ith a single
stroke of their dagger. The dissolute youth of Constantinople adopted
the blue livery of disorder; the laws were silent, and the bonds
of society were relaxed: creditors were compelled to resign their
obligations; judges to reverse their sentence; masters to enfranchise
their slaves; fathers to supply the extravagance of their children;
noble matrons were prostituted to the lust of their servants; beautiful
boys were torn from the arms of their parents; and wives, unless they
preferred a voluntary death, were ravished in the presence of their
husbands. [47] The despair of the greens, who were persecuted by their
enemies, and deserted by the magistrates, assumed the privilege of
defence, perhaps of retaliation; but those who survived the combat were
dragged to execution, and the unhappy fugitives, escaping to woods
and caverns, preyed without mercy on the society from whence they were
expelled. Those ministers of justice who had courage to punish the
crimes, and to brave the resentment, of the blues, became the victims of
their indiscreet zeal; a praefect of Constantinople fled for refuge to
the holy sepulchre, a count of the East was ignominiously whipped, and a
governor of Cilicia was hanged, by the order of Theodora, on the tomb of
two assassins whom he had condemned for the murder of his groom, and
a daring attack upon his own life. [48] An aspiring candidate may be
tempted to build his greatness on the public confusion, but it is the
interest as well as duty of a sovereign to maintain the authority of
the laws. The first edict of Justinian, which was often repeated,
and sometimes executed, announced his firm resolution to support the
innocent, and to chastise the guilty, of every denomination and color.
Yet the balance of justice was still inclined in favor of the blue
faction, by the secret affection, the habits, and the fears of the
emperor; his equity, after an apparent struggle, submitted, without
reluctance, to the implacable passions of Theodora, and the empress
never forgot, or forgave, the injuries of the comedian. At the accession
of the younger Justin, the proclamation of equal and rigorous justice
indirectly condemned the partiality of the former reign. "Ye blues,
Justinian is no more! ye greens, he is still alive!" [49]

[Footnote 44: Marcellin. in Chron. p. 47. Instead of the vulgar word
venata he uses the more exquisite terms of coerulea and coerealis.
Baronius (A.D. 501, No. 4, 5, 6) is s