Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/166

 144 THE DECLINE AND FALL Perpetual separation of the Ori- ental sects Royalists ; "- of men whose faith^ instead of resting on the basis of scripture, reason, or tradition, had been established, and was still maintained, by the arbitrary power of a temporal monarch. Their adversaries might allege the words of the fathers of Constantinople, who profess themselves the slaves of the king ; and they might relate, with malicious joy, how the decrees of Chalcedon had been inspired and reformed by the emperor Mareian and his virgin bride. The prevailing faction will naturally inculcate the duty of submission, nor is it less natural that dissenters should feel and assert the principles of freedom. Under the rod of persecution, the Nestorians and Monophysites degenerated into rebels and fugitives ; and the most ancient and useful allies of Rome were taught to consider the emperor not as the chief, but as the enemy, of the Chris- tians. Language, the leading principle which unites or separ- ates the tribes of mankind, .soon discriminated the sectaries of the East by a peculiar and perpetual badge, which abolished the means of intercourse and the hope of reconciliation. The long dominion of the Greeks, their colonies, and, above all, their eloquence had propagated a language doubtless the most perfect that has been contrived by the art of man. Yet the body of the people, both in Syria and Egypt, still persevered in the use of their national idioms ; with this difference, how- ever, that the Coptic was confined to the rude and illiterate peasants of the Nile, while the Syriac,ii'* from the mountains of Assyria to the Red Sea, was adapted to the higher topics of poetry and argument. Armenia and Abyssinia were infected by the speech and learning of the Greeks ; and their barbaric tongues, which have been revived in the studies of modern Europe, were unintelligible to the inhabitants of the Roman empire. The Syriac and the Coptic, the Armenian and the 112 This name, unknown till the xth century, appears to be of Syriac origin. It was invented by the Jacobites, and eagerly adopted by the Nestorians and Mahometans ; but it was accepted without shame by the Catholics, and is fre- quently used in the Annals of Eutychius (Asseman. Bibliot. Orient, torn. ii. p. 507, &c. torn. iii. p. 355. Renaudot, Hist. Patriarch. Alexandrin. p. 119). 'H^fis BoiiKoi. ToO Bao-iAew?, was the acclamation of the fathers of Constantinople (Concil. torn. vii. p. 765). [But cp. above, p. 127, n. 70.] 113 The Syriac, which the natives revere as the primitive language, was divided into three dialects : i. The Aramaean, as it was refined at Edessa and the cities of Mesopotamia ; 2. The Palestine, which was used in Jerusalem, Damascus, and the rest of Syria ; 3. The Nabathaean, the rustic idiom of the mountains of Assyria and the villages of Irak (Gregor. Abulpharag. Hist. Dynast, p. 11). On the Syriac, see Ebed-Jesu (Asseman. tom. iii. p. 326, &c.), whose prejudice alone could prefer it to the Arabic.