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Updated: May 31, 2025
No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs.
But the royalty of the Flavian line, which had been first ennobled by the Gothic Claudius, descended through several generations; and Constantine himself derived from his royal father the hereditary honors which he transmitted to his children. The emperor had been twice married. Minervina, the obscure but lawful object of his youthful attachment, had left him only one son, who was called Crispus.
It was an age when the love of truth was almost dead, extinguished partly by the crushing tyranny of omnipotent Emperors, partly by the intellectual and moral degeneration of pagan society. The Flavian house soon showed the same characteristics of a vainglorious despotism as the line of Caesars which it had supplanted.
Securely intrenched within that quarter and the Temple, Simon and John began the last resistance which should tax Roman endurance and Roman patience as it had not been taxed before. Titus no longer lagged. Famine had long since become a powerful ally and the honor of the Flavian house rested upon his immediate subjugation of the rebellious city.
The Coliseum, also, ma'am, is a wonderful place. It was built by the Flavian emperors, and when completed could hold eighty thousand spectators seated, with about twenty thousand standing. In hot weather these spectators were protected from the rays of the sun by means of awnings. It is a mighty fabric, ma'am!" "I should think so," said Lady Dalrymple. "The arch of Titus, ma'am, is a fine ruin.
Xenaias had been made bishop of Hierapolis by Peter the Fuller, was in fierce conflict with Flavian, patriarch of Antioch, and raised almost all Syria against him. He carried the flame of discord even to Constantinople. There a certain fanatic, Ascholius, tried to murder Macedonius, who pardoned him and bestowed on him a monthly pension.
In the last years of this emperor, the churches of the eastern empire were involved in the greatest disorders and sufferings. He had thrown aside altogether the mask of Catholic: he filled the patriarchal sees with the fiercest heretics. Flavian was driven from Antioch, Elias from Jerusalem. Timotheus, a man of bad character, had been put by him into the see of Constantinople.
The reigns of Nerva and Trajan, however much they were hailed as the beginning of a golden age, were really far less fertile in literary works than those of the Flavian Emperors; and the boasted restoration of freedom of speech was almost immediately followed by an all but complete silence of the Latin tongue.
The theology of Leo, his famous tome or epistle on the mystery of the incarnation, had been disregarded by the synod of Ephesus: his authority, and that of the Latin church, was insulted in his legates, who escaped from slavery and death to relate the melancholy tale of the tyranny of Dioscorus and the martyrdom of Flavian.
The dome of Agrippa, still glittering with bronze, the mausoleum of Adrian, not yet deprived of its columns and statues, the Flavian amphitheatre, not yet degraded into a quarry, told to the rude English pilgrims some part of the story of that great civilised world which had passed away.
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