[Footnote 230: "Here [in Egypt], as in Palestine, as in Syria, as in the country about the Euphrates, the efforts of the Persians could never have been attended with such immediate and easy success but for the disaffection of large masses of the population. This disaffection rested chiefly on the religious differences" (Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire_, ii, 214). Compare Gibbon, ch. 47, Bohn ed. v, 275; and Mosheim, _Eccles. Hist._, 5 Cent, pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 2, 4, 5 (Reid's ed. pp. 179-81). As to the welcoming of the Saracens in Egypt by the Monophysites, see Gibbon, ch. 51, Bohn ed. vi, 59-60. Cp. Sharpe, _Hist. of Egypt_, 6th ed. ii, 371; Milman, _Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 213; Finlay, i, 370-71.] [Footnote 231: _E.g._ the _tome_ of St. Leo, the Laws of Marcian, the _Henoticon of Zeno_, and the laws of Justinian; and the _ecthesis_ and _typus_ of Heraclius and Constans II--all retailed by Gibbon, ch. 47.] [Footnote 232: Finlay immediately afterwards (p. 139) declares of the choice of Byzantium by Constantine as his capital that "its first effect was to preserve the unity of the Eastern Empire." The admission is repeated on p. 140, where the whole credit of the stand made by the East is given to the administration. Cp. also the explanations as to Italy on p. 235, and as to Byzantium on p. 184. The theory of p. 138 is utterly unsupported, and on p. 289 it is practically repudiated once for all. Cp. finally, pp. 217, 276, 298, 309, 328, 329, 347, 348, and pp. 361 and 371. On p. 276 we have the explicit admission that the hostility to the Roman Government throughout the East [in the sixth century] was everywhere connected with an opposition to the Greek "clergy."] Chapter II GREEK ECONOMIC EVOLUTION § 1 In republican Greece, as in republican Rome, we have already seen the tendency to the accumulation of wealth in few hands, as proved by the strifes between rich and poor in most of the States. A world in which aristocrats were finally wont to take an oath to hate and injure the demos[233] was on no very hopeful economic footing, whatever its glory in literature and art. Nor did the most comprehensive mind of all the ancient world see in slavery anything but an institution to be defended against ethical attack as a naturally right arrangement.[234] In view of all this, we may reasonably hold that even if there had been no Macedonian dominance and no Roman conquest, Greek civilisation would not have gone on progressing indefinitely after the period which we now mark as its zenith--that the evil lot of the lower strata must in time have infected the upper. What we have here briefly to consider, however, is the actual economic course of affairs.