughter, and of another Helena of less renown, a niece of Justin. The Milion was an important station in the public processions of the Emperors. Walking from the south, and still keeping to the west side of the Augusteum, our traveller would have seen the great pillar surmounted by the statue of Justinian, and the other great pillar surmounted by the statue of the Empress Eudoxia, of which the stylobate still exists. Having passed some mansions of private individuals, he reaches the southern limit of the Augusteum and returns along the eastern side, which is occupied with more important edifices. Of these buildings, which are separated from the walls of the palace by a long portico called the Passage of Achilles,  the most southerly was the baths of Zeuxippus. Originally built by Severus, these baths were enriched with splendid statues, chiefly of great men, Homer and Hesiod, Plato and Aristotle, Demosthenes and Aeschines, Julius Caesar, Virgil. But these valuable works perished in the flames which consumed the whole building in the great Nika revolt of 532. Justinian rebuilt it, but he could not restore the labours of antiquity.

North of the Zeuxippus was the senate house (Buleuterion), originally built by Julian and adorned with even more precious monuments of Hellenic sculpture than the baths of Severus. But it too did not escape fire; like St. Sophia it had to be twice rebuilt, first in the reign of Arcadius, on the occasion of Chrysostom's arrest, and afterwards in the Nika sedition, which was fatal to so many public buildings.

After the senate house he comes to the residence of the Patriarch (Patriarcheion), which probably faced the Milion on the opposite side. The Patriarch's house contained a splendid hall, called the Thomaites, and also halls of justice for the hearing of ecclesiastical cases. A visitor to Byzantium, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, mentions that an excellent garden was attached to the patriarchal palace, and perhaps it lay between the house itself and the senate house.

Our imaginary traveller, having now reached the north side of the Augusteum again will notice a small church between the palace wall and the south-east corner of St. Sophia. This is the church of our Lady of the Chalkoprateia, so called because originally this region was a quarter of Jewish bronzesmiths. Hard by a gate will be observed in the wall of the palace, the gate of Meletius, from which the Emperor used to issue when he visited St. Sophia; entering the church of the Chalkoprateia, he used to proceed into the great church by a private covered staircase, called the "Wooden Scala," which spanned the distance between the two churches.

North of St. Sophia stood two important buildings, the hospice of Sampson and the church of St. Irene. Both of these were burned down in the Nika revolt, and newly erected.

The hippodrome, constructed by Septimius Severus, improved and adorned by Constantine, was the scene of many important political movements and transactions at Constantinople. Its length from north to south was 639 cubits, its breadth about 158. Its southern end was of crescent shape, like a sigma, the northern end was occupied by a small two-storied palace, and the Emperor beheld the games from a box or cathisma, which he entered through the palace by a winding stair. Under the palace were porticoes (like the Roman carceres), in which horses and chariots were kept, called the Mangana. The same name was applied to the great storehouse of arms at Constantinople. The hippodrome had at least four gates; one on the right of the cathisma, through which the Blue faction was wont to enter; a second corresponding on the left, which was appropriated to the Greens; a third, "the Gate of Decimus", close to the second; a fourth, called the "Dead Gate", through which the corpses of the slain were carried away, in the east wall. There was probably another gate opposite to the Dead Gate in the west wall, for when the Emperors visited the church of Sergius and Bacchus, which lay south-west of the hippodrome, they passed through the hippodrome.

As for the interior of the imperial palace, new light has been thrown upon the intricate details, which puzzle the student of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, by the researches of M. Paspatis, who has discovered new topographical marks for its reconstruction. In the first place, he was able to determine the direction of the old walls of the palace, the building of the Thracian railways having opened up the ground; and in the second place, the identification of the Pharos provided a starting point for tracing the situation of the buildings and chambers of the palace mentioned by historians, with the help of some other data derived from his studies on the spot. Into this reconstruction it is not necessary for us to enter here, for the internal arrangement of the palace concerns the history with which we have now to do very slightly. If we were dealing with the history of the Eastern Empire, and had to tell of the court of Theophilus or the court of Constantine VII, we could not afford to neglect the reconstruction of M. Paspatis; but the historians of the period from 395 to 800 AD seldom trouble us with perplexing details about the palace.

Constantinople had two suburbs over the water, to both of which the word peratic might be applied. There was the suburb of Scutari, on the other side of the Bosphorus; and there was the suburb of Sycae on the other side of the Golden Horn. Sycae had two regions, Galata and Pera, both of which names are still in use. When we read of the peratic demes in Byzantine historians, members of the demes who lived on the north side of the Golden Horn "across the water" seem to have been meant; but when we read of the peratic themes, the troops quartered in Asia Minor are meant. Galata, I conjecture, is a very old name, dating from the third century BC, when it was usual for kings and towns to hire the Celts as mercenaries. The Byzantines probably hired bands of Celts, and, afraid of admitting them into the city, allotted them a Celtic or "Galatian" quarter on the other side of the Golden Horn; and the name Galata clung to the place when the Galatae had been long forgotten.