ve 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 conversation 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 a 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 labored
for pardon and reward in the six books of the Imperial _edifices_. He
had dexterously chosen a subject of apparent splendor, 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 Themistocles and Cyrus. Disappointment might urge the
flatterer to secret revenge; and the first glance of favor 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
daemons, 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. From these various materials, I shall now
proceed to describe the reign of Justinian, which will deserve and
occupy an ample space. The present chapter will explain the elevation
and character of Theodora, the factions of the circus, and the peaceful
administration of the sovereign of the East. In the three succeeding
chapters, I shall