In the same proportion as the world was made desolate, did intellect also decay. Until the middle of the third century, the western world was very civilized; we still meet with distinguished poetical talent, and jurisprudence reached its highest state of development: but after that time, down to the days of Constantine, we already find throughout it the most downright barbarism: in the plastic arts, the decline begins even as early as in the times of Septimius Severus, the busts alone being still somewhat tolerable. As for poems, that of Nemesian on the chase, and the eclogues of Calpurnius in the reign of Carinus, are very characteristic of the age: it is sheer verse-making. Prose is no longer to be met with. There is indeed not one writer of it worth mentioning, except Lactantius the contemporary of Constantine, who has made the style of Cicero quite his own: even as Curtius is a reproduction of Livy, so is Lactantius of Cicero. Yet the man himself is also interesting: in his seventh book, he shows real imagination. Before him lived Arnobius, who is instructive and useful, his erudition being of great value to us; but he is without originality. In the East, a different class of writers had arisen. Instead of people trying, as in the second and third centuries, to reproduce the ancient Attic, the language of Plato and Demosthenes, which Dio Chrysostom and several others after him had done; there sprang up in the third century, from the times of Ammonius in Syria, the so-called New-Platonism, a system which aimed at higher things, and from the intellect which there was in it, was widely different from the rhetorical school before it. But it became thoroughly unreal, inasmuch as its votaries tampered with the hallowed mysteries of former times, being ashamed of them in their old form, and had foisted in what was altogether foreign to it.