Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 2).djvu/397

 of abundant common sense, well informed for his epoch, and less superstitious than any typical specimens of his contemporaries. In religion he was a freethinker, believing in a Providence, which, however, had not become concrete in the form of any personal being in his mind. When making use of previous writers he adopts their accounts with little discrimination, though he sometimes suggests that the reader may disbelieve if he sees fit to do so. Three terms

used, except in official documents and ecclesiastical writers. It is to this persistence of the original title of the city that we owe the survival into modern times of the epithet Byzantine.]*
 * [Footnote: not do otherwise without being singular: the new name is scarcely ever