TIIE BYZANTINE STYLE.
Though Rome ruled the world, it flattered the Greeks and so appre ciated their culture as to model its own upon it. Rome gathered Grecian art to itself and spread it wide over the globe. The Greeks were proud to know that they ruled the world-ruling Romans, that they were the only source from which both art and knowledge flowed, and that whatever others performed was hut the outflow of Greek genius. In their intellec teal pride they completely overlooked the fact that to them all impulses had come from without.
When Roman authority was no longer centred at one point, when the armies in the provinces made and unmade emperors, Constantinople became for the ancient Grecian countries a new centre which at once emulated Rome and rose higher in proportion as Rome declined. When the Western Empire fell, the Eastern emperors aspired to rule the world, sent their armies into the West, and reduced part of Italy; yet they were soon compelled to abandon it to the barbarians, to confine themselves to Greece and that part of Asia which was not torn from them by the inpouring tide of Islam, and to fall back upon the barbarous races which inhabited the part of Europe to the north of them, and which first received Christianity and civilization from Constantinople.
The Greeks preserved a goodly heritage from the Roman Empire, both in the bureaucratic organization which Rome's administration had intro duced into the East and in the preservation of the throne of the Cmsars. Their pride led to ignorance; their ignorance, to vainglory: they accounted themselves the only possessors of civilization, the only guardians of the grand old traditions; and, since they could not rule the West—since the powerful barbarians had overthrown the Greek authority there—they abandoned it and resolved to build for themselves a world in the East. Even that spiritual bond which united the churches of the East and the \Vest was more than their pride could bear, since its metropolis was not at Byzantium, but at Rome. That bond must be broken. The Church, which was in the West an independent power, must in the Orient become an instrument in the hands of an irresponsible emperor, or, rather, a slave to Byzantine forms and ceremonies by which even he was controlled. No
new life ruled in this state: it was the old administrative machine. It was the might of conventionality that upheld the state—that, as step by step advancing Islam sprang forward upon the booty, held* the remains together, until finally the Turks planted their victorious banners on Constantinople and the Crescent became the terror of Western Europe.
It is hard to fix a point at which the Empire ceases to be the Eastern Roman Empire and begins to be specifically Byzantine, since the rule of empty formalism creeps in little by little. Justinian, the mighty and powerful monarch who aimed to unite the East and the West, and who ruled knowing the ancient traditions yet worked beyond them, cannot be called a Byzantine: he was thoroughly Roman; yet what he executed formed the direct groundwork of Bvzantinism. This relation is apparent in the architecture of the time. While vet the union between the East and the West stood unbroken, when the Ostrogoths had become Romans and their style of architecture was Roman—or, rather, Grecian—Archi tecture followed the same course of development in the East and in the West.
Domical Churches: Church of Slo. great work, the Church of Sta. Sophia (pt. 15, fig. 6), is a member of that series of buildings with a lofty circular centre which existed equally in the Orient and in the Occident, since Agrippa built the Pantheon at Rome And thus set up its first and still extant link. Yet Sta. Sophia is not a simple circu lar church: the longitudinal form also permeates it. In it the problem of dome-support is solved; so that the cupola need no longer be raised upon a circle or a polygon, but 'by means of four pendentives carried upon a square base, and by combination with barrel-vaults and cross vaults, may be arranged to suit any specified ground-plan. In this way a grand monumental freedom of the rectangular plan through a continuous series of cupolas and the monumental execution of the domical central building were at once accomplished. In this sense Sta. Sophia is the unequalled model and the foundation of all Byzantine church-architec ture, which brought the old indigenous, primitive Oriental dome again into application on the basis of the arrangement of that grand edifice.