A survey of the literature of the fourth and fifth centuries will make equally clear the failure of Christianity to renew the mental life which had been dwindling in the Hellenic world since the days of Alexander, and in the western since those of Augustus. No modern seeker for wisdom or beauty in ancient lore thinks of turning for it to the Greek and Latin writings of the age of established Christianity. Augustine, whose energy was sufficient for a great literary performance, leaves a mass of work out of which two or three treatises only have any truly literary as distinct from an archæological interest; and these are vitiated as compared with good pagan work by their wearisome hysterical pietism no less than by their utter lack of serenity. The Confessions, which might have been a great human document, are reduced by their religious content almost to the plane of the surrounding wilderness of rhetorical theology, whereof a library still subsists, unreadable and unread. Rhetoric, the bane of the decadent pagan literature, infects equally all the Christian writers, giving to the most vehement the ring of inflation and false passion. Literature of artistic or intellectual value was almost at an end. Such Christian poets as Prudentius and Paulinus have indeed merit in their kind; but they could not begin a literary renascence under the conditions set up either by fanatical Christianity or by the worldly spirit which divided with fanaticism the control of the Christian Church and State in the West as in the East. And when the spirit of literature did later revive, it turned with less zest to the pietists named than to their pagan contemporary Claudian, who if not a great poet is yet high among the lesser classics of Rome.