Count Belisarius (14 page)

Anastasius unwisely took their advice. The constable died shortly afterwards, and the sons quarrelled over his will. Then the youngest of them, who was robbed of his inheritance, wrote to Kobad suggesting that a strong Persian force should seize the Gates, and that he himself should be appointed constable with a large yearly salary. Kobad sent the force, seized the Gates, killed all the sons, including the youngest one, and congratulated himself that his extreme Western dominions were now secure from attack by the Huns. If Anastasius had only had the courage to garrison the Gates, he could, whenever he pleased,
have let loose swarms of raiders on the Persian part of Armenia, as easily as a gardener removes a stop from a garden reservoir and floods the irrigation channels.

So much for the Caspian Gates. As for Anastasius's fortification of Daras: it was forbidden by ancient treaty for either side to build any new fortifications on the frontier. The Persians greatly resented his action, but Anastasius further fortified the village of Erzeroum in Roman Armenia, and made a strong city of it. This, too, the Persians took very ill, and also his intriguing with the Manichean monks in Persian Armenia, pretending to be a secret convert to their sect.

When Anastasius died, and Justin succeeded, Kobad grew anxious about the future. He knew Justin for a capable soldier and he felt his own death approaching. Like so many Eastern Kings, he hated his natural heir, whose name was Khaous. He doted on his youngest son Khosrou, the child of his second wife who by her self-sacrifice had once enabled him to escape from the so-called Castle of Oblivion, where he had been confined for two years by a usurper. She had changed clothes and places with him, and when the deception was discovered had been put to death by very cruel tortures. Kobad had sworn to her before he escaped that if ever he recovered his throne her son should be his successor. Besides Khaous, there was another son, Jamaspes, who was the most capable soldier in all Persia and had the confidence of the entire nobility; but he was not eligible for the throne because he had lost an eye in a battle with the Huns. No man with any deformity or mutilation is permitted to rule in Persia, and it is a peculiarity of Persian laws that they may never be cancelled or amended. Kobad pondered for years as to how he could set aside Khaous, who was loyally supported by his brother Jamaspes; but could hit on no answer to the problem. It was only when Anastasius died and Justin became Emperor that he decided on a course of action. He wrote Justin a strange letter, accompanying it with some very handsome presents of jewels and works of art. I quote it here with a few immaterial omissions.

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‘Kobad of the Sassanids, Brother of the Sun, Great King of the Persians, Acknowledged Emperor of Media, Iraq, Transjordania, Hither Arabia, Persarmenia, Kirman, Khorasan, Mekran, Oman, Sind, Sogdiana, and other lands too numerous conveniently to name in the
course of this short letter, to Justin the Christian Emperor of the Romans, resident at Constantinople, sends greeting.

‘Royal cousin, at the hand of your father Anastasius we have suffered great injustics, as you in your well-known nobility of soul will be among the first to acknowledge. Nevertheless, we have seen fit to abandon all the grave charges that we could bring against the Romans, confident that in your Royal Father's lifetime you deplored as much as ourself his unreasonable actions, though in filial piety you refrained from mitigating their effects. And we are assured that true victory lies with him who, though knowing himself to have been abused, is yet ready to be overcome by his enemies when they plead for friendship with him. Such is the proposed magnanimity of Kobad, and he is willing to bind himself to Justin with the closest possible ties of friendship.

‘Our royal cousin cannot be unaware of a notable transaction that took effect between his ancestor the Emperor Arcadius, and mine, the great Yesdijerd, self-surnamed (in his great humility before the Sun God whom we worship) “The Sinner”. This Arcadius, being grievously sick, and having no grown son, but only a child, Theodosius by name, was afraid lest this child should be cast aside from the line of succession by some powerful general or by one of his own ambitious kinsmen. He was equally afraid that his subjects would take advantage of the political uncertainty that so often marks the reign of an Emperor of tender years. He therefore boldly wrote to our ancestor Yesdijerd and begged him to act as guardian to his child until he came of age, and to preserve the throne for him against all rivals. Our noble ancestor, Sinner in name but virtuous in deed, accepted the charge and wrote to the Senate at Constantinople a letter threatening war on any usurper of the throne of Theodosius. He then preserved a policy of profound peace towards Rome until his death.

‘In commemoration of this noble history, which honours Arcadius no less than our ancestor, and in hopes of another century of peace such as the Emperor Theodosius subsequently swore with our ancestor Bahram the Hunter, and which terminated only lately, we have the following proposal to make: that you, Justin, make our beloved son Khosrou, who is our chosen successor to the Throne, your adopted son. Do this and we shall love you, and our subjects shall love yours, and the Great King and Emperor of the Romans shall no longer be cousins, but brothers. Farewell.'

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You would imagine that Justin, and Justinian as his prospective successor, would have been delighted with this letter as portending a happy solution to all their difficulties, including even the old dispute about the price of silk; and you would not be wrong. None the less, they thought it advisable to call the principal Senators together to ask their advice, as Anastasius had done in the matter of the Caspian Gates. It is well known what happens on such occasions. The simplest and most obvious conclusion is rejected as unworthy of such experts in wisdom as these ingenious hoary old men, and an obscure alternative is warmly debated and then rejected; finally, a most far-fetched and marvellously improper conclusion is found and unanimously accepted. There is a popular story which has aptness in this context. Once two clever Athenian policemen were pursuing a Theban thief towards the city boundaries when they came upon a sign: ‘The Sign of the Grape. Thebans made welcome.' One said: ‘He will have taken refuge here.' ‘No,' cried the other, ‘this is just the place where he will expect us to look for him.' ‘Exactly,' rejoined the first, ‘so he will have decided to outwit us by entering.' They therefore searched the place thoroughly. Meanwhile the Theban thief, who could not read, had run on to safety across the boundary. Thus now the clever Senate argued about Kobad. Was he being simple, or cunning, or mischievous? Or what besides?

All sorts of views were examined, and finally the Lord Chancellor, as an expert on law, gave it as his mature opinion that Kobad was hiding extreme cunning under the guise of extreme simplicity: he intended to have Khosrou adopted as Justin's son so that he could legally claim the Empire when Justin died! Any ordinary person – but no ordinary person was present – would have realized at once the absurdity of this argument. In the first place, the Persians are a truthful people, and the Great King would not be capable of lowering his royal dignity by such a pettifogging trick; in the second, no Persian had the least prospect of being accepted by us as a candidate for the Roman Throne, not even if he allowed himself to be baptized a Christian, which would, of course, cut him off from communion with his fellow fire-worshippers. The fact was, that Kobad was making a sincere and neighbourly offer (light-house signalling to light-house), just as Arcadius had once done. But the Lord Chancellor's view frightened Justinian, who wished to have no rivals to the succession; and even Theodora, who judged the letter to be what it purported to be, could not persuade him to return to a sensible view of the matter. So Justin
was obliged to return an inept answer to Kobad, in which he offered to adopt Khosrou by the ceremony of arms, but not by Imperial charter. The former method of adoption is used chiefly among the Goths. The prospective father presents a horse and a complete suit of armour to the prospective son and utters the simple formula: ‘You are my excellent Son. This day, after the custom of the Nations and in manly fashion, I have begotten you. Let my foes be your foes; my friends, your friends; my kin, your kin.' The difference between this formula and civil adoption, by charter, is that it is not recognized by Roman Law as conferring on the son any title to the patrimony, but only as a contract of legal protection on the one hand and filial obedience on the other.

Before calling the Council, Justinian had privately assured the Persian ambassador that the Emperor would, he thought, accept the charge with alacrity; and the ambassador had thereupon sent a message to Khosrou to be ready at the frontier, whence he would shortly be escorted to Constantinople for the adoption ceremony. But now, of course, things were altered. Khosrou felt bitterly insulted at the shabby reply which a Roman ambassador brought to his representative at Nisibis on the frontier. A simple ‘no' would have been far less galling than a ‘no' masquerading as a ‘yes'. Did Justin really expect that the ruler of the oldest and greatest kingdom in the civilized world would allow his favourite son, his chosen successor, a prince with the blood of Artaxerxes and Cyrus in his veins, to be treated like a barbarian German man-at-arms? War broke out soon afterwards; and in it Belisarius was given his first important command.

Before giving an account of his exploits, I must tell you a little more about my mistress and myself at Antioch. One day at noon – it was the twenty-ninth day of May – in the year that this new Persian war broke out, we were sitting in the garden porch of the house, waiting for luncheon to be announced. It was a cool place, beautifully tiled in blue, with a perpetually playing fountain and a white marble pool, full of vari-coloured fish, surrounded by pots of flowers, some of them very rare ones imported from the Far East. My mistress sleepily held a piece of needlework in her hand, unable to sew because of the oppressiveness of the day; I, too, was painfully slack-limbed and slack-minded. Suddenly I began to feel sick. The whole earth seemed to heave and rock about me. I was terrified: was it the cholera? Would I die within a few hours? Cholera was raging in the poorer quarters
of the city, killing 5,000 a day. Not far off stood a magnificent temple in the Corinthian style that had once been dedicated to the Goddess Diana (who is also the Syrian Goddess Astarte), but had now been used for a hundred years or more as the official headquarters of the Blue faction. Looking out through the porch, I tried to steady my gaze on the broad peristyle of this substantial building and its columns of yellow Numidian marble ranked in tall rows. But these, too, were swaying about in a drunken manner, and at a particularly violent lurch they all seemed to topple sideways – and down came the peristyle with a rumble and a resounding crash! I realized suddenly that it was not myself who was sick, but our mother the Earth! What I was experiencing was an earthquake of immense and horrible violence. I snatched up my mistress's boy Photius and her little Martha, who had been playing on the floor near me, and ran out into the garden, my mistress stumbling after me. We were only just in time: a still more violent heaving of the earth flung us all to the ground, and with a roar our beautiful, costly, comfortable house collapsed into a confused mass of rubble and broken timber. Some flying object struck my head and I found myself automatically making swimming motions with my arms, as if I had been flung into the sea from a wrecked ship and was being overwhelmed by hugely swelling waves. Indeed, at that very moment, though I did not know it, many thousands of my fellow-citizens were swimming too, and in desperate earnest. For the great River Orontes, swollen with its spring flood, had been driven out of its course by the convulsions of the earth; and now swept through the lower city to a height of twenty feet, carrying all before it.

When my head cleared a little, I caught at my mistress's hand and we ran back to where the house had been, frantically calling the names of the two elder children, and the names of their tutor and of the other domestics. But all were buried under the dusty ruins, except for two gardeners, and a footman who had rushed out of the back door when the first shock was felt, and one badly injured maid. We tried to free someone who was groaning close to us in the ruins – I think that it was my mistress's sister-in-law – but a sudden wind blew up, and a fire spread through the shattered mass, making rescue-work impossible. Once I thought I heard my mistress's elder boy screaming; but when I went to the spot I could hear nothing. After this the shocks gradually diminished in violence. A few hours later we were able to reckon up the day's horrors.

Antioch, the second city of the Eastern Empire (though Alexandria and Corinth and Jerusalem boldly disputed the title), lay in ruins. Of those who survived of its three-quarters of a million inhabitants, all but a few thousand were homeless; for a raging fire had destroyed the wooden houses that the earthquake had spared. Not a church or a public building was left undamaged. Immensely deep, long chasms had appeared in the earth, engulfing whole streets of houses. The most fantastic damage was in the Ostracine and Nymphaean quarters, but the greatest loss of life was at the Public Baths (named after Hadrian and Trajan) which were crowded at the time of the first shock.

The usual evils that accompany an earthquake of such magnitude were not lacking: pillage, rioting, contamination of the water supply, the spread of infectious diseases among the inhabitants (the cholera with increased force), and bitter religious argument as to the cause of the disaster. Fortunately we had an able governor who kept the confidence of the better elements among the survivors. He organized parties for releasing victims trapped in the ruins, for fighting the fires, for burying the dead, for building temporary shelters, and for the collection and distribution of food. If it had not been for him our situation would have been desperate indeed.