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Their architecture is essentially social. The cultivated citizen, and the noble leading a refined and intellectual life, find in Roman architecture all their wants adequately supplied. Of this there can be perhaps no better example than the magnificent baths, which ministered at once to use and intelligent enjoyment. It was the pride of the Romans to regard no luxury as luxury unless it wooed them in association with forms of beauty.
In treating of Roman architecture as thus characterised, allusion is naturally made to its condition under the earliest Emperors. In republican times it no doubt partook of the simplicity and comparative rudeness of Etruscan architecture; while, in its later forms, its magnificence lost elegance, and degenerated into that aspiration for splendour irrespective of refinement which culminated in Byzantium.
As mankind lost its appreciation of Grecian wisdom and philosophy, more barbaric elements were necessary to impress them with ideas of grandeur; and hence all that dazzled the eye in luxury of surface, combined with vastness of scale, superseded purer sources of architectural effect in the earliest works of the lower Empire. Under Constantine at Constantinople, and Honorius at Rome, architecture certainly fell to zero.
For the resuscitation of the art some new and all powerful stimulus appeared to be altogether indispensable. Such a stimulus and revivification speedily supervened. It was not alone the transplantation by Constantine of Roman artificers and artizans, and degenerate Greeks to Constantinople that produced this new life. It was rather the introduction of an entirely new set of artistic wants, and a certain amount of fire struck from the accidental meeting of Eastern with Western artists. When Justinian desired to raise a monument which should be worthy of the God of the Christians,—the principle of "Divine Wisdom,"—and of his own dignity as Emperor of the East, he sought, like a great and wise man, to break away from the effete traditions of the