[Footnote 420: Cp. Merivale, _History_, small ed. iv, 67-70, and Gibbon, ch. 31 (Bohn ed. iii, 420).] [Footnote 421: Sat, vii, 1.] [Footnote 422: Martial, i, 67, 118; xiii, 3. But cp. Becker, _Gallus_. Sc. iii, Excur. 3.] [Footnote 423: Vespasian began the endowment of professorships of rhetoric (Suetonius, _Vespasian_, 18). As to the Antonines, see Gibbon, ch. ii, _note_, near end; and cp. Hatch, _Influence of Greek Ideas upon the Christian Church_, 1900, pp. 38-39; and Boissier, _La Fin du Paganisme_, i, 166. Vespasian's endowments, it should be noted, were given only to the professors of rhetoric. The philosophers (presumably the Stoics, but also the astrologers) he banished, as did Domitian. On this cp. Merivale, _History_, vol. vii, ch. 60.] [Footnote 424: Cp. Guizot, _Histoire de la civilisation en France_, 13e éd. i, 48, 49.] [Footnote 425: _Id._, pp. 113-15.] [Footnote 426: _Id._, i, 121, 122.] [Footnote 427: Guizot (as cited, i, 135) makes much of the fact that Hilary, Ambrose, and Martin opposed the _capital_ punishment of heretics. He ignores the circumstance that Martin led an attack on all the pagan idols and temples of his neighbourhood, in which the peasants who resisted were slain.] [Footnote 428: U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, M. Hume's ed. 1900, i, 115.] EPILOGUE A GENERAL VIEW OF DECADENCE We are now, perhaps, in a position to contemplate the wood without being distracted by the trees, and without forgetting, on the other hand, that it is an aggregate of trees individually conditioned by aggregation. The record of Græco-Roman, as of all other ancient civilisation, with the partial exception of that of China, is one of a complete decadence--in this case a twofold decadence: a passing from collective energy and achievement to collective decrepitude and mental impotence, from intellectual freedom and force to the dogmatic arrest of thought, from artistic splendour to the very negation of the finest forms of art. However we may dispute about the nature of progress, we all agree that this was decadence. Not even the Christian Greek, the least freethinking of educated moderns, supposes that the life of his race went upwards from the time of Constantine. The Italian to this day aspires--by way of Tripoli, among other things--to bear some comparison with the Roman, whose "greatness" he envies. Decadence, then, is confessed. It concerns us, if we would have a historical philosophy at all, to think it all in terms of general causation.