Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 2.djvu/262

 244. THE DECLINE AND FALL CHAP, the design of this history, if we attempted minutely to ^ • describe the different buildings or quarters of the city. It may be sufficient to observe, that whatever could adorn the dignity of a great capital, or contribute to the benefit or pleasure of its numerous inhabitants, was contained within the walls of Constantinople. A par- ticular description, composed about a century after its foundation, enumerates a capitol or school of learning, a circus, two theatres, eight public and one hundred and fifty-three private baths, fifty-two porticoes, five granaries, eight aqueducts or reservoirs of water, four spacious halls for the meetings of the senate or courts of justice, fourteen churches, fourteen palaces, and four thousand three hundred and eighty-eight houses, which, for their size or beauty, deserved to be distin- guished from the multitude of plebeian habitations *". Population. The populousness of his favoured city was the next and most serious object of the attention of its founder. In the dark ages which succeeded the translation of the empire, the remote and the immediate consequences of that memorable event were strangely confounded by the vanity of the Greeks, and the credulity of the Latins". It was asserted and believed, that all the noble families of Rome, the senate, and the equestrian order, with their innumerable attendants, had followed their emperor to the banks of the Propontis ; that a spurious race of strangers and plebeians was left to possess the solitude of the ancient capital ; and that f See the Notitia. Rome only reckoned one thousand seven hundred and eighty large houses, domus ; but the word must have had a more dig- nified signification. No insula are mentioned at Constantinople. The old capital consisted of four hundred and twenty-four streets, the new of three hundred and twenty-two. B Liutprand. Legatio ad Imp. Nicephorum, p. 153. The modern Greeks have strangely disfigured the antiquities of Constantinople. We might ex- cuse the errors of the Turkish or Arabian writers ; but it is somewhat aston- ishing that the, Greeks, who had access to the authentic materials pre- served in their own language, should prefer fiction to truth, and loose tradition to genuine history. In a single page of Codinus we may detect twelve unpardonable mistakes; the reconciliation of Severus and Niger, the marriage of their son and daughter, the siege of Byzantium by the iMa- cedonians, tlie invasion of the Gauls, which recalled Severus to Rome, the silt}) years which elapsed from his death to the foundation of Constanti- nople, etc.