Count Belisarius

For good luck Justinian put aboard our vessel, the flag-ship of the fleet, a young Thracian who had just been baptized into the Orthodox Church. He was one of a dwindling sect, the Hunomians, whose peculiarity is that they deny that the Son can be God and eternal, on the grounds that He was once begotten: for eternal generation is, they say, a nonsensical idea. That which is begotten cannot possibly be of one substance with the unbegotten; and contrariwise. The unbegottcn remains eternally unbegotten, and the begotten cannot deny the act of begetting. Therefore… But, at all events, this young man was converted from his heresies and became godson to Belisarius and my mistress Antonina, and took the new name of Theodosius.

He was the handsomest man I ever saw, and I have seen many. He was not so tall and magnificently muscled as Belisarius, but he was strongly and gracefully built and had an extremely mobile face. (The only defect that I could find in him was that the nape of his neck was a trifle narrow and had a deep cleft in it.) But besides all this he was the only man that my mistress had ever met who could talk her own particular sort of happy nonsense with her. Belisarius was witty and eloquent and affectionate and had all the qualities which are admirable in a man, and there was never a woman who was so lucky in her husband as my mistress. He was like the Sun that runs around the heavens – warming creatures and buildings; but, like the Sun, his circle was not complete – he could not shine from the North. It was an incapacity connected with his loyalties: faith and ignorance occupied that quarter of his orbit. But Theodosius shone from the North, as it were, with a laughing light, the quality of which is very difficult for mc to express. I can only say that, whatever Belisarius lacked, with this Theodosius seemed to supply my mistress. It was little enough by comparison with what Belisarius had, yet extremely precious to her, even for its littleness.

It is almost impossible, I believe, for one man to love two women at the same time, without a secret reservation in his mind, 'this one I prize the most'. But a woman may very well be in such a situation, as my mistress soon discovered – at once the most happy and the most miserable one possible. She can reconcile the two in her heart, but in their relations with her each ignores her love of the other. The better man (and my mistress would never at any moment have failed to acknowledge Belisarius to be such) is tempted to behave rather unkindly towards her – from an inability to understand the phenomenon of radiance from the North, and from a desire to make a complete orbit of love around her. The other one is so free of jealous or intense feelings that he regards her loving someone else with as little seriousness as her loving himself. His equable humour makes any strong emotions seem absurd.

It was Theodosius's serene airiness in contrast with Belisarius's deep moral gravity that first made my mistress Antonina pair them together in her mind. There was the occasion of the drunken Massagetic Huns at Abydos; and then that matter of the water-bottles, as we ncarcd Sicily. Both must be told about in detail.

After taking the Thracian horses aboard at Pcrinthus we continued down the Sea of Marmora until we came to the Hellespont, and anchored off" Abydos one evening, intending to set sail early the next morning. The currents are very difficult here, and one needs a good north-easterly breeze to assist one in navigating them; but the next morning there was no breeze at all, so we were obliged to wait four days until one sprang up. The men, having been given shore-leave, found themselves at a loose end: there is not much to be done or seen in this part unless one has a taste for antiquities – then one may ride along the coast to the site of Troy and, dismounting, run around the Tomb of Achilles for good luck.

The Massagetic Huns carried with them what is called a 'bee', a sort of yeast that they put into marc's milk to make it ferment after they have beaten it in a bladder with a hollow club to thin it of its fatty parts. At Perinthus they had bought a quantity of marc's milk and treated it in this way, so that by now it was a very potent drink -they call it kavasse or kumys. In politeness to Aigan I tasted it once and found it far too pungent for my liking, though the after-taste was not unlike the taste of almond-milk; and there seemed something disgusting in its being drawn from a mare. But, as we say when the habits of others are not ours, 'Every fish to his own tipple', and 'Thistles are lettuce to the ass's lips'.