onstantinople. He passed along the
streets, and appeared in the Hippodrome, attended by a numerous and
brilliant suite of Gothic, Vandal, and Mauritanian chiefs, mounted on
the finest horses, and clad in the richest armour, that wealth could
command. In the days of his greatest prosperity, his own guards amounted
to 7000 horsemen; and they were more formidable from their discipline
and military experience than from their numbers. To this band of
well-trained veterans, he owed many of his victories over the Goths in
Italy.[24]

The civil administration of Belisarius was never very successful. His
bad financial management involved his African army in revolt; and in
Italy he overlooked disorders, which at last produced indiscipline in
his own ranks, and famine among the Italians. The expense of supporting
his cohorts of personal guards, and the necessity of securing the
services of the most experienced and boldest troopers in this chosen
corps, induced him to wink at irregularities in Africa and Italy, that
he would have been obliged to punish severely near Constantinople or in
Greece. At Abydos, he had ordered two Huns of the mercenary cavalry to
be hanged for committing a murder; at Rome, he ran the risk of being
murdered himself in the midst of a council of war, by one of his
generals, from having neglected too long to cheek the rapacity and
injustice every where perpetrated under the sanction of his authority.

His own personal conduct, and the manner in which he governed Italy,
cannot be better illustrated than by two examples recorded, not in the
secret libel, but in the public history of his secretary Procopius.

Belisarius deposed the Pope of Rome, as well as the Kings of the Vandals
and the Goths. The account Procopius gives us of this extraordinary act,
is conveyed in so few and in such cautious words, that it is necessary
to notice their brevity. "The Pope Silverius was suspected of holding
treasonable communication with the Goths, who at that time besieged
Rome. Belisarius seized him, and banished him to Greece."[25] But even
if the fact that Pope Silverius had really held treasonable
communication with the Goths, be admitted, still the manner in which he
was condemned by Belisarius affords irrefragable evidence of the
injustice of his civil administration.

As the representative of the emperor, Belisarius held a court with all
the pomp of a sovereign prince. Yet when the Pope, accompanied by his
clergy, pr