Count Belisarius Read online

  At this Modestus’s assurance suddenly deserts him. The great battle of Adrianople is an historical calamity that he has from time to time succeeded in forgetting, but never for long; and here it starts up again at his very table. He quavers, with an appealing glance at his supporters, and speaking for once in straight language: ‘We were betrayed. It was our Thracian light cavalry, on the left flank, that first gave way. We had almost won the battle. Our legionaries were cutting their way through the barricade of enemy wagons and in another half-hour we would have driven their main body off the field – but unexpectedly the Gothic heavy-cavalry squadrons returned from a foraging expedition and thundered upon these Thracians, who were driven off in all directions. So the Goths easily rode down our allied infantry, and pressed the survivors of these against our brave legionaries, who were busy enough already with the fight at the wagons. Next, the cavalry that was supposed to cover our right wing (Low Country horse, I believe) galloped off in disgraceful flight; and finally, out swarmed the whole barbarian mass from behind the wagons. Assailed in front, rear, and flank, we were hugged tight, as in the sudden embrace of an angry mountain she-bear…’

  Bessas agrees: ‘Most of the legionaries could not raise their arms to strike a blow, being pressed shoulder to shoulder, like a Hippodrome crowd, and some were lifted entirely off their feet. Spears snapped right and left, because the spearmen could not extricate them from the packed, swaying crowd, and many a man was accidentally impaled upon the sword-point of his rear-rank comrade. All day long until nightfall my ancestors, horsemen born, brave men, handy with the lance and the sword, killed and killed and killed. Our infantry poured in arrows. The dusty field was slippery with blood.’

  Modestus mutters again, a great tear splashing down his cheek into his cup: ‘Our allied cavalry betrayed us. That was all. The legions fought to the death.’

  Malthus asks: ‘But my dear Modestus, had not the same thing happened once before, in the war with Carthage? Did not Hannibal’s heavy cavalry at Cannae break the Roman light cavalry to pieces, so that our allied cavalry on the other wing fled too? Were not the legions then also pressed together into a mass and slaughtered? The Romans should have profited by that lesson. For though they were not born horsemen, as it seems agreed, neither were they born seamen, as the Carthaginians were; yet finding a stranded Carthaginian war-vessel they built others like it, and practised sea-fighting in the safety of their own harbours, and finally sought out the enemy fleet off Sicily, and destroyed it. They should have bred big-boned draught-horses to replace their smart Gallic ponies, and climbed on their broad backs and disciplined themselves into heavy cavalry — within the safety of the walls of Rome if necessary.’

  Bessas takes pity on Modestus, who is weeping again: ‘Courage, Distinguished Lord Modestus! It was you Romans who first instructed us barbarians in the warfare by which we defeated you here at Adrianople. It was you who taught us to co-ordinate our military movements, and showed us the importance of defensive armour, and of fighting in regular formation. We merely applied your teaching to cavalry fighting. And though we were lucky enough to defeat your main army we did not destroy your Empire; far from it. We admired too much your civilized ways, your firm roads and lofty buildings, your good food, your useful manufactures and extensive trade; thus it was you who conquered us in the end. Our nobles became the sworn henchmen of your Emperor, the successor to the Emperor we had slain, and a few years later marched with him to rescue Italy from the rebellious Gauls; whom we defeated in pitched battles, cavalry against infantry again. That was in the time of my great-grandfather. We have remained within the Roman Empire ever since, to protect it against the new nations of barbarians that press against the frontiers, and against the ancient Persians, your neighbours.’

  But Modestus remains sunk in gloom. He recalls other incidents of the battle. The legions fought on empty stomachs, because of some foolish Christian fast…

  Then Belisarius asks permission from Bessas to speak; because being only a boy he must in general refrain from doing so until addressed. Bessas nods consent, and Belisarius speaks, stammering a little from embarrassment, what is in his mind.

  ‘“Roman” is a name borne by hundreds of thousands who have never seen the City of Rome, and never will; and so it was, I believe, in the greatest days of the Empire. To be Roman is to belong not to Rome, a city in Italy, but to the world. The Roman legionaries who perished with Valens were Gauls and Spaniards and Britons and Dalmatians and many other sorts; of true-born Romans among them there cannot have been many hundreds. Then, I do not think that perfection in equipment and military tactics has been attained by the Gothic lancer. The Gothic lancer is a brave man, and his charge is terrible because of the weight of his horse, and because of the heavy armour he wears – cuirass, shield, helmet, greaves. But the Hun horseman is a brave man too, and he can let loose a rain of arrows while riding at full gallop; only his horse is too light to carry a fully armoured man. Thus the Hun has not attained perfection either. Yet, noble Bessas, was it not fear of the Huns that first drove you Goths over the Danube into our Thrace? For your foot-archers could not overtake them, nor could your lancers withstand their volleys of arrows. Now, suppose that one could combine Hun archer and Gothic lancer into a single fighting man and civilize him as a Roman, and put him under proper camp discipline – that, I think, would be to breed a soldier as near perfection as possible. And he would be a Roman both in name and spirit. I intend to command such troops one day.’

  Belisarius spoke with such quiet sincerity and such good sense that everyone applauded loudly, and the heart of my mistress Antonina went suddenly out to him in unmistakable love.

  When dessert was brought in, Antonina gave an exhibition of sword-dancing in the old Spartan style. By now the dispute had ended, for it was realized that Belisarius had said the last word that needed saying; and that the future of warfare lay with him and his boy-companions. Modestus called his nephew to him, and embraced him drunkenly. ‘When I die this villa of mine is yours – tables, plate, frieze, and all. I could not leave it to better hands.’ Indeed, the poor fellow died soon after, and was as good as his word. The property was a very valuable one.

  There is little more to be recorded of the rest of the banquet, which lasted until a late hour. Everyone but my mistress and Belisarius was very drunk – even Malthus — and young Uliaris grew boisterous and seized up a carving-knife and had to be disarmed. Modestus began, once more, his rambling disquisitions, and tied himself into such knots that he won almost as much applause as my mistress did with her last dance, when she so contorted herself that her legs seemed arms, and her belly, buttock. Being drenched in wine, he utterly forgot that he was a Christian and indulged in the most scandalous abuse and blasphemy of the Son (whether single, double, or many-natured) — though not of the Father, whom he generously identified with Jupiter, the supreme Deity of his own race. He went on to tell how the ruin of Rome had been her forsaking of the Old Gods and her taking up of this Galilean impostor – whose meek, unwarlike philosophy had rotted the Empire through and through; so that unlettered barbarians must be hired to undertake the defence of the Empire not merely in the lower ranks of the Army, but also in the capacity of colonels and generals and even commanders of armies.

  Now, while I am on this subject, let me copy out from Modestus’s book of poems an example of his Latin hendecasyllabics – the metre that he favoured most. It will show both the weakness and the occasional strength of his verse. Its weakness, in the continual puns and word-play – cuneus, a military column, or phalanx, and cuniculus, a rabbit; rupibus, rocks, and ruptis, broken; late, widely, and later, lurks. Its strength when, for once, an antithetic contrast (the triumph of the rabbits, that is to say the Christians, by means of their unwarrior-like meekness) is felt with a noble and sincere disgust. Chorazin, I believe, is a village in Galilee which Jesus cursed, but is used instead of ‘Galilee’, the part for the whole, according to poetical convention.

 
DE CUNICULOPOLITANIS

  Ruptis rupibus in Chorazinanis

  Servili cuneo cuniculorum

  Late qui later, allocutus isto

  Adridens BASILEUS, inermis ipse…*

  ON THE INHABITANTS OF RABBITOPOLIS

  In Galilean rocks the rabbits breed,

  A feeble folk, to whom their frail LORD said,

  Smiling: ‘Be bold to cowardice, yea with speed

  Dart from your Foe – unless he too has fled.’

  To our Eternal City these short-lived

  Prolific coneys came, and burrows found

  In catacombs, where they in darkness wived

  And numerous grew and pitted all the ground.

  Thistles of controversy, coney-burrows,

  Injured the farming of our frontier lands:

  No more the Roman sword with straight plough-furrows

  Securely drove through all marauding bands.

  Soon rabbits everywhere swarmed over-ground

  –Constantine took to him a rabbit bride,

  A white scut to his purple back he bound

  And two long ears exchanged for laurel pride.

  Rabbitopolitans, long sunk in shame,

  You bribe the fox, the ferrets and the stoats

  To constable your warren in Rome’s name:

  So blood spurts frequent from your furry throats.

  The next morning my mistress was thoughtful and silent, and I asked her at last what was on her mind.

  She replied: ‘Did you notice that boy Belisarius? Last night after the banquet he declared his love for me.’

  ‘There was surely no harm in that, was there, Mistress?’ I asked.

  ‘Such a strange declaration! Eugenius, imagine, he spoke of marrying me if I would have the patience to wait for him, and meanwhile he would look at no other woman. A boy of fourteen, indeed! Yet somehow I could not laugh.’

  ‘How did you answer him?’

  ‘I asked him whether he realized who I was — a public entertainer, a charioteer’s daughter, a Megaraean Sphinx – and his answer was: “Yes, a pearl from the muddy mussel.” He was evidently unaware that marriage between a man of his rank and a woman of my profession is forbidden by law. I did not know what to answer the poor fellow. I could not even kiss him. It was a foolish situation.’

  ‘And now you are weeping, Mistress. That is more foolish still.’

  ‘Oh, Eugenius, sometimes I wish I were dead!’ she cried.

  However, the melancholy fit soon passed when we were back again in Constantinople.

  *

  The story of how I had come to be in attendance on the dancing-girl Antonina, my mistress.

  There was a Syrian merchant from Acre, by name Barak, and his trade was in Christian relics. If any of these relics happened to be genuine, it was accidental, since I cannot remember that he ever handled any object for which he had to pay a fancy price. His chief talent lay in investing a worthless object with a spurious sanctity. For example, on a voyage to Ireland he carried with him a relic which he confidently ascribed to St Sebastian, martyred under Diocletian. It was a worn-out old military boot (appropriate because Sebastian had been an Army captain) picked up from the roadside in a suburb of Alexandria. Barak had been to the trouble of drawing out the rusty nails from the boot-heel and replacing them with golden ones, and lacing the uppers with purple silk cords, and finding a crimson-lined cedar-wood casket to hold this fine relic. He also brought with him the harsh, heavy loin-cloth of St John the Baptist, enclosed in a casket of silver and crystal. It was made not from linen but from asbestos, a substance which can be shredded and woven into a rough, fire-proof cloth. To the ignorant Irish it was an undeniable miracle that this loin-cloth could be passed through a fierce fire without either changing colour or crumbling away. He also had with him the jewel-encrusted shin-bone of the martyred St Stephen; and the backbone of a shark, its vertebrae bound together with gold wire, which he said was the backbone of the giant Goliath whom David killed; and a rounded piece of rock-salt, mounted in silver, which was supposedly the forearm of Lot’s wife; and many other such wonders. The richness of the settings seemed to prove the objects themselves authentic, and he had with him parchment letters of testimony from Eastern bishops, recounting at length the miracles of healing which these relics had already effected. All the letters were forged. The Irish petty kings paid enormous sums to secure these treasures, and genuine miracles were soon reported from the churches where they were stored.

  Barak returned by way of Cornwall, the extreme western cape of Britain, and touched at the Channel Islands, where he bought me, a six-year-old boy, from a captain of Saxon pirates. My name was Goronwy, the son of Geraint, who was a British nobleman. The Saxons had carried me off, together with my young nurse, in a sudden landing in the Severn estuary. I remember the grey, yellow-lichened keep of my father’s castle, and my father himself as a grave, black-bearded man dressed in a speckled cloak and saffron-dyed trews and wearing a chain of gold and amber about his neck; and I remember the harpers in the rush-strewn hall, and even some fragments of the ballads that they sang.

  My master Barak starved me and treated me very cruelly, and brought me with him to Palestine, where he changed my name to ‘Eugenius’ and castrated me. Then with the money that he had earned in Ireland he bribed the Bishops who ruled in the Holy Places to appoint him general overseer of monuments and chief guide to pilgrims. By their leave he greatly enhanced the wonder of the shrines, and grew very rich. It was he who put the two stone water-pots in the marriage-chamber at Cana of Galilee. They were so constructed that if one poured water in at the mouth they discharged wine in return. For there was a partition to each bottle, just below the neck, and water poured through a funnel into one part of the bottle did not mix with the wine already stored in the other. Barak also supplied the Potter’s Field, called Aceldama, with the original iron chain from which the Apostle Judas hanged himself; and, because pilgrims in the Church of Constantine at the mount of Golgotha often inquired after the sponge of hyssop from which Jesus was given sour wine to drink during His Crucifixion, Barak rediscovered this sponge – pilgrims could drink water through it if they fee’d the attendant well. In the synagogue at Nazareth he also deposited the identical horn-book from which the infant Jesus had been set to learn His alphabet, and the bench on which He sat with other children. My master Barak used to tell the pilgrims: ‘This bench may be easily moved or lifted by Christians, but no Jew can stir it.’ He had a Jew or two always within call to prove the truth of one-half of this assertion; the pilgrims themselves could prove the other half, if they paid for the privilege.

  To the Church of the Holy Sepulchre my master Barak had no need to make any pious additions, for the brazen lamp which had once been placed at Jesus’s head was already there, burning day and night; and the stone by which the tomb was closed lay there, too, at the entrance. It was as large as a millstone, and encrusted with gold and precious stones. From iron rods on the walls of the shrine hung armlets, bracelets, chains, necklaces, coronets, waist-bands, sword-belts, crowns bequeathed by Emperors, of pure gold and Indian jewels, and a great number of rich head-ornaments bequeathed by Empresses. The whole tomb (which recalled the winning-post at the Hippodrome on New Year’s Day hung with prizes for the Inaugural Stakes) was plated with solid silver – walls, floor and roof. An altar stood in front of the tomb, under hanging golden lamps in the form of suns.

  Barak visited Constantinople one summer (the pilgrim-seasons being spring and autumn) to sell relics to the monks there. He had forged a document purporting to be a testimonial from the Patriarch of Alexandria that a certain couch was the identical one on which Jesus had reclined at the Last Supper. He was asking ten thousand gold pieces for it. It happened that the private secretary to the Patriarch had just arrived in the City; hearing of the matter, he denounced the testimonial as a forgery. But my master Barak, not wishing to be scourged and mutilated as the law required, fled away at once, and took ship, and was no
t seen again in our Eastern part of the Empire for a great many years. Then a warrant was sworn against him by the landlord from whom he had rented a furnished house. This landlord was a Hippodrome charioteer, the father of the girl Antonina. He was owed a considerable sum of money; and the judge allowed him to distrain upon any goods that Barak had left behind. But Barak had succeeded in carrying away all his possessions except myself; for I had been sent by him on a shopping errand and had lost myself in the City streets. When I came home at last, very late, expecting a severe beating, I found my master Barak gone. Thus it was that I passed into the ownership of the charioteer, who handed me over to his wife to help in the kitchen, who later bequeathed me to her daughter Antonina, whom I served faithfully for more than fifty years.

  CHAPTER 3

  MEGARAEAN SPHINXES

  You may perhaps have been puzzled by the term ‘Megaraean Sphinx’: that was the name given by some epigrammatist or other to the prostitute of Constantinople. The Sphinx was a devouring monster that kept its secrets to itself, and it was from the Greek city of Megara that Constantinople was first colonized. The story is that the prospective colonists were instructed by an oracle to sail to the north-east until they came to the land opposite to ‘the city of the blind men’; they were to found their own city there, which would become the finest in the world. So they sailed north-east across the Aegean, and up the Hellespont until they reached the Bosphorus, and there they founded their city on the European bank – opposite Hieron, which was already colonized. This was clearly the place intended, for the men of Hieron had built their city on the more unfavourable bank, where currents were troublesome, fish scarce, and the ground unfertile, when they could readily have chosen the other bank with its fine natural harbour, the Golden Horn – so blind they were. Now after all these centuries Hieron is still a small place, but the Megaraean foundation has become a place of a million inhabitants, with magnificent buildings enclosed by a triple wall. It is the city of many names – to the Greeks officially ‘Constantinople’, familiarly ‘Byzantium’, to literary Italians ‘New Rome’, to the Goths and other German barbarians ‘Micklegarth’, to the Bulgars ‘Kesarorda’, to the Slavs ‘Tsarigrad’ – the wonder of the world, which I regard as my home.