Count Belisarius

My mistress was so grieved at his disappearance that she could not touch food or conduct her daily business, and presently took to her bed. She was forty years old now, and the anxieties of the Italian campaign had given her an anxious, haggard look, of which no cosmetics or massage could rid her. Also, the change of her blood had recently begun, so that she was in a nervous and irritable state; she fell into a melancholy from which Belisarius, for all his love and patience, could not rouse her. It seems that she took Theodosius's departure as a sign that her great beauty (which he used to celebrate, courtier-fashion, in songs of his own making) had left her, together with all her widely acknowledged wit and charm. I consider that Belisarius showed true magnanimity on this occasion. When she confessed that only the presence of Theodosius could revive her, he went directly to Justinian and made a humble petition that Theodosius be recalled.

Justinian consented to write to the Abbot of Ephesus, desiring him to release Theodosius from his vows and send him back; but Theodosius claimed the right to become a monk as one that no human authority, not even the Emperor's, could deny him.

When, in the spring, King Khosrou resumed his military operations and Belisarius was sent hurriedly to the frontier to oppose him, my mistress remained behind in the city, saving that in such low spirits she would be only a hindrance to him.

CHAPTER 19

VICTORY AT CARCHEMISH

Now my story enters on a phase in which I have no pleasure, since it was one of great unhappiness for my mistress Antonina and greater unhappincss, even, for Belisarius, her husband; and this despite a remarkable victory that he won over the Persians. But the evil must be told with the good.

My mistress, as I have said, remained in Constantinople while Belisarius was sent against King Khosrou in the late spring of the year of our Lord 541. He had spent as much of his time as his Court duties permitted in training the Gothic recruits of the Household Regiment in the use of the bow and his own well-tried system of cavalry tactics. But there was a very different sort of fighting material waiting for him in the East. On his arrival at Daras – a place, he wrote, sweetened for him by the memory of her visit to him there – he found the Imperial Forces sunk into a sadly low state of discipline and training; and, as for courage, they trembled at the very name of Persia. His own 7,000 men were all that he could count upon for serious fighting. Many regular regiments, of full strength according to the Army List and drawing full pay and rations, were short of several hundred men, and of the so-called trained men one-half were unarmed labourers employed on improving the fortifications of Daras and other places-according to the plan which Belisarius had himself drawn up twelve years before, and of which the necessity had only lately been discovered.

King Khosrou differed from most Eastern monarchs with military ambitions, whose practice is to undertake easy objectives in person while consigning the hazardous ones to their lieutenants: contrariwise, he always chose the post of greatest difficulty. On the invitation of the native Colchians, who were being shamefully squeezed by Justinian's tax-gatherers (though their land was only a Roman protectorate, not a possession), he invaded Colchis by a route through the foot-hills of the Caucasus which no Persian army had ever taken before and which had always been considered impossible. He had sent a large force of pioneers ahead of him to hack a road, through virgin forest and across the face of precipices, sufficiently broad and firm even for the transport of elephants. His design was not suspected, because he had given out that the expedition was against a tribe of Huns that had been raiding into Persian Iberia. To be short: he penetrated to the coast of Colchis, captured the principal Roman fortress of Petra, killed the Roman Governor, was acclaimed by the Colchians as a deliverer, took possession of the country.