CHAPTER XXVIToC FOOTNOTES: [157] Sometimes called the Age of Cicero. [158] Lucretius.—ED. [159] One of the most noted, the plea for Milo, was written much later. Cicero at the time of the delivery was distracted and said almost nothing. [160] See the "Dialogue of the Orators," attributed to Tacitus. [161] The word "rhetor" signified in Greek simply orator; the Romans used the word in a mistaken sense to designate the men who made a profession of speaking. [162] The same reserve must be maintained with regard to the arts as to the literature. The builders of the Roman monuments were not Romans, but provincials, often slaves; the only Roman would be the master for whom the slaves worked. [163] This estimate is too liberal. 1,500,00 is probably nearer the truth. See Friedlaender, Sittengeschichte Roms, i. 25.—ED. [164] Cicero describes this juridical comedy which was still in force in his time. CHAPTER XXVI ToC THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY The Christ. —He whom the Jews were expecting as their liberator and king, the Messiah, appeared in Galilee, a small province of the North, hardly regarded as Jewish, and in a humble family of carpenters. He was called Jesus, but his Greek disciples called him the Christ (the anointed), that is to say, the king consecrated by the holy oil. He was also called the Master, the Lord, and the Saviour. The religion that he came to found is that we now possess. We all know his life: it is the model of every Christian. We know his instructions by heart; they form our moral law. It is sufficient, then, to indicate what new doctrines he disseminated in the world. Charity. —Before all, Christ commended love. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy mind and thy neighbor as thyself.... On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." The first duty is to love others and to benefit them. When God will judge men, he will set on his right hand those who have fed the hungry, given drink to those who were thirsty, and have clad those that were naked. To those who would follow him the Christ said at the beginning: "Go, ... sell all that ye have and give to the poor." For the ancients the good man was the noble, the rich, the brave. Since the time of Christ the word has changed its sense: the good man is he who loves others. Doing good is loving others and seeking to be of service to them. Charity (the Latin name of love) from that time has been the cardinal virtue. Charitable becomes synonymous with beneficent. To the old doctrine of vengeance the Christ formally opposes his doctrine of charity. "Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; but I say unto you ... whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.... Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute you, ... that ye may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust." He himself on the cross prayed for his executioners, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Equality. —The Christ loved all men; he died not for one people only, but for all humanity. He never made a difference between men; all are equal before God. The ancient religions, even the Jewish, were religions of peoples who kept them with jealous care, as a treasure, without wishing to communicate them to other peoples. Christ said to his disciples, "Go, and teach all nations." And the apostle Paul thus formulated the doctrine of Christian equality: "There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, bond nor free." Two centuries later Tertullian, a Christian writer, said, "The world is a republic, the common land of the human race." Poverty and Humility. —The ancients thought that riches ennobled a man and they regarded pride as a worthy sentiment. "Blessed are the poor," said Christ, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." He that would not renounce all that he had could not be his disciple. He himself went from city to city, possessing nothing, and when his disciples were preoccupied with the future, he said, "Be not anxious for what ye shall eat, nor for what ye shall put on. Behold the birds of the heaven, they sow not neither do they reap, yet your heavenly Father feedeth them." The Christian was to disdain riches, and more yet, worldly honors. One day when his disciples were disputing who should have the highest rank in heaven, he said, "He that is greatest among you shall be your servant." "Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." Till our day the successor of Saint Peter calls himself "Servant of the servants of God." Christ drew to himself by preference the poor, the sick, women, children,—in a word, the weak and the helpless. He took all his disciples from among the populace and bade them be "meek and lowly of heart." The Kingdom of God. —Christ said that he had come to the earth to found the kingdom of God. His enemies believed that he wished to be a king, and when he was crucified, they placed this inscription on his cross, "Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews." This was a gross mistake. Christ himself had declared, "My kingdom is not of this world." He did not come to overturn governments nor to reform society. To him who asked if he should pay the Roman tax, he replied, "Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and to God the things that are God's." And so the Christian accepted what he found established and himself worked to perfect it, not to remodel society. To make himself pleasing to God and worthy of his kingdom it was not necessary to offer him sacrifices or to observe minute formulas as the pagans did: "True worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth." Their moral law is contained in this word of Christ: "Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." THE FIRST CENTURIES OF THE CHURCH Disciples and Apostles. —The twelve disciples who associated with Christ received from him the mission to preach his doctrine to all peoples. From that time they were called Apostles. The majority of them lived in Jerusalem and preached in Judæa; the first Christians were still Jews. It was Saul, a new convert, who carried Christianity to the other peoples of the Orient. Paul (for he took this name) spent his life visiting the Greek cities of Asia, Greece, and Macedonia, inviting to the new religion not only the Jews, but also and especially the Gentiles: "You were once without Christ," said he to them, "strangers to the covenant and to the promises; but you have been brought nigh by the blood of Christ, for it is he who of two peoples hath made both one." From this time it was no longer necessary to be a Jew if one would become a Christian. The other nations, disregarded by the law of Moses, are brought near by the law of Christ. This fusion was the work of St. Paul, also called the Apostle to the Gentiles. The religion of Christ spread very slowly, as he himself had announced: "The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard-seed ... which is the least of all seeds; but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs ... and the birds of the air lodge under its branches." The Church. —In every city where Christians were found they assembled to pray together, to sing the praises of God, and to celebrate the mystery of the Lord's Supper. Their meeting was called Ecclesia (assembly). Usually the Christians of the same assembly regarded themselves as brothers; they contributed of their property to support the widows, the poor, and the sick. The most eminent directed the community and celebrated the religious ceremonies. These were the Priests (their name signifies "elders"). Others were charged with the administration of the goods of the community, and were called Deacons (servants). Besides these officers, there was in each city a supreme head—the Bishop (overseer). Later the functions of the church became so exacting that the body of Christians was divided into two classes of people: the clergy, who were the officials of the community; the rest, the faithful, who were termed the laity. Each city had its independent church; thus they spoke of the church of Antioch, of Corinth, of Rome; and yet they all formed but one church, the church of Christ, in which all were united in one faith. The universal or Catholic faith was regarded as the only correct body of belief; all conflicting opinions (the heresies) were condemned as errors. The Sacred Books. —The sacred scripture of the Jews, the Old Testament, remained sacred for the Christians, but they had other sacred books which the church had brought into one structure (the New Testament). The four Gospels recount the life of Christ and the "good news" of salvation which he brought. The Acts of the Apostles describes how the gospel was disseminated in the world. The Epistles are the letters addressed by the apostles to the Christians of the first century. The Apocalypse (Revelation) is the revelation made through St. John to the seven churches of Asia. Many other pseudo-sacred books were current among the Christians, but the church has rejected all of these, and has termed them apocryphal. The Persecutions. —The Christian religion was persecuted from its birth. Its first enemies were the Jews, who forced the Roman governor of Judæa to crucify Christ; who stoned St. Stephen, the first martyr, and so set themselves against St. Paul that they almost compassed his death. Then came the persecution by the Pagans. The Romans tolerated all the religions of the East because the devotees of Osiris, of Mithra, and of the Good Goddess recognized at the same time the Roman gods. But the Christians, worshippers of the living God, scorned the petty divinities of antiquity. More serious still in the eyes of the Romans, they refused to adore the emperor as a god and to burn incense on the altar of the goddess Roma. Several emperors promulgated edicts against the Christians, bidding the governors arrest them and put them to death. A letter of Pliny the Younger, then governor in Asia, to the emperor Trajan, shows the procedure against them. "Up to this time, regarding the people who have been denounced as Christians, I have always operated as follows: I asked them if they were Christians; if they confessed it, I put the question to them a second time, and then a third time, threatening them with the penalty of death. When they persisted, I had them put to death, convinced that, whatever their fault that they avowed, their disobedience and their resolute obstinacy merited punishment. Many who have been denounced in anonymous writings have denied that they were Christians, have repeated a prayer that I pronounced before them, have offered wine and incense to your statue, which I had set forth for this purpose together with the statues of the gods, and have even reviled the name of Christ. All these are things which it is not possible to compel any true Christians to do. Others have confessed that they were Christians, but they affirm that their crime and their error consisted only in assembling on certain days before sunrise to adore Christ as God, to sing together in his honor, and to bind themselves by oath to commit no crime, to perpetrate no theft, murder, adultery, nor to violate their word. I have believed it necessary in order to secure the truth to put to the torture two female slaves whom they called deaconesses; but I have discovered only an absurd and exaggerated superstition." The Roman government was a persecutor, [165] but the populace were severer yet. They could not endure these people who worshipped another god than theirs and contemned their deities. Whenever famine or epidemic occurred, the well-known cry was heard, "To the lions with the Christians!" The people forced the magistrates to hunt and persecute the Christians. The Martyrs. —For the two centuries and a half that the Christians were persecuted, throughout the empire there were thousands of victims, of every age, sex, and condition. Roman citizens, like St. Paul, were beheaded; the others were crucified, burned, most often sent to the beasts in the amphitheatre. If they were allowed to escape with their lives, they were set at forced labor in the mines. Sometimes torture was aggravated by every sort of invention. In the great execution at Lyons, in 177, the Christians, after being tortured and confined in narrow prison quarters, were brought to the arena. The beasts mutilated without killing them. They were then seated in iron chairs heated red by fire. Blandina, a young slave, who survived all these torments was bound with cords and exposed to the fury of a bull. The Christians joyfully suffered these persecutions which gave them entrance to heaven. The occasion presented an opportunity for rendering public testimony to Christ. And so they did not call themselves victims, but martyrs (witnesses); their torture was a testimony. They compared it to the combat of the Olympian games; like the victor in the athletic contests, they spoke of the palm or the crown. Even now the festal day of a martyr is the day of his death. Frequently a Christian who was present at the persecution would draft a written account of the martyrdom—he related the arrest, the examination, the tortures, and the death. These brief accounts, filled with edifying details, were called The Acts of the Martyrs. They were circulated in the remotest communities; from one end of the empire to the other they published the glory of the martyrs and excited a desire to imitate them. Thousands of the faithful, seized by a thirst for martyrdom, pressed forward to incriminate themselves and to demand condemnation. One day a governor of Asia had decreed persecutions against some Christians: all the Christians of the city presented themselves in his tribunal and demanded to be persecuted. The governor, exasperated, had some of them executed and sent away the others. "Begone, you wretches! If you are so bent on death, you have precipices and ropes." Some of the faithful, to be surer of torture, entered the temples and threw down the idols of the gods. It was several times necessary for even the church to prohibit the solicitation of martyrdom. The Catacombs. —The ancient custom of burning the dead was repugnant to the Christians. Like the Jews, they interred their dead wrapped with a shroud in a sarcophagus. Cemeteries [166] were therefore required. At Rome where land was very high in price the Christians went below ground, and in the brittle tufa on which Rome was built may be seen long galleries and subterranean chambers. There, in niches excavated along the passages, they laid the bodies of their dead. As each generation excavated new galleries, there was formed at length a subterranean city, called the Catacombs ("to the tombs"). There were similar catacombs in several cities—Naples, Milan, Alexandria, but the most celebrated were those in Rome. These have been investigated in our day and thousands of Christian tombs and inscriptions recovered. The discovery of this subterranean world gave birth to a new department of historical science—Christian Epigraphy and Archæology. The sepulchral halls of the catacombs do not resemble those of the Egyptians or those of the Etruscans; they are bare and severe. The Christians knew that a corpse had no bodily wants and so they did not adorn the tombs. The most important halls are decorated with very simple ornaments and paintings which almost always represent the same scenes. The most common subjects are the faithful in prayer, and the Good Shepherd, symbolical of Christ. Some of these halls were like chapels. In them were interred the bodies of the holy martyrs and the faithful who wished to lie near them; every year Christians came here to celebrate the mysteries. During the persecutions of the third century the Christians of Rome often took refuge in these subterranean chapels to hold their services of worship, or to escape from pursuit. The Christians could feel safe in this bewildering labyrinth of galleries whose entrance was usually marked by a pagan tomb. THE MONKS OF THE THIRD CENTURY The Solitaries. —It was an idea current among Christians, especially in the East, that one could not become a perfect Christian by remaining in the midst of other men. Christ himself had said, "If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters ... he cannot be my disciple." The faithful man or woman who thus withdrew from the world to work out his salvation the more surely, was termed an Anchorite (the man who is set apart), or a Monk (solitary). This custom began in the East in the middle of the third century. The first anchorites established themselves in the deserts and the ruins of the district of Thebes in Upper Egypt, which remained the holy land of the solitaries. Paul (235-340), the oldest of the monks, lived to his ninetieth year in a grotto near a spring and a palm-tree which furnished him with food and clothing. The model of the monks was St Anthony. [167] At the age of twenty he heard read one day the text of the gospel, "If thou wilt be perfect, sell all thy goods and give to the poor." He was fine looking, noble, and rich, having received an inheritance from his parents. He sold all his property, distributed it in alms and buried himself in the desert of Egypt. He first betook himself to an empty tomb, then to the ruins of a fortress; he was clad in a hair-shirt, had for food only the bread that was brought to him every six months, fasted, starved himself, prayed day and night. Often sunrise found him still in prayer. "O sun," cried he, "why hast thou risen and prevented my contemplating the true light?" He felt himself surrounded by demons, who, under every form, sought to distract him from his religious thoughts. When he became old and revered by all Egypt, he returned to Alexandria for a day to preach against the Arian heretics, but soon repaired to the desert again. They besought him to remain: he replied, "The fishes die on land, the monks waste away in the city; we return to our mountains like the fish to the water." Women also became solitaries. Alexandra, one of these, shut herself in an empty tomb and lived there for ten years without leaving it to see anybody. Asceticism. —These men who had withdrawn to the desert to escape the world thought that everything that came from the world turned the soul from God and placed it in the peril of losing salvation. The Christian ought to belong entirely to God; he should forget everything behind him. "Do you not know," said St. Nilus later, "that it is a trap of Satan to be too much attached to one's family?" The monk Poemen had withdrawn to the desert with his brothers, and their mother came to visit them. As they refused to appear, she waited a little until they were going to the church; but on seeing her, they fled and would not consent to speak to her unless they were concealed. She asked to see them, but they consoled her by saying, "You will see us in the other world." But the world is not the only danger for the monk. Every man carried about with himself an enemy from whom he could not deliver himself as he had delivered himself from the world—that is, his own body. The body prevented the soul from rising to God and drew it to worldly pleasures that came from the devil. And so the solitaries applied themselves to overcoming the body by refusing to it everything that it loved. They subsisted only on bread and water; many ate but twice a week, some went to the mountains to cut herbs which they ate raw. They dwelt in grottoes, ruins, and tombs, lying on the earth or on a mat of rushes. The most zealous of them added other tortures to mortify, or kill, the body. St. Pachomius for fifteen years slept only in an erect position, leaning against a wall. Macarius remained six months in a morass, the prey of mosquitoes "whose stings would have penetrated the hide of a wild boar." The most noted of these monks was St. Simeon, surnamed Stylites (the man of the column). For forty years he lived in the desert of Arabia on the summit of a column, exposed to the sun and the rain, compelling himself to stay in one position for a whole day; the faithful flocked from afar to behold him; he gave them audience from the top of his column, bidding creditors free their debtors, and masters liberate their slaves; he even sent reproaches to ministers and counsellors of the emperor. This form of life was called Asceticism (exercise). The Cenobites. —The solitaries who lived in the same desert drew together and adopted a common life for the practice of their austerities. About St. Anthony were already assembled many anchorites who gave him their obedience. St. Pachomius (272-348) in this way assembled 3,000. Their establishment was at Tabenna, near the first cataract of the Nile. He founded many other similar communities, either of men or women. In 256 a traveller said he had seen in a single city of Egypt 10,000 monks and 20,000 vowed to a religious life. There were more of them in Syria, in Palestine, in all the Orient. The monks thus united in communities became Cenobites (people who live in common). They chose a chief, the abbot (the word signifies in Syriac "father"), and they implicitly obeyed him. Cassian relates that in one community in Egypt he had seen the abbot before the whole refectory give a cenobite a violent blow on the head to try his obedience. The primitive monks renounced all property and family relations; the cenobites surrendered also their will. On entering the community they engaged to possess nothing, not to marry, and to obey. "The monks," says St. Basil, "live a spiritual life like the angels." The first union among the cenobites was the construction of houses in close proximity. Later each community built a monastery, a great edifice, where each monk had his cell. A Christian compares these cells "to a hive of bees where each has in his hands the wax of work, in his mouth the honey of psalms and prayers." These great houses needed a written constitution; this was the Monastic Rule. St. Pachomius was the first to prepare one. St. Basil wrote another that was adopted by almost all the monasteries of the Orient. FOOTNOTES: [165] The church counted ten persecutions, the first under Nero, the last under Diocletian. [166] The word is Greek and signifies place of repose. [167] See his biography in the "Lives of the Fathers of the Desert," by Rufinus. CHAPTER XXVII ToC THE LATER EMPIRE THE REVOLUTIONS OF THE THIRD CENTURY Military Anarchy. —After the reigns of the Antonines the civil wars commenced. There were in the empire, beside the prætorian guard in Rome, several great armies on the Rhine, on the Danube, in the East, and in England. Each aimed to make its general emperor. Ordinarily the rivals fought it out until there was but one left; this one then governed for a few years, after which he was assassinated, [168] or if, by chance, he could transmit his power to his son, the soldiers revolted against the son and the war recommenced. The following, for example, is what occurred in 193. The prætorians had massacred the emperor Pertinax, and the army conceived the notion of putting up the empire at auction; two purchasers presented themselves, Sulpicius offering each soldier $1,000 and Didius more than $1,200. The prætorians brought the latter to the Senate and had him named emperor; later, when he did not pay them, they murdered him. At the same time the great armies of Britain, Illyricum, and Syria proclaimed each its own general as emperor and the three rivals marched on Rome. The Illyrian legions arrived first, and their general Septimius Severus was named emperor by the Senate. Then commenced two sanguinary wars, the one against the legions of Syria, and the other against the legions of Britain. At the end of two years the emperor was victorious. It is he who states his policy as follows, "My son, content the soldiers and you may despise the rest." For a century there was no other form of government than the will of the soldiers. They killed the emperors who displeased them and replaced them by their favorites. Strange emperors, therefore, occupied the throne: Elagabalus, a Syrian priest, who garbed himself as a woman and had his mother assemble a senate of women; Maximin, a soldier of fortune, a rough and bloodthirsty giant, who ate, it was said, thirty pounds of food and drank twenty-one quarts of wine a day. Once there were twenty emperors at the same time, each in a corner of the empire (260-278). These have been called the Thirty Tyrants. The Cult of Mithra. —This century of wars is also a century of superstitions. The deities of the Orient, Isis, Osiris, the Great Mother, have their devotees everywhere. But, more than all the others, Mithra, a Persian god, becomes the universal god of the empire. Mithra is no other than the sun. The monuments in his honor that are found in all parts of the empire represent him slaughtering a bull, with this inscription: "To the unconquerable sun, to the god Mithra." His cult is complicated, sometimes similar to the Christian worship; there are a baptism, sacred feasts, an anointing, penances, and chapels. To be admitted to this one must pass through an initiatory ceremony, through fasting and certain fearful tests. At the end of the third century the religion of Mithra was the official religion of the empire. The Invincible God was the god of the emperors; he had his chapels everywhere in the form of grottoes with altars and bas-reliefs; in Rome, even, he had a magnificent temple erected by the emperor Aurelian. The Taurobolia. —One of the most urgent needs of this time was reconciliation with the deity; and so ceremonies of purification were invented. The most striking of these was the Taurobolia. The devotee, clad in a white robe with ornaments of gold, takes his place in the bottom of a ditch which is covered by a platform pierced with holes. A bull is led over this platform, the priest kills him and his blood runs through the holes of the platform upon the garments, the face, and the hair of the worshipper. It was believed that this "baptism of blood" purified one of all sins. He who had received it was born to a new life; he came forth from the ditch hideous to look upon, but happy and envied. Confusion of Religions. —In the century that preceded the victory of Christianity, all religions fell into confusion. The sun was adored at once under many names (Sol, Helios, Baal, Elagabal, and Mithra). All the cults imitated one another and sometimes copied Christian forms. Even the life of Christ was copied. The Asiatic philosopher, Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in the first century (3-96), became in legend a kind of prophet, son of a god, who went about surrounded by his disciples, expelling demons, curing sicknesses, raising the dead. He had come, it was said, to reform the doctrine of Pythagoras and Plato. In the third century an empress had the life of Apollonius of Tyana written, to be, as it were, a Pythagorean gospel opposed to the gospel of Christ. The most remarkable example of this confusion in religion was given by Alexander Severus, a devout emperor, mild and conscientious: he had in his palace a chapel where he adored the benefactors of humanity—Abraham, Orpheus, Jesus, and Apollonius of Tyana. THE GOVERNMENT OF THE LATER EMPIRE Reforms of Diocletian and Constantine. —After a century of civil wars emperors were found who were able to stop the anarchy. They were men of the people, rude and active, soldiers of fortune rising from one grade to another to become generals-in-chief, and then emperors. Almost all arose in the semi-barbarous provinces of the Danube and of Illyria; some in their infancy had been shepherds or peasants. They had the simple manners of the old Roman generals. When the envoys of the king of Persia asked to see the emperor Probus, they found a bald old man clad in a linen cassock, lying on the ground, who ate peas and bacon. It was the story of Curius Dentatus repeated after five centuries. Severe with their soldiers, these emperors reëstablished discipline in the army, and then order in the empire. But a change had become necessary. A single man was no longer adequate to the government and defence of this immense territory; and so from this time each emperor took from among his relatives or his friends two or three collaborators, each charged with a part of the empire. Usually their title was that of Cæsar, but sometimes there were two equal emperors, and both had the title of Augustus. When the emperor died, one of the Cæsars succeeded him; it was no longer possible for the army to create emperors. The provinces were too great, and Diocletian divided them. The prætorians of Rome being dangerous, Diocletian replaced them with two legions. The Occident was in ruins and depopulated and hence the Orient had become the important part of the empire; Diocletian, therefore, abandoned Rome and established his capital at Nicomedia in Asia Minor. [169] Constantine did more and founded a new Rome in the East—Constantinople. Constantinople. —On a promontory where Europe is separated from Asia only by the narrow channel of the Bosporus, in a country of vineyards and rich harvests, under a beautiful sky, Greek colonists had founded the town of Byzantium. The hills of the vicinity made the place easily defensible; its port, the Golden Horn, one of the best in the world, could shelter 1,200 ships, and a chain of 820 feet in length was all that was necessary to exclude a hostile fleet. This was the site of Constantine's new city, Constantinople (the city of Constantine). Around the city were strong walls; two public squares surrounded with porticos were constructed; a palace was erected, a circus, theatres, aqueducts, baths, temples, and a Christian church. To ornament his city Constantine transferred from other cities the most celebrated statues and bas-reliefs. To furnish it with population he forced the people of the neighboring towns to remove to it, and offered rewards and honors to the great families who would come hither to make their home. He established, as in Rome, distributions of grain, of wine, of oil, and provided a continuous round of shows. This was one of those rapid transformations, almost fantastic, in which the Orient delights. The task began the 4th of November, 326; on the 11th of May, 330, the city was dedicated. But it was a permanent creation. For ten centuries Constantinople resisted invasions, preserving always in the ruins of the empire its rank of capital. Today it is still the first city of the East. The Palace. —The emperors who dwelt in the East [170] adopted the customs of the Orient, wearing delicate garments of silk and gold and for a head-dress a diadem of pearls. They secluded themselves in the depths of their palace where they sat on a throne of gold, surrounded by their ministers, separated from the world by a crowd of courtiers, servants, functionaries and military guards. One must prostrate one's self before them with face to the earth in token of adoration; they were called Lord and Majesty; they were treated as gods. Everything that touched their person was sacred, and so men spoke of the sacred palace, the sacred bed-chamber, the sacred Council of State, even the sacred treasury. The régime of this period has been termed that of the Later Empire as distinguished from that of the three preceding centuries, which we call the Early Empire. The life of an emperor of the Early Empire (from the first to the third century) was still that of a magistrate and a general; the palace of an emperor of the Later Empire became similar to the court of the Persian king. The Officials. —The officials often became very numerous. Diocletian found the provinces too large and so made several divisions of them. In Gaul, for example, Lugdunensis (the province about Lyons) was partitioned into four, Aquitaine into three. In place of forty-six governors there were from this time 117. [171] At the same time the duties of the officials were divided. Besides the governors and the deputies in the provinces there were in the border provinces military commanders—the dukes and the counts. The emperor had about him a small picked force to guard the palace, body-guards, chamberlains, assistants, domestics, a council of state, bailiffs, messengers, and a whole body of secretaries organized in four bureaus. All these officials did not now receive their orders directly from the emperor; they communicated with him only through their superior officers. The governors were subordinate to the two prætorian prefects, the officials of public works to the two prefects of the city, the collectors of taxes to the Count of the Sacred Largesses, the deputies to the Count of the Domains, all the officers of the palace to the Master of the Offices, the domestics of the court to the Chamberlain. These heads of departments had the character of ministers. This system is not very difficult for us to comprehend. We are accustomed to see officials, judges, generals, collectors, and engineers, organized in distinct departments, each with his special duty, and subordinated to the commands of a chief of the service. We even have more ministers than there were in Constantinople; but this administrative machine which has become so familiar to us because we have been acquainted with it from our infancy, is none the less complicated and unnatural. It is the Later Empire that gave us the first model of this; the Byzantine empire preserved it and since that time all absolute governments have been forced to imitate it because it has made the work of government easier for those who have it to do. Society in the Later Empire. —The Later Empire is a decisive moment in the history of civilization. The absolute power of the Roman magistrate is united to the pompous ceremonial of the eastern kings to create a power unknown before in history. This new imperial majesty crushes everything beneath it; the inhabitants of the empire cease to be citizens and from the fourth century are called in Latin "subjects" and in Greek "slaves." In reality all are slaves of the emperor, but there are different grades of servitude. There are various degrees of nobility which the master confers on them and which they transmit to their posterity. The following is the series: [172] 1. The Nobilissimi (the very noble); these are the imperial family; 2. The Illustres (the notable)—the chief ministers of departments; 3. The Spectabiles (the eminent)—the high dignitaries; 4. The Clarissimi (most renowned)—the great officials, also sometimes called senators; 5. The Perfectissimi (very perfect). [173] Every important man has his rank, his title, and his functions. [174] The only men who are of consequence are the courtiers and officials; it is the régime of titles and of etiquette. A clearer instance has never been given of the issue of absolute power united with the mania for titles and with the purpose to regulate everything. The Later Empire exhibits the completed type of a society reduced to a machine and of a government absorbed by a court. It realized the ideal that is proposed today by the partisans of absolute power; and for a long time the friends of liberty must fight against the traditions which the Later Empire has left to us. THE CHURCH AND THE STATE Triumph of Christianity. —During the first two centuries of our era the Christians occupied but a small place in the empire. Almost all of them were of the lower classes, workmen, freedmen, slaves, who lived obscure lives in the multitude of the great cities. For a long time the aristocracy ignored the Christians; even in the second century Suetonius in his "Lives of the Twelve Cæsars" speaks of a certain Chrestus who agitated the populace of Rome. When the religion first concerned the world of the rich and cultivated people, they were interested simply to deride it as one only for the poor and ignorant. It was precisely because it addressed the poor of this world in providing a compensation in the life to come that Christianity made so many proselytes. Persecution, far from suppressing it, gave it more force. "The blood of the martyrs," said the faithful, "is the seed of the church." During the whole of the third century conversions continued, not only among the poor, but among the aristocracy as well. At the first of the fourth century all the East had become Christian. Helena, the mother of Constantine, was a Christian and has been canonized by the church. When Constantine marched against his rival, he took for his ensign a standard (the labarum), which bore the cross and the monogram of Christ. His victory was the victory of the Christians. He allowed them now to perform their religious rites freely (by the edict of 313), and later he favored them openly. Yet he did not break with the ancient religion: while he presided at the great assembly of the Christian bishops, he continued to hold the title of Pontifex Maximus; he carried in his helmet a nail of the true cross and on his coins he still had the sun-god represented. In his city of Constantinople he had a Christian church built, but also a temple to Victory. For a half-century it was difficult to know what was the official religion of the empire. Organization of the Church. —The Christians even under persecution had never dreamed of overthrowing the empire. As soon as persecution ceased, the bishops became the allies of the emperors. Then the Christian church was organized definitively, and it was organized on the model of the Later Empire, in the form that it preserves to this day. Each city had a bishop who resided in the city proper and governed the people of the territory; this territory subject to the bishop was termed a Diocese. In any country in the Later Empire, there were as many bishops and dioceses as there were cities. This is why the bishops were so numerous and dioceses so many in the East and in Italy where the country was covered with cities. In Gaul, on the contrary, there were but 120 dioceses between the Rhine and the Pyrenees, and the most of these, save in the south, were of the size of a modern French department. Each province became an ecclesiastical province; the bishop of the capital (metropolis) became the metropolitan, or as he was later termed, the archbishop. The Councils. —In this century began the councils, the great assemblies of the church. There had already been some local councils at which the bishops and priests of a single province had been present. For the first time, in 324, [175] Constantine convoked a General Assembly of the World (an ecumenical council) at Nicæa, in Asia Minor; 318 ecclesiastics were in attendance. They discussed questions of theology and drew up the Nicene Creed, the Catholic confession of faith. Then the emperor wrote to all the churches, bidding them "conform to the will of God as expressed by the council." This was the first ecumenical council, and there were three others [176] of these before the arrival of the barbarians made an assembly of the whole church impossible. The decisions reached by these councils had the force of law for all Christians: the decisions are called Canons [177] (rules). The collection of these regulations constitutes the Canon Law. The Heretics. —From the second century there were among the Christians heretics who professed opinions contrary to those of the majority of the church. Often the bishops of a country assembled to pronounce the new teaching as false, to compel the author to abjure, and, if he refused, to separate him from the communion of Christians. But frequently the author of the heresy had partisans convinced of the truth of his teaching who would not submit and continued to profess the condemned opinions. This was the cause of hatred and violent strife between them and the faithful who were attached to the creed of the church (the orthodox). As long as the Christians were weak and persecuted by the state, they fought among themselves only with words and with books; but when all society was Christian, the contests against the heretics turned into persecutions, and sometimes into civil wars. Almost all of the heresies of this time arose among the Greeks of Asia or Egypt, peoples who were subtle, sophistical, and disputatious. The heresies were usually attempts to explain the mysteries of the Trinity and of the Incarnation. The most significant of these heresies was that of Arius; he taught that Christ was created by God the Father and was not equal to him. The Council of Nicæa condemned this view, but his doctrine, called Arianism, spread throughout the East. From that time for two centuries Catholics and Arians fought to see who should have the supremacy in the church; the stronger party anathematized, exiled, imprisoned, and sometimes killed the chiefs of the opposition. For a long time the Arians had the advantage; several emperors took sides with them; then, too, as the barbarians entered the empire, they were converted to Arianism and received Arian bishops. More than two centuries had passed before the Catholics had overcome this heresy. Paganism. —The ancient religion of the Gentiles did not disappear at a single stroke. The Orient was quickly converted; but in the Occident there were few Christians outside the cities, and even there many continued to worship idols. The first Christian emperors did not wish to break with the ancient imperial religion; they simultaneously protected the bishops of the Christians and the priests of the gods; they presided over councils and yet remained pontifex maximus. One of them, Julian (surnamed the Apostate), openly returned to the ancient religion. The emperor Gratian in 384 [178] was the first to refuse the insignia of the pontifex maximus. But as intolerance was general in this century, as soon as the Roman religion ceased to be official, men began to persecute it. The sacred fire of Rome that had burned for eleven centuries was extinguished, the Vestals were removed, the Olympian games were celebrated for the last time in 394. Then the monks of Egypt issued from their deserts to destroy the altars of the false gods and to establish relics in the temples of Anubis and Serapis. Marcellus, a bishop of Syria, at the head of a band of soldiers and gladiators sacked the temple of Jupiter at Aparnæa and set himself to scour the country for the destruction of the sanctuaries; he was killed by the peasants and raised by the church to the honor of a saint. Soon idolatry persisted only in the rural districts where it escaped detection; the idolaters were peasants who continued to adore sacred trees and fountains and to assemble in proscribed sanctuaries. [179] The Christians commenced to call "pagans" (the peasants) those whom up to this time they had called Gentiles. And this name has still clung to them. Paganism thus led an obscure existence in Italy, in Gaul, and in Spain down to the end of the sixth century. Theodosius. —The incursions of the Germanic peoples into the empire continued for two centuries until the Huns, a people of Tartar horsemen, came from the steppes of Asia, and threw themselves on the Germans, who occupied the country to the north of the Danube. In that country there was already a great German kingdom, that of the Goths, who had been converted to Christianity by Ulfilas, an Arian. To escape the Huns, a part of this people, the West Goths (Visigoths), fled into Roman territory, defeated the Roman armies, and overspread the country even to Greece. Valens, the emperor of the East, had perished in the defeat of Adrianople (378); Gratian, the emperor of the West, took as colleague a noble Spaniard, Theodosius by name, and gave him the title of Augustus of the East (379). Theodosius was able to rehabilitate his army by avoiding a great battle with the Visigoths and by making a war of skirmishes against them; this decided them to conclude a treaty. They accepted service under the empire, land was given them in the country to the south of the Danube, and they were charged with preventing the enemies of the empire from crossing the river. Theodosius, having reëstablished peace in the East, came to the West where Gratian had been killed by order of the usurper Maximus (383). This Maximus was the commander of the Roman army of Britain; he had crossed into Gaul with his army, abandoning the Roman provinces of Britain to the ravages of the highland Scotch, had defeated Gratian, and invaded Italy. He was master of the West, Theodosius of the East. The contest between them was not only one between persons; it was a battle between two religions: Theodosius was Catholic and had assembled a council at Constantinople to condemn the heresy of Arius (381); Maximus was ill-disposed toward the church. The engagement occurred on the banks of the Save; Maximus was defeated, taken, and executed. Theodosius established Valentinian II, the son of Gratian, in the West and then returned to the East. But Arbogast, a barbarian Frank, the general of the troops of Valentinian, had the latter killed, and without venturing to proclaim himself emperor since he was not a Roman, had his Roman secretary Eugenius made emperor. This was a religious war: Arbogast had taken the side of the pagans; Theodosius, the victor, had Eugenius executed and himself remained the sole emperor. His victory was that of the Catholic church. In 391 the emperor Theodosius promulgated the Edict of Milan. It prohibited the practice of the ancient religion; whoever offered a sacrifice, adored an idol, or entered a temple should be condemned to death as a state criminal, and his goods should be confiscated to the profit of the informer. All the pagan temples were razed to the ground or converted into Christian churches. And so Theodosius was extolled by ecclesiastical writers as the model for emperors. Theodosius gave a rare example of submission to the church. The inhabitants of Thessalonica had risen in riot, had killed their governor, and overthrown the statues of the emperor. Theodosius in irritation ordered the people to be massacred; 7,000 persons suffered death. When the emperor presented himself some time after to enter the cathedral of Milan, Ambrose, the bishop, charged him with his crime before all the people, and declared that he could not give entrance to the church to a man defiled with so many murders. Theodosius confessed his sin, accepted the public penance which the bishop imposed upon him, and for eight months remained at the door of the church.