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 admiraclass="underline" '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
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.
Justinian brought forward Theodora's view (which in her lifetime he had always opposed) as a new discovery of his own; having her arguments fresh in his memory. In an edict he stigmatized those who held the opposite view as 'worshippers of the corruptible'. He required all patriarchs and bishops to assent to this novel article of faith. In trepidation they begged leave to consider the matter for a while. But the Patriarch of Constantinople, who was a careful scholar and a very upright man, tore his clothing and put dust on his head, exclaiming in such terms as these: 'This is worse even than the heresy of the Monophysites — it verges upon the blasphemy of the filthy Manichees, who declare that the two natures of the Son are contradictory. For, my dear brothers, if Jesus Christ, when living here upon earth, was in truth insensible to passions and weaknesses (as His Clemency would have us believe) what shall we say of the famous weeping for Lazarus, and of those protests on the Cross — the plea that the cup of suffering be put from Him? Such acts, testified to by the Holy Evangelists, would be cither madness or false feigning if the body of Jesus had, forsooth, been the invulnerable body of a deity.'
The Cathedral clerics informed against the Patriarch, and he was deposed.
Belisarius expressed no opinion on these matters. When Sergius, a leading Senator, questioned him about them, he replied: 'It is difficult enough to live according to the commands of Christ, without perplexing oneself with philosophical inquiries as to His nature. I would as soon busy myself with a critical study of the personal character of the Emperor.'
Sergius looked closely at him to sec whether there was sharp satire hidden in his words, but answered: 'Best of men, would not such a study be most illuminating?'
Every day Belisarius attended the Emperor at the Palace; unless the Court was in recess, when he would visit his estates and go hunting there. He remained frugal in habits, generous to the poor, beloved by his friends, and between him and my dear mistress Antonina no words ever passed but words of love and understanding. My mistress conformed to the Christian code of manners, and had by this time abandoned all her pagan ways — except that she still used certain innocent charms for the cure of toothaches and headaches and for immunity from witchcraft. So calm and orderly was the tenor of their lives that it seemed as if they were taking a slow walk together towards the grave, hand in hand, and that no further obstacle would be set in their path, or disaster overtake them.
But Justinian hated Belisarius with an unconquerable hate, and loathed the prospect of dying, to leave his enemy in the enjoyment of unchecked fame and prosperity.' He has stolen our glory,' was Justinian's cry. 'Our ungrateful subjects have a greater regard for him than for the Sacred Person of their Emperor.'
The infamous Procopius, who had been military secretary to Belisarius in all his wan, had spent some years in writing a long history of them. Being a downright, cantankerous man, not given to flatten-, he had told the bitter truth, concealing little or nothing about the treachery of this general and the incompetence of that, and had given due credit to Belisarius for his many victories gained against such enormous odds. He had not directly blamed Justinian for his caprice, incompetence, cruelty, procrastination, meanness, ingratitude, yet had told the historical facts in so straightforward a way that no person with sense, reading them, could fail to form a most unfavourable opinion of the monarch or to conceive the greatest admiration for the general. This history was at last sent to the copying schools at Alexandria, where it was published. It had circulated widely before Justinian became aware of it's existence, some five years before the Battle of Chettos.