The principal prose work, however, which has come down from this age, shows a continued and even increased degradation of style. The so-called _Historia Augusta_, a series of memoirs, in continuation of Suetonius' _Lives of the Twelve Caesars_, of the Roman Emperors from Hadrian to Numerian (A.D. 117-284), was begun under Diocletian and finished under Constantine by six writers--Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Vulcacius Gallicanus, Trebellius Pollio, Aelius Lampridius, and Flavius Vopiscus. Most of them, if not all, were officials of the imperial court, and had free access to the registers of the senate as well as to more private sources of information. The extreme feebleness of the contents of this curious work is only exceeded by the poverty and childishness of the writing. History had sunk into a collection of trivial gossip and details of court life, couched in a language worthy of a second-rate chronicler of the Dark Ages. The mere outward circumstances of the men whose lives they narrated--the _purpurati Augusti,_ as one of the authors calls them in a romantically sonorous phrase--were indeed of world-wide importance, and among the masses of rubbish of which the memoirs chiefly consist there is included much curious information and striking incident. But their main interest is in the light they throw on the gradual sinking of the splendid administrative organisation of the second century towards the sterile Chinese hierarchy of the Byzantine Empire, and the concurrent degradation of paganism, both as a political and a religious system.