The Secret History (Historia Arcana)

1.1. All that has befallen the Roman nation in its wars down to the present I have already set out, having arranged my account of all those events by the appropriate occasions and places. What follows from here, however, will no longer be composed by me in the manner I have described, for here everything will be written down that has happened in every part of the Roman empire.

1.2. The reason is that, while those who did these deeds were still alive, it was not possible to record them as they ought to have been recorded. It was impossible to escape the notice of swarms of spies, and impossible, once detected, not to perish by the most pitiable death; for I could not put my confidence even in my closest kinsmen.

1.3. Indeed, in much of what I said in my earlier books I was forced to conceal the causes of events. So now I shall have to disclose both what until now has remained unspoken and the causes of what I set forth before.

1.4. But as I turn to a different contest, a hard one and terribly difficult to wage—the lives that Justinian and Theodora lived—I find myself stammering and shrinking back, reckoning over and over that what I am now going to write will seem to those who come after neither credible nor probable; and especially since, when in the long course of time the report has grown old, I fear I may even acquire the reputation of a teller of myths and be ranked among the tragic poets.

1.5. Yet I shall not flinch from the vast bulk of my task, taking courage in this: that my account will not be left without witnesses. For the men of today, being the best-informed witnesses of these deeds, will be trustworthy guarantors, passing on to future time their confidence in what I report.

1.6. And yet there was another thing besides that often held me back for a very long time, eager though I was to undertake this account. For I supposed it would be harmful to future generations, since it is most expedient that the foulest of deeds remain unknown to later time, rather than that they come to the ears of tyrants and be imitated.

1.7. For most rulers, through ignorance, always find it easy to imitate the evil deeds of their predecessors, and they turn ever more readily and effortlessly to the wrongs committed by men of old.

1.8. But afterward what brought me to the history of these deeds was this: that it will be plain to future tyrants that retribution for their crimes will in all likelihood overtake them, just as it befell these persons to suffer; and further, that their deeds and their characters will be on record forever, and so perhaps they will be more reluctant to transgress.

1.9. For who among later men would have known of the unbridled life of Semiramis, or of the madness of Sardanapalus and Nero, had not these memorials been left by those who wrote in their day? And besides, to those who may suffer the like at the hands of tyrants this hearing will be by no means without profit.

1.10. For the unfortunate are accustomed to console themselves with the thought that their disasters did not fall on them alone. For these reasons, then, I shall first proceed to tell what wicked things were done by Belisarius; and afterward I shall reveal what wicked things were done by Justinian and Theodora.

1.11. Belisarius had a wife, whom I mentioned in my earlier books. Her grandfather and her father were charioteers who had displayed their craft in Byzantium and Thessalonica, and her mother was one of the women who had prostituted themselves on the stage.

1.12. This woman, who in her earlier days had lived a lewd life and had broken loose in her ways, having had much to do with her father's sorcerers and learned what was useful to her, became in time the wedded wife of Belisarius,

1.13. though already the mother of many children. From the very outset she chose to be an adulteress, but she was at pains to conceal this practice—not out of any shame at her own pursuits, nor from any fear of her husband (for she never felt shame at any deed whatsoever, and she had got her husband fast in the grip of many spells), but because she dreaded retribution from the empress. For Theodora was exceedingly fierce against her and bared her teeth at her.

1.14. But once she had made Theodora pliant by serving her in matters of the greatest urgency—first by doing away with Silverius in a manner that will be told in a later book, and afterward by destroying John the Cappadocian, as I have related in my earlier books—then, with less fear and no longer concealing anything, she did not scruple to commit every kind of crime.

1.15. There was a certain young man from Thrace in the household of Belisarius, Theodosius by name, who had been brought up in the belief of those called Eunomians by his forefathers.

1.16. When Belisarius was about to sail for Libya, he bathed this youth in the sacred font, and taking him up in his own hands made him, together with his wife, an adopted son, in the way that Christians are accustomed to adopt; and so Antonina, since Theodosius was now her son by holy ordinance, loved him, as was natural, and kept him about her among those she cared for most.

1.17. And she fell extravagantly in love with him at once during this voyage, and being utterly possessed by her passion she shook off all fear and shame, whether of things divine or human, and had intercourse with him—at first secretly, but in the end even with servants and maids present.

1.18. For now, gripped by this lust and manifestly love-stricken, she could no longer see any obstacle to the deed. And once, in Carthage, Belisarius caught them in the very act, yet allowed himself to be deceived by his wife.

1.19. For finding the two of them in an underground chamber, he was beside himself with rage; but she, neither flinching nor abashed at the deed, said, "I came here to hide the most precious of the spoils with the young man, so that they should not become known to the emperor."

1.20. This she said by way of pretext, and he, pretending to be persuaded, let it go—though he saw that Theodosius had loosened the cord that fastened his trousers around his loins; for, compelled by love of the woman, he chose to disbelieve the testimony of his own eyes.

1.21. As her lewdness steadily advanced to unspeakable evil, the others who saw what was going on held their peace; but a certain slave-woman named Macedonia, at Syracuse, when Belisarius had conquered Sicily, bound her master by the most dreadful oaths that he would never betray her to her mistress, and then disclosed to him the whole story, providing as witnesses two slave-boys whose task it was to attend to the bedchamber.

1.22. On learning this, Belisarius ordered some of his attendants to put Theodosius to death.

1.23. But Theodosius, learning of it beforehand, fled to Ephesus. For most of the attendants, swayed by the unsteadiness of the man's resolve, were more eager to please the wife than to seem well-disposed to the husband, and so they betrayed the orders then laid upon them concerning Theodosius.

1.24. Constantinus, seeing Belisarius overcome with grief at what had happened, sympathized with him in general and added this remark: "For my part, I would sooner have made away with the wife than with the young man."

1.25. When Antonina learned of this, she nursed a secret grudge against him, so as to show forth her rancorous

1.26. hatred against him. For she was scorpion-like and dark in her wrath. Not long after, either by sorcery or by flattery, she persuaded her husband that the woman's accusation was not sound; and he, with no delay, sent for Theodosius, and undertook to hand Macedonia and the slave-boys over to his wife.

1.27. All these she first—so they say—had their tongues cut out, then cut them up little by little, and stuffing them into sacks threw them into the sea without any hesitation, one of the household servants, Eugenius by name, assisting her in the whole abomination—the same man by whom the foul deed against Silverius was carried out.

1.28. And not long afterward Belisarius, persuaded by his wife, killed Constantinus too. For the affair of Praesidius and the daggers happened at this time, as I have shown in my earlier books.

1.29. For when the man was about to be set free, Antonina did not relent until she had exacted from him the penalty

1.30. of the speech I just now mentioned. And from this Belisarius incurred great hatred both from the emperor and from all the men of distinction among the Romans.

1.31. So matters went thus. But Theodosius said he was not able to come to Italy, where Belisarius and Antonina were then staying, unless Photius were got out of the way.

1.32. For Photius was naturally prone to take offense if anyone could outdo him in influence with anybody, and in the case of Theodosius he had every reason to choke with vexation—because he himself, though a son, counted for nothing, while the other wielded great power and clothed himself in vast wealth.

1.33. For they say that from Carthage and Ravenna he had plundered the two palaces to the amount of a hundred centenaria and kept it, since to him alone it fell to handle these things at his own discretion.

1.34. But Antonina, when she learned the mind of Theodosius, did not let up in laying snares for her son and pursuing him with murderous plots, until she contrived that he, no longer able to bear the ambushes, departed thence and set out for Byzantium, while Theodosius came to her in Italy.

1.35. There she sated herself to the full both with her lover's company and with her husband's folly, and in time came with the two of them to Byzantium.

1.36. There the consciousness of guilt began to terrify Theodosius and to twist his mind. For he thought he could never escape detection entirely, since he saw that the woman was no longer able to keep her passion hidden, nor that it had broken out in secret, but that she did not in the least disdain to be openly an adulteress and to be so called.

1.37. Therefore he went back again to Ephesus and, shaving his head in the customary fashion, enrolled himself among those called monks.

1.38. Then indeed she went utterly mad, and changing her dress along with her manner of life to the mode of mourning, she went about the house constantly wailing, and using shrieks she lamented—though her husband was at her side—what a good thing had perished for her: how faithful, how charming, how kindly, how able a man.

1.39. And in the end she drew her husband too into these lamentations and set him weeping. At any rate the wretched man wept, calling on the beloved Theodosius.

1.40. Later he even went to the emperor, and entreating both him and the empress, persuaded them to send for Theodosius, on the ground that he was, and would be, indispensable to his household.

1.41. But Theodosius refused to leave that place at all, asserting that he would most securely hold fast to the monk's calling.

1.42. This, however, was a feigned excuse, so that as soon as Belisarius should leave Byzantium, he himself might come secretly to Antonina. And so indeed it came to pass.

2.1. For at once Belisarius set out, with Photius, to make war on Chosroes, and Antonina remained behind—a thing she had not been accustomed to do before.

2.2. For, that the man might not come to himself when left alone, and, making light of her spells, take some fitting thought concerning her, she made it her care to set out with him to every corner of the earth.

2.3. And in order that Theodosius might once more have access to Antonina, she made it her business to get Photius out of the way.

2.4. So she persuaded some of Belisarius' followers to mock and revile him perpetually, letting slip no opportunity; and she herself, writing nearly every day, slandered him continually and stirred up everything against her son.

2.5. Driven by this, the young man resolved to deal with his mother as an enemy: when someone came from Byzantium who reported that Theodosius was secretly staying with Antonina, he brought him at once before Belisarius, charging him to tell the whole story.

2.6. When Belisarius learned this, exceedingly enraged, he fell upon his face at Photius' feet and begged him to avenge him, who was suffering unholy treatment at the hands of those from whom it was least fitting, saying: "Sweetest child, you do not in the least know who your father was, since he left you while you were still nursed at the breast and measured out his own span of life, nor did you profit at all from anything of his; for in property he was not very prosperous.

2.7. But brought up under me, though I am only a stepfather, you are of such an age that it is for you to defend me when I am most grievously wronged; you have attained to the rank of consul and are clothed in such wealth that I—and justly so, noble youth—might be called father and mother and the whole of your kin, and might rightly be such.

2.8. For it is not by blood, but by deeds, that men are wont to measure their affection for one another.

2.9. It is time, then, for you not to look on while I, beside the ruin of my house, am robbed of so vast a sum of money, and your mother fastens upon herself so great a disgrace in the eyes of all men.

2.10. Bear in mind, too, that the sins of women do not fall upon their husbands alone, but touch their children even more—who will likely be reputed to resemble in character those who bore them.

2.11. And think of me thus: that I love my own wife exceedingly, and if it be granted me to take vengeance on the destroyer of my house, I will do her no harm; but while Theodosius lives I cannot allow her this charge."

2.12. Hearing this, Photius promised to assist in everything, though he feared he might suffer some harm from it, not having much confidence, in view of the unsteadiness of Belisarius' resolve where his wife was concerned; for many things gave him pause, and not least the fate of Macedonia.

2.13. Therefore the two of them swore to each other all the oaths that are reckoned and named most dreadful among Christians, never to betray each other even amid the dangers that lead to destruction.

2.14. For the present, then, they decided it was inexpedient to set their hand to the deed; but when Antonina should come from Byzantium, and Theodosius go to Ephesus, then Photius, being in Ephesus, should master Theodosius and the money with no trouble.

2.15. At that time, then, they themselves made their invasion with the whole army into the land of Persia; and concerning John the Cappadocian in Byzantium there happened what I have related in my earlier books.

2.16. There this one thing only was passed over by me out of fear: that Antonina deceived John and his daughter not at random, but by binding them with a multitude of oaths—than which nothing is held more dreadful among Christians—that she would use no treacherous intent against them.

2.17. Having brought this about, and trusting still more in the empress' friendship, she sent Theodosius to Ephesus, while she herself, suspecting no opposition, made her way to the East.

2.18. Belisarius had just taken the fortress of Sisauranon when she was reported to him on the road as coming. And he, reckoning everything else of no account, drew his army back.

2.19. For there had happened, as I have related before, certain other things in the camp that urged him to retreat. But this report hastened his withdrawal still more.

2.20. But, as I said at the beginning of this account, it did not seem to me free of danger at that time to tell all the causes of what was done.

2.21. And from this a charge arose against Belisarius among all the Romans, that he had set the most vital interests of the state below his domestic affairs.

2.22. For at first, gripped by passion for his wife, he was unwilling to go far from Roman soil, so that, as soon as he should learn that his wife had come from Byzantium, he might turn back at once and be able to catch and punish her.

2.23. For this reason he ordered Arethas and his men to cross the river Tigris, and they, having accomplished nothing worth mention, returned home; while he himself was at pains not to be left even a day's journey

2.24. from the Roman frontiers. For the fortress of Sisauranon is distant from the Roman borders more than a day's journey for an unencumbered man going by way of the city of Nisibis, and at another point the interval is the same.

2.25. And yet, if at the outset he had been willing to cross the river Tigris with his whole army, I think he would have plundered all the regions of Assyria and reached the city of Ctesiphon with no one at all opposing him, and would have rescued the captives of Antioch and all the other Romans who happened to be there, and returned to his homeland. He was also most responsible for Chosroes returning home from Colchis with less fear. In what manner this came about I shall now make clear.

2.26. When Chosroes, son of Cabades, invaded the land of Colchis and accomplished the other things I have related before, and took Petra, it happened that many of the Median army perished both in the war and through the difficulties of the ground. For Lazica is hard to traverse, as I have said, and altogether precipitous.

2.27. And besides, a plague fell upon them, and most of the army perished; many of them also died for lack of necessities.

2.28. Meanwhile certain men coming from the land of Persia reported that Belisarius had defeated Nabedes in battle near the city of Nisibis and was advancing, that he had taken the fortress of Sisauranon by siege and made captives of Bleschames and eight hundred Persian horsemen, and that he had sent another Roman army with Arethas the leader of the Saracens, which had crossed the river Tigris and was ravaging all the regions there, hitherto unspoiled.

2.29. Chosroes had also sent an army of Huns against the Armenians who were subjects of the Romans, so that, by their preoccupation with these, no perception might come to the Romans there of what was being done in Lazica.

2.30. But others reported that these barbarians, having met Valerian and the Romans in battle, had been worsted by far, most of them perishing.

2.31. When the Persians heard this—being already worn down by hardship in the land of the Lazi, and fearing that, falling in on the retreat with some enemy army among precipices and wooded places, they might all be destroyed in disorder—being in great fear for their children and wives and their country, then, if there was anything sound in the Median army, they began to revile Chosroes, charging him with having sinned against his oaths and the common laws of all mankind: that in time of truce he had invaded the land of the Romans without any right, and was wronging a state ancient and most worthy of all, which he could not overcome in war; and they were on the point of attempting some revolution.

2.32. Thrown into confusion by this, Chosroes found this remedy for the trouble. He read out to them a letter that the empress had recently happened to write to Zaberganes.

2.33. The writing declared the following: "How highly I esteem you, Zaberganes, believing you to be well-disposed to our affairs, you know, having come to us on an embassy not long ago.

2.34. You would, then, act in keeping with the opinion I have of you, if you should persuade King Chosroes to take peaceful counsel toward our state.

2.35. For in that case I guarantee that great benefits will come to you from my husband, who would do nothing

2.36. at all without my judgment." When Chosroes had read this out and reproached the Persian nobles, asking whether they considered that a state which a woman directed,

2.37. he managed to check the impulse of the men. Yet even so he departed thence in great fear, supposing that Belisarius and his men would stand in his way. But when none of the enemy met him, he gladly made his way back to his own land.

3.1. When Belisarius came into the land of the Romans, he found his wife arrived from Byzantium. He kept her under guard in disgrace, and though he often set his hand to making away with her, he grew soft—it seems to me,

3.2. overcome by some burning passion. They say, too, that he was caught by his wife's spells and at once dissolved. But Photius was sent in haste to Ephesus, having bound one of the eunuchs, Calligonus by name, who was his mistress' pander, and keeping him with him; and this man, being tortured on the journey, disclosed all the secrets.

3.3. Theodosius, learning of it beforehand, fled for refuge to the sanctuary of John the Apostle, which is there most holy and held in fair honor.

3.4. But Andreas, the high priest of Ephesus, persuaded by money, handed the man over. Meanwhile Theodora, alarmed for Antonina—for she had heard all that had befallen her—sent for Belisarius with her to Byzantium.

3.5. When Photius heard this, he sent Theodosius to Cilicia, where his bodyguards and shield-bearers happened to be wintering, charging the escorts to convey the man with the utmost secrecy, and on reaching Cilicia to keep him most carefully under guard, giving no one any perception of where in the world he was. He himself came to Byzantium with Calligonus and with Theodosius' money, which was considerable.

3.6. There the empress gave a demonstration to all men that she knew how to requite murderous favors with greater and fouler gifts.

3.7. For Antonina had lately entrapped and betrayed to her one enemy, the Cappadocian; but the empress, putting a multitude of men into Antonina's hands, did away with them without any charge.

3.8. For some of those friendly to Belisarius and Photius she tortured in body, bringing this one accusation only—that they were well-disposed to these two men—and so disposed of them that to what end fortune brought them we do not even now know; others she punished with exile, bringing the same charge.

3.9. One, however, of those who had followed Photius to Ephesus, Theodosius by name, though he had attained senatorial rank, she stripped of his property, and set him in an underground and wholly murky chamber, fastening a noose around his neck from a certain manger—so short that it was always taut and never at all slack.

3.10. The wretch stood continually at this manger, eating and taking his sleep and accomplishing all the other needs of nature, and nothing else was left him to make him like the asses

3.11. except braying. In this manner of life a span of not less than four months was worn away for the man, until, seized with the disease of melancholy and gone utterly mad, he was thus released from this prison and then died.

3.12. And she compelled Belisarius, against his will, to be reconciled with his wife Antonina. As for Photius, surrounding him with other slavish tortures and scourging him many times over the back and shoulders, she ordered him to tell where in the world Theodosius and the pander were.

3.13. But he, though racked by the torture, resolved to keep the oaths he had sworn—a man who, though sickly and slack before, and given to bodily indulgence, had never had experience of outrage or any hardship.

3.14. At any rate he himself betrayed none of Belisarius' secrets. Later, however, all that had until then been secret came to light.

3.15. And Calligonus she found there and handed over to Antonina; but Theodosius she summoned to Byzantium, and when he arrived she at once hid him in the Palace, and on the next day, sending for Antonina,

3.16. said: "Dearest patrician lady, a pearl fell into my hands yesterday such as no one ever beheld. And if you wish, I would not begrudge you the sight of it,

3.17. but will show it to you." And she, not understanding what was being done, earnestly entreated her to show her the pearl. But the empress brought Theodosius out from a little room belonging to one of the eunuchs

3.18. and displayed him. Antonina, at first overjoyed beyond measure, remained speechless for pleasure, and acknowledged that the empress had done her many favors, calling her savior and benefactress and very mistress.

3.19. This Theodosius the empress kept in the Palace and indulged with luxury and every other delight, and threatened that she would soon make him a general of the Romans.

3.20. But some forestalling justice, falling on him with the disease of dysentery, removed him from among men.

3.21. Now Theodora had certain chambers, hidden and altogether secret, murky and without neighbors, where there was no telling of either night or day.

3.22. There she kept Photius shut up for a long time. From this place it befell him by some chance to make his escape and get away—not once only, but twice.

3.23. The first time, fleeing for refuge to the church of the Mother of God, which is the holiest in Byzantium and so named, he sat as a suppliant beside the sacred table. But she raised him from there by main force and shut him up again.

3.24. The second time, coming to the sanctuary of Sophia, he suddenly seated himself in the very divine font, which Christians have held most of all in reverence.

3.25. But even from there the woman was able to drag him away. For no place was ever inviolable or untouched by her, but to violate all sanctuaries seemed to her no matter at all.

3.26. And along with the people, the priests of the Christians, struck down by fear, stood aside and yielded everything to her.

3.27. Three years' time, then, was worn away for him in this manner of life; but later the prophet Zacharias stood over him in a dream and bade him by oaths, they say, to flee, promising to assist him in this undertaking.

3.28. Persuaded by this vision, he rose up from there and, escaping notice, came to Jerusalem; and though ten thousand men were searching for him, none caught sight of the young man, even when they met him.

3.29. There, shaving his head and putting on the habit of those called monks, he was able to escape the punishment of Theodora.

3.30. But Belisarius, having disregarded his oaths and having chosen in no way to avenge Photius when he suffered, as has been said, unholy treatment, found thereafter, as was to be expected, all his undertakings hostile through the act of God. For straightway, being sent against the Medes and Chosroes when they invaded Roman territory for the third time, he incurred a charge of cowardice.

3.31. And yet he seemed to have accomplished something worth mention by shaking off the war from there. But when Chosroes, crossing the river Euphrates, took the populous city of Callinicum with no one defending it, and enslaved many tens of thousands of Romans, and Belisarius was not even eager to pursue the enemy, he carried off the reputation of one of two things—either of deliberate cowardice or of fear—and so he remained where he was.

4.1. About this time another thing happened to befall him, as follows. The plague, of which I made mention in my earlier books, was ravaging the people in Byzantium. And it happened that the emperor Justinian fell most grievously ill, so that it was even said he had perished.

4.2. Rumor, carrying this report about, conveyed it all the way to the Roman camp. There certain of the commanders said that if the Romans set up some other emperor for themselves in Byzantium, they would never permit it.

4.3. A little later it happened that the emperor recovered, and that the commanders of the Roman army became mutual accusers of one another.

4.4. For Peter the general and John, whom they called by the surname Phagas, insisted that they had heard Belisarius and Bouzes say the things I have just disclosed.

4.5. The empress Theodora, charging that these things had been said against herself, became full of wrath against the men.

4.6. So summoning all of them at once to Byzantium, and making an inquiry into this matter, she sent suddenly for Bouzes into the women's quarters, as though to confer with him on some most urgent affair.

4.7. Now there was a certain chamber in the Palace underground, secure and labyrinthine and such as to be likened to Tartarus, where she kept shut up those who, for the most part, had given offense.

4.8. Into this pit, then, Bouzes too was cast, and there a man of consular rank remained, ever ignorant of the present moment.

4.9. For neither could he himself, sitting in darkness, distinguish whether it was day or night,

4.10. nor was he able to meet anyone else. For the man who threw his food to him each day, like a beast meeting a beast, held wordless converse with the wordless.

4.11. And at once everyone supposed him dead, but no one dared to make any mention or remembrance of him. After two years and four months she took pity on the man and let him go.

4.12. And he was seen by all as though restored to life. From that time it befell the man ever after to be dim of sight and sickly in the rest of his body.

4.13. So matters concerning Bouzes went thus. As for Belisarius, the emperor—though he was convicted of none of the things charged against him—at the empress' insistence relieved him of the command he held, and appointed Martin general of the East in his place; and he gave orders that Belisarius' bodyguards and shield-bearers, and whatever of his household servants were of proven worth in war, be distributed among certain of the commanders and of the eunuchs in the Palace.

4.14. And they, casting lots for them, divided them all, arms and all, among themselves, as it chanced to fall to each.

4.15. And to many of his friends and to others who had served him before, he forbade to go to Belisarius any longer.

4.16. And there went about a bitter spectacle and an incredible sight: Belisarius a private man in Byzantium, almost alone, always brooding and gloomy, dreading death from a plot.

4.17. When the empress learned that he had much money in the East, she sent one of the eunuchs of the Palace and fetched it all.

4.18. Now Antonina, as I have said, had become at variance with her husband, but was dearest and most necessary to the empress beyond all others, since she had lately destroyed John the Cappadocian.

4.19. Therefore the empress, resolving to gratify Antonina, did everything so that the wife might seem to beg off her husband and to rescue him from such great misfortunes; and thus not only would Antonina be wholly reconciled with the wretched man, but also openly, as one saved by her, she might snatch him up as her captive.

4.20. It came about thus. Belisarius came once in the morning to the Palace, as was his custom, with a few wretched men.

4.21. Meeting with no goodwill from the emperor and empress, but even insulted there by base and common men, he departed homeward toward late afternoon, turning round many times in this withdrawal and looking everywhere to see from what quarter those who would destroy him might be coming upon him.

4.22. With this dread he went up into his chamber and sat alone upon his couch, thinking nothing noble, nor remembering that he had ever been a man, but sweating continually and dizzy and at a loss with much trembling, worn down by slavish fears and anxieties, both cowardly and altogether unmanly.

4.23. Antonina, as though neither knowing at all what was being done nor awaiting anything that was to come, kept taking many walks there, pretending an upset stomach.

4.24. For they were still suspicious of each other. Meanwhile a certain man from the Palace, Quadratus by name, came when the sun had already set, and crossing the courtyard suddenly stood at the door of the men's apartment, declaring that he had been sent there by the empress.

4.25. When Belisarius heard this, he drew in his hands and feet upon the couch and lay on his back, utterly ready for the slaughter; so completely had all manliness deserted him.

4.26. Quadratus, not yet having come in to him, showed him a letter from the empress.

4.27. The writing declared the following: "What you have done to us, most excellent sir, you know. But I, owing much to your wife, have resolved to remit to you all these charges, granting your life to her as a gift.

4.28. From now on, then, you may take courage for your safety and your money; and what sort of man you will be toward her we shall know by your future conduct."

4.29. When Belisarius had read this, at once lifted up to great joy by pleasure, and at the same time wishing to give present proof of his disposition, he rose up and fell on his face at his wife's feet.

4.30. And clasping both her legs with either hand, and ever shifting his tongue along the soles of the woman's feet, he called her the cause of his life and his safety, and acknowledged that henceforth he would be her faithful slave and not her husband.

4.31. And of the money the empress gave thirty centenaria of gold to the emperor, and gave the rest back to Belisarius.

4.32. So matters concerning Belisarius the general went thus—the man to whom fortune, not long before, had handed over Gelimer and Vittigis as captives of his spear.

4.33. From of old the wealth of this man had keenly galled Justinian and Theodora, being excessive and worthy of a royal court.

4.34. They said that he had secretly hidden away the greater part of the public treasures of Gelimer and Vittigis, and had given the emperor a small portion of them, and one in no way considerable.

4.35. But reckoning over the man's labors and the calumny of outsiders, and at the same time having no plausible pretext against him, they kept quiet.

4.36. Then, however, the empress, seizing him while he was terrified and utterly cowardly, contrived by a single act to become mistress of his entire property.

4.37. For they at once entered into a marriage alliance with each other: Ioannina, the daughter of Belisarius, of whom alone he was father, was betrothed to Anastasius, the empress' grandson.

4.38. Belisarius then thought to recover his own command, and, being appointed general of the East, to lead the Roman army again against Chosroes and the Medes; but Antonina by no means allowed it, for she said she had been insulted by him in those regions, and these she would never again look upon.

4.39. Therefore Belisarius, appointed commander of the imperial grooms, was sent to Italy a second time, having agreed with the emperor, as they say, that he would never ask him for money in this war, but would make all the preparation for the war himself with his own funds.

4.40. Everyone supposed that Belisarius had arranged matters concerning his wife in the way described, and had made these agreements with the emperor concerning the war, because he wished to be quit of his stay in Byzantium, and that as soon as he should get outside the city wall, he would at once snatch up his arms and contrive something noble and worthy of a man against his wife and those who had done him violence.

4.41. But he himself, reckoning everything that had happened as of no account, and falling into deep forgetfulness and disregard of the oaths he had sworn to Photius and his other friends, followed his wife, having become extravagantly love-stricken for her—and that, too, when she was already sixty years old.

4.42. Yet when he came to Italy, day by day affairs went contrary to him, since the things of God were plainly hostile to him.

4.43. First, the plans devised by this general in his earlier dealings against Theudatus and Vittigis, though they seemed ill-suited to the circumstances, for the most part came to a useful end; but in the latter period he carried off the reputation of having planned the better course, as one experienced in the affairs of this war, while, faring badly in the outcomes, the result was for the most part set down to him as ill counsel.

4.44. So true is it that human affairs are governed not by the counsels of men but by the impulse of God—which men are accustomed to call fortune, not knowing for what reason events proceed in the way

4.45. that becomes evident to them. For to what seems irrational the name of fortune is wont to attach. But let these things be as is pleasing to each.

5.1. Belisarius, coming into Italy a second time, departed thence most shamefully. For in a span of five years he was nowhere able to set foot on the land, as I have said in my earlier books, except where there was some fortified place; but sailing all this time he went about the coastal regions.

5.2. Totila was raging to catch him outside a wall, yet did not find a way, since he himself and the whole Roman army were held by much dread.

5.3. Therefore he recovered nothing of what had been lost, but even lost Rome besides, and, so to speak, everything else.

5.4. He became in this time most avaricious of all men and a most exact pursuer of shameful gain, since he received nothing from the emperor; and he plundered, with no decency, nearly all the Italians who dwelt about Ravenna and Sicily, and any other he had it in his power to catch, pretending to exact account of their past lives.

5.5. So, for instance, he went after Herodian too and demanded money, holding everything over the man as a threat.

5.6. Vexed by this, Herodian renounced his allegiance to the Roman army and at once gave himself, with his followers and Spolitium, to Totila and the Goths.

5.7. How it came about that he and John, the nephew of Vitalian, fell into discord—which most of all ruined the affairs of the Romans—I shall now make clear.

5.8. The empress came to such a degree of hatred against Germanus, and made the hatred so very plain to all, that, although he was the emperor's cousin, no one dared to make a marriage alliance with him, and his children remained unwedded until she was released from life. His daughter Justina, too, though eighteen years old and of marriageable age, was still unwed.

5.9. For this reason, when John, sent by Belisarius, came to Byzantium, Germanus was forced to enter into discussion with him about the marriage alliance, and that although John was much below his rank.

5.10. And since the affair pleased them both, they resolved to bind each other by the most dreadful oaths that they would indeed accomplish the marriage with all their power, since each of them had not the least confidence in the other—the one from his consciousness that he was reaching after things above his station, the other from his want of a son-in-law.

5.11. But she, at a loss what to do, going by every road, did not scruple to pursue each of them by every device, so as to hinder what was being done.

5.12. And when, though she had frightened them with many threats, she could persuade neither, she openly threatened to destroy John.

5.13. And from this John, sent again to Italy, in no way dared to join Belisarius, fearing the plot from Antonina, until Antonina should come to Byzantium.

5.14. For one might not unreasonably suspect that the empress had charged her with John's murder; and to one who reckoned up the character of Antonina, and knew that Belisarius gave way to his wife in everything, great fear came, and entered into him.

5.15. This, at any rate, dashed to the ground the affairs of the Romans, which already before were standing on but one leg.

5.16. So the Gothic war went thus for Belisarius. Despairing, he begged the emperor that it might be granted him to get away from there as quickly as possible.

5.17. And when he learned that the emperor accepted his entreaty, glad at once he departed and was gone, bidding a long farewell to the Roman army and the Italians, leaving most things subject to the enemy, and Perusia hard pressed by a most bitter siege—which, while he was still on the road, was taken by storm and came to every form of evil, as I have related before. And it befell that a reverse of fortune of the following sort came also in his household.

5.18. The empress Theodora, urgent to complete the betrothal of Belisarius' child to her grandson, kept harassing the parents of the girl by writing often.

5.19. They, drawing back from the alliance, put off the marriage to the time of their own presence, and when the empress summoned them to Byzantium, they pretended that they were unable to leave Italy at the present time.

5.20. But she, longing to make her grandson master of Belisarius' wealth—for she knew the girl would be heiress, since Belisarius had no other offspring—and having no confidence at all in the judgment of Antonina, and fearing that, after the close of her own life, Antonina would not prove faithful to her house, although she had found her so kindly in matters of the greatest urgency, and would tear up what had been agreed, did an unholy deed.

5.21. For she joined the girl in cohabitation with the youth by no lawful form. And they say that she even compelled the girl, unwilling, to lie with him in secret, and that the maiden, thus deflowered, was joined in wedlock to the boy, so that the emperor might not hinder what was being done.

5.22. Yet when the deed was accomplished, Anastasius and the girl were held by some burning love for each other, and a span of not less than eight months was worn away for them in this manner of life.

5.23. But when Antonina, after the empress' death, came to Byzantium, she willfully forgot what the other had lately done for her, and reckoning not at all that, if the girl were joined in cohabitation with anyone else, she would be reputed to have been first prostituted, she dishonored the offspring of Theodora as a son-in-law, and, forcing the girl most unwilling, tore her away from the man she loved.

5.24. And by this deed she carried off among all men a great reputation for ingratitude; and when her husband came, with no trouble she persuaded him to share with her in this abomination. So thereupon the man's character was plainly proven.

5.25. And yet, though he had sworn oaths to Photius and to certain of his friends before, and had in no way kept his oaths, he obtained pardon from all men.

5.26. For they supposed the cause of the man's faithlessness to be not the rule of his wife, but his fear of the empress.

5.27. But when, after the death of Theodora, as I have said, no account was made either of Photius or of any other of his intimates, but his wife appeared as his mistress and Calligonus the pander as his master, then at last all despaired of him, and mocked him, spreading the tale abroad, and reviled him as one convicted of folly. Such, then, is the plain telling of the wrongs done by Belisarius.

5.28. As for the wrongs done in Libya by Sergius, the son of Bacchus, I have set them out sufficiently in the appropriate books—Sergius, who was most responsible for the ruin of the Romans' affairs there, having disregarded the oaths he had sworn to the Levathae upon the Gospels, and having made away with the eighty envoys without any pretext. This much only must I now add to my account: that these men did not come to Sergius with any treacherous intent, nor did Sergius have any pretext of suspicion concerning them, but, having invited the men to a banquet under solemn oath, he made away with them with no decency.

5.29. From this it befell Solomon and the Roman army and all the Libyans to be ruined.

5.30. For on his account, especially after Solomon had died, as I have said, neither any commander nor any soldier was willing to go into the danger of war.

5.31. And most of all John, the son of Sisiniolus, was out of the fight through his hatred of him, until Areobindus came to Libya.

5.32. For Sergius was soft and unwarlike, and in character and age altogether young, given beyond measure to envy and arrogance toward all men, dissolute in his way of life and puffing out his cheeks.

5.33. But because he happened to be the betrothed of the granddaughter of Antonina, the wife of Belisarius, the empress was by no means willing to exact any punishment from him or to relieve him of his command, although she saw Libya being most continuously ruined, since she and the emperor had also let Solomon, the brother of Sergius, go unpunished for the murder of Pegasius. What this is I shall now make clear.

5.34. When Pegasius had ransomed Solomon from the Levathae and the barbarians had returned home, Solomon, with Pegasius who had ransomed him and a few soldiers, was setting out for Carthage; and on this journey Pegasius, catching Solomon doing some wrong, said he ought to bear in mind that God had lately rescued him from the enemy.

5.35. But Solomon, angered that he had reproached him as a captive of the spear, at once killed Pegasius, and paid the man this as a ransom-price.

5.36. And when Solomon came to Byzantium, the emperor cleared him of the murder, on the ground that he had slain a traitor of the Roman empire.

5.37. And he gave him a writing furnishing him security on these matters. And Solomon, thus escaping retribution, went gladly to the East to see his homeland and the family of his house.

5.38. But the retribution from God, overtaking him on this journey, removed him from among men. So matters concerning Solomon and Pegasius went thus.

6.1. Of what sort of human beings Justinian and Theodora were, and in what manner they tore apart the affairs of the Romans, I now proceed to tell.

6.2. While Leo held the imperial power in Byzantium, three young farmers, Illyrians by birth—Zimarchus and Dityvistus and Justin from Bederiana—struggling unremittingly at home with the troubles that come from poverty, and wishing to be quit of these, set out to take up soldiering.

6.3. And making their way on foot to Byzantium, they went carrying sheepskin cloaks on their shoulders, in which, when they arrived, they had nothing else but the twice-baked loaves they had put in from home; and being enrolled in the soldiers' registers, the emperor chose them for the guard of the Palace. For they were all most fair in body.

6.4. In time afterward, when Anastasius had taken over the kingship, war arose against the nation of the Isaurians, who had taken up arms against him.

6.5. And he sent against them an army worthy of mention, which John, surnamed the Hunchback, led. This John, for some fault, shut Justin up in a prison, and on the following day was about to make away with him, had not a vision in a dream, coming in the meantime, prevented it.

6.6. For he said that in the dream the general met a certain figure, huge in body and in other respects greater than to be likened to a man.

6.7. And this figure enjoined upon him to release the man whom he happened to have shut up that day; but he, on rising from sleep, made no account of the dream-vision.

6.8. But when another night came on, it seemed to him in the dream that he heard again the words he had heard before, yet even so he did not resolve to carry out

6.9. what was enjoined. And a third time the dream-vision, standing over him, threatened him with utter ruin if he should not do what was bidden, and added that, in time to come, when enraged, he would have great need of this very man and of his kindred.

6.10. So at that time it befell Justin thus to survive; but as time went on this Justin advanced to great power.

6.11. For the emperor Anastasius appointed him commander of the guards in the Palace. And when the emperor had departed from among men, Justin, by the power of his office, took over the kingship—already an old man at the grave's edge, and unlettered in all letters, and, as the saying is, illiterate, which had not happened before among the Romans.

6.12. And whereas it was customary for the emperor to set his own letters to documents, in everything that was issued at his command, he himself neither issued anything nor was able to share understanding of what was being done.

6.13. But the man who was allotted to sit beside him, holding the office of what is called quaestor, Proclus by name,

6.14. himself did everything by his own independent judgment. But in order that those whose task this is might have testimony of the emperor's hand, the following device was contrived.

6.15. Cutting into a small piece of worked wood the shape of four letters which can be read in the Latin tongue, and dipping a pen in the ink with which emperors are accustomed to write,

6.16. they would put it into this emperor's hand. And placing the wood I mentioned upon the document, and taking hold of the emperor's hand, they would lead it round with the pen over the outline of the four letters, winding it into all the cuts of the wood, and so they would depart, bearing such letters of the emperor.

6.17. So matters concerning Justin stood thus for the Romans. He lived with a woman named Lupicina. She, being both a slave and a barbarian, had become the concubine of the man who had previously bought her. And she, with Justin, at the close of his life, held the kingship.

6.18. Now Justin was able to do his subjects neither any harm nor any good. For he was possessed of much simplicity, being altogether tongue-tied and most boorish.

6.19. His nephew Justinian, while still young, directed the whole government and became the cause of disasters to the Romans such as, and so many as, no one in all the ages had ever before received by report.

6.20. For he proceeded most easily to the unjust murder of men and the plunder of others' money, and it was nothing to him that many tens of thousands of men were made to vanish from among the living, though they had furnished him no cause.

6.21. And he thought it right to preserve none of the established things, but wished forever to make everything new; and, to put it all in a word, this man was the greatest

6.22. destroyer of things well established. The plague, of which I spoke in my earlier books, though it fell upon the whole earth, was escaped by no fewer men than those who chanced to be destroyed by it—either men who were not seized by the disease at all, or who survived after it befell them to be seized.

6.23. But to escape this man, for any human being who was a Roman, befell no one at all; rather, like some other affliction sent from heaven falling upon the whole race, he left no one wholly untouched.

6.24. For some he killed without any reason, while others he set loose to struggle with poverty, making them more wretched than the dead, since they prayed to put an end to their present lot by the most pitiable death. From some, however, he took away their lives along with their money.

6.25. And since it was nothing to him merely to overthrow the Roman empire, he was able to win the mastery of Libya and Italy for no other reason than that, together with those already under him, he might destroy

6.26. the people there. At any rate, not yet ten days established in power, he killed Amantius, commander of the eunuchs in the Palace, along with certain others, for no cause, bringing nothing against the man except that he had spoken some rash word against John, the high priest of the city.

6.27. And from this he became the most terrible of all men. At once, too, he sent for Vitalian the usurper, to whom he had previously given his pledges for his safety, having shared with him in the mysteries of the Christians.

6.28. And a little later, on the suspicion that the man had given him offense, he made away with him in the Palace, together with his intimates, on no charge, not deigning at all to keep pledges so very dreadful.

7.1. The populace having long since been divided into two factions, as I have said in my earlier books, he attached to himself one of them, the Blues—which had in fact been the object of his zeal before—and so was able to throw everything into confusion and turmoil. And by this he brought the Roman state down upon its knees.

7.2. Not all the Blues, however, resolved to follow this man's policy, but only those who happened to be partisans.

7.3. And even these, as the evil now advanced, came to seem the most temperate of all men.

7.4. For they offended less than their license allowed. Nor indeed did the partisans of the Greens remain quiet, but they too were always committing crimes to whatever extent was possible for them, though they were continually punished, each on his own.

7.5. And this led them ever more by far to grow bolder. For when men are wronged, they are wont to turn to recklessness.

7.6. At that time, then, while he fanned the Blues and openly incited them, the whole Roman empire was shaken to its foundations, as though an earthquake or a flood had fallen upon it, or as though every city had been taken by the enemy.

7.7. For everything everywhere was thrown into confusion, and nothing thereafter remained on its own footing, but the laws and the order of the state, with confusion supervening, turned to the very opposite.

7.8. And first the partisans changed the fashion of their hair to a novel mode. For they cut it in no way like the other Romans.

7.9. For they did not touch the moustache or the beard at all, but wished to let these grow long, like the Persians, forever.

7.10. But the hair on their heads they cut away in front as far as the temples, and let the back hang down at very great length, with no reason, like the Massagetae. For this reason they even called this style the Hunnic.

7.11. Next, in the matter of dress, they all thought it proper to be richly bordered, clothing themselves in attire more pretentious than each man's rank deserved.

7.12. For they could acquire such things from improper sources. And the part of the tunic about the hands was drawn in close at the wrist, but from there to either shoulder spread out to an unspeakable breadth.

7.13. And as often as their arm was waved while they shouted in the theaters and hippodromes, or, as was their custom, cheered, this part rose up high of itself, giving the senseless the impression that their bodies were so fair and stout that they had to be covered by such garments—not perceiving that, by the thinness and emptiness of their dress, the wasted state of their bodies was all the more exposed.

7.14. Their cloaks, too, and their trousers, and most of their footwear, were assigned to the name and fashion of the Huns.

7.15. They carried weapons by night at first, nearly all of them openly, but by day they hid two-edged daggers along the thigh under their cloaks; and gathering into bands, when it grew dark, they would rob the more respectable men, both in the open marketplace and in the narrow streets, taking from those who fell in their way their cloaks and belts and golden brooches and anything else they had in hand.

7.16. Some, along with the robbery, they thought fit even to kill, so that the victims might report to no one what had befallen them.

7.17. At these things all men, and especially those of the Blues who were not partisans, were most distressed, since they too did not remain unscathed.

7.18. And from this most men thereafter used belts and brooches and cloaks of bronze, and much below their rank, so as not to be destroyed for their love of fine things; and before the sun had set they would withdraw into their houses and hide.

7.19. As the evil dragged on and no attention was paid to the offenders by the authority set over the populace, the audacity of the men rose ever to a great height.

7.20. For wrongdoing, when it is granted impunity, is by nature carried to infinity, since even crimes that are punished are wont not to be wholly cut off.

7.21. For by nature most men turn readily to wrongdoing.

7.22. So matters with the Blues went thus. As for the opposing partisans, some of them inclined to the others' faction, out of desire to share in the crimes and not pay the penalty; others, keeping to flight, hid themselves in other regions; and many, caught on the spot, were destroyed by their adversaries or punished by the authority.

7.23. And many other young men flowed together into this society, who had never before been zealous about such things, but were drawn there by the license of power and outrage.

7.24. For there is no abomination named by men that was not committed in this time and yet remained outside punishment.

7.25. First, then, they destroyed their opponents; but as they went on, they killed even those who had given them no offense.

7.26. And many, bribing them with money, would point out their own enemies, whom these men at once made away with, fastening on them the name of Greens,

7.27. though they were utterly unknown to them. And these things were no longer done in the dark or in secret, but at all hours of the day and in every quarter of the city, with men of the highest distinction sometimes looking on at what was done before their eyes.

7.28. For they had no need to conceal their crimes, since no fear of punishment hung over them, but there was even attached to it a claim of distinction, as they made a display of strength and manliness, that with a single blow they killed some unarmed man who fell in their way; and no one had any hope of living on, amid the precariousness of life.

7.29. For all suspected, in their terror, that death was hanging over them, and no place seemed secure to anyone, nor any occasion safe, since men were destroyed for no reason even in the most venerable sanctuaries and at festivals, and no trust was any longer left toward friends or kinsmen. For many died even by the plotting of those closest to them.

7.30. Yet no inquiry was made into what had been done. But the disasters fell unexpected upon all, and no one defended the fallen.

7.31. And no force of any law or contract was left in the security of order, but everything, turned to violence, was thrown into confusion, and the state was most like a tyranny—not, however, an established one, but one changing every day and forever beginning afresh.

7.32. And the minds of the magistrates seemed like men thunderstruck, their spirit enslaved by fear of a single man; and the judges, in giving their decisions on disputed matters, cast their votes not as seemed to them just and lawful, but according as each of the litigants stood, hostile or friendly, with the partisans. For a judge who disregarded their dictation incurred death as his penalty.

7.33. And many creditors were forced, with much violence, to give back their bonds to their debtors without having received any of the debt; many, against their will, set their slaves free.

7.34. And they say that some women too were compelled to many things they did not wish by their own slaves.

7.35. And by now even the sons of men of distinction, mingling with these young men, compelled their fathers to do many things against their will, and to hand over their money to them.

7.36. And many unwilling boys were compelled to come to an unholy bed with the partisans, their fathers not unaware.

7.37. And to women living with husbands the same thing befell. And it is said that one woman, decked in much finery, was sailing with her husband to a suburb on the opposite shore, and when the partisans fell in with them on this passage, and snatched her with threats from her husband and put her into their own boat, she got into the boat with the young men, charging her husband secretly to take courage and to fear nothing base on her account;

7.38. for nothing would befall her body to be outraged. And while her husband still looked upon her with great grief, she let her body down into the sea and at once vanished from among the living.

7.39. Such, then, were the deeds dared by these partisans at that time in Byzantium. Yet these grieved the victims less than the wrongs done to the state by Justinian, since for those who have suffered the worst at the hands of criminals, the greatest part of the grief that has entered through disorder is taken away by the constant expectation of retribution from the laws and the authority.

7.40. For when men are of good hope toward the future, they bear their present lot more easily and with less labor; but when they are oppressed by the very authority set over the state, they are all the more pained, as is natural, by their misfortunes, and turn forever to despair at the hopelessness of retribution.

7.41. He did wrong not only because he was in no way willing to pretend to defend the oppressed, but because he by no means disdained to set himself up openly as protector of the partisans.

7.42. For he gave great sums of money to these young men, and kept many of them about him, and thought fit to call some of them to offices and other dignities.

8.1. These things, then, were being done in Byzantium and in every city. For, like some other disease, the evil, beginning here, fell upon every part of the Roman empire.

8.2. But the emperor cared not at all for what was being done, since the man had no perception of it, although he was always an eyewitness of what was done in the hippodromes.

8.3. For he was prodigiously stupid, most like a sluggish ass, ready to follow whoever drew the bridle, with his ears constantly twitching.

8.4. Justinian did these things and threw everything else into turmoil. As soon as he laid hold of his uncle's rule, he was eager to squander the public moneys with no order, since he had become master of them.

8.5. For he gave very much to the Huns who from time to time fell in with him, on the state's account; and from this it befell that the land of the Romans

8.6. lay open to frequent inroads. For these barbarians, once they had tasted the wealth of the Romans, could no longer keep away from the road that led there.

8.7. And he thought fit to throw away much money also on certain buildings against the sea, forcing back the perpetual surge of the waves.

8.8. For from the shore he advanced with heaps of stones, contending against the inflowings from the deep, and, as though by the power of his wealth, vying with the might of the sea.

8.9. And he gathered to himself the private property of individual Romans from all the earth, bringing against some a charge of a crime that had not been committed, and in the case of others pretending that they had made him a gift of their intention.

8.10. And many, convicted of murders and other such crimes, then escaped paying the penalty for what they had done wrong by surrendering all their money to him.

8.11. Others, disputing improperly with their neighbors over some pieces of land—when they could in no way win judgment against their opponents, since the law stood against them—would make a present of these disputed properties to him and be quit of the case, themselves gaining, by a costless favor, the advantage of being known to this man, and being able, in a most lawless manner, to obtain a condemnation of their adversaries.

8.12. I think it not out of place to describe the appearance of this man. In body, then, he was neither tall nor unduly short, but of middle height, not lean, however, but somewhat fleshy; in face he was round and not ill-favored, for he kept his color even after fasting two days.

8.13. But to indicate his whole appearance in sum, he most closely resembled Domitian, the son of Vespasian, whose wickedness the Romans had to such a degree to endure that, even after cutting him to pieces, they did not feel they had vented their anger against him in full, but a decree of the senate was passed that the name of this emperor should not appear in writings, and that no image of him whatever should be preserved.

8.14. At any rate this name, everywhere on the writings of Rome and wherever else it happened to be inscribed, may be seen erased alone among the others, and no image of him appears anywhere in the Roman empire, except a single bronze one, for the following reason.

8.15. Domitian had a wife, free-born and otherwise respectable, who herself never did harm to any human being, nor did any of her husband's deeds please her.

8.16. Therefore, since she was greatly loved, the senate then sent for her and bade her ask whatever she wished.

8.17. And she made this one request: to receive Domitian's body and bury it, and to set up one bronze image to him, wherever she might wish.

8.18. And the senate granted this. But the woman, wishing to leave to later time

8.19. memorials of the inhumanity of those who had cut her husband to pieces, devised this. Gathering up Domitian's flesh, and fitting it exactly together and joining it to itself, she sewed up the whole body, and showing it to the sculptors, bade them reproduce in a bronze image this disaster.

8.20. So the craftsmen at once made the image. And the woman, taking it, set it up on the right of the ascent leading to the Capitol, as one goes there from the marketplace, displaying the appearance of Domitian and his fate down to this time.

8.21. One might guess that the whole body of Justinian, and his very face and all the features of his countenance, were plainly to be seen in this image.

8.22. Such, then, was his appearance; his character I could not describe with exactness. For this man was both a doer of evil and easily led into it, the kind whom they call a malicious fool—neither speaking the truth himself to those he met with, but with a treacherous mind ever saying and doing everything, and lying open with no trouble to those who wished to deceive him.

8.23. And a certain unusual mixture had grown up in him, compounded of folly and wickedness. And perhaps this was what one of the philosophers of the Peripatetic school declared in former times, that even the most opposite qualities happen to exist in human nature, as in the mixing of colors.

8.24. I write, however, of what it has not been possible for me to attain in full. This emperor, then, was dissembling, treacherous, false, dark in his anger, double, a man clever, most accomplished at feigning his opinion, and shedding tears not from any pleasure or grief, but contriving them on occasion according to the need of the moment, lying forever—yet not at random, but making both writings and the most dreadful oaths upon his agreements, and that toward his own subjects.

8.25. But he would at once withdraw from what he had agreed and sworn, like the worst of slaves, who are led by fear of the tortures hanging over them to confess under oath.

8.26. An unstable friend, an implacable enemy, a burning lover of murders and of money, quarrelsome and most given to innovation, easily led to evil, but coming to good by no counsel, quick to conceive base things and to carry them out, but thinking the very hearing of good things distasteful.

8.27. How could anyone be able to attain in words the character of Justinian? These and many evils still greater he plainly possessed beyond what is human; rather, Nature seemed to have taken away all wickedness from the rest of men and laid it up in the soul of this man.

8.28. And besides all the rest, he was exceedingly ready to believe slanders, and quick to inflict punishments. For he never judged after investigation, but on hearing the slanderer he resolved at once to bring out his verdict.

8.29. And he wrote, with no hesitation, letters ordering the captures of districts and the burning of cities and the enslavement of whole nations for no cause.

8.30. So that, if one wished to weigh up from the beginning all the things that have befallen the Romans and to set them against these, it seems to me he would find that more murders of men came about through this one man than have chanced to occur in all the rest of time.

8.31. As for other men's money, he was most untiring in seizing it without scruple; for he did not even think it worth while to put forward any pretext as a screen of justice for trespassing on what did not belong to him. But when it had become his own, he was most ready, out of a senseless love of display, to scorn it and to throw it away to the barbarians for no reason.

8.32. And, to put it all in a word, he himself had no money, nor did he allow anyone else of all men to have any, as though he were overcome not by avarice but by envy of those who possessed it.

8.33. Easily, then, banishing wealth from the land of the Romans, he became the artificer of poverty for all.

9.1. So Justinian's character, so far as we are able to describe it, was somewhat of this sort. And he married a wife, whom—in what manner she was born and reared and joined in marriage to this man, and rooted out the Roman state from its foundations—I shall now make clear.

9.2. There was a certain Acacius in Byzantium, keeper of the beasts in the wild-beast hunts of the Green faction, whom they call a bear-keeper.

9.3. This man died of a disease while Anastasius held the imperial power, leaving three girls—Comito and Theodora and Anastasia—of whom the eldest happened to be not yet seven years old.

9.4. The woman, his widow, went over to another man, who, together with her, was to take charge thenceforth both of the household and of this office.

9.5. But the dance-master of the Greens, Asterius by name, persuaded by money from another, removed these from this honor and, with no trouble, set in their place the man who had given him the money. For dance-masters were allowed to manage such things at their discretion, as they wished.

9.6. But when the woman saw the whole populace gathered in the wild-beast hunt, she set garlands on the heads and in both hands of the girls and seated them as suppliants.

9.7. But the Greens resolved by no means to receive the supplication; the Blues, however, established them in this same honor, since their beast-keeper too had lately died.

9.8. When these children came of age, the mother at once set them upon the stage there, since they were comely in appearance—not all at the same time, however, but as each seemed to her to be ripe for this work.

9.9. The first, Comito, had already become brilliant among the courtesans of her time; Theodora, the next after her, dressed in a little sleeved tunic such as befits a slave-girl, followed and served her in other ways, and always carried on her shoulders the stool on which Comito was accustomed to sit at the gatherings.

9.10. For a while, then, Theodora, being still unripe, was in no way able to lie with a man, nor to have intercourse as a woman; but she carried on a kind of masculine commerce of the basest sort with the wretches—and these slaves—who, following their masters into the theater, wrought this ruin as an incidental of the opportunity they had; and she spent much time also in a brothel at this unnatural traffic of the body.

9.11. But as soon as she came of age and was now ripe, she let herself down among the women on the stage, and at once became a courtesan, of the kind the men of old called common.

9.12. For she was neither a flute-player nor a harpist, nor had she been trained for the dance, but she gave over her bloom to all who came her way, working with her whole body for hire.

9.13. Then she consorted with the mimes in all their work on the stage and shared in their pursuits, serving them in some buffoonish jests. For she was exceedingly witty and a mocker, and at once became notable for her work.

9.14. For the woman had no share of shame, nor did anyone ever see her abashed, but she went into shameless services with no hesitation; and she was the kind of woman who, when struck and slapped on the cheeks, would make merry and laugh aloud, and who, stripping off both before and behind, would show naked to those she met what it is proper for men to keep unseen and hidden.

9.15. With her lovers she trifled, playing the coquette, and by ever-new contrivances of intercourse she was able to win over forever the souls of the dissolute; for she did not think it proper to wait to be solicited by any of those she met, but, on the contrary, herself jesting and making lewd play with her hips, she would solicit all who fell in her way, especially boys who were still beardless.

9.16. For no one was ever so given over to every kind of pleasure. For often she would come to a public banquet with ten young men, or more than these, in the full vigor of bodily strength and making lechery their business, and would lie with all her fellow-diners the whole night through; and when they had all given out at this work, she would go to their servants, thirty in number, as it might be, and couple with each of them, and yet not even so did she reach satiety of this lewdness.

9.17. And once, coming to the house of one of the men of distinction, in the midst of the drinking, while all the fellow-revelers, they say, were watching her, she went up onto the projecting part of the couch, and at the foot of it, drawing up her garments in no decent fashion, she did not disdain to display her wantonness there.

9.18. And though she worked from three openings, she would reproach Nature, complaining that the openings of her breasts had not also been bored wider than they are, so that she might be able to contrive yet another mode of intercourse there.

9.19. And she conceived often, but, contriving by almost every device, she was at once able to procure abortion.

9.20. And often even in the theater, under the eyes of the whole populace, she stripped and became naked in the midst, having only a girdle about her private parts and groin—not, indeed, because she was ashamed to show even these to the people, but because no one is permitted to come there utterly naked without having a girdle about the groin. In this guise, then,

9.21. she would lie back upon her back, stretched out on the floor. And certain hirelings, whose task this was, would scatter grains of barley over her private parts, which the geese, kept ready for this purpose, would pick up one by one with their bills from there and eat.

9.22. And she, far from rising in a blush, even seemed to take pride in this performance. For she was not only shameless, but most of all a maker of shamelessness in others.

9.23. And often, too, stripping with the mimes, she would stand in the midst on the stage, bending and thrusting back her hips both to those who had had experience of her and to those who had not yet lain with her, parading the exercises of the palaestra in which she was practiced.

9.24. And so wantonly did she outrage her own body that she seemed to have her shame not in the natural place, as with other women, but in her face.

9.25. Those who consorted with her were plainly known at once from that fact, that they did not make their unions according to the law of nature; and those of the more respectable who met her in the marketplace turned aside and hurriedly withdrew, lest, by touching any of the woman's garments, they should be thought to share in this pollution.

9.26. For to those who saw her, especially at the day's beginning, she was an ill-omened sight. Toward her fellow-actresses she was wont to be ever most savagely venomous; for she was held by much malice.

9.27. Later she followed Hecebolus, a Tyrian who had taken over the rule of Pentapolis, to serve him in the basest things; but having given the man some offense, she was driven thence as quickly as possible. As a result she fell into want of necessities, which thereafter she procured by working her customary transgression upon her body.

9.28. First, then, she came to Alexandria. Then, going round the whole East, she returned to Byzantium, plying her trade in each city—a trade which, I think, God could never be propitious to a man for naming—as though the demon would not endure that any place should be ignorant of Theodora's wantonness.

9.29. In such a manner, then, it befell this woman to be born and reared, and to become notorious among many of the common people and among all men.

9.30. But when she came again to Byzantium, Justinian fell in love with her with an extraordinary passion, and at first consorted with her as a mistress, although he raised her to the rank of patrician.

9.31. Thereupon Theodora was at once able to surround herself with extraordinary power and considerable wealth. For it seemed to the man the sweetest of all things—as is wont to happen with those who love extravagantly—to grant his mistress every favor and all his money.

9.32. And the state became fuel for this love. With her, then, he ruined the populace much more than before, not here only, but throughout the whole Roman empire.

9.33. For both, being of old of the Blue faction, put the affairs of the state in great measure into the hands of these partisans.

9.34. But long afterward the greater part of the evil abated, in the following manner.

9.35. It happened that Justinian fell ill for many days, and in this illness he came into such danger that it was even said he had died. The partisans, meanwhile, were committing the crimes that have been described, and killed a certain Hypatius, a man of no obscurity, in broad day in the sanctuary of Sophia.

9.36. When the deed had been done, the disturbance of the affair reached the emperor; and each of those about him, since he had got hold of Justinian's absence, was eager to magnify the monstrousness of what had been done, reciting from the beginning everything that had chanced to happen.

9.37. Then the emperor charged the prefect of the city to exact retribution for all that had been done. This man's name was Theodotus, whom they called by the surname Pumpkin.

9.38. And he, investigating everything, was able to seize and execute by law many of the criminals; but many also, escaping notice,

9.39. were saved. For in the meantime it was fated that they should perish along with the affairs of the Romans. But the emperor, unexpectedly saved by a sudden recovery, at once set about killing Theodotus too, as a poisoner and sorcerer.

9.40. And since he had no pretext to use for destroying the man, he most bitterly tortured certain of his friends and forced them to utter words against him that were anything but sound.

9.41. And while all stood aloof and in silence lamented the plot against Theodotus, Proclus alone, who held the office of what is called quaestor, declared the man clear of the charge and in no way deserving of death.

9.42. Therefore Theodotus was conveyed to Jerusalem by the emperor's decision. But learning that certain men had come there who would destroy him, he was in hiding in the sanctuary the whole time, and living thus he died.

9.43. So matters concerning Theodotus went thus. The partisans, from then on, became the most temperate of all men.

9.44. For they no longer endured to commit such crimes, although it was open to them to indulge their lawlessness of life more fearlessly.

9.45. And here is the proof: when a few of them later displayed the like audacity, no retribution came upon them.

9.46. For those who always had the power of punishing granted to these men who had done such dreadful deeds the license of escaping notice, by this very indulgence leading them on to trample upon the laws.

9.47. So long, then, as the empress Lupicina was still alive, Justinian had no means of making Theodora his wedded wife. For in this one matter alone she opposed him, though she opposed him in nothing else.

9.48. For the woman happened to be very far from wickedness, but she was altogether boorish and barbarian by birth, as I have said.

9.49. Nor was she in any way able to lay hold of virtue, but remained utterly without experience of the affairs of state—she who did not even enter the Palace under her own name, as being a ridiculous one, but was called Euphemia. But in the course of time it befell that the empress died.

9.50. And Justin, having become silly and altogether decrepit, was an object of laughter to his subjects, and all, treating him with much contempt because he understood nothing of what was being done, looked down upon him; but Justinian they courted with much fear. For, ever stirring and confounding things, he kept everything in continual uproar.

9.51. Then indeed Justinian set about making the betrothal to Theodora. But since it was impossible for a man who had attained senatorial rank to be united with a courtesan—forbidden of old by the most ancient laws—he compelled the emperor to dissolve the laws by another law, and thenceforth lived with Theodora as his wedded wife, and made the betrothal to courtesans open to all other men; and, playing the tyrant, he at once usurped the honor of the sovereign power, cloaking the violence of the act with a counterfeit pretext.

9.52. For they proclaimed him emperor, together with his uncle, all the Romans of any standing being led to this vote by an excess of fear.

9.53. So Justinian and Theodora took over the kingship three days before the feast of Easter, at a time when it is not even permitted to greet any of one's friends or to wish him peace.

9.54. And not many days later Justin died of a disease, having survived his accession by nine years, and Justinian, with Theodora, held the kingship alone.

10.1. Thus, then, Theodora, having been born and reared and educated in the manner described, came to the rank of empress, hindered by nothing.

10.2. For no thought of disgrace came to the man who married her, although it was open to him, choosing from the whole Roman empire, to make his wedded wife the woman who, of all women, was best born, and who had partaken of a secluded upbringing, and was not unpracticed in modesty, and was united with chastity, and besides her beauty was extraordinary, and was both a virgin and, as the saying goes, firm-breasted.

10.3. But he did not disdain to make the common pollution of all mankind his own private possession, feeling no shame at any of the things already disclosed, and consorting with a woman invested with great pollutions besides—the many child-murders of willful abortions. And I think there is nothing else at all left for me to mention concerning this man's character.

10.4. For all the passions of his soul this marriage would be sufficient witness to indicate fully, becoming interpreter and witness and recorder of his character.

10.5. For whoever, disregarding shame for what he has done, does not scruple to appear loathsome to those he meets, for him no path of lawlessness is untrodden, but, ever holding shamelessness before his brow, he advances most easily and with no trouble to the foulest of deeds.

10.6. Yet not one man of the senate, seeing the state fasten this disgrace upon itself, resolved to take it ill or to refuse the act, though all were about to do her reverence as a god.

10.7. Nor did any priest show himself indignant, and that when they were going to address her as their mistress.

10.8. And the populace that had formerly been her spectators thought it right, with no shame, to be her slaves and to be so called, with upturned hands.

10.9. Nor was any soldier angered if he was going to undergo the dangers of the camp on behalf of Theodora's interests; nor did any other of all men oppose her, but all, I suppose, bowing to the fact that this had been so granted, gave way to the completion of this pollution—as though Fortune had made a display of her power, who, governing all human affairs, cares not at all either that what is done should be reasonable, or that it should seem to men to have come about according to reason.

10.10. At any rate she suddenly raises some man to a great height by an irrational power, against whom many obstacles seem to be woven, but nothing in any single act stands in his way; rather, he is borne by every device wherever it has been ordained for him, all readily giving way and withdrawing before Fortune as she advances. But let these things be and be spoken of in whatever way is pleasing to God.

10.11. Theodora was fair of face and otherwise graceful, but short, and pale—not altogether, but enough to be somewhat sallow—and her glance was ever fierce and intent.

10.12. To tell most of what she did in her stage life all eternity would not suffice; but having selected a few things in my earlier account, I shall be able to make plain the woman's whole character to those who come after.

10.13. Now I must briefly disclose what she and her husband did, since they did nothing in their life apart from each other.

10.14. For a long time they seemed to all to go ever opposite to each other in their opinions and pursuits; but later this appearance was recognized to have been deliberately feigned by them, so that their subjects might not come to a common mind and rise against them, but might be divided in their opinions about them.

10.15. First, then, they set the Christians against each other and, pretending each to go to the opposite side in disputed matters, so tore them all apart, as I shall relate not long hence. Then they divided the partisans.

10.16. And she pretended to espouse the cause of the Blues with all her power, and, opening up to them license against their opponents, gave them leave to commit crimes and offer violence in irreparable ways with no decency.

10.17. And he seemed like one secretly vexed and grumbling, yet unable openly to oppose his wife; and often, changing their roles, they would take the opposite course to each other under the appearance of holding power.

10.18. For he would think fit to punish the Blues as wrongdoers, while she, angry in word, would take it ill that she had, against her will, been worsted by her husband.

10.19. The partisans of the Blues, however, as I have said, seemed to be the most temperate. For they did not at all think fit to use violence against their neighbors to the extent permitted, and in lawsuit-quarrels each of the two seemed to defend one of the disputing parties, but it was necessary that the one who stood by the unjust cause should win; and thus they plundered most of the property of those at law.

10.20. So this emperor, enrolling many men among his intimates, set them in the power to use violence and to commit against the state whatever wrongs they wished; but whenever they appeared to have invested themselves with some great quantity of wealth, they at once gave some offense to the wife and were at variance with her.

10.21. And at first he by no means disdained to espouse their cause with all eagerness; but later, withdrawing his goodwill toward the men, the turmoil in his zeal would arise suddenly.

10.22. And she would at once work irreparable deeds against them, while he, pretending to be unaware of what was being done, would gladly take their whole property by a shameless seizure.

10.23. And by these devices, while agreeing among themselves but in the open feigning faction, they were able both to divide their subjects and to establish their tyranny most firmly.

11.1. When, then, Justinian took over the kingship, he was at once able to throw everything into confusion. For he introduced into the state things that had previously been forbidden by law, and abolished all that existed and was customary, as though he had received the imperial form for this very purpose, that he might change everything into another form.

11.2. For some offices he abolished, and set up others that did not exist over affairs; and the laws and the registers of the soldiers he treated in the same way, not yielding to justice nor led to it by expediency, but only that everything might be new and named after himself. And if he was unable to change anything at the moment, yet he set his own name upon it.

11.3. No satiety of plundering money or of murdering men ever seized him; rather, having plundered very many houses of prosperous men, he sought out others, giving away at once to some of the barbarians, or to senseless buildings, the money that was the spoil of the former.

11.4. And having destroyed perhaps countless men for no reason, he at once set about plotting against many others.

11.5. So, while the Romans were at peace with all mankind, not knowing what to do in his lust for murders, he set all the barbarians against one another, and summoning the leaders of the Huns for no cause, he gave them great sums of money in his absurd love of display, making these, as he said, pledges of friendship—which he was said to have done also in the time of Justin's reign.

11.6. And they, having received money, would send some of their fellow-chiefs with their own followers, bidding them overrun the emperor's land in their raids, so that they too might be able to sell peace to him who wished to buy it for no reason.

11.7. And these at once enslaved the Roman empire, and were no less in the pay of the emperor; and others, after these, at once set about plundering the wretched Romans, and after the plunder received as the prize of their raid the emperor's bounty.

11.8. And thus, in a word, all of them, letting slip no opportunity, in rotation drove off and carried away everything.

11.9. For these barbarians have many divisions of chiefs, and the war went round and round, taking its cause from senseless love of display, but finding no end at all, but circling back upon itself

11.10. through all time. Therefore no spot, whether mountain or cave or anything else of the Roman land, remained unravaged in this time, and it befell many regions to be captured more than five times.

11.11. And these things, and all that befell at the hands of the Medes and Saracens and Sclaveni and Antae and the other barbarians, I have related in my earlier books; but, as I said at the beginning of this account, it was necessary for me here to state the cause of what befell.

11.12. And to Chosroes he gave a great quantity of centenaria for peace, but, taking it upon himself with no reason, he became most responsible for the truce being broken, being zealous and eager to win over to himself Alamundarus and the Huns who were in alliance with the Persians—a thing which, in my books concerning them, I think I did not state openly.

11.13. And while he stirred up and fanned for the Romans the evils of factions and wars, with this one purpose—that the earth might be filled with human blood by many devices and that more money might be plundered—he contrived much other slaughter of his subjects in the following way.

11.14. There are many rejected beliefs of Christians in the whole Roman empire, which they are accustomed to call heresies—of the Montanists and Sabbatians and all the others by which the opinions of men are wont to be led astray.

11.15. All these he ordered to change their old belief, threatening the disobedient with many things, and especially that they should no longer be able to pass on their property to their children or kinsmen.

11.16. Now the sanctuaries of these so-called heretics, and especially of those who practiced the belief of Arius, had a wealth beyond report.

11.17. For neither the whole senate nor any other very great part of the Roman empire could be compared, in respect of property, to these sanctuaries.

11.18. For they had treasures of gold and silver, and ornaments composed of precious stones, beyond telling and beyond number, and houses and villages in great abundance, and much land everywhere on the earth, and every other kind of wealth that exists and is named among all men, since none of those who had ever reigned before had troubled them.

11.19. And many men, even of the orthodox belief, ever had from this source, under the pretext of these pursuits, the resources of their livelihood.

11.20. So the emperor Justinian, first confiscating the property of these sanctuaries, suddenly took away all their money. From this it befell most men to be cut off thereafter from their livelihood.

11.21. And many men at once, going about everywhere, compelled those they fell in with to change from the ancestral belief.

11.22. And since this seemed unholy to country folk, they all resolved to resist those who gave this command.

11.23. Many, then, were destroyed by the soldiers, and many also made away with themselves, supposing in their foolishness that they were thus most piously serving God; and the greater part of them fled, abandoning the land of their fathers. But the Montanists, who dwelt in Phrygia, shutting themselves up in their own sanctuaries, at once set fire to these churches and perished together with them for no reason; and from this the whole Roman empire was filled with murder and flight.

11.24. And when a law of this kind was at once passed also concerning the Samaritans, an indiscriminate disturbance seized Palestine.

11.25. Now those who dwelt in my own Caesarea and in the other cities, thinking it a slight thing to suffer hardship for a foolish doctrine, exchanged their existing name for the name of Christians, and by this pretense were able to shake off the danger from the law.

11.26. And those of them who had any share of reason and decency by no means disdained to be faithful to this belief; but most, as though indignant that, not willingly but compelled by the law, they had changed their ancestral doctrine, at once inclined to the Manichaeans and to the so-called Polytheists.

11.27. And the farmers, all gathering in a body, resolved to take up arms against the emperor, setting up as their king one of the brigands, Julian by name, the son of Sabarus.

11.28. And for some time, coming to blows with the soldiers, they held out; but afterward, defeated in battle, they were destroyed together with their leader.

11.29. And it is said that a hundred thousand men perished in this struggle, and the region that was the best of all the earth was thereby made empty of farmers.

11.30. And to the owners of the lands, who were Christians, this matter came to a great evil. For it became necessary for them, getting nothing thence, to pay forever to the emperor the annual tax, a heavy one, since no mercy was shown in the enforcement of this matter.

11.31. From there he led his persecution against the so-called Hellenes, torturing their bodies and plundering their money.

11.32. But even those of them who resolved nominally to take the name of Christians, in word warding off their present troubles, these too, not long after, were for the most part caught at libations and sacrifices and other unholy works.

11.33. For what was done concerning the Christians will be told in my later books.

11.34. And after this he forbade pederasty by law—not investigating what came after the law, but those who had long since been seized by this disease.

11.35. And the proceeding against them was conducted with no decency, since the retribution against them was carried out even without an accuser, and the word of one man or boy—and that a slave, as it might be, and compelled unwillingly to testify against his master—

11.36. was held to be an exact proof. Those thus convicted they paraded with their genitals cut off. The evil, however, was not at first directed against all, but only against those who seemed either to be Greens, or to be invested with great wealth, or who happened to have given some other offense to the tyrants.

11.37. And further, they were harsh toward the astronomers. Therefore the authority appointed over thieves tortured them for no other cause, and, scourging them many times across the back, paraded them through the whole city mounted on camels—old men, and otherwise respectable—having nothing else to charge against them except that they wished to be wise concerning the stars

11.38. in such a place. So a great throng of men continually fled, not only to the barbarians, but also to the Romans settled far off, and one could see in every region and city most of the inhabitants strangers.

11.39. For, in order to escape notice, each readily exchanged the land of his fathers for a foreign one,

11.40. as though their country had been captured by enemies. So the wealth of those reputed prosperous, in Byzantium and in every city, next after those of the senate, Justinian and Theodora plundered and held in the ways described.

11.41. But in what manner they were able to take away the whole of the money of those in the senate too, I shall now make clear.

12.1. There was a certain man in Byzantium, Zeno by name, grandson of that Anthemius who had formerly held the kingship in the West. This man they deliberately appointed governor over Egypt and sent out.

12.2. But he, filling his ship with the most precious of his goods, made his preparations for the voyage; for he had an uncountable weight of silver, and gold plate adorned with pearls and emeralds and other such precious stones. But certain persons, persuading some of those reputed his most faithful servants, carried off the money from there as quickly as possible, and putting fire into the hold of the ship, bade them report to Zeno that the flame had broken out in the ship of itself and that the money had perished.

12.3. And in the course of time it befell Zeno suddenly to die, and they at once became masters of his property as his heirs.

12.4. For they produced a certain will, which was noised abroad as not having been composed by him.

12.5. And of Tatian and Demosthenes and Hilara they made themselves heirs in the same manner—men who, in other respects and in rank, were first in the senate of the Romans. And of some they got the property by fabricating not wills but letters.

12.6. For in this way they became heirs of Dionysius, who dwelt in Lebanon, and of John, the son of Basil, who had been the most distinguished of all the people of Edessa, but had been given by force by Belisarius to the Persians as a hostage, as I have said in my earlier books.

12.7. For this John, Chosroes would no longer release, charging the Romans with having disregarded all the agreements on which he had been given by Belisarius; he thought fit, however, to ransom him, as one who had become a captive of the spear.

12.8. And the man's grandmother (for she still chanced to be living), offering as ransom not less than two thousand pounds of silver, was likely to buy back her grandson.

12.9. But when this ransom came to Daras, the emperor learned of it and would not allow the transaction to be made, lest the wealth of the Romans, he said,

12.10. should be conveyed to the barbarians. And not long after it befell John to fall ill and vanish from among men; and the man who governed the city, fabricating a certain letter, said that John, as his friend, had written to him not long before that it was his wish that his property should go to the emperor.

12.11. The names of all the others, of whom they became heirs of their own accord, I could not recount.

12.12. But until the so-called Nika revolt occurred, they thought fit to gather in the properties of the prosperous one by one; but when this came about, as I have said in my earlier books, then indeed, confiscating almost all at once, so to speak, the properties of all the members of the senate, they disposed as they wished of all the furniture and of whatever lands were finest, and, selecting those subject to a bitter and most heavy tax, they gave them back, under the pretense of humanity, to their former owners.

12.13. Therefore, choked by the tax-collectors and worn down by the ever-flowing interest of their debts, they passed their lives unwillingly in a lingering death.

12.14. For these reasons, to me and to most of us these never seemed to be human beings, but certain avenging demons, and, as the poets say, a pair of destroyers of mortals, who, taking common counsel how they might be able most easily and quickly to destroy all the races and works of men, put on human form and, having become human demons, in this manner shook the whole world.

12.15. One might find proof of this in many things, and especially in the power of what was done. For the deeds of demons are distinguished from those of men by a great difference.

12.16. Many men, to be sure, have come into being in all time, terrible in the extreme through chance or nature, who have wrecked cities or lands or some other such thing by their own doing; but the destruction of all men and the disasters of the whole inhabited world no one was able to accomplish except these men, whose purpose Fortune also served, working together with their will at the destruction of men.

12.17. For by earthquakes and plagues and inundations of river waters very much was destroyed in this time, as I shall presently relate. So it was by no human, but by some other power, that they wrought these dreadful things.

12.18. And they say that his mother too said to certain of her intimates that he was not the son of Sabbatius her husband, nor of any human being.

12.19. For when she was about to conceive him, a demon visited her, unseen, but giving her a perception that he was present with her, as a man consorting with a woman, and then vanished as in a dream.

12.20. And some of those who were with him at a late hour of the nights, and conversed with him in the Palace—those whose souls were pure—thought they beheld a strange demonic apparition in his place.

12.21. For one of them said that he suddenly rose from the royal throne and walked about there—for he was never accustomed to sit long—and that Justinian's head at that moment vanished, while the rest of his body seemed to make these long traverses; and that he himself, his eyes being anything but sound about the sight, stood for a long while distressed and at a loss.

12.22. But later, when the head returned to the body, he thought he made up, beyond his expectation, what had until then been wanting.

12.23. And another said that he stood beside him as he sat, and that of a sudden he saw his face become like shapeless flesh; for it bore neither eyebrows nor eyes in their proper place, nor any other distinguishing mark at all; but in time he saw the form of the face return to him. These things I write not as having seen them myself, but as having heard them from those who insisted that they saw them at the time.

12.24. And they say also that a certain monk, most dear to God, persuaded by those who shared the desert with him, was sent to Byzantium to defend those settled nearest them, who were being oppressed and wronged beyond endurance; and that on arriving there he at once obtained admission to the emperor;

12.25. but as he was about to come in to him, he set one of his feet upon the threshold there, and then suddenly drew back and went backward.

12.26. The eunuch who was his usher, and those present there, earnestly entreated the man to go forward; but he, answering nothing, and like one struck with a stroke, departed thence to the lodging where he was staying; and when his attendants asked him why he did this, they say he declared outright that he saw the chief of the demons sitting on the throne in the Palace, with whom he would not deign to consort or to ask anything of him.

12.27. And how was this man not likely to be some destroying demon, who never came to satiety of drink or food or sleep, but, tasting somehow of what was set before him, would go about the palace at unseasonable hours of the night, though he was demonically zealous for the pleasures of love?

12.28. And some of Theodora's lovers say that, while she was on the stage, a demon, falling on them by night, drove them out of the chamber where they were spending the night with her. And there was a certain dancing-girl, Macedonia by name, of the Blues at Antioch, invested with much power.

12.29. For, writing letters to Justinian while he was still administering the kingship under Justin, she would with no trouble destroy whomever she wished of the men of distinction in the East, and would have their money entered in the public registers.

12.30. This Macedonia, they say, once when Theodora came from Egypt and Libya, was greeting her, and when she saw her exceedingly distressed and vexed at the way she had been outraged by Hecebolus and had lost her money on this journey, she greatly consoled and encouraged the woman, since Fortune was of such a kind as to become for her again the provider of great wealth.

12.31. Then, they say, Theodora said that a dream too had visited her that night, bidding her take no thought for the sake of wealth.

12.32. For when she should come to Byzantium, she would come to the bed of the chief of the demons, and would live with him as his wedded wife by every device, and from this she would become mistress of all money.

13.1. But these things were thus held by most as matters of belief. As for Justinian, he was indeed such in the rest of his character as has been shown; yet he made himself accessible and gentle to those who met with him, and no one of all men was shut out from coming into his presence; rather, even with those who stood or spoke before him in no proper fashion he was never angry.

13.2. Yet for all that he did not blush at any of those who were to be destroyed by him. Nor indeed did he ever show himself betraying anger or irritation toward those who had offended him, but with a gentle face, with brows let down, with a subdued voice, he would order tens of thousands of men who had done no wrong to be destroyed, cities to be razed, and all their money to be entered in the public registers.

13.3. One might guess from this character that the man had the temper of a sheep. But if anyone, beseeching him, tried to win pardon for the victims with suppliant prayers, then, grown fierce and snarling, he seemed to be full of wrath, so that to none of those reputed to be his intimates was there any hope thereafter of begging off a man.

13.4. He seemed to hold a firm belief concerning Christ, but even this to the destruction of his subjects. For he allowed the priests more fearlessly to use violence against their neighbors, and rejoiced with them when they plundered the property of those bordering on them, thinking in this way to be pious toward the divine.

13.5. And in giving such judgments he thought he was doing holy work, if anyone, having seized under the name of sacred things something that did not belong to him, went off victorious. For he thought that justice lay in the priests prevailing over their adversaries.

13.6. And he himself, acquiring from improper sources the properties of the living or the dead, and at once dedicating these to one of the churches, prided himself in the screen of piety, so that the possession of these things might not again revert

13.7. to those who had been despoiled. Indeed, he wrought an indiscriminate number of murders for these reasons. For, being eager to bring all into one belief concerning Christ, he destroyed the rest of mankind for no reason, and that while doing it under the pretext of piety; for he did not consider it murder of men, if those who perished did not happen to be of his own belief.

13.8. So zealously set upon the destruction of men was he forever, that he and his consort never ceased contriving causes that led to it.

13.9. For both these persons had, for the most part, desires that were sisters; but where it befell them to differ in character, each was wicked, yet by displaying the most opposite traits they destroyed their subjects.

13.10. For he was lighter in mind than dust, subject to those who at any time wished to lead him wherever they pleased, provided the matter did not tend to humanity or to forgoing gain, and most constantly admitting flattering words.

13.11. For those who flattered him persuaded him with no trouble that he was lifted up on high and walked the air.

13.12. And once, sitting beside him, Tribonian said that he was utterly in dread lest he should, through his piety, be taken up unawares into heaven. Such praises—or rather mockeries—he treated as established in his mind.

13.13. But if he chanced to admire someone's virtue, a little later he would revile him as wicked. And having abused one of his subjects, he would again become his praiser in word, having changed for no reason.

13.14. For the workings of his mind went contrary to what he himself said and wished to seem to be.

13.15. How his character stood toward friendship and enmity I have already indicated, drawing my proof from what the man for the most part did.

13.16. For as an enemy he was sure and unchanging, but toward his friends exceedingly unstable. So that, at any rate, he destroyed very many of those he had been zealous about, while he never became the friend of anyone he had once hated.

13.17. And those whom he seemed to hold most as acquaintances and intimates, these, to gratify his consort or anyone else whatever, he would shortly betray to destruction, though he knew well that they would die solely for their goodwill toward him.

13.18. For he was faithless in all things, except plainly in his inhumanity and avarice. From these no one was ever able to turn him away.

13.19. But even in matters where his consort could not persuade him, by casting before him hopes of great money to come from the deed, she would drag her husband, unwilling though he was, to the action she desired.

13.20. For the sake of unseemly gain he by no means disdained both to enact laws and again to abolish them.

13.21. And he gave judgment not according to the laws which he himself had written, but according as the promise of money, appearing greater and more magnificent, led him.

13.22. For he thought it brought him no shame to take away the properties of his subjects by petty thieving, whenever he could not take everything at once on some pretext, either by bringing an unexpected charge or under the pretense of a will that had not been made.

13.23. And while he ruled the Romans, there remained no faith or sure belief toward God, no firm law, no settled transaction, no contract at all.

13.24. And when his intimates were sent by him on some business, if it befell them to destroy many of those who fell in their way and to plunder a quantity of money, these were at once reputed and named by the sovereign as men of good report, as having carried out their instructions exactly; but if they came back to him having shown any mercy toward men, he was thereafter ill-disposed and hostile toward them.

13.25. And despairing of them, as men of an old-fashioned nature, he would no longer call them to his service. So that many were eager to show him that they were wicked, even though their conduct was not in fact of that sort.

13.26. Often, having promised something to people and made his promise more secure by oath or by writing, he would at once willfully fall into forgetfulness, thinking that this deed brought him a kind of glory.

13.27. And these things Justinian did not only toward his subjects, but also toward many of the enemy, as I have said before.

13.28. He was, for the most part, sleepless, and never came to satiety of food or drink, but, tasting almost with the tip of his finger, he would withdraw.

13.29. For such things seemed to him a kind of incidental task forced upon him by nature, since he would often remain without food for two whole days and nights, especially when the time before the so-called feast of Easter was upon him.

13.30. For then, often having gone two days, as has been said, without food, he thought fit to live on a little water and some wild herbs, and, sleeping, as it might be, a single hour, he would spend the rest of the time

13.31. always walking about. And yet, if he had been willing to spend this very time on good deeds, affairs would have advanced to a great degree of prosperity.

13.32. But as it was, using the strength of his nature for the ruin of the Romans, he was able to pull down their whole state to the ground. For he made it his work to be perpetually awake and to suffer hardship and toil for no other reason than to contrive day by day ever more pretentious disasters for his subjects.

13.33. For he was, as has been said, exceedingly quick to conceive and swift to accomplish unholy deeds, so that even the good gifts of his nature were turned, in his case, to the harm of his subjects.

14.1. For there was great untimeliness in affairs, and nothing of the customary things remained—of which, having mentioned a few, I must leave the rest all in silence, lest my account be endless.

14.2. First, then, he neither himself had anything suited to the imperial dignity, nor did he think fit to preserve it, but in tongue and bearing and mind he played the barbarian.

14.3. And whatever he wished to have written by his order, he did not entrust to the man holding the office of quaestor, as was the custom, to manage; but he himself thought fit to issue most of them—though his tongue was as it was—and a great crowd of bystanders did so too, so that those wronged thereby had no one to charge with it.

14.4. And to those called secretaries the dignity of writing the emperor's secrets, for which from of old they had been appointed, was no longer reserved; but he himself wrote, so to speak, everything, and even when it was necessary to give directions to the arbitrators in the city as to how they should proceed in their decisions.

14.5. For he allowed no one in the Roman empire to give his vote by his own independent judgment; but, willful with a senseless audacity, he himself regulated the verdicts that were to be, taking a hearsay account from one of the parties, and at once, without examination, set aside what had been decided, led by no law or justice,

14.6. but plainly overcome by base love of gain. For the emperor was not ashamed to take bribes, his insatiable greed having stripped him of all shame.

14.7. And often what had been approved by the senate and the sovereign ended in some other decision.

14.8. For the senate sat as though in a picture, having authority neither over its vote nor over the good, gathered together only for the sake of form and an ancient law; since it was not even permitted to any of those assembled there to utter any sound at all, but the emperor and his consort, for the most part, pretended to take opposite sides in disputed matters, and what had been agreed between them on these matters prevailed.

14.9. And if it seemed to anyone that, having broken the law, he was not secure in his victory, this man, paying out yet another piece of gold to this emperor, would at once procure a law that ran contrary to all those laid down before.

14.10. And if some other man then sought after this very law that had been abolished, the sovereign by no means disdained to recall it and reinstate it. And nothing stood firm in the security of his power, but the balance of justice wandered, carried about everywhere, wherever the heavier weight of gold could draw it down; and it lay in the public part of the marketplace—and that issuing from the Palace—and there were set up for sale stalls not only of judicial but also of legislative power.

14.11. And to those called referendaries it no longer sufficed to refer to the emperor the petitions of suppliants, and only to report to the magistrates, as was the custom, whatever should seem good to him concerning the suppliant; but gathering from all men the unjust plea, they deceived Justinian with tricks and certain misrepresentations—he being by nature subject to those who practice such things.

14.12. And going out at once, and shutting up the opponents of those who had dealt with them, they exacted money, with no one defending the victims and with no possibility of refutation, as much as might be enough for them.

14.13. And the soldiers who had the guard in the Palace, coming up to the arbitrators in the imperial portico, would bring in lawsuits with a violent hand.

14.14. And all, so to speak, abandoning their own posts, then walked at will roads that had before been impassable and untrodden for them; and all affairs were borne along in disorder, not even sharing in any proper name, and the state was like a queen amid playing children.

14.15. But the rest I must pass over, as I indicated at the beginning of this account. Yet it shall be told who was the man who first persuaded this emperor to take bribes in giving judgment.

14.16. There was a certain Leon, a Cilician by birth, demonically zealous for money. This Leon became the mightiest of all flatterers, and the kind of man to plant his own opinion in the minds of the ignorant.

14.17. For he had a certain persuasiveness that worked together with the tyrant's folly for the destruction of men. This man first persuaded Justinian to sell justice for money.

14.18. And once this man had resolved to steal in the manner described, he never let up, but the evil, advancing on its way, went to a great height; and whoever was eager to win an unjust suit against one of the respectable men would at once go to Leon, and, agreeing that a certain portion of the disputed property should be deposited both for the tyrant and for himself, would at once depart from the Palace victorious, against right.

14.19. And Leon was thus able to surround himself with very great wealth and became master of much land, but to the Romans he was most responsible for the state's coming to its knees.

14.20. And for those who had business there was no security—no law, no oath, no writing, no penalty agreed upon, nothing else at all—except to pay money to Leon and the emperor.

14.21. Nor indeed did even this remain firm in the resolve of Leon, but he thought fit to take pay from the adversaries too.

14.22. For, stealing always on both sides, he never suspected it to be any shame to slight those who had put their trust in him and to go against them.

14.23. For nothing seemed to him shameful, provided only that gain was attached, in playing a double game.

15.1. So Justinian was such a man. As for Theodora, she had fixed her mind most constantly in the security of inhumanity.

15.2. For she never did anything from being persuaded or compelled by another, but carried out what she had resolved, willful with all her power, no one daring to beg off the victim.

15.3. For neither length of time, nor satiety of punishment, nor any device of supplication, nor the threat of death—since she was likely to fall from heaven upon the whole race—could persuade her to lay aside any of her wrath.

15.4. And in short, no one ever saw Theodora reconciled with one who had offended her, not even when he had vanished from among men; but the son, inheriting the empress' hatred of his dead father like any other part of his inheritance, passed it on to the third generation.

15.5. For her spirit was most ready to be stirred to the destruction of men, but unable to be appeased.

15.6. She tended her body more than was needful, but less than her own desire.

15.7. For very early she would go to the bath, and from there to her breakfast.

15.8. And having breakfasted she would rest. But at her midday and evening meals she would set upon every kind of food and drink, and very long sleeps would ever lay hold of her—by day until the first part of night, by night until the rising of the sun.

15.9. And though she had fallen into every track of intemperance to such a degree, she thought fit to administer the whole Roman empire within so small a portion of the day.

15.10. And if the emperor charged anyone with some business without her consent, affairs came to such a turn of fortune for that man that not long after he was both stripped of his honor with great insult and destroyed by a most shameful death.

15.11. For Justinian it was easy to do everything, not only because of his easiness of mind, but because he was for the most part sleepless, as has been said, and most accessible of all men.

15.12. For much license was granted to men, even though they were utterly inglorious and obscure, not only to meet this tyrant, but even to confer with him and consort with him in secret.

15.13. But to the empress not even one of the magistrates had access except with much time and labor; rather, all sat in attendance forever in a kind of slavish waiting, in a narrow and stifling chamber the whole time. For to be left out was an unbearable danger to any of the magistrates.

15.14. And they stood continually on the tips of their toes, each straining to hold his face higher than his neighbor's, so that the eunuchs coming out from within might see him.

15.15. And some of them were called, and that with difficulty and many days later; and going in to her with much fear, they would depart as quickly as possible, having only done obeisance and touched the edge of each foot with the tip of their lips.

15.16. For to speak or to ask for anything, unless she bade it, was permitted to no one. For the state had come to servility, having her as its teacher of slavishness.

15.17. And so the affairs of the Romans were being ruined, by the tyrant's apparent excess of simplicity,

15.18. and by Theodora's harshness and exceeding peevishness. For in the simplicity was instability, and in the peevishness was the impossibility of getting anything done.

15.19. In their mind and manner of life, then, the difference between them appeared; but common to them were avarice and the lust for murders and the speaking of truth to no one.

15.20. For both were exceedingly apt at lying; and if anyone of those who had offended Theodora was said to have committed some small fault and one in no way worth mention, she would at once fabricate against the man charges that did not belong to him, and magnify the matter to a great evil.

15.21. And a multitude of accusations would be heard, and there was a court for the overthrow of the established order, and judges were assembled, gathered by her, who were to contend with one another, which of them might be most able to please the empress, beyond the others, by his inhumanity in judgment, in accordance with her will.

15.22. And thus she would at once have the victim's property entered in the public registers, and, having most bitterly tortured him—though perhaps he was of noble descent from of old—she by no means disdained to punish him with exile or death.

15.23. But if it chanced that one of those she favored was convicted of unjust murders or of any other of the greatest crimes, she would deride and mock the eagerness of the accusers and compel them, unwilling, to keep silent about what had happened.

15.24. And the most serious matters she would turn into farce whenever she pleased, as though she had made a business of it on a stage and in a theater.

15.25. And once a certain patrician, an old man who had long held office—whose name, though I know it well, I shall by no means mention, lest I make my insult of him unending—being unable to recover from one of her servants a great sum of money owed him, came in to her, intending to accuse the man who had contracted with him and to beg her to help him to his just rights.

15.26. But Theodora, learning of this beforehand, charged the eunuchs that, when the patrician should come to her, they should all encircle him and listen to her as she spoke, and she told them beforehand what they were to answer in response.

15.27. And when the patrician came into the women's quarters, he did obeisance as he was accustomed to do obeisance to her, and, like one in tears, said: "Mistress, it is a hard thing for a man of patrician rank to be in need of money.

15.28. For what brings to others pardon and pity, this in the case of this dignity is set apart for insult.

15.29. For any other man whatever, in the utmost want, may by saying this very thing to his creditors at once be quit of the trouble from them; but a man of patrician rank, having no means to pay his creditors what he owes, would be most ashamed to say this; and saying it he could never persuade them that it is impossible for poverty to dwell together with this order.

15.30. And if he should persuade them, it would befall him to have suffered the most shameful and grievous of all things.

15.31. Well then, mistress, I have creditors—some who have lent me their own money, and some who have borrowed from me.

15.32. And those who have lent, most constantly pressing me, I am unable, out of respect for my rank, to put off; but those who owe me, since they are not of patrician rank, resort to certain inhuman pretexts.

15.33. I beseech you, therefore, and supplicate and beg you to help me to my just rights

15.34. and to deliver me from my present troubles." So he spoke. And the woman answered in a chant, "Patrician So-and-so," and the chorus of eunuchs, taking it up, answered back,

15.35. "You have a great hernia." And again, when the man had supplicated and made a speech like to what he had said before, in the same way the woman answered and the chorus answered back, until the wretched man, giving up, did obeisance as was his custom and went off home.

15.36. For the greater part of the year she stayed in the suburbs by the sea, and especially in the place called Herion; and from this the great throng of her attendants were held by much hardship.

15.37. For they were short of necessities and exposed to the dangers of the sea, especially if a storm, as it might be, fell upon them, or the whale appeared somewhere there.

15.38. But they themselves thought the troubles of all other men no matter at all, provided only that it was open to them to live in luxury.

15.39. But what manner of character Theodora showed toward those who had offended her, I shall now make clear, mentioning, of course, a few things, lest I should seem to labor without end.

16.1. When Amalasuntha, wishing to be quit of her sojourn among the Goths, resolved to change her life and was planning to travel to Byzantium, as I have said in my earlier books, Theodora, reckoning that the woman was of noble birth and a queen, and exceedingly fair to look upon and most acute at devising whatever she wished, but holding her magnificence and especially her masculine bearing in suspicion, and at the same time fearing her husband's fickleness, conceived her jealousy on no small grounds, but resolved to entrap the woman to her death.

16.2. So she at once persuaded her husband to send Peter alone as ambassador to Italy.

16.3. As he set out, the emperor charged him with the things I have related in the appropriate books—where, for fear of the empress, it was impossible for me to make known the truth of what was done.

16.4. But she charged him only this: that he should as quickly as possible make away with the woman, and to set him riding on the hope of great rewards if he should do what was bidden,

16.5. once he had disposed of the woman. And he, when he came to Italy (for human nature does not know how to go reluctantly to unjust murder, when perhaps some office or great sums of money lie before it in hope), I do not know what exhortation he made to Theudatus, persuaded him to make away with Amalasuntha. And from this he advanced to the rank of master, and to the greatest power and, most of all men, to hatred.

16.6. So the affair of Amalasuntha ended in this.

16.7. Now Justinian had a secretary, Priscus by name, exceedingly wicked and a Paphlagonian and fitted to please his patron in character, but very well-disposed toward him and supposing that he met with like treatment from him; for which reason he very quickly became master of great wealth unjustly.

16.8. This man, as one who put on airs and tried to set himself against her, Theodora slandered to her husband.

16.9. And at first she accomplished nothing; but not long after she herself, putting the man aboard ship in the middle of winter, sent him wherever she pleased, and, shaving him, compelled him to become a priest against his will.

16.10. And he, pretending that he knew nothing of what was being done, neither searched out where in the world Priscus was, nor kept him thereafter in memory, but sat in silence as though seized with lethargy; the man's money, however, of which a little had been left him,

16.11. she plundered entirely. And when a suspicion fell on her of being love-stricken for one of her servants, Areobindus by name, a barbarian by birth, but comely and a young man, whom she had appointed her steward, wishing to clear herself of the charge—although, they say, she was demonically in love with the man—she resolved for the present to torture him most bitterly for no cause; but as for the rest, we have learned nothing concerning him, nor has anyone seen him to this day.

16.12. For if she wished to conceal any of her doings, this remained unspoken and unremembered by all, and it was no longer permitted either for one who knew to report it to any of his intimates, or for one who wished to learn to inquire, however curious he might be.

16.13. For no such fear of any tyrant has there been since men have existed, since it was not even possible for any of those who had offended her to escape notice.

16.14. For a multitude of spies reported to her what was said and done both in the marketplace and in the houses.

16.15. So whenever she did not wish the punishment of a victim to become known, she did the following.

16.16. Summoning the man, if he happened to be one of distinction, she alone, handing him over to one only of her servants, would charge him to convey him to the farthest bounds of the Roman empire.

16.17. And he, at an untimely hour of the night, putting the man, veiled and bound, aboard ship, and going with him to the place where he had been ordered by the woman, would there hand him over most secretly to one well able for this service, charging him to guard the man most securely and forbidding him to tell anyone, until either the empress should take pity on the wretch, or he should, after a long time, in a lingering death by the hardship there, waste away and die; and then he would depart.

16.18. And a certain Basianus, a Green, a young man of no obscurity, who had reviled her, she held in anger. Therefore Basianus (for he was not unaware of this anger) fled to the church of the Archangel.

16.19. But she at once set upon him the authority over the populace, charging him not at all with the reviling, but bringing against him the charge of pederasty.

16.20. And the authority, raising the man from the sanctuary, tortured him with an unbearable punishment; and the whole populace, when they saw a body that was free-born and reared in indulgent living from the first in such calamities, were at once stung with grief at the suffering, and with wailing cried out as loud as heaven, begging off the young man.

16.21. But she punished him still more, and cutting off his genitals destroyed him without refutation, and entered his property in the public registers.

16.22. So whenever this little woman was in anger, neither was any sanctuary secure, nor the prohibition of any law, nor the intercession of a city, sufficient to rescue the victim, nor did anything else of all things avail her.

16.23. And holding a certain Diogenes in anger as being a Green—a man of wit and beloved by all and by the emperor himself—she was no less eager to bring a false charge of unnatural intercourse against him.

16.24. So persuading two of his servants, she set them up as accusers and witnesses against their master.

16.25. But since he was examined not secretly and most privily, as was the custom, but in public, with many judges chosen, and not undistinguished, on account of Diogenes' reputation—when the words of the servants did not seem, to the judges who weighed things exactly, sufficient for the verdict, especially as they were mere boys, she shut up Theodore, one of Diogenes' intimates, in the customary little chambers.

16.26. There she went about the man with many flatteries and many tortures. And when nothing advanced for her, she ordered them to wind a cord of oxhide around the man's head about the ears and to twist and tighten the cord.

16.27. And Theodore supposed that his eyes had leaped out, leaving their proper place; yet he resolved to fabricate nothing of what had not happened.

16.28. Therefore the judges acquitted Diogenes, the suit being unsupported by witnesses, and the city held a festival on this account with all the people.

17.1. But this turned out thus. And it was told at the beginning of this account what things she did to Belisarius and Photius and Bouzes.

17.2. Two partisans of the Blues, Cilicians by birth, setting upon Callinicus, the governor of Cilicia Secunda, with much uproar, began to lay unjust hands upon him, and killed his groom, who stood close by and tried to defend his master, with the governor and the whole populace looking on.

17.3. And he put to death by law the partisans, who were convicted both of many other crimes and of this murder; but she, learning of it, and to show that she espoused the cause of the Blues, while he still held the office impaled him on the tomb of the murderers for no reason.

17.4. And the emperor, pretending to weep and lament the dead man, sat grunting, and though he made many threats against those who had assisted in the deed, he did nothing; the money of the dead man, however, he by no means disdained to plunder.

17.5. But Theodora was also at pains to devise punishments for sins against the body. At any rate, gathering up more than five hundred prostitutes in the middle of the marketplace, who plied their trade for three obols—just enough to live on—and sending them across to the opposite shore, she shut them up in the monastery called Repentance, compelling them to change their way of life.

17.6. Some of these threw themselves down from a height by night, and thus were released from the unwilling change.

17.7. There were two girls in Byzantium, sisters, born not only of a father and three generations of consuls, but from of old of the first blood in the senate.

17.8. These, having already come to marriage, it befell to become widows on the death of their husbands. At once Theodora, selecting two common and loathsome men, was eager to wed them to these sisters, charging that they were not living chastely.

17.9. And fearing lest this should happen, they fled to the sanctuary of Sophia, and coming to the divine font held fast with all their might to the basin there.

17.10. But the empress brought upon them such necessity and hardship that, wishing to be quit of the troubles there, they were eager to exchange these for their marriage. So no place remained for her undefiled or inviolate.

17.11. These, then, were wedded against their will to beggarly and outcast men far below their own rank, although there were noble suitors at hand for them.

17.12. And their mother, who had herself become a widow, daring neither to wail nor

17.13. to weep aloud at the calamity, was present at the betrothal. But afterward Theodora, expiating the pollution, resolved to console them with public misfortunes.

17.14. For she appointed each of the men to office. And to the girls there came no comfort even so, but irreparable and unbearable sufferings were inflicted by these men upon nearly all the subjects, which will be told in my later books.

17.15. For to Theodora neither the dignity of office nor of the state nor anything else was a care, provided only that her will be accomplished.

17.16. Now she happened to have conceived by one of her lovers, while she was still on the stage; and perceiving the misfortune late, she did everything, as was her custom, to procure abortion, but by no device could she destroy the untimely child, since it was not far from having become of human form.

17.17. Therefore, since nothing advanced, she let the attempt go and was compelled to bear it. And the father of the child, seeing her at a loss and vexed, because, having become a mother, she would no longer be able to work with her body as before, and perceiving truly that she would make away with the infant, took it up and, naming it John, since it was male, departed for Arabia, whither he was bound.

17.18. And when he was about to die, and John was now a youth, the father told him the whole story concerning his mother.

17.19. And he, when his father had vanished from among men, having performed all the customary rites for him, after some time came to Byzantium and announced the matter to those who always made the approaches to his mother.

17.20. And they, supposing that she would reckon nothing in a human manner, reported to the mother that her son John had come.

17.21. And the woman, fearing lest the report should become known to her husband, bade the boy come into her sight.

17.22. And when she saw him present, she handed him over to one of her servants,

17.23. to whom she was wont always to commit such matters. And in what manner the wretch vanished from among men I cannot say, but no one has been able to see him to this day, not even after the empress' death.

17.24. At that time it befell nearly all women too to be corrupted in character. For they sinned against their husbands with all license, the deed bringing them no danger or harm, since even those caught in adultery remained unscathed; and going at once to the empress, and turning the tables, and bringing a countersuit on charges that had never occurred, they would haul their husbands to court.

17.25. And it remained for the men, though unconvicted, to repay the dowry double, and, having been scourged, to be carried off for the most part to prison, and again to look on at their adulterous wives decked out and being lechered by their lovers more fearlessly. And many of the adulterers even obtained honor from this very deed.

17.26. Therefore most men thereafter, suffering unholy treatment from their wives, most gladly kept silent, unscourged, granting them their license by seeming not to have detected them.

17.27. She thought fit to govern all the affairs of the state by her own judgment. For she appointed the offices and the priesthoods, examining and guarding most carefully against this one thing only: that the man seeking the dignity should not be honorable or good, and so unable to serve her in what she commanded.

17.28. And she administered all marriages by a certain divine authority, and people no longer made any voluntary betrothal before marrying.

17.29. For a wife suddenly came to each man, not because she pleased him, as is the custom even among the barbarians, but because it was Theodora's pleasure.

17.30. And this same thing befell the women who were married to suffer in turn. For they were compelled, by no means willing, to live with their husbands.

17.31. And often, taking the bride down from the bridal chamber for no reason, she would dismiss the bridegroom unwed, saying only, with irritation, that the woman displeased her.

17.32. This she did to many others and to Leon, who held the office of referendary, and to Saturninus, the son of Hermogenes who had been master. For this Saturninus had a cousin betrothed to him, a maiden, free-born and respectable, whom her father Cyrillus had betrothed to him after Hermogenes had departed from life.

17.33. And when the bridal chamber had been prepared for them, she shut up the bridegroom, and he was led to the other bridal chamber, and married, wailing and lamenting, the daughter of Chrysomallo.

17.34. This Chrysomallo had long ago been a dancing-girl and again a courtesan, but at that time, with another Chrysomallo and Indaro, she had her dwelling in the Palace.

17.35. For instead of the phallus and the life in the theater, they now managed affairs here.

17.36. And Saturninus, having lain with the bride and found her deflowered, disclosed to one of his intimates that he had married no virgin.

17.37. And when this came to Theodora, she ordered her servants, since he was giving himself airs and being puffed up about nothing that concerned him, to toss him aloft, like children who go to a schoolmaster, and, scourging him many times across the back, she forbade him to be a chatterer.

17.38. What things she did to John the Cappadocian have been told in my earlier books. These she contrived in anger against the man—not for the wrongs he was doing the state (and here is the proof: of those who later did more dreadful things to the subjects, she did this to none), but because in other respects he dared to go openly against her, and slandered her to the emperor, so that she came near to being set at war with her own husband.

17.39. For of the causes, as I said, it is here most necessary for me to state the truest.

17.40. And when she had shut him up in Egypt, having suffered what I have already disclosed concerning him, even so she got no satiety of the man's punishment, but never ceased searching out false witnesses against him.

17.41. And four years later she was able to find two Greens of the partisans in Cyzicus, who were said to be among those who had risen against the bishop.

17.42. And she went about them with flatteries and arguments and threats, so that one of them, terrified and lifted up by hopes, referred the pollution of the murder to John.

17.43. But the other by no means resolved to go against the truth, although he was so racked by the torture that he was likely very soon to die.

17.44. Therefore she was by no means able to make away with John by this screen, but she cut off the right hands of these two young men—of the one because he would not bear false witness, of the other so that the plot might not become wholly manifest.

17.45. And while these things were being done in the public part of the marketplace, Justinian pretended to understand nothing at all of what was being done.

18.1. And that he was not a man, but some demon, as has been said, in human form, one might prove by weighing the magnitude of the evils he did to mankind.

18.2. For in the excess of his deeds the power of the doer too becomes manifest.

18.3. Now to state exactly the measure of those destroyed by him would never, it seems to me, be possible for any of all men, or for any but God.

18.4. For one might sooner, I think, number all the sand than how many this emperor destroyed. Reckoning over the country, for the most part, that has come to be empty of inhabitants, I say that ten thousand times ten thousand myriads perished.

18.5. For Libya, vast as it is in extent, was so destroyed that for a man going a long way it is hard and a thing worth mention to meet anyone.

18.6. And yet of the Vandals who there took up arms there were eighty thousand, and of their wives and children and servants who could guess the number?

18.7. And of the Libyans who formerly dwelt in the cities and farmed the land and worked the trade of the sea—which I myself for the most part chanced to witness—how could anyone be able to number the multitude of all those men? And far more numerous than these were the Moors there, all of whom, with their wives and offspring, it befell to be destroyed.

18.8. And many Roman soldiers, too, and those who followed them from Byzantium, the earth hid. So that if one insists that five million human beings perished in Libya, he would not, I think,

18.9. do justice to the matter. The reason was that, as soon as the Vandals were defeated, he took no care to secure the mastery of the country, nor did he provide that the guard of its good things should be safe in the goodwill of the subjects, but at once and with no delay he summoned Belisarius, charging against him a usurpation that in no way concerned him, so that, administering things thenceforth at his own discretion, he might swallow up the whole of Libya and plunder it.

18.10. At any rate he at once sent assessors of the land and imposed certain most bitter taxes that had not existed before. And he laid claim to whatever of the lands was best, and excluded the Arians from their own mysteries.

18.11. And he was in arrears with the soldiers' pay, and otherwise became burdensome to the soldiers. From these things factions, springing up, ended in great ruin.

18.12. For he could never abide by the established order, but it was his nature to throw everything into confusion and turbidness.

18.13. And Italy, which is not less than three times the size of Libya, has become everywhere empty of men much more than Libya. So that the measure of those destroyed here too

18.14. will be plain from near at hand. For the cause of what befell in Italy has already been related by me before. For everything that he did wrong in Libya, he did wrong here too.

18.15. And by sending in addition the so-called accountants, he held back and at once ruined everything.

18.16. Now the rule of the Goths, before this war, extended from the land of the Gauls to the borders of Dacia,

18.17. where the city of Sirmium is. The Germans, then, held Gaul and the greater part of the land of the Venetians, when the Roman army came to Italy.

18.18. And Sirmium and the regions there the Gepids hold; but everything, in a word, is utterly empty of men.

18.19. For some the war, and some disease and famine—which naturally follow war—made away with.

18.20. And Illyria and all Thrace—it would extend from the Ionian Gulf to the suburbs of Byzantium, in which is Greece and the land of the Chersonesites—the Huns and Sclaveni and Antae, overrunning it nearly every year since Justinian took over the Roman empire, wrought irreparable deeds upon the people there.

18.21. For more than two hundred thousand Romans, I think, were killed or enslaved there in each inroad, so that the desolation of Scythia, as it were, came to be everywhere in this land.

18.22. Such, then, are the things that befell in Libya and Europe in the war. But the Saracens, overrunning the eastern Romans from Egypt to the borders of Persia continuously through all this time, so utterly worked their destruction that all the regions there became most thinly peopled, and it will never, I think, be possible for a man, search as he may, to find the measure of those thus destroyed.

18.23. And the Persians under Chosroes, invading the rest of the Roman empire four times, both razed the cities and, of the men they captured in the cities they took and in every region, killing some and carrying others off with them, made the land empty of its inhabitants wherever they chanced to fall.

18.24. And from the time they drove into the land of Colchis, it has befallen them and the Lazi and the Romans to be destroyed up to the present.

18.25. Yet neither the Persians nor the Saracens nor the Huns nor the Sclaveni nation nor any others of the barbarians chanced to withdraw from Roman soil unscathed.

18.26. For both in their inroads, and much more in sieges and battles, dashing against many reverses, they were no less destroyed along with the rest.

18.27. For not only the Romans, but also nearly all the barbarians, had their fill of Justinian's murderousness.

18.28. For Chosroes himself was both wicked in character and—as I have said in the appropriate books—this man furnished him all the pretexts for the war.

18.29. For he did not think fit to suit his actions to the occasions, but did everything out of season: in peace and truce ever contriving, with a treacherous mind, pretexts of war against his neighbors; but in war doing nothing properly, and making his preparations for action exceedingly sluggishly out of avarice, and, instead of zeal about these matters, scanning the heavens and being meddlesome about the nature of God; neither giving up the war, because he was murderous and a man of blood, nor able to overcome his enemies, because, out of pettiness, he did not busy himself with what was needful.

18.30. So under his reign the whole earth was sufficiently filled with the blood of men, of Romans and barbarians, of nearly all alike.

18.31. These, then, are the things that befell, in a word, everywhere in the land of the Romans in war during this time.

18.32. But reckoning over the things that befell in faction-strife in Byzantium and in every city, I think the murder of men that came about here was no less than that in the war.

18.33. For since justice and the equal correction of crimes were anything but present, but one of the two factions was especially favored by the emperor, neither did the other keep quiet, but the one through being worsted, the other through over-confidence, looked ever to despair and recklessness; and, sometimes going against one another in a mass, sometimes fighting in small bands, or even man against man laying ambushes, as it might be, for two-and-thirty years, letting slip no opportunity, they both wrought irreparable deeds against one another and were for the most part destroyed by the authority set over the populace.

18.34. The retribution for crimes, however, fell for the most part upon the Greens. And further, the punishment of the Samaritans and of the so-called heretics filled the Roman empire with murder.

18.35. These things are now recalled by me only in summary, since they have been sufficiently related by me a little before.

18.36. These things, then, befell all men through the demon that came to be in a body, of which he himself, having become emperor, gave the causes. But what evils he wrought upon men by a hidden power and a demonic nature, I shall make clear.

18.37. For while this man administered the affairs of the Romans, many other calamities too befell, which some insisted came about by the presence and contrivance of this evil demon, while others said that the Divinity, hating his works and turning away from the Roman empire, gave place to the avenging demons to accomplish these things

18.38. thus. For the river Scirtus, overflowing Edessa, became the artificer of countless calamities for the people there, as will be written by me in my later books.

18.39. And the Nile, rising as was its custom, but not subsiding at the proper times, wrought dreadful deeds upon some of the inhabitants, which I have related before.

18.40. And the Cydnus, encompassing Tarsus, overflowed nearly the whole of it and flooded it for many days, and did not abate until it had wrought irreparable evils upon it.

18.41. And earthquakes overthrew Antioch, the first city of the East, and Seleucia, which is settled near it, and Anazarbus, the most distinguished city in Cilicia.

18.42. Of those destroyed along with these cities who could be able to number the measure? And one might add Ibora and Amasia, which happened to be the first city in Pontus, and Polybotus in Phrygia, and the city the Pisidians call Philomede, and Lychnidus among the Epirotes, and Corinth, which were from of old most populous.

18.43. For all these alike it befell, in this time, to fall down in earthquake, and nearly all their inhabitants to perish along with them.

18.44. And the plague, which I mentioned before, supervening, carried off about half the portion of the surviving men.

18.45. Such was the destruction of men that came about while Justinian first administered the state of the Romans, and later held the imperial power.

19.1. How he took away all their money I now proceed to tell, first relating a dream-vision which it befell one of the men of distinction to see at the beginning of Justin's reign.

19.2. He said that it seemed to him in the dream that he stood somewhere in Byzantium beside the seashore, which is opposite Chalcedon, and saw this man standing in the middle of the strait there.

19.3. And first that he drank up the whole water of the sea, so that he thought he stood thereafter on dry land, the strait no longer flowing there; then that another water, full of much filth and refuse, welling up from sewers on either side, came to that place, and that he drank up this too at once, and again made bare the ground of the strait.

19.4. So the dream-vision declared such things. Now this Justinian, when his uncle Justin took over the kingship, found the state full of public money.

19.5. For Anastasius, having been the most provident and the most thrifty of all sovereigns, fearing—what came to pass—lest his successor in the kingship, perhaps short of money, should plunder his subjects, filled his treasuries to overflowing with gold, and so measured out his life.

19.6. All of which Justinian very quickly squandered, partly on sea-buildings that had no reason, partly on his friendship toward the barbarians; and yet one would have thought it sufficient even for an exceedingly prodigal emperor for a hundred years.

19.7. For those set over the treasuries and the storehouses and all the other royal moneys insisted that Anastasius, having ruled the Romans more than twenty-seven years, left in the public treasury three thousand two hundred centenaria of gold.

19.8. But in the nine years that Justin held the imperial power, while this Justinian inflicted confusion and disorder on the state, four thousand centenaria were brought into the kingship in no lawful way, and of all this not one thing was left, but, while Justin was still alive, it had been spent by this man in the manner I have said in my earlier books.

19.9. For there is no device by which any account or reckoning or measure could appear of what he was able, throughout all that time, to appropriate improperly and to spend.

19.10. For, like some ever-flowing river, day by day plundering and despoiling his subjects, everything at once flowed away to the barbarians.

19.11. Having thus at once drained off the public wealth, he turned his gaze upon his subjects, and at once took away the properties of very many, plundering and using violence for no reason, and, when no crimes had been committed, bringing charges against those who seemed prosperous in Byzantium and in every city—against some polytheism, against others a heretical and unorthodox belief among Christians, against others pederasty, against others love of holy women, or some other unlawful intercourse, against others a pretext of faction, or affection for the Green party, or insult against himself; or, bringing some other charge whatever, he became the self-appointed heir of the dead, or even of the living, as it might be, having been adopted by them.

19.12. For such were his most august actions. And how, having managed the faction that arose against him, which they called Nika, he at once became heir to all the members of the senate, and how, before the faction, he took away the property of not a few, each man privately, I have already related a little earlier.

19.13. He bestowed great sums of money, letting slip no opportunity, on all the barbarians—eastern and western, to the north and to the south, as far as those settled in Britain, and the nations everywhere on the inhabited earth, of whom we had not even heard a report before, but, first seeing them, then learned the name of the race.

19.14. For they themselves, learning the man's character, flowed together to him from all the earth to Byzantium.

19.15. And he, with no hesitation, but exceedingly delighted with this business, and thinking it a kind of windfall to drain off the wealth of the Romans and pour it out to barbarian men or to certain sea-surges, ever day by day sent each of them away with ample money.

19.16. And thus all the barbarians became utterly masters of the wealth of the Romans—either receiving money from the emperor, or plundering the Roman empire, or selling back their captives, or selling truces; and the dream-vision which I just mentioned chanced to be fulfilled in this way for him who saw it.

19.17. And he was able to contrive other modes too of plundering his subjects, which shall be told at once, so far as I am able, by which he was able, not all at once but little by little, sufficiently to plunder the properties of all.

20.1. First, he set over the populace in Byzantium, for the most part, a prefect, who was to allot to those who held the shops a yearly revenue from this source, and to set them in the power of selling their wares at whatever price they wished.

20.2. And it came about that the people there bought their provisions paying triple the price, and had no one to whom they might complain about it.

20.3. And great harm arose from the business. For, since a part of this revenue went to the kingship, the authority set over the matter wished to grow rich from it.

20.4. And thence the servants of the authority, who had laid hold of this shameful service, and those who held the shops, having seized the license to break the law, wrought irreparable deeds upon those who then had need to buy, not only taking many times the price, but also contriving certain unspeakable adulterations in the wares.

20.5. Then, establishing many of the so-called monopolies, and selling off the welfare of his subjects to those who thought fit to make a business of this abomination, he himself, taking in exchange a price for this transaction, would depart, and to those who had bargained with him he granted to manage the business

20.6. as they wished. And this was done openly, without disguise, in all the other offices too. For, the emperor taking always a certain portion, not large, of the spoils, the offices, and those set over each matter, more fearlessly plundered those who fell in their way.

20.7. And as though the long-established offices were not enough for this, he contrived two others over the state, although the authority set over the populace formerly prosecuted all crimes.

20.8. But, in order that there might always be more informers, and that the bodies of men who had committed no fault might be tortured much more quickly, he resolved to devise these offices.

20.9. And one of them, in word, he set over thieves, giving it the name Praetor of the Demes; and to the other he assigned the perpetual punishment of those who committed pederasty and of those who had unlawful intercourse with women, and of anyone whose conduct toward the Divinity was not orthodox,

20.10. giving it the name Quaesitor. So the Praetor, if he found among the stolen goods anything worth much, thought fit to bring this to the sovereign, declaring

20.11. that the owners of these things in no way appeared. And in this way the emperor was able always to get a share of the most precious goods. And the so-called Quaesitor, making away with the victims, brought to the emperor what he wished, but himself no less grew rich on the property of others in no lawful way.

20.12. For the servants of these offices neither brought accusers nor furnished witnesses of what they had done, but throughout all this time, unaccused and unconvicted, meeting men most secretly, they killed them and took away their money.

20.13. Later this man of blood charged these offices and the one set over the populace all alike to take care of all crimes, telling them to contend with one another which of them might be able to destroy more, and more quickly.

20.14. And they say that one of them at once asked him, if anyone should be slandered before the three, to whom the cognizance of the matter should belong; and he, taking it up, said, "To whichever of them outstrips the others by being first."

20.15. And the office called that of quaestor he disposed of with no decency—an office which all, so to speak, of the former emperors took special care of, that those who administered it should be both experienced in other respects and especially wise in the laws, and plainly most incorruptible by money, since this would not happen without great ruin to the state, if those holding this office were either held by some inexperience or given over to avarice.

20.16. But this emperor first appointed to it Tribonian, whose practices have been sufficiently described in my earlier books.

20.17. And when Tribonian had vanished from among men, he took away a portion of his property, although a son and a multitude of descendants had been left to him, when the final day of life came upon the man, and appointed to this honor Junilus, a Libyan by birth, who had not even a hearsay knowledge of law, since he was not even one of the rhetoricians—knowing Latin letters, indeed, but as for Greek never having attended a schoolmaster, nor able even to speak the Greek tongue (at any rate, often, when he was eager to utter a Greek word, he incurred the laughter of his attendants)—but demonically zealous for base gain, who in no way sank into shame at selling the emperor's letters in public.

20.18. And for the sake of a single gold stater he by no means hesitated to stretch out his hand to those he met.

20.19. And for no less than seven years the state incurred this ridicule.

20.20. And when Junilus too came to the measure of his life, he appointed Constantinus to this dignity—a man not unpracticed in the laws, but altogether young and not yet come to the trial of forensic contest, but the most thievish and most boastful of all men.

20.21. This man had become exceedingly desired and most dear to Justinian, since through him this emperor by no means disdained always to steal and to give judgment.

20.22. Therefore Constantinus in a short time acquired great wealth, and used a prodigious arrogance, treading the air and despising all men; and if any wished to pay him much money, they were able, by depositing it with certain of his most trusted men, to set right what they were eager for.

20.23. But to meet him or consort with him was possible for none of all men, except as he went at a run to the emperor or departed from there—not at a walk, but with much haste and speed, lest those who approached should fasten on him some unprofitable distraction.

21.1. So matters stood thus for this emperor. And by the prefect of the praetorians more than thirty centenaria were exacted each year in addition to the public taxes.

21.2. To which he gave the name "air-money," indicating, I suppose, this: that the levy was not a regular or customary one, but he received it as borne to him always by some chance, as it were out of the air—whereas it ought to have been charged to the works of his own wickedness.

21.3. By the name of which those appointed to the office more fearlessly used their robberies against the subjects forever.

21.4. And these they thought fit to bring to the sovereign, while they themselves surrounded themselves with royal wealth with no trouble.

21.5. Of which Justinian thought fit to take no notice, watching for the opportunity when, as soon as they should surround themselves with some great quantity of wealth, he might, bringing some unfounded charge against them, be able to take away their whole property at once. This he did also to John the Cappadocian.

21.6. So all, at any rate, who held this office in this time suddenly became rich beyond all measure, except two—Phocas, whom I mentioned in my earlier books as one who took the utmost care of justice (for this man remained clean of any gain in his office), and Bassus, who took the office in a later time.

21.7. Of whom neither was able to keep the honor a year, but, as useless and altogether out of keeping with the times, they were put out of office within a few months.

21.8. But, lest my account be endless if I relate each case, these things were done in the other offices in Byzantium too.

21.9. And everywhere in the Roman empire Justinian did the following. Selecting the most wicked of men to do mischief, he sold them the offices for great sums.

21.10. For to no temperate man, or one who had any share of understanding, would it occur to pay out his own money in order to plunder those who had done no wrong.

21.11. And having received this gold from those who bargained with him, he set them in the power of doing everything to his subjects.

21.12. From which they were going, by ruining whole regions with their people, to be rich thereafter themselves.

21.13. And these men, having borrowed the purchase-price of the cities from the bank at heavy interest, and paid it over to the seller, when they came to the cities, ever showing every form of evil toward their subjects, set their care on nothing else than that they might pay their creditors the agreed sum and themselves thereafter be ranked among the richest—the business bringing them no danger or disgrace, but rather some glory, the more men, who fell in their way, they were able to kill for no reason and to plunder.

21.14. For the name of murderer and robber came to be reckoned for them as that of the man of action.

21.15. But all those holding offices whom he perceived to be flourishing in wealth, these he netted with pretexts and at once took away all their money in a body.

21.16. And after this he wrote a law that those seeking offices should swear that they would indeed be clean of all theft, and would neither give anything for the sake of the office

21.17. nor take anything. And he laid on all the curses that have been named by the most ancient men, if any of those who had subscribed should transgress.

21.18. But not a year after the law had been passed, he himself, disregarding what had been written and cursed, and more fearlessly, without shame on this account, exacted the prices of the offices—not in secret, but in the public part of the marketplace.

21.19. And those who had bought the offices, having sworn the oath, plundered everything more than before.

21.20. Later he contrived yet another thing beyond report. The offices which he thought the most worthy in Byzantium and in the other cities, he resolved no longer to sell as before, but, searching out hirelings, he appointed them, charging them, as wage-earners, to bring him all the spoils.

21.21. And they, having received their wage, more fearlessly gathered and carried off everything from all the land; and a hireling authority went round, plundering the subjects under the name of office.

21.22. So the emperor, scrutinizing carefully all the time, set over affairs those who in very truth were the foulest of all, and ever, tracking out

21.23. this evil, he hit upon it. So when, at any rate, he set the first wicked men over the office and the license of power brought their depravity to light, we marveled how human nature could contain so much wickedness.

21.24. But when those who in time succeeded them in office were able to surpass them by far in excess, men were at a loss with one another how those formerly reputed the most wicked—as though they themselves had been honorable and good in their practices—were outdone by their successors, and again how the third surpassed the second in all wickedness, and after them others, by the novelties of their crimes, attached to their predecessors a good name.

21.25. And as the evil dragged on, it befell all to learn by the fact that wickedness is wont to grow upon men without limit, and, nourished by the learning of those who came before, and led on by the license of impunity to the harming of those who fall in its way, ever seems to reach as far as the reputation of the injured can be reckoned to extend.

21.26. So, then, matters stood thus for the Romans concerning their magistrates. And often, when an army of Hunnish enemies had enslaved and plundered the Roman empire, the generals of the Thracians and Illyrians, having resolved to set upon them as they withdrew, leaped back, when they saw letters from the emperor Justinian forbidding them the attack upon the barbarians, on the ground that they were necessary as allies to the Romans against the Goths, perhaps, or against some other enemies.

21.27. And from this these barbarians plundered, as enemies, and enslaved the Romans there, but with the rest of the booty and the captives, as friends and allies of the Romans, made their way home.

21.28. And often some of the farmers there, driven by longing for their own children and wives who had been enslaved, gathering in a body, chanced to kill many as they withdrew, and were able to take away their horses with all the booty; yet from this they came to the trial of harsh affairs.

21.29. For certain men sent from Byzantium thought fit, with no hesitation, to torture them and maim their bodies and punish them with fines, until they should give up all the horses which they had taken from the barbarians.

22.1. When the emperor and Theodora had done away with John the Cappadocian, they wished to appoint someone to his office, and made it their common concern to find a man more wicked, scanning around for such an instrument of their tyranny and searching out all the dispositions of men, that they might be able to destroy their subjects still more quickly.

22.2. For the present, then, they set up Theodotus in his place over the office, a man not malicious, but not very well able to please them.

22.3. But afterward they went about searching everything. And, beyond expectation, they found a certain money-changer, Peter by name, a Syrian by birth, whom they called by the surname Barsymes; who long ago, sitting at the copper-money table, gained the most shameful profits from this very business, cleverly contriving the theft of small coins and ever cheating those who dealt with him by the quickness of his fingers.

22.4. For he was skillful at stealing freely the property of those who fell in his way, and, when caught, at swearing oaths and cloaking the fault of his hands by the audacity of his tongue.

22.5. And being enrolled among the soldiers of the prefects, he advanced to such a degree of monstrousness as to please Theodora most of all and to serve most readily the impossible things of her unjust desires.

22.6. Therefore they at once relieved Theodotus, whom they had appointed after the Cappadocian, of his office, and set Peter over it,

22.7. who carried out for them everything according to their mind. For he was seen, robbing the soldiers of all their pay, neither ashamed nor afraid ever; but he set the offices up for sale even more than before, and, having made them more dishonorable, he sold them to those who did not shrink from carrying on this unholy trade, expressly permitting those who bought the offices to use the lives and properties of their subjects as they wished.

22.8. For to him at once, and to the man who had paid the price of the office, the license to plunder and otherwise to seize was a part of the bargain. And the sale of men's livelihoods proceeded from the very head of the state,

22.9. and the contract for the ruin of the cities was transacted among the chief men of the law-courts; and in the public part of the marketplace a lawful robber went about, giving to his deed the name of the collection of the moneys paid for the prices of the offices, while there was no hope of any correction of the crimes.

22.10. And of all those who served the office, who were many and of good repute, he ever drew to himself the most wicked.

22.11. And this fault he did not commit alone, but also all those who held this honor before and after.

22.12. The like fault was committed in the office of the so-called master too, and among the Palatines, who are wont always to perform the service concerning the treasuries and the so-called private estates and the patrimony, and, in a word, in all the offices established in Byzantium and in the other cities.

22.13. For from the time this tyrant administered affairs, in each office, partly he himself, partly the man holding the honor, appropriated for no reason the revenues belonging to the servants, and those who served them under orders, reduced to the utmost poverty, were compelled all this time to serve most slavishly.

22.14. And when a great deal of grain had been brought to Byzantium, and most of it had now rotted, he laid it upon the eastern cities, a fixed share for each, although it was not fit for human food; and he laid it on, not at the price at which the best grain was wont to be sold, but at one much higher; and those who bought it were compelled, after paying out great sums at most burdensome prices, then to throw the grain into the sea or into some drain.

22.15. And when, besides, a great quantity of grain that was sound and not yet rotten was stored there, he resolved to sell this too to most of the cities short of grain.

22.16. For in this way he made twice the money that the treasury had formerly reckoned from the taxpayers for this grain.

22.17. But when, the next year, the yield of the crops was no longer equally abundant, the grain-bearing fleet came to Byzantium more scantily than the need required; and Peter, at a loss in his straits, thought fit to buy a great quantity of grain from the regions in Bithynia and Phrygia and Thrace.

22.18. And it was necessary for those dwelling there to carry the loads to the sea with much labor, and to bring them to Byzantium with danger, and to be paid a small price, nominally, by him, while the loss to them came to such magnitude that they were glad if anyone allowed them to make a gift of the grain to the public household and to pay out yet another sum for it.

22.19. This is the burden which they are wont to call "compulsory purchase." And since not even so was there enough grain in Byzantium for the need, many made complaint of the matter to the emperor.

22.20. And at the same time the soldiers too, nearly all of them, since they had not received their accustomed pay, were held by uproar and much disturbance throughout the city.

22.21. The emperor, then, both came to seem angry with him, and wished to relieve him of the office, both for these reasons that have been stated, and because he had heard that demonically great sums of money had been hidden away by him,

22.22. which he chanced to have stolen from the public treasury. And so it was. But Theodora would not allow her husband. For she loved Barsymes extravagantly, it seems to me, on account both of his wickedness and of his harming the subjects so signally.

22.23. For she herself was most cruel and utterly full of inhumanity, and thought fit that her servants should be in their character as suited to her as possible.

22.24. And they say that she became unwillingly well-disposed to him because she had been bewitched by Peter.

22.25. For this Barsymes was overcuriously zealous about sorcerers and demonic things, and admired the so-called Manichaeans and by no means disdained to be their patron openly.

22.26. And yet, even hearing this, the empress did not let go her goodwill toward the man, but rather resolved on this account to shelter and cherish him still more.

22.27. For she too, having consorted with magicians and sorcerers from childhood, since her pursuits led her to this, lived believing in this matter and ever taking courage from it.

22.28. And they say that she made Justinian pliant not so much by flattering him as by the constraint from the demons.

22.29. For this man was not so good-hearted or just or steadfast toward the good as ever to be superior to such a plot, but he was plainly a slave to the love of murders and of money, and not hard for those who deceived and flattered him to lead.

22.30. And even in the actions most zealously pursued by him he would change for no reason and was most like dust.

22.31. For this reason none even of his kinsmen or otherwise his acquaintances ever had any secure hope in him, but he was forever shifting his mind toward his pursuits.

22.32. So, being thus easy of access to the sorcerers, as has been said, and brought under Theodora's hand with no trouble, the empress especially cherished Peter beyond measure, as one zealous in such matters.

22.33. So the emperor barely relieved him of the office which he had formerly held, but, at Theodora's insistence, not long after appointed him commander of the treasuries, relieving John of this honor—who chanced to have taken it up a few months before.

22.34. Now this John was a Palestinian by birth, gentle and exceedingly good, and neither knew how to provide himself resources of unjust money, nor ever harmed any of all men.

22.35. At any rate the whole people loved him especially. For this very reason he in no way pleased Justinian and his consort, who, whenever they saw among those who served them anyone honorable and good beyond their expectation, dizzy and exceedingly vexed, were eager by every device to thrust him out as quickly as possible.

22.36. So, then, Peter, succeeding this John too, presided over the royal treasuries and again became most responsible to all for great calamities.

22.37. For, cutting off the greater part of the money which, by way of solace, was ordained of old to be furnished each year to many by the emperor, he himself, improperly, grew rich on the public funds and brought a portion of them to the emperor.

22.38. And those deprived of the money sat round in great mourning, since he thought fit to issue the gold coin not as before, but having made it lighter—a thing never done before.

22.39. So matters concerning the magistrates stood thus for the emperor. But how he everywhere destroyed the owners of the lands I now proceed to tell.

22.40. It would suffice for us, having mentioned a little before the magistrates sent to all the cities, to indicate the sufferings of these people too. For these magistrates first, by force, plundered the owners of the lands; and even so, all the rest shall be told.

23.1. First, whereas it was the custom from of old for each holder of the Roman empire not once only but often to grant to all his subjects remission of the remnants of public debts, so that neither those in want, who had no means at all of paying these remnants, might be continually choked, nor the tax-collectors might have pretexts to bring false charges against those of the taxpayers who owed nothing—this man, in two-and-thirty years' time, did nothing of the kind for his subjects.

23.2. And from this it was necessary for those in want to flee and never return to anyone.

23.3. And the informers wore down the more respectable men, brandishing accusation against them as having from of old paid the tax more scantily than the levy laid upon the land.

23.4. For the wretches feared not only the new exaction of the tax, but also being burdened for so great a length of time with taxes that did not concern them at all.

23.5. At any rate many, surrendering their own property to the informers or to the public treasury, departed.

23.6. Then, when the Medes and Saracens had plundered the greater part of the land of Asia, and the Huns and Sclaveni and Antae the whole of Europe, and had razed some of the cities to the ground, and most exactly extorted money from others, and enslaved the people with all their goods, and made every region empty of its inhabitants by their daily inroads, he remitted the tax to none of all, except only a year's tax to the cities that had been captured.

23.7. And yet if, like the emperor Anastasius, he had resolved to grant the captured cities seven years' remission of taxes, I think that even so he would not have done what was needful, since Cabades departed having done the buildings hardly any harm, but Chosroes burned everything and razed it to the ground, and inflicted greater sufferings on those who fell in his way.

23.8. And to these men, to whom he remitted this ridiculous part of the tax, and to all the others, who had often received the Median army, while the Huns and Saracens continually plundered the eastern land, and the barbarians of Europe no less ever did these things, day by day, to the Romans there—this emperor at once became harsher than all the barbarians.

23.9. For by compulsory purchases and by the so-called impositions and assessments the owners of the lands were ruined the very moment the enemy had withdrawn.

23.10. What these names are and mean I shall make clear.

23.11. They compel the owners of the lands to maintain the Roman army according to the measure of the levy laid upon each, the prices paid being not as the present need allows, but as is permitted and fixed, and not inquiring whether the necessities happen to be available to them in their region.

23.12. And it has come about that these wretched men are under necessity to bring in the provisions for soldiers and horses, buying all these at much higher prices, and that too from a region, as it might be, lying far from the place where the camp happens to be, and to measure them out to the suppliers of the soldiers not, as is the law for all men,

23.13. but as those men wish. And this is the matter which is called "compulsory purchase," from which it befalls all the owners of the lands to be enervated.

23.14. For from it they are under necessity to pay a yearly tax not less than tenfold, since to them it befell not only, as has been said, to furnish supplies to the army, but also often to convey grain to Byzantium—men who had suffered these things. For not only the so-called Barsymes dared to commit this abomination, but before him the Cappadocian, and after Barsymes those who took over this dignity of office.

23.15. Such, then, is the matter of compulsory purchase. But the name of imposition is a kind of ruin, unforeseen, suddenly coming upon the owners of the lands and rooting out from them the hope of their livelihood.

23.16. For when the tax of lands that have become deserted and impoverished—whose owners and farmers it has already befallen either to perish utterly, or, abandoning the land of their fathers, to hide on account of the evils pressing upon them—they do not disdain to lay upon those not yet entirely ruined.

23.17. Such is the name of imposition too, which, as was likely, became prevalent especially in this time. As for the assessments, having stated them most briefly, I shall be quit of them, and they stand thus.

23.18. It was necessary, especially in these times, for the cities to be involved in many penalties; the occasions and modes of which I forbear to state at present, lest my account be endless.

23.19. These the owners of the lands paid off, depositing a price according to the measure of the levy laid upon each.

23.20. But the evil did not stop with these things for them; rather, when the plague encompassed the whole inhabited world, and not least the Roman empire, and made away with the greater part of the farmers, and from this the lands had, as was likely, become deserted, he used no mercy toward their owners.

23.21. For he never ceased exacting the yearly tax, not only as he had laid it upon each, but also the share of the neighbors who had perished.

23.22. And besides them there were all the other things I mentioned just now, ever pressing upon those who had been unfortunate in the possession of their lands; and besides, they were to serve the soldiers, who were lodged in the finest and most precious of their chambers, while they themselves, all this time, had their dwelling in the meanest and most neglected of their little houses.

23.23. All these things it befell men to suffer continually under the reign of Justinian and Theodora, since in this time neither war nor any other of the greatest evils chanced to abate.

23.24. And since we have mentioned dwellings, neither must we pass over this, that the owners of the houses in Byzantium, providing lodging there for the barbarians, who were about seventy thousand, not only could in no way profit from their own property, but had other troubles inflicted on them besides.

24.1. Nor indeed must the things he did to the soldiers be passed over in silence, over whom he set the most wicked of all men, bidding them gather as much money as possible from this source, knowing well that a twelfth part of what was raised would be set aside for them.

24.2. And he gave them the name accountants. And these contrived the following each year. The soldiers' pay is by law furnished not equally to all alike, but to those still young and lately enlisted the allowance is smaller, while to those who have toiled and are now about midway in the register it advances to a greater amount.

24.3. To those, however, who have grown old and are about to be discharged from service, the allowance is far more ample, so that they themselves, living thereafter privately, may have enough to subsist on, and, whenever it befalls them to measure out their life, may be able to leave some solace of their property to those of their household.

24.4. So time, ever raising the lower soldiers to the grades of those who have died or been discharged from service, apportions to each, by seniority, the pay from the public treasury.

24.5. But the so-called accountants would not allow the names of the dead to be removed from the registers, although they were destroyed in great numbers, especially in the frequent wars; nor indeed did they any longer fill up the registers, and that for a long time.

24.6. And from this it came about that the number of those in service was ever more deficient for the state, and that the surviving soldiers, thrust by those long since dead into a lower grade than their due, were left behind, and received their pay at a lower rank than was fitting, while the accountants apportioned to Justinian the soldiers' money all this time.

24.7. And besides, they wore down the soldiers with many other forms of penalty, as though in requital for their dangers in the wars, charging some that they were Greeks—as though it were not permitted for any of those from Greece ever to be brave—and others that they were serving without the emperor's command, though they showed letters of the emperor about this, which the accountants dared to impugn with no hesitation; and others, that some days had been left them away from their comrades.

24.8. Later, some of the guards in the Palace too, being sent throughout the whole Roman empire, searched, nominally, in the registers for those least fit for service, and dared to strip the belts from some of them as useless or grown old, who thereafter, begging their food from the pious in the public part of the marketplace, became to all who met them ever occasions of tears and lamentation; while from the rest, lest they too suffer the same, they exacted great sums of money, so that it befell that the soldiers, enervated in many ways, became poorer than all and were in no way eager to make war.

24.9. Whence it befell the Romans that their affairs in Italy too were ruined. There Alexander the accountant, being sent, dared with no hesitation to bring these charges against the soldiers, while from the Italians he exacted money, saying that he was punishing what they had done in their dealings with Theoderic and the Goths.

24.10. And not only the soldiers were oppressed by poverty and want at the hands of the accountants, but also those who served all the generals, who were very numerous and formerly of great repute, were afflicted with hunger and dire poverty.

24.11. For they had no means from which to provide themselves the accustomed things.

24.12. And I shall add yet one other thing to these, since my account of the soldiers leads me to it. The emperors of the Romans in former times established everywhere on the borders of the state a very great number of soldiers for the guarding of the frontiers of the Roman empire, especially in the eastern part, checking thereby the inroads of the Persians and Saracens,

24.13. whom they called the limitanei. These the emperor Justinian at first treated so carelessly and shabbily that their paymasters were four or five years in arrears with their pay; and whenever peace came about between the Romans and Persians, these wretched men were compelled, as though they too were to enjoy the benefits of the peace, to make a present to the public treasury of the pay owed them for a stated period; and later he took from them even the very name of military service for no reason.

24.14. Thereafter the borders of the Roman empire remained without garrisons, and the soldiers suddenly looked to the hands of those who were wont to be pious.

24.15. Other soldiers, not fewer than three thousand five hundred, were from the beginning established for the guarding of the Palace, whom they call scholarii.

24.16. And to these the public treasury was ever wont to furnish more pay than to all the others. These the former emperors selected by merit from the Armenians and brought to this honor.

24.17. But from the time Zeno took over the kingship, license was given to all, even men utterly unmanly and unwarlike, to lay claim to this title.

24.18. And as time went on, they bought this service even by depositing slaves as the price. So when Justin took over the kingship, this Justinian appointed many to this honor, gathering great sums of money.

24.19. And when he perceived that there was no longer any vacancy in these registers, he inserted yet another two thousand, whom they called supernumeraries.

24.20. But when he himself held the kingship, he at once shook off these supernumeraries, paying them back not one thing of their money.

24.21. As for those within the number of the scholarii, he contrived the following. Whenever it was likely that an army would be sent to Libya or Italy or against the Persians, he would charge them to make ready, as though they would campaign with it, though he knew well that they were least fit for service; and they, fearing lest this should happen, would for a stated period give up their pay. This the scholarii often befell to suffer.

24.22. And Peter, all the time he held the office of the so-called master, ever, day by day, wore them down with unspeakable thefts.

24.23. For he was gentle and least of all knew how to commit outrage, but he was the most thievish of all men and utterly full of shameful filth. This Peter I mentioned in my earlier books also, as having wrought the murder of Amalasuntha, the daughter of Theoderic.

24.24. There are also others in the Palace much more worthy, since the public treasury is wont to furnish them more pay too, inasmuch as they deposit greater prices for the title of service, who are called domestics and protectors and are from the beginning unpracticed in the works of war.

24.25. For only for the sake of rank and appearance are they wont to be enrolled in the Palace. And some of them are settled in Byzantium, others, from of old, in Galatia and other regions.

24.26. But these too Justinian, ever frightening them in the manner described, compelled to give up the pay that belonged to them.

24.27. In summary it shall be told thus. It was the law that every five years the emperor should present each of the soldiers with a fixed sum of gold.

24.28. And sending every five years everywhere in the Roman empire, they furnished five gold staters to each soldier.

24.29. And it was by no means possible for this not to be done always by every means. But from the time this man administered the state, he did nothing of the kind, nor intended to, though now thirty-two years' time has been worn away, so that some forgetfulness of this practice came upon men.

24.30. I proceed to tell yet another mode of his plundering of the subjects. Those who, for the emperor and the offices in Byzantium, either bear arms or handle documents or render any other service, are at the beginning placed last in the registers, but as time goes on, ever rising into the place of those who die or withdraw, each advances in his own rank to this point, until a man, having mounted the first grade, comes at last to the term of his honor.

24.31. And to those who have come to this dignity such great sums of money have been ordained of old that more than a hundred centenaria of gold each year were gathered for these men, and they were cared for in their old age, and many others for the most part shared in the benefit with them from this source, and the affairs of the state ever advanced thereby to great prosperity.

24.32. But this emperor, depriving them of nearly all these things, brought evils both upon them and upon other men. For poverty, fastening on them first, then made its way through the others too, who had formerly had some share in the benefit.

24.33. And if anyone should reckon up the loss that befell them from this source over the two-and-thirty years, he will find the measure of what it befell them to be deprived of.

25.1. Thus did this tyrant treat the soldiers. But what he did to merchants and sailors and craftsmen and traders, and through them to all the rest, I now proceed to tell.

25.2. There are two straits, one on either side of Byzantium: one at the Hellespont, between Sestos and Abydos; the other at the mouth of the so-called Euxine Sea, where the place called the Sanctuary is.

25.3. Now in the strait of the Hellespont there was no customhouse in the public service, but a certain official, sent by the emperor, sat at Abydos, examining whether any ship bearing arms was going to Byzantium without the emperor's leave, and whether anyone was setting out from Byzantium without carrying the documents and seals of the men on whom this office is laid (for it is not lawful for anyone to set out from Byzantium without having been released by the men who serve in the office of the so-called master); and he exacted from the owners of ships a toll that gave no offense, but the man holding this office thought fit to receive it as a kind of wage for this work.

25.4. The man sent to the other strait, however, ever received his wage from the emperor, and examined exactly both these things which I have mentioned, and whether anything was being conveyed to the barbarians settled along the Euxine Sea, which it is not lawful to convey from Roman soil to the enemy. But it was not permitted to this man to take anything from those who sailed there.

25.5. But from the time Justinian took over the kingship, he established a public customhouse in each strait, and, sending two salaried officials there always, gave them the agreed wage, but charged them to bring him from there as much money as possible by every means.

25.6. And they, eager to show nothing but their goodwill toward him, departed having plundered absolutely all the prices of the goods from those who sailed.

25.7. So in each strait he did these things; but in Byzantium he contrived the following. He set up one of his intimates, a Syrian by birth, Addaeus by name, whom he charged to procure him some profit from the ships that put in there.

25.8. And this man no longer let go from there any of the ships that put in at the harbor of Byzantium, but either penalized the shipmasters by the prices of their own vessels, or compelled them to carry cargoes to Libya and

25.9. Italy. And some of them no longer wished either to take on cargo or to work the sea, but, burning their own ships, gladly departed at once.

25.10. Those, however, who were under necessity to make their living from this trade, took triple wages thereafter from the merchants and carried cargo; and it came about for the merchants that they must make good this loss for themselves at the expense of those who bought the goods; and thus it befell that the Romans were starved to death by every device.

25.11. So these things went on in the state. But what he did to the coinage, too, I think I must not pass over.

25.12. For whereas the money-changers were formerly wont to give out, for one gold stater, two hundred and ten obols, which they call folleis, to those who dealt with them, they themselves, contriving private gains, ordained that only a hundred and eighty obols should be given for the stater. In this way they cut off a sixth part of each gold coin from all men.

25.13. And since these emperors, having gathered most of the wares into the so-called monopolies, ever, day by day, choked those who wished to buy anything—only the clothing-shops being left untouched by them—they devised the following concerning these too.

25.14. Garments of silk were wont from of old to be made in Berytus and Tyre, cities of Phoenicia.

25.15. And the merchants and master-craftsmen and artisans of these wares dwelt there from of old, and from there this merchandise was carried to all the earth.

25.16. But when, under Justinian's reign, those engaged in this trade in Byzantium and the other cities sold this clothing at a higher price, alleging that at the present time more than before was being paid for it to the Persians, and that there were now more tithe-houses in the land of the Romans, the sovereign, giving everyone the impression that he was indignant at this, by law forbade all that this kind of clothing should be more than eight gold pieces the pound.

25.17. And a penalty was laid on those who should transgress the law, that they should be deprived of their existing property. These things seemed to men utterly impracticable and impossible. For it was not possible for the merchants, having bought these goods at a higher price, to sell them at a lower to those who dealt with them.

25.18. Therefore they no longer thought fit to carry on this trade, but more stealthily made little by little their sales of the goods left to them—plainly to certain of their acquaintances, to whom it was a pleasure, or in some way a necessity, to spend their money in adorning themselves with such things.

25.19. And the empress, perceiving these things from certain who whispered them, although she did not investigate the rumors, at once took away all the goods from the men, and fined them a centenarium of gold besides. Now the head of this trade, among the Romans, is the man set over the royal treasuries.

25.20. So, having appointed Peter, surnamed Barsymes, to this honor, not long after they allowed him to do unholy deeds.

25.21. For he required all the rest to keep the law exactly, but, compelling the craftsmen of this work to work for himself alone, he sold the goods, no longer concealing it, but in the public part of the marketplace—the ounce of ordinary dye at not less than six gold pieces, and of the royal dye, which they are wont to call holovera, at more than twenty-four gold pieces.

25.22. And from this he brought the emperor great sums of money, while he himself, surrounding himself with more, escaped notice;

25.23. and this, beginning with him, remained forever. For he alone, to this time, is established openly as both merchant and retailer of this merchandise.

25.24. So the merchants who formerly carried on this trade in Byzantium and in every city, both by sea and on land, bore, as was likely, the evils that came from the trade.

25.25. And in the cities the whole populace, so to speak, of those mentioned suddenly became beggars. For craftsmen and handworkers were compelled, as was likely, to wrestle with hunger, and many on this account, changing their country, fled and departed to the land of the Persians.

25.26. And the commander of the treasuries alone, ever making a business of this merchandise, thought fit to bring to the emperor a portion, as has been said, of the revenue from it, while he himself, carrying off the greater part, grew rich on public calamities. So these things went on thus.

26.1. In what manner he was able to destroy the ornaments and adornments of the cities, both in Byzantium and in every city, we shall now tell.

26.2. First he resolved to abolish the dignity of the advocates. For he at once took away all their rewards, by which they were formerly wont to live in luxury and to pride themselves, being relieved from their pleading, and ordered the litigants to stand by sworn statements; and from this they were insulted and fell into much despondency.

26.3. And when he had taken away, as has been said, all the properties of the senators and of the others reputed prosperous in Byzantium and in the whole Roman empire, nothing remained for this profession but to be idle.

26.4. For men had nothing worth any legal dispute over which they might contend with one another. So at once, from being many they became few, and from being distinguished they became utterly inglorious everywhere on earth, and were held, as was likely, by much poverty, and departed carrying off only the insult that came from their work.

26.5. And further, he made the physicians and the teachers of the liberal arts to be in want of necessities. For the maintenance which the former emperors ordained to be furnished from the public treasury to these professions, all this he took away.

26.6. And moreover, whatever revenues, civic or for spectacles, the inhabitants of all the cities had provided from their own resources, these too he dared to transfer and to mingle with the public taxes.

26.7. And thereafter no account was made of physicians or teachers, nor was anyone able to take thought for any public building, nor were lamps lit in the cities at public expense, nor was there any other solace for their inhabitants.

26.8. For the theaters and hippodromes and wild-beast hunts were for the most part all idle—where his wife happened to have been born and reared and educated.

26.9. And later he ordered these spectacles to be idle in Byzantium too, so that the treasury might not furnish the accustomed sums to many men, almost beyond number,

26.10. whose living came from this source. And there was, both privately and publicly, grief and dejection, as though some other affliction from heaven had fallen upon them, and life for all was without laughter.

26.11. And nothing else at all was carried about among men in their conversations, whether they were at home or shopping or spending time in the sanctuaries, except misfortunes and sufferings and an excess of ever-newer disasters.

26.12. So things stood thus for the cities. What remains for the account it is worth while to state. There were two consuls of the Romans each year, one in Rome, the other in Byzantium.

26.13. And whoever was called to this honor was to spend on the state more than twenty centenaria of gold—a little of his own,

26.14. but the greater part received from the emperor. And this money, going for the most part to the others I mentioned, and to the poorer among the livelihoods, and especially to all those on the stage, ever raised up the affairs of the city.

26.15. But from the time Justinian took over the kingship, these things were no longer done at the proper times; rather, at first a consul was established for the Romans after a long interval, and in the end they did not see the thing even in a dream—from which the affairs of men were continually squeezed by a certain poverty, the emperor no longer furnishing the accustomed things to his subjects, while he took away their existing property by every means from every quarter.

26.16. So that this destroyer swallowed up all the public moneys and took away the properties of the senators, each privately and all in common—

26.17. I think I have related sufficiently. And how, going about with false accusations, he was able to take away the money of the others reputed prosperous, I think I have stated most fully—not, however, the soldiers and those who served all the magistrates and those serving in the Palace, the farmers and the possessors and owners of lands and those whose pursuits are in learning, but also the merchants and shipmasters and sailors and craftsmen and handworkers and traders and those whose living comes from pursuits on the stage, and indeed almost all the rest, so to speak, to whom the harm from this reaches.

26.18. And what he did to the beggars and the common people and the poor and those held by every infirmity, we shall now tell; for what he did concerning the priests will be told in my later books.

26.19. First, as has been said, having encompassed all the shops and established the so-called monopolies of the most necessary wares, he exacted from all men more than triple the prices.

26.20. And as for the other things, since they seemed to me innumerable, I would not, for my part, contend to recount them in an endless account; but from those who bought bread he plundered most bitterly for all time—men who, being handworkers and poor and held by every infirmity, could not but buy bread.

26.21. For he himself thought fit to carry off from this three centenaria each year, so that the loaves became poorer and full of ash; for not even to this impiety of base gain did this emperor go reluctantly.

26.22. And under this pretext those on whom this office was laid, contriving private gains, themselves most easily came round to a great wealth, while they ever, beyond expectation, wrought a man-made famine for the poor in times of plenty, since it was not at all permitted to bring grain in from anywhere else, but it was necessary for all to eat the bread they bought.

26.23. And seeing the aqueduct of the city broken and bringing only a small portion of water into the city, they took no notice of it and would not pay out anything at all for it, although a great throng was ever choking about the fountains, and all the baths were closed; and yet on sea-buildings and other senseless things he poured out a quantity of money for no reason, contriving them everywhere in the suburbs, as though the royal palaces could not contain him, in which all the former emperors had ever wished to live.

26.24. So it was not from thrift of money, but for the destruction of men, that he resolved to neglect the building of the aqueduct, since no one in all time was more ready than this Justinian of all men both to acquire money wickedly and to pour it out at once still more wickedly.

26.25. So of the two things left to the utterly poor and beggarly in drink and food—water and bread—this emperor harmed them in both, as I have related, making the one unavailable to them and the other much dearer.

26.26. And he did these things not only to the beggars in Byzantium, but also to some of those dwelling elsewhere, as I shall presently relate.

26.27. For when Theoderic had taken Italy, he left the soldiers serving in the Palace of Rome where they were, so that some trace of the old state might be preserved there, leaving one allowance a day for each.

26.28. And these were very numerous. For among them were the so-called silentiaries and domestics and scholarii, to whom nothing was left but the name of military service, and this allowance, barely sufficient for them to subsist on, which Theoderic ordered them to pass on to their children and descendants.

26.29. And to the beggars who had their dwelling beside the church of Peter the Apostle, he ordained that the treasury should ever furnish three thousand bushels of grain each year; all of which these men continued to receive until Alexander Scissors came to Italy.

26.30. For this man at once, with no hesitation, resolved to take all of it away. On learning this, Justinian, sovereign of the Romans, approved this deed and held Alexander in still greater honor than before. On this journey Alexander did the following to the Greeks too.

26.31. The guard-post at Thermopylae the farmers of the regions there cared for from of old, and guarded the wall there in rotation, whenever an inroad of some barbarians was likely to fall upon the Peloponnese.

26.32. But this Alexander, being there at the time, pretending to take thought for the Peloponnesians, said he would not entrust the guard-post there to farmers.

26.33. So, establishing there about two thousand soldiers, he ordained that their pay should not be furnished from the public treasury, but transferred all the civic and spectacle moneys of all the cities in Greece to the public treasury under this pretext, that from there these soldiers should be fed; and from this, in all the rest of Greece, and not least in Athens itself, neither was any public building renewed nor was any other good thing able to come about.

26.34. Justinian, however, with no delay confirmed what had been done there by Scissors.

26.35. So these things went on thus. But we must come also to the poor in Alexandria. There was a certain Hephaestus among the rhetoricians there, who, taking over the rule of Alexandria, put a stop to the populace's rioting, appearing terrible to the partisans, but displayed to all the inhabitants there the utmost of utmost evils.

26.36. For at once establishing all the shops of the city in the so-called monopoly, he allowed no other of the merchants to carry on this trade, but, having become the sole retailer of all, he delivered all the wares, plainly fixing their prices by the power of his office; and the city of Alexandria was choked by the scarcity of necessities, where formerly all things had been cheap enough even for the utterly poor; and especially he pressed them concerning bread.

26.37. For he himself bought the grain from the Egyptians alone, not allowing anyone else to buy so much as a single bushel, and in this way disposed of the loaves and the prices of the loaves as he wished.

26.38. So he himself in a short time surrounded himself with untold wealth, and satisfied the emperor's desire in this matter.

26.39. And the populace of the Alexandrians, in fear of Hephaestus, bore their present lot quietly; but the sovereign, out of respect for the money ever brought in to him, cherished the man beyond measure.

26.40. And this Hephaestus, planning how he might be able to win the emperor's mind much more, contrived in addition the following.

26.41. Diocletian, who had been sovereign of the Romans, ordained that a great quantity of grain should be given each year from the public treasury of the Alexandrians to those in need.

26.42. This the populace then distributed among themselves and passed it on to their descendants down to the present.

26.43. But Hephaestus took away from those who lacked necessities up to two hundred thousand bushels yearly from this source and put it into the public treasury, writing to the emperor that these men had received it neither justly nor as was expedient for affairs up to now.

26.44. And from this the emperor, confirming the deed, held him in greater esteem, while those of the Alexandrians who had this hope of their livelihood were, in their most pressing need, deprived of it by this inhumanity.

27.1. The deeds of Justinian, then, are so many that not even all time could suffice for the account of them.

27.2. But it will be enough for me, having selected a few out of all, to tell those by which his whole character will be plainly evident to those who come after, as one who was a dissembler, and cared neither for God nor for priests nor for laws, nor for the populace though it seemed zealously devoted to him, nor indeed for any shame at all, or for the advantage of the state, or for whatever might be of service to it, or for how his deeds might find some pretext; nor did anything else enter his mind but the taking away of the money lying in all the earth. I shall begin here.

27.3. He appointed a high priest for the Alexandrians, Paul by name. And there happened to be a certain Rhodon, a Phoenician by birth, holding at that time the rule of Alexandria.

27.4. To him he gave orders to serve Paul in all things with all eagerness, so that none of his commands might remain unfulfilled.

27.5. For in this way he thought it would be possible to win over the heretics of Alexandria to the synod at Chalcedon.

27.6. Now there was a certain Arsenius, a Palestinian by birth, who had become an intimate of the empress Theodora in matters of the greatest urgency, and from this, surrounding himself with much power and great wealth, came to senatorial rank, though he was most foul.

27.7. This man was a Samaritan, but, in order not to give up his existing power, resolved to take the name of the Christians.

27.8. His father and brother, however, trusting in his power, continued in Scythopolis, sheltering their ancestral belief, and, by his counsel, wrought irreparable things upon all the Christians.

27.9. Therefore the citizens, rising against them, killed both by a most pitiable death, and from this many evils befell the Palestinians.

27.10. At that time, then, neither Justinian nor the empress did him any harm, although he had been most responsible for all these troubles, but they forbade him to go to the Palace any longer; for on his account they were most constantly troubled by the Christians.

27.11. This Arsenius, thinking to gratify the emperor, not long after was sent with Paul to Alexandria, to serve him in other things and to help him win over the Alexandrians with all his power.

27.12. For he insisted that during this time, when it befell him to be shut out of the Palace, he had become not unpracticed in all the doctrines of the Christians.

27.13. This grieved Theodora; for she pretended to go against the emperor in this, as I have said in my earlier books.

27.14. So when they came to Alexandria, Paul handed over to Rhodon a certain deacon, Psoes by name, to be put to death, declaring that he alone stood in his way against carrying out what the emperor had decided.

27.15. And Rhodon, led by the emperor's letters, which were many and very urgent, resolved to torture the man. And he, racked by the torture, died at once.

27.16. When this came to the emperor, the empress pressing most strongly, the emperor at once stirred up everything against Paul and Rhodon and Arsenius, as though he had forgotten all that he himself had commanded these men.

27.17. So, appointing Liberius, a man of patrician rank from Rome, to the rule of Alexandria, he sent some of the distinguished priests to Alexandria to make a judgment of the matter, among whom was also Pelagius, the archdeacon of Rome, who assumed the person of Vigilius the high priest, this having been enjoined upon him by Vigilius.

27.18. And the murder being proven, they at once deposed Paul from the priesthood; and the emperor took off the head of Rhodon, who had fled to Byzantium, and entered his property in the public registers, although the man produced thirteen letters which the emperor had written to him, urging and most earnestly insisting and commanding him to serve Paul in everything he ordered and to oppose him in nothing whatever, so that he might be able to carry out what had been decided in the way of doctrine.

27.19. And Liberius, by Theodora's decision, impaled Arsenius, and the emperor resolved to confiscate his property, although he had nothing to charge against him except that he had lived with Paul.

27.20. Whether these things were done by him rightly or in some other way, I cannot say; but for what purpose I have said them I shall now make clear.

27.21. Paul, after some time, coming to Byzantium and paying out seven centenaria of gold to this emperor, thought fit to recover the priesthood, on the ground that it had been taken from him by no law.

27.22. And Justinian received the money graciously and held the man in honor, and promised to appoint him at once high priest of the Alexandrians, although another held the honor—as though he did not know that he himself had killed those who had lived with him and dared to serve him, and had taken away their properties.

27.23. So the Augustus, insisting most earnestly, pressed the matter, and Paul was plainly likely to recover the priesthood by every means.

27.24. But Vigilius, who was present at the time, by no means resolved to yield to the emperor when he gave such an order. For he said he was not able himself to make his own verdict subject to revision,

27.25. indicating the judgment of Pelagius. So nothing else ever mattered to this emperor except the taking away of money. And another thing of the same kind shall be told.

27.26. There was a certain Faustinus, a Palestinian by birth, a Samaritan from of old, but taking the name of the Christians under the compulsion of the law.

27.27. This Faustinus came to senatorial rank and held the rule of the region; from which, being relieved not long after and coming to Byzantium, certain of the priests slandered him, bringing the charge that he was sheltering the customs of the Samaritans and had done unholy things to the Christians dwelling in Palestine.

27.28. And Justinian seemed to grow fierce and to make much of it on this account, that, while he held the Roman empire, the name of Christ should be derided by anyone whatever.

27.29. So those of the senate who made the judgment of the matter punished Faustinus with exile, the emperor pressing them.

27.30. But the emperor, having received from him as much money as he wished, at once made his own verdict subject to revision and reversed what had been judged.

27.31. And Faustinus, again holding his former dignity, consorted with the emperor, and, being appointed administrator of the royal lands in Palestine and Phoenicia, more fearlessly accomplished everything that was his pleasure.

27.32. In what manner, then, Justinian thought fit to shelter the rights of the Christians—though not many things have been said by me, but from these few it is possible to draw proof.

27.33. And how, with no hesitation, he shook the laws when money was at stake shall be shown in a very brief account.

28.1. There was a certain Priscus in the city of the Emesenes, who knew well how to imitate other men's handwriting, and was exceedingly skillful at this evil art.

28.2. Now the church of the Emesenes happened to have become heir to a certain distinguished man many years before.

28.3. This man was of patrician rank, Mammianus by name, brilliant in birth and in abundance of money.

28.4. And under Justinian's reign Priscus, searching out all the houses of the aforesaid city, if he found any flourishing in wealth and able to bear the loss of great sums, having investigated their forefathers exactly, and lighting upon their old writings, made many documents as though written by those men, acknowledging that they would pay great sums of money to Mammianus as having received these from him by way of deposit.

28.5. And the gold acknowledged in these forged documents came to not less than a hundred centenaria.

28.6. And he imitated demonically the handwriting of a certain man who, while Mammianus was alive, sitting at the time in the marketplace and holding great repute for his truthfulness and his other virtue, executed all the documents of the citizens, sealing each with his own hand—whom the Romans call a tabellio—and handed them over to those who administered the affairs of the church of the Emesenes, who had agreed that a certain portion of the money to be procured from this source should be set aside for him.

28.7. But since the law stood in the way, bringing all other suits within the bar of thirty years, and barring a few others, and the so-called mortgage suits, by the length of forty years,

28.8. they contrived the following. Coming to Byzantium and paying out great sums to this emperor, they begged him to help them work the destruction of the citizens, who owed nothing.

28.9. And he, having received the money, with no delay wrote a law that the churches should be barred from the suits belonging to them not within the proper times, but only after a hundred years, and that this should be valid not only in Emesa, but throughout the whole Roman empire.

28.10. And he appointed to adjudicate this matter for the Emesenes a certain Longinus, a man of action and exceedingly strong in body, who later held the office over the populace in Byzantium.

28.11. And those who administered the affairs of the church, having first brought a suit for two centenaria against one of the citizens out of the aforesaid documents, at once obtained judgment against the man, who had nothing at all to plead in his defense on account of so great a length of time and his ignorance of what had then been done.

28.12. And all the other men, alike exposed to the false accusers, sat in great mourning, and most of all the most distinguished of the Emesenes.

28.13. And as the evil was now flowing over most of the citizens, a certain providence of God came about, as follows.

28.14. Longinus ordered Priscus, who had wrought this whole intrigue, to bring him all the documents together; and when he drew back from the act, struck him with all his might.

28.15. And he, in no way bearing the blow of an exceedingly strong man, fell on his back, and, now trembling and terrified, and suspecting altogether that Longinus had perceived what had been done, confessed; and so, the whole intrigue being brought to light, the false accusation came to an end.

28.16. And these things he was ever, day by day, doing not only against the laws of the Romans, but this emperor was also eager to abolish those honored by the Hebrews.

28.17. For if ever the recurring time brought their Passover feast before that of the Christians, he would not allow the Jews to keep it at the proper times, nor in it to do anything to please God or to perform any of the rites among themselves.

28.18. And many of them those appointed over the offices, on the ground that they had tasted lamb at this time, fined with great sums of money, charging them with transgression against the state.

28.19. Knowing, then, countless other such deeds of Justinian, I would not set them down, since an end must be given to my account. For even by these it will be enough to indicate the man's character.

29.1. That he was both a dissembler and false, I shall now make clear. This Liberius, whom I mentioned just now, he relieved of the office he held, and appointed in his place John, an Egyptian by birth, surnamed Laxarion.

29.2. When Pelagius learned of this, being a great friend of Liberius, he inquired of the sovereign whether the report about Laxarion was true.

29.3. And he at once denied it, asserting that he had done nothing of the kind, and put into his hands letters to Liberius, charging him to hold fast most firmly to the office and in no way to give it up.

29.4. For he did not wish, he said, to relieve him of it at present. Now John had in Byzantium an uncle, Eudaemon by name, who had come to the rank of consul and was invested with much money, being at the time administrator of the emperor's private property.

29.5. This Eudaemon, when he had heard what has been said, himself too inquired of the emperor whether the office was secure for his nephew.

29.6. And he, denying what he had written to Liberius, wrote letters to John, charging him to hold fast to the office with all his power.

29.7. For he had, he said, taken no new resolve concerning it. By which John, persuaded, ordered Liberius to withdraw from the official residence, as one relieved of the office.

29.8. But Liberius declared he would by no means obey him, being plainly led himself too by the emperor's letters.

29.9. So John, arming his followers, went against Liberius, and he, with those about him, faced him in resistance. And a battle taking place, many others fell, and John himself, who held the office.

29.10. So, Eudaemon pressing most strongly, Liberius was at once summoned to Byzantium, and the senate, making a judgment of what had been done, acquitted the man, since the deed had come about not through his attacking, but through his defending himself.

29.11. The emperor, however, did not relent until he had penalized him in money secretly.

29.12. So Justinian knew how to speak the truth and was straight of tongue. But I think it not out of season to tell something incidental to this account. For this Eudaemon died not long after, having left many kinsmen, but neither making any will nor saying anything else at all.

29.13. And about the same time a certain man who had become commander of the eunuchs in the Palace, Euphratas by name, departed from life, leaving a nephew, but having made no disposition of his property, which was very great.

29.14. And both their properties the emperor took away, having become heir of his own accord, and paying out not so much as three obols to any of the lawful heirs.

29.15. With such respect did this emperor treat both the laws and the kinsmen of his intimates.

29.16. So too he took away the right of Irenaeus, who had died long before, although he had no claim against them whatever.

29.17. What follows on these things, which happened about the same time, I would not pass over in silence. There was a certain Anatolius who held the first place on the roll of the Ascalonites. His daughter one of the Caesareans took to wife,

29.18. Mamilianus by name, of an exceedingly distinguished house. And the girl was an heiress, since Anatolius had been father of her alone.

29.19. Now it was ordained of old by law that, whenever a councillor of any city should depart from among men leaving no male offspring, of the money he left a fourth should be given to the council of the city, while the heirs of the dead man should enjoy all the rest; but here too the sovereign, displaying a token of his own character, had recently written a law administering the matter the other way round, so that, whenever a councillor died childless of male offspring, his heirs should have the fourth, while all the rest the public treasury and the city roll should carry off.

29.20. And yet never, since men have existed, had the public treasury or an emperor any share in councillors' money.

29.21. This law, then, being in force, the final day of life came upon Anatolius, and his daughter divided his estate between the public treasury and the city council according to the law; and both the emperor himself and the Ascalonites of the roll wrote letters to her, releasing her from any dispute over these matters, on the ground that they had received what belonged to them rightly and justly.

29.22. Later Mamilianus too departed from life, who had become son-in-law to Anatolius, leaving one daughter, who alone, as was natural, held her father's property.

29.23. And afterward she too, while her mother was still living, came to the measure of life, having been wedded to one of the men of distinction, but having become mother of no offspring, female or male.

29.24. But Justinian at once laid hold of all the money, uttering that marvelous saying, that it was not holy for the daughter of Anatolius, now an old woman, to grow rich on the money both of her husband and of her father.

29.25. And, so that the woman might not thenceforth be ranked among the beggars, he ordained that this woman should receive a gold stater each day so long as she lived, setting this down in the writings by which he plundered this money: that he gave out this stater for the sake of piety. "For it is my custom," he said, "to do what is holy and pious."

29.26. But about these things it is enough to speak, lest my account become excessive, since it is not possible for a man to recall everything.

29.27. And that he made no account even of the Blues, who seemed to be favored by him, when money was at stake, I shall make clear.

29.28. There was a certain Malthanes among the Cilicians, son-in-law of that Leon who held, as I have said before, the honor of the so-called referendary.

29.29. This man he charged to check the acts of violence in Cilicia. And Malthanes, taking this pretext, wrought irreparable evils upon most of the Cilicians, and, plundering their money, sent part to the tyrant, while of the rest he thought fit to grow rich himself.

29.30. Now the others bore their present lot in silence; but those of the Tarsians who were Blues, taking courage in the license from the emperor, in the public part of the marketplace heaped many insults upon Malthanes, who was not present among them.

29.31. When Malthanes learned of this, bringing a great number of soldiers, he came at once to Tarsus by night, and sending the soldiers round to the houses at deep dawn, ordered them to take lodging.

29.32. And the Blues, supposing this to be an attack, defended themselves with what they had. So it befell that other evils came about in the dark, and that Damianus,

29.33. a man of the council, struck by an arrow, fell. Now this Damianus was the patron of the Blues there. When this came to Byzantium, the Blues, vexed, were held by much uproar throughout the city, and greatly troubled the emperor about the matter, and reviled Leon and Malthanes with most dreadful threats.

29.34. And the sovereign too pretended to grow no less fierce at what had been done. So he at once wrote a letter ordering that an inquiry and retribution be made for what Malthanes had done.

29.35. But Leon, paying out to him a quantity of gold, at once put a stop both to his anger and to his affection for the Blues; and the matter remaining unexamined, the emperor received Malthanes, who came to Byzantium to him, with much friendliness and held him in honor.

29.36. But the Blues, watching for him as he came out from the emperor, inflicted blows on him in the Palace, and would have made away with him, had not some of them prevented it—those who chanced to have already received money from Leon secretly.

29.37. And yet who would not call that state most pitiable, in which the emperor, taking a bribe, left the crimes unexamined, while the partisans, with the emperor in the Palace, dared with no hesitation to rise against one of the magistrates,

29.38. and to lay unjust hands upon him? Yet no retribution on this account came either upon Malthanes or upon those who rose against him. From these things, if anyone wishes, let him draw proof of the character of the emperor Justinian.

30.1. Whether he made any account of the advantage of the state, what he did to the public post and to the spies will show.

30.2. For the sovereigns of the Romans in former times, providing that everything should be reported to them most quickly and given over with no delay—both what befell at the hands of the enemy in each region, and what happened to the cities through faction or any other unforeseen calamity, and what was done by the magistrates and all others everywhere in the Roman empire, and so that those who conveyed the yearly taxes might be brought safely through, without delay and danger—established a swift public post everywhere in the following way.

30.3. For a day's journey of an unencumbered man they set up stations, in some places eight, in others fewer, but for the most part not less than five.

30.4. And up to forty horses stood at each station. And grooms in proportion to the number of horses were appointed at all the stations.

30.5. And, by frequent relays of the finest horses, those on whom this work was laid, riding always, accomplished, as it might be, a ten days' journey in a single day, and did all that I have just disclosed; and besides, the owners of the lands everywhere, especially if the lands happened to be in the interior, were on this account most prosperous.

30.6. For, selling each year to the public treasury the crops they had in surplus, for the feeding of the horses and grooms,

30.7. they made great sums. And it came about by these means that the public treasury ever received the taxes laid upon each, and gave them over at once to those who brought them in; and besides, the needs of the state were met.

30.8. So matters formerly stood thus. But this sovereign first abolished the post from Chalcedon as far as Dacibiza, and compelled all, against their will, to sail at once from Byzantium as far as Helenopolis.

30.9. So sailing in certain small boats, such as are wont to cross over there, when a storm, as it might be, fell upon them, they came into great danger. For, with urgent haste pressing upon them, it is impossible to watch for the right moment and to await the coming calm.

30.10. Then, along the road leading to the Persians, he allowed the post to remain in its former form, but for all the rest of the East, as far as Egypt, he established only one station for a day's journey, and that not of horses,

30.11. but of a few asses. Therefore what befalls in each region, being reported with difficulty and late, after the events, naturally meets with no help, while the owners of the fields, their crops rotting and lying useless, are ever without profit.

30.12. The matter of the spies is as follows. Many men were from of old fed at public expense, who, going to the enemy and getting into the Persian palaces, whether under the name of trade or in some other way, and searching out everything exactly, on returning to Roman soil were able to report to the magistrates all the secrets of the enemy.

30.13. And they, forewarned, kept guard, and nothing unforeseen befell them. This practice existed among the Medes too from of old. And Chosroes, indeed, having, as they say, made the spies' pay greater, enjoyed the providence that came from it.

30.14. For nothing of what was done among the Romans escaped him. But Justinian, spending nothing at all, wiped out the very name of spies from Roman soil; from which many other wrongs came about, and Lazica was captured by the enemy, the Romans having in no way learned where in the world the Persian king was with his army.

30.15. Moreover, the public treasury was from of old wont to maintain a great number of camels, which followed the Roman army when it went against the enemy, carrying all the supplies.

30.16. And then it was not necessary for the farmers to do forced transport, nor did the soldiers want for any necessity; but these too Justinian did away with, nearly all of them. Therefore now, when the Roman army goes against the enemy, it is impossible for any of what is needful to be done.

30.17. So, then, the most serious affairs of the state were borne along thus. But it is no worse to mention also one of his absurdities.

30.18. Among the rhetoricians in Caesarea there was a certain Evangelus, a man of no obscurity, who, a favoring breeze of fortune having come to him, became master of much money and much land.

30.19. And later he bought a certain seaside village, Porphyreon by name, for three centenaria of gold. Learning this, the emperor Justinian at once took away the property, paying out to him only a small portion of the price, and uttering this saying, that it could never be seemly for Evangelus, being a rhetorician, to be master of such a village.

30.20. But about these things, having mentioned them somewhat, we shall cease to speak.

30.21. Of the innovations made by Justinian and Theodora upon the state, these too are part. Formerly the senate, coming before the emperor, was wont to do obeisance in the following way. A patrician would do obeisance at his right breast.

30.22. And the emperor, kissing him on the head, would dismiss him, while all the rest, bending the right knee to the emperor, departed.

30.23. The empress, however, it was by no means the custom to do obeisance to. But before Justinian and Theodora, those making their approaches—all the rest, and as many as held the patrician rank—fell at once upon the floor on their faces, and, with hands and feet stretched out exceedingly, having touched with their lips the foot of each, rose up.

30.24. For Theodora too did not decline this claim—she who by no means disdained even to receive the envoys of the Persians and of the other barbarians, and to present them with money, as though the Roman empire lay under her—a thing that had never happened in all time.

30.25. And formerly those who consorted with the emperor called him emperor and his wife empress, and each of the other magistrates by whatever rank he held at the time.

30.26. But if anyone, falling into conversation with either of these two, made mention of emperor or empress, but did not call them master and mistress, or if he tried not to name himself a slave of any of the magistrates, he was held to be so ignorant and so unbridled of tongue, and, as one who had committed the bitterest fault and insulted those whom he least ought, departed from there.

30.27. And formerly few, and those with difficulty, were admitted to the palace; but from the time these took over the kingship, magistrates together with all the rest had their dwelling most constantly in the Palace.

30.28. The reason was that formerly the magistrates were permitted to do what was just and lawful by their own independent judgment.

30.29. So the magistrates, administering the customary business, remained in their own residences, and the subjects, neither seeing nor hearing anything violent on the part of the emperor, naturally troubled him little.

30.30. But these, ever drawing all things to themselves for the harm of their subjects, compelled all to attend upon them most slavishly; and one could see, nearly every day, all the law-courts for the most part empty of men, but in the emperor's court a crowd and insolence and great jostling and slavishness forever and altogether.

30.31. And those who seemed to be their intimates, standing there the whole day continuously and a great part of the night too forever, sleepless and without food at the proper times, were ruined; and to this their seeming prosperity came in the end.

30.32. But, released from all these things, men contended with one another as to where in the world the money of the Romans might be.

30.33. For some insisted that it was all among the barbarians, while others said that the emperor kept it shut up in many small chambers.

30.34. So whenever Justinian, if he is a man, departs from life, or, as chief of the demons, lays down his life, those who chance to be then alive will know the truth.