READING HALLTHE DOORS OF WISDOM |
THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY
THE
ROMAN EMPIRE UNDER CONSTANTINE THE GREAT
This history of the Middle Ages begins with the double
revolution worked by the Emperor Constantine the Great within the ancient and
decaying Roman Empire and the declining civilization of Antiquity which the
Empire embodied. The first of these revolutions was the transfer of the
imperial capital to Byzantium on the Bosphorus, an act which sealed the
transference, long in preparation, of the centre of gravity of the Empire to
its less anaemic Eastern half. The second was the adoption of Christianity as
the dominant religion of the Empire. It is not that these epoch-making events
created or began the Middle Ages, for medieval times were still some two
centuries in the future and, when they came, there were other elements which
had no less effect on their origin and development. But these two decisions of
one man did lay down conditions without which medieval and modem Europe could
hardly have been shaped and grown.
To himself, we may guess, Constantine seemed no
innovator, but the divinely led preserver of a civilization hardly won and now
in pressing danger, the successor of the long line of autocrats who safeguarded
the peace and the existence of the Roman Empire, the only state where human
life was truly civilized. To appreciate his task and the evolution he could not
foresee we must first reconstruct the Empire of his day, its geography,
populations, structure, and economics, its mentality and its armaments, its
strength, its internal weaknesses and its external foes.
The Roman Empire under Constantine formed a natural
unity cleft into two no less natural halves. Its unity was due to the fact that
it essentially consisted of the lands and peoples clustered round the
Mediterranean Sea. There its civilization had grown. There its dominion had
spread. The way of life of its peoples was formed by Mediterranean climate and
conditions. Under the long Roman peace the inland sea had been the easiest and
widest route of its commerce, supplemented by the rivers of Italy, Spain, and
Gaul. The long Roman roads which spanned the Empire were military and
governmental links in the first place, and only secondarily commercial
arteries: industrial and commercial cities were predominantly on or near the
Mediterranean coasts. The expansion of the Empire was limited in part by
climatic conditions. If we follow on the map the isothermal lines of midwinter
we find that the average temperature of its European provinces does not fall
below freezing-point: beyond that line are obvious military frontiers on or
beyond the Danube. If we take the midsummer, the average temperature on the
frontier in Asia and Africa stands at near 86° Fahrenheit. The frozen north
and the torrid south were equally outside of and alien to the Empire, and the
city-life of the Mediterranean was with difficulty adapted even to the edge of
its native zone. Further afield, as in Britain, the Romano-British country
house, the villa, had to be modified to suit its non-Mediterranean
surroundings.
If only by
reason of its vast extent, with the manifold variations of soil, configuration,
racial composition, and in a subordinate degree of climate which it implied,
the Empire had from the first fallen into natural divisions which impaired its
overruling and largely political unity. As the central power grew weaker in the
political convulsions and disasters of the third century a.d., as the subject populations were
taken up into Roman citizenship and furnished the army and the official
classes, as the memory of crushing conquest by the Empire evaporated, it was no
wonder that the underlying provincial characteristics should pierce through and
modify the common culture imposed upon them. Chief of all these divisions,
however, were those of East and West, which were due to the dual character of
that common civilization itself. The East was the Greek or Hellenized, the West
the Latin or Romanized half of the Empire. Though Rome had borrowed its culture
from Greece, it did so with a difference, and in turn imbued the West, which
had been barbaric, with its own version of civilization, with its unsubtle but
dynamic cult of law and authority and with its native Latin tongue, the fit
vehicle of both and of its plain, matter-of-fact, if rhetorical, thought. The
West was the Latin part of the Empire, however vulgarized and slipshod its
common speech might be. Against the West stood the East, home of ancient
civilizations which had received directly the vivifying, transforming imprint
of Greece before the Roman conquest. Here the language and literature of
civilization were Greek. Much of the Greek spirit had been infused into alien
peoples, inquisitive, speculative, turning the material world which the Roman
took for granted into themes for creative thought. This Greek world was a
borrower, too; from Rome it took law and state organization; from the East, as
we shall see, it took religious conceptions and mysticism which it in turn
passed on to the West. But although they had so much in common, the two halves
were separate in language and ethos, and if they had drawn closer to one
another in the cosmopolitan first two centuries of our era, they were steadily
falling apart in the third. The cultivated class was ceasing to be bilingual.
Both East and
West enjoyed but an imperfect inner unity resting on the educated, official
classes, for the lower men’s positions were in the social scale, the more they
were divided by provincial, local conditions and the less they shared in the
common culture of the Empire. Peasant and craftsman might have little Roman
about them save their reverence—it was hardly modern patriotism—for the
majestic Empire which ruled and protected them, and their uncouth varieties of
vulgar Latin or unpolished Greek. There were great territorial aggregates
within the Empire, marked out by natural frontiers and conditions as well as by
history, which possessed a certain self-consciousness of their separate being.
We cannot call it a national or tribal sentiment; it was rather an ever
stronger provincialism, which could and did become more disruptive to the
Empire than unifying to the territory itself.
To take the West first. There was the imperial, or
ex-imperial, land of Italy, now stretching over all the peninsula south of the
Alps, impoverished, depopulated, and dethroned, but still encircled by a halo
of past greatness, and possessing the eternal city of Rome itself, the maker of
the Empire. Save in a scanty resident aristocracy, dignified and idle, the
Romans of the offspring of countless immigrants might have little in
common with the Romans of old, but the material city they dwelt in retained all
its prestige. It was still in imagination the mistress of the world, a marble
monument compact of temples, palaces and triumphal buildings, enshrining the
imperishable glories of the past, and seeming throughout the Empire she had
made to be a pledge for perpetuity. Yet Italy, with her annex Rhaetia, seems to
have the least identity of all the lands of the Empire. We can speak of Gauls
and Spaniards, but hardly of Italians, when this history begins.
To the east of the Adriatic lay the mountainous lands
of the northwestern Balkan peninsula, which may be somewhat loosely termed
Illyricum. Latin as the spoken language reached here as far as Naissus and
Scupi (the modem Nish and Skoplje), though the ultimate political frontier,
largely for geographical reasons, left both these places in the eastern half of
the Empire. These lands, with their extension, partly mountainous (Noricum) and
partly plain (Pannonia), to the Danube, inhabited by a rude and hardy
peasantry, had in the years 250-300 furnished the best of the Roman troops, the
generals, and the Emperors. They had in fact borne the weight of the Empire’s
defence against its external foes and by consequence had ruled it. But they had
spent themselves in the task, and their depopulation owing to this and to
barbarian inroads was by 300 annulling their preponderance and levelling them
with other exhausted provinces.
To the north-west of Italy came the provinces of Gaul,
defined by its natural boundaries of the Alps, the Pyrenees, the sea, and the
river Rhine. This most Romanized country mainly consisted of two fertile
plains, the greater in the north and west stretching from the lower Rhine to
the Pyrenees, the lesser in the south on the Mediterranean Sea. Between them
rose the mountain range of the Cevennes. The land was linked by ample water-systems,
the Rhone in the south-east, the Garonne and the Loire in the west and centre,
the Seine in the north, and the Rhine on the northeastern German frontier. No
territory was more fitted to be a bulwark of the Empire and a reservoir of men,
but its blood had been drained in the effort, and its eastern districts,
half-Germanic at its conquest, were becoming further Germanized by the
settlements of the German soldiery.
Across the Channel lay the somewhat detached territory
of Roman Britain, with whose physical characters the reader may be assumed to
be familiar. But it is to be remembered that much, especially the Midlands, lay
under woodland, and that marshy riverine districts tended to be thinly
populated. Only the south-east, bounded roughly by a line from the Wash to the
Bristol Channel, was thoroughly Romanized, and even there the towns and country
houses, the villas, were surrounded by barbaric peasants. In the north-west,
save for a few towns like Chester and Viriconium, there were military settlements
and camps, such as those along the Roman Wall or at York, but little
Romanization of the scanty British population. Britain was a bastion worth
having, but its part in imperial politics was occasional and secondary—the very
recruits it provided served mostly on more critical frontiers. Its own
frontier, however, had some amplitude. By land the free barbarians of the north
reached up to the Wall of Hadrian; across the western sea lay Ireland, a less
and less peaceful barbaric neighbour; to the east, as we shall see, the
Germans were becoming nearer enemies.
In contrast to Gaul and Britain, and even to Italy if
we reckon with Italy her alpine Rhaetian appendage, the territory of Spain in
300 had no external frontiers. The Pyrenees, with their few and lofty passes,
separated it from Gaul, the Mediterranean from the inner provinces and from
Africa, the Atlantic as yet from the outer world. Spain internally was divided
by its mountain ridges into several sections of plateau or fertile plain. The
most northerly of these latter, the Cantabrian range, continued the Pyrenees
westward to the Atlantic. South of it lay the barren mountain plateau divided
by the Guadarrama range and watered by the upper Douro and the upper Tagus
rivers. But Lusitania, the lower plains of these two rivers on the Atlantic,
was rainy and fertile. South of the Pyrenees came the rich Mediterranean
watershed of the river Ebro and its kindred eastern coast, Tarraconensis. Most
southerly of all, divided from the central plateau by the Sierra Morena,
extended the fertile, sub-tropic land of Baetica, fringed near its seaboard by
the Sierra Nevada. All these provinces had given men and natural wealth to the
Empire.
Across the Straits of Gibraltar lay the African
territories. From the Atlantic to the Gulf of Gabes (the Syrtes) they were
dominated by the branches of the Atlas range, on the slopes of which or between
which lay fertile Roman provinces, the Mauretanias to the west, Numidia (the
most Roman) in the centre, and Africa, roughly corresponding to modern Tunis,
to the east. Here there were bred the formidable light horse who fought on
other frontiers. Their own limit, at the edge of the desert of Sahara, was held
against their barbaric kinsmen, the free Moors, by troops from Syria.
As we have seen, Latin and Greek met in the Balkan
peninsula that stretched south from the river Danube to the Mediterranean,
varying from a continental to a Mediterranean climate. Its dominating feature
was the great mass of mountains covering the centre, with its eastern offshoots
of Haemus and Rhodope. Around them and parted by them lay wide plains: Moesia,
which was the southern watershed of the Danube, Thrace between Haemus, Rhodope
and the Propontis, Macedonia round the city of Thessalonica, Thessaly south of
Mount Olympus, and the lesser hollows farther south still in Boeotia, Attica,
and the Peloponnese. The whole was a land naturally variegated and divided,
which had been brought to a unity by Roman rule. True Greece to the south
enjoyed still the prestige of its history and its civilization—it was a centre
of culture—but it had always been infertile as a whole, and had long been
terribly depopulated. Macedonia and Thrace were still populous and wealthy,
but Moesia, like Illyricum, had lost the best of its peasantry in the wars and
for the legions.
On the eastern edge of Thrace, between the Black Sea
and the Aegean, flowed the all-but inland waters which divided Europe and Asia,
the two Straits of the Bosphorus and the Hellespont or Dardanelles and the landlocked
Propontis or Sea of Marmora. These coasts were the key-point of both sea and
land-routes between east and west and north and south, and it is, perhaps, a
testimony to the strength of the Empire which could beat back its separate foes
on its many frontiers that it was only towards 300 that an Emperor in search of
a strategic centre from which to defend the East fixed his residence on the
Propontis at Nicomedia.
Nicomedia was on the Asiatic coast in the peninsular
territory now called Asia Minor, which already in prosperity and population was
in a way to become the kernel of the eastern Empire. On its wide and productive
tableland, girt with a rim of mountain ranges, and in its river-valleys on the
west and outer edge of fertile coastland, there dwelt a numerous and hardy
people of peasant tillers and herdsmen, with fishermen and traders in the port
towns. It could rank as an extension of Hellas, if alloyed. The mountain
ranges of the eastern border as far as the upper Euphrates were higher with few
passes, so that with their warlike highlanders they formed in Armenia Minor a
natural defensible frontier; and the same rarity of practicable passes in the
southern range of the Taurus mountains cut off the Cilician coast more from
Asia Minor than from Syria.
Much of the Syrian territory, the watersheds of the
Orontes and the middle Euphrates, was among the most prosperous of the Empire,
and the barren Phoenician coastland flourished on trade and navigation. The
large towns were thoroughly Hellenized. Even the frontier land of Mesopotamia
could be populous while the Persians were kept at bay beyond Nisibis. Palestine
on the south was at any rate a route of transit trade.
Lastly came the river land of Egypt, still, though
over-exploited, a chief granary of the Empire. Here lay a great centre of
Hellenism at Alexandria, one of the wealthiest of ports, and the Greek element
was strong in the Delta and beyond, as it was in Cyrenaica, which was really an
appendage to Egypt between the desert and the sea.
THE FOUNDING OF CONSTANTINOPLE AND THE ADOPTION
OF CHRISTIANITY
It can easily be seen how difficult it was to find a
suitable administrative centre, a real capital, for this vast Empire and its
divergent provinces, when once the pressure of outer foes had become persistent
and severe and the cohesion of its parts was diminished. The wonderful system
of strategic roads might lessen physical obstacles to the movement of troops
and speed up the receipt of intelligence, but it could not obviate the
necessity of the Emperor being within convenient reach of his frontier armies,
and able with as little loss of time as might be to hurry to important provinces
to quell internal revolt. The problem of a centre of the whole Empire was in
fact insoluble. It had already led to the desertion of Rome by the Emperors and
their residence in more conveniently placed cities like Milan. Together with
the ever tighter centralization needed to hold the Empire together and
galvanize the flagging energies of its populations, and with the enormous
increase of business at headquarters which accompanied this, it had inspired a
short-lived scheme of Diocletian for the division of the Roman world among four
co-regent rulers, the two Augusti and their satellite Caesars, each taking
charge of a section of the province’s and frontiers. The arrangement had
foreshadowed the division between East and West.
But while no single centre fit to control the whole
West could be found, the genius of Diocletian perceived that the region of the
Propontis was the natural centre of the East. Thence in the heart of the Empire
watch could be kept on the frontier of the lower Danube and the still more
endangered frontier of Persia. There was the crossing of the routes of trade
and armies, east to west and north to south. Even isolated Egypt was barely
less accessible by sea from Asia Minor than by land across the desert from
Antioch. Diocletian had chosen Nicomedia on the Asiatic shore, with its more
sheltered climate, for his residence; the still more gifted Constantine, taught
by the experience of his war with his rival Licinius and perhaps by its three
years’ siege 130 years earlier by the troops of the Emperor Severus, had the
imaginative insight to choose Byzantium for his new eastern capital. There is
no need to credit him with an impossible prescience of later history. What he
could see was that Byzantium added to the advantages of the Propontine general
situation those of an all-but impregnable port, citadel, and arsenal. With the
new extent he gave it on its promontory on the inner mouth of the Bosphorus,
with its unequalled harbour of the Golden Horn, it commanded the transit
between Europe and Asia, between the Black Sea and the inner Mediterranean. It
could be the bulwark of either continent if invasion swept one or the other. It
could reach out to either for administration and conquest. It was a natural
emporium. Once made, the choice seems so inevitable that the blindness of
earlier rulers for a capital they did not, in their circumstances, require, can
be unfairly blamed. It took fifty years for Constantine’s New Rome, which he
founded in 330 and which was known as his city—Constantinople—to become the
habitual residence and capital of the peripatetic Emperors, but that evolution
Constantine foresaw and planned. He gave it its Senate, which his son made the
equal of Old Rome’s, its Forum, its statues, the spoils of Greece, and its
games; he gave it, too, its corn-supply from Egypt, like that of Old Rome from
Africa, extending an abuse to create a capital. He made it also pre-eminently
a Christian city. Its heathen temples were ghosts left by Byzantium; all that
was new, living, and Constantinian was Christian, like his basilica, whose
foundations can still be seen beside St Sophia.
We may glance at the future unknown to Constantine.
The new creation intensified the division between East and West, for
Constantinople gave cohesion to the East and was bound to be a chief, as it was
the most secure, seat of Empire. Yet an Emperor there was too far off to
control and defend the West; he must have a Western colleague, and his own
interests, indeed his mere successes, were to divert the barbarian pressure
from the Lower Danube to the Rhine. Thus Constantinople’s prosperity and safety
meant a fatal weakening of the more straggling, more exhausted West. It also
entailed the survival of the Eastern Empire for 1100 years. With that strong
heart and behind that bulwark, the East could repel the attacks of enemies
divided by the Propontis and the Straits; it had time for many centuries to
reform itself, not once only, and to survive. Not till the recruiting grounds
of Asia Minor were largely lost in the eleventh century was its strength
fatally impaired; not till its sea-power was lost in the twelfth century did
Constantinople cease to be impregnable and fall a victim to the Latins. Even
then, when the Greeks recovered it, it could still hold out 200 more years as a
frontier fortress of Europe and as the remaining citadel of the ancient world
and of Greek thought and literature, which were to be an inspiring guide and
teacher to the modern evolution of Europe.
This was possible because Constantinople was a profoundly
Greek city and the heir of ancient Hellas. But its Hellenic character was one
of the factors which co-operated to cut short the dominions of the Eastern
Emperors. It was not only the exhaustion of the Persian wars and the
irresistible eruption of the Moslem Arabs which shore off Syria and Egypt from
the Empire; it was also the mental incompatibility of the main populations of
those Asiatic provinces with the Greek core of Asia Minor and the Balkans. Lack
of spiritual sympathy alienated Syrians and Egyptians from their old masters,
while an inner resemblance reconciled them to their new ones. This was the
political significance of the contest between orthodoxy and Monophysitism in
religion, then the one free sphere of the mind in which all, however
illiterate, could take a side.
It was in September 323 that Constantine had
vanquished his remaining rival Licinius in the battle of Chrysopolis (Skutari).
In the November following he traced the line of the walls of New Rome on the
opposite shore of the Bosphorus. He had conquered as a Christian Emperor, and
it was as such and in charge of the Christian Church that he summoned the First
(Ecumenical Council to meet at Nicaea in Bithynia in the summer of 325. The
Council was to complete the work of the Emperor, who had already reconciled the
Christians to the Roman State, by reconciling the Christians among themselves.
It is hard to say exactly at what moment Constantine
had definitely adopted his new faith. The exigencies of a ruler, whose subjects
were mainly pagan, the ebb and flow of a convert’s opinions ‘this way and that
dividing the swift mind’, would make his steps ambiguous. But at any rate,
after the victory of the Milvian Bridge over the heathen Maxentius in 312 instinctu
divinitatis, ‘by divine prompting,’ it would be incredulous to deny that
Constantine had exchanged the semi-monotheistic worship of Sol Invictus, ‘the
unconquered Sun’, for the God of the Christians. But this was as yet the
religion of Flavius Constantinus, not of the Emperor. The agreed policy of
toleration, put into effect next year, when he met his colleague and then ally,
Licinius, which is known as the ‘Edict’ of Milan, shows how far his favour to
the Christians might safely go with the approval of pagan opinion. Not only
was freedom of worship permitted to all, but the churches and property
confiscated from Christian communities in the persecution of Diocletian were
restored to them, and private pagan claims were bought out from imperial funds.
Heathen deities, even ‘Sol Invictus’, soon disappeared from his coinage. The
clergy of the Catholic Church received in 313 the exemption from public burdens
which certain pagan priesthoods enjoyed; manumissions of slaves in churches
were to be valid as they were in certain temples. It was a most favoured
religion privilege applied to Christianity. More marked was his personal intervention
in the Donatist schism. He laid the Donatists’ appeal before the bishops in
synod at Rome and Arles in 313-14 and upheld their decision. He issued on provocation
a decree of persecution against these dissident and disobedient Christians in
316, a measure which he revoked on its failure in 321. In 317 his guards were
bearing the monogram ‘Christos’ on their shields, as all his troops had
done by his order at the Milvian Bridge. Its meaning must by then have been
unmistakable, and it was the Christian Emperor who defeated the heathen
Licinius, now again a persecutor, at Chrysopolis. The conversion which had
begun, perhaps, as an opinion, had ended in the mystical, inspiring belief that
he was the chosen instrument of the One True God and Saviour, the Giver of
Victory.
That conviction, not unalloyed with superstition, was
powerfully backed by the policy which it sanctioned. Constantine, himself
inclined to and then convinced of the new religion with the multiplying proofs
of his success, had the native insight to perceive the strength and cohesion of
the Christians. They had a universal creed, contrasting with the wavering
speculations of the pagans, their local, competing deities, their inconsistent
traditions, their mixture of discordant philosophies and ethics combined with
popular superstitions and dubious practices. They, he may have felt— for he was
not unlettered—were still writing a literature which showed life and
contemporary inspiration apart from the endless imitation of masterpieces far
in the past. The universal church, with its appeal to every class and province,
seemed designed to be the support and the solidifying force of the universal empire.
It had been a cardinal error of his predecessors not to recognize the value of
this unifying, vivifying force. They had declared war against a mighty
potential ally in the name of outworn beliefs which were yearly losing their
appeal. The deified Emperor had for forty years already sunk to be the
favourite of the god of one or other cult. It was better to be the hallowed
vicegerent of the one almighty Summus Deus, Christianity could be a new
and living form of patriotism and loyalty, imposing obedience and inspiring
veneration. Nor were the immediate gains to be despised. By favouring and then
professing Christianity Constantine acquired the support of an active and
stubborn minority throughout the Empire: his rivals had only the tepid
adherence of interested supporters and habitual, disorganized pagans. And
Constantine would know well that imperial favour would be rapidly increasing
that minority by the facile conversion of all who wished to rise in this
present world. These were powerful political motives to second that confidence
in himself and his divine mission which his experience inspired.
As with the foundation of Constantinople, we may look
forward to the future then unknown. The revolution worked by Constantine was
irrevocable. The abounding life of Christianity could not fail to triumph over
the anaemic gods of paganism, and the nostalgic longing for the past was unable
to provide more than evanescent attempts at reaction. Only the crasser
superstitions of the populace, the underworld of pagan beliefs, had vitality to
survive either furtively in an acknowledged magic and spirit worship or
disguised and reputable in a Christian transmutation. The Roman Empire and
ancient civilization became bound up with Christianity, from which they
received new life, new power to survive, new ability to be imparted to the
oncoming barbarians. Medieval Europe was to evolve and become civilized, to
improve in ethical ideals, motives, and behaviour under the guidance of
Christianity, through which it also received the remnants of the heritage of
the ancient world. In spite of immense inner diversities, Europe was to develop
its common distinctive character from its Christian mould.
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE EMPIRE
The government of the Roman Empire, in which Constantine
the Great carried through his religious revolution, was an autocracy based on
the support of the armies, but also conforming to the rule of law inherited
from the days when Rome was a free republic and still permeating thought and
life. This reign of law was the hall-mark of the Empire, which it never lost
and which it bequeathed to Europe. The monarch could make and alter the law at
pleasure, but arbitrary, capricious infringement of it was against the spirit
of his office and the Roman State. By constitutional theory all the powers of
the Roman people had been transferred irrevocably to the elect of the Senate
and armies. Now the Senate was not even a sleeping partner, and the choice or
the assent of the armies made the despot. The whole of government, including
the association of a colleague or successor, was in his hands, yet not even
that could create a right of hereditary succession. The nature of his office
derived from its founder, the Emperor Augustus whose name was still his title,
and indeed the everrecurring crises of the Empire forbade the expedient of
hereditary rule, however much loyalty and habit might tend to maintain a
dynasty which had once attained the throne. The consequent uncertainty was a
weakness in that it encouraged revolt and civil war, but a strength in that it
helped to ensure the capacity of the Emperors, for the ablest ruler could fight
his way to a legitimate crown. The Empire suffered its worst misfortunes when
loyalty to incompetent heirs was strongest. It was partly to diminish the
danger of military revolts that Diocletian had adopted for the Emperors the
oriental pomp and aloofness of the Persian kings. They wore the diadem with
the purple robe and shoes; their life became a ceremonial, surrounded by
eunuchs and guards; their subjects admitted to audience fell prone in
adoration to kiss the hem of their robe. If with the Christian dispensation
they ceased to be divine, their persons, acts and possessions were ‘sacred’. An
aureole of majesty was made to seclude them from common humanity. But if there
was shrewd policy in the system, there was also weakness: the Emperor might not
know the Empire and the peoples he ruled. An active life in the world before
his accession might compensate for his seclusion after it, but it was hard for
him to penetrate the veil of his household and ministers, and if he succeeded
to the throne in boyhood, he might become their puppet.
Centralization and despotism required the services of
an immense, hierarchic bureaucracy to administer the Empire, and since the days
of Diocletian, as a precaution against revolt, the civil administration had
been rigidly separated from the military commands. At the head of it stood the
Sacred Consistory, the Privy Council of high functionaries which advised the
Emperor. Certain chiefs of departments invariably became members. Of these the
chief eunuch, the Praepositus Sacri
Cubiculi, became one of the most influential, and often the most hated and
corrupt. He was in charge of the palace. The Count of the Sacred Largesses was
the Treasurer, while the Count of the Res
Privatae managed the immense imperial estates. The Quaestor of the Sacred
Palace was the chief legal officer: he drafted laws and interpreted them, and
advised the answers to petitions. The Master of the Offices was head of the
secretariat with its manifold duties. Under him were the central scrinia headed by their magistri, which dealt with all documents, but he also
commanded the imperial guards and controlled the arsenals. Perhaps his most
formidable charge was that of the agentes in rebus, the imperial secret
service. These multitudinous and ubiquitous official spies superintended the
imperial postal service, conveyed official commands, and reported real or
imaginary delinquencies of all and sundry. They were worse than the abuses they
were supposed to prevent; their corruption was notorious, and they added to the
ills and oppression of the Empire. Unlike the Master of the Offices, the
Pretorian Prefects were an old institution, but although they were officials of
the central administration, they were not so closely connected by necessity
with the person of the Emperor. There were never less than three, and sometimes
there were four among whom the Empire was divided, and unless there were two or
more Augusti, only one was in immediate touch with his monarch. The East,
Italy, and Gaul were the three certain centres of the prefects’ spheres: when
there was a fourth, he was entrusted with Illyricum, i.e. the Balkans. The
duties of all may be described as those of minister of the interior and chief
justice of appeal. It was a post, like that of the Quaestor, particularly
fitted for an eminent lawyer, yet for a trained administrator as well. The
pretorian prefect received appeals from the governors in his sphere, but
he also superintended the levy of taxes, the furnishing of supplies to the
army, and the conduct of the provincial executive officials. The discretion
allowed to him was great; he judged without appeal; yet he appears as more
important for routine efficiency than for policy.
For the purposes of civil government the Empire was
divided into some 120 provinces which were grouped in twelve dioceses. In the
West lay the dioceses of Britain, Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Illyricum; in the
East Dacia, Macedonia, Thrace, Asia, Pontus, the East (Syria), and Egypt. The
vicar of each diocese assisted the pretorian prefect to supervise the
provincial governors, and was an alternative judge of appeal from them, appeals
from the vicar not going to the prefect but to the Emperor. The provincial
governors themselves, most of whom bore the title of President (Praeses), also
united executive and judicial authority. Below them were the oligarchies of
Curiales, who ruled the cities through their chiefs, the local Senates, the
members of which were styled Decurions. An exceptional government was enjoyed
by Rome itself. The Prefect of the City, whose office went back to the reign of
Augustus, and who alone among officials still wore the ancient Roman toga,
ruled the capital and presided in the Senate, while his appellate jurisdiction
extended over a circuit of 100 miles. But although the cities with their
dependent countryside were the typical units which made up the province, they
did not cover all its expanse. The domains (saltus) of the Emperor and
the great landowners, mostly senators, were largely exempt from them and the
governors and controlled by imperial procurators or private stewards. It was
an anticipation of medieval feudalism.
In itself this elaborate hierarchy was cumbrous, but
corruption and suspicion made it burdensome to the last degree. Every official
was watched and duplicated by the agentes in rebus, whose sins in
corruption and extortion were worse than his own. Defensores from among
the wealthy were appointed to supervise the cities and aid the oppressed, but
the most efficient check was provided by the Christian bishop whose voluntary
arbitration was authorized and encouraged by the Emperors: he was the most
equitable judge obtainable, and as a refuge to the oppressed deservedly gained
much of the influence which he expended in the doctrinal disputes of the age.
Here again the coming Middle Age cast its shadow before.
Except in certain frontier districts, where the dux or general of the troops exercised the civil government also, military command
was completely separated from civilian rule. The highest office was that of
Master of the Soldiers (magister militum), either of the horse (m.
equitum) or of the foot (m. peditum), or of both (m. utriusque
militiae). In the latter days of Constantine there were four Magistri;
eventually there were eight. Two of them accompanied the Emperor, but the
function of all was much the same: to command an army and conduct
a war. Beneath them the forces on the frontier were commanded by some
thirty-five dukes (duces), of whom ten were known by the higher title of
counts (comites), i.e. ‘companions of the Emperor. Besides these there
were the two Counts of the Domestics, the guards of the Emperor, composed at
first of Protectores, who were selected veterans, and of Domestics
proper, who were well-born officers in training. The rest of the army fell into
three main classes, the limitanei, the comitatenses, and the palatini. The limitanei were almost a garrison militia stationed on the fortified
frontiers where they had their hereditary farms in return for military service:
they were largely of barbarian extraction, the descendants of the captives of
old wars or the residuum of old migrations. The comitatenses, on the
other hand, together with the pseudo-comitatenses which Constantine had
drawn from the limitanei to reinforce them, were mobile troops, who
could take the field anywhere. The palatini formed a similar field-army
but were cantoned in the provinces near the Emperor’s residence. The strength
of the legions, who were the heavy infantry, was now about 1000 men, for even
the older legions, who still numbered 6000 men, were divided in practice into
similar regiments. They were levied by a mixture of heredity, conscription, and
voluntary enlistment. The auxilia, in contrast, who were cavalry and
light infantry, were mainly barbarian mercenaries from outside the Empire, and
were of higher repute for their fighting qualities. Among them the heavy
cavalry, cataphracts trained in the Persian method, were growing in importance.
They wore scale armour, and carried long spears as well as bows. Their charge
and volleys were becoming a decisive element in victory even in the non-Persian
wars.
The army as a whole was a disciplined and formidable
array, but the proportion of barbarians and semi-barbarians within it was a
grave danger not because of disloyalty, but because it proved the increasingly
unwarlike character of the civilized population of the Empire. The
long-continued cult of callous ferocity and sadistic sensationalism in the
gladiatorial shows of the amphitheatre had debased the people without
preserving their virility. The appetite for this supremely selfish, insane
pleasure was fostered by the popularity-hunting government to the destruction
of public spirit. In Italy and Egypt self-mutilation, by amputating the thumb,
was practised to escape conscription. Yet war was nearer to men than ever
before in imperial times. The disastrous civil contests of the third century had
been accompanied and followed by barbarian invasions which pierced far beyond
the fortified frontier zones and all but wrecked the Empire. It was a sad
sequel to the erstwhile Roman peace when the Emperor Aurelian (270-5) undertook
the fortification of the cities and even of Rome itself, and the small
circumference of the walls of the provincial towns is a striking witness to the
decrease in the numbers of a population which had never attained the density of
modem Europe. The plague under Marcus Aurelius (165-6), succeeded by a century
of war and devastation, had reduced the human assets of the state beyond danger
point.
Since the edict of the Emperor Caracalla in 212 every
citizen of a city in the Empire was also a Roman citizen and subject to the
Roman Law. But that was far from implying the equality or homogeneity of the
citizen body. Rather it was becoming ever more split up into classes and
occupations which were in process of being hereditary castes. The first cleft
was that between the honestiores (honourable) and the humiliores (lower). The honestiores included the senatorial order, the equestrian
order (both transformed inheritances from the Republic), the soldiers, and the
decurions: their punishments for crime were lighter, and they could only be tortured
on special counts. The humiliores were the rest of the population. Among
the honestiores the highest in rank were another survival, the two
ordinary consuls who gave their name to the year. Surrounded with extraordinary
pomp and burdened with expense which only great wealth could bear, the
consulship was an empty honour conferred on high birth or eminent services: the
Emperors themselves took the office at least once in their reign. Below the
consuls came the patricians, since Constantine a personal dignity, unconnected
save in name with the hereditary patricians of earlier times. The next rank was
that of high officials, like the pretorian prefect, who were styled viri
illustres, the next that of officials who were entitled spectabiles, below them again came the clarissimi, who all belonged to the senatorial
order, which was much wider than the actual members of the two Senates of Rome
and Constantinople. The clarissimi were in the main the descendants of
imperial soldiers, officials, and contractors who had made fortunes. But few
could trace their male lineage to the nobles of the Republic. Below them came
other titles, eminent issimus, perfectissimus and the like, which
denoted the precedence an office held in the official hierarchy. The
fulsomeness of these titles, disguised by habit, was an expression, as they
were invented, of a courtly, servile age and its pompous, privileged
bureaucracy.
The class of curiales, or town-dwelling
landowners of middle fortune, governed the cities as a hereditary duty. But
craftsmen and traders, too, bakers, shipmen and the like, were turned into
hereditary corporations from which there was no escape. Even the class of
paupers (proletarii) who received the public dole of food at Rome seems
itself to have been hereditary. The peasant class of coloni in like
manner were tied to their paternal holdings (adscripticii glebae) which
they cultivated as a state duty. Freedom of life and occupation had in short
largely vanished from the Roman Empire. Men existed to pay their dues to the
State and to keep the anaemic fabric of society in working order. The dreadful,
callous practice of legal infanticide by the exposure of new-born children,
whether unwanted girls or weakly boys, which was endemic in parts at least, and
those the most civilized, of the Empire, is perhaps evidence of the small hope
men placed in the future, just as the fierce degrading shows of captives forced
to fight and criminals exposed to wild beasts in the amphitheatres suggest the
jaded boredom of the present to the town dwellers. Both practices were frowned
upon by the Christian Church and Constantine.
The causes of this rigid, government-driven system lay partly in the drab and aimless life of men outside the imperial bureaucracy, partly in the economic decline of the overtasked Empire, both perhaps to be summarized as the senility of a civilization and its inducements to action. That civilization had been formed and had made its advance in the free city-states, in an atmosphere of city pride, of patriotic competition, and of dazzling opportunity. City politics were world politics: each citizen could take his part in the common effort and could hope for his share in gain and fame. When monarchy came with Alexander the Great, there was still a civilization to spread and an empire to exploit. The Roman conquest reduced political activity to local affairs, but there was still the Graeco-Roman civilization to impart to pupil races, still the native city to be adorned and to excel its neighbours in an age of peace, still the sense of expanding energy and increasing activity. This was the age of private munificence and municipal extravagance, encouraged by the government. Temples, baths, basilicas for public business, theatres, amphitheatres, spectacles were lavished on the townsmen by their wealthier fellows and their magistrates. But it was largely unproductive expenditure which slowly drained the wealth of each locality without facilitating its renewal. Over parts of the Empire, such as Britain, the city was an artificial institution set up by the government, a luxury only maintainable in times of prosperity. The imperial government was provoked to supervise municipal administration more and more, and to place the towns in leading-strings. Town notables, as town autonomy vanished, found they had become subordinate implements of the imperial bureaucracy, and the life went out of their public functions, which grew every decade more disagreeable, more profitless and more oppressive. They had to be driven to their unwelcome tasks and burdens, which brought no real honour and gratified no ambition. Like beasts at the water-wheel, they plodded a dreary round to haul up the taxes needed by their rulers. Provincial sentiment, although it played a part in the army revolts which had rent the Empire in the third century, did not as yet provide more than a disintegrating force in civil life. It made men sluggish in imperial concerns, rather than energetic in their own. In short, Roman patriotism, though not Roman pride, was in a way the business of the army and the bureaucracy.
ECONOMIC LIFE
The economic decline of the Empire was a still more
potent factor in this moral paralysis of its citizens. A long story must here
be cut short. The peace of the early Empire and its victories had produced a
vigorous interprovincial trade seconded by the labour of a multitude of cheap
slaves, won in the wars, and employed on great estates or in workshops. But
with the spread of civilization, especially westward, and with the equality of
universal citizenship, the provinces provided more and more for their own
ordinary wants; inter-provincial trade became far more restricted to the
luxuries or quasi-luxuries which had always formed its staple. Indeed, the
civil wars of the third century and the dislocation of the Empire must have put
an end to most of it, and a full recovery from those disasters never happened.
Then, too, with the end of expansion and conquest and with the adoption of the
policy of settling barbarian captives as military peasants on the depleted
frontiers, the supply of cheap slaves gave out: slaves became a costly luxury.
Thus the means of production on a large scale for distribution at a distance
were severely limited.
One of the worst evils of the third century had been the
debasement of the coinage, when the Emperors were attempting to provide for
increasing military and civil expenditure from the taxes of a population
reduced in numbers and prosperity by plague and war. The debasement, besides
diminishing in the end the value of the revenue, was pernicious to trade near
and far and bore its full share in the economic decline of the Empire. So
debased and disorganized was the coin that the sacks (folles) of what
was really base metal, issued by the mints, were passed from hand to hand
unopened, the clumsiest, bulkiest form of a circulating medium. Still more
significant was the custom that taxes and salaries, even the soldiers’ pay,
were rendered more and more in kind. This avoided the uncertainties of
depreciated money, but the ease which it might thereby give the taxpayer was
more than counter-balanced by the burden of transport which it imposed upon him
and by the waste and expense of storage and deterioration when the crops were
on the way to and when they reached the government magazines. Diocletian and
Constantine between them did indeed restore the coinage. The new gold solidus retained its fineness for centuries. The new silver coins were genuine silver.
But both gold and silver were only legal tender when weighed. Clipping and
abrasion no doubt produced a diffidence which the government felt as much as
any one. Only the tiny follis (now meaning the separate coin) was merely
counted. The gold and silver coins, too, were less plentiful for currency, it
seems. The mines in the Empire were less productive. A considerable quantity of
the precious metals had leaked to the East in the purchase of luxuries, there
being little counter-exports to exchange for jewels, silks, and spices from
India and China. Still more perhaps was hoarded in various ways, as a treasury
reserve, as the household equipment of the court and the wealthy, as the
ornament of temples and then of churches. It did not assist in the revivification
of moribund commerce, which might in fact seem to be a risky and needless
investment. Nor did it supersede the custom of taxes and payments in kind,
which remained to clog and burden the administration and economic life of the
Empire.
The luxury trade manufacture within the Empire had its
strongest home in the East. Syria produced its dyed webs. There were celebrated
wines there, in Asia Minor, and in Italy. Trade in necessaries was scantier,
but oil with which food was cooked was sent from the olive-bearing zone elsewhere,
and the corn-tribute from Egypt for Constantinople and from Africa for Rome had
to be handled under government control. Again, iron and the metals and pottery
had their producing centres, whence they journeyed to government arsenals, to
the mints, or to shops and private buyers. The profits of this and of local
trade cannot, however, have been alluring, for the Emperors made the membership
of the trading corporations hereditary and compulsory. It was a crime to fly
from an occupation and even in some cases to marry outside its circle. The desire
to escape from the burdens of life in the decadent and overtaxed towns was
obvious as the fourth century grew old.
Yet there was wealth in the Empire, though vegetative
and not producing greater wealth. Strewn over the provinces lay the estates,
the latifundia, of the senatorial order, yielding an ample revenue and
supplying all save luxury needs to their proprietors. Some of these estates and
incomes reached fabulous proportions, and as residence in the capital was no
longer required, the clarissimi were becoming in large part a
provincial, rural nobility. Given to country sports and imitative, lifeless
culture, they lived in their spacious villas or country houses amid their
dependants. The domestic manufactures of the estate were almost departments of
a self-sufficing area under the control of its lord. A certain portion of the
cultivated land was reserved as a home-farm; the rest was divided into small
holdings, which supported the coloni and their families, who gave as
rent a share of the crops, and supplemented it by prescribed work on the
home-farm. The system all tended to a self-sufficing, stagnant economy.
The class of coloni was formed from very
different elements. There were the descendants of pre-Roman serfs, whose
condition had changed but little; there were those of barbarian captives
settled on the land; there were slaves planted out in tenements; there were
former free peasants who found life easier and safer by becoming the tenants or
prot6g£s of the great landowner; there were absconding curiales and
others from the towns fleeing the taxes. But the general picture is fairly
uniform. The peasant was bound to his hereditary plot to which he had an
hereditary right. He suffered from the oppressions of his landlord and the
government, but each afforded some protection from the other, the landlord the
most. Apart from barbarian invasions, such as those which desolated Illyricum,
he enjoyed a measure of stability and security. In the course of the fourth
century, he was made to pay his taxes through his landlord, which was possibly
a benefit, and was deprived of the power to bring a civil action against his
landlord, an almost certain grievance. The landlord was his magistrate, and
might illegally keep his private prison and his private armed troop. It was a
life far on the way to medieval feudalism. The peasant’s best protection lay
not in the law, but in the private, obvious interest of the lord, which led him
to keep his estate populated and prosperous. Better terms were obtainable by
the varieties of tenure under emphyteusis. This was the lease of land
with a light rent to redeem it from uncultivation or to turn it into
olive-grove or vineyard. The land would be forfeited if the conditions were
broken, but otherwise the tenure was in practice perpetual. A valuable tenant
was not to be lost. In fact the fear of land going out of cultivation was a
constant preoccupation of government and landlord. Derelict land had by law to
be taken over by the neighbours; land could not be sold without its coloni. Yet in the fertile lands of Campania, Ionia and Egypt there is evidence of
derelict arable, and this was not due to barbarian devastation. The fleeing
peasant might take to begging or brigandage or, if he were a devout Christian,
to monasticism.
A chief cause of the economic distress, visible in
town and country in spite of transient improvement, was the severe pressure of
the wasteful taxation needed to keep the revived Empire solvent. It would
probably have been bearable if it had not been for the extortions and
corruption of the officials and the oppression of the powerful, and these vices
no laws, no remedies, no machinery (such as the agentes in rebus) devised by the Emperors were able to prevent: indeed, they were possibly more
rampant on the vast imperial estates than on those of the great landowners. The
system of taxation had been reformed by Diocletian; it was equitable in
intention, and perhaps in practice had it been honestly administered, but at
its best it was cumbrous and obscure, even to officials, at least with regard
to its chief component, the land-tax or annona. The land of each city
and great domain was surveyed and roughly classed in separate units (iuga) according
to its extent, its produce, its working resources and fertility. By the
combination of these factors, it was liable to a proportion of the annona on
the territory to which it belonged, the amount of which was fixed by imperial
edict (indictio) for each year. It was supplemented by a poll-tax on the
inhabitants. In the towns the tradesmen (collegiati) paid an oppressive
tax, the chrysargyrion, and the curiales the five-yearly aurum
coronarium, while the clarissimi were subject to the heavy aurum
oblaticium. To these taxes we must add that on sales and the various angariae, such as the imperial post, which scarred the districts along the roads.
The worst lot in the system of taxation fell to the curiales. It was their duty to supplement the insufficient income of their town out of
their own property in order to cover its expenses. But more onerous still was
their function of collecting the imperial taxes which were assessed to their
city and its dependent territory. In any case this was a difficult and odious
task—in 383 the domains of the clarissimi were removed from their area,
which must have been a measure of relief—but the fact that they were obliged to
make up any deficiency in the receipts made it intolerable. Flight was
forbidden under heavy penalties; they were legally tethered to their city and
caste; the land of an absconding curialis or of an extinct family had to
be taken over by their fellows. Late in the fourth century inscription as a
member of the curia was used as a punishment for certain offences. To
live concealed as a colonus on a great estate seemed to many a
preferable life if it could be achieved. In self-defence they were extortionate
and corrupt when they had the power to be so. In fact, although the East as a
whole was better off than the West, the city organization of the Empire was
breaking down under its burdens. The lesser landowner, the trader, the
peasant-freeholder, and the colonus all had to be chained to their
hereditary tasks so as to support the overladen State and provide it with funds
and food to carry on. The benefits of civilized life and the pleasure in its
activities seemed to be outweighed by its miseries.
CULTURE
It is to be remembered that an appreciable proportion
of the Empire’s inhabitants had no share in either its Greek or its Latin
civilization. In Britain the majority of the country folk still spoke their
native Celtic language, the ancestor of Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Round Trier
and elsewhere in Gaul allied tongues were living; St Irenaeus (ob. 202)
had preached in Gaulish as well as in Greek and Latin. On each side of the Pyrenees,
Basque, which survives today, maintained itself. Germanic was spoken in
considerable areas west of the Rhine. In Africa the Moors kept up their still
living Berber dialects, and the settled upper class retained the Semitic Punic,
introduced by the Carthaginians, and still possibly alive in Malta. In
Illyricum, in spite of widespread Latin, the native idiom held its own and has
produced modem Albanian. When we look at the East, the pre-Greek languages
assume national proportions and possess national literatures which repel Greek
with but subordinate infiltration of Hellenism. Copts in Egypt, Aramaeans in
Syria, Armenians in the northern mountains, not to mention the Asiatic
tribesmen of the Taurus and the Celtic Galatians, who were illiterate, clung
firmly to their ancient languages, which embodied their distinctive habits of
thought and steadily sapped their cohesion with the Empire.
The Greek and Latin speakers, however, were largely illiterate peasants and artisans, whose varying patois by no means allowed them to appreciate the conservative literary tongue. That was a privilege of the educated classes, and they were perhaps more alive to the externals than to the inner spirit of the heritage that they revered. The investigating curiosity of the Greeks had not survived the Roman conquest; knowledge of natural science had ceased to grow. The system of education in rhetoric, although implying much more than oratory, had concentrated men’s attention on declamatory, exaggerated phrases, on the art of spinning sentences to a patient audience, on the resources of a pleader with a view to his career. Where there were points of law to be discussed, principles of law to be applied, and plain facts to reason on, this society could be highly rationalistic; but in general the rationalism of an earlier generation had disappeared. It was an age of signs and wonders, of emotional credulity and vulgar magic. Partly this may have been due to the mere predominance of the average citizen whether hellenized or romanized, now that, so to say, society had been denuded of those thin intellectual strata which had produced Western civilization. The more primitive rocks now made the landscape. Partly it was the effect of the steady penetration of oriental influences, which had life and originality now denied to the West, and preferred the marvellous and esoteric to the matter-of-fact, which sought for mystical illumination rather than for explanation. The continued disasters of the times, the long absence of the political liberty in which ancient habits of thought had been formed, the loss of even personal freedom in the regimented state organized by Diocletian, the very dead-weight of insuperable, unattainable models in literature, thought, and art, all combined to drive both eastern and western men into themselves, to spin a visionary universe from the unreachable ego. The worship of the stately, idealized Olympian gods had palled and become an ancient custom, that of sheer human power in the deified Emperors seemed less natural as unity disappeared and fleeting rulers were slain or carried captive in civil and foreign wars; the little or local deities who gave fertility, the real, heartfelt religion of average folk, were always perhaps more like familiar spirits than gods, and were less attractive amid derelict fields and scanty offspring. The eastern cult of Mithras seems to have been a soldier’s creed which supplied a divine personal protector by a magical ceremony, which appealed more to credulity than to evidence. Other similar cults like that of Isis differed less in method and aim than in the public they addressed. The official cult of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, looks like an attempt to acclimatize a speculative monotheism with ‘a local habitation and a name’. Save in Syria, whence it spread, it was a governmental creed. The most philosophic form of pagan illuminism appeared
in the Neo-Platonism founded by the Egyptian Plotinus (ob. 269) and
propagated by the Phoenician Porphyry (ob. 304). An exalted pantheistic
monotheism was grafted by Plotinus with subtlety and fervour on Platonic
thought. The material world was an emanation from the indescribable spiritual
unity and yet a glorious hindrance to the reunion of the soul with its
unalloyed original. Oriental asceticism and ecstatic vision were natural
concomitants of the system, and the pagan gods were without difficulty
accepted, nay cherished, as embodiments, aspects, and glimpses of the One. With
the Aramaean Iamblichus (ob. 330) the degenerate, fanatic side of this
philosophy took the lead. Magic and miracles, the boosting of any and every
superstition so long as it was not Christian, testified to the desperate
efforts of educated pagans to retain belief in their multitudinous deities.
Unable to be sceptics, averse from a revolutionary monotheism, they slid down
from Platonic heights, grasping at any tuft of grass or withered thorn. There
must have been a competition, however unacknowledged, for the suffrage of the
primitive masses of the population, a suffrage easiest to be gained by an
appeal to their ingrained belief in spells and charms and the mystery of petty
ritual. But that it should be congenial to the Neo-Platonists reveals the
mentality of their credulous age.
The law was a favourite study of the upper-class Roman
citizen, whether in the civil service or out of it. But it is noticeable that,
although schools of law flourished, the series of the creative commentators,
those great jurisconsults who had done so much to develop it, had ended in the
middle of the third century. The age of Constantine saw codifiers and
collectors. None the less legal studies retained their influence. The education
of the schools of rhetoric was largely directed to produce good pleading in the
courts. A successful pleader might rise in the imperial service and become a
governor or a minister. Lawyers still shared with soldiers the government of
the Roman world.
The cultured men of the day, when they were not
engrossed in law, philosophy, or Christian theology, tended to an anecdotic
antiquarianism which required more learning than intellect. One of the best of
these students was the friend of Constantine, the ultra-learned Christian Eusebius,
bishop of Caesarea in Palestine. Bred, one may say, in the ample library left by
Origen in Caesarea, Eusebius had a critical sense of documentary evidence and
a large conception of universal history. His Chronography was to be the
basis of general historical knowledge for centuries; his Ecclesiastical
History preserved and arranged a mass of carefully compiled information.
It is true that precision of statement yields to overcharged general rhetoric.
An objective treatment of facts was beyond the reach and the desires of an age
devoted to flattery, controversy, and propaganda, but Eusebius is an instance
of the intellectual superiority of the Christian writers over their pagan
contemporaries. They had a consistent scheme of knowledge, a concrete object of
research; they had something to say and still had liberty to say it.
The art of the age is in its turn self-revealing. We
find an imitative largeness of conception natural to an ecumenic empire, and
the skilful engineering of long experience in practical building—the arch, the
apse, and the cupola were great stand-bys for the architect. Withal there
spread from the East, from Egypt and Syria, an originality and emotionalism and
a sense of colour and gorgeousness which make the hues of their predecessors
seem elementary. Of craftsmanship in glass, ivory, metal and stone there was plenty,
mostly oriental in origin. But in the West especially there was in building the
curse of official bigness and pomposity. The intellectual grasp of reality, the
rationalism of Greek art, the delicate, unrelaxing vigilance, the apt
simplicity of earlier times were gone. They were not of facile manufacture nor
did they produce quick effects; and mere imitation of past masterpieces had
little inspiration and ceased to be desired. They were replaced in smaller
objects by rich decoration of varied device, often the most effective when
least Hellenic in tradition: the barbaric art of the steppes was invading the
Empire. And though the same shop might produce for pagan and Christian, the
Christian themes, however much they reproduced older emblems and scenes, had a
new interpretation, a new conviction of appeal, which made them more living—in
short, better art. Ancient statuary and the zeal to represent the human and
animal forms with the exquisiteness of nature seem to have died; lumpish,
inexact energy in the limbs, a stolid glare in the coarse faces, a tailor-like
truth in the dress were the effects aimed at and achieved, unless sculptures
were plundered from old monuments to deck the new. But there was both emotion,
splendour, and beauty in the schemes of coloured marbles which encrusted the
inner walls, and in the variegated glass mosaics which adorned the curved
ceilings. Here again Christian beliefs gave the best and novel themes, just as
the Christian churches could give meaning and use to the creative invention of
the architect. The favourite form among several was the basilica, the
rectangular hall ending in an apse, in front of which stood the altar and
around which were the seats of the clergy. It was a design which had served for
halls of justice and audience, and in the first century appears in a
subterranean temple at Rome. But besides its own variants, such as three to
five aisles, subsidiary apses, transepts which suggested the cross, and an
entrance hall, there were rivals such as the round church, suitable for a
baptistery, all of them with appropriateness for Christian ritual and freely
designed from the accumulated traditions which no longer oppressed the builder.
The Christian art, like the Christian literature of
the age, was in fact a part of the general culture of the Empire, giving
greater scope to its practitioners by reason of its new purposes, its new
heartfelt subject-matter, and perhaps still more by its new freedom when all
else was bound down in thought and action, in caste and livelihood under a
bureaucratic, suspicious despotism. The Christians were only a minority in most
parts, a half in some eastern provinces, a tenth or merely a twentieth in
others and the west, when the Empire in the person of Constantine made its
peace with them. But, whether left alone as mostly happened or fiercely
assailed in the persecutions, they were an independent community in their
religion, with their own way of life, their own theology and inner
controversies, and their own officials and institutions. They formed an adult
worldwide organization, not derived from the Empire but allied with it, almost
a state within the state, accustomed to self-management, where every member
counted for something and could take sides in what concerned his church and its
beliefs. The Emperor, now a Christian, could share in the Church’s life and
influence it, but he could not dominate what the Empire had not created. He was
inevitably immensely powerful in the Church, but he interfered chiefly in
dangerous crises of disputes affecting the unity of the whole body. In the
normal life of the Church, it was self-governing. This external fact agreed
with a fundamental tenet of Christianity itself. Pagan religion had been a
civic or family function for earthly welfare. The Christian faith was the way
for the individual believer of any rank or race to attain eternal salvation. It
was not a part of civil life, but beside it and in essence superior to it. The
problem of Church and State begins for Europe with Constantine.
THE ORGANIZATION OF THE CHURCH
The Christian
organization may be described as a loose confederation of autonomous
communities, held together by the conviction of unity and fraternity in a
common faith, fortified in practice by continuous mutual intercourse. Since
Christianity had grown up amid the city-state organization of the Empire, its
autonomous communities, its ‘churches’, were mostly city-communities, although
rural communities, where cities were sparse and great estates, imperial or
other, wide, did make their appearance. Of each church the ruler, focus and
embodiment of its tradition, was its bishop, elected by the community and
considered to be the successor of the Apostles even when the church was not of
immediate apostolic foundation. He was assisted in his pastoral office by the
presbyters, who in many dioceses, to use a later term, were also taking charge
of the districts and their several churches into which the ever-increasing
Christian population was divided. Like the bishops, but with a more unanimous
assent, they were now considered as a separate order in the Church, possessed
by the laying on of hands of the power to consecrate the bread and wine in the
Eucharist, the central act of Christian worship. The presbyter was a sacerdos,
tepevs, a priest like those of the Jews; the bishop was a summus
sacerdos. In the bishop’s administrative duties, he was assisted by the
order of deacons. Below these again came the subdeacons, the exorcists,
acolytes, and readers (lectors), and
the deaconesses, the minor orders of a later time. A growing custom approved
the slow promotion in ordination from the lesser dignity to the higher, but in
actual importance the deacons who had charge of church property often outweighed
the more sacred presbyters. Here two facts of high significance stand out.
Christianity gave to women a position as personalities, not merely as mothers,
which paganism had denied them. The old fertility cults had ceased to appeal to
the educated class. Women as well as men were martyrs and confessors. Chastity,
virginity and the gentler virtues were held in the highest honour; indeed the
severity of oriental asceticism had made its way into Egyptian and Syrian
Christianity and was rapidly spreading. Constantine’s social legislation, which
punished, sometimes with desperate cruelty, offences against morals, is
evidence of his conversion to Christianity as well as of his diagnosis of
social evils. He discountenanced the callous exposure of unwanted infants and
the savage gladiatorial shows. Women were the most zealous of converts and the
most effectual of domestic missionaries, for they were in charge in the
impressionable years of life. To them was likewise largely due the second
fact. In 321 Constantine decreed that the Christian churches could receive by
gift or legacy anything from anybody, an unexampled privilege which no pagan
temple had ever enjoyed. The result was that wealth flowed into them with rapid
profusion, much of it derived from the piety of devout ladies. By a phenomenon
which has recurred in other times, the extinction of the male line and the
accumulation of wealth by heiresses were not uncommon among the wealthy and
well-to-do, and their benefactions, seconded by imperial and other liberality,
rendered in a century the Bishop of Rome, for instance, among the greatest of
the landed proprietors of the Empire. If some of these riches provided a too
alluring bait to the ambitious and worldly and were spent in sumptuous luxury,
they also provided means which were zealously used to relieve the poor and
distressed, to finance orphanages and hospitals, to build and adorn churches.
The spate of conversions to Christianity which set in when the Emperor was a
Christian was not exclusively owing to self-interested ambition or fashion any
more than to the moral and intellectual appeal of the faith; there was always
the active benevolence of the churches to attract the poor and oppressed. The
bishop was an intercessor for the unfortunate, his church an asylum for the
harshly or unjustly condemned; his arbitration was fairer and less costly than
the tribunal’s judgement; Constantine seems to have encouraged his judicial
powers. And he was the choice of the people. He could freely persuade them from
the pulpit. Can we wonder at the unbridled fervour with which they flung
themselves into the doctrinal disputes which affected the whole being and
teaching of their community, and which they were free to debate in contrast to
the chained submission of the rest of their lives?
While in each city its church under its bishop was
effectively organized, it was not the same with the whole body of Christians.
Yet the local churches had always been in close touch with one another by
personal intercourse and by letters. The bishops of a province and even of a civil
diocese were accustomed to act together. Councils of bishops to settle disputed
points were growing in frequency: in 314, under Constantine’s patronage, a
council of Western bishops met at Arles to adjudicate on the Donatist schism in
Africa, and Constantine for some years endeavoured to enforce their decision by
persecuting the recalcitrant Donatists. But the most effectual bond of unity
lay in the influence of the great sees. The bishop of a provincial capital in
the East was the metropolitan of the lesser cities of its province: this was
modelled on secular divisions, and the custom became universal in the century
after Constantine. More important were the churches of the super-eminent
cities. Here, as was natural, the believers were most numerous, the city’s
secular rank most impressive, the line of bishops and martyrs most illustrious,
the tradition of the past best attested and most ancient, and lastly the
prestige of apostolic foundation best remembered and accepted. Rome, Alexandria
and Antioch stood out among competitors. Rome, with all the glamour of the
Eternal City, declared its bishop the successor of St Peter, the prince of the
Apostles, and of St Paul, over whose relics Constantine had built two famous
basilicas. Its church claimed that its pure tradition was never sullied with
heretical opinions. Antioch, the capital of the East, where the name of
Christian was first given, also claimed St Peter as its first bishop. The
learned church of Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, was said to have been
founded by the evangelist St Mark, the disciple of St Peter, and in secular
matters the corn-supply and the artistic productions which went to Rome had
long bound it closely to the centre of the Empire. While the influence of other
sees depended more on the personality of a particular bishop during his life,
Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria gave pre-eminence to each temporary occupant, and
how much they owed to their secular standing was shown by the swift rise of the
New Rome, Constantinople, to an equal rank.
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESSES OF THE EMPIRE
In traversing the catalogue of the characteristics and
the weaknesses of the Tate classical Roman Empire, it is a hard task to give a
harmonious picture in which the lights and shades should fall in a just proportion,
and in their variety and detail should form a whole and provide some reasonable
estimate of the reasons why the Eastern half of the Empire survived for long
centuries and the Western half broke up under barbarian conquerors and
descended to a lower stage of civilization. Stress may be rightly laid on the
share of ‘contingency’, the chance of certain events which drew a long train of
consequences after them. The Empire, terribly exhausted by plague and civil war
in the third century after Christ, was exposed to the violent pressure of
barbaric invasions, which in their turn were due to external developments
partly caused by events in the distant East and wholly, wherever they happened,
outside Roman control. The Empire was temporarily saved by a succession of most
able rulers, but the very means, the rigid centralized organization which they
found necessary for survival, were themselves an evil, and time was never given
in the West, though it was in the East, for their full effect and at least
partial transmutation for the better. But while ‘contingencies’ may give us the
deciding immediate impulses to what actually happened, they cannot tell
us what would have occurred without them, nor can they throw light on the
fundamental state of things which made them so effectual. It may be suggested
that the Roman Empire and ‘Ancient’ classical civilization was suffering from
senescence and spiritual exhaustion in its polity, in its ideas and culture, in
the lack of depth in its contact with the masses of the population, into which
it was ceasing to infiltrate, in the stagnant economic system which decayed in
material wealth when increasing wealth was urgently needed. Able men in
practical affairs abounded, but the rationalism of ancient thought was absent
in literature and art, perhaps, too, one may say, in politics; how much the
life of ancient, imaginative polytheism had vanished is obvious from the apathy
with which the pagan majority accepted a malevolent toleration and then
suppression from the Christian Emperors. Tolerated paganism, losing adherents
day by day, was the religion of cultured honestiores for old times’ sake
with Neo-Platonism as its intellectual backing, and of rude peasants still in
awe of the gods of tilth and woodland. The self-administering city was largely
an artificial structure west of the Alps, and where it was indigenous had lost
its half-free character and therewith its vitality. Under the crushing burden
of taxation and with the retrogression of trade, men had to be chained and forced
to their occupations as a duty to the State. Universal compulsion succeeded
and completed the demise of zeal. The swarming bureaucracy employed to keep
the flagging Empire in action was oppressive, corrupt, wasteful, and unmanageable.
The very strength of provincial, separatist feeling was a danger to the unity
of the ecumenic Empire and therefore to be checked and feared. The most warlike
provinces, such as Illyricum, had been depopulated; others, such as Italy, had
been drained of their adventurous elements; and the result was that the army
was largely made up of barbarian mercenaries or of half-barbarians settled as
military tenants on the frontiers. The dangers of the system were immense, for
the armies were the source of power, and it would not be long before barbarian
generals, uneducated or halfeducated, though surprisingly loyal, disposed of
the Empire. It is true that this army was cheaper to maintain than the native
volunteer, but its discipline and efficiency decayed with its barbarization,
and its numbers, perhaps some 300,000 or 400,000 men in all, were in any case
too few to protect the interminable frontier and hold back more powerful and
more desperate foes.
If this were all, the Empire might have been expected
to crumble any moment instead of experiencing a genuine revival under
Constantine. But there were better symptoms too. There was still a great
reservoir of human capacity in the Empire, men who could plan, act, and govern;
there was still a population of hardy peasants and industrious townsmen. In the
East there were wealthy, trading towns which had not lost their resilience under
their burdens; the Asiatic provinces had suffered less than most others. There
were well-chosen defensible frontiers with an elaborate system of fortification
scientifically guarded. The Empire indeed, even in its evils, was a triumph of
organization worthy of the civilized, ancient world. The Roman law, confusing
as might be its sources and its local variants, was a common possession of the
citizens, binding the Empire together by its civilized excellence. And the
sense of unity and pride in being Roman, a member of the one truly civilized
society with its overwhelming prestige, was strong still, if passively
obedient. Given time to recuperate, given a faith to revivify men’s trust in
themselves and devotion to a cause, given, too, a contraction of the frontiers
able to convert provincial preferences into an imperial patriotism which should
be identical with a fervently held imperial religion, given in fact what
happened in the East and was cut short prematurely in the West, the Empire and
its civilization could be preserved and renovated, but not, as its history
showed, be rejuvenated. The weight of the past was too oppressive for more than
a stabilized vitality.
THE PERSIAN EMPIRE
The map of the
Roman Empire reveals one of its major misfortunes, that save on a part of the
Atlantic seaboard it was encircled by a ring of actual or potential foes. In
Africa the plundering Moorish tribes of the Sahara demanded a frontier garrison
at the least; if that was depleted, their inroads meant loss of territory, for
they would be joined by provincial Moors, little more civilized than
themselves. The Nubians of Ethiopia were indeed inoffensive, and the disunited
Arabs across the Red Sea were as yet no danger, while their northern tribes
along the Syrian frontier were useful, if predatory, allies. But the great
oriental monarchy of Persia or Iran under the Sassanian dynasty was a rival
empire and a most formidable enemy.
Sassanian
Persia claimed to be, and indeed was, the heir of the Persian Empire of Cyrus
and Darius, which had ruled Nearer Asia from the Aegean to the Indus centuries
earlier. That eclectic empire had collected, added to, and continued the
earlier civilizations, such as the Babylonian, within its area. But the Greek
conquest by Alexander had intervened and spread over it a Hellenistic layer,
percolating into the native population, deeply in Asia Minor and Syria, more
superficially farther east. Then had begun a resurgence of the older culture, a
reaction of orientalism, led at first by the Parthian dynasty of the Arsacids,
which reconstituted the Iranian empire east of Mesopotamia. In 227 the Arsacids
were overthrown and replaced by the vassal King of Persis (Persia proper), the
Sassanian Ardashir (Artaxerxes) I. Thus the true Persians of the south
recovered the leadership of Iran. But the change of dynasty did not merely mean
a change in the particular province which held the hegemony in Iran. It meant a
stronger central control: vassal kingships no longer turned the monarchy into a
kind of federation. It meant a vividly conscious nationalism: far more than the
Arsacids did the Sassanians feel themselves the heirs of Cyrus and the
champions of Iran against the European power of Rome in a kind of competition
for world dominion. Lastly, as was to happen to the Byzantine Empire, that
nationalism was inspired and fortified by a national religion, Zoroastrianism.
Though the Arsacids had been Zoroastrians, their zeal was pale beside that of
the Sassanians who had begun as priests of the fire-temple of Istakhr. With the
accession of Ardashir I a new energy was let loose. Fortunately for Rome,
Sassanian Persia had ambitious and deadly foes in Central Asia, on the Oxus and
towards the Indus, as well as in the West.
The religion of Zoroaster, or Mazdaism, as it was
expounded in Sassanian times, was based on the strife of Ormazd, the good god
who was to triumph, and Ahriman, the evil creator whose power and followers
were to be resisted by the devout Zoroastrian until their eventual defeat. Only
Ormazd and his subordinate deities were to be worshipped. Thus, in its dualism,
the religion was essentially a monotheism with a lofty and intolerant doctrine
of life and morals. But it was a religion both sacerdotal and ritualistic to a
high degree. The priests or Magi were a power in the State. The worship of the
sacred fires, the observance of ceremonial purity, the chanting by the Magi of
the spell-like hymns of their later sacred books, the dread of polluting the
holy elements of fire, earth, and water which led to the exposure of the dead
to be eaten by birds of prey, all tended to prevent the expansion of
Zoroastrianism outside its native Iran, and to make it a burden even there,
although its dualistic cosmogony, borrowed by the eclectic theories of Mani (ob. 273) in his new religion of Manichaeism, found an easy way into both Europe and
Asia in spite of persecution on all sides.
Sub-kings, when they existed, were merely highly
titled governors; yet great noble families, with wide domains, were a power in
Iran. The backbone of the army consisted of the numerous lesser nobles, who in
return for their fiefs formed the heavy mailed cavalry. They were splendid
lancers and archers, and such deadly adversaries to the Roman legions that they
were imitated in the regiments of cataphracts.
While the Sassanians drew their strength from Iran,
the centre of administration and commerce lay for geographical reasons outside
Iran in could have more fostered a restless, warlike spirit among chiefs and
followers. They produced the dynamic force which thrust the tribes on raids
and wanderings. A successful warrior might become a chief; a chief was eager to
increase his following and power by increasing his wealth and fame. The
institution implied nearly continuous war, and war fostered the power, when it
did not cause the appearance, of a central institution, the kingship of a whole
tribe or sub-tribe. The majority of the chieftains of a tribe came of families
already recognized as noble, but among them there was usually a pre-eminently
noble family, which claimed descent from the gods, and from whose members alone
the tribal king, if he was desired, could rightly be elected. The oldest of
these kingships possibly originated from priesthoods of ancient fertility
cults, but the effective cause of the election of a king among the migrating
tribes was the need of unity of command in war. Most of the tribes adopted
permanent kingship sooner or later, and the strong feeling that only the race
of divine descent could rightfully occupy the throne had, even among
Christians, important political consequences. If the privileged family became
extinct, tribal cohesion was seriously damaged: any great noble felt he had an
equal right to reign with the successful competitor. Loyalty and common action
gave way to rebellion and treason. On the other hand, the continued existence
of the acknowledged royal house, even in decadence and civil strife, gave a
concrete embodiment of tribal unity and common tradition which appealed to a
barbaric age.
The god from whom the royal families usually traced
their descent was Woden (Odin), the war-god and wily magician, whose character
expressed the qualities of the war-chief united to the priest of a magic
ritual. It would appear that the nobles and their followers were specially
devoted to his worship. Among them, later at any rate in Scandinavia, he was
exalted as the Allfather, whose mantle was the starry sky, and who had learnt
the secrets of the Fates. He was the death-dealing god who slew his own
favourites, the god of the fighting hero in battle and feasting in hall, the
god of spells and the lays in which the warriors’ deeds were celebrated. Beside
him was the plain war-god Tiu (Tyr), somewhat, it seems, outshone by his
cunning compeer. Of wider attributes, though warlike also, was Thunor (Thor),
the thunder-god of farmers and of lawful possession. Dimmer gods and goddesses
of primeval fertility existed besides these three, though lessened in honour,
not to mention the minor spirits of soil and water, spring and woodland. The
impression is given of a natural polytheism changing under the influence of the
warlike migrations and ill fitted to resist a consistent, stable religion
presented with all the glamour of higher civilization. But the ethos which it
produced survived it.
The Germanic tribes in the fourth century fell into
three main divisions; the Scandinavians, whose activities were barely observable
in the background, the West Germans, and the East Germans. The two latter were
roughly divided by the river Elbe, and although possessing much in common, were
markedly distinct in their tribal habits and destiny. The West Germans between
the Rhine and Elbe were, so to say, taking root by now in their territories;
they were expansionist rather than migratory; only on the coast did their
colonists migrating across the sea slowly lose touch with their former homes.
The East Germans, between the Elbe, the Baltic, the Vistula and the Black Sea,
were completely migratory, ready to change their habitations entirely in search
of richer lands; it was they who really broke down the fabric of the Western
Empire in their wanderings and by the foundation of their transitory states.
The most numerous of the East Germanic peoples was
that of the Goths, who had crossed, like most of their fellows, from
Scandinavia to the opposite coast of the Baltic some centuries before. Thence,
soon after 200 they had moved south-east to the steppe-land north of the Black
Sea, where they had adopted the nomadic life of the region and soon became the
most pressing danger of the Empire. Under their king, Kniwa, they had ravaged
the Balkans and destroyed (251) the Emperor Decius and his army. Eighteen years
later they received a crushing defeat from the Emperor Claudius Gothicus near
Naissus (Nish), which kept them from more than passing raids for several
generations, but Illyricum was fatally exhausted by their ravages. Constantine
himself had to intervene in 331-2 to repel a Gothic invasion of Moesia.
Meantime they engaged in intertribal wars which accentuated their divisions.
About 300 their eastern tribe, the Greutungi or Ostrogoths, under a king, held
the steppes between the rivers Dniester and Don with a wide supremacy over
their neighbours. The Tervingi or Visigoths occupied the steppe and
forest between the Dniester and the Danube; they seem to have lacked a king. In
modern Transylvania were settled the allied, less active, tribe of the Gepids,
while on the Sea of Azov was a fraction of the much scattered tribe of the
Heruli, by all accounts the most savage of these Teutonic stocks. Between the
Gepids and the Danube, there appeared in Constantine’s last years a part of
another East Germanic tribe, the Asding Vandals, who drove out the older
inhabitants; the other principal Vandal tribe, the Silings, were settled in
modern Silesia, which retains their name.
It is easier to say where the lesser East Germanic
tribes had been than where their main branches were in the time of Constantine.
The Rugians had been on the Baltic and have left their name in the island of
Rugen; they were now, perhaps, north of the Carpathians with the Sciri and
part of the Heruli. The Langobards had been on the lower Elbe, where the Bardengau
long preserved their memory; now they, too, were somewhere north of the
Erzgebirge. The Burgundians, some of whom had appeared on the Don, have left
traces of themselves in the island of Bornholm (Burgundarholm) in the Baltic;
they had been between the rivers Oder and Vistula; lately they had forced their
way westward and were now settled on the river Main and the adjacent Rhineland,
pressing earlier invaders farther south.
A more permanent, though not motionless, picture is
presented by the West Germans. The Marcomanni and the Quadi, both of the group
of tribes known as Suevi, kept their seats in modern Bohemia and Moravia
respectively, whence they raided the Empire across the Danube. Northwest of
them the Thuringians, the ancient Hermunduri, possessed the present Thuringia
with wider extension to south and north. Far more enterprising was the recent
confederacy of the Alemanni, a mixture, as their name implies, of several
clans, among whom the latest come were the Suevic Semnones from beyond the
Elbe, who eventually provided an alternative name, Swabia, to Alemannia. The
confederacy was in bitter enmity with Rome. The Alemanni were old raiders of
Gaul. Driven from the Main by the Burgundians, they had occupied the once Roman
territory of the Agri Decumates (in modern Baden and Wurttemberg) and were now
pressing furiously on the Roman frontiers of the upper Rhine and upper Danube.
North of them along the east bank of the Rhine had arisen another loose
confederacy also with a new name, the Franks, composed of tribes long settled
there, such as the Sugambri, Chamavi, Chatti, Chattoarii, with perhaps some
reinforcement fiom defeated tribes, like the Chauci, moving west. Both Franks
and Alemanni were ruled by kinglets (gau- kings) who were not mere
chieftains. Further north again, in the coastal marshlands of modern Holland
and Hanover, dwelt the Frisians on their terpen or artificial hillocks,
where they had been for centuries. Although they had slowly spread over a
greater area, the Frisians made no collective conquests; but some are found
taking a part in the raids of other tribes. East of the Frisians and Franks
were the fierce group of Saxons, the men of the cutlass, a lax confederation
whose leading people, the Saxons proper, had spread from Holstein beyond the
Elbe, which they still retained; the class of half-free laten, like the liti of the Franks and Frisians, presumably was made up of the remnants of conquered
tribes, such as the Chauci. Whether marshmen on the coast or heath-dwellers
inland, the Saxons took readily to the sea and were formidable pirates who
plundered the coasts of Britain and Gaul. They were much resembled in dialect
and habits by the kindred tribe of Angles, who inhabited the peninsular modern
Slesvig to the north, but the Angles, unlike the Saxons, seem to have possessed
a kingship. North again, the peninsula of Jutland was or had been held in part
probably by the Jutes, while the adjacent islands were already occupied by the
Danes from Scandinavia. All these coastland tribes were increasing in numbers;
they jostled, pressed upon, and allied with one another, broke up and united;
all were seafarers, and their migratory instinct led them over seas familiar to
them by trade and piracy. Though not impervious to Roman and oriental
influences, their barbaric culture was in essentials homegrown. Their religion
and their lays and legends expressed the turmoil, the exploits and hardy
cunning of their lives, their ‘Heroic Age’.
CELTS AND SLAVS
Equally hostile to the Empire, but less dangerous
because of their narrower and isolated zone of attack, were the Picts and Scots
of the British Isles. Both invaders had escaped the Roman conquest and retained
their barbaric tribalism and culture; they too, were in their ‘Heroic Age’.
The Picts or ‘painted (tattooed) people’ were the tribes to the north of the
Forth who had never been annexed to the Empire. Possibly they were already
coalescing into the loose tribal kingdom of Alban. Their southerly division
certainly spoke a Celtic Brythonic dialect akin to ancient Welsh; their
northerly members round the Moray Firth, although eminent specialists claim
them as Brythonic, are of more dubious origin, and some of their royal names
and the ‘Pictish succession’ of their kings, which was not patriarchal but
descended through females, suggest that they were, partially, of non-Celtic
speech and customs. In any case both divisions assailed their more civilized
British neighbours by land and sea. The Scots, although like other peoples of
mingled race, were more homogeneous in speech and institutions. They were the
Celtic tribes of Ireland, speaking the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages,
the ancestor of modern Gaelic, and organized in clans of kindreds under the
rule of patriarchal chiefs. Their civilization much resembled that of the
Britons four centuries earlier. Their paganism exhibited a rich mythology, and
they were accumulating a store of mythic and historic tales, the substance of
which is partly preserved in later lays. They too were tending to coalesce in
loosely federate kingdoms and to employ their surplus energies in sea-raids on
Roman Britain.
From the present we turn to the future enemies of the
Empire. Only a cursory mention need as yet be made of the Slavs, known to their
German neighbours as Wends. These prolific tribes, speaking a conservative
branch of the Indo-European group of languages, were steadily spreading from
their centre of dispersion, the modern Polesia, in and around the Pripet
marshes; westward they had reached the Vistula and perhaps the Oder and its
mouth on the Baltic, as these lands were evacuated by the East Germans.
Northward they were extending towards Novgorod, but were held back by the still
more conservative Indo-European Balts in the forests and marshes of Lithuania
and Prussia proper. Southward they were roughly bounded by the grass steppes of
the modern Ukraine. Deficient in organization and living in their villages
under a simple patriarchal system, they were a ready prey to aggressive
neighbours such as the Ostrogoths, and their vegetarian diet has been
attributed to the impossibility of retaining herds amid their plundering
enemies. They were barely known to the Romans.
THE NOMADS OF THE STEPPES
Far more potentially dangerous and destructive near
and far were the nomad horsemen of the vast steppes of Central Asia and
south-east Europe, ranging from the mouth of the Danube to the Pacific Ocean,
and to some extent divided by the mountain mass north of the Pamirs. They were
by no means all of the same race or group of languages, for much of their life
and customs was imposed by their habitat, and intermixture of blood by conquest
or alliance was common. The Goths during their residence in the Ukraine took up
in some measure nomad ways; the blond Alans between the Don, the Volga, and
Mount Caucasus were Iranian in speech and partly in blood, and remnants of
other Iranian nomads, not to mention descendants of captive women and slaves,
were no doubt absorbed into new-coming tribes from the East. But the main and
typical mass of the nomads east of the Volga belonged to the yellow
Ural-Altaian race which had peopled the eastern steppes from time immemorial.
Their languages, in spite of their variety, were of the same group, and their
physique and character were all but identical. The Ural-Altaian, or Mongolian
as he is often called, was thick set and wiry, but soon corpulent, and bandy
legged; his hair was straight and black, and the beard was scanty; his
cheek-bones were high and his eyes slanted upward and outward, the lids showing
the ‘Mongolian fold’. To other peoples he seemed excessively ugly, and his
ferocity deepened the shades. Fearless, enduring, and cruel, he appeared
everywhere as a ruthless destroyer, a heartless and incessant plunderer and
slave-taker, and, until long intermixture had changed his racial
characteristics, incapable of a higher civilization than the simple habits
prescribed by the steppes.
Those habits were due to the necessities of a
horseman, hunter, and sheepmaster, who changed his camping ground yearly from
the winterpastures of the south or sheltered valleys, burnt up in the hot
weather, to the summer-pastures of the north or the uplands, frozen when the
cold set in. The distance covered between them might be anything up to 1000
miles, and over this the nomads rode on their horses, their best wealth, famous
for their endurance and speed. The horse conditioned their whole existence.
Their favourite food was kumiz, fermented mare’s milk. The hours they
did not pass in their felt tents were spent on horseback. Their riding and
archery were superb, and their ubiquity and elusiveness in war exaggerated
their numbers and wore down resistance in a slower foe. It was hard to bring
them to close quarters in battle, until they saw their opponents exhausted:
their feigned flights proved the most effective tactics; they were never more
dangerous than when they tempted pursuit.
Their invasions were partly the result of an
overflowing population, and they were allured by the wealth of settled,
agricultural races around them; but still more important were migrations due to
wars among themselves. One collection of tribes would drive out another from
the best pastures. Those of the conquered who did not submit to the victors
migrated to treat more distant tribes in the same way. The process ended in an
attack on the settled, civilized peoples beyond the steppes. The accumulation
of large hordes of invaders was made easier by the elementary organization of
the Ural-Altaians. A few families under a patriarchal rule formed a camp, a few
camps a clan, a few clans a tribe, all very loosely held together. It would
happen that under an able leader tribes would gather in a horde, clans of
different tribes would form new combinations and a new but temporary people
would arise and conquer. There is a probability that some of the tribes on the
frontier of China, whose name the Chinese transcribed as Hiung-nu, retreated
westward and passed, doubtless with fresh recruits and with losses on the
route, to the steppes east of the Caspian Sea, where they appeared as the Huns.
In any case they were a horde hitherto unknown to westerners and set in motion
by events farther east. Distant, incalculable upheavals had prepared a
revolution in Europe.
The paganism of the nomads had but little advanced
beyond a belief in the numberless spirits, good and ill, of earth, water, and
air, who could be propitiated and controlled by offerings and magical ritual.
Among them the spirits of the dead held a prominent place in the religion of
their living kinsmen, and ancestor-worship might be described as their chief
cult. But superior creative spirits also appeared in their cosmogony, even
perhaps an originating god of heaven. The ancient sword, however, which their
king Attila worshipped, was rather the habitation or symbol of his tutelary
spirit of war.
Although so barbaric, the Ural-Altaians were not
without an art and culture which they shared with and partly borrowed from the
old nomad Iranian art of the western steppes. This art, preponderantly the work
of the smith, had received potent influences from the Greeks, the Persians, and
the Chinese, but it had absorbed and transformed them according to its own
aesthetic tendencies. Vigorous, fierce, but stylized animal forms, blended into
spirals and volutes for decoration, inlaid enamels of bright colours, these
ornamented their weapons, clothing, armour, and utensils. The style was
barbaric but impressive; it spread not only with the nomads but to other
receptive peoples. Its influence can be traced among the most westerly Germanic
and Celtic tribes.
It is very evident that neither Moor nor Persian,
neither German nor Celt required external pressure to induce them to invade the
Roman Empire. They saw there wealth, fertility, and civilization which were
irresistibly attractive. Persia was an expanding monarchy. German and Celt were
prolific barbarians little inclined to find room by forest clearance or more
laborious agriculture. Their institutions, such as the chief with his sworn
followers, and their whole ethos with its glorification of warlike adventure,
impelled them to gain fame, land, and wealth by the sword. The Empire had held
them back by main force for centuries. Now the Empire was weakened in cohesion,
population and morale; it was depending more and more on hired levies from the
barbarians themselves. Resistance grew more and more exhausting and difficult,
and then, as we shall see, the barbarians were in their turn thrust forward by
the hordes from Asia. It is little wonder that the frontiers were permanently
broken, and that the overtasked, more straggling western half of the Empire was
submerged, while the eastern half with its fortunate capital survived. The sea,
which divided the Balkans from Asia Minor made it less vulnerable from the
north, and the Persians had their own eastern frontier to protect against the
nomads. They, too, were obliged to fight on two fronts.
THE FLAVIAN DYNASTY
AND THE PERSIAN WAR
The chief
external dangers to the Roman Empire lay on three frontiers, those of Persia,
the Danube and the Rhine, and the course of the struggle on each frontier is
clearest when told consecutively. But the three theatres interacted on one
another; a defeat on the Rhine might divert or withhold sorely needed troops
from the Persian war: the Roman armies and revenues were not sufficient for all
the calls upon them. Dynastic questions, too, and rivalries for the throne
affected the Empire’s government and defence beyond any group of provinces.
There was a contest between the hereditary, dynastic principle, which appealed
to men longing for peace and order, and the elective principle inherent in the
constitution, which allured the mutinous soldiers of localized armies and the
private ambitions of their discontented, distrusted generals. The effects of
rebellion could not be localized in fact, although the narrative may have to
separate civil wars according to their geographical scene. None the less, as
the weightiest and most critical events in each period fall in the range of a
particular frontier, some continuity may be observed. The first in order of
time may be described in connexion with the Persian war.
While the
genius of Constantine, his capacity as a general and ruler, his insight into
the world before him, the amazing, sustained audacity of his decisions, stand
out consistently, his character exhibits conflicting traits, which have led to
very diverse interpretations. Contemporary dishonest panegyric and ill-informed
malicious detraction obscure his portrait. The practical shrewd veteran, chaste
and humane, degenerated into an elderly fop, devoted to the new politic pomp of
the throne, and led by his venal and corrupt entourage of eunuchs and
sycophants who fleeced his subjects. It was partly the penalty of an Asiatic
secluded despotism, but perhaps the wear and tear of a hectic career had left
scars on the mind. He was capable of a mystic enthusiasm which sustained his
self-confidence, but made him more liable to bursts of imperious anger;
moreover a rational explanation of irrational acts is not to be expected when
the acts themselves are scantly known. There was in him as in so many of his
successors a strain of savagery. After all they were half-civilized, and the
degrading amphitheatre had long been brutalizing the Roman world.
It seems that
Constantine was strongly attached to the dynastic principle. The Empire was too
vast and centralized to be governed for long by a single man. The system of
imperial partners, hastily allied by political marriages, had proved a complete
failure; close blood-relationship within the Flavian house offered a better
chance of harmony. Yet in 326 Constantine put to death his eldest and
promising son Crispus and his wife the Empress Fausta. There may have been mere
family discord, for Fausta is accused of contriving the death of her stepson
Crispus, or perhaps there was a real plot, or the Emperor may have been egged
on to a fever of suspicion and jealousy. His subsequent arrangements show that
he hoped for concord and collaboration within the imperial house. His three
sons by Fausta were carefully bred to rule, and were given shares of the Empire
as Caesars. Constantine II, the eldest, was put in charge of the West beyond
the Alps; Constans, the youngest, of the centre with Italy and Illyricum;
Constantius II of the East; while two nephews, Delmatius and Hanniballianus,
were to rule the lower Danube frontier and north-east Asia Minor respectively,
the latter with the oriental title of King of Kings, which suggests a hoped-for
expansion eastwards. But scarcely had Constantine breathed his last at
Nicomedia in 337, after a baptism more than usually delayed, when the scheme
broke down. The soldiers of the army of the East massacred the nephews, brothers,
and the hated chief minister of Constantine, only leaving alive two children,
Gallus and Julian: none but the sons of the Emperor should rule.
The Persian war had begun. Shapur II had already
driven out the Armenian King Arsaces and had vainly besieged the frontier town
of Nisibis. Constantius II restored Arsaces, but adopted for years a defensive
policy, punctuated by a victory near Singara. His main work was to reform the
Eastern army. Henceforward the cataphracts, the heavy mailed cavalry on the Persian
model, were the chief arm of the East Roman forces. Not till 359 did Shapur win
a dear success by the capture of the key town of Amida (Diarbakr) on the
Tigris, and Constantius prepare for more decisive action in the desultory war.
Events within the Empire had held his hands so long.
In 340 Constantine II, the senior Augustus, attempted to dispossess the young
Constans, but perished in an ambuscade near Aquileia. The valiant Constans took
over his brother’s lands without resistance, and proved himself an untiring
defender of his frontiers until his vices and misgovernment led to a revolt of
the Gallic troops and his murder (350). The old days seemed coming back, for
the usurper accepted by the troops was a soldier, Magnentius, of German
extraction. Italy and Africa submitted to him, and the army of Illyricum was
only kept from full revolt by the elevation to the Empire of its commander,
Vetranio, in collusion with Constantius. Fortunately the Persians once again
failed to take Nisibis, so that Constantius could move westwards. In a dramatic
scene before the armies Vetranio abdicated, and Constantius could advance to
inflict a crushing defeat (351) on Magnentius at Mursa (Esseg or Osijek) on the
Drave. The cataphracts decisively proved their superiority as a fighting arm
over the Gallic legions, but the loss of some 54,000 men in this internecine
struggle weakened the Empire’s defensive forces for years. The usurper was not
driven to suicide in Gaul till 353.
His brother’s murder, the usurpation by a half-barbarian
soldier, and his own childlessness forced on Constantius the problem of the
succession and the harmony of the Empire. In 351 he called his elder cousin
Gallus from seclusion and made him Caesar with Antioch for his residence and
the East for his sphere of government. The choice was unfortunate: the bloodthirsty
Caesar exercised a reign of terror without compensating ability, and his wife
Constantina, the Emperor’s sister, made his tyranny worse. He became a danger
to the Empire. Constantius’ remedy was to invite him to his presence in Italy,
where he was tried and beheaded (354). There was now only one Flavian left,
Julian, the half-brother of Gallus, and to him the Emperor turned after long
years of suspicion and neglect. Both were natural. Julian’s father had been
murdered in the massacre of 337 with Constantius’ assent; his half-brother had
just been executed; and Julian’s tastes and occupations were studious and
literary. His sympathy for paganism was as yet unknown. While he had inherited the
energy of the Flavians, his upright, kindly temper stood in contrast to the
fierce passions of his cousins and may have been derived from his mother’s
family, the Anicians, the most illustrious of the older senatorial houses.
Constantius, however, in spite of the dissuasions of his eunuch favourites,
appointed his cousin Caesar, gave him a sister to wife, and sent him to Gaul.
Julian’s success in administration and war surpassed the Emperor’s hopes, and
aroused the suspicions which he was always prone to adopt and which were fanned
by jealous or corrupt officials and courtiers. He was already estranged when
the revival of the Persian war and the loss of Amida gave him the opportunity
to weaken his too popular Caesar.
More troops were urgently needed in the East for a
major campaign, and Constantius sent the fatal order—not to Julian but to
subordinates—that the pick of the Gallic army should march to Asia. Julian
prepared to obey, but the order was hated by the soldiers and they almost
forced him to accept the style of Augustus at Paris (360). This was rebellion,
which Julian attempted to cover by asking for recognition from the senior
Augustus. Constantius, whose sense of duty detained him and his army in the
East on the frontier, replied by demanding abdication and submission. A
compromise became impossible, and Julian took the plunge into civil war before
the Eastern army could advance against him. By rapid and risky converging
movements through Rhaetia and North Italy, he first seized the key-city of Sirmium
(Mitrovitsa) among the marshes on the Save and then the pass of Succi (Trajan’s
Gate, Troyanova Vrata), which commanded the ascent from the Thracian plain to
the Haemus range. The threat could not be neglected, and Constantius started
from Syria to oppose it. On the way he died in Cilicia in November 361. The
Empire fell unresisting to his cousin. A grim, Dantesque face looks from the
statue of Constantius II. If not a great or attractive ruler, he was no
weakling; he possessed the tireless energy of his house; he knew how to exact
obedience from the tried ministers and generals he promoted; and he felt deeply
his responsibility for the safety of the Empire. Himself no brilliant general,
he improved the efficiency of the army by his changes. But his merits were
vitiated by his intolerance of opposition and his fear of treason, which led
him to indiscriminate, cruel injustice and made him a persecuting theologian.
He distrusted eminent ability, and listened easily to sycophants who used his
favour for extortion and oppression. ‘He had much influence’, it was said,
‘with Eusebius’, the eunuch who was his chief chamberlain. This was the
resource of a second-rate prince to whom the possession of high talents meant a
potential rebel, and the ineligibility of a eunuch was a recommendation. The
strict separation of military and civil commands was a safeguard, but even so
the untrustworthiness of Roman-born generals was a permanent disease of the
Empire.
The pagan reaction of Julian, like the Christian
proselytizing zeal of his predecessor, must be left to the appropriate chapter.
In external affairs, during a temporary lull in the West, Julian was free to
devote himself to the Persian war in the vain hope of giving a lasting check to
Persian aggression. In 363 he assembled his mobile army, 65,000 men—a revealing
figure—including the Gallic legions, in Syria, sent a division due east to hold
Mesopotamia, and himself struck deep southwards along the Euphrates to capture
the capital, Ctesiphon, and paralyse the enemy. In spite of the flooding of
central Iraq by the Persians, who cut the canals, Julian reached and crossed
the Tigris, but he was in no condition to assault the city: retreat up the
eastern bank of the Tigris was the only resource. The northwards march in the
heat of summer, through country wasted by Shapur’s order, harassed by the
swarms of the Persian heavy and light cavalry, was arduous. Julian’s plans had
miscarried. Shapur was a different foe from the haphazard German chiefs he knew
and he was forced to fight at a disadvantage. It may be that he had hoped for a
diversion from Arsaces of Armenia, who remained prudently neutral; and the
Mesopotamian division probably hardly knew their Emperor’s whereabouts. The
final blow was a mortal wound to Julian himself on 26 June 363, which deprived
his men of a resolute and inspiring leader. The new Emperor, elected by them
almost by chance on the extinction of the Flavian house, was the captain of the
guard, the Christian Jovian, whose delays rendered an escape that was difficult
impossible. At Dura he accepted the ‘shameful peace’ offered by the Persians as
the price of a safe retreat. Shapur’s terms were obviously devised to secure a
defensible strategic frontier. Singara and Nisibis, the two strong, loyal frontier
towns, and the Kurdish provinces east of the Tigris which had been won by
Galerius, were ceded to him; Armenia was to be left in the Persian sphere.
This was a peace which the Empire might and did accept
as tolerable for the actual frontier, but Armenia as a Persian vassal opened a
gate into Asia Minor and the Black Sea. Shapur’s endeavours to annex Armenia—he
captured the temporizing Arsaces—and Caucasian Iberia and to convert them both
to Mazdaism provoked Valens, Jovian’s successor in the East, to counter-measures;
he was successful in Iberia and supported the Christian Armenians who won some
victories, but he was called off to the Gothic war, and the death of the great
Shapur (380) only partially softened the conflict. With his hands full in Europe,
Theodosius the Great, Valens’ successor, was willing to agree to a compromise
(387) with the then King of Persia, Shapur III. Four-fifths of Armenia became a
vassal state of Persia under a Christian king; the remainder was left to the
Empire, first as a vassal kingdom and finally as a province defended by the new
city of Theodosiopolis. The Empire had at least barred the gate into Asia
Minor, and in spite of subsequent rivalries which ended in Persarmenia being
reduced to a Persian province, the frontier assumed a character of bickering
permanence. Besides their gains under the compromise, the defence of their own
eastern frontier no doubt made the kings of Persia more pacific towards the
Empire.
THE DEFENCE OF THE RHINE AND UPPER DANUBE
While the defence of the Rhine frontier lacked the
grandiose appearance of a conflict of great powers which characterized the
Persian war, it was in essentials far more critical, nay disastrous, for the
Empire, for it devastated the stronghold of the West; the loss of Gallic
man-power, not to mention wealth, was not to be remedied. The evil had begun in
the bad days before Diocletian, and Constantine the Great had won his early
laurels through his crushing victories over Franks and Alemanni, so crushing
and so bloody in reprisals that there was comparative peace on the Rhine till
his death. He exposed two Frankish kinglets and a host of their followers to
the wild beasts in the amphitheatre at Trier, for he was then still a pagan.
But the depopulation of eastern Gaul was shown by the fact that his father Constantius
I Chlorus had settled thousands of Franks and Alemanni as laeti, bound
to military service, west of the Rhine, which meant steady Germanization and
barbarization, while free Franks and Alemanni from beyond the Rhine flocked in
as recruits for the field-army. The usurper Magnentius was a Frank by blood.
These more peaceful years restored the Germans’ numbers, and Constans was
obliged to repress the Franks in 341-2, but the disastrous civil war between
Constantius II and the rebel Magnentius brought the usual consequences. The
frontier garrisons were depleted, the field-army was moved away and decimated
at Mursia, and Franks and Alemanni ranged plundering and slaying over Gaul.
Though Constantius attacked the Alemanni, they remained in possession of
Alsace, and the Salian Franks, a newly mentioned, perhaps newly formed,
sub-tribe, crossed the lower Rhine and occupied Toxandria, which is now
Brabant. Cologne fell to the Ripuarian Franks, a similar conglomeration on the
middle Rhine. The Germanization of these regions became all but complete.
It was the Caesar Julian who with inadequate forces
and disloyal colleagues had to meet this inundation. In brilliant campaigns
(356-8) he cleared Gaul of the Alemanni, winning one decisive victory at
Strasbourg, and quelled them in their homes beyond the Rhine. He recaptured
Cologne from the Ripuarians, and expelled the Chamavi to their old home on the
Yssel; but he was obliged to leave the Salians as foederati (vassal
allies owing contingents of troops) in Toxandria. The Empire’s armour had here
been pierced. A mild and just administration and the repression of extortion
did something to heal the wounds of Gaul; so did the repatriation of 20,000
captives carried off by the Alemanni; the frontier defences were restored along
the Rhine. But the province needed years of peace, which it did not get, and
abundant armies, which were drawn off to the East. When Valentinian succeeded
Jovian (364), he saw that a single ruler of the Empire was quite impossible. He
left his brother Valens as Emperor in the securer East, and himself undertook
the crucial task of defending the imperilled West.
The reign of Jovian had been as brief as it was
inglorious. He died suddenly in Asia Minor in February 364. The careful choice
that was made of his successor by the council at Nicaea shows that the needs of
the Empire were well understood by them. They elected a Christian and a
distinguished soldier. Valentinian I was the son of a Pannonian peasant,
Gratian, who had entered the army and risen to high rank and wealth. His son
had served in Gaul and was an officer in the imperial guards. His energy and
soldierly qualities were conspicuous even among these Emperors from Illyricum,
and his reign was occupied in the defence of the frontiers. But as a civil
ruler he was less efficient. That the Emperor disliked men of birth and
breeding and knew no Greek did little harm in the Latin West he ruled, yet it
shows his lack of education in all but war. He tightened the regime of castes
and the harsh centralization of the Empire in his endeavours to combat the
evils of the time. But he could be hoodwinked by his corrupt entourage, and his
wayward outbursts of despotic passion and cruelty were harmful to justice and
good government. The wicked tyranny of Count Romanus in Africa escaped
punishment and was redoubled in spite of complaints and commissions of inquiry,
for he had friends at court; it was the honest accusers who were put to death.
Valentinian’s main preoccupations were with the
defence of Gaul and Britain. In Gaul the Alemanni were the worst danger. They
crossed the frozen Rhine at midwinter, defeated Roman generals, and spread
desolation. At last in three victories Jovinus, master of the cavalry, drove
them back. Valentinian was able to retaliate by wasting Alemannia, never so
effectual a process, as the Germans could flee to the forests. None the less by
375 the Alemanni had been taught a lesson, and peace was arranged with their
king Macrianus. The brigandage of uprooted peasants, which followed the raids
and was the curse of Gaul, was sternly and ferociously repressed for a season.
Meanwhile the Emperor refortified the Rhine frontier and overawed the Franks,
whose recruits formed a valuable part of his army. When he was dead and news
came of the war of Valens with the Goths, an invasion by the Alemannian tribe
of the Lentienses reached no farther than Alsace, and was decisively routed by
the Emperor Gratian at Argentaria, near Colmar (378).
It was in Valentinian’s reign that Britain suffered
irremediable disaster. Events there and in Gaul reacted on one another. The
rumour of invasions spread; the Romans were hard put to it to defend themselves
on all sides, and it is the strongest testimony to Valentinian that he quenched
for a time the wildfire of ubiquitous ravage. At the very opening of the
century Constantius Chlorus had been obliged to undertake a major campaign
against Picts, Scots, and Saxons and reorganize the defences of Britain, where
he died (306). Besides restoring the Wall of Hadrian in the north against the
Picts, he instituted fortifications on the coast against the Saxons under an
officer styled significantly the Count of the Saxon Shore. Coast castles,
serving as bases for the old-established and enlarged fleet, were built from
the Wash to the Isle of Wight. Other harbour forts were built on the Irish Sea.
The command of the bulk of the garrison belonged to the Duke of the Britains
stationed at York. Britain in fact was now all frontier. But the new system
worked, and, although Constans in 342 had to intervene in person, the raids
were kept within bounds. But from Julian’s death, or even earlier, they assumed
dangerous proportions. Picts, Scots, Saxons, and, it is curious to note, Franks
descended on the country from all sides. The villas of the landed proprietors
began to be deserted as devastation went farther. The Franks must have been
Salians in part, although at this time the Salians were mainly loyal foederati, but it is a legitimate conjecture that they were largely Jutes, whose
traditions bring them from Jutland, yet whose culture and customs at a later
date show a close connexion with Frisia and the Rhine. They may well have
formed part of the Frankish conglomerate. In any case the situation of Britain
was desperate: the Wall was lost, overrun by Scots from the west and Germans
from the east, and the count and the duke were both slain in their defeat. In
368 Valentinian sent over his best general, Count Theodosius, to Britain, with
picked troops as reinforcements. The tables were turned, the marauding bands
intercepted, rounded up, and driven out; a mutiny was repressed, the Wall
restored, and punitive raids carried out. The Saxon Shore was furnished with
signal towers in Yorkshire, and a new province, Valentia, was created, perhaps
in Wales, to keep settled invaders down. Yet the respite was transitory owing
to the internal revolutions of the West.
The Roman provinces of Rhaetia, Noricum, and Pannonia
under the Flavian dynasty enjoyed comparative peace from the barbarians across
the upper Danube. Rhaetia served more as a Roman base against than as a victim
of the Alemanni. Constantine the Great dealt so effectually with the
Sarmatians, a Dacian tribe between the Danube and the Theiss, carrying off the
majority of them to be peasant-soldiers in Pannonia, that the remnant were
quiet neighbours at the close of his reign. The next generation, however,
renewed the assault, and in 357-9 Constantius II crushed the Sarmatians and
curbed the Suevic Quadi of modern Moravia. Valentinian’s fortifications, which
he extended beyond the Danube in disregard of the treaty, provoked both Quadi
and Sarmatians to fresh devastations. The Emperor’s reprisals were decisive,
and the cowed barbarians came to beg for mercy at Brigetio not far from the
southward bend of the Danube. At their appearance Valentinian in a transport of
rage was struck by apoplexy (February 375). His death was a disaster for the
Empire. It would have had worse immediate consequences had it not been for the
amiable character of his son Gratian, whom he had associated (367) with him as
Emperor of the West. The Illyrian army proclaimed Gratian’s step-brother
Valentinian II, a child of six, their Emperor, and Gratian accepted his
colleague in the spirit of an affectionate guardian. But in spite of soldierly
qualities and success against marauding Franks and Vandals, who now were
raiding across the Rhine, Gratian lost his hold on the armies. He neglected
administration for sport, and his open preference for Alan mercenaries, if
justified by their fighting qualities, lost him the devotion of the Gallic
troops. This was to give an opening for the ruinous disease of mutiny and
private ambition which afflicted the Empire. On the defeat and death of his
uncle Valens by the Goths (378), Gratian made the admirable choice of a
colleague to save the East in Theodosius the Great, but thereby the rivalry and
hopes of another distinguished general, not of the imperial family, were
aroused.
The Spaniard Maximus commanded in Britain, where the
attacks of Picts and Scots were being renewed. He accepted his army’s
proclamation of him as Augustus and sailed with it to Gaul in complete
disregard of the island’s interests. The Gallic troops went over to him; the
deserted Gratian was treacherously murdered at Lyons (August 383); and the
usurper was acknowledged in Spain and Africa. Theodosius saved the Italian
diocese for the young Valentinian II at the cost of recognizing Maximus. It was
a hollow peace. Maximus tried in vain to trap the Italian Augustus into a
meeting; Bauto the Frank held the Alpine passes against an attempt at invasion,
while Theodosius prepared for war. Levies of men, principally barbarians,
and extortion of money to pay them went on through both halves of the Empire.
In 387 Maximus moved, and easily drove the feeble Valentinian II from Italy to
Theodosius. The Eastern Emperor advanced through Illyricum. Three hard-fought
battles, the last at Aquileia, achieved the overthrow of Maximus; he was
captured and put to death (July 388), and his son Victor shared his fate in
Gaul. There had been a manly energy in the rule of Maximus, who discarded the
employment of eunuchs, which was lacking in the young Valentinian, now made
sole Emperor of the West by the conqueror. He was an amiable second Gratian
without experience or power, which was in the hands of a general, the Frankish
Count Arbogast. In May 392 he was strangled in the night. Arbogast was
ambitious, but he was a barbarian and dared not usurp the Empire. Instead he
was king-maker of an imperial puppet, Eugenius, who had been his secretary, and
who was in touch with the votaries of moribund paganism. In the war that
followed Theodosius depended more on Gothic, Arbogast more on Frankish
auxiliaries. The issue was decided in the battle of the river Frigidus (Vipao,
Wippach) at the head of the Adriatic. Eugenius was executed; Arbogast committed
suicide; and the victorious Theodosius united East and West for the last time
till his death in 395.
The civil wars from the revolt of Maximus had dealt
incurable and unnecessary wounds on the Western Empire. At their close it is
evident that the mobile army was composed not only of barbarian levies but of
barbarian tribal allies, foederati, fighting in their own fashion and under
their own kinglets and chiefs. Not only that, but the highest commands in the
army were held by barbarian generals, Bauto, Arbogast, Stilicho, who thus
disposed of the fate of the Empire. Meanwhile, barbarian raiders, in the
absence of the field-armies, were piercing the frontiers and laying waste the
exhausted, dispeopled provinces. When Maximus left Britain the raids there
redoubled. The Wall of Hadrian was finally deserted. The landowners fled from
their villas even in the south. The diocese was sinking back into barbarism
under assaults from all sides. This was the time when Niall of the Nine
Hostages, High-king of Ireland (389-405), was the scourge of Britain and even
of the Gallic coast. His power is obvious from his suzerainty of his own
country. It was in these raids that the British boy, St Patrick, son of a
decurion, was captured (389) in his father’s little villa and taken to slavery
in north Ireland, whither he was to return years after as a missionary. At the
same time Ripuarian Franks and Alemanni were crossing the Rhine into Gaul.
Count Arbogast repelled them and retaliated and then levied them for the army
which he was to lead against Theodosius. The danger on the frontier was
undiminished when the Emperor died (395)
THE GOTHS AND THE CROSSING OF THE DANUBE
For many years the Flavian dynasty succeeded in
maintaining a stable situation on the lower Danube. Constantine the Great was
aided in the Black Sea against Ostrogoth aggression by the alliance of the
Greek republic of Cherson in the Crimea. His eldest son and namesake inflicted
a severe defeat on the Visigoths (332) when they invaded Moesia. The river
fortifications were strengthened and a wall built across the Dobrudzha to the
Black Sea, where the delta of the Danube did not provide a defensible line. But
in the main peace prevailed. Ermanaric, the king of the Ostrogoths, famed in
legend as Hermanrich, extended his suzerainty northwards, perhaps to the
Baltic, and thus turned away from the Empire. The Visigoths seemed to be
settling down under several chieftains. They were foederati of the
Empire, and supplied troops under their own leaders at call in return for
annual subsidies. Whether from their proximity to the Empire or the number of
their Christian captives and serfs or from the decadence of their paganism in
their wanderings, a momentous change was penetrating them, the adoption of
Arian Christianity. But whatever sporadic Christians there may have been among
the Goths, the apostle of the nation and through them of all the East German
tribes was Wulfila (Ulfilas) (310—81). He belonged to a Cappadocian family
which had been carried away captive in a Gothic raid, and it is significant
that he was a Goth by language and ‘nationality’. As a boy he was a hostage in
Constantinople, where c. 341 he was ordained bishop for the Goths by the Arian
bishop Eusebius. For seven years he preached and organized Christianity among
the Visigoths, gaining over large numbers to the Faith. But there was still a
powerful heathen party led by one of the greatest chiefs, Athanaric, who
conducted a fierce persecution in which those who would not worship the old
gods were burnt alive. Wulfila himself with a considerable band took refuge in
the Empire, where they were given by Constantius land in Moesia and were known
as the Lesser Goths. But many Christians remained, and by degrees the whole
tribe was converted. Nameless missionaries carried Christianity to the other
East Germans, Ostrogoths, Gepids, Vandals, Heruli, and Burgundians, even to the
West German Longobards; by 400 all had embraced the Arian faith. Part of this
rapid conversion, which left the more settled West Germans as a whole
untouched, was due to the genius of Wulfila, who provided his countrymen with a
Christian written literature. He replaced their native script, the runes, which
were only fitted for the briefest incised sentences, by a modification of the
Greek alphabet with supplementary letters to express the sounds of the Gothic
language, and he translated the Scriptures into Gothic. A manuscript of his New
Testament, dating from the fifth or sixth century, still survives. In this way
the elements of Christianity and Graeco-Roman civilization were acquired by the
East Germans who ruined the Western Empire. The benefits of their conversion
were real, if slow, but unhappily they were ardent Arians. Their heresy
deepened the offence of their barbarism to their Catholic subjects, and made
the gulf between the two peoples unbridgeable. Good relations between
conquerors and conquered would have been difficult to create in any case; the
hostility in religion made them impossible. But it was better than if the East
Germans had remained incorrigible, unteachable heathens.
Meanwhile the
Visigoths had been tempted by its civil wars to attack the Empire. In 365
Procopius, a cousin of Julian, persecuted by Valens and a fugitive because of
his kinship to the apostate, raised a revolt in Constantinople and gained the
Balkans. He was only overthrown by the arrival of the eastern army from Syria
(366). But he had called in Gothic aid, and Valens decided on a punitive war
(367-9) across the Danube. He drove Athanaric into the Transylvanian mountains
and enforced a peace. The first effect was civil war among the Visigoths, and
fierce persecution of the Christians by Athanaric. But he lost ground, and
Fritigern, who adopted Christianity, took the lead among the chiefs. Then came
a cataclysm. The Huns started to move from the east of the Caspian Sea. In 372
they overthrew the Alans, most of whose remnants came fleeing west.
Next came the turn of the Ostrogoths. They were broken by the Hunnic onslaught
after a desperate resistance and subjected; the aged Ermanaric killed himself,
and his son King Withimir was slain in battle. The Visigoths, too, were unable
to resist. They were defeated under Athanaric in 375 on the bank of the
Dniester. Athanaric withdrew to Transylvania shorn of most of his power; years
after he took refuge in Constantinople and died there. But the greater part of
the tribe fled under Fritigern and other chiefs to the Danube and clamoured for
admission into the Empire. Valens decided to grant their petition on terms. It
was a momentous decision to allow so numerous a people to pass the defences en
masse. But there were wide vacant lands in Moesia, the Visigoths would
provide admirable recruits for the army, and on a smaller scale the same policy
had been followed without ill result. The Visigoths, too, were largely
Christians, and were required to give up their arms. Once they were ferried
tumultuously across the Danube, however, the arrangements broke down. The
shameless extortion and corruption of the imperial officials, who kept them in
semi-starvation yet left them their arms in return for bribes, drove the
barbarians to desperation. Brawls were inevitable. One occurred while Fritigem
was entertained by Count Lupicinus at a feast in Marcianopolis, and the count
ordered the massacre of such of the chief’s comitatus as were in the
city. Fritigern escaped by a ruse, and the war began. The other Gothic chieftains
joined him with their clans, as well as a part of the Ostrogoths with their
boy-king Witheric. Not only Moesia, but the untouched province of Thrace south
of the Haemus range was desolated and the inhabitants carried away captive. Yet
the cities held out securely, and in open fighting the Roman troops at least
held their own. The enemy, however, was too strong to be overcome by the forces
at hand. Valens brought up the army from the eastern frontier, while his nephew
Gratian sent detachments in aid and followed with his army from the West. By
ill advice Valens, who had reached Adrianople, refused to wait for his nephew
and offered battle on 9 August 378. He was completely out-manoeuvred by
Fritigem. His cavalry were too weak against the Ostrogothic horsemen, his
infantry were mishandled, and he himself fell with two-thirds of the Roman
army. They had fought as well as ever, but incompetent leadership and the
disadvantage of too weak a force of cavalry produced a major disaster. The
Goths were now inside the frontier, the Balkans were still more dispeopled, and
the regular army fatally depleted. The defeat of Adrianople is a landmark in
the decline of the Roman Empire.
The Emperor Gratian did the best in his power to
remedy the catastrophe. He summoned from retirement in Spain the most able
general of the Empire, Theodosius, put him in command, and soon created him
Emperor of the East. In view of the disloyalty of Roman generals this was a
risky measure, and Theodosius had wrongs which he might have avenged. His
father, Count Theodosius, after his success in Britain had subdued a serious
Moorish revolt, but he had also revealed the crimes of Count Romanus and the
miscarriage of justice that followed. This made him powerful enemies, who
obtained his execution on the death of his master Valentinian (376). His son,
already distinguished, had been disgraced at the same time. Now the son,
Theodosius the Great, was called on to save the Empire. He did so as much by
diplomacy as by arms and at great cost. He reformed the army, repelled the
Goths from the siege of Thessalonica, his headquarters, drove back a fresh
invasion of Ostrogoths at the Danube delta, and hemmed in the Visigoths in
Moesia. But in the war they had devastated Macedonia and Thessaly, while the
Ostrogoths and Alans invaded Pannonia. At last, with Fritigern dead, a treaty
was made in 382. The Visigoths were settled as foederati in Moesia, and
besides their obligations as self-governing vassals they supplied plentiful
recruits to the Eastern army. A little earlier Gratian had adopted the same
course with the Ostrogoths, who were given Pannonia. It was an unsatisfactory
peace. The Danube had ceased to be a frontier; barbarian states were inside the
Empire, providing much of its armed force, and many of the Goths were in favour
of renewing the war and continuing their conquests. It was, in fact, only a
respite. In 390, with the aid of Huns from beyond the Danube, Alaric led a part
of the Visigoths to devastate Thrace and was not rounded up till 392. It is
significant that the victorious general was Stilicho, a Vandal bred in the
Roman service. By the end of Theodosius’ reign (395) the Roman generals were
mostly barbarian mercenaries and the Roman armies largely composed of
barbarian foederati.
THE
ARIAN CONTROVERSY
When
Constantine the Great took over the Eastern provinces of the Empire from the
fallen Licinius, he was met by a controversy which threatened to cleave the
unity of the Christian Church. It concerned the most fundamental of Christian
beliefs, the divinity of Christ, and both as a convert and as a statesman the
Emperor had every reason to desire that his instructors should agree on the
basis of his new faith, and that the Church as a whole should continue to be a
solid support for the throne and a cement for the Empire. Thus nothing could be
more natural than that he should use all his influence to end the Arian schism.
The
controversy arose from the difficulty of combining the divinity of Christ, the
incarnate Logos, with the unity of God. Already in the third century Sabellius
had stressed monotheism to the extent of declaring that the Logos was a
function of God the Father rather than a separate Person, but his view had
comparatively few adherents. The majority of Eastern Christians held firmly to
the separate Person of the Redeemer without defining too plainly the sense in
which the Father and the Son were the One God. The doctrine of Ari us, in which
he had precursors, was that there was an eternity when the Son was not, that he
had been begotten by a once lonely Creator, and that the Incarnation was the
dwelling of the Logos in the human body of Christ. In his endeavour to be
monotheistic, Arius taught the existence of a secondary, inferior God, whose
humanity was merely physical. He was a respected presbyter of Alexandria, and
his bishop Alexander vigorously opposed his theology. Arius was driven to
Palestine, but though he was condemned by a small Council of bishops at Antioch
(324), his partisans were numerous; he had crystallized a type of Christian
thought by what seemed a simple explanation, if its ease was superficial, and
although it made the worship of Christ as God almost contradictory to its
monotheism. It might, too, be more congenial and seem more natural to recent
converts from paganism, accustomed to a gradation of deities in existence,
rank, and power. It certainly attracted the East Germans, as we have seen, when
they were converted. But the opposition to it in the Graeco-Roman world was
intense, and produced a more definite form of the counter-doctrine, which
should not be either Sabellian or polytheistic. This asserted in terms that the
Son was the co-eternal Logos of the Father and had taken on Himself human
nature at the Incarnation.
It was now that Constantine intervened. He first
vainly urged reconciliation on a basis of live and let live with an
irreducible minimum in the divinity of the Redeemer, a policy to which he
steadfastly adhered. Then he took control of the situation by summoning the
proposed synod at Ancyra in Cappadocia to sit in his presence at Nicaea in
Bithynia as an Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church. Some 300 bishops
came at his call in 325. They were almost all Easterners, though deputies
represented the Bishop of Rome, and a most important member was Bishop Hosius
of Cordova, much in the Emperor’s confidence. Other leading figures were Arius
himself, Bishop Marcellus of Ancyra, the Sabellian, Alexander of Alexandria and
his deacon Athanasius, and the two Eusebiuses, the Bishop of Nicomedia and the
learned Bishop of Caesarea, who belonged to the conservative, inclusive
majority of the East. It was easy to agree in condemning the extreme opinions
of Arianism and Sabellianism, but a common formula to unite the other parties
was hard to reach. At last, under the Emperor’s influence, the Council devised
and accepted with only two dissentients the original Nicene Creed. The
Only-begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, was declared to be of the same
substance, omoúsios, with the Father.
The Council dissolved, leaving an indelible mark on Christian doctrine and
government as well, for it had legislated in canons binding on the whole
Church, besides formulating articles of faith in the creed which were to prove
permanent. Constantine hoped that on its broad basis reunion and reconciliation
of the disputants might take place.
He was prepared to enforce subscription to the new
creed by banishing the recalcitrants, and even Arius subscribed at last. But
the obstacles were greater than the practical Emperor thought. On the one hand,
the definitely Nicene party, headed by Athanasius, now Bishop or Patriarch of
Alexandria, insisted that the creed, with omoúsios,
should be understood in their strict sense, and that Arius should not be
forgiven without express acceptance of his adversaries’ meaning. On the other,
the conservatives of various shades, headed by Eusebius of Nicomedia, who
feared Sabellianism most of all, distrusted the word omoúsios, and looked on Arius as a pardonable, too-precise
extremist. They formed the wide, amorphous party of semi-Arians, whose
difficulty was to find a common formula save by the addition of fresh anathemas
on the solutions proposed. They began, however, by attacking the chief members
of the Nicene party, and in 335 a Council at Tyre deposed Athanasius on
trumped-up charges. The Patriarch appealed in person to Constantine, at first
with success, but soon he was banished to Gaul, though no fresh Patriarch
filled his see. At Tyre Arius had been readmitted to communion, just as the
Emperor wished: his enemies rejoiced that he died suddenly the day before the
formal ceremony.
St Athanasius
is the hero of the Arian controversy. A subtle Greek metaphysician and
theologian, bred to the law, he was too ingenious a case-maker, but his grasp
of principles and what they implied was profound, his courage and firmness were
unshakable, his insight into men and affairs was piercing. His generosity of
temper and his leadership gained him the devotion of the Egyptians and the
respect of the outside world. With magnificent persistence he maintained and
propagated the Nicene doctrine of the Incarnation against skilful opponents who
had the Emperors on their side.
On the death of Constantine (337) Athanasius returned
to his see. The new Eastern Emperor Constantius II was personally opposed to
him; he had theological tastes and was easily influenced by court Arianizers.
In 341 he expelled Athanasius and other bishops by force, and one new version
of the creed after another was devised by Eastern synods. But now the West was
being roused to the theological problem. Less metaphysical and less given to
subtle distinctions than the East, the West venerated the Council of Nicaea and
was content with its creed. Julius, the Bishop of Rome, gave the vast authority
of his church to the support of Athanasius. The Emperor Constans, a sordid champion,
demanded a new General Council. It met (343) in two discordant halves, the
Westerns at Sardica (the modern Sofia) and the Easterns at Philippopolis. The
Westerns under Hosius restored Athanasius, the Easterns under Stephen,
Patriarch of Antioch, condemned him. But the victory was won for Sardica later,
when Stephen was detected in an infamous plot to discredit the Western Bishop
of Cologne on a mission to Antioch. In 346 Constantius was obliged to consent
to the restoration of Athanasius.
The lull in the controversy, however, only lasted
until Constantius became master of the West by the overthrow of Magnentius.
From 353 he renewed the attack on Athanasius and the Nicene leaders by councils
which acted under pressure. Hosius of Cordova was imprisoned; Liberius of Rome
and Hilary of Poitiers were exiled, the one the head of the greatest of the
churches, the other the best Western theologian. A surprise attack (356) was
made by the soldiery on Athanasius, who barely escaped to a secret life as a
fugitive for six years among the desert monks and the devout of Egypt. His
rival Patriarch, George of Cappadocia, a dubious character, who had been a
pork-contractor, was obliged to flee from the mob in a year or two.
Meantime changes were taking place in the anti-Nicene
ranks. The moderates preferred the word omioúsios ‘of like substance’, to omoúsios ‘of
the same substance’, but held to the eternity of the Logos who became
incarnate. The real extremists were the utter Arians, Anomoeans, who denied
even the likeness, and between these grew up a temporizing party, the Homoeans,
who omitted the substance while asserting the likeness. It was the latter who
enjoyed the vacillating support of Constantius. Ans the Homoeans won.
At
Constantinople in 360 a colourless Homoean creed (the fourth of Sirmium) was
adopted under imperial pressure, and the moderate semi-Arian chiefs were sent
into exile. But this decision had no effect in the West, where Arians and
semi-Arians were few. In the East the sympathies of the moderate semi-Arians
were becoming more Nicene and they were listening to friendly overtures from
Athanasius. By contrast the Homoeans were definitely Arian in doctrine. When
the Patriarch of Antioch, Meletius, preached a Nicene sermon, he was exiled and
an Arian set in his stead.
JULIAN AND THE PAGAN REACTION
The imperial support, not only of the Homoeans but of
Christianity, was lost by the accession of the pagan Julian and by his attempt
to put new life into the worship of the old gods. Julian had been brought up,
mainly in seclusion, as a Christian and as an enthusiast for the literature of
ancient Hellas. The Arianism in which he was bred had scant attractions for
him; paganism to him was Hellenism, and at Nicomedia he willingly fell under
the influence of a cultured pagan circle which gathered round the great
rhetorician and teacher Libanius. In a credulous age Julian was outstripped by
none in credulity. The Neo-Platonism of the time was thick with prodigies and
marvellous stances, which found him an eager believer. He formed an admiring
friendship with the impressive philosophic charlatan, Maximus. He himself was
guided by divine voices. Iamblichus seemed to him to have written the final
truths of religion. His new pagan education was completed in the schools of
Athens, which were the stronghold of the ancient gods. There he became an
initiate of the Eleusinian mysteries. Doubtless the secrecy of his conversion
and the hypocrisy which as an outward Christian he was bound to practise
account in part for the neurotic and highly strung character of Julian. It is
to his credit that he showed a humanity, uprightness and chastity rare in the
declining Empire. If he was vain and pedantic, he was neither treacherous nor
cruel in his pagan fanaticism. He did not have time to develop the ruthless
spleen of despotism.
It was not till Julian rebelled against Constantius
that he could reveal his true religion as a proselytizing pagan determined to revivify
the worship of the gods. His Gallic troops were largely heathen, and from the
moment when he reached Sirmium in 361 he spared no pains to increase their
fervour and gain over apostates like himself, if less sincere, in the army,
court, and administration. No great success attended his efforts at conversion,
but the purging of the corrupt civil service and the dispersal of the swarm of
court menials and officials which the cult of oriental despotism had fostered
gave opportunities for the promotion of pagans, who were numerous in the
educated classes. Julian, whose incessant activity and literary tastes allowed
him to be a voluminous author, endeavoured to reanimate the pagans and confound
the Christians by his polemic writings. They had a vivacious, witty brilliance.
As we might expect from the spirit of the age, they are better in criticism and
learning than in constructive or penetrating thought. Intended to convince,
their appeal was to the NeoPlatonic enthusiast, not to his opponents.
Julian trusted most of all to the exercise of his
authority as Pontifex Maximus, high priest of the ancient religion, backed by
his absolute power as Emperor. This office had been from the time of Augustus
one of the constituent elements of the imperial regime, and had continued to be
held by Constantine and his sons, who had employed deputies for its religious
functions. Their attitude to paganism had been one of unfriendly toleration.
The best statues of the gods were taken to adorn Christian Constantinople.
Temples had been despoiled of their lands and revenues for the benefit of court
favourites or of Christian churches. The lapse of temple services and
sacrifices, as pagan devotion decayed, was encouraged. The temples themselves,
in some parts, were allowed to be destroyed or converted to other uses.
Constantius II had even removed the altar of Victory from the Senate-house when
he visited Rome, in spite of the pagan majority in the Senate (357). But in
general the maintenance of the pagan cults had been left to depend on the
varying zeal of local magistrates and the proportion of pagans in the
population. Julian now set out to use his powers to restore everywhere the
rites and endowments of the temples, to rekindle devotion to them, and to
reorganize the disconnected cults of the whole amorphous assemblage of gods,
Greek, Roman, barbaric, and oriental, as a state church of paganism. He saw the
strength that Christianity possessed in its unity and organization, and
imitated them in his new creation. But the philosophic, doctrinal basis of his
pagan church was to be Neo-Platonic monotheism with its emanations, expressed
in the devout worship of the multitudinous departmental gods of tradition. All
the temples were to be reopened and all cults zealously performed, however
forgotten. The Empire smoked with sacrifices and hecatombs. Julian himself was
tireless in his participation in public worship. The priests were to be
virtuous and professional; they were even to preach. The provinces were to have
their metropolitans, the cities their high priests in an orderly hierarchy.
They should organize charitable relief for the religious poor. It is evident
how the Emperor took his lesson from the Christianity he hated and hoped to
outvie.
But the appeal showed no signs of success. It not only
failed with the Christians, who might, as in Cappadocia, embrace the whole
population, but it did not inspire the pagans beyond a small circle of
Neo-Platonists. The cultured conservatives had no wish to see their ancestral
usages brigaded into a religion of enthusiasm. If they wished for religious consolation
and visionary ecstasy, they sought them as initiates in the secret rites of the
mystery religions of Mithras or Isis or the like, in which Julian himself was
an adept. These were experiences for the individual or a select group, not for
public worship of state or city-gods. The pagan populace preferred to his
austere puritan revival the cruel or sensational games of the amphitheatre and
circus, to which Julian gave the minimum of his countenance, and the magical
invocation of the rustic gods. Indeed the Emperor was at one with the majority
of his subjects only in his credulity, which gave them an unquestioning faith
in omens, oracles, spells and magicians. It was the underworld of paganism
which had the most tenacious life. Even the Christian Emperors, who punished
the practice of magic as a heinous crime, believed in its efficacy.
Julian, when he re-established paganism as the
imperial religion, proclaimed universal toleration. But the effects of his
abolition of Christian privileges were harsh enough. State subventions were to
cease; so were the exemptions granted to the clergy and the right to receive
bequests to the churches. Temple lands and sites were to be restored to their
former use, and if the temples had been destroyed, they were to be rebuilt by
the destroyers. He hoped much from Christian divisions, the clash of Arian and
Catholic. Even his justice was quibbling in his desire to foment them. He
revoked the sentences of exile and confiscation which Constantius had decreed
against the Catholic bishops, but when Athanasius re-entered on the see of
Alexandria, which was vacant by the murder of the Arian George of Cappadocia in
a riot provoked by his greed and tyranny, Julian drove him once more into exile
as an unauthorized intruder; it is true that he might well fear the influence
of the Patriarch. Towards the close of his reign he entered on a path which led
to persecution. He forbade Christians to teach in the schools of rhetoric on
the masterpieces of ancient literature even to their co-religionists. How
should Christians expound the heathen works which they denounced, and which
were almost the scriptures of paganism? Tolerant pagans, as well as Christians,
condemned the edict, for the culture and education of the day depended on these
works; it was an attempt to deprive the Christians of a common cultural
inheritance, to make them intellectual plebeians. Julian wished to handicap his
antagonists. The vanity of his hopes was shown at his death, when his own army
elected the Christian Jovian as his successor.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF CATHOLICISM
The change of ruler marked the end of the pagan
reaction. Whether from weakness or good sense the new Emperor had just time
before his sudden death in 364 to proclaim universal toleration and to
recognize Athanasius as Patriarch of Alexandria. Valentinian followed in his
footsteps in the West. He adhered to the Nicene party, which steadily grew, but
let the Arians and pagans be. Valens, however, who in other matters was loyally
subservient to the brother to whom he owed his throne, in religion was a
convinced and even persecuting Arian. His personal adherence helped to sustain
opinions that were losing ground, for Valens, when his cruelty was not roused
by fear, was a good administrator. He reduced the taxes, fortified the
frontier, and built splendidly. Until the Gothic migration confronted him with
a crisis, his indecision and delays did little harm in secular affairs, while
he was fixed in his religious policy by the influence of the Homoean bishops
left by Constantius, and especially by Eudoxius, the Patriarch of
Constantinople.
During his brief return to his see under Julian,
Athanasius had reinvigorated the Nicene party in the East, but he had also
alarmed the conservatives by the express acknowledgement of the Holy Spirit as
the Third co-equal Person in the Trinity. Valens, who expelled the returning
Nicene bishops, failed to depose Athanasius permanently, nor was he able to
quell the opposition to Arianism. When he fell at Adrianople, Athanasius was
already dead (373); his place as leader of the Eastern Nicenes was taken by the
ascetic St Basil, Bishop of Cappadocian Caesarea, whom Valens had not dared to
depose. Although the Arians were strong in some districts, such as
Constantinople, the tendency of conservatives and semiArians was to accept
the Nicene Creed and the full doctrine of the Trinity expounded by Athanasius.
It was only the support of Valens which maintained the Arians in power. His
death left the Nicene Emperor Gratian in control, and in January 379 Gratian
appointed the Spaniard Theodosius, a rigid Nicene, to be his colleague in the
East. In 380 Theodosius commanded all his Christian subjects to follow the
Nicene doctrine professed by the churches of Rome and Alexandria; next year he
ordered the churches of the East to be given over to the Nicenes. An Eastern
Council, later recognized as ecumenical, was held at Constantinople in May 381
and reaffirmed the Nicene Creed. It was followed up by new persecuting edicts
of the Emperor, which went far beyond the partisanship of Valens: the Arians
were forbidden to build themselves new churches even outside the walls of
cities; their ordinations were proscribed; they were subjected to civil
disabilities. Constantinople, which was their stronghold, if somewhat
influenced by the missionary efforts of the preacher, St Gregory Nazianzen of
Cappadocia, was in fact forcibly converted by Theodosius. From this time the
Arians were a persecuted and dwindling minority in the East as well as in the
West. When the young Western Emperor Valentinian II, under the influence of his
Arian mother, the Empress Justina, ordered two churches in Milan to be given to
the Arians, he was baffled by the indignant protests of the archbishop, St
Ambrose, one of the pillars of his throne. Even this passing favour was ended
by the conversion of Valentinian to orthodoxy under the influence of his
protector, Theodosius. But if Arian Romans became few, the East German tribes
who invaded the Empire remained steadfast to the Arian doctrine. Arianism
became the badge of barbarian Christianity, and the religious dissidence
deepened and widened the cleft between them and their subjects, who clung
passionately to their orthodox faith.
The Council of Constantinople took a further step in
the development of church organization. It gave to the Bishop of Constantinople
the second place in the ecclesiastical hierarchy immediately after the Bishop
of Rome, and before those of Antioch and Alexandria. The title of Patriarch
came into use for the bishops of these super-eminent sees, to whom was added in
the fifth century the Bishop of the holy city of Jerusalem. The Roman world
during this period fell under the authority of these patriarchates. Other
cities, like Carthage, Milan, or Ephesus, however high in rank or illustrated
by famous bishops, took a secondary place. Constantinople achieved its position
as the New Rome, the capital of the Eastern Empire, but its secular claims were
resented and denied by the ancient capital of Rome, which asserted a universal
authority based on its Petrine foundation. The Western Council of Sardica (343)
had given the right of an appeal to Rome to a bishop deposed by a local synod.
It was under the statesmanlike if worldly minded Damasus (366-84), who obtained
his bishopric after fierce faction fights, that the see of Rome put forth its
first official definition of its primacy over all other churches, as their type
and model and supervisor. While the claim was admitted in the sense of an
honoured pre-eminence in the East, it was confirmed as an appellate
jurisdiction in the West by an edict of the Emperor Valentinian III.
The establishment of Christianity as the religion of
the State undoubtedly brought evil effects in its train to the religion of the
Gospel. For one thing, with the power of the Empire at its back, the spirit of
persecution, bred among passionately held convictions on the true faith and
made familiar by the anti-Christian persecutions of the pagan Emperors, had
become endemic in the Church. Not only were Jews, Manichees and pagans
penalized, but heretics, i.e. Christians of scantly held or defeated opinions,
were subjected to harsh persecution. The despotism of the Empire entered the
Church in the endeavour to control men’s thoughts as well as their actions. The
toleration of Arian worship appeared a scandalous sin to the eyes of the saintly
Ambrose, which may have led him even to countenance pious fraud in the
opportune discovery of the bodies of the unknown martyrs, St Gervasius and St
Protasius, during his conflict with Justina. On another count, the character of
the bishops deteriorated under the influence of court favour and wealthy sees.
While many maintained a standard which won the respect of unbelievers, too many
were sycophants and careerists, whose lives did little credit to the Church.
Again, when the profession of Christianity became profitable and fashionable,
swarms of converts entered the Christian community, bringing with them a
general decline in Christian morals and behaviour. When all the Roman world had
become Christian, it seemed much the same world as it had been before
conversion.
Yet there are signs of the beneficial, renovating
action of Christianity on that fatigued civilization and its ingrained defects.
Men found they had a sacred cause, beyond self-preservation, to plan and strive
for. A fresh and vivid interest in things of the mind, which involved the
eternal destiny of each and all, sprang up instead of the passive acquiescence
in government orders and the little-heeded speculations of cliques of
philosophers. It was the doctrine of redemption by the Incarnate Saviour which
awoke men from their apathy and servitude. It gave energy and freedom to the
disputes on the creed, a nobility to life in spite of mob violence and
persecution, and it won the victory for the Nicenes, its most efficient
champions.
The beneficial effect of the Church’s authority and
its spirit of independence amid the servility and spasmodic ferocity of a
decadent age were evident in the reign of Theodosius the Great. Devout and
benevolent as the Emperor was in the main, he was liable to fits of passionate
wrath which knew no bounds of mercy or equity. When a disloyal riot broke out
(383) in the excitable city of Antioch on the occasion of new and grinding
taxation, it was the intercession of the Bishop Flavian with Theodosius which
put a stop to the executions and obtained the revocation of his edict degrading
the offending capital from its rank and privileges. Still more cruel was the
Emperor’s action towards Thessalonica, after Constantinople the most important
city of the Balkans. In 390 the mob, long irritated by the billeting of
barbarian troops on them, savagely murdered Botheric, who commanded the
garrison. By the Emperor’s order, given from Milan, in spite of the pleas of St
Ambrose, the soldiers treacherously massacred some 7000 citizens gathered in
the circus. St Ambrose at once refused the communion until penance was done by
the culprit, and the Roman world was amazed to see the Emperor without his
purple standing as a penitent in the cathedral of Milan. Perhaps only St
Ambrose with his courage and fame could have won such a victory, but he won it
by the power of a Christian bishop, who could overawe the temporal autocrat of
the State. The dead weight of military despotism and the callous brutality
fostered by the amphitheatre found at last an opponent they could not subdue.
The influence of Christian ethics may be traced in the
humanitarian legislation, however ineffective and marred by desperately
ferocious penalties, of the Christian Emperors. Constantine abolished the cruel
punishment of crucifixion, although burning at the stake became customary, and
quite vainly denounced the inhuman sports of the amphitheatre. Valentinian had
more success in forbidding the condemnation of Christian criminals at least to
the arena. It was Valentinian, too, who punished the callous practice of
exposing unwanted infants as murder. Constantine had done something to protect
the slave from ill usage: to kill him was to be punished like the murder of a
freeman. It was forbidden to break up the families of slaves or coloni by sales. Sexual crimes, like rape, were threatened with punishments of such
fierceness as to suggest that their prevalence had far passed the danger-point.
Parental tyranny was limited; and by a law of Theodosius the conviction of the
father was not to involve the complete ruin of his dependants. When the courts
were arbitrary and corrupt and spies and informers were a public evil, the
right of asylum given to the churches was a protection to the oppressed in
spite of its abuse. But more important was the free access given to the
bishops’ courts on civil suits and the binding force of their decisions: it
showed their fairness and the evil reputation of the civil tribunals. The great
St Ambrose, who had been a lawyer and a governor before his election to Milan,
was overwhelmed by his judicial duties as archbishop. That the clergy were
freed from curial responsibilities and trade-taxes was justified by the
abundant charities and humane activity of the Church, but it led to a rush of
the unfit for ordination, and Constantine already in 320 forbade a curialis to take orders. The reform cannot have conduced to the recruiting of an
educated priesthood, nor did it keep out the careerist: Valentinian found it
necessary to cancel the free reception of legacies by clerics who courted the
favour of wealthy ladies.
The Church, however, did not only influence the
imperial laws and their administration; it had become a new source of law, the
scope of which was widened as the number of Christians increased. The Councils
which were held legislated on Christian institutions and conduct as well as on
the creed. Only certain canons, or church laws, had as yet an ecumenic vogue.
The difference between East and West was shown in their laws. In the East bishops
only were bound to celibacy, while in the West priests and deacons also were
forbidden to marry by the canons. The East accepted the canons of Eastern
Councils only; in the West, besides the canons of Nicaea and some other Greek
Councils, those of Sardica and of a number of provincial Councils were in
force, although the last applied to restricted areas. In the West, too, a new
source of Canon Law was appearing in the decretals, or authoritative letters,
of the Bishops of Rome. Current usage was applying to the primate of the West
the title of Pope (Papa), which effectually distinguished him from his
fellow-bishops, and his pronouncements had a corresponding weight.
The veneration of saints and martyrs and a belief in
their authority and intercession had long been a characteristic of
Christianity. Their relics were treasured; miracles wrought by them in life or
after death were readily believed; churches were dedicated to them; the days of
their death were held in special honour; the importance of sees depended in
part on their apostolic foundation or the Saints who had occupied them. But the
hasty conversion of the majority of heathens in the fourth century added
enormously to this veneration and credulity. The new converts were accustomed
to numerous, varied and local objects of worship and prayer, and they turned
willingly from their old gods to the saints and holy relics. Nothing was more
in accord with their prepossessions than the array of saints which was almost a
new pantheon. Such an event as St Ambrose’s discovery of St Gervasius and St
Protasius aroused a storm of enthusiasm. Indeed, apocryphal saints were
invented by the wish to convert and to believe. At times and in certain places
the old divinity in a Christian disguise retained his ancient worship. Some of
the pagan festivals, which occurred at fit seasons of the year for prayer or
rejoicing, were adapted to the Christian calendar.
EARLY MONASTICISM
Along with these developments resulting from the rapid
extension of Christianity, there were others due to the depth of the religious
convictions of the age, the growth of asceticism and monasticism. Ascetic
tendencies were of old date and authorized by Scripture. The insistence on
celibacy for the higher clergy shows their influence. Celibacy was upheld as
one of the highest virtues. So an ascetic life appeared among the devout laity,
especially among women: widows and virgins devoted themselves to a religious
life and good works. Two factors played a great part in transforming these
ascetic tendencies into the monastic movement which so powerfully affected the
life and ideas of Europe during the Middle Ages. One, the more external, was
the evils of the times. It was in the close of the third century that the great
impulse to monasticism began, the flight from the evil world, sinful,
disordered, unjust, oppressed, extortionately taxed, where a more ordinary life
of Christian austerity and renunciation seemed barely practicable. Men fled
from the natural ties and duties of life in search of liberty to pray and
contemplate. The other factor was the strong influence of oriental ideas on the
Empire. The solitary ascetic who undertook a life of religious exercises and
self-mortification was an Eastern growth, which naturally appealed to the
Eastern provinces and spread from them with Christian theology to the West.
There was a general conviction that the ascetic life was the only fully
Christian life, the ideal and surest way to salvation. It is significant of the
creative power which returned to the Roman world with Christianity that these
ascetic impulses formed new and lasting institutions outside the rigid
framework of secular society.
The fathers of monasticism were two Egyptians, St
Anthony and St Pachomius. St Anthony (c. 250-356) was an Egyptian peasant, who,
after an ascetic novitiate of fifteen years, secluded himself in a deserted
fort for twenty years of solitary devotion. His renown brought a colony of
ascetics round him, and at their petition he organized (c. 305) a form of
co-operative hermit-life. It allowed a wide variety in the degree of seclusion.
North of Lycopolis (Asyut) the desert fringe of Lower Egypt was populated by
Antonian hermits, either singly or in small or large groups. At Nitria (Wady
Natrun) in the Libyan Desert, the largest settlement, there were communal
bakeries, the monks could live either alone or several together, there was a
common discipline by the scourge for faults, they all wove linen for their
clothes, but they only gathered for common worship on Saturday and Sunday. At
Cellia, a few miles off, however, the hermits lived in complete solitude
save for the Saturday and Sunday services. The individual hermit, in short,
arranging his life as he wished, was the Antonian ideal. St Pachomius (c.
290-345), on the other hand, was the founder of cenobitic or community
monasticism. He began life as a pagan recluse of the god Serapis in the
Thebaid, and became a Christian hermit at the age of twenty. Love of the
brethren led him to establish (c. 315-20) his first monastery at Tabennisi near
Tentyra (Denderah) on the Nile; other foundations followed over Upper Egypt. He
established real communities under a Rule. The monks had a common kitchen and
eating-room, which they served in turn, and a great variety of work made them a
self-sufficing colony. Their day was divided by a fixed routine of church
services, Bible reading, and the exercise of the occupations for which they
were qualified. They were marked more by their tonsure than their garb. It was
a rule which appealed to women as well as men, and there were Pachomian
nunneries besides Antonian anchoresses. Taken together, the two saints had
given a new expression to the Christian ideal.
The movement spread rapidly outside Egypt. In Palestine,
where Hilarion introduced Antonian hermit-life, and in Syria, where it met
Asiatic ascetic influences, it remained predominantly eremitical. The cenobia
were looked on as training grounds for hermits. In the fifth century, besides
the cenobia which followed St Basil’s Rule, there were the lauras, to
which St Sabas gave a semi-eremitical constitution. But the Syrian monks and
hermits differed from the Egyptians by adopting artificial methods of
mortifying the body by self-torture. Such were the pillar-saints, like St
Simeon Stylites (395-461), and the hermits who afflicted themselves with chains
and weights or those who grazed like cattle. In Asia Minor an advance in
cenobitic monasticism was made by St Basil (329-79), Archbishop of Caesarea.
He was the father of Greek and Slav monasticism, of which his two Rules set the
type. About 360 he retired to a spot near Neocaesarea in Pontus and thence
legislated for his new monastery and the others which sprang up in imitation.
The Basilian monastery was thoroughly cenobitical. The monks lived under the
same roof, ate together, and assembled six times a day in the church. Work,
largely agricultural, rather than ascetic practices was insisted upon. The
education of boys and the care of orphanages were among their virtues. Not the
least important duty of their profession was strict obedience to abbot and
superiors, now made an essential, like chastity and poverty, of the monastic
life. For St Basil the hermit was not even theoretically more holy than the
cenobitic monk.
It was from Egypt that St Athanasius (339) introduced
both hermits and cenobites to Rome and Italy. Their increase was speedy.
Eusebius, Bishop of Vercelli (ob. 371), made the innovation of placing
the clerics of his cathedral under a cenobitic rule, and in this he was
imitated by St Augustine in Africa. St Martin, Bishop of Tours, was the founder
of monastic life in Gaul (c. 363). He appears to have kept close to the
Pachomian model. In one way or another the ascetics spread over the West.
Whether men fled most from the burdens or from the sins of society, it was a
sign of the whole-hearted and ever wider acceptance of Christian belief.
The numbers of the monks, especially in Egypt and the
East, presented a problem to the government. In 390 there were 5000 Antonian
hermits in Nitria alone; the Pachomian monks of Egypt numbered some 7000 in
all. It was among these indomitable ascetics that St Athanasius possessed a
secure refuge from the government. The Arian Valens endeavoured in vain to bend
them to his creed by conscripting the young and able bodied at Nitria for the
army. Among the crowd of hermits or individualistic monks there existed,
indeed, a growing number of impostors who feigned or made capital out of their
austerities, an evil which led to canons prescribing episcopal supervision. A
profound and not entirely desirable influence on the life of the Empire was
exercised by the veneration which the ascetics, and especially the more
spectacular among them, like the pillar saints, enjoyed among all classes. It
produced a hectic mob emotion which distorted the religion of the time. The
monks, drawn from the peasantry and indiscriminately recruited, invaded
theological and even political controversy with a wild fanaticism with which
they infected the populace.
THE END OF PAGANISM
The triumph of Christianity implied its concomitant,
the decay of paganism. Julian’s reign had merely suspended the progress of
desertion. The rule of Valens in the East was marked by the ruin of numerous
temples, if only for lack of repair: their revenues were diverted to public or
private use, and where the maintenance of their worship depended on the local
magistrates those overtaxed notables, though pagan, cannot have been eager to
provide for their upkeep. It was in the great cities and by the support of
wealthy senatorial families that the worship of the Olympian deities could be
carried on. In Rome the resident senators still maintained paganism as the
established religion; the altar of Victory had been restored by Julian; the
ancient ceremonies were performed at the government’s expense. In Athens the
schools of philosophers were heathen. The Eleusinian mysteries, the Olympic
games continued. It was the Emperor Gratian who began to employ more effectual
measures against this kind of toleration. He refused to take the title of
Pontifex Maximus, confiscated the revenues of the Roman priesthoods, and
removed once more the altar of Victory from the senate-house in spite of the
forlorn appeals of the pagan senators (382). His action was upheld by
Valentinian II, who listened to St Ambrose against the pagan spokesman
Symmachus. The conservatives’ hopes were revived when Arbogast placed on the
throne Eugenius, who, though a Christian, restored the altar and made an
exuberant pagan, Flavian, praetorian prefect. But this wishful thinking was
dispelled by the battle of the Frigidus and the supremacy of Theodosius the
Great.
The altar of Victory now disappeared for good and all.
Theodosius closed the temples, of which many were destroyed by ardent bishops,
like that of Serapis at Alexandria (391) by the Patriarch Theophilus. The
temple properties were confiscated in East and West. The Olympic games ceased
(394). Sacrifices to the heathen gods in any form were prohibited as
treasonable. Yet paganism survived as a private, almost quietistic, belief for
over a century. Imperial officials could be employed and promoted in spite of
their adherence to it. The Eleusinian mysteries only came to an end in 396 (?),
when Alaric destroyed the temple of Demeter. Till the reign of Justinian the
teachers of Athens were pagans and Neo-Platonists. In literary circles, steeped
in the ancient poets, paganism died hard. Indeed the great Christian writers,
like St Jerome and St Augustine, were remorseful for the hold that heathen
literature kept upon themselves. Pagan philosophy still coloured the intimate
thoughts of Boethius, a Christian and a theologian, in the sixth century, when
as a creed it had vanished. The old faith lived longest in the more primitive
strata of the population, not as a religion but as a magical practice to
conciliate or compel familiar spirits or demons who had once been Olympian or
petty local deities. But even among these feeble folk the Christian saints were
triumphantly superior. The Roman world
had accepted Christianity.
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