Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 6 (1897).djvu/82

 62 THE DECLINE AND FALL CHAPTER LIII State of the Eastern Empire in the Tenth Cenlurij — Extent and Division — Wealth and Revenue — Palace of Constantinople — Titles and Offices — Pride and Power of the Emperors — Tactics of the Greeks, Arabs, and Franks — Loss of the Latin Tongue — Studies and Solitude of the Greeks Memorials of A RAY of Iiistoric light secms to beam from the darkness of the empire" tenth century. We open with curiosity and respect the royal volumes of Constantine Porphyrogenitus/ which he composed, at a mature age, for the instruction of his son, and which promise to unfold the state of the Eastern empire, both in peace Works of and war, both at home and abroad. In the first of these works Constantine i.ii.ii Porphyro- he minutelv describes tlie pompous ceremonies of the church and [The Cere- palacc of Constantinople, according to his own practice and that monies] r -i i oti ii or his predecessors.- In the second he attempts an accurate survey of the provinces, the themes, as they were then denomin- [The Themes] atcd, both of Europe and Asia.^ The system of Roman tactics, 1 The epithet of ilop<|)i/poyeVir)Tot, Porphyrogenitus, born in the purple, is elegantly defined by Claudian : — Ardua privates nescit fortuna Penates ; Et regnuni cum luce dedit. Cognata potestas Excepit Tyrio venerabile pignus in ostro. And Ducange, in his Greek and Latin Glossaries, produces many passages ex- pressive of the same idea. [In connexion with the following account of the work of Constantine, the reader might have been reminded that the Continuation of Theophanes (and also the work of Genesius) were composed at the instigation of this Emperor, and that he himself wrote the Life of his grandfather Basil — a re- markable work whose tendency, credibility, and value have been fully discussed in A. Rambaud's L'empire grec au dixieme siecle, p. 137-164.] 2 A splendid Ms. of Constantine, de Ceremoniis Aulas et Ecclesiae Byzantinae, wandered from Constantinople to Buda, Frankfort, and Leipsic, where it was pub- lished in a splendid edition by Leich and Reiske (a.d. i75i[-i7S4] in folio), with such slavish praise as editors never fail to bestow on the worthy or worthless object of their toil. [See Appendix i.] •'See, in the first volume of Banduri's Imperium Orientale, Constantinus de Thematibus, p. 1-24, de Administrando Imperio, p. 45-127, edit. Venet. The text of the old edition of Meursius is corrected from a Kls. of the royal library of Paris, which Isaac Causabon had formerly seen (Epist. ad Polybiuni, p. 10), and the sense is illustrated by two maps of William Deslisle, the prince of geographers till the appearance of the greater d'Anville. [On the Themes, see Appendix 3 ; on the treatise on the Administration, see Appendix 4.]