innocent victims, which has been the inseparable accompaniment of an uneasy and revolutionary age. All this he describes with rude and insistent emphasis, and yet it never occurs to him to question the claims of the sacred city to the eternal veneration of mankind, or to challenge its supreme place in the Divine ordering of the Universe. That the architectural splendours of the Imperial capital-its amphitheatres, temples, baths and palaces-contributed in some measure to counterbalance the impression left upon his mind by the degraded habits of its population is probable enough; for, though Antioch was sumptuous and famed for luxury, Rome was in respect of material magnificence far superior to any city in the Empire. But, in his many allusions to Rome, Ammianus was not chiefly inspired by the emotions of the architectural connoisseur or the retired veteran from the provinces, dazzled by the glittering marbles and huge structures of the capital. If we read his mind aright, he thought of Rome chiefly as the mother-city of a great and enduring Empire, rich in sublime associations, celebrated by a long line of famous authors as the shrine of ancient hardihood and virtue, and still in her old age the legitimate object of sentimental reverence. Nothing will enable us more fully to understand the feeling of the devout Catholic for the city of St Peter than the spell which the grandeur of Rome cast upon the mind of an Antiochene pagan in the last decades of the Empire of the West. In the time of Ammianus it was impossible to discern the future destinies of the Roman Episcopate, but it is clear from his narrative that the city of Romulus still worked its old enchantments, and conferred upon its officials and upon the members of its aristocracy a special renown throughout the Empire.

It has, indeed, been objected against Ammianus that, living under a sky black with storm-cloud, he appears to be insensible to the direction of the wind. A philosophic historian, considering the happenings of that time, would at least, one would think, have noted, as likely to change the very warp and woof of Mediterranean civilisation, two great tendencies-the impending victory of the Christian religion and the declining power of the Roman Empire. But Ammianus did not argue thus.

He belonged to that large class of men who feel little interest in theological speculations and possess no gift for the mystical ascesis of the spirit. The Christian religion did not attract him. As a soldier he admired the fortitude of the martyrs; and a well-known passage, contrasting the pomp and luxury of the Roman Bishop with the poverty and self-denial of the poor country priest, shows that he was not insensible to the milder virtues of the pastoral life. But of Christianity as a system of belief or conduct he has little knowledge and less curiosity. To the political mind the religious zealot principally presents himself as an administrative nuisance; and Ammianus condemns the synods of the Christian Fathers on the practical ground that they disorganised the postal transport of the Empire. It is not, therefore, to him that we must look for an appreciation of the strength and promise of the Christian life. A cold and somewhat scornful spectator of ecclesiastical events, he appears to be unversed in the literature and only remotely conversant with the ceremonies of the Christians. So far as he could judge the general outcome of that Oriental movement, it led to barbaric chaos, sect wrangling with sect, and every episcopal vacancy furnishing matter for intrigue or bloodshed. In one disputed election to the Bishopric of Rome a hundred and thirty-seven corpses were counted in a Christian Church.

The most impressive feature, on the contrary, of this honest and impartial writer's outlook upon his own age is a robust faith in the permanence and power of the Roman Empire. This Greek from Antioch is in spirit more Roman than the Romans, so Roman that it is difficult to believe that no Latin blood ran in his veins. His masters in literature are the classical authors of Rome-Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Sallust, Tacitus; and he draws his ideal of human conduct from that older and more simple Roman life which was canonised in the retrospective affection of a luxurious age. Indeed, as we read Ammianus, we are made sensible, at every turn, of the span and impetus of that great body politic which, despite furious batteries from without and more subtle maladies gnawing at the heart, still remained the most impressive monument in the world of force, fortune and prudence. How could a soldier historian fail to feel the

miracle of an Empire which sent its legions to fight on the Tees and the Euphrates, and included within its orbit all the peoples of the Mediterranean world? To a contemporary, the crushing defeat of Julian at Ctesiphon, the immense disaster of the Gothic victory at Adrianople, might well have seemed to be unfavourable episodes, carrying with them no sinister omen of ruin nor seed of mischief beyond repair. For centuries the Romans had fought and absorbed the barbarians; and Ammianus saw little reason to doubt that Rome would continue to fight and absorb barbarians to the end of time.*

One other circumstance may help to explain the survival, despite much cause for despondency, of a firm imperial faith in the spirit of Ammianus. The last and most impressive book of the history is devoted to an account of the Gothic invasion of Thrace, which culminated in the rout of a Roman army and the death of the Emperor Valens. The story of this great calamity is told with sombre force, and loses none of its tragical quality in the hands of Ammianus, who, after working steadily up to the great climax of the battle, ends with two minor but startlingly significant episodes-a Gothic attack upon Constantinople, which was repulsed by a sally of Saracen mercenaries, and the treacherous massacre by order of a Roman governor of a large body of Gothic youths who had been distributed through the cities of Asia Minor. In the light of our later knowledge these ominous passages might seem to be inspired by a profound valedictory emotion, but there is nothing consciously valedictory in the attitude of Ammianus. The history was not composed under the immediate impulse of the disaster of Adrianople, but was begun some ten years later, when the military vigour of Theodosius was asserting itself; so that, writing in a brief oasis of calm when the sky was blue and the sunshine again golden, Ammianus could recount the perils of the past, gravely indeed, but yet without a note of weakness or despair.

Almost all the little that we know of the life of

Fifty years later the Greek historian, Sozomen, started a philosophy of the Decline and Fall; but Rutilius Namatianus, writing shortly after the sack of Rome by Alaric, was still of opinion that the Empire would last for ever.

Ammianus is derived from allusions in his own writings. Sprung of noble lineage, he passed early into the ranks of the 'Protectores Domestici,' a corps d'élite which may be compared to our Guards Brigade, and was soon attached to the person of Ursicinus, a distinguished and experienced soldier who inspired the confidence and admiration of his youthful aide-de-camp. A better opening for an ambitious and enterprising young man, fond of travel, adventure and companionship, could not have been contrived; and, before Ammianus had reached the age of thirty, he had voyaged on military and official errands from Mesopotamia to Gaul and from Gaul to Mesopotamia, and had tasted the excitements of a siege, a reconnaissance and a campaign. It is one of our misfortunes that, with a few rare exceptions, he refrains from recounting his personal experiences, and that his impressions of travel, which must have been various and diverting, are sacrificed to the austere tradition of classical history. Nevertheless here and there we descry traces of his activity. He was at Cologne with Ursicinus in 355, and witnessed the downfall of the rebel Silvanus and the beginnings of Julian's work in Gaul. Two years later he returned to the East, when Roman rule was once more exposed to grave peril from the energy and ambitions of Shapur the Great, the most formidable of the Sassanian kings of Persia. As he recounts this period of his career, Ammianus drops for a moment the impersonal tone which generally marks his history. He describes with some vividness of feeling his own part in the Persian campaign-how he was sent on a mission to the Emir of Corduene, how he took part in the famous defence of Amida (the modern Diarbekr), and joined in that expedition to the Tigris which resulted in Julian's death and the repulse of the Roman legions at Ctesiphon. After that catastrophe he returned to Antioch and for many years vanishes from history. When he emerges, it is as the spectator of the high-treason trials at Antioch in 371, as the tourist visiting the plain of Adrianople that he may inspect the site still strewn with the whitened bones of Goth and Roman, or finally as the man of letters, recently established in Rome and receiving the compliments of his friend, Libanius, upon a successful course of historical lectures. The sun-browned veteran

was, in fact, reading instalments of his magnum opus to the intellectuals of the capital and tasting the sweets of literary fame. We may guess that his last reading was not later than 392.

It has been conjectured, on the ground of his interest in legal affairs, that, after the death of Julian, Ammianus abandoned a military for a civil career, and that the later part of his life was divided between judicial and literary pursuits. Such a development is not impossible, for the 'Protectores Domestici' constituted a school of training for civil as well as for military duties. Nor is it easy to suppose that a man of so active a temperament would have retired altogether from public life at so early a point in his course. But there is no direct evidence, and we must be content with surmises. We only know that, resembling the Father of History in curiosity and love of movement, Ammianus travelled widely, visiting Egypt and Greece as well as Thrace, and carrying, as we may conjecture, in his head, the exciting design of the great book, the Tacitus brought up to date, which was to be recited before an exacting and distinguished audience in the marble capital of the Empire.

The circumstance that the history was intended for recitation was unfavourable to its quality as a work of art. It is a common experience that lectures, effective enough on first delivery, fail through some lack of subtlety and finish to preserve their power when issued to the world in cold print; and the historical lectures of the Syrian veteran were probably injured for posterity by too close an attention to the recondite tastes of an affected public. Ammianus had a rough but powerful mind, and, what is even more important in an historian, and priceless by reason of its rarity in that age, an essential sincerity and justness of judgment. Unfortunately he thought it necessary to conform himself to a literary fashion which we suspect to have been foreign to his real nature. His narrative is stuffed with turgid declamation and interrupted by long stretches of encyclopædic learning which a modern author would omit or at least consign to footnotes or appendices. He breaks off to describe a prodigy, an omen, a cause célèbre, in order that out of the studied variety of his matter he may provide a stimulus, appropriate to the varying