observe, on one hand, the precautions of Justinian to curb the savages
of ∆thiopia, and on the other, the long walls which he constructed
in CrimÊa for the protection of his friendly Goths, a colony of three
thousand shepherds and warriors. From that peninsula to Trebizond, the
eastern curve of the Euxine was secured by forts, by alliance, or by
religion; and the possession of _Lazica_, the Colchos of ancient, the
Mingrelia of modern, geography, soon became the object of an important
war. Trebizond, in after-times the seat of a romantic empire, was
indebted to the liberality of Justinian for a church, an aqueduct, and
a castle, whose ditches are hewn in the solid rock. From that maritime
city, frontier line of five hundred miles may be drawn to the fortress
of Circesium, the last Roman station on the Euphrates. Above Trebizond
immediately, and five days' journey to the south, the country rises into
dark forests and craggy mountains, as savage though not so lofty as the
Alps and the Pyrenees. In this rigorous climate, where the snows seldom
melt, the fruits are tardy and tasteless, even honey is poisonous: the
most industrious tillage would be confined to some pleasant valleys; and
the pastoral tribes obtained a scanty sustenance from the flesh and milk
of their cattle. The _Chalybians_ derived their name and temper from
the iron quality of the soil; and, since the days of Cyrus, they might
produce, under the various appellations of ChadÊans and Zanians,
an uninterrupted prescription of war and rapine. Under the reign of
Justinian, they acknowledged the god and the emperor of the Romans, and
seven fortresses were built in the most accessible passages, to exclude
the ambition of the Persian monarch. The principal source of the
Euphrates descends from the Chalybian mountains, and seems to flow
towards the west and the Euxine: bending to the south-west, the river
passes under the walls of Satala and Melitene, (which were restored
by Justinian as the bulwarks of the Lesser Armenia,) and gradually
approaches the Mediterranean Sea; till at length, repelled by Mount
Taurus, the Euphrates inclines its long and flexible course to the
south-east and the Gulf of Persia. Among the Roman cities beyond the
Euphrates, we distinguish two recent foundations, which were named from
Theodosius, and the relics of the martyrs; and two capitals, Amida and
Edessa, which are celebrated in the history of every age. Their strength
was proportioned by Justinian to the danger of their situation. A ditch
and palisade might be sufficient to resist the artless force of the
cavalry of Scythia; but more elaborate works were required to sustain
a regular siege against the arms and treasures of the great king. His
skilful engineers understood the methods of conducting deep mines, and
of raising platforms to the level of the rampart: he shook the strongest
battlements with his military engines, and sometimes advanced to the
assault with a line of movable turrets on the backs of elephants. In
the great cities of the East, the disadvantage of space, perhaps of
position, was compensated by the zeal of the people, who seconded the
garrison in the defence of their country and religion; and the fabulous
promise of the Son of God, that Edessa should never be taken, filled the
citizens with valiant confidence, and chilled the besiegers with doubt
and dismay. The subordinate towns of Armenia and Mesopotamia were
diligently strengthened, and the posts which appeared to have
any command of ground or water were occupied by numerous forts,
substantially built of stone, or more hastily erected with the obvious
materials of earth and brick. The eye of Justinian investigated every
spot; and his cruel precautions might attract the war into some lonely
vale, whose peaceful natives, connected by trade and marriage, were
ignorant of national discord and the quarrels of princes. Westward of
the Euphrates, a sandy desert extends above six hundred miles to the Red
Sea. Nature had interposed a vacant solitude between the ambition of two
rival empires; the Arabians, till Mahomet arose, were formidable only as
robbers; and in the proud security of peace the fortifications of Syria
were neglected on the most vulnerable side.
But the national enmity, at least the effects of that enmity, had
been suspended by a truce, which continued above fourscore years. An
ambassador from the emperor Zeno accompanied the rash and unfortunate
Perozes, in his expedition against the Nepthalites, or white Huns,
whose conquests had been stretched from the Caspian to the heart of
India, whose throne was enriched with emeralds, and whose cavalry was
supported by a line of two thousand elephants. The Persians were
twice circumvented, in a situation which made valor useless and flight
impossible; and the double victory of the Huns was achieved by military
stratagem. They dismissed their royal captive after he had submitted to
adore the majesty of a Barbarian; and the humiliation was poorly evaded
by the casuistical subtlety of the Magi, who instructed Perozes to
direct his attention to the rising sun. The indignant successor of
Cyrus forgot his danger and his gratitude; he renewed the attack with
headstrong fury, and lost both his army and his life. The death of
Perozes abandoned Persia to her foreign and domestic enemies; and twelve
years of confusion elapsed before his son Cabades, or Kobad, could
embrace any designs of ambition or revenge. The unkind parsimony of
Anastasius was the motive or pretence of a Roman war; the Huns and Arabs
marched under the Persian standard, and the fortifications of Armenia
and Mesopotamia were, at that time, in a ruinous or imperfect
condition. The emperor returned his thanks to the governor and people
of Martyropolis for the prompt surrender of a city which could not be
successfully defended, and the conflagration of Theodosiopolis might
justify the conduct of their prudent neighbors. Amida sustained a long
and destructive siege: at the end of three months the loss of fifty
thousand of the soldiers of Cabades was not balanced by any prospect
of success, and it was in vain that the Magi deduced a flattering
prediction from the indecency of the women on the ramparts, who had
revealed their most secret charms to the eyes of the assailants. At
length, in a silent night, they ascended the most accessible tower,
which was guarded only by some monks, oppressed, after the duties of a
festival, with sleep and wine. Scaling-ladders were applied at the dawn
of day; the presence of Cabades, his stern command, and his drawn
sword, compelled the Persians to vanquish; and before it was sheathed,
fourscore thousand of the inhabitants had expiated the blood of their
companions. After the siege of Amida, the war continued three years, and
the unhappy frontier tasted the full measure of its calamities. The
gold of Anastasius was offered too late, the number of his troops was
defeated by the number of their generals; the country was stripped of
its inhabitants, and both the living and the dead were abandoned to the
wild beasts of the desert. The resistance of Edessa, and the deficiency
of spoil, inclined the mind of Cabades to peace: he sold his conquests
for an exorbitant price; and the same line, though marked with
slaughter and devastation, still separated the two empires. To avert the
repetition of the same evils, Anastasius resolved to found a new colony,
so strong, that it should defy the power of the Persian, so far advanced
towards Assyria, that its stationary troops might defend the province by
the menace or operation of offensive war. For this purpose, the town
of Dara, fourteen miles from Nisibis, and four days' journey from the
Tigris, was peopled and adorned; the hasty works of Anastasius were
improved by the perseverance of Justinian; and, without insisting on
places less important, the fortifications of Dara may represent the
military architecture of the age. The city was surrounded with two
walls, and the interval between them, of fifty paces, afforded a retreat
to the cattle of the besieged. The inner wall was a monument of strength
and beauty: it measured sixty feet from the ground, and the height of
the towers was one hundred feet; the loopholes, from whence an enemy
might be annoyed with missile weapons, were small, but numerous; the
soldiers were planted along the rampart, under the shelter of double
galleries, and a third platform, spacious and secure, was raised on the
summit of the towers. The exterior wall appears to have been less lofty,
but more solid; and each tower was protected by a quadrangular bulwark.
A hard, rocky soil resisted the tools of the miners, and on the
south-east, where the ground was more tractable, their approach was
retarded by a new work, which advanced in the shape of a half-moon. The
double and treble ditches were filled with a stream of water; and in the
management of the river, the most skilful labor was employed to supply
the inhabitants, to distress the besiegers, and to prevent the mischiefs
of a natural or artificial inundation. Dara continued more than sixty
years to fulfil the wishes of its founders, and to provoke the jealousy
of the Persians, who incessantly complained, that this impregnable
fortress had been constructed in manifest violation of the treaty of
peace between the two empires.
Between the Euxine and the Caspian, the countries of Colchos, Iberia,
and Albania, are intersected in every direction by the branches of Mount
Caucasus; and the two principal _gates_, or passes, from north to south,
have been frequently confounded in the geography both of the ancients
and moderns. The name of _Caspian_ or _Albanian_ gates is properly
applied to Derbend, which occupies a short declivity between the
mountains and the sea: the city, if we give credit to local tradition,
had been founded by the Greeks; and this dangerous entrance was
fortified by the kings of Persia with a mole, double walls, and doors of
iron. The _Iberian_ gates are formed by a narrow passage of six miles
in Mount Caucasus, which opens from the northern side of Iberia, or
Georgia, into the plain that reaches to the Tanais and the Volga. A
fortress, designed by Alexander perhaps, or one of his successors,
to command that important pass, had descended by right of conquest or
inheritance to a prince of the Huns, who offered it for a moderate
price to the emperor; but while Anastasius paused, while he timorously
computed the cost and the distance, a more vigilant rival interposed,
and Cabades forcibly occupied the Straits of Caucasus. The Albanian and
Iberian gates excluded the horsemen of Scythia from the shortest and
most practicable roads, and the whole front of the mountains was covered
by the rampart of Gog and Magog, the long wall which has excited the
curiosity of an Arabian caliph and a Russian conqueror. According to a
recent description, huge stones, seven feet thick, and twenty-one feet
in length or height, are artificially joined without iron or cement, to
compose a wall, which runs above three hundred miles from the shores
of Derbend, over the hills, and through the valleys of Daghestan and
Georgia. Without a vision, such a work might be undertaken by the policy
of Cabades; without a miracle, it might be accomplished by his son, so
formidable to the Romans, under the name of Chosroes; so dear to the
Orientals, under the appellation of Nushirwan. The Persian monarch held
in his hand the keys both of peace and war; but he stipulated, in every
treaty, that Justinian should contribute to the expense of a common
barrier, which equally protected the two empires from the inroads of the
Scythians.
VII. Justinian suppressed the schools of Athens and the consulship of
Rome, which had given so many sages and heroes to mankind. Both these
institutions had long since degenerated from their primitive glory; yet
some reproach may be justly inflicted on the avarice and jealousy of a
prince, by whose hand such venerable ruins were destroyed.
Athens, after her Persian triumphs, adopted the philosophy of Ionia
and the rhetoric of Sicily; and these studies became the patrimony of a
city, whose inhabitants, about thirty thousand males, condensed, within
the period of a single life, the genius of ages and millions. Our sense
of the dignity of human nature is exalted by the simple recollection,
that Isocrates was the companion of Plato and Xenophon; that he
assisted, perhaps with the historian Thucydides, at the first
representation of the dipus of Sophocles and the Iphigenia of Euripides;
and that his pupils ∆schines and Demosthenes contended for the crown of
patriotism in the presence of Aristotle, the master of Theophrastus, who
taught at Athens with the founders of the Stoic and Epicurean sects.
The ingenuous youth of Attica enjoyed the benefits of their domestic
education, which was communicated without envy to the rival cities. Two
thousand disciples heard the lessons of Theophrastus; the schools of
rhetoric must have been still more populous than those of philosophy;
and a rapid succession of students diffused the fame of their teachers
as far as the utmost limits of the Grecian language and name. Those
limits were enlarged by the victories of Alexander; the arts of Athens
survived her freedom and dominion; and the Greek colonies which the
Macedonians planted in Egypt, and scattered over Asia, undertook long
and frequent pilgrimages to worship the Muses in their favorite temple
on the banks of the Ilissus. The Latin conquerors respectfully listened
to the instructions of their subjects and captives; the names of Cicero
and Horace were enrolled in the schools of Athens; and after the perfect
settlement of the Roman empire, the natives of Italy, of Africa, and
of Britain, conversed in the groves of the academy with their
fellow-students of the East. The studies of philosophy and eloquence are
congenial to a popular state, which encourages the freedom of inquiry,
and submits only to the force of persuasion. In the republics of Greece
and Rome, the art of speaking was the powerful engine of patriotism or
ambition; and the schools of rhetoric poured forth a colony of statesmen
and legislators. When the liberty of public debate was suppressed, the
orator, in the honorable profession of an advocate, might plead the
cause of innocence and justice; he might abuse his talents in the
more profitable trade of panegyric; and the same precepts continued
to dictate the fanciful declamations of the sophist, and the chaster
beauties of historical composition. The systems which professed to
unfold the nature of God, of man, and of the universe, entertained the
curiosity of the philosophic student; and according to the temper of
his mind, he might doubt with the Sceptics, or decide with the Stoics,
sublimely speculate with Plato, or severely argue with Aristotle. The
pride of the adverse sects had fixed an unattainable term of moral
happiness and perfection; but the race was glorious and salutary; the
disciples of Zeno, and even those of Epicurus, were taught both to act
and to suffer; and the death of Petronius was not less effectual than
that of Seneca, to humble a tyrant by the discovery of his impotence.
The light of science could not indeed be confined within the walls of
Athens. Her incomparable writers address themselves to the human race;
the living masters emigrated to Italy and Asia; Berytus, in later
times, was devoted to the study of the law; astronomy and physic
were cultivated in the musÊum of Alexandria; but the Attic schools of
rhetoric and philosophy maintained their superior reputation from the
Peloponnesian war to the reign of Justinian. Athens, though situate in a
barren soil, possessed a pure air, a free navigation, and the monuments
of ancient art. That sacred retirement was seldom disturbed by the
business of trade or government; and the last of the Athenians were
distinguished by their lively wit, the purity of their taste and
language, their social manners, and some traces, at least in discourse,
of the magnanimity of their fathers. In the suburbs of the city, the
_academy_ of the Platonists, the _lycum_ of the Peripatetics, the
_portico_ of the Stoics, and the _garden_ of the Epicureans, were
planted with trees and decorated with statues; and the philosophers,
instead of being immured in a cloister, delivered their instructions in
spacious and pleasant walks, which, at different hours, were consecrated
to the exercises of the mind and body. The genius of the founders
still lived in those venerable seats; the ambition of succeeding to the
masters of human reason excited a generous emulation; and the merit of
the candidates was determined, on each vacancy, by the free voices of
an enlightened people. The Athenian professors were paid by their
disciples: according to their mutual wants and abilities, the price
appears to have varied; and Isocrates himself, who derides the avarice
of the sophists, required, in his school of rhetoric, about thirty
pounds from each of his hundred pupils. The wages of industry are just
and honorable, yet the same Isocrates shed tears at the first receipt
of a stipend: the Stoic might blush when he was hired to preach the
contempt of money; and I should be sorry to discover that Aristotle or
Plato so far degenerated from the example of Socrates, as to exchange
knowledge for gold. But some property of lands and houses was settled by
the permission of the laws, and the legacies of deceased friends, on the
philosophic chairs of Athens. Epicurus bequeathed to his disciples the
gardens which he had purchased for eighty minÊ or two hundred and fifty
pounds, with a fund sufficient for their frugal subsistence and monthly
festivals; and the patrimony of Plato afforded an annual rent, which,
in eight centuries, was gradually increased from three to one thousand
pieces of gold. The schools of Athens were protected by the wisest and
most virtuous of the Roman princes. The library, which Hadrian founded,
was placed in a portico adorned with pictures, statues, and a roof of
alabaster, and supported by one hundred columns of Phrygian marble. The
public salaries were assigned by the generous spirit of the Antonines;
and each professor of politics, of rhetoric, of the Platonic, the
Peripatetic, the Stoic, and the Epicurean philosophy, received an annual
stipend of ten thousand drachmÊ, or more than three hundred pounds
sterling. After the death of Marcus, these liberal donations, and the
privileges attached to the _thrones_ of science, were abolished and
revived, diminished and enlarged; but some vestige of royal bounty may
be found under the successors of Constantine; and their arbitrary choice
of an unworthy candidate might tempt the philosophers of Athens to
regret the days of independence and poverty. It is remarkable, that the
impartial favor of the Antonines was bestowed on the four adverse sects
of philosophy, which they considered as equally useful, or at least, as
equally innocent. Socrates had formerly been the glory and the
reproach of his country; and the first lessons of Epicurus so strangely
scandalized the pious ears of the Athenians, that by his exile, and
that of his antagonists, they silenced all vain disputes concerning
the nature of the gods. But in the ensuing year they recalled the hasty
decree, restored the liberty of the schools, and were convinced by the
experience of ages, that the moral character of philosophers is not
affected by the diversity of their theological speculations.
The Gothic arms were less fatal to the schools of Athens than the
establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superseded the exercise
of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned
the infidel or sceptic to eternal flames. In many a volume of laborious
controversy, they exposed the weakness of the understanding and
the corruption of the heart, insulted human nature in the sages of
antiquity, and proscribed the spirit of philosophical inquiry, so
repugnant to the doctrine, or at least to the temper, of an humble
believer. The surviving sects of the Platonists, whom Plato would have
blushed to acknowledge, extravagantly mingled a sublime theory with the
practice of superstition and magic; and as they remained alone in the
midst of a Christian world, they indulged a secret rancor against the
government of the church and state, whose severity was still suspended
over their heads. About a century after the reign of Julian, Proclus was
permitted to teach in the philosophic chair of the academy; and such
was his industry, that he frequently, in the same day, pronounced five
lessons, and composed seven hundred lines. His sagacious mind explored
the deepest questions of morals and metaphysics, and he ventured to urge
eighteen arguments against the Christian doctrine of the creation of
the world. But in the intervals of study, he _personally_ conversed
with Pan, ∆sculapius, and Minerva, in whose mysteries he was secretly
initiated, and whose prostrate statues he adored; in the devout
persuasion that the philosopher, who is a citizen of the universe,
should be the priest of its various deities. An eclipse of the sun
announced his approaching end; and his life, with that of his scholar
Isidore, compiled by two of their most learned disciples, exhibits a
deplorable picture of the second childhood of human reason. Yet the
golden chain, as it was fondly styled, of the Platonic succession,
continued forty-four years from the death of Proclus to the edict of
Justinian, which imposed a perpetual silence on the schools of Athens,
and excited the grief and indignation of the few remaining votaries
of Grecian science and superstition. Seven friends and philosophers,
Diogenes and Hermias, Eulalius and Priscian, Damascius, Isidore, and
Simplicius, who dissented from the religion of their sovereign, embraced
the resolution of seeking in a foreign land the freedom which was denied
in their native country. They had heard, and they credulously believed,
that the republic of Plato was realized in the despotic government
of Persia, and that a patriot king reigned ever the happiest and most
virtuous of nations. They were soon astonished by the natural discovery,
that Persia resembled the other countries of the globe; that Chosroes,
who affected the name of a philosopher, was vain, cruel, and ambitious;
that bigotry, and a spirit of intolerance, prevailed among the Magi;
that the nobles were haughty, the courtiers servile, and the magistrates
unjust; that the guilty sometimes escaped, and that the innocent were
often oppressed. The disappointment of the philosophers provoked them
to overlook the real virtues of the Persians; and they were scandalized,
more deeply perhaps than became their profession, with the plurality
of wives and concubines, the incestuous marriages, and the custom of
exposing dead bodies to the dogs and vultures, instead of hiding them in
the earth, or consuming them with fire. Their repentance was expressed
by a precipitate return, and they loudly declared that they had rather
die on the borders of the empire, than enjoy the wealth and favor of
the Barbarian. From this journey, however, they derived a benefit which
reflects the purest lustre on the character of Chosroes. He required,
that the seven sages who had visited the court of Persia should be
exempted from the penal laws which Justinian enacted against his Pagan
subjects; and this privilege, expressly stipulated in a treaty of peace,
was guarded by the vigilance of a powerful mediator. Simplicius and his
companions ended their lives in peace and obscurity; and as they left no
disciples, they terminate the long list of Grecian philosophers, who may
be justly praised, notwithstanding their defects, as the wisest and most
virtuous of their contemporaries. The writings of Simplicius are now
extant. His physical and metaphysical commentaries on Aristotle have
passed away with the fashion of the times; but his moral interpretation
of Epictetus is preserved in the library of nations, as a classic book,
most excellently adapted to direct the will, to purify the heart, and
to confirm the understanding, by a just confidence in the nature both of
God and man.
About the same time that Pythagoras first invented the appellation of
philosopher, liberty and the consulship were founded at Rome by the
elder Brutus. The revolutions of the consular office, which may be
viewed in the successive lights of a substance, a shadow, and a name,
have been occasionally mentioned in the present History. The first
magistrates of the republic had been chosen by the people, to exercise,
in the senate and in the camp, the powers of peace and war, which were
afterwards translated to the emperors. But the tradition of ancient
dignity was long revered by the Romans and Barbarians. A Gothic
historian applauds the consulship of Theodoric as the height of all
temporal glory and greatness; the king of Italy himself congratulated
those annual favorites of fortune who, without the cares, enjoyed the
splendor of the throne; and at the end of a thousand years, two consuls
were created by the sovereigns of Rome and Constantinople, for the sole
purpose of giving a date to the year, and a festival to the people. But
the expenses of this festival, in which the wealthy and the vain aspired
to surpass their predecessors, insensibly arose to the enormous sum of
fourscore thousand pounds; the wisest senators declined a useless
honor, which involved the certain ruin of their families, and to this
reluctance I should impute the frequent chasms in the last age of the
consular Fasti. The predecessors of Justinian had assisted from the
public treasures the dignity of the less opulent candidates; the avarice
of that prince preferred the cheaper and more convenient method of
advice and regulation. Seven _processions_ or spectacles were the number
to which his edict confined the horse and chariot races, the athletic
sports, the music, and pantomimes of the theatre, and the hunting of
wild beasts; and small pieces of silver were discreetly substituted to
the gold medals, which had always excited tumult and drunkenness,
when they were scattered with a profuse hand among the populace.
Notwithstanding these precautions, and his own example, the succession
of consuls finally ceased in the thirteenth year of Justinian, whose
despotic temper might be gratified by the silent extinction of a title
which admonished the Romans of their ancient freedom. Yet the annual
consulship still lived in the minds of the people; they fondly expected
its speedy restoration; they applauded the gracious condescension of
successive princes, by whom it was assumed in the first year of their
reign; and three centuries elapsed, after the death of Justinian, before
that obsolete dignity, which had been suppressed by custom, could be
abolished by law. The imperfect mode of distinguishing each year by the
name of a magistrate, was usefully supplied by the date of a permanent
Êra: the creation of the world, according to the Septuagint version,
was adopted by the Greeks; and the Latins, since the age of Charlemagne,
have computed their time from the birth of Christ.
Chapter XLI: Conquests Of Justinian, Character Of Balisarius.--Part I.
Conquests Of Justinian In The West.--Character And First
Campaigns Of Belisarius--He Invades And Subdues The Vandal
Kingdom Of Africa--His Triumph.--The Gothic War.--He
Recovers Sicily, Naples, And Rome.--Siege Of Rome By The
Goths.--Their Retreat And Losses.--Surrender Of Ravenna.--
Glory Of Belisarius.--His Domestic Shame And Misfortunes.