On the other hand, with the single exception of the case of the gladiatorial combats (which had been denounced in the first century by the pagan Seneca, [992] and in the fourth by the pagan Libanius, but lasted in Rome long after Christianity had become the State religion; [993] while the no less cruel combats of men with wild beasts were suppressed only when the finances of the falling Empire could no longer maintain them), [994] the vice of cruelty seems to have been in no serious degree cast out. [995] Cruelty to slaves was certainly not less than in the Rome of the Antonines; and Chrysostom [996] denounces just such atrocities by cruel mistresses as had been described by Horace and Juvenal. The story of the slaying of Hypatia, indeed, is decisive as to Christian ferocity. [997] In fine, the entire history of Christian Egypt, Asia, and Africa, progressively decadent till their easy conquest by the Saracens, and the entire history of the Christian Byzantine empire, at best stagnant in mental and material life during the thousand years of its existence, serve conclusively to establish the principle that in the absence of freethought no civilization can progress. More completely than any of the ancient civilizations to which they succeeded, they cast out or were denuded of the spirit of free reason. The result was strictly congruous. The process, of course, was one of socio-political causation throughout; and the rule of dogma was a symptom or effect of the process, not the extraneous cause. But that is only the clinching of the sociological lesson.