nuchs,
barbaric splendor, and ostentatious titles replaced the white toga and
the stately, though severe, grandeur of the Roman citizen of former
times. The Roman spirit was dying out in sloth and effeminacy; it was
fitting that a new capital of the Empire should be erected in the East,
for the new times were strange and unrelated to the manes of the Roman
ancestors. Nobility of thought had likewise perished, at least from the
secular life of the Empire. As Duruy says: "Courts have sometimes been
schools of elegance in manners, refinement in mind, and politeness in
speech. Literature and art have received from them valuable
encouragement. But at the epoch of which we are writing, poetry and
art--those social forces by which the soul is elevated--no longer exist.
With an Asiatic government and a religion soon to become intolerant,
great subjects of thought are prohibited. There is no discussion of
political affairs, for the emperor gives absolute commands; no history,
for the truth is concealed or condemned to a complaisance which is
odious to honest men; no eloquence, for nowhere can it be employed
except in disgraceful adulation of the sovereign.... Only the Church is
to have mighty orators,--but in the interests of heaven, not earth; and
so, in this empire now exposed to countless perils, the little mental
activity now existing in civil society will occupy itself only with
court intrigues, the subtleties of philosophers aspiring to be
theologians, or the petty literature of some belated and feeble admirers
of the early Muses."

The three sons of Constantine, among whom, by will, he divided the
Empire, were adherents of the Christian religion; but Constantius, who
soon became the sole ruler, though a weighty factor in the evolution of
the Church's doctrine, was no very edifying example of the moral effect
of her teaching. His jealousy and implacability almost exterminated the
race of Constantine, numerously represented as that sturdy emperor had
left himself. The closest ties of relationship did not avail to save the
lives of those who might stand in the way of the new ruler's ambitions.
Constantina, the sister of Constantius, had been married to
Hannibalianus, his cousin, but in spite of this double relationship the
latter cruelly perished.

Constantina was a woman of whom it would be interesting to know more
than the few references which history affords. She must have been a
person of able as well as ambitious char