5]

[Footnote 1115: During the latter part of his reign, the hostilities
of the Saracens, who invested a Pergamenian, named Tiberius, with the
purple, and proclaimed him as the son of Justinian, and an earthquake,
which destroyed the walls of Constantinople, compelled Leo greatly
to increase the burdens of taxation upon his subjects. A twelfth was
exacted in addition to every aurena as a wall tax. Theophanes p. 275
Schlosser, Bilder eturmeud Kaiser, p. 197.--M.]

In a long reign of thirty-four years, the son and successor of Leo,
Constantine the Fifth, surnamed Copronymus, attacked with less temperate
zeal the images or idols of the church. Their votaries have exhausted
the bitterness of religious gall, in their portrait of this spotted
panther, this antichrist, this flying dragon of the serpent's seed,
who surpassed the vices of Elagabalus and Nero. His reign was a long
butchery of whatever was most noble, or holy, or innocent, in his
empire. In person, the emperor assisted at the execution of his victims,
surveyed their agonies, listened to their groans, and indulged, without
satiating, his appetite for blood: a plate of noses was accepted as a
grateful offering, and his domestics were often scourged or mutilated
by the royal hand. His surname was derived from his pollution of his
baptismal font. The infant might be excused; but the manly pleasures of
Copronymus degraded him below the level of a brute; his lust confounded
the eternal distinctions of sex and species, and he seemed to extract
some unnatural delight from the objects most offensive to human sense.
In his religion the Iconoclast was a Heretic, a Jew, a Mahometan, a
Pagan, and an Atheist; and his belief of an invisible power could
be discovered only in his magic rites, human victims, and nocturnal
sacrifices to Venus and the daemons of antiquity. His life was stained
with the most opposite vices, and the ulcers which covered his body,
anticipated before his death the sentiment of hell-tortures. Of these
accusations, which I have so patiently copied, a part is refuted by its
own absurdity; and in the private anecdotes of the life of the princes,
the lie is more easy as the detection is more difficult. Without
adopting the pernicious maxim, that where much is alleged, something
must be true, I can however discern, that Constantine the Fifth was
dissolute and cruel. Calumny is more prone to exaggerate than to invent;
and her licentious tongue is checked in so