The Historians' History of the World 06

As a matter of fact the spread of Christianity in Asia had by that time attained considerable proportions, as is evident from the report sent by Pliny to Trajan and from other records; and as early as the reign of Domitian it had made its way in Rome even to the steps of the throne. But there was certainly no man then living who would have thought it possible that this despised religion of the poor was destined to conquer the world-wide empire, and this disdain is the only explanation we can find for the fact that the first general persecution of the Christians—for the local outbreaks of persecution under Marcus Aurelius, Severus, and Maximinus, confined as they were to a narrow circle, cannot be so called—did not take place until about the middle of the third century. Tertullian may have described too grandiloquently the enormous advance of Christianity throughout the empire; it is nevertheless beyond controversy that by the beginning of the third century it had become a power which serious-minded rulers, solicitous for the maintenance of a national empire, might well imagine that their duty to their country required them to extirpate with fire and sword. In this spirit Decius waged war against Christianity, and so did Diocletian, who assumed the surname of Jovius, after the supreme divinity of Rome, as patron of the national paganism. But it was a hopeless struggle; only ten years later Constantine made his peace with the Christian church by the Milan edict of toleration, and shortly before his death he received baptism.

With Constantine the history of ancient Rome comes to an end; the transference of the capital to Byzantium was the outward visible sign that the Roman Empire was no more. The process of dissolution had long been at work; symptoms thereof come to light as early as the first century, and are frightfully apparent under the weak emperor Marcus, whose melancholy Contemplations breathe the utter hopelessness of a world scourged by war and pestilence. The real dissolution of the Roman world, however, did not take place until the middle of the third century. The empire, assailed by barbarians and rent asunder by internal feuds, became the sport of ambitious generals who in Gaul, Mœsia, and Pannonia, placed themselves at the head of their barbarian troops; the time of the so-called Thirty Tyrants witnesses the speedy disintegration of the recently united West.

INEVITABLE DECAY

Nor could the strong emperors from the Danubian provinces check the process of decay. Poverty fell upon the cities of Italy and the provinces, whose material prosperity and patriotic devotion had been the most pleasing pictures offered by the good days of the Roman Empire; seats in the town council and municipal offices, once passionately striven after as the goal of civic ambition, as the election placards at Pompeii testify, now found no candidates because upon their occupants rested the responsibility of raising taxes it was impossible to pay; the way was paved for the compulsory hereditary tenure of posts and trades indispensable to the government. Agriculture was ruined, and documents dating from the third century and the end of the second, which have been recently brought to light in parts of the empire remote from one another, describe with affecting laments the want and hardships endured by colonists and small landholders in the vast imperial demesnes. The currency was debased, silver coins had depreciated to mere tokens, salaries had to be paid for the most part in kind, public credit was destroyed.

The desolation of the land, no longer tilled in consequence of the uncertainty of possession amidst disorders within and without; a steady decrease of the population of Italy and the provinces from the end of the second century onwards; famine, and a prodigious rise in the cost of all the necessaries of life, which it was a hopeless undertaking to check by any imperial regulation of prices, are the sign-manual of the time. The army, from which Italians had long since disappeared, liberally interspersed with barbarian elements and no longer held together by any interest in the empire and in an emperor who was never the same for long together, was no longer capable of coping with the Goths and Alamanni who ravaged the Roman provinces in all directions; the right bank of the Rhine and the Limes Germanicus and Limes Ræticus, laboriously erected and fortified with ramparts and castellae, fell a prey to the Germans in the middle of the third century. A Roman emperor meets a shameful death in captivity among the Parthians; Dacia, Trajan’s hard-won conquest, has to be abandoned and its inhabitants, who were spared by the enemy, transplanted to the southern bank of the Danube.