The Last Athenian Author:Viktor Rydberg Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VII. PETER. The secretaries and waiting priests had departed. The moon, rising over Lycabettus, shed its light upon the western colonnade in the de... more »serted court. Peter was alone in his study, through whose only window, fashioned like a port-hole, the moonbeams streamed, contending with the light of a lamp, on a ponderous table, whose rays were directed by means of a shade, upon an open book. Not far from the table stood a cupboard, fashioned in the same heavy style as the table, and supporting a book case, which contained some volumes and rolls of papyrus. On the wall opposite the book-case hung a map of the world, drawn in accordance with Ptolemy's idea of the divisions of land and water. On this map the bishop had marked out with fine but distinct lines the boundaries of each mother-church: you could see how the Orient was divided into the patriarchates of Constantinople, Corinth, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria, how these were crowded together on one side of the world, while the rest composed one enormous whole, embracing Italy, Africa, Mau- retania, Hispania, Gaul and Britannia—with its centre at Rome. Rome's name alone was yet a power. Dreading the memory of freedom, whose ghost still wandered there, the first Christian emperor had removed his court to the new capital he had built on the Bosphorus. He had lavished the treasures of the world to give this creation of his a splendor and greatness that might rival, and if possible surpass, that of the old Tiber city. He had robbed a thousand towns of their works of art to embellish this. He hadcalled his city New Rome, that, with the name, it might also inherit the respect and adoration bestowed upon the old. But for the people old Rome was, and remained, the capital of the world, and in spite of Con...« less