The love of even professing Christians for _spectacula_ proved hard to combat. There are no documents which throw more light on the society of the Eastern Empire at the close of the fourth century than the works of St. Chrysostom; and to St. Chrysostom, both as a priest at Antioch before 397 and as patriarch of Constantinople after that year, the stage is as present a danger as it was to Tertullian two centuries earlier[59]. A sermon preached on Easter-day, 399, is good evidence of this. St. Chrysostom had been attacking the stage for a whole year, and his exhortations had just come to nought. Early in Holy Week there was a great storm, and the people joined the rogatory processions. But it was a week of _ludi_. On Good Friday the circus, and on Holy Saturday the theatre, were thronged and the churches were empty. The Easter sermon was an impassioned harangue, in which the preacher dwelt once more on the inevitable corruption bound up with things theatrical, and ended with a threat to enforce the sentence of excommunication, prescribed only a few months before by the council of Carthage, upon whoever should again venture to defy the Church’s law in like fashion on Sunday or holy day[60]. Perhaps one may trace the controversy which St. Chrysostom’s deliverance must have awakened, on the one hand in the rescript of the autumn of 399 pointedly laying down that the _ludicrae artes_ must be maintained, on the other in the prohibition of the following year against performances in Holy week, and similar solemn tides.