Apuleius and other imperial writers have left us a picture, gaudy and fascinating enough, of the earlier centuries of the Roman Empire. In their works the pomps and frivolities of that decaying world pass in procession before our eyes; the tenuous old Roman gods and goddesses rub shoulders in the popular imagination, on the one hand, with powerful relics of the Egyptian Mysteries, and on the other—already in the second century—with full-blooded medieval witches and demons; while the polite scepticism and graceful dissipation of the educated raises its eyebrows and shrugs its shoulders at the credulous fervours of Christians and their numerous fellow-cranks. There are only one or two common English words which throw any direct light on this period. _Martyr_, the Greek word for a ‘witness’, and so ‘a witness to the truth’, tells its story of the earlier days of the Church, as _heresy_ of the later. The name _Constantinople_ has a double historical significance. It bears the name of the first Roman emperor who recognized Christianity as the established religion of the empire, and it marks the removal in A.D. 330 of the imperial capital from Italy to the shores of the Bosphorus. That removal foreshadowed the inevitable splitting up of the Roman Empire into an eastern and a western half, a schism which survives formally to-day in the difference between the Greek and the Catholic Church. It may be called the starting-point of European history. For Christian Rome we can go to Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_ and Kingsley’s _Hypatia_, while Merejkowski, in his _Death of the Gods_, has attempted to paint, in addition, something of the _inner_ surface of that world, to depict the huge shadowy movements that were taking place deep down in the wills and imaginations of men. Powerful movements they must have been. For now the meanings and associations of all those Latin words which were subsequently to come into our language in the various ways described in Chapter III were being built up or altered, not only by outstanding figures such as St. Jerome and St. Augustine, and the lawyer Emperor Justinian, but also by insignificant Roman legionaries and barbarian private soldiers, by outlandish scholars and studious, dreaming monks. In particular, an increasing number of the profound and manifold concepts which had been laboriously worked into the Greek language in the manner suggested in the last chapter were gradually decanted, either by actual translation or by more indirect methods, into Latin syllables. Thus, side by side with the Septuagint, there came into being the Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments, finished by St. Jerome in A.D. 405, and still the received text of the Roman Catholic Church. But it did not stand alone like the Septuagint. Many volumes of ecclesiastical literature are extant through which we could trace the gradual importation into the Latin language of the new meanings.