hy; the name of the Roman Republic, which so
long preserved a faint tradition of freedom, was confined to the Latin
provinces; and the princes of Constantinople measured their greatness by
the servile obedience of their people. They were ignorant how much this
passive disposition enervates and degrades every faculty of the mind.
The subjects, who had resigned their will to the absolute commands of
a master, were equally incapable of guarding their lives and fortunes
against the assaults of the Barbarians, or of defending their reason
from the terrors of superstition.

[Footnote 1: Father Montfaucon, who, by the command of his Benedictine
superiors, was compelled (see Longueruana, tom. i. p. 205) to execute
the laborious edition of St. Chrysostom, in thirteen volumes in
folio, (Paris, 1738,) amused himself with extracting from that immense
collection of morals, some curious antiquities, which illustrate the
manners of the Theodosian age, (see Chrysostom, Opera, tom. xiii. p.
192-196,) and his French Dissertation, in the Memoires de l'Acad. des
Inscriptions, tom. xiii. p. 474-490.]

[Footnote 2: According to the loose reckoning, that a ship could sail,
with a fair wind, 1000 stadia, or 125 miles, in the revolution of a day
and night, Diodorus Siculus computes ten days from the Palus Moeotis to
Rhodes, and four days from Rhodes to Alexandria. The navigation of the
Nile from Alexandria to Syene, under the tropic of Cancer, required, as
it was against the stream, ten days more. Diodor. Sicul. tom. i. l. iii.
p. 200, edit. Wesseling. He might, without much impropriety, measure
the extreme heat from the verge of the torrid zone; but he speaks of the
Moeotis in the 47th degree of northern latitude, as if it lay within the
polar circle.]

The first events of the reign of Arcadius and Honorius are so intimately
connected, that the rebellion of the Goths, and the fall of Rufinus,
have already claimed a place in the history of the West. It has already
been observed, that Eutropius, [3] one of the principal eunuchs of the
palace of Constantinople, succeeded the haughty minister whose ruin he
had accomplished, and whose vices he soon imitated. Every order of
the state bowed to the new favorite; and their tame and obsequious
submission encouraged him to insult the laws, and, what is still more
difficult and dangerous, the manners of his country. Under the weakest
of the predecessors of Arcadius, the reign of the eunuchs had been
se