The reign of Heraclius forms the best dividing point in the history of the
 empire between what may roughly be called Ancient History and the Middle
 Ages. There is no break at all between Constantine and Heraclius, though
 the area, character, social life, and religion of the empire had been
 greatly modified in the three hundred years that separated them. The new
 order of things, which commenced when Constantine established his capital
 on the Bosphorus, had a peaceable and orderly development. The first
 prominent fact that strikes the eye in the history of the three centuries
 is that the sceptre passed from sovereign to sovereign in quiet and
 undisturbed devolution. From the death of Valens onward there is no
 instance of a military usurper breaking the line of succession till the
 crowning of Phocas in 602. The emperors were either designated by their
 predecessors or--less frequently--chosen by the high officials and the
 senate. The regularity of their sequence is all the more astonishing when
 we realize that only in three cases in the whole period was father
 succeeded by son. Saving Constantine himself, Theodosius I., and Arcadius,
 not a single emperor left male issue; yet the hereditary instinct had
 grown so strong in the empire that nephews, sons-in-law, and
 brothers-in-law of sovereigns were gladly received as their legitimate
 heirs. Considering this tendency, it is extraordinary to note that the
 whole three hundred years did not produce a single unmitigated tyrant.
 Constantius II. was gloomy and sometimes cruel, Valens was stupid and
 avaricious, Arcadius utterly weak and inept, Justinian hard and thankless;
 but the general average of the emperors were men of respectable ability,
 and in moral character they will compare favourably with any list of
 sovereigns of similar length that any country can produce.
 
 The chief modifications which must be marked in the character of the
 empire between 320 and 620 depend on two processes of gradual change which
 were going on throughout the three centuries. The first was the gradual
 de-Romanization (if we may coin the uncouth word) alike of the governing
 classes and the masses of population. In the fourth century the Roman
 impress was still strong in the East; the Latin language was habitually
 spoken by every educated man, and nearly all the machinery of the
 administration was worked in Latin phraseology. All law terms are
 habitually Latin, all titles of officers, all names of taxes and
 institutions. Writers born and bred in Greece or Asia still wrote in Latin
 as often as in the Greek which must have been more familiar to them.
 Ammianus Marcellinus may serve as a fair example: born in Greece, he wrote
 in the tongue of the ruling race rather than in his own idiom. Moreover
 there was still in the lands east of the Adriatic a very large body of
 Latin-speaking population--comprising all the inhabitants of the inland of
 the Balkan peninsula, for, except Greece proper, Macedonia, and a
 scattered line of cities along the Thracian coast, the whole land had
 learnt to speak the tongue of its conquerors.
 
 By the seventh century this Roman element was rapidly vanishing. It is
 true that the Emperor was still hailed as the "Pius, Felix, Perpetuus,
 Augustus": it was not till about A.D. 800 that he dropped the old style
 and called himself "{~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~} {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER CHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER RHO~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH PERISPOMENI AND YPOGEGRAMMENI~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH VARIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH VARIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~} {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER RHO WITH DASIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER MU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}." Nor were the
 old Roman official titles yet disused: men were still tribunes and
 patricians, counts and praetors, but little more than the names survived.
 Already in the sixth century a knowledge of Latin was growing unusual even
 among educated men. The author Johannes Lydus tells us that he owed his
 rise in the civil service mainly to this rare accomplishment. Procopius,
 the best writer of the day and a man of real merit and discernment, was
 absolutely ignorant of the rudiments of Latin, and blunders when he tries
 to translate the simplest phrase. Justinian was the last emperor who spoke
 Latin as his mother tongue, all his successors were better skilled in
 Greek.
 
 The gradual disuse of Latin has its origin in the practical--though not
 formal--solution of the continuity between Rome and the East, which began
 with the division of the empire between the sons of Constantine and became
 more complete after Odoacer made himself King of Italy in 476. In the
 course of a century and a half the Latin element in the East, cut off from
 the Latin-speaking West, was bound to yield before the predominant Greek.
 But the process would have been slower if the Eastern provinces which
 spoke Latin had not been those which suffered most from the barbarians.
 The Visigoths and Ostrogoths harassed and decimated the Thracians,
 Illyrians, and Moesians, but the Slavs a century later almost exterminated
 them. In A.D. 400 probably a quarter of the provincials east of the
 Adriatic spoke Latin; in A.D. 620 not a tenth. The Romanized lands of the
 Balkan peninsula had now become Slavonic principalities: only the
 Dalmatian seaports and a few scattered survivors in the Balkans still used
 the old tongue. The only districts where a considerable Latin-speaking
 population obeyed the Emperor were Africa and the Italian Exarchate, now
 reunited to Constantinople by the conquests of Justinian. But they seem to
 have been too remote from the centre of life and government to have
 exercised any influence or delayed the de-Romanizing of the East. The last
 notable author, who being a subject of the empire wrote in Latin as his
 native tongue, was the poet Flavius Corippus who addressed a long
 panegyric to Justinus II.: as might have been expected, he was an African.
 
 While the empire was losing its Roman characteristics, it was at the same
 time growing more and more Christian at heart. Under Constantine and his
 immediate successors the machinery of government was only just beginning
 to be effected by the change of the emperor's religion. Though the
 sovereign personally was Christian, the system remained what it had been
 before. Many of the high officials were still pagans, and the form and
 spirit of all administrative and legal business was unaltered from what it
 had been in the third century. It is not till forty years after
 Constantine's death that we find the Christian spirit fully penetrating
 out of the spiritual into the material sphere of life. Attempts by the
 State to suppress moral sin no less than legal crime begin with Theodosius
 I., whose crusade against sexual immorality would have been
 incomprehensible to even the best of the pagan emperors. The old
 gladiatorial shows, one of the most characteristic and repulsive features
 of Roman life, were abolished not long after. They survived for sixty
 years at Rome, though Christian Constantinople never knew them. But this
 was not the work of the State, but of a single individual. One day in A.D.
 404 the games had begun, and the gladiators were about to engage, when the
 monk Telemachus leapt down into the arena and threw himself between the
 combatants, adjuring them not to slay their brethren. There was an angry
 scuffle, and the good monk was slain. But his death had the effect that
 his protests might have failed to bring about, and no gladiatorial show
 was ever given again.
 
                               
 
 General View Of St. Sophia. (_From "L'Art Byzantin." Par C. Bayet. Paris,
                              Quantin, 1883._)
 
 
 In other provinces of social life the work of Christianity was no less
 marked. It put an end to the detestable practice of infanticide which
 pervaded the ancient world, resting on the assumption that the father had
 the right to decide whether or not he would rear the child he had
 begotten. Constantine made the State assume the charge of feeding and
 rearing the children of the destitute, lest their parents should be
 tempted to cast them forth to perish in the old fashion, and Valentinian
 I. in 374 assimilated infanticide to other forms of murder, and made it a
 capital offence.
 
 Slavery was also profoundly affected by the teaching of the Church. The
 ancient world, save a few philosophers, had regarded the slave with such
 contempt that he was hardly reckoned a moral being or conceived to have
 rights or virtues. Christianity taught that he was a man with an immortal
 soul, no less than his own master, and bade slaves and freemen meet on
 terms of perfect equality around the baptismal font and before the sacred
 table. It was from the first taught that the man who manumitted his slaves
 earned the approval of heaven, and all occasions of rejoicing, public and
 private, were fitly commemorated by the liberation of deserving
 individuals. Though slavery was not extinguished for centuries, its evils
 were immensely modified; Justinian's legislation shows that by his time
 public opinion had condemned the characteristic evils of ancient slavery:
 he permitted the intermarriage of slaves and free persons, stipulating
 only for the consent of the owner of the servile partner in the wedlock.
 He declared the children of such mixed marriages free, and he made the
 prostitution of a slave by a master a criminal offence. Hereditary slavery
 became almost unknown, and the institution was only kept up by the
 introduction of barbarian captives, heathens and enemies, whose position
 did not appeal so keenly to the mind of their captors.
 
 The improvement of the condition of all the unhappy classes of which we
 have been speaking--women, infants, slaves, gladiators--can be directly
 traced back to a single fundamental Christian truth. It was the belief in
 the importance of the individual human soul in the eyes of God that led
 the converted Roman to realize his responsibility, and change his attitude
 towards the helpless beings whom he had before despised and neglected. It
 is only fair to add that the realization of this central truth did not
 always operate for good in the Roman world of the fifth and sixth
 centuries. Some of the developments of the new idea were harmful and even
 dangerous to the State. They took the form of laying such exclusive stress
 on the relations between the individual soul and heaven, that the duties
 of man to the State were half forgotten. Chief among these developments
 was the ascetic monasticism which, starting from Egypt, spread rapidly all
 over the empire, more especially over its eastern provinces. When men
 retire from their duties as citizens, intent on nothing but on saving
 their own souls, take up a position outside the State, and cease to be of
 the slightest use to society, the result may be harmless so long as their
 numbers are small. But at this time the monastic impulse was working on
 such a large scale that its development was positively dangerous. It was
 by thousands and ten thousands that the men who ought to have been bearing
 the burdens of the State, stepped aside into the monastery or the hermit's
 cave. The ascetics of the fifth century had neither of the justifications
 which made monasticism precious in a later age, they were neither
 missionaries nor men of learning. The monastery did not devote itself
 either to sending out preachers and teachers, or to storing up and
 cherishing the literary treasures of the ancient world. The first abbot to
 whom it occurred to turn the vast leisure of his monks to good account by
 setting them systematically to work at copying manuscripts was
 Cassiodorus, the ex-secretary to King Theodoric the Goth [A.D. 530-40].
 Before his time monks and books had no special connection with each other.
 
 When a State contains masses of men who devote their whole energies to a
 repulsively selfish attempt to save their own individual souls, while
 letting the world around them slide on as best it may, then the body
 politic is diseased. The Roman Empire in its fight with the barbarians was
 in no small degree hampered by this attitude of so many of its subjects.
 The ascetic took the barbarian invasions as judgments from heaven rightly
 inflicted upon a wicked world, and not as national calamities which called
 on every citizen to join in the attempt to repel them. Many men
 complacently interpreted the troubles of the fifth century as the
 tribulations predicted in the Apocalypse, and watched them develop with
 something like joy, since they must portend the close approach of the
 Second Advent of our Lord.
 
 This apathetic attitude of many Christians during the afflictions of the
 empire was maddening to the heathen minority which still survived among
 the educated classes. They roundly accused Christianity of being the ruin
 of the State by its anti-social teaching which led men to neglect every
 duty of the citizen. The Christian author Orosius felt himself compelled
 to write a lengthy history to confute this view, aiming his work at the
 pagan Symmachus whose book had been devoted to tracing all the calamities
 of the world to the conversion of Constantine.
 
 It was fortunate for the empire that its governing classes continued to
 preserve the old traditions of Roman state-craft, and fought on doggedly
 against all the ills of their time--barbarian invasion, famine, and
 pestilence, instead of bowing to the yoke and recognizing in every
 calamity the righteous judgment of heaven and the indication of the
 approaching end of the world.
 
 Paganism had practically disappeared by the end of the fifth century as an
 active force; none save a few philosophers made an open profession of it,
 and in 529 Justinian put a formal end to their teaching, by closing the
 schools of Athens, the last refuge of the professors of the expiring
 religion. But if open heathenism was dead, a large measure of
 indifferentism prevailed among the educated classes: many men who in the
 fifth century would have been pagans were Christians in name in the sixth,
 but little affected by Christianity in their lives. This type was
 extremely common among the literary and official classes. There are plenty
 of sixth-century authors--Procopius may serve as an example--whose works
 show no trace of Christian thought, though the writer was undoubtedly a
 professing member of the Church. Similar examples could be quoted by the
 dozen from among the administrators, lawyers, and statesmen of the day,
 but all were now nominally Christian. As time went on, such men grew
 rarer, and the old stern, non-religious Roman character passed away into
 the emotional and superstitious mediaeval type of mind. The survival of
 pre-Christian feeling, which appeared as indifferentism among the educated
 classes, took a very different shape among the lower strata of society. It
 revealed itself in a crowd of gross superstitions connected with magic,
 witchcraft, fortune-telling, charms, and trivial or obscene ceremonies
 practised in secret. The State highly disapproved of such practices,
 treated them as impious or heretical, and imposed punishment on those who
 employed them: but nevertheless these contemptible survivals of heathenism
 persisted down to the latest days of the empire.
 
 It has been usual to include all the Eastern Romans of all the centuries
 between Constantine I. and Constantine XIV. in one sweeping condemnation,
 as cowardly, corrupt, and effete. The ordinary view of Byzantine life may
 be summed up in Mr. Lecky's irritating statement that "the universal
 verdict of history is that it constitutes the most base and despicable
 form that civilization ever assumed, and that there has been no other
 enduring civilization so absolutely destitute of all the forms and
 elements of greatness, none to which the epithet _mean_ may be so
 emphatically applied. It is a monstrous story of the intrigues of priests,
 eunuchs, and women; of poisoning, conspiracies, uniform ingratitude,
 perpetual fratricide." How Mr. Lecky obtained his universal verdict of
 history, it is hard to see: certainly that verdict can not have been
 arrived at after a study of the evidence bearing on the life of the
 persons accused. It sounds like a cheap echo of the second-hand historians
 of fifty years ago, whose staple commodity was Gibbon-and-water.
 
                               
 
 Illuminated Initials. (_From Byzantine MSS._) (_From "L'Art Byzantin." Par
                     C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
 
 
 If we must sum up the characteristics of the East Romans and their
 civilization, the conclusion at which we arrive will be very different. It
 is only fair to acknowledge that they had their faults: what else could be
 expected when we know that the foundations of the Eastern Empire were laid
 upon the Oriental provinces of the old Roman world, among races that had
 long been stigmatized by their masters as hopelessly effete and
 corrupt--Syrians, Egyptians, and Hellenized Asiatics, whom even the
 degenerate Romans of the third century had been wont to despise. The
 Byzantine Empire displayed from its very cradle a taint of weakness
 derived from this Oriental origin. It showed features particularly
 obnoxious to the modern mind of the nineteenth century--such as the
 practice of a degrading and grovelling court etiquette, full of
 prostrations and genuflexions, the introduction of eunuchs and slaves into
 high offices of State, the wholesale and deliberate use of treachery and
 lying in matters of diplomacy.
 
 But remembering its origins we shall, on the whole, wonder at the good
 points in Byzantine civilization rather than at its faults. It may fairly
 be said that Christianity raised the Roman East to a better moral position
 than it had known for a thousand years. With all their faults the monks
 and hermits of the fifth century are a good substitute for the priests of
 Cybele and Mithras of the second. It was something that the Government and
 the public opinion of the day had concurred to sweep away the orgies of
 Daphne and Canopus. Church and State united in the reign of Justinian to
 punish with spiritual and bodily death the unnatural crimes which had been
 the open practice of emperors themselves in the first centuries of the
 empire.
 
 The vices of which the East Romans have most commonly been accused are
 cowardice, frivolity, and treachery. On each of these points they have
 been grossly wronged. Cowardice was certainly not the chief characteristic
 of the centuries that produced emperors like Theodosius I. and Heraclius,
 prelates like Athanasius and Chrysostom, public servants like Belisarius
 and Priscus. It is not for cowardice that we note the Byzantine populace
 which routed Gainas and his mercenaries, and raised the _Nika_ sedition,
 but for turbulence. If military virtue was wanting to the East-Roman
 armies, how came the Ostrogoth and Vandal to be conquered, the Persian and
 the Hun to be driven off, how, above all, was the desperate struggle
 against the fanatical Saracen protracted for four hundred years, till at
 last the Caliphate broke up?
 
 Frivolity and luxury are an accusation easy to bring against any age.
 Every moralist, from Jeremiah to Juvenal, and from Juvenal to Mr. Ruskin,
 has believed his own generation to be the most obnoxious and contemptible
 in the world's history. We have numerous tirades against the manners of
 Constantinople preserved in Byzantine literature, and may judge from them
 something of the faults of the time. It would seem that there was much of
 the sort of luxury to which ascetic preachers take exception--much
 splendour of raiment, much ostentatious display of plate and furniture, of
 horses and chariots. Luxury and evil living often go together, but when we
 examine all the enormities laid to the charge of the Byzantines, there is
 less alleged than we might expect. When Chrysostom raged against the
 contemporaries of Arcadius, his anathemas fell on such crimes as the use
 of cosmetics and dyes by fashionable dames, on the gambling propensities
 of their husbands, on the immoral tendencies of the theatre, on the
 drunken orgies at popular festivals--accusations to which any age--our own
 included--might plead guilty. The races of the Circus played a
 disproportionate part in social life, and attracted the enthusiastic
 attention of thousands of votaries; but it is surely hard that our own
 age, with all its sporting and athletic interests, should cast a stone at
 the sixth century. We have not to look far around us to discover classes
 for whom horse-racing still presents an inexplicable attraction. When we
 remember that the Constantinopolitans were excitable Orientals, and had no
 other form of sport to distract their attention from the Circus, we can
 easily realize the genesis of the famous riots of the Blues and Greens.
 
 From the darker forms of vice great cities have never been free, and there
 is no reason to think that Constantinople in the sixth century differed
 from London in the nineteenth. It is fair to point out that Christian
 public opinion and the Government strove their best to put down sexual
 immorality. Theodosius and Justinian are recorded to have entered upon the
 herculean task of endeavouring to suppress all disorderly houses: the
 latter made exile the penalty for panders and procuresses, and inflicted
 death on those guilty of the worst extremes of immorality. We must
 remember, too, that if Constantinople showed much vice, it also displayed
 shining examples of the social virtues. The Empress Flaccilla was wont to
 frequent the hospitals, and tend the beds of the sick. Of the monastic
 severity which the Empress Pulcheria displayed in the palace we have
 spoken already.
 
 After cowardice and light morals, it is treachery that is popularly cited
 as the most prominent vice of the Eastern Empire. There have been other
 states and epochs more given to plots and revolts, but it is still true
 that there was too much intrigue at Constantinople. The reason is not far
 to seek: the "_carriere ouverte aux talents_" practically existed there,
 and the army and the civil service were full of poor, able, and ambitious
 men of all races and classes mixed together. The converted Goth or the
 renegade Persian, the half-civilized mountaineer from Isauria, the Copt
 and Syrian and Armenian were all welcomed in the army or civil service, if
 only they had ability. Both the bureaucracy and the army therefore had
 elements which lacked patriotism, conscience, and stability, and were
 prone to seek advancement either by intrigue or military revolt. This
 being granted, it is perhaps astonishing to have to record that between
 350 and 600 the empire never once saw its legitimate ruler dethroned,
 either by palace intrigue or military revolt. The fact that all the
 plots--and there were many in the period--failed hopelessly, is, on the
 whole, a proof that if there was much treachery there was much loyalty
 among the East Romans. There have certainly been periods in more recent
 times which show a much worse record. A single instance may
 suffice--Mediaeval Italy from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century could
 produce far more shocking examples of conscienceless and unjustifiable
 plotting than the Byzantine Empire in the whole thousand years of its
 existence.