e Deos, et nullus in aris
Vestoe exoratoe fotus strue palleat ignis.
Ilis instructa dolis palatia celsa subibo;
Majorum mores, et pectora prisca fugabo
Funditus; atque simul, nullo discrimine rerum,
Spernantur fortes, nec sic reverentia justis.
Attica neglecto pereat facundia Phoebo:
Indignis contingat honos, et pondera rerum;
Non virtus sed casus agat; tristique cupido;
Pectoribus saevi demens furor aestuet aevi;
Omniaque hoec sine mente Jovis, sine numine sumimo.

Merobaudes in Niebuhr's edit. of the Byzantines, p. 14.--M.]

[Footnote 62: Denique pro meritis terrestribus aequa rependens

Munera, sacricolis summos impertit honores.

Dux bonus, et certare sinit cum laude suorum,
Nec pago implicitos per debita culmina mundi Ire
viros prohibet.
Ipse magistratum tibi consulis, ipse tribunal

Contulit.
Prudent. in Symmach. i. 617, &c.

Note: I have inserted some lines omitted by Gibbon.--M.]

[Footnote 63: Libanius (pro Templis, p. 32) is proud that Theodosius
should thus distinguish a man, who even in his presence would swear
by Jupiter. Yet this presence seems to be no more than a figure of
rhetoric.]

[Footnote 64: Zosimus, who styles himself Count and Ex-advocate of the
Treasury, reviles, with partial and indecent bigotry, the Christian
princes, and even the father of his sovereign. His work must have
been privately circulated, since it escaped the invectives of the
ecclesiastical historians prior to Evagrius, (l. iii. c. 40-42,)
who lived towards the end of the sixth century. * Note: Heyne in his
Disquisitio in Zosimum Ejusque Fidem. places Zosimum towards the close
of the fifth century. Zosim. Heynii, p. xvii.--M.]

[Footnote 65: Yet the Pagans of Africa complained, that the times would
not allow them to answer with freedom the City of God; nor does St.
Augustin (v. 26) deny the charge.]

[Footnote 66: The Moors of Spain, who secretly preserved the Mahometan
religion above a century, under the tyranny of the Inquisition,
possessed the Koran, with the peculiar use of the Arabic tongue. See the
curious and honest story of their expulsion in Geddes, (Miscellanies,
vol. i. p. 1-198.)]

[Footnote 67: Paganos qui supersunt, quanquam jam nullos esse credamus,
&c. Cod. Theodos. l. xvi. tit. x. leg. 22, A.D. 423. The younger
Theodosius was afterwards satisfied, that his judgment had been somewhat
premature. Note: The statemen