of the two empires, and what we may properly call Byzantine history. The East and the West soon became thoroughly out of sympathy with each other. At a time when a community of feeling and sentiment was specially needful in the face of the terrors of barbarian inroads, there was positive strife and discord between these two great divisions of the world. Italy claimed to represent the old republic of Rome, and looked down on the East with a sort of contempt which a senator in old days would have felt for Greeks and Asiatics. It was itself again despised as rude and barbarous by the more civilized, if too luxurious and effeminate, inhabitants of the eastern provinces. Already there was a schism between East and West. With two governments, as Gibbon notes, two separate nations came into existence.
From Theodosius to Arcadius there was as great a fall as from Edward I. to Edward II. Arcadius was not unlike the latter prince. He was a poor feeble creature, whom we can hardly think of as a Roman emperor, though of course he bore the title, and was styled Cæsar and Augustus. His appearance was contemptible; he was short of stature and almost deformed; and of accomplishments, such as might be fairly expected in a prince, he seems to have possessed but one, an elegant handwriting. His faults and weaknesses were those of a Persian and Oriental despot. He was ruled by women and eunuchs. Of these last the chief was Eutropius, who rose to the highest honour, and instigated his master to many a cruel act under the pretext of punish-
