ouncil at
which one of his generals of division rushes at him with a drawn sword,
do not give us an exalted idea of the order maintained in society during
the brilliant conquests of Justinian's reign. Reasoning from analogy, it
may appear natural enough that such a governor-general and
commander-in-chief should end his career by having his eyes put out and
by begging his bread.

There was another circumstance which very much increased the probability
of Belisarius dying a beggar. We do not wish to deprive the tale of the
smallest portion of the just sympathy of the latest posterity. The fact
is, Belisarius grew enormously rich during his successful campaigns
against Gelimer and Witiges, and even contrived to accumulate treasures
during his unsuccessful wars with Chosroes and Totila.[30] Like his
friend Bessas and his enemy Konstantinos, as the truth must be spoken,
he did not neglect the golden opportunities he enjoyed of gaining golden
spoils from all sorts of men. Now, from the days of Sylla, to those of
Justinian, not to say a good deal earlier and later, it was the avowed
system of the financiers of Rome to increase the budget by
confiscations. The Ottoman empire, heir to most of the vices and some of
the grandeur of Imperial Constantinople, cherished the system as a part
of its strength, until it adopted the more pitiful vices of Western
Europe. Anastasius--not the ecclesiastical historian of the earlier
Popes, but the hero of the "Memoirs of a Greek," by Mr Thomas Hope--in
his ratiocination on the principles of Ottoman finance, gives us a
compendious abstract of those of Imperial Rome during eleven centuries,
from Augustus to Constantine Dragoses:--

"Regarding each officer of the state only in the light of one of the
smaller and more numerous reservoirs, distributed on distant points to
collect the first produce of dews, and drip, and rills, ere the
collective mass be poured into the single greater central basin of the
Sultan's treasury, you give yourself no trouble to check the dishonesty
of your agent, or to prevent his peculations. You rather for a while
connive at, and favour and lend your own authority to his exactions,
which will enable you, when afterwards you squeeze him out, to combine
greater profit with a more signal show of justice. In permitting a
temporary defalcation from your treasury, you consider yourselves as
only lending out your capital at more usurious interest. Nine long
years, while your