Illuminated Initials. (From Byzantine MSS.) (From "L'Art Byzantin." Par C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883.)
If we must sum up the characteristics of the East Romans and their civilization, the conclusion at which we arrive will be very different. It is only fair to acknowledge that they had their faults: what else could be expected when we know that the foundations of the Eastern Empire were laid upon the Oriental provinces of the old Roman world, among races that had long been stigmatized by their masters as hopelessly effete and corrupt—Syrians, Egyptians, and Hellenized Asiatics, whom even the degenerate Romans of the third century had been wont to despise. The Byzantine Empire displayed from its very cradle a taint of weakness derived from this Oriental origin. It showed features particularly obnoxious to the modern mind of the nineteenth century—such as the practice of a degrading and grovelling court etiquette, full of prostrations and genuflexions, the introduction of eunuchs and slaves into high offices of State, the wholesale and deliberate use of treachery and lying in matters of diplomacy.
But remembering its origins we shall, on the [pg 154] whole, wonder at the good points in Byzantine civilization rather than at its faults. It may fairly be said that Christianity raised the Roman East to a better moral position than it had known for a thousand years. With all their faults the monks and hermits of the fifth century are a good substitute for the priests of Cybele and Mithras of the second. It was something that the Government and the public opinion of the day had concurred to sweep away the orgies of Daphne and Canopus. Church and State united in the reign of Justinian to punish with spiritual and bodily death the unnatural crimes which had been the open practice of emperors themselves in the first centuries of the empire.
The vices of which the East Romans have most commonly been accused are cowardice, frivolity, and treachery. On each of these points they have been grossly wronged. Cowardice was certainly not the chief characteristic of the centuries that produced emperors like Theodosius I. and Heraclius, prelates like Athanasius and Chrysostom, public servants like Belisarius and Priscus. It is not for cowardice that we note the Byzantine populace which routed Gainas and his mercenaries, and raised the Nika sedition, but for turbulence. If military virtue was wanting to the East-Roman armies, how came the Ostrogoth and Vandal to be conquered, the Persian and the Hun to be driven off, how, above all, was the desperate struggle against the fanatical Saracen protracted for four hundred years, till at last the Caliphate broke up?
Frivolity and luxury are an accusation easy to bring against any age. Every moralist, from Jeremiah to [pg 155] Juvenal, and from Juvenal to Mr. Ruskin, has believed his own generation to be the most obnoxious and contemptible in the world's history. We have numerous tirades against the manners of Constantinople preserved in Byzantine literature, and may judge from them something of the faults of the time. It would seem that there was much of the sort of luxury to which ascetic preachers take exception—much splendour of raiment, much ostentatious display of plate and furniture, of horses and chariots. Luxury and evil living often go together, but when we examine all the enormities laid to the charge of the Byzantines, there is less alleged than we might expect. When Chrysostom raged against the contemporaries of Arcadius, his anathemas fell on such crimes as the use of cosmetics and dyes by fashionable dames, on the gambling propensities of their husbands, on the immoral tendencies of the theatre, on the drunken orgies at popular festivals—accusations to which any age—our own included—might plead guilty. The races of the Circus played a disproportionate part in social life, and attracted the enthusiastic attention of thousands of votaries; but it is surely hard that our own age, with all its sporting and athletic interests, should cast a stone at the sixth century. We have not to look far around us to discover classes for whom horse-racing still presents an inexplicable attraction. When we remember that the Constantinopolitans were excitable Orientals, and had no other form of sport to distract their attention from the Circus, we can easily realize the genesis of the famous riots of the Blues and Greens.
From the darker forms of vice great cities have [pg 156] never been free, and there is no reason to think that Constantinople in the sixth century differed from London in the nineteenth. It is fair to point out that Christian public opinion and the Government strove their best to put down sexual immorality. Theodosius and Justinian are recorded to have entered upon the herculean task of endeavouring to suppress all disorderly houses: the latter made exile the penalty for panders and procuresses, and inflicted death on those guilty of the worst extremes of immorality. We must remember, too, that if Constantinople showed much vice, it also displayed shining examples of the social virtues. The Empress Flaccilla was wont to frequent the hospitals, and tend the beds of the sick. Of the monastic severity which the Empress Pulcheria displayed in the palace we have spoken already.
After cowardice and light morals, it is treachery that is popularly cited as the most prominent vice of the Eastern Empire. There have been other states and epochs more given to plots and revolts, but it is still true that there was too much intrigue at Constantinople. The reason is not far to seek: the “carrière ouverte aux talents” practically existed there, and the army and the civil service were full of poor, able, and ambitious men of all races and classes mixed together. The converted Goth or the renegade Persian, the half-civilized mountaineer from Isauria, the Copt and Syrian and Armenian were all welcomed in the army or civil service, if only they had ability. Both the bureaucracy and the army therefore had elements which lacked patriotism, conscience, and stability, and were prone to seek advancement either [pg 157] by intrigue or military revolt. This being granted, it is perhaps astonishing to have to record that between 350 and 600 the empire never once saw its legitimate ruler dethroned, either by palace intrigue or military revolt. The fact that all the plots—and there were many in the period—failed hopelessly, is, on the whole, a proof that if there was much treachery there was much loyalty among the East Romans. There have certainly been periods in more recent times which show a much worse record.[19] A single instance may suffice—Mediæval Italy from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century could produce far more shocking examples of conscienceless and unjustifiable plotting than the Byzantine Empire in the whole thousand years of its existence.