atricians: he was suddenly drawn forth to assume the
government of Greece; and this promotion of an injured man was a mark
of the contempt rather than of the confidence of his prince. As he
was followed to the port by the kind offices of his friends, Leontius
observed, with a sigh, that he was a victim adorned for sacrifice,
and that inevitable death would pursue his footsteps. They ventured
to reply, that glory and empire might be the recompense of a generous
resolution; that every order of men abhorred the reign of a monster; and
that the hands of two hundred thousand patriots expected only the voice
of a leader. The night was chosen for their deliverance; and in the
first effort of the conspirators, the praefect was slain, and the prisons
were forced open: the emissaries of Leontius proclaimed in every street,
"Christians, to St. Sophia!" and the seasonable text of the patriarch,
"This is the day of the Lord!" was the prelude of an inflammatory
sermon. From the church the people adjourned to the hippodrome:
Justinian, in whose cause not a sword had been drawn, was dragged before
these tumultuary judges, and their clamors demanded the instant death of
the tyrant. But Leontius, who was already clothed with the purple, cast
an eye of pity on the prostrate son of his own benefactor and of so many
emperors. The life of Justinian was spared; the amputation of his nose,
perhaps of his tongue, was imperfectly performed: the happy flexibility
of the Greek language could impose the name of Rhinotmetus; and the
mutilated tyrant was banished to Chersonae in Crim-Tartary, a lonely
settlement, where corn, wine, and oil, were imported as foreign
luxuries.

On the edge of the Scythian wilderness, Justinian still cherished the
pride of his birth, and the hope of his restoration. After three years'
exile, he received the pleasing intelligence that his injury was avenged
by a second revolution, and that Leontius in his turn had been dethroned
and mutilated by the rebel Apsimar, who assumed the more respectable
name of Tiberius. But the claim of lineal succession was still
formidable to a plebeian usurper; and his jealousy was stimulated by the
complaints and charges of the Chersonites, who beheld the vices of the
tyrant in the spirit of the exile. With a band of followers, attached
to his person by common hope or common despair, Justinian fled from the
inhospitable shore to the horde of the Chozars, who pitched their tents
between the