ism, and the intensity of
sectarian strife gave to Christian literature a freshness and vigor
lacking in the works of pagan writers, and produced a wealth of
apologetic, dogmatic and theological writings. But the Christian authors
followed the accepted categories of the pagan literature, and while
producing polemic writings, works of translation and of religious
exegesis, they entered the fields of history, biography, oratory and
epistolography. Thus arose a profane, as well as a sacred, Christian
literature. And since Christian writers were themselves men of education
and appealed to educated circles, their works are dominated by the current
rhetorical standards of literary taste. Yet in some aspects, in particular
in sacred poetry and popular religious biography, they break away from
classical traditions and develop new literary types.

But after the first half of the fifth century originality and productivity
in Christian literature also are on the wane. This is in part due to the
effects of the struggle of the empire with barbarian peoples; in part to
the suppression of freedom of religious thought by the orthodox church.
Even after the extinction of paganism the classical literatures of Greece
and Rome afforded the only material for a non-religious education. And
since they no longer constituted a menace to Christianity, the church
became reconciled to their use for purposes of instruction, and it was to
the church, and especially to the monasteries, that the pagan literature
owes its preservation throughout the Dark Ages.

A symptom of the general intellectual decline of the later empire is the
dying out of Greek in the western empire. While up to the middle of the
third Christian century the world of letters had been bi-lingual, from
that time onwards, largely as a result of the political conditions which
led to a separation of the eastern and western parts of the empire, the
knowledge of Greek began to disappear in the West until in the late empire
it was the exception for a Latin-speaking man of letters to be versed in
the Greek tongue.

*Pagan Latin literature.* A wide gulf separated the pagan Latin literature
of the fourth century from that of the early principate. Poetry had
degenerated to learned tricks, historical writing had taken the form of
epitomies, while published speeches and letters were but empty exhibitions
of rhetorical skill. The influence of rhetorical studies made itself felt
in legal phras