The last act in the official crusade against paganism, open spoliation, had become possible at length through the sheer decadence of character in the empire. In the west, so-called Romans had lived on a tradition of ancient rule till they were become as masquerading apes in the light of the retrospect: all that was left of patrician semblance was a faculty for declamation, pedantry, and pomp. The repeated discussions over the removal of the statue of Victory were on the senatorial side a tissue of artificial rhetoric, on the Christian a mixture of frank bigotry and bad sophistry. Religious fanaticism, the last and lowest form of moral energy, abounded only with the mob; and the formless pagan crowd, never in touch with priests or senators, and never conscious of a common centre, was useless for political purposes when at length the upper class had need of it; while the much smaller Christian mob, drilled and incited to a common fervour, was a force formidable even to the autocrat. Patricians whose line had for centuries cringed in all things political were not the men to lose their lives for a ceremonial; and those of them who as priests had been plundered by Gratian and Theodosius were on this side also devoid of organization, and incapable of joint action. The rule of Valentinian had forced the Christian Church to remain in touch with its original and popular sources of revenue; whereas the pagan priesthoods, once deprived of stipends and domains, had nowhere to turn to, and may be said to have fallen without a blow, unless the deposition of Valentinian II by Arbogastes, and the short usurpation of Eugenius, be regarded as their last official effort to survive.
But the cause of empire in the West was no less moribund than that of the ancient Gods. Italy was reaching the last stage of economic and military depletion. The richest revenue-yielding provinces of the empire lay in Africa and the East; and when there came the fatal struggle with barbarism, the eastern and richer part of the empire, so long wont to act independently of the western, let that succumb. It was at least dramatically fit that the multiform and fortuitous contexture of Roman paganism, evolved like the empire itself by a long series of instinctive acts and adaptations, unruled by any higher wisdom, should yield up its official form and sustenance to feed the dying body politic, and should be expunged from the face of the State before that was overthrown. Augustine might say what he would to the reproachful pagans, but the last humiliation came under Christian auspices; and the fanatical Jerome, type of the transformation of Roman energy from action to private pietism, had to weep in his old age that his cult could not save the immemorial city whose very name had so long ruled the world, and was almost the last semblance of a great thing left in it.