[292] They may have begun as early as the Peloponnesian war (Foucart, p. 66).
[293] Finlay, i, 85-86, notes.
[294] Id. i, 289.
[295] Id. p. 309; cp. pp. 328, 329.
[296] A fair idea of the facts may be had by combining the narratives of Gibbon, Finlay, and Mr. Oman (The Byzantine Empire, ch. x). Gibbon and Mr. Oman ignore the threat to make Carthage the capital; Gibbon ignores the point as to the stoppage of the grain supply; Finlay ignores the Church loan; Mr. Oman (p. 133) represents it as voluntary, whereas Gibbon shows it to have been compulsory (ch. 46. Bohn ed. v, 179, note). Mr. Bury alone (History of the Later Roman Empire, 1889, ii, 217-21) gives a fairly complete view of the situation. He specifies a famine and a pestilence as following on the stoppage of the grain supply.
[297] Finlay, i, 425.
[298] Id. ii, 37.
[299] Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 12.
[300] Oman, as cited, pp. 147, 148. The conventional claim, as made by Robertson and echoed by Guizot, was partly disallowed even by Milman, and countered by the clerical editor of the Bohn ed. of Gibbon (ii, 50-54). But such conventional formulas are always subject to resuscitation.
[301] Finlay (i, 81) writes that "at this favourable conjuncture Christianity stepped in to prevent avarice from ever recovering the ground which humanity had gained." This clearly did not happen, and his later chapters supply the true explanation.