ition.
For a long time the Arians had the advantage; several emperors took
sides with them; then, too, as the barbarians entered the empire, they
were converted to Arianism and received Arian bishops. More than two
centuries had passed before the Catholics had overcome this heresy.

=Paganism.=--The ancient religion of the Gentiles did not disappear at
a single stroke. The Orient was quickly converted; but in the Occident
there were few Christians outside the cities, and even there many
continued to worship idols. The first Christian emperors did not wish
to break with the ancient imperial religion; they simultaneously
protected the bishops of the Christians and the priests of the gods;
they presided over councils and yet remained pontifex maximus. One of
them, Julian (surnamed the Apostate), openly returned to the ancient
religion. The emperor Gratian in 384[178] was the first to refuse the
insignia of the pontifex maximus. But as intolerance was general in
this century, as soon as the Roman religion ceased to be official, men
began to persecute it. The sacred fire of Rome that had burned for
eleven centuries was extinguished, the Vestals were removed, the
Olympian games were celebrated for the last time in 394. Then the
monks of Egypt issued from their deserts to destroy the altars of the
false gods and to establish relics in the temples of Anubis and
Serapis. Marcellus, a bishop of Syria, at the head of a band of
soldiers and gladiators sacked the temple of Jupiter at Aparnaea and
set himself to scour the country for the destruction of the
sanctuaries; he was killed by the peasants and raised by the church to
the honor of a saint.

Soon idolatry persisted only in the rural districts where it escaped
detection; the idolaters were peasants who continued to adore sacred
trees and fountains and to assemble in proscribed sanctuaries.[179]
The Christians commenced to call "pagans" (the peasants) those whom up
to this time they had called Gentiles. And this name has still clung
to them. Paganism thus led an obscure existence in Italy, in Gaul, and
in Spain down to the end of the sixth century.

=Theodosius.=--The incursions of the Germanic peoples into the empire
continued for two centuries until the Huns, a people of Tartar
horsemen, came from the steppes of Asia, and threw themselves on the
Germans, who occupied the country to the north of the Danube. In that
country there was already a great German kingdom, that of th