In Rome, however, there was always a strong admixture of barbaric blood, and, to the last, the barbarians married for love. Justinian was an example. Born of an obscure race of barbarians in the desolate Bulgarian country, he fell uncontrollably in love with Theodora, who had scandalized even the theatres of Constantinople. His mother died of shame; but Justinian persevered, and, while she lived, his devotion to his wife never wavered.
In Rome and in Byzantium such women were the stronger or the more fortunate; their counterparts are easily to be found in any economic age. The fate of the weaker there was slavery; now they are forced by competition into the ranks of the cheapest labour,—a lot, perhaps, hardly preferable.
And yet art, perhaps, even more clearly than religion, love, or war, indicates the pathway of consolidation; for art reflects with the subtlest delicacy those changes in the forms of competition which enfeeble or inflame the imagination. Of Greek art, in its zenith, little need be said; its great qualities have been too fully recognized. It suffices to point out that it was absolutely honest, and that it formed a vehicle of expression as flexible as the language itself. A temple apparently of marble, was of marble; a colonnade apparently supporting a portico, did support it; and, while the ornament formed an integral part of the structure, the people read it as intelligently as they read the poems of Homer. Nothing similar ever flourished in Rome.
Unlike the Greeks, the Romans were never sensitive or imaginative. Properly speaking, they had nothing which they could express through art; they were utilitarian from the outset, and their architecture finally took shape in the most perfect system of materialistic building which, probably, has ever existed. Obviously such a system could only be matured in a capitalistic society, and, accordingly, Roman architecture only reached perfection somewhat late, perhaps, toward the close of the first century.
The Romans, though vulgar and ostentatious, understood business. They knew how to combine economy and even solidity with display. As Viollet-le-Duc has observed, “They were rich, and they wanted to appear so,”[388] but they strove to attain their end without waste. Therefore they first ran up a cheap core of rubble, bricks, and mortar, which could be put together by rude slave labour under the direction of an engineer and a few overseers; and their squalid interior they afterward veneered with marble, adding, by way of ornament, tier above tier of Greek columns ranged against the walls. That gaudy exterior had nothing whatever to do with the building itself, and could be stripped off without vital injury. From the Greek standpoint nothing could be falser, more insulting to the intelligence, or, in a word, more plutocratic; but the work was sound and durable, and, to a certain degree, imposing from its mass. This system lasted, substantially unimpaired, even to Constantine or until the final migration of capital to the Bosphorus, the only difference between the monuments of the fourth century and the first being that the former are somewhat coarser, just as the coins of Diocletian are coarser than those of Nero.
Yet, although the monied aristocracy remained supreme down to the final disintegration of the West, emigration began very early to modify the base of society, by the injection of a considerable amount of imaginative blood; and, as early as the reign of Claudius, this new store of energy made its presence felt through the outlet of Christianity. The converts were, of course, the antipodes of the ruling class. They were “humiliores,” poor people, below the notice of a rich man like Tacitus; “quos, ... vulgus Christianos appellabat.”[389]
These Christians held a position analogous to that of Nihilists now, whom they resembled save in respect to violence. They were socialists living under a monied despotism, and they openly prayed for the end of the world; therefore they were thought “haters of the human race,”[390] and they suffered the penalty. Primitive Christianity was incompatible with the existence of Roman society, against which it was a protest, for it “fully accepted the idea that the rich, if he did not surrender his superfluity, kept what belonged to another.”[391] By right the Kingdom of Heaven was closed to the wealthy.
Probably very few of these early Christians were Italians; most of them were from the Levant, and that they were intensely emotional is proved by their lust for martyrdom—they voluntarily sought death as a means of glorifying God. One day Arrius Antoninus, proconsul of Asia, having ordered certain Christians arrested, saw all the faithful of the town present themselves before his tribunal, demanding to share the fate of those chosen for martyrdom. He dismissed them in wrath, telling them that if they were so in love with death they might commit suicide;[392] and Renan’s account of the persecutions under Nero shows an incredible exaltation.[393]
Almost at once the effect of this emotional temperament became perceptible. The paintings in the catacombs are, perhaps, the oldest example of Christian art, and of these M. Vitet thus spoke many years ago:—
“These decorations, made with the hand raised, in secret, hurriedly, and more for pious reasons than for love of the beautiful, nevertheless reveal to the most rebellious eyes and in spite of strange negligence and incorrectness, I know not what of animation, of youth, of fecundity, and, so to speak, a real transformation of that very art which, in the service of paganism, seemed then, we are all agreed, dying of exhaustion.”[394]