The most pernicious ideas relative to the duties and privileges of citizenship had been imported from Italy. The people were divided into castes. The aristocracy considered all occupations carried on for profit as disgraceful to a patrician. It was a maxim with the populace, and one which it would have been dangerous to controvert, that the state owed it sustenance and amusement. In maintaining such a principle, the lower classes could have no motive for labor, and the rabble of Constantinople had not forgotten that the Roman citizen who so far disregarded his dignity as to become an artisan was ignominiously driven from his tribe. The only career open to the aspiring plebeian was through the Church. To obtain a commanding position in the hierarchy, the favor and assistance of a eunuch or of a princess of the royal family was indispensable. The duties of the priesthood required the possession of little intelligence and less education. The affairs of palace and cathedral were usually administered by emasculated monks, indebted for their places to the ostentatious devotion or convenient servility by which they demonstrated their usefulness in furthering the designs of ambitious patrons. While the general licentiousness which scandalized the papal court did not prevail to an equal extent among the clergy of Constantinople, the lives of many of the patriarchs were stained with vices equal in baseness and impiety to any that defiled the character of the worst of the pontiffs. Soldiers, eunuchs, parasites, and tools of intriguing statesmen were elevated in turn to the most eminent dignity of the Eastern Church. Some carried with them into the episcopal palace the manners and the license of the camp. Others, by enlisting the services of the monks and the populace, fomented sanguinary and disastrous revolutions. Others again, by the monstrous extravagance of their behavior and the irreverence which they displayed in the discharge of their sacred functions, aroused the indignation and incurred the censure of the devout. Of the latter, Theophylactus offers a conspicuous example. The sale of ecclesiastical preferments furnished him regularly with means for the gratification of his unholy passions. He was raised to the patriarchal throne of Constantinople at the age of twelve years. He introduced into the Greek ritual absurd ceremonies and licentious hymns which, strange to relate, survived him for almost two centuries. To this practice are traceable the riotous and obscene festivals of the Middle Ages, when religion was travestied and the rites of the Church profaned by license as gross as that which characterized the excesses of the decadent empire of the Cæsars. He deprecated the wrath of the Devil with heathen sacrifices. In his stable were two thousand horses, which were fed on almonds and figs steeped in wine, regaled with costly liquors, and sprinkled with the most exquisite perfumes. Not infrequently in the midst of the mass he