Count Belisarius

The Cham Zabergan broke camp and retreated with his whole army. Belisarius followed him, stage by stage. He had entered that battle with 300 armed men only and finished it with 500. The newcomers were Thracian peasants, chosen from among the recruits as men accustomed to horses and to the use of a light bow for hunting; they had been given the horses and arms of the dead Bulgars. Belisarius's dead numbered three only, though many were wounded; Unigatus, who had fought bravely with his one good arm, died of his wounds a few days later.

Belisarius sent a dispatch to the Emperor: 'Obeying your Sacred orders, we have conquered the enemy and are pursuing him.'

In the streets, jubilation and ceaseless praise for Belisarius – 'This victory of his outshines every former one'; in the Palace, mortification and muttering.

Justinian told his admiral: 'Discharge the cargoes of the vessels. We shall not sail.' His Chamberlain (another than Narses, who was still in Italy) cried in pretended indignation: 'Are the citizens mad that they give thanks for their deliverance not to Your Glorious Serenity who ordained the battle, but to Belisarius – by whose neglect Thrace had been wasted and the city all but lost?'

Justinian sent this message to Belisarius: 'Enough now. Let the Huns go in peace, not wasting lives in vain battles. We may have need for their services in wars against our other enemies. If you pursue them farther you will fall under our displeasure'

Belisarius obeyed. Then Justinian's messengers rode forward to Zabergan's camp. 'The Emperor's message. Following the example of the Glorious Christ who once, in flesh, ordered His servant Peter to put up his sword after he had valiantly struck at a Jewish officer and wounded him, we have likewise called off our armies. But we conjure you in Christ's name to be gone in peace.'

The Cham Zabergan was puzzled by this message, but understood at least that Belisarius had been recalled. Regaining courage, he continued in Thrace all the summer long, burning and pillaging. In the autumn Justinian offered him money to be gone, and Zabergan, afraid lest his retreat might be cut by a flotilla of armed vessels sent up the Danube from the Black Sea, signed a treaty and withdrew.

Justinian now set himself feverishly to the task of rebuilding the long wall of Anastasius – though he took no steps for the training of a proper defence force. The courtiers cried: 'See how the Father of his people puts his negligent officers to shame!'

When Belisarius and his 300 returned by the Fountain Gate, the Guards and peasants behind them singing the paean of victory, they were greeted with garlands and palms and kisses from the enthusiastic citizenry. From the Palace came only a single, curt message: 'Count Belisarius has overstepped his authority in dismantling the palings of our park at the Golden Gate without a signed authority from the Keeper of the Parks. Let these stakes be restored forthwith.' The last phrase became a byword in the wine-shops: if a man who had done his neighbour a signal service was afterwards taken up sharply by him for some slight fault, the outraged benefactor would exclaim: 'Ay, ay, dear sir, and let the stakes be restored forthwith.'

This Battle of Chettos was the last battle that Count Belisarius fought; and let none doubt that my account is true, since these things were not done far away on a distant frontier, but here close by, not a day's journey from a city of a million inhabitants. One may ride out for an afternoon's pleasure to view the defile, and the two camps, the Cham Zabergan's at Melantias and Count Belisarius's at Chettos, and return to the city again before evening falls.

CHAPTER 24

THE LAST INGRATITUDE

How can I bear to tell of the final cruelty, not possessing his patience or great heart who suffered it? My story has reached the year of our Lord 564, when Justinian had completed the eightieth year of his life and the thirty-seventh of his reign. The Empire was at peace at last, but it was such peace as a sick man attains after the crisis of a violent fever; and none can say, will he recover or will he the.

The Emperor had grown slovenly in appearance and slovenly in speech; and – this stout champion of Orthodoxy, this harsh persecutor of heretics – had now himself lapsed into a scandalous heresy concerning the nature of the Son.

It had been Theodora's view that the body of Jesus Christ had been insensible to fleshly passions and weaknesses, and was in fact incorruptible flesh, and therefore not human flesh; for the character of all ordinary flesh is to corrupt, she said, unless it be converted into a mummy, in the Egyptian fashion, or frozen by accident in a solid block of ice. But the Orthodox view was that Jesus, until the Resurrection, subsisted in corruptible human flesh, and that to deny this was Monophysitism, and detracting from the greatness of the sacrifice that Jesus had made for mankind.