a new world was growing up with which it had so little in common that
hitherto it would only have been confusing to take the latter much
into account. This review of the older civilisation has, so far as may
be, been kept apart from all that is implied by the introduction of
Christianity; it has even spoken of the decay and death of literature,
though literature and thought in another field were never more active
than in the early centuries of the Church. Of the immense gain that
came then to the world it is not necessary to speak; we all know it.
For the latter half of the period of human history over which the
Greek Anthology stretches, this new world was in truth the more
important of the two. While to the ageing Greek mind life had already
lost its joy, and thought begun to sicken, we hear the first notes of
a new glory and passion;

{Egeire o katheudon
Kai anasta ek ton vekron
Kai epiphausei soi o KHristos}[1]--

in this broken fragment of shapeless and barbaric verse, not in the
smooth and delicate couplets of contemporary poets, Polyaenus or
Antiphilus, lay the germ of the music which was to charm the centuries
that followed. Even through the long swoon of art which is usually
thought of as following the darkness of the third century, the truth
was that art was transforming itself into new shapes and learning a
new language. The last words of the Neo-Platonic philosophy with its
mystical wisdom were barely said when the Church of the Holy Wisdom
rose in Constantinople, the most perfect work of art that has yet been
known in organic beauty of design and splendour of ornament; and when
Justinian by his closure of the schools of Athens marked off, as by a
precise line, the end of the ancient world, in the Greek monasteries