and, though the
winds were wild, to fear a shipwreck less than the barbarians--making
provision not for our own safety so much as for the chastity of our
virgins." In another letter, speaking of these "wolves of the north," he
says: "How many monasteries were captured? The waters of how many rivers
were stained with human gore? Antioch was besieged and the other cities,
past which the Halys, the Cydnus, the Orontes, the Euphrates flow. Herds
of captives were dragged away; Arabia, Phoenicia, Palestine, Egypt,
were led captive by fear."

The Huns, however, were not the only depredators at whose hands the
provinces of Asia Minor and Syria suffered. There were other enemies
within, whose ravages were constant, while the expedition of the Huns
from without occurred only once. These enemies were the freebooters who
dwelt in the Isaurian mountains, wild and untamed in their secure
fastnesses. Ammianus Marcellinus describes picturesquely the habits of
these sturdy robbers. They used to descend from the difficult mountain
slopes like a whirlwind to places on the sea-shore, where in hidden ways
and glens they lurked till the fall of night, and in the light of the
crescent moon watched until the mariners riding at anchor slept; then
they boarded the vessels, killed and plundered the crews. Thus the coast
of Isauria was like a deadly shore of Sciron; it was avoided by sailors,
who made a practice of putting in at the safer ports of Cyprus.

The Isaurians did not always confine their land expeditions to the
surrounding provinces of Cilicia and Pamphylia; they penetrated, in A.D.
403, northward to Cappadocia and Pontus, or southward to Syria and
Palestine; and the whole range of the Taurus, as far as the confines of
Syria, seems to have been their spacious habitation. An officer named
Arbacazius was intrusted by Arcadius with an office similar in object to
that which, four and a half centuries ago, had been assigned to
Pompeius; but, though he quelled the spirits of the freebooters for a
moment, Arbacazius did not succeed in eradicating the lawless element,
in the same way as Pompeius had succeeded in exterminating the piracy
which in his day infested the same regions. In the years 404 and 405
Cappadocia was overrun by the robber bands.

Meanwhile, after the death of Rufinus, the weak emperor Arcadius passed
under the influence of the eunuch Eutropius, who, in unscrupulous greed
of money, resembled Rufinus and many other officials