The child also got some new advantages. If you got a job in the old Roman days, your earnings went to your father. Under the Byzantines, you could keep them yourself.
Slaves also had to be treated with justice. Under Christianity, even the most wretched slave was a human being with a soul which he could lose or save. He was no longer cattle, and his master could not slay him at will. He could not even treat him inhumanely.
Even the laws about business were based on the idea that the good of everybody was more important than the good of any individual. In fact, the Byzantines had an almost socialistic control of everything and everybody that made money.
Every branch of Byzantine industry was organized into corporations or guilds, and these corporations had the right to fix prices and wages down to the last penny. They had the right to decide who could go into a trade or business. They had the right to decide the exact place where a shop or booth or factory could be set up; for example, no shop selling wax and candles could be less than seventy yards from another candle shop. They also had the right to decide what goods could be imported, and what kind of goods, and in what amounts, could be shipped abroad.
But even at that, the corporations did not have absolute control of everything, for over them was the eparch, or lord mayor, and over the eparch was the emperor.
The emperor was supposed to be for all of the people and not for any group of them, and the emperor had the last word.
In spite of all they accomplished and their charitable principles and humane ideas, the Byzantines also had faults, however. There was a black side to their civilization just as there was a bright side, and some of it was very black indeed.
The Byzantines were very cruel. They were Greek, but they were also Oriental, and had in them a ferocious streak that not only was indifferent to suffering but seemed to take a fiendish pleasure in it. Most mobs are savage, but the Byzantine mob was even more savage than usual. Only the mobs of the French Revolution can compare with it.
For instance, when the Byzantines overthrew the emperor Andronicus, they were not satisfied with just tossing him from his throne. A howling crowd of men and women tore out his beard, broke his teeth, beat him, and dragged him through the streets at the tail of a mangy camel while shouting fearful curses at him. He was seventy years old, but although he begged to be put out of his misery, it was many hours before a soldier who was not one of the crowd took pity on him and killed him.
He was by no means the only emperor who died cruelly. As a matter of fact, it was a very rare thing for an emperor to die peacefully in his bed. Usurpers and would-be emperors were often treated just as savagely as Andronicus had been.