From the orthodox themselves we know how Pope Leo had banished and imprisoned the Manichæans and Pelagians who sought refuge at Rome when the Vandals attacked Carthage. The emperors exhibit the process of decivilization. Valentinian died of rage: his pious sons were weaklings; and Theodosius, when the rabble of Thessalonica braved him by murdering his governor for enforcing the law against a popular charioteer, treacherously planned a systematic and indiscriminate massacre by which there perished from seven to fifteen thousand men, women, and children. No pagan emperor had ever done the like; and no such number of Christians can have been put to death by Nero. Heraclius, after beheading Phocas, sent his head and limbs to be dragged through the streets of Constantinople--a reversion to barbarism. Two centuries earlier (415) a rabble of Alexandrian monks, acting in the interest of Cyril the Patriarch, seized the pagan teacher Hypatia, stripped her, tore her flesh from her bones with shells, and burned the remains. It is one of the anomalies of historiography that a moral rebirth of the world should have been held to begin in an age in which such things could be. Rather the Mediterranean world had grown more neurotically evil than ever before. The facts that Bishop Ambrose of Milan denounced the act of Theodosius, forcing him to do penance for seven months before re-admitting him to worship, and that Theodosius in his remorse submitted to the sentence and was afterwards less vindictive, are the best that can be recorded per contra. Ambrose himself warmly justified the burning of Jewish synagogues; and while he, with all his ecclesiastical frauds, showed a public spirit, it is a commonplace of Christian history that from the third century onwards bishops in general were self-seekers, who battled furiously over questions of diocesan boundaries, and were the ideal contrast to the legendary apostles. Among the Christianized barbarians who in their turn overran the empire the moral phenomena become even worse, their religion seeming only to make them more savage and vicious.