generally designated. In reality he was a philosopher of great modera tion; a sovereign whose reign was distinguished above most of his successors for devotion to the happiness of the people. Those of his writings which are not on controversial subjects display uncommon literary care for the age, and some of them are of great historical importance. Two or three of them, his Cæsars, or the Banquet, and The Misopogon, or Beard-hater, exhibit a considerable turn for satire. But his deliberate preference of Paganism over Christianity, in consequence of the quarrels and scandalous conduct of some of the professors of the latter, and the superior urbanity and literary accomplishments of some of the adherents to the former, instead of forming his opinion upon the moral and religious ideas which lie at the respective foundations of the two, will justly and for ever deprive him of the praise of being a profound thinker.

§ 5. The Eastern and Western Empires were separated in A. D. 364, by Valentinian and Valens. In the north and east, the storm of barbarian invasion was ominously gathering against the Empire. The Goths were permitted by Valens to pass the Danube, when the fiercer Huns, advancing from the confines of China, compelled them to seek the protection of the Emperor. This movement quartered a million of warriors within the domain of Rome, between whom and the Empire a desperate war speedily broke out. But the separation of the East from the West bound up the interests of the sovereigns more intimately with the fortunes of their Greek subjects. The Greek language began to supplant the Latin at the court, and the feeling of Greek nationality penetrated even to the imperial family; and new vigor seemed about to be infused into the eastern portion of the Empire. The municipal and ecclesiastical organizations of the Greeks gained still greater influence in the general government; and the Christian religion gradually directed the attention of the educated to theological questions, almost exclusively. There still remained in the schools, however, a number of philosophical adherents to declining paganism; many of them, like Julian and Libanius, not only distinguished by their literary accomplishments, but by the general purity of their lives. The name of Hellenes was gradually limited to the Pagan Greeks of Europe. Christians and Hellenes became distinctive terms in Greece itself, which still retained the name of Hellas. At the present day this application of the term is not unknown in some parts of Greece. The influence of the lawyers on the general administration of justice began to exercise a very important control, not only over the judicial tribunals, but as a check to the injustice of proconsuls, and even to the despotism of the Emperors themselves; but it is a singular fact, and one which diminished the beneficial influence of this body among the Greeks, that though the Greek language was the language of the Eastern Church, yet the Latin was the language of legal business in the East, until the time of Justinian, that is, till after the sixth century; circumstance that enabled the clergy, by their more intimate connection with the people, to extend their sphere of activity beyond the range of ecclesias

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tical, to the civil affairs. All this apparent progress was arrested, or at least interrupted, by the troubles with the Goths. The Huns pressed forward, subjecting district after district, and province after province. In the first half of the fifth century, at the head of an immense troop of followers, Attila advanced upon Europe, and, almost without the show of resistance, invaded, occupied, and desolated all the regions from the Euxine to the Adriatic Sea. Greece suffered the extremities of spoliation under these swarming hordes, with all its atrocities and horrors. The Emperor was terrified into purchasing peace by the payment of an annual tribute of two thousand pounds of gold, and ceding an extensive territory of fifteen days' journey in breadth, and extending in length from Nyssa to Belgrade. For the next seven years Attila was the terror of the East and West. His exploits were the theme of popular songs among the barbarians, and tradition added fable to the facts of history. Under the name of Etzel he reappears in the earliest legends of Germany, and is one of the leading personages in that grand old poem, the Nibelungenlied. "He was interred," says Sir James Emerson Tennent, " after the ancient manner of the fathers of his nation, the Huns cutting off their hair, and gashing their faces with hideous wounds, to bewail their chieftain, not with effeminate tears, but with the blood of warriors. His body, placed beneath a silken pavilion, was exhibited in the midst of the plain, whilst the horsemen of his tribe rode around it, and celebrated his exploits in funeral hymns. In the darkness of midnight the remains of Attila were inclosed in a golden, and again in a silver coffin, to mark that the Romans and the Greeks had been his tributaries; and all was enveloped in an iron chest, to indicate the untamed ferocity of his dominion. The trappings of his war-horse, and his royal insignia, were committed to the same sepulchre with himself; and the slaves who hollowed out his tomb were slain when the work was finished, in order that no mortal might disclose the last resting-place of the warrior of the Huns."

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§ 6. The long reign of Justinian, from 527 to 565,-thirty-nine years, was in some respects a brilliant one; but, to use the language of another, "it was merely a glowing episode in a tale of ruin,- a meteor in a midnight sky, which flashes brightly for an instant, and, vanishing, leaves no halo of its transient brilliancy behind." Yet he was indefatigably occupied with reforms, intended to strengthen the Empire. He embellished the capital with costly edifices, rebuilt the cathedral church of St. Sophia, repaired the walls and towers of Constantinople, the strongholds in the North of Greece, the fortifications of Athens and Peiræus, and protected the Peloponnesus by fortresses at Corinth and on the Isthmus. He paid more than a million of dollars towards rebuilding and embellishing Antioch, after it had been overthrown by an earthquake. He abolished the consulship which had been in existence more than a thousand years, and in his reign the schools of Athens and Alexandria, in which doctrines antagonistic to Christianity were still taught, were closed. He was brilliantly

successful in his wars, through his generals, and this with his contemporaries gave him still greater glory than his works of peace: but posterity acknowledge him chiefly for his agency in compiling the Institutes, Digest, and Pandects, the Corpus Juris Civilis, - which has so largely influenced the administration of justice down to the present day.

§ 7. The Western Empire ended with the inglorious reign of Romulus Augustulus, in A. D. 476; but the Eastern Empire, under Roman influ ences, continued for a period of about one hundred and fifty years after Justinian, to the accession of Leo the Isaurian, in A. D. 717, when, in the opinion of Mr. Finlay, the proper Byzantine Period commences. In this century and a half seventeen Emperors sat upon the throne; but the most important events, so far as the Greeks were concerned, were the settlements of Slavonians, and other foreign or barbarous races, over the greater part of Greece. The diminution of the Hellenic people had gone on, partly owing to the general decay of the Empire, and partly to other and local causes, chiefly, among the latter, by the accumulation of immense landed estates in the hands of individuals. The neglect of roads led to the abandonment of the cultivation of the soil on large tracts of country, and its conversion into pasture land; and, as the revenues to be derived from a country in this condition were insignificant, the government at Constantinople became indifferent to its defence. The provinces of Greece were thus exposed to the inroads of Slavonian settlers, which commenced early in the sixth century. The progress of these settlements is obscurely intimated in the Byzantine historians; but the fact that they occupied the greater part of Macedonia, and in such numbers that Justinian II., at the end of the seventh century, was able to remove into Asia, and settle on the shores of the Bosporus, a colony of one hundred and fifty thousand souls, shows in what numbers they came. They became almost the sole possessors of the territories once occupied by the Illyrians and Thracians. They advanced southward, occupying the waste lands; but as they penetrated into the heart of Greece, they met with more obstruction from a dense population, especially in the neighborhood of the still remaining walled towns. In the early part of the eighth century, nearly the whole of the Peloponnesus was occupied by the Slavonians, and it was then regarded by pilgrims from Western Europe as the Slavonian land; and the complete colonization of the whole country of Greece and the Peloponnesus is dated by the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus from the time of the great pestilence that depopulated the East, in A. D. 746, which is a little later than the commencement of the Byzantine period. Such are the principal facts known in history with regard to this extraordinary series of events, by which an old population was almost entirely displaced, in the course of two centuries, by swarms of another race, coming into the country partly as warriors and enemies, partly as agriculturists, herdsmen, and shepherds, to occupy the lands left vacant by the greatly diminished numbers of the Greeks. These bodies seem to have been set in motion

by wars along the line of the northern provinces; and when they were once established, they lived in a rude and wild independence. They took possession of the valleys chiefly, and the interior of the provinces, and they left traces of their possession in the still remaining Slavonic names which are scattered all over the surface, of Greece. The Greeks themselves still held the sea-coasts and the large towns, the old Greek names of which were for the most part still retained. From time to time, the old and the new inhabitants came into collision, and wars raged here and there. Twice, at least, the aid of the Emperor was supplicated, large armies were sent from Constantinople, and the Slavonians were partially conquered and compelled to pay tribute to the imperial government. But the singularity of this chapter in Greek history consists in the fact, that this great body of intrusive settlers gradually disappeared from the soil of Greece as mysteriously as they came. Some had, of course, mingled with the Greeks, were converted to Christianity, and in the course of time, by the blending of families, became Hellenized in language, manners, and blood, and to all intents and purposes Greeks, just as the descendants of a foreign settler in England, mingling his blood with the native race, lose the original nationality of their ancestors and become Englishmen. Professor Fallmereyer indeed, in his learned and entertaining work, written in German, the History of the Peninsula of the Morea, — maintains that the Hellenic population was entirely exterminated, and that the people who call themselves Greeks at the present day are nothing but descendants of these Slavonian hordes. His book has called forth several replies; and his unfounded assumptions and numerous misrepresentations of historical facts have been ably exposed by Zinkeisen, in his excellent History of Grecce. But in truth, it is quite unnecessary to enter largely into historical research, to show the fallacy of Fallmereyer's opinion. The Slavonians are light-haired, blonde-complexioned, and blue-eyed; the Greeks have dark hair, brown complexions, and sparkling black eyes. The Slavonians are broad-faced, stout, and somewhat clumsy; the Greeks are lithe, slender, nimble, graceful. The same features that we admire in the ancient statues, nature still reproduces everywhere in Greece. The intellectual qualities of the races are strikingly different. The Greek is lively, quick to understand, adroit, eloquent, curious, eager for novelty; the Slavonian slow, indifferent, not easily moved to take an interest in anything that does not immediately concern himself, and, what is more, the traveller in Greece falls in, here and there, with descendants of the Slavonians and other foreign settlers, sometimes occupying an entire village by themselves. Even in Athens, there is a quarter inhabited almost exclusively by Albanians; and not ten miles from Athens there is a village where Greek is not understood. Now it is impossible for the most careless observer to mistake these people for one another, either in their looks or their speech, or in their mental characteristics.

§ 1. Conquests of the Normans. § 2. Crusades. Frankish Domination in Greece. 8. Dukes of Athens. 4. Origin and Progress of the Turks. § 5. Mohammed II. Preparations for the Capture of Constantinople. § 6. Capture of Constantinople. § 7. Conquest of the Morea. 8. Conquest of Trebizond. § 9. Byzantine Writers, their General Characteristics. 10. Zosimus, Procopius, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Nicephorus Bryennius, Anna Comnena, Laonicos Chalcocondyles.

§ 1. FROM the period of which we have been speaking, the condition of Greece remained without undergoing any important change, until the conquests of the Normans in the eleventh century. In 1081 Robert Guiscard passed over from Brindisi to Corfou with a powerful fleet. The inhabitants of the island making no resistance, he then landed in Epeirus; but in consequence of the death of the chieftain the expedition had no permanent consequence on the condition of the country. Another invasion of Greeee was made by Bohemund, called the Duke of Antioch: it was repelled by the Emperor Alexis, and Bohemund forced to acknowledge himself liegeman of the Byzantine Emperor. A third invasion was conducted by Roger, the powerful and wealthy king of Sicily. He appeared off Corfou in 1146 with a fleet of seventy sail, and, having easily mastered the island, proceeded to the mainland, marched through Epeirus and Attica, and plun