an
earthquake, during which nearly all their inhabitants perished.
Afterwards the plague (which I have spoken of before) began to rage,
and swept away nearly half the survivors. Such were the disasters that
afflicted mankind, from the day when Justinian first commenced to
manage the affairs of the kingdom to the time, and after he had
ascended the Imperial throne.

CHAPTER XIX

I will now relate the manner in which he got possession of the wealth
of the world, after I have first mentioned a vision which was seen in
a dream by a person of distinction at the commencement of his reign.
He thought he was standing on the coast at Byzantium, opposite
Chalcedon, and saw Justinian standing in the midst of the channel. The
latter drank up all the water of the sea, so that it seemed as if he
were standing on dry land, since the water no longer filled the
strait. After this, other streams of water, full of filth and rubbish,
flowing in from the underground sewers on either side, covered the dry
land. Justinian again swallowed these, and the bed of the channel
again became dry. Such was the vision this person beheld in his dream.

This Justinian, when his uncle Justin succeeded to the throne, found
the treasury well filled, for Anastasius, the most provident and
economical of all the Emperors, fearing (what actually happened) that
his successor, if he found himself in want of money, would probably
plunder his subjects, filled the treasure-houses with vast stores of
gold before his death. Justinian exhausted all this wealth in a very
short time, partly by senseless buildings on the coast, partly by
presents to the barbarians, although one would have imagined that a
successor, however profligate and extravagant, would have been unable
to have spent it in a hundred years; for the superintendents of the
treasures and other royal possessions asserted that Anastasius, during
his reign of more than twenty-seven years, had without any difficulty
accumulated 320,000 centenars, of which absolutely nothing remained,
it having all been spent by this man during the lifetime of his uncle,
as I have related above. It is impossible to describe or estimate the
vast sums which he appropriated to himself during his lifetime by
illegal means and wasted in extravagance; for he swallowed up the
fortunes of his subjects like an ever-flowing river, daily absorbing
them in order to disgorge them amongst the barbarians. Having thus
squandered t