The emperor Philip celebrated the secular games (recurring every 100 years), with great pomp, for the fifth time in the year 248. We may consider this event, for our present purpose, as a convenient finish of the classic period of antique art, and of the reflections of it in the woodwork and furniture and the surroundings of private life. Ten centuries had elapsed since Romulus had fortified the hills on the banks of the Tiber. "During the first four ages" (says Gibbon) "the Romans, in the laborious school of poverty, had acquired the virtues of war and government; by the vigorous exertion of these virtues, and by the assistance of fortune, they had obtained in the course of the three succeeding centuries an absolute empire over many countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The last three centuries had been consumed in apparent prosperity and internal decline." CHAPTER IV. BYZANTINE ART. We may take as the next period for illustration the centuries that witnessed the break up of the old Roman constitution and the gradual formation of a new order of society down to the end of the first ten centuries of our era. Seven hundred and fifty years out of those ten hundred belong in great part to mediæval history. The misfortunes of Italy, and the incessant state of war, invasion, and struggle in that peninsula were too destructive of personal wealth and the means of showing it in costly furniture to leave us any materials from thence for our present subject. The history of furniture and woodwork, as applied to civil and social uses, now belongs to such civilisation as took its origin and its form from Constantinople. Art of these centuries is called Byzantine. [Illustration] The woodcut is from the chair of St. Peter in Rome, the oldest and most interesting relic of antique furniture in existence; that is, of furniture made of wood and kept in use from the days of ancient Rome. But it has had repairs and additions, and a description of it shall be referred to in another section. Byzantine art is a debased form of the classic, but with a large mixture of Greek; not of the old classic Greek type which had long been exhausted, but of that Asiatic Greek which derived so much of its splendour from the rich but unimaginative decorations of Persia. The objects actually executed at Constantinople or by Byzantine artists now remaining can scarcely be included in a treatise on furniture. They are mostly caskets and other small pieces executed in metal or in ivory. Accounts of many interesting pieces of Byzantine sculpture will be found in the "Description of the ivories in the South Kensington museum." Amongst them the diptychs of the consuls are not only the most important, but the most interesting to a treatise on furniture, as we see in them consular seats and thrones of many varieties.