ower enough to conceive so many reverses of fortune,
such destruction of cities, such a flight of men, such a murdering of
peoples, much less to describe them in words. Italy was strewn with ruins
and dead bodies from the Alps to Tarentum. Famine and pestilence, following
on the steps of war, had reduced whole districts to desolation. Procopius
compares the reckoning of losses to that of reckoning the sands of the
sea. A sober estimate computes that one-third of the population perished,
and the ancient form of life in Rome and in all Italy was extinct for ever.

But before we make an estimate of Justinian's whole action and character
and their result, a subject on which we have scarcely touched has to be
carefully weighed.

What was the relation between the Two Powers conceived in the mind of
Justinian, expressed in his legislation, carried out in his conduct,
whether to the Roman Primate or the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch,
Jerusalem, and Constantinople in his own eastern empire, or to the whole
Church when assembled in council, as at Constantinople in 553? Was he
merely carrying on as emperor a relation which he had inherited from so
many predecessors, beginning with Constantine, or did he by his own laws
and conduct alter an equilibrium before existing, and impair a definite and
lawful union by transgressing the boundaries which made it the co-operation
of Two Powers.

If we look back just a hundred years before his _Digest_ appeared, we find,
in the great deed[154] in which the emperors Theodosius II. and Valentinian
III. convoked the Council of Ephesus, the charge which they considered to
be laid upon the imperial power to maintain that union of the natural and
the spiritual government on which, as on a joint foundation, the Roman
State, in the judgment of its rulers, was itself built. Some of the words
they use are: "We are the ministers of Providence for the advancement of
the commonwealth, while, inasmuch as we represent the whole body of our
subjects, we protect them at once in a right belief and in a civil polity
corresponding with it".

This first and all-embracing principle of protecting all and every power
which existed in the commonwealth, and maintaining it in due position, was
most firmly held by Justinian. As to his own imperial authority and the
basis on which it rested, he says: "Ever bearing in mind whatever regards
the advantage and the honour of the commonwealth which God has entrusted to
o