date is 565, and in the month of March of
this year Belisarius died; and in the month of November Justinian also
followed him. The rescript speaks of Belisarius incidentally as "our
most glorious patrician;" an expression incompatible with his having
suffered any great indignity, or remained in permanent disgrace.[46]

We must now turn from examining public history, to consider popular
feeling. Belisarius, as we have already observed, was the hero of the
Roman world; but another society existed in the very heart of that
world, which hated every thing Roman. This society was Greek; it had its
own feelings, its own literature, and its own church. Of its literature,
Procopius has left us a curious specimen in his Secret History, where
the facts of his public Roman history are presented to the discontented
Greeks, richly spiced with calumny and libels on the Roman
administration. Peculiar circumstances gave the reign of Justinian a
prominent position in the history of the world, as the last great era of
Roman history, and its memory was long cherished with a feeling of
wonder and awe.[47] We must, however, remark, that from the death of
Justinian to the accession of Leo III. the Isaurian, the government of
the Eastern empire was strictly Roman. From the reign of Leo III. to
that of Basil I. the Macedonian (867) if not quite Roman, it was very
far from Greek.

Three centuries after the death of Belisarius and Justinian, new
feelings arose. The Greeks then looked back on the authentic history of
Belisarius as they did on that of Scipio and Sylla,--as a history
unconnected with their own national glory, but marking the last
conquests which illustrated the annals of the Roman empire, and
affording one of those mighty names admirably adapted

"To point a moral, or adorn a tale."

We must now endeavour to prove that its use for this purpose, in the
manner transmitted to us, was subsequent to the accession of Basil the
Macedonian.

We believe that the blindness and beggary of Belisarius, as recorded in
the Greek romance, of which the memory has become a part of the
tradition of Western Europe, was suggested to the novelist by the fate
of Symbat, an Armenian noble in the Byzantine service, who married the
daughter of the Caesar Bardas, the uncle of the Emperor Michael III. The
catastrophe of the romance is mentioned by two writers of the twelfth
century. One is the anonymous author of a description of Constantinople,
wh