[See Finlay, _History of Greece_, as cited, i, 284-85, as to the veto on discussion by Theodosius. In the next century Justinian suppressed the philosophic schools at Athens. Finlay, in one passage (i, 221), speaks of them as nearly extinct before suppression; but elsewhere (pp. 277-81) he gives an entirely contrary account. There are too many such contradictions in his pages. Cp. Hertzberg, _Geschichte Griechenlands seit dem Absterben des antiken Lebens_, 1876, i, 78-84.] By the time of Constantine, even the coinage had come to look like that of a semi-barbarian State; and thought, of course, had already stagnated when Christianity conquered the "educated" classes. But these classes themselves were speedily narrowed nearly to those of the priests and the bureaucracy, save in so far as commerce maintained some semi-leisure. Barbarian invasion and imperial taxation combined in many districts to exterminate the former leisured and property-owning class. It is indeed an exaggeration to say that "the labourer and the artisan alone could find bread ... and, with the extinction of the wealthy and educated classes, the local prejudices of the lower orders became the law of society."[363] But the last clause is broadly true. In this society the priest, with his purely pietistic tastes and knowledge, became the type and source of culture. A cultured modern Greek apologist of the Byzantine Empire[364] has anxiously sought to combine with the thesis that Christianity is a civilising force, the unavoidable admission that Byzantine civilisation was intellectually stationary for a thousand years. It is right that every possible plea for that ill-famed civilisation should be carefully attended to, even when it takes the form of reminding us[365] that after all the sixth century produced Procopius and Agathias; the seventh, George of Pisidia; the eighth, John of Damascus; the ninth, Photius; and so on--one man or two per century who contrived to be remembered without being annalised as emperor. Of rather more importance is the item that Christian Constantinople at one point, following Egyptian and Roman precedent, improved on the practice of heathen Athens, in that the women of the imperial court and of the upper classes seem to have received a fair share of what culture there was.[366] It is further a matter of bare justice to note that Byzantium had all along to maintain itself against the assaults of Persia, of Islam, of barbarism, heathen and Christian, and of Latin Christendom. But there must all the same be made the grieving admission that "We certainly do not find in the Byzantine authors the same depth and originality which mark the ancient writers whom they copied";[367] and that this imitation "was unhappily the essential weakness of Byzantine literature." That is to say, the intelligence of the Christian Empire, like that of the Greece of the