BY WILL DURANT

The Story of Philosophy

Transition

The Pleasure of Philosophy

Adventures in Genius


BY WILL AND ARIEL DURANT


THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION

1. Our Oriental Heritage

2. The Life of Greece

3. Caesar and Christ

4. The Age of Faith

5. The Renaissance

6. The Reformation

7. The Age of Reason Begins

8. The Age of Louis XIV

9. The Age of Voltaire

10. Rousseau and Revolution

11. The Age of Napoleon


The Lessons of History

Interpretation of Life

A Dual Autobiography




COPYRIGHT 1950 BY WILL DURANT


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION


IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM


PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER


A DIVISION OF GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION


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SIMON AND SCHUSTER AND COLOPHON ARE TRADEMARKS OF SIMON & SCHUSTER





ISBN 0-671-01200-1


eISBN-13: 978-1-45164-761-7


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 35-10016


MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA



TO ETHEL, GORDON, AND JIM



To the Reader

THIS book aims to give as full and fair an account of medieval civilization from A.D. 325 to 1300, as space and prejudice will permit. Its method is integral history—the presentation of all phases of a culture or an age in one total picture and narrative. The obligation to cover the economic, political, legal, military, moral, social, religious, educational, scientific, medical, philosophic, literary, and artistic aspects of four distinct civilizations—Byzantine, Islamic, Judaic, and West European—has made unification and brevity difficult. The meeting and conflict of the four cultures in the Crusades provides a measure of unity; and the tired reader, appalled by the length of the book, may find some consolation in learning that the original manuscript was half again longer than the present text.* Nothing has been retained except what seemed necessary to the proper understanding of the period, or to the life and color of the tale. Nevertheless certain recondite passages, indicated by reduced type, may be omitted by the general reader without mortal injury.

These two volumes constitute Part IV of a history of civilization. Part I, Our Oriental Heritage (1935), reviewed the history of Egypt and the Near East to their conquest by Alexander about 330 B.C., and of India, China, and Japan to the present century. Part II, The Life of Greece (1939), recorded the career and culture of Hellas and the Near East to the Roman Conquest of Greece in 146 B.C. Part III, Caesar and Christ (1944), surveyed the history of Rome and Christianity from their beginnings, and of the Near East from 146 B.C., to the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. This book continues the study of the white man’s life to the death of Dante in 1321. Part V, The Renaissance and the Reformation, covering the period from 1321 to 1648, should appear in 1955; and Part VI, The Age of Reason, carrying the story to our own time, should be ready by 1960. This will bring the author so close to senility that he must forgo the privilege of applying the integral method to the two Americas.

Each of these volumes is designed as an independent unit, but readers familiar with Caesar and Christ will find it easier to pick up the threads of the present narrative. Chronology compels us to begin with those facets of the quadripartite medieval civilization which are most remote from our normal interest—the Byzantine and the Islamic. The Christian reader will be surprised by the space given to the Moslem culture, and the Moslem scholar will mourn the brevity with which the brilliant civilization of medieval Islam has here been summarized. A persistent effort has been made to be impartial, to see each faith and culture from its own point of view. But prejudice has survived, if only in the selection of material and the allotment of space. The mind, like the body, is imprisoned in its skin.

The manuscript has been written three times, and each rewriting has discovered errors. Many must still remain; the improvement of the part is sacrificed to the completion of the whole. The correction of errors will be welcomed.

Grateful acknowledgment is due to Dr. Use Lichtenstadter, of the Asia Institute of New York, for reading the pages on Islamic civilization; to Dr. Bernard Mandelbaum, of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, for reviewing the pages on medieval Jewry; to Professor Lynn Thorndike, of Columbia University, for the use of his translation of a passage from Alexander Neckham; to the Cambridge University Press for permission to quote translations from Edward G. Browne’s A Literary History of Persia; to the Public Library of Los Angeles, and specifically to its Hollywood Branch, and to the Library of Congress, for the loan of books; to Miss Rose Mary DeWitte for typing 50,000 notes; to Dr. James L. Whitehead, Dr. C. Edward Hopkin, and Mrs. Will Durant for their learned aid in classifying the material; to Misses Mary and Flora Kaufman for varied assistance; and to Mrs. Edith Digate for her high competence in typing the manuscript.

This book, like all its predecessors, should have been dedicated to my wife, who for thirty-seven years has given me a patient toleration, protection, guidance, and inspiration that not all these volumes could repay. It is at her prompting that these two volumes are dedicated to our daughter, son-in-law, and grandson.

WILL DURANT

November 22, 1949


Table of Contents


BOOK I: THE BYZANTINE ZENITH: A.D. 325–565

Chronological Table

Chapter I. JULIAN THE APOSTATE: 332–63

I. The Legacy of Constantine

II. Christians and Pagans

III. The New Caesar

IV. The Pagan Emperor

V. Journey’s End

Chapter II. THE TRIUMPH OF THE BARBARIANS: 325–476

I. The Threatened Frontier

II. The Savior Emperors

III. Italian Background

IV. The Barbarian Flood

V. The Fall of Rome

Chapter III. THE PROGRESS OF CHRISTIANITY: 364–451

I. The Organization of the Church

II. The Heretics

III. The Christian West

1. Rome

2. St. Jerome

3. Christian Soldiers

IV. The Christian East

1. The Monks of the East

2. The Eastern Bishops

V. St. Augustine

1. The Sinner

2. The Theologian

3. The Philosopher

4. The Patriarch

VI. The Church and the World

Chapter IV. EUROPE TAKES FORM: 325–529

I. Britain Becomes England

II. Ireland

III. Prelude to France

1. The Last Days of Classic Gaul

2. The Franks

3. The Merovingians

IV. Visigothic Spain

V. Ostrogothic Italy

1. Theodoric

2. Boethius

Chapter V. JUSTINIAN: 527–65

I. The Emperor

II. Theodora

III. Belisarius

IV. The Code of Justinian

V. The Imperial Theologian

Chapter VI. BYZANTINE CIVILIZATION: 337–565

I. Work and Wealth

II. Science and Philosophy

III. Literature

IV. Byzantine Art

1. The Passage from Paganism

2. The Byzantine Artist

3. St. Sophia

4. From Constantinople to Ravenna

5. The Byzantine Arts

Chapter VII. THE PERSIANS: 224–641

I. Sasanian Society

II. Sasanian Royalty

III. Sasanian Art

IV. The Arab Conquest


BOOK II: ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION: A.D. 569–1258

Chronological Table

Chapter VIII. MOHAMMED: 569–632

I. Arabia

II. Mohammed in Mecca

III. Mohammed in Medina

IV. Mohammed Victorious

Chapter IX. THE KORAN

I. Form

II. Creed

III. Ethics

IV. Religion and the State

V. Sources of the Koran

Chapter X. THE SWORD OF ISLAM: 632–1058

I. The Successors

II. The Umayyad Caliphate

III. The Abbasid Caliphate

1. Harun al-Rashid

2. Decline of the Abbasids

IV. Armenia

Chapter XI. THE ISLAMIC SCENE: 632–1058

I. The Economy

II. The Faith

III. The People

IV. The Government

V. The Cities

Chapter XII. THOUGHT AND ART IN EASTERN ISLAM: 632–1058

I. Scholarship

II. Science

III. Medicine

IV. Philosophy

V. Mysticism and Heresy

VI. Literature

VII. Art

VIII. Music

Chapter XIII. WESTERN ISLAM: 641–1086

I. The Conquest of Africa

II. Islamic Civilization in Africa

III. Islam in the Mediterranean

IV. Spanish Islam

1. Caliphs and Emirs

2. Civilization in Moorish Spain

Chapter XIV. THE GRANDEUR AND DECLINE OF ISLAM: 1058–1258

I. The Islamic East

II. The Islamic West

III. Glimpses of Islamic Art

IV. The Age of Omar Khayyam

V. The Age of Sa’di

VI. Moslem Science

VII. Al-Ghazali

VIII. Averroës

IX. The Coming of the Mongols

X. Islam and Christendom


BOOK III: JUDAIC CIVILIZATION: A.D. 135–1300

Chronological Table

Chapter XV. THE TALMUD: 135–500

I. The Exiles

II. The Makers of the Talmud

III. The Law

1. Theology

2. Ritual

3. Ethics of the Talmud

IV. Life and the Law

Chapter XVI. THE MEDIEVAL JEWS: 500–1300

I. The Oriental Communities

II. The European Communities

III. Jewish Life

1. Government

2. Economy

3. Morals

4. Religion

IV. Anti-Semitism

Chapter XVII. THE MIND AND HEART OF THE JEW: 500–1300

I. Letters

II. The Adventures of the Talmud

III. Science Among the Jews

IV. The Rise of Jewish Philosophy

V. Maimonides

VI. The Maimonidean War

VII. The Cabala

VIII. Release


BOOK IV: THE DARK AGES: A.D. 566–1095

Chronological Table

Chapter XVIII. THE BYZANTINE WORLD: 566–1095

I. Heraclius

II. The Iconoclasts

III. Imperial Kaleidoscope

IV. Byzantine Life

V. The Byzantine Renaissance

VI. The Balkans

VII. The Birth of Russia

Chapter XIX. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST: 566–1066

I. Italy

1. The Lombards

2. The Normans in Italy

3. Venice

4. Italian Civilization

II. Christian Spain

III. France

1. The Coming of the Carolingians

2. Charlemagne

3. The Carolingian Decline

4. Letters and Arts

5. The Rise of the Dukes

Chapter XX. THE RISE OF THE NORTH: 566–1066

I. England

1. Alfred and the Danes

2. Anglo-Saxon Civilization

3. Between Conquests

II. Wales

III. Irish Civilization

IV. Scotland

V. The Northmen

1. The Kings’ Saga

2. Viking Civilization

VI. Germany

1. The Organization of Power

2. German Civilization

Chapter XXI. CHRISTIANITY IN CONFLICT: 529–1085

I. St. Benedict

II. Gregory the Great

III. Papal Politics

IV. The Greek Church

V. The Christian Conquest of Europe

VI. The Nadir of the Papacy

VII. The Reform of the Church

VIII. The Great Eastern Schism

IX. Gregory VII Hildebrand

Chapter XXII. FEUDALISM AND CHIVALRY: 600–1200

I. Feudal Origins

II. Feudal Organization

1. The Slave

2. The Serf

3. The Village Community

4. The Lord

5. The Feudal Church

6. The King

III. Feudal Law

IV. Feudal War

V. Chivalry


BOOK V: THE CLIMAX OF CHRISTIANITY: A.D. 1095–1300

Chronological Table

Chapter XXIII. THE CRUSADES: 1095–1291

I. Causes

II. The First Crusade

III. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem

IV. The Second Crusade

V. Saladin

VI. The Third Crusade

VII. The Fourth Crusade

VIII. The Collapse of the Crusades

IX. The Results of the Crusades

Chapter XXIV. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION: 1066–1300

I. The Revival of Commerce

II. The Progress of Industry

III. Money

IV. Interest

V. The Guilds

VI. The Communes

VII. The Agricultural Revolution

VIII. The Class War

Chapter XXV. THE RECOVERY OF EUROPE: 1095–1300

I. Byzantium

II. The Armenians

III. Russia and the Mongols

IV. The Balkan Flux

V. The Border States

VI. Germany

VII. Scandinavia

VIII. England

1. William the Conqueror

2. Thomas à Becket

3. Magna Carta

4. The Growth of the Law

5. The English Scene

IX. Ireland—Scotland—Wales

X. The Rhinelands

XI. France

1. Philip Augustus

2. St. Louis

3. Philip the Fair

XII. Spain

XIII. Portugal

Chapter XXVI. PRE-RENAISSANCE ITALY: 1057–1308

I. Norman Sicily

II. The Papal States

III. Venice Triumphant

IV. From Mantua to Genoa

V. Frederick II

1. The Excommunicate Crusader

2. The Wonder of the World

3. Empire vs. Papacy

VI. The Dismemberment of Italy

VII. The Rise of Florence

Chapter XXVII. THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH: 1095–1294

I. The Faith of the People

II. The Sacraments

III. Prayer

IV. Ritual

V. Canon Law

VI. The Clergy

VII. The Papacy Supreme

VIII. The Finances of the Church

Chapter XXVIII. THE EARLY INQUISITION: 1000–1300

I. The Albigensian Heresy

II. The Background of the Inquisition

III. The Inquisitors

IV. Results

Chapter XXIX. MONKS AND FRIARS: 1095–1300

I. The Monastic Life

II. St. Bernard

III. St. Francis

IV. St. Dominic

V. The Nuns

VI. The Mystics

VII. The Tragic Pope

VII. Retrospect

Chapter XXX. THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF CHRISTENDOM: 700–1300

I. The Christian Ethic

II. Premarital Morality

III. Marriage

IV. Woman

V. Public Morality

VI. Medieval Dress

VII. In the Home

VIII. Society and Sport

IX. Morality and Religion

Chapter XXXI. THE RESURRECTION OF THE ARTS: 1095–1300

I. The Esthetic Awakening

II. The Adornment of Life

III. Painting

1. Mosaic

2. Miniatures

3. Murals

4. Stained Glass

IV. Sculpture

Chapter XXXII. THE GOTHIC FLOWERING: 1095–1300

I. The Cathedral

II. Continental Romanesque

III. The Norman Style in England

IV. The Evolution of Gothic

V. French Gothic

VI. English Gothic

VII. German Gothic

VIII. Italian Gothic

IX. Spanish Gothic

X. Considerations

Chapter XXXIII. MEDIEVAL MUSIC: 326–1300

I. The Music of the Church

II. The Music of the People

Chapter XXXIV. THE TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE: 1000–1300

I. The Rise of the Vernaculars

II. The World of Books

III. The Translators

IV. The Schools

V. Universities of the South

VI. Universities of France

VII. Universities of England

VIII. Student Life

Chapter XXXV. ABÉLARD: 1079–1142

I. Divine Philosophy

II. Héloïse

III. The Rationalist

IV. The Letters of Heloise

V. The Condemned

Chapter XXXVI. THE ADVENTURE OF REASON: 1120–1308

I. The School of Chartres

II. Aristotle in Paris

III. The Freethinkers

IV. The Development of Scholasticism

V. Thomas Aquinas

VI. The Thomist Philosophy

1. Logic

2. Metaphysics

3. Theology

4. Psychology

5. Ethics

6. Politics

7. Religion

8. The Reception of Thomism

VII. The Successors

Chapter XXXVII. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE: 1095–1300

I. The Magical Environment

II. The Mathematical Revolution

III. The Earth and Its Life

IV. Matter and Energy

V. The Revival of Medicine

VI. Albertus Magnus

VII. Roger Bacon

VIII. The Encyclopedists

Chapter XXXVIII. THE AGE OF ROMANCE: 1100–1300

I. The Latin Revival

II. Wine, Woman, and Song

III. The Rebirth of Drama

IV. Epics and Sagas

V. The Troubadours

VI. The Minnesingers

VII. The Romances

VIII. The Satirical Reaction

Chapter XXXIX. DANTE: 1265–1321

I. The Italian Troubadours

II. Dante and Beatrice

III. The Poet in Politics

IV. The Divine Comedy

1. The Poem

2. Hell

3. Purgatory

4. Heaven

EPILOGUE: THE MEDIEVAL LEGACY

Bibliography

Notes

Index


List of Illustrations


FIG. 1. Interior of Santa Maria Maggiore

FIG. 2. Interior of Hagia Sophia

FIG. 3. Interior of San Vitale

FIG. 4. Detail of Rock Relief

FIG. 5. Court of the Great Mosque

FIG. 6. Dome of the Rock

FIG. 7. Portion of Stone Relief

FIG. 8. Court of El Azhar Mosque

FIG. 9. Wood Minbar in El Agsa Mosque

FIG. 10. Pavilion on Court of Lions, the Alhambra

FIG. 11. Interior of Mosque

FIG. 12. Façade of St. Mark’s

FIG. 13. Piazza of the Duomo, Showing Baptistry, Cathedral, and Leaning Tower

FIG. 14. Interior of Capella Palatina

FIG. 15. Apse of Cathedral, Monreale

FIG. 16. Cimabue: Madonna with Angels and St. Francis

FIG. 17. Portrait of a Saint, Book of Kells

FIG. 18. Glass Painting, 12th Century

FIG. 19. Rose Window, Strasbourg

FIG. 20. Notre Dame

FIG. 21. The Virgin of the Pillar

FIG. 22. Gargoyle

FIG. 23. Chartres Cathedral, West View

FIG. 24. “Modesty”

FIG. 25. “The Visitation”

FIG. 26. Rheims Cathedral

FIG. 27. St. Nicaise Between Two Angels

FIG. 28. “The Annunciation and Visitation”

FIG. 29. Wrought Iron Grille

FIG. 30. Canterbury Cathedral

FIG. 31. Hôtel de Ville

FIG. 32. Salisbury Cathedral

FIG. 33. Cathedral Interior, Durham

FIG. 34. Cathedral Interior, Winchester

FIG. 35. Westminster Abbey

FIG. 36. Strasbourg Cathedral

FIG. 37. “The Church”

FIG. 38. “The Synagogue”

FIG. 39. Saint Elizabeth

FIG. 40. Mary

FIG. 41. Ekkehard and His Wife Uta

FIG. 42. Rose Façade, Orvieto Cathedral

FIG. 43. Façade, Siena Cathedral

FIG. 44. Pulpit of Pisano

FIG. 45. Rear View of Cathedral, Salamanca

FIG. 46. Cathedral Interior, Santiago di Compostela


Maps of Europe and the Byzantine Empire (A.D. 565), the Caliphate (A.D. 750), and Europe (A.D. 1190) will be found on the inside covers.


All photographs, with the exception of those otherwise marked, were secured through Bettmann Archive.




BOOK I


THE BYZANTINE ZENITH


325–565



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE


Dates of rulers and popes are of their reigns. All dates are A.D.


226:

Ardashir founds Sasanian dynasty


241–72:

Shapur I of Persia


251–356:

St. Anthony of Egypt


293–373:

Athanasius


300–67:

Hilary of Poitiers


309–79:

Shapur II of Persia


310–400:

Ausonius, poet


311–81:

Ulfilas, apostle to the Goths


325:

Council of Nicaea


325–403:

Oribasius, physician


325–91:

Ammianus Marcellinus, hist’n


329–79:

St. Basil


320–89:

Gregory Nazianzen


331:

B. of Julian the Apostate


337:

Death of Constantine


340–98:

St. Ambrose


340–420:

St. Jerome


345–407:

St. John Chrysostom


345–410:

Symmachus, senator


348–410:

Prudentius, poet


353–61:

Constantius sole emperor


354–430:

St. Augustine


359–408:

Stilicho, patricius


361–3:

Julian emperor


363–4:

Jovian emperor


364–7:

Valentinian I, Western emp.


364–78:

Valens Eastern emperor


365–408:

Claudian, poet


366–84:

Pope Damasus I


372:

Huns cross the Volga


375–83:

Gratian Western emperor


378:

Battle of Hadrianople


379:

Theon of Alexandria, math’n


379–95:

Theodosius I, emperor


382–92:

Affair of Altar of Victory


383–92:

Valentinian II, Western emp.


386–404:

Jerome’s transl, of Bible


387:

Baptism of Augustine


389–461:

St. Patrick


390:

Penance of Theodosius


392–4:

Eugenius Western emperor


394:

End of the Olympian Games


394–423:

Honorius Western emp.


395–408:

Arcadius Eastern emp.


395–410:

Alaric I King of Visigoths


397:

Confessions of St. Augustine


c. 400:

Saturnalia of Macrobius


402:

Alaric defeated at Pollentia


403:

Ravenna becomes Western capital


404:

End of gladiatorial games


407:

Roman legions leave Britain


408–50:

Theodosius II Eastern emp.


409:

Pelagius, theologian


410:

Alaric sacks Rome


410–85:

Proclus, mathematician


413:

Orosius, historian


413–26:

Augustine’s City of God


415:

Murder of Hypatia


425:

University of Constantinople


425–55:

Valentinian III Western emp.


428–31:

Nestorius patriarch at C’ple


429:

Vandals conquer Africa


431:

Council of Ephesus


432–82:

Sidonius Apollinaris


432–61:

St. Patrick in Ireland


433–54:

Aëtius patricius


438:

Theodosian Code


439:

Gaiseric takes Carthage


440–61:

Pope Leo I


440:

Moses of Chorene, hist’n


449:

Anglo-Saxons invade Britain


450–67:

Marcian Eastern emp.


450–550:

Great age of architecture and mosaic at Ravenna


451:

Attila defeated at Troyes


452:

Leo I turns Attila from Rome


453:

D. of Attila


454:

Valentinian III slays Aëtius


455:

Gaiseric sacks Rome


456:

Ricimer rules the West


457–61:

Majorian Western emp.


466–83:

Visigoths conquer Spain


474–91:

Zeno Eastern emp.


475–6:

Romulus Augustulus


475–526:

Theodoric King of Ostrogoths


475–524:

Boethius, philosopher


476:

End of Western Roman Empire


480–573:

Cassiodorus, historian


481:

Clovis and the Franks begin conquest of Gaul


483–531:

Kavadh I; Mazdakite communism


490–570:

Procopius, historian


491–518:

Anastasius I Eastern emp.


493–526:

Theodoric rules Italy


525–605:

Alexander of Tralles, physician


527–65:

Justinian I Eastern emp.


529:

Justinian closes schools of Athens; St. Benedict founds Monte Cassino


530–610:

Fortunatus, poet


531–79:

Khosru I of Persia


532–7:

Cathedral of St. Sophia


533:

Belisarius regains Africa


535–53:

The “Gothic War” in Italy


538–94:

Gregory of Tours, hist’n


546–53:

Totila rules Italy


552:

Silk culture introduced into Europe


570–636:

Isidore of Seville, encyclopedist


577:

Anglo-Saxon victory at Deorham


589–628:

Khosru II of Persia


616:

Persians conquer Egypt


637–42:

Arabs conquer Persia


641:

End of Sasanian dynasty



CHAPTER I


Julian the Apostate


332–63


I. THE LEGACY OF CONSTANTINE

IN the year 335 the Emperor Constantine, feeling the nearness of death, called his sons and nephews to his side, and divided among them, with the folly of fondness, the government of the immense Empire that he had won. To his eldest son, Constantine II, he assigned the West—Britain, Gaul, and Spain; to his son Constantius, the East—Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt; to his youngest son, Constans, North Africa, Italy, Illyricum, and Thrace, including the new and old capitals—Constantinople and Rome; and to two nephews Armenia, Macedonia, and Greece. The first Christian Emperor had spent his life, and many another, in restoring the monarchy, and unifying the faith, of the Roman Empire; his death (337) risked all. He had a hard choice: his rule had not acquired the sanctity of time, and could not ensure the peaceable succession of a sole heir; divided government seemed a lesser evil than civil war.

Civil war came none the less, and assassination simplified the scene. The army rejected the authority of any but Constantine’s sons; all other male relatives of the dead Emperor were murdered, except his nephews Gallus and Julian; Gallus was ill, and gave promise of an early death; Julian was five, and perhaps the charm of his age softened the heart of Constantius, whom tradition and Ammianus credited with these crimes.1 Constantius renewed with Persia that ancient war between East and West which had never really ceased since Marathon, and allowed his brothers to eliminate one another in fraternal strife. 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.

The city that Constantine had called Nova Roma, but which even in his lifetime had taken his name, had been founded on the Bosporus by Greek colonists about 657 B.C. For almost a thousand years it had been known as Byzantium; and Byzantine would persist as a label for its civilization and its art. No site on earth could have surpassed it for a capital; at Tilsit, in 1807, Napoleon would call it the empire of the world, and would refuse to yield it to a Russia fated by the direction of her rivers to long for its control. Here at any moment the ruling power could close a main door between East and West; here the commerce of continents would congregate, and deposit the products of a hundred states; here an army might stand poised to drive back the gentlemen of Persia, the Huns of the East, the Slavs of the North, and the barbarians of the West. The rushing waters provided defense on every side but one, which could be strongly walled; and in the Golden Horn—a quiet inlet of the Bosporus—war fleets and merchantmen might find a haven from attack or storm. The Greeks called the inlet Keras, horn, possibly from its shape; golden was later added to suggest the wealth brought to this port in fish and grain and trade. Here, amid a population predominantly Christian, and long inured to Oriental monarchy and pomp, the Christian emperor might enjoy the public support withheld by Rome’s proud Senate and pagan populace. For a thousand years the Roman Empire would here survive the barbarian floods that were to inundate Rome; Goths, Huns, Vandals, Avars, Persians, Arabs, Bulgarians, Russians would threaten the new capital in turn and fail; only once in that millennium would Constantinople be captured—by Christian Crusaders loving gold a little better than the cross. For eight centuries after Mohammed it would hold back the Moslem tide that would sweep over Asia, Africa, and Spain. Here beyond all expectation Greek civilization would display a saving continuity, tenaciously preserve its ancient treasures, and transmit them at last to Renaissance Italy and the Western world.

In November 324 Constantine the Great led his aides, engineers, and priests from the harbor of Byzantium across the surrounding hills to trace the boundaries of his contemplated capital. Some marveled that he took in so much, but “I shall advance,” he said, “till He, the invisible God who marches before me, thinks proper to stop.”2 He left no deed undone, no word unsaid, that could give to his plan, as to his state, a deep support in the religious sentiments of the people and in the loyalty of the Christian Church.

“In obedience to the command of God,”3 he brought in thousands of workmen and artists to raise city walls, fortifications, administrative buildings, palaces, and homes; he adorned the squares and streets with fountains and porticoes, and with famous sculptures conscripted impartially from a hundred cities in his realm; and to divert the turbulence of the populace he provided an ornate and spacious hippodrome where the public passion for games and gambling might vent itself on a scale paralleled only in degenerating Rome. 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.

Within two centuries of its establishment as a capital, Constantinople became, and for ten centuries remained, the richest, most beautiful, and most civilized City in the world. In 337 it contained some 50,000 people; in 400 some 100,000; in 500 almost a million.4 An official document (c. 450) lists five imperial palaces, six palaces for the ladies of the court, three for high dignitaries, 4388 mansions, 322 streets, 52 porticoes; add to these a thousand shops, a hundred places of amusement, sumptuous baths, brilliantly ornamented churches, and magnificent squares that were veritable museums of the art of the classic world.5 On the second of the hills that lifted the city above its encompassing waters lay the Forum of Constantine, an elliptical space entered under a triumphal arch at either end; porticoes and statuary formed its circumference; on the north side stood a stately senate house; at the center rose a famous porphyry pillar, 120 feet high, crowned with the figure of Apollo, and ascribed to Pheidias himself.*

From the Forum a broad Mese or Middle Way, lined with palaces and shops, and shaded with colonnades, led westward through the city to the Augusteum, a plaza a thousand by three hundred feet, named after Constantine’s mother Helena as Augusta. At the north end of this square rose the first form of St. Sophia—Church of the Holy Wisdom; on the east side was a second senate chamber; on the south stood the main palace of the emperor, and the gigantic public Baths of Zeuxippus, containing hundreds of statues in marble or bronze; at the west end a vaulted monument—the Milion or Milestone—marked the point from which radiated the many magnificent roads (some still functioning) that bound the provinces to the capital. Here, too, on the west of the Augusteum, lay the great Hippodrome. Between this and St. Sophia the imperial or Sacred Palace spread, a complex structure of marble surrounded by 150 acres of gardens and porticoes. Here and there and in the suburbs were the mansions of the aristocracy. In the narrow, crooked, congested side streets were the shops of the tradesmen, and the homes or tenements of the populace. At its western terminus the Middle Way opened through the “Golden Gate”—in the Wall of Constantine—upon the Sea of Marmora. Palaces lined the three shores, and trembled with reflected glory in the waves.

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. Below the great officials and the senators was an aristocracy of landowners dwelling now in the city, now on their country estates. Scorned by these, but rivaling them in wealth, were the merchants who exchanged the goods of Constantinople and its hinterland for those of the world; below these, a swelling bureaucracy of governmental employees; below these the shopkeepers and master workmen of a hundred trades; below these a mass of formally free labor, voteless and riotous, normally disciplined by hunger and police, and bribed to peace by races, games, and a daily dole totaling 80,000 measures of grain or loaves of bread. 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.6

Periodically the free population rose from its toil to crowd the Hippodrome. There, in an amphitheater 560 feet long and 380 wide, seats accommodated from 30,000 to 70,000 spectators;7 these were protected from the arena by an elliptical moat; and between the games they might walk under a shaded and marble-railed promenade 2766 feet long.8 Statuary lined the spina or backbone of the course—a low wall that ran along the middle length of the arena from goal to goal. At the center of the spina stood an obelisk of Thothmes III, brought from Egypt; to the south rose a pillar of three intertwined bronze serpents, originally raised at Delphi to commemorate the victory of Plataea (479 B.C.); these two monuments still stand. The emperor’s box, the Kathisma, was adorned in the fifth century with four horses in gilded bronze, an ancient work of Lysippus. In this Hippodrome the great national festivals were celebrated with processions, athletic contests, acrobatics, animal hunts and fights, and exhibitions of exotic beasts and birds. 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. Nevertheless, the twenty-four horse and chariot races that usually dominated the program provided all the excitement that had marked a Roman holiday. Jockeys and charioteers were divided into Blues, Greens, Reds, and Whites, according to their employers and their garb; the spectators—and indeed the whole population of the city—divided likewise; and the principal fashions—the Blues and Greens—fought with throats in the Hippodrome and occasionally with knives in the streets. Only at the games could the populace voice its feelings; there it claimed the right to ask favors of the ruler, to demand reforms, to denounce oppressive officials, sometimes to berate the emperor himself as he sat secure in his exalted seat, from which he had a guarded exit to his palace.

Otherwise the populace was politically impotent. The Constantinian Constitution, continuing Diocletian’s, was frankly monarchical. The two senates—at Constantinople and at Rome—could deliberate, legislate, adjudicate; but always subject to the imperial veto; their legislative functions were largely appropriated by the ruler’s advisory council, the sacrum consistorium principis. 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. Diocletian and Constantine concluded that order could be restored only by restricting higher offices to an aristocracy of patrician counts (comites) and dukes (duces), recruited not by birth but through appointment by an emperor who possessed full responsibility and power, and was clothed with all the awesome prestige of ceremonial inaccessibility, Oriental pomp, and ecclesiastical coronation, sanctification, and support. Perhaps the system was warranted by the situation; but it left no check upon the ruler except the advice of complaisant aides and the fear of sudden death. 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.


II. CHRISTIANS AND PAGANS

In this Mediterranean world of the fourth century, where the state depended so much on religion, ecclesiastical affairs were in such turmoil that government felt called upon to interfere even in the mysteries of theology. The great debate between Athanasius and Arius had not ended with the Council of Nicaea (325). Many bishops—in the East a majority9—still openly or secretly sided with Arius; i.e., they considered Christ the Son of God, but neither consubstantial nor coeternal with the Father. Constantine himself, after accepting the Council’s decree, and banishing Arius, invited him to a personal conference (331), could find no heresy in him, and recommended the restoration of Arius and the Arians to their churches, Athanasius protested; a council of Eastern bishops at Tyre deposed him from his Alexandrian see (335); and for two years he lived as an exile in Gaul. Arius again visited Constantine, and professed adherence to the Nicene Creed, with subtle reservations that an emperor could not be expected to understand. Constantine believed him, and bade Alexander, Patriarch of Constantinople, receive him into communion. The ecclesiastical historian Socrates here tells a painful tale:

It was then Saturday, and Arius was expecting to assemble with the congregation on the day following; but Divine retribution overtook his daring criminality. For going out from the imperial palace … and approaching the porphyry pillar in the Forum of Constantine, a terror seized him, accompanied by violent relaxation of his bowels. … Together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious hemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestine; moreover, portions of his spleen and his liver were eliminated in the effusion of blood, so that he almost immediately died.10

Hearing of this timely purge, Constantine began to wonder whether Arius had not been a heretic after all. But when the Emperor himself died, in the following year, he received the rites of baptism from his friend and counselor Eusebius, Bishop of Nicomedia, an Arian.

Constantius took theology more seriously than his father. He made his own inquiry into the paternity of Jesus, adopted the Arian view, and felt a moral obligation to enforce it upon all Christendom. Athanasius, who had returned to his see after Constantine’s death, was again expelled (339); church councils, called and dominated by the new Emperor, affirmed merely the likeness, not the consubstantiality, of Christ with the Father; ecclesiastics loyal to the Nicene Creed were removed from their churches, sometimes by the violence of mobs; for half a century it seemed that Christianity would be Unitarian, and abandon the divinity of Christ. In those bitter days Athanasius spoke of himself as solus contra mundum; all the powers of the state were opposed to him, and even his Alexandrian congregation turned against him. Five times he fled from his see, often in peril of his life, and wandered in alien lands; through half a century (323–73) he fought with patient diplomacy and eloquent vituperation for the creed as it had been defined under his leadership at Nicaea; he stood firm even when Pope Liberius gave in. To him, above all, the Church owes her doctrine of the Trinity.

Athanasius laid his case before Pope Julius I (340). Julius restored him to his see; but a council of Eastern bishops at Antioch (341) denied the Pope’s jurisdiction, and named Gregory, an Arian, as bishop of Alexandria. When Gregory reached the city the rival factions broke into murderous riots, killing many; and Athanasius, to end the bloodshed, withdrew (342).11 In Constantinople a similar contest raged; when Constantius ordered the replacement of the orthodox patriot Paul by the Arian Macedonius, a crowd of Paul’s supporters resisted the soldiery, and three thousand persons lost their lives. 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.

Christians divided on almost every point but one—that the pagan temples should be closed, their property confiscated, and the same weapons of the state used against them and their worshipers that had formerly assailed Christianity.12 Constantine had discouraged, but not forbidden, pagan sacrifices and ceremonies; Constans forbade them on pain of death; Constantius ordered all pagan temples in the Empire closed, and all pagan rituals to cease. Those who disobeyed were to forfeit their property and their lives; and these penalties were extended to provincial governors neglecting to enforce the decree.13 Nevertheless, pagan isles remained in the spreading Christian sea. The older cities—Athens, Antioch, Smyrna, Alexandria, Rome—had a large sprinkling of pagans, above all among the aristocracy and in the schools. In Olympia the games continued till Theodosius I (379–95); in Eleusis the Mysteries were celebrated till Alaric destroyed the temple there in 396; and the schools of Athens continued to transmit, with mollifying interpretations, the doctrines of Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno. (Epicurus was outlawed, and became a synonym for atheist.) Constantine and his son continued the salaries of the scholarchs and professors who loosely constituted the University of Athens; lawyers and orators still flocked there to learn the tricks of rhetoric; and pagan sophists—teachers of wisdom—offered their wares to any who could pay. All Athens was fond and proud of Prohaeresius, who had come there as a poor youth, had shared one bed and cloak with another student, had risen to the official chair of rhetoric, and at eighty-seven was still so handsome, vigorous, and eloquent that his pupil Eunapius regarded him as “an ageless and immortal god.”14

But the leading sophist of the fourth century was Libanius. Born at Antioch (314), he had torn himself away from a fond mother to go and study at Athens; offered a rich heiress as wife if he would stay, he declared that he would decline the hand of a goddess just to see the smoke of Athens.15 He used his teachers there as stimuli, not oracles; and amid a maze of professors and schools he educated himself. After lecturing for a time at Constantinople and Nicomedia, he returned to Antioch (354), and set up a school that for forty years was the most frequented and renowned in the Empire; his fame (he assures us) was so great that his exordiums were sung in the streets.16 Ammianus Marcellinus, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Basil were among his pupils. He enjoyed the favor of Christian princes, though he spoke and wrote in defense of paganism and offered sacrifice in the temples. When the bakers of Antioch went on strike he was chosen by both sides as arbitrator; when Antioch revolted against Theodosius I he was named by the chastened city to plead its cause before the Emperor.17 He survived by almost a generation the assassination of his friend Julian, and the collapse of the pagan revival.

Fourth-century paganism took many forms: Mithraism, Neoplatonism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and the local cults of municipal or rustic gods. Mithraism had lost ground, but Neoplatonism was still a power in religion and philosophy. Those doctrines to which Plotinus had given a shadowy form—of a triune spirit binding all reality, of a Logos or intermediary deity who had done the work of creation, of soul as divine and matter as flesh and evil, of spheres of existence along whose invisible stairs the soul had fallen from God to man and might ascend from man to God—these mystic ideas left their mark on the apostles Paul and John, had many imitators among the Christians, and molded many Christian heresies.18 In Iamblichus of Syrian Chalcis miracle was added to mystery in Neoplatonic philosophy: the mystic not only saw things unseen by sense, but—by touching God in ecstasy—he acquired divine powers of magic and divination. Iamblichus’ disciple, Maximus of Tyre, combined the claim to mystic faculties with a devout and eloquent paganism that conquered Julian. Said Maximus, defending against Christian scorn the use of idols in pagan worship,

God the father and the fashioner of all that is, older than the sun or sky, greater than time and eternity and all the flow of being, is unnamable by any lawgiver, unutterable by any voice, not to be seen by any eye. But we, being unable to apprehend His essence, use the help of sounds and names and pictures, of beaten gold and ivory and silver, of plants and rivers, torrents and mountain peaks, yearning for the knowledge of Him, and in our weakness naming after His nature all that is beautiful in this world. … If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidias, or an Egyptian by worshiping animals, or another man by a river or a fire, I have no anger for their divergences; only let them note, let them remember, let them love.19

It was in part the eloquence of Libanius and Maximus that won Julian from Christianity to paganism. When their pupil reached the throne Maximus rushed to Constantinople, and Libanius raised in Antioch a song of triumph and joy: “Behold us verily restored to life; a breath of happiness passes over all the earth, while a veritable god, under the appearance of a man, governs the world.”20


III. THE NEW CAESAR

Flavius Claudius Iulianus was born in the purple at Constantinople in 332, nephew of Constantine. His father, his eldest brother, and most of his cousins were slain in the massacre that inaugurated the reign of Constantine’s sons. He was sent to Nicomedia to be educated by its Bishop Eusebius; he received an overdose of Christian theology, and gave signs of becoming a saint. At seven he began to study classical literature with Mardonius; the old eunuch’s enthusiasm for Homer and Hesiod passed down to his pupil, and Julian entered with wonder and delight into the bright and poetic world of Greek mythology.

In 341, for reasons now unknown, Julian and his brother Gallus were banished to Cappadocia, and were for six years practically imprisoned in the castle of Macellum. Released, Julian was for a time allowed to live in Constantinople; but his youthful vivacity, sincerity, and wit made him too popular for the Emperor’s peace of mind. He was again sent to Nicomedia, where he took up the study of philosophy. He wanted to attend the lectures of Libanius there, but was forbidden; however, he arranged to have full notes of the master’s discourses brought to him. He was now a handsome and impressionable lad of seventeen, ripe for the dangerous fascination of philosophy. And while philosophy and free speculation came to him in all their lure, Christianity was presented to him as at once a system of unquestionable dogma and a Church torn with scandal and schism by the Arian dispute and the mutual excommunications of East and West.

In 351 Gallus was created Caesar—i.e., heir apparent to the throne—and took up the task of government at Antioch. Safe for a while from imperial suspicion, Julian wandered from Nicomedia to Pergamum to Ephesus, studying philosophy under Edesius, Maximus, and Chrysanthius, who completed his secret conversion to paganism. Suddenly in 354 Constantius summoned both Gallus and Julian to Milan, where he was holding court. Gallus had overreached his authority, and had ruled the Asiatic provinces with a despotic cruelty that shocked even Constantius. Tried before the Emperor, he was convicted of various offenses, and was summarily beheaded. Julian was kept under guard for several months in Italy; at last he convinced a suspicious monarch that politics had never entered his head, and that his one interest was in philosophy. Relieved to find that he had only a philosopher to deal with, Constantius banished him to Athens (355). Having expected death, Julian easily reconciled himself to an exile that placed him at the fountainhead of pagan learning, religion, and thought.

Six happy months he spent there studying in the groves that had heard Plato’s voice, making friends with Themistius and other immortal and forgotten philosophers, pleasing them with his eagerness to learn, and charming the citizens with the grace and modesty of his conduct. 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.21 He wept when he heard of famous temples overthrown, of pagan priests proscribed, of their property distributed to eunuchs and partisans.22 It was probably at this time that in cautious privacy he accepted initiation into the Mysteries at Eleusis. The morals of paganism condoned the dissembling of his apostasy. His friends and teachers, who shared his secret, could hardly consent to his revealing it; they knew that Constantius would crown him with inopportune martyrdom, and they looked forward to the time when their protégé would inherit the throne, and restore their emoluments and their gods. For ten years Julian conformed in all externals to the Christian worship, and even read the Scriptures publicly in church.23

Amid all this apprehensive concealment a second summons came to present himself before the Emperor at Milan. He hardly dared go; but word was conveyed to him from the Empress Eusebia that she had promoted his cause at court, and that he had nothing to fear. To his astonishment Constantius gave him his sister Helena in marriage, conferred upon him the title of Caesar, and assigned to him the government of Gaul (355). The shy young celibate, who had come dressed in the cloak of a philosopher, adopted uncomfortably the uniform of a general and the duties of matrimony. It must have further embarrassed him to learn that the Germans, taking advantage of the civil wars that had almost destroyed the military power of the Empire in the West, had invaded the Roman provinces on the Rhine, defeated a Roman army, sacked the old Roman colonia of Cologne, taken forty-four other towns, captured all Alsace, and advanced forty miles into Gaul. Faced with this new crisis, Constantius called upon the lad whom he both suspected and despised to metamorphose himself at once into an administrator and a warrior. He gave Julian a guard of 360 men, commissioned him to reorganize the army of Gaul, and sent him over the Alps.

Julian spent the winter at Vienne on the Rhone, training himself with military exercises, and zealously studying the art of war. In the spring of 356 he collected an army at Reims, drove back the German invaders, and recaptured Cologne. Besieged at Sens by the Alemanni—the tribe that gave a name to Germany—he repulsed their attacks for thirty days, managed to secure food for the population and his troops, and outwore the patience of the enemy. Moving south, he met the main army of the Alemanni near Strasbourg, formed his men into a crescent wedge, and with brilliant tactics and personal bravery led them to a decisive victory over forces far outnumbering his own.24 Gaul breathed more freely; but in the north the Salian Franks still ravaged the valley of the Meuse. Julian marched against them, defeated them, forced them back over the Rhine, and returned in triumph to Paris, the provincial capital. The grateful Gauls hailed the young Caesar as another Julius, and his soldiers already voiced their hopes that he would soon be emperor.

He remained five years in Gaul, repeopling devastated lands, reorganizing the Rhine defenses, checking economic exploitation and political corruption, restoring the prosperity of the province and the solvency of the government, and at the same time reducing taxes. Men marveled that this meditative youth, so lately torn from his books, had transformed himself as if by magic into a general, a statesman, and a just but humane judge.25 He established the principle that an accused person should be accounted innocent till proved guilty. Numerius, a former governor of Gallia Narbonensis, was charged with embezzlement; he denied the charge, and could not be confuted at any point. The judge Delfidius, exasperated by lack of proofs, cried out: “Can anyone, most mighty Caesar, ever be found guilty if it be enough to deny the charge?” To which Julian replied: “Can anyone be proved innocent if it be enough to have accused him?” “And this,” says Ammianus, “was one of many instances of his humanity.”26

His reforms made him enemies. Officials who feared his scrutiny, or envied his popularity, sent to Constantius secret accusations to the effect that Julian was planning to seize the imperial throne. Julian countered by writing a fulsome panegyric of the Emperor. Constantius, still suspicious, recalled the Gallic prefect Sallust, who had co-operated loyally with Julian. If we may believe Ammianus, the Empress Eusebia, childless and jealous, bribed attendants to give Julian’s wife an abortifacient whenever she was with child; when, nevertheless, Helena bore a son, the midwife cut its navel string so near the body that the child bled to death.27 Amid all these worries Julian received from Constantius (360) a command to send the best elements of his Gallic army to join in the war against Persia.

Constantius was not unjustified. Shapur II had demanded the return of Mesopotamia and Armenia (358); when Constantius refused, Shapur besieged and captured Amida (now Diyarbekir in Turkish Kurdistan). Constantius took the field against him, and ordered Julian to turn over to the imperial legates, for the campaign in Asia, 300 men from each Gallic regiment. Julian protested that these troops had enlisted on the understanding that they would not be asked to serve beyond the Alps; and he warned that Gaul would not be safe should her army be so depleted. (Six years later the Germans successfully invaded Gaul.) Nevertheless, he ordered his soldiers to obey the legates. The soldiers refused, surrounded Julian’s palace, acclaimed him Augustus—i.e., Emperor—and begged him to keep them in Gaul. He again counseled obedience; they persisted; Julian, feeling, like an earlier Caesar, that the die was cast, accepted the imperial title, and prepared to fight for the Empire and his life. The army that had refused to leave Gaul now pledged itself to march to Constantinople and seat Julian on the throne.

Constantius was in Cilicia when news reached him of the revolt. For another year he fought Persia, risking his throne to protect his country; then, having signed a truce with Shapur, he marched his legions westward to meet his cousin. Julian advanced with a small force. He stopped for a while at Sirmium (near Belgrade), and there at last proclaimed his paganism to the world. To Maximus he wrote enthusiastically: “We now publicly adore the gods, and all the army that followed me is devoted to their worship.”28 Good fortune rescued him from a precarious position: in November 361 Constantius died of a fever near Tarsus, in the forty-fifth year of his age. A month later Julian entered Constantinople, ascended the throne without opposition, and presided with all the appearance of a loving cousin over Constantius’ funeral.


IV. THE PAGAN EMPEROR

Julian was now thirty-one. Ammianus, who saw him often, describes him as

of medium stature. His hair lay smooth as if it had been combed; and his beard was shaggy and trained to a point; his eyes were bright and full of fire, bespeaking the keenness of his mind. His eyebrows fine, his nose perfectly straight, his mouth a bit large, with full lower lip; his neck thick and bent, his shoulders large and broad. From his head to his fingertips he was well proportioned, and therefore was strong and a good runner.29

His self-portrait is not so flattering:

Though nature did not make my face any too handsome, nor give it the bloom of youth, I myself out of sheer perversity added to it this long beard. … I put up with the lice that scamper about in it as though it were a thicket for wild beasts. … My head is disheveled; I seldom cut my hair or my nails, and my fingers are nearly always black with ink.30

He prided himself on maintaining the simplicity of a philosopher amid the luxuries of the court. He rid himself at once of the eunuchs, barbers, and spies that had served Constantius. His young wife having died, he resolved not to marry again, and so needed no eunuch; one barber, he felt, could take care of the whole palace staff; as for cooks, he ate only the plainest foods, which anyone could prepare.31 This pagan lived and dressed like a monk. Apparently he knew no woman carnally after the death of his wife. He slept on a hard pallet in an unheated room;32 he kept all his chambers unheated throughout the winter “to accustom myself to bear the cold.” He had no taste for amusements. He shunned the theater with its libidinous pantomimes, and offended the populace by staying away from the Hippodrome; on solemn festivals he attended for a while, but finding one race like another, he soon withdrew. At first the people were impressed by his virtues, his asceticism, his devotion to the chores and crises of government; they compared him to Trajan as a general, to Antoninus Pius as a saint, to Marcus Aurelius as a philosopher-king.33 We are surprised to see how readily this young pagan was accepted by a city and an Empire that for a generation had known none but Christian emperors.

He pleased the Byzantine Senate by his modest observance of its traditions and prerogatives. He rose from his seat to greet the consuls, and in general played the Augustan game of holding himself a servant and delegate of the senators and the people. When, inadvertently, he infringed a senatorial privilege, he fined himself ten pounds of gold, and declared that he was subject like his fellow citizens to the laws and forms of the republic. From morn till night he toiled at the tasks of government, except for an intermission in the afternoon, which he reserved for study. His light diet, we are told, gave his body and mind a nervous agility that passed swiftly from one business or visitor to another, and exhausted three secretaries every day. He performed with assiduity and interest the functions of a judge; exposed the sophistry of advocates; yielded with grace to the sustained opinions of judges against his own; and impressed everyone with the righteousness of his decisions. He reduced the taxes levied upon the poor, refused the gift of golden crowns traditionally offered by each province to a new emperor, excused Africa from accumulated arrears, and remitted the excessive tribute heretofore exacted from the Jews.34 He made stricter, and strictly enforced, the requirements for a license to practice medicine. His success as an administrator crowned his triumph as a general; “his fame,” says Ammianus, “gradually spread until it filled the whole world.”35

Amid all these activities of government his ruling passion was philosophy, and his never-forgotten purpose was to restore the ancient cults. He gave orders that the pagan temples should be repaired and opened, that their confiscated property should be restored, and their accustomed revenues renewed. He dispatched letters to the leading philosophers of the day, inviting them to come and live as his guests at his court. When Maximus arrived, Julian interrupted the address he was making to the Senate, ran at full speed to greet his old teacher, and introduced him with grateful praise. Maximus took advantage of the Emperor’s enthusiasm, assumed ornate robes and luxurious ways, and was subjected, after Julian’s death, to severe scrutiny of the means by which he had acquired so rapidly such unbecoming wealth.36 Julian took no notice of these contradictions; he loved philosophy too much to be dissuaded from it by the conduct of philosophers. “If anyone,” he wrote to Eumenius, “has persuaded you that there is anything more profitable to the human race than to pursue philosophy at one’s leisure without interruptions, he is a deluded man trying to delude you.”37

He loved books, carried a library with him on his campaigns, vastly enlarged the library that Constantine had founded, and established others. “Some men,” he wrote, “have a passion for horses, others for birds, others for wild beasts; but I from childhood have been possessed by a passionate longing to acquire books.”38 Proud to be an author as well as a statesman, he sought to justify his policies with dialogues in the manner of Lucian, or orations in the style of Libanius, letters almost as fresh and charming as Cicero’s, and formal philosophical treatises. In a “Hymn to a King’s Son” he expounded his new paganism; in an essay “Against the Galileans” he gave his reasons for abandoning Christianity. The Gospels, he writes, in a preview of Higher Criticism, contradict one another, and agree chiefly in their incredibility; the Gospel of John differs substantially from the other three in narrative and theology; and the creation story of Genesis assumes a plurality of gods.

Unless every one of these legends [of Genesis] is a myth, involving, as I indeed believe, some secret interpretation, they are filled with blasphemies against God. In the first place He is represented as ignorant that she who was created to be a helpmate to Adam would be the cause of man’s fall. Secondly, to refuse to man a knowledge of good and evil (which knowledge alone gives coherence to the human mind), and to be jealous lest man should become immortal by partaking of the tree of life—this is to be an exceedingly grudging and envious god. Why is your god so jealous, even avenging the sins of the fathers upon the children? … Why is so mighty a god so angry against demons, angels, and men? Compare his behavior with the mildness even of Lycurgus and the Romans towards transgressors. The Old Testament (like paganism) sanctioned and required animal sacrifice. … Why do you not accept the Law which God gave the Jews? … You assert that the earlier Law … was limited in time and place. But I could quote to you from the books of Moses not merely ten but ten thousand passages where he says that the Law is for all time.39

When Julian sought to restore paganism he found it not only irreconcilably diverse in practice and creed, but far more permeated with incredible miracle and myth than Christianity; and he realized that no religion can hope to win and move the common soul unless it clothes its moral doctrine in a splendor of marvel, legend, and ritual. He was impressed by the antiquity and universality of myths. “One could no more discover when myth was originally invented … than one could find out who was the first man that sneezed.”40 He resigned himself to mythology, and condoned the use of myths to instill morality into unlettered minds.41 He himself told again the story of Cybele, and how the Great Mother had been carried in the form of a black stone from Phrygia to Rome; and no one could surmise from his narrative that he doubted the divinity of the stone, or the efficacy of its transference. He discovered the need of sensory symbolism to convey spiritual ideas, and adopted the Mithraic worship of the sun as a religious counterpart, among the people, of the philosopher’s devotion to reason and light. It was not difficult for this poet-king to pen a hymn to Helios King Sun, source of all life, author of countless blessings to mankind; this, he suggested, was the real Logos, or Divine Word, that had created, and now sustained, the world. To this Supreme Principle and First Cause Julian added the innumerable deities and genii of the old pagan creeds; a tolerant philosopher, he thought, would not strain at swallowing them all.

It would be a mistake to picture Julian as a freethinker replacing myth with reason. He denounced atheism as bestial,42 and taught doctrines as supernatural as can be found in any creed. Seldom has a man composed such nonsense as in Julian’s hymn to the sun. He accepted the Neoplatonist trinity, identified Plato’s creative archetypal Ideas with the mind of God, considered them as the intermediary Logos or Wisdom by which all things had been made, and looked upon the world of matter and body as a devilish impediment to the virtue and liberation of the imprisoned soul. Through piety, goodness, and philosophy, the soul might free itself, rise to the contemplation of spiritual realities and laws, and so be absorbed in the Logos, perhaps in the ultimate God Himself. The deities of polytheism were in Julian’s belief impersonal forces; he could not accept them in their popular anthropomorphic forms; but he knew that the people would seldom mount to the abstractions of the philosopher, or the mystic visions of the saint. In public and private he practiced the old rituals, and sacrificed so many animals to the gods that even his admirers blushed for his holocausts.43 During his campaigns against Persia he regularly consulted the omens, after the fashion of Roman generals, and listened carefully to the interpreters of his dreams. He seems to have credited the magic-mongering of Maximus.

Like every reformer, he thought that the world needed a moral renovation; and to this end he designed no mere external legislation but a religious approach to the inner hearts of men. He had been deeply moved by the symbolism of the Mysteries at Eleusis and Ephesus; no ceremony seemed to him better fitted to inspire a new and nobler life; and he hoped that these impressive rites of initiation and consecration might be extended from an aristocratic few to a large proportion of the people. According to Libanius, “he wished rather to be called a priest than an emperor.”44 He envied the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Christianity, its devoted priests and women, the communalism of its worship, the binding persuasiveness of its charity. He was not above imitating the better aspects of a religion which he hoped to supplant and destroy. He called new blood into the pagan priesthood, organized a pagan Church with himself as its head, and importuned his clergy to rival and surpass the Christian ministry in providing instruction to the people, distributing alms to the poor, offering hospitality to strangers, and giving examples of the good life.45 He established in every town schools for lectures and expositions of the pagan faith. To his pagan priests he wrote like a Francis to fellow monks:

Act towards me as you think I should act towards you; if you like, let us make this compact, that I am to point out to you what are my views concerning all your affairs, and you in return are to do the same for me concerning my sayings and doings. Nothing in my opinion could be more valuable for us than this reciprocity.…46 We ought to share our money with all men, but more generally with the good and the helpless and the poor. And 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.47

This pagan was a Christian in everything but creed and as we read him, and discount his dead mythology, we suspect that he owed many lovable developments of his character to the Christian ethic which had been poured into him in childhood and early youth. How, then, did he behave to the religion in which he had been reared? He allowed Christianity full freedom of preaching, worship, and practice, and recalled the orthodox bishops exiled by Constantius. He withdrew from the Christian Church all state subsidies, and closed to Christians the chairs of rhetoric, philosophy, and literature in the universities, on the ground that these subjects could be taught with sympathy only by pagans.48 He ended the exemption of the Christian clergy from taxation and burdensome civic duties, and the free use by the bishops of the facilities supplied for the public post. He forbade legacies to churches; made Christians ineligible to governmental offices;49 ordered the Christians of each community to make full reparation for any damage that they had inflicted upon pagan temples during preceding reigns; and permitted the demolition of Christian churches that had been built upon the illegally seized lands of pagan shrines. When confusion, injustice, and riots resulted from this precipitate logic, Julian sought to protect the Christians, but he refused to change his laws. He was capable of sarcasm hardly becoming a philosopher when he reminded certain Christians who had suffered violence that “their Scriptures exhort them to support their misfortunes with patience.”50 Christians who reacted to these laws with insults or violence were severely punished; pagans who took to violence or insults in dealing with Christians were handled with leniency.51 In Alexandria the pagan populace had nursed a special hatred for that Arian Bishop George who had taken Athanasius’ see; when he provoked them by a public procession satirizing the Mithraic rites they seized him and tore him to pieces; and though few Christians cared to defend him, many Christians were killed or wounded in the attendant disorders (362). Julian wished to punish the rioters, but his advisers prevailed upon him to content himself with a letter of strong protest to the people of Alexandria. Athanasius now came out of hiding, and resumed his episcopal seat; Julian protested that this was done without consulting him, and ordered Athanasius to retire. The old prelate obeyed; but in the following year the Emperor died, and the Patriarch, symbol of the triumphant Galileans, returned to his see. Ten years later, aged eighty, he passed away, rich in honors and scars.

In the end Julian’s passionate perseverance defeated his program. Those whom he injured fought him with subtle pertinacity; those whom he favored responded with indifference. Paganism was spiritually dead; it no longer had in it any stimulus to youth, any solace to sorrow, any hope beyond the grave. Some converts came to it, but mostly in expectation of political advancement or imperial gold; some cities restored the official sacrifices, but only in payment for favors; at Pessinus itself, home of Cybele, Julian had to bribe the inhabitants to honor the Great Mother. Many pagans interpreted paganism to mean a good conscience in pleasure. They were disappointed to find Julian more puritan than Christ. This supposed freethinker was the most pious man in the state, and even his friends felt it a nuisance to keep pace with his devotions; or they were skeptics who not too privately smiled at his outmoded deities and solicitous hecatombs. The custom of sacrificing animals on altars had almost died out in the East, and in the West outside of Italy; people had come to think of it as a disgrace or a mess. Julian called his movement Hellenism, but the word repelled the pagans of Italy, who scorned anything Greek that was not dead. 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. Even before he died his failure had become evident; and the army that loved and mourned him named a Christian to succeed to his throne.


V. JOURNEY’S END

His last great dream was to rival Alexander and Trajan: to plant the Roman standards in the Persian capitals, and end once and for all the Persian threat to the security of the Roman Empire. Eagerly he organized his army, chose his officers, repaired the frontier fortresses, provisioned the towns that would mark his route to victory. In the fall of 362 he came to Antioch, and gathered his troops. The merchants of the city took advantage of the influx to raise prices; the people complained that “everything is plentiful but everything is dear.” Julian called in the economic leaders and pled with them to restrain their profit seeking; they promised, but did not perform; and at last he “appointed a fair price for everything, and made it known to all men.” Perhaps to force prices down he had 400,000 modii (pecks) of corn brought in from other cities in Syria and Egypt.52 The merchants protested that his prices made profit impossible; they secretly bought up the imported corn, took it and their goods to other towns, and Antioch found itself with much money and no food. Soon the populace denounced Julian for his interference. The wits of Antioch made fun of his beard, and of his laborious attendance upon dead gods. He replied to them in a pamphlet, Misopogon, or Hater of Beards, whose wit and brilliance hardly became an emperor. He sarcastically apologized for his beard, and berated the Antiocheans for their insolence, frivolity, extravagance, immorality, and indifference to the gods of Greece. The famous park called Daphne, once a sacred shrine of Apollo, had been changed into an amusement resort; Julian ordered the amusements ended and the shrine restored; this had hardly been completed when a fire consumed it. Suspecting Christian incendiarism, Julian closed the cathedral of Antioch, and confiscated its wealth; several witnesses were tortured, and a priest was put to death.53 The Emperor’s one consolation in Antioch was his “feast of reason” with Libanius.

At last the army was ready, and in March 363 Julian began his campaign. He led his forces across the Euphrates, then across the Tigris; pursued the retreating Persians, but was harassed and almost frustrated by their “scorched earth” policy of burning all crops in their wake; time and again his soldiers were near starvation. In this exhausting campaign the Emperor showed his best qualities; he shared every hardship with his men, ate their scant fare or less, marched on foot through heat and flood, and fought in the front ranks in every battle. Persian women of youth and beauty were among his captives; he never disturbed their privacy, and allowed no one to dishonor them. Under his able generalship his troops advanced to the very gates of Ctesiphon, and laid siege to it; but the inability to get food compelled retreat. Shapur II chose two Persian nobles, cut off their noses, and bade them go to Julian in the guise of men who had deserted because of this cruel indignity, and lead him into a desert. They obeyed; Julian trusted them, and followed them, with his army, for twenty miles into a waterless waste. While he was extricating his men from this snare they were attacked by a force of Persians. The attack was repulsed, and the Persians fled. Julian, careless of his lack of armor, was foremost in their pursuit. A javelin entered his side and pierced his liver. He fell from his horse and was carried to a tent, where his physicians warned him that he had but a few hours to live. Libanius alleged that the weapon came from a Christian hand, and it was noted that no Persian claimed the reward that Shapur had promised for the slaying of the Emperor. Some Christians, like Sozomen, agreed with Libanius’ account, and praised the assassin “who for the sake of God and religion had performed so bold a deed.”54 The final scene (June 27, 363) was in the tradition of Socrates and Seneca. Julian, says Ammianus,

lying in his tent, addressed his disconsolate and sorrowing companions: “Most opportunely, friends, has the time now come for me to leave this life, which I rejoice to restore to Nature at her demand.” … All present wept, whereupon, even then maintaining his authority, he chided them, saying that it was unbecoming for them to mourn for a prince who was called for a union with heaven and the stars. As this made them all silent, he engaged with the philosophers Maximus and Priscus in an intricate discussion about the nobility of the soul. Suddenly the wound in his side opened wide, the pressure of the blood checked his breath, and after a draught of cold water for which he had asked, he passed quietly away, in the thirty-second year of his age.55*

The army, still in peril, required a commander; and its leaders chose Jovian, captain of the imperial guard. The new Emperor made peace with Persia by surrendering four of the five satrapies that Diocletian had seized some seventy years before. Jovian persecuted no one, but he promptly transferred state support from the pagan temples to the Church. The Christians of Antioch celebrated with public rejoicings the death of the pagan Emperor.57 For the most part, however, the victorious Christian leaders preached to their congregations a generous forgetfulness of the injuries that Christianity had borne.58 Eleven centuries would pass before Hellenism would have another day.


CHAPTER II


The Triumph of the Barbarians


325–476


I. THE THREATENED FRONTIER

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. The Persians in themselves were an insoluble problem. They were growing stronger, not weaker; soon they would reconquer nearly all that Darius I had held a thousand years before. West of them were the Arabs, mostly penniless Bedouins; the wisest statesman would have smiled at the notion that these somber nomads were destined to capture half the Roman Empire, and all Persia too. South of the Roman provinces in Africa were Ethiopians, Libyans, Berbers, Numidians, and Moors, who waited in fierce patience for the crumbling of imperial defenses or morale. Spain seemed safely Roman behind its forbidding mountains and protecting seas; none surmised that it would become in this fourth century German, and in the eighth Mohammedan. 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. Only a small imperial garrison could be spared to protect Roman Britain from Scots and Picts on the west and north and from Norse or Saxon pirates on the east or south. Norway’s shores were a chain of pirate dens; its people found war less toilsome than tillage, and counted the raiding of alien coasts a noble occupation for hungry stomachs or leisure days. In southern Sweden and its isles the Goths claimed to have had their early home; possibly they were indigenous to the region of the Vistula; in any case they spread as Visigoths southward to the Danube, and as Ostrogoths they settled between the Dniester and the Don. In the heart of Europe—bounded by the Vistula, the Danube, and the Rhine—moved the restless tribes that were to remake the map, and rename the nations, of Europe: Thuringians, Burgundians, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Gepidae, Quadi, Vandals, Alemanni, Suevi, Lombards, Franks. Against these ethnic tides the Empire had no protective wall except in Britain, but merely an occasional fort and garrison along the roads or rivers that marked the frontier limit (limes) of the Roman realm. 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.

Perhaps we should modify the tradition that speaks of these German tribes as barbarians. It is true that in calling them bar bari the Greeks and Romans meant no compliment. The word was probably brother to the Sanskrit var-vara, which meant a rough and letterless churl;1 it appears again in Berber. But it was not for nothing that for five centuries the Germans had touched Roman civilization in trade and war. By the fourth century they had long since adopted writing and a government of stable laws. If we except the Merovingian Franks, their sexual morals were superior to those of the Romans and the Greeks.* 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.3 They were individualistic to the point of chaos, while the Romans had now been tamed to sociability and peace. In their higher ranks they showed some appreciation of literature and art; Stilicho, Ricimer, and other Germans entered fully into the cultural life of Rome, and wrote a Latin that Symmachus professed to enjoy.4 In general the invaders—above all, the Goths—were civilized enough to admire Roman civilization as higher than their own, and to aim rather at acquiring it than at destroying it; for two centuries they asked little more than admission to the Empire and its unused lands; and they shared actively in its defense. If we continue to refer to the German tribes of the fourth and fifth centuries as barbarians, it will be in surrender to the convenience of custom, and with these reservations and apologies.

South of the Danube and the Alps the swelling tribes had already entered the Empire by peaceable immigration, even by royal invitation. Augustus had begun the policy of settling barbarians within the frontier, to replenish vacant areas and legions that the infertile and unmartial Romans no longer filled; and Aurelius, Aurelian, and Probus had adoped the plan. 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. Once the Empire had Romanized such elements; now the immigrants barbarized the Romans.5 Romans began to wear fur coats in barbarian style, and to let their hair flow long; some even took to trousers, evoking outraged imperial decrees (397, 416).6

The cue for the great invasion came from far-off Mongolian plains. The Hsiung-nu, or Hiung-nu, or Huns, a division of the Turanian stock, occupied in our third century the region north of Lake Balkash and the Aral Sea. According to Jordanes, their chief weapon was their physiognomy.

By the terror of their features they inspired great fear in those whom perhaps they did not really surpass in war. They made their foes flee in horror because their swarthy aspect was fearful, and they had … a shapeless lump instead of a head, with pinholes rather than eyes. They are cruel to their children on the very day of their birth. For they cut the cheeks of the males with a sword, so that before they receive the nourishment of milk, they must learn to endure wounds. Hence they grow old beardless, and with faces scarred by the sword. They are short in stature, quick in bodily movement, alert horsemen, ready in the use of bow and arrow, broad-shouldered, and with firm set necks always erect in pride.7

War was their industry, pasturing cattle was their recreation. “Their country,” said a proverb, “is the back of a horse.”8 Armed with arrows and knives, equipped with courage and speed, driven by the exhaustion of their lands and the pressure of their eastern enemies, they advanced into Russia about 355, overcame and absorbed the Alani, crossed the Volga (372?), and attacked the almost civilized Ostrogoths in the Ukraine. Ermanaric, the centenarian Ostrogothic King, fought bravely, was defeated, and died, some said, by his own hand. Part of the Ostrogoths surrendered and joined the Huns; part fled west into the lands of the Visigoths north of the Danube. A Visigothic army met the advancing Huns at the Dniester, and was overwhelmed; a remnant of the Visigoths begged permission of the Roman authorities on the Danube to cross the river and settle in Moesia and Thrace. The Emperor Valens sent word that they should be admitted on condition that they surrender their arms, and give up their youths as hostages. The Visigoths crossed, and were shamelessly plundered by imperial officials and troops; their girls and boys were enslaved by amorous Romans; but after diligent bribery the immigrants were allowed to keep their arms. Food was sold them at famine prices, so that hungry Goths gave ten pounds of silver, or a slave, for a joint of meat or a loaf of bread; at last the Goths were forced to sell their children into bondage to escape starvation.9 When they showed signs of revolt the Roman general invited their leader Fritigern to a banquet, plotting to kill him. Fritigern escaped, and roused the desperate Goths to war. They pillaged, burned, and killed until almost all Thrace was laid waste by their hunger and their rage. 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. Two thirds of the Roman army perished, Valens himself was seriously wounded; the Goths set fire to the cottage in which he had taken refuge, and the Emperor and his attendants died in the flames. The victorious horde marched upon Constantinople, but failed to pierce the defenses organized by Valens’ widow Dominica. The Visigoths, joined by Ostrogoths and Huns who crossed the unprotected Danube, ravaged the Balkans at will from the Black Sea to the borders of Italy.


II. THE SAVIOR EMPERORS: 364–408

In this crisis the Empire did not cease to produce able rulers. On Jovian’s death the army and Senate had passed the crown to Valentinian, a blunt and Greekless soldier recalling Vespasian. With the consent of the Senate he had appointed his younger brother Valens as Augustus and Emperor in the East, while he himself chose the apparently more dangerous West. He refortified the frontiers of Italy and Gaul, built up the army to strength and discipline, and again drove the encroaching Germans back across the Rhine. From his capital at Milan he issued enlightened legislation forbidding infanticide, founding colleges, extending state medicine in Rome, reducing taxes, reforming a debased coinage, checking political corruption, and proclaiming freedom of creed and worship for all. He had his faults and his weaknesses; he was capable of cold cruelties to enemies; and if we may believe the historian Socrates, he legalized bigamy to sanction his marriage with Justina,11 whose beauty had been too generously described to him by his wife. Nevertheless, it was a tragedy for Rome that he died so soon (375). His son Gratian succeeded to his power in the West, lived up to his father for a year or two, then abandoned himself to amusements and the chase, and left the government to corrupt officials who put every office and judgment up for sale. The general Maximus overthrew him and invaded Italy in an effort to displace Gratian’s successor and half brother Valentinian II; but the new Emperor of the East, Theodosius I the Great, marched westward, defeated the usurper, and set the young Valentinian firmly on his Milan throne (388).

Theodosius was a Spaniard. He had distinguished himself as a general in Spain, Britain, and Thrace; he had persuaded the victorious Goths to join his army instead of fighting it; he had ruled the Eastern provinces with every wisdom except tolerance; and half the world looked in awe at his astonishing assemblage of handsome features and majestic presence, ready anger and readier mercy, humane legislation and sternly orthodox theology. While he was wintering at Milan a disturbance characteristic of the times broke out in Thessalonica. The imperial governor there, Botheric, had imprisoned for scandalous immorality a charioteer popular with the citizens. They demanded his release; Botheric refused; the crowd overcame his garrison, killed him and his aides, tore their bodies to pieces, and paraded the streets displaying the severed limbs as emblems of victory. The news of this outburst stirred Theodosius to fury. He sent secret orders that the entire population of Thessalonica should be punished. The people were invited into the hippodrome for games; hidden soldiery fell upon them there, and massacred 7000 men, women, and children (390),12 Theodosius sent a second order mitigating the first, but it came too late.

The Roman world was shocked by this savage retaliation, and Ambrose, who administered with stoic Christianity the see of Milan, wrote to the Emperor that he, the Bishop, could not again celebrate Mass in the imperial presence until Theodosius should have atoned before all the people for his crime. Though privately remorseful, the Emperor was reluctant to lower the prestige of his office by so public a humiliation. He tried to enter the cathedral, but Ambrose himself barred the way. After weeks of vain efforts Theodosius yielded, stripped himself of all the insignia of empire, entered the cathedral as a humble penitent, and begged heaven to forgive his sins (390). It was an historic triumph and defeat in the war between Church and state.

When Theodosius returned to Constantinople, Valentinian II, a lad of twenty, proved inadequate to the problems that enmeshed him. His aides deceived him, and took power into their venal hands; his master of the militia, the pagan Frank, Arbogast, assumed imperial authority in Gaul; and when Valentinian went to Vienne to assert his sovereignty he was assassinated (392). Arbogast, inaugurating a long line of barbarian kingmakers, raised to the throne of the West a mild and manageable scholar. Eugenius was a Christian, but so intimate with the pagan parties in Italy that Ambrose feared him as another Julian. Theodosius marched westward again, to restore legitimacy and orthodoxy with an army of Goths, Alani, Caucasians, Iberians, and Huns; among its generals were the Goth Gainas who would seize Constantinople, the Vandal Stilicho who would defend Rome, and the Goth Alaric who would sack it. In a two-day battle near Aquileia, Arbogast and Eugenius were defeated (394); Eugenius was surrendered by his soldiers and slain; Arbogast died by his own hand. Theodosius summoned his elevenyear-old son Honorius to be Emperor of the West, and named his eighteenyear-old son Arcadius as co-Emperor of the East. Then, exhausted by his campaigns, he died at Milan (395), in the fiftieth year of his age. The Empire that he had repeatedly united was again divided, and except briefly under Justinian it would never be united again.

Theodosius’ sons were effeminate weaklings nursed in an enfeebling security. Though their morals were almost as excellent as their intentions, they were not made to be pilots in a storm; they soon lost hold of affairs, and surrendered administration and policy to their ministers: in the East to the corrupt and avaricious Rufinus, in the West to the able but unscrupulous Stilicho. In 398 this noble Vandal arranged the marriage of his daughter Maria to Honorius, hoping to be the grandfather as well as the father-in-law of an emperor. But Honorius proved to be as free of passion as of intellect; he spent his time feeding the imperial poultry with tender affection, and Maria died a virgin after having been for ten years a wife.13

Theodosius had kept the Goths at peace by employing them in war, and by paying them an annual subsidy as allies. His successor refused to continue this subsidy, and Stilicho dismissed his Gothic troops. The idle warriors craved money and adventure, and their new leader, Alaric, provided both with a skill that outplayed the Romans in diplomacy as well as war. Why, he asked his followers, should the proud and virile Goth submit to be a hireling of effete Romans or Greeks, instead of using his courage and his arms to cut out from the dying Empire a kingdom of his own? In the very year of Theodosius’ death, Alaric led almost the whole mass of Thracian Goths into Greece, marched unhindered through the pass of Thermopylae, massacred en route all men of military age, enslaved the women, ravaged the Peloponnesus, destroyed the temple of Demeter at Eleusis, and spared Athens only on receiving a ransom that absorbed most of the city’s movable wealth (396). Stilicho went to the rescue, but too late; he maneuvered the Goths into an indefensible position, but made truce with them when a revolution in Africa called him back to the West. Alaric signed an alliance with Arcadius, who allowed him to settle his Goths in Epirus. For four years the Empire was at peace.

It was during those years that Synesius of Cyrene, half Christian bishop and half pagan philosopher, in an address before Arcadius’ luxury-loving court at Constantinople, described with clarity and force the alternatives that faced Greece and Rome. How could the Empire survive if its citizens continued to shirk military service, and to entrust its defense to mercenaries recruited from the very nations that threatened it? He proposed an end to luxury and ease and the enlistment or conscription of a citizen army aroused to fight for country and freedom; and he called upon Arcadius and Honorius to rise and smite the insolent barbarian hosts within the Empire, and to drive them back to their lairs behind the Black Sea, the Danube, and the Rhine. The court applauded Synesius’ address as an elegant oratorical exercise, and returned to its feasts.14 Meanwhile Alaric compelled the armorers of Epirus to make for his Goths a full supply of pikes, swords, helmets, and shields.

In 401 he invaded Italy, plundering as he came. Thousands of refugees poured into Milan and Ravenna, and then fled to Rome; farmers took shelter within the walled towns, while the rich gathered whatever of their wealth they could move, and frantically sought passage to Corsica, Sardinia, or Sicily. Stilicho denuded the provinces of their garrisons to raise an army capable of stemming the Gothic flood; and at Pollentia, on Easter morning of 402, he pounced upon the Goths, who had interrupted pillage for prayer. The battle was indecisive; Alaric retreated, but ominously toward unprotected Rome; and only a massive bribe from Honorius persuaded him to leave Italy.

The timid Emperor, on Alaric’s approach to Milan, had thought of transferring his capital to Gaul. Now he cast about for some safer place, and found it in Ravenna, whose marshes and lagoons made it impregnable by land, and its shoals by sea. But the new capital trembled like the old when the barbarian Radagaisus led a host of 200,000 Alani, Quadi, Ostrogoths, and Vandals over the Alps, and attacked the growing city of Florentia. Stilicho once more proved his generalship, defeated the motley horde with a relatively small army, and brought Radagaisus to Honorius in chains. Italy breathed again, and the imperial court of patricians, princesses, bishops, eunuchs, poultry, and generals resumed its routine of luxury, corruption, and intrigue.

Olympius, the chancellor, envied and distrusted Stilicho; he resented the great general’s apparent connivance at Alaric’s repeated escapes, and thought he detected in him the secret sympathy of a German with German invaders. He protested against the bribes that on Stilicho’s prompting had been paid or pledged to Alaric. Honorius hesitated to depose the man who for twenty three years had led Rome’s armies to victory and had saved the West; but when Olympius persuaded him that Stilicho was plotting to put his son on the throne, the timid youth consented to his general’s death. Olympius at once sent a squad of soldiers to carry out the decree. Stilicho’s friends wished to resist; he forbade them, and offered his neck to the sword (408).

A few months later Alaric re-entered Italy.


III. ITALIAN BACKGROUND

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. Gaul prospered, and threatened Italian leadership in every field. 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. Italy was forced to depend upon its own human and material resources; and these had been dangerously reduced by family limitation, famine, epidemics, taxation, waste, and war. Industry had never flourished in the parasitic peninsula; now that its markets were being lost in the East and Gaul, it could no longer support the urban population that had eked out doles by laboring in shops and homes. The collegia or guilds suffered from inability to sell their votes in a monarchy where voting was rare. Internal trade fell off, highway brigandage grew; and the once great roads, though still better than any before the nineteenth century, were crumbling into disrepair.

The middle classes had been the mainstay of municipal life in Italy; now they too were weakened by economic decline and fiscal exploitation. Every property owner was subject to rising taxes to support an expanding bureaucracy whose chief function was the collection of taxes. Satirists complained that “those who live at the expense of the public funds are more numerous than those who provide them.”16 Corruption consumed much of the taxes paid; a thousand laws sought to discourage, detect, or punish the malversation of governmental revenue or property. Many collectors overtaxed the simple, and kept the change; in recompense they might ease the tax burdens of the rich for a consideration.17 The emperors labored to secure an honest collection; Valentinian I appointed in each town a Defender of the City to protect citizens from the chicanery of the susceptores; and Honorius remitted the taxes of towns that were in financial straits. 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.”18 Under these conditions the incentives to parentage weakened, and populations fell. Thousands of arable acres were left untilled, creating an economic vacuum that conspired with the surviving wealth of the cities to draw in the land-hungry barbarians. 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. A like process was taking form in Egypt, Africa, and Gaul.

Slavery was slowly declining. In a developed civilization nothing can equal the free man’s varying wage, salary, or profit as an economic stimulus. Slave labor had paid only when slaves were abundant and cheap. Their cost had risen since the legions had ceased to bring home the human fruits of victory; escape was easy for the slaves now that government was weak; besides, slaves had to be cared for when they ailed or aged. As the cost of slaves mounted, the owner protected his investment in them by more considerate treatment; but the master still had, within limits, the power of life and death over his chattels,19 could use the law to recapture fugitive slaves, and could have his sexual will with such of them, male or female, as pleased his ambidextrous fancy. Paulinus of Pella complimented himself on the chastity of his youth, when “I restrained my desires … never accepted the love of a free woman … and contented myself with that of female slaves in my household.”20

The majority of the rich now lived in their country villas, shunning the turmoil and rabble of the towns. Nevertheless, most of Italy’s wealth was still drawn to Rome. The great city was no longer a capital, and seldom saw an emperor, but it remained the social and intellectual focus of the West. And here was the summit of the new Italian aristocracy—not as of old an hereditary caste, but periodically recruited by the emperors on the basis of landed wealth. Though the Senate had lost some of its prestige and much of its power, the senators lived in splendor and display. They filled with competence important administrative posts, and provided public games out of their private funds. Their homes were congested with servants and expensive furniture; one carpet cost $400,000.21 The letters of Symmachus and Sidonius, the poetry of Claudian, reveal the fairer side of that lordly life, the social and cultural activity, the loyal service of the state, the genial friendliness, the fidelity of mates, the tenderness of parental love.

A priest of Marseille, in the fifth century, painted a less attractive picture of conditions in Italy and Gaul. Salvian’s book On the Government of God (c. 450) addressed itself to the same problem that generated Augustine’s City of God and Orosius’ History Against the Pagans—how could the evils of the barbarian invasions be reconciled with a divine and beneficent Providence? These sufferings, Salvian answered, were a just punishment for the economic exploitation, political corruption, and moral debauchery of the Roman world. No such ruthless oppression of poor by rich, he assures us, could be found among the barbarians; the barbarian heart is softer than the Roman’s; and if the poor could find vehicles they would migrate en masse to live under barbarian rule.22 Rich and poor, pagan and Christian within the Empire, says our moralist, are alike sunk in a slough of immorality rarely known in history; adultery and drunkenness are fashionable vices, virtue and temperance are the butts of a thousand jokes, the name of Christ has become a profane expletive among those who call Him God.23 Contrast with all this, says our second Tacitus, the health and vigor and bravery of the Germans, the simple piety of their Christianity, their lenient treatment of conquered Romans, their mutual loyalty, premarital continence, and marital fidelity. The Vandal chieftain Gaiseric, on capturing Christian Carthage, was shocked to find a brothel at almost every corner; he closed these dens, and gave the prostitutes a choice between marriage and banishment. The Roman world is degenerating physically, has lost all moral valor, and leaves its defense to mercenary foreigners. How should such cowards deserve to survive? The Roman Empire, Salvian concludes, “is either dead, or drawing its last breath,” even at the height of its luxury and games. Moritur et ridet—it laughs and dies.24

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. Augustine paints almost as dark a picture for a like moralizing end; he complains that the churches are often emptied by the competition of dancing girls displaying in the theaters their disencumbered charms.25 The public games still saw the slaughter of convicts and captives to make a holiday. We surmise the lavish cruelty of such spectacles when Symmachus writes that he spent $900,000 on one celebration, and that the twenty-nine Saxon gladiators who were scheduled to fight in the arena cheated him by strangling one another in compact suicide before the games began.26 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.27 The barbarians took advantage of this passion for vicarious battle by attacking Carthage, Antioch, and Trier while the people were absorbed at the amphitheater or the circus.28 In the year 404 a gladiatorial program celebrated at Rome the dubious victory of Stilicho at Pollentia. Blood had begun to flow when an Oriental monk, Telemachus, leaped from the stands into the arena and demanded that the combats cease. The infuriated spectators stoned him to death; but the Emperor Honorius, moved by the scene, issued an edict abolishing gladiatorial games.* Circus races continued till 549, when they were ended by the exhaustion of the city’s wealth in the Gothic wars.

Culturally, Rome had not seen so busy an age since Pliny and Tacitus. Music was the rage; Ammianus29 complains that it had displaced philosophy, and had “turned the libraries into tombs”; he describes gigantic hydraulic organs, and lyres as large as chariots. Schools were numerous; everyone, says Symmachus, had an opportunity to develop his capacities.30 The “universities” of professors paid by the state taught grammar, rhetoric, literature, and philosophy to students drawn from all the Western provinces, while the encompassing barbarians patiently studied the arts of war. Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from the trunk.

Into this city of a million souls, about the year 365, came a Syrian Greek of noble birth and handsome figure, Ammianus Marcellinus of Antioch. He had been a soldier on the staff of Ursicinus in Mesopotamia as an active participant in the wars of Constantius, Julian, and Jovian; he had lived before he wrote. When peace came in the East he retired to Rome, and undertook to complete Livy and Tacitus by writing the history of the Empire from Nerva to Valens. 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 a frank pagan, an admirer of Julian, a scorner of the luxury that he ascribed to the bishops of Rome; but for all that he was generally impartial, praised many aspects of Christianity, and condemned Julian’s restriction of academic freedom as a fault “to be overwhelmed with eternal silence.”31 He was as well educated as a soldier can find time to be. He believed in demons and theurgy, and quoted in favor of divination its archopponent Cicero.32 But he was, by and large, a blunt and honest man, just to all factions and men; “no wordy deceit adorns my tale, but untrammeled faithfulness to facts.”33 He hated oppression, extravagance, and display, and spoke his mind about them wherever found. He was the last of the classic historians; after him, in the Latin world, there were only chroniclers.

In that same Rome whose manners seemed to Ammianus snobbish and corrupt, Macrobius found a society of men who graced their wealth with courtesy, culture, and philanthropy. He was primarily a scholar, loving books and a quiet life; in 399, however, we find him serving as vicarius, or imperial legate, in Spain. His Commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio became a popular vehicle of Neoplatonist mysticism and philosophy. His chef-d’oeuvre, quoted by almost every historian these last 1500 years, was the Saturnalia, or Feast of Saturn, a “Curiosities of Literature” in which the author gathered the heterogeneous harvest of his studious days and bookish nights. He improved upon Aulus Gellius while poaching upon him, by putting his material into the form of an imaginary dialogue among real men—Praetextatus, Symmachus, Flavian, Servius, and others—gathered to celebrate the three-day feast of the Saturnalia with good wine, good food, and learned conversation. Disarius, a physician, is asked some medical questions: Is a simple better than a varied diet?—Why do women rarely, and old men so regularly, get drunk?—“Is the nature of women colder or hotter than that of men?” There is a discourse on the calendar, a long analysis of Virgil’s vocabulary, grammar, style, philosophy, and plagiarisms; a collection of bons mots from all ages; a treatise on rich banquets and rare foods. In the evenings lighter questions amuse these pundits. Why do we blush with shame and pale with fear?—Why does baldness begin at the top of the head?—Which came first, the chicken or the egg? (Ovumne prius fuerit an gallina?)34 Here and there in the medley are some noble passages, as when the senator Praetextatus speaks of slavery:

I shall value men not by their status but by their manners and their morals; these come from our character, that from chance. … You must seek for your friends, Evangelus, not only in the Forum or the Senate, but in your own house. Treat your slave with gentleness and goodness, admit him to your conversation, occasionally even into your intimate council. Our ancestors, removing pride from the master and shame from the slave, called the former pater familias, the latter familiaris (i.e., one of the family). Your slaves will respect you more readily than they will fear you.35

It was some such circle as this that, about 394, welcomed into its number a poet destined to sing the swan song of Rome’s magnificence. Claudius Claudianus, like Ammianus, was born in the East, and spoke Greek as a mother tongue; but he must have learned Latin at an early age to write it so fluently well. After a short stay in Rome he went to Milan, found a place on Stilicho’s staff, became unofficial poet laureate to the Emperor Honorius, and married a lady of birth and wealth; Claudian had an eye to the main chance, and did not propose to be buried in Potter’s Field. He served Stilicho with melodious panegyrics and with savagely vituperative poems against Stilicho’s rivals. In 400 he returned to Rome, and was gratefully acclaimed when, in a poem “On the Consulate of Stilicho,” he wrote for the Eternal City a eulogy worthy of Virgil himself:

Consul all but peer of the gods, protector of a city greater than any that on earth the air encompasses, whose amplitude no eye can measure, whose beauty no imagination can picture, whose praise no voice can sound, who raises a golden head under the neighboring stars, and with her seven hills imitates the seven regions of heaven; mother of arms and of law, who extends her sway over all the earth, and was the earliest cradle of justice: this is the city which, sprung from humble beginnings, has stretched to either pole, and from one small place extended its power so as to be coterminous with the light of the sun. … ’Tis she alone who has received the conquered into her bosom, and like a mother, not an empress, protected the human race with a common name, summoning those whom she has defeated to share her citizenship, and drawing together distant races with bonds of affection. To her rule of peace we owe it that the world is our home, that we can live where we please, and that to visit Thule and explore its once dreaded wilds is but a sport; thanks to her, all and sundry may drink the waters of the Rhone and quaff Orontes’ stream. Thanks to her we are all one people.36

The grateful Senate raised a statue to Claudian in Trajan’s Forum “as to the most glorious of poets,” who had united Virgil’s felicity with Homer’s power. After further verses in honor of remunerative subjects, Claudian turned his talents to The Rape of Proserpine, and told the old tale with haunting pictures of land and sea, and a tender note that recalls the Greek love romances of the time. In 408 he learned that Stilicho had been assassinated, and that many of the general’s friends were being arrested and executed. We do not know the remainder of his story.

In Rome, as in Athens and Alexandria, substantial pagan minorities survived, and 700 pagan temples were still standing at the end of the fourth century.37 Jovian and Valentinian I do not seem to have closed the temples opened by Julian. The Roman priests still (394) met in their sacred colleges, the Lupercalia were celebrated with their old half-savage rites, and the Via Sacra now and then resounded with the prescient bellowing of oxen driven to sacrifice.

The most highly respected of Rome’s latter-day pagans was Vettius Praetextatus, leader of the pagan majority in the Senate. All men admitted his virtues—integrity, learning, patriotism, fine family life; some compared him to old Cato and Cincinnatus. Time remembers better his friend Symmachus (345–410), whose letters paint so pleasant a picture of that charming aristocracy which thought itself immortal on the eve of death. Even his family seemed immortal: his grandfather had been consul in 330, his father prefect in 364; he himself was prefect in 384, and consul in 391. His son was a praetor, his grandson would be consul in 446, his great-grandson would be consul in 485, his great-great-grandsons would both be consuls in 522. His wealth was immense; he had three villas near Rome, seven others in Latium, five on the Bay of Naples, others elsewhere in Italy, so that “he could travel up and down the peninsula and be everywhere at home.”38 No one is recorded as having grudged him this wealth, for he spent it generously, and redeemed it with a life of study, public service, blameless morals, and a thousand acts of inconspicuous philanthropy. Christians as well as pagans, barbarians as well as Romans, were among his faithful friends. Perhaps he was a pagan before he was a patriot; he suspected that the culture that he represented and enjoyed was bound up with the old religion, and he feared that the one could not fall without the other. Through fidelity to the ancient rites the citizen would feel himself a link in a chain of marvelous continuity from Romulus to Valentinian, and would learn to love a city and a civilization so bravely built through a thousand years. Not without reason his fellow citizens chose Quintus Aurelius Symmachus as their representative in their last dramatic struggle for their gods.

In 380 the Emperor Gratian, won to a passionate orthodoxy by the eloquent Ambrose, proclaimed the Nicene Creed as compulsory “on all the peoples subject to the governments of our clemency,” and denounced as “mad and insane” the followers of other faiths.39 In 382 he ordered an end to payments by the imperial or municipal treasuries for pagan ceremonies, vestal virgins, or priests; confiscated all lands belonging to temples and priestly colleges; and bade his agents remove from the Senate House in Rome that statue of the goddess Victory which Augustus had placed there in 29 B.C., and before which twelve generations of senators had taken their vows of allegiance to the emperor. A delegation headed by Symmachus was appointed by the Senate to acquaint Gratian with the case for Victoria; Gratian refused to receive them, and ordered Symmachus banished from Rome (382). In 383 Gratian was killed, and the hopeful Senate sent a deputation to his suecessor. 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

The young Valentinian was moved; Ambrose tells us that even the Christians in the imperial council advised the restoration of the statue of Victory. But Ambrose, who had been absent on a diplomatic mission for the state, overruled the council with an imperious letter to the Emperor. He took up one by one the arguments of Symmachus, and countered them with characteristic force. In effect he threatened to excommunicate the ruler if the plea should be granted. “You may enter the churches, but you will find no priest there to receive you, or you will find them there to forbid you entrance.”41 Valentinian denied the Senate’s appeal.

The pagans of Italy made a last effort in 393, risking all on revolution. The half-pagan Emperor Eugenius, refused recognition by Theodosius, and hoping to enlist the pagans of the West in his defense, restored the statue of Victory, and boasted that after defeating Theodosius he would stable his horses in Christian basilicas. Nicomachus Flavianus, son-in-law of Symmachus, led an army to support Eugenius, shared in the defeat, and killed himself. Theodosius marched into Rome, and compelled the Senate to decree the abolition of paganism in all its forms (394). When Alaric sacked Rome the pagans saw in the humiliation of the once lordly city the anger of their neglected gods. The war of the faiths broke the unity and morale of the people, and when the torrent of invasion reached them they could only meet it with mutual curses and divided prayers.


IV. THE BARBARIAN FLOOD

As a postscript to the assassination of Stilicho, Olympius ordered the slaughter of thousands of Stilicho’s followers, including the leaders of his barbarian legions. Alaric, who had awaited his opportunity behind the Alps, seized it now. He complained that the 4000 pounds of gold that the Romans had promised him had not been paid; in return for this payment he pledged the noblest Gothic youth as hostages for his future loyalty. When Honorius refused, he marched over the Alps, pillaged Aquileia and Cremona, won to his side 30,000 mercenaries resentful of the slaughter of their leaders, and swept down the Flaminian Way to the very walls of Rome (408). 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. The frightened Senate, as in Hannibal’s day, was stampeded into barbarism; it suspected Stilicho’s widow as an accomplice of Alaric, and put her to death. Alaric responded by cutting off every avenue by which food could enter the capital. Soon the populace began to starve; men killed men, and women their children, to eat them. A delegation was sent to Alaric, asking terms. They warned him that a million Romans were ready to resist; he laughed, and answered, “The thicker the hay, the more easily it is mowed.” Relenting, he consented to withdraw on receiving all the gold and silver and valuable movable property in the city. “What will then be left to us?” the envoys asked. “Your lives,” was the scornful reply. Rome chose further resistance, but starvation compelled a new offer of surrender. Alaric accepted 5000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver, 4000 silk tunics, 3000 skins, 3000 pounds of pepper.

Meanwhile an incalculable number of barbarian slaves, escaping from their Roman masters, entered the service of Alaric. As if in compensation, a Gothic leader, Sarus, deserted Alaric for Honorius, took with him a considerable force of Goths, and attacked the main barbarian army. Alaric, holding this to be a violation of the truce that had been signed, again besieged Rome. A slave opened the gates; the Goths poured in, and for the first time in 800 years the great city was taken by an enemy (410). For three days Rome was subjected to a discriminate pillage that left the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul untouched, and spared the refugees who sought sanctuary in them. But the Huns and slaves in the army of 40,000 men could not be controlled. Hundreds of rich men were slaughtered, their women were raped and killed; it was found almost impossible to bury all the corpses that littered the streets. Thousands of prisoners were taken, among them Honorius’ half sister Galla Placidia. Gold and silver were seized wherever found; works of art were melted down for the precious metals they contained; and many masterpieces of sculpture and pottery were joyously destroyed by former slaves who could not forgive the poverty and toil that had generated this beauty and wealth. Alaric restored discipline, and led his troops southward to conquer Sicily; but in that same year he was stricken with fever, and died at Cosenza. Slaves diverted the flow of the river Busento to bare a secure and spacious grave for him; the stream was then brought back to its course; and to conceal the spot the slaves who had performed these labors were slain.42

Ataulf (Adolf), Alaric’s brother-in-law, was chosen to succeed him as king. He agreed to withdraw his army from Italy on condition that he should be given Placidia in marriage, and that his Visigoths, as foederati of Rome, should receive southern Gaul, including Narbonne, Toulouse, and Bordeaux, for their self-governed realm. Honorius refused the marriage; Placidia consented. The Gothic chieftain proclaimed that his ambition was not to destroy the Roman Empire but to preserve and strengthen it. He marched his army out of Italy, and by a judicious mixture of diplomacy and force founded the Visigothic kingdom of Gaul, theoretically subject to the Empire and with its capital at Toulouse (414). A year later he was assassinated. Placidia, who loved him, wished to remain a perpetual widow, but was awarded by Honorius to the general Constantius. After the death of Constantius (421) and Honorius (423), Placidia became regent for her son Valentinian III, and for twenty-five years ruled the Empire of the West with no discredit to her sex.

Even in Tacitus’ days the Vandals were a numerous and powerful nation, possessing the central and eastern portions of modern Prussia. By the time of Constantine they had moved southward into Hungary. Their armies having suffered an overwhelming defeat at the hands of the Visigoths, the remaining Vandals asked permission to cross the Danube and enter the Empire. Constantine consented, and for seventy years they increased and multiplied in Pannonia. The successes of Alaric stirred their imagination; the withdrawal of legions from beyond the Alps to defend Italy left the rich West invitingly open; and in 406 great masses of Vandals, Alani, and Suevi poured over the Rhine and ravaged Gaul. They plundered Mainz, and massacred many of the inhabitants. They moved north into Belgica, and sacked and burned the imperial city of Trier. They bridged the Meuse and the Aisne, and pillaged Reims, Amiens, Arras, and Tournai, almost reaching the English Channel. Turning south, they crossed the Seine and the Loire into Aquitaine and wreaked their vandal fury upon almost all its cities except Toulouse, which was heroically defended by its Bishop Exuperius. They paused at the Pyrenees, then turned east and pillaged Narbonne. Gaul had seldom known so thorough a devastation.

In 409 they entered Spain, 100,000 strong. There, as in Gaul and the East, Roman rule had brought oppressive taxation and orderly administration, wealth concentrated in immense estates, a populace of slaves and serfs and impoverished freemen; and yet, by the mere grace of stability and law, Spain was now among the most prosperous of Roman provinces, and Merida, Cartagena, Cordova, Seville, and Tarragona were among the richest and most cultured cities of the Empire. Into this apparently secure peninsula the Vandals, Suevi, and Alani descended; for two years they plundered Spain from the Pyrenees to the Strait, and extended their conquest even to the African coast. Honorius, unable to defend Roman soil with Roman arms, bribed the Visigoths of southwestern Gaul to recapture Spain for the Empire; their able King Wallia accomplished the task in well-planned campaigns (420); the Suevi retreated into northwest Spain, the Vandals southward into the Andalusia that still bears their name; and Wallia shamed the faithlessness of Roman diplomats by restoring Spain to the imperial power.

Still hungry for conquest and bread, the Vandals crossed over into Africa (429). If we may believe Procopius43 and Jordanes,44 they came by the invitation of the Roman governor of Africa, Boniface, who wished their aid against his rival Aëtius, successor to Stilicho; the story is of uncertain authority. In any case the Vandal king was quite capable of originating the plan. Gaiseric was the proud bastard son of a slave, lame but strong, ascetic in regimen, undaunted in conflict, furious in anger, cruel in enmity, but with an unbeaten genius for both negotiation and war. Arrived in Africa, his 80,000 Vandal and Alani warriors, women, and children were joined by the savage Moors, long resentful of Roman domination, and the Donatist heretics, who had been persecuted by the orthodox Christians, and now welcomed a new rule. Out of a population of some 8,000,000 souls in Roman North Africa, Boniface could muster only a negligible number to help his small regular army; overwhelmingly defeated by Gaiseric’s horde, he retreated to Hippo, where the aged St. Augustine aroused the population to heroic resistance. For fourteen months the city stood siege (430–1); Gaiseric then withdrew to meet another Roman force, and so overwhelmed it that Valentinian’s ambassador signed a truce recognizing the Vandal conquest in Africa. Gaiseric observed the truce until the Romans were off their guard; then he pounced upon rich Carthage and took it without a blow (439). The nobles and the Catholic clergy were dispossessed of their property, and were banished or enserfed; lay and ecclesiastical property was seized wherever found, and torture was not spared to discover its hiding place.45

Gaiseric was still young. Though a capable administrator, who reorganized Africa into a lucrative state, he was happiest when engaged in war. Building a great fleet, he ravaged with it the coasts of Spain, Italy, and Greece. No one could tell where his cavalry-laden ships would land next; never in Roman history had such unhindered piracy prevailed in the western Mediterranean. At last the Emperor, as the price of the African corn on which Ravenna as well as Rome lived, made peace with the barbarian king, and even pledged him an imperial daughter in marriage. Rome, soon to be destroyed, continued to laugh and play.

Three quarters of a century had passed since the Huns had precipitated the barbarian invasions by crossing the Volga. Their further movement westward had been a slow migration, less like the conquest of Alaric and Gaiseric than like the spread of colonists across the American continent. Gradually they had settled down in and near Hungary and had brought under their rule many of the German tribes.

About the year 433 the Hun king Rua died, and left his throne to his nephews Bleda and Attila. Bleda was slain—some said by Attila—about 444, and Attila (i.e., in Gothic, “Little Father”) ruled divers tribes north of the Danube from the Don to the Rhine. The Gothic historian Jordanes describes him, we do not know how accurately:

He was a man born into the world to shake the nations, the scourge of all lands, who in some way terrified all mankind by the rumors noised abroad concerning him. He was haughty in his walk, rolling his eyes hither and thither, so that the power of his proud spirit appeared in the movement of his body. He was indeed a lover of war, yet restrained in action; mighty in counsel, gracious to suppliants, and lenient to those who were once received under his protection. He was short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head; his eyes were small, his beard was thin and sprinkled with gray. He had a flat nose and a swarthy complexion, revealing his origin.46

He differed from the other barbarian conquerors in trusting to cunning more than to force. He ruled by using the heathen superstitions of his people to sanctify his majesty; his victories were prepared by the exaggerated stories of his cruelty which perhaps he had himself originated; at last even his Christian enemies called him the “scourge of God,” and were so terrified by his cunning that only the Goths could save them. He could neither read nor write, but this did not detract from his intelligence. He was not a savage; he had a sense of honor and justice, and often proved himself more magnanimous than the Romans. He lived and dressed simply, ate and drank moderately, and left luxury to his inferiors, who loved to display their gold and silver utensils, harness, and swords, and the delicate embroidery that attested the skillful fingers of their wives. Attila had many wives, but scorned that mixture of monogamy and debauchery which was popular in some circles of Ravenna and Rome. His palace was a huge loghouse floored and walled with planed planks, but adorned with elegantly carved or polished wood, and reinforced with carpets and skins to keep out the cold. 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.

He was now (444) the most powerful man in Europe. Theodosius II of the Eastern Empire, and Valentinian of the Western, both paid him tribute as a bribe to peace, disguising it among their peoples as payments for services rendered by a client king. Able to put into the field an army of 500,000 men, Attila saw no reason why he should not make himself master of all Europe and the Near East. In 441 his generals and troops crossed the Danube, captured Sirmium, Singidunum (Belgrade), Naissus (Nish) and Sardica (Sofia), and threatened Constantinople itself. Theodosius II sent an army against them; it was defeated; and the Eastern Empire won peace only by raising its yearly tribute from 700 to 2100 pounds of gold. In 447 the Huns entered Thrace, Thessaly, and Scythia (southern Russia), sacked seventy towns, and took thousands into slavery. The captured women were added to the wives of the captors, and so began generations of blood mixture that left traces of Mongol features as far west as Bavaria. These Hun raids ruined the Balkans for four centuries. The Danube ceased for a long time to be a main avenue of commerce between East and West, and the cities on its banks decayed.

Having bled the East to his heart’s content, Attila turned to the West and found an unusual excuse for war. Honoria, sister of Valentinian III, having been seduced by one of her chamberlains, had been banished to Constantinople. Snatching at any plan for escape, she sent her ring to Attila with an appeal for aid. The subtle King, who had his own brand of humor, chose to interpret the ring as a proposal of marriage; he forthwith laid claim to Honoria and to half the Western Empire as her dowry. Valentinian’s ministers protested, and Attila declared war. His real reason was that Marcian, the new Emperor of the East, had refused to continue payment of tribute, and Valentinian had followed his example.

In 451 Attila and half a million men marched to the Rhine, sacked and burned Trier and Metz, and massacred their inhabitants. All Gaul was terrified; here was no civilized warrior like Caesar, no Christian—however Arian—invader like Alaric and Gaiseric; this was the awful and hideous Hun, the flagellum dei come to punish Christian and pagan alike for the enormous distance between their professions and their lives. 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. The victory of the West was indecisive; Attila retreated in good order, and the victors were too exhausted, or too divided in policy, to pursue him. In the following year he invaded Italy.

The first city to fall in his path was Aquileia; the Huns destroyed it so completely that it never rose again. Verona and Vicenza were more leniently treated; Pavia and Milan bought off the conqueror by surrendering their movable wealth. The road to Rome was now open to Attila; Aëtius had too small an army to offer substantial resistance; but Attila tarried at the Po. Valentinian III fled to Rome, and thence sent to the Hun King a delegation composed of Pope Leo I and two senators. No one knows what happened at the ensuing conference. Leo was an imposing figure, and received most credit for the bloodless victory. History only records that Attila now retreated. Plague had broken out in his army, food was running short, and Marcian was sending reinforcements from the East (452).

Attila marched his horde back over the Alps to his Hungarian capital, threatening to return to Italy in the next spring unless Honoria should be sent him as his bride. Meanwhile he consoled himself by adding to his harem a young lady named Ildico, the frail historic basis of the Nibelungenlied’s Kriemhild. He celebrated the wedding with an unusual indulgence in food and drink. On the morrow he was found dead in bed beside his young wife; he had burst a blood vessel, and the blood in his throat had choked him to death (453).47 His realm was divided among his sons, who proved incompetent to preserve it. Jealousies broke out among them; the subject tribes refused their allegiance to a disordered leadership; and within a few years the empire that had threatened to subdue the Greeks and the Romans, the Germans and the Gauls, and to put the stamp of Asia upon the face and soul of Europe, had broken to pieces and melted away.


V. THE FALL OF ROME

Placidia having died in 450, Valentinian III was free to err in the first person. As Olympius had persuaded Honorius to kill Stilicho who had stopped Alaric at Pollentia, so now Petronius Maximus persuaded Valentinian to kill Aëtius who had stopped Attila at Troyes Valentinian had no son, and resented the desire of Aëtius to espouse his son to Valentinian’s daughter Eudocia. In a mad seizure of alarm the Emperor sent for Aëtius and slew him with his own hand (454). “Sire,” said a member of his court, “you have cut off your right hand with your left.” A few months later Petronius induced two of Aëtius’ followers to kill Valentinian. No one bothered to punish the assassins; murder had long since become the accepted substitute for election. Petronius elected himself to the throne, compelled Eudoxia, Valentinian’s widow, to marry him, and forced Eudocia to take as her husband his son Palladius. If we may believe Procopius,48 Eudoxia appealed to Gaiseric as Honoria had appealed to Attila. Gaiseric had reasons for responding: Rome was rich again despite Alaric, and the Roman army was in no condition to defend Italy. The Vandal King set sail with an invincible armada (455). Only an unarmed Pope, accompanied by his local clergy, barred his way between Ostia and Rome. Leo was not able this time to dissuade the conqueror, but he secured a pledge against massacre, torture, and fire. For four days the city was surrendered to pillage; Christian churches were spared, but all the surviving treasures of the temples were taken to the Vandal galleys; the gold tables, seven-branched candlesticks, and other sacred vessels of Solomon’s Temple, brought to Rome by Titus four centuries before, were included in these spoils. All precious metals, ornaments, and furniture in the imperial palace were removed, and whatever remained of value in the homes of the rich. Thousands of captives were enslaved; husbands were separated from wives, parents from children. Gaiseric took the Empress Eudoxia and her two daughters with him to Carthage, married Eudocia to his son Huneric, and sent the Empress and Placidia (the younger) to Constantinople at the request of the Emperor Leo I. All in all, this sack of Rome was no indiscriminate vandalism, but quite in accord with the ancient laws of war. Carthage had leniently revenged the Roman ruthlessness of 146 B.C.

Chaos in Italy was now complete. A half century of invasion, famine, and pestilence had left thousands of farms ruined, thousands of acres untilled, not through exhaustion of the soil but through the exhaustion of man. St. Ambrose (c. 420) mourned the devastation and depopulation of Bologna, Modena, Piacenza; Pope Gelasius (c. 480) described great regions of northern Italy as almost denuded of the human species; Rome itself had shrunk from 1,500,000 souls to some 300,000 in one century;49 all the great cities of the Empire were now in the East. The Campagna around Rome, once rich in villas and fertile farms, had been abandoned for the security of walled towns; the towns themselves had been contracted to some forty acres as a means of economically walling them for defense; and in many cases the walls were improvised from the debris of theaters, basilicas, and temples that had once adorned the municipal splendor of Italy. In Rome some wealth still remained even after Gaiseric, and Rome and other Italian cities would recover under Theodoric and the Lombards; but 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. 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.

The final years were a kaleidoscope of imperial mediocrities. The Goths of Gaul proclaimed one of their generals, Avitus, emperor (455); the Senate refused to confirm him, and he was transformed into a bishop. Majorian (456–61) labored bravely to restore order, but was deposed by his patricius or prime minister, the Visigoth Ricimer. Severas (461–5) was an inefficient tool of Ricimer. Anthemius (467–72) was a half-pagan philosopher, unacceptable to the Christian West; Ricimer besieged and captured him and had him killed. Olybrius, by grace of Ricimer, ruled for two months (472), and surprised himself by dying a natural death. Glycerius (473) was soon deposed, and for two years Rome was ruled by Julius Nepos. At this juncture a new conglomeration of barbarians swept down into Italy—Heruli, Sciri, Rugii, and other tribes that had once acknowledged the rule of Attila. At the same time a Pannonian general, Orestes, deposed Nepos, and established his son Romulus (nicknamed Augustulus) on the throne (475). The new invaders demanded from Orestes a third of Italy; when he refused they slew him, and replaced Romulus with their general Odoacer (476). This son of Attila’s minister Edecon was not without ability; he convened the cowed Senate, and through it he offered to Zeno, the new Emperor of the East, sovereignty over all the Empire, provided that Odoacer might as his patricius govern Italy. Zeno consented, and the line of Western emperors came to an end.

No one appears to have seen in this event the “fall of Rome”; on the contrary, it seemed to be a blessed unification of the Empire, as formerly under Constantine. The Roman Senate saw the matter so, and raised a statue to Zeno in Rome. The Germanization of the Italian army, government, and peasantry, and the natural multiplication of the Germans in Italy, had proceeded so long that the political consequences seemed to be negligible shifts on the surface of the national scene. Actually, however, Odoacer ruled Italy as a king, with small regard for Zeno. 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.

The results of the barbarian conquest were endless. Economically it meant reruralization. The barbarians lived by tillage, herding, hunting, and war, and had not yet learned the commercial complexities on which cities thrived; with their victory the municipal character of Western civilization ceased for seven centuries. Ethnically the migrations brought a new mingling of racial elements—a substantial infusion of Germanic blood into Italy, Gaul, and Spain, and of Asiatic blood into Russia, the Balkans, and Hungary. The mixture did not mystically reinvigorate the Italian or Gallic population. What happened was the elimination of weak individuals and strains through war and other forms of competition; the compulsion laid upon everyone to develop strength, stamina, and courage, and the masculine qualities that long security had suppressed; the renewal, by poverty, of healthier and simpler habits of life than those which the doles and luxuries of the cities had bred. Politically the conquest replaced a higher with a lower form of monarchy; it augmented the authority of persons, and reduced the power and protection of laws; individualism and violence increased. 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 new beginning was now possible: the Empire in the West faded, but the states of modern Europe were born. 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.


CHAPTER III


The Progress of Christianity


364–451

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 life. The historic function of Christianity was to re-establish the moral basis of character and society by providing supernatural sanctions and support for the uncongenial commandments of social order; to instill into rude barbarians gentler ideals of conduct through a creed spontaneously compounded of myth and miracle, of fear and hope and love. There is an epic grandeur, sullied with superstition and cruelty, in the struggle of the new religion to capture, tame, and inspire the minds of brute or decadent men, to forge a uniting empire of faith that would again hold men together, as they had once been held by the magic of Greece or the majesty of Rome. Institutions and beliefs are the offspring of human needs, and understanding must be in terms of these necessities.


I. THE ORGANIZATION OF THE CHURCH

If art is the organization of materials, the Roman Catholic Church is among the most imposing masterpieces of history. Through nineteen centuries, each heavy with crisis, she has held her faithful together, following them with her ministrations to the ends of the earth, forming their minds, molding their morals, encouraging their fertility, solemnizing their marriages, consoling their bereavements, lifting their momentary lives into eternal drama, harvesting their gifts, surviving every heresy and revolt, and patiently building again every broken support of her power. How did this majestic institution grow?

It began in the spiritual hunger of men and women harassed with poverty, wearied with conflict, awed by mystery, or fearful of death. 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. It was at first a simple association of believers, an ecclesia or gathering. Each ecclesia or church chose one or more presbyteroi—elders, priests—to lead them, and one or more readers, acolytes, subdeacons, and deacons to assist the priest. As the worshipers grew in number, and their affairs became more complex, the congregations chose a priest or layman in each city to be an episcopos—overseer, bishop—to co-ordinate their functioning. As the number of bishops grew, they in turn required supervision and co-ordination; in the fourth century we hear of archbishops, metropolitans, or primates governing the bishops and the churches of a province. Over all these grades of clergy patriarchs held sway at Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Rome. At the call of a patriarch or an emperor the bishops and archbishops convened in synods or councils. If a council represented only a province it was called provincial; if it represented only the East or the West it was called plenary; if both, it was general; if its decrees were accepted as binding upon all Christians, it was ecumenical—i.e., applying to the oikoumene, or (total Christian) inhabited world. The occasionally resultant unity gave the Church its name of Catholic, or universal.

This organization, whose power rested at last upon belief and prestige, required some regulation of the ecclesiastical life. In the first three centuries of Christianity, celibacy was not required of a priest. He might keep a wife whom he had married before ordination, but he must not marry after taking holy orders; and no man could be ordained who had married two wives, or a widow, a divorcee, or a concubine. Like most societies, the Church was harassed with extremists. In reaction against the sexual license of pagan morals, some Christian enthusiasts concluded from a passage in St. Paul1 that any commerce between the sexes was sinful; they denounced all marriage, and trembled at the abomination of a married priest. The provincial council of Gengra (c. 362) condemned these views as heretical, but the Church increasingly demanded celibacy in her priests. Property was being left in rising amounts to individual churches; now and then a married priest had the bequest written in his name and transmitted it to his children. Clerical marriage sometimes led to adultery or other scandal, and lowered the respect of the people for the priest. A Roman synod of 386 advised the complete continence of the clergy; and a year later Pope Siricius ordered the unfrocking of any priest who married, or continued to live with his wife. Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine supported this decree with their triple power; and after a generation of sporadic resistance it was enforced with transient success in the West.

The gravest problem of the Church, next to reconciling her ideals with her continuance, was to find a way of living with the state. The rise of an ecclesiastical organization side by side with the officials of the government created a struggle for power in which the accepted subjection of one to the other was the prerequisite of peace. In the East the Church became subordinate to the state; in the West she fought for independence, then for mastery. In either case the union of Church and state involved a profound modification of Christian ethics. Tertullian, Origen, and Lactantius had taught that war is always unlawful; the Church, now protected by the state, resigned herself to such wars as she deemed necessary to protect either the state or the Church. She had not in herself the means of force; but when force seemed desirable she could appeal to the “secular arm” to implement her will. She received from the state, and from individuals, splendid gifts of money, temples, or lands; she grew rich, and needed the state to protect her in all the rights of property. Even when the state fell she kept her wealth; the barbarian conquerors, however heretical, seldom robbed the Church. The authority of the word so soon rivaled the power of the sword.


II. THE HERETICS

The most unpleasant task of ecclesiastical organization was to prevent a fragmentation of the Church through the multiplication of heresies—i.e., doctrines contrary to conciliar definitions of the Christian creed. 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. Neither the Church nor the heretics thought of heresy in purely theological terms. The heresy was in many cases the ideological flag of a rebellious locality seeking liberation from the imperial power; so the Monophysites wished to free Syria and Egypt from Constantinople; the Donatists hoped to free Africa from Rome; and as Church and state were now united, the rebellion was against both. Orthodoxy opposed nationalism, heresy defended it; the Church labored for centralization and unity, the heretics for local independence and liberty.

Arianism, overcome within the Empire, won a peculiar victory among the barbarians. Christianity had been first carried to the Teutonic tribes by Roman captives taken in the Gothic invasions of Asia Minor in the third century. The “apostle” Ulfilas (311?–81) was not quite an apostle. He was the descendant of a Christian captive from Cappadocia, and was born and raised among the Goths who lived north of the Danube. About 341 he was consecrated as their bishop by Eusebius, the Arian prelate of Nicomedia. When the Gothic chieftain Athanaric persecuted the Christians in his dominions, Ulfilas obtained permission from the Arian Constantius to bring the little community of Gothic Christians across the Danube into Thrace. To instruct and multiply his converts he patiently translated, from the Greek into Gothic, all the Bible except the Books of Kings, which he omitted as dangerously martial; and as the Goths had as yet no written language, he composed a Gothic alphabet based upon the Greek. His Bible was the first literary work in any Teutonic tongue. The devoted and virtuous life of Ulfilas generated among the Goths such confidence in his wisdom and integrity that his Arian Christianity was accepted by them without question. As other barbarians received their Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries from the Goths, nearly all the invaders of the Empire were Arians, and the new kingdoms established by them in the Balkans, Gaul, Spain, Italy, and Africa were officially Arian. Conquerors and conquered differed by only an iota in their faith: the orthodox held Christ to be identical in being (homoousios), the Arians considered Him only similar in being (homoiousios), with God the Father; but the difference became vital in the politics of the fifth and sixth centuries. By this chance concatenation of events Arianism held its ground till the orthodox Franks overthrew the Visigoths in Gaul, Belisarius conquered Vandal Africa and Gothic Italy, and Recared (589) changed the faith of the Visigoths in Spain.

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. Manicheism was not so much a Christian heresy as a Persian dualism of God and Satan, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness; it thought to reconcile Christianity and Zoroastrianism, and was bitterly buffeted by both. It faced with unusual candor the problem of evil, the strange abundance of apparently unmerited suffering in a world providentially ruled; and felt compelled to postulate an Evil Spirit coeternal with the Good. During the fourth century Manicheism made many converts in East and West. Several of the emperors used ruthless measures against it; Justinian made it a capital crime; gradually it faded out, but it left its influence on such later heretics as the Paulicians, Bogomiles, and Albigensians. In 385 a Spanish bishop, Priscillian, was accused of preaching Manicheism and universal celibacy; he denied the charges; he was tried before the usurping Emperor Maximus at Trier, two bishops being his accusers; he was condemned; and over the protests of St. Ambrose and St. Martin he and several of his companions were burned to death (385).

While meeting all these assailants the Church found herself almost overwhelmed by the Donatist heresy in Africa. Donatus, Bishop of Carthage (315), had denied the efficacy of sacraments administered by priests in a state of sin; the Church, unwilling to risk so much on the virtues of the clergy, wisely repudiated the idea. The heresy nevertheless spread rapidly in North Africa; it enlisted the enthusiasm of the poor, and the theological aberration grew into a social revolt. Emperors fulminated against the movement; heavy fines and confiscations were decreed for persistence in it; the power of buying, selling, or bequeathing property was denied to the Donatists; they were driven from their churches by imperial soldiery, and the churches were turned over to orthodox priests. Bands of revolutionaries, at once Christian and communist, took form under the name of Circumcelliones, or prowlers; they condemned poverty and slavery, canceled debts and liberated slaves, and proposed to restore the mythical equality of primitive man. When they met a carriage drawn by slaves they put the slaves in the carriage and made the master pull it behind him. Usually they contented themselves with robbery; but sometimes, irritated by resistance, they would blind the orthodox or the rich by rubbing lime into their eyes, or would beat them to death with clubs; or so their enemies relate. If they in turn met death they rejoiced, certain of paradise. Fanaticism finally captured them completely; they gave themselves up as heretics, and solicited martyrdom; they stopped wayfarers and asked to be killed; and when even their enemies tired of complying, they leaped into fires, or jumped from precipices, or walked into the sea.2 Augustine fought Donatism with every means, and for a time seemed to have overcome it; but when the Vandals arrived in Africa the Donatists reappeared in great number, and rejoiced at the expulsion of the orthodox priests. A tradition of fierce sectarian hatred was handed down with pious persistence, and left no united opposition when (670) the Arabs came.

Meanwhile Pelagius was stirring three continents with his attack on the doctrine of original sin, and Nestorius was courting martyrdom by doubts concerning the Mother of God. Nestorius had been a pupil of Theodore of Mopsuestia (350?–?428), who had almost invented the Higher Criticism of the Bible. The Book of Job, said Theodore, was a poem adapted from pagan sources; the Song of Songs was an epithalamium of frankly sensual significance; many of the Old Testament prophecies supposedly referring to Jesus alluded only to pre-Christian events; and Mary was the Mother not of God but only of the human nature in Jesus.3 Nestorius raised himself to the episcopal see at Constantinople (428), drew crowds with his eloquence, made enemies by his harsh dogmatism, and gave them their opportunity by adopting the ungallant opinion of Theodore about Mary. If Christ was God, then, said most Christians, Mary was theotokos, god-bearing, the Mother of God. Nestorius thought the term too strong; Mary, he said, was mother only of the human, not of the divine, nature in Christ. It would be better, he suggested, to call her the Mother of Christ.

Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria, preached at Easter, 429, a sermon announcing the orthodox doctrine—that Mary is the true mother not of the Godhead itself, but of the incarnate Logos, or Word of God, containing both the divine and the human natures of Christ.4 Pope Celestine I, stirred by a letter from Cyril, called a council at Rome (430), which demanded that Nestorius be deposed or retract. When Nestorius refused, an ecumenical council at Ephesus (431) not only deposed but excommunicated him. Many bishops protested; but the people of Ephesus broke out into demonstrations of joy that must have awakened memories of Diana-Artemis. Nestorius was allowed to retire to Antioch; but as he continued to defend himself and demand restoration, the Emperor Theodosius II banished him to an oasis in the Libyan desert. He survived many years; at last the Byzantine court took pity on him, and sent him an imperial pardon. The messenger found him dying (c. 451). His followers withdrew to eastern Syria, built churches, established a school of learning at Edessa, translated the Bible, Aristotle, and Galen into Syriac, and played a vital part in acquainting the Moslems with Greek science, medicine, and philosophy. Persecuted by the Emperor Zeno, they crossed into Persia, opened an influential school at Nisibis, flourished under Persian toleration, and founded communities in Balkh and Samarkand, in India and China. Scattered through Asia, they survive to this day, still denouncing Mariolatry.

The last great heresy of this turbulent period, and the most momentous in result, was announced by Eutyches, head of a monastery near Constantinople. In Christ, said Eutyches, there were not two natures, human and divine; there was only the divine. Flavian, the patriarch of Constantinople, called a local synod which condemned this “Monophysite” heresy, and excommunicated Eutyches. The monk appealed to the bishops of Alexandria and Rome; Dioscoras, who had succeeded Cyril, persuaded the Emperor Theodosius to call another council at Ephesus (449). Religion was subordinated to politics; the Alexandrian see continued its war upon the see of Constantinople; Eutyches was exonerated, and Flavian was assailed with such oratorical violence that he died.5 The council issued anathemas against any man who should hold that there were two natures in Christ. Pope Leo I had not attended the council, but had sent it several letters (“Leo’s tome”) supporting Flavian. Shocked by the report of his delegates, Leo branded the council as the “Robber Synod,” and refused to recognize its decrees. A later council, at Chalcedon in 451, acclaimed Leo’s letters, condemned Eutyches, and reaffirmed the double nature of Christ. But the twenty-eighth canon of this council affirmed the equal authority of the bishop of Constantinople with that of Rome. Leo, who had fought for the supremacy of his office as indispensable to the unity and authority of the Church, rejected this canon; and a long struggle began between the rival sees.

To perfect the confusion, the majority of Christians in Syria and Egypt refused to accept the doctrines of two natures in the one person of Christ. The monks of Syria continued to teach the Monophysite heresy, and when an orthodox bishop was appointed to the see of Alexandria he was torn to pieces in his church on Good Friday.6 Thereafter Monophysitism became the national religion of Christian Egypt and Abyssinia, and by the sixth century predominated in western Syria and Armenia, while Nestorianism grew in Mesopotamia and eastern Syria. The success of the religious rebellion strengthened political revolt; and when the conquering Arabs, in the seventh century, poured into Egypt and the Near East, half the population welcomed them as liberators from the theological, political, and financial tyranny of the Byzantine capital.


III. THE CHRISTIAN WEST


1. Rome

The bishops of Rome, in the fourth century, did not show the Church at her best. Sylvester (314–35) earned the credit for converting Constantine; and pious belief represented him as receiving from the Emperor in the “Donation of Constantine” nearly all of western Europe; but he did not behave as if he owned half the white man’s world. Julius I (337–52) strongly affirmed the supreme authority of the Roman see, but Liberius (352–66) submitted, through weakness or age, to the Arian dictates of Constantius. Upon his death Damasus and Ursinus contested the papacy; rival mobs supported them in the most vigorous tradition of Roman democracy; in one day and in one church 137 persons were killed in the dispute.7 Praetextatus, then pagan prefect of Rome, banished Uisinus, and Damasus ruled for eighteen years with pleasure and skill. He was an archaeologist, and adorned the tombs of the Roman martyrs with beautiful inscriptions; he was also, said the irreverent, an auriscalpius matronarum, a scratcher of ladies’ ears—i.e., an expert in wheedling gifts for the Church from the rich matrons of Rome.8

Leo I, surnamed the Great, held the throne of Peter through a generation of crisis (440–61), and by courage and statesmanship raised the Apostolic See to new heights of power and dignity. When Hilary of Poitiers refused to accept his decision in a dispute with another Gallic bishop, Leo sent him peremptory orders; and the Emperor Valentinian III seconded these with an epoch-making edict imperially confirming the authority of the Roman bishop over all Christian churches. The bishops of the West generally acknowledged, those of the East resisted, this supremacy. The patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria claimed equal authority with the Roman see; and the furious controversies of the Eastern Church proceeded with scant obeisance to the bishop of Rome. Difficulties of communication and travel combined with diversity of language to alienate the Western from the Eastern Church. In the West, however, the popes exercised a growing leadership even in secular affairs. They were subject in non-religious matters to the Roman state and prefect, and until the seventh century they sought the confirmation of their election from the emperor. But the distance of the Eastern and the weakness of the Western rulers left the popes pre-eminent in Rome; and when, in the face of invasion, both Senate and emperor fled, and civil government collapsed, while the popes stood unawed at their posts, their prestige rapidly rose. The conversion of the Western barbarians immensely extended the authority and influence of the Roman see.

As rich and aristocratic families abandoned paganism for Christianity, the Roman Church participated more and more in the wealth that came to the Western capital; and Ammianus was surprised to find that the bishop of Rome lived like a prince in the Lateran Palace, and moved through the city with the pomp of an emperor.9 Splendid churches now (400) adorned the city. A brilliant society took form, in which elegant prelates mingled happily with ornate women, and helped them to make their wills.

While the Christian populace joined the surviving pagans at the theater, the races, and the games, a minority of Christians strove to live a life in harmony with the Gospels. Athanasius had brought to Rome two Egyptian monks; he had written a life of Anthony, and Rufinus had published for the West a history of monasticism in the East. Pious minds were influenced by the reported holiness of Anthony, Schnoudi, and Pachomius; monasteries were established in Rome by Sixtus III (432–440) and Leo I; and several families, while still living in their homes, accepted the monastic rule of chastity and poverty. Roman ladies of wealth, like Marcella, Paula, and three generations of the Melanias, gave most of their funds to charity, founded hospitals and convents, made pilgrimages to the monks of the East, and maintained so ascetic a regimen that some of them died of self-denial. Pagan circles in Rome complained that this kind of Christianity was hostile to family life, the institution of marriage, and the vigor of the state; and polemics fell heavily upon the head of the leading advocate of asceticism—one of the greatest scholars and most brilliant writers ever produced by the Christian Church.


2. St. Jerome

He was born about 340 at Strido, near Aquileia, probably of Dalmatian stock, and was promisingly named Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius—“the reverend, holy-named sage.” He received a good education at Trier and Rome, learned the Latin classics well, and loved them, he thought, to the point of sin. Nevertheless, he was a positive and passionate Christian; he joined with Rufinus and other friends to found an ascetic brotherhood in Aquileia, and preached such counsels of perfection that his bishop reproved him for undue impatience with the natural frailties of man. 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 Leaving Aquileia to its sins, Jerome and some fellow devotees went to the Near East and entered a monastery in the Chalcis desert near Antioch (374). The unhealthy climate was too much for them; two died, and Jerome himself was for a time on the verge of death. Undeterred, he left the monastery to live as an anchorite in a desert hermitage, with occasional relapses into Virgil and Cicero. He had brought his library with him, and could not quite turn away from verse and prose whose beauty lured him like some girlish loveliness. His account of the matter reveals the medieval mood. He dreamt that he had died, and was

dragged before the Judge’s judgment seat. I was asked to state my condition, and replied that I was a Christian. But He Who presided said, “Thou liest; thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian. For where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.” Straightway I became dumb, and [then I felt] the strokes of the whip—for He had ordered me to be scourged…. At last the bystanders fell at the knees of Him Who presided, and prayed Him to pardon my youth and give me opportunity to repent of my error, on the understanding that the extreme of torture should be inflicted upon me if ever I read again the books of Gentile authors. … This experience was no sweet or idle dream. … I profess that my shoulders were black and blue, and that I felt the bruises long after I awoke. … Henceforth I read the books of God with greater zeal than I had ever given before to the books of men.11

In 379 he returned to Antioch, and was ordained a priest. In 382 we find him in Rome as secretary to Pope Damasus, and commissioned by him to make an improved Latin translation of the New Testament. He continued to wear the brown robe and the tunic of an anchorite, and lived an ascetic life amid a luxurious papal court. The pious Marcella and Paula received him into their aristocratic homes as their spiritual adviser, and his pagan critics thought he enjoyed the company of women more than became so passionate a praiser of celibacy and virginity. He replied by satirizing the Roman society of the age in ageless terms:

Those women who paint their cheeks with rouge and their eyes with belladonna, whose faces are covered with powder … whom no number of years can convince that they are old; who heap their heads with borrowed tresses … and behave like trembling schoolgirls before their grandsons. … Gentile widows flaunt silk dresses, deck themselves in gleaming jewelry, and reek of musk. … Other women put on men’s clothing, cut their hair short … blush to be women, and prefer to look like eunuchs.… Some unmarried women prevent conception by the help of potions, murdering human beings before they are conceived; others, when they find themselves with child as the result of sin, secure abortion with drugs…. Yet there are women who say, “To the pure all things are pure…. Why should I refrain from the food which God made for my enjoyment?”12

He scolds a Roman lady in terms that suggest an appreciative eye:

Your vest is slit on purpose. … Your breasts are confined in strips of linen, your chest is imprisoned in a tight girdle … your shawl sometimes drops so as to leave your white shoulders bare; and then it hastily hides what it intentionally revealed.13

Jerome adds to the moralist’s bias the exaggerations of the literary artist molding a period, and of a lawyer inflating a brief. His satires recall those of Juvenal, or of our own time; it is pleasant to know that women have always been as charming as they are today. Like Juvenal, Jerome denounces impartially, fearlessly, and ecumenically. He is shocked to find concubinage even among Christians, and more shocked to find it covered by the pretense of practicing chastity the hard way. “From what source has this plague of ‘dearly beloved sisters’ found its way into the church? Whence come these unwedded wives? These novel concubines, these one-man harlots? They live in the same house with their male friends; they occupy the same room, often the same bed; yet they call us suspicious if we think that anything is wrong.”14 He attacks the Roman clergy whose support might have raised him to the papacy. He ridicules the curled and scented ecclesiastics who frequent fashionable society, and the legacy-hunting priest who rises before dawn to visit women before they have gotten out of bed.15 He condemns the marriage of priests and their sexual digressions, and argues powerfully for clerical celibacy; only monks, he thinks, are true Christians, free from property, lust, and pride. With an eloquence that would have enlisted Casanova, Jerome calls upon men to give up all and follow Christ, asks the Christian matrons to dedicate their first-born to the Lord as offerings due under the Law,16 and advises his lady friends, if they cannot enter a convent, at least to live as virgins in their homes. He comes close to rating marriage as sin. “I praise marriage, but because it produces me virgins”;17 he proposes to “cut down by the ax of virginity the wood of marriage,”18 and exalts John the celibate apostle over Peter, who had a wife.19 His most interesting letter (384) is to a girl, Eustochium, on the pleasures of virginity. He is not against marriage, but those who avoid it escape from Sodom, and painful pregnancies, and bawling infants, and household cares, and the tortures of jealousy. He admits that the path of purity is also hard, and that eternal vigilance is the price of virginity.

Virginity can be lost even by a thought.… Let your companions be those who are pale of face and thin with fasting.… Let your fasts be of daily occurrence. Wash your bed and water your couch nightly with tears. … Let the seclusion of your own chamber ever guard you; ever let the Bridegroom sport with you within.… When sleep falls upon you He will come behind the wall, and will put His hand through the door and will touch your belly (ventrem). And you will awake and rise up and cry, “I am sick with love.” And you will hear Him answer: “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.”20

The publication of this letter, Jerome tells us, “was greeted with showers of stones”; perhaps some readers sensed a morbid prurience in these strange counsels in a man apparently not yet free from the heat of desire. When, a few months later (384), the young ascetic Blesilla died, many blamed the austerities that had been taught her by Jerome; some pagans proposed to throw him into the Tiber with all the monks of Rome. Unrepentant, he addressed to the hysterically mournful mother a letter of consolation and reproof. In the same year Pope Damasus passed away, and his successor did not renew Jerome’s appointment as papal secretary. In 385 he left Rome forever, taking with him Blesilla’s mother Paula, and Eustochium her sister. At Bethlehem he built a monastery of which he became head, a convent over which first Paula and then Eustochium presided, a church for the common worship of the monks and nuns, and a hospice for pilgrims to the Holy Land.

He made his own cell in a cave, gathered his books and papers there, gave himself up to study, composition, and administration, and lived there the remaining thirty-four years of his life. He quarreled at pen’s point with Chrysostom, Ambrose, Pelagius, and Augustine. He wrote with dogmatic force half a hundred works on questions of casuistry and Biblical interpretation, and his writings were eagerly read even by his enemies. He opened a school in Bethlehem, where he humbly and freely taught children a variety of subjects, including Latin and Greek; now a confirmed saint, he felt that he could read again the classic authors whom he had forsworn in his youth. He resumed the study of Hebrew, which he had begun in his first sojourn in the East; and in eighteen years of patient scholarship he achieved that magnificent and sonorous translation of the Bible into Latin which is known to us as the Vulgate, and remains as the greatest and most influential literary accomplishment of the fourth century. There were errors in the translation as in any work so vast, and some “barbarisms” of common speech which offended the purists; but its Latin formed the language of theology and letters throughout the Middle Ages, poured Hebraic emotion and imagery into Latin molds, and gave to literature a thousand noble phrases of compact eloquence and force.* The Latin world became acquainted with the Bible as never before.

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. It is sad to find in so great a man so many violent outbursts of hatred, misrepresentation, and controversial ferocity. He calls John, Patriarch of Jerusalem, a Judas, a Satan, for whom hell can never provide adequate punishment;21 he describes the majestic Ambrose as “a deformed crow”;22 and to make trouble for his old friend Rufinus he pursues the dead Origen with such heresy-hunting fury as to force the condemnation of Origen by Pope Anastasius (400). We might rather have pardoned some sins of the flesh than these acerbities of the soul.

His critics punished him without delay. When he taught the Greek and Latin classics they denounced him as a pagan; when he studied Hebrew with a Jew they accused him of being a convert to Judaism; when he dedicated his works to women they described his motives as financial or worse.23 His old age was not happy. Barbarians came down into the Near East and overran Syria and Palestine (395); “how many monasteries they captured, how many rivers were reddened with blood!” “The Roman world,” he concluded sadly, “is falling.”24 While he lived, his beloved Paula, Marcella, and Eustochium died. Almost voiceless and fleshless with austerities, and bent with age, he toiled day after day on work after work; he was writing a commentary on Jeremiah when death came. 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.


3. Christian Soldiers

Jerome and Augustine were only the greatest pair in a remarkable age. Among her “Fathers” the early medieval Church distinguished eight as “Doctors of the Church”: in the East Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, and John of Damascus; in the West Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great.

The career of Ambrose (340?–398) illustrates the power of Christianity to draw into its service first-rate men who, a generation earlier, would have served the state. Born at Trier, son of the prefect of Gaul, he was by every precedent destined to a political career, and we are not surprised to hear of him next as provincial governor of northern Italy. Residing at Milan, he was in close touch with the emperor of the West, who found in him the old Roman qualities of solid judgment, executive ability, and quiet courage. Learning that rival factions were gathering at the cathedral to choose a bishop, he hurried to the scene, and by his presence and his words quelled an incipient disturbance. When the factions could not agree on a candidate, someone suggested Ambrose; his name brought the people to an enthusiastic unanimity; and the governor, protesting and still unbaptized, was hurriedly christened, ordained to the diaconate, then to the priesthood, then to the episcopacy, all in one week (374).25

He filled his new office with the dignity and mastery of a statesman. He abandoned the trappings of political position, and lived in exemplary simplicity. He gave his money and property to the poor, and sold the consecrated plate of his church to ransom captives of war.26 He was a theologian who powerfully defended the Nicene Creed, an orator whose sermons helped to convert Augustine, a poet who composed some of the Church’s earliest and noblest hymns, a judge whose learning and integrity shamed the corruption of secular courts, a diplomat entrusted with difficult missions by both Church and state, a good disciplinarian who upheld but overshadowed the pope, an ecclesiastic who brought the great Theodosius to penance, and dominated the policies of Valentinian III. The young Emperor had an Arian mother, Justina, who tried to secure a church in Milan for an Arian priest. The congregation of Ambrose remained night and day in the beleaguered church in a holy “sit-down strike” against the Empress’ orders to surrender the building. “Then it was,” says Augustine, “that the custom arose of singing hymns and songs, after the use of the Eastern provinces, to save the people from being utterly worn out by their long and sorrowful vigils.”27 Ambrose fought a famous battle against the Empress, and won a signal victory for intolerance.

At Nola in southern Italy Paulinus (353–431) exemplified a gentler type of Christian saint. Born in an old rich family of Bordeaux, and married to a lady of like high lineage, he studied under the poet Ausonius, entered politics, and rapidly advanced. Suddenly “conversion” came to him in the full sense of a turning away from the world: he sold his property, and gave all to the poor except enough to keep himself in the barest necessities; and his wife Therasia agreed to live with him as his chaste “sister in Christ.” The monastic life not yet having established itself in the West, they made their modest home at Nola a private monastery and lived there for thirty-five years, abstaining from meat and wine, fasting many days in every month, and happy to be released from the complexities of wealth. The pagan friends of his youth, above all his old teacher Ausonius, protested against what seemed to them a withdrawal from the obligations of civic life; he answered by inviting them to come and share his bliss. In a century of hatred and violence he kept to the end a spirit of toleration. Pagans and Jews joined Christians at his funeral.

Paulinus wrote charming verse, but only incidentally. The poet who best expressed the Christian view in this age was the Spaniard Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (c. 348–410). While Claudian and Ausonius cluttered their compositions with dead gods, Prudentius sang in the ancient meters the new and living themes: stories of the martyrs (Peri stephanon, or Book of Crowns), hymns for every hour of the day, and an answer in verse to Symmachus’ plea for the statue of Victory. It was in this last poem that he made a memorable appeal to Honorius to suppress gladiatorial combats. He did not hate the pagans; he had kind words for Symmachus, and even for Julian; and he begged his fellow Christians not to destroy pagan works of art. He shared Claudian’s admiration for Rome, and rejoiced that one might pass through most of the white man’s world and be under the same laws, everywhere secure; “wherever we are we live as fellow citizens.”28 In this Christian poet we catch a last echo of the achievement and mastery of Rome.

It was not Rome’s least glory that Gaul had now so high a civilization. Corresponding to Ausonius and Sidonius in literature were the great bishops of fourth-century Gaul: Hilary of Poitiers, Remi of Reims, Euphronius of Autun, Martin of Tours. Hilary (d. c. 367) was one of the most active defenders of the Nicene Creed, and wrote a treatise in twelve “books” struggling to explain the Trinity. Yet in his modest see at Poitiers we see him living the good life of a devoted churchman—rising early, receiving all callers, hearing complaints, adjusting disputes, saying Mass, preaching, teaching, dictating books and letters, listening to pious readings at his meals, and every day performing some manual labor like cultivating the fields, or weaving garments for the poor.29 This was the ecclesiastic at his best.

St. Martin left more of a name; 3675 churches and 425 villages in France bear it today. He was born in Pannonia about 316; at twelve he wished to become a monk, but at fifteen his father compelled him to join the army. He was an unusual soldier—giving his pay to the poor, helping the distressed, practicing humility and patience as if he would make a monastery out of the army camp. After five years in military service Martin realized his ambition, and went to live as a monk in a cell, first in Italy, then at Poitiers near the Hilary he loved. In 371 the people of Tours clamored to have him as their bishop, despite his shabby garments and rough hair. He agreed, but insisted on still living like a monk. Two miles from the city, at Marmoutier, he built a monastery, gathered together eighty monks, and lived with them a life of unpretentious austerity. His idea of a bishop was of a man who not only celebrated Mass, preached, administered the sacraments, and raised funds, but also fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick, and helped the unfortunate. Gaul loved him so that all its parts told stories of his miracles, even of his having raised three men from the dead.30 France made him one of her patron saints.

The monastery that Martin had founded at Poitiers (362) was the first of many that now sprang up in Gaul. Because the monastic idea had come to Rome through Athanasius’ Life of Anthony, and Jerome’s powerful call to the anchoritic life, the West first took up the most arduous and lonely forms of monasticism, and tried to practice in less genial climates the rigors of monks living under the Egyptian sun. 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. St. Senoch, near Tours, enclosed himself so narrowly within four walls that the lower half of his body could not move; in this situation he lived many years, an object of veneration to the populace.31 St. John Cassian brought the ideas of Pachomius to balance the ecstasy of Anthony; inspired by some sermons of Chrysostom, he established a monastery and convent at Marseille (415), and wrote for it the first Western regimen for the monastic life; before he died (435) some 5000 monks in Provence were living by his rule. Soon after 400 St. Honoratus and St. Caprasius built a monastery on the island of Lérins, facing Cannes. These institutions trained men to co-operative labor, study, and scholarship rather than to solitary devotion; they became schools of theology, and vitally influenced the thought of the West. When the rule of St. Benedict came to Gaul in the next century, it built upon the tradition of Cassian one of the most beneficent religious orders in history.


IV. THE CHRISTIAN EAST


1. The Monks of the East

As the Church ceased to be a set of devotees and became an institution governing millions of men, she tended to adopt a more lenient view of human frailty, and to tolerate, sometimes to share, the pleasures of this world. A minority of Christians held such condescension to be treason to Christ; they resolved to gain heaven by poverty, chastity, and prayer, and retired completely from the world. Possibly Ashoka’s missionaries (c. 250 B.C.) had brought to the Near East the monastic forms as well as the theory and ethics of Buddhism; and pre-Christian anchorites like those of Serapis in Egypt, or the Essene communities in Judea, may have transmitted to Anthony and Pachomius the ideals and methods of the strictly religious life. Monasticism was for many souls a refuge from the chaos and war of the barbarian invasions; there were no taxes in the monastery or the desert cell, no military service, no marital strife, no weary toil; ordination to the priesthood was not required of a monk; and after a few years of peace would come eternal bliss.

Egypt, whose climate almost invited monasticism, teemed with anchoritic and cenobitic monks, following the solitary habits of Anthony, or the community life that Pachomius had established at Tabenne. The Nile was banked with monasteries and convents, some containing as many as 3000 monks and nuns. Of the anchorites Anthony (c. 251–356) was by far the most renowned. After wandering from solitude to solitude he fixed his cell on Mount Kolzim, near the Red Sea. Admirers found him out, imitated his devotion, and built their cells as near to his as he would permit; before he died the desert was peopled with his spiritual progeny. He seldom washed, and lived to the age of 105. He declined an invitation from Constantine, but at the age of ninety he journeyed to Alexandria to support Athanasius against the Arians. Only less famous was Pachomius, who (325) founded nine monasteries and one nunnery; sometimes 7000 monks who followed his rule gathered to celebrate some holy day. These cenobites worked as well as prayed; periodically they sailed down the Nile to Alexandria to sell their products, buy their necessities, and join in the ecclesiastical-political fray.

Among the anchorites a keen rivalry arose for the austerity championship. Macarius of Alexandria, says the Abbé Duchesne, “could never hear of any feat of asceticism without at once trying to surpass it.” If other monks ate no cooked food in Lent, Macarius ate none for seven years; if some punished themselves with sleeplessness, Macarius could be seen “frantically endeavoring for twenty consecutive nights to keep himself awake.” Throughout one Lent he stood upright night and day, and ate nothing except, once a week, a few cabbage leaves; and during this time he continued to work at his basket-weaving trade.32 For six months he slept in a marsh, and exposed his naked body to poisonous flies.33 Some monks excelled in feats of solitude; so Serapion inhabited a cave at the bottom of an abyss into which few pilgrims had the hardihood to descend; when Jerome and Paula reached his lair they found a man almost composed of bones, dressed only in a loincloth, face and shoulders covered by uncut hair; his cell was barely large enough for a bed of leaves and a plank; yet this man had lived among the aristocracy of Rome.34 Some, like Bessarion for forty, Pachomius for fifty, years, never lay down while they slept;35 some specialized in silence, and went many years without uttering a word; others carried heavy weights wherever they went, or bound their limbs with iron bracelets, greaves, or chains. Many proudly recorded the number of years since they had looked upon a woman’s face.36 Nearly all anchorites lived—some to a great age—on a narrow range of food. Jerome tells of monks who subsisted exclusively on figs or on barley bread. When Macarius was ill someone brought him grapes; unwilling so to indulge himself, he sent them to another hermit, who sent them to another; and so they made the rounds of the desert (Rufinus assures us) until they came back intact to Macarius.37 The pilgrims who flocked from all quarters of the Christian world to see the monks of the East credited them with miracles as remarkable as those of Christ. They could cure diseases or repel demons by a touch or a word, tame serpents or lions with a look or a prayer, and cross the Nile on the back of a crocodile. The relics of the anchorites became the most precious possession of Christian churches, and are treasured in them to this day.

In the monasteries the abbot required absolute obedience, and tested novices with impossible commands. One abbot (story says) ordered a novice to leap into a raging furnace; the novice obeyed; the flame, we are informed, parted to let him pass. Another monk was told to plant the abbot’s walking stick in the earth and water it till it flowered; for years he walked daily to the Nile, two miles away, to draw water to pour upon the stick; in the third year God took pity on him and the stick bloomed.38 Work was prescribed for the monks, says Jerome,39 “lest they be led astray by dangerous imaginings.” Some tilled fields, some tended gardens, wove mats or baskets, carved wooden shoes, or copied manuscripts; many ancient classics were preserved by their pens. Most Egyptian monks, however, were innocent of letters, and scorned secular knowledge as a futile conceit.40 Many of them considered cleanliness hostile to godliness; the virgin Silvia refused to wash any part of her body except her fingers; in a convent of 130 nuns none ever bathed, or washed the feet. Towards the end of the fourth century, however, the monks became resigned to water, and the abbot Alexander, scorning this decadence, looked back longingly to the time when monks “never washed the face.”41

The Near East rivaled Egypt in the number and marvels of its monks and nuns. Jerusalem and Antioch were meshed with monastic communities or cells. The Syrian desert was peopled with anchorites; some of them, like Hindu fakirs, bound themselves with chains to immovable rocks, others disdained so settled a habitation, and roamed over the mountains eating grass.42 Simeon Stylites (390?–459), we are told, used to go without food through the forty days of Lent; during one Lent he was, at his own insistence, walled up in an enclosure with a little bread and water; on Easter he was unwalled, and the bread and the water were found untouched. 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 his flesh, which putrefied around it, stank, and teemed with worms; Simeon picked up the worms that fell from his sores, and replaced them there, saying to them, “Eat what God has given you.” From his high pulpit he preached sermons to the crowds that came to see him, converted barbarians, performed marvelous cures, played ecclesiastical politics, and shamed the moneylenders into reducing their interest charges from twelve to six per cent.43 His exalted piety created a fashion of pillar hermits, which lasted for twelve centuries, and, in a thoroughly secularized form, persists today.

The Church did not approve of such excesses; perhaps she sensed a fierce pride in these humiliations, a spiritual greed in this self-denial, a secret sensualism in this flight from woman and the world. The records of these ascetics abound in sexual visions and dreams; their cells resounded with their moans as they struggled with imaginary temptations and erotic thoughts; they believed that the air about them was full of demons assailing them; the monks seem to have found it harder to be virtuous in solitude than if they had lived among all the opportunities of the town. It was not unusual for anchorites to go mad. Rufinus tells of a young monk whose cell was entered by a beautiful woman; he succumbed to her charms, after which she disappeared, he thought, into the air; the monk ran out wildly to the nearest village, and leaped into the furnace of a public bath to cool his fire. In another case a young woman begged admission to a monk’s cell on the plea that wild beasts were pursuing her; he consented to take her in briefly; but in that hour she happened to touch him, and the flame of desire sprang up in him as if all his years of austerity had left it undimmed. He tried to grasp her, but she vanished from his arms and his sight, and a chorus of demons, we are told, exulted with loud laughter over his fall. This monk, says Rufinus, could no longer bear the monastic life; like Paphnuce in Anatole France’s Thaïs, he could not exorcise the vision of beauty that he had imagined or seen; he left his cell, plunged into the life of the city, and followed that vision at last into hell.44

The organized Church had at first no control over the monks, who rarely took any degree of holy orders; yet she felt responsibility for their excesses, since she shared in the glory of their deeds. She could not afford to agree completely with monastic ideals; she praised celibacy, virginity, and poverty, but could not condemn marriage or parentage or property, as sins; she had now a stake in the continuance of the race. Some monks left their cells or monasteries at will, and troubled the populace with their begging; some went from town to town preaching asceticism, selling real or bogus relics, terrorizing synods, and exciting impressionable people to destroy pagan temples or statuary, or, now and then, to kill an Hypatia. The Church could not tolerate these independent actions. The Council of Chalcedon (451) ordained that greater circumspection should be used in admitting persons to monastic vows; that such vows should be irrevocable; and that no one should organize a monastery, or leave it, without permission from the bishop of the diocese.

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