ad.

So began the Church's Rome.[174] Enslaved politically to Byzantium, wherein
the so-called Roman State, with Greek subtlety, carried on the principles
of the old heathen government and practised a remorseless despotism, the
city of the ancient Caesars and the people they fed on "bread and games"
ceased to exist, and was changed into the holy city, whose life was the
Chair of Peter. From the time of Narses, during all the two hundred years
of Lombard assault and Byzantine neglect and exaction, the Pope alone,
watchful and unceasingly active, carried out the fabric of the Roman
hierarchy.[175] Its gradual increase, its springing up out of the dust of
the old Roman State under the most difficult circumstances, will ever
claim the astonishment of the after-world as the greatest transformation to
be found in history.

Let us approach the secret of this transformation in the person of the man
who best represents it.

Gregory was born about the year 540, and so was witness from his childhood
of the intense misery and special degradation of Rome produced by the
Gothic war. He was himself the son of Gordian, a man of senatorial rank,
from whom he inherited great landed property. Through him he was the great
grandson of that illustrious Pope Felix III., whom we have seen resist with
success the insolence of Acacius and the despotism of Zeno. Gregory had
therefore a doubly noble inheritance--that of a true Roman noble's spirit,
and that of the Church's championship. His paternal house stood on that
well-known slope of the Coelian hill, opposite the imperial palace on the
Palatine, from which in after-time he sent forth St. Augustine with the
monks his brethren to be the Apostle of paganised England. He founded six
monasteries in Sicily upon his property, and changed his father's palace
into a seventh, in which he followed the Benedictine Rule. In early manhood
he had been praetor or prefect of the city, being probably the most eminent
of all its citizens in wealth and rank. But his mother St. Silvia, a woman
of fervent piety, had educated him with great care. He turned from the
secular to the religious life, following perhaps her example, since on the
death of his father she became a nun. He was a monk on the Coelian hill
when Pope Benedict in the year 577 named him seventh deacon of the Roman
Church. Pope Pelagius II. sent him as nuncio to Constantinople, an office
equally difficult and honourable. The emperor Tiberius was t