which are continued in the five books of Agathias, deserve our esteem
as a laborious and successful imitation of the Attic, or at least of
the Asiatic, writers of ancient Greece. His facts are collected from
the personal experience and free conversations of a soldier, a
statesman, and a traveller; his style continually aspires, and often
attains, to the merit of strength and elegance; his reflections, more
especially in the speeches which he too frequently inserts, contain a
rich fund of political knowledge; and the historian, excited by the
generous ambition of pleasing and instructing posterity, appears to
disdain the prejudices of the people and the flattery of courts. The
writings of Procopius were read and applauded by his contemporaries;
but, although he respectfully laid them at the foot of the throne, the
pride of Justinian must have been wounded by the praise of an hero who
perpetually eclipses the glory of his inactive sovereign. The
conscious dignity of independence was subdued by the hopes and fears
of a slave, and the secretary of Belisarius laboured for pardon and
reward in the six books of imperial _edifices._[6] He had dexterously
chosen a subject of apparent splendour, in which he could loudly
celebrate the genius, the magnificence, and the piety of a prince,
who, both as a conqueror and legislator, had surpassed the puerile
virtues of Cyrus and Themistocles. Disappointment might urge the
flatterer to secret revenge, and the first glance of favour might
again tempt him to suspend and suppress a libel, in which the Roman
Cyrus is degraded into an odious and contemptible tyrant, in which
both the Emperor and his consort Theodora are seriously represented as
two demons, who had assumed a human form for the destruction of
mankind. Such base inconsistency must doubtless sully the reputation
and detract from the credit of Procopius; yet, after the venom of his
malignity has been suffered to exhale, the residue of the 'Anecdotes,'
even the most disgraceful facts, some of which had been tenderly
hinted in his public history, are established by their internal
evidence, or the authentic monuments of the times."[7] It remains to
add that in some passages, owing to imperfections in the text or the
involved nature of the sentences, it is difficult to feel sure as to
the meaning. In these the translator can only hope to have given a
rendering which harmonises with the context and is generally
intelligible, even if t