CHAPTER III.

Condition of the Greeks under the Reign of Justinian, A. D. 527-565.

 

Sect. I

Influence of the Imperial Power on the condition of the Greek Nation during the reign of Justinian

 

It happens not unfrequently, that during long periods of time national feelings and popular institutions escape the attention of historians; their feeble traces are lost in the importance of events, apparently the effect of accident, destiny, or the special intervention of Providence. In such cases, history becomes a chronicle of facts, or a series of biographical sketches; and it ceases to yield the instructive lessons which it always affords, as long as it connects events with local habits, national customs, and the general ideas of a people. The history of the Eastern Empire often assumes this form, and is frequently little better than a mere chronicle. Its historians hardly display national character or popular feeling, and only participate in the superstition and party spirit of their situation in society. In spite of the brilliant events which have given the reign of Justinian a prominent place in the annals of mankind, it is presented to us in a series of isolated and incongruous facts. Its chief interest is derived from the biographical memorials of Belisarius, Theodora, and Justinian; and its most instructive lesson has been drawn from the influence which its legislation has exercised on foreign nations. The unerring instinct of mankind has, however, fixed on this period as one of the greatest eras in man’s annals. The actors may have been men of ordinary merit, but the events of which they were the agents effected the mightiest revolutions in society. The frame of the ancient world was broken to pieces, and men long looked back with wonder and admiration at the fragments which remained, to prove the existence of a nobler race than their own. The Eastern Empire, though too powerful to fear any external enemy, was withering away from the rapidity with which the State devoured the resources of the people; and this malady or corruption of the Roman government appeared to the wisest men of the age so utterly incurable, that it was supposed to indicate the approaching dissolution of the globe. No dawn of a new social organization had yet manifested its advent in any part of the known world. A large portion, perhaps the majority of the human race, continued to live in a state of slavery; and slaves were still regarded as intelligent domestic animals, not as men. Society was destined to be regenerated by the destruction of predial slavery; but, to destroy predial slavery, the free inhabitants of the civilized world were compelled to descend to the state of poverty and ignorance in which they had, for ages, kept the servile population. The field for general improvement could only be opened, and the reorganization of society could only commence, when slaves and freemen were so closely intermingled in the cares and duties of life as to destroy the prejudices of class; then, at last, feelings of philanthropy were called into action by the necessities of man’s condition.

The reign of Justinian is more remarkable as a portion of the history of mankind, than as a chapter in the annals of the Roman Empire or of the Greek nation. The changes of centuries passed in rapid succession before the eyes of one generation. The life of Belisarius, either in its reality or its romantic form, has typified his age. In his early youth, the world was populous and wealthy, the empire rich and powerful. He conquered extensive realms and mighty nations, and led kings captive to the footstool of Justinian, the lawgiver of civilization. Old age arrived; Belisarius sank into the grave suspected and impoverished by his feeble and ungrateful master; and the world, from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Tagus, presented the awful spectacle of famine and plague, of ruined cities, and of nations on the brink of extermination. The impression on the hearts of men was profound. Fragments of Gothic poetry, legends of Persian literature, and fables concerning the fate of Belisarius himself, still indicate the eager attention with which this period was long regarded.

The expectation that Justinian would be able to re-establish the Roman power was entertained by many, and not without reasonable grounds, at the time of his accession to the throne; but, before his death, the delusion was utterly dissipated. Anastasius, by filling the treasury, and remodelling the army, had prepared the way for reforming the financial administration and improving the condition of the people. Justinian unfortunately employed the immense wealth and effective army to which he succeeded, in such a manner as to increase the burden of the imperial government, and render hopeless the future reform of the system. Yet it must still be observed that the decay of the internal resources of the empire, which proceeded with such fearful rapidity in the latter days of Justinian’s reign, was interwoven with the frame of society. For six centuries, the Roman government had ruled the East in a state of tranquillity, when compared with the ordinary fortunes of the human race; and during this long period, the people had been moulded into slaves of the imperial treasury. Justinian, by introducing measures of reform, tending to augment the powers and revenues of the State, only accelerated the inevitable catastrophe prepared by centuries of fiscal oppression.

It is impossible to form a correct idea of the position of the Greeks at this time without taking a general, though cursory view of the nature of the Roman administration, and observing the effect which it produced on the whole population of the empire. The contrast presented by the increasing efforts of the government to centralize every branch of the administration, and the additional strength which local feelings were gaining in the distant provinces, was a singular though natural consequence of the increasing wants of the sovereign, and of the declining civilization of the people. The civil organization of the empire attained its highest degree of perfection in the reign of Justinian; the imperial power secured a practical supremacy over the military officers and beneficed clergy, and placed them under the control of the civil departments of the state; the absolute authority of the emperor was fully established, and systematically exercised in the army, the church, and the state. A century of prudent administration had infused new vigour into the government, and Justinian succeeded to the means of rendering himself one of the greatest conquerors in the annals of the Roman Empire. The change which time had effected in the position of the emperors, from the reign of Constantine to that of Justinian, was by no means inconsiderable. Two hundred years, in any government, must prove productive of great alterations.

It is true that in theory the power of the military emperor was as great as that of the civil monarch; and, according to the phrases in fashion with their contemporaries, both Constantine and Justinian were constitutional sovereigns, equally restrained, in the exercise of their power, by the laws and usages of the Roman Empire. But there is an essential difference between the position of a general and a king; and all the Roman emperors, until the accession of Arcadius, had been generals. The leader of an army must always, to a certain extent, be the comrade of his soldiers; he must often participate in their feelings, and make their interests and views coincide with his own. This community of sentiment generally creates so close a connection, that the wishes of the troops exercise great influence over the conduct of their leader, and moderate to them, at least, the arbitrary exercise of despotic power, by confining it within the usages of military discipline and the habits of military life. When the civil supremacy of the Roman emperors became firmly established by the changes which were introduced into the imperial armies after the time of Theodosius the Great, the emperor ceased to be personally connected with the army, and considered himself quite as much the master of the soldiers whom he paid, as of the subjects whom he taxed. The sovereign had no longer any notion of public opinion beyond its existence in the church, and its display in the factions of the court or the amphitheatre. The immediate effects of absolute power were not, however, fully revealed in the details of the administration, until the reign of Justinian. Various circumstances have been noticed in the preceding chapter, which tended to connect the policy of several of the emperors who reigned during the fifth century with the interests of their subjects. Justinian found order introduced into every branch of the public administration, immense wealth accumulated in the imperial treasury, discipline re-established in the army, and the church eager to support an orthodox emperor. Unfortunately for mankind, this increase in the power of the emperor rendered him independent of the good-will of his subjects, whose interests seemed to him subordinate to the exigencies of the public administration; and his reign proved one of the most injurious, in the history of the Roman Empire, to the moral and political condition of its subjects. In forming an opinion concerning the events of Justinian’s reign, it must be borne in mind that the foundation of its power and glory was laid by Anastasius, while Justinian sowed the seeds of the misfortunes of Maurice; and, by persecuting the very nationality of his heterodox subjects, prepared the way for the conquests of the Mussulmans.

Justinian mounted the throne with the feelings, and in the position, of a hereditary sovereign, prepared, however, by every advantage of circumstance, to hold out the expectation of a wise and prudent reign. Born and educated in a private station, he had attained the mature age of forty-five before he ascended the throne. He had received an excellent education. He was a man of honourable intentions, and of a laborious disposition, attentive to business, and well versed in law and theology; but his abilities were moderate, his judgment was feeble, and he was deficient in decision of character. Simple in his own habits, he, nevertheless, added to the pomp and ceremonial of the imperial court, and strove to make the isolation of the emperor, as a superior being, visible in the public pageantry of government. Though ambitious of glory, he was infinitely more attentive to the exhibition of his power than to the adoption of measures for securing the essentials of national strength.

The Eastern Empire was an absolute monarchy, of a regular and systematic form. The emperor was the head of the government, and the master of all those engaged in the public service; but the administration was an immense establishment, artfully and scientifically constructed in its details. The numerous individuals employed in each ministerial department of the State consisted of a body of men appropriated to that special service, which they were compelled to study attentively, to which they devoted their lives, and in which they were sure to rise by talents and industry. Each department of the State formed a separate profession, as completely distinct, and as perfectly organized in its internal arrangements, as the legal profession is in modem Europe. A Roman emperor would no more have thought of suddenly creating a financier, or an administrator, than a modem sovereign would think of making a lawyer. This circumstance explains at once how education and official knowledge were so long and so well preserved in the Roman administration, where, as in the law and the church, they flourished for ages after the extinction of literary acquirements in all other classes of the people; and it affords also an explanation of the singular duration of the Roman government, and of its inherent principle of vitality. If it wanted the energy necessary for its own regeneration, which could only have proceeded from the influence of a free people on the sovereign power, it at least escaped the evils of official anarchy and vacillating government. Nothing but this systematic composition of the multifarious branches of the Roman administration could have preserved the empire from dissolution during the period in which it was a prey to internal wars and foreign invasions; and this supremacy of the system over the will of individuals gave a character of immutability to administrative procedure, which warranted the boast of the subjects of Constantine and Justinian that they lived under the protection of the Roman constitution. The greatest imperfection of the government arose from the total want of any popular control over the moral conduct of the public servants. Political morality, like pure taste, cannot live without the atmosphere of public opinion.

The state of society in the Eastern Empire underwent far greater changes than the imperial administration. The race of wealthy nobles, whose princely fortunes and independent bearing had excited the fears and the avarice of the early Caesars, had been long extinct. The imperial court and household included all the higher classes in the capital. The senate was now only a corps of officials, and the people had no position in the State but that of tax-payers. While the officers of the civil, finance, and judicial departments, the clergy and the military, were the servants of the emperor, the people, the Roman people, were his slaves. No connecting link of common interest or national sympathy united the various classes as one body, and connected them with the emperor. The only bond of union was one of universal oppression, as everything in the imperial government had become subordinate to the necessity of supplying the treasury with money. The fiscal severity of the Roman government had for centuries been gradually absorbing all the accumulated wealth of society, as the possession of large fortunes was almost sure to entail their confiscation. Even if the wealth of the higher classes in the provinces escaped this fate, it was, by the constitution of the empire, rendered responsible for the deficiencies which might occur in the taxes of the districts from which it was obtained; and thus the rich were everywhere rapidly sinking to the level of the general poverty. The destruction of the higher classes of society had swept away all the independent landed proprietors before Justinian commenced his series of reforms in the provinces.

The effect of these reforms extended to future times, and exercised an important influence on the internal composition of the Greek people. In ancient times, a very large portion of society consisted of slaves. They formed the great body of the rural population; and, as they received no moral training, they were inferior, in every mental quality, to the barbarians of the north: from this very cause they were utterly incapable of making any exertion to improve their condition; and whether the province which they inhabited belonged to the Romans or Greeks, the Goths or the Huns, they remained equally slaves. The Roman financial administration, by depressing the higher classes, and impoverishing the rich, at last burdened the small proprietors and the cultivators of the soil with the whole weight of the land-tax. The labourer of the soil then became an object of great interest to the treasury, and, as the chief instrument in furnishing the financial resources of the State, obtained almost as important a position in the eyes of the fisc as the landed proprietor himself. The first laws which conferred any rights on the slave, are those which the Roman government enacted to prevent the landed proprietors from transferring their slaves engaged in the cultivation of lands, assessed for the land-tax, to other employments which, though more profitable to the proprietor of the slave, would have yielded a smaller, or less permanent, return to the imperial treasury. The avarice of the imperial treasury, by reducing the mass of the free population to the same degree of poverty as the slaves, had removed one cause of the separation of the two classes. The position of the slave had lost most of its moral degradation, and occupied precisely the same political position in society as the poor labourer, from the moment that the Roman fiscal laws compelled any freeman who had cultivated lands for the space of thirty years to remain for ever attached, with his descendants, to the same estate. The lower orders were from that period blended into one class: the slave rose to be a member of this body; the freeman descended, but his descent was necessary for the improvement of the great bulk of the human race, and for the extinction of slavery. Such was the progress of civilization in the Eastern Empire. The measures of Justinian which, by their fiscal rapacity, tended to sink the free population to the same state of poverty as the slaves, really prepared the way for the rise of the slaves as soon as any general improvement took place in the condition of the human race.

Justinian found the central administration still aided and controlled by municipal institutions and corporate communities throughout the empire, as well as by the religious assemblies of the orthodox and heterodox congregations. Many of these bodies possessed large revenues. The fabric of the ancient world still existed. Consuls were still named. Rome, though subject to the Goths, preserved its senate. Constantinople enjoyed all the license of the hippodrome; Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and many other cities, received public distributions of grain. Athens and Sparta were still governed as little states, and a body of Greek provincial militia still guarded the pass of Thermopylae. The Greek cities possessed their own revenues, and maintained their roads, schools, hospitals, police, public buildings, and aqueducts; they paid professors and public physicians, and kept their streets paved, cleaned, and lighted. The people enjoyed their local festivals and games; and though music had supplanted poetry, the theatres were still open for the public amusement.

Justinian defaced these traces of the ancient world far more rapidly in Greece than Theodoric in Italy. He was a merciless reformer, and his reforms were directed solely by fiscal calculations. The importance of the consulate was abolished, to save the expenses attendant on the installation of the consuls. The Roman senators were exterminated in the Italian wars, during which the ancient race of the inhabitants of Rome was nearly destroyed. Alexandria was deprived of its supplies of grain, and the Greeks in Egypt were reduced in number and consideration. Antioch was sacked by Chosroes, and the position of the Greek population of Syria permanently weakened.

But it was in Greece itself that the Hellenic race and institutions received the severest blow. Justinian seized the revenues of the free cities, and deprived them of their most valuable privileges, for the loss of their revenues compromised their political existence. Poverty produced barbarism. Roads, streets, and public buildings could no longer be repaired or constructed unless by the imperial treasury. That want of police which characterizes the middle ages, began to be felt in the East. Public instruction was neglected, but the public charities were liberally supported; the professors and the physicians were robbed of the funds destined for their maintenance. The municipalities themselves continued to exist in an enfeebled state, for Justinian affected to reform, but never attempted to destroy them; and even his libeller, Procopius, only accuses him of plundering, not of destroying them. The poverty of the Greeks rendered it impossible for them to supply their municipalities with new funds, or even to allow local taxes to be imposed, for maintaining the old establishments. At this crisis, the population was saved from utter barbarism by the close connection which existed between the clergy and the people, and the powerful influence of the church.  The clergy and the people being united by a community of language, feelings, and prejudices, the clergy, as the most powerful class of the community, henceforth took the lead in all public business in the provinces. They lent their aid to support the charitable institutions, to replace the means of instruction, and to maintain the knowledge of the healing art; they supported the communal and municipal organization of the people; and by preserving the local feelings of the Greeks, they strengthened the foundations of a national organization. History supplies few materials to illustrate the precise period at which the clergy in Greece formed their alliance with the municipal organization of the people, independent of the central authority; but the alliance became of great national importance, and exercised permanent effects after the municipalities had been impoverished by Justinian’s reforms.

 

Sect. II

Military Forces of the Empire

 

The history of the wars and conquests of Justinian is narrated by Procopius, the secretary of Belisarius, who was often an eyewitness of the events which he records with a minuteness which supplies much valuable information on the military system of the age. The expeditions of the Roman armies were so widely extended, that most of the nations of the world were brought into direct communication with the empire. During the time Justinian's generals were changing the state of Europe, and destroying some of the nations which had dismembered the Western Empire, circumstances beyond the control of that international system of policy, of which the sovereigns of Constantinople and Persia were the arbiters, produced a general movement in the population of central Asia. The whole human race was thrown into a state of convulsive agitation, from the frontiers of China to the shores of the Atlantic. This agitation destroyed many of the existing governments, and exterminated several powerful nations, while, at the same time, it laid the foundation of the power of new states and nations, some of which have maintained their existence to the present time.

The Eastern Empire bore no inconsiderable part in raising this mighty storm in the West, and in quelling its violence in the East; in exterminating the Goths and Vandals, and in arresting the progress of the Avars and Turks. Yet the number and composition of the Roman armies have often been treated by historians as weak and contemptible. It is impossible, in this sketch, to attempt any examination of the whole military establishment of the Roman Empire during Justinian’s reign; but in noticing the influence exercised by the military system on the Greek population, it is necessary to make a few general observations. The army consisted of two distinct classes, — the regular troops, and the mercenaries. The regular troops were composed both of native subjects of the Roman empire, raised by conscription, and of barbarians, who had been allowed to occupy lands within the emperor's dominions, and to retain their own usages, on the condition of furnishing a fixed number of recruits for the army. The Roman government still clung to the great law of the empire, that the portion of its subjects which paid the land-tax could not be allowed to escape that burden by entering the army. The proprietors of the land were responsible for the tribute; the cultivators of the soil, both slaves and serfs, secured the amount of the public revenues; neither could be permitted to forego their fiscal obligations to perform military duties. For some centuries it had been more economical to purchase the service of barbarians than to employ native troops; and perhaps, if the oppressive system of the imperial administration had not impaired the resources of the State, and diminished the population by consuming the capital of the people, this might have long continued to be the case. Native troops were always drawn from the mountainous districts, which paid a scanty tribute, and in which the population found difficulty in procuring subsistence. The invasions of the barbarians, likewise, threw numbers of the peasantry of the provinces to the south of the Danube out of employment, and many of these entered the army. A supply of recruits was likewise obtained from the idle and needy population of the towns. The most active and intelligent soldiers were placed in the cavalry, — a force that was drilled with the greatest care, subjected to the most exact discipline, and sustained the glory of the Roman arms in the field of battle. As the higher and middle classes in the provinces had, for ages, been excluded from the military profession, and the army had been at last composed chiefly of the rudest and most ignorant peasants, of enfranchised slaves, and naturalized barbarians, military service was viewed with aversion; and the greatest repugnance arose among the civilians to become soldiers. In the meantime, the depopulation of the empire daily increased the difficulty of raising the number of recruits required for a service which embraced an immense extent of territory, and entailed a great destruction of human life.

The troops of the line, particularly the infantry, had deteriorated considerably in Justinian’s time; but the artillery and engineer departments were not much inferior, in science and efficiency, to what they had been in the best days of the empire. Military resources, not military knowledge, had diminished. The same arsenals continued to exist; mere mechanical skill had been uninterruptedly exercised; and the constant demand which had existed for military mechanicians, armourers, and engineers, had never allowed the theoretical instruction of this class to be neglected, nor their practical skill to decline from want of employment. This fact requires to be borne in mind.

The mercenaries formed the most valued and brilliant portion of the army; and it was the fashion of the day to copy and admire the dress and manners of the barbarian cavalry. The empire was now surrounded by numbers of petty princes, who, though they had seized possession of provinces once belonging to the Romans, by force, and had often engaged in war with the emperor, still acknowledged a certain degree of dependence on the Roman power. Some of them, as the kings of the Heruls and the Gepids, and the king of Colchis, held their regal rank, by a regular investiture, from Justinian. These princes, and the kings of the Lombards, Huns, Saracens, and Moors, all received regular subsidies. Their best warriors entered the Roman service, and served in separate bands, under their own leaders, and with their national weapons, but subjected to the regular organization and discipline of the Roman armies, though not to the Roman system of military exercises and manoeuvres. Some of these corps of barbarians were also formed of volunteers, who were attracted by the high pay which they received, and the license with which they were allowed to behave.

The superiority of these troops arose from natural causes. The northern nations who invaded the empire consisted of a population trained from infancy to warlike exercises, and following no profession but that of arms. Their lands were cultivated by the labour of their slaves, or by that of the Roman subjects who still survived in the provinces they had occupied; but their only pecuniary resources arose from the plunder of their neighbours, or the subsidies of the Roman emperors. Their habits of life, the celerity of their movements, and the excellence of their armour, rendered them the choicest troops of the age. The emperors preferred armies composed of a number of small bands of mercenary foreigners, attached to their own persons by high pay, and commanded by chiefs who could never pretend to political rank, and who had much to lose and little to gain by rebellion; for experience proved that they perilled their throne by intrusting the command of a national army to a native general, who, from a popular soldier, might become a dangerous rival. Though the barbarian mercenaries in the service of Rome generally proved far more efficient troops than their free countrymen, yet they were on the whole unequal to the native Roman cavalry of Justinian's army, the Cataphracti, sheathed in complete steel on the Persian model, and armed with the Grecian spear, who were still the best troops in a field of battle, and were the real type of the chivalry of the middle ages.

Justinian weakened the Roman army in several ways by his measures of reform. His anxiety to reduce its expenditure induced him to diminish the establishment of camels, horses, and chariots, which attended the troops for transporting the military machines and baggage. This train had been previously very large, as it was calculated to save the peasantry from any danger of having their labours interrupted, or their cattle seized, under the pretext of being required for transport. Numerous abuses were introduced by diminishing the pay of the troops, and by neglecting to pay them with regularity and to furnish them with proper food and clothing. At the same time the efficiency of the army in the field was more seriously injured, by continuing the policy adopted by Anastasius, of restricting the power of the generals; a policy, however, which, it must be confessed, was not unnecessary in order to avoid greater evils. This is evident from the numerous rebellions in Justinian's reign, and the absolute want of any national or patriotic feeling in the majority of the Roman officers. Large armies were at times composed of a number of corps, each commanded by its own officer, over whom the nominal commander-in-chief had little or no authority; and it is to this circumstance that the unfortunate results of some of the Gothic and Persian campaigns are to be attributed, and not to any inferiority of the Roman troops. Even Belisarius himself, though he gave many proofs of attachment to Justinian’s throne, was watched with the greatest jealousy. He was treated with constant distrust, and his officers were at times encouraged to dispute his measures, and never punished for disobeying his orders. The fact is, that Belisarius might, if so disposed, have assumed the purple, and perhaps dethroned his master. Narses was the only general who was implicitly trusted and steadily supported; but Narses was an aged eunuch, and could never have become emperor.

The imperial military forces consisted of one hundred and fifty thousand men; and though the extent of the frontier which these troops were compelled to guard was very great, and lay open to the incursions of many active hostile tribes, still Justinian was able to assemble some admirably appointed armies for his foreign expeditions. The armament which accompanied Belisarius to Africa consisted of ten thousand infantry, five thousand cavalry, and twenty thousand sailors. Belisarius must have had about thirty thousand troops under his command in Italy before the taking of Ravenna. Germanus, when he arrived in Africa, found that only one-third of the Roman troops about Carthage had remained faithful, and the rebels under Stozas amounted to eight thousand men. As there were still troops in Numidia which had not joined the deserters, the whole Roman force in Africa cannot have been less than fifteen thousand. Narses, in the year 551, when the empire began to show evident proofs of the bad effects of Justinian’s government, could assemble thirty thousand chosen troops, an army which defeated the veterans of Totila, and destroyed the fierce bands of Franks and Alemanns which hoped to wrest Italy from the Romans. The character of the Roman troops, in spite of all that modern writers have said to depreciate them, still stood so high that Totila, the warlike monarch of the Goths, strove to induce them to join his standard by offers of high pay. No army had yet proved itself equal to the Roman troops on the field of battle; and their exploits in Spain, Africa, Colchis, and Mesopotamia, prove their excellence; though the defeats which they sustained, both from the Persians and on the Danube, reveal the fact that their enemies were improving in military science, and ready to avail themselves of the slightest neglect on the part of the Roman government.

Numerous examples could be cited of almost incredible disorder in the armies, — originating generally in the misconduct of the imperial government. Belisarius attempted, but found it impossible, to enforce strict discipline, for his soldiers were often left unpaid and his officers were at times encouraged to act independently of his orders. Two thousand Heruls ventured to quit his standard in Italy, and, after marching round the Adriatic, were pardoned by Justinian, and again engaged in the imperial service. Procopius mentions repeatedly that the disorders of the unpaid troops ruined the provinces; and in Africa, no less than three Roman officers, Stozas, Maximin, and Gontharis, attempted to render themselves independent, and were supported by large bodies of troops. The Greeks were the only portion of the population who were considered as sincerely attached to the imperial government, or, at least, who would readily defend it against every enemy; and accordingly, Gontharis, when he wished to secure Carthage, ordered all the Greeks to be murdered without distinction. The Greeks were, however, from their position and rank in society as burgesses or tax-payers, almost entirely excluded from the army, and, though they furnished the greater part of the sailors for the fleet, they were generally an unwarlike population. Witiges, the Gothic king, calls the Roman army of Belisarius an army of Greeks, a band of pirates, actors, and mountebanks.

One of the most unfortunate measures of Justinian was his disbanding all the provincial militia. This is incidentally mentioned in the Secret History of Procopius, who informs us that Thermopylae had been previously guarded by two thousand of these troops; but that this corps was dissolved, and a garrison of regular troops placed in Greece. As a general measure it was probably dictated by a plan of financial reform, and not by any fear of popular insurrection; but its effects were extremely injurious to the empire in the declining state of society, and in the increasing disorganization of the central power; and though it may possibly have prevented some provinces from recovering their independence by their own arms, it prepared the way for the easy conquests of the Avars and Arabs. Justinian was intent on centralizing all power, and rendering all public burdens uniform and systematic; and had adopted the opinion that it was cheaper to defend the empire by walls and fortresses than by a moveable army. The necessity of frequently moving troops with great celerity to defend the frontiers, had induced the officers to abandon the ancient practice of fortifying a regular camp; and at last, even the art of encamping was neglected. The barbarians, however, could always move with greater rapidity than the regular troops of the empire.

To secure the frontiers, Justinian adopted a new system of defence. He constructed extensive lines supported by innumerable forts and castles, in which he placed garrisons, in order that they might be ready to sally out on the invading bands. These lines extended from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, and were farther strengthened by the long wall of Anastasius, which covered Constantinople, by walls protecting the Thracian Chersonesus and the peninsula of Pallene, and by the fortifications at Thermopylae, and at the Isthmus of Corinth, which were carefully repaired. At all these posts permanent garrisons were maintained. The eulogy of Procopius on the public edifices of Justinian seems almost irreconcilable with the events of the latter years of his reign; for Zabergan, king of the Huns, penetrated through breaches he found unrepaired in the long wall, and advanced almost to the very suburbs of Constantinople.

Another instance of the declining state of military tactics may be mentioned, as it must have originated in the army itself, and not in consequence of any arrangements of the government. The combined manoeuvres of the divisions of the regiments had been so neglected that the bugle-calls once used had fallen into desuetude, and were unknown to the soldiers. The motley recruits, of dissimilar habits, could not acquire, with the requisite rapidity, a perception of the delicacy of the ancient music, and the Roman infantry no longer moved

 

In perfect phalanx, to the Dorian mood.

Of flutes and soft recorders.

 

It happened, during the siege of Auximum in Italy, that Belisarius was placed in difficulty from the want of an instantaneous means of communicating orders to the troops engaged in skirmishing with the Goths. On this occasion it was suggested to him by Procopius, his secretary and the historian of his wars, to replace the forgotten bugle-calls by making use of the brazen trumpet of the cavalry to sound a charge, and of the infantry bugle to summon a retreat.

Foreigners were preferred by the emperors as the occupants of the highest military commands; and the confidence with which the barbarian chiefs were honoured by the court enabled many to reach the highest rank in the army. Narses, the most distinguished military leader after Belisarius, was a Pers-Armenian captive. Peter, who commanded against the Persians in the campaign of 528, was also a Pers-Armenian. Pharas, who besieged Gelimer in Mount Pappua, was a Herul. Mundus, who commanded in Illyria and Dalmatia, was a Gepid prince. Chilbud, who, after several victories, perished with his army in defending the frontiers against the Sclavonians, was of northern descent, as may be inferred from his name. Salomon, who governed Africa with great courage and ability, was a eunuch from Dara. Artaban was an Armenian prince. John Troglita, the patrician, the hero of the poem of Corippus, called the Johannid, is also supposed to have been an Armenian. Yet the empire might still have furnished excellent officers, as well as valiant troops; for the Isaurians and Thracians continued to distinguish themselves in every field of battle, and were equal in courage to the fiercest of the barbarians.

It became the fashion in the army to imitate the manners and habits of the barbarians; their headlong personal courage became the most admired quality, even in the highest rank; and nothing tended more to hasten the decay of the military art. The officers in the Roman armies became more intent on distinguishing themselves for personal exploits than for exact order and strict discipline in their corps. Even Belisarius himself appears at times to have forgotten the duties of a general in his eagerness to exhibit his personal valour on his bay charter; though he may, on such occasions, have considered that the necessity of keeping up the spirits of his army was a sufficient apology for his rashness. Unquestionably the army, as a military establishment, had declined in excellence ere Justinian ascended the throne, and his reign tended to sink it much lower; yet it is probable that it was never more remarkable for the enterprising valour of its officers, or for their personal skill in the use of their weapons. The death of numbers of the highest rank in battles and skirmishes in which they rashly engaged, proves this fact. There was, however, one important feature of ancient tactics still preserved in the Roman armies, which gave them a decided superiority over their enemies. They had still the confidence in their discipline and skill to form their ranks, and encounter their opponents in line; the bravest of their enemies, whether on the banks of the Danube or the Tigris, only ventured to charge them, or receive their attack, in close masses.

 

Sect. III

 Influence of Justinian’s legislation on the Greek population.

 

The Greeks long remained strangers to the Roman law. The free cities continued to be governed by their own legal systems and local usages, and the Greek lawyers did not consider it necessary to study the civil law of their masters. But this state of things underwent a great modification, after Constantine transformed the Greek town of Byzantium into the Roman city of Constantinople. The imperial administration after that period, came into more immediate connection with its eastern subjects; the legislative power of the emperors was more frequently exercised in the regulation of provincial business; and the Christian church, by uniting the whole Greek population into one body, often called forth general measures of legislation. While the confusion arising from the incongruity of old laws to the new exigencies of society was generally felt, the increasing poverty, depopulation, and want of education in the Greek cities, rendered it difficult to maintain the ancient tribunals. The Greeks were often compelled to study at the universities where Roman jurisprudence alone was cultivated, and thus the municipal law-courts were at last guided in their decisions by the rules of Roman law. As the number of the native tribunals decreased, their duties were performed by judges named by the imperial administration; and thus Roman law, silently, and without any violent change or direct legislative enactment, was generally introduced into Greece.

Justinian, from the moment of his accession to the throne, carried his favourite plan, of centralizing the direction of the complicated machine of the Roman administration in his own person, as far as possible. The necessity of condensing the various authorities of Roman jurisprudence, and of reducing the mass of legal opinions into a system of legislative enactments, possessing unity of form and facility of reference, was deeply felt. Such a system of legislation is useful in every country; but it becomes peculiarly necessary, after a long period of civilization, in an absolute monarchy, in order to restrain the decisions of legal tribunals by published law, and prevent the judges from assuming arbitrary power, under the pretext of interpreting obsolete edicts and conflicting decisions. A code of laws, to a certain degree, serves as a barrier against despotism, for it supplies the people with the means of calmly confuting the acts of their government and the decisions of their judges by recognised principles of justice; and at the same time it is a useful ally to the absolute sovereign, as it supplies him with increased facilities for detecting injustice committed by his official agents.

The faults or merits of Justinian’s system of laws belong to the lawyers intrusted with the execution of his project, but the honour of having commanded this work may be ascribed to the emperor alone. It is to be regretted that the position of an absolute sovereign is so liable to temptation from passing events, that Justinian himself could not refrain from injuring the surest monument of his fame, by later enactments, which mark too clearly that they emanated either from his own increasing avarice, or from weakness in yielding to the passions of his wife or courtiers. It could not be expected that his political sagacity should have devised the means of securing the rights of his subjects against the arbitrary exercise of his own power; but he might have consecrated the great principle of equity, that legislation can never act as a retrospective decision; and he might have ordered his magistrates to adopt the oath of the Egyptian judges, who swore, when they entered an office, that they would never depart from the principles of equity (law), and that if the sovereign ordered them to do wrong, they would not obey. Justinian, however, was too much of a despot, and too little of a statesman, to proclaim the law, even while retaining the legislative power in his person, to be superior to the executive branch of the government. But in maintaining that the laws of Justinian might have been rendered more perfect, and have been framed to confer greater benefits on mankind, it is not to be denied that the work is one of the most remarkable monuments of human wisdom; and we should remember with gratitude, that for thirteen hundred years the Pandects served as the magazine of legal lore to the Christian world, both in the East and in the West; and if it has now become an instrument of administrative tyranny in the continental monarchies of Europe, the fault is in the nations who refuse to follow out the principles of equity logically in regulating the dispensation of justice, and do not raise the law above the sovereign, nor render every minister and public servant amenable to the regular tribunals for every act he may commit in the exercise of his official duty, like the humblest citizen.

The government of Justinian’s empire was Roman, its official language was Latin, Oriental habits and usages, as well as time and despotic power, had indeed introduced modifications in the old forms; but it would be an error to consider the imperial administration as having assumed a Greek character. The accident of the Greek language having become the ordinary dialect in use at court, and of the church in the East being deeply tinctured with Greek feelings, is apt to create an impression that the Eastern Empire had lost something of its Roman pride, in order to adopt a Greek character. The circumstance that its enemies often reproached it with being Greek, is a proof that the imputation was viewed as an insult. As the administration was entirely Roman, the laws of Justinian — the Code, the Pandects, and the Institutions — were published in Latin, though many of the latter edicts (novells) were published in Greek. Nothing can illustrate in a stronger manner the artificial and antinational position of the eastern Roman Empire than this fact, that Latin was the language of the laws of an empire, of which Greek was the language of the church and the people. Latin was preserved in official business, and in public ceremonials, from feelings of pride connected with the ancient renown of the Romans, and the dignity of the Roman Empire. So strong is the hold which antiquated custom maintains over the minds of men, that even a professed reformer, like Justinian, could not break through so irrational an usage as the publication of his laws in a language incomprehensible to most of those for whose use they were framed.

The laws and legislation of Justinian throw only an indistinct and vague light on the state of the Greek population. They were drawn entirely from Roman sources, calculated for a Roman state of society, and occupied with Roman forms and institutions. Justinian was so anxious to preserve them in all their purity, that he adopted two measures to secure them from alteration. The copyists were commanded to refrain from any abridgment, and the commentators were ordered to follow the literal sense of the laws. All schools of law were likewise forbidden, except those of Constantinople, Rome, and Berytus, a regulation which must have been adopted to guard the Roman law from being corrupted, by falling into the hands of Greek teachers, and becoming confounded with the customary law of the various Greek provinces. This restriction, and the importance attached to it by the emperor, prove that the Roman law was now the universal rule of conduct in the empire. Justinian took every measure which prudence could dictate to secure the best and purest legal instruction and administration for the Roman tribunals; but only a small number of students could study in the licensed schools, and Rome, one of these schools, was, at the time of the publication of the law, in the hands of the Goths. It is therefore not surprising that a rapid decline in the knowledge of Roman law commenced very shortly after the promulgation of Justinian's legislation.

Justinian’s laws were soon translated into Greek without the emperor’s requiring that these paraphrases should be literal; and Greek commentaries of an explanatory nature were published. His novells were subsequently published in Greek when the case required it; but it is evident that any remains of Greek laws and customs were rapidly yielding to the superior system of Roman legislation, perfected as this was by the judicious labours of Justinian’s councillors. Some modifications were made in the jurisdiction of the judges and municipal magistrates at this time; and we must admit the testimony of Procopius as a proof that Justinian sold judicial offices, though the vagueness of the accusation does not afford us the means of ascertaining under what pretext the change in the earlier system was adopted. It is perhaps impossible to determine what share of authority the Greek municipal magistrates retained in the administration of justice and police, after the reforms effected by Justinian in their financial affairs, and the seizure of a large part of their local revenues. The existence of Greek corporations in Italy shows that they retained an acknowledged existence in the Roman Empire.

 

Sect. IV

 Internal Administration as it affected the Greeks

 

The religious intolerance and financial rapacity of Justinian’s internal administration increased the deep-rooted hatred of the imperial power throughout the provinces, and his successors soon experienced the bitter effects of his policy. Even the commencement of his own reign gave some alarming manifestations of the general feeling. The celebrated sedition of the Nika, though it broke out among the factions of the amphitheatre, acquired its importance in consequence of popular dissatisfaction with the fiscal measures of the emperor. This sedition possesses an unfortunate celebrity in the annals of the empire, from the destruction of many public buildings and numerous works of ancient art, occasioned by the conflagrations raised by the rebels. Belisarius succeeded in suppressing it with considerable difficulty after much bloodshed, and not until Justinian had felt his throne in imminent danger. The alarm produced a lasting impression on his mind; and more than one instance occurred during his reign to remind him that popular sedition puts a limit to despotic power. At a subsequent period, an insurrection of the people compelled him to abandon a project for recruiting the imperial finances, according to a common resource of arbitrary sovereigns, by debasing the value of the coin.

We possess only scanty materials for describing the condition of the Greek population during the reign of Justinian. The relations of the Greek provinces and cities with the central administration had endured for ages, slowly undergoing the changes produced by time, but without the occurrence of any general measure of reform, until the decree of Caracalla conferred on all the Greeks the rights and privileges of Roman citizens. That decree, by converting all Greeks into Romans, must have greatly modified the constitution of the free and autonomous cities; but history furnishes no means of determining with precision its effect on the inhabitants of Greece. Justinian made another great change by confiscating the local revenues of the municipalities; but in the six centuries which had elapsed from the fall of the Roman republic to the extinction of municipal freedom in the Greek cities, the prominent feature of the Roman administration had been invariably the same — fiscal rapacity, which gradually depopulated the country, and prepared the way for its colonization by foreign races.

The colossal fabric of the Roman government embraced not only a numerous imperial court and household, a host of administrators, finance agents, and judges, a powerful army and navy, and a splendid church establishment; it also conferred the privilege of titular nobility on a large portion of the higher classes, both on those who were selected to fill local offices in connection with the public administration, and on those who had held public employments during some period of their lives. The titles of this nobility were official; its members were the creatures of government, attached to the imperial throne by ties of interest; they were exempted from particular taxes, separated from the body of the people by various privileges, and formed, from their great numbers, rather a distinct nation than a privileged class. They were scattered over all the provinces of Justinian’s empire, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, and constituted, at this period, the real nucleus of civil society in the Roman world. Of their influence, many distinct traces may be found, even after the extinction of the Roman power, both in the East and in the West.

The population of the provinces, and more especially the proprietors and cultivators of the soil, stood completely apart from these representatives of the Roman supremacy, and almost in a state of direct opposition to the government. The weight of the Roman yoke had now pressed down all the provincials to nearly the same level. As a general rule, they were excluded from the profession of arms; their poverty caused them to neglect the cultivation of arts, sciences, and literature, and their whole attention was absorbed in watching the increasing rapacity of the imperial treasury, and in finding means to evade the oppression which they saw no possibility of resisting. The land and capitation taxes formed the source of this oppression. No taxes were, perhaps, more equitable in their general principle, and few appear ever to have been administered, for so long a period, with such unfeeling prudence. Their severity had been so gradually increased, that but a very small annual encroachment had been made on the savings of the people, and centuries elapsed before the whole accumulated capital of the empire was consumed; but at last the whole wealth of its subjects was drawn into the imperial treasury; free men were sold to pay taxes; vineyards were rooted out, and buildings were destroyed to escape taxation.

The manner of collecting the land and capitation taxes displays singular ingenuity in the mode of estimating the value of the property to be taxed, and an inhuman sagacity in framing a system capable of extracting the last farthing which that property could yield. The registers underwent a public revision every fifteenth year, but the indictio, or amount of taxation to be paid, was annually fixed by an imperial ordinance. The whole empire was divided into capita, or hides of land. The proprietors of these capita were grouped together in communities, the wealthier members of which were formed into a permanent magistracy, and rendered liable for the amount of the taxes due by their community. The same law of responsibility was applied to the senates and magistrates of cities and free states. Confiscation of private property had, from the earliest days of the empire, been regarded as an important financial resource.  In the days of Tiberius, the nobles of Rome, whose power, influence, and character alarmed the jealous tyrant, were swept away. Nero attacked the wealthy to fill his exhausted treasury; and from that time to the days of Justinian, the richest individuals in the capital and the provinces had been systematically punished for every offence by the confiscation of their fortunes. The pages of Suetonius and Tacitus, of Zosimus and Procopius, attest the extent and duration of this war against private wealth. Now, in the eyes of the Roman government, the greatest political offence was the failure to perform a public duty; and the most important duty of a Roman subject had long been to furnish the amount of taxes required by the State. The increase of the public burdens at last proceeded so far, that every year brought with it a failure in the taxes of some province, and consequently the confiscation of the private property of the wealthiest citizens of the insolvent district, until at last all the rich proprietors were ruined, and the law became nugatory. The poor and ignorant inhabitants of the rural districts in Greece forgot the literature and arts of their ancestors; and as they had no longer anything to sell, nor the means of purchasing foreign commodities, money ceased to circulate.

But though the proud aristocracy and the wealthy votaries of art, literature, and philosophy, disappeared, and though independent citizens and proprietors now stood scattered over the provinces as isolated individuals, without exercising any direct influence on the character of the age, still the external framework of ancient society displayed something of its pomp and greatness. The decay of its majesty and strength was felt; mankind perceived the approach of a mighty change, but the revolution had not yet arrived; the past glory of Greece shed its colouring on the unknown future, and the dark shadow which that future now throws back, when we contemplate Justinian’s reign, was then imperceptible.

Many of the habits, and some of the institutions of ancient civilization, still continued to exist among the Greek population. Property, though crumbling away under a system of slow corrosion, was regarded by public opinion as secure against lawless violence or indiscriminate confiscation; and it really was so, when a comparison is made between the condition of a subject of the Roman empire and a proprietor of the soil in any Other country of the then known world. If there was much evil in the state of society, there was also some good; and, when contemplating it from our modern social position, we must never forget that the same causes which destroyed the wealth, arts, literature, and civilization of the Romans and Greeks, began to eradicate from among mankind the greatest degradation of our species — the existence of slavery.

In the reign of Justinian, the Greeks as a people had lost much of their superiority over the other subjects of the empire. The schools of philosophy, which had afforded the last refuge for the ancient literature of the country, had long fallen into neglect, and were on the very eve of extinction, when Justinian closed them by a public edict. The poverty and ignorance of the inhabitants of Greece had totally separated the philosophers from the people. The town population had everywhere embraced Christianity. The country population, composed in great part of the offspring of freedmen and slaves, was removed from all instruction, and paganism continued to exist in the retired mountains of the Peloponnesus, Those principles of separation which originated in non-communication of ideas and interests, and which began to give the Roman empire the aspect of an agglomeration of nations, rather than the appearance of a single State, operated as powerfully on the Greek people as on the Egyptian, Syrian, and Armenian population. The needy cultivators of the soil — the artisans in the towns — and the servile dependents on the imperial administration, —formed three distinct classes of society. A strong line of distinction was created between the Greeks in the service of the empire and the body of the people, both in the towns and country. The mass of the Greeks naturally participated in the general hostility to the Roman administration; yet the immense numbers who were employed in the State, and in the highest dignities of the Church, neutralized the popular opposition, and deprived Greece of intellectual leaders, who might have taught it to aspire to national independence.

It has been already observed that Justinian restricted the powers and diminished the revenues of the Greek municipalities, but that these corporations continued to exist, though shorn of their former power and influence. Splendid monuments of Grecian architecture, and beautiful works of Grecian art, still adorned the Agora and the Acropolis in many Greek cities. Where the ancient walls were falling into decay, and the untenanted buildings presented an aspect of ruin, they were cleared away to construct new fortifications, churches, and monasteries, which Justinian was constantly building in every province of the empire. The hasty construction of these buildings, rapidly erected from the materials furnished by the ancient structures around, accounts both for their number and for the facility with which time has effaced almost every trace of their existence. Still, even in architecture, the Roman Empire displayed some traces of its greatness; the church of St Sophia, and the aqueduct of Constantinople, attest the superiority of Justinian’s age over subsequent periods, both in the East and in the West.

The superiority of the Greek population must at this time have been most remarkable in their regulations of internal government and police administration. Public roads were still maintained in a serviceable state, though not equal in appearance or solidity of construction to the Appian Way in Italy, which excited the admiration of Procopius. Streets were kept in repair by the proprietors of houses. The astynomoi and the agoranomoi were still elected, but their number often indicated the former greatness of a diminished population. The post-houses, post-mansions, and every means of transport, were maintained in good order, but they had long been rendered a means of oppressing the people; and, though laws had often been passed to prevent the provincials from suffering from the exactions of imperial officers when travelling, the extent of the abuse was beginning to ruin the establishment. The Roman Empire, to the latest period of its existence, paid considerable attention to the police of the public roads, and it was indebted to this care for the preservation of its military superiority over its enemies, and of its lucrative commerce.

The activity of the government in clearing the country of robbers and banditti, and the singular severity of the laws on this subject, show that the slightest danger of a diminution of the imperial revenues inspired the Roman government with energy and vigour. Nor were other means of advancing the commercial interests of the people neglected. The ports were carefully cleaned, and their entry indicated by lighthouses, as in earlier times; and, in short, only that portion of ancient civilization which was too expensive for the diminished resources of the age had fallen into neglect. Utility and convenience were universally sought, both in private and public life; but solidity, taste, and the durability which aspires at immortality, were no longer regarded as objects of attainable ambition. The basilica, or the monastery, constructed by breaking to pieces the solid blocks of a neglected temple, and cemented together by lime burnt from the marble of the desecrated shrine, or from some heathen tomb, was intended to contain a certain number of persons; and the cost of the building, and its temporary sufficiency for the required purpose, were just as much the general object of the architect’s attention in the time of Justinian as in our own.

The worst feature of Justinian's administration was its venality. This vice, it is true, generally prevails in every administration uninfluenced by public opinion and based on an organized bureaucracy; for whenever the corps of administrators becomes too numerous for the moral character of individuals to be under the direct control of their superiors, usage secures to them a permanent official position, unless they grossly neglect their duties. Justinian, however, countenanced the venality of his subordinates by an open sale of offices; and the violent complaints of Procopius are confirmed by the legislative measures of the emperor. When shame prevented the emperor himself from selling an official appointment, he did not blush to order the payment of a stated sum to be made to the empress Theodora. This conduct opened a door to abuses on the part of the imperial ministers and provincial governors, and contributed, in no small degree, to the misfortunes of Justin II. It diminished the influence of the Roman administration in the distant provinces, and neutralized the benefits which Justinian had conferred on the empire by his legislative compilations. A strong proof of the declining condition of the Greek nation is to be found in the care with which every misfortune of this period is recorded in history. It is only when little hope is felt of repairing the ravages of disease, fire, and earthquakes, that these evils permanently affect the prosperity of nations. In an improving state of society, great as their ravages may prove, they are only personal misfortunes and temporary evils; the void which they create in the population is quickly replaced, and the property which they destroy rises from its ruins with increased solidity and beauty. When it happens that a pestilence leaves a country depopulated for many generations, and that conflagrations and earthquakes ruin cities, which are never again reconstructed of their former size — these evils are apt to be mistaken by the people as the primary cause of the national decline, and acquire an undue historical importance in the popular mind. The age of Justinian was remarkable for a terrible pestilence which ravaged every province of the empire in succession, for many famines which swept away no inconsiderable portion of the population, and for earthquakes which laid waste no small number of the most flourishing and populous cities of the empire.

Greece had suffered very little from hostile attacks after the departure of Alaric; for the piratical incursions of Genseric were neither very extensive nor very successful; and after the time of these barbarians, the ravages of earthquakes begin to figure in history, as an important cause of the impoverished and declining condition of the country. The Huns, it is true, extended their plundering expeditions, in the year 540, as far as the Isthmus of Corinth, but they do not appear to have succeeded in capturing a single town of any note. The fleet of Totila plundered Corcyra, and the coast of Epirus, from Nicopolis up to Dodona; but these misfortunes were temporary and partial, and could have caused no irreparable loss, either of life or property. The fact appears to be, that Greece was in a declining condition; but that the means of subsistence were abundant, and the population had but an incorrect and vague conception of the means by which the government was consuming their substance and depopulating their country. In this state of things, several earthquakes, of singular violence, and attended by unusual phenomena, made a deep impression on men’s minds, by producing a degree of desolation which a declining state of society rendered irreparable. Corinth, which was still a populous city, Patrae, Naupactus, and Coronea, were all laid in ruins. An immense assembly of Greeks was collected at the time to celebrate a public festival; the whole population was swallowed up in the midst of their ceremonies. The waters of the Maliac Gulf retired suddenly, and left the shores of Thermopylae dry; but the sea, suddenly returning with violence, swept up the valley of the Spercheius, and carried away the inhabitants. In an age of ignorance and superstition, when the prospects of mankind were despondent, and at the moment when the emperor was effacing the last relics of the religion of their ancestors — a religion which had filled the sea and the land with guardian deities — these awful occurrences could not fail to produce an alarming effect on men’s minds, and were not unnaturally regarded as a supernatural confirmation of the despair which led many to imagine that the ruin of our globe was approaching. It is not wonderful that many pagans believed with Procopius that Justinian was the demon destined to complete the catastrophe of the human race.

The condition of the Greek population in Achaia seems to have been as little understood by the courtiers of Justinian as that of the newly-established Greek kingdom by its Bavarian masters and the protecting Powers. The splendid appearance which the ancient monuments, shining in the clear sky with the freshness of recent constructions, gave to the Greek cities, induced the Constantinopolitans and other strangers who visited the country, to suppose that the aspect of elegance and delicacy of finish, everywhere apparent, was the result of constant municipal expenditure. The buildings of Constantine and Theodosius in the capital were probably begrimed with dust and smoke, so that it was natural to conceive that those of Pericles and Epaminondas could retain a perpetual youth only by a liberal expenditure for their preservation. The celebrity of the city of Athens, the privileges which it still enjoyed, the society by which it was frequented, as an agreeable residence, as a school for study, or as a place of retirement for the wealthy literary men of the age, gave the people of the capital a far too exalted idea of the well-being of Greece. The contemporaries of Justinian judged the Greeks of their age by placing them in too close a relation with the inhabitants of the free states of antiquity; we, on the contrary, are too apt to confound them with the rude inhabitants who dwelt in the Peloponnesus after it was filled with Sclavonian and Albanian colonies. Had Procopius rightly estimated the condition of the rural population, and reflected on the extreme difficulty which the agriculturist always encounters in quitting his actual employment in order to seek any distant occupation, and the impossibility of finding money in a country where there are no purchasers for extra produce, he would not have signalized a penurious disposition as the national characteristic of the Greeks. The population which spoke the Greek language in the capital and in the Roman administration was now influenced by a very different spirit from that of the inhabitants of the true Hellenic lands; and this separation of feeling became more and more conspicuous as the empire declined in power. The central administration soon ceased to pay any particular attention to Greece, which was sure to furnish its tribute, as it hated the Romans less than it feared the barbarians. From henceforward, therefore, the inhabitants of Hellas become almost lost to the historians of the empire; and the motley and expatriated population of Constantinople, Asia Minor, Syria, and Alexandria, is represented to the literary world as forming the real body of the Greek nation — an error which has concealed the history of a nation from our study, and replaced it by the annals of a court and the records of a government.

 

Sect. V

 Influence of Justinian’s Conquests on the Greek Population and the change effected by the Conquest of the Vandal Kingdom of Africa

 

The attention of Justinian’s immediate predecessors had been devoted to improving the internal condition of the empire, and that portion of the population which spoke Greek, forming the most important body of the emperor’s subjects, had participated in the greatest degree in this improvement. The Greeks were, apparently, on the eve of securing a national preponderance in the Roman state, when Justinian forced them back into their former secondary condition, by directing the influence of the public administration to arms and law, the two departments of the Roman government from which they were in a great measure excluded. The conquests of Justinian, however, tended to improve the condition of the mercantile and manufacturing portion of the Greek population, by extending its commercial relations with the West; and this extended commerce tended to support the central government at Constantinople, when the framework of the Roman imperial administration began to give way in the provinces. With the exception of Sicily, and the southern portion of Italy, the whole of Justinian’s conquests in the West were peopled by the Latin race; and the inhabitants, though attached to the emperor of Constantinople as the political head of the Orthodox Church, were already opposed to the Greek nation.

When the Goths, Sueves, and Vandals had completed their establishment in Spain, Africa, and Italy, and were spread over these countries as landed proprietors, the smallness of their number became apparent to the mass of the conquered population; and the barbarians soon lost in individual intercourse as citizens the superiority which they had enjoyed while united in armed bands. The Romans, in spite of the confiscation of a portion of their estates to enrich their conquerors, and in spite of the oppression with which they were treated, still formed the majority of the middle classes; the administration of the greater part of the landed property, the commerce of the country, the municipal and judicial organization, all centred in their hands. In addition to this, they were separated from their conquerors by religion. The northern invaders of the Western Empire were Arians, the Roman population was orthodox. This religious feeling was so strong, that the Catholic king of the Franks, Clovis, was often able to avail himself of the assistance of the orthodox subjects of the Arian Goths, in his wars with the Gothic kings. As soon, however, as Justinian proved that the Eastern Empire had recovered some portion of the ancient Roman vigour, the eyes of all the Roman population in Spain, Gaul, Africa, and Italy, were directed to the imperial court; and there can be no doubt that the government of Justinian maintained extensive relations with the Roman population and the orthodox clergy over all Europe, who did much to assist his military operations.

Justinian succeeded to the empire while it was embroiled in war with Persia, but he was fortunate enough to conclude a peace with Chosroes the Great, who ascended the Persian throne in the fourth year of his reign. In the East the emperor could never expect to make any permanent conquests; while in the West a large portion of the population was ready to receive his troops with open arms; and, in case of success, formed submissive and probably attached subjects. Both policy and religion induced Justinian to commence his attacks on the invaders of the Roman Empire in Africa. The conquest of the northern coast of Africa by the Vandals, like the conquest of the other great provinces of the Western Empire by the Goths, the Burgundians, and the Franks, was gradually effected, in a series of consecutive campaigns, for the Vandals who first entered the country with Genseric were not sufficiently numerous to subdue and garrison the whole province. The Vandals, who quitted Spain in 428, could not arm more than 80,000 men. In the year 431, Genseric having defeated Boniface, took Hippo; but it was not until 439 that he gained possession of Carthage; and the conquest of the whole African coast to the frontier of the Greek settlements in Cyrenaica was not completed until after the death of Valentinian III, and the sack of Rome in 455. The Vandals were bigoted Arians, and their government was peculiarly tyrannical; they treated the Roman inhabitants of Africa as political enemies, and persecuted them as religious opponents. The Visigoths in Spain seized two-thirds of the subjugated lands, the Ostrogoths in Italy were satisfied with one-third; and both these people acknowledged the civil rights of the Romans as citizens and Christians. The Vandals adopted a different policy. They exterminated the Roman landlords and seized all the richest lands. Genseric reserved immense domains to himself and to his sons. He divided the densely peopled and rich district of Africa proper among the Vandal warriors, exempting them from taxation, and binding them to military service. Eighty thousand lots were apportioned, clustered round the large possessions of the highest officers. Only the poorer proprietors were permitted to preserve the arid and distant parts of the country. Still the number of Romans excited the fears of the Vandals, who destroyed the walls of the provincial towns in order to deprive the inhabitants of all means of defence in case of their venturing to rebel. The Roman population was enfeebled by these measures, but its hatred of the Vandal government was increased; and when Gelimer assumed the royal authority in the year 531, the people of Tripolis rebelled, and solicited assistance from Justinian.

Justinian could not forget the great wealth of Africa at the time of its conquest by Genseric; the distributions of grain which it had furnished for Rome, and the immense tribute which it had once paid. He could hardly have imagined that the government of the Vandal kings could have depopulated the country and annihilated the greater part of its wealth in the space of a single century. The conquest of a civilized population by rude warriors must always be attended by the ruin, and often by the extermination, of the numerous classes which are supported by those manufactures which are destined for the consumption of the refined. The first conquerors despise the manners of the conquered, and never adopt immediately their costly dress, which is naturally considered as a sign of effeminacy and cowardice, nor do they adorn their dwellings with the same taste and refinement. The vanquished being deprived of the wealth necessary to procure these luxuries, the ruin of a numerous class of manufacturers, and of a great portion of the industrious population, is an inevitable consequence of this cessation of demand. Thousands of artisans, tradesmen, and labourers, must either emigrate or perish by starvation; and the annihilation of a large commercial capital employed in supporting human life takes place with wonderful rapidity. Yet the conquerors may long live in what to them is wealth and luxury; the accumulated riches of the country will for many years be found amply sufficient to gratify all their desires, and the whole of this wealth will generally be consumed, and even the power of reproducing it be greatly diminished, before any signs of poverty are perceived. These facts are illustrated in the clearest manner by the history of the Vandal domination in Africa. The emigration of Vandal families from Spain did not consist of more than eighty thousand males of warlike age; and when Genseric conquered Carthage, his whole army amounted only to fifty thousand warriors; yet this small horde devoured all the wealth of Africa in the course of a single century, and, from an army of hardy soldiers, it was converted into a caste of luxurious nobles living in splendid villas round Carthage. In order fully to understand the influence of the Vandals on the state of the country which they occupied, it must be observed that their oppressive government had already so far lowered the condition and reduced the numbers of the Roman provincials, that the native Moors began to reoccupy the country from which Roman industry and Roman capital had previously excluded them. The Moorish population being in a lower state of civilization than the lowest grade of the Romans, could exist in districts abandoned as uninhabitable after the destruction of buildings and plantations which the oppressed farmer had no means of replacing; and thus, from the time of the Vandal invasion, we find the Moors continually gaining ground on the Latin colonists, gradually covering an increased extent of country, and augmenting in numbers and power.

The Vandals had become one of the most luxurious nations in the world, when they were attacked by Belisarius, but as they continued to affect the character of soldiers, they were admirably armed, and ready to take the field with their whole male population. Their equipments were splendid, but the neglect of military discipline and science rendered their armies very inefficient. A revolution had lately occurred. Hilderic, the fifth monarch of the Vandal kingdom, the grandson of Genseric, and son of Eudocia, the daughter of the Emperor Valentinian III, showed himself inclined to protect his orthodox and Roman subjects. This disposition, and his Roman descent, excited the suspicion of his Vandal and Arian countrymen, without attaching the orthodox provincials to his hated race. Gelimer, the great-grandson of

Genseric, availed himself of the general discontent to dethrone Hilderic, but the revolution was not effected without manifestations of dissatisfaction. The Roman inhabitants of the province of Tripolis availed themselves of the opportunity to throw off the Vandal yoke, and solicit assistance from Justinian; and a Gothic officer who commanded in Sardinia, then a dependency of the Vandal kingdom, rebelled against the usurper.

 

The succession of the Vandal monarchs was as follows:

They invaded Africa, A.D. 428

Genseric ascended the throne. 429

Hunneric, 477

Gundamund, 484

Thorismund, 496

Hilderic, 523

Gelimer seized the crown, 531

 

The treason of Gelimer afforded Justinian an excellent pretext for invading the Vandal kingdom. Belisarius, a general already distinguished by his conduct in the Persian war, was selected to command an expedition of considerable magnitude, though by no means equal to the great expedition which Leo I had sent to attack Genseric. Ten thousand infantry, and five thousand cavalry, were embarked in a fleet of five hundred transports, which was protected and escorted by ninety-two light galleys of war. The troops were all veterans, inured to discipline, and the cavalry was composed of the choicest soldiers in the imperial service. After a long navigation, and some delay at Methone and in Sicily, they reached Africa. The Vandals, who, in the time of Genseric, had been redoubted pirates, and as such were national enemies of the commercial Greeks, were now too wealthy to court danger, and were ignorant of the approach of the Roman armament, until they received the news that Belisarius was marching towards Carthage. They were numerous, and doubtless brave, but they were no longer trained to war, or accustomed to regular discipline, and their behaviour in the field of battle was contemptible. Two engagements of cavalry, in the bloodiest of which the Vandals lost only eight hundred men, decided the fate of Africa, and enabled Belisarius to subjugate the Vandal kingdom. The brothers of Gelimer fell gallantly in the field. His own behaviour renders even his personal courage doubtful,—he fled to the Moors of the mountainous districts; but the misery of barbarous warfare, and the privations of a besieged camp, soon extinguished his feelings of pride, and his love of independence. He surrendered, and Belisarius led him prisoner to Constantinople, where he appeared in the pageantry of a triumphal procession. A conquering general, a captive monarch, and a Roman triumph, offered strong temptations to romantic fancies; but the age was a time of great events and common-place men. Gelimer received from Justinian large estates in Galatia, to which he retired with his relations. Justinian offered him the rank of patrician, and a seat in the senate; but he was attached to his Arian principles, or he thought that his personal dignity would be best maintained by avoiding to appear in a crowd of servile senators. He refused to join the Orthodox Church, and evaded accepting the proffered honour.

The Vandals displayed as little patriotism and fortitude as their king. Some were slain in the war, the rest were incorporated in the Roman armies, or escaped to the Moors. The provincials were allowed to reclaim the lands from which they had been expelled at the conquest; the Arian heresy was proscribed, and the race of these remarkable conquerors was in a short time exterminated. A single generation sufficed to confound their women and children in the mass of the Roman inhabitants of the province, and their very name was soon totally forgotten. There are few instances in history of a nation disappearing so rapidly and so completely as the Vandals of Africa. After their conquest by Belisarius, they vanish from the face of the earth as completely as the Carthaginians after the taking of Carthage by Scipio. Their first monarch, Genseric, had been powerful enough to plunder both Rome and Greece, yet his army hardly exceeded fifty thousand men. His successors, who held the absolute sovereignty of Africa for one hundred and seven years, do not appear to have commanded a larger force. The Vandals seem never to have multiplied so much that the individuals lost the oligarchical position in which their sudden acquisition of immense wealth had placed them.

Belisarius soon established the Roman authority so firmly round Carthage, that he was able to despatch troops in every direction, in order to secure and extend his conquests. The western coast was subjected as far as the Straits of Hercules: a garrison was placed in Septum, and a body of troops stationed in Tripolis, to secure the eastern part of this extensive province from the incursions of the Moors. Sardinia, Corsica, Majorca, Minorca, and Ibiza, were added to the empire, merely by sending officers to take the command of these islands, and troops to form the garrisons. The commercial relations of the Greeks, and the civil institutions of the Romans, still exercised a very powerful influence over the population of these islands.

Justinian determined to re-establish the Roman government on precisely the same basis as it existed before the Vandal invasion; but as the registers of the land-tax and capitation, and the official admeasurement of the estates, no longer existed, officers were sent from Constantinople for the assessment of the taxes; and the old principle of extorting as much of the surplus produce of the land as possible, was adopted as the rule for apportioning the tribute. Yet, in the opinion of the provincials, the financial rapacity of the imperial government was a more tolerable evil than the tyranny of the Vandals, and they remained long sincerely attached to the Roman power. Unfortunately, the rebellion of the barbarian mercenaries, who formed the flower of Justinian’s army in Africa, the despair of the persecuted Arians, the seductions of the Vandal women, and the hostile incursions of the Moorish tribes, aided the severity of the taxes in desolating this flourishing province. The exclusion of the Roman population from the right of bearing arms, and forming themselves into a local militia, even for the protection of their property against the plundering expeditions of the neighbouring barbarians, prevented the African provincials from aspiring at independence, and rendered them incapable of defending their property without the aid of the experienced though disorderly soldiery of the imperial armies. Religious persecution, financial oppression, the seditions of unpaid troops, and the incursions of barbarous tribes, though they failed to cause a general insurrection of the inhabitants, ruined their wealth, and lessened their numbers. Procopius records the commencement of the desolation of Africa in his time; and subsequently, as the imperial government grew weaker, more negligent, and more corrupt, it pressed more heavily on the industry and well-being of the provincials, and enabled the barbarous Moors to extend their encroachments on Roman civilization.

The glory of Belisarius deserves to be contrasted with the oblivion which has covered the exploits of John the Patrician, one of the ablest generals of Justinian. This experienced general assumed the command in Africa when the province had fallen into a state of great disorder; the inhabitants were exposed to a dangerous coalition of the Moors, and the Roman army was in such a state of destitution that their leader was compelled to import the necessary provisions for his troops. Though John defeated the Moors, and restored prosperity to the province, his name is almost forgotten. His actions and talents only affected the interests of the Byzantine Empire, and prolonged the existence of the Roman province of Africa; they exerted no influence on the fate of any of the European nations whose history has been the object of study in modern times, so that they were utterly forgotten, when the recently discovered poetry of Corippus, one of the last and worst of the Roman poets, rescued them from complete oblivion.

 

 

Sect. VI

Causes of the easy Conquest of the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy by Belisarius

 

The government of the Ostrogoths, though established on just principles by the wisdom of the great Theodoric, soon fell into the same state of disorder as that of the Vandals, though the Goths themselves, from being more civilized, and living more directly under the restraint of the laws which protected the property of their Roman subjects, had not become individually so corrupted by the possession of wealth. The conquest of Italy had not produced any very great revolution in the state of the country. The Romans had long been accustomed to be nominally defended, but, in fact, to be ruled, by the commanders of the mercenary troops in the emperor’s service. They were as completely excluded from military service under their own emperors for a long period, as they were by the Gothic kings. And though the conquest deprived them of one-third of their landed property, it secured to them the enjoyment of the remaining two-thirds under a stronger, and more regular administration than that of the later emperors. They retained their moveable wealth, and as they were relieved from extraordinary military contributions, it is probable that their incomes were not greatly diminished, and that their social position underwent very little change. Policy induced Theodoric to treat the inhabitants of Italy with mildness. The permanent maintenance of his conquests required a considerable revenue, and that revenue could only be supplied by the industry and civilization of his Italian subjects. His sagacity told him, that it was wiser to tax the Romans than to plunder them, and that it was necessary, in order to secure the fruits of a regular system of taxation, to leave them in the possession of those laws and privileges which enabled them to defend their civilization. It is singular that the empire of Theodoric, the most extensive and most celebrated of those which were formed by the conquerors of the Roman provinces, should have proved the least durable. The justice of Theodoric, and the barbarity of Genseric, were equally ineffectual in consolidating a permanent dominion. The civilization of the Romans was more powerful than the mightiest of the barbarian monarchs; and until that civilization had sunk nearly to the level of their conquerors, the institutions of the Romans were always victorious over the national strength of the barbarians. Under Theodoric, Italy was still Roman. The senate of Rome, the municipal councils of the other cities, the old courts of law, the parties of the circus, the factions in the Church, and even the titles and the pensions attached to nominal offices in the State, all existed unchanged; men still fought with wild beasts in the Coliseum. The orthodox Roman lived under his own law, with his own clergy, and the Arian Goth only enjoyed equal liberty. The powerful and the wealthy, whether they were Romans or Goths, were equally sure of obtaining justice; the poor, whether Goths or Romans, were in equal danger of being oppressed.

The kingdom which the great Theodoric left to his grand-son Athalaric, under the guardianship of his daughter Amalasunta, embraced not only Italy, Sicily, and a portion of the south of France; it also included Dalmatia, a part of Illyricum, Pannonia, Noricum, and Rhaetia. In these extensive dominions, the Gothic race formed but a small part of the population; and yet the Goths, from the privileges which they enjoyed, were everywhere regarded with jealousy by the bulk of the inhabitants. Dissensions arose in the royal family; Athalaric died young; Amalasunta was murdered by Theodatus, his successor; and as she had been in constant communication with the court of Constantinople, this crime afforded Justinian a decent pretext for interfering in the affairs of the Goths. To prepare the way for the reconquest of Italy, Belisarius was sent to attack Sicily, which he invaded with an army of seven thousand five hundred men, in the year 535, and subjected without difficulty. During the same campaign, Dalmatia was conquered by the imperial arms, recovered by the Goths, but again reconquered by Justinian’s troops. A rebellion of the troops in Africa arrested, for a while, the progress of Belisarius, and compelled him to visit Carthage; but he returned to Sicily in a short time, and crossing over to Rhegium, marched directly to Naples. As he proceeded, he was everywhere welcomed by the inhabitants, who were almost universally Greeks; even the Gothic commander in the south of Italy favoured the progress of the Roman general.

The city of Naples made a vigorous defence; but after a siege of three weeks it was taken by introducing into the place a body of troops through the passage of an ancient aqueduct. The conduct of Belisarius, after the capture of the city, was dictated by policy, and displayed very little humanity. As the inhabitants had shown some disposition to assist the Gothic garrison in defending the city, and as such conduct would have greatly increased the difficulty of his campaign in Italy, in order to intimidate the population of other cities he appears to have winked at the pillage of the town, to have tolerated the massacre of many of the citizens in the churches, where they had sought an asylum, and to have overlooked a sedition of the lowest populace, in which the leaders of the Gothic party were assassinated. From Naples, Belisarius marched forward to Rome.

Only sixty years had elapsed since Rome was conquered by Odoacer; and during this period its population, the ecclesiastical and civil authority of its bishop, who was the highest dignitary in the Christian world, and the influence of its senate, which still continued to be in the eyes of mankind the most honourable political body in existence, enabled it to preserve a species of independent civic constitution. Theodoric had availed himself of this municipal government to smooth away many of the difficulties which presented themselves in the administration of Italy. The Goths, however, in leaving the Romans in possession of their own civil laws and institutions, had not diminished their aversion to a foreign yoke; yet, as they possessed no distinct feelings of nationality apart from their connection with the imperial domination and their religious orthodoxy, they never aspired to independence, and were content to turn their eyes towards the emperor of the East as their legitimate sovereign. Belisarius, therefore, entered the ‘Eternal City’ rather as a, friend than as a conqueror; but he had hardly entered it before he perceived that it would be necessary to take every precaution to defend his conquest against the new Gothic king Witiges. He immediately repaired the walls, strengthened them with a breastwork, collected large stores of provisions, and prepared to sustain a siege.

The Gothic war forms an important epoch in the history of the city of Rome; for, within the space of sixteen years, it changed masters five times, and suffered three severe sieges.

 

Rome was taken by Belisarius A.D. 536

Besieged by Witiges, 537

Besieged and taken by Totila, 546

Retaken by Belisarius, 547

Again besieged and retaken by Totila, 549

Taken by Narses, 552

 

 Its population was almost destroyed; its public buildings and its walls must have undergone many changes, according to the exigencies of its defence. It has, consequently, been too generally assumed that the existing walls indicate the exact position of those of Aurelian. This period is also memorable for the ruin of many monuments of ancient art, which the generals of Justinian destroyed without compunction. With the conquest of Rome by Belisarius the history of the ancient city may be considered as terminating; and with his defence against Witiges commences the history of the Middle Ages,—of the times of destruction and of change.

Witiges laid siege to Rome with an army which Procopius says amounted to 150,000 men, yet this army was insufficient to invest the whole circuit of the city. The Gothic king distributed his troops in seven fortified camps; six were formed to surround the city, and the seventh was placed to protect the Milvian Bridge. Five camps covered the space from the Praenestine to the Flaminian gates, and the remaining camp was formed beyond the Tiber, in the plain below the Vatican. By these arrangements the Goths only commanded about half the circuit of Rome, and the roads to Naples and to the ports at the mouth of the Tiber remained open. The Roman infantry was now the weakest part of a Roman army. Even in the defence of a fortified city it was subordinate to the cavalry, and the military superiority of the Roman arms was sustained by mercenary horsemen. It is strange to find the tactics of the middle ages described by Procopius in classic Greek. The Goths displayed an utter ignorance of the art of war; they had no skill in the use of military engines, and they were unable to render their numerical superiority available in assaults. The leading operations of the attack and defence consisted in a series of cavalry engagements fought under the walls; and in these the superior discipline and skill of the mercenaries of Belisarius generally secured them the victory. The Roman cavalry,—for so the mixture of Huns, Heruls, and Armenians which formed the elite of the army must be termed,—trusted chiefly to the bow; while the Goths placed their reliance on the lance and sword, which the able manoeuvres of their enemies seldom allowed them to use with effect. The infantry of both armies usually remained idle spectators of the combat. Belisarius himself considered it of little use in a field of battle; and when he once reluctantly admitted it, at the pressing solicitation of its commanders, to share in one of his engagements, its defeat, after the exhibition of great bravery on the part both of the officers and men, confirmed him in his preference of the cavalry. In spite of the prudent arrangements adopted by Belisarius to insure supplies of provisions from his recent conquests in Sicily and Africa, Rome suffered severely from famine during the siege; but the Gothic army was compelled to undergo equal hardships, and suffered far greater losses from disease. The communications of the garrison with the coast were for a time interrupted, but at last a body of five thousand fresh troops, and an abundant supply of provisions, despatched by Justinian to the assistance of Belisarius, entered Rome. Shortly after the arrival of this reinforcement, the Goths found themselves constrained to abandon the siege, in which they had persevered for a year. Justinian again augmented his army in Italy, by sending over seven thousand troops under the command of the eunuch Narses, a man whose military talents were in no way inferior to those of Belisarius, and whose name occupies an equally important place in the history of Italy. The emperor, guided by the prudent jealousy which dictated the strictest control over all the powerful generals of the empire, had conferred on Narses an independent authority over his own division, and that general, presuming too far on his knowledge of Justinian’s feelings, ventured to throw serious obstacles in the way of Belisarius. The dissensions of the two generals delayed the progress of the Roman arms. The Goths availed themselves of the opportunity to continue the war with vigour; they succeeded in reconquering Milan, which had admitted a Roman garrison, and sacked the city, which was second only to Rome in wealth and population. They massacred the whole male population, and behaved with such cruelty that three hundred thousand persons were said to have perished—a number which probably only indicates the whole population of Milan at this periods

A state of warfare soon disorganized the ill-cemented government of the Gothic kingdom; and the ravages caused by the wide-extended military operations of the armies, which degenerated into a succession of sieges and skirmishes, created a dreadful famine in the north of Italy. Whole provinces remained uncultivated; great numbers of the industrious natives perished by actual starvation, and the ranks of the Goths were thinned by misery and disease. Society receded a step towards barbarism. Procopius, who was himself in Italy at the time, records a horrible story of two women who lived on human flesh, and were discovered to have murdered seventeen persons, in order to devour their bodies. This famine assisted the progress of the Roman arms, as the imperial troops drew their supplies of provisions from the East, while the measures of their enemies were paralyzed by the general want.

Witiges, finding his resources inadequate to stop the conquests of Belisarius, solicited the aid of the Franks, and despatched an embassy to Chosroes to excite the jealousy of the Persian monarch. The Franks, under Theodebert, entered Italy, but they were soon compelled to retire; and Belisarius, being placed at the head of the whole army by the recall of Narses, quickly terminated the war. Ravenna, the Gothic capital, was invested; but the siege was more remarkable for the negotiations which were carried on during its progress than for the military operations. The Goths, with the consent of Witiges, made Belisarius the singular offer of acknowledging him as the Emperor of the West, on condition of his joining his forces to theirs, and permitting them to retain their position and property in Italy, thus insuring them the possession of their nationality and their peculiar laws. Perhaps neither the state of the mercenary army which he commanded, nor the condition of the Gothic nation, rendered the project very feasible. It is certain that Belisarius only listened to it, in order to hasten the surrender of Ravenna, and secure the person of Witiges without farther bloodshed. Italy submitted to Justinian, and the few Goths who maintained their independence beyond the Po pressed Belisarius in vain to declare himself emperor. But even without these solicitations, his power had awakened the fears of his sovereign, and he was recalled, though with honour, from his command in Italy. He returned to Constantinople leading Witiges captive, as he had formerly appeared conducting Gelimer.

Belisarius had hardly quitted Italy when the Goths reassembled their forces. They were accustomed to rule, and nourished in the profession of arms. Justinian sent a civilian, Alexander the logothete, to govern Italy, hoping that his financial arrangements would render the new conquest a source of revenue to the imperial treasury. The fiscal administration of the new governor soon excited great discontent. He diminished the number of the Roman troops, and put a stop to those profits which a state of war usually affords the military; while, at the same time, he abolished the pensions and privileges which formed no. inconsiderable portion of the revenue of the higher classes, and which had never been entirely suppressed during the Gothic domination. Alexander may have acted in some cases with undue severity in enforcing these measures; but it is evident, from their nature, that he must have received express orders to put an end to what Justinian considered the lavish expenditure of Belisarius. A part of the Goths in the north of Italy retained their independence after the surrender of Witiges. They raised Hildibald to the throne, which he occupied about a year, when he was murdered by one of his own guards. The tribe of Rugians then raised Erarich their leader to the throne; but on his entering into negotiations with the Romans he was murdered, after a reign of only five months. Totila was then elected king of the Goths, and had he not been opposed to the greatest men whom the declining age of the Roman Empire produced, he would probably have succeeded in restoring the Gothic monarchy in Italy. His successes endeared him to his countrymen, while the justice of his administration, contrasted with the rapacity of Justinian’s government, gained him the respect and submission of the Italians. He was on the point of commencing the siege of Rome, when Belisarius, who, after his departure from Ravenna, had been employed in the Persian war, was sent back to Italy to recover the ground already lost. The imperial forces were destitute of that unity and military organization which constitute a number of different corps into one army. The various bodies of troops were commanded by officers completely independent of one another, and obedient only to Belisarius as commander-in-chief. Justinian, acting on his usual maxims of jealousy, and distrusting Belisarius more than formerly, retained the greater part of that general’s body-guard, and all his veteran followers, at Constantinople; so that he now appeared in Italy unaccompanied by a staff of scientific officers and a body of veteran troops on whose experience and discipline he could rely for implicit obedience to his orders. The heterogeneous elements of which his army was composed made all combined operations impracticable, and his position was rendered still more disadvantageous by the change that had taken place in that of his enemy. Totila was now able to command every sacrifice on the part of his followers, for the Goths, taught by their misfortunes and deprived of their wealth, felt the importance of union and discipline, and paid the strictest attention to the orders of their sovereign. The Gothic king laid siege to Rome, and Belisarius established himself in Porto, at the mouth of the Tiber; but all his endeavours to relieve the besieged city proved unsuccessful, and Totila compelled it to surrender under his eye, and in spite of all his exertions.

The national and religious feelings of the orthodox Romans rendered them the irreconcilable enemies of the Arian Goths. Totila soon perceived that it would not be in his power to defend Rome against a scientific enemy and a hostile population, in consequence of the great extent of the fortifications, and the impossibility of dislodging the imperial troops from the forts at the mouth of the Tiber. But he also perceived that the Eastern emperors would be unable to maintain a footing in central Italy without the support of the Roman population, whose industrial, commercial, aristocratic, and ecclesiastical influence was concentrated in the city population of Rome. He therefore determined to destroy the Eternal City, and if policy authorizes kings on great occasions to trample on the precepts of humanity, the king of the Goths might claim a right to destroy the capital of the Romans. Even the statesman may still doubt whether the decision of Totila, if it had been carried into execution in the most merciless manner, would not have purified the moral atmosphere of Italian society. He commenced the destruction of the walls; but either the difficulty of completing his project, or the feelings of humanity which were inseparable from his enlightened ambition, induced him to listen to the representations of Belisarius, who conjured him to abandon his barbarous scheme of devastation. Totila, nevertheless, did everything in his power to depopulate Rome; he compelled the inhabitants to retire into the Campagna, and forced the senators to abandon their native city. It is to this emigration that the utter extinction of the old Roman race and civic government must be attributed; for when Belisarius, and, at a later period, when Totila himself, attempted to repeople Rome, they laid the foundations of a new society, which connects itself rather with the history of the middle ages than with that of preceding times.

Belisarius entered the city after the departure of the Goths; and as he found it deserted, he had the greatest difficulty in putting it in a state of defence. But though Belisarius was enabled, by his military skill, to defend Rome against the attacks of Totila, he was unable to make any head against the Gothic army in the open field; and after vainly endeavouring to bring back victory to the Roman standards in Italy, he received permission to resign his command and return to Constantinople. His want of success must be attributed solely to the inadequacy of the means placed at his disposal for encountering an active and able sovereign like Totila. The unpopularity of his second administration in Italy arose from the neglect of Justinian in paying the troops, and the necessity which that irregularity imposed on their commander, of levying heavy contributions on the Italians, while it rendered the task of enforcing strict discipline, and of protecting the property of the people from the ill-paid soldiery, quite impracticable. Justice, however, requires that we should not omit to mention that Belisarius, though he returned to Constantinople with diminished glory, did not neglect his pecuniary interests, and came back without any diminution of his own wealth.

Great as the talents of Belisarius really were, and sound as his judgment appears to have been, still it must be confessed that his name occupies a more prominent place in history than his merits are entitled to claim. The accident that his conquests put an end to two powerful monarchies, of his having led captive to Constantinople the representatives of the dreaded Genseric and the great Theodoric, joined with the circumstance that he enjoyed the singular good fortune of having his exploits recorded in the classic language of Procopius, the last historian of the Greeks, have rendered a brilliant career more brilliant from the medium through which it is seen. At the same time the tale of his blindness and poverty has made his very name express heroism reduced to misery by royal ingratitude, and extended a sympathy with his misfortunes into circles which would have remained indifferent to the real events of his history. Belisarius, though he refused the Gothic throne and the empire of the West, did not despise nor neglect wealth; he accumulated riches which could not have been acquired by any commander-in-chief amidst the wars and famines of the period, without rendering the military and civil administration subservient to his pecuniary profit. On his return from Italy he lived at Constantinople in almost regal splendour, and maintained a body of seven thousand cavalry attached to his household. In an empire where confiscation was an ordinary financial resource, and under a sovereign whose situation rendered jealousy only common prudence, it is not surprising that the wealth of Belisarius excited the imperial cupidity, and induced Justinian to seize great part of it. His fortune was twice reduced by confiscations. The behaviour of the general under his misfortunes, and the lamentable picture of his depression which Procopius has drawn, when he was impoverished by his first disgrace, does not tend to elevate his character. At a later period, his wealth was again confiscated on an accusation of treason, and on this occasion it is said that he was deprived of his sight, and reduced to such a state of destitution that he begged his bread in a public square, soliciting charity with the exclamation, “Give Belisarius an obolus!” But ancient historians were ignorant of this fable, which has been rejected by every modern authority in Byzantine history. Justinian, on calm reflection, disbelieved the treason imputed to a man who, in his younger days, had refused to ascend a throne; or else he pardoned what he supposed to be the error of a general to whose services he was so deeply indebted; and Belisarius, reinstated in some part of his fortune, died in possession of wealth and honour.

As soon as Totila was freed from the restraint imposed on his movements by the fear of Belisarius, he quickly recovered possession of Rome; and the loss of Italy appeared inevitable, when Justinian decided on making a new effort to retain it. As it was necessary to send a large army against the Goths, and invest the commander-in-chief with great powers, it is not probable that Justinian would have trusted any other of his generals more than Belisarius had he not fortunately possessed an able officer, the eunuch Narses, who could never rebel with the hope of placing the imperial crown on his own head. This assurance of his fidelity gave Narses great influence in the interior of the palace, and secured him a support which no other general attained. His military talents, and his freedom from the reproach of avarice or peculation, augmented his personal influence, and his diligence and liberality soon assembled a powerful army. The choicest mercenary troops — Huns, Heruls, Armenians, and Lombards — marched under his standard with the veteran Roman soldiers. The first object of Narses after his arrival in Italy was to force the Goths to risk a general engagement, trusting to the excellence of his troops, and to his own skill in the employment of their superior discipline. The rival armies met at Tagina, near Nocera, and the victory of Narses was completed Totila and six thousand Goths perished, and Rome again fell under the dominion of Justinian. At the solicitation of the Goths an army of Franks and Germans was permitted by Theobald, king of Austrasia, to enter Italy for the purpose of making a diversion in their favour. Bucelin, the leader of this army, was met by Narses on the banks of the Vulturnus, near Capua. The forces of the Franks consisted of thirty thousand men, those of the Romans did not exceed eighteen thousand, but the victory of Narses was so complete that but few of the invaders escaped. The Goths elected another king, Theias, who perished with his army near the banks of the Samo. His death put an end to the kingdom of the Ostrogoths, and allowed Narses to turn his whole attention to the civil government of his conquests, and to establish security of property and a strict administration of justice. He appears to have been a man singularly well adapted to his situation — possessing the highest military talents, combined with a perfect knowledge of the civil and financial administration, he was able to estimate with exactness the sum which he could remit to Constantinople, without arresting the gradual improvement of the country. His fiscal government was, nevertheless, regarded by the Italians as extremely severe, and he was unpopular with the inhabitants of Rome.

 

Chronology of the Kings of the Ostrogoths.

                     A. D.

Theodoric, 493-526

Athalaric, 526-534

Amalasunta.

Theodatus, 534-536

Witiges, 536-540

Hildibald, 540-541

Erarich, 541-541

Totila, 541-552

Theias, 552-653

 

The existence of a numerous Roman population in Spain, connected with the Eastern Empire by the memory of ancient ties, by active commercial relations, and by a strong orthodox feeling against the Arian Visigoths, enabled Justinian to avail himself of these advantages in the same manner as he had done in Africa and Italy. The king Theudes attempted to make a diversion in Africa by besieging Ceuta, in order to call off the attention of Justinian from Italy. His attack was unsuccessful, but the circumstances were not favourable at the time for Justinian’s attempting to revenge the injury. Dissensions in the country soon after enabled the emperor to find a pretext for sending a fleet and troops to support the claims of a rebel chief, and in this way he gained possession of a large portion of the south of Spain. The rebel Athanagild having been elected king of the Visigoths, vainly endeavoured to drive the Romans out of the provinces which they had occupied. Subsequent victories extended the conquests of Justinian from the mouth of the Tagus, Ebora, and Corduba, along the coast of the ocean, and that of the Mediterranean almost as far as Valentia; and at times the relations of the Romans with the Catholic population of the interior enabled them to carry their arms almost into the centre of Spain. The Eastern Empire retained possession of these distant conquests for about sixty years.

 

Sect. VII

Relations of the Northern Nations with the Roman Empire and the Greek Nation

 

The reign of Justinian witnessed the total decline of the power of the Gothic race on the banks of the Danube, where a void was created in the population which neither the Huns nor the Sclavonians could fill. The consequence was that new races of barbarians from the East poured into the countries between the Black Sea and the Carinthian Alps; and the military aristocracy of the Goths, whose social arrangements conformed to the system of the ancient world, was succeeded by the ruder domination of nomad tribes. The causes of this change are to be found in the same great principle which was modifying the position of the various races of mankind in every region of the earth; and by the destruction of the elements of civilization in the country immediately to the south of the Danube, in consequence of the repeated ravages to which it had been exposed; and in the impossibility of any agricultural population, not sunk very low in the scale of civil society, finding the means of subsistence, where villages, farm-houses, and barns were in ruins; where the fruit-trees were cut down; where the vineyards were destroyed, and the cattle required for cultivating the land were carried off. The Goths, who had once ruled all the country from the Lake Maeotis to the Adriatic, and who were the most civilized of all the invaders of the Roman Empire, were the first to disappear. Only a single tribe, called the Tetraxits, continued to inhabit their old seats in the Tauric Chersonese, where some of their descendants survived until the sixteenth century. The Gepids, a kindred people, had defeated the Huns, and established their independence after the death of Attila. They obtained from Marcian the cession of a considerable district on the banks of the Danube, and an annual subsidy in order to secure their alliance in defending the frontier of the empire against other invaders. In the reign of Justinian their possessions were reduced to the territories lying between the Save and the Drave, but the alliance with the Roman Empire continued in force, and they still received their subsidy.

The Heruls, a people whose connection with Scandinavia is mentioned by Procopius, and who took part in some of the earliest incursions of the Gothic tribes into the empire, had, after many vicissitudes, obtained from the emperor Anastasius a fixed settlement; and in the time of Justinian they possessed the country to the south of the Save, and occupied the city of Singidunum (Belgrade). The Lombards, a Germanic people, who had once been subject to the Heruls, but who had subsequently defeated their masters, and driven them within the bounds of the empire for protection, were induced by Justinian to invade the Ostrogothic kingdom, and establish themselves in Pannonia, to the north of the Drave. They occupied the country between the Danube and the Theiss, and, like their neighbours, received an annual subsidy from the Eastern Empire. These Gothic nations never formed the bulk of the population in the lands which they occupied; they were only the lords of the soil, who knew no occupations but those of war and hunting. But their successes in war, and the subsidies by which they had been enriched, had accustomed them to a degree of rude magnificence which became constantly of more difficult attainment, as their own oppressive government, and the ravages of their more barbarous neighbours, depopulated all the regions around their settlements. When they became, like the other northern conquerors, a territorial aristocracy, they suffered the fate of all privileged classes which are separated from the mass of the people. Their luxury increased, and their numbers diminished. At the same time, incessant wars and ravages of territory swept away the unarmed population, so that the conquerors were at last compelled to abandon these possessions to seek richer seats, as the Indians of the American continent quit the lands where they have destroyed the wild game, and plunge into new forests.

Beyond the territory of the Lombards, the country to the south and east was inhabited by various tribes of Sclavonians, who occupied the country between the Adriatic and the Danube, including a part of Hungary and Vallachia, where they mingled their settlements with the Dacian tribes who had dwelt in these regions from an earlier period. The independent Sclavonians were, at this time, a nation of savage robbers, in the lowest condition of social civilization, whose ravages and incursions were rapidly tending to reduce all their neighbours to the same state of barbarism. Their plundering expeditions were chiefly directed against the rural population of the empire, and were often pushed many days’ journey to the south of the Danube. Their cruelty was dreadful; but neither their numbers nor their military power excited, at this time, any fear that they would be able to effect permanent conquests within the bounds of the empire.

The Bulgarians, a nation of Hunnish or Turkish race, occupied the eastern parts of ancient Dacia, from the Carpathian Mountains to the Dniester. Beyond them, as far as the plains to the east of the Tanais, the country was still ruled by the Huns, who had now separated into two independent kingdoms: that to the west was called the Kutigur; and the other, to the east, the Utugur. The Huns had conquered the whole Tauric Chersonese except the city of Cherson. The importance of the commercial relations which Cherson kept up between the northern and southern nations was so advantageous to all parties, that it enabled the Greek colonists in this distant spot to preserve their political independence.

In the early part of Justinian’s reign (A.D, 528) the city of Bosporus was taken and plundered by the Huns. It was soon recovered by an expedition fitted out by the emperor at Odessus (Varna); but these repeated conquests of a mercantile emporium, and an agricultural colony, by pastoral nomads like the Huns, and by mercenary soldiers like the imperial army, must have had a very depressing effect on the remains of Greek civilization in the Tauric Chersonesus. The increasing barbarism of the inhabitants of these regions diminished the commerce which had once flourished in the neighbouring lands, and which was now almost entirely centred in Cherson. The hordes of plundering nomads, who never remained long in one spot, had little to sell, and did not possess the means of purchasing foreign luxuries; and the language and manners of the Greeks, which had once been prevalent all around the shores of the Euxine, began to fall into neglect. The various Greek cities which still maintained some portion of their ancient social and municipal institutions received many severe blows during the reign of Justinian. The towns of Kepoi and Phanagoris, situated near the Cimmerian Bosphorus, were taken by the Huns. Sebastopolis, or Diospolis, and Pityous, distant two days’ journey from one another, on the eastern shores of the Euxine, were abandoned by their garrisons during the Colchian war; and the conquests of the Avars at last confined the influence of the Roman Empire, and the trade and civilization of the Greeks, to the cities of Bosporus and Cherson.

It is necessary to record a few incidents which mark the progress of barbarism, poverty, and depopulation, in the lands to the south of the Danube, and explain the causes which compelled the Roman and Greek races to abandon their settlements in these countries. Though the commencement of Justinian’s reign was illustrated by a signal defeat of the Antes, a powerful Sclavonian tribe, still the invasions of that people were soon renewed with all their former vigour. In the year 533 they defeated and slew Chilbudius, a Roman general of great reputation, whose name indicates his northern origin. In 538 a band of Bulgarians defeated the Roman army chained with the defence of the country, captured the general Constantiolus, and compelled him to purchase his liberty by the payment of one thousand pounds of gold, —a sum which was considered sufficient for the ransom of the flourishing city of Antioch by the Persian monarch Chosroes. In 539 the Gepids ravaged Illyricum, and the Huns laid waste the whole country from the Adriatic to the long wall which protected Constantinople. Cassandra was taken, and the peninsula of Pallene plundered; the fortifications of the Thracian Chersonese were forced, and a body of the Huns crossed over the Dardanelles into Asia, while another, after ravaging Thessaly, turned Thermopylae, and plundered Greece as far as the Isthmus of Corinth. In this expedition, the Huns are said to have collected and carried away one hundred and twenty thousand prisoners, chiefly belonging to the rural population of the Greek provinces. The fortifications erected by Justinian, and the attention which the misfortunes of his arms compelled him to pay to the efficiency of his troops on the northern frontier, restrained the incursions of the barbarians for some years after this fearful foray; but in 548, the Sclavonians again ravaged Illyricum to the very walls of Dyrrachium, murdering the inhabitants, and carrying them away as slaves in face of a Roman army of fifteen thousand men, which was unable to arrest their progress. In 550 fresh incursions desolated Illyricum and Thrace. Topirus, a flourishing city on the Aegean Sea, was taken by assault. Fifteen thousand of the inhabitants were massacred, while an immense number of women and children were carried away into captivity. In 551 an eunuch named Scholasticus, who was intrusted with the defence of Thrace, was defeated by the barbarians near Adrianople. Next year, the Sclavonians again entered Illyricum and Thrace, and these provinces were reduced to such a state of disorder, that an exiled Lombard prince, who was dissatisfied with the rank and treatment which he had received from Justinian, taking advantage of the confusion, fled from Constantinople with a company of the imperial guards and a few of his own countrymen, and, after traversing all Thrace and Illyricum, plundering the country as he passed, and evading the imperial troops, at last reached the country of the Gepids in safety. Even Greece, though usually secure from its distance and its mountain passes against the incursions of the northern nations, did not escape the general destruction. It has been mentioned that Totila despatched a fleet of three hundred vessels from Italy to ravage Corcyra and the coast of Epirus, and this expedition plundered Nicopolis and Dodona. Repeated ravages at last reduced the great plains of Moesia to such a state of desolation that Justinian allowed even the savage Huns to form settlements to the south of the Danube.

Thus the Roman government began to replace the agricultural population by hordes of nomad herdsmen, and abandoned the defence of civilization as a vain struggle against the increasing strength of barbarism.

The most celebrated invasion of the empire at this period, though by no means the most destructive, was that of Zabergan, the king of the Kutigur Huns, who crossed the Danube in the year 559. Its historical fame is derived from its success in approaching the walls of Constantinople, and because its defeat was the last military exploit of Belisarius. Zabergan formed his army into three divisions, and finding the country everywhere destitute of defence, he ventured to advance on the capital with one division, amounting to only seven thousand men. After all the lavish expenditure of Justinian in building forts and erecting fortifications, he had allowed the long wall of Anastasius to fall into such a state of dilapidation, that Zabergan passed it without difficulty, and advanced to within seventeen miles of Constantinople, before he encountered any serious resistance. The modern historian must be afraid of conveying a false impression of the weakness of the empire, and of magnifying the neglect of the government, if he venture to transcribe the ancient accounts of this expedition. Yet the miserable picture which ancient writers have drawn of the close of Justinian’s reign is authenticated by the calamities of his successors. As soon as the wars with the Persians and Goths ceased, Justinian dismissed the greater part of those chosen mercenaries who had proved themselves the best troops of the age, and he neglected to fill up the vacancies in the native legions of the empire by enrolling new recruits. His immense expenditure in fortifications, civil and religious buildings, and court pageants, forced him at times to be as economical as he was at others careless and lavish. The army which had achieved so many foreign conquests was reduced, and Constantinople, where Belisarius had lately appeared with seven thousand horsemen, was now so destitute of troops that the great wall was left unguarded. Zabergan established his camp at the village of Melantias, on the river Athyras, which flows into the lake now called Buyuk Tchekmedjee, or the great bridge.

At this crisis the fate of the Roman Empire depended on the ill-paid and neglected troops of the line, who formed the ordinary garrison of the capital, and on the veterans and pensioners who happened to reside there, and who immediately resumed their arms. The corps of imperial guards called Silentiarii, Protectores, and Domestici, shared with the chosen mercenaries the duty of mounting guard on the fortifications of the imperial palace, and of protecting the person of Justinian, not only against the barbarian enemy, but also against any attempt which a rebellious general or a seditious subject might make, to profit by the general confusion. After the walls of Constantinople were properly manned, Belisarius marched out of the city with his army. The legion of scholarians formed the principal body of his troops, and it was distinguished by the regularity of its organization and the splendour of its equipments. This privileged corps consisted of 3500 men, and its ordinary duty was to guard the outer court and the avenues of the emperor’s residence. They may be considered as the representatives of the praetorian guards of an earlier period of Roman history, and the manner in which their discipline was ruined by Justinian affords a curious parallel to many similar bodies in other despotic states. The scholarians received higher pay than the troops of the line. Previous to the reign of Zeno, they had been composed of veteran soldiers, who were appointed to vacancies in the corps as a reward for good service. Armenians were generally preferred by Zeno’s immediate predecessors, because the volunteers of this warlike nation were considered more likely to remain firmly attached to the emperor’s person in case of any rebellious movement in the empire, than native subjects who might participate in the exasperation caused by the measures of the government. The instability of Zeno’s throne induced him to change the organization of the scholarians. His object was to form a body of troops whose interests secured their fidelity to his person. Instead of veteran soldiers who brought their military habits and prejudices into the corps, he filled its ranks with his own countrymen, from the mountains of Isauria. These men were valiant, and accustomed to the use of arms. Though they were ignorant of tactics and impatient of discipline, their obedience to their officers was secured by their attachment to Zeno as their countryman and benefactor, and by their absolute dependence on his power as emperor for the enjoyment of their enviable position. The jealousy with which these rude mountaineers were regarded by the whole army, and the hatred felt to them by the people of Constantinople, kept them separate from the rest of the world, secluded in their barracks and steady to their duty in the palace. Anastasius and Justin I introduced the practice of appointing the scholarians by favour, without reference to their military services; and Justinian is accused of establishing the abuse of selling places in their ranks to wealthy citizens, and householders of the capital who had no intention of following a military life, but who purchased their enrolment in the scholarians to enjoy the privilege of the military class in the Roman empire. It is remarkable that absolute princes, whose power is so seriously endangered by the inefficiency of their army, should be so often themselves the corrupters of its discipline. The abuses which render chosen troops useless as soldiers are generally introduced by the sovereign, as in this example of the scholarians of Justinian, but they are sometimes caused by the power of the soldiers, who convert their corps into a hereditary corporation, as in the case of the janissaries of the Othoman Empire.

On such troops Belisarius was forced to depend for the defence of the country round Constantinople, and for the more difficult task of conserving his own military reputation unsullied in his declining years. While the federates remained to guard Justinian, his general marched to encounter the Huns at the head of a motley army, composed of the neglected troops of the line, and of the sleek scholarians, who, though they formed the most imposing and brilliant portion of his force in appearance, were in reality the worst-trained and least courageous troops under his orders. A crowd of volunteers also joined his standard, and from these he was able to select upwards of 300 of those veteran horseguards who had been so often victorious over the Goths and the Persians. Belisarius established his camp at Chettoukome, a position which enabled him to circumscribe the ravages of the Huns, and stop their advance to the villages and country houses in the immediate vicinity of Constantinople. The peasants who had fled from the enemy assembled round his army, and their labour enabled him to cover his position with strong works and a deep ditch, before the Huns could attack his troops.

There can be doubt that the historians of this campaign misrepresent the facts when they state that the Roman army was inferior in number to the division of the Huns which Zabergan led against Constantinople. This inferiority could only exist in the cavalry; but we know that Belisarius had no confidence in the Roman infantry, and the ill-disciplined troops then under his orders must have excited his contempt. They, on the other hand, were confident in their numbers, and their general was fearful lest their rashness should compromise his plan of operations. He therefore addressed them in a speech, which modified their precipitation by assuring them of success after a little delay. A cavalry engagement, in which Zabergan led 2000 Huns in person to beat up the quarters of the Romans, was completely defeated. Belisarius allowed the enemy to approach without opposition, but before they could extend their line to charge, they were assailed in flank by the unexpected attack of a body of two hundred chosen cavalry, which issued suddenly from a woody glen, and at the same moment Belisarius charged them in front. The shock was irresistible. The Huns fled instantly, but their retreat was embarrassed by their position, and they left four hundred men dead on the field. This trifling affair finished the campaign. The Huns, finding that they could no longer collect supplies, were anxious to save the booty in their possession. They broke up their camp at Melantias, retired to St. Stratonikos, and hastened to escape beyond the long wall. Belisarius had no body of cavalry with which he could venture to pursue an active and experienced enemy. An unsuccessful skirmish might still compromise the safety of many districts, and the jealousy of Justinian was perhaps as dangerous as the army of Zabergan. The victor returned to Constantinople, and there heard himself reproached by courtiers and sycophants for not bringing back the king of the Kutigurs a prisoner, as in other days he had presented the kings of the Vandals and of the Ostrogoths captives before Justinian’s throne. Belisarius was ungratefully treated by Justinian, suspected of resenting the imperial ingratitude, accused of treason, plundered, and pardoned.

The division of the Huns sent against the Thracian Chersonese was as unsuccessful as the main body of the army. But while the Huns were incapable of forcing the wall which defended the isthmus, they so utterly despised the Roman garrison, that six hundred embarked on rafts, in order to paddle round the fortifications. The Byzantine general possessed twenty galleys, and with this naval force he easily destroyed all who had ventured to sea. A well-timed sally on the barbarians who had witnessed the destruction of their comrades, routed the remainder, and showed them that their contempt of the Roman soldiery had been carried too far. The third division of the Huns had been ordered to advance through Macedonia and Thessaly. It penetrated as far as Thermopylae, but was not very successful in collecting plunder, and retreated with as little glory as the other two.

Justinian, who had seen a barbarian at the head of an army of twenty thousand men ravage a considerable portion of his empire, instead of pursuing and crushing the invader, engaged the king of the Utugur Huns, by promises and money, to attack Zabergan. These intrigues were successful and the dissensions of the two monarchs prevented the Huns from again attacking the empire. A few years after this incursion the Avars invaded Europe, and, by subduing both the Hunnish kingdoms, gave the Roman emperor a far more dangerous and powerful neighbour than had lately threatened his northern frontier.

The Turks and the Avars become politically known to the Greeks, for the first time, towards the end of Justinian’s reign. Since that period the Turks have always continued to occupy a memorable place in the history of mankind, as the destroyers of ancient civilization. In their progress towards the West, they were preceded by the Avars, a people whose arrival in Europe produced the greatest alarm, whose dominion was soon widely extended, but whose complete extermination, or amalgamation with their subjects, leaves the history of their race a problem never likely to receive a very satisfactory solution. The Avars are supposed to have been a portion of the inhabitants of a powerful Asiatic empire which figures in the annals of China as ruling a great part of the centre of Asia, and extending to the Gulf of Corea. The great empire of the Avars was overthrown by a rebellion of their Turkish subjects, and the noblest caste soon became lost to history amidst the revolutions of the Chinese empire.

The original seats of the Turks were in the country round the great chain of Mount Altai. As subjects of the Avars, they had been distinguished by their skill in working and tempering iron; their industry had procured them wealth, and wealth had inspired them with the desire for independence. After throwing off the yoke of the Avars, they waged war with that people, and compelled the military strength of the nation to fly before them in two separate bodies. One of these divisions fell back on China; the other advanced into western Asia, and at last entered Europe. The Turks engaged in a career of conquest, and in a few years their dominions extended from the Volga and the Caspian Sea to the shores of the ocean, or the Sea of Japan, and from the banks of the Oxus (Gihoun) to the deserts of Siberia. The western army of the Avars, increased by many tribes who feared the Turkish government, advanced into Europe as a nation of conquerors, and not as a band of fugitives. The mass of this army is supposed to have been composed of people of the Turkish race, because those who afterwards bore the Avar name in Europe seem to have belonged to that family. It must not, however, be forgotten, that the mighty army of Avar emigrants might easily, in a few generations, lose all national peculiarities, and forget its native language, amidst the greater number of its Hunnish subjects, even if we should suppose the two races to have been originally derived from different stocks. The Avars, however, are sometimes styled Turks, even by the earliest historians. The use of the appellation Turk, in an extended sense, including the Mongol race, is found in Theophylactus Simocatta, a writer possessing considerable knowledge of the affairs of eastern Asia, and who speaks of the inhabitants of the flourishing kingdom of Taugast as Turks. This application of the term appears to have arisen from the circumstance, that the part of China to which he alluded was subject at the time to a foreign, or, in his phrase, a Turkish dynasty.

The Avars soon conquered all the countries as far as the banks of the Danube, and before Justinian’s death they were firmly established on the borders of Pannonia. Their pursuers, the Turks, did not visit Europe until a later period; but they extended their conquests in central Asia, where they destroyed the kingdom of the Ephthalite Huns to the east of Persia, a part of which Chosroes had already subdued. They engaged in long wars with the Persians; but it is sufficient to pass over the history of the first Turkish Empire with this slight notice, as it exercised but a very trifling direct influence on the fortunes of the Greek nation. The wars of the Turks and Persians tended, however, greatly to weaken the Persian Empire, to reduce its resources, and increase the oppression of the internal administration, by the call for extraordinary exertions, and thus prepared the way for the easier conquest of the country by the followers of Mahomet.

The sudden appearance of the Avars and Turks in history, marks the singular void which a long period of vicious government and successive conquests had created in the population of regions which were once flourishing. Both these nations took a prominent part in the destruction of the frame of ancient society in Europe and Asia; but neither of them contributed anything to the reorganization of the political, social, or religious condition of the modem world. Their empires soon fell to decay, and the very nations were again almost lost to history. The Avars, after having attempted the conquest of Constantinople, became at last extinct; and the Turks, after having been long forgotten, slowly rose to a high degree of power, and at length achieved the conquest of Constantinople, which their ancient rivals had vainly attempted.

 

Sect. VIII

 Relations of the Roman Empire with Persia

 

The Asiatic frontier of the Roman Empire was less favourable for attack than defence. The range of the Caucasus was occupied, as it still is, by a cluster of small nations of various languages, strongly attached to their independence, which the nature of their country enabled them to maintain amidst the wars and conflicting negotiations of the Romans, Persians, and Huns, by whom they were surrounded. The kingdom of Colchis (Mingrelia) was in permanent alliance with the Romans, and the sovereign received a regular investiture from the emperor. The Tzans, who inhabited the mountains about the sources of the Phasis, enjoyed a subsidiary alliance with Justinian until their plundering expeditions within the precincts of the empire induced him to garrison their country. Iberia, to the east of Colchis, the modern Georgia, formed an independent kingdom under the protection of Persia.

Armenia, as an independent kingdom, had long formed a slight counterpoise between the Roman and Persian empires. In the reign of Theodosius II it had been partitioned by its powerful neighbours; and about the year 429, it had lost the shadow of independence which it had been allowed to retain. The greater part of Armenia had fallen to the share of the Persians; but as the people were Christians, and

possessed their own church and literature, they had maintained their nationality uninjured after the loss of their political government. The western, or Roman part of Armenia, was bounded by the mountains in which the Araxes, the Boas, and the Euphrates take their rise; and it was defended against Persia by the fortress of Theodosiopolis (Erzeroum), situated on the very frontier of Pers-Armenia. From Theodosiopolis the empire was bounded by ranges of mountains which cross the Euphrates and extend to the river Nymphaeus, and here the city of Martyropolis, the capital of Roman Armenia, east of the Euphrates, was situated. From the junction of the Nymphaeus with the Tigris the frontier again followed the mountains to Dara, and from thence it proceeded to the Chaboras and the fortress of Circesium.

The Arabs or Saracens who inhabited the district between Circesium and Idumaea, were divided into two kingdoms: that of Ghassan, towards Syria, maintained an alliance with the Romans; and that of Hira, to the east, enjoyed the protection of Persia. Palmyra, which had fallen into ruins after the time of Theodosius II, was repaired and garrisoned; and the country between the Gulfs of Ailath and Suez, forming a province called the Third Palestine, was protected by a fortress constructed at the foot of Mount Sinai, and occupied by a strong body of troops.

Such a frontier, though it presented great difficulties in the way of invading Persia, afforded admirable means for protecting the empire; and, accordingly, it had very rarely indeed happened that a Persian army had ever penetrated into a Roman province. It was reserved for Justinian’s reign to behold the Persians break through the defensive line, and contribute to the ruin of the wealth, and the destruction of the civilization, of some of the most flourishing and enlightened portions of the Eastern Empire. The wars which Justinian carried on with Persia reflect little glory on his reign; but the celebrated name of his rival, the great Chosroes Nushirvan, has rendered his political and military mismanagement venial in the eyes of historians. The Persian and Roman empires were at this time nearly equal in power and civilization: both were ruled by princes whose reigns form national epochs; yet history affords ample evidence that the brilliant exploits of both these sovereigns were effected by a wasteful expenditure of the national resources, and by a consumption of the lives and capital of their subjects which proved irreparable. Neither empire was ever able to regain its former state of prosperity, nor could society recover the shock which it had received. The governments were too demoralized to venture on political reforms, and the people too ignorant and too feeble to attempt national revolutions.

The government of declining countries often gives slight signs of weakness and approaching dissolution as long as the ordinary relations of war and peace require to be maintained only with habitual friends or enemies, though the slightest exertion, created by extraordinary circumstances, may cause the political fabric to fall to pieces. The armies of the Eastern Empire and of Persia had, by long acquaintance, found the means of balancing any peculiar advantage of their enemy, by some modification of tactics, or some improvement in military discipline, which neutralized its effect. War between the two states was consequently carried on according to a regular routine of service, and was continued during a succession of campaigns in which much blood and treasure were expended, and much glory gained, with very little change in the relative military power, and none in the frontiers, of the two empires.

The avarice of Justinian, and his inconstancy in pursuing his political and military projects, often induced him to leave the eastern frontier of the empire very inadequately garrisoned; and this frontier presented an extent of country against which a Persian army, concentrated behind the Tigris, could choose its point of attack. The option of carrying the war into Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, or Colchis generally lay with the Persians; and Chosroes attempted to penetrate into the empire by every portion of this frontier during his long wars. The Roman army, in spite of the change which had taken place in its arms and organization, still retained its superiority.

The war with Persia in which Justinian found the empire engaged on his succession, was terminated by a peace which the Romans purchased by the payment of eleven thousand pounds of gold to Chosroes. The Persian monarch required peace to regulate the affairs of his own kingdom; and the calculation of Justinian, that the sum which he paid to Persia was much less than the expense of continuing the war, though it may have been correct, did not render the payment less impolitic, as it really conveyed an admission of inferiority and weakness. Justinian's object had been to place the great body of his military forces at liberty, in order to direct his exclusive attention to recovering the lost provinces of the Western Empire. Had he availed himself of peace with Persia to diminish the burdens on his subjects, and consolidate the defence of the empire instead of extending its frontiers, he might perhaps have re-established the Roman power. As soon as Chosroes heard of the conquests of Justinian in Africa, Sicily, and Italy, his jealousy induced him to renew the war. The solicitations of an embassy sent by Witiges are said to have had some effect in determining him to take up arms.

In 540 Chosroes invaded Syria with a powerful army, and laid siege to Antioch, the second city of the empire in population and wealth. He offered to raise the siege on receiving payment of one thousand pounds’ weight of gold, but this small sum was refused. Antioch was taken by storm, its buildings were committed to the flames, and its inhabitants were carried away captive, and settled as colonists in Persia. Hierapolis, Berrhoea (Aleppo), Apamea, and Chalcis, escaped this fate by paying the ransom demanded from each. To save Syria from utter destruction, Belisarius was sent to take the command of an army assembled for its defence, but he was ill supported, and his success was by no means brilliant. The fact that he saved Syria from utter devastation, nevertheless, rendered his campaign of 543 by no means unimportant for the empire. The war was carried on for twenty years, but during the latter period of its duration, military operations were confined to Colchis. It was terminated in 562 by a truce for fifty years, which effected little change in the frontiers of the empire. The most remarkable clause of this treaty of peace imposed on Justinian the disgraceful obligation of paying Chosroes an annual subsidy of thirty thousand pieces of gold; and he was compelled immediately to advance the sum of two hundred and ten thousand, for seven years. The sum, it is true, was not very great, but the condition of the Roman empire was sadly changed, when it became necessary to purchase peace from all its neighbours with gold, and with gold to find mercenary troops to carry on its wars. The moment, therefore, a supply of gold failed in the imperial treasury, the safety of the Roman power was compromised.

The weakness of the Roman Empire, and the necessity of finding allies in the East, in order to secure a share of the lucrative commerce of which Persia had long possessed a monopoly, induced Justinian to keep up friendly communications with the king of Ethiopia (Abyssinia). Elesboas, who then occupied the Ethiopian throne, was a prince of great power, and a steady ally of the Romans. The wars of this Christian monarch in Arabia are related by the historians of the empire; and Justinian endeavoured, by his means, to transfer the silk trade with India from Persia to the route by the Red Sea. The attempt failed from the great length of the sea voyage, and the difficulties of adjusting the intermediate commerce of the countries on this line of communication; but still the trade of the Red Sea was so great, that the king of Ethiopia, in the reign of Justin, was able to collect a fleet of seven hundred native vessels, and six hundred Roman and Persian merchantmen, which he employed to transport his troops into Arabia. The diplomatic relations of Justinian with the Avars and Turks, and particularly with the latter nation, were influenced by the position of the Roman Empire with regard to Persia, both in a commercial and political point of view.

 

Sect. IX

Commercial position of the Greeks and comparison with the other Nations living under the Roman Government

 

Until the northern nations conquered the southern provinces of the Western Empire, the commerce of Europe was in the hands of the subjects of the Roman emperors: and the monopoly of the Indian trade, its most lucrative branch, was almost exclusively possessed by the Greeks. But the invasions of the barbarians, by diminishing the wealth of the countries which they subdued, greatly diminished the demand for the valuable merchandise imported from the East; and the financial extortions of the imperial government gradually impoverished the Greek population of Syria, Egypt, and Cyrenaica, the greater portion of which had derived its prosperity from this now declining trade. In order to comprehend fully the change which must have taken place in the commercial relations of the Greeks with the western portion of Europe, it is necessary to compare the situation of each province, in the reign of Justinian, with its condition in the time of Hadrian. Many countries which had once supported an extensive trade in articles of luxury imported from the East, became incapable of purchasing any foreign production, and could hardly supply a diminished and impoverished population with the mere necessaries of life. The wines of Lesbos, Rhodes, Cnidos, Thasos, Chios, Samos, and Cyprus, the woollen cloths of Miletus and Laodicea, the purple dresses of Tyre, Gaetulia, and Laconia, the cambric of Cos, the manuscripts of Egypt and Pergamus, the perfumes, spices, pearls, and jewels of India, the ivory, the slaves, and tortoise-shell of Africa, and the silks of China, were once abundant on the banks of the Rhine and in the north of Britain. Treves and York were long wealthy and flourishing cities, where every foreign luxury could be obtained. Incredible quantities of the precious metals in coined money then circulated freely, and trade was carried on with activity far beyond the limits of the empire. The Greeks who traded in amber and fur, though they may have rarely visited the northern countries in person, maintained constant communications with these distant lands, and paid for the commodities which they imported in gold and silver coin, in ornaments, and by inducing the barbarians to consume the luxuries, the spices, and the incense of the East. Nor was the trade in statues, pictures, vases, and objects of art in marble, metals, earthenware, ivory, and painting, a trifling branch of commerce, as it may be conjectured from the relics which are now so frequently found, after having remained concealed for ages beneath the soil.

In the time of Justinian, Britain, Gaul, Rhaetia, Pannonia, Noricum, and Vindelicia, were reduced to such a state of poverty and desolation, that their foreign commerce was almost annihilated, and their internal trade reduced to a trifling exchange of the rudest commodities. Even the south of Gaul, Spain, Italy, Africa, and Sicily, had suffered a great decrease of population and wealth under the government of the Goths and Vandals; and though their cities still carried on a considerable commerce with the East, that commerce was very much less than it had been in the times of the empire. As the greater part of the trade of the Mediterranean was in the hands of the Greeks, this trading population was often regarded in the West as the type of the inhabitants of the eastern Roman Empire. The mercantile class was generally regarded by the barbarians as favouring the Roman cause; and probably not without reason, for its interests must have required it to keep up constant communications with the empire. When Belisarius touched at Sicily, on his way to attack the Vandals, Procopius found a friend at Syracuse, who was a merchant, carrying on extensive dealings in Africa, as well as with the East. The Vandals, when they were threatened by Justinian’s expedition, threw many of the merchants of Carthage into prison, as they suspected them of favouring Belisarius. The laws adopted by the barbarians for regulating the trade of their native subjects, and the dislike with which most of the Gothic nations viewed trade, manufactures, and commerce, naturally placed all commercial and money transactions in the hands of strangers. When it happened that war or policy excluded the Greeks from participating in these transactions, they were generally conducted by the Jews. We find, indeed, after the fall of the Western Empire, that the Jews, availing themselves of their commercial knowledge and neutral political character, began to be very numerous in all the countries gained by conquest from the Romans, and particularly so in those situated on the Mediterranean, which maintained constant communications with the East.

Several circumstances, however, during the reign of Justinian contributed to augment the commercial transactions of the Greeks, and to give them a decided preponderance in the Eastern trade. The long war with Persia cut off all those routes by which the Syrian and Egyptian population had maintained their ordinary communications with Persia; and it was from Persia that they had always drawn their silk, and great part of their Indian commodities, such as muslins and jewels. This trade now began to seek two different channels, by both of which it avoided the dominions of Chosroes; the one was to the north of the Caspian Sea, and the other by the Red Sea. This ancient route through Egypt still continued to be that of the ordinary trade. But the importance of the northern route, and the extent of the trade carried on by it through different ports on the Black Sea, are authenticated by the numerous colony of the inhabitants of central Asia established at Constantinople in the reign of Justin II. Six hundred Turks availed themselves, at one time, of the security offered by the journey of a Roman ambassador to the Great Khan of the Turks, and joined his train. This fact affords the strongest evidence of the great importance of this route, as there can be no question that the great number of the inhabitants of central Asia, who visited Constantinople, were attracted to it by their commercial occupations. The Indian commerce through Arabia and by the Red Sea was still more important; much more so, indeed, than the mere mention of Justinian’s failure to establish a regular importation of silk by this route might lead us to suppose. The immense number of trading vessels which habitually frequented the Red Sea shows that it was very great.

It is true that the population of Arabia now first began to share the profits and feel the influence of this trade. The spirit of improvement and inquiry roused by the excitement of this new field of enterprise, and the new subjects for thought which it opened, prepared the children of the desert for national union, and awakened the social and political impulse which gave birth to the character of Mahomet.

As the whole trade of Western Europe, in Chinese and Indian productions, passed through the hands of the Greeks, its amount, though small in any one district, yet as a whole must have been large. The Greek mercantile population of the Eastern Empire had declined, though perhaps not yet in the same proportion as the other classes, so that the relative importance of the trade remained as great as ever with regard to the general wealth of the empire; and its profits were probably greater than formerly, since the restricted nature of the transactions in the various localities must have discouraged competitors and produced the effects of a monopoly, even in those countries where no recognised privileges were granted, to the merchants. Justinian was also fortunate enough to secure to the Greeks the complete control of the silk trade, by enabling them to share in the production and manufacture of this precious commodity. This trade had excited the attention of the Romans at an early period. One of the emperors, probably Marcus Aurelius, had sent an ambassador to the East, with the view of establishing commercial relations with the country where silk was produced, and this ambassador succeeded in reaching China. Justinian long attempted in vain to open direct communications with China; but all his efforts to obtain a direct supply of silk either proved unavailing or were attended with very partial success. The Persians alone were able to supply the Chinese and Indian trade with the commodities suitable for that distant market. They were, however, unable to retain the monopoly of this profitable commerce; for the high price of silk in the West during the Persian wars induced the nations of central Asia to open direct communications by land with China, and convey it, by caravans to the frontiers of the Roman Empire. This trade followed various channels, according to the security which political circumstances afforded to the traders. At times it was directed towards the frontiers of Armenia, while at others it proceeded as far north as the Sea of Azov. Jornandes, in speaking of Cherson at this time, calls it a city whence the merchant imports the produce of Asia.

At a moment when Justinian must almost have abandoned the hope of participating in the direct trade with China, he was fortunate enough to be put in possession of the means of cultivating silk in his own dominions. Christian missions have been the means of extending very widely the benefits of civilization. Christian missionaries first established regular communications between Ethiopia and the Roman Empire, and they frequently visited China. In the year 551 two monks, who had studied the method of rearing silkworms and winding silk in China, succeeded in conveying the eggs of the moth to Constantinople, enclosed in a cane. The emperor, delighted with the acquisition, granted them every assistance which they required, and zealously encouraged their under- taking. It would not, therefore, be just to deny to Justinian some share in the merit of having founded a flourishing branch of trade, which tended very materially to support the resources of the Eastern Empire, and to enrich the Greek nation for several centuries.

The Greeks, at this time, maintained their superiority over the other people in the empire only by their commercial enterprise, which preserved that civilization in the trading cities which was rapidly disappearing among the agricultural population. In general they were reduced almost to the same level with the Syrians, Egyptians, Armenians, and Jews. In Cyrenaica and Alexandria they suffered from the same government, and declined in the same proportion, as the native population. Of the decline of Egypt we possess exact information, which it may not be unprofitable to pass in review. In the reign of Augustus, Egypt furnished Rome with a tribute of twenty millions of modii of grain annually, and it was garrisoned by a force rather exceeding twelve thousand regular troops. Under Justinian the tribute in grain was reduced to about five millions and a half modii, that is 800,000 artabas; and the Roman troops, to a cohort of six hundred men. Egypt was prevented from sinking still lower by the exportation of its grain to supply the trading population on the shores of the Red Sea. The canal connecting the Nile with the Red Sea afforded the means of exporting an immense quantity of inferior grain to the arid coasts of Arabia, and formed a great artery for civilization and commerce.

About this period the Jewish nation attained a degree of importance which is worthy of attention, as explaining many circumstances connected with the history of the human race. The Jews either by natural multiplication or by proselytism appear to have increased very much in the age immediately preceding Justinian’s reign. This increase is to be accounted for by the decline of the rest of the population in the countries round the Mediterranean, and by the general decay of civilization, in consequence of the severity of the Roman fiscal system, which trammeled every class of society with regulations restricting the industry of the people. These circumstances afforded an opening for the Jews, whose social position had been previously so bad, that the decline of their neighbours, at least, afforded them some relative improvement. The Jews, too, at this period, were the only neutral nation who could carry on their trade equally with the Persians, Ethiopians, Arabs, and Goths; for, though they were hated everywhere, the universal dislike was a reason for tolerating a people never likely to form common cause with any other. In Gaul and Italy they had risen to considerable importance; and in Spain they carried on an extensive trade in slaves, which excited the indignation of the Christian church, and which kings and ecclesiastical councils vainly endeavoured to destroy. The Jews generally found support from the barbarian monarchs; and Theodoric the Great granted them every species of protection. Their alliance was often necessary to render the country independent of the wealth and commerce of the Greeks.

To commercial jealousy, therefore, as well as religious zeal, we must attribute some of the persecutions which the Jews sustained in the Eastern Empire. The cruelty of the Roman government nourished that bitter nationality and revengeful hatred of their enemies, which have always marked the energetic character of the Israelites; but the history of the injustice of one party, and of the crimes of the other, does not fall within the scope of this inquiry, though the position of the Jews and Greeks in modem times offers many points of similarity and comparison.

The Armenians, who have at different times taken a large share in the trade of the East, were then entirely occupied with war and religion, and appeared in Europe only as mercenary soldiers in the pay of Justinian, in whose service many attained the highest military rank. In civilization and literary attainments, the Armenians held, however, as high a rank as any of their contemporaries. In the year 552 their patriarch, Moses II, assembled their learned men, in order to reform their calendar; and they then fixed on the aera which the Armenians have since continued to use. It is true that the numerous translations of Greek books which distinguished the literature of Armenia were chiefly made during the preceding century, for the sixth only produced a few ecclesiastical works. The literary energy of Armenia is remarkable, inasmuch as it excited the fears of the Persian monarch, who ordered that no Armenian should visit the Eastern Empire to study at the Greek universities of Constantinople, Athens, or Alexandria.

The literature of the Greek language ceased, from this time, to possess a national character, and became more identified with the government, the governing classes of the Eastern Empire, and the Orthodox Church, than with the inhabitants of Greece. The fact is easily explained by the poverty of the native Hellenes, and by the position of the ruling caste in the Roman Empire. The highest offices in the court, in the civil administration, and in the Orthodox Church, were filled with a Graeco-Roman caste, sprung originally from the Macedonian conquerors of Asia, and now proud of the Roman name which repudiated all idea of Greek nationality, and affected to treat Greek national distinctions as mere provincialism, at the very time it was acting under the impulse of Greek prejudices, both in the State and the Church. The long existence of the new Platonic school of philosophy at Athens, seems to have connected paganism with Hellenic national feelings and Justinian was doubtless induced to put an end to it, and drive its last teachers into banishment from his hostility to all independent institutions.

The universities of the other cities of the empire were intended for the education of the higher classes destined for the public administration, or for the church. That of Constantinople possessed a philosophical, philological, legal, and theological faculty. Alexandria added to these a celebrated medical school. Berytus was distinguished for its school of jurisprudence, and Edessa was remarkable for its Syriac, as well as its Greek faculties. The university of Antioch suffered a severe blow in the destruction of the city by Chosroes, but it again rose from its ruin. The Greek poetical literature of this age is utterly destitute of popular interest, and shows that it formed only the amusement of a class of society, not the portrait of a nation’s feelings. Paul the Silentiary and Agathias the historian, wrote many epigrams, which exist in the Anthology. The poem of ‘Hero and Leander’, by Musaeus, is generally supposed to have been composed about the year 450, but it may be mentioned as one of the last Greek poems which displays a true Greek character; and it is peculiarly valuable, as affording us a testimony of the late period to which the Hellenic people preserved their correct taste. The poems of Coluthus and Tryphiodorus, which are almost of the same period, are very far inferior in merit; but as both were Egyptian Greeks, it is not surprising that their poetical productions display the frigid character of the artificial school. After this period, the verses of the Greeks are entirely destitute of the spirit of poetry, and even the curious scholar finds their perusal a wearisome task.

The prose literature of the sixth century can boast of some distinguished names. The commentary of Simplicius on the manual of Epictetus has been frequently printed, and the work has even been translated into German. Simplicius was a pupil of Damascius, and one of the philosophers who, with that celebrated teacher, fled to Persia on the dispersion of the Athenian schools. The collection of Stobaeus, even in the mutilated form in which we possess it, contains much curious information; the medical works of Aetius and Alexander of Tralles have been printed several times, and the geographical writings of Hierocles and Cosmas Indicopleustes possess considerable interest. In history, the writings of Procopius and Agathias are of great merit, and have been translated into several modern languages. Many other names of authors, whose works have been preserved in part and published in modern times, might be cited; but they possess little interest for the general reader, and it does not belong to our inquiry to enter into details, which can be found in the history of Greek literature, nor does it fill within our province to enumerate the legal and ecclesiastical writers of the age.

 

Sect. X

 Influence of the Orthodox Church on the national feelings of the Greeks

 

It is necessary here to advert to the effect which the existence of the established Church, as a constituted body, and forming a part of the State, produced both on the government and on the people; though it will only be to notice its connection with the Greeks as a nation. The political connection of the Church with the State displayed its evil effects by the active part which the clergy took in exciting the numerous persecutions which distinguish this period. The alliance of Justinian and the Roman government of his time with the orthodox Christians was forced on the parties by their political position. Their interests in Africa, Italy, and Spain, identified the imperial party and the orthodox believers, and invited them to appeal to arms as the arbiter of opinions. It became, or was thought necessary, at times, even within the limits of the empire, to unite political and ecclesiastical power in the same hands; and the union of the office of prefect and patriarch of Egypt, in the person of Apollinarius, is a memorable instance. To the combination, therefore, of Roman policy with orthodox bigotry, we must attribute the religious persecutions of the Arians, Nestorians, Eutychians, and other heretics; as well as of Platonic philosophers, Manichaeans, Samaritans, and Jews. The various laws which Justinian enacted to enforce unity of opinion in religion, and to punish any difference of belief from that of the established church, occupy a considerable space in his legislation; yet as if to show the impossibility of fixing opinions, it appeared at the end of his reign that this most orthodox of Roman emperors and munificent patron of the church, held that the body of Jesus was incorruptible, and adopted a heterodox interpretation of the Nicene creed, in denying the two natures of Christ.

The religious persecutions of Justinian tended to ripen the general dissatisfaction with the Roman government into feelings of permanent hostility in all those portions of the empire in which the heretics formed the majority of the population. The Orthodox Church, unfortunately, rather exceeded the common measure of bigotry in this age; and it was too closely connected with the Greek nation for the spirit of persecution not to acquire a national as well as a religious character. As Greek was the language of the civil and ecclesiastical administration, those acquainted with the Greek language could alone attain the highest ecclesiastical preferments. The jealousy of the Greeks generally endeavoured to raise a suspicion of the orthodoxy of their rivals, in order to exclude them from promotion; and, consequently, the Syrians, Egyptians, and Armenians found themselves placed in opposition to the Greeks by their national language and literature.

The Scriptures had, at a very early period, been translated into all the spoken languages of the East; and the Syrians, Egyptians, and Armenians, not only made use of their own language in the service of the church, but also possessed at this time a provincial clergy in no ways inferior to the Greek provincial clergy in learning and piety, and their ecclesiastical literature was fully equal to the portion of the Greek ecclesiastical literature which was accessible to the mass of the people. This use of the national language gave the church of each province a national character; the ecclesialstical opposition which political circumstances created in these national churches against the established church of the emperors, furnished a pretext for the imputation of heresy, and, probably, at times gave a heretical impulse to the opinions of the provincials. But a large body of the Armenians and the Chaldaeans had never submitted to the supremacy of the Greek church in ecclesiastical matters, and a strong disposition to quarrel with the Greeks had always displayed itself among the natives of Egypt. Justinian carried his persecutions so far that in several provinces the natives separated from the established church and elected their own bishops, an act which, in the society of the time, was a near approach to open rebellion. Indeed, the hostility to the Roman government throughout the East was everywhere connected with an opposition to the Greek clergy. The Jews revived an old saying indicating a national as well as political and religious animosity, — “Cursed is he who eateth swine's flesh, or teacheth his child Greek”

Power, whether ecclesiastical or civil, is so liable to abuse, that it is not surprising that the Greeks, as soon as they had succeeded in transforming the established church of the Roman Empire into the Greek church, should have acted unfairly to the provincial clergy of the eastern provinces in which the Greek liturgy was not used; nor is it surprising that national differences should have soon been identified with points of doctrine. As soon as any question arose, the Greek clergy, from their alliance with the State, and their possession of the ecclesiastical revenues of the Church, were sure of being orthodox; and the provincial clergy were in constant danger of being regarded as heterodox, merely because they were not Greeks. There can be no doubt that several of the national churches of the East owed some increase of their hostility to the Roman government to the circumstances adverted to. The sixth century gave strong proofs that every nation which possesses a language and literature of its own ought, if it be practicable, to possess its own national church; and the struggle of the Roman Empire and the Greek ecclesiastical establishment against this attempt at national independence on the part of the Armenians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Africans, involved the empire in many difficulties, and opened a way, first for the Persians to push their invasions into the heart of the empire, and afterwards for the Mohammedans to conquer the eastern provinces, and virtually to put an end to the Roman power.

 

Sect. XI

 State of Athens during the Decline of Paganism and until the Extinction of its Schoob by Justinian

 

Ancient Greek literature and Hellenic traditions expired at Athens in the sixth century. In the year 529 Justinian closed the schools of rhetoric and philosophy, and confiscated the property devoted to their support. The measure was probably dictated by his determination to centralize all power and patronage at Constantinople in his own person; for the municipal funds appropriated annually by the Athenian magistrates to pay the salaries of public teachers could not have excited the cupidity of the emperor during the early part of his reign, while the imperial treasury was still overflowing with the savings of Anastasius and Justin. The conduct of the great lawgiver must have been the result of policy rather than of rapacity.

It seems to be generally supposed that Athens had dwindled into a small town; that its schools were frequented only by a few lazy pedants, and that the office of professor had become a sinecure before Justinian closed for ever the gates of the Academy, the Lyceum, and the Stoa, and exiled the last Athenian philosophers to Persia, where, though they enjoyed the protection of the great Chosroes, they sought in vain for votaries to supply the places of those whom they had lost in the Roman Empire. A passage of Synesius, who was compelled to touch at the port of the Piraeus without having any desire to visit Athens, has been cited to prove the decay of learning, and the decline of population. The African philosopher says that the deserted aspect of the city of Minerva reminded him of the skin of an animal which had been sacrificed, and whose body had been consumed as an offering. Athens had nothing to boast of but great names. The Academy, the Lyceum, and the Stoa, were indeed still shown to travellers, but learning had forsaken these ancient retreats, and, instead of philosophers in the agora, you met only dealers in honey. The Dorian prejudices of the Cyrenian, who boasted of his descent from Spartan kings, evidently overpowered the candour of the visitor. His spleen may have been caused by some neglect on the part of the Athenian literary aristocracy to welcome their distinguished guest, but it does little honour to the taste of Synesius that he could see the glorious spectacle of the Acropolis in the rich hue of its original splendour, and walk along surrounded by the many noble monuments of architecture, sculpture, and painting, which then adorned the city, without one expression of admiration. The time of his visit was not the most favourable for one who sought Athenian society, for it was only two years after the invasion of Alaric; but, after every allowance has been made for the peevishness of the writer, and for the deserted state of the city in consequence of the Gothic invasion, there exists ample proof that this description is a mere flourish of rhetorical exaggeration. History tells us that Athens prospered, and that her schools were frequented by many eminent men long after the ravages of Alaric and the visit of Synesius. The empress Eudocia (Athenais) was a year old, and Synesius might have seen in a nurse’s arms the infant who received at Athens the education which made her one of the most accomplished ladies of a brilliant and luxurious court, as well as a person of learning, even without reference to her sex and rank.

Athens was not then a rude provincial town. It was still a literary capital frequented by the aristocratic portion of society in the Eastern Empire, where Hellenic literature was cultivated and the doctrines of Plato were taught; and it is not impossible that in elegance it rivalled Constantinople, however inferior it may have been in luxury. St. John Chrysostom informs us that, in the court of the first Eudocia, the mother of Pulcheria, a knowledge of dress, embroidery, and music, were considered the most important objects on which taste could be displayed; but that to converse with elegance, and to compose pretty verses, were regarded as necessary proofs of intellectual superiority. Pulcheria, though born in this court, against which Chrysostom declaimed with eloquent but sometimes unseemly violence, lived the life of a saint. Yet she adopted the beautiful heathen maiden Athenais as a protégé, and, when she had succeeded in converting her to Christianity, bestowed on her the name of her own mother Eudocia. Though history tells us nothing of the fashionable society of Athens at this time, it supplies us with some interesting information concerning the social position of her learned men, and we know that they were generally gentlemen whose chief pride was that they were also scholars.

When the members of the native aristocracy in Greece found that they were excluded by the Romans from the civil and military service of the State, they devoted themselves to literature and philosophy. It became the tone of good society to be pedantic. The wealth and fame of Herodes Atticus have rendered him the type of the Greek aristocratic philosophers. The Emperor Hadrian revived the importance and augmented the prosperity of Athens by his visits, and gave additional consequence to its schools by appointing an official professor of the branch of learning called sophistics. Lollianus, who first occupied this chair, was a native of Ephesus; but he was welcomed by the Athenians, as if he had been a native citizen, for the strong remedies the Romans had applied to diminish their pride had at least cured them of the absurd vanity of autochthonism. Lollianus not only received the rights of citizenship; he was elected strategos, then the highest office in the local magistracy. During his term of service he employed his own wealth and his personal credit to alleviate the sufferings caused by a severe famine. He discharged all the debts contracted by the city in collecting and distributing provisions from his private fortune. The Athenians rewarded him for his generosity by erecting two statues to his memory.

Antoninus Pius increased the public importance of the schools of Athens, and gave them an official character, by allowing the professors named by the emperor an annual salary of ten thousand drachmas. Marcus Aurelius, who visited Athens on his return from the East after the rebellion of Avidius Cassius, established official teachers of every kind of learning then publicly taught, and organized the philosophers into an university. Scholarchs were appointed for the four great philosophical sects of the stoics, platonists, peripatetics, and epicureans, who received fixed salaries from the government. The wealth and avarice of the Athenian philosophers became after this common subjects of envy and reproach. Many names of some eminence in literature might be cited as connected with the Athenian schools during the second and third centuries; but to show the universal character of the studies pursued, and the freedom of inquiry that was allowed, it is only necessary to mention the Christian writers Quadratus, Aristeides, and Athenagoras, who shared with their heathen contemporaries the fame and patronage of which Athens could dispose.

It appears that even before the end of the second century the population of the city had undergone a great change, in consequence of the constant immigration of Asiatic and Alexandrian Greeks who visited it in order to frequent its schools and make use of its libraries. The attendants and followers of these wealthy strangers settled at Athens in such numbers as to modify the spoken dialect, which then lost its classic purity; and it was only in the depopulated demoi, and among the impoverished landed proprietors of Attica, who were too poor to purchase foreign slaves or to associate with wealthy sophists, that pure Attic Greek was any longer heard. Strangers filled the chairs of eloquence and philosophy, and rhetoricians were elected to be the chief magistrates. In the third century, however, we find the Athenian Dexippus, a rhetorician, a patriot, and a historian, holding the highest offices in the local administration with honour to himself and to his country.

Both Athens and the Piraeus had completely recovered from the ravages committed by the Goths before the time of Constantine. The large crews which were embarked in ancient galleys, and the small space which they contained for the stowage of provisions, rendered it necessary to select a port, which could furnish large supplies of provisions either from its own resources or from its being a centre of commercial communication, as a station for a great naval force. The fact that Constantine selected the Piraeus as the harbour at which his son Crispus concentrated the large force with which he defeated Licinius at the Hellespont, proves at least that the Athenian markets afforded abundant supplies of provisions.

The heathen city of Minerva continued to enjoy the favour and protection of the Christian emperors. Constantine enlarged the privileges of the scholarchs and professors, and exempted them from many onerous taxes and public burdens. He furnished the city with an annual supply of grain for distribution, and he accepted the title of strategos, as Hadrian had accepted that of archon, to show that he deemed it an honour to belong to its local magistrature. Constantius granted a donative of grain to the city as a special mark of favour to Proaeresius; and during his reign we find its schools extremely popular, crowded with wealthy students from every province of the empire, and attended by all the great men of the time. Four celebrated men resided there nearly at the same period — the future Emperor Julian, the sophist Libanius, St. Basil, and St. Gregory Nazianzenus. Athens then enjoyed the inestimable blessing of toleration. Heathens and Christians both frequented her schools unmolested, in spite of the laws already promulgated against some pagan rites, for the regulations against soothsayers and diviners were not supposed to be applicable to gentlemen and philosophers. Athenian society consequently suffered for some time very little from the changes which took place in the religious opinions of the emperors. It gained nothing from the heathenism of Julian, and lost nothing by the Arianism of Valens.

Julian, it is true, ordered all the temples to be repaired and regular sacrifices to be performed with order and pomp; but his reign was too short to effect any considerable change, and his orders met with little attention in Greece, for Christianity had already made numerous converts among the priests of the temples, who, strange to say, appear to have embraced the doctrines of Christianity much more readily and promptly than the philosophers. Many priests had already been converted to Christianity with their whole families, and in many temples it was difficult to procure the celebration of the heathen ceremonies. Julian attempted to inflict one serious wound on Christianity at Athens, by issuing an unjust and arbitrary edict forbidding Christians from giving instruction publicly in rhetoric and literature. His respect for the character of Proaeresius, an Armenian, who was then a professor at Athens, induced him to exempt that teacher from his ordinance; but Proaeresius refused to avail himself of the emperor’s permission, for, as new ceremonies were prescribed in the resorts of public teaching, he considered it his duty to cease lecturing rather than appear tacitly to conform to heathen usages.

The supremacy of paganism was of short duration. About two years after Julian had proclaimed it again the established religion of the Roman Empire, Valentinian and Valens published an edict forbidding incantations, magical ceremonies, and offerings by night, under pain of death. The application of this law, according to the letter, would have prevented the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries, and rendered life intolerable to many fervid votaries of Hellenic superstition, and of the Neo-platonic philosophy. The suppression of the great heathen festivals, of which some of the rites were celebrated during the night, would have seriously injured the prosperity of Athens, and some other cities in Greece. The celebrated Praetextatus, a heathen highly esteemed for his integrity and administrative talents, was then proconsul of Achaia. His representations induced the emperors to make some modifications in the application of the edict, and the Eleusinian mysteries continued to be celebrated until Alaric destroyed the temple.

Paganism rapidly declined, but the heathen philosophers at Athens continued to live as a separate class of society, refusing to embrace Christianity, though without offering any opposition to its progress. They considered their own religious opinions as too elevated for the vulgar, so that there existed no community of feeling between the aristocratic Neo-platonists of the schools, the burgesses of the towns, whether they were heathens or Christians, and the agriculturists in the country, who were generally pagans. Hence the emperors entertained no political dislike to the philosophers, and continued to employ them in the public service. Neither Christian emperors nor Christian bishops felt any rancour against the amiable scholars who cherished the exclusive prejudices of Hellenic civilization, and who considered the philanthropic spirit of Christianity as an idle dream. The Neo-platonists viewed man as by nature a brutal creature, and they deemed slavery to be the proper condition of the labouring classes. They scorned equally the rude idolatry of corrupted paganism, and the simple doctrines of pure Christianity. They were deeply imbued with those social prejudices which have for centuries separated the rural and urban population in the East; prejudices which were first created by the prevalence of predial slavery, but which were greatly increased by the fiscal system of the Romans, which enthralled men to degraded employment in hereditary castes. Libanius, Themistius, and Symmachus, were favoured even by the orthodox emperor Theodosius the Great. St. Basil corresponded with Libanius. Musonius, who had taught rhetoric at Athens, was imperial governor of Asia in the year 367; but, as it is possible that he had then embraced Christianity, this circumstance can only be cited to prove the social rank still maintained by the teachers of the Athenian schools.

The last breath of Hellenic life was now rapidly passing away, and its dissolution confined no glory on Greece. The Olympic games were celebrated until the reign of Theodosius I, and they ceased in the first year of the 293rd Olympiad, A.D. 393. The last recorded victor was an Armenian, named Varastad, of the race of the Arsacidae. Alexander, son of Amyntas, king of Macedon, had not been allowed to become a competitor for a prize until he had proved his Hellenic descent; but the Hellenes were at this time prouder of being Romaioi than of being Greeks, and the Armenian Varastad, whose name closes the long list which commences with demi-gods, and is filled with heroes, was a Romaios. Hellenic art also fled from the soil of Hellas. The chryselephantine statue of the Olympian Jupiter was transported to Constantinople, where it was destroyed in the year 476 by one of the great fires which so often laid waste that city. The statue of Minerva, which the pagans believed had protected her favourite city against Alaric, was carried off about the same time, and thus the two great works of Phidias were exiled from Greece. The destruction of the great temple of Olympia followed soon after, but the exact date is unknown. Some have supposed that it was burned by the Gothic troops of Alaric; others think that it was destroyed by Christian bigotry in the reign of Theodosius II. The Olympiads, which for generation after generation had served to record the noble emulation of the Greeks, were now supplanted by the notation of the indiction. Glory resigned her influence over society to taxation.

The restrictions which Julian had placed on public instruction in order to injure Christianity, had not been productive of permanent effects. Theodosius II was the first emperor who interfered with public instruction for the direct object of controlling and circumscribing public opinion. While he honoured those professors who were appointed by his own authority, and propagated the principles of submission, or rather of servility, to the imperial commands, he struck a mortal blow at the spirit of free inquiry by forbidding private teachers to give public lectures under pain of infamy and banishment. Private teachers of philosophy had hitherto enjoyed great freedom in teaching throughout Greece; but henceforth thought was enslaved even at Athens, and no opinions were allowed to be taught except such as could; obtain a license from the imperial authorities. Emulation was destroyed, and genius, which is always regarded with suspicion by men of routine, for it sheds new light even on the oldest subject, was now officially suppressed. Men not having the liberty of uttering their thoughts soon ceased to think.

Though we are acquainted with very few precise facts relating to the state of society in Athens from the time of Theodosius II to the suppression of the schools of philosophy by Justinian, we are, nevertheless, able to form some idea of the peculiarities which distinguished it from the other provincial cities of the empire. The privileges transmitted from the time when Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius treated Athens as a free city, were long respected by the Christian emperors. Some Hellenic pride was still nourished at Athens, from the tradition of its having been long an ally and not a subject of Rome. A trace of this memory of the past seems discernible in the speech of the Empress Eudocia to the people of Antioch, as she was on her pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It closed with a boast of their common Hellenic origin. The spirit of emulation between the votaries of the Gospel and the schools undoubtedly tended to improve the morality of Athens. Paganism, after it had been driven from the mind, survived in the manners, of the people in most of the great cities of the empire. But at Athens the philosophers distinguished themselves by purity of morals; and the Christians would have been ashamed in their presence of the exhibitions of tumult and simony which disgraced the ecclesiastical elections at Rome, Alexandria, and Constantinople. In the meantime, the civilization of the ancient world was not extinct, though many of its vices were banished. Public hotels for strangers existed on the model which the Mohammedans have gained so much honour by imitating; alms-houses for the destitute, and hospitals for the sick, were to be found in due proportion to the population, or the want would have been justly recorded to the disgrace of the wealthy pagans. The truth is, that the spirit of Christianity had penetrated into heathenism, which had become virtuous and unobtrusive, as well as mild and timid. The habits of Athenian society were soft and humane; the wealthy lived in palaces, and purchased libraries. Many philosophers, like Proclus, enjoyed ample revenues, and perhaps, like him, received rich legacies. Ladies wore dresses of silk embroidered with gold. Both sexes delighted in boots of thick silk ornamented with tassels of gold fringe. The luxurious drank wine of Rhodes, Cnidos and Thasos, as we find attested by the inscribed handles of broken amphorae still scattered in the fields round the modern city. The luxury and folly against which Chrysostom declaimed at Constantinople were perhaps not unknown at Athens, but, as there was less wealth, they could not exhibit themselves so shamelessly in the philosophic as in the orthodox city. It is not probable that the Bishop of Athens found it necessary to preach against ladies swimming in public cisterns, which excited the indignation of the saint at Constantinople, and which continued to be a favourite amusement of the fair sex for several generations, until Justinian suppressed it by admitting it as a ground of divorce.

Theodosius I, Arcadius, and Theodosius II passed many laws prohibiting the ceremonies of paganism, and ordering the persecution of its votaries. It appears that many of the aristocracy, and even some men in high official employment, long adhered to its delusions. Optatus, the prefect of Constantinople in 404, was a heathen. Isokasios, quaestor of Antioch, was accused of the same crime in 467; and Tribonian, the celebrated jurist of Justinian, who died in 545, was supposed to be attached to philosophic opinions hostile to Christianity, though he made no scruple in conforming outwardly to the established religion. His want of religious principle caused him to be called an atheist. The philosophers were at last persecuted with great cruelty, and anecdotes are related of their martyrdom in the reign of Zeno. Phocas, a patrician, poisoned himself in the reign of Justinian to avoid being compelled to embrace Christianity, or suffer death as a criminal. Yet the most celebrated historians of this period were heathens. Of Eunapius and Zosimus there is no doubt, and the general opinion refuses to regard Procopius as a Christian.

At last, in the year 529, Justinian confiscated all the funds devoted to philosophic instructions at Athens, closed the schools, and seized the endowments of the academy of Plato, which had maintained an uninterrupted succession of teachers for nearly nine hundred years. The last teacher enjoyed an annual revenue of one thousand gold solidi, but it is probable that he wandered in a deserted grove, and lectured in an empty hall. Seven Athenian philosophers are celebrated for exiling themselves to Persia, where they were sure of escaping the persecutions of Justinian, and where they perhaps hoped to find disciples. But they met with no sympathy among the followers of Zoroaster, and they were soon happy to avail themselves of the favour of Chosroes, who obtained for them permission to return and spend their lives in peace in the Roman Empire. Toleration rendered their declining influence utterly insignificant, and the last heathen fancies of the philosophic schools disappeared from the conservative aristocracy, where they had found their last asylum.