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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.
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.
At the bottom, as everywhere in the Empire, were slaves, less numerous than in Caesar’s Rome, and more humanely treated through the legislation of Constantine and the mitigating influence of the Church.
Greek tradition and Christian sentiment combined to make the amusements of Constantinople less cruel than those of Rome; we hear of no gladiatorial combats in the new capital.
The emperor himself could legislate by simple decree, and his will was the supreme law. In the view of the emperors, democracy had failed; it had been destroyed by the Empire that it had helped to win; it could rule a city, perhaps, but not a hundred varied states; it had carried liberty into license, and license into chaos, until its class and civil war had threatened the economic and political life of the entire Mediterranean world.
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.
He compared these polished pagans, heirs of a millennium of culture, with the grave theologians who had surrounded him in Nicomedia, or those pious statesmen who had thought it necessary to kill his father, his brothers, and so many more; and he concluded that there were no beasts more ferocious than Christians.
I will assert, though it will seem paradoxical, that it would be a pious act to share our clothes and food even with the wicked. For it is to the humanity in a man that we give, and not to his moral character.
Paganism was spiritually dead; it no longer had in it any stimulus to youth, any solace to sorrow, any hope beyond the grave.
He relied too much on philosophical argument, which never reached to the emotional bases of faith; his works were intelligible only to the educated, who were too educated to accept them; his creed was an artificial syncretism that struck no roots in the hopes or fancies of men.
PERSIA was but one sector of a 10,000-mile frontier through which, at any point and at any moment, this Roman Empire of a hundred nations might be invaded by tribes unspoiled by civilization and envious of its fruits.
Gaul now surpassed Italy in Roman pride, in order and wealth, in Latin poetry and prose; but in every generation it had to defend itself against Teutons whose women were more fertile than their fields.
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.
Though they lacked the civility and graces of a cultured people, they often shamed the Romans by their courage, hospitality, and honesty. They were cruel, but hardly more so than the Romans; they were probably shocked to find that Roman law permitted the torturing of freemen to extort confessions or testimony.
By the end of the fourth century the Balkans and eastern Gaul were predominantly German; so was the Roman army; many high offices, political as well as military, were in Teutonic hands.
Valens hurried up from the East and met the Goths on the plains of Hadrianople with an inferior force mostly composed of barbarians in the service of Rome (378). The result, in the words of Ammianus, was “the most disastrous defeat encountered by the Romans since Cannae” 594 years before.10 The Gothic cavalry prevailed over the Roman infantry, and from that day till the fourteenth century the strategy and tactics of cavalry dominated the declining art of war.
Of the approximately 70,000,000 souls in the Empire, 20,000,000 or more were Gauls, hardly 6,000,000 were Italians;15 the rest were mostly Greek-speaking Orientals; Rome itself since 100 A.D. had been ethnically an Oriental city. Once Rome had lived on the East, as modern Europe lived on its conquests and colonies till the middle of the twentieth century; the legions had sucked the products and precious metals of a dozen provinces into the mansions and coffers of the victors. Now conquest was ended and retreat had begun.
Every property owner was subject to rising taxes to support an expanding bureaucracy whose chief function was the collection of taxes.
Many peasant proprietors, unable to pay their taxes or to defend their homes against invasion or robbery, turned their holdings over to richer or stronger landlords, and became their coloni or cultivators; they bound themselves to give the lord a proportion of their produce, labor, and time in return for guaranteed subsistence, and protection in peace and war. Thus Italy, which would never know full feudalism, was among the first nations to prepare its foundations.
In fourth-century Rome there were 175 holidays in the year; ten with gladiatorial contests; sixty-four with circus performances; the rest with shows in the theaters.
He wrote a difficult and involved Latin, like a German writing French; he had read too much Tacitus, and had too long spoken Greek.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? (Ovumne prius fuerit an gallina?)
“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).
flagellum dei
Rome itself had shrunk from 1,500,000 souls to some 300,000 in one century;
in 470 a general impoverishment of fields and cities, of senators and proletarians, depressed the spirits of a once great race to an epicurean cynicism that doubted all gods but Priapus, a timid childlessness that shunned the responsibilities of life, and an angry cowardice that denounced every surrender and shirked every martial task.
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.
THE foster mother of the new civilization was the Church. As the old order faded away in corruption, cowardice, and neglect, a unique army of churchmen rose to defend with energy and skill a regenerated stability and decency of
To millions of souls the Church brought a faith and hope that inspired and canceled death. That faith became their most precious possession, for which they would die or kill; and on that rock of hope the Church was built.
In the East the Church became subordinate to the state; in the West she fought for independence, then for mastery.
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.
auriscalpius matronarum, a scratcher of ladies’ ears—i.e., an expert in wheedling gifts for the Church from the rich matrons of Rome.
Congregations like to be scolded, but not to be reformed.
More puzzling still-filling all Augustine’s life with wonder and debate—was the problem of harmonizing the free will of man with the foreknowledge of God. If God is omniscient He sees the future in all details; since God is immutable, this picture that He has of all coming events lays upon them the necessity of occurring as He has foreseen them; they are irrevocably predestined. Then how can man be free? Must he not do what God has foreseen? And if God has foreseen all things, He has known from all eternity the final fate of every soul that He creates; why, then, should He create those that
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To understand the Middle Ages we must forget our modern rationalism, our proud confidence in reason and science, our restless search after wealth and power and an earthly paradise; we must enter sympathetically into the mood of men disillusioned of these pursuits, standing at the end of a thousand years of rationalism, finding all dreams of utopia shattered by war and poverty and barbarism, seeking consolation in the hope of happiness beyond the grave,
An intimate and trustful worship of saints replaced the cult of the pagan gods, and satisfied the congenial polytheism of simple or poetic minds. Statues of Isis and Horus were renamed Mary and Jesus; the Roman Lupercalia and the feast of the purification of Isis became the Feast of the Nativity;99 the Saturnalia were replaced by Christmas celebrations, the Floralia by Pentecost, an ancient festival of the dead by All Souls’ Day,100 the resurrection of Attis by the resurrection of Christ.
The soul of the simple man can be moved only through the senses and the imagination, by ceremony and miracle, by myth and fear and hope; he will reject or transform any religion that does not give him these.
For the first time in European history the teachers of mankind preached an ethic of kindliness, obedience, humility, patience, mercy, purity, chastity, and tenderness—virtues perhaps derived from the lowly social origins of the Church, and their popularity among women, but admirably adapted to restore order to a de-moralized people, to tame the marauding barbarian, to moderate the violence of a falling world.
Too many Christians of these early centuries thought that they could serve God best—or, rather, most easily escape hell—by abandoning their parents, mates, or children, and fleeing from the responsibilities of life in the frightened pursuit of a selfishly individual salvation. In paganism the family had been the social and religious unit; it was a loss that in medieval Christianity this unit became the individual.
By making matrimony indissoluble she raised the security and dignity of the wife, and encouraged the patience that comes from hopelessness.
The Church did not condemn slavery. Orthodox and heretic, Roman and barbarian alike assumed the institution to be natural and indestructible; a few philosophers protested, but they too had slaves.
Having displaced the axis of man’s concern from this world to the next, Christianity offered supernatural explanations for historical events, and thereby passively discouraged the investigation of natural causes; many of the advances made by Greek science through seven centuries were sacrificed to the cosmology and biology of Genesis.
if, thereafter, reason should fail, and science should find no answers, but should multiply knowledge and power without improving conscience or purpose; if all utopias should brutally collapse in the changeless abuse of the weak by the strong: then men would understand why once their ancestors, in the barbarism of those early Christian centuries, turned from science, knowledge, power, and pride, and took refuge for a thousand years in humble faith, hope, and charity.
Famine and pestilence fought successfully against the eager reproductiveness of men.
Through the influence of the Church, which retained Latin in her sermons and liturgy, the Visigoths, within a century after their conquest of Spain, forgot their Germanic speech, and corrupted the Latin of the peninsula into the masculine power and feminine beauty of the Spanish tongue.
Property was concentrated in the hands of a few; the great gulf between rich and poor, between Christian and Jew, divided the nation into three states; and when the Arabs came, the poor and the Jews connived at the overthrow of a monarchy and a Church that had ignored their poverty or oppressed their faith.
she built a pretty “Convent of Repentance” for reformed prostitutes. Some of the girls repented of their repentance, and threw themselves from the windows, literally bored to death.
perhaps it merits note that the greatest generals—Alexander, Caesar, Belisarius, Saladin, Napoleon—found clemency a mighty engine of war.
The aristocracy was shattered; so many of its members had been slain in battle, pillage, or flight that too few survived to continue the Senate of Rome; after 579 we hear of it no more.
