Count Belisarius

Meanwhile Belisarius was expecting word from King Harith – or, failing him, from Trajan – as to what progress had been made and what Persian forces were stationed in Assyria. Receiving no message at all, he began to grow anxious. But he succeeded in capturing Sisauranum: being crowded with peasant refugees, it surrendered from famine after a six weeks' siege. Unlike the frontier cities of Daras and Nisibis, this city kept no permanent store of food as a safeguard against siege, and the suddenness of Belisarius's appearance had not permitted the collection of stocks of corn from the surrounding country. Belisarius's terms were generous: a free pardon for all the citizens – who were Christians of Roman descent, this being one of the cities handed over to Persia a century and a half before by the disgraceful treaty of Jovian – and for the 800 Persian horsemen of the garrison a choice between common slavery and enlistment in the Emperor Justinian's army. They chose to serve under Justinian and were later transferred to Italy to fight against the Goths – as the Goths enlisted in the Household Regiment had been transferred to Mesopotamia to fight against the Persians. The fortifications of Sisauranum were razed to the ground.

Still no news came from King Harith, and Belisarius feared that the whole expeditionary force had been ambushed and destroyed. He now called a council of war and pressed for an advance across the Tigris – perhaps Harith was still holding out in some captured city or other, waiting for relief. But not one of the generals would support him in this project. Those from the Lebanon insisted on returning with their troops, now that the Saracens' Ramadan was over; while the others pointed out that their troops were suffering so severely from the heat that fully one-third of them were incapacitated for fighting. They began a disorderly clamour, the refrain of which was: 'Take us back again. We will not cross the Tigris. We refuse to go farther. Take us back again.'

Thus by the bravado of Peter, the treachery of King Harith, the credulousncss of John the Epicure, the cowardice of these other generals, Belisarius was robbed of what might have been the greatest of his victories. For when King Khosrou in Colchis heard of the Arab raid in Assyria and of Belisarius's capture of Sisauranum, he came hurrying back by the road which passes to the westward of Lake Van and along the eastern bank of the Tigris. He had already lost nearly one-half of his army by a cholera epidemic. He now lost one-half of what remained to him by a breakdown of his food supply – the frightening news of the cholera turned his commissariat-trains back to Iberia. He was delayed further by a landslide which carried away his new road at the most difficult point of the journey, so that he had to cut it afresh in order to pass. If Belisarius had now been able to cross the Tigris he would have intercepted Khosrou and, the Persians being in a pitiful state of starvation and disorder, would doubtless have added a third captured king to the gifts he had made to Justinian.

But it was not to be: Belisarius could not persuade his generals to inarch. He laid his sick in carts and retired past Nisibis to Daras.

In Constantinople strange things had been happening. To begin with, there appeared in the city an illegitimate son of Theodora's, born to her in Egypt during that one unlucky year when she went off to Pentapolis from the club-house. The father was a person of no importance – an Arabian merchant, recently dead; he had taken the boy (whom he christened John) off her hands. Theodora had told Justinian that she had never had a child; and when he conferred patrician rank on her she signed a document solemnly affirming this. Cappadocian John's hold on Theodora was his knowledge that this child existed: his agents in Egypt had brought the story to him, but without any details to confirm it. Theodora could not be sure whether or not he was in possession of any evidence that would carry weight with Justinian; she herself had never been able to discover where her son was. At last the young man, John the Bastard, was told the secret of his birth by his dying father and came to Constantinople from Aden on the Red Sea, where they lived. He approached Theodora through my mistress Antonina, whose first husband, he knew, had been a business associate of his father's. If he expected to be greeted with maternal tears and kisses and given a prominent position at Court he was much mistaken. Theodora wasted no time, but declared him a lunatic and shut him up in a Bedlam, where he soon died. She had not loved the father, why should she love the son? Besides, he was a greedy, vain, illiterate fellow.

Theodora, with sighs of relief, told my mistress: 'Now at last, my dearest, we can settle our account with Cappadocian John: I no longer have anything to fear from him.'