by
intrigue exerted a dominating influence over the emperor even up to his
dying moments, and by intrigue tried to determine the destiny of her son
and her stepson. But the intriguing widow reaped in public abhorrence
the natural results of her offences. For a time the people endured the
abomination of her unnatural crimes, but at last they visited upon her a
well-merited punishment.

The reign of the empress Irene is noteworthy because of her restoration
of the images banished by Leo the Isaurian and his successors, and
because it marks the end of all union between the Eastern and Western
Empires and the beginning of the Byzantine Empire strictly so called.
Hence, it deserves more minute attention than the other reigns we have
briefly sketched, and some mention must be made of the history of the
religious movement with which Irene's name is so intimately connected.

Leo III., the Isaurian, the most remarkable of the Byzantine emperors
since the days of the great Justinian, made his long reign from 717 to
740 memorable by his victories over the Saracens and his long and bitter
conflict against the image worship and relic worship which had developed
rapidly throughout the Empire and had assumed the aspect of fetichism.

The early Christians, owing to their Jewish proclivities, had felt an
unconquerable repugnance to the use of images, and their religious
worship was uniformly simple and spiritual. As the Greek influence
spread throughout the Church, however, there developed a veneration of
the Cross and of the relics of the saints. Then it was thought that if
the relics were esteemed, so much the more should be the faithful copies
of the persons of the saints, as delineated by the arts of painting and
sculpture. In course of time, by a natural development, the honors of
the original were transferred to the copy, and the Christian's prayer
before the image of the saint ceased to distinguish between the
counterfeit presentment and the saint it was designed to portray. As
healing power was attributed to many of the images and pictures, the
popular adoration of them grew. Thus, by the end of the sixth century
the worship of images was firmly established, especially among the
Greeks and Asiatics. Many pious souls began to see that this idolatry of
the Christians hardly differed from the idolatry of the Greeks, and that
they had no potent arguments against the assertions of Jews and
Mohammedans that Greek Christianity was bu