Count Belisarius

Ravenna is a city of paradoxes. It is built on piles in a lagoon. 'The frogs in Ravenna greatly outnumber the citizens,' they say, 'and its mosquitoes outnumber even the angels of Heaven.' The sea, however, is gradually receding from the coast, so that the harbour which the Emperor Augustus built is now orchard land. 'Apples grow on the masts in Ravenna harbour,' they say. A yard or two below the surface of the soil water is always struck, which is inconvenient for the building of walls and the burial of corpses; but the water is brackish, and the inhabitants rely on rain-catchment for drinking and cooking. They say: 'Here the dead swim and the living go thirsty. Here waters stand and walls fall.' A colony of retired Syrian traders is settled at Ravenna, all very pious; whereas the local priests are mercenary and inclined to disregard Canon law. 'Here Syrians pray, but priests practise usury,' they say. There is no hunting to be had in the neighbourhood, and no sport but hand-ball at the baths; nevertheless, because of the damp a man must take vigorous exercise to keep in health. As a result, many wealthy civilians belong to a militia and practise military exercises on the parade-ground and in the tilt-yard; but the garrison-officers, from sheer boredom, join literary clubs in order to improve their education. 'Here men of letters play at being soldiers, and soldiers at being men of letters,' they say. To these many paradoxes was now added a man who could have been a sovereign but would not, and a man who would have liked to remain a sovereign but could not.

Paradoxical, too, was the discovery that my former master Barak, so knowledgeable in relics, had been piously adoring in a local church a relic of St Vitalis which, as any historical expert would tell you, cannot possibly have been his: I found a votive offering hanging in the church to commemorate Barak's miraculous cure from gall-stones by means of this relic. And for Barak a whole series of paradoxes was in store. He came to Ravenna to claim a great reward from Belisarius for having suggested to the Goths that he should be invited to become Emperor of the West. But Belisarius, so far from rewarding him, arrested him at my instance on that thirty-three-year-old charge of forgery, and sent him under guard to Constantinople to stand his trial. However, in his report on the case Belisarius did not mention Barak's part in the plot to make him Emperor: he regarded the whole transaction with such distaste that he preferred to suppress all reference Co it. At Constantinople Barak secured an honourable release by bribery, and though by now seventy years of age, resumed his long-interrupted task as overseer of monuments in the Holy Places. It was Ids pleasure to refresh the blood-marks on the pillar of scourging; and to renew the hyssop-sponge at Golgotha, which the piety of pilgrims had worn almost to nothing; and to discover at Joppa, buried in an old chest during the persecutions of the Emperor Nero, a startling number of early Christian relics of the first importance and in an agreeably sound state of preservation.

Fortunately we left Ravenna before the mosquito season began. Bloody John had written a warning letter to Justinian as soon as he became aware that the Goths had offered the Diadem to Belisarius. Justinian immediately recalled Belisarius, commending him warmly for his magnificent services and hinting that he would soon be employed in a yet wider field. Belisarius would have wished first to settle accounts with Uriah's army, now reduced to a mere thousand men, but he would not risk Justinian's displeasure by any further act of apparent disobedience. He therefore ordered his household to begin packing up, preparatory to moving. When Uriah at Pavia heard of this he was surprised and greatly disappointed; for he had believed that Belisarius still intended to proclaim himself Emperor. He concluded that Belisarius, weighing the strength of the Imperial troops hostile to him against that of the Gothic armies, considered that the step was too risky. He therefore persuaded his fellow-nobles to elect as Gothic king a certain Hildibald, who was a nephew of the Visigothic King of Spain; the prospect of a military alliance between the Goths of Italy and the Goths of Spain would perhaps tip the balance of Belisarius's judgement in favour of accepting the Diadem. Hildibald undertook to go to Ravenna and there do homage to Belisarius at once.