It could not be otherwise. A city exalted to be the capital of the part of the Empire under the sway of Greek traditions, and employing the Greek language as a vernacular speech, would inevitably consider itself called upon to embody and champion the peculiar properties of the society of which it was the constituted head. Nor could a community whose religious life was under the direction of a Church that worshipped in the Greek tongue, and was stirred by the eloquence of the Chrysostoms, the Gregories, and the Basils of the East retain a Roman complexion and character without serious modifications. So long, indeed, as the western division of the Empire existed, the political union between Rome and Constantinople proved a check upon the Greek bias of the latter city, owing to the necessity of using Latin, as the language whose writ could run equally in both parts of the Roman world. The Popes of Rome, with characteristic insight, recognised the value of a common official language as a bond of unity, and an instrument of maintaining universal rule. The use of the Latin in the services and administration of the Roman Church is a master-stroke of political genius. But when partly by the estrangement of the two portions of the Empire, and partly by the Fall of the Empire in the West, the need of a common speech ceased to exist, the stream of tendency in the East was left free to follow its natural bent. [Illustration: A BLACKSMITH’S SHOP] Within the period under review we see, of course, only the early symptoms of the Greek bias to gain ascendency, but though these symptoms are comparatively slight, they are the proverbial straws that indicate the direction of the wind. While Latin alone glitters in the inscriptions upon the Golden Gate, Greek also is allowed a place in the legends which celebrate the elevation of the obelisk upon its pedestal in the Hippodrome. The pedestal adorned by the statue of the Empress Eudoxia likewise bore a bilingual inscription. The extraordinary energy displayed by the Prefect Constantine in the erection of the outer Theodosian Wall is lauded, on the Gate of Rhegium, in both languages. Probably the same was the case in the record of that splendid achievement put upon another gate of the fortifications--the Gate Xylokerkou--although the historian, owing doubtless to his ignorance of Latin, has preserved only the Greek version. But the balance inclines in favour of Greek, when, at the University of Constantinople, there are more professors attached to the studies in that language than to the studies in the tongue of the elder Rome. At the same time also, the Prefect Cyrus introduced the custom of publishing decrees in Greek instead of in Latin. And along with this preference for Greek in speech, there is a marked growth of what was Greek in spirit. Thus in the relations between the Empire and Persia, as well as in the relations between the Empire and the barbarians, the Government of Constantinople