languages and the old national feelings lingered on only in remote and obscure corners, such as Wales, parts of Spain and Africa, and some tribes in the interior of Asia Minor. But these races could contribute nothing to the intellectual, religious, or political life of the Empire; they did not affect the general truth of its thoroughly Greek and Roman character. But in the Oriental provinces, Syria and Egypt, the case was widely different. They had been for centuries portions of the Roman Empire. For centuries before the Roman conquest they had been ruled by Macedonian Kings. They contained many Greek cities, two of which, Alexandria and Antioch, were for a long time the greatest cities of the Grecian world, the most famous centres of Hellenic literature and cultivation. But Syria and Egypt each boasted of a language, a literature, a civilization, a general national being, earlier than that of Greece and Rome. And these elements of national life were only overshadowed, not extinguished, by Macedonian and Roman domination. Syria and Egypt were not hellenized; Antioch and Alexandria remained Greek colonies in a foreign land. And indeed, when the seat of government was transferred to a Greek city, Byzantium became the great centre of Greek intellectual life, so that Antioch and Alexandria lost something of their Greek character and became more identified with the national life of the provinces. That national life, as was natural in those ages, took an ecclesiastical turn. The Syrians and Egyptians showed their independence by the establishment, not of rival dynasties, but of rival forms of belief. They adopted Christianity, and became among its most zealous professors; but they addopted it in forms moulded by the national character, and

LEGAL CHARACTER OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 17

alien from the standard of Roman and Byzantine orthodoxy. The truth or falsehood of these views on the most mysterious points of our religion does not concern our present subject. The doctors alike of Greek, Roman, and Protestant theology agree in condemning them; but it is certain that the Nestorian and Jacobite heresies were the national faith of the national churches of Syria and Egypt. Anathematized by Catholic Councils, persecuted by Catholic Emperors, the inhabitants of those provinces became as lax in their civil as in their spiritual allegiance. Heresy became the badge of nationality; the orthodox party were Melchites, literally Royalists, men of the Emperor, assertors of a foreign and usurped jurisdiction. When the seventh century commenced, they were very precarious and unprofitable appendages to the Roman Empire, ready to fall away at the first touch of an invader.

The heterogeneous assemblage of nations within the Roman Empire, their religious dissensions, and the doubtful tenure of the distant provinces, formed a marked contrast to the strong religious and national unity of Persia. But Rome had one great countervailing advantage. Persia was an ordinary Oriental despotism; its government consisted in the arbitrary sway of one man, with no check on his personal will except the obligations imposed on his conscience by religion. The national life moreover seemed bound up in the sway of one family, those glorious descendants of Sassan who had restored to Persia her national independence and her national faith. But the Roman Empire, hardly less despotic in practice than the Persian, was still emphatically the Empire of Law. The Imperial power, which had gradually

C

grown up from Augustus to Diocletian, still retained something of the old constitutional forms. The whole legislative and executive power were indeed practically vested in the sovereign; but that sovereign was in theory not an hereditary monarch but an elective magistrate. Election indeed sometimes took the form of revolution, sometimes that of quiet hereditary succession; but in theory the sovereign Roman People were conceived to transfer by a formal act to the ruler of their choice those attributes of sovereignty which were held to be inherent in themselves1. There was still a Roman Senate, a Roman People; some of the old republican titles lingered on; Belisarius invaded Italy in the character of a Roman Consul, and that nominal office, abolished by Justinian, was restored by his successor Justin, to the delight of a people who still venerated the name. The Roman Emperor then, himself the creature of law, was bound to rule according to law. Justinian himself, the great restorer of the Empire, is still more famous as the compiler of that great system of Roman Law, which has formed the groundwork of the jurisprudence of nearly every European nation. The subject of his Empire, though enjoying no more real political rights than his foe beyond the Euphrates, not only contrasted his heathen blindness with his own orthodox Christianity, but, as a Roman citizen, living, as he deemed, under a system of law and liberty, he looked down with contempt on the Persian bondslave,

1 "Quod Principi placuit, legis habet vigorem; utpote quum Lege Regiâ, quæ de ejus imperio lata est, Populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem conferat."-Digest., lib. i. tit. iv.

The popular origin of the Imperial power was therefore clearly the theory as late as the reign of Justinian; but of course ideas of this kind gradually died out in the later Empire.

WARS BETWEEN ROME AND PERSIA.

19

who knew no law but the caprice of an arbitrary will.

I have already said that the Romans and Persians were almost always engaged in warfare. Their last and most terrible war was contemporary with the preaching of Mahomet. Its immediate cause is to be found in the internal revolutions of the two countries. Khosru or Chosroes, surnamed Parviz, the Persian King, being expelled from his kingdom, took refuge in the Roman territories, and by the assistance of the Emperor Maurice, regained his throne. In 602 Maurice was murdered in a revolution at Constantinople, and the brutal and bloodthirsty tyrant Phokas was placed on the throne. Khosru, under pretence of avenging the wrongs of his benefactor, invaded the Roman provinces, and commenced a war which lasted more than twenty years. The wretched Phokas did nothing to hinder the complete conquest of the Asiatic provinces, and the Persian Empire was again, as it had been in the days of Darius, extended to the Mediterranean and the Egæan. But in 610, almost simultaneously with the commencement of Mahomet's mission, the great Heraclius, son of the exarch or governor of Africa, with the general good will of all the provinces, sailed to Constantinople, deposed and slew Phokas, and assumed the Empire. For some time he was obliged to submit to the sight of a Persian army encamped at Chalkedon, but after some years' preparation, he entered on a series of campaigns which place his name alongside of those of Hannibal and Belisarius. Leaving the Persians in possession of his own dominions, he struck at the heart of the enemy's country; by a series of victories, one of them gained on the site of Nineveh, he utterly overthrew

the Persian power, till Khosru was slain by his own subjects, and his successor Siroueh concluded peace. From that time Persia was the scene of a series of intestine commotions till it fell an easy prey to the Saracens. In 629 Heraclius returned in triumph to Jerusalem, and almost at the same moment the Roman territories were first attacked by the followers of Mahomet. The Prophet had no doubt been diligently watching the course of the war, which is once at least directly alluded to in the Koran1. He could not but see the immense advantage which he gained by finding the two greatest powers of the world utterly exhausted by this tremendous struggle. In such circumstances it seemed hardly possible that either could resist a new enemy, full of such vigour and enthusiasm as the early Saracens. Yet we shall see that of the provinces of Rome it was only the disaffected eastern portions, just recovered from the Persians, which the Mahometan invaders could subdue. Those provinces where Roman dominion and Greek theology had thoroughly taken root, resisted for centuries; they only fell when the Saracens themselves had fallen also, and when a new race of Moslem conquerors had taken up their place and mission.

The Arabian peninsula, the native land of Mahomet, lies on the confines of the two great rival states, and was therefore naturally brought into relations with both. Some of the tribes on the confines had become the dependent allies of Rome and Persia respectively,

1 Koran, cap. xxx. "The Romans." Sale (ii. 258) translates Al Roum, "the Greeks," which of course obscures the fact that Roman was the only name known to the Orientals. Maracci (ii. 536) has, properly, Romani.

In this chapter, composed during the triumphs of the Persians, Mahomet predicts the future successes of the Romans.