William Gordon Holmes

“ The merchant floating down the stream; the caravan crossing the desert, mounting the defile, looking out upon the sea and its harbours; the ferry passing the river; the mariners in their little ship—they are real figures, yet they are nameless, all but a few; they suffer and they succumb without ever finding a voice for their story. On the desert, perhaps, a cloud of robber horse burst upon them; on the river the boat sinks, overladen; in the mountain passes they drop with cold; in the dirty lanes of the mart they die of disease. ”

“ Previous to the commencement of the siege, the Roman legates had been received in the Persian camp, where they vainly endeavoured to dissuade Chosroes from continuing the war. He now summoned them to his presence, and, in a lacrymose tone, delivered a homily on the diversified nature of human fortune. The ruin of this noble capital, he remarked, was a sad spectacle, which he had done all in his power to prevent. By their rash defence with unequal forces, the citizens had brought this calamity on themselves, but he had restrained the incensed soldiery and given time for great numbers to escape. ”

“ The people of this age contemplated nature without comprehending her operations; her forces were displayed before their eyes, but it never entered into their heads to master them and make them subservient to the needs of human life; they moved within a narrow cage unconscious of the barriers which confined them, without a thought of emerging to the freedom of the beyond; and an ordinary citizen of the present day is in the possession of information which would surprise and instruct the greatest sage of ancient Greece. ”

“ Without history and without science, inflated by ambition within their narrow sphere, they applied the conception of immortality, which millenniums would not justify, to being acclaimed in the ephemeral fervour of the populace or to being remembered for a few decades in the finite language of poetry and rhetoric.
While the Roman state was in its cradle a citizen and a soldier were equivalent terms, and every man gave his military service as a free contribution to the general welfare of the public. ”

“ As for the common people, they were indolent and dissolute, spent their time in wine-shops and brothels, were addicted to gambling, and in their lower sphere imitated the pride of their masters by pretending to high-sounding names and descent from illustrious families, even though without shoes to their feet. Their devotion to the games of the Circus was as intense as that of the Constantinopolitans, but the factions of the Blues and Greens were not of such political weight or such breeders of riot as their fellows of the Byzantine capital. ”

“ Amongst some follies, the Stoic philosophers, in their pantheistic conception of nature, reached the highest level which has yet been attained in the expression of theocratic dogma. With them, the universe is the very body of the divine essence, and the good and wise man is in no way inferior to the sublimest manifestation of it. He is rightly called a god upon earth, and his intellect is an efflux of the Deity. “Back to the Porch for your ideas of God and nature,” the modern philosopher may cry to his age. “You are gods yourselves, and nature is your realm to conquer and hold in subjection.” ”

“ He moved about on horseback amid a concourse of his personal guards, all mounted like himself, whom he maintained to the number of seven thousand. Vandals, Moors, and Goths swelled their ranks, and indicated by their distinctive visages with what a variety of nations he had fought. Belisarius was tall and handsome, with a countenance of singular dignity, equalled only by the modesty and affability of his address. In war he was determined and resourceful, but never oblivious of humanity, and always mindful of the interests of those dependent on him. ”

“ With the experience of a thousand years, the wisdom of Roman statesmen and jurists failed to evolve a political system which could insure stability to the throne or prosperity to the nation. Seditious in the cities, abject in the country, ill-disciplined in the camp, unfaithful in office, the subjects of the Empire never rose in the social scale, but languished through many centuries to extinction, the common grave of Grecian culture and Roman prowess. ”

“ Though he may be permitted to live in safety as an exile, the master of an empire should not survive the loss of his dignity. As for myself, may I never live to see the day when this purple mantle shall fall from me, and people no longer salute me as Empress. I hold no sentiment so dear as that old saying, 'Royalty is a fine thing to be buried in.'" [290] {467}
By this bold speech Theodora infused her own intrepid spirit into the Imperial party. ”

“ Whatever ethical purity may have adorned the lives of the first converts, Christianity as an established religion was not less of a grovelling superstition than Paganism in its worst forms. The worship of martyrs, of saints, the factitious miracles wrought at their graves, the veneration of their relics and images, were but a travesty of polytheism under another name without the saving graces of the old belief. ”

“ You see before you an immense host, but the infantry are contemptible, wretched rustics, and mere camp-followers, fit only to dig beneath the walls or to strip the slain. They carry no arms to assault you with, and merely cover themselves with great shields to avoid our darts. Bear yourselves bravely, and the Persians will never again dare to invade our country." On the other side, Perozes bade his troops to take no heed of the skilful tactics now first observable among the Romans. "You think," said he, "that your adversaries have become more warlike because of this imposing formation. ”

“ When Grecian science and philosophy seemed to stand on the threshold of modern enlightenment the pall of despotism and superstition descended on the earth and stifled every impulse of progress for more than fifteen centuries. The Yggdrasil of Christian superstition spread its roots throughout the Roman Empire, strangling alike the nascent ethics of Christendom, and the germinating science of the ancient world. ”

“ MILITARY OPERATIONS IN LAZICA WHILE Justinian was thus conquering in the West and substituting his own rule for that of barbarian potentates, the tide of war was rising in the East, and almost similar disasters to those he was inflicting were impending on the integral territory of the Empire.
The triumphal progress of the Imperial arms in Africa and Italy was watched with the keenest solicitude by Chosroes, and he began to fear that the power and resources of his hereditary rival were being so formidably increased that he would soon be able to make an irresistible attack on his own dominions. ”

“ CONSTANTINOPLE IN THE SIXTH CENTURY [3] The Byzantine peninsula has been regarded from a very early date as an ideal situation for a capital city. Placed at the junction of two great seas which wash the shores of three continents, and possessed of a safe and extensive anchorage for shipping, it might become the centre of empire and commerce for the whole Eastern hemisphere. Yet, owing to an adverse fate, the full realization of this splendid conception remains a problem of the future. Byzantium as an independent city was little more than an outpost of civilization ”

“ The arts of Greece, after having flourished in perfection from the time of Pericles to that of Alexander in the various departments of architecture, sculpture, painting, and literature, remained dormant for some centuries until the establishment of universal peace under the dominion of Rome provided a new theatre for their exercise. Fostered in the Augustan age by the indolence and luxury of the Imperial city, which offered the prospect of fortune to every artist of ambition and talent, they were communicated to the Latins, who strove earnestly to imitate and equal their masters. ”

“ THE ARCHITECTURAL WORK OF JUSTINIAN WHILST it is evident that the distinctive character of Justinian impelled him to be incessantly active in every branch of the monarchical profession, the devastation wrought at Constantinople by the Nika rebellion might have awakened a passion for building in the breast of the most phlegmatic Emperor. [459] A mass of sightless ruins had taken the place of those architectural adornments which are the essential feature of a capital and the foundations of the dignity of a throne. ”

“ Civilization has now included almost the whole globe in its comprehensive embrace; both the old world and the new have been overrun by the intellectual heirs of the Greeks; in every land the extinction of retrograde races proceeds with measured certainty, and we appear to be safer from a returning flood of barbarism than from some astronomical catastrophe. The mediaeval order of things is reversed, the xii ravages of Attila reappear under a new aspect, and the descendants of the Han and the Hun alike are raised by the hand, or crushed under the foot of aggressive civilization. ”

“ In the autumn of 554 the exiled Pope Vigilius quitted the Imperial capital to annunciate the Pragmatic Sanction from the throne of St. Peter as the Emperor's message of amity to the Italian people. Yet the concessions made to the inhabitants by this Constitution were, perhaps, not worthy of the name; and many who benefited, through the adoption of a definite Imperial policy, did so at the expense of others. Not altogether inequitably, however, as the main object of the Emperor was to restore the status quo before the accession to power of Totila. ”

“ The early Greek philosophers awoke into life to find themselves endowed with vast intelligence in a world of which they knew nothing. No record of the past, no forecast of the future disturbed the serenity of their intellectual horizon. In a more aesthetic environment they renewed the impulse to interpret nature with a finer sense of congruity than was possessed by their rude ancestors, but their methods were identical, and they believed they could advance beyond the bounds of experience by the exercise of a vivid imagination. ”

“ During the whole of this period the barbarians to the north of the Danube and Euxine were kept in a state of active commotion by various influences; and, if at any moment the countless wild hordes, who peopled that immense region, could have been moved by a unanimous impulse to hurl their combined force against the Empire, it seems impossible but that the Byzantine administration must have succumbed at once and finally to the irresistible shock. ”

“ In the turn of the ages we are confronted by new Pagans who adhere to an obsolete religion; and the philosopher can only hope for an era when every one will have sufficient sense and science to think according to the laws of nature and civilization.
The history of the disintegrating and moribund Byzantine Empire has been explored by modern scholars with untiring assiduity; and the exposition of that debased political system will always reflect more credit on their brilliant researches than on the chequered annals of mankind. ”

“ I do not design to produce under this heading a lengthy disquisition on paedagogics among the Byzantines, but merely to indicate, by some broad lines, upon what stock of common knowledge the foundations of civilization rested in this age. The student of early Roman history will scarcely need to be reminded that the virtues of the Republic were not derived from the schools of art or philosophy; or that the aesthetic tastes of those blunt citizens only developed in proportion as they found themselves lords over the culture as well as over the country of the Greeks. ”

“ An imaginative system of cosmogony, baseless as the fabric of a dream, is the creation of a moment; to dissipate it the work of ages in study and investigation. Less than a century ago philosophic scepticism could only vent itself in a sneer at the credibility of a tradition, or the fidelity of a manuscript; and the folklore of peasants, encrusted with the hoar of antiquity, was accepted by erudite mystics as the solution of cosmogony and the proof of our communion with the supernatural. ”

“ To the ancient world that first step in science must have appeared also to be the last; and ages rolled away during which man learned no more than to employ effectively the materials thus acquired. If the expectation that diligent research may be rewarded by some signal increase of knowledge be excluded from the sphere of human activity, individual aspirations must be restricted to whatever is social and national; and those desirous of distinction have no choice but to devote themselves to art or politics. Within these channels were confined the energies of the people of antiquity ”

“ The dissolution of powerful political organizations was no new feature in the ancient world; in Egypt, in Asia, dynasties with their dominions had periodically collapsed, but in Europe the Roman supremacy was the first to consolidate the principal countries into a compact and homogeneous state. Civil wars, however, had been waged on several occasions; princes unfit to reign had been the cause of serious administrative perturbation. Did these vicissitudes, we may inquire, herald the break-up of the Empire, unassailable as it was by any civilized adversary? ”

“ Concomitantly with such proceedings we find that the greatest of English encyclopaedias is published with introductory articles in which it is allowed that the old religion is now a mere phantasm on the stage of reality. At the present moment every form of religious belief rests secure and stable on the broad back of popular ignorance; and it remains for posterity in ages to come to solve the problem as to how long humanity will have to wait for the evolution of that elevation of mind which will decline to pay the tribute of hypocrisy and reticence for the assurance of a stipend. ”

“ In the pride of original supremacy we may perceive that citizens of Latin lineage despise the feeble Greeks who forfeited nationality and independence, whilst the latter, pluming themselves on their inheritance of the harmonious tongue in which are enshrined all the masterpieces of poetry and philosophy, contemn the uninspired genius of the Romans, whose efforts to create a literature never soared above imitation and plagiarism. ”

“ Whilst the records of ages assiduously collated from every quarter of the globe exhibit the irrepressible folly of undisciplined human thought and the immeasurable credulity of ignorance, the boundless expansion of our intellectual horizon compels us to reject as irrational, the belief in an almighty and intelligent Father, who regards with equanimity the disruption of worlds, but is capable of being delighted by a choir of fulsome praise emanating from their ephemeral inhabitants. ”