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Speaker 1:
[00:02] Good evening, and thank you for joining me for another Boring Books for Bedtime. I hope tonight's selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep. Before we begin, I'd like to give a special shoutout of thanks to some new members of our Patreon family. Jessica, Ivy, Jennifer, Mel and Tinika. Thank you all so much for supporting this podcast. By becoming members of Patreon, you help us remain 100% listener-supported and ad-free for everyone, and it's very much appreciated. If you're interested in supporting Boring Books for Bedtime, and finding out more about the perks available to subscribers, including exclusive episodes, full books, and downloadable MP3s that you can listen to anywhere on any device, you'll find a link to Patreon in the show description. You'll also find a link to buymeacoffee.com, where you can support us with a one-time tip, no subscription required. I hope you'll take a moment to check them out. Now let's read and relax. Find a comfortable spot. Take a nice, deep breath in. Let it out slowly. And off we go. Tonight, let's continue our month of long time favorites with a 10th reading from one that certainly fits the bill. Let's relax with more. From A Short History of the World by HG. Wells. First published in 1922 by the Macmillan & Company, New York. And with this 10th reading, we've reached the halfway point in this short history. So let's pick up right where we left off at the beginning of Chapter 37. Let's begin. Chapter 37. The Teaching of Jesus. It was while Augustus Caesar, the first of the emperors, was reigning in Rome that Jesus, who was the Christ of Christianity, was born in Judea. In his name, a religion was to arise, which was destined to become the official religion of the entire Roman Empire. Now it is on the whole more convenient to keep history and theology apart. A large proportion of the Christian world believes that Jesus was an incarnation of that God of all the earth, whom the Jews first recognized. The historian, if he is to remain historian, can neither accept nor deny that interpretation. Materially, Jesus appeared in the likeness of a man, and it is as a man that the historian must deal with him. He appeared in Judea in the reign of Tiberius Caesar. He was a prophet. He preached after the fashion of the preceding Jewish prophets. He was a man of about thirty, and we are in the profoundest ignorance of his manner of life before his preaching began. Our only direct sources of information about the life and teaching of Jesus are the four Gospels. All four agree in giving us a picture of a very definite personality. But just as the personality of Gautama Buddha has been distorted and obscured by the stiff squatting figure, the gilded idol of later Buddhism, so one feels that the lean and strenuous personality of Jesus is much wronged by the unreality and conventionality that a mistaken reverence has imposed upon his figure in modern Christian art. Jesus was a penniless teacher who wandered about the dusty, sun-bit country of Judea, living upon casual gifts of food, yet he is always represented clean, combed and sleek, in spotless raiment, erected with something motionless about him as though he was gliding through the air. This alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people. We are left, if we do strip this record of these difficult accessories, with the figure of a being, very human, very earnest and passionate, capable of swift anger, and teaching a new and simple and profound doctrine. Namely, the universal loving fatherhood of God and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. He was clearly a person, to use a common phrase, of intense personal magnetism. He attracted followers and filled them with love and courage. Weak and ailing people were heartened and healed by his presence. He went about the country for three years, spreading his doctrine, and then he came to Jerusalem and was accused of trying to set up a strange kingdom in Judea. He was tried upon this charge and crucified together with two thieves. Long before these two were dead, his sufferings were over. The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought. It is small wonder if the world of that time failed to grasp its full significance and recoiled in dismay from even a half apprehension of its tremendous challenges to the established habits and institutions of mankind. For the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus seems to have preached it, was no less than a bold and uncompromising demand for a complete change and cleansing of the life of our struggling race, an utter cleansing without and within. To the Gospels the reader must go for all that is preserved of this tremendous teaching. Here we are only concerned with the jar of its impact upon established ideas. The Jews were persuaded that God, the one God of the whole world, was a righteous God, but they also thought of him as a trading God who had made a bargain with their father Abraham to bring them at last to predominance in the earth. With dismay and anger, they heard Jesus sweeping away their dear securities. God, he thought, was no bargainer. There were no chosen people and no favorites in the kingdom of heaven. God was the loving father of all life, as incapable of showing favor as the universal son, and all men were brothers, sinners alike and beloved sons alike, of this divine father. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus cast scorn upon that natural tendency we all obey, to glorify our own people and to minimize the righteousness of other creeds and other races. In the parable of the laborers, he thrust aside the obstinate claim of the Jews to have a special claim upon God. All whom God takes into the kingdom, he taught, God serves alike. There is no distinction in his treatment, because there is no measure to his bounty. From all moreover, as the parable of the buried talent witnesses, and as the incident of the widow's might enforces, he demands the utmost. There are no privileges, no rebates, and no excuses in the kingdom of heaven. But it is not only the intense tribal patriotism of the Jews that Jesus outraged. They were a people of intense family loyalty, and he would have swept away all the narrow and restrictive family affections in the great flood of the love of God. The whole kingdom of heaven was to be the family of his followers. We are told that, while he yet talked to the people, behold his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him. Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee. But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother, and who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hands towards his disciples and said, Behold my mother and my brethren, for whosoever shall do the will of my father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother. And not only did Jesus strike at patriotism and the bonds of family loyalty in the name of God's universal fatherhood and brotherhood of all mankind, but it is clear that his teaching condemned all the gradations of the economic system, all private wealth, and personal advantages. All men belong to the kingdom, all their possessions belong to the kingdom. The righteous life for all men, the only righteous life, was the service of God's will with all that we had, with all that we were. Again and again he denounced private riches and the reservation of any private life. And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said to him, Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one that is God. Thou knowest the commandments, do not commit adultery, do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false witness, defraud not, honor thy father and mother. And he answered and said unto him, Master, all these things have I observed from my youth. Then Jesus, beholding him, loved him and said unto him, One thing thou lackest, go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me. And he was sad at that saying and went away grieved, for he had great possessions. And Jesus looked round about and sayeth unto his disciples, how hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God. And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answered again and sayeth unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God? It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. Moreover, in his tremendous prophecy of this kingdom, which was to make all men one together in God, Jesus had small patience for the bargaining righteousness of formal religion. Another large part of his recorded utterances is aimed against the meticulous observance of the rules of a pious career. Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders? But eat bread with unwashed hands. He answered and said unto them, Well, hath Isaiah prophesied of you hypocrites as it is written, This people honoreth me with their lips, But their heart is far from me. How be it in vain do they worship me, Teaching for doctrines the commandments of men? For laying aside the commandment of God, Ye hold the tradition of men, As the washing of pots and cups, And many other such things ye do. And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, That ye may keep your own tradition. It was not merely a moral and a social revolution that Jesus proclaimed. It is clear from a score of indications that his teaching had a political bent of the plainest sort. It is true that he said his kingdom was not of this world, that it was in the hearts of men and not upon a throne. But it is equally clear that wherever and in what measure his kingdom was set up in the hearts of men, the outer world would be in that measure revolutionized and made new. Whatever else the deafness and blindness of his hearers may have missed in his utterances, it is plain they did not miss his resolve to revolutionize the world. The whole tenor of the opposition to him and the circumstances of his trial and execution show clearly that to his contemporaries he seemed to propose plainly and did propose plainly to change and fuse and enlarge all human life. In view of what he plainly said, is it any wonder that all who were rich and prosperous felt a horror of strange things, a swimming of their world at his teaching? He was dragging out all the little private reservations they had made from social service into the light of a universal religious life. He was like some terrible moral huntsman digging mankind out of the snug burrows in which they had lived hitherto. In the white blaze of this kingdom of his, there was to be no property, no privilege, no pride and precedence, no motive in deed and no reward but love. Is it any wonder that men were dazzled and blinded and cried out against him? Even his disciples cried out when he would not spare them the light. Is it any wonder that the priests realized that between this man and themselves there was no choice but that he or priestcraft should perish? Is it any wonder that the Roman soldiers, confronted and amazed by something soaring over their comprehension and threatening all their disciplines, should take refuge in wild laughter and crown him with thorns and robe him in purple and make a mock Caesar of him? For to take him seriously was to enter upon a strange and alarming life, to abandon habits, to control instincts and impulses, to essay an incredible happiness. Chapter 38 The Development of Doctrinal Christianity In the four gospels, we find the personality and teachings of Jesus, but very little of the dogmas of the Christian Church. It is in the Epistles, a series of writings by the immediate followers of Jesus, that the broad lines of Christian belief are laid down. Chief among the makers of Christian doctrine was Saint Paul. He had never seen Jesus nor heard him preach. Paul's name was originally Saul, and he was conspicuous at first as an active persecutor of the little band of disciples after the Crucifixion. Then he was suddenly converted to Christianity, and he changed his name to Paul. He was a man of great intellectual vigor, and deeply and passionately interested in the religious movements of the time. He was well-versed in Judaism and in the Mithraism and Alexandrian religion of the day. He carried over many of their ideas and terms of expression into Christianity. He did very little to enlarge or develop the original teaching of Jesus, the teaching of the Kingdom of Heaven. But he taught that Jesus was not only the promised Christ, the promised leader of the Jews, but also that his death was a sacrifice, like the deaths of the ancient sacrificial victims of the primordial civilizations for the redemption of mankind. When religions flourish side by side, they tend to pick up each other's ceremonial and other outward peculiarities. Buddhism, for example, in China, has now almost the same sort of temples and priests and uses as Taoism, which follows in the teachings of Lao Tzu. Yet the original teachings of Buddhism and Taoism were almost flatly opposed, and it reflects no doubt or discredit upon the essentials of Christian teaching, that it took over not merely such formal things as the shaven priest, the votive offering, the altars, candles, chanting and images of the Alexandrian and Mithraic faiths, but adopted even their devotional phrases and their theological ideas. All these religions were flourishing side by side with many less prominent cults. Each was seeking adherence, and there must have been a constant going and coming of converts between them. Sometimes one or other would be in favor with the government. But Christianity was regarded with more suspicion than its rivals, because like the Jews, its adherents would not perform acts of worship to the god Caesar. This made it a seditious religion, quite apart from the revolutionary spirit of the teachings of Jesus himself. Saint Paul familiarized his disciples with the idea that Jesus, like Osiris, was a god who died to rise again and give men immortality. And, presently, the spreading Christian community was greatly torn by complicated theological disputes about the relationship of this god Jesus to god the father of mankind. The Arians taught that Jesus was divine, but distant from and inferior to the father. The Sibelians taught that Jesus was merely an aspect of the father, and that god was Jesus and father at the same time, just as a man may be a father and an artificer at the same time. And the Trinitarians taught a more subtle doctrine, that god was both one and three, father, son, and Holy Spirit. For a time it seemed that Arianism would prevail over its rivals, and then after disputes, violence, and wars, the Trinitarian formula became the accepted formula of all Christendom. It may be found in its completest expression in the Athanasian Creed. We offer no comment on these controversies here. They do not sway history as the personal teaching of Jesus sways history. The personal teaching of Jesus does seem to mark a new phase in the moral and spiritual life of our race. Its insistence upon the universal fatherhood of God, and the implicit brotherhood of all men. Its insistence upon the sacredness of every human personality as a living temple of God, was to have the profoundest effect upon all the subsequent social and political life of mankind. With Christianity, with the spreading teachings of Jesus, a new respect appears in the world for man as man. It may be true, as hostile critics of Christianity have urged, that St. Paul preached obedience to slaves, but it is equally true that the whole spirit of the teachings of Jesus, preserved in the Gospels, was against the subjugation of man by man. And still more distinctly was Christianity opposed to such outrages upon human dignity as the gladiatorial combats in the arena. Throughout the first two centuries after Christ, the Christian religion spread throughout the Roman Empire, weaving together an ever-growing multitude of converts into a new community of ideas and will. The attitude of the emperors varied between hostility and toleration. There were attempts to suppress this new faith in both the second and third centuries. And finally, in 303 and the following years, a great persecution under the Emperor Diocletian. The considerable accumulations of church property were seized. All Bibles and religious writings were confiscated and destroyed. Christians were put out of the protection of the law and many executed. The destruction of the books is particularly notable. It shows how the power of the written word in holding together the new faith was appreciated by the authorities. These book religions, Christianity and Judaism, were religions that educated. Their continued existence depended very largely on people being able to read and understand their doctrinal ideas. The older religions had made no such appeal to the personal intelligence. In the ages of barbaric confusion that were now at hand in Western Europe, it was the Christian Church that was mainly instrumental in preserving the tradition of learning. The persecution of Diocletian failed completely to suppress the growing Christian community. In many provinces, it was ineffective because the bulk of the population and many of the officials were Christian. In 317, an edict of toleration was issued by the Associated Emperor Galerius. And in 324, Constantine the Great, a friend and on his deathbed a baptized convert to Christianity, became sole ruler of the Roman world. He abandoned all divine pretensions and put Christian symbols on the shields and banners of his troops. In a few years, Christianity was securely established as the official religion of the empire. The competing religions disappeared or were absorbed with extraordinary celerity, and in 300, the Edocius the Great caused the great statue of Jupiter Serapis at Alexandria to be destroyed. From the outset of the 5th century onward, the only priests or temples in the Roman Empire were Christian priests and temples. Chapter 39 The Barbarians Break the Empire into East and West Throughout the 3rd century, the Roman Empire, decaying socially and disintegrating morally, faced the barbarians. The emperors of this period were fighting military autocrats, and the capital of the empire shifted with the necessities of their military policy. Now the imperial headquarters would be at Milan in North Italy, now in what is now Serbia at Sirmium or Niche, now at Nicomedia in Asia Minor. Rome, halfway down Italy, was too far from the center of interest to be a convenient imperial seat. It was a declining city. Over most of the empire, peace still prevailed, and men went about without arms. The armies continued to be the sole repositories of power. The emperors, dependent on their legions, became more and more autocratic to the rest of the empire and their state more and more like that of the Persian and other Oriental monarchs. Diocletian assumed a royal diadem and Oriental robes. All along the imperial frontier, which ran roughly along the Rhine and Danube, enemies were now pressing. The Franks and other German tribes had come up to the Rhine. In North Hungary were the Vandals. In what was once Dacia and is now Romania, the Visigoths or West Goths. Behind these in South Russia were the East Goths or Ostrogoths. And beyond these again the Alans. But now Mongolian peoples were forcing their way towards Europe. The Huns were already expecting tribute from the Alans and Ostrogoths and pushing them to the West. In Asia the Roman frontiers were crumpling back under the push of a renaissance Persia. This new Persia, the Persia of the Sassanid kings, was to be a vigorous and on the whole a successful rival of the Roman Empire in Asia for the next three centuries. A glance at the map of Europe will show the reader the peculiar weakness of the Empire. The River Danube comes down to within a couple of hundred miles of the Adriatic Sea in the region of what is now Bosnia and Serbia. It makes a square reentrant angle there. The Romans never kept their sea communications in good order, and this 200-mile strip of land was their line of communication between the Western Latin-speaking part of the Empire and the Eastern Greek-speaking portion. Against this square angle of the Danube, the barbarian pressure was greatest. When they broke through there, it was inevitable that the Empire should fall into two parts. A more vigorous Empire might have thrust forward and reconquered Dacia, but the Roman Empire lacked any such vigor. Constantine the Great was certainly a monarch of great devotion and intelligence. He beat back a raid of the Gauls from just these vital Balkan regions, but he had no force to carry the frontier across the Danube. He was too preoccupied with the internal weaknesses of the Empire. He brought the solidarity and moral force of Christianity to revive the spirit of the declining Empire, and he decided to create a new permanent capital at Byzantium upon the Hellespont. This new-made Byzantium, which was rechristened Constantinople in his honor, was still building when he died. Towards the end of his reign occurred a remarkable transaction. The vandals, being pressed by the Goths, asked to be received into the Roman Empire. They were assigned lands in Pannonia, which is now that part of Hungary west of the Danube, and their fighting men became nominally legionnaires. But these new legionnaires remained under their own chiefs. Rome failed to digest them. Constantine died working to reorganize his great realm, and soon the frontiers were ruptured again, and the Visigoths came almost to Constantinople. They defeated the emperor Valens at Adrianople, and made a settlement in what is now Bulgaria, similar to the settlement of the Vandals in Pannonia. Nominally, they were subjects of the emperor. Practically, they were conquerors. From 379 to 395 AD reigned the emperor Theodosius the Great. And while he reigned, the empire was still formally intact. Over the armies of Italy and Pannonia presided Stilicho, a vandal. Over the armies in the Balkan Peninsula, Alaric, a Goth. When Theodosius died at the close of the fourth century, he left two sons. Alaric supported one of these, Arcadius in Constantinople, and Stilicho the other, Anorius in Italy. In other words, Alaric and Stilicho fought for the empire with the princes as puppets. In the course of their struggle, Alaric marched into Italy and after a short siege took Rome in 410 AD. The opening half of the fifth century saw the whole of the Roman Empire in Europe the prey of robber armies of barbarians. It is difficult to visualize the state of affairs in the world at that time. Over France, Spain, Italy, and the Balkan Peninsula, the great cities that had flourished under the early empire still stood, impoverished, partly depopulated and falling into decay. Life in them must have been shallow, mean, and full of uncertainty. Local officials asserted their authority and went on with their work with such conscience as they had, no doubt in the name of a now remote and inaccessible emperor. The churches went on, but usually with illiterate priests. There was little reading and much superstition and fear. But everywhere except where looters had destroyed them, books and pictures and statuary and such like works of art were still to be found. The life of the countryside had also degenerated. Everywhere this Roman world was much more weedy and untidy than it had been. In some regions, war and pestilence had brought the land down to the level of a waste. Roads and forests were infested with robbers. Into such regions the barbarians marched with little or no opposition and set up their chiefs as rulers, often with Roman official titles. If they were half-civilized barbarians, they would give the conquered districts tolerable terms. They would take possession of the towns, associate and intermarry, and acquire, with an accent, a Latin speech. But the Jutes, the Angles, and Saxons, who submerged the Roman province of Britain, were agriculturalists and had no use for towns. They seemed to have swept South Britain clear of the Romanized population, and they replaced the language by their own Teutonic dialects, which became at last English. It is impossible in the space at our disposal to trace the movements of all the various German and Slavonic tribes, as they went to and fro in the disorganized empire in search of plunder and a pleasant home. But let the Vandals serve as an example. They came into history in East Germany. They settled, as we have told, in Pannonia. Thence they moved, some when, about 425 AD through the intervening provinces to Spain. There they found Visigoths from South Russia and other German tribes setting up dukes and kings. From Spain, the Vandals under Genseric sailed for North Africa in 429, captured Carthage in 439 and built a fleet. They secured the mastery of the sea and captured and pillaged Rome in 455, which had recovered very imperfectly from her capture and looting by Alaric half a century earlier. Then the Vandals made themselves masters of Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and most of the other islands of the Western Mediterranean. They made in fact a sea empire, very similar in its extent to the Sea Empire of Carthage 700 odd years before. They were at the climax of their power about 477. They were a mere handful of conquerors holding all this country. In the next century, almost all their territory had been reconquered for the Empire of Constantinople, during a transitory blaze of energy under Justinian I. The story of the Vandals is but one sample of a host of similar adventures. But now there was coming into the European world the least kindred and most redoubtable of all these devastators, the Mongolian Huns or Tartars. A people active and able, such as the Western world had never before encountered. Chapter 40 The Huns and the End of the Western Empire This appearance of a conquering Mongolian people in Europe may be taken to mark a new stage in human history. Until the last century or so before the Christian era, the Mongol and the Nordic peoples had not been in close touch. Far away in the frozen lands beyond the northern forests, the Laps, a Mongolian people, had drifted westward as far as Lapland, but they played no part in the main current of history. For thousands of years, the Western world carried on the dramatic interplay of the Aryan, Semitic, and fundamental Brunette peoples, with very little interference, except for an Ethiopian invasion of Egypt or so, either from the African peoples to the south, or from the Mongolian world in the Far East. It is probable that there were two chief causes for the new westward drift of the nomadic Mongolians. One was the consolidation of the Great Empire of China, its extension northward, and the increase of its population during the prosperous period of the Han Dynasty. The other was some process of climatic change, a lesser rainfall that abolished swamps and forests, perhaps, or a greater rainfall that extended grazing over desert steps. Or even perhaps, both these processes going on in different regions, but which anyhow facilitated a westward migration. A third contributory cause was the economic wretchedness, internal decay, and falling population of the Roman Empire. The rich men of the later Roman Republic and then the tax gatherers of the military emperors had utterly consumed its vitality. So we have the factors of thrust, means, and opportunity. There was pressure from the east, rot in the west, and an open road. The Hun had reached the eastern boundaries of European Russia by the first century AD. But it was not until the fourth and fifth centuries AD that these horsemen rose to predominance upon the steppes. The fifth century was the Huns' century. The first Huns to come into Italy were mercenary bands in the pay of Stilicho the Vandal, the master of Anorius. Presently they were in possession of Pannonia, the empty nest of the Vandals. By the second quarter of the fifth century, a great war chief had arisen among the Huns, Attila. We have only vague and tantalizing glimpses of his power. He ruled not only over the Huns but over a conglomerate of tributary Germanic tribes. His empire extended from the Rhine crossed the plains into Central Asia. He exchanged ambassadors with China. His head camp was in the plain of Hungary east of the Danube. There he was visited by an envoy from Constantinople, Priscus, who has left us an account of his state. The way of living of these Mongols was very like the way of living of the primitive Aryans they had replaced. The common folk were in huts and tents. The chiefs lived in great stockaded timber halls. There were feasts and drinking and singing by the bards. The Homeric heroes and even the Macedonian Companions of Alexander would probably have felt more at home in the camp capital of Attila than they would have done in the cultivated and decadent court of Theodosius II, the son of Arcadius, who was then reigning in Constantinople. For a time it seemed as though the nomads under the leadership of the Huns and Attila would play the same part towards the Greco-Roman civilization of the Mediterranean countries that the barbaric Greeks had played long ago to the Aegean civilization. It looked like history repeating itself upon a larger stage. But the Huns were much more wedded to the nomadic life than the early Greeks, who were rather migratory cattle farmers than true nomads. The Huns raided and plundered, but did not settle. For some years Attila bullied Theodosius as he chose. His armies devastated and looted right down to the walls of Constantinople. Gibbon says that he totally destroyed no less than 70 cities in the Balkan Peninsula, and Theodosius bought him off by payments of tribute and tried to get rid of him for good by sending secret agents to assassinate him. In 451, Attila turned his attention to the remains of the Latin-speaking half of the Empire and invaded Gaul. Nearly every town in northern Gaul was sacked. Franks, Visigoths, and the Imperial Forces united against him, and he was defeated at Troy's in a vast dispersed battle, in which a multitude of men, variously estimated as between 150,000 and 300,000, were killed. This checked him in Gaul, but it did not exhaust his enormous military resources. Next year, he came into Italy by way of Venetia, burned Aquilia and Padua, and looted Milan. Numbers of fugitives from these North Italian towns, and particularly from Padua, fled to islands in the lagoons at the head of the Adriatic, and laid there the foundations of the city-state of Venice, which was to become one of the greatest of the trading centers of the Middle Ages. In 453, Attila died suddenly, after a great feast to celebrate his marriage to a young woman, and at his death this plunder confederation of his fell to pieces. The actual Huns disappear from history, mixed into the surrounding more numerous Aryan-speaking populations. But these great Hun raids practically consummated the end of the Latin Roman Empire. After his death, ten different emperors ruled in Rome in twenty years, set up by vandal and other mercenary troops. The vandals from Carthage took and sacked Rome in 455. Finally, in 476, Odoacer, the chief of the barbarian troops, suppressed a Pannonian who was figuring as emperor under the impressive name of Romulus Augustalis, and informed the court of Constantinople that there was no longer an emperor in the west. So ingloriously, the Latin Roman Empire came to an end. In 493, the Adaric, the Goth became king of Rome. All over Western and Central Europe now, barbarian chiefs were reigning as kings, dukes, and the like, practically independent, but for the most part, professing some sort of shadowy allegiance to the emperor. There were hundreds and perhaps thousands of such practically independent brigand rulers. In Gaul, Spain, and Italy, and in Dacia, the Latin speech still prevailed in locally distorted forms. But in Britain, and east of the Rhine, languages of the German group, or in Bohemia, a Slavonic language, Czech, were the common speech. The superior clergy and a small remnant of other educated men read and wrote Latin. Everywhere life was insecure and property was held by the strong arm. Castles multiplied and roads fell into decay. The dawn of the sixth century was an age of division and of intellectual darkness throughout the western world. Had it not been for the monks and Christian missionaries, Latin learning might have perished altogether. Why had the Roman Empire grown and why had it so completely decayed? It grew because at first the idea of citizenship held it together. Throughout the days of the expanding republic and even into the days of the early empire, there remained a great number of men conscious of Roman citizenship, feeling it a privilege and an obligation to be a Roman citizen, confident of their rights under the Roman law and willing to make sacrifices in the name of Rome. The prestige of Rome as of something just and great and law upholding it spread far beyond the Roman boundaries. But even as early as the Punic Wars, the sense of citizenship was being undermined by the growth of wealth and slavery. Citizenship spread indeed, but not the idea of citizenship. The Roman Empire was, after all, a very primitive organization. It did not educate, did not explain itself to its increasing multitudes of citizens, did not invite their cooperation in its decisions. There was no network of schools to ensure a common understanding, no distribution of news to sustain collective activity. The adventurers who struggled for power, from the days of Marius and Salah onward, had no idea of creating and calling in public opinion upon the imperial affairs. The spirit of citizenship died of starvation, and no one observed it die. All empires, all states, all organizations of human society are in the ultimate, things of understanding and will. There remained no will for the Roman Empire in the world, and so it came to an end. But though the Latin-speaking Roman Empire died in the 5th century, something else had been born within it that was to avail itself enormously of its prestige and tradition, and that was the Latin-speaking half of the Catholic Church. This lived while the Empire died because it appealed to the minds and wills of men, because it had books and a great system of teachers and missionaries to hold it together, things stronger than any law or legions. Throughout the 4th and 5th centuries AD., while the Empire was decaying, Christianity was spreading to a universal dominion in Europe. It conquered its conquerors, the barbarians. When Attila seemed disposed to march on Rome, the Patriarch of Rome intercepted him and did what no armies could do, turning him back by sheer moral force. The Patriarch or Pope of Rome claimed to be the head of the entire Christian Church. Now that there were no more emperors, he began to annex imperial titles and claims. He took the title of Pontifex Maximus, head sacrificial priest of the Roman Dominion, the most ancient of all the titles that the emperors had enjoyed. And with the end of the Roman Empire, I think we'll end this evening's reading from A Short History of the World by HG. Wells, which once again was a most interesting and concise trot through the world's history. I hope you enjoyed that. If you'd like to read this fascinating work for yourself, as always, you'll find a link to a free e-book from Project Gutenberg in the show description. If you'd like to connect, suggest a Boring Book you'd like to hear read, or request more from one we've already started, you can drop me an e-mail via our website www.boringbookspod.com. It's always a pleasure to hear from you. Thank you so much for joining me for this evening's reading. Until our next Boring Book, good night!