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"Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing Could touch him farther!"

No wonder those agreeable years were considered by the fond gratitude of the time, and the unavailing regrets of succeeding generations, the golden age of man. Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus--these are still great names, and are everywhere recognised as the most wonderful succession of sovereigns the world has ever seen. They are still called the "Good Emperors," the "Wise Rulers."

Nerva reigned but sixteen months, and had no time to do more than display his kindness of disposition, and to name his successor. This was Trajan, a man who was not even a Roman by birth, but who was thought by his patron to have retained, in the distant province of Spain where he was born, the virtues which had disappeared in the centre and capital of the empire. The deficiency of Nerva's character had been its softness and want of force. The stern vigilance of Trajan made ample amends. He was the best-known soldier of his time, and revived once more the terror of the Roman arms. He conquered wherever he appeared; but his warlike impetuosity led him too far. He trod in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, and advanced farther eastward than any of the Roman armies had previously done. But his victories were fruitless: he attached no new country permanently to the empire, and derives all his glory now from the excellence of his internal administration. He began his government by declaring himself as subordinate to the laws as the meanest of the people. His wife, Pompeia Plotina, was worthy of such a husband, and said, on mounting the steps of the palace, that she should descend them unaltered from what she was. The emperor visited his friends on terms of equality, and had the greatness of mind, generally deficient in absolute princes, to bestow his confidence on those who deserved it. Somebody, a member perhaps of the old police who had made such fortunes in the time of Domitian by alarming the tyrant with stories of plots and assassinations, told Trajan one day to beware of his minister, who intended to murder him on the first opportunity. "Come again, and tell me all particulars to-morrow," said the emperor. In the mean time he went unbidden and supped with the accused. He was shaved by his barber--was attended for a mock illness by his surgeon--bathed in his bath--and ate his meat and drank his wine. On the following day the informer came. "Ah!" said Trajan, interrupting him in his accusation of Surenus, "if Surenus had wished to kill me, he would have done it last night."

Trajan and Adrian had now made the world accustomed to justice in its rulers; and as far as regards their public conduct, this character is not to be denied. Yet in their private relations they were not so faultless. Trajan the great and good was a drunkard. To such a pitch did he carry this vice, that he gave orders that after a certain hour of the day none of his commands were to be obeyed. Adrian was worse: he was regardless of life; he put men to death for very small offences. An architect was asked how he liked a certain series of statues designed by the emperor and ranged in a sitting attitude round a temple which he had built. The architect was a humourist, not a courtier. "If the goddesses," he said, "take it into their heads to rise, they will never be able to get out at the door." A poor criticism, and not a good piece of wit, but not bad enough to justify his being beheaded; yet the answer cost the poor man his life. As Adrian grew older, he grew more reckless of the pain he gave. He had a brother-in-law ninety years of age, and there was a grandson of the old man aged eighteen. He had them both executed on proof or suspicion of a conspiracy. The popular feeling was revolted by the sight of the mingled blood of two sufferers so nearly related, at the opposite extremities of life. The old man, just before he died, protested his innocence, and uttered a revengeful prayer that Adrian might wish to die and find death impossible! This imprecation was fulfilled. The emperor was tortured with disease, and longed for deliverance in vain. He called round him his physicians, and priests, and sorcerers, but they could give him no relief. He begged his slaves to kill him, and stabbed himself with a dagger; but in spite of all he could not die. Lingering on, and with no cessation of his pain, he must have had sad thoughts of the past, and no pleasant anticipations of the future, if, as we learn from the verses attributed to him, he believed in a future state. His lines still remain, but are indebted to Pope, who paraphrased them, for their Christian spirit and lofty aspiration:--

"Vital spark of heavenly flame! Quit, oh, quit this mortal frame! Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying, Oh, the pain, the bliss of dying! Cease, fond nature, cease thy strife, And let me languish into life!

"Hark! they whisper! angels say, Sister spirit, come away! What is this absorbs me quite, Steals my senses, shuts my sight, Drowns my spirits, draws my breath? Tell me, my soul, can this be death?

"The world recedes; it disappears! Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears With sounds seraphic ring: Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly! O Grave! where is thy victory? O Death! where is thy sting?"

His wish was at last achieved. He died aged sixty-two, having reigned twenty-one years. In travelling and building his whole time was spent. Temples, theatres, bridges--wherever he went, these evidences of his wisdom or magnificence remained. He persecuted the Christians, but found persecution a useless proceeding against a sect who gloried in martyrdom, and whose martyrdoms were only followed by new conversions. He tried what an opposite course of conduct would do, and is said to have intended to erect a temple to Jesus Christ. "Take care what you do," said one of his counsellors: "if you permit an altar to the God of the Christians, those of the other gods will be deserted."

But now came to supreme authority the good and wise Antoninus Pius, who was as blameless in his private conduct as in his public acts. His fame extended farther than the Roman arms had ever reached. Distant kings, in lands of which the names were scarcely known in the Forum, took him as arbiter of their differences. The decision of the great man in Rome gave peace on the banks of the Indus. The barbarians themselves on the outskirts of his dominions were restrained by respect for a character so pure and power so wisely used. An occasional revolt in Britain was quelled by his lieutenants--an occasional conspiracy against his authority was caused by the discontent which turbulent spirits feel when restrained by law. The conspiracies were repressed, and on one occasion two of the ringleaders were put to death. The Senate was for making further inquiry into the plot. "Let us stop here," said the emperor. "I do not wish to find out how many people I have displeased." Some stories are told of him, which show how little he affected the state of a despotic ruler. A pedantic philosopher at Smyrna, of the name of Polemo, returned from a journey at a late hour, and found the proconsul of Rome lodged in his house. This proconsul was Antonine, who at that time had been appointed to the office by Adrian. Instead of being honoured by such a guest, the philosopher stormed and raged, and made so much noise, that in the middle of the night the sleepless proconsul left the house and found quarters elsewhere. When years passed on, and Antonine was on the throne, Polemo had the audacity to present himself as an old acquaintance. "Ha! I remember him," said the emperor: "let him have a room in the palace, but don't let him leave it night or day." The imprisonment was not long, for we find the same Polemo hero of another anecdote during this visit to Rome. He hissed a performer in the theatre, and stamped and screeched, and made such a disturbance that the unfortunate actor had to leave the stage. He complained of Polemo to the emperor. "Polemo!" exclaimed Antonine; "he forced you off the stage in the middle of the day, but he drove me from his house in the middle of the night, and yet I never appealed." It would be pleasant if we could learn that Polemo did not get off so easily. But the twenty-two years of this reign of mildness and probity were brought to a close, and Marcus Aurelius succeeded in 161.

Marcus Aurelius did no dishonour to the discernment of his friend and adoptive father Antoninus Pius. Studying philosophy and practising self-command, he emulated and surpassed the virtues of the self-denying leaders of his sect, and only broke through the rule he imposed on himself of clemency and mildness, when he found philosophy in danger of being counted a vain deceit, and the active duties of human brotherhood preferred to the theoretic rhapsodies on the same subject with which his works were filled. Times began to change. Men were dissatisfied with the unsubstantial dream of Platonist and Stoic. There were symptoms of an approaching alteration in human affairs, which perplexed the thoughtful and gave promise of impunity to the bad. Perhaps a man who, clothed in the imperial purple, bestowed so much study on the intellectual niceties of the Sophists, and endeavoured to keep his mind in a fit state for abstract speculation by scourging and starving his body, was not so fitted for the approaching crisis as a rougher and less contemplative nature would have been. Britain was in commotion, there were tumults on the Rhine, and in Armenia the Parthians cut the Roman legions to pieces. And scarcely were those troubles settled and punished, when a worse calamity befell the Roman empire. Its inviolability became a boast of the past. The fearful passions for conquest and rapine of the border-barbarians were roused. Barbaric cohorts encamped on the fields of Italy, and the hosts of wild men from the forests of the North pillaged the heaped-up treasures of the garden of the world. The emperor flew to the scene of danger, but the fatal word had been said. Italy was accessible from the Alps and from the sea; and, though a bloody defeat at Aquileia flung back the invaders, disordered and dispirited, over the mountains they had descended with such hopes, the struggle was but begun. The barbarians felt their power, and the old institutions of Rome were insufficient to resist future attacks. But to the aid of the old Roman institutions a new institution came, an institution which was destined to repel the barbarians by overcoming barbarism itself, and save the dignity of Rome by giving it the protection of the Cross. But at present--that is, during the reign of the philosophic Marcus Aurelius--a persecution raged against the Christians which seemed to render hopeless all chance of their success. The mild laws of Trajan and Adrian, and the favourable decrees of Antoninus Pius, were set aside by the contemptuous enmity of this explorer of the mysterious heights of virtue, which occasionally carried him out of sight of the lower but more important duties of life. An unsocial tribe the Christians were, who rigorously shut their eyes to the beauties of abstract perfection, and preferred the plain orders of the gospel to the most ambitious periods of the emperor. But the persecution of a sect so small and so obscure as the Christian was at that time, is scarcely perceptible as a diminution of the sum of human happiness secured to the world by the gentleness and equity which regulated all his actions. Here is an example of the way in which he treated rebels against his authority. An insurrection broke out in Syria and the East, headed by a pretended descendant of the patriot Cassius, who had conspired against Julius Caesar. The emperor hurried to meet him--some say to resign the empire into his hands, to prevent the effusion of blood; but the usurper died in an obscure commotion, and nothing was left but to take vengeance on his adherents. This is the letter the conqueror wrote to the Senate:--"I beseech you, conscript Fathers! not to punish the guilty with too much rigour. Let no Senator be put to death. Let the banished return to their country. I wish I could give back their lives to those who have died in this quarrel. Revenge is unworthy of an emperor. You will pardon, therefore, the children of Cassius, his son-in-law, and his wife. Pardon, did I say? Ah! what crime have they committed? Let them live in safety, let them retain all that Cassius possessed. Let them live in whatever place they choose, to be a monument of your clemency and mine."

In such hands as these the fortune of mankind was safe. A pity that the father's feelings got the better of his judgment in the choice of his successor. It is the one blot on his otherwise perfect disinterestedness. In dying, with such a monster as Commodus ready to leap into his seat, he must have felt how inexpressibly valuable his life would be to the Roman people. He perhaps saw the danger to which he exposed the world; for he committed his son to the care of his wisest counsellors, and begged him to continue the same course of government he had pursued. Perhaps he was tired of life, perhaps he sought refuge in his self-denying philosophy from the prospect he saw before him of a state of perpetual struggle and eventual overthrow. When the Tribune came for the last time to ask the watchword of the day, "Go to the rising sun," he said; "for me, I am just going to set."

But before we enter on the downward course, and since we are now arrived at the period of the greatest apparent force and extent of the Roman empire, let us see what it consisted of, and what was the real amount of its power.

Viewed in comparison with some of the monarchies of the present day, neither its extent of territory, nor amount of population, nor number of soldiers, is very surprising. The Queen of England reigns over more subjects, and commands far mightier fleets and armies, than any of the Roman emperors. The empire of Russia is more extensive, and yet the historians of a few generations ago are lost in admiration of the power of Rome. The whole military force of the empire amounted to four hundred and fifty thousand men. The total number of vessels did not exceed a thousand. But see what were the advantages Rome possessed in the compactness of its territory and the unity of its government. The great Mediterranean Sea, peopled and cultivated on both its shores, was but a peaceful lake, on which the Roman galley had no enemy to fear, and the merchant-ship dreaded nothing but the winds and waves. There were no fortresses to be garrisoned on what are now the boundaries of jealous or hostile kingdoms. If the great circuit of the Roman State could be protected from barbarian inroads, the internal defence of all that vast enclosure could be left to the civil power. If the Black Sea and the Sea of Azoff could be kept clear of piratical adventurers, the broad highway of the Mediterranean was safe. A squadron near Gibraltar, a squadron at the Dardanelles, and the tribes which might possibly venture in from the ocean--the tribes which, slipping down from the Don or the Dnieper, might thread their way through the Hellespont and emerge into the Egean--were caught at their first appearance; and when the wisdom of the Romans had guarded the mouths of the Danube from the descent, in canoe or coracle, of the wild settlers on its upper banks, the peace and commerce of the whole empire were secured. With modern Europe the case is very different. There are boundaries to be guarded which occupy more soldiers than the territories are worth. Lines are arbitrarily fixed across the centre of a plain, or along the summit of a mountain, which it is a case of war to pass. Belgium defends her flats with a hundred thousand men, and the marshes of Holland are secured by sixty thousand Dutch. The State of Dessau in Germany, threatens its neighbours with fifteen hundred soldiers, while Reuss guards its dignity and independence with three hundred infantry and fifty horse. But the Great Powers, as they are called, take away from the peaceable and remunerative employments of trade or agriculture an amount of labour which would be an incalculable increase to the riches and happiness of the world. The aggregate soldiery of Europe is upwards of five millions of men,--just eleven times the largest calculation of the Roman legions. The ships of Europe--to the smaller of which the greatest galleys of the ancient world would scarcely serve as tenders--amount to 2113. The number of guns they carry, against which there is nothing we can take as a measure of value in ancient warfare, but which are now the greatest and surest criterions of military power, amounts to 45,367. But this does not give so clear a view of the alteration in relative power as is yielded by an inspection of some of the separate items. Gaul, included within the Rhine, was kept in order by six or seven legions. The French empire has on foot an army of six hundred and fifty thousand men, and a fleet of four hundred sail. Britain, which was garrisoned by thirty thousand men, had, in 1855, an army at home and abroad of six hundred and sixty thousand men, and a fleet of five hundred and ninety-one ships of war, with an armament of seventeen thousand guns. The disjointed States which now constitute the Empire of Austria, and which occupied eight legions in their defence, are now in possession of an army of six hundred thousand men; and Prussia, whose array exceeds half a million of soldiers, was unheard of except in the discussions of geographers.

With the death of the excellent Marcus Aurelius the golden age came to a close. Commodus sat on the throne, and renewed the wildest atrocities of the previous century. Nero was not more cruel--Domitian was not so reckless of human life. He fought in the arena against weakly-armed adversaries, and slew them without remorse. He polluted the whole city with blood, and made money by selling permissions to murder. Thirteen years exhausted the patience of the world, and a justifiable assassination put an end to his life. There was an old man of the name of Pertinax, originally a nickname derived from his obstinate or pertinacious disposition, who now made his appearance on the throne and perished in three months. It chanced that a certain rich man of the name of Didius was giving a supper the night of the murder to some friends. The dishes were rich, and the wine delicious. Inspired by the good cheer, the guests said, "Why don't you buy the empire? The soldiers have proclaimed that they will give it to the highest bidder." Didius knew the amount of his treasure, and was ambitious: he got up from table and hurried to the Praetorian camp. On the way he met the mutilated body of the murdered Pertinax, dragged through the streets with savage exultation. Nothing daunted, he arrived at the soldiers' tents. Another had been before him--Sulpician, the father-in-law and friend of the late emperor. A bribe had been offered to each soldier, so large that they were about to conclude the bargain; but Didius bade many sesterces more. The greedy soldiery looked from one to the other, and shouted with delight, as each new advance was made. At last Sulpician was silent, and Didius had purchased the Roman world at the price of upwards of ?200 to each soldier of the Praetorian guard. He entered the palace in state, and concluded the supper, which had been interrupted at his own house, on the viands prepared for Pertinax. But the excitement of the auction-room was too pleasant to be left to the troops in Rome. Offers were made to the legions in all the provinces, and Didius was threatened on every side. Even the distant garrisons of Britain named a candidate for the throne; and Claudius Albinus assumed the imperial purple, and crossed over into Gaul. More irritated still, the army in Syria elected its general, Pescennius Niger, emperor, and he prepared to dispute the prize; but quietly, steadily, with stern face and unrelenting heart, advancing from province to province, keeping his forces in strict subjection, and laying claim to supreme authority by the mere strength of his indomitable will, came forward Septimius Severus, and both the pretenders saw that their fate was sealed. Illyria and Gaul recognised his title at once. Albinus was happy to accept from him the subordinate title of Caesar, and to rule as his lieutenant. Didius, whose bargain turned out rather ill, besought him to be content with half the empire. Severus slew the messengers who brought this proposition, and advanced in grim silence. The Senate assembled, and, by way of a pleasant reception for the Illyrian chief, requested Didius to prepare for death. The executioners found him clinging to life with unmanly tenacity, and killed him when he had reigned but seventy days. One other competitor remained, the general of the Syrian army--the closest friend of Severus, but now separated from him by the great temptation of an empire in dispute. This was Niger, from whom an obstinate resistance was expected, as he was equally famous for his courage and his skill. But fortune was on the side of Severus. Niger was conquered after a short struggle, and his head presented to the victor. Was Albinus still to live, and approach so near the throne as to have the rank of Caesar? Assassins were employed to murder him, but he escaped their assault. The treachery of Severus brought many supporters to his rival. The Roman armies were ranged in hostile camps. Severus again was fortunate, and Albinus, dashing towards him to engage in combat, was slain before his eyes. He watched his dying agonies for some time, and then forced his horse to trample on the corpse. A man of harsh, implacable nature--not so much cruel as impenetrable to human feelings, and perhaps forming a just estimate of the favourable effect upon his fortunes of a disposition so calm, and yet so relentless. The Praetorians found they had appointed their master, and put the sword into his hand. He used it without remorse. He terrified the boldest with his imperturbable stillness; he summoned the seditious soldiery to wait on him at his camp. They were to come without arms, without their military dress, almost like suppliants, certainly not like the ferocious libertines they had been when they had sold the empire at the highest price. "Whoever of you wishes to live," said Severus, frowning coldly, "will depart from this, and never come within thirty leagues of Rome. Take their horses," he added to the other troops who had surrounded the Praetorians, "take their accoutrements, and chase them out of my sight." Did the Senate receive a milder treatment? On sending them the head of Albinus, he had written to the Conscript Fathers alarming them with the most dreadful threats. And now the time of execution had come. He made them an oration in praise of the proscriptions of Marius and Sylla, and forced them to deify the tyrant Commodus, who had hated them all his life. He then gave a signal to his train, and the streets ran with blood. All who had borne high office, all who were of distinguished birth, all who were famous for their wealth or popular with the citizens, were put to death. He crossed over to England and repressed a sedition there. His son Caracalla accompanied him, and commenced his career of warlike ardour and frightful ferocity, which can only be explained on the ground of his being mad. He tried even to murder his father, in open day, in the sight of the soldiers. He was stealing upon the old man, when a cry from the legion made him turn round. His inflexible eye fell upon Caracalla--the sword dropped from his unfilial hand--and dreadful anticipations of vengeance filled the assembly. The son was pardoned, but his accomplices, whether truly or falsely accused, perished by cruel deaths. At last the emperor felt his end approach. He summoned his sons Caracalla and Geta into his presence, recommended them to live in unity, and ended by the advice which has become the standing maxim of military despots, "Be generous to the soldiers, and trample on all beside."

With this hideous incarnation of unpitying firmness on the throne--hopeless of the future, and with dangers accumulating on every side, the Second Century came to an end, leaving the amazing contrast between its miserable close and the long period of its prosperity by which it will be remembered in all succeeding time.

THIRD CENTURY.

Emperors.

A.D.

SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS-- Fifth Persecution of the Christians.

Authors.

CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, DION CASSIUS, ORIGEN, CYPRIAN, PLOTINUS, LONGINUS, HIPPOLITUS PORTUENSIS, JULIUS AFRICANUS CELSUS, ORIGEN.

THE THIRD CENTURY.

ANARCHY AND CONFUSION--GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.

We are now in the twelfth year of the Third Century. Septimius Severus has died at York, and Caracalla is let loose like a famished tiger upon Rome. He invites his brother Geta to meet him to settle some family feud in the apartment of their mother, and stabs him in her arms. The rest of his reign is worthy of this beginning, and it would be fatiguing and perplexing to the memory to record his other acts. Fortunately it is not required; nor is it necessary to follow minutely the course of his successors. What we require is only a general view of the proceedings of this century, and that can be gained without wading through all the blood and horrors with which the throne of the world is surrounded. Conclusive evidence was obtained in this century that the organization of Roman government was defective in securing the first necessities of civilized life. When we talk of civilization, we are too apt to limit the meaning of the word to its mere embellishments, such as arts and sciences; but the true distinction between it and barbarism is, that the one presents a state of society under the protection of just and well-administered law, and the other is left to the chance government of brute force. There was now great wealth in Rome--great luxury--a high admiration of painting, poetry, and sculpture--much learning, and probably infinite refinement of manners and address. But it was not a civilized state. Life was of no value--property was not secure. A series of madmen seized supreme authority, and overthrew all the distinctions between right and wrong. Murder was legalized, and rapine openly encouraged. It is a sort of satisfaction to perceive that few of those atrocious malefactors escaped altogether the punishment of their crimes. If Caracalla slays his brother and orders a peaceable province to be destroyed, there is a Macrinus at hand to put the monster to death. But Macrinus, relying on the goodness of his intentions, neglects the soldiery, and is supplanted by a boy of seventeen--so handsome that he won the admiration of the rudest of the legionaries, and so gentle and captivating in his manners that he strengthened the effect his beauty had produced. He was priest of the Temple of the Sun at Emesa in Phoenicia; and by the arts of his grandmother, who was sister to one of the former empresses, and the report that she cunningly spread abroad that he was the son of their favourite Caracalla, the affection of the dissolute soldiery knew no bounds. Macrinus was soon slaughtered, and the long-haired priest of Baal seated on the throne of the Caesars, under the name of Heliogabalus. As might be expected, the sudden alteration in his fortunes was fatal to his character. All the excesses of his predecessors were surpassed. His extravagance rapidly exhausted the resources of the empire. His floors were spread with gold-dust. His dresses, jewels, and golden ornaments were never worn twice, but went to his slaves and parasites. He created his grandmother a member of the Senate, with rank next after the consuls; and established a rival Senate, composed of ladies, presided over by his mother. Their jurisdiction was not very hurtful to the State, for it only extended to dresses and precedence of ranks, and the etiquette to be observed in visiting each other. But the evil dispositions of the emperor were shown in other ways. He had a cousin of the name of Alexander, and entertained an unbounded jealousy of his popularity with the soldiers. Attempts at poison and direct assassination were resorted to in vain. The public sympathy began to rise in his favour. The Praetorians formally took him under their protection; and when Heliogabalus, reckless of their menaces, again attempted the life of Alexander, the troops revolted, proclaimed death to the infatuated emperor, and slew him and his mother at the same time.

Alexander was now enthroned--a youth of sixteen; gifted with higher qualities than the debased century in which he lived could altogether appreciate. But the origin of his noblest sentiments is traced to the teaching he had received from his mother, in which the precepts of Christianity were not omitted. When he appointed the governor of a province, he published his name some time before, and requested if any one knew of a disqualification, to have it sent in for his consideration. "It is thus the Christians appoint their pastors," he said, "and I will do the same with my representatives." When his justice, moderation, and equity were fully recognised, the beauty of the quotation, which was continually in his mouth, was admired by all, even though they were ignorant of the book it came from: "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you." He trusted the wisest of his counsellors, the great legalists of the empire, with the introduction of new laws to curb the wickedness of the time. But the multiplicity of laws proves the decline of states. In the ancient Rome of the kings and earlier consuls, the statutes were contained in forty decisions, which were afterwards enlarged into the laws of the Twelve Tables, consisting of one hundred and fifty texts. The profligacy of some emperors, the vanity of others, had loaded the statute-book with an innumerable mass of edicts, senatus-consultums, praetorial rescripts, and customary laws. It was impossible to extract order or regularity from such a chaos of conflicting rules. The great work was left for a later prince; at present we can only praise the goodness of the emperor's intention. But Alexander, justly called Severus, from the simplicity of his life and manners, has held the throne too long. The Praetorians have been thirteen years without the donation consequent on a new accession.

Among the favourite leaders selected by Alexander for their military qualifications was one Maximin, a Thracian peasant, of whose strength and stature incredible things are told. He was upwards of eight feet high, could tire down a horse at the gallop on foot, could break its leg by a blow of his hand, could overthrow thirty wrestlers without drawing breath, and maintained this prodigious force by eating forty pounds of meat, and drinking an amphora and a half, or twelve quarts, of wine. This giant had the bravery for which his countrymen the Goths have always been celebrated. He rose to high rank in the Roman service; and when at last nothing seemed to stand between him and the throne but his patron and benefactor, ambition blinded him to every thing but his own advancement. He murdered the wise and generous Alexander, and presented for the first time in history the spectacle of a barbarian master of the Roman world. Other emperors had been born in distant portions of the empire; an African had trampled on Roman greatness in the person of Septimius Severus; a Phoenician priest had disgraced the purple in the person of Heliogabalus; Africa, however, was a Roman province, and Emesa a Roman town. But here sat the colossal representative of the terrible Goths of Thrace, speaking a language half Getic, half Latin, which no one could easily understand; fierce, haughty, and revengeful, and cherishing a ferocious hatred of the subjects who trembled before him--a hatred probably implanted in him in his childhood by the patriotic songs with which the warriors of his tribe kept alive their enmity and contempt for the Roman name. The Roman name had indeed by this time lost all its authority. The army, recruited from all parts of the empire, and including a great number of barbarians in its ranks, was no longer a bulwark against foreign invasion. Maximin, bestowing the chief commands on Pannonians and other mercenaries, treated the empire as a conquered country. He seized on all the wealth he could discover--melted all the golden statues, as valuable from their artistic beauty as for the metal of which they were composed--and was threatening an approach to Rome to exterminate the Senate and sack the devoted town. In this extremity the Senate resumed its long-forgotten power, and named as emperors two men of the name of Gordian--father and son--with instructions "to resist the enemy." But father and son perished in a few weeks, and still the terrible Goth came on. His son, a giant like himself, but beautiful as the colossal statue of a young Apollo, shared in all the feelings of his father. Terrified at its approaching doom, the Senate once more nominated two men to the purple, Maximus and Balbinus: Balbinus, the favourite, perhaps, of the aristocracy, by the descent he claimed from an illustrious ancestry; while Maximus recommended himself to the now perverted taste of the commonalty by having been a carter. Neither was popular with the army; and, to please the soldiers, a son or nephew of the younger Gordian was associated with them on the throne. But nothing could have resisted the infuriated legions of the gigantic Maximin; they were marching with wonderful expedition towards their revenge. At Aquileia they met an opposition; the town shut its gates and manned its walls, for it knew what would be the fate of a city given up to the tender mercies of the Goths. Meanwhile the approach of the destroyer produced great agitation in Rome. The people rose upon the Praetorians, and enlisted the gladiators on their side. Many thousands were slain, and at last a peace was made by the intercession of the youthful Gordian. Glad of the cessation of this civic tumult, the population of Rome betook itself to the theatres and shows. Suddenly, while the games were going on, it was announced that the army before Aquileia had mutinied and that both the Maximins were slain. All at once the amphitheatre was emptied; by an impulse of grateful piety, the emperors and people hurried into the temples of the gods, and offered up thanks for their deliverance. The wretched people were premature in their rejoicing. In less than three months the spoiled Praetorians were offended with the precaution taken by the emperors in surrounding themselves with German guards. They assaulted the palace, and put Maximus and Balbinus to death. Gordian the Third was now sole emperor, and the final struggle with the barbarians drew nearer and nearer.

Constantly crossing the frontiers, and willingly received in the Roman ranks, the communities who had been long settled on the Roman confines were not the utterly uncultivated tribes which their name would seem to denote. There was a conterminous civilization which made the two peoples scarcely distinguishable at their point of contact, but which died off as the distance from the Roman line increased. Thus, an original settler on the eastern bank of the Rhine was probably as cultivated and intelligent as a Roman colonist on the other side; but farther up, at the Weser and the Elbe, the old ferocity and roughness remained. Fresh importations from the unknown East were continually taking place; the dwellers in the plains of Pannonia, now habituated to pasturage and trade, found safety from the hordes which pressed upon them from their own original settlements beyond the Caucasus, by crossing the boundary river; and by this means the banks were held by cognate but hostile peoples, who could, however, easily be reconciled by a joint expedition against Rome. New combinations had taken place in the interior of the great expanses not included in the Roman limits. The Germans were no longer the natural enemies of the empire. They furnished many soldiers for its defence, and several chiefs to command its forces. But all round the external circuit of those half-conciliated tribes rose up vast confederacies of warlike nations. There were Cheruski, and Sicambri, and Attuarians, and Bruttuarians, and Catti, all regularly enrolled under the name of "Franks," or the brave. The Sarmatians or Sclaves performed the same part on the northeastern frontier; and we have already seen that the irresistible Goths had found their way, one by one, across the boundary, and cleared the path for their successors. The old enemies of Rome on the extreme east, the Parthians, had fallen under the power of a renovated mountain-race, and of a king, who founded the great dynasty of the Sassanides, and claimed the restoration of Egypt and Armenia as ancient dependencies of the Persian crown. To resist all these, there was, in the year 241, only a gentle-tempered youth, dressed in the purple which had so lost its original grandeur, and relying for his guidance on the wisdom of his tutors, and for his life on the forbearance of the Praetorians. The tutors were wise and just, and victory at first gave some sort of dignity to the reign of Gordian. The Franks were conquered at Mayence; but Gordian, three years after, was murdered in the East; and Philip, an Arabian, whose father had been a robber of the desert, was acknowledged emperor by senate and army. Treachery, ambition, and murder pursued their course. There was no succession to the throne. Sometimes one general, luckier or wiser than the rest, appeared the sole governor of the State. At other times there were numberless rivals all claiming the empire and threatening vengeance on their opponents. Yet amidst this tumult of undistinguishable pretenders, fortune placed at the head of affairs some of the best and greatest men whom the Roman world ever produced. There was Valerian, whom all parties agreed in considering the most virtuous and enlightened man of his time. Scarcely any opposition was made to his promotion; and yet, with all his good qualities, he was the man to whom Rome owed the greatest degradation it had yet sustained. He was taken prisoner by Sapor, the Persian king, and condemned, with other captive monarchs, to draw the car of his conqueror. No offers of ransom could deliver the brave and unfortunate prince. He died amid his deriding enemies, who hung up his skin as an offering to their gods. Then, after some years, in which there were twenty emperors at one time, with army drawn up against army, and cities delivered to massacre and rapine by all parties in turn, there arose one of the strong minds which make themselves felt throughout a whole period, and arrest for a while the downward course of states. The emperor Probus, son of a man who had originally been a gardener, had distinguished himself under Aurelian, the conqueror of Palmyra, and, having survived all his competitors, had time to devote himself to the restoration of discipline and the introduction of purer laws. His victories over the encroaching barbarians were decided, but ineffectual. New myriads still pressed forward to take the place of the slain. On one occasion he crossed the Rhine in pursuit of the revolted Germans, overtook them at the Necker, and killed in battle four hundred thousand men. Nine kings threw themselves at the emperor's feet. Many thousand barbarians enlisted in the Roman army. Sixty great cities were taken, and made offerings of golden crowns. The whole country was laid waste. "There was nothing left," he boasted to the Senate, "but bare fields, as if they had never been cultivated." So much the worse for the Romans. The barbarians looked with keener eyes across the river at the rich lands which had never been ravaged, and sent messages to all the tribes in the distant forests, that, having no occasion for pruning-hooks, they had turned them into swords. But Probus showed a still more doubtful policy in other quarters. When he conquered the Vandals and Burgundians, he sent their warriors to keep the Caledonians in subjection on the Tyne. The Britons he transported to Moesia or Greece. What intermixtures of race may have arisen from these transplantations it is impossible to say; but the one feeling was common to all the barbarians, that Rome was weak and they were strong. He settled a large detachment of Franks on the shores of the Black Sea; and of these an almost incredible but well-authenticated story is told. They seized or built themselves boats. They swept through the Dardanelles, and ravaged the isles of Greece. They pursued their piratical career down the Mediterranean, passed the pillars of Hercules into the Great Sea, and, rounding Spain and France, rowed up the Elbe into the midst of their astonished countrymen, who had long given them up for dead. A fatal adventure this for the safety of the Roman shores; for there were the wild fishermen of Friesland, and the audacious Angles of Schleswig and Holstein, who heard of this strange exploit, and saw that no coast was too distant to be reached by their oar and sail. But if these forced settlements of barbarians on Roman soil were impolitic, the generous Probus did not feel their bad effect. His warlike qualities awed his foes, and his inflexible justice was appreciated by the hardy warriors of the North, who had not yet sunk under the debasing civilization of Rome. In Asia his arms were attended with equal success. He subdued the Persians, and extended his conquests into Ethiopia and the farthest regions of the East, bringing back some of its conquered natives to swell the triumph at Rome and terrify the citizens with their strange and hideous appearance. But Probus himself must yield to the law which regulated the fate of Roman emperors. He died by treachery and the sword. All that the empire could do was to join in the epitaph pronounced over him by the barbarians, "Here lies the emperor Probus, whose life and actions corresponded to his name."

The characteristic of this century is its utter confusion and want of order. There was no longer the unity even of despotism at Rome to make a common centre round which every thing revolved. There were tyrants and competitors for power in every quarter of the empire--no settled authority, no government or security, left. In the midst of this relaxation of every rule of life, grew surely, but unobserved, the Christian Church, which drew strength from the very helplessness of the civil state, and was forced, in self-defence, to establish a regular organization in order to extend to its members the inestimable benefits of regularity and law. Under many of the emperors Christianity was proscribed; its disciples were put to excruciating deaths, and their property confiscated; but at that very time its inner development increased and strengthened. The community appointed its teachers, its deacons, its office-bearers of every kind; it supported them in their endeavours--it yielded to their directions; and in time a certain amount of authority was considered to be inherent in the office of pastor, which extended beyond the mere expounding of the gospel or administration of the sacraments. The chief pastor became the guide, perhaps the judge, of the whole flock. While it is absurd, therefore, in those disastrous times of weakness and persecution to talk in pompous terms of the succession of the Bishops of Rome, and make out vain catalogues of lordly prelates who sat on the throne of St. Peter, it is incontestable that, from the earliest period, the Christian converts held their meetings--by stealth indeed, and under fear of detection--and obeyed certain canons of their own constitution. These secret associations rapidly spread their ramifications into every great city of the empire. When by the friendship, or the fellowship, of the emperor, as in the case of the Arabian Philip, a pause was given to their fears and sufferings, certain buildings were set apart for their religious exercises; and we read, during this century, of basilicas, or churches, in Rome and other towns. The subtlety of the Greek intellect had already led to endless heresies and the wildest departures from the simplicity of the gospel. The Western mind was more calm, and better adapted to be the lawgiver of a new order of society composed of elements so rough and discordant as the barbarians, whose approach was now inevitably foreseen. With its well-defined hierarchy--its graduated ranks, and the fitness of the offices for the purposes of their creation; with its array of martyrs ready to suffer, and clear-headed leaders fitted to command, the Western Church could look calmly forward to the time when its organization would make it the most powerful, or perhaps the only, body in the State; and so early as the middle of this century the seeds of worldly ambition developed themselves in a schism, not on a point of doctrine, but on the possession of authority. A double nomination had made the anomalous appointment of two chief pastors at the same time. Neither would yield, and each had his supporters. All were under the ban of the civil power. They had recourse to spiritual weapons; and we read, for the first time in ecclesiastical history, of mutual excommunications. Novatian--under his breath, however, for fear of being thrown to the wild beasts for raising a disturbance--thundered his anathemas against Cornelius as an intruder, while Cornelius retorted by proclaiming Novatian an impostor, as he had not the concurrence of the people in his election. This gives us a convincing proof of the popular form of appointing bishops or presbyters in those early days, and prepares us for the energy with which the electors supported the authority of their favourite priests.

But, while this new internal element was spreading life among the decayed institutions of the empire, we have, in this century, the first appearance, in great force, of the future conquerors and renovators of the body politic from without. It is pleasant to think that the centuries cast themselves more and more loose from their connection with Rome after this date, and that the barbarians can vindicate a separate place in history for themselves. In the first century, the bad emperors broke the strength of Rome by their cruelty and extravagance. In the second century, the good emperors carried on the work of weakening the empire by the softening and enervating effects of their gentle and protective policy. The third century unites the evil qualities of the other two, for the people were equally rendered incapable of defending themselves by the unheard-of atrocities of some of the tyrants who oppressed them and the mistaken measures of the more benevolent rulers, in committing the guardianship of the citizens to the swords of a foreign soldiery, leaving them but the wretched alternative of being ravaged and massacred by an irruption of savage tribes or pillaged and insulted by those in the emperor's pay.

The empire had long been surrounded by its foes. It will suffice to read the long list of captives who were led in triumph behind the car of Aurelian when he returned from foreign war, to see the fearful array of harsh-sounding names which have afterwards been softened into those of great and civilized nations. It is in following the course of some of these that we shall see how the present distribution of forces in Europe took place, and escape from the polluted atmosphere of Imperial Rome. In that memorable triumph appeared Goths, Alans, Roxolans, Franks, Sarmatians, Vandals, Allemans, Arabs, Indians, Bactrians, Iberians, Saracens, Armenians, Persians, Palmyreans, Egyptians, and ten Gothic women dressed in men's apparel and fully armed. These were, perhaps, the representatives of a large body of female warriors, and are a sign of the recent settlement of the tribe to which they belonged. They had not yet given up the habits of their march, where all were equally engaged in carrying the property and arms of the nation, and where the females encouraged the young men of the expedition by witnessing and sometimes sharing their exploits in battle.

The triumph of Probus, when only seven years had passed, presents us with a list of the same peoples, often conquered but never subdued. Their defeats, indeed, had the double effect of showing to them their own ability to recruit their forces, and of strengthening the degraded people of Rome in the belief of their invincibility. After the loss of a battle, the Gothic or Burgundian chief fell back upon the confederated tribes in his rear; a portion of his army either visited Rome in the character of captives, or enlisted in the ranks of the conquerors. In either case, the wealth of the great city and the undefended state of the empire were permanently fixed in their minds; the populace, on the other hand, had the luxury of a noble show and double rations of bread--the more ambitious of the emperors acting on the professed maxim that the citizen had no duty but to enjoy the goods provided for him by the governing power, and that if he was fed by public doles, and amused with public games, the purpose of his life was attained. The idlest man was the safest subject. A triumph was, therefore, more an instrument of degradation than an encouragement to patriotic exertion. The name of Roman citizen was now extended to all the inhabitants of the empire. The freeman of York was a Roman citizen. Had he any patriotic pride in keeping the soil of Italy undivided? The nation had become too diffuse for the exercise of this local and combining virtue. The love of country, which in the small states of Greece secured the individual's affection to his native city, and yet was powerful enough to extend over the whole of the Hellenic territories, was lost altogether when it was required to expand itself over a region as wide as Europe. It is in this sense that empires fall to pieces by their own weight. The Roman power broke up from within. Its religion was a source of division, not of union--its mixture of nations, and tongues, and usages, lost their cohesion. And nothing was left at the end of this century to preserve it from total dissolution, but the personal qualities of some great rulers and the memory of its former fame.

FOURTH CENTURY.

Emperors.

A.D.

Authors.

DONATUS, EUTROPIUS, ST. ATHANASIUS, AUSONIUS, CLAUDIAN, ARNOBIUS, LACTANTIUS, EUSEBIUS, ARIUS, GREGORY NAZIANZEN, BASIL THE GREAT, Bishop Of Cesarea, AMBROSE, AUGUSTINE THEODORET, MARTIN, Bishop of Tours.

THE FOURTH CENTURY.

THE REMOVAL TO CONSTANTINOPLE--ESTABLISHMENT OF CHRISTIANITY--APOSTASY OF JULIAN--SETTLEMENT OF THE GOTHS.

Rome was stripped, that Constantinople might be filled. All the wealth of Italy was carried across the AEgean. The Roman Senator was invited to remove with his establishment. He found, on arriving at his new home, that by a complimentary attention of the emperor, a fac-simile of his Roman palace had been prepared for him on the Propontis. The seven hills of the new capital responded to the seven hills of the old. There were villas for retirement along the smiling shores of the Dardanelles or of the Bosphorus, as fine in climate, and perhaps equal in romantic beauty, to Baiae or Brundusium. There was a capital, as noble a piece of architecture as the one they had left, but without the sanctity of its thousand years of existence, or the glory of its unnumbered triumphs. One omission was the subject of remark and lamentation. The temples were nowhere to be seen. The images of the gods were left at Rome in the solitude of their deserted shrines, for Constantine had determined that Constantinople should, from its very foundation, be the residence of a Christian people. Churches were built, and a priesthood appointed. Yet, with the policy which characterized the Church at that time, he made as little change as possible in the external forms. There is still extant a transfer of certain properties from the old establishment to the new. There are contributions of wax for the candles, of frankincense and myrrh for the censers, and vestures for the officiating priests as before. Only the object of worship is changed, and the images of the heathen gods and heroes are replaced with statues of the apostles and martyrs.

It is difficult to gather a true idea of this first of the Christian emperors from the historians of after-times. The accounts of him by contemporary writers are equally conflicting. The favourers of the old superstition describe him as a monster of perfidy and cruelty. The Church, raised to supremacy by his favour, sees nothing in him but the greatest of men--the seer of visions, the visible favourite of the Almighty, and the predestined overthrower of the powers of evil. The easy credulity of an emancipated people believed whatever the flattery of the courtiers invented. His mother Helena made a journey to Jerusalem, and was rewarded for the pious pilgrimage by the discovery of the True Cross. Chapels and altars were raised upon all the places famous in Christian story; relics were collected from all quarters, and we are early led to fear that the simplicity of the gospel is endangered by its approach to the throne, and that Constantine's object was rather to raise and strengthen a hierarchy of ecclesiastical supporters than to give full scope to the doctrine of truth. But not the less wonderful, not the less by the divine appointment, was this unhoped-for triumph of Christianity, that its advancement formed part of the ambitious scheme of a worldly and unprincipled conqueror. Rather it may be taken as one among the thousand proofs with which history presents us, that the greatest blessings to mankind are produced irrespective of the character or qualities of the apparent author. A warrior is raised in the desert when required to be let loose upon a worn-out society as the scourge of God; a blood-stained soldier is placed on the throne of the world when the time has come for the earthly predominance of the gospel. But neither is Attila to be blamed nor Constantine to be praised.

It was the spirit of his system of government to form every society on a strictly monarchical model. There was everywhere introduced a clearly-defined subordination of ranks and dignities. Diocletian, we saw, surrounded the throne with a state and ceremony which kept the imperial person sacred from the common gaze. Constantine perfected his work by establishing a titled nobility, who were to stand between the throne and the people, giving dignity to the one, and impressing fresh awe upon the other. In all previous ages it had been the office that gave importance to the man. To be a member of the Senate was a mark of distinction; a long descent from a great historic name was looked on with respect; and the heroic deeds of the thousand years of Roman struggle had founded an aristocracy which owed its high position either to personal actions or hereditary claims. But now that the emperors had so long concentrated in themselves all the great offices of the State--now that the bad rulers of the first century had degraded the Senate by filling it with their creatures, the good rulers of the second century had made it merely the recorder of their decrees, and the anarchy of the third century had changed or obliterated its functions altogether--there was no way left to the ambitious Roman to distinguish himself except by the favour of the emperor. The throne became, as it has since continued in all strictly monarchical countries, the fountain of honour. It was not the people who could name a man to the consulship or appoint him to the command of an army. It was not even in the power of the emperor to find offices of dignity for all whom he wished to advance. So a method was discovered by which vanity or friendship could be gratified, and employment be reserved for the deserving at the same time. Instead of endangering an expedition against the Parthians by intrusting it to a rich and powerful courtier who desired to have the rank of general, the emperor simply named him Nobilissimus, or Patricius, or Illustris, and the gratified favourite, the "most noble," the "patrician," or the "illustrious," took place with the highest officers of the State. A certain title gave him equal rank with the Senator, the judge, or the consul. The diversity of these honorary distinctions became very great. There were the clarissimi--the perfectissimi--and the egregii--bearing the same relative dignity in the court-guide of the fourth century, as the dukes, marquises, earls, and viscounts of the peerage-books of the present day. But so much did all distinction flow from proximity to the throne, that all these high-sounding names owed their value to the fact of their being bestowed on the associates of the sovereign. The word Count, which is still the title borne by foreign nobles, comes from the Latin word which means "companion." There was a Comes, or Companion, of the Sacred Couch, or lord chamberlain--the Companion of the Imperial Service, or lord high steward--a Companion of the Imperial Stables, or lord high constable; through all these dignitaries, step above step, the glorious ascent extended, till it ended in the Companion of Private Affairs, or confidential secretary. At the head of all, sacred and unapproachable, stood the embodied Power of the Roman world, who, as he had given titles to all the magnates of his court, heaped also a great many on himself. His principal appellation, however, was not as in our degenerate days "Majesty," whether "Most Catholic," "Most Christian," or "Most Orthodox," but consisted in the rather ambitious attribute--eternity. "Your Eternity" was the phrase addressed to some miserable individual whose reign was ended in a month. It was proposed by this division of the Roman aristocracy to furnish the empire with a body for show and a body for use; the latter consisting of the real generals of the armies and administrators of the provinces. And with this view the two were kept distinct; but military discipline suffered by this partition. The generals became discontented when they saw wealth and dignities heaped upon the titular nobles of the court; and to prevent the danger arising from ill will among the legions on the frontier, the emperor withdrew the best of his soldiers from the posts where they kept the barbarians in check, and entirely destroyed their military spirit by separating them into small bodies and stationing them in towns. This exposed the empire to the foreign foes who still menaced it from the other side of the boundary, and gave fresh settlements in the heart of the country to the thousands of barbarian youth who had taken service with the eagles. In every legion there was a considerable proportion of this foreign element: in every district of the empire, therefore, there were now settled the advanced guards of the unavoidable invasion. Men with barbaric names, which the Romans could not pronounce, walked about Roman towns dressed in Roman uniforms and clothed with Roman titles. There were consulars and patricians in Ravenna and Naples, whose fathers had danced the war-dance of defiance when beginning their march from the Vistula and the Carpathian range.

But not yet firm and impregnable were the bulwarks of Christianity. While dreaming anchorites in the deserts of Thebais were repeating the results of fasting and insanity as the manifestation of divine favour, the world was startled from its security by the appalling discovery that the emperor himself, the young and vigorous Julian, was a follower of the old philosophers, and a worshipper of the ancient gods. And a dangerous antagonist he was, even independent of his temporal power. His personal character was irreproachable, his learning and talent beyond dispute, and his eloquence and dialectic skill sharpened and improved by an education in Athens itself. Less than forty years had elapsed since Constantine pronounced the sentence of banishment on the heathen deities. It was not possible that the Christian truth was in every instance received where the old falsehood was driven away. We may therefore conclude, without the aid of historic evidence, that there must have been innumerable districts--villages in far-off valleys, hidden places up among the hills--where the name of Christ had not yet penetrated, and all that was known was, that the shrine of the local gods was overthrown, and the priests of the old ceremonial proscribed. When we remember that the heathen worship entered into almost all the changes of the social and family life--that its sanction was necessary at the wedding--that its auguries were indispensable at births--that it crowned the statue of the household god with flowers--that it kept alive the fire upon the altar of the emperor--and that it was the guardian of the tombs of the departed, as it had been the principal consolation during the funeral rites,--we shall perceive that, irrespective of absolute faith in his system of belief, the cessation of the priest's office must have been a serious calamity. The heathen establishment had been enriched by the piety or ostentation of many generations. There must have been still alive many who had been turned out of their comfortable temples, many who viewed the assumption of Christianity into the State as a political engine to strengthen the tyranny under which the nations groaned. We may see that self-interest and patriotism may easily have been combined in the effort made by the old faith to regain the supremacy it had lost. The Emperor Julian endeavoured to lift up the fallen gods. He persecuted the Christians, not with fire and sword, but with contempt. He scorned and tolerated. He preached moderation, self-denial, and purity of life, and practised all these virtues to an extent unknown upon a throne, and even then unusual in a bishop's palace.

How those Christian graces, giving a charm and dignity to the apostate emperor, must have received a still higher authority from the painful contrast they presented to the agitated condition and corrupted morals of the Christian Church! Everywhere there was war and treachery, and ambition and unbelief. Half the great sees were held by Arians, who raved against the orthodox; and the other half were held by Athanasius and his followers, who accused their adversaries of being "more cruel than the Scythians, and more irreconcilable than tigers." At Rome itself there was an orthodox bishop and an Arian rival. It is not surprising that Julian, disgusted with the scenes presented to him by the mutual rage of the Christian sects, thought the surest method of restoring unity to the empire would be to silence all the contending parties and reintroduce the peaceful pageantries of the old Pantheon. If some of the fanciful annotators of the new faith had allegorized the facts of Christianity till they ceased to be facts at all, Julian performed the same office for the heathen gods. Jupiter and the rest were embodiments of the hidden powers of nature. Vulcan was the personification of human skill, and Venus the beautiful representative of connubial affection. But men's minds were now too sharpened with the contact they had had with the real to be satisfied with such fallacies as these. Eloquent teachers arose, who separated the eternal truths of revelation from the accessories with which they were temporarily combined. Ridicule was retorted on the emperor, who had sneered at the Christian services. Who, indeed, who had caught the slightest view of the spirituality of Christ's kingdom, could abstain from laughing at the laborious heathenism of the master of the world? He cut the wood for sacrifice, he slew the goat or bull, and, falling down on his knees, puffed with distended cheeks the sacred fire. He marched to the temple of Venus between two rows of dissolute and drunken worshippers, striving in vain by face and attitude to repress the shouts of riotous exultation and the jeers of the spectators. Then, wherever he went he was surrounded by pythonesses, and augurs, and fortune-tellers, magicians who could work miracles, and necromancers who could raise the dead. When he restored a statue to its ancient niche, he was rewarded by a shake of its head; when he hung up a picture of Thetis or Amphitrite, she winked in sign of satisfaction. Where miracles are not believed, the performance of them is fatal. But his expenditure of money in honouring the gods was more real, and had clearer results. He nearly exhausted the empire by the number of beasts he slew. He sent enormous offerings to the shrines of Dodona, and Delos, and Delphi. He rebuilt the temples, which time or Christian hatred had destroyed; and, by way of giving life to his new polity, he condescended to imitate the sect be despised, in its form of worship, in its advocacy of charity, peace, and good will, and in its institutions of celibacy and retirement, which, indeed, had been a portion of heathen virtue before it was admitted into the Christian Church. But his affected contempt soon degenerated into persecution. He would have no soldiers who did not serve his gods. Many resigned their swords. He called the Christians "Galileans," and robbed them of their property and despitefully used them, to try the sincerity of their faith. "Does not your law command you," he said, "to submit to injury, and to renounce your worldly goods? Well, I take possession of your riches that your march to heaven may be unencumbered." All moderation was now thrown off on both sides. Resistance was made by the Christians, and extermination threatened by the emperor. In the midst of these contentions he was called eastward to resist the aggression of Sapor, the Persian king. An arrow stretched Julian on his couch. He called round him his chief philosophers and priests. With them, in imitation of Socrates, he entered into deep discussions about the soul. Nothing more heroic than his end, or more eloquent than his parting discourse. But death did not soften the animosity of his foes. The Christians boasted that the arrow was sent by an angel, that visions had foretold the persecutor's fall, and that so would perish all the enemies of God. The adherents of the emperor in return blamed the Galileans as his assassins, and boldly pointed to Athanasius, the leader of the Christians, as the culprit. Athanasius would certainly not have scrupled to rid the world of such an Agag and Holofernes, but it is more probable that the death occurred without either a miracle or a murder. The successors of Julian were enemies of the apostate. They speedily restored their fellow-believers to the supremacy they had lost. A ferocious hymn of exultation by Gregory of Nazianzen was chanted far and wide. Cries of joy and execration resounded in market-places, and churches, and theatres. The market-places had been closed against the Christians, their churches had been interdicted, and the theatres shut up, by the overstrained asceticism of the deceased. It was perceived that Christianity had taken deeper root than the apostate had believed, and henceforth no effort could be made to revivify the old superstition. After a nominal election of Jovian, the choice of the soldiers fell on two of their favourite leaders, Valentinian and Valens, brothers, and sufferers in the late persecutions for their faith. Named emperors of the Roman world, they came to an amicable division of the empire into East and West. Valens remained in Constantinople to guard the frontiers of the Danube and the Euphrates; while Valentinian, who saw great clouds darkening over Italy and Gaul, fixed his imperial residence in the strong city of Milan. The separation took place in 364, and henceforth the stream of history flows in two distinct and gradually diverging channels. This century has already been marked by the removal of the seat of power to Constantinople; by the attempt at the restoration of Paganism by Julian; and we have now to dwell for a little on the third and greatest incident of all, the invasion of the Goths, and final settlement of hostile warriors on the Roman soil.

Names that have retained their sound and established themselves as household words in Europe now meet as at every turn. Valentinian is engaged in resisting the Saxons. The Britons, the Scots, the Germans, are pushing their claims to independence; and in the farther East, the persecutions and tyranny of the contemptible Valens are suddenly suspended by the news that a people hitherto unheard of had made their appearance within an easy march of the boundary, and that universal terror had taken possession of the soldiers of the empire. Who were those soldiers? We have seen for many years that the policy of the emperors had been to introduce the barbarians into the military service of the State, and to expose the wasted and helpless inhabitants to the rapacity of their tax-gatherers. This system had been carried to such a pitch, that it is probable there were none but mercenaries of the most varying interests in the Roman ranks. Yet such is the effect of discipline, and the pride of military combination, that all other feelings gave way before it. The Gothic chief, now invested with command in the Roman armies, turned his arms against his countrymen. The Albanian, the Saxon, the Briton, elevated to the rank of duke or count, looked back on Marius and Caesar as their lineal predecessors in opposing and conquering the enemies of Rome. The names of the generals and magistrates, accordingly, which we encounter after this date, have a strangely barbaric sound. There are Ricimer, and Marcomir, and Arbogast--and finally, the name which overtopped and outlived them all, the name of Alaric the Goth. Now, the Goths, we have seen, had been settled for many generations on the northern side of the Danube. Much intercourse must have taken place between the inhabitants of the two banks. There must have been trade, and love, and quarrellings, and rejoicings. At shorter and shorter intervals the bravest of the tribes must have passed over into the Roman territory and joined the Legions. Occasionally a timid or despotic emperor would suddenly order his armies across, and carry fire and sword into the unsuspecting country. But on the whole, the terms on which they lived were not hostile, for the ties which united the two peoples were numerous and strong. Even the languages in the course of time must have come to be mutually intelligible, and we read of Gothic leaders who were excellent judges of Homer and seldom travelled without a few chosen books. This being the case, what was the consternation of the almost civilized Goths in the fertile levels of the present Wallachia and Moldavia to hear that an innumerable horde of dreadful savages, calling themselves Huns and Magyars, had appeared on the western shore of the Black Sea, and spread over the land, destroying, murdering, burning whatever lay in their way! Cooped up for an unknown period, it appeared, on the northeastern side of the Palus Maeotis, now better known to us as the Sea of Azof--living on fish out of the Don, and on the cattle of the long steppes which extend across the Volga, these sons of the Scythian desert had never been heard of either by the Goths or Romans. A hideous people to behold, as the perverted imagination of poet or painter could produce. They were low in stature, but broad-shouldered and strong. Their wide cheek-bones and small eyes gave them a savage and cruel expression, which was increased by their want of nose, for the only visible appearance of that indispensable organ consisted of two holes sunk into the square expanse of their faces. Fear is not a flattering painter, but from these rude descriptions it is easy to recognise the Calmuck countenance; and when we add their small horses, long spears, and prodigious lightness and activity, we shall see a very close resemblance between them and their successors in the same district, the Russian Cossacks of the Don. On, on, came the torrent of these pitiless, fearless, ugly, dirty, irresistible foes. The Goths, terrified at their aspect, and bewildered with the accounts they heard of their numbers and mode of warfare, petitioned the emperor to give them an asylum on the Roman side. Their prayer was granted on condition of depositing their children and arms in Roman hands. They had no time to squabble about terms. Every thing was agreed to. Boats manned by Roman soldiers were busy, day and night in transporting the Gothic exiles to the Roman side. Arms and jewels, and wives and children, the furniture of their tents, and idols of their gods, all got safely across the guarding river. The Huns, the Alans, and the other unsightly hordes who had gathered in the pursuit, came down to the bank, and shouted useless defiance and threats of vengeance. The broad Danube rolled between; and there rested that night on the Roman soil a whole nation, different in interest, in manners and religion, from the population they had joined, numbering upwards of a million souls, bound together by every thing that constitutes the unity of a people. The avarice and injustice of the Roman authorities negatived the clause of the agreement that stipulated for the surrender of the Gothic arms. To redeem their swords and spears, they parted with the silver and gold they had amassed in their predatory incursions on the Roman territory. They know that once in possession of their weapons they could soon reclaim all they gave--and in no long time the attempt was made. Fritigern, the leader of their name, led them against the armies of Rome. Insulted at their audacity, the Emperor Valens, at the head of three hundred thousand men, met them in the plain of Adrianople. The existence of the Gothic people was at stake. They fought with desperation and hatred. The emperor was defeated, leaving two-thirds of his army on the field of battle. Seeking safety in a cottage at the side of the road, he was burned by the inexorable pursuers, who, gathering up their broken lines, marched steadily through the intervening levels and gazed with enraptured eyes on the glittering towers and pinnacles of Constantinople itself. But the walls were high and strongly armed. The barbarians were inveigled into a negotiation, and mastered by the unequal powers of lying at all times characteristic of the Greeks. Fritigern consented to withdraw his troops: some were embodied in the levies of the empire, and others dispersed in different provinces. Those settled in Thrace were faithful to their employers, and resisted their ancient enemies the Huns; but the great body of the discontented conquerors were ready for fresh assaults on the Roman land. Theodosius, called to the throne in 379, succeeded in staving off the evil day; but when the final partition of the empire took place between his two sons--Honorius and Arcadius--there was nothing to oppose the terrible onset of the Goths. At their head was Alaric, the descendant of their original chiefs, and himself the bravest of his warriors. He broke into Greece, forcing his way through Thermopylae, and devastated the native seats of poetry and the arts with fire and sword. The ruler at Constantinople heard of his advance with terror, and opposed to him the Vandal Stilicho, the greatest of his generals. But the wily Alaric declined to fight, and out-manoeuvred his enemies, escaping to the sure fastnesses of Epirus, and sat down sullen and discontented, meditating further expeditions into richer plains, and already seeing before him the prostrate cities of Italy. The terror of Arcadius tried in vain to soften his rage, or satisfy his ambition with vain titles, among others, that of Count of the Illyrian Border. The spirit of aggression was fairly roused. All the Gothic settlers in the Roman territory were ready to join their countrymen in one great and combined attack;--and with this position of the personages of the drama, the curtain falls on the fourth century, while preparations for the great catastrophe are going on.

FIFTH CENTURY

Emperors.

HONORIUS--

ARCADIUS--

King of the Franks.

A.D.

King of Italy.

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