170 THE DECLINE AND FALL Constantinople was doubtless more opulent and populous than Athens at her most flourishing aera, when a scanty sum of six thousand talents, or twelve hundred thousand pounds sterling, was possessed by twenty-one thousand male citizens of an adult age. But each of these citizens was a freeman, who dared to assert the liberty of his thoughts, words, and actions ; whose person and property were guarded by equal law ; and who exercised his independent vote in the government of the republic. Their numbers seem to be multiplied by the strong and various discriminations of character : under the shield of freedom, on the wings of emulation and vanity, each Athenian aspired to the level of the national dignity ; from this com- manding eminence some chosen spirits soared beyond the reach of a vulgar eye ; and the chances of superior merit in a great and populous kingdom, as they are proved by experience, would excuse the computation of imaginary millions. The territories of Athens, Sparta, and their allies do not exceed a moderate province of France or England ; but, after the trophies of Salamis and Plataea, they expand in our fancy to the gigantic size of Asia, which had been trampled under the feet of the victorious Greeks. But the subjects of the Byzan- tine empire, who assume and dishonour the names both of Greeks and Romans, present a dead uniformity of abject vices, which are neither softened by the weakness of humanity nor animated by the vigour of memorable crimes. The freemen of antiquity might repeat, with generous enthusiasm, the sentence of Homer, " that, on the first day of his servitude, the captive is deprived of one half of his manly virtue ". But the poet had only seen the effects of civil or domestic slavery, nor could he foretell that the second moiety of man- hood must be annihilated by the spiritual despotism which shackles not only the actions but even the thoughts of the pi'ostrate votary. By this double yoke, the Greeks were op- pressed under the successors of Heraclius ; the tyrant, a law of eternal justice, was degraded by the vices of his subjects ; and on the throne, in the camp, in the schools, we search, perhaps with fruitless diligence, the names and characters that may deserve to be rescued from oblivion. Nor are the defects of the subject compensated by the skill and variety of the painters. Of a space of eight hundred years, the four first centuries are overspread with a cloud, interrupted by some faint and broken rays of historic light : in the lives of the emperors, from Maurice to Alexius, Basil the Macedonian has
