differed widely from that of the old imperial persecution. It was not political. In general, each persecuting sect since has justified its action on the ground that belief in its particular faith was necessary to salvation. Therefore it seemed right and merciful to torture the bodies of heretics in order to save their souls and to protect the souls of others. Under cover of such theory, there now began a dark and bloody chapter in human history-to last over twelve hundred years.

568. Effect of the Conversion of the Empire. The conversion of the empire produced less improvement politically than we should have expected. In general the church fell in with the despotic tendencies of the times, so far as human government was concerned. But upon other institutions its purifying influence was marked. It mitigated slavery; it made suicide a crime; it built up a vast and beneficent system of charity; and it deserves almost sole credit for the rapid abolition of the gladiatorial games. The deeper results, in the hearts of individual men and women, history cannot trace directly.

But no event of this kind can work in one direction only. The pagan world was converted at first more in form than in spirit, and paganism reacted upon Christianity. The victory was in part a compromise. The pagan Empire became Christian, but the Christian church became, to some degree, imperial and pagan. When it conquered the barbarians, soon afterward, it became to some degree barbarian. The gain enormously exceeded the loss; but there did take place a sweeping change from the earlier Christianity.

FOR FURTHER READING on the church in the fourth century: Carr's The Church and the Empire, 27-139; Fisher's History of the Christian Church; Lecky's European Morals, II; Stanley's Lectures on the Eastern Church; Newman's Arians. The canons and creeds are given in Pennsylvania Reprints, IV, No. 2; other valuable source extracts are found in Robinson's Readings in European History, I, chs. ii, iv.

1 Most of the great pagans looked upon suicide as perfectly excusable (though Socrates had condemned it as cowardly), and its practice had been growing frightfully common.

2 Read Lecky, European Morals, II, 79–98.

II. SOCIETY IN THE FOURTH CENTURY.

The three quar

569. Growing Exhaustion of the Empire. ters of a century after the reunion of the empire under Constantine were marked by a fair degree of outward prosperity. But the secret forces that were sapping the strength of society continued to work, and early in the coming century the empire was to crumble under barbarian attacks. These inroads were no more formidable than those which had so often been rebuffed. Apparently they were weaker. The barbarians, then, are not to be considered as the chief cause of the "Fall." The causes were internal. The Roman Empire was overthrown from without by an ordinary attack, because it had grown weak within.

This weakness was not due, in any marked degree at least, to decline in the army. The army kept its superb organization, and to the last was so strong in its discipline and its pride that it was ready to face any odds unflinchingly.' But more and more it became impossible to find men to fill the legions, or money to pay them. Dearth of men and of money was the cause of the fall of the state. The empire had become a shell.2

570. The Classes of Society. The Roman society of the fourth and fifth centuries differed widely from that of the first three centuries. At the top was the emperor to direct the machinery of government. At the bottom were the peasantry and artisans to produce food and wealth wherewith to pay taxes. Between these extremes were two aristocracies,

an

1 Read Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Empire, 288-291. 2 The older writers explained the decay on moral grounds. Recent scholars are at one in recognizing, first, that the moral decay of Roman society has been greatly exaggerated, and, secondly, that the immediate causes of decline were political and economic. On the exaggeration of the moral decline, read Dill, Roman Society, bks. ii and iii (especially pp. 115-131 and 227-228); Seeley, Roman Imperialism, especially 54-64; and Adams, Civilization, 79–81. Kingsley, Roman and Teuton, Lecture II, gives graphic statement of the older but unhistorical view. If read, it should be corrected by Dill's treatment of the same authorities.

imperial aristocracy for the empire at large, and a local aristocracy in as many sections as there were cities (§§ 571, 572).

571. The senatorial nobility, the higher aristocracy, now included many nobles who never sat in the Senate either at Rome or at the new capital Constantinople. It had swallowed up the old senatorial class of Rome, and most of the knights. It was "a nobility of office": that is, a family lost its rank, unless from time to time it furnished officials to the empire.1

A noble of this class possessed great honor and some important privileges. He was a citizen of the whole empire, not of one municipality alone, and he did not have to pay local taxes. He bore, however, heavy imperial burdens. He might be called upon at any moment for ruinous expenses at the capital, in fulfilling some imperial command, or he might be required to assume some costly office at his own expense, on a distant frontier. But only a few individuals were actually ruined by such duties, and the lot of the great majority was enviable.

572. The Curials.3-Below the imperial nobility was the local nobility. Each city had its senate, or curia. The curials were not drafted into the armies, as the lower classes might be, nor were they subject to bodily punishment. They managed the finances of their city, and to some degree still (§§ 500, 501) they controlled its other local affairs. Those curials who rose to the high magistracies, however, had to bear large expense in providing shows and festivals for their fellow townsmen, and all curials had costly duties in supplying the poor with corn.

More crushing still to this local nobility were the imperial burdens. The chief imperial tax was the land tax. The needs of the Empire caused the amount to be increased steadily, while the ability of the people to pay steadily decreased. The curials

1 The principle seems to have been not unlike that of the modern Russian nobility. Advanced students may refer to Leroy-Beaulieu's Tsars and the Russians, I, bk. vi.

2 Read Dill's Roman Society in the Last Century of the Empire, 249, or Bury's Later Roman Empire, 37-42.

8 There is an admirable account in Dill, 250-262.

were made the collectors of this tax in their city, and were held personally responsible for any deficit.

This duty was so undesirable that the number of curials tended to fall away. To secure the revenue, the emperors tried to prevent this decrease. The curials were made a hereditary class and were bound to their office. They were forbidden to become clergy, soldiers, or lawyers; they were not allowed to move from city to city, or even to travel without special permission.

A place in the senate of his city had once been the highest ambition of a wealthy middle-class citizen; but in the fourth century it had become almost an act of heroism to assume the duty. Indeed, as the position grew more and more unendurable, desperate attempts were made to escape at any sacrifice. Of course the desirable escape was into the imperial nobility, but this was possible only to a few. Others, despite the law, sought refuge in the artisan gilds, in the church, or even in serfdom, in a servile marriage, or in flight to the barbarians.2

573. The Middle Class. Between the curials and the laborers came a small middle class of traders, small landowners, and professional men. When any one of these acquired a certain amount of land, he was compelled by law to become a curial; but the general drift was for them to sink rather than rise.

574. The Artisans were grouped in gilds, or colleges, each with its own organization. Each member was bound to his gild, as the curial to his office.

575. The Peasantry had become serfs.3 That is, they were bound to their labor on the soil, and changed masters with the land they tilled.

1 A story is told that in a Spanish municipality a public-spirited man voluntarily offered himself for a vacancy in the curia, and that his fellowcitizens erected a statue in his honor.

2 See Robinson's Readings, I, 29.

8 Arnold, Roman Provincial Administration, 161-163; Bury, Later Roman. Empire, I, 28-32, and III, 418-421; Dill, Roman Society, 262-266; Munro and Sellery, Medieval Civilization, ch. ii. The teacher will see the need of guarding the students against thinking of serfdom as a result of the barbarian conquests and of the later feudalism.

In the latter days of the Republic, the system of great estates which had blighted Italy earlier (§§ 396-398), began to curse province after province outside Italy. Free labor disappeared before slave labor; grain culture declined; and large areas of land ceased to be tilled.

To remedy this state of affairs in part, the emperors introduced a new system. After successful wars, they gave large numbers of barbarian captives to great landlords, — thousands in a batch, not as slaves, but as coloni, or serfs. The purpose was to secure a hereditary class of agricultural laborers, and so keep up the food supply. The coloni were really given not to the landlord, but to the land.

They were not personal property, as slaves were. They were part of the real estate. They, and their children after them, were attached to the soil, and could not be sold off it. They had some rights which slaves did not have. They could contract a legal marriage, and each had his own plot of ground, of which he could not be dispossessed so long as he paid to the landlord a fixed rent in labor and in produce.

Augustus began this system on a small scale, and it soon became a regular practice to dispose thus of vanquished tribes. This made it still more difficult for the free small-farmer to maintain himself. That class sank into serfs; but it had been on the high road to extinction anyway. On the other hand, the slaves rose into serfs, until nearly all cultivators of the soil were of this order.

This institution of coloni was to last for hundreds of years, under the name of serfdom, and it was to help change the ancient slave organization of labor into the modern free organization. From the point of view

of the slave, it was an immense gain. At the moment, however, it was one more factor in killing out the old middle class and in widening the gap between the nobles and the small cultivators.

In the fourth century, too, the lot of the coloni had become miserable. They were crushed by imperial taxes, in addition to the rent due their landlord; and in Diocletian's time, in Gaul, they rose in desperate revolt against the upper classes, to plunder, murder, and torture. This was a terrible forerunner of the peasant-risings during the Middle Ages.