The relationship—or lack of it—between religious belief and socalled secular culture is a topic which has been of perennial interest both to ancient students of religion and history and to modern historians. Students today use the phrase Unity of Faith and Culture because it has become current and because it bears some relationship to our own situation and problems, but we must also consider the subject, at least as we see it in antiquity, in terms of the interdependence or the interaction of faith and culture.

One of the most impressive manifestations of the majesty and the antiquity of the Byzantine Empire must have been the great series of imperial tombs in the mausoleums of Constantine and Justinian which were attached to the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. Beginning with the burial of Constantine the Great (d. 337), the mausoleums served as the resting-places of most of the emperors (often with members of their families) who reigned during the next seven centuries, the last emperor to be buried there being Constantine VIII (d. 1028). The mausoleums then became full, and the emperors began to be buried in other churches and monasteries in Constantinople, often in establishments which they themselves had founded. There are not many comparable series of royal burials, and the presence of these tombs, as a visible record of the greatness of Byzantium, was one reason why the Church of the Holy Apostles enjoyed a celebrity only second to that of St. Sophia.

The emperors, beginning with Constantine the Great, understood very well the importance of placing the imperial burials in a worthy setting. The significance of the burials is illustrated by a report of a speech of Leo V, the Armenian (813–820), in which Leo is supposed to have remarked that the orthodox emperors were all buried respectably at the Holy Apostles, while the others died in exile or on the field of battle. In reality most of the emperors who reigned before the time of Leo V were buried at the Holy Apostles, and nearly all of those who reigned between his time and the beginning of the eleventh century were buried there.

All scholars who have been concerned with the Church of St. Sophia in Constantinople have noticed that different sources sometimes give it different names, or different forms of the same name. A certain number of examples of the usage of the ancient writers have been collected and have been available in the current works of reference, but these published lists are not exhaustive. Having had occasion to make a study of the name of the church as given by Nikolaos Mesarites, the present writer has made a collection of examples which appears to be larger than any hitherto published, and it is hoped that the testimonia assembled here may give scholars a better understanding of the conception which the ancient writers had of the dedication of the church and the significance of the designations which were applied to it.

In part, perhaps, because of the lack of a modern edition — the most recent, Wilhelm Dindorf's text of 1832, has become extremely scarce — Themistius' orations, and their significance in the religious and intellectual history of the fourth century, have not been as well known as they should be. It is hoped that a new edition may be forthcoming before long. In the meantime the present study will offer some observations on Themistius' writings which will suggest some of his significance in the general picture of the fourth century. Incidentally the writer will venture to point out various passages which suggest that Themistius had some knowledge of the Christian scriptures, especially the New Testament.

Students of the cultural history of the late Roman and Byzantine periods sometimes speculate as to what may have been the ordinary daily intellectual interests—the private store of detached thought and emotion—of the average educated men of those times. To us, the literary activity of those centuries seems a barren skeleton, picked bare by the sophists, an abhorrent thing in which we can find no real interest. The formal philosophy of the schools was a wild business whose fantastic flights seem to many of us today to be quite incredible and absurd. We can perhaps understand a little better the intellectual and political interest which attached to the theological controversies, though these often went to lengths which seem to us to be excessive. Private religious experience there was, of course, and there was an emotional outlet in Christian art which we can understand quite well. But even the total of these things will not perhaps satisfy our curiosity; whether rightly or wrongly, we find it difficult to understand that a man's life can have been made up of these things alone, and we wonder what a mind of at least some independence and vigor can have found as a basis for its individual existence.

In these days, when men's ideas of the functions of rulers and governments are being changed—sometimes overnight—and when new programs and new “ideologies” are proclaimed with bewildering suddenness, students are returning with renewed interest, and with new interests, to the investigation of ancient governments. The nature and significance of the official character of the Roman emperor, and of his heir, the Byzantine emperor, has proved a particularly fruitful field of research in recent years, and our ideas in this domain have been transformed and expanded in significant fashion. We have been shown, for example, how the emperor came to be surrounded by a whole galaxy of attributes and virtues — chief among them Bravery, Clemency, Justice, Sense of Duty, Foresight—which made up his official personality. Constantly illustrated on coins and commemorated in inscriptions, these attributes served to remind the people of the Roman Empire what they might expect from their rulers. The emperor came to be looked upon as the father of his people, the source of all good things, and the fount of all wisdom and law.

Few figures in the story of the rise and establishment of Christianity have drawn so much attention as Julian the Apostate. The emperor who attempted to overthrow the church and reestablish the ancient pagan faith has from his own day to this been bitterly attacked by some, and as stoutly defended by others, until he has become almost a legendary character. Whether monster or tragic hero, his brief career has inevitably called forth an enormous literature in which every shade of the Christian and the pagan points of view is represented. Professional scholars and men of letters, attracted by a number of different aspects of the emperor's life, find rich material in the problem of his curiously mixed personality and in the spectacle of this last concerted; attempt to revive dying paganism. The manner in which the pagans responded to the attempt, and the way in which the church combatted this attack upon it, are alike subjects which will seem to every student to offer valuable lessons. Scholars realize both the difficulty and the importance of a just appreciation of these problems, and the effort to assay them properly has produced studies of the highest value.

The sixth century in the Eastern Roman Empire saw the appointment to high ecclesiastical offices of several laymen chosen from the upper ranks of the army and the civil service. Apollinaris, patriarch of Alexandria from 551 to 570, had been before his appointment a high military officer, and his successor John had likewise passed the whole of his previous career in the army. It was evidently their marked executive ability which was responsible for the sudden translation of such men from the government service to the church, and in their new careers their energy and their mastery of administrative detail no doubt outweighed any previous lack of training in theological affairs.