The disappearance of predial serfdom was a change for the better within the empire. But in most other things the changes had been for the worse. The civilisation of the whole realm had sunk to a very low level compared with that which prevailed in the fifth century. [Sidenote: Decay of arts and letters.] Arts and letters had reached the lowest depth which they ever knew in the East. All literature save the compiling of polemical religious tracts had disappeared: between 620 and 720 we have not a single contemporary historian: the story of the times has to be learned entirely from later sources. Poetical, scientific, and philosophical composition had also died off; except the _Heracliad_—the wars of Heraclius told as an epic—of George of Pisidia, the seventh century produced no single poem. The study of Latin had so far died out that the great legal works of Justinian had become useless to the inhabitants of the empire. They were a sealed book to all save the exceptionally learned, so that systematic law had almost disappeared. In the various themes we find justice being administered according to local customs and usages, instead of by old Roman precept. Leo had to abridge and translate Justinian’s Code, in order to render it either useful or intelligible. When doing this he omitted great sections of it, in order to bring the book into accordance with the needs and customs of the day, for both manners and social conditions had been transformed since the reign of Justinian. The decay of art had been as rapid as that of letters: very few remains of the unhappy seventh century have come down to us, but in those which are most numerous, the coins of the emperors, we find the most barbarous incapacity to express the simplest forms. The faces of Heraclius or Constantine V. are barely human: the legends surrounding them are so ill spelt as to be almost unintelligible: the letters are ill formed and ill cut. But the most painful feature of the time was that the decay of arts and letters had been accompanied by the growth of a dense superstition and ignorance which would have seemed incredible to the ancient Roman of the fourth, or even the fifth century. Although Constantinople still preserved all the great literary works of antiquity, the minds of its rulers were no more influenced by them than were the eyes and hands of its craftsmen inspired by the great works of Greek sculpture that still adorned the streets. It was a time of the growth of countless silly superstitions, of witchcraft and necromancy, of the framing of wild legends of apocryphal saints, and of strange misconceptions of natural phenomena.