Theophilus was succeeded by his widow, the Empress Theodora, who governing in the name of her infant son Michael III., promptly reversed all the edicts of her husband and his predecessors, and endeared herself to the Greeks, by the restoration of their beloved images, and the final defeat of the iconoclastic party, which was accomplished about 842. Though there was a sensible difference after this movement, still it is easy to exaggerate its influence on Byzantine art. The edicts of the Emperor were not always carried out to the letter, except, perhaps, in the capital city, and even there the smaller objects were secreted, and women, always conservative, clung to their _lares_ and _penates_, keeping up the old observances as much as possible. Many an obstinate monk took pride and pleasure in setting the law at defiance, carving little diptychs with the decoration on the inner side, so that they could be folded together and slipped away in safety. [Illustration: [VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON 14. OLIPHANT Oriental-Byzantine, ninth and tenth centuries] The civil art went on uninterruptedly, and in such a luxurious city the objects of secular use must have been very rich and varied. A large series of caskets have come down to us, preserved in the treasuries of churches as shrines for the relics of saints, also large oliphants, or complete tusks, hollowed out and thickly covered with linked patterns of strongly oriental style; these were first imported from the East and afterwards imitated more or less exactly by Byzantine craftsmen. In early ritual they were used as horns to announce the commencement and the end of the Mass, and also to contain relics, and it was the latter use which brought them in such numbers to the West. The miniaturists, also, continued their art, copying and illustrating texts of Homer and Virgil and other classical writers. The iconoclastic movement, though lasting a century and a quarter, had no permanent effect in checking the natural development of art. In fact, the greater impetus given to the civil art had rather the effect of purifying the Byzantine style by constant reference to the antique, and prepared the way for the Renaissance of the tenth century. Byzantine art is still so little known that it is probable that many ivories now classed in the tenth may belong to the preceding century.