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Left sole Emperor (353), he returned to Constantinople, and governed the reunified realm with dour integrity and devoted incompetence, too suspicious to be happy, too cruel to be loved, too vain to be great.
Jake Sylvestre liked this
Napoleon would call it the empire of the world,
The New Rome was dedicated as capital of the Eastern Empire on May 11, 330—a day that was thereafter annually celebrated with imposing ceremony. Paganism was officially ended; the Middle Ages of triumphant faith were, so to speak, officially begun. The East had won its spiritual battle against the physically victorious West, and would rule the Western soul for a thousand years.
The population of the city was mainly Roman at the top, and for the rest overwhelmingly Greek. All alike called themselves Roman. While the language of the state was Latin, Greek remained the speech of the people, and, by the seventh century, displaced Latin even in government.
It created a remarkably efficient administrative and judicial organization, and kept the Byzantine Empire in existence for a millennium; but at the cost of political stagnation, public atrophy, court conspiracies, eunuch intrigues, wars of succession, and a score of palace revolutions that gave the throne occasionally to competence, seldom to integrity, too often to an unscrupulous adventurer, an oligarchic cabal, or an imperial fool.
Probably more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in these two years (342–3) than by all the persecutions of Christians by pagans in the history of Rome.
The higher birth rate outside the Empire, and the higher standard of living within it, made immigration or invasion a manifest destiny for the Roman Empire then as for North America today.
The court applauded Synesius’ address as an elegant oratorical exercise, and returned to its feasts.
The Western Roman Empire, toward the end of the fourth century, presented a complex picture of recovery and decline, of literary activity and sterility, of political pomp and military decay.
Nevertheless, if we may believe Salvian, some citizens fled across the frontier to live under barbarian kings who had not yet learned the full art of taxation; “the agents of the Treasury seemed more terrible than the enemy.”
Slavery was slowly declining. In a developed civilization nothing can equal the free man’s varying wage, salary, or profit as an economic stimulus.
These sufferings, Salvian answered, were a just punishment for the economic exploitation, political corruption, and moral debauchery of the Roman world.
Moritur et ridet—it laughs and dies.
It is a terrible picture, obviously exaggerated; eloquence is seldom accurate.
Doubtless then, as now, virtue modestly hid its head, and yielded the front page to vice, misfortune, politics, and crime.
Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from the trunk.
He wrote a difficult and involved Latin, like a German writing French; he had read too much Tacitus, and had too long spoken Greek.
He was as well educated as a soldier can find time to be.
He was the last of the classic historians; after him, in the Latin world, there were only chroniclers.
I shall value men not by their status but by their manners and their morals; these come from our character, that from chance.
The speech of Symmachus before Valentinian II was acclaimed as a masterpiece of eloquent pleading. It was not expedient, he argued, to end so abruptly religious practices that had through a millennium been associated with the stability of social order and the prestige of the state. After all, “What does it matter by what road each man seeks the truth? By no one road can men come to the understanding of so great a mystery” (uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum).40
No one resisted him except a solitary monk who denounced him as a robber; Alaric bemused him by declaring that God Himself had commanded the invasion.
Rome, soon to be destroyed, continued to laugh and play.
His capital was a large village probably on the site of the present Buda—a city which until our century was by some Hungarians called Etzelnburg, the City of Attila.
In this crisis Theodoric I, aged King of the Visigoths, came to the rescue of the Empire; he joined the Romans under Aëtius, and the enormous armies met on the Catalaunian Fields, near Troyes, in one of the bloodiest battles of history: 162,000 men are said to have died there, including the heroic Gothic King.
Through all this economic and biological decline ran political decay: aristocrats who could administer but could not rule; businessmen too absorbed in personal gain to save the peninsula; generals who won by bribery more than they could win by arms; and a bureaucracy ruinously expensive and irremediably corrupt. The majestic tree had rotted in its trunk, and was ripe for a fall.
In effect the Germans had conquered Italy as Gaiseric had conquered Africa, as the Visigoths had conquered Spain, as the Angles and Saxons were conquering Britain, as the Franks were conquering Gaul. In the West the great Empire was no more.
Historically, the conquest destroyed the outward form of what had already inwardly decayed; it cleared away with regrettable brutality and thoroughness a system of life which, with all its gifts of order, culture, and law, had worn itself into senile debility, and had lost the powers of regeneration and growth.
A thousand years before Christ northern invaders had entered Italy, subdued and mingled with its inhabitants, borrowed civilization from them, and with them, through eight centuries, had built a new civilization. Four hundred years after Christ the process was repeated; the wheel of history came full turn; the beginning and the end were the same. But the end was always a beginning.
Institutions and beliefs are the offspring of human needs, and understanding must be in terms of these necessities.
The occasionally resultant unity gave the Church its name of Catholic, or universal.
Once triumphant, the Church ceased to preach toleration; she looked with the same hostile eye upon individualism in belief as the state upon secession or revolt.
We cannot interest ourselves today in the many winds of doctrine that agitated the Church in this period—Eunomians, Anomeans, Apollinarians, Macedonians, Sabellians, Massalians, Novatians, Priscillianists; we can only mourn over the absurdities for which men have died, and will.
auriscalpius matronarum, a scratcher of ladies’ ears—i.e., an expert in wheedling gifts for the Church from the rich matrons of Rome.
A brilliant society took form, in which elegant prelates mingled happily with ornate women, and helped them to make their wills.
He replied by calling the bishop ignorant, brutal, wicked, well matched with the worldly flock that he led, the unskillful pilot of a crazy bark.10
“Thou liest; thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.”
Like Juvenal, Jerome denounces impartially, fearlessly, and ecumenically.
he proposes to “cut down by the ax of virginity the wood of marriage,”
Jerome was a saint only in the sense that he lived an ascetic life devoted to the Church; he was hardly a saint in character or speech.
We might rather have pardoned some sins of the flesh than these acerbities of the soul.
He was a great, rather than a good, man; a satirist as piercing as Juvenal, a letter writer as eloquent as Seneca, an heroic laborer in scholarship and theology.
The monk Wulfilaich lived for years, with bare legs and feet, on a column at Trier; in winter the nails fell from his toes, and icicles hung from his beard.
The relics of the anchorites became the most precious possession of Christian churches, and are treasured in them to this day.
At Kalat Seman, in northern Syria, about 422, Simeon built himself a column six feet high and lived on it. Ashamed of his moderation, he built and lived on ever taller columns, until he made his permanent abode on a pillar sixty feet high. Its circumference at the top was little more than three feet; a railing kept the saint from falling to the ground in his sleep. On this perch Simeon lived uninterruptedly for thirty years, exposed to rain and sun and cold. A ladder enabled disciples to take him food and remove his waste. He bound himself to the pillar by a rope; the rope became embedded in
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yet she felt responsibility for their excesses, since she shared in the glory of their deeds.
It was typical of him that his last letter was to Hypatia, and his last prayer to Christ.46
He advised his followers to avoid the theatrical severities of the Egyptian anchorites, but rather to serve God, health, and sanity by useful work; tilling the fields, he thought, was an excellent prayer. To this day the Christian East acknowledges his pre-eminent influence.
In Constantinople hardly a sign of pagan worship remained. Christianity itself, however, was torn with conflict; Arianism was still powerful, new heresies were always rising, and every man had his own theology. “This city,” wrote Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyassa, about 380, “is full of mechanics and slaves who are all of them profound theologians, and preach in the shops and the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf.… you are told that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you
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Sequoyah liked this
Here were no pious abstractions, but Christian precepts, applied so specifically that they hurt.
