The pagan religion was finally destroyed about the year 390, and the faintest vestiges of it were not visible thirty years later.  Its influence, however, might be observed in many of the ceremonies which were introduced into the Church, and the worship of martyrs and relics seemed to revive a system of polytheism by the worship of a hierarchy of saints.  Among the most famous of the dignitaries of the Church at this period was the Archbishop of Constantinople, who was distinguished by the epithet of Chrysostom, or the Golden Mouth.  He attempted to purify the eastern empire, excited the animosity of the Empress Eudoxia, and died in exile in 407.

The monastic system had been founded by Antony, an illiterate youth, in the year 305, by the establishment on Mount Cobyim, near the Red Sea, of a colony of ascetics, who renounced all the business and pleasures in life as the price of eternal happiness.  A long series of hermits, monks, and anachorets propagated the system and, patronised by Athanasius, it spread to all parts of the world.

The monastic profession was an act of voluntary devotion, and the inconstant fanatic was threatened with the eternal vengeance of the God whom he deserted.  The monks had to give a blind submission to the commands of their abbot, however absurd, and the freedom of the mind, the source of every generous and rational sentiment, was destroyed by the habits of credulity and submission.  In their dress and diet they preserved the most rigorous simplicity, and they subsisted entirely by their own manual exertions.  But in the course of time this simplicity vanished, and, enriched by the offerings of the faithful, they assumed the pride of wealth, and at last indulged in the luxury of extravagance.

The conversion of the barbarians followed upon their invasion of the Roman world; but they were involved in the Arian heresy, and from their advocacy of that cause they were characterised by the name of heretics, an epithet more odious than that of barbarian.  The bitterness engendered by this reproach confirmed them in their faith, and the Vandals in Africa persecuted the orthodox Catholic with all the vigour and cruel arts of religious tyranny.

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Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—­IV

I.—­Theodoric the Ostrogoth

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, an interval of fifty years, until the memorable reign of Justinian, is faintly marked by the obscure names and imperfect annals of Zeno, Anastasius, and Justin, who successively ascended the throne of Constantinople.  During the same period Italy revived and nourished under the government of a Gothic king, who might have deserved a statue among the best and bravest of the ancient Romans.