[468-491 A.D.]
He returned to Constantinople with the loss of more than half of his fleet and army, and sheltered his guilty head in the sanctuary of St. Sophia, till his sister, by her tears and entreaties, could obtain his pardon from the indignant emperor. Leo confirmed and dishonoured his reign by the perfidious murder of Aspar and his sons, who too rigorously exacted the debt of gratitude and obedience. The inheritance of Leo and of the East was peaceably devolved on his infant grandson, Leo II, the son of his daughter Ariadne; and her Isaurian husband, the fortunate Trascalisseus, exchanged that barbarous sound for the Grecian appellation of Zeno. After the decease of the elder Leo, he approached with unnatural respect the throne of his son, humbly received as a gift the second rank in the empire, and soon excited the public suspicion on the sudden and premature death of his young colleague, whose life could no longer promote the success of his ambition. But the palace of Constantinople was ruled by female influence, and agitated by female passions; and Verina, the widow of Leo, claiming his empire as her own, pronounced a sentence of deposition against the worthless and ungrateful servant on whom she alone had bestowed the sceptre of the East.
As soon as she sounded a revolt in the ears of Zeno, he fled with precipitation into the mountains of Isauria, and her brother Basiliscus, already infamous by his African expedition, was unanimously proclaimed by the servile senate. But the reign of the usurper was short and turbulent.
Basiliscus presumed to assassinate the lover of his sister; he dared to offend the lover of his wife, the vain and insolent Harmatius, who, in the midst of Asiatic luxury, affected the dress, the demeanour, and the surname of Achilles. By the conspiracy of the malcontents, Zeno was recalled from exile; and the armies, the capital, the person of Basiliscus, were betrayed; and his whole family was condemned to the long agony of cold and hunger by the inhuman conqueror who wanted courage to encounter or to forgive his enemies. [It was after Zeno’s return to the throne that Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king, left Illyricum with his people to invade Italy (488). This event will be fully described in Chapter I of the “Western Empire.”]
The haughty spirit of Verina was still incapable of submission or repose. She provoked the enmity of a favourite general, embraced his cause as soon as he was disgraced, created a new emperor in Syria and Egypt, raised an army of seventy thousand men, and persisted to the last moment of her life in a fruitless rebellion, which, according to the fashion of the age, had been predicted by Christian hermits and pagan magicians. While the East was afflicted by the passions of Verina, her daughter Ariadne was distinguished by the female virtues of mildness and fidelity; she followed her husband in his exile, and after his restoration she implored his clemency in favour of her mother. On the decease of Zeno, Ariadne, the daughter, the mother, and the widow of an emperor, gave her hand and the imperial title to Anastasius, an aged domestic of the palace, who survived his elevation above twenty-seven years, and whose character is attested by the acclamation of the people: “Reign as you have lived!”b
[491-518 A.D.]
Anastasius’ accession was not undisputed. Zeno’s brother Longinus claimed the throne and with his brother Isaurians fought for it. A five years’ war beginning in 491 was the result. Constantinople furnished the scene for several bloody riots, especially when, after a decisive victory of the troops at Colyæum in 493, Anastasius issued an edict expelling the Isaurians from the capital. The adherents of the banished nation kept up desultory fighting until in 496 Longinus and his brother were taken. The Isaurian War was the temporary ruin of Asia Minor, and the Persian monarch Kobad found it no difficult task to seize Martyropolis, Amida, and other Armenian strongholds in 503. The cause of this hostile act is a matter of dispute; it may have been that the emperor refused a payment promised by Leo, or Anastasius may have declined to grant Kobad a loan he wished to raise. The consequence of this war might have been most serious for the empire had not the Huns invaded Persia at this critical moment. Kobad was now anxious to sue for peace, the more so since the new Roman general Celer was fast undoing the mistakes of his predecessor, Hypatius. The treaty was signed in 505. The next few years are marked chiefly with the revolt of Vitalian, the Goth. In 514 he attempted to seize the throne, but Anastasius brought him to terms with the office of magister militum of Thrace, and a present of money.a
JUSTIN I
Justin I is said to have been an illiterate Illyrian peasant, who, with two other peasants of the same village, deserted for the profession of arms the more useful employment of husbandmen or shepherds. On foot, with a scanty provision of biscuit in their knapsacks, the three youths followed the high road to Constantinople, and were soon enrolled, for their strength and stature, among the guards of the emperor Leo.
Under the two succeeding reigns, the fortunate peasant emerged to wealth and honours; and his escape from some dangers which threatened his life was afterwards ascribed to the guardian angel who watches over the fate of kings. His long and laudable service in the Isaurian and Persian wars would not have preserved from oblivion the name of Justin; yet they might warrant the military promotion which in the course of fifty years he gradually obtained—the rank of tribune, of count, and of general, the dignity of senator, and the command of the guards, who obeyed him as their chief at the important crisis when the emperor Anastasius was removed from the world. The powerful kinsmen, whom he had raised and enriched, were excluded from the throne; and the eunuch Amantius, who reigned in the palace, had secretly resolved to fix the diadem on the head of the most obsequious of his creatures. A liberal donative, to conciliate the suffrage of the guards, was entrusted for that purpose in the hands of their commander. But these weighty arguments were treacherously employed by Justin in his own favour; and as no competitor presumed to appear, the Dacian peasant was invested with the purple, by the unanimous consent of the soldiers, who knew him to be brave and gentle, of the clergy and people, who believed him to be orthodox, and of the provincials, who yielded a blind and implicit submission to the will of the capital.
[518-527 A.D.]
The elder Justin, as he is distinguished from another emperor of the same family and name, ascended the Byzantine throne at the age of sixty-eight years; and, had he been left to his own guidance, every moment of a nine years’ reign must have exposed to his subjects the impropriety of their choice. His ignorance was similar to that of Theodoric; and it is remarkable that in an age not destitute of learning two contemporary monarchs had never been instructed in the knowledge of the alphabet. But the genius of Justin was far inferior to that of the Gothic king; the experience of a soldier had not qualified him for the government of an empire, and, though personally brave, the consciousness of his own weakness was naturally attended with doubt, distrust, and political apprehension. But the official business of the state was diligently and faithfully transacted by the quæstor Proclus, and the aged emperor adopted the talents and ambition of his nephew Justinian, an aspiring youth whom his uncle had drawn from the rustic solitude of Dacia, and educated at Constantinople, as the heir of his private fortune and at length of the Eastern Empire.
Since the eunuch Amantius had been defrauded of his money, it became necessary to deprive him of his life. The task was easily accomplished by the charge of a real or fictitious conspiracy; and the judges were informed, as an accumulation of guilt, that he was secretly addicted to the Manichæan heresy. Amantius lost his head; three of his companions, the first domestics of the palace, were punished either with death or exile; and their unfortunate candidate for the purple was cast into a deep dungeon, overwhelmed with stones, and ignominiously thrown, without burial, into the sea.