WE have seen that the Roman Imperium under Justinian reached the absolutism to which it had always tended, and Justinian realized that Caesaropapism at which the Christian Emperors had been continually aiming. It has been pointed out that Justinian accomplished his great achievements by means of an artificial State system, which maintained the Empire in equilibrium for the time; but it was only for the time. At his death the winds were loosed from prison; the disintegrating elements began to operate with full force; the artificial system collapsed; and the metamorphosis in the character of the Empire, which had been surely progressing for a long time past, though one is apt to overlook it amid the striking events of Justinian's busy reign, now began to work rapidly and perceptibly.

Things which seemed of comparatively secondary importance under the enterprising government of Justinian, engage the whole attention of his successors. The Persian war assumes a serious aspect, and soon culminates in a struggle for life or death; the Balkan peninsula is overrun by Avars and Slaves; and consequently the Empire cannot retain any real hold on its recent conquests in Italy and Spain. Thus the chief features of the reigns of Justin, Tiberius, and Maurice are: the struggle against the Persians, with whom the Romans become less and less able to cope, the sufferings of Illyricum and Thrace at the hands of Hunnic and Slavonic barbarians, the conquests of the Lombards in Italy, and the change in the political position of the Emperor, whose power sensibly declines. The general disintegration of the Empire reaches a climax in the reign of Phocas (602-610), and the State is with difficulty rescued from destruction and revived by the energy and ability of Heraclius.

In reading the history of the later years of Justinian we are conscious of a darkness creeping over the sky; the light that had illuminated the early part of his reign is waning. This change had become perceptible after the great plague. But after the death of Justinian the darkness is imminent; the Empire is stricken as it were with paralysis, and a feeling of despondency prevails; the Emperors are like men grappling with hopeless tasks. We are not surprised that an idea possessed men's minds that the end of the world or some great change was at hand; it expressed the feeling that the spiritual atmosphere was dark, and the prospect comfortless. "He that is giddy thinks the world turns round."

I.

Justin II

A struggle for the succession between the relations of Justin and those of Theodora had at one time seemed probable, but it had been forestalled by the alliance of the two families in the person of Justin, a nephew of the Emperor, and Sophia, a niece of the Empress. Justin held the position of curopalates, >which we might translate mayor of the palac, and on his uncle's death was at once recognized by the senate. The panegyric of the African poet Corippus, written in four books of Latin hexameters, de laudibus Justini Augusti minoris, giving a coloured account of the circumstances of the Emperor's accession, had probably a political intention. Justin required a trumpet.

According to the narrative in the poem of Corippus, which we may assume to represent, with sufficient accuracy, what actually happened, Justin was wakened before daybreak by the Patrician Callinicus, who announced that Justinian was dead. At the same time the senate entered the palace buildings, and proceeding to a beautiful room overlooking the sea, whither Justin had already repaired, found him conversing with his wife Sophia. Callinicus, as the spokesman of the senate, greeted Justin as the new Augustus, virtually designated by the late Emperor as his successor. All then repaired to the imperial chambers, and gazed on the corpse of the deceased sovereign, who lay on a golden bier. Justin is represented as apostrophising the dead, and complaining that his uncle left the world at a critical moment: "Behold the Avars and the fierce Franks, and the Gepids and the Goths (Getae, probably meaning the Slaves), and so many other nations encompass us with wars." Sophia ordered an embroidered cloth to be brought, on which the whole series of Justinian's labours was wrought in gold and brilliant colours, the Emperor himself in the midst with his foot resting on the neck of the Vandal tyrant.

In the morning Justin and his wife proceeded to the church of St. Sophia, and made a public declaration of the orthodox faith. Returning to the palace, Justin assumed the royal robes and ornaments, and was raised on a shield lifted by four guardsmen, after which ceremony the Patriarch blessed him and placed the diadem on his head. The Emperor then delivered an inaugural speech from the throne, in which he enunciated his intention to pursue the principles of piety and justice, and regretted that important departments of the administration had been neglected or mismanaged in the last years of Justinian, who in his old age was careless of such matters, and cold to the things of this life. After this oration, the senate in due form adored the new Emperor.

Then, attended by the senators and court, Justin proceeded to the hippodrome, and took his seat in the cathisma. When the jubilant greetings of the people, who had taken no part in his actual elevation, had subsided, the Emperor delivered another oration, exhorting the populace to be peaceable and orderly, and announcing his intention to assume the consulship and honour the following year with his name.

Suddenly the benches which lined each side of the hippodrome were emptied, and crowds of people made their way to the space in front of the cathisma. They presented to the Emperor bonds for loans which his uncle had contracted, and implored or demanded to be repaid. Justin in his speech to the senators had signified his purpose of liquidating these debts, and he now commanded that the money should be paid on the spot. The scene is graphically described by the obsequious pen of Corippus. This popular act was followed by another example of clemency, and many prisoners were released at the prayers of their kinsfolk. Corippus seems to imply that the prisons were entirely emptied, and takes pains to justify a hardly justifiable act.

The poet goes on to describe the obsequies of Justinian, the beauties of the imperial palace, and the reception of the Avaric ambassadors, but we need not follow him further. The Emperor appointed his son-in-law Baduarius, who had married his daughter Arabia, to the post of curopalates, which his own accession had rendered vacant.

The accession of Justin was not wholly unendangered or unstained with blood. A conspiracy of two senators was detected and punished, and the Emperor's namesake Justin, the son of his cousin Germanus, was put to death in Alexandria as a dangerous and perhaps designing relation. The influence of Sophia may have been operative here, for enmity and jealousy had always prevailed between her aunt Theodora and the family of Germanus.

Sophia had the ambition, without the genius, of her aunt Theodora. Like her, she had been originally a monophysite. But a bishop had suggested that the heretical opinions of her husband and herself stood in the way of his promotion to the rank of Caesar; and accordingly the pair found it convenient to join the ranks of the orthodox, on whom they had before looked down as "synodites". It is perhaps to be regretted that Sophia was not content to induce her husband to alter his opinions and to retain her own faith. The administration of an orthodox Emperor and a monophysitic Empress had worked well in the case of Justinian and Theodora; the balance of religious parties had been maintained, so that neither was alienated from the crown. It is probable that if Sophia had remained satisfied with One Nature, the persecution of monophysitic heretics, which disgraced the latter half of Justin's reign, would not have taken place, and the eastern provinces would have been less estranged from the central power.

When Justin came to the throne he decided to make a fresh start and abandon the unpopular system of his uncle, as is clearly indicated in the poem of Corippus. An opportunity of taking a first step in this direction was offered almost immediately by the arrival of an embassy of Avars to demand the payments which Justinian's policy was accustomed to grant. Justin boldly refused to concede these payments any longer, and his refusal was the signal for a series of ruinous depredations, which prepared the way for a complete change in the population of the Illyrian provinces. This resolution of Justin was a direct break with a vital part of the Justinianean system, and was perhaps not unwise, for money payments could have hardly restrained the Avars and Slaves much longer from invading the cis-Danubian countries. It was a popular act, because it seemed brave, and might lead to the possibility of lightening the burden of taxation.

Justinian's religious doctrines in his last years had been erratic, and he was stigmatized as a heretic. In this respect, too, Justin's accession signalized a reaction. He published a manifesto to all Christians strictly orthodox, from whom he expressly excluded the friends of one nature. But at this time he did not purpose to do more than withdraw the light of his countenance from the party which had, in recent years at least, been contented with Justinian. A monophysite expressly acknowledges that for the first six years of his reign Justin was mild and peaceable in his religious policy.

Circumstances necessitated the reaction which Justin's reign inaugurated, but they equally necessitated the failure of this attempt at a new policy. Justin was not a strong man, and the circumstances of the time were strong and inexorable. He was completely unsuccessful, as he owned before he died, and his mind was probably diseased long before he became undoubtedly insane. We Can measure his want of success by the fact that even the orthodox did not approve of him; and ecclesiastical historians are prepared to forgive much for the grace of the two natures. Evagrius speaks of him in harsh terms, charging him with avarice and profligacy, and with trafficking in ecclesiastical offices. And he seems to have resorted to many modes of raising money which were not calculated to make his rule beloved; for though he wisely remitted a burden of arrears which could not be profitably exacted, he levied on ship-cargoes taxes, which brought in large sums, and also taxed the bread which was publicly distributed in the capital and called "political (or civil) loaves."

But the state of the Empire was such that popularity could only have been obtained by an almost unwise generosity, such as that by which Tiberius afterwards won general affection; and such a policy would have ultimately aided rather than arrested the forces of disintegration. The disintegration took place in two different ways.

(1) On the one hand the imperial power was no longer absolute. The Emperor found himself face to face with a number of wealthy and influential aristocrats, whose power had increased so much in the declining years of Justinian that they were almost able to assume an independent attitude.

History shows us that the maintenance of law is least secure when aristocratic classes become predominant; turbulence waxes rife, attempts to override the rights of inferiors are sure to take place, and the only safeguard is a strong monarchical authority. Now this evil prevailed in the days of Justin. The noble lords were turbulent and licentious, and while Justin made praiseworthy efforts to enforce the law at all costs, there was, doubtless, a constant struggle, in which Justin was generally obliged to compromise; and we can thus understand a bitter allusion in a speech which he delivered on the occasion of Tiberius' elevation to the rank of Caesar. He bade Tiberius beware of the lords, who were present at the ceremony, as of men who had led himself into an evil plight.

Justin's desire to enforce the maintenance of justice, and the corruption with which he had to contend, are illustrated by an anecdote. The prefect of the city was a man who, knowing Justin's anxiety to protect the oppressed, had proposed himself for the post, and had promised that if he received for a certain time full powers, unrestricted by any privilege of class, the wronged individuals who were always addressing appeals to the throne would soon cease to trouble the sovereign. One day a man appeared before the prefect and accused a person of senatorial rank. The accused noble did not vouch­safe to notice the prefect's summons, and, on receiving a second citation, attended a banquet of the Emperor instead of appearing in court. During the feast the prefect entered the banqueting-hall of the palace, and addressed the Emperor: "I promised your Majesty to leave not a single oppressed person in the city within a certain time, and I shall succeed perfectly in my engagement if your authority come to my aid. But if you shelter and patronize wrongdoers, and entertain them at your table, I shall fail. Either allow me to resign or do not recognize the wrongdoers". The Emperor replied: "If I am the man, take me". The prefect, thus reassured, arrested the criminal, tried him, found him guilty, and flogged him. The plaintiff was recompensed amply. It is said that people were so terrified by this example of strictness that for thirty days no accusations were lodged with the prefect

(2) At the same time the bonds which attached the provinces of the Empire to the centre, and thereby to  each other, were being loosened; and it is important to notice and easy to apprehend that this change was closely connected with the diminution of the imperial authority. For that authority held the heterogeneous  elements together in one whole; and if the position of the Emperor became insecure or his hand weak, the centrifugal forces immediately began to operate. Now, it is to be noted that certain changes introduced by Justinian, which from one point of view might seem to make for absolutism, were calculated to further the progress of the centrifugal tendency if it once began to set in. I refer to the removal of some important rungs in the ladder of the administrative hierarchy; the abolition of the count of the East and the vicarius of Asiana. These smaller centres had helped to preserve the compactness of the Empire, and their abolition operated in the reverse direction.

A remarkable law of Justin (568 AD) is preserved, in which he yields to the separatist tendencies of the provinces to a certain extent. This law provided that the governor of each province should be appointed without cost at the request of the bishops, landowners, and inhabitants of the province. It was a considerable concession in the direction of local government, and its importance will be more fully recognized if it is remembered that Justinian had introduced in some provinces the practice of investing the civil governor, who held judicial as well as administrative power, with military authority also. It is a measure which sheds much light on the state of the Empire, and reminds us of that attempt of Honorius to give representative local government to the cities in the south of Gaul, a measure which came too late to cure the political lethargy which prevailed.

The estrangement of the eastern provinces from the crown was further increased by the persecutions of heretics, which began about the year 572. The Emperor fell under the influence of the Patriarch, John of Sirimis (a place near Antioch), and to have been induced by him to make a new attempt at unifying the Church by means of persecution. The procedure against the Samaritans (572 AD) was so effective that that important people became quite insignificant. The monophysitic monks and nuns were expelled from their monasteries and convents, fleeing "like birds before the hawk." John of Ephesus, a monophysite, describes in his ecclesiastical history the details of this persecution. We may take as an example the case of Antipatra and Juliana, two noble ladies attached to the monophysitic faith. They were confined in a monastery at Chalcedon, and, because they would not accept the formula of the orthodox, were obliged to wear the dress of nuns, were shorn of their hair, and were "made to sweep the convent, and carry away the dirt, and scrub and wash out the latrinae, and serve in the kitchen, and wash the candlesticks and dishes, and perform other similar duties." Unable to endure these hardships, they submitted in form to the Chalcedonian communion. This, however, is said to have been a very mild case. The measure which the monophysites most resented was the annulling of the orders of their clergy. The Patriarch of Constantinople had hereby a welcome opportunity for interfering with the dioceses of Antioch, Alexandria, and Cyprus over which he desired to exercise a jurisdiction like that which the bishop of Rome possessed over the see of Thessalonica, for example, or the see of Ravenna.

In the year 574 the Emperor became a hopeless and even dangerous lunatic, and his vagaries were the talk of Constantinople. It was necessary to place bars on his windows to prevent him from hurling himself down, and in his fits he used to bite his chamberlains. The only charm by which they could then quiet his fury was the words, "The son of Gabolo is coming"—a reference to Harith, king of a tribe of Arabs. When he heard this exclamation he was cowed at once. His favourite amusement was to sit in a little waggon, which his attendants used to draw about in the palace chambers, and a musical instrument was constantly played in his presence to calm his temper.

Sophia did not feel equal to carrying on the government without male assistance, especially as the Persian war was pressing the realm hard. Her representations of the unfortunate state of things in the capital had, it is said, induced Chosroes to grant a temporary peace, but the renewal of the war was certain at a near date, while the Avars were unceasing in their hostilities. A firm hand at the reins was indispensable. Accordingly, in the last month of 574, in one of his sane intervals, Justin, at her instance, created Tiberius, the count of the excubiti, a Caesar. On this occasion he delivered an unexpectedly candid and repentant speech, which made a deep impression on contemporaries.

"Know, he said, that it is God who blesses yon and confers this dignity and its symbols upon you, not I. Honour it, that you may be honoured by it. Honour your mother, who was hitherto your queen; you do not forget that formerly you were her slave, now you are her son. Delight not in the shedding of blood; take no share in murder; do not return evil for evil, that you may become like unto me in unpopularity. I have been called to account as a man, for I fell, and I received according to my sins; but I shall sue those who caused me to err at the throne of Christ. Let not this imperial garb elate thee as it elated me. Act to all men as you would act to yourself, remembering what yon were before and what you are now. Be not arrogant, and you will not go wrong: you know what I was, what I became, and what I am. All these are your children and servants—you know that I preferred you to my own blood; you see them here before you, you see all the persons of the administration. Pay attention to the army; do not encourage informers, and let not men say of thee, 'His predecessor was such and such'; for I speak from my own experience. Permit those who possess to enjoy their property in peace; and give unto those who possess not."

The Patriarch then pronounced a prayer, and when all had said Amen, and the new Caesar had fallen at the feet of the Augustus, Justin said, "If you will, I live; if you will not, I die. May God, who made heaven and earth, place in your heart all that I have forgotten to tell you."

But although Sophia approved and promoted the elevation of Tiberius to the rank of Caesar and the position of regent, she was determined to retain all her authority and sovereignty as Augusta, and above all she would not consent to the presence of another queen in the palace. Justin, with the good-nature of a man, suggested that Ino, the wife of Tiberius, should reside with him, for "he is a young man, and the flesh is hard to rule"; but Sophia would not hear of it. "As long as I live," she said, "I will never give my kingdom to another", words that breathe the spirit of the great Theodora. Accordingly, during Justin's lifetime Ino and her two daughters lived in a house near the palace in complete retirement. The wives of noblemen and senators were much exercised in their minds whether they should call upon the wife of the Caesar or not. They met together to consider the important question, but were afraid to decide to visit Ino without consulting the wishes of Sophia. When they asked the Empress, she scolded them sharply; "Go, and be quiet", she said,  it is no business of yours." But when Tiberius was inaugurated Emperor in September 578, a few days before Justin's death, he installed his wife in the palace, to the chagrin of Sophia, and caused the new Augusta to be recognized by the factions of the circus. It is said that a riot took place in the hippodrome, as the Blues wished to change her pagan name to "Anastasia". while  the Greens proposed "Helena." Anastasia was adopted as her imperial name.

 

II. Tiberius II.

The independent reign of Tiberius Constantine (for he had assumed with the purple a new name) lasted only four years. Although during his regency the administration was in his hands, yet the influence of Sophia over the occasionally sane Justin had been a considerable limit on his powers and scope of action; for the Empress was determined to be queen in more than name. The limitation of the powers of Tiberius when he was only Caesar are fully apparent from the mere fact that Sophia and Justin retained the management of the exchequer in their own hands. Sophia judged, and not without reason, that the young Caesar was inclined to be too lavish with money; and her prudence withheld from him the keys of the treasury, while he was granted a fixed allowance. After the death of Justin, he did not delay to emancipate himself from her dictation, and she is said to have set afoot several conspiracies to dethrone him. It is related that she suborned Justinian, the son of Germanus, who had won laurels in the East, to join in a plot against Tiberius; but this treason was discovered in time. The clemency of the Emperor pardoned Justinian, but his "mother" was deprived of her retinue and subjected to a strict supervision.

It was thought that of all men Tiberius was the man, had he lived longer, to have checked the forces of dissolution that were at work, and placed the Empire on a new basis. Yet what we know of him hardly justifies such a conclusion. The fact that he was thoroughly well intentioned, and the fact that he was very popular, combined with the circumstance that his reign was prematurely ended by death, have pre-possessed men  strongly in his favour. No charges can be brought against him like those that have been brought against his predecessor Justin or his successor Maurice.  But, notwithstanding, I think it may be shown that he did as much harm as good to the Empire, and that he was not in any way the man to stem the tide.

The chief services rendered to the State by Tiberius consisted in the care which he bestowed upon  strengthening the army and his attention to military matters. In this important department he had able supporters in Justinian, the son of Germanus, who is recorded to have revived the discipline of the army, which was beginning to relax, and in Maurice, who became Emperor afterwards. "We are told that Tiberius expended large sums of money in collecting troops, and it deserves to be specially noticed that in the last year of his reign he organized a body of 15,000 foederati, which may be perhaps looked upon as the original nucleus or form of the bodyguard which in later centuries was called Varangian. Maurice was appointed general of this company, with the title "Count of the Federates."

But though he might have made a very good minister of war, Tiberius did not make a good Emperor. It was natural that his first acts should be reactionary, as Justin's government had been extremely unpopular. He removed the duty on the "political bread", and remitted a fourth part of the taxes throughout the Empire. Had he been contented with this he might deserve praise, but he began a system of most injudicious extravagance. He gratified the soldiers with large and frequent Augustatica, and he granted donations to members of all the professions—scholastics or jurists (a very numerous profession), physicians, silversmiths, bankers. This liberality soon emptied the treasury of its wealth. "What use," cried Tiberius, "is this hoarded gold, when all the world is choking with hunger?" a sentiment which was hardly relevant, as his generosity benefited the rich and not the hungry. The result was that by the end of the first year of his reign he had spent 7200 lbs. of gold, beside silver and silk in abundance; and before he died he was obliged to have recourse to the reserve fund which the prudent economy of Anastasius had laid by, to be used in the case of an extreme emergency. And, notwithstanding these financial difficulties, he laid out money on new buildings in the palace.

The consequence of this recklessness was that when Maurice came to the throne he found the exchequer empty and the State bankrupt. He was thus, by no fault of his own, compelled to be extremely parsimonious; and his scrupulous economy rendered him unpopular, while it endeared, by the force of contrast, the memory of the deceased, who had been really the cause of the perplexing situation. There is considerable reason, I think, to remove Tiberius from his pedestal.

Nor did his reign lack the distinction of a persecution of heretics; and yet his pleasant and easy fiscal system secured him such general popularity that even the monophysites were disposed to excuse him from the blame of the persecution, because he was so much occupied with wars. But his persecution of the Arians will perhaps reflect little credit on him in the eyes of humanity. When he enlisted Goths to compose his corps of foederati, they urged the modest demand that a church for holding Arian services should be granted to them. The bigots  of  Constantinople were furious at this impious prayer, and there arose a sedition of such formidable aspect  that Tiberius, in order to quell it, resorted to the device of commanding or permitting a general persecution of the Arians, that he might thereby be acquitted of having entertained any ntention of granting such an outrageous request.

Theophylactus, the historian of Maurice, remarked in praise of Tiberius that "he preferred that his subjects should share the imperial authority with him to their being tyrannically governed like slaves." The natural comment is that these two modes of State economy do not exhaust the alternative courses open to Tiberius; but this remark has a deeper historical significance. The point is not the preference of Tiberius; the point is that the imperial power was drifting away from its old moorings at the promontory of absolutism.

Maurice returned from Persia in the summer of 582, to find the Emperor sick unto death, and to be elected by him to reign in his stead. The ceremony was performed on the 5th of August. There were present not only the Patriarch (John the Paster) and the chief ecclesiastics, the guards of the palace, the aulic officials and senators, as in the case of Justin's accession, but also the "more distinguished men of the people", by which must be meant the demarchs and prominent persons in the circus factions. In his oration on this occasion Tiberius expressed a hope that his fairest funeral monument might be the reign of his successor. A marriage was arranged between Maurice and Constantina, Tiberius’ younger daughter; and thus Maurice, as being the son-in-law of Tiberius, who was the adopted son of Justin and Sophia, may be regarded as belonging to the dynasty of Justinian. Eight days later Tiberius expired in the palace of Hebdomon, outside the walls.

 

CHAPTER  II

MAURICE

 

Two years after his accession, a son was born to Maurice (4th August 584), whom he named Theodosius, in memory of Theodosius II, the last Emperor who had been born in the purple. This event is said to have been the cause of great rejoicing, and when Maurice appeared in the hippodrome the people shouted,"God grant thee well, for thou hast freed us from subjection to many". This illustrates the fact that a feeling of uncertainty and apprehension always prevailed in the Roman Empire when there was no apparent heir marked out by birth; men dreaded a struggle for sovereignty. In regard to the question how far the principle of heredity was acknowledged, it is important to observe that there is no case of a difficulty arising as to the accession of an Emperor's legitimate son; he was always acknowledged to be the rightful successor. Maurice occupied the throne for twenty years. During all that time the Empire was harassed by the troublesome hostilities of the Avars and Slavs, and for the first ten years of his reign the wearisome war with Persia was protracted. His great difficulty was want of money, which produced want of public confidence; and the unavoidable parsimony, which he was forced to practice, naturally won for him the repute of avarice and meanness; he was said to have a diseased appetite for gold. Soon after his accession he was obliged to purchase a temporary peace from the Avars, whom he was not prepared to oppose, by paying a considerable sum from the almost exhausted treasury. Perhaps the impecuniousness which pressed hard on him during the first years of his reign habituated him to a spirit of parsimony, which he continued to exhibit when circumstances both admitted and demanded a less scrupulous economy. It is certain that he attempted several times to retrench in the pay or commissariat of the army; serious mutinies were the consequence; and this unwise policy was one of the chief causes of his fall.

Evagrius, a contemporary ecclesiastical historian, says that Maurice was moderate, self-willed, and keen-witted. He showed his self-will in his operations at Arabissus, which by no means tended to increase his popularity. Though a Roman by descent, he was born at Arabissus in Cappadocia, and he cherished such a curious love for this insignificant place (as Justinian had done for his birthplace in Dardania) that he determined to convert it into a splendid city, and began elaborate buildings, in spite of his parsimonious proclivities. When the buildings were considerably advanced, an earthquake destroyed them, and the self-will of Maurice, who had a touch of the Roman passion for building, caused them to be begun all over again. To this strange affection of Maurice for his remote birthplace was joined a strong attachment to his kinsmen, whom he was anxious to advance into high places. He made his father Paul president of the senate, he gave all his relations rich palaces, and he divided the large property of Justin's brother Marcellus between Paul his father and Peter his brother.

He was also "moderate". His moderation appears especially in his ecclesiastical policy, for he completely rejected the practice of persecution adopted by his two predecessors, and passed a law that schismatics should not be compelled to conform. It is hard to say, however, whether the credit of this ought not to be ascribed to the Patriarch Johannes rather than to Maurice; we cannot be sure that if the former had urged persecution, the latter would not have acquiesced. For it is worthy of note that at this period the Emperors, feeling that their authority rested on an insecure footing, formed close alliances with the Patriarchs, who possessed immense influence with the people. Justin was prepared to adopt the ecclesiastical policy of John of Sirimis, Tiberius was ready to support Eutychius, and now we find Maurice standing fast by John Nesteutes in his contest with the see of Rome. It was the aim of the patriarchs of Constantinople to hold the same position in eastern Christendom that the bishop of Rome was acknowledged to hold in universal Christendom. In order to accomplish this aim they had two problems to solve. One problem was to reduce the large independent sees of the East, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, under the jurisdiction of Byzantium; the other problem was to prevent the interference of the Pope in the affairs of the East and thereby induce him to acknowledge the Patriarch of Constantinople as a pontiff of ecumenical position like his own. The first of these objects was directly aimed at, as we are expressly told, in the persecutions organized by John of Sirimis; the second was essayed by John the Faster, who assumed the title of "Ecumenical bishop". Gregory the Great, who occupied the chair of St Peter from 590 to 604, was horrified and grieved at such presumption. He wrote a friendly letter of expostulation on the subject to Maurice, in which he said that he was "compelled to cry aloud and say, O tempora! O mores!" He also wrote a letter to the Empress Constantina, for he understood the art, which popes, bishops, and priests so easily learn, of bringing female influence into play. To the Empress he expressed his conviction that John's assumption of the title universal was a clear indication that the times of Antichrist were at hand. His argument that Maurice ought to interfere in the matter is impressive. No one, he says, can govern on earth rightly except he knows how to handle divine things; and the peace of the State depends on the peace of the whole Church. It is this peace, not any personal interest, that he himself is defending; it is this peace that John is troubling, by interfering with the established economy of Christendom. It consequently behoves Maurice, in the interests of the State, to inhibit the proceedings of his Patriarch. Maurice, however, was not convinced by the reasons of the Pope, but sympathized thoroughly with John's claims to ecumenical dignity. Hence a breach ensued between the Emperor and the Pope, and the latter complains that Maurice, touching another matter, had the indecency to call him "fatuous."

"We may date the long struggle between the sees of Rome and Constantinople, which culminated in the final schism of 1055, from the reign of Maurice and the pontificate of Gregory I.

Maurice gives us the melancholy impression of a prince who, possessing many good qualities and cherishing many good purposes, was almost completely ineffectual. The army detested, and pretended to despise him, and the disaffection prevalent in the capital presented a favourable opportunity for revolution. In the year 599 he refused to ransom 12,000 captives from the chagan of the Avars, who consequently put them to death; and this refusal, which perhaps seems inhuman, increased the detestation in which he was held. Theophylactus, in his panegyrical history of the reign of Maurice, does not mention the matter, and his silence suggests that he did not feel able to palliate the act; but it has been conjectured that many of the prisoners were probably deserters, and in any case it is evident that it was not to save money, but to punish soldiers who had been mutinous and intractable, that Maurice acted as he did. It was an impolitic measure, and two years later he attempted another measure, which under the circumstances was equally impolitic, and illustrates that self-will which Evagrius ascribes to him. He issued commands that the army which was defending the Balkan provinces should winter in the trans-Danubian lands of the Slovenes, in order to save supplies. This led to a rebellion. Peter, the general, was placed in a disagreeable predicament between the peremptory behests of his brother the Emperor and the undisguised dissatisfaction of the army. When the matter came to a crisis at Securisca, the soldiers positively refused to cross the river, and raising the centurion Phocas on a shield, they conferred on him the title of captain (exarch).

When the news of the revolt reached Maurice he did not allow it to be published, but with an air of security which he was far from feeling he celebrated a series of equestrian contests in the hippodrome, and made light of the rumours which had reached the city concerning the military insurrection. His heralds or mandatores bade the demes not to be alarmed or excited by an unreasonable and unimportant disorder in the camp; at which proclamation the Blues shouted, “God, O Emperor! who raised you to the throne, will subdue unto you every conspirator against your authority. But if the offender is a Roman, ungrateful to his benefactor, God will subject him unto you without shedding of blood”.

Three days later Maurice summoned to the palace Sergius and Cosmas, the demarchs of the green and blue factions respectively, and inquired the numbers of the members of their demes. Sergius counted fifteen hundred Greens, while on the list of Cosmas there were only nine hundred Blues. The object of Maurice's inquiries was to form the demesmen into a garrison for the protection of the city against the army, which was already advancing under the leadership of Phocas. They were set to guard the walls of Theodosius.

It is difficult to grasp the exact cause of this revolution and the intrigues which underlay it; but the following points may be emphasized. In the first place, there was not at the outset any intention of elevating Phocas to the throne; he was merely elected general of the rebellious army. In the second place, it was the purpose of the army to depose Maurice and elect a new Emperor, perhaps Theodosius, the son of Maurice, or Germanus, Theodosius' father-in-law. In the third place, the declaration of disloyalty on the part of the army was followed up in Constantinople by the movement of a disaffected party, on whose co-operation the military ringleaders had probably calculated. In the fourth place, the demes play an important part in this movement, and Maurice seems to have acted imprudently in arming them.

While the citizens and the sovereign were in a state of expectancy and anxiety as to the events which a few days might bring about, it happened that the young Emperor Theodosius and his father-in-law Germanus were hunting outside the walls of the city, near a place called Callicratea. A messenger suddenly accosted Theodosius and gave him a letter, purporting to come from the army. The contents of the letter were a request that either he or Germanus should assume the reins of government; “the forces of the Romans will no longer have Maurice to reign over them”. The sportsmen were accompanied by an imperial retinue, and the incident of the letter soon reached the ears of Maurice, who immediately summoned his son. On the morning of the second day after this occurrence Germanus was admitted to the presence of the Emperor, who, with tears in his eyes, charged him with being the prime promoter of the whole movement. Not only the letter, but the ambiguous fact that the ravages of the mutineers in the neighbourhood of the city had diligently spared the horses of Germanus, seemed to the suspicious monarch sure proofs of guilt. The accused indignantly denied the charge, but the Emperor either was not or feigned not to be convinced. Theodosius, who had been present at the interview, secretly admonished his father-in-law that his life was in danger, and Germanus betook himself to the asylum of the church erected by Cyrus to the Mother of God. Towards sunset the Emperor sent the eunuch Stephanus, the tutor of the young princes, to persuade the suppliant to leave the altar, but members of the household of Germanus, who had attended him to the church, drove the tutor forth ignominiously. Under the cover of night Germanus stole to the surer refuge of the altar of the great church. In the meantime Maurice flogged his son, whom he accused of also tampering with treason. He then sent a body of guards to drag Germanus from St. Sophia, and a large multitude of indignant citizens gathered round the portals of the church. Germanus was at length persuaded to leave the altar, but as he approached the door a man named Andrew cried out,"Back to the shrine, Germanus, save thy life! An thou goest, death is in store for thee." These ominous words arrested the steps of Germanus, and repenting of his imprudent submission, he returned to the safety of the altar. The populace meanwhile loaded the name of the Emperor with execrations and abuse, calling him a Marcionist, a term which implied not only impiety but folly. As the uproar increased, the demesmen, who were stationed on the walls under the command of Comentiolus, were excited by the significant sounds of tumult and sedition; they left their posts, and soon gave the menaces of the crowd a definite direction. The object of their fury was the house of Constantine Lardys, the praetorian prefect of the East, one of the most illustrious senators in the Empire and a trusted friend of the Emperor; it was burned down.

When the revolt had reached this point, Maurice dressed himself in the apparel of a private individual, and along with his wife Constantina, his children, and the faithful minister, whose house was even then in flames, embarked in a vessel which lay moored by the private stairs of the palace. The imperial fugitives reached the church of Autonomos the Martyr, on the bay of Nicomedia, and the distress of a nocturnal flight was aggravated for Maurice by a severe attack of gout, a disease to which the luxurious inhabitants of Constantinople were peculiarly liable. As soon as they reached the shore of Asia, Theodosius was despatched to Persia to supplicate the assistance of Chosroes II for the Emperor, who had assisted that monarch in his own hour of necessity.

It seemed possible that Germanus might be raised to the throne, and in that case the revolution might have been bloodless; but the rivalry of the factions decided that it was not to be so. He had always been a partisan and patron of the Blues, but it was now important for him to gain the united support of both factions, especially as the Greens were numerically stronger. Accordingly he opened negotiations with Sergius, the demarch of the Greens, and promised to favour them in case he were elected. The demarch communicated this proposal to the managing committee of his party, but they met it with a decided refusal. The Greens were convinced that Germanus would never really abandon the Blues. Recognizing, then, that he had no chance of realizing his ambitious aspiration, Germanus embraced the party of the winner, the centurion Phocas, to whom members of the green faction were already hastening to present their allegiance.

The question arises whether Germanus cherished any treasonable ambition before the suspicion of the Emperor fell on him, or did this suspicion first arouse in him the hope as well as the fears of a conspirator. The narrative of Theophylactus naturally suggests the latter alternative, but does not exclude the former. Another point, which must remain obscure, is whether the letter received by Theodosius really expressed the wishes of the army, or was a device of Phocas, intended to awaken the suspicions of Maurice. The fact that the news of its arrival reached the ears of Maurice so soon, coupled with the probability that Theodosius did not communicate its contents to any one save Germanus, suggests that the intention of the epistle was not what it seemed. If this conjecture is right, it will go far to establish the innocence of Germanus; for the object of Phocas must have been to divide the camp of his opponents by sowing discord between Germanus and Maurice.

The Greens, who had gone forth from the city to meet Phocas, found him at Rhegium, and persuaded him to advance to Hebdomon. Theodore, one of the imperial secretaries, whose presence at Rhegium is not explained by our authorities, was sent to the city to bid the senate and the Patriarch proceed to Hebdomon for the purpose of crowning Germanus, in whose interests Phocas still pretended to be acting. The name of Germanus moved  the senators and the Patriarch Cyriacus; they hastened to the designated spot, only to see the diadem placed on the head of Phocas, amidst the acclamations of the demes, in the church of St. John the Baptist. On the morrow the new Emperor entered the city, carried in an imperial litter drawn by four white horses, and his progress was marked by showers of golden coins among the people. Horse races celebrated his entry; on the following day he bestowed the usual donations on the soldiers, and his wife Leontia was crowned Augusta.

On the occasion of the coronation of Leontia an incident occurred which indicated that the seat of Phocas was not yet secure. An important part of these ceremonies consisted in the procession from the palace to the great church, and it was customary for the various demes to post themselves at certain stages in the course of the processions, and to utter certain formulae or exclamations as the Emperor or imperial party passed. In certain cases the Emperor used to stop and receive the homage of the demes. The station of each deme was prescribed by custom, but on this occasion a dispute arose between the Greens and the Blues. The Greens desired to make their station in the portal of the palace called Ampelios, and there receive the Empress with the appropriate shouts of applause, but their jealous rivals objected to this arrangement as contrary to precedent. A tumult ensued, and Phocas sent out Alexander, who had made himself conspicuous in the revolt against Maurice, to calm the strife. Cosmas, the demarch of the Blues, entered into argument with the imperial emissary, and Alexander, with the insolence of an Emperor's friend, heaped abuse on the demarch, and even pushed him aside so roughly that he fell. Thereupon the insulted Blues gave vent to their wrath in ominous words, "Begone! understand the situation, Maurice is not yet dead!"

The appearance of the usurper quieted the dispute of the factions, but the words that the Blues had spoken sank into the heart of Phocas, and he decided that the death of Maurice and the extinction of Maurice's children were necessary to his own safety. Accordingly, on the morrow he sent Lilius over to Chalcedon to carry out this decision. In the harbour at Eutropius the four sons of Maurice were first slain, in their father's presence, and the Emperor, adopting the attitude of a philosopher or of a resigned Christian, is reported to have said "Thou art just, Lord, and just is thy judgment." An incident took place which illustrates the faithfulness of a nurse and the steadfastness of an Emperor. The nurse concealed one of the imperial infants, and presented a child of her own to the sword of the executioner; but the sovereign was as superior as the servant to the promptings of nature and declared the fraud Theodosius, the eldest son, did not escape the fate of his father and brothers. He had only reached Nicaea when Maurice, assuming a temper of dignified resignation, gave up all thoughts of struggling, and, disdaining to beg for the assistance of Chosroes, recalled his son. But the report gained ground and was afterwards made use of by the enemies of Phocas, that Theodosius, having reached Persia safely, had wandered to Colchis and ended his life in desert places. This report seemed to have some basis from the fact that Theodosius was not slain at the same time as his father. Phocas had entrusted his creature Alexander with the task of removing both the prince and Constantine Lardys, who had taken refuge in churches, and it was said that Alexander was bribed by Germanus not to slay hi son-in-law. Three distinguished men are mentioned as having shared the fate of their august master; Comentiolus “the general of Europe!”, George the lieutenant of Philippicus, and Praesentinus the domesticiis of Peter.

It is important to notice the part that the factions of the hippodrome played in this revolution; they strike us a suddenly reasserting a suppressed existence. There was still a strong spirit of rivalry; and although the Blues were obliged to acquiesce in the coronation of Phocas, they were not friendly to him. Both parties were opposed to the government of Maurice, but they were not at one touching the question who should be his successor.

Here a conjecture may be put forward as to the significance of this opposition of the demes to Maurice. Finlay acutely suggested that the observation of Evagrius, that Maurice installed an aristocracy of reason in his breast and expelled the democracy of the passions, contains a significance below the surface, and was intended as a hint at the circumstance that Maurice had allied himself with that aristocracy, which, as I said before, was endangering and limiting the extent of the imperial power. However this may be, there is no doubt that Maurice maintained his position as long as he did through the support of those men, of whose pernicious influence Justin had bitterly complained. Now, it seems almost certain that in this respect the attitude of Tiberius differed from that of Justin and from that of Maurice. Tiberius took Justin's advice to heart and assumed a position independent, as far as was possible, of the nobles, whose power was dangerously and unhealthily increasing. But in order to render himself independent of this class he was obliged to depend on another; and the organized demes of the hippodrome were an obvious resort. I conjecture, therefore, chat he gave them and their leaders a political influence which they had not possessed since the revolt of 532.

Thus Tiberius and Maurice tried to meet the danger which was threatening the imperial power in divergent ways. Tiberius opposed the influence of the aristocrats by making an Alliance with the demes, while Maurice tried to overcome the peril by an unnatural bond with the forces that were tending to undermine the throne, and thereby placed himself in opposition to both the army and the people. This difference partly explains the popularity of Tiberius and the unpopularity of Maurice, who seems to have been by temperament inclined o a certain aristocratic exclusiveness.

In support of these remarks I may add that in their light the observation of Theophylactus that Tiberius desired that his subjects should rule along with him, has a special point the expression is strong and must mean more than the influence of court officials. Moreover, as a matter of fad Tiberius recognized the demarchs and others as possessing political status. Further, the words of Evagrius about Maurice, in accordance with Friday's explanation, will be still more speaking; the expulsion of the democracy of passion will have the definite meaning that Maurice abandoned this democratic policy of Tiberius. Moreover, the important part that the factions played in the revolt of 602 seems to presuppose a considerable revival of their political power an almost a reorganization since they had been crushed under the rule of Justinian; and this reorganization I would attribute to the policy of Tiberius.

The testament of Maurice, which he had drawn up in the fifteenth year of his reign, on the occasion of a severe illness: was found more than eight years after his death, at the beginning of the reign of Heraclius. The document possess a considerable interest, for Maurice had conceived the design of adopting the Constantinian policy of dividing the Empire among his children. The fatal results to which this had led in the case of the sons of Constantine did not deter him. He assigned New Rome and "the East" to his eldest son Theodosius; Old Rome, Italy, and the western islands to hi second son Tiberius; while the remaining provinces were to be sliced up among his other sons, and Domitian of Meliten was appointed their guardian. This intention to recur to in fourth-century practice is worthy of note; and but for the revolution it might have been carried out.

 

CHAPTER  III

THE PERSIAN  WAR (572-591 AD)

 

THE peace which Justinian and Chosroes had ratified in 562, although the long term of fifty years was fixed for its duration, was of necessity doomed to be short-lived, because its basis was a payment of money, and neither party had entertained any expectation that it would last long. The Roman government was fully determined to renew the war, when the first ten years, for which term they made the stipulated payment in two sums, had expired; and Chosroes, though he would have been glad to protract the peace, was indisposed to make any concessions.

And so, as we might expect, the relations between the Empires during the first seven years of Justin are strained; they collide in numerous ways, and causes for hostility accumulate. During the first few years fruitless negotiations  are carried on, in regard (1) to the cession of Suania to Rome, and (2) to the claims of the Persophil Saracens of Hirah to subsidies from the Roman Emperor, and these haggling negotiations tended to produce ill feeling and dissatisfaction which more important circumstances soon brought to a crisis.

One of these circumstances was the interference of Persia in the affairs of the kingdom of Yemen, in south Arabia. Yemen had been reduced under the sway of an Abyssinian dynasty, with which the Roman Emperor was always on friendly terms. Saif, a descendant of the native Homerite kings, intolerant of the yoke of the strangers, sought refuge at the court of Chosroes, and by Persian assistance Yemen was conquered and the Homerite dynasty, in the person of Saif, restored. But Saif reigned only for a short time; his government was a failure; and Chosroes set a Persian marzpan (or margrave) over the country, which was placed in somewhat the same relation to Persia as the exarchate of Ravenna to Constantinople. But the Homerites found that the little finger of the marzpan was thicker than the loins of an Abyssinian prince, and sent an embassy to New Rome to beg for assistance.

In 571-572, when the term of ten years was approaching its close and a new payment would soon be due, another appeal to the Emperor, which he was only too ready to entertain, rendered an outbreak of war with Persia probable. Persarmenia, which was in a constant state of actual or intermittent rebellion, as the Christian population could not remain happy under Persian domination, appealed to the Emperor of the Romans in the name of their common religion; he accepted their allegiance, and, when Chosroes remonstrated, replied that Christians could not reject Christians.

These relations with two peoples over which Chosroes ex­ercised jurisdiction, and especially the protection accorded by the Emperor to the Persarmenian, were important causes of the ensuing war. But with these yet another cause concurred in producing the result. This was a newly formed relation of alliance with the Turks, who now for the first time appear in the West. They were gradually taking the place of the Ephthalite Huns, whom they had made their tributaries,— those Huns who had been such formidable neighbours to Persia. The Chinese silk commerce and the trade on the Caspian, which had been hitherto monopolized by the Huns, were passing into their hands.

The Turks sent an embassy to the Byzantine court at the end of 568 or early in 569. They had previously tried to enter into commercial relations with Persia, but the Persian king had a wholesome horror of Turks, and did not wish his subjects to have any dealings with them. He poisoned some of their ambassadors, so that they should not come again. Then Dizabul, khan of the Turks, determined to seek an alliance with the Roman Empire, which seemed to offer special advantages, as its inhabitants used more silk than any other nation. Justin received the embassy kindly, and sent back Roman ambassadors in the autumn to see the Turkish chagan and conclude a treaty. These negotiations did not please Persia, and attempts were made by that power to waylay the ambassadors on their journey back to Byzantium.

The dominion of Dizabul was not a kingdom; it was an empire whose sovereign held sway over four subject kingdoms and received tribute from other peoples, as for instance from the Ephthalites. This empire threatened now to become formidable to Persia, just as the Avars (who, once the subject of these very Turks, had revolted and migrated to the West) had become formidable to the Romans. In fact the Roman Empire and the Persian kingdom were in very similar circumstances. The former was placed between the Avars and the Persians, just as the latter was placed between the Turks (on the north) and the Romans.

The new allies of Justin were anxious that the forces of Persia should be occupied with a war on the western frontier, and did all they could to induce Justin to renounce the peace of fifty years.

Any one of the causes mentioned might have been insufficient to produce a rupture, but all together were irresistible, and accordingly, when the time came for paying the stipulated annuity, Justin refused (572). The war which ensued lasted for twenty years; and its conclusion was due to the outbreak of a civil war in Persia. We may conveniently divide it into two parts, the death of Chosroes Nushirvan in 579 forming the point of division. The meagre accounts of the operations which we possess present little interest and much difficulty.

(1) Marcian, a senator and patrician, perhaps a cousin of Justinian, was appointed general in 572, and arrived in Osroene at the end of summer. Nothing took place in this year except an incursion of three thousand Roman hoplites into Arzanene. In 573 Marcian gained a great victory at Sargathon, but failed to take Nisibis, which he had blockaded. It was not for this failure alone that Marcian was deposed and Acacius appointed in his stead; a curious complication with the Saracens of Ghassan seems to have led to the recall of the general. Harith, king of Ghassan, died and was succeeded by Mondir; and Kabus, king of the rival Saracens of Hirah, seized the opportunity to invade the Ghassanid dominion. But Mondir, having collected an army, defeated the invader, and followed up his success by invading the territories of Kabus, over whom he gained yet another victory. After these successes he ventured to address a letter to the Roman Emperor, with a request for money, and this presumption inflamed the indignation of Justin. The Emperor indited two letters, one to Mondir full of soft words and promises, the other to Marcian ordering him to assassinate the king of Ghassan. Through some mistake the missives were interchanged, and Mondir read with surprise and consternation the warrant for his own destruction. "This is my desert," he said bitterly. Full of resentment, he vowed vengeance against the Romans. At this juncture the Persians and Persophil Saracens invaded Syria and laid it waste as far as Antioch, but Mondir stood aloof, like Achilles, and retired into the desert. Justin bade the generals try to conciliate him, but he would not receive them. He held aloof for three years, at the end of which term he entered into communication with Justinian, the son of Germanus, whose honorable character had won men's confidence; and by his means a reconciliation was effected.

The invasion of Syria just referred to took place under the leadership of Adormahun (Adarmanes), and the country, as has been said, was devastated up to the walls of Antioch. The city of Apamea was committed to the flames. Syria seems to have been entirely undefended; for thirty years the inhabitants had been exempt from hostile attacks, and had consequently become so unmanly and unaccustomed to the sights of war that they were unable to take measures for their own defence. The captives who were led away to Persia are said to have numbered two hundred and ninety-two thousand.

From these captives Chosroes is recorded to have selected two thousand beautiful virgins, and ordered them to be hand­somely adorned like brides and sent as a present to the chagan of the Turks. Two marzpans and a body of troops were appointed to escort them to the land of the barbarians, and received express orders to travel at a leisurely pace. The virgins were dejected for their souls' sakes, because they could no longer hope to receive religious instruction, and they revealed their longings for death to other Syrian captives. When they had arrived within fifty leagues of the Turkish frontier, they came to a great river, and agreed among themselves to die rather than to pollute themselves with heathen ways and lose their Christianity. "Before our bodies are defiled by the barbarians and our souls polluted and death finally overtake us, let us now, while our bodies are still pure, and our souls free from heathendom, in the name and trusting to the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, offer unto him in purity both our souls and bodies by yielding ourselves up now to death, that we may be saved from our enemies and live for evermore. For it is but the pain of a moment which we have to endure in defense of our Christianity and for the preservation of our purity in body and soul." As the virgins were never allowed to be alone, they asked their conductors for permission to bathe in the river: "We are ashamed to bathe if you stand by and look on." The permission to bathe and the seclusion which they requested were granted, and the whole company of virgins rushed suddenly into the water and were drowned. The Persians saw them floating and sinking, but were unable to rescue them.

This example of Christian martyrdom, as it may be called, and of overpowering dread of the Turkish minotaur, so many centuries before he had set foot in Europe, is recorded only by John of Ephesus.

It seems that Marcian was recalled and Acacius sent to the East at the beginning of 574. When the Romans abandoned the siege of Nisibis, Chosroes swooped down upon Daras and besieged it, using against its walls the engines which the Romans had left behind them at Nisibis. But it was not easily taken, and the Persians almost despaired. Finally, over-confidence produced remissness in the garrison, and after a siege of six months the city passed into the hands of the Persians, about seventy years after its foundation by Anastasius. Thus Chosroes now held the two great fortresses of eastern Mesopotamia, Nisibis and Daras.

Besides these disasters, other difficulties beset the Roman government. It was perplexed by the hostilities of the Avars on the Danube and it was embarrassed by the mental aberration of the Emperor. Sophia was driven to write a letter of entreaty to Chosroes, and as her request was supported by a sum of 45,000 pieces of gold, she obtained the respite of a year's truce (spring 574 to spring 575). As Justin's malady increased, Tiberius was made regent, or rather subordinate co-regent with Sophia, and although the new caesar had no intention of bringing the war to a conclusion, he saw that it was absolutely necessary to gain time and prolong the cessation of hostilities. Accordingly, when the truce had expired, a peace was made for three years, not applying, however, to the war in Persarmenia, on condition that the Romans paid 30,000 pieces of gold annually. For the following three years (576, 577, 578) therefore the war was confined to Persarmenia.

Justinian, the son of Germanus, was appointed commander of the armies and repaired to Armenia (576). Chosroes advanced in person, intending to invest Theodosiopolis, but finding that it was too strong he proceeded westward, and, entering the Roman provinces, marched in the direction of Caesarea in Cappadocia through the country included between the Euphrates and the Lycus. The Romans marched to obstruct his advance in the Antitaurus mountains, in the north-east corner of Cappadocia, but when they approached Chosroes made a northward movement against Sebaste, which he took and burned. But he obtained no captives in that town, for when the rumour spread that the Persians were coming, all the inhabitants of those districts fled. Finding himself in serious difficulties in a hostile and mountainous country, and apparently not supported in the rear, Chosroes began to retreat. But he was not allowed by Justinian to depart with impunity; the Romans pressed on, and the Persians were forced to fight against their will. The battle was fought somewhere between Sebaste and Melitene, probably in the valley of the river Melas, land its details are described or invented by a rhetorical historian. It resulted in a complete victory for Justinian; Chosroes was forced to flee from his camp to the mountains, and leave his tent furniture, with all the gold, the silver, and the pearls which an oriental monarch required even in his campaigns, a prey to the conqueror. The booty, it is said, was immense.

The routed Persians grumbled at their lord for conducting them into this hole in the mountains, and Chosroes with difficulty mollified their indignation by an appeal to his gray hairs. Then the Sassanid descended into the plain of Melitene and burned that city, which had no means of resisting his attack. In the meantime, it may be asked, how was the Roman army occupied? It would seem that there was nothing to prevent the Romans from following the defeated and demoralized Persians, and at least hindering the destruction of Melitene, if they did not annihilate the host. This loss of opportunity is ascribed by a contemporary to the envy and divisions that prevailed among the Roman officers.

After the conflagration of Melitene, Chosroes retired towards the Euphrates, but he received a letter from the Roman general, reproaching him for being guilty of an unkingly act in robbing and then running away like a thief. The great king consented to accept offer of battle, and awaited the arrival of the Romans. The adversaries faced one another until the hour of noon; then three Romans rode forth, three times successively, close to the Persian ranks, but no Persian moved to answer the challenge. At length Chosroes sent a message to the Roman generals that there could be "no battle today," and took advantage of the fall of night to flee to the river. The Romans pursued and drove the fugitives into the waters of the Euphrates. More than half of the Persian army was drowned; the rest escaped to the mountains. It is said by Roman historians that Chosroes signalized these reverses by passing a law that no Persian king should ever go forth to battle in person.

Thus the campaign of 576 was attended with good fortune for the Romans, notwithstanding the destruction of Sebaste and Melitene. Nor were the events to the west of the Euphrates the only successes. Roman troops  penetrated into Babylonia, and came within a hundred miles of the royal capital; the elephants which they carried off were sent to Byzantium.

The following year, 577, opened with negotiations for peace, which Chosroes, dispirited by his unlucky campaign, was anxious to procure. His general, Tamchosro, however, gained a victory over Justinian in Armenia. The Romans, in consequence of their successes, had become elated and incautious, and the Persians suddenly approached, surprised, and routed them. The victors, it is said, lost 30,000 men, the vanquished four times as many, so that the battle must have been an important affair. Encouraged by the change of fortune, Chosroes no longer desired peace, and the negotiations led to no result.

A pious historian considers that this reverse was a retribution on the Roman soldiers for their irreligious behaviour in Persarmenia, a district where there were many Christian settlers. When the Roman army invaded it, Christian priests came out to meet them with the holy Gospels in their hands, but no reverence was shown to their pious supplications. The worst outrages were committed, without distinction of creed. The soldiers seized infants, two at a time, by their legs, and tossing them up in the air caught the falling bodies on the points of their spears; monks were plundered, hermits and nuns were tortured, if they could not or would not produce gold and silver to satisfy the greed of the depredators. This imprudent behaviour produced a reaction against Roman rule among the Christians of Persarmenia; twenty thousand immediately went over to the Persians,—all in fact except the princes, who escaped to Byzantium.

After this defeat Maurice, who held the office of comes excubitorum which Tiberius had filled before his investiture as Caesar, was sent to the East with full powers, and Gregory, the praetorian prefect, accompanied him to administer the military fiscus. Having collected troops in Cappadocia, his native province, Maurice assembled the generals and captains at Kitharizon, a fortress near Martyropolis, and assigned to each his part. Tamchosro, the Persian general in Armenia, employed a stratagem to put the Romans off their guard. He wrote to the troops at Theodosiopolis, bidding them prepare for battle on a certain day, and in the meantime he left Armenia and invaded Sophene, devastating the country about Amida and thus violating the peace, which had not yet expired. Maurice retaliated by carrying his arms into Persian territory; he overran Arzanene, and penetrated into the province of Corduene, which no Roman army had entered since the days of Jovian. He did not, however, occupy any country except Arzanene; his invasion was the same sort of blow to Persia that the expedition of Adormahun in 573 had been to the Empire. More than ten thousand captives were taken, of whom most were Christian Armenians, and a large number were located in Cyprus, where lands were allotted to them. Thus the current of Persian success has now been finally stopped.

There is no doubt that the successes of Chosroes had been due to the bad condition and the disorganization of the Roman army, and the tide began to change when the generals Justinian and Maurice assumed the command in the East. Justinian reformed the degenerate discipline of the soldiers, and Maurice, who, though he had not enjoyed the advantage of a military training, had made a special study of warfare and afterwards wrote a book on Strategic, did much for the reorganization of the army. As an example of the kind of reform which Maurice found necessary, I may notice that he was obliged to re-introduce the custom of entrenching a camp; the laziness and negligence of soldiers and officers had, it seems, come to such a pass that they dispensed with the loss as a useless expenditure of labour.

(2) The turn which affairs had taken would certainly, as Menander remarks, have led to a peace, and that on term tolerably favourable to the Romans, but for the death of the aged Chosroes in spring 579, a few months after the death of Justin (December 578). His son and successor Hormisdas, whose character has been painted in dark colours, rejected the proposals which Tiberius made, and Maurice continued a career of partial success, which culminated in the important victory of Constantina in 581. It must be also observed that Tiberius purchased peace from the Avars for 80,000 aurei in order to throw all the energies of the Empire into the Persian war. Events on the Ister and events on the Euphrates constantly exerted a mutual influence.

The year 579 was marked by the invasion of Media by a portion of the Roman army. In the following year, 580, Maurice combined forces with the Saracen king Mondir (Alamundar) for a grand invasion; but disputes arose between the Roman and the Saracen leaders in the neighborhood of Callinicum; Mondir is said to have acted treacherously, and the expedition failed. Adormahun had harried Osroene, leaving not so much as a house standing, and had written to Maurice and Mondir, "Ye are exhausted with the fatigue of your march; don't trouble yourselves to advance against me. Rest a little, and I shall come to you." And he was allowed to retreat, says the historian, although 200,000 men were eating at the Emperor's expense. In 581 the Romans gained a great victory at Constantina.

When Maurice became Emperor, in the following year, he adopted the precedent of his predecessors and ceased to be a general. He appointed John Mystacon ("the Moustachioed") commander of the eastern armies, and the year 583 was marked by a defeat of the Romans in a battle on the river Nymphius, the Persians being led by a general entitled the kardarigan. The defeat was mainly due to enmity between John and a captain named Kurs, who was appointed to command the right wing, and disloyally took no part in the engagement.

At the beginning of 584 John Mystacon was deposed from his command as not sufficiently energetic, and was succeeded by Philippicus, the husband of Gordia the Emperor's sister. In autumn Persia was invaded and the pursuit of the kardarigan was eluded, but nothing of consequence occurred. Early in 585 Philippicus invaded Arzanene, but he was soon obliged by sickness to retire to Martyropolis and entrust the command temporarily to a captain named Stephanus; but this year, like the preceding, was unmarked by any important event.

In the spring of 586 Philippicus, who had visited Byzantium during the winter, was met at Amida by Persian ambassadors, who had come to urge the conclusion of a peace, for which they expected the Romans to pay money. But the Romans had lately experienced no reverses, and therefore disdained the offer. The operations of this year took place in the neighbourhood of the river of Arzamon and the mountain of Izal. The Romans commanded the banks of the river, and as water was procurable from no other source in these regions, it was expected that, if the Persians advanced to the attack, thirst would be a powerful ally. But the Persians loaded camels with skins of water and advanced confidently, intending to attack the Romans on Sunday. Philippicus, informed on Saturday of their approach, suspected their design and drew up his army in array for fighting in the plain of Solachon. The right wing was commanded by Vitalius; the left wing by Wilfred (Iliphredas), governor of Emesa; the centre by Philippicus and his lieutenant Heraclius, the father of that Heraclius who was afterwards Emperor. On the Persian side, the centre was commanded by the kardarigan; Mebodes faced Wilfred; and Aphraates, a nephew of the kardarigan, opposed Vitalius. The Roman troops were encouraged by the elevation of a flag adorned with a picture of Christ, which was believed not to have been made by hands; it was known as a "theandric image." On the other hand the Persian general resorted to the desperate measure of destroying the water supply, in order that his soldiers might feel that life depended on success.

The battle was begun by the advance of the right Roman wing, which forced back the Persian left and fell on the baggage in the rear. But, occupying themselves with the plunder, the victors allowed the fugitives to turn and unite themselves with the Persian centre, so that the Roman centre had to deal with a very formidable mass. Philippicus, who had retired a little from the immediate scene of conflict, resorted to a device to divert the troops of Vitalius from their untimely occupation with the baggage. He gave his helmet to Theodore Ilibinus, his spear-bearer, and ordered him to strike the plunderers with his sword. This device produced the desired effect; the soldiers thought that Philippicus himself was riding about the field, and returned to the business of battle. The left wing of the Romans was completely successful, and the routed Persians fled as far as Daras. But in the centre the conflict raged hotly for a long time, and it was believed by the Christians that a divine interposition took place to decide the result in their favour. The kardarigan fled to an adjacent hill, where he starved for a few days, and then hastened to Daras, whose inhabitants refused to receive a fugitive.

After the victory of Solachon, Philippicus invaded Arzanene. The inhabitants of that district concealed themselves in underground dwellings, and were dug out like rats by the Romans, who discovered them by the tell-tale subterranean sounds. Here Heraclius, who had been sent with a small force in the company of two Persian deserters, who undertook to point out a locality favorable for establishing a fortress, fell in with the kardarigan, but succeeded in eluding his superior forces by a dexterous retreat. A messenger was sent to Philippicus, who was besieging the fortress of Chlomari, to apprise him of the approach of the enemy; and he ordered the trumpet to be sounded, to recall all the troops who were scouring the surrounding country. The kardarigan soon arrived, and the Persians and Romans found themselves separated by a large ravine, which prevented an immediate battle. At night the Persians, marching round this ravine, encamped behind the Romans, and apparently occupied such a dominant position on the hill that it would have been impossible to continue the siege of Chlomari. On the following night in the first watch the Roman camp was suddenly alarmed by the departure of the general, whose conduct seems quite inexplicable, as the Persian forces led by the kardarigan were no match for his own, and there appears to have been no imminent danger. The soldiers followed him in confusion, with difficulty finding their way through the darkness of a moonless night; and if the enemy had known the actual state of the case the army might have easily been annihilated. But the movement was so unaccountable that the Persians suspected a stratagem, and did not leave their camp during the night. The fortress of Aphumon, whither Philippicus had made his way, received the Romans, who, harassed by the arrows of the slowly following Persians, arrived during the forenoon, and consoled themselves by deriding the general. The whole army retreated to Amida, the Persians still following and harassing, but not venturing on a general battle.

Philippicus did not carry on in person any further opera­tions during this year, but his second in command, the able officer Heraclius, invaded and wasted the southern regions of Media. In the spring of 587 Philippicus consigned two-thirds of his forces to Heraclius, and the remaining third to Theodorus of Kabdis and Andreas, a Saracen interpreter, with instructions to harass the territory of the enemy by incursions. The general himself again suffered from illness, and was unable to take the field. Both Heraclius and Theodorus were successful; each of them laid siege to a strong fortress, and both fortresses were stormed.

In winter Philippicus set out for Constantinople, leaving Heraclius in charge of the army, but before he reached Tarsus he learned that the Emperor had signified his intention of appointing Priscus commander-in-chief instead of himself. In spring, accompanied by Germanus the bishop of Damascus, Priscus arrived at Monokarton, where the army was stationed. It was usual for a new general on his arrival to descend from his horse, and, walking between the rows of the marshalled army, honour them with a salutation. Priscus neglected this ceremony; and a dissatisfaction which had been long brewing among the soldiers burst out into open mutiny. This dissatisfaction was caused, not only by the deposition of Philippicus, who was popular among the troops, notwithstanding his strange flight in 586, but by an unpopular innovation of Maurice, who ordained that the rations of the soldiers should be reduced by one-quarter. The injudicious haughtiness or indifference of Priscus offended the soldiers, already disposed to murmur; and the camp became a scene of disorder. Priscus was thoroughly frightened, and resorted to the expedient of sending Wilfred to march through the camp with the holy "theandric" standard in his hands; but such was the excitement that the mystic symbol was received with contumely and stones. The general escaped, not unwounded, to the city of Constantina, where he had recourse to the services of a physician; and he despatched letters to the governors of the surrounding cities and forts, with reassurances that the soldiers would not be deprived of any portion of what they were in the habit of receiving. He likewise sent a messenger to the camp at Monokarton, to announce that the Emperor had changed his mind and that the rations would not be diminished. The old bishop Germanus went on this mission, but the soldiers meanwhile had elected an officer named Germanus, not to be confounded with the bishop, as their general. The representations of the prelate were not listened to, and the soldiers urged the inhabitants of Constantina to expel Priscus.

Informed  of these events, Maurice recalled Priscus  and reappointed Philippicus, but the mutineers were not satisfied, , and refused to submit to the command of their former general. The Persians meanwhile attacked Constantina; but the provincial commander Germanus, who seems to have acted through constraint rather than inclination, induced a thousand men to accompany him, and relieved the menaced city. He then restored order so far as to enable him to organise a company of four thousand for the invasion of Persia, and at the same time Aristobulus, an emissary of Maurice, succeeded by gifts and promises in mollifying the exasperated troops. While Philippicus, diffident and uncertain, was still at Hierapolis, a battle was fought at the "City of the Witnesses"—to adopt the style of our historian Theophylactus—and the Romans obtained a brilliant victory.

Early in 589 the Persians captured Martyropolis by the treachery of a certain Sittas, who introduced four hundred Persians into the city on the plea that they were deserters to the Romans, while the truth was that he was himself a deserter to the barbarians. Philippicus surrounded the city, but Mebodes and Aphraates arrived with considerable forces, and the Romans were defeated. Thus Martyropolis passed into the hands of the Persians.

At this juncture Comentiolus succeeded Philippicus, and almost immediately after his assumption of the command he worsted the enemy in an important battle near Nisibis, which was fatal to the general Aphraates, and it is specially mentioned that Heraclius performed signal acts of valor. In the Persian camp rich spoils were obtained.

In the same year the Roman arms won minor successes in the northern regions of Albania. Persia had been encompassed by several dangers at the same time. Arabs invaded Mesopotamia from the south, the Turks threatened in the north, and in the north-west the Chazars poured into Armenia and penetrated to Azerbiyan. The general Varahran was victorious in an expedition against the Turks, and was then sent to Suania, but as he returned thence he was twice defeated by Romanus in Albania on the banks of the Araxes.

But now the course of events in Persia took a turn which proved decidedly favourable to the Romans, and led to a conclusion of the war. Hormisdas deposed Varahran from the command in consequence of his ill success in Albania, and is said to have insulted him by sending him the garment of a woman and a distaff. This story may be true, but we cannot help remembering that it was told long ago of a Cypriote king and a queen of Cyrene, and in recent years of Sophia and Narses. Varahran revolted against the unpopular monarch, and the result of the civil war was that (September 590) Hormisdas was slain, and the rebel was proclaimed king. The second act of the drama was the contest between Chosroes Eberwiz, a son of Hormisdas, and the usurper, which by the help of Roman arms was decided in favour of the legitimate heir. Chosroes fled for refuge to Roman territory, and sent an appeal for help to the Roman Emperor. The difficulties in which Persia was involved offered an excellent opportunity to New Rome, and Chosroes was fully conscious of this fact. We are informed that the ambassadors who bore Chosroes' letter used thirteen arguments to persuade Maurice; and especially worthy of notice, even if it be due, not to the brain of Chosroes, but to the pen of Theophylactus, is the argument drawn from the example of Alexander the Great. The Persian empire was at this moment implicated in such serious difficulties that it seemed by no means a chimerical idea or an impossible undertaking for the Roman "Republic", in spite of its degenerate condition, to make an attempt to reduce the Persian kingdom beneath its sway. Consequently the envoys of Chosroes are represented as being at pains to point out that while Alexander had subdued Persia, he had not succeeded in forming a lasting empire; his vast dominion had been broken up among his successors. The nature of men, the ambassadors are reported to have observed, makes it impossible that a single universal kingdom, reflecting the unity of the divine government, should exist on earth.

This contemporary comparison of a possible undertaking on the part of the Emperor Maurice with the actual undertaking of Alexander more than nine centuries before is interesting. We pause, as we read Theophylactus, and reflect that this 'Romaic' Empire, ruling  chiefly over lands which had submitted to the sway of Alexander—Macedonia, Thrace, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt,—and Greek not Latin in its speech, was in a stricter sense the successor of Alexander's empire than the Roman Empire had been when it reached to the northern seas. It was as if the spirit of Alexander had lain dissolved in the universal spirit of Rome for seven hundred years, and were now once more precipitated in its old place, changed but recognisable.

Maurice was not emulous of Alexander's glories and dangers; the Roman Empire at that moment had not the heart to aspire to new conquests. He undertook to restore Chosroes to the throne of the Sassanids, on condition that Persarmenia and eastern Mesopotamia, with the cities of Daras and Martyropolis, should be ceded to the Romans. The terms were readily accepted, and two victories gained at Ganzaca and Adiabene sufficed to overthrow the usurper and place Chosroes II on the throne (591).

The peace was concluded, Maurice withdrew his troops from Asia to act against the Avars in Thrace, and for ten years, as long as Maurice was alive, the old enmity between Rome and Persia slept.

A word must be  said  of the state of Persia under the rule of Chosroes Nushirvan, whose reign extends over nearly half of the sixth century, and may be called the golden or at least the gilded period of the monarchy of the Sassanids. It was a period of reforms, of which most seem to have been salutary. In order to prevent the local tyranny or mismanagement of satraps, who were too far from the centre to be always under the king's eye, he adopted a new administrative division, which was perhaps suggested to him by the Roman system of prefectures. He divided Persia into four parts, over which he placed four governors, whose duty was to keep diligent watch over the transactions of the provincial rulers. And for greater security he adopted the practice of periodically making progresses himself through his dominions. He was greatly concerned for the maintenance of the population, which seems to have been declining, and he employed two methods to meet the difficulty; he settled captives in his dominions, and he enforced marriages. He introduced a new land system, which was found to work so well that after the fall of the Sassanid monarchy the Saracen caliphs adopted it unaltered. But perhaps his most anxious pains were spent on the state of the army, and it is said that when he reviewed it he used to inspect each individual soldier. He succeeded in reducing its cost and increasing its efficiency. Like Peter Alexiovitch or Frederick the Great, he encouraged foreign culture at his court, he patronized the study of Persian history, and caused a Shahnameh (Book of the kings) to be composed. Of his personal culture, however, the envy or impartiality of Agathias speaks with contempt, as narrow and superficial; on the other hand, he has received the praises of an ecclesiastical historian. “He was a prudent and wise man”, writes John of Ephesus, “and all his lifetime he assiduously devoted himself to the perusal of philosophical works. And, as was said, he took pains to collect the religious books of all creeds, and read and studied them, that he might learn which were true and wise and which were foolish. ... He praised the books of the Christians above all others, and said, ‘These are true and wise above those of any other religion’.”

 

CHAPTER  IV

SLAVS AND AVARS IN ILLYRICUM AND THRACE

 

CHAPTER  V

THE  LOMBARDS  IN  ITALY

 

CHAPTER VI

THE EMPIRE AND THE FRANKS

 

We have become acquainted with the internal decline of the Empire from the death of Justinian to the fall of Maurice, we have followed the course of the wars with Persia and witnessed the depredations of the Avars and Slaves in the Balkan peninsula, and we have seen how the Lombards wrested half of the Italian peninsula from its Roman lords. We must now learn the little that is to be known of the relations of the Empire to the Merovingian kings of Gaul; and our evidence, although fragmentary, is quite sufficient to show not only that the Roman Empire still maintained its position as the first state in Europe, and that New Rome was regarded as the centre of civilization, but that the Merovingians still acknowledged a sort of theoretical relation of dependence on the Emperors.

Chlotar, son of Chlodwig, survived his brothers, and was sole king of Gaul for a short time before his death. He died in 561, and his four sons, Sigibert, Chilperic, Charibert, and Gunthramn, divided Gaul into four kingdoms, even as their father and uncles had divided it fifty years before after the death of Chlodwig. In 574 Sigibert, who ruled in Austrasia (formerly the kingdom of Theoderic), sent an embassy to Justin. The two envoys, Warmar a Frank and Firminus a Gallo-Roman of Auvergne, sailed to Constantinople, and were successful in obtaining from Justin what their master sought; what this was we are not informed. In the following year they returned to Gaul.

Some years later, probably at the end of 578 after the death of Justin, Chilperic sent ambassadors to New Rome. The object of this embassy was, I conjecture, to congratulate the new Emperor Tiberius on his accession. The ambassadors did not return to the court of Chilperic until the year 581; the delay seems to have been partly due to a shipwreck which they suffered near Agatha, on the coast of Spain. They brought back gold coins, each weighing no less than a pound, sent by the munificent Tiberius as a present to Chilperic. On the obverse was an image of the Emperor with the legend, round the edge, tiberii constantini perpetui avgusti, while on the reverse were represented a chariot and charioteer, with gloria romanorum. These coins and many other ornaments, which the envoys had brought, were shown by Chilperic to the historian Gregory of Tours.

It is remarkable that, while Childerich and Sigibert thus maintained friendly relations with the Empire, we never hear of Gunthramn sending embassies to Constantinople. Now, the interests of Gunthramn and the interests of the lords of Austrasia collided. When Sigibert died, his son Childebert was a mere child, and his widow Brunhilda carried on the government. Brunhilda was a Visigothic princess, and had received a Roman education; she had, therefore, a leaning towards the Roman Empire, and maintained a friendly intercourse both with New Rome and with Old Rome. Gunthramn was not on good terms with his sister-in-law; presuming on the youth of his nephew and the rule of a woman, he had seized cities which had belonged to Sigibert, and was determined to retain them.

This then is the situation at the accession of Maurice. Brunhilda, the queen of Austrasia, is friendly to the Empire and at enmity with Gunthramn, the king of Burgundia, who maintains apparently no relations with the Empire. It is plain that it would be advantageous for Maurice to have a friend or a vassal in the south of Gaul instead of Gunthramn, and that such a change would also please Brunhilda. Accordingly, we are not surprised to find that both Maurice and Brunhilda support the enterprise of a pretender to wrest Burgundy from Gunthramn.

This pretender was named Gundovald, and he fancied himself, whether truly or not, to be the son of Chlotar I. He had been born in Gaul, carefully nurtured, and received a liberal education; his hair fell in tresses down his back, as it was worn by sons of kings; and he was presented by his mother to Childebert as the son of Chlotar, and therefore Childebert's nephew; "His father hates him", she said, "so do you take him, because he is your flesh". Then Chlotar sent a message to his brother demanding the boy, and Childebert did not refuse to send him. Gundovald's hair was shorn by the order of his reputed father, who repudiated the relationship. From this time until the death of Chlotar he supported himself by painting the walls and domes of sacred buildings. After the death of Chlotar he found a refuge with Charibert, whom he regarded as his brother. His hair grew long again, but, probably after Charibert's death, Sigibert summoned him to his court, and having caused him to be tonsured, sent him to Koln. Gundovald fled from Koln to Italy, where he was received by the exarch Narses, and married a wife, by whom he had two sons. From Italy he proceeded to Constantinople, where the Emperors Justin and Tiberius accorded him a kind welcome, and he abode there for several years, treated as a royal refugee.

Gunthramn Boso, a general of Gunthramn, king of Burgundy, arrived at Constantinople and informed Gundovald of the situation in Gaul. The only representatives of the house of Chlodwig were the childless Gunthramn, the child Childebert, and Chilperic, whose family was dying out. It seemed an excellent opportunity for Gundovald to claim a share in the heritage of his father Chlotar, and Boso invited him to return to Gaul: "Come", he said, "for all the chief men of the kingdom of King Childebert invite you, and no one has dared to breathe a word against you. For we know that you are the son of Chlotar, and there is left in Gaul none able to rule his kingdom, unless you come". Having assured himself of the good faith of Boso by exacting oaths from him in twelve different sanctuaries, and having bestowed gifts upon him, Gundovald set sail for Massilia, where he was received by the bishop Theodoras. Massilia nominally belonged to both Burgundy and Austrasia, but at this time Gunthramn's power was preponderant there. The sympathies of the bishop, however, were with Brunhilda and Childebert, and he therefore welcomed Gundovald, whom they had invited.

Although no Roman ships or Roman soldiers had accompanied Gundovald from Constantinople to support him in his attempt to establish himself on a throne in Gaul, yet there is no doubt that Maurice looked with favor on his enterprise, and assisted him with ample sums of money. He arrived at Massilia with large treasures, of which the perfidious Boso robbed him. Gunthramn of Burgundy considered the arrival of Boso due to a definite scheme on the part of the Roman Emperor to reduce the kingdom of the Franks under the imperial sway; and he arrested bishop Theodoras on the charge that he co-operated in this scheme by receiving the "stranger" Gundovald.

From Marseilles Gundovald proceeded to Avignon, where he was received by the Patrician Mummolus, who embraced his cause. But Boso, having betrayed the man whom he had invited to Gaul, and robbed him of his treasures, returned to his loyalty to Gunthramn, and led an army against Mummolus. The Burgundians, however, were vanquished, and Gundovald, who had withdrawn to an island on the sea-coast, returned to the city of Avignon. Two important dukes, Desiderius and Bladastes, embraced the pretender's cause; and after Chilperic's death, in 584, the arms of Gundovald and his supporters won many important towns in south-western Gaul, including Tolosa and Burdigala. But his success depended ultimately upon the support of Austrasia, and when Childebert made peace with Gunthramn the cause of Gundovald was lost. He was deserted by his adherents, and delivered by Mummolus into the hands of Gunthramn's army. Boso killed him by hurling a stone at his head, and his corpse was treated with contumely by the soldiers. Such was the end of the pretender Gundovald, who seems to have been commissioned by the Emperor Maurice to wrest southern Gaul from Gunthramn in somewhat the same way as the great Theodoric was commissioned by Zeno to wrest Italy from Odovacar.

The peace between Gunthramn and Childebert did not interfere with the relations between the court of Metz and the court of Byzantium. Maurice sought the help of the Austrasian forces against the Lombards of Italy, and for that purpose sent fifty thousand solidi to Childebert or Brunhilda. He also adopted Childebert as a son, even as Justinian had adopted Theudebert. Childebert crossed the Alps with a large army, but the Lombards hastened to submit themselves before he had time to strike a blow, and induced him with gifts and promises of loyalty to return to his kingdom. When Maurice heard that he had made peace with the Lombards he sent ambassadors to demand back the money from Childebert, who had not fulfilled his part of the bargain; but Childebert, confiding in his strength, did not even deign to reply.

No less than four times did the king of Austrasia, urged by the importunities of his "father" the Emperor Maurice, set forth against the lords of northern Italy, but each time he accomplished nothing. In the year 586, two years after his first expedition, the incessant demands of the imperial envoys that he should either perform his promise or repay the money, induced him to lead an army against Italy; but dissensions among the generals compelled him to return, probably before he had reached the Alps, and he made peace with Autharis, king of the Lombards, to whom he also promised his sister Chlotsuinda in marriage. But in 588 he promised the same lady to Reccared, king of the Goths, who had been converted recently to the Catholic faith, and determined once more to cross the Alps and co-operate with the exarch of Ravenna in driving the Lombards from Italy. This time the Lombards and Franks met in battle, and the forces of Childebert suffered a terrible defeat.

The letter of Maurice, in which he reproaches Childebert for his half-heartedness after this failure, is preserved, and Childebert again crossed the Alps in 590 with an army commanded by no fewer than twenty dukes. The fourth expedition was little more successful than the other three. The Romans failed to co-operate with the Franks; the Lombards diligently avoided hazarding a battle; and ultimately disease broke out in the army of Childebert, and compelled him to return to Transalpine Gaul.

But the question of warring together against the Lombards was not the only cause of the embassies which passed between the courts of New Rome and Austrasia. Childebert had a sister, Ingundis, who married Hermenigild, son of Leovigild, king of the Visigoths. Ingundis and her husband were adherents of the Catholic faith, and they both endured persecution at the hands of the Arian king. It was in vain that they placed themselves under the protection of the "Republic" in southern Spain; Leovigild captured Hermenigild and threw him into prison. Ingundis, with her infant son Athanagild, resolved to seek at New Rome the protection which the Republic could not afford her at Seville (Hispalis). She died on her journey, but Athanagild reached Byzantium and was reared as a Roman by the care of Maurice. What ultimately became of this Visigothic prince is not known, but in the year 590 we find his grandmother Brunhilda, herself originally a Visigothic princess, and his uncle Childebert begging Maurice to send the boy to Gaul. Maurice probably regarded him as a useful hostage for the loyalty of the Austrasian king; but though we have the letters of Brunhilda and Childebert concerning the restitution of Athanagild, the reply of Maurice has not been preserved. Childebert left no stone unturned to induce Maurice to comply with his wish. He wrote not only to Maurice himself, but to all the persons at Constantinople who possessed influence at court, including Paul the Emperor's father, Theodore the master of offices, John the quaestor, Magnus the curator (of the palace), Italica a patrician lady, Venantius a patrician. Moreover, Brunhilda wrote both to Maurice and to the Empress Anastasia. We have also the letters of Brunhilda and Childebert to Athanagild. All these epistles were carried to New Rome by ambassadors, of whom the spatharius Gripo seems to have been the chief, and the tone of this correspondence illustrates the lofty position which the Roman Emperor held in the eyes of the western nations. The majesty of the Imperator was still considered something far higher than all German royalties. Childebert's letter to Maurice begins thus: "The King Childebert to the glorious pious perpetual renowned triumphant Lord, ever Augustus, my father Maurice, Imperator." The Emperor, on the other hand, adopts the following form of address, which may be given in the original Latin: Domini nostri Dei Jesu Christi Imperator Caesar Flavius Mauritius Tiberius fidelis in Christo mansuetus maximus beneficus pacificus Alamannicus Goticus Anticus Alanicus ;Wandalicus Herulicus Gypedicus [Gepaedicus] Africus pius felix inclytus victor ac triumphato semper Augustus Childeberto viro ;glorioso regi Francorum.

Like Justin II, Maurice adopts all the pompous titles of his great predecessor Justinian; they were part of the inheritance. He is fully conscious that he is the greatest sovereign in Europe, or even in the world, and the kings of the West acknowledge that they owe him homage and deference as Roman Emperor. In the economy of the Empire the king of the Franks is only a vir gloriosus.

 

CHAPTER VII

THE LANGUAGE OF THE ROMAIOI IN THE SIXTH CENTURY

 

It will not be inappropriate to give some account of the Greek language as it was spoken by the Romans of the fifth and sixth centuries and written by their historians. It is to be observed that in the year 400, when Gaul and Spain were still Roman, the Greek-speaking people in the Empire were in a minority, and the official language of the Empire was still purely Latin. In the year 500, when not only Gaul and Spain, but Africa and even Italy (practically if not theoretically) had been lost, the Empire was a realm of Hellenic speech with the exception of Illyricum, and though Latin was still the official language, the Emperors often issued their constitutions in Greek. When Africa, Italy, and the western islands were recovered, the Latin element was once more considerable, but not so considerable as the Greek. Justinian, although Latin was his native tongue, as he often states with a certain pride, issued most of his constitutions, which were to have effect in the Greek-speaking part of the Empire, in the Greek language. An official of the civil service in the sixth century complains that a knowledge of Latin is no longer as valuable as it used to be, inasmuch as it is being superseded by Greek in official documents. By the end of the sixth century Latin had ceased to be the imperial tongue.

This disuse of Latin had a considerable effect on the vocabulary of the Greek language. Official or technical Latin terms, for which there were no equivalents ready to hand, had already made their way into Greek speech, but no one would have ventured to use them in writing without an apology. But once they were regularly employed in the imperial constitutions, they became as it were accredited; they began to lose their foreign savor, and were no longer looked on as strangers; prose-writers no longer scrupled to use them.

But we must carefully distinguish between three kinds of Greek. There was (1) the vulgar spoken language, from which modern Greek is derived. Its idiom varied in different places; the Greek spoken in Antioch, for example, differed to some extent from that spoken in Byzantium or that spoken in Alexandria. Antiochian Greek may have been influenced by Syriac, as Syriac was certainly influenced by Greek. There was (2) the spoken language of the educated, which, under the influence of the vulgar tongue, tended to degenerate. There was (3) the conventional written language, which endeavoured to preserve the traditions of Hellenistic prose from the changes which affected the oral "common dialect". We may take these three kinds of Greek in order.

(1) Of the vulgar dialect, such as it was spoken at Byzantium in the sixth century, a specimen has been preserved in the dialogue which took place in the hippodrome between the Emperor and the green faction shortly before the revolt of Nika. From this and from stray words which are preserved by historians or inscriptions, we see that it is already far on its way to becoming what is called Romaic; in fact it was already called Romaic. A sixth-century inscription in Nubia proves that the word neron was then used for "water", whence comes the modern Greek nepó.

Besides the strange vocabulary, derived partly from Latin and partly from local Greek words, changes are taking place in the grammar and syntax. Terminations in -ion, for example, are becoming corrupted to -in: the perfect tense and many prepositions and particles are falling into disuse.

(2)That the language of educated people was different from that of the vulgar, and approximated to the written language, is proved by a passage in Menander. It was, nevertheless, subject to the same tendencies, as is fully demonstrated by the fact that these very tendencies soon affected written prose and changed Hellenistic into Byzantine literature. Graecized Latin words must have been used even more by the higher classes than by the lower; a super elegant writer at the beginning of the seventh century employs familía (familia) without a line of apology. These Latinisms were chiefly adopted in matters appertaining to Roman law, to the imperial administration, or to warfare. There were also many new colloquial usages of old words, which the purism of Procopius or Agathias would not have countenanced. The adjective oreos, for instance, meant nothing more than "fair" or " pretty"; ponó meant "I am ill", and Kindenévo was used in the special sense of being sick unto death ... It was some time, doubtless, before unsightly forms like évala were adopted from the mouths of the common people, but the perfect and pluperfect tenses were soon relegated to the speech of the pedant and the prose of the man of letters; the old variety of particles and prepositions was replaced by a baldness and monotony of expression which correspond to the more simple constructions that came into use; ean was used with the indicative mood.

(3) It has been already pointed out that the Greek historians of the fifth and sixth centuries wrote in a traditional prose style, handed down by an unbroken series of Hellenistic writers from Polybius, and, although it underwent some modifications, differing less from the style of Polybius than the style of Polybius differs from the style of Xenophon. Olympiodorus seems to have been the only writer who ventured to introduce words and phrases from the spoken language, and thus his writings may be considered, in point of style, a mild anticipation of the chronicles of Malalas and Theophanes.

Procopius and Agathias and Menander could not, indeed, avoid the necessity of sometimes introducing technical or official Latin words which had become current in spoken Greek, but they always considered themselves bound to add an apologetic "so-called" or "to use the Latin expression". As a rule, however, they employ periphrases, and avoid the use of such titles as praetorian prefect, magister militum, or comes largitionum. Even the word "indiction" is considered undignified, and rendered by such a circumlocution as "the fifteen-year circuit". It would be interesting, if we had more data, to trace the reciprocal influences exerted on each other by the spoken language of the higher classes and the conventional prose.

This conventional prose never ceased to be written until the fifteenth century. Laconicus Chalcocondyles and George Phrantzes are, as far as their Greek is concerned, lineal descendants of Polybius. There was indeed a break from the middle of the seventh century to the end of the eighth, from Theophylactus to Nicephorus the Patriarch, but even during this period of historiographical inactivity the conventional Greek was employed by theological writers.

It is natural that in the sixth century, when the Roman Empire was losing its Latin appearance and assuming a Greek complexion in language, and in other respects too, the word "Roman" should have become elastic and ambiguous. In Greek writers Romaioi generally means all the subjects of the Empire; but it is also used of the inhabitants of Old Rome; and it is even used of the ancient Romans as opposed to the "modern" Romans of the Empire. All these usages will be found in Procopius. Again, the expression "Romaic language" may signify one of two things. It sometimes means Latin and sometimes it means Greek. In the former case it is opposed to Greek, whether spoken or written; in the latter case it is spoken Greek opposed to written Greek. Written Greek is called the "language of the Hellenes"; and, as applied to language, the word "Hellenic" has escaped the opprobrious religious meaning which had become attached to the name "Hellên." Procopius for the most part speaks of "Latin" and not of "Romaic"; the latter term was fast becoming fixed in its application to the language which was spoken at New Rome. It should be noticed that Romaic never came to be synonymous with Hellenic; writers could never lose the consciousness of the vast gulf which separated the conventional language of written prose, which they often fondly imagined to be Attic, from the language of daily life. By the end of the sixth century Romaic has become equivalent to the language of the Romaioi; it is no longer used for the language of the Romani. This is apparent from its use in Theophylactus Simocatta. We are often startled in the pages of this writer by meeting the word Latini, and reading that the Latins were carrying on operations in Mesopotamia or Thrace. The affected historian uses the word as synonymous with Romaioi. The Latin name had once meant the populus Romanus; in Theophylactus it meant the populus Romaioi. Virgil or Livy might have spoken of Latins warring on the Euphrates or the Danube; at a much later time we are accustomed to speak of the Latins at Constantinople or in Palestine; but it is strange to find the "Latins" commanded by Priscus and Philippicus—names indeed that suggest Old Rome—at the end of the sixth century. But if Theophylactus uses Latin in a forced sense as the equivalent of Romaic, he uses Romaic in its natural sense and not as an equivalent of Latin. And when a word which he calls Romaic happens to be of Latin origin, he does not desire to convey that fact to the reader, but only to indicate that it is a word of the vulgar language, which cannot be introduced into prose by a dignified writer without an apologetic explanation.

It is interesting to observe how, while Greek words were told off to serve as the equivalents for Latin words connoting purely Roman things or relations, in other cases the Latin words were naturalized and assumed a Greek garb. Thus at a very early stage of the relations between Rome and Greece ípatos became the technical word for consul, and andipatos for proconsul. Eparchos was adopted to express prefect, and eparchia was used in the double meaning of province or prefecture. On the other hand, comes was introduced as kómis, and declined as a Greek noun (gen. kómitos)...

The fates of the words Hellene and barbarian are extremely curious. Originally they were conjugate terms; the world was divided into Hellenes and barbarians. The course of history, the diffusion of Christianity, and the influence of the Roman Empire brought it about that each became the conjugate of something quite different. Hellene came to mean a non-christian or a pagan, and thus was opposed to Christian: while barbarian came to be opposed to Romaioi. It will be remembered that in the plays of Plautus, taken from Greek originals, a Roman was spoken of as a barbarian. It may be noticed, as a curious freak of usage, that the Latin word for pagan, paganus, made its way into the Greek language, but in a different sense; paganikós was used of secular as opposed to sacred or holyday things, and especially of everyday as opposed to festal apparel.

When Hellene received its new theological meaning, what word, it may be asked, was used to denote the Greeks as opposed to the Latins? The answer seems to be that the need of such a word was not much felt, and whenever occasion demanded there was the word Graecus to fall back on. But all the Greeks were Romaioi, they formed no nation; and no subject of the Empire belonged to a class called "Greek"; he belonged to such and such a province, or to such and such a city.

After Justinian the Roman Emperors ceased to speak either in private or in public life the tongue that was spoken at Old Rome. The official language had already become practically Greek; we can trace this tendency in the Code of Theodosius, where we find no vestige of the purism of Claudius, who would not admit a Greek word in an edict; but in the Code of Justinian it is no longer a mere tendency. Yet this official Greek is full of Latinisms, and until the last day of the Roman or Romaic Empire memories of its origin from Latin Rome survived in its language.

 

CHAPTER VIII

LITERATURE OF THE SIXTH CENTURY

 

When the gods of Greece were hurled from heaven by the God of Christianity, Athens was left for two hundred years as a "hill retired" on which their votaries could stand apart "in high thoughts elevate", reasoning of Providence and fate. But this inner circle could not resist for ever the atmosphere that encompassed it; this quietistic negation of the prevailing spirit could not last. And so, when Justinian in 529 AD commanded that the schools of Athens should be closed, we can hardly suppose that he anticipated by many years their natural death.

Proclus must be looked on as the last link in the chain of Greek philosophy; he was the last philosophical genius, the last originator of a system. But the seven professors who were ranged round the deathbed of philosophy, and who, despairing of pursuing their studies conveniently within the Empire, betook themselves to Persia, have won a place in the recollection of posterity by their curious and somewhat pathetic experiences. All seven were Asiatics, and had a high reputation; the most celebrated were Simplicius of Cilicia and Damascius of Syria, a Neoplatonist. Exaggerated rumours had represented to them Chosroes as a sort of royal philosopher, if not the ideal of Plato, yet equal at least to Julian or Marcus Aurelius, and they formed golden dreams of riving in an enlightened kingdom, a place like heaven, in which thieves do not break through and steal. They were disappointed. Among the subjects of Chosroes they found human nature as near the ground as in the lands which they had left, and on the throne they found a man who affected higher culture, but was really ignorant. Disillusionized, they returned to the Roman Empire; it was more tolerable to them to be put to death among Roman christians than to be lords among the Persian fire-worshippers. Chosroes, however, rendered them a service. In the peace of 532 AD he bargained with Justinian for the personal safety of the seven philosophers, whom he could not persuade to remain at his court.

A thinker who deserves the name of a philosopher, although he wrote professedly in the interests of Christian theology, was Johannes Philoponus, who lived in the sixth century and was a contemporary of Simplicius. In his early years he wrote a book against Aristotle's doctrine that the world is eternal, to which attack Simplicius wrote a reply. He also composed a work, still extant, on the eternity of the world, arguing against the demonstrations of Proclus. The noteworthy point is that he met the pagan theories on their own ground, and attempted to construct the world from the indications of reason alone, without help from revelation. His position was that reason of itself leads to the doctrines of Christianity. In another direction, however, he propagated nominalistic opinions which endangered a cardinal dogma of the Church. His logical theories may be considered as a sort of link between the nominalism of Antisthenes the Cynic and the nominalism of the medieval school of Roscelin; and he consistently applied his logic to the Trinity in a way that threatened the divine unity. He may be looked upon as a forerunner of the Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages, such as Michael Psellus in the East and the schoolmen in the West. He introduced the application of Aristotelianism to Christianity.

The Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, an Egyptian monk who visited the East' at the beginning of Justinian's reign, is interesting not only for the light which it throws on the state of southern Asia, but also for its cosmological speculations. The problem was to explain the position of the earth in the universe and determine its shape, so as not to conflict with foregone theological suppositions. The rising and setting of the sun were of course the chief difficulties. The notion of Lactantius, Augustine, and Chrysostom touching the Antipodes was that it was a place where the grass grew downwards and the rain fell up. Cosmas looked on the earth as a flat parallelogram whose length from east to west was twice as great as its breadth from north to south. This parallelogram, according to his view, is enclosed by walls on which the firmament rests, and the sun and the moon and the stars move underneath this firmament. In the northern part of the earth there is a very high mountain, round which the sun and other heavenly bodies move; this explains day and night, as the mountain conceals the sun and stars from view when they are on the other side. In the same plane as the earth, but beyond its confines, lies the place where man dwelled before the Deluge.

The difference in spirit between the fifth century and the sixth is perhaps most evident in the sphere of history. As a rule, the historians of the fifth century are either pronounced Christians or pronounced pagans; as a rule the historians of the sixth century are neither pronounced Christians nor pronounced pagans. Procopius and Agathias, nominally Christians, allow Christian conceptions to have no influence over their historical views, and Menander writes in the same spirit.

 

PROCOPIUS

Procopius of Caesarea, the secretary of Belisarius and the historian of his campaigns, wrote a history of the Persian, Vandalic, and Gothic wars, which, while it is arranged in geographical divisions after the fashion of Appian, has its unity in a central figure, the hero Belisarius. Procopius has been compared both to Herodotus and to Polybius. He has been compared to Herodotus on account of his love of the marvellous, which, however, did not eliminate his love of historical truth, such as he conceived it; and if Herodotus' care for truth can be called in question, that of Procopius can certainly not be doubted, notwithstanding the fact that his friendship with Belisarius has often biassed him. Like Herodotus also, he gives us much ethnographical information. He has been compared to Polybius because he explains the course of history by reference to Tyche, Fortune, or to the divinity that shapes our ends. Tyche continually interferes with the plans of men, and the final cause of their foolish acts is "to prepare the way for Tyche". He attributes envy to this deity. It would be interesting to know how he conceived the relation of Tyche to the divine principle, and whether he was a sceptic in regard to a scheme or a final cause of the universe. Did he believe that chance corrects chance?

And yet he professes faith in Christianity. He tells us that he believes that Jesus was the Son of God for two reasons, because he committed no sins, and on account of the miracles which he performed. The second reason is characteristic of a lover of the marvellous. He does not think of questioning the truth of the record; the only question for him is whether the miracles as recorded point to the divinity of the operator. But this acceptance of the Christian creed does not affect his views of history. He practically permits the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to rest idly like the gods of Epicurus, careless of mankind; he is not influenced by the Christian views of history introduced& by Eusebius. In fact Procopius was at core, in the essence of his spirit, a pagan; Christianity, assented to by his lips and his understanding, was alien to his soul, like a half-known foreign language. He could not think in Christian terms; he was not able to handle the new religious conceptions; he probably felt wonder, rather than satisfaction, at the joys that come from Nazareth. And we may safely say that it was just this pagan nature, deeper perhaps than that of the aggressive Zosimus, that made him such a good historian. He is almost worthy to be placed beside Ammianus. He attended Belisarius in his campaigns and kept a diary, from which he afterwards composed the eight books of his History. He adopted a geographical arrangement, and so placed the two Persian wars together, although the Vandalic war and the first period of the Gothic war intervened. We have thus the record of an eye-witness who kept a diary, as is especially plain in his description of the sailing of the expedition against the Vandals. Of the history of events in which he did not himself assist as a spectator or actor he gives us scant information. He is not satisfactory as to the causes of the Gothic war or as to the intrigues in Constantinople which affected the career of Belisarius. But these are just the deficiencies to be expected in an eye-witness who concentrates all his interest on the part of the drama which he sees himself, and in a contemporary who is unable to obtain a complete view of the situation.

Procopius is not out of touch with his own age, like Tacitus or Zosimus; although, on the other hand, he is not enthusiastic about it, like Polybius or Virgil. He is able to appreciate the greatness of Justinian, and his ardent admiration of Belisarius sometimes damages the credit of his statements. The book on Edifices, which he wrote later than his history, is a monument in honour of Justinian's vast activity, and there is no reason to consider it an insincere work, although it was perhaps written to order.

The History of Procopius, which closes with 550 AD, was continued by Agathias of Myrrina, a sckolasticus or lawyer, who wrote five books embracing the history of seven years (552-558). They contain an account of the end of the Gothic war and describe the invasion of Zabergan, but are mainly occupied with the Perso-Colchian wars, and supply us with some important details about early Sassanid history, which the writer obtained from Persian records through the medium of his friend Sergius, who, as an interpreter, was skilled in the Persian language.

 

AGATHIAS

Like Procopius, Agathias was a Christian, and, like Procopius, he did not permit his professed religion to influence his historical conceptions. We should never have known from his history that he was not a pagan; but some of his epigrams apprise us of his Christianity. He does not, however, refer events to the leading of Tyche; he usually speaks of the divine principle, to which he attributes the exercise of retribution. In telling of the plague which destroyed the army of Leutharis in Italy, he observes that some wrongly ascribe it to the corruption of the atmosphere; others, also erroneously, placed its cause in a sudden change from the hardships of war to the luxury of rest and pleasure. The real cause, according to him, was the unrighteousness of the victims, which brought down divine wrath upon their heads.

He has a firm belief in free will, and this is a point of difference between his view and that of Procopius. Procopius emphasises Tyche; Agathias emphasises free will. Speaking of wars, he will ascribe them neither to the divine principle, which is in its nature good and not a friend of wars, nor yet to fate or j blind astral influences. "For", he says, "if the power of fate prevail, and men be deprived of the power of volition and free will, we shall have to consider all advice, all arts, all instruction as idle and useless, and the hopes of men who live most righteously will vanish and bear no fruit. He, therefore attributes wars to the nature of men, and believes that they will continue to occur as long as the congenital nature of men remains the same.

He professes to have a strict ideal of what history should be. It should be useful for human life, and not merely a bare uncritical relation of events, which would be little better than the fables told by women in their bowers over their spinning. It should be true, irrespective of persons. Both he and Procopius are distinctly conscious of the obligation to truth. Agathias blames previous historians for their careless inaccuracy, for their distortion of facts to flatter kings and lords, as if history were not different from an encomium, and for their tendency to revile or disparage the dead.

Agathias, like Thucydides, has a high idea of the vast importance of the age in which he lived. "It happened in my time that great wars broke out unexpectedly in many parts of the world, that movements and migrations of many barbarous nations took place. There have been strange issues to obscure and incredible actions, random turns of the scales of fortune. Races of men have been overthrown, cities enslaved and their inhabitants changed. In a word, all human things have been set in motion. In view of this, it occurred to me that it would not be quite pardonable to leave these mighty and wonderful events, which might prove of profit and use to posterity, unrecorded."

He was not content with his profession. He describes himself, in accents of complaint, sitting from early morn to sunset in the "Imperial Porch" poring over his briefs and legal documents, feeling a grudge against his clients for disturbing him, and still more vexed if clients did not appear, as he depended on the emoluments of his profession for the necessaries of life. He had thus little leisure to devote to literary pursuits, such as writing epigrams or making researches in Persian history; and literary composition, he tells us, was his favourite occupation.

 

MENANDER

Menander of Constantinople studied for the bar, but he had as little taste as Agathias—whom he admired and probably knew—for spending his days in the Imperial Porch. As however, unlike Agathias, he had money at his disposal, a profession was not inevitable; so he cast aside his law books and adopted the idle life of a "man about town". He took an interest in horse­races and the excitement of the colours, that is the blue and green factions. He was fond of theatrical ballet-dancing, and he confesses that in the wrestling schools he often stripped off all sense and all sense of decency along with his dress. After this candid confession of wickedness and "wild oats", he informs us that the taste for letters displayed by the Emperor Maurice, who used often to spend a great part of the night in discussing or meditating on questions in poetry and history, infected himself, and caused him to reflect that he might do something better than loiter about. Thus Maurice appears as a lover of literature who not only patronised but stimulated; and this character is confirmed by the testimony of Theophylactus. The only work which the Emperor is known to have composed is the treatise in twelve books on military science. Accordingly, Menander determined to continue the history of Agathias cut short by that writer's death. He carried it down to the last year of Tiberius, 582 AD, and he formed his style on the model of Agathias. Only fragments of his history remain, but they give us a favourable impression of the writer.

Almost the same period as that covered by Menander was dealt with in the history, also lost, of Theophanes of Byzantium, who began with the year 566 and ended with 581. He wrote in the last years of the sixth century.

 

JOHANNES THE LYDIAN

Justinian himself was a man of culture, who occupied himself with profound studies without allowing them to relax his firm grip of the helm of State. He presents an example of the polymathy which was characteristic of the sixth and the two preceding centuries, and of which Boethius, as we shall see, was a typical example in the West. He composed treatises on theological controversies which are still extant, but we must suppose that he also patronised literature in general, even though on religious grounds he shut up the schools of Athens, whose open paganism was a manifest scandal in the Christian world. We know that he engaged the services of writers to compose poems or histories in praise of his own deeds. The book on Edifices of Procopius is a work of this kind, and it is possible that the book on offices written by Johannes Lydus was partly inspired by Justinian.

As most of the literary men of the time were educated for the legal profession and many of them entered the civil service, it is worthwhile to give a short biographical account of Johannes (known as Lydus, the Lydian), from whose pen three treatises are wholly or partially extant. Born at Philadelphia of noble provincials in easy circumstances, he went to Constantinople in his youth for the purpose of making a career. He learned philosophy, and read Aristotle and Plato under the direction of a pupil of the great Proclus named Agapius, of whom a versifier said in an unmetrical line, "Agapius is the last, but yet the first of all."

He had been for a year a clerk in a civil service office, when he obtained the post of shorthand writer in the staff of his townsman Zoticus of Philadelphia, who had been appointed praetorian prefect. This post proved lucrative. He won 1000 gold solidi in a single year. A relation, who was in the same office as he, and Zoticus the prefect were useful friends, and did him a good office in procuring him a rich wife, who had a dowry of 100 pound weight in gold and was also remarkable among her sex for her modesty. Johannes wrote an encomium on Zoticus for which he received a golden coin for every line, which seems a liberal reward to literary merit, and indicates that the bad poets of the time might count on distinguished patronage. Having steadily advanced through all the grades of the service, in which his excellent knowledge of Latin, a rare accomplishment then in Constantinople, must have stood him in some stead, he reached the rank of cornicularius at the age of sixty (in 551). But the service was declining owing to a diminution of the tribute received and for other reasons, and Lydus found that the emoluments long looked forward to with expectant confidence, which should have been at a minimum 1000 solidi, proved absolutely nil. In bitterness of mind at this disappointment he composed the book on Offices, in which he gives an account of the civil service and explains its decline.

Of his personal treatment by the Emperor he could not complain. Justinian had engaged him, perhaps in the early part of his reign, to compose a panegyric on himself and also a history of the Persian wars. At the end of John's career Justinian wrote a letter to the prefecture, in which he dwelled on his rhetorical excellence, his grammatical accuracy, his poetical grace, his polymathy, and went so far as to say that his labours illuminated the language of the Romaioi. He praised him for having spent time on study, although a civil servant, and enjoined the prefect to reward him at the public expense, and confer dignities upon him in recognition of his eloquence. The prefect, on receiving the letter, assigned Lydus a place in the Capitolium or Capitoline Aule, that is, a lecture-room in the university buildings, where he might give public instruction, presumably in rhetoric. Pecuniarily, however, he was passed over as though he had never performed public services; on the other hand, he received honor and consideration from the Emperor, and enjoyed the leisure of a quiet life. He retired to the peace of his library, having served the State for more than forty years, feeling himself very ill used, and probably soured in temper. In religion the complexion of Lydus was doubtful; sometimes he speaks like a pagan, sometimes like a Christian, so that one is not quite sure when he is speaking in earnest; but, Christian or pagan, he was superstitious.

Poetry was dead; the epigrams of Agathias and the composition in hexameters on the church of St. Sophia do not deserve the name; and few of the verses would satisfy "the scrupulous ear of a well-flogged critic". We may admit, however, that the iambic lines in the style of late Attic comedy, which Agathias prefixed to this book of epigrams, are not quite unworthy of a writer of new comedy, and that the hexameters which follow, in praise of Justinian's Empire, are written with some spirit in spite of their affectation. Agathias tells us that in his boyhood he was chiefly addicted to heroic verse, and "loved the sweets of poetical refinements". This expression could hardly apply to Homer; his luscious models must have been the Alexandrine writers, Theocritus, Callimachus, and the rest, or recent composers like Nonnus, as may be also inferred from the works which he wrote under this inspiration, a collection of short poems in hexameters called Dafniaká, consisting of erotic stories and "other such witcheries". In complete satisfaction with himself and the poetical flights of his youth, Agathias, having given an account of his poems, is unable to contain his enthusiasm, and suddenly breaks out, "For veritably poetry is something divine and holy". Its votaries, as Plato would say, are in a state of fine frenzy. When we think of the productions of the fine frenzy of the writer himself, this outburst is sufficiently amusing.

The description of St. Sophia and the inaugural poem on the opening of the cathedral, to which the description is annexed, breathe the enthusiasm of flattery, in which the flatterer, Paul the Silentiary, was perhaps himself in earnest. The first eighty lines, written in iambics and consisting of a glorification of Justinian, were intended to be recited in the palace. Then follow more iambics to be recited in the Patriarch's residence, beginning thus: "We come to you, sirs, from the home of the Emperor to the home of the Almighty Emperor, the deviser of the universe, by whose grace victory cleaves unto our lord". And this approximation of God to the Emperor, suggesting a comparison between them, occurs frequently. Speaking with conventional modesty of his own verses, the author says that they will not be judged by "bean-eating Athenians, but by men of piety and indulgence, in whom God and the Emperor find pleasure". This contempt for the ancient Athenians is a touch of characteristic Christian bigotry, and, if I may hazard the conjecture, is intended as a laudatory allusion to Justinian's measure of sweeping away the decrepit survival of Attic culture and exclusiveness in 529.

The iambics are succeeded by hexameters which begin with the praise of peace and the boast of the superiority of New to Old Rome, where Paul does not lose an opportunity of comparing Justinian to the Deity. It would be wearisome to follow the poem to its close. Its chief interest consists in its architectural information, which has been encased in a metrical dress with some ingenuity.

 

CASSIODORUS

When we turn to the Latin literature of the sixth century the most prominent figure that meets us is Cassiodorus, the statesman of Theodoric and his successors (born about 480). Starting as an assistant in the bureau of his father, who had served as a finance minister under Odovacar and held the praetorian prefecture under Theodoric, he was fortunate enough to win the Gothic king's notice, while yet a mere subaltern, by a panegyric which he pronounced on him on a public occasion. Theodoric, who immediately recognized and welcomed his talent, appointed him to the post of quaestor, allowing him to dispense with all the grades of the civil service. The quaestorship was an office in which scope was given for literary talents, and Cassiodorus took full advantage of the opportunity. The letters which he wrote for Theodoric, along with those which he composed during subsequent reigns, were collected by him shortly before he retired from public life and published in a still extant collection under the title of Variae Epistolae. Under Amalasuntha, Theodoric's daughter, under Theodabad the student of Plato, and Witigis the thorough Goth, Cassiodorus held the exalted post of praetorian prefect. About the year 539, not long before the capture of Ravenna by the Romans, he retired after forty years of public service, to his birthplace Squillace in Bruttii, a charming spot for which he entertained a romantic affection. He founded there two monasteries, of which one, up in the hills, was for the men who were uncompromisingly austere, while the other, down below, built beside a fish-pond, and hence called vivarium, was for those monks who took that less strict and more cheerful view of the spiritual life of the cloister which characterised western monasticism once it had grown independent of its oriental origin.

Here Cassiodorus made a new departure, which, quiet and unostentatious as it was, has led to incalculably fruitful results for the modern world. This new departure consisted in occupying the abundant leisure of the monks with the labour of multiplying copies of Latin texts. To this simple but brilliant idea of taking advantage of the unemployed energy that ran to seed in monastic society for the spread and transmission of learning, both profane and sacred, we owe the survival of the great bulk of our Latin literature. There was a chamber, called the scriptorium or "writing-room," in the monastery, in which the monks used to copy both pagan and Christian texts, working by the light of "mechanical lamps," mechanicas lucernas, whose peculiarity was that they were self-supplying, and measuring their time by sun-dials or water-clocks.

The style of Cassiodorus accords only too well with the principle stated by himself in the preface to his letters. "It is adornment alone", he says there, "that distinguishes the learned from the unlearned." He thus candidly takes pride in what is the characteristic of all ages of decadence, a love of embellishment for its own sake. He finds it impossible to state a simple or trivial fact in simple words. He essays to raise triviality to the sphere of the dignified and solemn; he succeeds in making it appear ridiculous. He will not allow the simple to wear the grace of its own simplicity. Nothing is more curious and amusing, though it soon becomes wearisome, than the correspondence of Theodoric in Cassiodorian dress, each epistle posing as it were in tragic cothurni and trailing a sweeping train.

Thus in the letters which describe the duties of the various ministers of state and other public officers, the quaestor makes it his object to give a tincture of poetry to functions, which in themselves suggest neither very solemn nor very poetical associations. He reminds the prefect of the corn-supplies that Ceres herself discovered corn, and that panis, "bread", may be derived from the great god Pan. The prefect of the police he apostrophises thus: "Go forth then under the starry skies, watch diligently with all the birds of night, and as they seek food in the darkness, so do thou hunt therein for fame". To the count of the port of Rome he cries : "Excellent thought of the men of old to provide two channels by which strangers might enter the Tiber, and to adorn them with two stately cities which shine like lights upon the watery way!".

These examples of his manner are more favourable to him than many others that might be selected. Yet, though this manner has its amusing side, it may be said that Cassiodorus had really that sort of nature which, removing "the veil of familiarity" from common and trivial things, finds in them a certain dignity and feels a reverence for them; and that he unsuccessfully tried to express this feeling by using grandiloquent and embellished language, a feat in which Pindar was successful when, for example, he called a cloak "a healthy remedy against weary cold."

As an instance of the far-fetched and frigid conceits which were popular in that age, I may quote the words used by Cassiodorus of monks engaged in copying the sacred writings: "The fast-traveling reed writes down the holy words, and thus avenges the malice of the wicked one, who caused a reed to be used to smite the head of the Saviour."

It is interesting to record the attention paid by Cassiodorus to the beautiful binding of his books, and the biblical language in which he justifies it is characteristic of his age. It is meet, he says, that a book should be clothed in a fair dress, even as the guests were arrayed in wedding garments in the New Testament parable.

Beside the letters, Cassiodorus wrote (1) a treatise on the soul in which its relation to the body is treated with a delicate touch of paganism that reminds us of Hadrian's hospes comesque corporis; (2) the Historia Tripartita, a compilation from Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, and a history of the Goths from which Jordanes drew; (3) various theological works; (4) an educational work on the Arts and Disciplines of the Liberal Letters; (5) a treatise, composed in his ninety-third year, on orthography, intended as a guide to the monks at Squillace in their spelling. Thus the influence of Cassiodorus and the traditions of culture and accuracy which he established at Squillace formed a counterpoise to that spirit, represented by Pope Gregory I, which regarded grammar as trivial and culture as superfluous, or even a temptation; a spirit which soon launched the Church into the waters of ignorance and barbarism.

 

BOETHIUS

Another prominent figure in the reign of Theodoric, but who did not, like Cassiodorus, enjoy a happy old age amid the ruins of his country, was Boethius the Patrician, whose unfortunate end is veiled to a certain degree in obscurity. We know not what were the real motives for his condemnation, passed formally by the Roman senate, and his subsequent execution (524 AD) Charges were brought against him of astrological magic, stigmatized as a serious crime by the Theodosian Code, but it is evident that these were only pretexts. He seems to have been suspected of taking part in a conspiracy; yet the silence of Cassiodorus, as Mr. Hodgkin justly insists, is ominous for the fame of the Gothic king. The blow seems to have fallen quite unexpectedly on Boethius and his affectionate father-in-law Symmachus, who had the reputation of being a "modern Cato", and who shared the fate of his son-in-law.

In prison under the pressure of this sudden calamity, which burst like a peal of thunder on the calm course of his life,—justifying the saying of Solon, that the happiness of a man's life must not be asserted till after his death,—Boethius composed the work which has immortalized him, the Consolation of Philosophy. He did not lay the world under such a great obligation of gratitude as Cassiodorus; and yet this work was better known and more read throughout the Middle Ages, although it completely ignores Christianity, than any of Cassiodorus' writings. It was translated into Anglo-Saxon by King Alfred, and into English by Chaucer.

Boethius was an Aristotelian, and he employed his leisure in translating works of Aristotle into Latin. It was partly through these translations that Aristotelianism was accessible to the students of the Middle Ages; and thus the two chief literary men at the beginning of the sixth century, Cassiodorus and Boethius, made each in his way contributions of vast importance to the culture of medieval and modern times. Cassiodorus may be considered to have secured the survival of Latin literature, as was explained above, while Boethius laid the foundations for Scholasticism. Boethius and Johannes Philoponus were the realist and the nominalist respectively of the sixth century.

The Latin of Boethius is far superior to the Latin of Cassiodorus. It is elegant, but not exaggerated through an extravagant love of embellishment. In fact he had the faculty of taste, which even in the lowest stages of decadence distinguishes good and bad writers, and of which Cassiodorus was almost destitute.

The Consolatio Philosophiae has a considerable charm, which is increased by the recollection of the circumstances under which it was composed. A student who, maintaining indeed a lukewarm connection with politics, had spent most of his days in the calm atmosphere of his library, where he expected to end his life, suddenly found himself in the confinement of a dismal prison with death impending over him. There is thus a reality and earnestness in his philosophical meditations which so many treatises of the kind lack; there is an earnestness born of a real fervent need of consolation, while at the same time there is a pervading calm. The lines of poetry, sometimes lyrical, sometimes elegiac, which break the discussion at intervals, like organ chants in a religious service, serve to render the calmness of the atmosphere distinctly perceptible.

The problem of the treatise is to explain the "unjust confusion" which exists in the world, the eternal question how the fact that the evil win often the rewards of virtue and the good suffer the penalties of crime, can be reconciled with a "deus, rector mundi". If I could believe, says Boethius, that all things were determined by chance and hazard, I should not be so puzzled. We need not follow him in his discussion of the subject, which of course is unsatisfactory—did it really satisfy him?—and need only observe that in one place he defines the relation of fate to the Deity in the sense that fate is a sort of instrument by which God regulates the world according to fixed rules. In other words, fate is the law of phenomena or nature, under the supreme control of the highest Being, which he identifies with the Summum Bonum or highest good.

But the metaphysical discussion does not interest the student of literature so much as the setting of the piece and things said incidentally. Boethius imagines his couch surrounded by the Muses of poetry, who suggest to him accents of lamentation. Suddenly there appears at his head a strange lady of lofty visage. There was marvellous fluidity in her stature; she seemed sometimes of ordinary human height, and at the next moment her head seemed to touch heaven, or penetrated so far into its recesses that her face was lost to the vision. Her eyes too were unnatural, brilliant and transparent beyond the power of human eyes, of fresh color and unquenchable vigor. And yet at the same time she seemed so ancient of days "that she could not be taken for a woman of our age." Her garments were of the finest threads, woven by some secret art into an indissoluble texture, woven, as Boethius afterwards learned, by her own hands. And on this robe there was a certain mist of neglected antiquity, the sort of colour that statues have which have been exposed to smoke. On the lower edge of the robe there was the Greek letter P, from which stairs were worked leading upwards to the letter TH (Theoritiki, Pure Philosophy). And her garment had the marks of violent usage, as though rough persons had tried to rend it from her and carried away shreds in their hands. The lady was Philosophia; she bore a sceptre and parchment rolls. She afterwards explained that the violent persons who had rent her robe were the Epicureans, Stoics, and other late schools; they succeeded in tearing away patches of her dress, fancying severally that they had obtained the whole garment. Philosophia's first act is to drive out the Muses, whom she disdainfully terms "theatrical strumpets", and she makes a remark, with which many perhaps who have sought for consolation in poetry will agree, that it "accustoms the minds of men to the disease but does not set them free."

The description of the lady Philosophia has a considerable aesthetic value. The conception of her robe resembling marble statues discoloured by smoke, is a really happy invention to suggest that antique quaintness which the Greeks expressed with the word epifnis.

But the most striking feature of the Consolatio is the interspersion of the prose dialogue with poems at certain intervals, which, like choruses in Greek tragedy, appertain, though more closely than they, to the preceding argument. Thus the work resembles in form Dante's Vita Nuova, where the sonnets gather up in music the feelings occasioned by the narrated events. These poems, which betray the influence of Seneca's plays, have all a charm of their own, and metres of various kinds are gracefully employed.

This idea of the mind, vexed by the cares of earth, leaving its own light and passing into outer darkness, in externas tenebras, would be a suitable illustration of the spiritual meaning of the outer darkness spoken of in the New Testament. Another poem, constructed with as much care as a modern sonnet, sings of the love that moves the sun and stars, an idea best known to modern readers from the last line of Dante's Divina Commedia, but which is as old as Empedocles. In another place we have an anticipation of Shelley's nought may endure but mutability".

As an example of poetical tenderness, quite Virgilian, I may quote two lines of a stanza, where the author is illustrating the return of nature to itself by a caged bird, which, when it beholds the greenwood once more, spurns the sprinkled crumbs—

silvas tantum maesta requirit,

silvas tantum voce susurrat

Immediately after this poem Boethius proceeds thus: "Ye too, 0 creatures of earth! albeit in a vague image, yet do ye dream of your origin",—a felicitous expression of pantheism.

I must not omit to notice the delicate feeling for metrical effect which Boethius displays in the poem on the protracted toils of the siege of Troy and the labors of Hercules. It is written in Sapphic metre, but the short fourth lines are omitted until the end. The effect of this device is that the mind and voice of the reader continue to travel without relief or metrical resting-place until all the labors are over and heavenly rest succeeds in the stars of the concluding and only Adonius—

superata tellus

sidera donat.

The age was so poor in works of pure literary interest that I have gladly lingered a little over the Consolatio of Boethius. It remains to add that he wrote short books on Christian theology, and must therefore have been professedly a Christian. This religion, however, did not influence his pagan spirit, just as it left Procopius untouched; and it was probably the theological subtleties that interested him and not the spirit of the faith. He was a very accomplished man, acquainted with a diversity of subjects; polymathy, as I said before, was a characteristic of the time. As well as a philosopher and a poet, he was a musician, he was learned in astronomy, he was fond of inventive science, like the Greek architect Anthemius. It would appear, indeed, that scientific studies were fashionable in the sixth century; natural science was a favourite subject of Cassiodorus.

If the church of San Vitale at Ravenna is the great monument of the imperial restoration in Italy, the poems of Flavius Cresconius Corippus may be considered the monument of the imperial restoration in Africa. He is not known, indeed, to have chosen the victories of Belisarius as the subject of a special work, but in his Johannis and in his de laudibus Justini, which have been mentioned in previous chapters, joy over the fall of the Vandal and the restoration of Africa to the Empire is expressed in strong and sometimes effective language.