is not recognized by Roman Law as conferring on the son any title to the patrimony, but only as a contract of legal protection on the one hand and filial obedience on the other.
Before calling the Council, Justinian had privately assured the Persian ambassador that the Emperor would, he thought, accept the charge with alacrity; and the ambassador had thereupon sent a message to Khosrou to be ready at the frontier, whence he would shortly be escorted to Constantinople for the adoption ceremony. But now, of course, things were altered. Khosrou felt bitterly insulted at the shabby reply which a Roman ambassador brought to his representative at Nisibis on the frontier. A simple 'no' would have been far less galling than a 'no' masquerading as a 'yes'. Did Justin really expect that the ruler of the oldest and greatest kingdom in the civilized world would allow his favourite son, his chosen successor, a prince with the blood of Artaxerxes and Cyrus in his veins, to be treated like a barbarian German man-at-arms? War broke out soon afterwards; and in it Belisarius was given his first important command.
Before giving an account of his exploits, I must tell you a little more about my mistress and myself at Antioch. One day at noon — it was the twenty-ninth day of May — in the year that this new Persian war broke out, we were sitting in the garden porch of the house, waiting for luncheon to be announced. It was a cool place, beautifully tiled in blue, with a perpetually playing fountain and a white marble pool, full of vari-coloured fish, surrounded by pots of flowers, some of them very rare ones imported from the Far East. My mistress sleepily held a piece of needlework in her hand, unable to sew because of the oppressiveness of the day; I, too, was painfully slack-limbed and slack- minded. Suddenly I began to feel sick. The whole earth seemed to heave and rock about me. I was terrified: was it the cholera? Would I the within a few hours? Cholera was raging in the poorer quarters of the city, killing 5,000 a day. Not far offstood a magnificent temple in the Corinthian style that had once been dedicated to the Goddess Diana (who is also the Syrian Goddess Astarte), but had now been used for a hundred years or more as the official headquarters of the Blue faction. Looking out through the porch, I tried to steady my gaze on the broad peristyle of this substantial building and its columns of yellow Numidian marble ranked in tall rows. But these, too, were swaying about in a drunken manner, and at a particularly violent lurch they all seemed to topple sideways — and down came the peristyle with a rumble and a resounding crash! I realized suddenly that it was not myself who was sick, but our mother the Earth! What I was experiencing was an earthquake of immense and horrible violence. I snatched up my mistress's boy Photius and her little Martha, who had been playing on the floor near me, and ran out into the garden, my mistress stumbling after me. We were only just in time: a still more violent heaving of the earth flung us all to the ground, and with a roar our beautiful, costly, comfortable house collapsed into a confused mass of rubble and broken timber. Some flying object struck my head and I found myself automatically making swimming motions with my arms, as if I had been flung into the sea from a wrecked ship and was being overwhelmed by hugely swelling waves. Indeed, at that very moment, though I did not know it, many thousands of my fellow-citizens were swimming too, and in desperate earnest. For the great River Orontes, swollen with its spring flood, had been driven out of its course by the convulsions of the earth; and now swept through the lower city to a height of twenty feet, carrying all before it.
When my head cleared a little, I caught at my mistress's hand and we ran back to where the house had been, frantically calling the names of the two elder children, and the names of their tutor and of the other domestics. But all were buried under the dusty ruins, except for two gardeners, and a footman who had rushed out of the back door when the first shock was felt, and one badly injured maid. We tried to free someone who was groaning close to us in the ruins — I think that it was my mistress's sister-in-law — but a sudden wind blew up, and a fire spread through the shattered mass, making rescue-work impossible. Once I thought I heard my mistress's elder boy screaming; but when I went to the spot I could hear nothing. After this the shocks gradually diminished in violence. A few hours later we were able to reckon up the day's horrors.
Antioch, the second city of the Eastern Empire (though Alexandria and Corinth and Jerusalem boldly disputed the title), lay in ruins. Of those who survived of its three-quarters of a million inhabitants, all but a few thousand were homeless; for a raging fire had destroyed the wooden houses that the earthquake had spared. Not a church or a public building was left undamaged. Immensely deep, long chasms had appeared in the earth, engulfing whole streets of houses. The most fantastic damage was in the Ostracine and Nymphacan quarters, but the greatest loss of life was at the Public Baths (named after Hadrian and Trajan) which were crowded at the time of the first shock.
The usual evils that accompany an earthquake of such magnitude were not lacking: pillage, rioting, contamination of the water supply, the spread of infectious diseases among the inhabitants (the cholera with increased force), and bitter religious argument as to the cause of the disaster. Fortunately we had an able governor who kept the confidence of the better elements among the survivors. He organized parties for releasing victims trapped in the ruins, for fighting the fires, for burying the dead, for building temporary shelters, and for the collection and distribution of food. If it had not been for him our situation would have been desperate indeed.
My mistress's husband had been caught in the collapse of the Temple of Diana, and his body was never identified; but we were able to recover a large sum in gold from the cellars of the house, and his will was safe in the crypt of a church at Seleucia, under the charge of priests, and the store-building in which he kept his bales of silk had neither collapsed nor been burned. The villa in the Lebanon would be unaffected by the disaster. It might all have been much worse, we decided. Of my mistress's four children she still had two. She suffered the usual mother's pangs for the two that she had lost, telling herself that they were her favourites and the most beautiful and gifted of the four; but whether this was really the case I do not know. It is true that Photius did not prove a good son to her, but I preferred him to his brother who died.
When Justin was informed of the disaster, which had involved not only Antioch but the great city of Edessa on the road to Persia, and Anazarba, and Pompeiopolis, and, in the West, Durazzo and Corinth, all principal cities, he was overcome with grief. He took off the diadem from his head and put on a grey mourning cloak, and offered sacrifices at a shrine outside the City walls, and refrained from washing or shaving for a whole month. He also closed the theatres and the Hippodrome by decree for the same length of time. He contributed 2,000,000 gold pieces to the rebuilding of Antioch and proportionately to the other cities; he also remitted their taxes for a number of years. The loss in Imperial revenue was staggering.
As for my mistress, Antonina: she waited for two years at Antioch until conditions there had improved sufficiently to restore land values to a reasonable level. Then she sold all the property that she had inherited from her husband, and returned to Constantinople, with her two children, accompanied by myself. She bought a small house in the suburb of Blachernae, overlooking the waters of the Golden Horn, and did not announce her presence in the City to Theodora or any other of her former associates, preferring to live in seclusion.
Shortly after our arrival, Justinian became Emperor in succession to Justin. Theodora was already his wife, for his old aunt had died and he had persuaded Justin to repeal the law forbidding patricians to marry women who had been stage-actresses.
So my mistress's former club-mate now wore the Empress's crown of gold heightened with sprays of jewels, and strings of pearls over her shoulders, and a purple silk mantle, and a red gold-brocaded skirt, and golden slippers, and green stockings. My mistress thought it better to let Theodora seek her out, if she wished, than wait upon Theodora herself. For all we knew, she might wish to forget or destroy all evidence of her former life.
My mistress eagerly followed the news of the Persian War, and came to take a secret pride in Belisarius's achievements. He and anotherr young commander named Sittas had raided Persian Armenia and carried away a number of prisoners. This was the only success that the Romans could show in the war, which so far had gone badly for us. The Iberian subjects of the Persians, who were Christians, had revolted from Kobad because he had tried to force Persian burial customs on them. The Christians dig graves and the pagans practise cremation, but the Persians expose their dead, in towers, for the carrion-birds to feed upon: they regard fire and earth as elements too sacred to contaminate with corpse-flesh. Help had been sent to the Iberians from Constantinople in the form of a distinguished general, money, and a small force of friendly Huns from the borders of Colchis; but this was not enough to prevent the Persians from reconquering the Iberians.
In the mountain-range between Iberia and Colchis there are two passes, dominated by ancient forts. The men of Colchis who manned these forts made the war an excuse for sending an ambassador to Constantinople, asking to be paid for maintaining their difficult and disagreeable service; but saying that if the Emperor preferred to hold the fortresses with his own men, he was at liberty to do so. This was while Justin was still alive, though in his dotage. Justinian, who now took all the important decisions himself, was determined not to repeat the mistake that Anastasius had made over the Caspian Gates. Without calling a meeting of the Senate, he informed the ambassador that Justin would accept the second alternative. The Colchians therefore withdrew their garrisons, and Imperial
