trial, had earned the title of masters (_maistores_). Each society was presided over by a “protomaistor” helped by secretaries (_grammateus_ and _kerux_) to summon the meetings. It was at once a corporation of workmen, a religious brotherhood, and a mutual aid society: and such societies engaged in mutual acts of hospitality and assistance between one town and another. All workers in the East seem to have been thus associated into guilds, and municipal life was organised on the guilds. This is evident at Constantinople as early as the _Notitia_, see p. 11 above. The members of the guilds had to help at fires, and Lydus gives the cry which brought them together, “_Omnes Collegiati_.” Demetrius, the silversmith of Ephesus, called together the _Sunergasia_ when the craft was in danger; we even hear of strikes. Even unskilled labourers had their guilds, and Mr. Ramsay has described the Guild of Street Porters of Smyrna in Roman times (_American Journal of Archæology_, Vol. I.). The existence of the guilds is the most significant fact of the social history of the middle ages. In such craft organisation of labour, free of the financial middlemen who now rightly call themselves “Contractors,” we see the only hope that building for service, and ornamenting for delight, can again be made possible. Our studies have convinced us that “shop production” went on side by side with the building organisation. This shop production will be at once allowed for such things as gold cups and altars, lamps and bronze doors, but we believe that decorative marble work was largely produced in this way, and that just as enamelled cups and damascened doors were “ordered” in Constantinople, so also were sculptured slabs and capitals. It would be possible to account for mere resemblance by “influence,” but absolute likeness between the capitals and sculptured or inlaid slabs found in contemporary buildings, at cities so far apart as Constantinople, Salonica, Parenzo, Ravenna, and Rome show that in the fifth and sixth centuries such works were dispersed from a common centre. So early as the fourth century S. Gregory Nazianzenus speaks of a priest who came to Constantinople “from Thasos bringing with him the gold of the church wherewith to buy slabs (_plakes_) of Proconnesian marble.”[340] These things were not only bought, but specially commissioned; for instance, the marbles of St. Clemente, which are almost certainly Constantinople work, bear fine monograms of John, afterwards elected pope in 532. The great contributing cause for this, besides the political and artistic position of Constantinople, was doubtless its possession of an absolutely perfect material in boundless profusion--the coarse white marble, which we may see to-day so delightfully wrought in small shops into the tombs, each of which has its carved tree of cypress, palm, or rose. § 3. ORIGINAL FORM OF THE CHURCH.