s wont, either in jest or in repentance, to throw them down
again, it came about after these things that there rose up in various
parts of the world all the barbarous peoples against Rome; whence there
ensued after no long time not only the humiliation of so great an Empire
but the ruin of the whole, and above all of Rome herself, and with her
were likewise utterly ruined the most excellent craftsmen, sculptors,
painters, and architects, leaving the arts and their own selves buried
and submerged among the miserable massacres and ruins of that most
famous city. And the first to fall into decay were painting and
sculpture, as being arts that served more for pleasure than for use,
while the other--namely, architecture--as being necessary and useful for
bodily weal, continued to exist, but no longer in its perfection and
excellence. And if it had not been that the sculptures and pictures
presented, to the eyes of those who were born from day to day, those who
had been thereby honoured to the end that they might have eternal life,
there would soon have been lost the memory of both; whereas some of
them survived in the images and in the inscriptions placed in private
houses, as well as in public buildings, namely, in the amphitheatres,
the theatres, the baths, the aqueducts, the temples, the obelisks, the
colossi, the pyramids, the arches, the reservoirs, the public
treasuries, and finally, in the very tombs, whereof a great part was
destroyed by a barbarous and savage race who had nothing in them of man
but the shape and the name. These, among others, were the Visigoths,
who, having created Alaric their King, assailed Italy and Rome and
sacked the city twice without respect for anything whatsoever. The same,
too, did the Vandals, having come from Africa with Genseric, their King,
who, not content with his booty and prey and all the cruelties that he
wrought there, carried away her people into slavery, to their exceeding
great misery, and among them Eudoxia, once the wife of the Emperor
Valentinian, who had been slaughtered no long time before by his own
soldiers. For these, having fallen away in very great measure from the
ancient Roman valour, for the reason that all the best had gone a long
time before to Byzantium with the Emperor Constantine, had no longer any
good customs or ways of life. Nay more, there had been lost at one and
the same time all true men and every sort of virtue, and laws, habits,
names, and tongues had