The Eighteen Christian Centuries
by James White · English · Gutenberg #44703 · 976,588 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Eighteen Christian Centuries
Author: James White
Release date: January 18, 2014 [eBook #44703]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EIGHTEEN CHRISTIAN CENTURIES ***
THE
EIGHTEEN CHRISTIAN CENTURIES.
BY
THE REV. JAMES WHITE,
AUTHOR OF A "HISTORY OF FRANCE."
With a Copious Index.
FROM THE SECOND EDINBURGH EDITION.
NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
549 & 551 BROADWAY.
1878.
NOTE BY THE AMERICAN PUBLISHERS.
This valuable work, which has been received with much favour in Great
Britain, is reprinted without abridgment from the second Edinburgh
edition. The lists of names of remarkable persons in the present issue
have been somewhat enlarged, and additional dates appended, thereby
increasing the value of the book.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
FIRST CENTURY.
THE BAD EMPERORS 9
SECOND CENTURY.
THE GOOD EMPERORS. 41
THIRD CENTURY.
ANARCHY AND CONFUSION--GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 65
FOURTH CENTURY.
THE REMOVAL TO CONSTANTINOPLE--ESTABLISHMENT OF
CHRISTIANITY--APOSTASY OF JULIAN--SETTLEMENT OF THE GOTHS. 83
FIFTH CENTURY.
END OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE--FORMATION OF MODERN STATES--GROWTH
OF ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORITY. 105
SIXTH CENTURY.
BELISARIUS AND NARSES IN ITALY--SETTLEMENT OF THE
LOMBARDS--LAWS OF JUSTINIAN--BIRTH OF MOHAMMED. 123
SEVENTH CENTURY.
POWER OF ROME SUPPORTED BY THE MONKS--CONQUESTS OF THE
MOHAMMEDANS. 141
EIGHTH CENTURY.
TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPES--THE EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 171
NINTH CENTURY.
DISMEMBERMENT OF CHARLEMAGNE'S EMPIRE--DANISH INVASION
OF ENGLAND--WEAKNESS OF FRANCE--REIGN OF ALFRED. 193
TENTH CENTURY.
DARKNESS AND DESPAIR. 219
ELEVENTH CENTURY.
THE COMMENCEMENT OF IMPROVEMENT--GREGORY THE SEVENTH--FIRST
CRUSADE. 241
TWELFTH CENTURY.
ELEVATION OF LEARNING--POWER OF THE CHURCH--THOMAS
À-BECKETT. 269
THIRTEENTH CENTURY.
FIRST CRUSADE AGAINST HERETICS--THE ALBIGENSES--MAGNA
CHARTA--EDWARD I. 297
FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
ABOLITION OF THE ORDER OF THE TEMPLARS--RISE OF MODERN
LITERATURES--SCHISM OF THE CHURCH. 325
FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM--AGINCOURT--JOAN OF ARC--THE
PRINTING-PRESS--DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 359
SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
THE REFORMATION--THE JESUITS--POLICY OF ELIZABETH. 401
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
ENGLISH REBELLION AND REVOLUTION--DESPOTISM OF LOUIS THE
FOURTEENTH. 447
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
INDIA--AMERICA--FRANCE 491
INDEX 527
FIRST CENTURY.
Emperors.
A.D.
AUGUSTUS CÆSAR.
14. TIBERIUS.
37. CAIUS CALIGULA.
41. CLAUDIUS.
54. NERO. First Persecution of the Christians.
68. GALBA.
69. OTHO. }
69. VITELLIUS.}
69. VESPASIAN.}
79. TITUS.
81. DOMITIAN. Second Persecution of the Christians.
96. NERVA.
98. TRAJAN.
Authors.
LIVY, OVID, TIBULLUS, STRABO, COLUMELLA, QUINTUS CURTIUS, SENECA,
LUCAN, PETRONIUS, SILIUS ITALICUS, PLINY THE ELDER, MARTIAL,
QUINCTILIAN, TACITUS.
Christian Fathers and Writers.
BARNABAS, CLEMENT OF ROME, HERMAS, IGNATIUS, POLYCARP.
THE
EIGHTEEN CHRISTIAN CENTURIES.
THE FIRST CENTURY.
THE BAD EMPERORS.
Nobody disputes the usefulness of History. Many prefer it, even for
interest and amusement, to the best novels and romances. But the
extent of time over which it has stretched its range is appalling to
the most laborious of readers. And as History is growing every day,
and every nation is engaged in the manufacture of memorable events, it
is pitiable to contemplate the fate of the historic student a hundred
years hence. He is not allowed to cut off at one end, in proportion as
he increases at the other. He is not allowed to forget Marlborough,
in consideration of his accurate acquaintance with Wellington. His
knowledge of the career of Napoleon is no excuse for ignorance of
Julius Cæsar. All must be retained--victories, defeats--battles,
sieges--knights in armour, soldiers in red; the charge at Marathon,
the struggle at Inkermann--all these things, a thousand other things,
at first apparently of no importance, but growing larger and larger
as time develops their effects, till men look back in wonder that
the acorn escaped their notice which has produced such a majestic
oak,--a thousand other things still, for a moment rising in apparently
irresistible power, and dying off apparently without cause, must be
folded up in niches of the memory, ready to be brought forth when
needed, and yet room be left for the future. And who can pretend
to be qualified for so great a work? Most of us confess to rather
dim recollections of things occurring in our own time,--in our own
country--in our own parish; and some, contemplating the vast expanse
of human history, its innumerable windings and perplexing variations,
are inclined to give it up in despair, and have a sulky sort of
gratification in determining to know nothing, since they cannot
know all. All kings, they say, are pretty much alike, and whether
he is called John in England, or Louis in France, doesn't make much
difference. Nobles also are as similar as possible, and peoples are
everywhere the same. Now, this, you see, though it ambitiously pretends
to be ignorance, is, in fact, something infinitely worse. It is false
knowledge. It might be very injurious to liberty, to honour, and to
religion itself, if this wretched idea were to become common, for where
would be the inducement to noble endeavour? to reform of abuses? to
purity of life? Kings and nobles and peoples are not everywhere the
same. They are not even _like_ each other, or like themselves in the
same land at different periods. They are in a perpetual series, not
only of change, but of contrast. They are "variable as the sea,"--calm
and turbulent, brilliant and dark by turns. And it is this which
gives us the only chance of attaining clearness and distinctness
in our historic views. It is by dissimilarities that things are
individualized: now, how pleasant it would be if we could simplify and
strengthen our recollections of different times, by getting personal
portraits, as it were, of the various centuries, so as to escape the
danger of confounding their dress or features. It would be impossible
in that case to mistake the Spanish hat and feather of the sixteenth
century for the steel helmet and closed vizor of the fourteenth. We
should be able, in the same way, to distinguish between the modes of
thought and principles of action of the early ages, and those of the
present time. We should be able to point out anachronisms of feeling
and manners if they occurred in the course of our reading, as well
as of dress and language. It is surely worth while, therefore, to
make an attempt to individualize the centuries, not by affixing to
them any arbitrary marks of one's own, but by taking notice of the
distinguishing quality they possess, and grouping round that, as a
centre, the incidents which either produce this characteristic or are
produced by it. What should we call the present century, for instance?
We should at once name it the Century of Invention. The great war with
Napoleon ending in 1815, exciting so many passions, and calling forth
such energy, was but the natural introduction to the wider efforts and
amazing progress of the succeeding forty years. Battles and bulletins,
alliances and quarrels, ceased, but the intellect aroused by the
struggle dashed into other channels. Commerce spread its humanizing
influences over hitherto closed and unexplored regions; the steamboat
and railway began their wondrous career. The lightning was trained
to be our courier in the electric telegraph, and the sun took our
likenesses in the daguerreotype. How changed this century is in all its
attributes and tendencies from its predecessor, let any man judge for
himself, who compares the reigns of our first Hanoverian kings with
that of our gracious queen.
In nothing, indeed, is the course of European history so remarkable as
in the immense differences which intervals of a few years introduce.
In the old monarchies of Asia, time and the world seem almost to stand
still. The Indian, the Arab, the Chinese of a thousand years ago, wore
the same clothes, thought the same thoughts, and led the same life as
his successor of to-day. But with us the whole character of a people
is changed in a lifetime. In a few years we are whirled out of all our
associations. Names perhaps remain unaltered, but the inner life is
different; modes of living, states of education, religious sentiments,
great national events, foreign wars, or deep internal struggles--all
leave such ineffaceable marks on the history of certain periods, that
their influence can be traced through all the particulars of the time.
The art of printing can be followed, on its first introduction, into
the recesses of private life, as well as in the intercourse of nations.
The Reformation of religion so entirely altered the relations which the
states of the world bore to each other, that it may be said to have put
a limit between old history and new, so that human character itself
received a new development; and actions, both public and private, were
regulated by principles hitherto unknown.
In one respect all the past centuries are alike,--that they have done
their part towards the formation of this. We bear the impress, at this
hour, of the great thoughts and high aspirations, the struggles, and
even the crimes, of our ancestral ages; and yet they have no greater
resemblance to the present, except in the unchangeable characteristics
of human nature itself, than the remotest forefathers in a long line
of ancestry, whose likenesses hang in the galleries of our hereditary
nobles, bear to the existing owner of title and estate. The ancestor
who fought in the wars of the Roses has a very different expression
and dress from the other ancestor who cheated and lied (politically,
of course) in the days of the early Georges. Yet from both the present
proprietor is descended. He retains the somewhat rusty armour on an
ostentatious nail in the hall, and the somewhat insincere memoirs in a
secret drawer in the library, and we cannot deny that he is the joint
production of the courage of the warrior and the duplicity of the
statesman; anxious to defend what he believes to be the right, like the
supporter of York or Lancaster--but trammelled by the ties of party,
like the patriot of Sir Robert Walpole.
If we could affix to each century as characteristic a presentment as
those portraits do of the steel-clad hero of Towton, or the be-wigged,
be-buckled courtier of George the Second, our object would be gained.
We should see a whole history in a glance at a century's face. If
it were peculiarly marked by nature or accident, so much the more
easy would it be to recognise the likeness. If the century was a
warlike, quarrelsome century, and had scars across its brow; if it
was a learned, plodding century, and wore spectacles on nose; if it
was a frivolous, gay century, and simpered forever behind bouquets of
flowers, or tripped on fantastic toe with a jewelled rapier at its
side, there would be no mistaking the resemblance; there would also be
no chance of confusing the actions: the legal century would not fight,
the dancing century would not depose its king.
Taking our stand at the beginning of our era, there are only eighteen
centuries with which we have to do, and how easily any of us get
acquainted with the features and expression of eighteen of our friends!
Not that we know every particular of their birth and education, or can
enter into the minute parts of their character and feelings; but we
soon know enough of them to distinguish them from each other. We soon
can say of which of the eighteen such or such an action or opinion
is characteristic. We shall not mistake the bold deed or eloquent
statement of one as proceeding from another.
"Boastful and rough, your first son is a squire.
The next a tradesman, meek, and much a liar:
Tom struts a soldier, open, bold, and brave:
Will sneaks a scrivener, an exceeding knave.
Is he a churchman? then he's fond of power:
A Quaker? sly: a Presbyterian? sour:
A smart free-thinker? all things in an hour."
Now, though it is impossible to put the characteristics of a whole
century into such terse and powerful language as this, it cannot be
doubted that each century, or considerable period, has its prevailing
Thought,--a thought which it works out in almost all the ramifications
of its course; which it receives from its predecessor in a totally
different shape, and passes on to its successor in a still more
altered form. Else why do we find the faith of one generation the
ridicule and laughing-stock of the next? How did knighthood rise
into the heroic regions of chivalry, and then sink in a succeeding
period into the domain of burlesque? How did aristocracy in one age
concentrate into kingship in another? And in a third, how did the
golden ring of sovereignty lose its controlling power, and republics
take their rise? How did the reverence of Europe settle at one time on
the sword of Edward the Third, and at another on the periwig of Louis
the Fourteenth? These and similar inquiries will lead us to the real
principles and motive forces of a particular age, as they distinguished
it from other ages. We shall label the centuries, as it were, with
their characteristic marks, and know where to look for thoughts and
incidents of a particular class and type.
Let us look at the first century.
Throughout the civilized world there is nothing but Rome. Under
whatever form of government--under consuls, or triumvirs, or
dictators--that wonderful city was mistress of the globe. Her internal
dissensions had not weakened her power. While her streets were running
with the blood of her citizens, her eagles were flying triumphant in
Farther Asia and on the Rhine. Her old constitution had finally died
off almost without a blow, and unconsciously the people, still talking
of Cato and Brutus, became accustomed to the yoke. For seven-and-twenty
years they had seen all the power of the state concentrated in one man;
but the names of the offices of which their ancestors had been so proud
were retained; and when Octavius, the nephew of the conqueror Julius
Cæsar, placed himself above the law, it was only by uniting in his own
person all the authority which the law had created. He was consul,
tribune, prætor, pontifex, imperator,--whatever denomination conferred
dignity and power; and by the legal exercise of all these trusts he had
no rival and no check. He was finally presented by the senate with the
lofty title of Augustus, which henceforth had a mysterious significance
as the seal of imperial greatness, and his commands were obeyed without
a murmur from the Tigris to the Tyne. But whilst in the enjoyment of
this pre-eminence, the Roman emperor was unconscious that in a village
of Judea, in the lowest rank of life, among the most contemned tribe of
his dominions, his Master was born. [A.D. 1.] By this event the whole
current of the world's history was changed. The great became small and
the small great. Rome itself ceased to be the capital of the world,
for men's eyes and hearts, when the wonderful story came to be known,
were turned to Jerusalem. From her, commissioned emissaries were to
proceed with greater powers than those of Roman prætors or governors.
From her gates went forth Peter and John to preach the gospel. Down
her steep streets rode Paul and his companions, breathing anger
against the Church, and ere they reached Damascus, behold, the eyes
of the persecutor are blinded with lightning, and his understanding
illuminated with the same flash; and henceforth he proceeds, in
lowliness and humility, to convey to others the glad tidings that had
been revealed to himself. Away in all directions, but all radiating
from Jerusalem, travelled the messengers of the amazing dispensation.
Everywhere--in all centuries--in all regions, we shall encounter the
results of their ministry; and as we watch the swelling of the mighty
tide, first of Christian faith and then of priestly ambition, which
overspread the fairest portions of the globe, we shall wonder more
and more at the apparent powerlessness of its source, and at the vast
effects for good and evil which it has produced upon mankind.
What were they doing at Rome during the thirty-three years of our
Saviour's sojourn upon earth? For the first fourteen of them Augustus
was gathering round him the wits, and poets, and sages, who have made
his reign immortal. [A.D. 14.] After that date his successor, Tiberius,
built up by stealthy and slow degrees the most dreadful tyranny the
world had ever seen,--a tyranny the results of which lasted long after
the founders of it had expired. For from this period mankind had
nothing to hope but from the bounty of the emperor. It is humiliating
to reflect that the history of the world for so long a period consists
of the deeds and dispositions of the successive rulers of Rome.
All men, wherever their country, or whatever their position, were
dependent, in greater or less degree, for their happiness or misery
on the good or bad temper of an individual man. If he was cruel, as
so many of them were, he filled the patricians of Rome with fear, and
terrified the distant inhabitants of Thrace or Gaul. His benevolence,
on the other hand, was felt at the extremities of the earth. No
wonder that every one was on the watch for the first glimpse of a new
emperor's character and disposition. What rejoicings in Italy and
Greece and Africa, and all through Europe, when a trait of goodness
was reported! and what a sinking of the heart when the old story was
renewed, and a monster of cruelty succeeded to a monster of deceit!
For the fearfullest thing in all the descriptions of Tiberius is the
duplicity of his behaviour. He withdrew to an island in the sunniest
part of the Mediterranean, and covered it with gorgeous buildings,
and supplied it with all the implements of luxury and enjoyment. From
this magnificent retirement he uttered a whisper, or made a motion
with his hand, which displaced an Eastern monarch from his throne, or
doomed a senator to death. He was never seen. He lived in the dreadful
privacy of some fabled deity, and was only felt at the farthest ends
of his empire by the unhappiness he occasioned; by his murders, and
imprisonments, and every species of suffering, men's hearts and minds
were bowed down beneath this invisible and irresistible oppressor.
Self-respect was at an end, and liberty was not even wished for. The
emperor had swallowed up the empire, and there was no authority or
influence beside. This is the main feature of the first or Imperial
Century, that, wherever we look, we see but one,--one gorged and
bloated brutalized man, sitting on the throne of earthly power, and
all the rest of mankind at his feet. [A.D. 37.] Humanity at its flower
had culminated into a Tiberius; and when at last he was slain, and the
world began to breathe, the sorrow was speedily deeper than before, for
it was found that the Imperial tree had blossomed again, and that its
fruit was a Caligula.
This was a person with much the same taste for blood as his
predecessor, but he was more open in the gratification of this
propensity. He did not wait for trial and sentence,--those dim
mockeries of justice in which Tiberius sometimes indulged. He had a
peculiar way of nodding with his head or pointing with his finger,
and the executioner knew the sign. The man he nodded to died. For the
more distinguished of the citizens he kept a box,--not of snuff, like
some monarchs of the present day, but of some strong and instantaneous
poison. Whoever refused a pinch died as a traitor, and whoever took one
died of the fatal drug. [A.D. 41.] Even the degenerate Romans could
not endure this long, and Chæreas, an officer of his guard, put him to
death, after a sanguinary reign of four years.
Still the hideous catalogue goes on. Claudius, a nephew of Tiberius,
is forced upon the unwilling senate by the spoilt soldiers of the
capital, the Prætorian Guards. Colder, duller, more brutal than the
rest, Claudius perhaps increased the misery of his country by the
apathy and stupidity of his mind. The other tyrants had some limit
to their wickedness, for they kept all the powers of the State in
their own hands, but this man enlisted a countless host of favourites
and courtiers in his crusade against the happiness of mankind. Badly
eminent among these was his wife, the infamous Messalina, whose name
has become a symbol of all that is detestable in the female sex. Some
people, indeed, in reading the history of this period, shut the book
with a shudder, and will not believe it true. They prefer to think that
authors of all lands and positions have agreed to paint a fancy picture
of depravity and horror, than that such things were. But the facts are
too well proved to be doubted. We see a dull, unimpassioned, moody
despot; fond of blood, but too indolent to shed it himself, unless at
the dictation of his fiendish partner and her friends; so brutalized
that nothing amazed or disturbed him; so unobservant that, relying on
his blindness, she went through the ostentatious ceremony of a public
marriage with one of her paramours during the lifetime, almost under
the eyes, of her husband; and yet to this frightful combination of
ferocity and stupidity England owes its subjection to the Roman power,
and all the blessings which Roman civilization--bringing as it did the
lessons of Christianity in its train--was calculated to bestow. In the
forty-fourth year of this century, and the third year of the reign of
Claudius, Aulus Plautius landed in Britain at the head of a powerful
army; and the tide of Victory and Settlement never subsided till the
whole country, as far north as the Solway, submitted to the Eagles.
The contrast between the central power at Rome, and the officials
employed at a distance, continued for a long time the most remarkable
circumstance in the history of the empire. Tiberius, Caligula,
Claudius, vied with each other in exciting the terror and destroying
the happiness of the world; but in the remote extremities of their
command, their generals displayed the courage and virtue of an earlier
age. They improved as well as conquered. They made roads, and built
bridges, and cut down woods. They established military stations, which
soon became centres of education and law. They deepened the Thames,
and commenced those enormous embankments of the river, to which, in
fact, London owes its existence, without being aware of the labour
they bestowed upon the work. If by some misfortune a great fissure
took place--as has occurred on a small scale once before--in these
artificial dikes, it would task the greatest skill of modern engineers
to repair the damage. They superseded the blood-stained ceremonies of
the Druids with the more refined worship of the heathen deities, making
Claudius himself a tutelary god, with priest and temple, in the town
of Colchester; and this, though in our eyes the deification of one of
the worst of men, was, perhaps, in the estimation of our predecessors,
only the visible embodiment of settled government and beneficent power.
But murder and treachery, and unspeakable iniquity, went their way
as usual in the city of the Cæsars. Messalina was put to death, and
another disgrace to womanhood, in the person of Agrippina, took her
place beside the phlegmatic tyrant. Thirteen years had passed, when
the boundary of human patience was attained, and Rome was startled one
morning with the joyful news that her master was no more. [A.D. 54.]
The combined cares of his loving spouse and a favourite physician had
produced this happy result,--the one presenting him with a dish of
deadly mushrooms, and the other painting his throat for a hoarseness
with a poisoned feather.
Is there no hope for Rome or for mankind? Is there to be a perpetual
succession of monster after monster, with no cessation in the dreadful
line? It would be pleasant to conceal for a minute or two the name of
the next emperor, that we might point to the glorious prospect now
opening on the world. But the name has become so descriptive that
deception is impossible. When the word Nero is said, little more is
required. But it was not so at first; a brilliant sunrise never had so
terrible a course, or so dark a setting. We still see in the earlier
statues which remain of him the fine outline of his face, and can fancy
what its expression must have been before the qualities of his heart
had stamped their indelible impression on his features. For the first
five years of his reign the world seemed lost as much in surprise as in
admiration. Some of his actions were generous; none of them were cruel
or revengeful. He was young, and seemed anxious to fulfil the duties of
his position. But power and flattery had their usual effect. All that
was good in him was turned into evil. He tortured the noblest of the
citizens; and degraded the throne to such a degree by the expositions
he made of himself, sometimes as a musician on the stage, sometimes
as a charioteer in the arena, that if there had been any Romans left
they would have despised the tyrant more than they feared him. But
there were no Romans left. The senators, the knights, the populace,
vied with each other in submission to his power and encouragement of
his vices. The rage of the monster, once excited, knew no bounds. He
burned the city in the mere wantonness of crime, and fixed the blame
on the unoffending Christians. These, regardless of age or condition
or sex, he destroyed by every means in his power. He threw young
maidens into the amphitheatre, where the hungry tigers leapt out upon
them; he exposed the aged professors of the gospel to fight in single
combat with the trained murderers of the circus, called the Gladiators;
and once, in ferocious mockery of human suffering, he enclosed whole
Christian families in a coating of pitch and other inflammable
materials, and, setting fire to the covering, pursued his sport all
night by the light of these living flambeaux. Some of his actions it
is impossible to name. It will be sufficient to say that at the end of
thirteen years the purple he disgraced was again reddened with blood.
Terrified at the opposition that at last rose against him--deserted, of
course, by the confederates of his wickedness--shrinking with unmanly
cowardice from a defence which might have put off the evil day, he
fled and hid himself from his pursuers. Agonized with fear, howling
with repentant horror, he was indebted to one of his attendants for
the blow which his own cowardly hand could not administer, and he
died the basest, lowest, and most pitiless of all the emperors. And
all those hopes he had disappointed, and all those iniquities he had
perpetrated, at the age of thirty-two. He was the last of the line
of Cæsar; and if that conqueror had foreseen that in so few years
after his death the Senate of Rome would have been so debased, and the
people of Rome so brutalized, he would have pardoned to Brutus the
precautionary blow which was intended to prevent so great a calamity.
[A.D. 68.]
Galba was elected to fill his place, and was murdered in a few months.
The degraded prætorians then elevated one of the companions of Nero's
guilty excesses to the throne in the person of Otho, but resistance was
made to their selection. [A.D. 69.] The forces in Germany nominated
Vitellius to the supreme authority; and Otho, either a voluptuary tired
of life, or a craven incapable of exertion, committed suicide to save
the miseries of civil war. But this calamity was averted by a nobler
hand. Vitellius had only time to show that, in addition to the usual
vices of the throne, he was addicted to the animal enjoyments of eating
and drinking to an almost incredible degree, when he heard a voice from
the walls of Jerusalem which hurled him from the seat he had so lately
taken; for the legions engaged in that most memorable of sieges had
decided on giving the empire of the world to the man who deserved it
best, and had proclaimed their general, Flavius Vespasian, Imperator
and Master of Rome.
[A.D. 70.]
Now we will pause, for we have come to the year seventy of this
century, and a fit breathing-time to look round us and see what
condition mankind has fallen into within a hundred years of the end of
the Republic. We leave out of view the great empires of the farther
East, where battles were won, and dynasties established on the plains
of Hindostan, and within the Chinese Wall. The extent of our knowledge
of Oriental affairs is limited to the circumference of the Roman
power. Following that vast circle, we see it on all sides surrounded by
tribes and nations who derive their sole illumination from its light,
for unless the Roman conquests had extended to the confines of those
barbaric states, we should have known nothing of their existence.
Beyond that ring of fire it is almost matter of conjecture what must
have been going on. Yet we learn from the traditions of many peoples,
and can guess with some accuracy from the occurrences of a later
period, what was the condition of those "outsiders," and what were
their feelings and intentions with regard to the civilized portions of
the world. Bend your eyes in any direction you please, and what names,
what thoughts, suggest themselves to our minds! We see swarms of wild
adventurers with wives and cattle traversing with no definite object
the uncultivated districts beyond the Danube; occasionally pitching
their tents, or even forming more permanent establishments, around
the roots of Caucasus and north of the Caspian Sea, where grass was
more plentiful, and hills or marshes formed an easily defended barrier
against enemies as uncivilized as themselves. Coming from no certain
region--that is, forgetting in a few years of wandering the precise
point from which they set out, pushed forward by the advancing waves
of great national migrations in their rear--moving onward across the
upper fields of Europe, but keeping themselves still cautiously from
actual contact with the Roman limits, from those hordes of homeless,
lawless savages are derived the most polished and greatest nations
of the present day. Forming into newer combinations, and taking
different names, their identity is scarcely to be recognised when,
three or four centuries after this, they come into the daylight of
history; but nobody can doubt that, during these preliminary ages,
they were gathering their power together, hereafter, under the
impulse of fresh additions, to be hurled like a dammed-up river upon
the prostrate realm, carrying ruin and destruction in their course,
but no less certainly than the overflowing Nile leaving the germs of
future fertility, and enriching with newer vegetation the fields they
had so ruthlessly submerged. And year by year the mighty mass goes on
accumulating. The northern plains become peopled no one knows how. The
vast forests eastward of the Rhine receive new accessions of warriors,
who rapidly assimilate with the old. United in one common object of
retaining the wild freedom of their tribe, and the possession of the
lands they have seized, they have opposed the advance of the Roman
legions into the uncultivated districts they call their own; they
have even succeeded in destroying the military forces which guarded
the Rhine, and have with difficulty been restrained from crossing
the great river by a strong line of forts and castles, of which the
remains astonish the traveller of the present day, as, with Murray's
Guide-Book in his hand, he gazes upon their ruins between Bingen and
Aix-la-Chapelle.
Repelled by these barriers, they cluster thicker than ever in the woods
and valleys, to which the Romans have no means of penetrating. Southern
Gaul submits, and becomes a civilized outpost of the central power; but
far up in the wild regions of the north, and even to the eastward of
the Gulfs of Bothnia and Finland, the assemblage goes on. Scandinavia
itself becomes over-crowded by the perpetual arrival of thousands of
these armed and expatriated families, and sends her teeming populations
to the east and south. But all these incidents, I must remind you,
are occurring in darkness. We only know that the desert is becoming
peopled with crowded millions, and that among them all there floats
a confused notion of the greatness of the Roman power, the wealth
of the cities and plains of Italy; and that, clustering in thicker
swarms on the confines of civil government, the watchful eyes of
unnumbered savage warriors are fixed on the territories lying rich
and beautiful within the protection of the Roman name. So the whole
Roman boundary gets gradually surrounded by barbaric hosts. Their
trampings may be heard as they marshal their myriads and skirt the
upper boundaries of Thrace; but as yet no actual conflict has occurred.
A commotion may become observable among some of the farthest distant
of the half intimidated of the German tribes; or an enterprising
Roman settler beyond the frontier, or travelling merchant, who has
penetrated to the neighbourhood of the Baltic, may bring back amazing
reports of the fresh accumulations of unknown hordes of strange and
threatening aspect; but the luxurious public in Rome receive them
merely as interesting anecdotes to amuse their leisure or gratify their
curiosity: they have no apprehension of what may be the result of those
multitudinous arrivals. They do not foresee the gradual drawing closer
to their outward defences--the struggle to get within their guarded
lines--the fight that is surely coming between a sated, dull, degraded
civilization on the one side, and a hungry, bold, ambitious savagery
on the other. They trust every thing to the dignity of the Eternal
City, and the watchfulness of the Emperor: for to this, his one idea
of irresistible power equally for good or evil, the heart of the Roman
was sure to turn. And for the eleven years of the reigns of Vespasian
and Titus, the Roman did not appeal for protection against a foreign
enemy in vain. Rome itself was compensated by shows and buildings--with
a triumph and an arch--for the degradation in which it was held. But
prætor and proconsul still pursued their course of oppressing the
lands committed to their defence; and the subject, stripped of his
goods, and hopeless of getting his wrongs redressed, had only the
satisfaction of feeling that the sword he trembled at was in the hand
of a man and not of an incarnate demon. A poor consolation this when
the blow was equally fatal. Vespasian, in fact, was fonder of money
than of blood, and the empire rejoiced in having exchanged the agony of
being murdered for the luxury of being fleeced. [A.D. 79.] With Titus,
whom the fond gratitude of his subjects named the Delight of the human
race, a new age of happiness was about to open on the world; but all
the old horrors of the Cæsars were revived and magnified when he was
succeeded, after a reign of two years, by his brother, the savage and
cowardly Domitian. [A.D. 81.] With the exception of the brief period
between the years 70 and 81, the whole century was spent in suffering
and inflicting pain. The worst excesses of Nero and Caligula were now
imitated and surpassed. The bonds of society became rapidly loosened.
As in a shipwreck, the law of self-preservation was the only rule.
No man could rely upon his neighbour, or his friend, or his nearest
of kin. There were spies in every house, and an executioner at every
door. An unconsidered word maliciously reported, or an accusation
entirely false, brought death to the rich and great. To the unhappy
class of men who in other times are called the favourites of fortune,
because they are born to the possession of great ancestral names and
hereditary estates, there was no escape from the jealous and avaricious
hatred of the Emperor. If a patrician of this description lived in the
splendour befitting his rank--he was currying favour with the mob! If
he lived retired--he was trying to gain reputation by a pretence of
giving up the world! If he had great talents--he was dangerous to the
state! If he was dull and stupid--oh! don't believe it--he was only an
imitative Brutus, concealing his deep designs under the semblance of
fatuity! If a man of distinguished birth was rich, it was not a fitting
condition for a subject--if he was poor, he was likely to be seduced
into the wildest enterprises. So the prisons were filled by calumny and
suspicion, and emptied by the executioner. A dreadful century this--the
worst that ever entered into tale or history; for the memory of former
glories and comparative freedom was still recent. A man who was sixty
years old, in the midst of the terrors of Tiberius, had associated
in his youth with the survivors of the Civil War, with men who had
embraced Brutus and Cassius; he had seen the mild administration of
Augustus, and perhaps had supped with Virgil and Horace in the house
of Mæcenas. And now he was tortured till he named a slave or freedman
of the Emperor his heir, and then executed to expedite the succession.
There was a hideous jocularity in some of these imperial proceedings,
which, however, was no laughing-matter at the time. When a senator was
very wealthy, it was no unusual thing for Tiberius and his successors
to create themselves the rich man's nearest relations by a decree of
the Senate. The person so honoured by this graft upon his family tree
seldom survived the operation many days. The emperor took possession of
the property as heir-at-law and next of kin; and mourned for his uncle
or brother--as the case might be--with the most edifying decorum.
But besides giving the general likeness of a period, it is necessary
to individualize it still further by introducing, in the background of
the picture, some incident by which it is peculiarly known, as we find
Nelson generally represented with Trafalgar going on at the horizon,
and Wellington sitting thoughtful on horseback in the foreground of the
fire of Waterloo. Now, there cannot be a more distinguishing mark than
a certain great military achievement which happened in the year 70 of
this century, and is brought home to us, not only as a great historical
event in itself, but as the commencement of a new era in human affairs,
and the completion of a long line of threats and prophecies. This was
the capture and destruction of Jerusalem. The accounts given us of this
siege transcend in horror all other records of human sorrow. It was at
the great annual feast of the Passover, when Jews from all parts of the
world flocked to the capital of their nation to worship in the Temple,
which to them was the earthly dwelling-place of Jehovah. The time was
come, and they did not know it, when God was to be worshipped in spirit
and in truth. More than a million strangers were resident within the
walls. There was no room in house or hall for so vast a multitude; so
they bivouacked in the streets, and lay thick as leaves in the courts
of the holy place. Suddenly the Roman trumpets blew. The Jews became
inspired with fanatical hatred of the enemy, and insane confidence that
some miracle would be wrought for their deliverance. They deliberated,
and chose for their leaders the wildest and most enthusiastic of the
crowd. They refused the offers of mercy and reconciliation made to
them by Titus. They sent back insulting messages to the Roman general,
and stood expectant on the walls to see the idolatrous legions smitten
by lightning or swallowed up by an earthquake. But Titus advanced his
forces and hemmed in the countless multitude of men, and women, and
children--few able to resist, but all requiring to be fed. Famine and
pestilence came on; but still the mad fanatics of the Temple determined
to persevere. They occasionally opened a gate and rushed out with the
cry of "The sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" and were slaughtered
by the unpitying hatred of the Roman soldiers. Their cruelty to
their prisoners, when they succeeded in carrying off a few of their
enemies, was great; but the patience of Titus at last gave way, and
he soon bettered the instruction they gave him in pitilessness and
blood. He drew a line of circumvallation closer round the city, and
intercepted every supply; when deserters came over, he crucified them
all round the trenches; when the worn-out people came forth, imploring
to be suffered to pass through his ranks, he drove them back, that
they might increase the scarcity by their lives, or the pestilence
by adding to the heaps of unburied dead. Dissensions were raging all
this time among the defenders themselves. They fought in the streets,
in the houses, and heaped the floor and outcourts of the Temple with
thousands of the slain. There was no help either from heaven or earth;
eleven hundred thousand people had died of plague and the sword; and
the rest were doomed to perish by more lingering torments. Nearest
relations--sisters, brothers, fathers, wives--all forgot the ties of
natural affection under this great necessity, and fought for a handful
of meal, or the possession of some reptile's body if they were lucky
enough to trace it to its hiding-place; and at last--the crown of all
horrors--the daughter of Eleazer killed her own child and converted it
into food. The measure of man's wrong and Heaven's vengeance was now
full. The daily sacrifice ceased to be offered; voices were audible
to the popular ear uttering in the Holy of Holies, "Let us go hence."
The Romans rushed on--climbed over the neglected walls--forced their
way into the upper Temple, and the gore flowed in streams so rapid and
so deep that it seemed like a purple river! Large conduits had been
made for the rapid conveyance away of the blood of bulls and goats
offered in sacrifice; they all became choked now with the blood of
the slaughtered people. At last the city was taken; the inhabitants
were either dead or dying. Many were crushed as they lay expiring in
the great tramplings of the triumphant Romans; many were recovered by
food and shelter, and sold into slavery. The Temple and walls were
levelled with the ground, and not one stone was left upon another. The
plough passed over where palace and tower had been, and the Jewish
dispensation was brought to a close.
History in ancient days was as exclusive as the court newsman in ours,
and never published the movements of anybody below a senator or a
consul. All the Browns and Smiths were left out of consideration; and
yet to us who live in the days when those families--with the Joneses
and Robinsons--form the great majority both in number and influence,
it would be very interesting to have any certain intelligence of their
predecessors during the first furies of the Empire. We have but faint
descriptions even of the aristocracy, but what we hear of them shows,
more clearly than any thing else, the frightful effect on morals and
manliness of so uncontrolled a power as was vested in the Cæsars, and
teaches us that the worst of despotisms is that which is established by
the unholy union of the dregs of the population and the ruling power,
against the peace and happiness and security of the middle class. You
see how this combination of tyrant and mob succeeded in crushing all
the layers of society which lay between them, till there were left
only two agencies in all the world--the Emperor on his throne, and the
millions fed by his bounty. The hereditary nobility--the safest bulwark
of a people and least dangerous support of a throne--were extirpated
before the end of the century, and impartiality makes us confess that
they fell by their own fault. As if the restraints of shame had been
thrown off with the last hope of liberty, the whole population broke
forth into the most incredible licentiousness. If the luxury of
Lucullus had offended the common sense of propriety in the later days
of the republic, there were numbers now who looked back upon his feasts
as paltry entertainments, and on the wealth of Croesus as poverty. The
last of the Pompeys, in the time of Caligula, had estates so vast, that
navigable rivers larger than the Thames performed the whole of their
course from their fountain-head to the sea without leaving his domain.
There were spendthrifts in the time of Tiberius who lavished thousands
of pounds upon a supper. The pillage of the world had fallen into the
hands of a few favoured families, and their example had introduced a
prodigality and ostentation unheard of before. No one who regarded
appearances travelled anywhere without a troop of Numidian horsemen,
and outriders to clear the way. He was followed by a train of mules
and sumpter-horses loaded with his vases of crystal--his richly-carved
cups and dishes of silver and gold. But this profusion had its natural
result in debt and degradation. The patricians who had been rivals of
the imperial splendour became dependants on the imperial gifts; and the
grandson of the conqueror of a kingdom, or the proconsul of the half of
Asia, sold his ancestral palace, lived for a while on the contemptuous
bounty of his master, and sank in the next generation into the nameless
mass. Others, more skilful, preserved or improved their fortunes while
they rioted in expense. By threats or promises, they prevailed on
the less powerful to constitute them their heirs; they traded on the
strength, or talents, or the beauty of their slaves, and lent money
at such usurious interest that the borrower tried in vain to escape
the shackles of the law, and ended by becoming the bondsman of the
kind-hearted gentleman who had induced him to accept the loan.
If these were the habits of the rich, how were the poor treated? The
free and penniless citizens of the capital were degraded and gratified
at the same time. The wealthy vied with each other in buying the favour
of the mob by shows and other entertainments, by gifts of money and
donations of food. But when these arts failed, and popularity could
no longer be obtained by merely defraying the expense of a combat of
gladiators, the descendants of the old patricians--of the men who
had bought the land on which the Gauls were encamped outside the
gates of Rome--went down into the arena themselves and fought for
the public entertainment. Laws indeed were passed even in the reign
of Tiberius, and renewed at intervals after that time, against this
shameful degradation, and the stage was interdicted to all who were
not previously declared infamous by sentence of a court. But all was
in vain. Ladies of the highest rank, and the loftiest-born of the
nobility, actually petitioned for a decree of defamation, that they
might give themselves up undisturbed to their favourite amusement. This
perhaps added a zest to their enjoyment, and rapturous applauses must
have hailed the entrance of the beautiful grandchild of Anthony or
Agrippa, in the character and drapery of a warlike amazon--the louder
the applause and greater the admiration. Yet in order to gratify them
with such a sight, she had descended to the level of the convict, and
received the brand of qualifying disgrace from a legal tribunal. But
the faint barrier of this useless prohibition was thrown down by the
policy and example of Domitian. The emperor himself appeared in the
arena, and all restraint was at an end. Rather, there was a fury of
emulation to copy so great a model, and "Rome's proud dames, whose
garments swept the ground," forgot more than ever their rank and
sex, and were proud, like their lovers and brothers, not merely to
mount the stage in the lascivious costume of nymph or dryad, but to
descend into the blood-stained lists of the Coliseum and murder each
other with sword and spear. There is something strangely horrible in
this transaction, when we read that it occurred for the first time in
celebration of the games of Flora--the goddess of flowers and gardens,
who, in old times, was worshipped under the blossomed apple-trees in
the little orchards surrounding each cottage within the walls, and was
propitiated with children's games and chaplets hung upon the boughs.
But now the loveliest of the noble daughters of the city lay dead upon
the trampled sand. What was the effect upon the populace of these
extraordinary shows?
Always stern and cruel, the Roman was now never satisfied unless with
the spectacle of death. Sometimes in the midst of a play or pantomime
the fierce lust of blood would seize him, and he would cry out for a
combat of gladiators or nobles, who instantly obeyed; and after the
fight was over, and the corpses removed, the play would go on as if
nothing had occurred. The banners of the empire still continued to bear
the initial letters of the great words--the Senate and people of Rome.
We have now, in this rapid survey, seen what both those great names
have come to--the Senate crawling at the feet of the emperor, and the
people living on charity and shows. The slaves fared worst of all,
for they were despised by rich and poor. The sated voluptuary whose
property they were sometimes found an excitement to his jaded spirits
by having them tortured in his sight. They were allowed to die of
starvation when they grew old, unless they were turned to use, as was
done by one of their possessors, Vidius Pollio, who cast the fattest of
his domestics into his fish-pond to feed his lampreys. The only other
classes were the actors and musicians, the dwarfs and the philosophers.
They contributed by their wit, or their uncouth shape, or their
oracular sentences, to the amusement of their employers, and were safe.
They were licensed characters, and could say what they chose, protected
by the long-drawn countenance of the stoic, or the comic grimaces of
the buffoon. So early as the time of Nero, the people he tyrannized and
flattered were not less ruthless than himself. In his cruelty--in his
vanity--in his frivolity, and his entire devotion to the gratification
of his passions--he was a true representative of the men over whom he
ruled. Emperor and subject had even then become fitted for each other,
and flowers, we are credibly told by the historians, were hung for many
years upon his tomb.
Humanity itself seemed to be sunk beyond the possibility of
restoration; but we see now how necessary it was that our nature should
reach its lowest point of depression to give full force to the great
reaction which Christianity introduced. Men were slavishly bending at
the footstool of a despot, trembling for life, bowed down by fear and
misery, when suddenly it was reported that a great teacher had appeared
for a while upon earth, and declared that all men were equal in the
sight of God, for that God was the Father of all. The slave heard this
in the intervals of his torture--the captive in his dungeon--the widow
and the orphan. To the poor the gospel, or good news, was preached.
It was this which made the trembling courtiers of the worst of the
emperors slip out noiselessly from the palace, and hear from Paul of
Tarsus or his disciples the new prospect that was opening on mankind.
It spread quickly among those oppressed and hopeless multitudes. The
subjection of the Roman empire--its misery and degradation--were only a
means to an end. The harsher the laws of the tyrant, the more gracious
seemed the words of Christ. The two masters were plainly set before
them, which to choose. And who could hesitate? One said, "Tremble!
suffer! die!" The other said, "Come unto me, all ye that are weary and
heavy laden, and I will give you rest!"
SECOND CENTURY.
Emperors.
A.D.
TRAJAN--(_continued._) Third Persecution of the Christians.
117. ADRIAN. Fourth Persecution of the Christians.
138. ANTONINUS PIUS.
161. MARCUS AURELIUS.
180. COMMODUS.
193. PERTINAX--DIDIUS, and NIGER--Defeated by
193. SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS.
Authors.
PLINY THE YOUNGER, PLUTARCH, SUETONIUS, JUVENAL, ARRIAN, ÆLIAN,
PTOLEMY, (Geographer,) APPIAN, EPICTETUS, PAUSANIAS, GALEN,
(Physician,) ATHENÆUS, TERTULLIAN, JUSTIN MARTYR, TATIAN, IRENÆUS,
ATHENAGORAS, THEOPHILUS OF ANTIOCH, CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, MARCION,
(Heretic.)
THE SECOND CENTURY.
THE GOOD EMPERORS.
In looking at the second century, we see a total difference in the
expression, though the main features continue unchanged. There is still
the central power at Rome, the same dependence everywhere else; but the
central power is beneficent and wise. As if tired of the hereditary
rule of succession which had ended in such a monster as Domitian, the
world took refuge in a new system of appointing its chiefs, and perhaps
thought it a recommendation of each successive emperor that he had no
relationship to the last. We shall accordingly find that, after this
period, the hereditary principle is excluded. It was remarked that, of
the twelve first Cæsars, only two had died a natural death--for even
in the case of Augustus the arts of the poisoner were suspected--and
those two were Vespasian and Titus, men who had no claim to such an
elevation in right of lofty birth. Birth, indeed, had ceased to be a
recommendation. All the great names of the Republic had been carefully
rooted out. Few people were inclined to boast of their ancestry
when the proof of their pedigree acted as a sentence of death; for
there was no surer passport to destruction in the times of the early
emperors than a connection with the Julian line, or descent from a
historic family. No one, therefore, took the trouble to inquire into
the genealogy of Nerva, the old and generous man who succeeded the
monster Domitian. [A.D. 96.] His nomination to the empire elevated him
at once out of the sphere of these inquiries, for already the same
superstitious reverence surrounded the name of Augustus which spreads
its inviolable sanctity on the throne of Eastern monarchs. Whoever sits
upon that, by whatever title, or however acquired, is the legitimate
and unquestioned king. No rival, therefore, started up to contest the
position either of Nerva himself, or of the stranger he nominated to
succeed him. [A.D. 102.] Men bent in humble acquiescence when they
knew, in the third year of this century, that their master was named
Trajan,--that he was a Spaniard by birth, and the best general of Rome.
For eighty years after that date the empire had rest. Life and property
were comparatively secure, and society flowed on peaceably in deep
and well-ascertained channels. A man might have been born at the end
of the reign of Domitian, and die in extreme old age under the sway
of the last of the Antonines, and never have known of insecurity or
oppression--
"Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Could touch him farther!"
No wonder those agreeable years were considered by the fond gratitude
of the time, and the unavailing regrets of succeeding generations,
the golden age of man. Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus
Aurelius Antoninus--these are still great names, and are everywhere
recognised as the most wonderful succession of sovereigns the world has
ever seen. They are still called the "Good Emperors," the "Wise Rulers."
It is easy, indeed, to be good in comparison with Nero, and wise in
comparison with Claudius; but the effect of the example of those
infamous tyrants made it doubly difficult to be either good or wise.
The world had become so accustomed to oppression, that it seemed at
first surprised at the change that had taken place. The emperors
had to create a knowledge of justice before their just acts could
be appreciated. The same opposition other men have experienced in
introducing bad and cruel measures was roused by their introduction
of wise and salutary laws. What! no more summary executions, nor
forfeitures of fortunes, nor banishments to the Danube? All men equal
before the dread tribunal of the imperial judge? The world was surely
coming to an end, if the emperor did not now and then poison a senator,
or stab his brother, or throw half a dozen courtiers to the beasts!
It is likely enough that some of the younger Romans at first lamented
those days of unlimited license and perpetual excitement; but in the
course of time those wilder spirits must have died out, and the world
gladly acquiesced in an existence of dull security and uninteresting
peace. By the end of the reign of Trajan the records of the miseries of
the last century must have been studied as curiosities--as historical
students now look back on the extravagances and horrors of the French
Revolution. Fortunately, men could not look forward to the times, more
pitiable still, when their descendants should fall into greater sorrows
than had been inflicted on mankind by the worst of the Cæsars, and they
enjoyed their present immunity from suffering without any misgivings
about the future. But a government which does every thing for a people
renders it unable to do any thing for itself. The subject stood quietly
by while the emperor filled all the offices of the State--guarded him,
fed him, clothed him, treated him like a child, and reduced him at
last to childlike dependence. An unjust proconsul, instead of being
supported and encouraged in his exactions, was dismissed from his
employment and forced to refund his ill-got gains,--the population,
relieved from their oppressor, saw in his punishment the hand of an
avenging Providence. The wakeful eye of the governor in Rome saw the
hostile preparations of a tribe of barbarians beyond the Danube; and
the legions, crossing the river, dispersed and subdued them before they
had time to devastate the Roman fields. The peaceful colonist saw, in
the suddenness of his deliverance, the foresight and benevolence of a
divinity. No words were powerful enough to convey the sentiments of
admiration awakened, by such vigour and goodness, in the breast of a
luxurious and effeminate people; and accordingly, if we look a little
closely into the personal attributes of the five good emperors, we
shall see that some part of their glory is due to the exaggerations of
love and gratitude.
Nerva reigned but sixteen months, and had no time to do more than
display his kindness of disposition, and to name his successor. This
was Trajan, a man who was not even a Roman by birth, but who was
thought by his patron to have retained, in the distant province of
Spain where he was born, the virtues which had disappeared in the
centre and capital of the empire. The deficiency of Nerva's character
had been its softness and want of force. The stern vigilance of Trajan
made ample amends. He was the best-known soldier of his time, and
revived once more the terror of the Roman arms. He conquered wherever
he appeared; but his warlike impetuosity led him too far. He trod in
the footsteps of Alexander the Great, and advanced farther eastward
than any of the Roman armies had previously done. But his victories
were fruitless: he attached no new country permanently to the empire,
and derives all his glory now from the excellence of his internal
administration. He began his government by declaring himself as
subordinate to the laws as the meanest of the people. His wife, Pompeia
Plotina, was worthy of such a husband, and said, on mounting the steps
of the palace, that she should descend them unaltered from what she
was. The emperor visited his friends on terms of equality, and had the
greatness of mind, generally deficient in absolute princes, to bestow
his confidence on those who deserved it. Somebody, a member perhaps
of the old police who had made such fortunes in the time of Domitian
by alarming the tyrant with stories of plots and assassinations, told
Trajan one day to beware of his minister, who intended to murder him
on the first opportunity. "Come again, and tell me all particulars
to-morrow," said the emperor. In the mean time he went unbidden and
supped with the accused. He was shaved by his barber--was attended for
a mock illness by his surgeon--bathed in his bath--and ate his meat
and drank his wine. On the following day the informer came. "Ah!" said
Trajan, interrupting him in his accusation of Surenus, "if Surenus had
wished to kill me, he would have done it last night."
[A.D. 117.]
The emperor died when returning from a distant expedition in the
East, and Pompeia declared that he had long designated Adrian as his
successor. This evidence was believed, and Adrian, also a Spaniard by
birth, and eminent as a military commander, began his reign. Trajan had
been a general--a conqueror, and had extended for a time the boundaries
of the Roman power. But Adrian believed the empire was large enough
already. He withdrew the eagles from the half-subdued provinces, and
contented himself with the natural limits which it was easy to defend.
But within those limits his activity was unexampled. He journeyed from
end to end of his immense domain, and for seventeen years never rested
in one spot. News did not travel fast in those days--but the emperor
did. Long before the inhabitants of Syria and Egypt heard that he had
left Rome on an expedition to Britain, he had rushed through Gaul,
crossed the Channel, inquired into the proceedings of the government
officers at York, given orders for a wall to keep out the Caledonians,
(an attempt which has proved utterly vain at all periods of English
history, down to the present day,) and suddenly made his appearance
among the bewildered dwellers in Ephesus or Carthage, to call
tax-gatherers to order and to inspect the discipline of his troops.
The master's eye was everywhere, for nobody knew on what point it was
fixed. And such a master no kingdom has been able to boast of since.
His talents were universal. He read every thing and forgot nothing.
He was a musician, a poet, a philosopher. He studied medicine and
mineralogy, and plead causes like Cicero, and sang like a singer at the
opera. Perhaps it is difficult to judge impartially of the qualities
of a Roman emperor. One day he found fault on a point of grammar with
a learned man of the name of Favorinus. Favorinus could have defended
himself and justified his language, but continued silent. His friends
said to him, "Why didn't you answer the emperor's objections?" "Do
you think," said the sensible grammarian, "I am going to enter into
disputes with a man who commands thirty legions?" But the greatness
of Adrian's character is, that he _did_ command those thirty legions.
He was severe and just; and Roman discipline was never more exact.
The result of this was shown on the grand scale only once during this
reign, and that was in the case of the revolted Jews. We have seen the
state to which their Temple at Jerusalem was reduced by Titus. Fifty
years had now passed, and the passionate love of the people for their
native land had congregated them once more within their renovated
walls, and raised up another temple on the site of the old. They still
expected the Messiah, for the Messiah to them represented vengeance
upon the Romans and triumph over the world. An impostor of the name
of Barcho-chebas led three hundred thousand of them into the field.
They were mad with national hatred, and inspired with fanatical hope.
It took three years of desperate effort to quell this sedition; and
then Adrian had his revenge. The country was laid waste. Fifty towns
and a thousand villages were sacked and burned. The population, once
more nearly exhausted by war and famine, furnished slaves, which were
sold all over the East. Jerusalem itself felt the conqueror's hatred
most. Its name was blotted out--it was called Ælia Capitolina; and,
with ferocious mockery, over the gate of the new capital of Judea
was affixed the statue of the unclean beast, the abomination of the
Israelite. But nothing could keep the Jews from visiting the land of so
many promises and so much glory. Whenever they had it in their power,
they crept back from all quarters, if it were only to weep and die amid
the ruins of their former power.
Trajan and Adrian had now made the world accustomed to justice in its
rulers; and as far as regards their public conduct, this character
is not to be denied. Yet in their private relations they were not so
faultless. Trajan the great and good was a drunkard. To such a pitch
did he carry this vice, that he gave orders that after a certain hour
of the day none of his commands were to be obeyed. Adrian was worse: he
was regardless of life; he put men to death for very small offences. An
architect was asked how he liked a certain series of statues designed
by the emperor and ranged in a sitting attitude round a temple which
he had built. The architect was a humourist, not a courtier. "If the
goddesses," he said, "take it into their heads to rise, they will never
be able to get out at the door." A poor criticism, and not a good
piece of wit, but not bad enough to justify his being beheaded; yet
the answer cost the poor man his life. As Adrian grew older, he grew
more reckless of the pain he gave. He had a brother-in-law ninety years
of age, and there was a grandson of the old man aged eighteen. He had
them both executed on proof or suspicion of a conspiracy. The popular
feeling was revolted by the sight of the mingled blood of two sufferers
so nearly related, at the opposite extremities of life. The old man,
just before he died, protested his innocence, and uttered a revengeful
prayer that Adrian might wish to die and find death impossible! This
imprecation was fulfilled. The emperor was tortured with disease, and
longed for deliverance in vain. He called round him his physicians, and
priests, and sorcerers, but they could give him no relief. He begged
his slaves to kill him, and stabbed himself with a dagger; but in
spite of all he could not die. Lingering on, and with no cessation of
his pain, he must have had sad thoughts of the past, and no pleasant
anticipations of the future, if, as we learn from the verses attributed
to him, he believed in a future state. His lines still remain, but are
indebted to Pope, who paraphrased them, for their Christian spirit and
lofty aspiration:--
"Vital spark of heavenly flame!
Quit, oh, quit this mortal frame!
Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying,
Oh, the pain, the bliss of dying!
Cease, fond nature, cease thy strife,
And let me languish into life!
"Hark! they whisper! angels say,
Sister spirit, come away!
What is this absorbs me quite,
Steals my senses, shuts my sight,
Drowns my spirits, draws my breath?
Tell me, my soul, can this be death?
"The world recedes; it disappears!
Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears
With sounds seraphic ring:
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O Grave! where is thy victory?
O Death! where is thy sting?"
His wish was at last achieved. He died aged sixty-two, having reigned
twenty-one years. In travelling and building his whole time was spent.
Temples, theatres, bridges--wherever he went, these evidences of his
wisdom or magnificence remained. He persecuted the Christians, but
found persecution a useless proceeding against a sect who gloried in
martyrdom, and whose martyrdoms were only followed by new conversions.
He tried what an opposite course of conduct would do, and is said to
have intended to erect a temple to Jesus Christ. "Take care what you
do," said one of his counsellors: "if you permit an altar to the God of
the Christians, those of the other gods will be deserted."
[A.D. 138.]
But now came to supreme authority the good and wise Antoninus Pius, who
was as blameless in his private conduct as in his public acts. His fame
extended farther than the Roman arms had ever reached. Distant kings,
in lands of which the names were scarcely known in the Forum, took him
as arbiter of their differences. The decision of the great man in Rome
gave peace on the banks of the Indus. The barbarians themselves on the
outskirts of his dominions were restrained by respect for a character
so pure and power so wisely used. An occasional revolt in Britain
was quelled by his lieutenants--an occasional conspiracy against his
authority was caused by the discontent which turbulent spirits feel
when restrained by law. The conspiracies were repressed, and on one
occasion two of the ringleaders were put to death. The Senate was for
making further inquiry into the plot. "Let us stop here," said the
emperor. "I do not wish to find out how many people I have displeased."
Some stories are told of him, which show how little he affected the
state of a despotic ruler. A pedantic philosopher at Smyrna, of the
name of Polemo, returned from a journey at a late hour, and found the
proconsul of Rome lodged in his house. This proconsul was Antonine,
who at that time had been appointed to the office by Adrian. Instead
of being honoured by such a guest, the philosopher stormed and raged,
and made so much noise, that in the middle of the night the sleepless
proconsul left the house and found quarters elsewhere. When years
passed on, and Antonine was on the throne, Polemo had the audacity to
present himself as an old acquaintance. "Ha! I remember him," said the
emperor: "let him have a room in the palace, but don't let him leave
it night or day." The imprisonment was not long, for we find the same
Polemo hero of another anecdote during this visit to Rome. He hissed
a performer in the theatre, and stamped and screeched, and made such
a disturbance that the unfortunate actor had to leave the stage. He
complained of Polemo to the emperor. "Polemo!" exclaimed Antonine; "he
forced you off the stage in the middle of the day, but he drove me
from his house in the middle of the night, and yet I never appealed."
It would be pleasant if we could learn that Polemo did not get off so
easily. But the twenty-two years of this reign of mildness and probity
were brought to a close, and Marcus Aurelius succeeded in 161.
[A.D. 161]
Marcus Aurelius did no dishonour to the discernment of his friend and
adoptive father Antoninus Pius. Studying philosophy and practising
self-command, he emulated and surpassed the virtues of the self-denying
leaders of his sect, and only broke through the rule he imposed
on himself of clemency and mildness, when he found philosophy in
danger of being counted a vain deceit, and the active duties of human
brotherhood preferred to the theoretic rhapsodies on the same subject
with which his works were filled. Times began to change. Men were
dissatisfied with the unsubstantial dream of Platonist and Stoic. There
were symptoms of an approaching alteration in human affairs, which
perplexed the thoughtful and gave promise of impunity to the bad.
Perhaps a man who, clothed in the imperial purple, bestowed so much
study on the intellectual niceties of the Sophists, and endeavoured
to keep his mind in a fit state for abstract speculation by scourging
and starving his body, was not so fitted for the approaching crisis
as a rougher and less contemplative nature would have been. Britain
was in commotion, there were tumults on the Rhine, and in Armenia the
Parthians cut the Roman legions to pieces. And scarcely were those
troubles settled and punished, when a worse calamity befell the Roman
empire. Its inviolability became a boast of the past. The fearful
passions for conquest and rapine of the border-barbarians were roused.
Barbaric cohorts encamped on the fields of Italy, and the hosts of wild
men from the forests of the North pillaged the heaped-up treasures
of the garden of the world. The emperor flew to the scene of danger,
but the fatal word had been said. Italy was accessible from the Alps
and from the sea; and, though a bloody defeat at Aquileia flung back
the invaders, disordered and dispirited, over the mountains they had
descended with such hopes, the struggle was but begun. The barbarians
felt their power, and the old institutions of Rome were insufficient
to resist future attacks. But to the aid of the old Roman institutions
a new institution came, an institution which was destined to repel the
barbarians by overcoming barbarism itself, and save the dignity of
Rome by giving it the protection of the Cross. But at present--that
is, during the reign of the philosophic Marcus Aurelius--a persecution
raged against the Christians which seemed to render hopeless all
chance of their success. The mild laws of Trajan and Adrian, and
the favourable decrees of Antoninus Pius, were set aside by the
contemptuous enmity of this explorer of the mysterious heights of
virtue, which occasionally carried him out of sight of the lower but
more important duties of life. An unsocial tribe the Christians were,
who rigorously shut their eyes to the beauties of abstract perfection,
and preferred the plain orders of the gospel to the most ambitious
periods of the emperor. But the persecution of a sect so small and so
obscure as the Christian was at that time, is scarcely perceptible as
a diminution of the sum of human happiness secured to the world by
the gentleness and equity which regulated all his actions. Here is an
example of the way in which he treated rebels against his authority.
An insurrection broke out in Syria and the East, headed by a pretended
descendant of the patriot Cassius, who had conspired against Julius
Cæsar. The emperor hurried to meet him--some say to resign the empire
into his hands, to prevent the effusion of blood; but the usurper died
in an obscure commotion, and nothing was left but to take vengeance
on his adherents. This is the letter the conqueror wrote to the
Senate:--"I beseech you, conscript Fathers! not to punish the guilty
with too much rigour. Let no Senator be put to death. Let the banished
return to their country. I wish I could give back their lives to those
who have died in this quarrel. Revenge is unworthy of an emperor. You
will pardon, therefore, the children of Cassius, his son-in-law, and
his wife. Pardon, did I say? Ah! what crime have they committed? Let
them live in safety, let them retain all that Cassius possessed. Let
them live in whatever place they choose, to be a monument of your
clemency and mine."
In such hands as these the fortune of mankind was safe. A pity
that the father's feelings got the better of his judgment in the
choice of his successor. It is the one blot on his otherwise perfect
disinterestedness. In dying, with such a monster as Commodus ready
to leap into his seat, he must have felt how inexpressibly valuable
his life would be to the Roman people. He perhaps saw the danger to
which he exposed the world; for he committed his son to the care of
his wisest counsellors, and begged him to continue the same course of
government he had pursued. Perhaps he was tired of life, perhaps he
sought refuge in his self-denying philosophy from the prospect he saw
before him of a state of perpetual struggle and eventual overthrow.
When the Tribune came for the last time to ask the watchword of the
day, "Go to the rising sun," he said; "for me, I am just going to set."
And here the history of the Second Century should close. It is painful
to go back again to the hideous scenes of anarchy and crime from which
we have been delivered so long. What must the sage counsellors, the
chosen companions and equals in age of the Antonines, have thought
when all at once the face of affairs, which they must have believed
eternal, was changed?--when the noblest and wisest in the land were
again thrown heedlessly into the arena without trial?--when spies
watched every meal, and the ferocious murderer on the throne seemed to
gloat over the struggles of his victims? Yet, if they had reflected
on the inevitable course of events, they must have seen that a
government depending on the character of one man could never be relied
on. Where, indeed, could any element of security be found? The very
ground-work of society was overthrown. There was no independent body
erect amid the general prostration at the footstool of the emperor.
Local self-government had ceased except in name. All the towns which
hitherto had been subordinate to Rome, but endowed at the same time
with privileges which were worth defending, had been absorbed into the
great whirlpool of imperial centralization, and were admitted to the
rights of Roman citizenship,--now of little value, since it embraced
every quarter of the empire. Jupiter and Juno, and the herd of effete
gods and goddesses, if they had ever held any practical influence
over the minds of men, had long sunk into contempt, except in so far
as their rich establishments were defended by persons interested in
their maintenance, and the processions and gaudy display of a foul and
meretricious worship were pleasing to the depraved taste of the mob.
But the religious principle, as a motive of action, or as a point of
combination, was at an end. Augurs were still appointed, and laughed
at the uselessness of their office; oracles were still uttered, and
ridiculed as the offspring of ignorance and imposture; conflicting
deities fought for pre-eminence, or compromised their differences by an
amalgamation of their altars, and perhaps a division of their estates.
It was against this state of society the early Fathers directed their
warnings and denunciations. The world did certainly lie in darkness,
and it was indispensable to warn the followers of Christ not to be
conformed to the fashion of that fleeting time. Some, to escape the
contagion of this miserable condition, when men were without hope, and
without even the wretched consolation which a belief in a false god
would have given them, fled to the wilds and caves. Hermits escaped
equally the perils of sin and the hostility of the heathen. Believers
were exhorted to flee from contamination, and some took the words
in their literal meaning. But not all. Many remained, and fought the
good fight in the front of the battle, as became the soldiers of the
cross. In the midst of the anarchy and degradation which characterized
the last years of the century, a society was surely and steadily
advancing towards its full development, bound by rules in the midst
of the helplessness of external law, and combined by strong faith,
in a world of utter unbelief--an empire within an empire--soon to be
the only specimen left either of government or mutual obligation, and
finally to absorb into its fresh and still-spreading organization the
withered and impotent authority which had at first seen in it its enemy
and destroyer, and found it at last its refuge and support. Yet at
this very time the empire had never appeared so strong. By a stroke of
policy, which the event proved to be injudicious, Marcus Aurelius, in
the hope of diminishing the number of his enemies, had converted many
thousands of the barbarians into his subjects. They had settlements
assigned them within the charmed ring. What they had not been able to
obtain by the sword was now assured to them by treaty. But the unity of
the Roman empire by this means was destroyed. Men were admitted within
the citadel who had no reverence implanted in them from their earliest
years for the majesty of the Roman name. They saw the riches contained
in the stronghold, and were only anxious to open the gates to their
countrymen who were still outside the walls.
But before we enter on the downward course, and since we are now
arrived at the period of the greatest apparent force and extent of the
Roman empire, let us see what it consisted of, and what was the real
amount of its power.
Viewed in comparison with some of the monarchies of the present day,
neither its extent of territory, nor amount of population, nor number
of soldiers, is very surprising. The Queen of England reigns over more
subjects, and commands far mightier fleets and armies, than any of
the Roman emperors. The empire of Russia is more extensive, and yet
the historians of a few generations ago are lost in admiration of the
power of Rome. The whole military force of the empire amounted to four
hundred and fifty thousand men. The total number of vessels did not
exceed a thousand. But see what were the advantages Rome possessed in
the compactness of its territory and the unity of its government. The
great Mediterranean Sea, peopled and cultivated on both its shores, was
but a peaceful lake, on which the Roman galley had no enemy to fear,
and the merchant-ship dreaded nothing but the winds and waves. There
were no fortresses to be garrisoned on what are now the boundaries of
jealous or hostile kingdoms. If the great circuit of the Roman State
could be protected from barbarian inroads, the internal defence of all
that vast enclosure could be left to the civil power. If the Black Sea
and the Sea of Azoff could be kept clear of piratical adventurers, the
broad highway of the Mediterranean was safe. A squadron near Gibraltar,
a squadron at the Dardanelles, and the tribes which might possibly
venture in from the ocean--the tribes which, slipping down from the
Don or the Dnieper, might thread their way through the Hellespont and
emerge into the Egean--were caught at their first appearance; and when
the wisdom of the Romans had guarded the mouths of the Danube from the
descent, in canoe or coracle, of the wild settlers on its upper banks,
the peace and commerce of the whole empire were secured. With modern
Europe the case is very different. There are boundaries to be guarded
which occupy more soldiers than the territories are worth. Lines are
arbitrarily fixed across the centre of a plain, or along the summit
of a mountain, which it is a case of war to pass. Belgium defends
her flats with a hundred thousand men, and the marshes of Holland
are secured by sixty thousand Dutch. The State of Dessau in Germany,
threatens its neighbours with fifteen hundred soldiers, while Reuss
guards its dignity and independence with three hundred infantry and
fifty horse. But the Great Powers, as they are called, take away from
the peaceable and remunerative employments of trade or agriculture an
amount of labour which would be an incalculable increase to the riches
and happiness of the world. The aggregate soldiery of Europe is upwards
of five millions of men,--just eleven times the largest calculation
of the Roman legions. The ships of Europe--to the smaller of which
the greatest galleys of the ancient world would scarcely serve as
tenders--amount to 2113. The number of guns they carry, against which
there is nothing we can take as a measure of value in ancient warfare,
but which are now the greatest and surest criterions of military power,
amounts to 45,367. But this does not give so clear a view of the
alteration in relative power as is yielded by an inspection of some
of the separate items. Gaul, included within the Rhine, was kept in
order by six or seven legions. The French empire has on foot an army of
six hundred and fifty thousand men, and a fleet of four hundred sail.
Britain, which was garrisoned by thirty thousand men, had, in 1855, an
army at home and abroad of six hundred and sixty thousand men, and a
fleet of five hundred and ninety-one ships of war, with an armament of
seventeen thousand guns. The disjointed States which now constitute the
Empire of Austria, and which occupied eight legions in their defence,
are now in possession of an army of six hundred thousand men; and
Prussia, whose array exceeds half a million of soldiers, was unheard of
except in the discussions of geographers.[A]
[A.D. 181.]
With the death of the excellent Marcus Aurelius the golden age came to
a close. Commodus sat on the throne, and renewed the wildest atrocities
of the previous century. Nero was not more cruel--Domitian was not so
reckless of human life. He fought in the arena against weakly-armed
adversaries, and slew them without remorse. He polluted the whole
city with blood, and made money by selling permissions to murder.
Thirteen years exhausted the patience of the world, and a justifiable
assassination put an end to his life. There was an old man of the
name of Pertinax, originally a nickname derived from his obstinate or
pertinacious disposition, who now made his appearance on the throne
and perished in three months. It chanced that a certain rich man of
the name of Didius was giving a supper the night of the murder to some
friends. The dishes were rich, and the wine delicious. Inspired by
the good cheer, the guests said, "Why don't you buy the empire? The
soldiers have proclaimed that they will give it to the highest bidder."
Didius knew the amount of his treasure, and was ambitious: he got up
from table and hurried to the Prætorian camp. On the way he met the
mutilated body of the murdered Pertinax, dragged through the streets
with savage exultation. Nothing daunted, he arrived at the soldiers'
tents. Another had been before him--Sulpician, the father-in-law and
friend of the late emperor. A bribe had been offered to each soldier,
so large that they were about to conclude the bargain; but Didius bade
many sesterces more. The greedy soldiery looked from one to the other,
and shouted with delight, as each new advance was made. [A.D. 193.] At
last Sulpician was silent, and Didius had purchased the Roman world at
the price of upwards of £200 to each soldier of the Prætorian guard. He
entered the palace in state, and concluded the supper, which had been
interrupted at his own house, on the viands prepared for Pertinax. But
the excitement of the auction-room was too pleasant to be left to the
troops in Rome. Offers were made to the legions in all the provinces,
and Didius was threatened on every side. Even the distant garrisons of
Britain named a candidate for the throne; and Claudius Albinus assumed
the imperial purple, and crossed over into Gaul. More irritated still,
the army in Syria elected its general, Pescennius Niger, emperor, and
he prepared to dispute the prize; but quietly, steadily, with stern
face and unrelenting heart, advancing from province to province,
keeping his forces in strict subjection, and laying claim to supreme
authority by the mere strength of his indomitable will, came forward
Septimius Severus, and both the pretenders saw that their fate was
sealed. Illyria and Gaul recognised his title at once. Albinus was
happy to accept from him the subordinate title of Cæsar, and to rule as
his lieutenant. Didius, whose bargain turned out rather ill, besought
him to be content with half the empire. Severus slew the messengers
who brought this proposition, and advanced in grim silence. The Senate
assembled, and, by way of a pleasant reception for the Illyrian chief,
requested Didius to prepare for death. The executioners found him
clinging to life with unmanly tenacity, and killed him when he had
reigned but seventy days. One other competitor remained, the general of
the Syrian army--the closest friend of Severus, but now separated from
him by the great temptation of an empire in dispute. This was Niger,
from whom an obstinate resistance was expected, as he was equally
famous for his courage and his skill. But fortune was on the side of
Severus. Niger was conquered after a short struggle, and his head
presented to the victor. Was Albinus still to live, and approach so
near the throne as to have the rank of Cæsar? Assassins were employed
to murder him, but he escaped their assault. The treachery of Severus
brought many supporters to his rival. The Roman armies were ranged
in hostile camps. Severus again was fortunate, and Albinus, dashing
towards him to engage in combat, was slain before his eyes. He watched
his dying agonies for some time, and then forced his horse to trample
on the corpse. A man of harsh, implacable nature--not so much cruel as
impenetrable to human feelings, and perhaps forming a just estimate
of the favourable effect upon his fortunes of a disposition so calm,
and yet so relentless. The Prætorians found they had appointed their
master, and put the sword into his hand. He used it without remorse.
He terrified the boldest with his imperturbable stillness; he summoned
the seditious soldiery to wait on him at his camp. They were to come
without arms, without their military dress, almost like suppliants,
certainly not like the ferocious libertines they had been when they
had sold the empire at the highest price. "Whoever of you wishes to
live," said Severus, frowning coldly, "will depart from this, and
never come within thirty leagues of Rome. Take their horses," he added
to the other troops who had surrounded the Prætorians, "take their
accoutrements, and chase them out of my sight." Did the Senate receive
a milder treatment? On sending them the head of Albinus, he had written
to the Conscript Fathers alarming them with the most dreadful threats.
And now the time of execution had come. He made them an oration in
praise of the proscriptions of Marius and Sylla, and forced them to
deify the tyrant Commodus, who had hated them all his life. He then
gave a signal to his train, and the streets ran with blood. All who
had borne high office, all who were of distinguished birth, all who
were famous for their wealth or popular with the citizens, were put
to death. He crossed over to England and repressed a sedition there.
His son Caracalla accompanied him, and commenced his career of warlike
ardour and frightful ferocity, which can only be explained on the
ground of his being mad. He tried even to murder his father, in open
day, in the sight of the soldiers. He was stealing upon the old man,
when a cry from the legion made him turn round. His inflexible eye fell
upon Caracalla--the sword dropped from his unfilial hand--and dreadful
anticipations of vengeance filled the assembly. The son was pardoned,
but his accomplices, whether truly or falsely accused, perished by
cruel deaths. At last the emperor felt his end approach. He summoned
his sons Caracalla and Geta into his presence, recommended them to live
in unity, and ended by the advice which has become the standing maxim
of military despots, "Be generous to the soldiers, and trample on all
beside."
With this hideous incarnation of unpitying firmness on the
throne--hopeless of the future, and with dangers accumulating on every
side, the Second Century came to an end, leaving the amazing contrast
between its miserable close and the long period of its prosperity by
which it will be remembered in all succeeding time.
THIRD CENTURY.
Emperors.
A.D.
SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS--(_continued._) Fifth Persecution of the
Christians.
211. CARACALLA and GETA.
217. MACRINUS.
218. HELIOGABALUS.
222. ALEXANDER SEVERUS.
235. MAXIMIN. Sixth Persecution.
238. MAXIMUS and BALBINUS
238. GORDIAN.
244. PHILIP THE ARABIAN.
249. DECIUS. Seventh Persecution.
251. VIBIUS.
251. GALLUS.
254. VALERIAN. Eighth Persecution.
260. GALLIEN.
268. CLAUDIUS THE SECOND.
270. AURELIAN. Ninth Persecution.
275. TACITUS.
276. FLORIAN.
277. PROBUS.
278. CARUS.
278. CARINUS and NUMERIAN.
284. DIOCLETIAN and MAXIMIAN. Tenth and Last Persecution.
Authors.
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, DION CASSIUS, ORIGEN, CYPRIAN, PLOTINUS,
LONGINUS, HIPPOLITUS PORTUENSIS, JULIUS AFRICANUS CELSUS, ORIGEN.
THE THIRD CENTURY.
ANARCHY AND CONFUSION--GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.
We are now in the twelfth year of the Third Century. Septimius Severus
has died at York, and Caracalla is let loose like a famished tiger
upon Rome. He invites his brother Geta to meet him to settle some
family feud in the apartment of their mother, and stabs him in her
arms. The rest of his reign is worthy of this beginning, and it would
be fatiguing and perplexing to the memory to record his other acts.
Fortunately it is not required; nor is it necessary to follow minutely
the course of his successors. What we require is only a general view of
the proceedings of this century, and that can be gained without wading
through all the blood and horrors with which the throne of the world is
surrounded. Conclusive evidence was obtained in this century that the
organization of Roman government was defective in securing the first
necessities of civilized life. When we talk of civilization, we are too
apt to limit the meaning of the word to its mere embellishments, such
as arts and sciences; but the true distinction between it and barbarism
is, that the one presents a state of society under the protection of
just and well-administered law, and the other is left to the chance
government of brute force. There was now great wealth in Rome--great
luxury--a high admiration of painting, poetry, and sculpture--much
learning, and probably infinite refinement of manners and address. But
it was not a civilized state. Life was of no value--property was not
secure. A series of madmen seized supreme authority, and overthrew all
the distinctions between right and wrong. Murder was legalized, and
rapine openly encouraged. It is a sort of satisfaction to perceive that
few of those atrocious malefactors escaped altogether the punishment
of their crimes. If Caracalla slays his brother and orders a peaceable
province to be destroyed, there is a Macrinus at hand to put the
monster to death. [A.D. 218.] But Macrinus, relying on the goodness
of his intentions, neglects the soldiery, and is supplanted by a boy
of seventeen--so handsome that he won the admiration of the rudest of
the legionaries, and so gentle and captivating in his manners that
he strengthened the effect his beauty had produced. He was priest of
the Temple of the Sun at Emesa in Phoenicia; and by the arts of
his grandmother, who was sister to one of the former empresses, and
the report that she cunningly spread abroad that he was the son of
their favourite Caracalla, the affection of the dissolute soldiery
knew no bounds. Macrinus was soon slaughtered, and the long-haired
priest of Baal seated on the throne of the Cæsars, under the name
of Heliogabalus. As might be expected, the sudden alteration in
his fortunes was fatal to his character. All the excesses of his
predecessors were surpassed. His extravagance rapidly exhausted the
resources of the empire. His floors were spread with gold-dust. His
dresses, jewels, and golden ornaments were never worn twice, but went
to his slaves and parasites. He created his grandmother a member
of the Senate, with rank next after the consuls; and established a
rival Senate, composed of ladies, presided over by his mother. Their
jurisdiction was not very hurtful to the State, for it only extended
to dresses and precedence of ranks, and the etiquette to be observed
in visiting each other. But the evil dispositions of the emperor were
shown in other ways. He had a cousin of the name of Alexander, and
entertained an unbounded jealousy of his popularity with the soldiers.
Attempts at poison and direct assassination were resorted to in vain.
The public sympathy began to rise in his favour. The Prætorians
formally took him under their protection; and when Heliogabalus,
reckless of their menaces, again attempted the life of Alexander, the
troops revolted, proclaimed death to the infatuated emperor, and slew
him and his mother at the same time.
[A.D. 222.]
Alexander was now enthroned--a youth of sixteen; gifted with higher
qualities than the debased century in which he lived could altogether
appreciate. But the origin of his noblest sentiments is traced to
the teaching he had received from his mother, in which the precepts
of Christianity were not omitted. When he appointed the governor of
a province, he published his name some time before, and requested
if any one knew of a disqualification, to have it sent in for his
consideration. "It is thus the Christians appoint their pastors,"
he said, "and I will do the same with my representatives." When his
justice, moderation, and equity were fully recognised, the beauty of
the quotation, which was continually in his mouth, was admired by all,
even though they were ignorant of the book it came from: "Do unto
others as you would that they should do unto you." He trusted the
wisest of his counsellors, the great legalists of the empire, with the
introduction of new laws to curb the wickedness of the time. But the
multiplicity of laws proves the decline of states. In the ancient Rome
of the kings and earlier consuls, the statutes were contained in forty
decisions, which were afterwards enlarged into the laws of the Twelve
Tables, consisting of one hundred and fifty texts. The profligacy of
some emperors, the vanity of others, had loaded the statute-book with
an innumerable mass of edicts, senatus-consultums, prætorial rescripts,
and customary laws. It was impossible to extract order or regularity
from such a chaos of conflicting rules. The great work was left for
a later prince; at present we can only praise the goodness of the
emperor's intention. But Alexander, justly called Severus, from the
simplicity of his life and manners, has held the throne too long. The
Prætorians have been thirteen years without the donation consequent on
a new accession.
Among the favourite leaders selected by Alexander for their military
qualifications was one Maximin, a Thracian peasant, of whose strength
and stature incredible things are told. He was upwards of eight feet
high, could tire down a horse at the gallop on foot, could break its
leg by a blow of his hand, could overthrow thirty wrestlers without
drawing breath, and maintained this prodigious force by eating forty
pounds of meat, and drinking an amphora and a half, or twelve quarts,
of wine. This giant had the bravery for which his countrymen the
Goths have always been celebrated. He rose to high rank in the Roman
service; and when at last nothing seemed to stand between him and the
throne but his patron and benefactor, ambition blinded him to every
thing but his own advancement. He murdered the wise and generous
Alexander, and presented for the first time in history the spectacle
of a barbarian master of the Roman world. Other emperors had been born
in distant portions of the empire; an African had trampled on Roman
greatness in the person of Septimius Severus; a Phoenician priest had
disgraced the purple in the person of Heliogabalus; Africa, however,
was a Roman province, and Emesa a Roman town. But here sat the colossal
representative of the terrible Goths of Thrace, speaking a language
half Getic, half Latin, which no one could easily understand; fierce,
haughty, and revengeful, and cherishing a ferocious hatred of the
subjects who trembled before him--a hatred probably implanted in him
in his childhood by the patriotic songs with which the warriors of his
tribe kept alive their enmity and contempt for the Roman name. The
Roman name had indeed by this time lost all its authority. The army,
recruited from all parts of the empire, and including a great number
of barbarians in its ranks, was no longer a bulwark against foreign
invasion. Maximin, bestowing the chief commands on Pannonians and other
mercenaries, treated the empire as a conquered country. He seized on
all the wealth he could discover--melted all the golden statues, as
valuable from their artistic beauty as for the metal of which they
were composed--and was threatening an approach to Rome to exterminate
the Senate and sack the devoted town. In this extremity the Senate
resumed its long-forgotten power, and named as emperors two men of
the name of Gordian--father and son--with instructions "to resist the
enemy." But father and son perished in a few weeks, and still the
terrible Goth came on. His son, a giant like himself, but beautiful as
the colossal statue of a young Apollo, shared in all the feelings of
his father. Terrified at its approaching doom, the Senate once more
nominated two men to the purple, Maximus and Balbinus: Balbinus, the
favourite, perhaps, of the aristocracy, by the descent he claimed from
an illustrious ancestry; while Maximus recommended himself to the now
perverted taste of the commonalty by having been a carter. Neither was
popular with the army; and, to please the soldiers, a son or nephew of
the younger Gordian was associated with them on the throne. But nothing
could have resisted the infuriated legions of the gigantic Maximin;
they were marching with wonderful expedition towards their revenge. At
Aquileia they met an opposition; the town shut its gates and manned its
walls, for it knew what would be the fate of a city given up to the
tender mercies of the Goths. Meanwhile the approach of the destroyer
produced great agitation in Rome. The people rose upon the Prætorians,
and enlisted the gladiators on their side. Many thousands were slain,
and at last a peace was made by the intercession of the youthful
Gordian. Glad of the cessation of this civic tumult, the population
of Rome betook itself to the theatres and shows. Suddenly, while the
games were going on, it was announced that the army before Aquileia
had mutinied and that both the Maximins were slain. [A.D. 235.] All at
once the amphitheatre was emptied; by an impulse of grateful piety, the
emperors and people hurried into the temples of the gods, and offered
up thanks for their deliverance. The wretched people were premature
in their rejoicing. In less than three months the spoiled Prætorians
were offended with the precaution taken by the emperors in surrounding
themselves with German guards. They assaulted the palace, and put
Maximus and Balbinus to death. Gordian the Third was now sole emperor,
and the final struggle with the barbarians drew nearer and nearer.
Constantly crossing the frontiers, and willingly received in the Roman
ranks, the communities who had been long settled on the Roman confines
were not the utterly uncultivated tribes which their name would seem
to denote. There was a conterminous civilization which made the two
peoples scarcely distinguishable at their point of contact, but which
died off as the distance from the Roman line increased. Thus, an
original settler on the eastern bank of the Rhine was probably as
cultivated and intelligent as a Roman colonist on the other side; but
farther up, at the Weser and the Elbe, the old ferocity and roughness
remained. Fresh importations from the unknown East were continually
taking place; the dwellers in the plains of Pannonia, now habituated
to pasturage and trade, found safety from the hordes which pressed
upon them from their own original settlements beyond the Caucasus, by
crossing the boundary river; and by this means the banks were held by
cognate but hostile peoples, who could, however, easily be reconciled
by a joint expedition against Rome. New combinations had taken place
in the interior of the great expanses not included in the Roman
limits. The Germans were no longer the natural enemies of the empire.
They furnished many soldiers for its defence, and several chiefs
to command its forces. But all round the external circuit of those
half-conciliated tribes rose up vast confederacies of warlike nations.
There were Cheruski, and Sicambri, and Attuarians, and Bruttuarians,
and Catti, all regularly enrolled under the name of "Franks," or
the brave. The Sarmatians or Sclaves performed the same part on the
northeastern frontier; and we have already seen that the irresistible
Goths had found their way, one by one, across the boundary, and
cleared the path for their successors. The old enemies of Rome on the
extreme east, the Parthians, had fallen under the power of a renovated
mountain-race, and of a king, who founded the great dynasty of the
Sassanides, and claimed the restoration of Egypt and Armenia as ancient
dependencies of the Persian crown. To resist all these, there was, in
the year 241, only a gentle-tempered youth, dressed in the purple which
had so lost its original grandeur, and relying for his guidance on
the wisdom of his tutors, and for his life on the forbearance of the
Prætorians. The tutors were wise and just, and victory at first gave
some sort of dignity to the reign of Gordian. [A.D. 244.] The Franks
were conquered at Mayence; but Gordian, three years after, was murdered
in the East; and Philip, an Arabian, whose father had been a robber of
the desert, was acknowledged emperor by senate and army. Treachery,
ambition, and murder pursued their course. There was no succession to
the throne. Sometimes one general, luckier or wiser than the rest,
appeared the sole governor of the State. At other times there were
numberless rivals all claiming the empire and threatening vengeance
on their opponents. Yet amidst this tumult of undistinguishable
pretenders, fortune placed at the head of affairs some of the best
and greatest men whom the Roman world ever produced. There was
Valerian, whom all parties agreed in considering the most virtuous and
enlightened man of his time. [A.D. 253.] Scarcely any opposition was
made to his promotion; and yet, with all his good qualities, he was the
man to whom Rome owed the greatest degradation it had yet sustained.
He was taken prisoner by Sapor, the Persian king, and condemned, with
other captive monarchs, to draw the car of his conqueror. No offers of
ransom could deliver the brave and unfortunate prince. He died amid his
deriding enemies, who hung up his skin as an offering to their gods.
Then, after some years, in which there were twenty emperors at one
time, with army drawn up against army, and cities delivered to massacre
and rapine by all parties in turn, there arose one of the strong minds
which make themselves felt throughout a whole period, and arrest for a
while the downward course of states. [A.D. 276.] The emperor Probus,
son of a man who had originally been a gardener, had distinguished
himself under Aurelian, the conqueror of Palmyra, and, having survived
all his competitors, had time to devote himself to the restoration
of discipline and the introduction of purer laws. His victories over
the encroaching barbarians were decided, but ineffectual. New myriads
still pressed forward to take the place of the slain. On one occasion
he crossed the Rhine in pursuit of the revolted Germans, overtook them
at the Necker, and killed in battle four hundred thousand men. Nine
kings threw themselves at the emperor's feet. Many thousand barbarians
enlisted in the Roman army. Sixty great cities were taken, and made
offerings of golden crowns. The whole country was laid waste. "There
was nothing left," he boasted to the Senate, "but bare fields, as if
they had never been cultivated." So much the worse for the Romans. The
barbarians looked with keener eyes across the river at the rich lands
which had never been ravaged, and sent messages to all the tribes
in the distant forests, that, having no occasion for pruning-hooks,
they had turned them into swords. But Probus showed a still more
doubtful policy in other quarters. When he conquered the Vandals
and Burgundians, he sent their warriors to keep the Caledonians in
subjection on the Tyne. The Britons he transported to Moesia or Greece.
What intermixtures of race may have arisen from these transplantations
it is impossible to say; but the one feeling was common to all the
barbarians, that Rome was weak and they were strong. He settled a large
detachment of Franks on the shores of the Black Sea; and of these an
almost incredible but well-authenticated story is told. They seized or
built themselves boats. They swept through the Dardanelles, and ravaged
the isles of Greece. They pursued their piratical career down the
Mediterranean, passed the pillars of Hercules into the Great Sea, and,
rounding Spain and France, rowed up the Elbe into the midst of their
astonished countrymen, who had long given them up for dead. A fatal
adventure this for the safety of the Roman shores; for there were the
wild fishermen of Friesland, and the audacious Angles of Schleswig and
Holstein, who heard of this strange exploit, and saw that no coast was
too distant to be reached by their oar and sail. But if these forced
settlements of barbarians on Roman soil were impolitic, the generous
Probus did not feel their bad effect. His warlike qualities awed his
foes, and his inflexible justice was appreciated by the hardy warriors
of the North, who had not yet sunk under the debasing civilization of
Rome. In Asia his arms were attended with equal success. He subdued the
Persians, and extended his conquests into Ethiopia and the farthest
regions of the East, bringing back some of its conquered natives to
swell the triumph at Rome and terrify the citizens with their strange
and hideous appearance. But Probus himself must yield to the law
which regulated the fate of Roman emperors. He died by treachery and
the sword. All that the empire could do was to join in the epitaph
pronounced over him by the barbarians, "Here lies the emperor Probus,
whose life and actions corresponded to his name."
Three or four more fantastic figures, "which the likeness of a kingly
crown have on," pass before our eyes, and at last we observe the
powerful and substantial form of Diocletian, and feel once more we
have to do with a real man. [A.D. 284.] A Druidess, we are told,
had prophesied that he should attain his highest wish if he killed
a wild boar. In all his hunting expeditions he was constantly on
the look-out, spear in hand, for an encounter with the long-tusked
monster. Unluckily for a man who had offended Diocletian before,
and who had basely murdered his predecessor, his name was Aper; and
unluckily, also, _aper_ is Latin for a boar. This fact will perhaps be
thought to account for the prophecy. It accounts, at all events, for
its fulfilment; for, the wretched Aper being led before the throne,
Diocletian descended the steps and plunged a dagger into his chest,
exclaiming, "I have killed the wild boar of the prediction." This is
a painful example of how unlucky it is to have a name that can be
punned upon. Determined to secure the support of what he thought the
strongest body in the State, he gratified the priests by the severest
of all the many persecutions to which the Christians had been exposed.
By way of further showing his adhesion to the old faith, he solemnly
assumed the name of Jove, and bestowed on his partner on the throne
the inferior title of Hercules. In spite of these truculent and absurd
proceedings, Diocletian was not altogether destitute of the softer
feelings. The friend he associated with him on the throne--dividing
the empire between them as too large a burden for one to sustain--was
called Maximian. They had both originally been slaves, and had neither
of them received a liberal education. Yet they protected the arts, they
encouraged literature, and were the patrons of modest merit wherever it
could be found. They each adopted a Cæsar, or lieutenant of the empire,
and hoped that, by a legal division of duties among four, the ambition
of their generals would be prevented. But the limits of the empire
were too extended even for the vigilance of them all. In Britain,
Carausius raised the standard of revolt, giving it the noble name of
national independence; and, with the instinctive wisdom which has been
the safeguard of our island ever since, he rested his whole chance of
success upon his fleet. Invasion was rendered impossible by the care
with which he guarded the shore, and it is not inconceivable that even
at that early time the maritime career of Britain might have been begun
and maintained, if treason, as usual, had not cut short the efforts of
Carausius, who was soon after murdered by his friend Allectus. The
subdivision of the empire was a successful experiment as regarded its
external safety, but within, it was the cause of bitter complaining.
There were four sumptuous courts to be maintained, and four imperial
armies to be paid. Taxes rose, and allegiance waxed cold. The Cæsars
were young, and looked probably with an evil eye on the two old men who
stood between them and the name of emperor. However it may be, after
many victories and much domestic trouble, Diocletian resolved to lay
aside the burden of empire and retire into private life. His colleague
Maximian felt, or affected to feel, the same distaste for power, and
on the same day they quitted the purple; one at Nicomedia, the other
at Milan. Diocletian retired to Salona, a town in his native Dalmatia,
and occupied himself with rural pursuits. He was asked after a while
to reassume his authority, but he said to the persons who made him the
request, "I wish you would come to Salona and see the cabbages I have
planted with my own hands, and after that you would never wish me to
remount the throne."
The characteristic of this century is its utter confusion and want
of order. There was no longer the unity even of despotism at Rome to
make a common centre round which every thing revolved. There were
tyrants and competitors for power in every quarter of the empire--no
settled authority, no government or security, left. In the midst of
this relaxation of every rule of life, grew surely, but unobserved, the
Christian Church, which drew strength from the very helplessness of the
civil state, and was forced, in self-defence, to establish a regular
organization in order to extend to its members the inestimable benefits
of regularity and law. Under many of the emperors Christianity was
proscribed; its disciples were put to excruciating deaths, and their
property confiscated; but at that very time its inner development
increased and strengthened. The community appointed its teachers, its
deacons, its office-bearers of every kind; it supported them in their
endeavours--it yielded to their directions; and in time a certain
amount of authority was considered to be inherent in the office of
pastor, which extended beyond the mere expounding of the gospel or
administration of the sacraments. The chief pastor became the guide,
perhaps the judge, of the whole flock. While it is absurd, therefore,
in those disastrous times of weakness and persecution to talk in
pompous terms of the succession of the Bishops of Rome, and make out
vain catalogues of lordly prelates who sat on the throne of St. Peter,
it is incontestable that, from the earliest period, the Christian
converts held their meetings--by stealth indeed, and under fear of
detection--and obeyed certain canons of their own constitution. These
secret associations rapidly spread their ramifications into every
great city of the empire. When by the friendship, or the fellowship,
of the emperor, as in the case of the Arabian Philip, a pause was
given to their fears and sufferings, certain buildings were set apart
for their religious exercises; and we read, during this century, of
basilicas, or churches, in Rome and other towns. The subtlety of the
Greek intellect had already led to endless heresies and the wildest
departures from the simplicity of the gospel. The Western mind was
more calm, and better adapted to be the lawgiver of a new order of
society composed of elements so rough and discordant as the barbarians,
whose approach was now inevitably foreseen. With its well-defined
hierarchy--its graduated ranks, and the fitness of the offices for
the purposes of their creation; with its array of martyrs ready to
suffer, and clear-headed leaders fitted to command, the Western Church
could look calmly forward to the time when its organization would
make it the most powerful, or perhaps the only, body in the State; and
so early as the middle of this century the seeds of worldly ambition
developed themselves in a schism, not on a point of doctrine, but on
the possession of authority. A double nomination had made the anomalous
appointment of two chief pastors at the same time. Neither would yield,
and each had his supporters. All were under the ban of the civil power.
They had recourse to spiritual weapons; and we read, for the first time
in ecclesiastical history, of mutual excommunications. Novatian--under
his breath, however, for fear of being thrown to the wild beasts for
raising a disturbance--thundered his anathemas against Cornelius as an
intruder, while Cornelius retorted by proclaiming Novatian an impostor,
as he had not the concurrence of the people in his election. This gives
us a convincing proof of the popular form of appointing bishops or
presbyters in those early days, and prepares us for the energy with
which the electors supported the authority of their favourite priests.
But, while this new internal element was spreading life among the
decayed institutions of the empire, we have, in this century, the first
appearance, in great force, of the future conquerors and renovators
of the body politic from without. It is pleasant to think that the
centuries cast themselves more and more loose from their connection
with Rome after this date, and that the barbarians can vindicate
a separate place in history for themselves. In the first century,
the bad emperors broke the strength of Rome by their cruelty and
extravagance. In the second century, the good emperors carried on the
work of weakening the empire by the softening and enervating effects
of their gentle and protective policy. The third century unites the
evil qualities of the other two, for the people were equally rendered
incapable of defending themselves by the unheard-of atrocities of some
of the tyrants who oppressed them and the mistaken measures of the
more benevolent rulers, in committing the guardianship of the citizens
to the swords of a foreign soldiery, leaving them but the wretched
alternative of being ravaged and massacred by an irruption of savage
tribes or pillaged and insulted by those in the emperor's pay.
The empire had long been surrounded by its foes. [A.D. 273.] It will
suffice to read the long list of captives who were led in triumph
behind the car of Aurelian when he returned from foreign war, to
see the fearful array of harsh-sounding names which have afterwards
been softened into those of great and civilized nations. It is in
following the course of some of these that we shall see how the
present distribution of forces in Europe took place, and escape from
the polluted atmosphere of Imperial Rome. In that memorable triumph
appeared Goths, Alans, Roxolans, Franks, Sarmatians, Vandals, Allemans,
Arabs, Indians, Bactrians, Iberians, Saracens, Armenians, Persians,
Palmyreans, Egyptians, and ten Gothic women dressed in men's apparel
and fully armed. These were, perhaps, the representatives of a large
body of female warriors, and are a sign of the recent settlement of the
tribe to which they belonged. They had not yet given up the habits of
their march, where all were equally engaged in carrying the property
and arms of the nation, and where the females encouraged the young men
of the expedition by witnessing and sometimes sharing their exploits in
battle.
The triumph of Probus, when only seven years had passed, presents us
with a list of the same peoples, often conquered but never subdued.
Their defeats, indeed, had the double effect of showing to them
their own ability to recruit their forces, and of strengthening the
degraded people of Rome in the belief of their invincibility. After
the loss of a battle, the Gothic or Burgundian chief fell back upon
the confederated tribes in his rear; a portion of his army either
visited Rome in the character of captives, or enlisted in the ranks of
the conquerors. In either case, the wealth of the great city and the
undefended state of the empire were permanently fixed in their minds;
the populace, on the other hand, had the luxury of a noble show and
double rations of bread--the more ambitious of the emperors acting
on the professed maxim that the citizen had no duty but to enjoy the
goods provided for him by the governing power, and that if he was fed
by public doles, and amused with public games, the purpose of his life
was attained. The idlest man was the safest subject. A triumph was,
therefore, more an instrument of degradation than an encouragement
to patriotic exertion. The name of Roman citizen was now extended to
all the inhabitants of the empire. The freeman of York was a Roman
citizen. Had he any patriotic pride in keeping the soil of Italy
undivided? The nation had become too diffuse for the exercise of this
local and combining virtue. The love of country, which in the small
states of Greece secured the individual's affection to his native city,
and yet was powerful enough to extend over the whole of the Hellenic
territories, was lost altogether when it was required to expand itself
over a region as wide as Europe. It is in this sense that empires fall
to pieces by their own weight. The Roman power broke up from within.
Its religion was a source of division, not of union--its mixture of
nations, and tongues, and usages, lost their cohesion. And nothing was
left at the end of this century to preserve it from total dissolution,
but the personal qualities of some great rulers and the memory of its
former fame.
FOURTH CENTURY.
Emperors.
A.D.
304. GALERIUS and CONSTANTIUS.
305. MAXIMIN.
306. CONSTANTINE.
337. CONSTANTINE II., CONSTANS and
CONSTANTIUS.
361. JULIAN THE APOSTATE.
363. JOVIAN.
A.D. _West._ A.D. _East._
364. VALENTINIAN. 364. VALENS.
367. GRATIAN.
375. VALENTINIAN II. 379. THEODOSIUS.
395. HONORIUS. 395. ARCADIUS.
Authors.
DONATUS, EUTROPIUS, ST. ATHANASIUS, AUSONIUS, CLAUDIAN, ARNOBIUS,
(303,) LACTANTIUS, (306,) EUSEBIUS, (315,) ARIUS, (316,) GREGORY
NAZIANZEN, (320-389,) BASIL THE GREAT, Bishop Of Cesarea, (330-379,)
AMBROSE, (340-397,) AUGUSTINE (353-429,) THEODORET, (386-457,) MARTIN,
Bishop of Tours.
THE FOURTH CENTURY.
THE REMOVAL TO CONSTANTINOPLE--ESTABLISHMENT OF
CHRISTIANITY--APOSTASY OF JULIAN--SETTLEMENT OF THE GOTHS.
As the memory of the old liberties of Rome died out, a nearer approach
was made to the ostentatious despotisms of the East. Aurelian, in
270, was the first emperor who encircled his head with a diadem; and
Diocletian, in 284, formed his court on the model of the most gorgeous
royalties of Asia. On admission into his presence, the Roman Senator,
formerly the equal of the ruler, prostrated himself at his feet. Titles
of the most unmanly adulation were lavished on the fortunate slave or
herdsman who had risen to supreme power. He was clothed in robes of
purple and violet, and loaded with an incalculable wealth of jewels
and gold. It was from deep policy that Diocletian introduced this
system. Ceremony imposes on the vulgar, and makes intimacy impossible.
Etiquette is the refuge of failing power, and compensates by external
show for inherent weakness, as stiffness and formality are the refuge
of dulness and mediocrity in private life. There was now, therefore,
seated on the throne, which was shaken by every commotion, a personage
assuming more majestic rank, and affecting far loftier state and
dignity, than Augustus had ventured on while the strength of the
old Republic gave irresistible force to the new empire, or than the
Antonines had dreamt of when the prosperity of Rome was apparently at
its height. But there was still some feeling, if not of self-respect,
at least of resistance to pretension, in the populace and Senators
of the capital. Diocletian visited Rome but once. He was attacked in
lampoons, and ridiculed in satirical songs. His colleague established
his residence in the military post of Milan. We are not, therefore,
to feel surprised that an Orientalized authority sought its natural
seat in the land of ancient despotisms, and that many of the emperors
had cast longing eyes on the beautiful towns of Asia Minor, and even
on the far-off cities of Mesopotamia, as more congenial localities
for their barbaric splendours. By a sort of compromise between his
European origin and Asiatic tastes, the emperor Constantine, after many
struggles with his competitors, having attained the sole authority,
transferred the seat of empire from Rome to a city he had built on the
extreme limits of Europe, and only divided from Asia by a narrow sea.
All succeeding ages have agreed in extolling the situation of this
city, called, after its founder, Constantinople, as the finest that
could have been chosen. All ages, from the day of its erection till the
hour in which we live, have agreed that it is fitted, in the hands of a
great and enterprising power, to be the metropolis and arbiter of the
world; and Constantinople is, therefore, condemned to the melancholy
fate of being the useless and unappreciated capital of a horde of
irreclaimable barbarians. To this magnificent city Constantine removed
the throne in 329, and for nearly a thousand years after that, while
Rome was sacked in innumerable invasions, and all the capitals of
Europe were successively occupied by contending armies, Constantinople,
safe in her two narrow outlets, and rich in her command of the two
continents, continued unconquered, and even unassailed.
Rome was stripped, that Constantinople might be filled. All the wealth
of Italy was carried across the Ægean. The Roman Senator was invited
to remove with his establishment. He found, on arriving at his new
home, that by a complimentary attention of the emperor, a fac-simile of
his Roman palace had been prepared for him on the Propontis. The seven
hills of the new capital responded to the seven hills of the old. There
were villas for retirement along the smiling shores of the Dardanelles
or of the Bosphorus, as fine in climate, and perhaps equal in romantic
beauty, to Baiæ or Brundusium. There was a capital, as noble a piece
of architecture as the one they had left, but without the sanctity
of its thousand years of existence, or the glory of its unnumbered
triumphs. One omission was the subject of remark and lamentation. The
temples were nowhere to be seen. The images of the gods were left at
Rome in the solitude of their deserted shrines, for Constantine had
determined that Constantinople should, from its very foundation, be the
residence of a Christian people. Churches were built, and a priesthood
appointed. Yet, with the policy which characterized the Church at
that time, he made as little change as possible in the external
forms. There is still extant a transfer of certain properties from
the old establishment to the new. There are contributions of wax for
the candles, of frankincense and myrrh for the censers, and vestures
for the officiating priests as before. Only the object of worship is
changed, and the images of the heathen gods and heroes are replaced
with statues of the apostles and martyrs.
It is difficult to gather a true idea of this first of the Christian
emperors from the historians of after-times. The accounts of him by
contemporary writers are equally conflicting. The favourers of the old
superstition describe him as a monster of perfidy and cruelty. The
Church, raised to supremacy by his favour, sees nothing in him but
the greatest of men--the seer of visions, the visible favourite of
the Almighty, and the predestined overthrower of the powers of evil.
The easy credulity of an emancipated people believed whatever the
flattery of the courtiers invented. His mother Helena made a journey to
Jerusalem, and was rewarded for the pious pilgrimage by the discovery
of the True Cross. Chapels and altars were raised upon all the places
famous in Christian story; relics were collected from all quarters,
and we are early led to fear that the simplicity of the gospel is
endangered by its approach to the throne, and that Constantine's object
was rather to raise and strengthen a hierarchy of ecclesiastical
supporters than to give full scope to the doctrine of truth. But not
the less wonderful, not the less by the divine appointment, was this
unhoped-for triumph of Christianity, that its advancement formed part
of the ambitious scheme of a worldly and unprincipled conqueror. Rather
it may be taken as one among the thousand proofs with which history
presents us, that the greatest blessings to mankind are produced
irrespective of the character or qualities of the apparent author. A
warrior is raised in the desert when required to be let loose upon
a worn-out society as the scourge of God; a blood-stained soldier
is placed on the throne of the world when the time has come for the
earthly predominance of the gospel. But neither is Attila to be blamed
nor Constantine to be praised.
It was the spirit of his system of government to form every society
on a strictly monarchical model. There was everywhere introduced a
clearly-defined subordination of ranks and dignities. Diocletian, we
saw, surrounded the throne with a state and ceremony which kept the
imperial person sacred from the common gaze. Constantine perfected his
work by establishing a titled nobility, who were to stand between
the throne and the people, giving dignity to the one, and impressing
fresh awe upon the other. In all previous ages it had been the office
that gave importance to the man. To be a member of the Senate was a
mark of distinction; a long descent from a great historic name was
looked on with respect; and the heroic deeds of the thousand years of
Roman struggle had founded an aristocracy which owed its high position
either to personal actions or hereditary claims. But now that the
emperors had so long concentrated in themselves all the great offices
of the State--now that the bad rulers of the first century had degraded
the Senate by filling it with their creatures, the good rulers of
the second century had made it merely the recorder of their decrees,
and the anarchy of the third century had changed or obliterated its
functions altogether--there was no way left to the ambitious Roman
to distinguish himself except by the favour of the emperor. The
throne became, as it has since continued in all strictly monarchical
countries, the fountain of honour. It was not the people who could name
a man to the consulship or appoint him to the command of an army. It
was not even in the power of the emperor to find offices of dignity
for all whom he wished to advance. So a method was discovered by which
vanity or friendship could be gratified, and employment be reserved for
the deserving at the same time. Instead of endangering an expedition
against the Parthians by intrusting it to a rich and powerful courtier
who desired to have the rank of general, the emperor simply named
him Nobilissimus, or Patricius, or Illustris, and the gratified
favourite, the "most noble," the "patrician," or the "illustrious,"
took place with the highest officers of the State. A certain title
gave him equal rank with the Senator, the judge, or the consul. The
diversity of these honorary distinctions became very great. There
were the clarissimi--the perfectissimi--and the egregii--bearing the
same relative dignity in the court-guide of the fourth century, as the
dukes, marquises, earls, and viscounts of the peerage-books of the
present day. But so much did all distinction flow from proximity to the
throne, that all these high-sounding names owed their value to the fact
of their being bestowed on the associates of the sovereign. The word
Count, which is still the title borne by foreign nobles, comes from the
Latin word which means "companion." There was a Comes, or Companion, of
the Sacred Couch, or lord chamberlain--the Companion of the Imperial
Service, or lord high steward--a Companion of the Imperial Stables,
or lord high constable; through all these dignitaries, step above
step, the glorious ascent extended, till it ended in the Companion of
Private Affairs, or confidential secretary. At the head of all, sacred
and unapproachable, stood the embodied Power of the Roman world, who,
as he had given titles to all the magnates of his court, heaped also
a great many on himself. His principal appellation, however, was not
as in our degenerate days "Majesty," whether "Most Catholic," "Most
Christian," or "Most Orthodox," but consisted in the rather ambitious
attribute--eternity. "Your Eternity" was the phrase addressed to some
miserable individual whose reign was ended in a month. It was proposed
by this division of the Roman aristocracy to furnish the empire with
a body for show and a body for use; the latter consisting of the real
generals of the armies and administrators of the provinces. And with
this view the two were kept distinct; but military discipline suffered
by this partition. The generals became discontented when they saw
wealth and dignities heaped upon the titular nobles of the court; and
to prevent the danger arising from ill will among the legions on the
frontier, the emperor withdrew the best of his soldiers from the posts
where they kept the barbarians in check, and entirely destroyed their
military spirit by separating them into small bodies and stationing
them in towns. This exposed the empire to the foreign foes who still
menaced it from the other side of the boundary, and gave fresh
settlements in the heart of the country to the thousands of barbarian
youth who had taken service with the eagles. In every legion there was
a considerable proportion of this foreign element: in every district
of the empire, therefore, there were now settled the advanced guards
of the unavoidable invasion. Men with barbaric names, which the Romans
could not pronounce, walked about Roman towns dressed in Roman uniforms
and clothed with Roman titles. There were consulars and patricians in
Ravenna and Naples, whose fathers had danced the war-dance of defiance
when beginning their march from the Vistula and the Carpathian range.
All these troops must be supported--all these dignitaries maintained
in luxury. How was this done? The ordinary revenue of the empire in
the time of Constantine has been computed at forty millions of our
money a year. Not a very large amount when you consider the number of
the population; but this is the sum which reached the treasury. The
gross amount must have been far larger, and an ingenious machinery was
invented by which the tax was rigorously collected; and this machinery,
by a ludicrous perversion of terms, was made to include one of the most
numerous classes of the artificial nobility created by the imperial
will. In all the towns of the empire some little remains were still to
be found of the ancient municipal government, of which practically they
had long been deprived. There were nominal magistrates still; and among
these the _Curials_ held a distinguished rank. They were the men who,
in the days of freedom, had filled the civic dignities of their native
city--the aldermen, we should perhaps call them, or, more nearly, the
justices of the peace. They were now ranked with the peerage, but with
certain duties attached to their elevation which few can have regarded
in the light of privilege or favour. To qualify them for rank, they
were bound to be in possession of a certain amount of land. They were,
therefore, a territorial aristocracy, and never was any territorial
aristocracy more constantly under the consideration of the government.
It was the duty of the curials to distribute the tax-papers in their
district; but, in addition to this, it was unfortunately their duty
to see that the sum assessed on the town and neighbourhood was paid
up to the last penny. When there was any deficiency, was the emperor
to suffer? Were the nobilissimi, the patricii, the egregii, to lose
their salaries? Oh, no! As long as the now ennobled curial retained
an acre of his estate, or could raise a mortgage on his house, the
full amount was extracted. The tax went up to Rome, and the curial,
if there had been a poor's house in those days, would have gone into
it--for he was stripped of all. His farm was seized, his cattle were
escheated; and when the defalcation was very great, himself, his wife
and children were led into the market and sold as slaves. Nothing so
rapidly destroyed what might have been the germ of a middle class
as this legalized spoliation of the smaller landholders. Below this
rank there was absolutely nothing left of the citizenship of ancient
times. Artificers and workmen formed themselves into companies; but
the trades were exercised principally by slaves for the benefit of
their owners. These slaves formed now by far the greatest part of the
Roman population, and though their lot had gradually become softened
as their numbers increased, and the domestic bondsman had little to
complain of except the greatest of all sorrows, the loss of freedom,
the position of the rural labourers was still very bad. There were
some of them slaves in every sense of the word--mere chattels, which
were not so valuable as horse or dog. But the fate of others was
so far mitigated that they could not be sold separate from their
family--that they could not be sold except along with the land; and at
last glimpses appear of a sort of rent paid for certain portions of the
lord's estate in full of all other requirements. But this process had
again to be gone through when many centuries had elapsed, and a new
state of society had been fully established, and it will be sufficient
to remind you that in the fourth century, to which we are now come,
the Roman world consisted of a monarchy where all the greatness and
magnificence of the empire were concentrated on the emperor and his
court; that the monarchical system was rapidly pervading the Church;
and that below these two distinct but connected powers there was no
people, properly so called--the country was oppressed and ruined, and
the ancient dignity of Rome transplanted to new and foreign quarters,
at the sacrifice of all its oldest and most elevating associations.
The half-depopulated city of Romulus and the Kings--of the Consuls
and Augustus, looked with ill-disguised hatred and contempt on the
modern rival which denied her the name of Capital, and while fresh
from the builder's hand, robbed her of the name of the Eternal City.
We shall see great events spring from this jealousy of the two towns.
In the mean time, we shall finish our view of Constantine by recording
the greatness of his military skill, and merely protest against the
enrolment in the list of _saints_ of a man who filled his family
circle with blood--who murdered his wife, his son, and his nephew,
encouraged the contending factions of the now disputatious Church--gave
a fallacious support to the orthodox Athanasius, and died after a
superstitious baptism at the hands of the heretical Arius. [A.D. 337.]
An unbiassed judgment must pronounce him a great politician, who
played with both parties as his tools, a Christian from expediency and
not from conviction. It is a pity that the subserviency of the Greek
communion has placed him in the number of its holy witnesses, for we
are told by a historian that when the emperor, after the dreadful
crimes he had perpetrated, applied at the heathen shrines for expiatory
rites, the priests of the false gods had truly answered, "there are no
purifications for such deeds as these." But nothing could be refused
to the benefactor of the Church. The great ecclesiastical council of
this age, (325), consisting of three hundred and eighteen bishops,
and presided over by Constantine in person, gave the Nicene Creed as
the result of their labours--a creed which is still the symbol of
Christendom, but which consists more of a condemnation of the heresies
which were then in the ascendant, than in the plain enunciation
of the Christian faith. A layman, we are told, an auditor of the
learned debates in this great assembly, a man of clear and simple
common sense, met some of the disputants, and addressed them in these
words:--"Arguers! Christ and his apostles delivered to us, not the art
of disputation, nor empty eloquence, but a plain and simple rule which
is maintained by faith and good works." The disputants, we are further
told, were so struck with this undeniable truth that they acknowledged
their error at once.
But not yet firm and impregnable were the bulwarks of Christianity.
[A.D. 360.] While dreaming anchorites in the deserts of Thebais were
repeating the results of fasting and insanity as the manifestation
of divine favour, the world was startled from its security by the
appalling discovery that the emperor himself, the young and vigorous
Julian, was a follower of the old philosophers, and a worshipper of
the ancient gods. And a dangerous antagonist he was, even independent
of his temporal power. His personal character was irreproachable, his
learning and talent beyond dispute, and his eloquence and dialectic
skill sharpened and improved by an education in Athens itself. Less
than forty years had elapsed since Constantine pronounced the sentence
of banishment on the heathen deities. It was not possible that the
Christian truth was in every instance received where the old falsehood
was driven away. We may therefore conclude, without the aid of historic
evidence, that there must have been innumerable districts--villages
in far-off valleys, hidden places up among the hills--where the name
of Christ had not yet penetrated, and all that was known was, that
the shrine of the local gods was overthrown, and the priests of the
old ceremonial proscribed. When we remember that the heathen worship
entered into almost all the changes of the social and family life--that
its sanction was necessary at the wedding--that its auguries were
indispensable at births--that it crowned the statue of the household
god with flowers--that it kept alive the fire upon the altar of the
emperor--and that it was the guardian of the tombs of the departed, as
it had been the principal consolation during the funeral rites,--we
shall perceive that, irrespective of absolute faith in his system of
belief, the cessation of the priest's office must have been a serious
calamity. The heathen establishment had been enriched by the piety or
ostentation of many generations. There must have been still alive many
who had been turned out of their comfortable temples, many who viewed
the assumption of Christianity into the State as a political engine
to strengthen the tyranny under which the nations groaned. We may see
that self-interest and patriotism may easily have been combined in the
effort made by the old faith to regain the supremacy it had lost. The
Emperor Julian endeavoured to lift up the fallen gods. He persecuted
the Christians, not with fire and sword, but with contempt. He scorned
and tolerated. He preached moderation, self-denial, and purity of life,
and practised all these virtues to an extent unknown upon a throne, and
even then unusual in a bishop's palace.
How those Christian graces, giving a charm and dignity to the
apostate emperor, must have received a still higher authority from
the painful contrast they presented to the agitated condition and
corrupted morals of the Christian Church! Everywhere there was war and
treachery, and ambition and unbelief. Half the great sees were held
by Arians, who raved against the orthodox; and the other half were
held by Athanasius and his followers, who accused their adversaries
of being "more cruel than the Scythians, and more irreconcilable than
tigers." At Rome itself there was an orthodox bishop and an Arian
rival. It is not surprising that Julian, disgusted with the scenes
presented to him by the mutual rage of the Christian sects, thought
the surest method of restoring unity to the empire would be to silence
all the contending parties and reintroduce the peaceful pageantries
of the old Pantheon. If some of the fanciful annotators of the new
faith had allegorized the facts of Christianity till they ceased to
be facts at all, Julian performed the same office for the heathen
gods. Jupiter and the rest were embodiments of the hidden powers of
nature. Vulcan was the personification of human skill, and Venus the
beautiful representative of connubial affection. But men's minds
were now too sharpened with the contact they had had with the real to
be satisfied with such fallacies as these. Eloquent teachers arose,
who separated the eternal truths of revelation from the accessories
with which they were temporarily combined. Ridicule was retorted on
the emperor, who had sneered at the Christian services. Who, indeed,
who had caught the slightest view of the spirituality of Christ's
kingdom, could abstain from laughing at the laborious heathenism of
the master of the world? He cut the wood for sacrifice, he slew the
goat or bull, and, falling down on his knees, puffed with distended
cheeks the sacred fire. He marched to the temple of Venus between
two rows of dissolute and drunken worshippers, striving in vain by
face and attitude to repress the shouts of riotous exultation and the
jeers of the spectators. Then, wherever he went he was surrounded by
pythonesses, and augurs, and fortune-tellers, magicians who could work
miracles, and necromancers who could raise the dead. When he restored
a statue to its ancient niche, he was rewarded by a shake of its head;
when he hung up a picture of Thetis or Amphitrite, she winked in sign
of satisfaction. Where miracles are not believed, the performance of
them is fatal. But his expenditure of money in honouring the gods was
more real, and had clearer results. He nearly exhausted the empire by
the number of beasts he slew. He sent enormous offerings to the shrines
of Dodona, and Delos, and Delphi. He rebuilt the temples, which time or
Christian hatred had destroyed; and, by way of giving life to his new
polity, he condescended to imitate the sect be despised, in its form
of worship, in its advocacy of charity, peace, and good will, and in
its institutions of celibacy and retirement, which, indeed, had been
a portion of heathen virtue before it was admitted into the Christian
Church. But his affected contempt soon degenerated into persecution.
He would have no soldiers who did not serve his gods. Many resigned
their swords. He called the Christians "Galileans," and robbed them
of their property and despitefully used them, to try the sincerity of
their faith. "Does not your law command you," he said, "to submit to
injury, and to renounce your worldly goods? Well, I take possession
of your riches that your march to heaven may be unencumbered." All
moderation was now thrown off on both sides. Resistance was made by the
Christians, and extermination threatened by the emperor. In the midst
of these contentions he was called eastward to resist the aggression
of Sapor, the Persian king. An arrow stretched Julian on his couch.
He called round him his chief philosophers and priests. With them, in
imitation of Socrates, he entered into deep discussions about the soul.
[A.D. 363.] Nothing more heroic than his end, or more eloquent than
his parting discourse. But death did not soften the animosity of his
foes. The Christians boasted that the arrow was sent by an angel, that
visions had foretold the persecutor's fall, and that so would perish
all the enemies of God. The adherents of the emperor in return blamed
the Galileans as his assassins, and boldly pointed to Athanasius, the
leader of the Christians, as the culprit. Athanasius would certainly
not have scrupled to rid the world of such an Agag and Holofernes, but
it is more probable that the death occurred without either a miracle
or a murder. The successors of Julian were enemies of the apostate.
They speedily restored their fellow-believers to the supremacy they
had lost. A ferocious hymn of exultation by Gregory of Nazianzen
was chanted far and wide. Cries of joy and execration resounded in
market-places, and churches, and theatres. The market-places had been
closed against the Christians, their churches had been interdicted,
and the theatres shut up, by the overstrained asceticism of the
deceased. It was perceived that Christianity had taken deeper root
than the apostate had believed, and henceforth no effort could be
made to revivify the old superstition. After a nominal election of
Jovian, the choice of the soldiers fell on two of their favourite
leaders, Valentinian and Valens, brothers, and sufferers in the late
persecutions for their faith. Named emperors of the Roman world, they
came to an amicable division of the empire into East and West. Valens
remained in Constantinople to guard the frontiers of the Danube and
the Euphrates; while Valentinian, who saw great clouds darkening over
Italy and Gaul, fixed his imperial residence in the strong city of
Milan. The separation took place in 364, and henceforth the stream of
history flows in two distinct and gradually diverging channels. This
century has already been marked by the removal of the seat of power
to Constantinople; by the attempt at the restoration of Paganism by
Julian; and we have now to dwell for a little on the third and greatest
incident of all, the invasion of the Goths, and final settlement of
hostile warriors on the Roman soil.
Names that have retained their sound and established themselves as
household words in Europe now meet as at every turn. Valentinian is
engaged in resisting the Saxons. The Britons, the Scots, the Germans,
are pushing their claims to independence; and in the farther East,
the persecutions and tyranny of the contemptible Valens are suddenly
suspended by the news that a people hitherto unheard of had made their
appearance within an easy march of the boundary, and that universal
terror had taken possession of the soldiers of the empire. Who were
those soldiers? We have seen for many years that the policy of the
emperors had been to introduce the barbarians into the military
service of the State, and to expose the wasted and helpless inhabitants
to the rapacity of their tax-gatherers. This system had been carried
to such a pitch, that it is probable there were none but mercenaries
of the most varying interests in the Roman ranks. Yet such is the
effect of discipline, and the pride of military combination, that all
other feelings gave way before it. The Gothic chief, now invested with
command in the Roman armies, turned his arms against his countrymen.
The Albanian, the Saxon, the Briton, elevated to the rank of duke or
count, looked back on Marius and Cæsar as their lineal predecessors in
opposing and conquering the enemies of Rome. The names of the generals
and magistrates, accordingly, which we encounter after this date,
have a strangely barbaric sound. There are Ricimer, and Marcomir, and
Arbogast--and finally, the name which overtopped and outlived them
all, the name of Alaric the Goth. Now, the Goths, we have seen, had
been settled for many generations on the northern side of the Danube.
Much intercourse must have taken place between the inhabitants of the
two banks. There must have been trade, and love, and quarrellings,
and rejoicings. At shorter and shorter intervals the bravest of the
tribes must have passed over into the Roman territory and joined the
Legions. Occasionally a timid or despotic emperor would suddenly order
his armies across, and carry fire and sword into the unsuspecting
country. But on the whole, the terms on which they lived were not
hostile, for the ties which united the two peoples were numerous and
strong. Even the languages in the course of time must have come to be
mutually intelligible, and we read of Gothic leaders who were excellent
judges of Homer and seldom travelled without a few chosen books. This
being the case, what was the consternation of the almost civilized
Goths in the fertile levels of the present Wallachia and Moldavia to
hear that an innumerable horde of dreadful savages, calling themselves
Huns and Magyars, had appeared on the western shore of the Black Sea,
and spread over the land, destroying, murdering, burning whatever
lay in their way! Cooped up for an unknown period, it appeared, on
the northeastern side of the Palus Maeotis, now better known to us
as the Sea of Azof--living on fish out of the Don, and on the cattle
of the long steppes which extend across the Volga, these sons of the
Scythian desert had never been heard of either by the Goths or Romans.
A hideous people to behold, as the perverted imagination of poet or
painter could produce. They were low in stature, but broad-shouldered
and strong. Their wide cheek-bones and small eyes gave them a savage
and cruel expression, which was increased by their want of nose, for
the only visible appearance of that indispensable organ consisted of
two holes sunk into the square expanse of their faces. Fear is not a
flattering painter, but from these rude descriptions it is easy to
recognise the Calmuck countenance; and when we add their small horses,
long spears, and prodigious lightness and activity, we shall see a
very close resemblance between them and their successors in the same
district, the Russian Cossacks of the Don. On, on, came the torrent of
these pitiless, fearless, ugly, dirty, irresistible foes. The Goths,
terrified at their aspect, and bewildered with the accounts they
heard of their numbers and mode of warfare, petitioned the emperor to
give them an asylum on the Roman side. Their prayer was granted on
condition of depositing their children and arms in Roman hands. They
had no time to squabble about terms. Every thing was agreed to. Boats
manned by Roman soldiers were busy, day and night in transporting
the Gothic exiles to the Roman side. Arms and jewels, and wives and
children, the furniture of their tents, and idols of their gods, all
got safely across the guarding river. The Huns, the Alans, and the
other unsightly hordes who had gathered in the pursuit, came down to
the bank, and shouted useless defiance and threats of vengeance. The
broad Danube rolled between; and there rested that night on the Roman
soil a whole nation, different in interest, in manners and religion,
from the population they had joined, numbering upwards of a million
souls, bound together by every thing that constitutes the unity of a
people. The avarice and injustice of the Roman authorities negatived
the clause of the agreement that stipulated for the surrender of the
Gothic arms. To redeem their swords and spears, they parted with
the silver and gold they had amassed in their predatory incursions
on the Roman territory. They know that once in possession of their
weapons they could soon reclaim all they gave--and in no long time
the attempt was made. Fritigern, the leader of their name, led them
against the armies of Rome. Insulted at their audacity, the Emperor
Valens, at the head of three hundred thousand men, met them in the
plain of Adrianople. The existence of the Gothic people was at stake.
[A.D. 379.] They fought with desperation and hatred. The emperor was
defeated, leaving two-thirds of his army on the field of battle.
Seeking safety in a cottage at the side of the road, he was burned by
the inexorable pursuers, who, gathering up their broken lines, marched
steadily through the intervening levels and gazed with enraptured eyes
on the glittering towers and pinnacles of Constantinople itself. But
the walls were high and strongly armed. The barbarians were inveigled
into a negotiation, and mastered by the unequal powers of lying
at all times characteristic of the Greeks. Fritigern consented to
withdraw his troops: some were embodied in the levies of the empire,
and others dispersed in different provinces. Those settled in Thrace
were faithful to their employers, and resisted their ancient enemies
the Huns; but the great body of the discontented conquerors were ready
for fresh assaults on the Roman land. Theodosius, called to the throne
in 379, succeeded in staving off the evil day; but when the final
partition of the empire took place between his two sons--Honorius
and Arcadius--there was nothing to oppose the terrible onset of the
Goths. [A.D. 394.] At their head was Alaric, the descendant of their
original chiefs, and himself the bravest of his warriors. He broke
into Greece, forcing his way through Thermopylæ, and devastated the
native seats of poetry and the arts with fire and sword. The ruler at
Constantinople heard of his advance with terror, and opposed to him
the Vandal Stilicho, the greatest of his generals. But the wily Alaric
declined to fight, and out-manoeuvred his enemies, escaping to the sure
fastnesses of Epirus, and sat down sullen and discontented, meditating
further expeditions into richer plains, and already seeing before him
the prostrate cities of Italy. The terror of Arcadius tried in vain
to soften his rage, or satisfy his ambition with vain titles, among
others, that of Count of the Illyrian Border. The spirit of aggression
was fairly roused. All the Gothic settlers in the Roman territory were
ready to join their countrymen in one great and combined attack;--and
with this position of the personages of the drama, the curtain falls on
the fourth century, while preparations for the great catastrophe are
going on.
FIFTH CENTURY
Emperors.
A.D. _West._
HONORIUS--(_cont._)
424. VALENTINIAN III.
455. PETRONIUS MAXIMUS.
455. AVITUS.
457. MAJORIANUS.
461. SEVERUS.
467. ANTHEMIUS.
472. OLIBIUS.
473. GLYCERIUS.
474. JULIUS NEPOS.
475. AUGUSTULUS ROMULUS.
A.D. _East._
ARCADIUS--(_cont._)
408. THEODOSIUS II.
450. MARCIAN.
457. LEO THE GREAT.
474. ZENO.
491. ANASTASIUS.
King of the Franks.
A.D.
481. CLOVIS.
King of Italy.
A.D.
489. THEODORIC.
Authors.
CHRYSOSTOM, JEROME, AUGUSTINE, PELAGIUS, (405,) SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS,
PATRICIUS, MACROBIUS, VICENTIUS OF LERINS, (died 450,) CYRIL, BISHOP OF
ALEXANDRIA, (412-444.)
THE FIFTH CENTURY.
END OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE--FORMATION OF MODERN STATES--GROWTH OF
ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORITY.
We find the same actors on the stage when the curtain rises again, but
circumstances have greatly changed. After his escape from Stilicho,
Alaric had been "lifted on the shield," the wild and picturesque way
in which the warlike Goths nominated their kings, and henceforth
was considered the monarch of a separate and independent people, no
longer the mere leader of a band of predatory barbarians. In this new
character he entered into treaties with the emperors of Constantinople
or Rome, and broke them, as if he had already been the sovereign of a
civilized state.
In 403 he broke up from his secure retreat on the Adriatic, and burst
into Italy, spreading fire and famine wherever he went. Honorius,
the Emperor of the West, fled from Milan, and was besieged in Asti
by the Goths. Here would have ended the imperial dynasty, some years
before its time, if it had not been for the watchful Stilicho. This
Vandal chief flew to the rescue of Honorius, repulsed Alaric with
great slaughter, and delivered his master from his dangerous position.
The grateful emperor entered Rome in triumph, and for the last time
the Circus streamed with the blood of beasts and men. [A.D. 408.] He
retired after this display to the inaccessible marshes of Ravenna, at
the mouths of the Po, and, secure in that fortress, sent an order to
have his preserver and benefactor murdered; Stilicho, the only hope
of Rome, was assassinated, and Alaric once more saw all Italy within
his grasp. It was not only the Goths who followed Alaric's command. All
the barbarians, of whatever name or race, who had been transplanted
either as slaves or soldiers--Alans, Franks, and Germans--rallied
round the advancing king, for the impolitic Honorius had issued an
order for the extermination of all the tribes. There were Britons,
and Saxons, and Suabians. It was an insurrection of all the manly
elements of society against the indescribable depravation of the
inhabitants of the Peninsula. The wildest barbarian blushed in the
midst of his ignorance and rudeness to hear of the manners of the
highest and most distinguished families in Rome. Nobody could hold out
a hand to avert the judgment that was about to fall on the devoted
city. Ambassadors indeed appeared, and bought a short delay at the
price of many thousand pounds' weight of gold and silver, and of large
quantities of silk; but these were only additional incitements to the
cupidity of the invader. Tribe after tribe rose up with fresh fury;
warriors of every hue and shape, and with every manner of equipment.
The handsome Goth in his iron cuirass; the Alan with his saddle covered
with human skin; the German making a hideous sound by shrieking on
the sharp edge of his shield; and the countryman of Alaric himself
sounding the "horn of battle," which terrified the Romans with its
ominous note--all started forward on the march. At the head of each
detachment rode a band, singing songs of exultation and defiance; and
the Romans, stupefied with fear, saw these innumerable swarms defile
towards the Milvian bridge and close up every access to the town.
There was no corn from Sicily or Africa; a pest raged in every house,
and hunger reduced the inhabitants to despair. The gates were thrown
open, and all the pent-up animosity of the desert was poured out upon
the mistress and corrupter of the world. For six days the city was
given up to remorseless slaughter and universal pillage. The wealth
was incalculable. The captives were sold as slaves. The palaces were
overthrown, and the river choked with carcasses and the treasures of
art which the barbarians could not appreciate. "The new Babylon," cries
Bossuet, the great Bishop of Meaux, "rival of the old, swelled out like
her with her successes, and, triumphing in her pleasures and riches,
encountered as great a fall." And no man lamented her fate.
[A.D. 410.]
Alaric, who had thus achieved a victory denied to Hannibal and Pyrrhus,
resolved to push his conquests to the end of Italy. But on his march
towards the Straits of Sicily, illness overtook him. His life had been
unlike that of other men, and his burial was to excite the wonder of
the Bruttians, among whom he died. A large river was turned from its
course, and in its channel a deep grave was dug and ornamented with
monumental stone. To this the body of the barbaric king was carried,
clothed in full armour, and accompanied with some of the richest spoils
of Rome; and then the stream was turned on again, the prisoners who
had executed the works were slaughtered to conceal the secret of the
tomb, and nobody has ever found out where the Gothic king reposes. But
while the Busentino flowed peaceably on, and guarded the body of the
conqueror from the revenge of the Romans, new perils were gathering
round the throne of the Western emperor. As if the duration of the
empire had been inseparably connected with the capital, the reverence
of mankind was never bestowed on Milan or Ravenna, in which the court
was now established, as it had been upon Rome. Britain had already
thrown off the distant yoke, and submitted to the Saxon invaders.
Spain had also peaceably accepted the rule of the three kindred tribes
of Sueves and Alans and Vandals. Gaul itself had given its adhesion
to the Burgundians (who fixed their seat in the district which still
bears their name) and offered a feeble resistance to any fresh invader.
Ataulf, the brother of Alaric, came to the rescue of the empire, and of
course completed the destruction. He married the sister of Honorius,
and retained her as a hostage of the emperor's good faith. He promised
to restore the revolted provinces to their former master, and succeeded
in overthrowing some competitors who had started up to dispute with
Ravenna the wrecks of former power. He then forced his way into Spain,
and the hopes of the degenerate Romans were high. But murder, as usual,
stopped the career of Ataulf, and all was changed. [A.D. 415.] The
emperor ratified the possessions which he could not dispute, and in
the first twenty years of this century three separate kingdoms were
established in Europe. This was soon followed by a Vandal conquest of
the shores of Africa, which raised Carthage once more to commercial
importance, united Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia to the new-founded
state, and by the creation of a fleet gained the command of the
Mediterranean Sea, and threatened Constantinople itself.
With so many provinces not only torn from the empire, but erected into
hostile kingdoms, nothing was wanting but some new irruption into the
still dependent territories to put a final end to the Roman name. And a
new incursion came. In the very involved relations existing between the
emperors of the East and West, it is difficult to follow the course of
events with any clearness. While the deluded populace of Constantinople
were rejoicing in the fall of their Italian rival, they heard with
amazement, in 441, that a savage potentate, who had pitched his tents
in the plains of Pannonia and Thrace, and kept round him, for defence
or conquest, seven hundred thousand of those hideous-featured Huns who
had spread devastation and terror all over the populations of Asia,
from the borders of China to the Don, had determined on stretching his
conquests over the whole world, and merely hesitated with which of the
doomed empires to begin his career. His name was Attila, or, according
to its native pronunciation, Etzel; and it soon resounded, louder and
more terrifying than that of Alaric the Goth. The Emperor of the East
sent an embassy to this dreadful neighbour, a minute account of which
remains, and from which we learn the barbaric pomp and ceremony of the
leader of the Huns, and the perfidy and debasement of the Greeks. An
attempt was made to poison the redoubtable chief, and he complained
of the guilty ambassador to the very person who had given him his
instructions for the deed. Unsatisfied with the result, the Hunnish
monarch advanced his camp. Constantinople, anxious to ward off the blow
from itself, descanted to the savage king on the exposed condition and
ill-defended wealth of the Italian towns. Treachery of another kind
came to his aid. An offended sister of the emperor sent to Attila her
ring as a mark of espousal, and he now claimed a portion of the empire
as the dowry of his bride. When this was refused, he reiterated his old
claim of satisfaction for the attempt upon his life, and ravaged the
fields of Belgium and Gaul, in the double character of avenger of an
insult and claimant of an inheritance. It does not much matter under
what plea a barbarous chieftain, with six hundred thousand warriors,
makes a demand. It must be answered sword in hand, or on the knees.
The newly-established Frankish and Burgundian kings gathered their
forces in defence of their Christian faith and their recently-acquired
dominions. Attila retired from Orleans, of which he had commenced the
siege, and chose for the battle-field, which was to decide the destiny
of the world, a vast plain not far from Châlons, on the Marne, where
his cavalry would have room to act, and waited the assault of all the
forces that France and Italy could collect. The Visigoths prepared
for the decisive engagement under their king, Theodoric; the Franks
of the Saal under Meroveg; the Ripuarian Franks, the Saxons, and the
Burgundians were under leaders of their own. [A.D. 451.] It was a
fight in which were brought face to face the two conquering races of
the world, and upon its result it depended whether Europe was to be
ruled by a dynasty of Calmucks or left to her free progress under her
Gothic and Teutonic kings. Three hundred thousand corpses marked the
severity of the struggle, but victory rested with the West. Attila
retreated from Gaul, and wreaked his vengeance on the Italian cities.
He destroyed Aquileia, whose terrified inhabitants hid themselves in
the marshes and lagoons which afterwards bore the palaces of Venice;
Vicenza, Padua, and Verona were spoiled and burned. Pavia and Milan
submitted without resistance. On approaching Rome, the venerable
bishop, Saint Leo, met the devastating Hun, and by the gravity of his
appearance, the ransom he offered, and perhaps the mystic dignity
which still rested upon the city whose cause he pleaded, prevailed on
him to retire. Shortly after, the chief of this brief and terrible
visitation died in his tent on the banks of the Danube, and left no
lasting memorial of his irruption except the depopulation his cruelty
had caused, and the ruin he had spread over some of the fairest regions
of the earth.
But Rome, spared by the influence of the bishop from the ravage of
the Huns, could not escape the destroying enmity of Genseric and the
Vandals. Dashing across from Africa, these furious conquerors destroyed
for destruction's sake, and affixed the name of Vandalism on whatever
is harsh and unrefined. For fourteen days the spoilers were at work in
Rome, and it is only wonderful that after so many plunderings any thing
worth plundering remained. When the sated Vandals crossed to Carthage
again, the Gothic and Suevic kings gave the purple to whatever puppet
they chose. Afraid still to invest themselves with the insignia of
the Imperial power, they bestowed them or took them away, and at last
rendered the throne and the crown so contemptible, that when Odoacer
was proclaimed King of Italy, the phantom assembly which still called
itself the Roman Senate sent back to Constantinople the tiara and
purple robe, in sign that the Western Empire had passed away. Zeno, the
Eastern ruler, retained the ornaments of the departed sovereignty, and
sent to the Herulean Odoacer the title of "Patrician," sole emblem left
of the greatness and antiquity of the Roman name. It may be interesting
to remember that the last who wore the Imperial crown was a youth who
would probably have escaped the recognition of posterity altogether, if
he had not, by a sort of cruel mockery of his misfortunes, borne the
names of Romulus Augustulus--the former recalling the great founder of
the city, and the latter the first of the Imperial line.
Thus, then, in 476, Rome came to her deserved and terrible end; and
before we trace the influence of this great event upon the succeeding
centuries, it will be worth while to devote a few words to the cause of
its overthrow. These were evidently three--the ineradicable barbarity
and selfishness of the Roman character, the depravation of manners in
the capital, and the want of some combining influence to bind all the
parts of the various empire into a whole. From the earliest incidents
in the history of Rome, we gather that she was utterly regardless of
human life or suffering. Her treatment of her vanquished enemies, and
her laws upon parental authority, upon slaves and debtors, show the
pitiless disposition of her people. Look at her citizens at any period
of her career--her populace or her consuls--in the field of battle
or in the forum, you will always find them the true descendants of
those blood-stained refugees, who established their den of robbers on
the seven hills, and pretended they were led by a man who had been
suckled by a wolf. While conquest was their object, this sanguinary
disposition enabled them to perform great exploits; but when victory
had secured to them the blessings of peace and safety, the same thirst
for excitement continued. They cried out for blood in the amphitheatre,
and had no pleasure in any display which was not accompanied with pain.
The rival chief who had perilled their supremacy in the field was led
in ferocious triumph at the wheel of his conqueror, and beheaded or
flogged to death at the gate of the Capitol. The wounded gladiator
looked round the benches of the arena in hopes of seeing the thumbs
of the spectators turned down--the signal for his life being spared;
but matrons and maids, the high and the low, looked with unmoved faces
upon his agonies, and gave the signal for his death without remorse.
They were the same people, even in their amusements, who gave order for
the destruction of Numantium and Carthage. But cruelty was not enough.
They sank into the wildest vices of sensuality, and lost the dignity
of manhood, and the last feelings of self-respect. Never was a nation
so easily habituated to slavery. They licked the hand that struck them
hardest. They hung garlands for a long time on the tomb of Nero. They
insisted on being revenged on the murderers of Commodus, and frequently
slew more citizens in broils in the street and quarrels in the theatre,
than had fought at Cannæ or Zama. It might have been hoped that the
cruelty which characterized the days of their military aggression
would be softened down when they had become the acknowledged rulers of
the world. Luxury itself, it might be thought, would be inconsistent
with the sight of blood. But in this utterly detestable race the two
extremes of human society seemed to have the same result. The brutal,
half-clothed savage of an early age conveyed his tastes as well as his
conquests to the enervated voluptuary of the empire. The virtues, such
as they were, of that former period--contempt of danger, unfaltering
resolution, and a certain simplicity of life--had departed, and all the
bad features were exaggerated. Religion also had disappeared. Even a
false religion, if sincerely entertained, is a bond of union among all
who profess its faith. But between Rome and its colonies, and between
man and man, there was soon no community of belief. The sweltering
wretches in the Forum sneered at the existence of Bacchus in the midst
of his mysteries, and imitated the actions of their gods, while they
laughed at the hypocrisy of priests and augurs, who treated them as
divine. A cruel, depraved, godless people--these were the Romans who
had enslaved the world with their arms and corrupted it with their
civilization. When their capital fell, men felt relieved from a burden
and shame. The lessons of Christianity had been thrown away on a
population too gross and too truculent to receive them. Some of gentler
mould than others had received the Saviour; but to the mass of Romans
the language of peace and justice, of forgiveness and brotherhood, was
unknown. It was to be the worthier recipients of a pure and elevating
faith, that the Goth was called from his wilderness and the German from
his forest.
But the faith had to be purified itself before it was fitted for the
reception of the new conquerors of the world. The dissensions of the
Christian Churches had added only a fresh element of weakness to the
empire of Rome. There were heretics everywhere, supporting their
opinions with bigotry and violence--Arians, Sabellians, Montanists, and
fifty names besides. Torn by these parties, dishonoured by pretended
conversions, the result of flattery and ambition, the Christian Church
was further weakened by the effect of wealth and luxury upon its
chiefs. While contending with rival sects upon some point of discipline
or doctrine, they made themselves so notorious for the desire of
riches, and the infamous arts they practised to get themselves
appointed heirs of the rich members of their congregations, that a
law was passed making a conveyance in favour of a priest invalid. And
it is not from Pagan enemies or heretical rivals we learn this--it
is from the letters still extant of the most honoured Fathers of the
Church. One of them tells us that the Prefect Pretextatus, alluding
to the luxury of the Pontiffs, and to the magnificence of their
apparel, said to Pope Damasus, "Make me Bishop of Rome, and I will
turn Christian." "Far, then," says a Roman Catholic historian of our
own day, "from strengthening the Roman world with its virtues, the
Christian society seemed to have adopted the vices it was its office
to overcome." But the fall of Roman power was the resurrection of
Christianity. It had a Resurrection, because it had had a Death, and a
new world was now prepared for its reception. Its everlasting truths,
indeed, had been full of life and vigour all through the sad period
of Roman depravation, but the ground was unfitted for their growth;
and the great characteristic of this century is not the conquest of
Rome by Alaric the Goth, or the dreadful assault on Europe by Attila
the Hun, or the final abolition of the old capital of the world by
Odoacer the Herulean, but rather the ecclesiastical chaos which spread
over the earth. The age of martyrs had passed--the philosophers had
begun their pestiferous tamperings with the facts of revelation--and
over all rioted and stormed an ambitious and worldly priesthood, who
hated their opponents with more bitterness than the heathens had
displayed against the Christians, and ran wild in every species of
lawlessness and vice. The deserts and caves which used to give retreat
to meditative worshippers or timid believers, now teemed with thousands
of furious and fanatical monks, who rushed occasionally into the great
cities of the empire, and filled their streets with blood and rapine.
Guided by no less fanatical bishops, they spread murder and terror
over whole provinces. Alexandria stood in more fear of these professed
recluses than of an army of hostile soldiers. "There is a race," says
Eunapius, "called monks--men indeed in form, but hogs in life, who
practise and allow abominable things. Whoever wears a black robe, and
is not ashamed of filthy garments, and presents a dirty face to the
public view, obtains a tyrannical authority." False miracles, absurd
prophecies, and ludicrous visions were the instruments with which these
and other impostors established their power. Mad enthusiasts imprisoned
themselves in dungeons, or exposed themselves on the tops of pillars,
naked, except by the growth of their tangled hair, and the coating of
filth upon their persons,--and gained credit among the ignorant for
self-denial and abnegation of the world.
All the high offices of the Church were so lucrative and honourable as
to be the object of universal desire.
To be established archbishop of a diocese cost more lives than the
conquest of a province. When the Christian community needed support
from without, they had recourse to some rich or powerful individual,
some general of an army, or governor of a district, and begged him
to assume the pastoral staff in exchange for his military sword.
Sometimes the assembled crowd cried out the name of a favourite who
was not even known to be a Christian, and the mitre was conveyed by
acclamation to a person who had to undergo the ceremonies of baptism
and ordination before he could place it on his head. Sometimes the
exigencies of the congregation required a scholar or an orator for
its head. It applied to a philosopher to undertake its direction. He
objected that his philosophy had been declared inconsistent with the
Christian faith, and his mode of life contrary to Christian precept.
They forgave him his philosophy, his horses and hounds, his wife and
children, and constituted him their chief. Age was of no consequence.
A youth of eighteen has been saluted bishop by a cry which seemed to
the multitude the direct inspiration of Heaven, and seated in the
chair of his dignity almost without his knowledge. Once established
on his episcopal seat, he had no superior. The Roman Bishop had not
yet asserted his supremacy over the Church. Each prelate was sovereign
Pontiff of his own see, and his doctrines for a long time regulated the
doctrines of his flock. Under former bishops, Milan had been Arian,
under Ambrose it was orthodox, and with a change of master might
have been Arian again. The emperors had occasionally interfered with
their authoritative decisions, but generally the dispute was left in
divided dioceses to be settled by argument, when the rivals' tempers
allowed such a mode of warfare, but more frequently by armed bands of
the retainers of the respective creeds, and sometimes by an appeal to
miracles. But with this century a new spirit of bitterness was let
loose upon the Church. Councils were held, at which the doctrines of
the minority were declared dangerous to the State, and the civil power
was invoked to carry the sentence into effect. In Africa, where the
great name of Augustin of Hippo admitted no opposition, the Donatists,
though represented by no less than two hundred and seventy-nine
prelates, were condemned as heretics, and given over to the persecuting
sword. But in other quarters the dissidents looked for support to
the civil power, when it happened to be of their opinion in Church
affairs. Rome chose Clovis, the politic and energetic Frank, for its
guardian and protector, and the Arians threw themselves in the same
way on the support of the Visigoths and Burgundians. A difference of
faith became a pretext for war. Clovis, who envied his neighbours
their territories south of the Loire, led an expedition against them,
crying, "It is shameful to see those Arians in possession of such
goodly lands!" and everywhere a vast activity was perceptible in
the Church, because its interests were now connected with those of
kings and peoples. In earlier times, discussions were carried on on a
great variety of doctrines which, though widely spread, were not yet
authoritatively declared to be articles of faith. St. Jerome himself,
and others, had had to defend their opinions against the attacks of
various adversaries, who, without ceasing to be considered true members
of the Church, wrote powerfully against the worship of martyrs and
their relics; against the miracles professedly wrought at their tombs;
against fasting, austerities, and celibacy. No appeal was made on
those occasions either to the Bishop of Rome as head of the Church,
or to the emperor as head of the State. Now, however, the spirit of
moderation was banished, and the decrees of councils were considered
superior to private or even diocesan judgment. Life and freedom of
discussion were at an end under an enforced and rigid uniformity. But
the struggle lasted through the century. It was the period of great
convulsions in the State, and disputations, wranglings, and struggle
in the Church. How these, in a State tortured by perpetual change,
and a Church filled with energy and fire, acted upon each other, may
easily be supposed. The doubtful and unsteady civil government had
subordinated itself to the turbulent ardour of the perplexed but
highly-animated Church. After the conquest of Rome, where was the
barbaric conqueror to look for any guide to internal unity, or any
relic of the vanished empire by which to connect himself with the past?
There was only the Church, which was now not only the professed teacher
of obedience, peace, and holiness, but the only undestroyed institution
of the State. The old population of Rome had been wasted by the sword,
and famine, and deportation. The emperors of the West had left the
scene; the Roman Senate was no more. There was but one authority which
had any influence on the wretched crowd who had returned to their
ancient capital, or sought refuge in its ruined palaces or grass-grown
streets from the pursuit of their foes; and that was the Bishop of
the Christian congregation--whose palace had been given to him by
Constantine--who claimed already the inheritance of St. Peter--and who
carried to the new government either the support of a willing people,
or the enmity of a seditious mob.
[A.D. 489.]
A new hero came upon the scene in the person of Theodoric, the
Ostrogoth. Odoacer tried in vain to resist the two hundred thousand
warriors of this tribe who poured upon Italy in 490, and, after
a long resistance in Ravenna, yielded the kingdom of Italy to his
rival. Theodoric, though an Arian, cultivated the good opinion of the
orthodox, and gained the favour of the Roman Bishop. He had almost a
superstitious veneration for the dignities of ancient Rome. He treated
with respect an assembly which called itself the Senate, but did not
allow his love of antiquity to blind him to the degeneracy of the
present race. He interdicted arms to all men of Roman blood, and tried
in vain to prevent his followers from using the appellation "Roman"
as their bitterest form of contempt. Lands were distributed to his
followers, and they occupied and improved a full third of Italy. Equal
laws were provided for both populations, but he forbade the toga and
the schools to his countrymen, and left the studies and refinements of
life, and offices of civil dignity, to the native race. The hand that
holds the pen, he said, becomes unfitted for the sword. But, barbarian
as he was called, he restored the prosperity which the fairest region
of the earth had lost under the emperors. Bridges, aqueducts, theatres,
baths, were repaired; palaces and churches built. Agriculture was
encouraged, attempts were made to drain the Pontine Marshes; iron-mines
were worked in Dalmatia, and gold-mines in Bruttium. Large fleets
protected the coasts of the Mediterranean from pirates and invaders.
Population increased, taxes were diminished; and a ruler who could
neither read nor write attracted to his court all the learned men of
his time. Already the energy of a new and enterprising people was felt
to the extremities of his dominions. A new race, also, was established
in Gaul. Klodwig, leader of the Franks, received baptism at the hands
of St. Remi in 496, and began the great line of French rulers, who,
passing his name through the softened sound of Clovis, presented, in
the different families who succeeded him, eighteen kings of the name of
Louis, as if commemorative of the founder of the monarchy.
In England the petty kingdoms of the Heptarchy were in the course of
formation, and though, when viewed closely, we seemed a divided and
even hostile collection of individual tribes, the historian combines
the separate elements, and tells us that, before the fifth century
expired, another branch of the barbarians had settled into form and
order, and that the Anglo-Saxon race had taken possession of its place.
With these newly-founded States rising with fresh vigour from among the
decayed and festering remains of an older society, we look hopefully
forward to what the future years will show us.
SIXTH CENTURY.
Kings of the Franks.
A.D.
CLOVIS.--(_cont._)
511. CHILDEBERT, THIERRY, CLOTAIRE, CLODOMIR.
559. CLOTAIRE (sole King).
562. CHARIBERT, GONTRAN, SIGEBERT and CHILDERIC.
584. CLOTAIRE II., (of Soissons.)
596. THIERRY II., THEODOBERT, (of Paris and Austrasia.)
Emperors of the East.
A.D.
ANASTASIUS.--(_cont._)
518. JUSTIN.
527. JUSTINIAN I.
565. JUSTIN II.
578. TIBERIUS II.
582. MAURICE.
Authors.
BOETHIUS, PROCOPIUS, GILDAS, GREGORY OF TOURS, COLUMBA, (520-597,)
PRISCIAN, COLUMBANUS, BENEDICT, EVAGRIUS, (SCHOLASTICUS,) FULGENTIUS,
GREGORY THE GREAT.
THE SIXTH CENTURY.
BELISARIUS AND NARSES IN ITALY--SETTLEMENT OF THE LOMBARDS--LAWS OF
JUSTINIAN--BIRTH OF MOHAMMED.
Theodoric, though not laying claim to universal empire in right of
his possession of Rome and Italy, exercised a sort of supremacy over
his contemporaries by his wisdom and power. He also strengthened his
position by family alliances. His wife was sister of Klodwig or Clovis,
King of the Franks. He married his own sister to Hunric, King of the
Vandals, his niece to the Thuringian king. One of his daughters he
gave to Sigismund, King of the Burgundians, and the other to Alaric
the Second, King of the Visigoths. Relying on the double influence
which his relationship and reputation secured to him, he rebuked or
praised the potentates of Europe as if they had been his children, and
gave them advice in the various exigencies of their affairs, to which
they implicitly submitted. He would fain have kept alive what was
left of the old Roman civilization, and heaped honours on the Senator
Cassiodorus, one of the last writers of Rome. "We send you this man
as ambassador," he said to the King of the Burgundians, "that your
people may no longer pretend to be our equals when they perceive what
manner of men we have among us." But his rule, though generous, was
strict. He imprisoned the Bishop of Rome for disobedience of orders
in a commission he had given him, and repressed discontent and the
quarrels of the factions with an unsparing hand. But the death of this
great and wise sovereign showed on what unstable foundations a barbaric
power is built. Frightful tragedies were enacted in his family. His
daughter was murdered by her nephew, whom she had associated with her
in the guardianship of her son. But vengeance overtook the wrong-doer,
and a strange revolution occurred in the history of the world. The
emperor reigning at Constantinople was the celebrated Justinian. He
saw into what a confused condition the affairs of the new conquerors
of Italy had fallen. Rallying round him all the recollections of the
past--giving command of his armies to one of the great men who start
up unexpectedly in the most hopeless periods of history, whose name,
Belisarius, still continues to be familiar to our ears--and rousing
the hostile nationalities to come to his aid, he poured into the
peninsula an army with Roman discipline and the union which community
of interests affords. [A.D. 535.] In a remarkably short space of time,
Belisarius achieved the conquest of Italy. The opposing soldiers threw
down their arms at sight of the well-remembered eagles. The nations
threw off the supremacy of the Ostrogoths. Belisarius had already
overthrown the kingdom of the Vandals and restored Africa to the empire
of the East. He took Naples, and put the inhabitants to the sword.
He advanced upon Rome, which the Goths deserted at his approach. The
walls of the great city were restored, and a victory over the fugitives
at Perugia seemed to secure the whole land to its ancient masters.
But Witig, the Ostrogoth, gathered courage from despair. He besought
assistance from the Franks, who had now taken possession of Burgundy;
and volunteers from all quarters flocked to his standard, for he had
promised them the spoils of Milan. Milan was immensely rich, and had
espoused the orthodox faith. The assailants were Arians, and intent on
plunder. Such destruction had scarcely been seen since the memorable
slaughter of the Huns at Châlons on the Marne. The Ostrogoths and
Burgundian Franks broke into the town, and the streets were piled up
with the corpses of all the inhabitants. There were three hundred
thousand put to death, and multitudes had died of famine and disease.
The ferocity was useless, and Belisarius was already on the march;
Witig was conquered, in open fight, while he was busy besieging Rome;
Ravenna itself, his capital, was taken, and the Ostrogothic king was
led in triumph along the streets of Constantinople.
[A.D. 540.]
But the conqueror of the Ostrogoths fell into disfavour at court. He
was summoned home, and a great man, whom his presence in Italy had kept
in check, availed himself of his absence. Totila seemed indeed worthy
to succeed to the empire of his countryman Theodoric. He again peopled
the utterly exhausted Rome; he restored its buildings, and lived among
the new-comers himself, encouraging their efforts to give it once more
the appearance of the capital of the world. But these efforts were
in vain. There was no possibility of reviving the old fiction of the
identity of the freshly-imported inhabitants and the countrymen of
Scipio and Cæsar. Only one link was possible between the old state of
things and the new. It was strange that it was left for the Christian
Bishop to bridge over the chasm that separated the Rome of the
Consulship and the Empire from the capital of the Goths. Yet so it was.
While the short duration of the reigns of the barbaric kings prevented
the most sanguine from looking forward to the stability of any power
for the future, the immunity already granted to the clerical order, and
the sanctuary afforded, in the midst of the wildest excesses of siege
and storm, by their shrines and churches, had affixed a character of
inviolability and permanence to the influence of the ecclesiastical
chief. At Constantinople, the presence of the sovereign, who affected a
grandeur to which the pretensions to divinity of the Roman emperors had
been modesty and simplicity, kept the dignity of the Bishop in a very
secondary place. But at Rome there was no one left to dispute his rank.
His office claimed a duration of upwards of four hundred years; and
though at first his predecessors had been fugitives and martyrs, and
even now his power had no foundation except in the willing obedience
of the members of his flock, the necessity of his position had forced
him to extend his claims beyond the mere requirements of his spiritual
rule. During the ephemeral occupations of the city by Vandals and Huns
and Ostrogoths, and all the tribes who successively took possession of
the great capital, he had been recognised as the representative of the
most influential portion of the inhabitants. As it naturally followed
that the higher the rank of a ruler or intercessor was, the more likely
his success would be, the Christians of the orthodox persuasion had
the wisdom to raise their Bishop as high as they could. He had stood
between the devoted city and the Huns; he had promised obedience or
threatened resistance to the Goths, according to the conduct pursued
with regard to his flock by the conquerors. He had also lent to
Belisarius all the weight of his authority in restoring the power of
the emperors, and from this time the Bishop of Rome became a great
civil as well as ecclesiastical officer. All parties in turn united in
trying to win him over to their cause--the Arian kings, by kindness
and forbearance to his adherents; and the orthodox, by increasing the
rights and privileges of his see. And already the policy of the Roman
Pontiffs began to take the path it has never deserted since. They
looked out in all quarters for assistance in their schemes of ambition
and conquest. Emissaries were despatched into many nations to convert
them, not from heathenism to Christianity, but from independence to an
acknowledgment of their subjection to Rome. It was seen already that
a great spiritual empire might be founded upon the ruins of the old
Roman world, and spread itself over the perplexed and unstable politics
of the barbaric tribes. No means, accordingly, were left untried to
extend the conquests of the spiritual Cæsar. When Clovis the Frank was
converted by the entreaties of his wife from Arianism to the creed
of the Roman Church, the orthodox bishops of France considered it a
victory over their enemies, though these enemies were their countrymen
and neighbours. And from henceforth we find the different confessions
of faith to have more influence in the setting up or overthrowing of
kingdoms than the strength of armies or the skill of generals. Narses,
who was appointed the successor of Belisarius, was a believer in the
decrees of the Council of Nice. His orthodoxy won him the support of
all the orthodox Huns and Heruleans and Lombards, who formed an army
of infuriated missionaries rather than of soldiers, and gained to his
cause the majority of the Ostrogoths whom it was his task to fight.
Totila in vain tried to bear up against this invasion. The heretical
Ostrogoths, expelled from the towns by their orthodox fellow-citizens,
and ill supported by the inhabitants of the lands they traversed,
were defeated in several battles; and at last, when the resisting
forces were reduced to the paltry number of seven thousand men, their
spirits broken by defeat, and a continuance in Italy made useless by
the hostile feelings of the population, they applied to Narses for
some means of saving their lives. He furnished them with vessels,
which carried them from the lands which, sixty years before, had
been assigned them by the great Theodoric, and they found an obscure
termination to so strange and checkered a career, by being lost and
mingled in the crowded populations of Constantinople. This was in
553. The Ostrogoths disappear from history. The Visigoths have still
a settlement at the southwest of France and in the rich regions of
Spain, but they are isolated by their position, and are divided into
different branches. The Franks are a great and seemingly well-cemented
race between the Rhine and the sea. The Burgundians have a form of
government and code of laws which keep them distinct and powerful.
There are nations rising into independence in Germany. In England,
Christianity has formed a bond which practically gives firmness and
unity to the kingdoms of the Heptarchy; and it might be expected
that, having seen so many tribes of strange and varying aspect emerge
from the unknown regions of the East, we should have little to do but
watch the gradual enlightenment of those various races, and see them
assuming, by slow degrees, their present respective places; but the
undiscovered extremities of the earth were again to pour forth a swarm
of invaders, who plunged Italy back into its old state of barbaris
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