Thus stood the temples, triumphal arches, pillars, and statues before the eyes of a young Roman noble, one out of the few patrician families still surviving. These were the sights with which St. Gregory, who claimed kindred with the Anician race, was familiar from his boyhood, so that the desolation of Jerusalem rose before his mind as the state of his own Rome pressed on his eyes and seared his heart. This skeleton of a city was scarcely inhabited by the remnant of a people, decimated by hunger and pestilence, and in perpetual fear to see its ill-defended gates broken into by Lombard savages. The walls of Aurelian, half demolished by Totila and hurriedly repaired by Belisarius, alone saved it year after year from the horrors which fell upon captured cities; and would not have saved it but for the indomitable spirit, the perpetual wisdom, foresight, and courage of a son who had been exalted to the Chair of Peter. While Old Rome lay thus, the shadow of its former self, bereft of all political power, looking to the imperial exarch at Ravenna for its temporal rule, in danger moreover of inundation from its own Tiber, whose banks were no longer maintained with unremitting care, New Rome beside the Bosporus rioted in all the pomp and circumstance of a court still the head of a vast empire. The tributes of all the East, of numberless cities in Asia Minor, in Syria, in Egypt, were still borne unceasingly within its walls, which rose as an impregnable fortress between Europe and Asia. Its emperor still thought himself the lord of the world; its bishop assumed the title of Ecumenical Patriarch. Both emperor and bishop cast but a disdainful glance on the widowed rival which threatened to sink into the grave of waters brought down by her own river. Constantinople could raise and pay armies from all the races of the North and East. A single imperial regiment was quartered at Rome, which, being ill-paid, became disaffected and neglectful of its charge, and could not be counted upon by the Pope for vigorous defence against the ever-pressing danger of a Lombard inroad. So began the Church's Rome.[174] Enslaved politically to Byzantium, wherein the so-called Roman State, with Greek subtlety, carried on the principles of the old heathen government and practised a remorseless despotism, the city of the ancient Caesars and the people they fed on "bread and games" ceased to exist, and was changed into the holy city, whose life was the Chair of Peter. From the time of Narses, during all the two hundred years of Lombard assault and Byzantine neglect and exaction, the Pope alone, watchful and unceasingly active, carried out the fabric of the Roman hierarchy.[175] Its gradual increase, its springing up out of the dust of the old Roman State under the most difficult circumstances, will ever claim the astonishment of the after-world as the greatest transformation to be found in history.