Statues, many of them the work of the finest chisels of antiquity, had been collected from all parts of the Empire to make the new capital a museum of art, and to foster the love of the beautiful. Historical monuments also were there, to suggest the continuity between the past and the present, and to rouse the men of a new age to emulate the noble deeds of the old time before them. Of these monuments none was so inspiring as the Serpent Column brought from Delphi to the Hippodrome, upon whose lowest thirteen coils are graven the names of the heroic little States which hurled the Persians out of Greece. No monument stood more appropriately in a city whose supreme task was to resist the encroachments of barbarism upon the civilised world. Scattered over the city were palatial mansions, some erected at the Emperor’s order for personages whom he wished to attract to the new capital, others built by men of wealth and rank who had come of their own accord to bask in the sunshine of imperial favour. Persons belonging to other classes of society had also been attracted in crowds by openings for business, demand for labourers, exemption from certain taxes, and by the free distribution of bread, for which the cornfields of Egypt furnished 80,000 modii of wheat. After the pattern of Rome, the good order of the city was secured by the division of the city into fourteen wards or regions, of which twelve lay within the walls, and two were suburban. One of the latter, the 13th ward, was on the site of Galata; the other, the 14th ward, the famous suburb of Blachernæ, stood on the hill now occupied by the quarter of Egri Kapou. Both of these extra-mural suburbs were fortified. Each ward had a curator, who attended to the general interests of that portion of the city; a crier or messenger to give public notice to its inhabitants of matters which concerned them; five night watchmen; and a body of men (colligiati) representing the trade-guilds, and varying in number according to the size or importance of the ward, to render assistance in case of fire. After this survey of the new city, the most loyal son of the old town might come to the ancient Strategion--the ground devoted to military exercises (on the level tract beside the present Stamboul Railway Station)--and gladly bow to the decree inscribed on a column erected there, that Byzantium should henceforth be named New Rome. [Illustration: THE GALATA BRIDGE which spans the Golden Horn at the end near the Bosporus forms the principal link between Galata and Stamboul. It is presented here as seen through a window in a small café on one of the adjoining steamboat quays.] CHAPTER II THE MAKING OF CONSTANTINOPLE, UNDER THE EMPERORS CONSTANTIUS, JULIAN, VALENS, THEODOSIUS THE GREAT, AND ARCADIUS. 337-408 A.D.