the influence of Athanasius of Alexandria, Palladius once more presented the ideals of monastic life, introducing into his history an element of legend. The ruthless enemy of Nestorius, Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, also lived during this period. During his stormy and strenuous life he wrote a large number of letters and sermons, which, now and then, the Greek bishops of a later period sometimes learnt by heart. He also left a number of dogmatic, polemical, and exegetic treatises which serve as one of the main sources on the ecclesiastical history of the fifth century. According to his own confession, his rhetorical education was insufficient and he could not pride himself upon the Attic purity of his style.

Another extremely interesting figure of this epoch is the woman-philosopher, Hypatia, who was killed by the fanatical mob of Alexandria some time in the early part of the fifth century. She was a woman of exceptional beauty and unusual intellectual attainments. Through her father, a famous Alexandrian mathematician, she became acquainted with the mathematical sciences and classical philosophy. By her remarkable activities as a teacher she gained wide fame. Among her pupils were such great literary men as Synesius of Cyrene, who mentions the name of Hypatia in many of his letters. One source tells how, "clothed in a mantle, she used to wander about the city and expound to willing listeners the works of Plato, Aristotle, or some other philosopher.""140

Greek literature flourished in Egypt until the year 451, when the council of Chalcedon condemned the Monophysitic doctrine; and since this doctrine was the official Egyptian religion, the action of the council was followed by the abolition of Greek from the church and the substitution of the Coptic language in its stead. The Coptic literature which developed after this is of some importance even to Greek literature, because certain original Greek works have been lost and preserved for us only through their Coptic translations.

The period which we are discussing here saw the development of the literature of religious hymns. The hymn writers were gradually getting away from their original practice of imitating classical

140 Suidae Lexicon, s. v. Trarla. The very well-known novel of Charles Kingsley, Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face, 2 vols., may be read with great interest and profit.

meters and developed their own peculiar meters, which had nothing in common with the older forms and were considered as prose for a long time. It is only in comparatively recent times that these meters have been partly explained. The hymns of this period contain various types of acrostics and rhyme. Unfortunately, the religious hymns of the fourth and fifth centuries are known very little; the history of their gradual development in this early period is therefore obscure for us. And yet this development, it is quite apparent, had been vigorous. While Gregory the Theologian, in most of his poetical hymns, followed the antique meters, the works of Romanus the Melode (Hymn-writer), which, as has been proved, appeared in the early sixth century during the reign of Anastasius I, were all written in new meters and made use of acrostics and rhymes.

There has been a long series of disputes among scholars as to whether Romanus lived in the sixth, or in the early eighth, century. These disputes were based on the allusion in his brief Life to his arrival at Constantinople during the reign of the Emperor Anastasius. For a long time it was impossible to determine whether it meant Anastasius I (491-518) or Anastasius II (713-16). At the present time, after a long study of the works of Romanus, the scholarly world has definitely agreed that it was the period of Anastasius I.

Romanus the Melode is the greatest poet of the Byzantine period. This "Pindar of rhythmical poetry"111 is the author of a large number of superb hymns, among which we find the famous Christmas hymn, "Today the Virgin Brings Forth the Supersubstantial."142 The poet was born in Syria, and it is very likely that the period of his literary bloom fell during the reign of Justinian, for according to his Life he came during the rule of Anastasius as a young deacon from Syria to Constantinople, where he miraculously acquired from heaven the gift of writing hymns. The marvelous work of Romanus in the sixth century forces the supposition that religious poetry in the fifth century must have been very highly developed; but unfortunately we have very inadequate data on this point. It is difficult to conceive the existence of this unusual poet in

141 Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur, p. 663.

142 See the special article on this hymn, G. Camelli, "L'inno per la natività di Romano il Melode," Studi Bizantini (Roma, 1925), pp. 45-58.

the sixth century without some previous development of church poetry.

While the Christian literature of this period is represented by so many remarkable authors, pagan literature does not lag far behind. There, too, we find a number of interesting and gifted men.

One of these men is Themistius of Paphlagonia, the philosophically educated director of the school of Constantinople and at the same time the court orator and senator highly esteemed by the pagans as well as by the Christians of that period. He wrote a large collection of "Paraphrases of Aristotle," in which he aimed to clarify the more complicated ideas of the Greek philosopher. He is also the author of about forty orations, containing abundant information about the important events of the period as well as about his personal life. The greatest of all the pagan teachers of the fourth century was Libanius of Antioch, who influenced his contemporaries more than any other man of the period. Among his pupils were such men as John Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and his lectures were studied enthusiastically by the young Julian before he ascended to the throne. Among the numerous writings of Libanius, his sixty-five public addresses are of particularly great interest. They give abundant material for the internal life of the time. Of no lesser importance is the collection of his letters, which in richness of content and remarkable spirit may be compared with the letters of Synesius of Cyrene.

An extremely brilliant figure in the intellectual life of the fourth century was the Emperor Julian, who clearly showed his talent in various departments of literature in spite of his short-lived career. His orations, reflecting his obscure philosophical and religious speculations, such as his appeal "To the King Sun," his letters, his work "Against the Christians," which has come down to us in fragments only, his satirical pamphlet on the people of Antioch entitled Misopogon ("The Beardhater"),143 important as a biographical source-all these reveal Julian as a gifted writer, historian, thinker, satirist, and moralist. The extent to which his writings were interwoven with the actual realities of the period was brought out in our earlier discussion of Julian. We must not forget that the 143 The people of Antioch ridiculed Julian's beard.

unusual genius of this young emperor did not have an opportunity to develop to its fullest extent because of his early and sudden death.

Pagan literature of the fourth and fifth centuries is represented also by several writers in the field of pure history, of whom we shall point out only the most significant.

We have already mentioned Priscus of Thrace, the historian of the fifth century and a member of the embassy to the Huns. His "Byzantine History," which has survived in fragments, and his information on the life and customs of the Huns are both extremely interesting and valuable. In fact, Priscus was the main source on the history of Attila and the Huns for the Latin historians of the sixth century, Cassiodorus and Jordanes. Zosimus, who lived in the fifth and early part of the sixth century, wrote The New History, bringing his account down to Alaric's siege of Rome in the year 410. As an enthusiastic believer in the old gods he explained the fall of the Roman Empire by the anger of the gods at being forsaken by the Romans, and blamed, above all, Constantine the Great. His opinion of Julian is very high.

Ammianus Marcellinus, a Syrian Greek born in Antioch, wrote at the end of the fourth century his Res Gestae, a history of the Roman Empire in Latin. He intended it to be a kind of continuation of the history of Tacitus, bringing the account through the period from Nerva to the death of Valens (96-378). Only the last eighteen books of this history, covering historical events during the period 353-73, have survived. The author has profited by his harsh military experience, during which he participated in Julian's campaigns against the Alemanni and the Persians, and has related in his history first-hand information of contemporary events. He remained a pagan to the end of his life, but showed great tolerance toward Christianity. His history is an important source on the period of Julian and Valens, as well as on Gothic and early Hunnic history.

Athens, the city of declining classical thought, was in the fifth century the home of the last distinguished representative of neoPlatonism, Proclus of Constantinople, who taught and wrote there for a long period of years. It was also the birthplace of the wife of

Theodosius II, Athenais-Eudocia, who possessed some literary ability and wrote several works.

We shall not discuss here the Western European literature of this period, represented by the remarkable works of St. Augustine and several other gifted writers of prose and poetry.

After the transfer of the capital to Constantinople, Latin still remained the official language of the Empire during the fourth and fifth centuries. It was the language used for all the imperial decrees which were collected in the Theodosian code, as well as for the later decrees of the fifth and of the beginning of the sixth centuries. But, as we have already pointed out, in the curriculum of the higher school at Constantinople in the time of Theodosius II there was a decline of the predominance of Latin and a definite preference for the Greek, which was, after all, the most widely spoken language in the eastern part of the Empire. The Greek tradition was also upheld by the Athenian pagan school, whose gradual decline was accelerated by the triumph of Christianity.

In the realm of art the time from the fourth to the sixth century represents a period when various elements which contributed to the formation of a new art were gradually blended into an organic whole. This new art bears the name of Byzantine or East-Christian art. As the science of history goes more deeply into the study of the roots from which this art came forth, it becomes more and more convinced that the East and its traditions have played the predominant part in the development of Byzantine art. By the end of the nineties of the last century German scholars advanced the theory that the "art of the Roman Empire" (Römische Reichskunst), which had developed in the West during the first two centuries of the Empire, replaced the old Hellenistic culture of the East, which was in a state of decline, and so to speak, laid the cornerstone on which Christian art of the fourth and fifth centuries was later built. At present this theory is repudiated. Since the appearance in the year 1900 of the famous work of D. V. Ainalov on the Hellenistic Origin of Byzantine Art (in Russian) and the publication in 1901 of the remarkable work of the Austrian scholar J. Strzygowski on Orient or Rome the problem of the origin of Byzantine art has assumed an entirely new form: it is taken for granted that the main