hey profusely spilt the blood of the innocent; churches and altars were
polluted by atrocious murders; and it was the boast of the assassins,
that their dexterity could always inflict a mortal wound with a single
stroke of their dagger. The dissolute youth of Constantinople adopted
the blue livery of disorder; the laws were silent, and the bonds
of society were relaxed: creditors were compelled to resign their
obligations; judges to reverse their sentence; masters to enfranchise
their slaves; fathers to supply the extravagance of their children;
noble matrons were prostituted to the lust of their servants; beautiful
boys were torn from the arms of their parents; and wives, unless they
preferred a voluntary death, were ravished in the presence of their
husbands. The despair of the greens, who were persecuted by their
enemies, and deserted by the magistrates, assumed the privilege of
defence, perhaps of retaliation; but those who survived the combat were
dragged to execution, and the unhappy fugitives, escaping to woods
and caverns, preyed without mercy on the society from whence they were
expelled. Those ministers of justice who had courage to punish the
crimes, and to brave the resentment, of the blues, became the victims
of their indiscreet zeal; a praefect of Constantinople fled for refuge to
the holy sepulchre, a count of the East was ignominiously whipped, and a
governor of Cilicia was hanged, by the order of Theodora, on the tomb of
two assassins whom he had condemned for the murder of his groom, and a
daring attack upon his own life. An aspiring candidate may be tempted to
build his greatness on the public confusion, but it is the interest as
well as duty of a sovereign to maintain the authority of the laws.
The first edict of Justinian, which was often repeated, and sometimes
executed, announced his firm resolution to support the innocent, and to
chastise the guilty, of every denomination and _color_. Yet the balance
of justice was still inclined in favor of the blue faction, by the
secret affection, the habits, and the fears of the emperor; his equity,
after an apparent struggle, submitted, without reluctance, to the
implacable passions of Theodora, and the empress never forgot, or
forgave, the injuries of the comedian. At the accession of the younger
Justin, the proclamation of equal and rigorous justice indirectly
condemned the partiality of the former reign. "Ye blues, Justinian is no
more! ye greens, he is sti