The primitive monks renounced all property and family relations; the cenobites surrendered also their will.  On entering the community they engaged to possess nothing, not to marry, and to obey.  “The monks,” says St. Basil, “live a spiritual life like the angels.”  The first union among the cenobites was the construction of houses in close proximity.  Later each community built a monastery, a great edifice, where each monk had his cell.  A Christian compares these cells “to a hive of bees where each has in his hands the wax of work, in his mouth the honey of psalms and prayers.”  These great houses needed a written constitution; this was the Monastic Rule.  St. Pachomius was the first to prepare one.  St. Basil wrote another that was adopted by almost all the monasteries of the Orient.

FOOTNOTES: 

[165] The church counted ten persecutions, the first under Nero, the last under Diocletian.

[166] The word is Greek and signifies place of repose.

[167] See his biography in the “Lives of the Fathers of the Desert,” by Rufinus.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE LATER EMPIRE

THE REVOLUTIONS OF THE THIRD CENTURY

=Military Anarchy.=—­After the reigns of the Antonines the civil wars commenced.  There were in the empire, beside the praetorian guard in Rome, several great armies on the Rhine, on the Danube, in the East, and in England.  Each aimed to make its general emperor.  Ordinarily the rivals fought it out until there was but one left; this one then governed for a few years, after which he was assassinated,[168] or if, by chance, he could transmit his power to his son, the soldiers revolted against the son and the war recommenced.  The following, for example, is what occurred in 193.  The praetorians had massacred the emperor Pertinax, and the army conceived the notion of putting up the empire at auction; two purchasers presented themselves, Sulpicius offering each soldier $1,000 and Didius more than $1,200.  The praetorians brought the latter to the Senate and had him named emperor; later, when he did not pay them, they murdered him.  At the same time the great armies of Britain, Illyricum, and Syria proclaimed each its own general as emperor and the three rivals marched on Rome.  The Illyrian legions arrived first, and their general Septimius Severus was named emperor by the Senate.  Then commenced two sanguinary wars, the one against the legions of Syria, and the other against the legions of Britain.  At the end of two years the emperor was victorious.  It is he who states his policy as follows, “My son, content the soldiers and you may despise the rest.”  For a century there was no other form of government than the will of the soldiers.  They killed the emperors who displeased them and replaced them by their favorites.