evolution of the whole frame of social
life by the organisation which they gave to the Church from the moment
they began to embrace the Christian religion. It awakened many of the
national characteristics which had slept for ages, and gave new vigour
to the communal and municipal institutions, and even extended to
political society. Christian communities of Greeks were gradually melted
into one nation, having a common legislation and a common civil
administration as well as a common religion, and it was this which
determined Constantine to unite Church and State in strict alliance.

From the time of Constantine the two great principles of law and
religion began to exert a favourable influence on Greek society, and
even limited the wild despotism of the emperors. The power of the
clergy, however, originally resting on a more popular and more pure
basis than that of the law, became at last so great that it suffered the
inevitable corruption of all irresponsible authority entrusted to
humanity.

Then came the immigration and ravages of the Goths to the south of the
Danube, and that unfortunate period marked the commencement of the rapid
decrease of the Greek race, and the decline of Greek civilisation
throughout the empire. Under Justinian (527-565), the Hellenic race and
institutions in Greece itself received the severest blow. Although he
gave to the world his great system of civil law, his internal
administration was remarkable for religious intolerance and financial
rapacity. He restricted the powers and diminished the revenues of the
Greek municipalities, closed the schools of rhetoric and philosophy at
Athens, and seized the endowments of the Academy of Plato, which had
maintained an uninterrupted succession of teachers for 900 years. But it
was not till the reign of Heraclius that the ancient existence of the
Hellenic race terminated.

_II.--The Byzantine and Greek Empires_

The history of the Byzantine Empire divides itself into three periods
strongly marked by distinct characteristics. The first commences with
the reign of Leo III., the Isaurian, in 716, and terminates with that of
Michael III., in 867. It comprises the whole history of the predominance
of iconoclasm in the established church, of the reaction which
reinstated the Orthodox in power, and restored the worship of pictures
and images.

It opens with the effort by which Leo and the people of the empire saved
the Roman law and the Christian rel