We are fond of regarding ourselves as the heirs of Rome, and we like to
think that the Latin genius, after having absorbed the genius of Greece,
held an intellectual and moral supremacy in the ancient world similar to
the one Europe now maintains, and that the culture of the peoples that
lived under the authority of the Cæsars was stamped forever by their strong
touch. It is difficult to forget the present entirely and to renounce
aristocratic pretensions. We find it hard to believe that the Orient has
not always lived, to some extent, in the state of humiliation from which it
is now slowly emerging, and we are inclined to ascribe to the ancient
inhabitants of Smyrna, Beirut or Alexandria the faults with which the
Levantines of to-day are being reproached. The growing influence of the
Orientals that accompanied the decline of the empire has frequently been
considered a morbid phenomenon and a symptom of the slow decomposition of
the ancient world. Even Renan does not seem to have been sufficiently free
from an old prejudice when he wrote on this subject:[1] "That the oldest
and most worn out civilization should by its corruption subjugate the
younger was inevitable."
But if we calmly consider the real facts, avoiding the optical illusion
that makes things in our immediate {2} vicinity look larger, we shall form
a quite different opinion. It is beyond all dispute that Rome found the
point of support of its military power in the Occident. The legions from
the Danube and the Rhine were always braver, stronger and better
disciplined than those from the Euphrates and the Nile. But it is in the
Orient, especially in these countries of "old civilization," that we must
look for industry and riches, for technical ability and artistic
productions, as well as for intelligence and science, even before
Constantine made it the center of political power.
While Greece merely vegetated in a state of poverty, humiliation and
exhaustion; while Italy suffered depopulation and became unable to provide
for her own support; while the other countries of Europe were hardly out of
barbarism; Asia Minor, Egypt and Syria gathered the rich harvests Roman
peace made possible. Their industrial centers cultivated and renewed all
the traditions that had caused their former celebrity. A more intense
intellectual life corresponded with the economic activity of these great
manufacturing and exporting countries. They excelled in every profession
except that of arms, and even the prejudiced Romans admitted their
superiority. The menace of an Oriental empire haunted the imaginations of
the first masters of the world. Such an empire seems to have been the main
thought of the dictator Cæsar, and the triumvir Antony almost realized it.
Even Nero thought of making Alexandria his capital. Although Rome,
supported by her army and the right of might, retained the political
authority for a long time, she bowed to the fatal moral ascendency of more
advanced peoples. Viewed from this standpoint the history of the empire {3}
during the first three centuries may be summarized as a "peaceful
infiltration" of the Orient into the Occident.[2] This truth has become
evident since the various aspects of Roman civilization are being studied
in greater detail; and before broaching the special subject of these
studies we wish to review a few phases of the slow metamorphosis of which
the propagation of the Oriental religions was one phenomenon.
In the first place the imitation of the Orient showed itself plainly in
political institutions.[3] To be convinced of this fact it is sufficient to
compare the government of the empire in the time of Augustus with what it
had become under Diocletian. At the beginning of the imperial régime Rome
ruled the world but did not govern it. She kept the number of her
functionaries down to a minimum, her provinces were mere unorganized
aggregates of cities where she only exercised police power, protectorates
rather than annexed countries.[4] As long as law and order were maintained
and her citizens, functionaries and merchants could transact their
business, Rome was satisfied. She saved herself the trouble of looking
after the public service by leaving broad authority to the cities that had
existed before her domination, or had been modeled after her. The taxes
were levied by syndicates of bankers and the public lands rented out.
Before the reforms instituted by Augustus, even the army was not an organic
and permanent force, but consisted theoretically of troops levied before a
war and discharged after victory.
Rome's institutions remained those of a city. It was difficult to apply
them to the vast territory she attempted to govern with their aid. They
were a clumsy {4} apparatus that worked only by sudden starts, a
rudimentary system that could not and did not last.
What do we find three centuries later? A strongly centralized state in
which an absolute ruler, worshiped like a god and surrounded by a large
court, commanded a whole hierarchy of functionaries; cities divested of
their local liberties and ruled by an omnipotent bureaucracy, the old
capital herself the first to be dispossessed of her autonomy and subjected
to prefects. Outside of the cities the monarch, whose private fortune was
identical with the state finances, possessed immense domains managed by
intendants and supporting a population of serf-colonists. The army was
composed largely of foreign mercenaries, professional soldiers whose pay or
bounty consisted of lands on which they settled. All these features and
many others caused the Roman empire to assume the likeness of ancient
Oriental monarchies.
It would be impossible to admit that like causes produce like results, and
then maintain that a similarity is not sufficient proof of an influence in
history. Wherever we can closely follow the successive transformations of a
particular institution, we notice the action of the Orient and especially
of Egypt. When Rome had become a great cosmopolitan metropolis like
Alexandria, Augustus reorganized it in imitation of the capital of the
Ptolemies. The fiscal reforms of the Cæsars like the taxes on sales and
inheritances, the register of land surveys and the direct collection of
taxes, were suggested by the very perfect financial system of the
Lagides,[5] and it can be maintained that their government was the first
source from which those of modern Europe were derived, through the medium
{5} of the Romans. The imperial _saltus_, superintended by a procurator and
cultivated by metayers reduced to the state of serfs, was an imitation of
the ones that the Asiatic potentates formerly cultivated through their
agents.[6] It would be easy to increase this list of examples. The absolute
monarchy, theocratic and bureaucratic at the same time, that was the form
of government of Egypt, Syria and even Asia Minor during the Alexandrine
period was the ideal on which the deified Cæsars gradually fashioned the
Roman empire.
One cannot however deny Rome the glory of having elaborated a system of
private law that was logically deduced from clearly formulated principles
and was destined to become the fundamental law of all civilized
communities. But even in connection with this private law, where the
originality of Rome is uncontested and her preeminence absolute, recent
researches have shown with how much tenacity the Hellenized Orient
maintained its old legal codes, and how much resistance local customs, the
woof of the life of nations, offered to unification. In truth, unification
never was realized except in theory.[7] More than that, these researches
have proved that the fertile principles of that provincial law, which was
sometimes on a higher moral plane than the Roman law, reacted on the
progressive transformation of the old _ius civile_. And how could it be
otherwise? Were not a great number of famous jurists like Ulpian of Tyre
and Papinian of Hemesa natives of Syria? And did not the law-school of
Beirut constantly grow in importance after the third century, until during
the fifth century it became the most brilliant center of legal education?
Thus Levantines {6} cultivated even the patrimonial field cleared by
Scaevola and Labeo.[8]
In the austere temple of law the Orient held as yet only a minor position;
everywhere else its authority was predominant. The practical mind of the
Romans, which made them excellent lawyers, prevented them from becoming
great scholars. They esteemed pure science but little, having small talent
for it, and one notices that it ceased to be earnestly cultivated wherever
their direct domination was established. The great astronomers,
mathematicians, and physicians, like the originators or defenders of the
great metaphysical systems, were mostly Orientals. Ptolemy and Plotinus
were Egyptians, Porphyry and Iamblichus, Syrians, Dioscorides and Galen,
Asiatics. All branches of learning were affected by the spirit of the
Orient. The clearest minds accepted the chimeras of astrology and magic.
Philosophy claimed more and more to derive its inspiration from the
fabulous wisdom of Chaldea and Egypt. Tired of seeking truth, reason
abdicated and hoped to find it in a revelation preserved in the mysteries
of the barbarians. Greek logic strove to coordinate into an harmonious
whole the confused traditions of the Asiatic religions.
Letters, as well as science, were cultivated chiefly by the Orientals.
Attention has often been called to the fact that those men of letters that
were considered the purest representatives of the Greek spirit under the
empire belonged almost without exception to Asia Minor, Syria or Egypt. The
rhetorician Dion Chrysostom came from Prusa in Bithynia, the satirist
Lucian from Samosata in Commagene on the borders of the Euphrates. A number
of other names could be cited. {7} From Tacitus and Suetonius down to
Ammianus, there was not one author of talent to preserve in Latin the
memory of the events that stirred the world of that period, but it was a
Bithynian again, Dion Cassius of Nicea, who, under the Severi, narrated the
history of the Roman people.
It is a characteristic fact that, besides this literature whose language
was Greek, others were born, revived and developed. The Syriac, derived
from the Aramaic which was the international language of earlier Asia,
became again the language of a cultured race with Bardesanes of Edessa. The
Copts remembered that they had spoken several dialects derived from the
ancient Egyptian and endeavored to revive them. North of the Taurus even
the Armenians began to write and polish their barbarian speech. Christian
preaching, addressed to the people, took hold of the popular idioms and
roused them from their long lethargy. Along the Nile as well as on the
plains of Mesopotamia or in the valleys of Anatolia it proclaimed its new
ideas in dialects that had been despised hitherto, and wherever the old
Orient had not been entirely denationalized by Hellenism, it successfully
reclaimed its intellectual autonomy.
A revival of native art went hand in hand with this linguistic awakening.
In no field of intellect has the illusion mentioned above been so complete
and lasting as in this one. Until a few years ago the opinion prevailed
that an "imperial" art had come into existence in the Rome of Augustus and
that thence its predominance had slowly spread to the periphery of the
ancient world. If it had undergone some special modifications in Asia these
were due to exotic influences, undoubtedly {8} Assyrian or Persian. Not
even the important discoveries of M. de Vogüé in Hauran[9] were sufficient
to prove the emptiness of a theory that was supported by our lofty
conviction of European leadership.
To-day it is fully proven not only that Rome has given nothing or almost
nothing to the Orientals but also that she has received quite a little from
them. Impregnated with Hellenism, Asia produced an astonishing number of
original works of art in the kingdoms of the Diadochs. The old processes,
the discovery of which dates back to the Chaldeans, the Hittites or the
subjects of the Pharaohs, were first utilized by the conquerors of
Alexander's empire who conceived a rich variety of new types, and created
an original style. But if during the three centuries preceding our era,
sovereign Greece played the part of the demiurge who creates living beings
out of preexisting matter, during the three following centuries her
productive power became exhausted, her faculty of invention weakened, the
ancient local traditions revolted against her empire and with the help of
Christianity overcame it. Transferred to Byzantium they expanded in a new
efflorescence and spread over Europe where they paved the way for the
formation of the Romanesque art of the early Middle Ages.[10]
Rome, then, far from having established her suzerainty, was tributary to
the Orient in this respect. The Orient was her superior in the extent and
precision of its technical knowledge as well as in the inventive genius and
ability of its workmen. The Cæsars were great builders but frequently
employed foreign help. Trajan's principal architect, a magnificent builder,
was a Syrian, Apollodorus of Damascus.[11] {9}
Her Levantine subjects not only taught Italy the artistic solution of
architectonic problems like the erection of a cupola on a rectangular or
octagonal edifice, but also compelled her to accept their taste, and they
saturated her with their genius. They imparted to her their love of
luxuriant decoration, and of violent polychromy, and they gave religious
sculpture and painting the complicated symbolism that pleased their
abstruse and subtle minds.
In those times art was closely connected with industry, which was entirely
manual and individual. They learned from each other, they improved and
declined together, in short they were inseparable. Shall we call the
painters that decorated the architecturally fantastic and airy walls of
Pompeii in Alexandrian or perhaps Syrian taste artisans or artists? And how
shall we classify the goldsmiths, Alexandrians also, who carved those
delicate leaves, those picturesque animals, those harmoniously elegant or
cunningly animated groups that cover the phials and goblets of Bosco Reale?
And descending from the productions of the industrial arts to those of
industry itself, one might also trace the growing influence of the Orient;
one might show how the action of the great manufacturing centers of the
East gradually transformed the material civilization of Europe; one might
point out how the introduction into Gaul[12] of exotic patterns and
processes changed the old native industry and gave its products a
perfection and a popularity hitherto unknown. But I dislike to insist
overmuch on a point apparently so foreign to the one now before us. It was
important however to mention this subject at the beginning because in
whatever direction scholars of {10} to-day pursue their investigations they
always notice Asiatic culture slowly supplanting that of Italy. The latter
developed only by absorbing elements taken from the inexhaustible reserves
of the "old civilizations" of which we spoke at the beginning. The
Hellenized Orient imposed itself everywhere through its men and its works;
it subjected its Latin conquerors to its ascendancy in the same manner as
it dominated its Arabian conquerors later when it became the civilizer of
Islam. But in no field of thought was its influence, under the empire, so
decisive as in religion, because it finally brought about the complete
destruction of the Greco-Latin paganism.[13]
The invasion of the barbarian religions was so open, so noisy and so
triumphant that it could not remain unnoticed. It attracted the anxious or
sympathetic attention of the ancient authors, and since the Renaissance
modern scholars have frequently taken interest in it. Possibly however they
did not sufficiently understand that this religious evolution was not an
isolated and extraordinary phenomenon, but that it accompanied and aided a
more general evolution, just as that aided it in turn. The transformation
of beliefs was intimately connected with the establishment of the monarchy
by divine right, the development of art, the prevailing philosophic
tendencies, in fact with all the manifestations of thought, sentiment and
taste.
We shall attempt to sketch this religious movement with its numerous and
far-reaching ramifications. First we shall try to show what caused the
diffusion of the Oriental religions. In the second place we shall examine
those in particular that originated in Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria and Persia,
and we shall endeavor to {11} distinguish their individual characteristics
and estimate their value. We shall see, finally, how the ancient idolatry
was transformed and what form it assumed in its last struggle against
Christianity, whose victory was furthered by Asiatic mysteries, although
they opposed its doctrine.
* * * * *
But before broaching this subject a preliminary question must be answered.
Is the study which we have just outlined possible? What items will be of
assistance to us in this undertaking? From what sources are we to derive
our knowledge of the Oriental religions in the Roman empire?
It must be admitted that the sources are inadequate and have not as yet
been sufficiently investigated.
Perhaps no loss caused by the general wreck of ancient literature has been
more disastrous than that of the liturgic books of paganism. A few mystic
formulas quoted incidentally by pagan or Christian authors and a few
fragments of hymns in honor of the gods[14] are practically all that
escaped destruction. In order to obtain an idea of what those lost rituals
may have been one must turn to their imitations contained in the chorus of
tragedies, and to the parodies comic authors sometimes made; or look up in
books of magic the plagiarisms that writers of incantations may have
committed.[15] But all this gives us only a dim reflection of the religious
ceremonies. Shut out from the sanctuary like profane outsiders, we hear
only the indistinct echo of the sacred songs and not even in imagination
can we attend the celebration of the mysteries.
We do not know how the ancients prayed, we cannot penetrate into the
intimacy of their religious life, {12} and certain depths of the soul of
antiquity we must leave unsounded. If a fortunate windfall could give us
possession of some sacred book of the later paganism its revelations would
surprise the world. We could witness the performance of those mysterious
dramas whose symbolic acts commemorated the passion of the gods; in company
with the believers we could sympathize with their sufferings, lament their
death and share in the joy of their return to life. In those vast
collections of archaic rites that hazily perpetuated the memory of
abolished creeds we would find traditional formulas couched in obsolete
language that was scarcely understood, naive prayers conceived by the faith
of the earliest ages, sanctified by the devotion of past centuries, and
almost ennobled by the joys and sufferings of past generations. We would
also read those hymns in which philosophic thought found expression in
sumptuous allegories[16] or humbled itself before the omnipotence of the
infinite, poems of which only a few stoic effusions celebrating the
creative or destructive fire, or expressing a complete surrender to divine
fate can give us some idea.[17]
But everything is gone, and thus we lose the possibility of studying from
the original documents the internal development of the pagan religions.
We should feel this loss less keenly if we possessed at least the works of
Greek and Latin mythographers on the subject of foreign divinities like the
voluminous books published during the second century by Eusebius and Pallas
on the Mysteries of Mithra. But those works were thought devoid of interest
or even dangerous by the devout Middle Ages, and they are not likely to
have survived the fall of paganism. The {13} treatises on mythology that
have been preserved deal almost entirely with the ancient Hellenic fables
made famous by the classic writers, to the neglect of the Oriental
religions.[18]
As a rule, all we find in literature on this subject are a few incidental
remarks and passing allusions. History is incredibly poor in that respect.
This poverty of information was caused in the first place by a narrowness
of view characteristic of the rhetoric cultivated by historians of the
classical period and especially of the empire. Politics and the wars of the
rulers, the dramas, the intrigues and even the gossip of the courts and of
the official world were of much higher interest to them than the great
economic or religious transformations. Moreover, there is no period of the
Roman empire concerning which we are so little informed as the third
century, precisely the one during which the Oriental religions reached the
apogee of their power. From Herodianus and Dion Cassius to the Byzantines,
and from Suetonius to Ammianus Marcellinus, all narratives of any
importance have been lost, and this deplorable blank in historic tradition
is particularly fatal to the study of paganism.
It is a strange fact that light literature concerned itself more with these
grave questions. The rites of the exotic religions stimulated the
imagination of the satirists, and the pomp of the festivities furnished the
novelists with brilliant descriptive matter. Juvenal laughs at the
mortifications of the devotees of Isis; in his _Necromancy_ Lucian parodies
the interminable purifications of the magi, and in the _Metamorphoses_
Apuleius relates the various scenes of an initiation into the mysteries of
Isis with the fervor of a neophyte and {14} the studied refinement of a
rhetorician. But as a rule we find only incidental remarks and superficial
observations in the authors. Not even the precious treatise _On the Syrian
Goddess_, in which Lucian tells of a visit to the temple of Hierapolis and
repeats his conversation with the priests, has any depth. What he relates
is the impression of an intelligent, curious and above all an ironical
traveler.[19]
In order to obtain a more perfect initiation and a less fragmentary insight
into the doctrines taught by the Oriental religions, we are compelled to
turn to two kinds of testimony, inspired by contrary tendencies, but
equally suspicious: the testimony of the philosophers, and that of the
fathers of the church. The Stoics and the Platonists frequently took an
interest in the religious beliefs of the barbarians, and it is to them that
we are indebted for the possession of highly valuable data on this subject.
Plutarch's treatise _Isis and Osiris_ is a source whose importance is
appreciated even by Egyptologists, whom it aids in reconstructing the
legends of those divinities.[20] But the philosophers very seldom expounded
foreign doctrines objectively and for their own sake. They embodied them in
their systems as a means of proof or illustration; they surrounded them
with personal exegesis or drowned them in transcendental commentaries; in
short, they claimed to discover their own ideas in them. It is always
difficult and sometimes impossible to distinguish the dogmas from the
self-confident interpretations which are usually as incorrect as possible.
The writings of the ecclesiastical authors, although prejudiced, are very
fertile sources of information, but in perusing them one must guard against
another kind {15} of error. By a peculiar irony of fate those
controversialists are to-day in many instances our only aid in reviving the
idolatry they attempted to destroy. Although the Oriental religions were
the most dangerous and most persistent adversaries of Christianity, the
works of the Christian writers do not supply as abundant information as one
might suppose. The reason for this is that the fathers of the church often
show a certain reserve in speaking of idolatry, and affect to recall its
monstrosities only in guarded terms. Moreover, as we shall see later
on,[21] the apologists of the fourth century were frequently behind the
times as to the evolution of doctrines, and drawing on literary tradition,
from epicureans and skeptics, they fought especially the beliefs of the
ancient Grecian and Italian religions that had been abolished or were dying
out, while they neglected the living beliefs of the contemporary world.
Some of these polemicists nevertheless directed their attacks against the
divinities of the Orient and their Latin votaries. Either they derived
their information from converts or they had been pagans themselves during
their youth. This was the case with Firmicus Maternus who has written a bad
treatise on astrology and finally fought the _Error of the Profane
Religions_. However, the question always arises as to how much they can
have known of the esoteric doctrines and the ritual ceremonies, the secret
of which was jealously guarded. They boast so loudly of their power to
disclose these abominations, that they incur the suspicion that the
discretion of the initiates baffled their curiosity. In addition they were
too ready to believe all the calumnies that were circulated against the
pagan mysteries, {16} calumnies directed against occult sects of all times
and against the Christians themselves.
In short, the literary tradition is not very rich and frequently little
worthy of belief. While it is comparatively considerable for the Egyptian
religions because they were received by the Greek world as early as the
period of the Ptolemies, and because letters and science were always
cultivated at Alexandria, it is even less important for Phrygia, although
Cybele was Hellenized and Latinized very early, and excepting the tract by
Lucian on the goddess of Hierapolis it is almost nothing for the Syrian,
Cappadocian and Persian religions.
The insufficiency of the data supplied by writers increases the value of
information furnished by epigraphic and archeological documents, whose
number is steadily growing. The inscriptions possess a certainty and
precision that is frequently absent in the phrases of the writers. They
enable one to draw important conclusions as to the dates of propagation and
disappearance of the various religions, their extent, the quality and
social rank of their votaries, the sacred hierarchy and sacerdotal
personnel, the constitution of the religious communities, the offerings
made to the gods, and the ceremonies performed in their honor; in short,
conclusions as to the secular and profane history of these religions, and
in a certain measure their ritual. But the conciseness of the lapidary
style and the constant repetition of stereotyped formulas naturally render
that kind of text hardly explicit and sometimes enigmatical. There are
dedications like the _Nama Sebesio_ engraved upon the great Mithra
bas-relief preserved in the Louvre, that caused a number of {17}
dissertations to be written without any one explaining it. And besides, in
a general way, epigraphy gives us but little information about the liturgy
and almost nothing regarding the doctrines.
Archeology must endeavor to fill the enormous blanks left by the written
tradition; the monuments, especially the artistic ones, have not as yet
been collected with sufficient care nor interpreted with sufficient method.
By studying the arrangement of the temples and the religious furniture that
adorned them, one can at the same time determine part of the liturgic
ceremonies which took place there. On the other hand, the critical
interpretation of statuary relics enables us to reconstruct with sufficient
correctness certain sacred legends and to recover part of the theology of
the mysteries. Unlike Greek art, the religious art at the close of paganism
did not seek, or sought only incidentally, to elevate the soul through the
contemplation of an ideal of divine beauty. True to the traditions of the
ancient Orient, it tried to edify and to instruct at the same time.[22] It
told the history of the gods and the world in cycles of pictures, or it
expressed through symbols the subtle conceptions of theology and even
certain doctrines of profane science, like the struggle of the four
elements; just as during the Middle Ages, so the artist of the empire
interpreted the ideas of the clergy, teaching the believers by means of
pictures and rendering the highest religious conceptions intelligible to
the humblest minds. But to read this mystic book whose pages are scattered
in our museums we must laboriously look for its key, and we cannot take for
a guide and exegetist some Vincent de Beauvais of Diocletian's period[23]
as when looking over the marvelous {18} sculptured encyclopedias in our
Gothic cathedrals. Our position is frequently similar to that of a scholar
of the year 4000 who would undertake to write the history of the Passion
from the pictures of the fourteen stations, or to study the veneration of
the saints from the statues found in the ruins of our churches.
But, as far as the Oriental religions are concerned, the results of all the
laborious investigations now being made in the classical countries can be
indirectly controlled, and this is a great advantage. To-day we are
tolerably well acquainted with the old religions of Egypt, Babylonia and
Persia. We read and translate correctly the hieroglyphics of the Nile, the
cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia and the sacred books, Zend or Pahlavi, of
Parseeism. Religious history has profited more by their deciphering than
the history of politics or of civilization. In Syria also, the discovery of
Aramaic and Phoenician inscriptions and the excavations made in temples
have in a certain measure covered the deficiency of information in the
Bible or in the Greek writers on Semitic paganism. Even Asia Minor, that is
to say the uplands of Anatolia, is beginning to reveal herself to explorers
although almost all the great sanctuaries, Pessinus, the two Comanas,
Castabala, are as yet buried underground. We can, therefore, even now form
a fairly exact idea of the beliefs of some of the countries that sent the
Oriental mysteries to Rome. To tell the truth, these researches have not
been pushed far enough to enable us to state precisely what form religion
had assumed in those regions at the time they came into contact with Italy,
and we should be likely to commit very strange errors, if we brought
together practices that may have been {19} separated by thousands of years.
It is a task reserved for the future to establish a rigorous chronology in
this matter, to determine the ultimate phase that the evolution of creeds
in all regions of the Levant had reached at the beginning of our era, and
to connect them without interruption of continuity to the mysteries
practiced in the Latin world, the secrets of which archeological researches
are slowly bringing to light.
We are still far from welding all the links of this long chain firmly
together; the orientalists and the classical philologists cannot, as yet,
shake hands across the Mediterranean. We raise only one corner of Isis's
veil, and scarcely guess a part of the revelations that were, even
formerly, reserved for a pious and chosen few. Nevertheless we have
reached, on the road of certainty, a summit from which we can overlook the
field that our successors will clear. In the course of these lectures I
shall attempt to give a summary of the essential results achieved by the
erudition of the nineteenth century and to draw from them a few conclusions
that will, possibly, be provisional. The invasion of the Oriental religions
that destroyed the ancient religions and national ideals of the Romans also
radically transformed the society and government of the empire, and in view
of this fact it would deserve the historian's attention even if it had not
foreshadowed and prepared the final victory of Christianity.
* * * * *
{20}