OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 385 they publicly offered in the great church of Constantinople. Their palace was converted into a monastery ; and all males, except the guides of their conscience, the saints who had for- gotten the distinction of sexes, were scrupulously excluded from the holy threshold. Pulcheria, her two sisters, and a chosen train of favourite damsels formed a religious community : they re- nounced the vanity of dress ; interrupted, by frequent fasts, their simple and frugal diet ; allotted a portion of their time to works of embroidery ; and devoted several hours of the day and night to the exercises of prayer and psalmody. The piety of a Christian virgin was adorned by the zeal and liberality of an empress. Ecclesiastical history describes the splendid churches which were built at the expense of Pulcheria, in all the provinces of the East ; her charitable foundations for the benefit of strangers and the poor ; the ample donations which she assigned for the perpetual maintenance of monastic societies ; and the active severity with which she laboured to suppress the opposite heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches. Such virtues were supposed to deserve the peculiar favour of the Deity ; and the relics of martyrs, as well as the knowledge of future events, were com- municated in visions and revelations to the Imperial saint.^ Yet the devotion of Pulcheria never diverted her indefatigable attention fi*om temporal affairs ; and she alone, among all the descendants of the great Theodosius, appears to have inherited any share of his manly spirit and abilities. The elegant and familiar use which she had acquired both of the Greek and Latin languages was readily applied to the various occasions of speaking or writing on public business ; her deliberations were maturely weighed ; her actions were prompt and decisive ; and, while she moved, without noise or ostentation, the wheel of government, she discreetly attributed to the genius of the emperor the long tranquillity of his reign. In the last years of his peaceful life Europe was indeed afflicted by the arms of Attila ; but the more extensive provinces of Asia still continued to enjoy a profound and permanent repose. Theodosius the younger was never reduced to the disgraceful necessity of 71 She was admonished, by repeated dreams, of the place where the relics of the forty martyrs had been buried. The ground had successively belonged to the house and garden of a woman of Constantinople, to a monastery of Macedonian monks, and to a church of St. Thyrsus, erected by Caesarius, who was consul, A.d. 397; and the memory of the relics was almost obliterated. Notwithstanding the charitable wishes of Dr. Jortin (Remarks, tom. iv. p. 234) it is not easy to acquit Pulcheria of some share in the pious fraud ; which must have been transacted when she has more than five and thirty years of age. VOL. III. 25
