romoted on this occasion the
interest of the Persian king; and his interest was powerfully magnified
by the national and religious prejudices of the Magi and satraps. In a
strain of artful adulation, which assumed the language of freedom, they
presumed to censure the excess of his gratitude and friendship for the
Greeks; a nation with whom it was dangerous to conclude either peace or
alliance; whose superstition was devoid of truth and justice, and who
must be incapable of any virtue, since they could perpetrate the most
atrocious of crimes, the impious murder of their sovereign. For the
crime of an ambitious centurion, the nation which he oppressed was
chastised with the calamities of war; and the same calamities, at the
end of twenty years, were retaliated and redoubled on the heads of the
Persians. The general who had restored Chosroes to the throne still
commanded in the East; and the name of Narses was the formidable
sound with which the Assyrian mothers were accustomed to terrify their
infants. It is not improbable, that a native subject of Persia should
encourage his master and his friend to deliver and possess the provinces
of Asia. It is still more probable, that Chosroes should animate his
troops by the assurance that the sword which they dreaded the most would
remain in its scabbard, or be drawn in their favor. The hero could not
depend on the faith of a tyrant; and the tyrant was conscious how
little he deserved the obedience of a hero. Narses was removed from his
military command; he reared an independent standard at Hierapolis, in
Syria: he was betrayed by fallacious promises, and burnt alive in the
market-place of Constantinople. Deprived of the only chief whom they
could fear or esteem, the bands which he had led to victory were twice
broken by the cavalry, trampled by the elephants, and pierced by the
arrows of the Barbarians; and a great number of the captives were
beheaded on the field of battle by the sentence of the victor, who might
justly condemn these seditious mercenaries as the authors or accomplices
of the death of Maurice. Under the reign of Phocas, the fortifications
of Merdin, Dara, Amida, and Edessa, were successively besieged, reduced,
and destroyed, by the Persian monarch: he passed the Euphrates, occupied
the Syrian cities, Hierapolis, Chalcis, and Berrhaea or Aleppo, and soon
encompassed the walls of Antioch with his irresistible arms. The rapid
tide of success discloses the decay of the