whole, now showing the snowy brightness of white marble and now the
glowing hues of coloured marble, ended by crowning Rome and the world
with the most extraordinary and most insolent abode of sovereignty--
whether palace, temple, basilica, or cathedral--that omnipotence and
dominion have ever reared under the heavens.

But death lurked beneath this excess of strength and glory. Seven hundred
and thirty years of monarchy and republic had sufficed to make Rome
great; and in five centuries of imperial sway the people-king was to be
devoured down to its last muscles. There was the immensity of the
territory, the more distant provinces gradually pillaged and exhausted;
there was the fisc consuming everything, digging the pit of fatal
bankruptcy; and there was the degeneration of the people, poisoned by the
scenes of the circus and the arena, fallen to the sloth and debauchery of
their masters, the Caesars, while mercenaries fought the foe and tilled
the soil. Already at the time of Constantine, Rome had a rival,
Byzantium; disruption followed with Honorius; and then some ten emperors
sufficed for decomposition to be complete, for the bones of the dying
prey to be picked clean, the end coming with Romulus Augustulus, the
sorry creature whose name is, so to say, a mockery of the whole glorious
history, a buffet for both the founder of Rome and the founder of the
empire.

The palaces, the colossal assemblage of walls, storeys, terraces, and
gaping roofs, still remained on the deserted Palatine; many ornaments and
statues, however, had already been removed to Byzantium. And the empire,
having become Christian, had afterwards closed the temples and
extinguished the fire of Vesta, whilst yet respecting the ancient
Palladium. But in the fifth century the barbarians rush upon Rome, sack
and burn it, and carry the spoils spared by the flames away in their