Count Belisarius

While they ferried him and his horse across the river on a raft, one of them galloped up the tow-path to take the bad news to Belisarius at the boom. What he said was: 'Alas, General, all is lost at the Port of Rome. Isaac and the entire garrison have been killed by the Goths – all but one man, your guardsman Sisifried, who has escaped and been fetched wounded across the river at the delta head.'

Belisarius knew Sisifried as a bold, loyal, resourceful soldier, and the messenger also as a very trusty man, so he could not but believe the news. The first question he asked, with a sort of gasp, was: 'And my wife, the Lady Antonina?'

The messenger answered: 'I do not know. Sisifried's words were: "I alone am left of Isaac's men." '

At this Belisarius swayed upon his feet. Tears burst from his eyes, and for a while he stood speechless. He crossed himself, muttering a broken prayer. But in a little while he regained control of his feelings: perhaps he recalled how Geilimer, the Vandal King, had lost a battle by untimely grief for a dear one. It was now three o'clock, and Bessas had not made the expected sortie, though aware of the burning of the tower and the destruction of the boom. Must he engage the whole Gothic Army by himself? That would be foolhardy to the point of madness. Nevertheless, he would have done so, in the hope of aid from Bessas as soon as the galleys drew near to the city; but that, with the Port taken, he was cut off from the sea – for Ostia was also held by the enemy, and defeat now would be disaster. His only hope lay in immediate return and the recapture of the Port. He ordered the helms of his galleys to be turned hard about, and, taking the infantry aboard, recalled his cavalry by trumpet-blast and hurried downstream. Perhaps it was still not too late to wrest the fortress from the enemy and avenge his dead.

When we at the Port saw his boats returning we were filled with amazement, but not so great an amazement as he himself felt on observing our sentries still at the gates of the fortress. Then relief and disgust struggled for mastery in his mind – relief that the report was an error, disgust at having, from foolish credulity, abandoned an attempt so well begun. He said bitterly: 'This is the day of St Nicholas, when children find sweetmeats hidden in their shoes, and when old soldiers turn simpletons.'

That night his malarial fever came back upon him. The restless and unhappy condition of his mind aggravated the attack; he grew very sick indeed, and was soon raving in delirium. He kept calling for my mistress, not recognizing her at his bedside. Her heart was pierced when in the wanderings of his mind he relived the anguish that he had suffered in the belief that she was killed. 'What remains for mc now?' he continually cried. 'Antonina is dead.'

At the height of his fever, we who attended him were obliged to call the assistance of eight of his strongest guardsmen to restrain him from doing some wild deed. Now he imagined that he was fighting the Goths outside the walls of Rome, and now that it was the Persians at Daras. Once he uttered his war-cry in a terrible voice and caught two men in his arms, nearly crushing them to death; but suddenly fell gasping.

CHAPTER 22

RECALL AND FORGIVENESS

Belisarius was confined to his chamber for ten days. On the eleventh day King Teudel took Rome, being admitted one night with all his army by four treacherous Isaurian soldiers at the Asinarian Gate. Bessas had not constantly changed the duty roster for his guards, as Belisarius had done, or changed the locks on the gates; thus the soldiers had been able to agree with Teudel for an exact hour some days in advance. The cause of their treachery was a grievance against the captain of their company for holding back part of their com ration in order to sell it to patricians.

King Teudel's Goths immediately set about plundering the great houses of the patricians, allowing Bessas and his garrison to escape without hindrance. Teudel contented himself with what he found in the Pincian Palace – Bessas's evilly won store, which had the appearance of a royal treasury or the hoard of a successful admiral of pirates. In all Rome, a city that had recently housed half a million souls, the Goths found no more than 500 commoners and 400 persons of patrician blood – nearly all women and children, these, since most of the patricians themselves had escaped with the garrison. Teudel began pulling down the fortifications; and swore that, for its ungrateful hostility to the benignant Gothic rule of Theoderich and his descendants, the city had earned no better fate than to be burned down and reduced to the level of a sheep-walk.