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Nor was the Emperor successful in stamping out the private
thaumaturgist. Human nature was too strong for him. Sileat perpetuo
divinandi curiositas, ordered one of his successors in 358. But the
curiosity to divine the future continued to defy both civil and
ecclesiastical law.
A much bolder act, however, than the closing of a few temples on
the score of public decency or the forbidding of private divination
was the edict of 325, in which Constantine ordered the abolition of
the gladiatorial shows. “Such blood-stained spectacles,” he said, “in
the midst of civil peace and domestic quiet are repugnant to our
taste.” He ordained, therefore, that in future all criminals who were
usually condemned to be gladiators should be sent to work in the
mines, that they might expiate their offences without shedding of
blood. But it was one thing to issue an edict and another to enforce
it. Whether Constantine insisted on the observance of this particular
edict, we cannot say, but his successors certainly did not, for the
gladiatorial spectacles at Rome were in full swing in the days of
Symmachus, who ransacked the world for good swordsmen and
strange animals. The “cruenta spectacula” as Constantine called
them, were not finally abolished until the reign of Honorius.
To sum up. The only reasonable view to take of the religious
character of Constantine is that he was a sincere and convinced
Christian. This is borne out alike by his passionate professions of
faith and by the clear testimony of his actions. There are, it is true,
many historians who hold that he was really indifferent to religion,
and others who credit him with an easy capacity for finding truth in all
religions alike. Professor Bury, for example, says that “the evidence
seems to shew that his religion was a syncretistic monotheism; that
he was content to see the deity in the Sun, in Mithras, or in the God
of the Hebrews.” Such a description would suit the character of
Constantius Chlorus perfectly, and it may very well have suited
Constantine himself before the overthrow of Maxentius. There is a
passage in the Ninth Panegyric which seems to have been uttered
by one holding these views, and it is worth quotation, for it is an
invocation to the supreme deity to bless the Emperor Constantine. It
runs as follows:
Wherefore we pray and beseech thee to keep our Prince safe for
all eternity, thee, the supreme creator of all things, whose names are
as manifold as it has been thy will that nations should have tongues.
We cannot tell by what title it is thy pleasure that we should address
thee, whether thou art a divine force and mind permeating the whole
world and mingled with all the elements, and moving of thine own
motive power without impulse from without, or whether thou art some
Power above all Heaven who lookest down upon this thy handiwork
from some loftier arch of Nature.
AUREUS OF CARAUSIUS.
AUREUS OF ALLECTUS.
SOLIDUS OF HELENA.
SOLIDUS OF GALERIUS.
SOLIDUS OF LICINIUS I.
The land tax, of course, was not the only one, for the theory of
Imperial finance was that everybody and everything should pay.
Constantine did not spare his new aristocracy. Every member of the
senatorial order paid a property tax known as “the senatorial purse”
(follis senatoria), and another imposition bearing the name of aurum
oblaticium, which was none the more palatable because it was
supposed to be a voluntary offering. Any senator, moreover, might
be summoned to the capital to serve as prætor and provide a costly
entertainment—a convenient weapon in the hands of autocracy to
clip the wings of an obnoxious ex-official. Another ostensibly
voluntary contribution to the Emperor was the aurum coronarium, or
its equivalent of a thousand or two thousand pieces of gold, which
each city of importance was obliged to offer to the sovereign on
festival occasions, such as the celebration of five or ten complete
years of rule. Every five years, also, there was a lustralis collatio to
be paid by all shopkeepers and usurers, according to their means.
This was usually spoken of as “the gold-silver” (chrysargyrum), and,
like “the senatorial purse,” is said by some authorities to have been
the invention of Constantine himself. Zosimus, in a very bitter attack
on the fiscal measures of the Emperor, declares that even the
courtesans and the beggars were not exempt from the extortion of
the treasury officials, and that whenever the tribute had to be paid,
nothing was heard but groaning and lamentation. The scourge was
brought into play for the persuasion of reluctant taxpayers; women
were driven to sell their sons, and fathers their daughters. Then
there were the capitatio humana, a sort of poll-tax on all labourers;
the old five per cent. succession duty; an elaborate system of octroi
(portoria), and many other indirect taxes. We need not, perhaps,
believe the very worst pictures of human misery drawn by the
historians, for, in fairness to the Emperors, we must take some note
of the roseate accounts of the official rhetoricians. Nazarius, for
example, explicitly declares that Constantine had given the Empire
“peace abroad, prosperity at home, abundant harvests, and cheap
food.”[148] Eusebius again and again conjures up a vision of
prosperous and contented peoples, living not in fear of the tax-
collector, but in the enjoyment of their sovereign’s bounty. But we
fear that the sombre view is nearer the truth than the radiant one,
and that the subsequent financial ruin, which overtook the western
even more than the eastern provinces, was largely due to the
oppressive and wasteful fiscal system introduced and developed by
Diocletian and Constantine, and to the old standing defect of Roman
administration, that the civil governor was also the judge, and thus
administrative and judicial functions were combined in the same
hands.
Here, indeed, lay one of the strongest elements of disintegration in
the reorganised Empire, but there were other powerful solvents at
work, at which we may briefly glance. One was slavery, the evil
results of which had been steadily accumulating for centuries, and if
these were mitigated to some extent by the increasing scarcity of
slaves, the degradation of the poor freeman to the position of a
colonus more than counterbalanced the resultant good. Population,
so far from increasing, was going back, and, in order to fill the gaps,
the authorities had recourse to the dangerous expedient of inviting in
the barbarian. The land was starving for want of capital and labour,
and the barbarian colonus was introduced, as we have seen in an
earlier chapter, not, if the authorities are to be trusted, by tens, but by
hundreds of thousands, “to lighten the tribute by the fruits of his toil
and to relieve the Roman citizens of military service.” This was the
principal and certainly the original reason why recourse was had to
the barbarian; the idea that the German or the Goth was less
dangerous inside than outside the frontier, and would help to bear
the brunt of the pressure from his kinsmen, came later. The result,
however, of importing a strong Germanic and Gothic element into the
Empire was one of active disintegration. Though they occupied but a
humble position industrially, as tillers of the soil, they formed the best
troops in the Imperial armies. The boast which Tacitus put into the
mouth of a Gallic soldier in the first century, that the alien trooper
was the backbone of the Roman army,[149] was now an undoubted
truth, and the spirit which these strangers brought with them was that
of freedom, quite antagonistic to the absolutism of the Empire.
There was yet another great solvent at work,—in its cumulative
effects the greatest of them all,—the solvent of Christianity,
dissociating, as it did, spiritual from temporal authority, and
introducing the absolutely novel idea of a divine law that in every
particular took precedence of mundane law. The growth of the power
of the Church, as a body entirely distinct from the State and claiming
a superior moral sanction, was a new force introduced into the
Roman Empire, which, beyond question, weakened its powers of
resistance to outside enemies, inasmuch as it caused internal
dissensions and divisions. The furious hatreds between Christianity
and paganism which lasted in the West down to the fall of Rome,
and the equally furious hatreds within the Church which continued
both in East and West for long centuries, can only be considered a
source of serious weakness. No one disputes that the desperate and
murderous struggle between Catholic and Huguenot retarded the
development of France and weakened her in the face of the enemy,
and it stands to reason that a nation which is torn by intestinal
quarrel cannot present an effective front to foreign aggression. It
wastes against members of its own household part of the energy
which should be infused into the blows which it delivers at its foe.
Christianity has always tended to break down distinctions and
prejudices of race. It has never done so wholly and never will, but
the tendency is forever at work, and, as such, in the days of the
Empire, it was opposed both to the Roman and to the Greek spirit.
For though there had already sprung up a feeling of cosmopolitanism
within the Empire, it cannot be said to have extended to those
without the Empire, who were still barbarians in the eyes not only of
Greek or Roman, but of the Romanised Celt and Iberian, whose
civilisation was no longer a thin veneer. When we say that
Christianity was a disintegrating element in this respect, the term is
by no means wholly one of reproach. For it also implies that
Christianity assisted the partial fusion which took place when at
length the frontier barriers gave way and the West was rushed by the
Germanic races. These races were themselves Christianised to a
certain extent. They, too, worshipped the Cross and the Christ, and
this circumstance alone must, to a very considerable degree, have
mitigated for the Roman provinces the terrors and disasters of
invasion. It is true that the invaders were for the most part Arians,—
though it is a manifest absurdity to suppose that the free Germans
from beyond the Rhine understood even the elements of a
controversy so metaphysical and so purely Greek,—and, when Arian
and Catholic fought, they tipped their barbs with poison. “I never yet,”
said Ammianus Marcellinus, “found wild beasts so savagely hostile
to men, as most of the Christians are to one another.”[150] But the fact
remains that the German and Gothic conquerors, who settled where
they had conquered, accepted the civilisation of the vanquished
even though they modified it to their own needs; they did not wipe it
out and substitute their own, as did the Turk and the Moor when they
appeared, later on, at the head of their devastating hordes. If,
therefore, Christianity tended to weaken, it also tended to assimilate,
and we are not sure that the latter process was not fully as important
as the former. The Roman Empire, as a universal power, had long
been doomed; Christianity, in this respect, simply accelerated its
pace down the slippery slope.
But other and more specific charges have been brought against
Christianity. One is that it contributed largely to the depopulation of
the Empire, which, from the point of view of the State, was an evil of
the very greatest magnitude. The indictment cannot be refuted
wholly. In the name of Christianity extravagant and pernicious
doctrines were preached of which it would be difficult to speak with
patience, did we not remember that violent disorders need violent
remedies. No one can doubt the unutterable depravity and
viciousness which were rampant and unashamed in the Roman
Empire, especially in the East. If there was a public conscience at all,
it was silent. Decent, clean-living people held fastidiously aloof and
tolerated the existence of evils which they did nothing to combat. A
strong protest was needed; it was supplied by Christianity. But many
of those who took upon themselves to denounce the sins of the age
felt compelled to school themselves to a rigid asceticism which made
few allowances not only for the weaknesses but even for the natural
instincts of human nature. The more fanatical among them
grudgingly admitted that marriage was honourable, but rose to
enthusiastic frenzy in the contemplation of virginity, which, if they
dared not command, they could and did commend with all the
eloquence of which they were capable. One cannot think without pity
of all the self-torture and agonising which this new asceticism—new,
at least, in this aggravated form—brought upon hundreds and
thousands of men and women, whose services the State needed
and would have done well to possess, but who cut themselves off
from mundane affairs, and withdrew into solitudes, not to learn there
how to help their fellowmen but consumed only with a selfish anxiety
to escape from the wrath to come. They thought of nothing but the
salvation of their own souls. It is impossible to see how these wild
hermits, who peopled the Libyan deserts, were acceptable in the
sight either of themselves, their fellows, or their God. Simon Stylites,
starving sleepless on his pillar in the posture of prayer for weeks,
remains for all time as a monument of grotesque futility. If charity
regards him with pity, it can only regard with contempt those who
imputed his insane endurance unto him for righteousness. No one
can estimate the amount of unnecessary misery and sufferings
caused by these extreme fanatics, who broke up homes without
remorse, played on the fears and harrowed the minds of
impressionable men and women, and debased the human soul in
their frantic endeavour to fit it for the presence of its Maker. They
stand in the same category as the gaunt skeletons who drag
themselves on their knees from end to end of India in the hope of
placating a mild but irresponsive god. Man’s first duty may be
towards God; but not to the exclusion of his duty towards the State.
It is not to be supposed, of course, that the majority of Christians
were led to renounce the world and family life. The weaker brethren
are always in a majority, and we do not doubt that most of the
Christian priests were of like mind with their flock in taking a less
heroic but far more common-sense view. It is also to be noted that
the practical Roman temper speedily modified the extravagances of
the eastern fanatics, and the asceticism of monks and nuns living in
religious communities in the midst of their fellow-citizens, and
working to heal their bodies as well as to save their souls, stands on
a very different plane from the entirely self-centred eremitism
associated with Egypt. By doing the work of good Samaritans the
members of these communities acted the part of good citizens.
Succeeding Emperors, whose Christianity was unimpeachable,
looked with cold suspicion on the recluses of the deserts. Valens, for
example, regarding their retirement as an evasion of their civic
duties, published an edict ordering that they should be brought back;
Theodosius with cynical wisdom said that as they had deliberately
chosen to dwell in the desert, he would take care that they stopped
there. But it is easy to exaggerate the influence wielded by extreme
men, whose doctrines and professions only emerge from obscurity
because of their extravagances. We must not, therefore, lay too
much stress on the constant exhortations to celibacy and virginity
which we find even in the writings of such men as Jerome and
Ambrose. However zealously they plied the pitchfork, human nature
just as persistently came back, and the extraordinary outspokenness
of Jerome, for example, in his letters to girls who had pledged
themselves to virginity—an outspokenness based on the confident
assumption that human, and more especially womanly, nature is
weak and liable to err—shews that he was profoundly diffident of the
success of his preaching. Nevertheless, when the counsel of
perfection offered by the Church was the avoidance of marriage, it is
a just charge against Christianity that it was in this respect anti-civic
and anti-social.
DOUBLE SOLIDUS OF CONSTANTINE THE GREAT.