dence and fortitude, the knowledge of mankind, and the
important art of gaining their confidence and directing their passions.
It is agreed that Leo was a native of Isauria, and that Conon was his
primitive name. The writers, whose awkward satire is praise, describe
him as an itinerant pedler, who drove an ass with some paltry
merchandise to the country fairs; and foolishly relate that he met on
the road some Jewish fortune-tellers, who promised him the Roman
empire, on condition that he should abolish the worship of idols. A more
probable account relates the migration of his father from Asia Minor to
Thrace, where he exercised the lucrative trade of a grazier; and he must
have acquired considerable wealth, since the first introduction of his
son was procured by a supply of five hundred sheep to the Imperial
camp. His first service was in the guards of Justinian, where he soon
attracted the notice, and by degrees the jealousy, of the tyrant.
His valor and dexterity were conspicuous in the Colchian war: from
Anastasius he received the command of the Anatolian legions, and by the
suffrage of the soldiers he was raised to the empire with the general
applause of the Roman world.--II. In this dangerous elevation, Leo the
Third supported himself against the envy of his equals, the discontent
of a powerful faction, and the assaults of his foreign and domestic
enemies. The Catholics, who accuse his religious innovations, are
obliged to confess that they were undertaken with temper and conducted
with firmness. Their silence respects the wisdom of his administration
and the purity of his manners. After a reign of twenty-four years, he
peaceably expired in the palace of Constantinople; and the purple which
he had acquired was transmitted by the right of inheritance to the third
generation.

In a long reign of thirty-four years, the son and successor of Leo,
Constantine the Fifth, surnamed Copronymus, attacked with less temperate
zeal the images or idols of the church. Their votaries have exhausted
the bitterness of religious gall, in their portrait of this spotted
panther, this antichrist, this flying dragon of the serpent's seed,
who surpassed the vices of Elagabalus and Nero. His reign was a long
butchery of whatever was most noble, or holy, or innocent, in his
empire. In person, the emperor assisted at the execution of his victims,
surveyed their agonies, listened to their groans, and indulged, without
satiating, his appetite f