Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847

The age of Belisarius was deeply imbued with the military spirit of the middle ages; and Belisarius was himself as proud of his accomplishments as a daring horseman, a good lance, and a stout bowman, as of his military science. Cavalry was the favourite portion of the army in his day, and he shared in the general contempt felt for infantry. The horsemen were sheathed in complete steel; and their helmets, breast-plates and shields, were impenetrable even to the shafts of the Persians, who drew their bow-strings to the right ear, and threw discredit on the prowess of the Homeric archers.13 The Roman officers, as must always be the case where cavalry is the principal arm, were remarkable for personal courage and impetuous daring; and perhaps in the whole annals of Rome there cannot be found another period in which headlong rashness was so universally the characteristic of the generals of the Roman armies.

"How concise—how just—how beautiful is the whole picture! I see the attitudes of the archer—I hear the twanging of the bow." The figures of the archers in the Æginetan marbles at Munich, admirably illustrate the genius of Homer and the taste of Gibbon.]

The favourite position of Belisarius on the field of battle was to figure like Richard Cœur-de-Lion as a colonel of cuirassiers, not like Marlborough, to perform the duties of a commander-in-chief. Procopius prefaces an account of one of his rashest combats by declaring that he was not in the habit of exposing himself unnecessarily, but on the occasion in question, he owns that Belisarius fought too much like a mere soldier in the front rank.

The whole Gothic army advancing to besiege Rome had passed the Tiber before Belisarius was aware that his troops, stationed to defend the Milvian bridge, had abandoned their post. On going out to reconnoitre, he fell in with the enemy. Instead of retreating, he led on the cavalry that attended him to the charge. He was mounted on his favourite charger; the Greeks called it Phalion, the barbarians Balan, from its colour: it was a bay with a white face. Balan was perfectly broken to his hand, and his armour, wrought by the skill of Byzantine artists, was too light to incommode his powerful frame, yet tempered to resist the best-directed arrow or javelin. The person of Belisarius was soon recognised in the Gothic army, and the shout spread far and wide to the javelin-men and the archers, "At the bay horse! At the bay horse!" The bravest of the Gothic chiefs placed their lances in rest, and rushed forward to bear down the Roman general. The guards of Belisarius, in that trying hour, showed themselves worthy of their own and, their general's fame. They closed up by his side, so well as to leave him only a single enemy. It is ridiculous to attempt describing a personal encounter thirteen centuries after the event. The duties of Procopius did not place him at the elbow of Belisarius at such an hour, and even if he had been there he could have seen but little of what others were about.

The result of the encounter is matter of history. A thousand Goths fell in the skirmish, and the bravest of the veteran guards of Belisarius perished by his side. The barbarians were driven back to their camp; but when Belisarius imprudently followed them, he was repulsed by the Gothic infantry forming before the lines, and the Romans were compelled to make a precipitate retreat. They galloped back to the gates of Rome closely pursued by fresh squadrons of Gothic cavalry. But as they reached the walls in disorder, the garrison refused to open the gates, fearing lest the Goths might force their way into the city with the fugitives, and believing that Belisarius had perished in the battle. There was now nothing left for the commander-in-chief but to form a small squadron of his faithful guards, and make a desperate and sudden charge on the advancing Goths. The manœuvre was executed with consummate skill, and the leading ranks of the enemy were broken, thrown into confusion, and forced back on the succeeding squadrons by the impetuous charge. The cry spread that the garrison had made a sally; the obscurity of evening was commencing, the Goths commenced their retreat; and Belisarius and his wearied troops were at last allowed to enter Rome. In this desperate encounter, their respective enemies allowed that Belisarius was the bravest of the Romans, and Wisand of the Goths. The Roman general escaped without a wound, but the valiant Goth, borne down in the combat around the person of Belisarius, was left for dead on the field, where he remained all the next day, and it was only on the third morning, in taking up his body for interment, that he was discovered to be still alive. He recovered from his wounds and lived long afterwards.14

Belisarius, unlike the noble barons of more modern days, who were all pride and presumption in their iron shells, mounted on their dray horses, but useless when dismounted, did not disdain to add to his knightly accomplishments that of a most skilful archer. This skill saved Rome in a dangerous attack. When the Goths advanced their movable towers against the walls, drawn forward by innumerable yokes of oxen, Belisarius, placing himself on the ramparts, ordered the garrison to allow the towers to advance unmolested by the machines to within bow-shot. Then taking up a long bow, which might have graced the hand of Robin Hood, and choosing two shafts of a yard in length, he drew the bowstring to his ear, and shot his shaft at the tower. The Gothic captain, who was directing its movements from the summit, had trusted too much to the workmanship of his Milan armour. The fabric was not equal to that of Byzantium. The shaft pierced him to the heart; he tottered a moment on the edge of the tower, and then fell headlong forward. The second shaft brought down another Goth. Belisarius then ordered his archers to shoot at the oxen, which soon fell, pierced by a thousand arrows; and the towers that the Gothic army counted on to enable them to make a general assault, remained immovable until the Romans could burn them.15

Belisarius, fond of cavalry, seems to have overlooked, nay, even to have neglected, the discipline of the Roman infantry. While besieged in Rome, he defended the place by a series of cavalry skirmishes, and allowed all the officers of the infantry who could mount themselves to serve on horse-back. Some of the native officers of the legionaries, jealous of their reputation, offered to lead their troops on foot. Belisarius would hardly allow them to quit the walls, and plainly expressed his want of confidence in the Roman infantry on the field of battle, while he showed his utter contempt for the city militia, by keeping it carefully shut up within the walls. The battle in which the infantry took part proved unsuccessful; but the officers who led it died bravely, sustaining the combat after the cavalry had fled.16

Yet Belisarius knew well how to appreciate the tactics of the old Roman legion; and he made use of a singular method of obtaining the great military advantages to be derived from the possession of a body of the best infantry. At the battle of Kallinikon, when his cavalry was broken by the iron-cased horsemen of Persia—the renowned kataphraktoi, or original steel lobsters—the Roman general, with the genius of a Scipio or a Cæsar, saw that the steadiness of a body of infantry could alone save his army. He immediately ordered the heavy lancers of his own guard to dismount, and form square before the feebler and less perfectly equipped soldiers of the legions of the line. With this phalanx, presenting its closely serried shields and long lances to the repeated charges of the kataphraktoi, he foiled every attack of the victorious Persians, and saved his army.17

Belisarius, however, acquired more favour at the court of Justinian, and secured the personal affection of the Emperor more, by slaughtering the people of Constantinople in a city rebellion, originating out of the factions of the Circus, than by his exploits against the distant enemies of the empire. The affair was called the Day of Victory. The scene was repeated on the 4th of October 1795, in the city of Paris, and was called the Day of the Sections. The part of the Thracian Belisarius was then performed by the Corsican Bonaparte. In the tragedy of old, three thousand citizens were massacred by the mild Belisarius, in that of Paris, hardly three hundred perished by the inexorable Napoleon.

The personal conduct of Belisarius is presented to us under two totally different points of view, in the works of his Secretary Procopius. In the authentic history of the Persian, Vandal, and Gothic wars, he appears as the commander-in-chief of the Roman armies, his actions are narrated by a Roman historian, and his conduct is held up to the admiration of Roman society. In the secret history, on the contrary, we have, it is true, the same man described by the same author, but the work is addressed to the Greek race, and not to their Roman rulers, and it presents Belisarius as the instrument of a corrupt and tyrannical court, engaged in plundering the people, while crouching under the oppression of which he was the minister. The history of Procopius was written for the libraries of the Byzantine nobles; the anecdotes for the clubs of the Greek people. Though composed in the same language, they belong not only to two different classes of literature, but even to the literature of two different races of men.18

Belisarius was a fortunate, as well as a great general. His victories over the Vandals and the Goths prove his military talents; but the spectacle of their kings, Gelimer and Witiges, the representatives of the dreaded Genseric and the mighty Theoderic, walking as captives through the streets of Constantinople, made a deeper impression on men's minds than the slaughter of the bloodiest battle. Nor was the restoration of the sacred plate of the Temple of the Jews to the city of Jerusalem, an event of less importance, in a superstitious age, than the destruction of a barbarian monarchy. Among the spoils of the Vandals at Carthage, Belisarius had found in the treasury those sacred vessels which Titus, nearly five centuries before, had carried away to Rome from the ruins of Jerusalem. Genseric had transported these relics to Africa, when he plundered Rome in the year 455. Justinian was generous enough to revive the long forgotten ceremony of a Roman triumph in order to augment the glory of Belisarius; and the sacred plate of the Jews was exhibited to the people of Constantinople amidst the pomp of the gorgeous pageant. The emperor then commanded them to be removed to Jerusalem, to be preserved in a Christian church.19

The restoration of the sacred spoils of Jerusalem rendered the name of Belisarius renowned in the eastern world, far beyond the bounds of the Roman empire; the glory of refusing the throne of the Cæsars of the west, amazed the barbarians of Europe as far as the filiation of the Gothic and Germanic races extended. The glory of being deemed worthy of the empire, was eclipsed by the singular display of personal dignity which could refuse the honour. When Belisarius was on the eve of putting an end to the Gothic monarchy by the conquest of Ravenna and the capture of Witiges, the Goths, reflecting on their national position in the days of Alaric and Theoderic, when they were only the soldiers of the empire, offered their submission to Belisarius, and invited him to assume the dignity of Emperor of the West. Belisarius refused the offer. He had seen in his Italian campaigns, that the Gothic nobles of Italy were no longer the same soldiers as the Gothic mercenaries of the imperial armies.20 The merit of refusing the empire must have been deeply felt by Justinian; but the jealousy excited by the renown, which conferred the option of accepting such power, gradually effaced the impression of that merit in the breasts both of the feeble emperor, and of his energetic and ambitious consort, Theodora. Though Belisarius loved money and splendour, and had more of Pompey than Cæsar in his character, still the boldest cabinet minister must have felt that lie could no longer safely be entrusted with the whole military power of the empire. Though his fidelity remained inviolable, a seditious army could compel him, even if unwilling, to become its instrument. From the day, therefore, that Belisarius refused the Empire of the West, a cloud fell over his military career. It was determined by the imperial administration never again to entrust him with a force sufficient to proceed in a career of conquest.

It is needless to dwell on the military events of the life of Belisarius. Lord Mahon states it as the purpose of his work, to show how the genius of one man averted the dangers, and corrected the defects, which beset the tottering empire.21 Gibbon, in gorgeous phrase, exalts him to the dignity of being the Africanus of New Rome; and speaks of the Roman armies as being animated by the spirit of Belisarius, one of those heroic names which are familiar to every age and to every nation.22 But if history is to be composed from the facts recorded by historians, rather than from their opinions and their distribution of flattery and censure, it must be owned that Belisarius was only the greatest in a constellation of gallant warriors. Hilbud, Germanos, and Salomon, were his worthy companions in arms; and the eunuch Narses was all but his equal as a general, and greatly his superior as a statesman.

We must now turn to examine the personal conduct of Belisarius. He was unfortunately too much under the influence of his beautiful wife, though she was a few years older than her husband. Her close friendship with the Empress Theodora, her talents, her bold character, and the devoted attachment she displayed to Belisarius, excuses his too servile affection. She embarked with him in the African expedition, though Procopius says that the boldest Roman generals feared the enterprise; and she accompanied him in Italy. In the historical works of Procopius, she is represented as an excellent wife; in his secret libel, as a shameless and profligate woman.

The presence of the Lady Antonina at Carthage and Rome, compelled Belisarius to keep up a splendid and expensive court. The commander-in-chief was fond of wealth, Antonina of splendour. The fortunes of private individuals were still enormous, and rivalled the wealth of Crassus and the debts of Cæsar.23 Belisarius, like a noble Roman, availed himself of his commands in Africa, and Italy, to become master of sums equalling in amount the mighty accumulations of extortion collected by the consuls and proconsuls of old Rome, when they plundered Syria, Egypt, Pontus and Armenia. Of this wealth Belisarius made no inconsiderable display when at Constantinople. He passed along the streets, and appeared in the Hippodrome, attended by a numerous and brilliant suite of Gothic, Vandal, and Mauritanian chiefs, mounted on the finest horses, and clad in the richest armour, that wealth could command. In the days of his greatest prosperity, his own guards amounted to 7000 horsemen; and they were more formidable from their discipline and military experience than from their numbers. To this band of well-trained veterans, he owed many of his victories over the Goths in Italy.24

The civil administration of Belisarius was never very successful. His bad financial management involved his African army in revolt; and in Italy he overlooked disorders, which at last produced indiscipline in his own ranks, and famine among the Italians. The expense of supporting his cohorts of personal guards, and the necessity of securing the services of the most experienced and boldest troopers in this chosen corps, induced him to wink at irregularities in Africa and Italy, that he would have been obliged to punish severely near Constantinople or in Greece. At Abydos, he had ordered two Huns of the mercenary cavalry to be hanged for committing a murder; at Rome, he ran the risk of being murdered himself in the midst of a council of war, by one of his generals, from having neglected too long to cheek the rapacity and injustice every where perpetrated under the sanction of his authority.

His own personal conduct, and the manner in which he governed Italy, cannot be better illustrated than by two examples recorded, not in the secret libel, but in the public history of his secretary Procopius.

Belisarius deposed the Pope of Rome, as well as the Kings of the Vandals and the Goths. The account Procopius gives us of this extraordinary act, is conveyed in so few and in such cautious words, that it is necessary to notice their brevity. "The Pope Silverius was suspected of holding treasonable communication with the Goths, who at that time besieged Rome. Belisarius seized him, and banished him to Greece."25 But even if the fact that Pope Silverius had really held treasonable communication with the Goths, be admitted, still the manner in which he was condemned by Belisarius affords irrefragable evidence of the injustice of his civil administration.

As the representative of the emperor, Belisarius held a court with all the pomp of a sovereign prince. Yet when the Pope, accompanied by his clergy, presented himself at the palace to answer the summons of the imperial lieutenant, he was compelled to enter alone into the cabinet, where the affairs of Italy were decided by the governor-general. In this hall of audience, the Pope found Belisarius seated, while Antonina was reclining on a sofa, in the midst of the assembly, and taking an active part in the business transacted. It was she, and not Belisarius, who interrogated the pontiff. The general's wife insulted the representative of Saint Peter with reproaches, while the general remained a silent spectator of the lady's arrogance, and did not even investigate the evidence of the Pope's guilt. Prejudged by the suspicions of Belisarius, and condemned by the anger of Antonina, Silverius was allowed no opportunity of repelling the accusations brought against him. In the very presence of the commander-in-chief, his pontifical robes were torn off; and as he was hurried away, he was hastily covered with the garb of a monk, and immediately embarked for Greece, to die an exile.

Now, whether it be true or not that Belisarius and Antonina persecuted the Pope to gratify the revenge of Theodora, who had vainly demanded his approbation of an heretical favourite, or that they committed this act of injustice to participate in a large bribe paid by his successor, there can be no doubt that the manner of the Pope's condemnation, without trial, must have destroyed all confidence in the justice of Belisarius throughout Italy, and from this moment every calumny against his administration would readily find credence.

The second example of the arbitrary government of Belisarius, affords the means of estimating the extent to which the officers of the army were allowed to carry their peculation and extortion, as well as the total disregard of all the principles of judicial administration displayed by the commander-in-chief himself, in compelling them to disgorge their plunder. The details of this singular event are reported by Procopius with minuteness and simplicity, and he concludes his narration with a distinct condemnation of the injustice of his patron's conduct. He says, it was the only dishonourable act of his life, but adds, that in spite of the usual moderation of Belisarius, Konstantinos was murdered.26

Konstantinos, a Thracian general, was one of the bravest and most active of the Byzantine officers. He led a division of the army against Perugia and Spoleto; and during the assault of Rome by the Goths, the defence of the tomb of Hadrian had been confided to him. He defended this strange fortress with great valour, though his proceedings have been the subject of execration for the lovers of ancient art ever since, as he used the innumerable statues with which the tomb was adorned, to serve as missiles against the enemy.27

Præsidius, a Roman of Italy, and a man of some distinction, resided at Ravenna under the dominion of the Goths. Wishing to escape from their power, he fled, and sought refuge in a church near Spoleto. The only objects of great value he had carried away with him, were two splendid daggers set in gold, and richly adorned with valuable gems. Konstantinos, hearing of this booty, sent his adjutant to take away the daggers. Præsidius hastened to Rome, and on arriving complained to Belisarius, who only requested Konstantinos to arrange the affair. Such conduct appeared to Præsidius a mockery of justice; and one day, as Belisarius was riding through the Agora, he laid hold of the reins of the general's horse, and called with a loud voice, "Is it permitted, Belisarius, by the laws of the Roman empire, that a suppliant who implores your protection against the barbarians be plundered by Roman generals?" In vain the staff officers around ordered Præsidius to let go the general's bridle, and threatened him with punishment; he refused, until he received a promise from Belisarius that he should receive justice. There is something truly Oriental in all this, and very little in accordance with the principles of the Justinian code: the promise of Belisarius is considered of more value than the laws of the empire. He appears in the character of a vizier or a sultan in the Arabian Nights.

Next day a council of the principal officers of the army was convoked in the palace of Belisarius; and, in the presence of the assembled generals, Konstantinos was summoned to restore the jewelled daggers to Præsidius. The attempt to discountenance military license, which had so long been tolerated, appeared to the rude Thracian a parade of justice, assumed merely for the purpose of imposing on the Italians; he conceived, that while surrounded by his colleagues, he might safely despise what he considered to be a farce. He therefore refused to give up his plunder, and said gaily that he would rather throw the daggers into the Tiber than restore them. Belisarius, enraged at the insolent boldness of his proceeding, exclaimed, "Are you not bound to obey me?" The reply was, "Yes, in every thing else according to the Emperor's commission; but not in this matter." On receiving this answer, the commander-in-chief ordered his guards to be summoned. The order astonished Konstantinos, who saw the affair was assuming a more serious aspect than he had foreseen. Well aware that peculation and extortion were not very heinous offences in the Roman armies, he immediately suspected the existence of a project to ruin him for some other reason, and cried out, "Are the guards ordered in to murder me?" "No," said Belisarius, "only to compel you to restore the plunder which your adjutant seized in the church at Spoleto." Konstantinos saw the commander-in-chief enraged, and knew the Byzantine government well enough to feel his life insecure under the turn affairs seemed taking. With the quick determination of the daring chiefs who then led the fierce soldiers of the empire, he resolved to secure revenge, and perhaps make it the means of escape. Suddenly drawing his sword, he sprang at Belisarius, and made a thrust at his heart. The commander-in-chief, struck with amazement, only contrived to escape by jumping back and dodging behind Bessas, a Thracian Goth of high rank in the Roman army.28 Konstantinos turned to escape, but was seized by the generals Ildiger and Valerian; and the guards entering dragged him from the council chamber to another room, where he was shortly after murdered by the order of Belisarius.29

Now it must be recollected that we have an account of these two remarkable events in the life of Belisarius from an eye-witness. The very reserve of Procopius, who, in the affair of the Pope, omits all mention of Antonina, and glides over the injustice of the proceedings from dread of the feminine ferocity of the lady, and the priestly persecution of the successor of Silverius, who still continued to occupy the Papal chair when the history was written, affords us an indubitable warrant for the accuracy of the graphic description of the impressive scene which attended the murder of Konstantinos. When the History of the Gothic War was published, many of the generals who had been present at the council were still living.

These pictures of Belisarius and his times are not very favourable. A governor-general sitting in council, with his wife on the sofa directing the despatch of business, and a commander-in-chief holding a council at which one of his generals of division rushes at him with a drawn sword, do not give us an exalted idea of the order maintained in society during the brilliant conquests of Justinian's reign. Reasoning from analogy, it may appear natural enough that such a governor-general and commander-in-chief should end his career by having his eyes put out and by begging his bread.