us,
to conduct the defence of the Syrian capital, while Buzes, an officer
who had gained some repute in the Armenian war, was entrusted with
the general protection of the East until Belisarius should arrive from
Italy; but Germanus, after a brief stay, withdrew from Antioch into
Cilicia, and Buzes disappeared without any one knowing whither he had
betaken himself. Antioch was left almost without a garrison; and had
not Theoctistus and Molatzes, two officers who commanded in the
Lebanon, come to the rescue and brought with them a body of six thousand
disciplined troops, it is scarcely possible that any resistance should
have been made. As it was, the resistance was brief and ineffectual.
Chosroes at once discerned the weak point in the defences, and, having
given a general order to the less trusty of his troops to make attacks
upon the lower town in various places, himself with the flower of
the army undertook the assault upon the citadel. Here the commanding
position so unaccountably left outside the walls enabled the Persians to
engage the defenders almost on a level, and their superior skill in the
use of missile weapons soon brought the garrison into difficulties. The
assailants, however, might perhaps still have been repulsed, had not
an unlucky accident supervened, which, creating a panic, put it in the
power of the Persians by a bold movement to enter the place. The Romans,
cramped for room upon the walls, had extemporized some wooden stages
between the towers, which they hung outside by means of ropes. It
happened that, in the crush and tumult, one of these stages gave way;
the ropes broke, and the beams fell with a crash to the earth, carrying
with them a number of the defenders. The noise made by the fall was
great, and produced a general impression that the wall itself had been
broken down; the towers and battlements were at once deserted; the
Roman soldiers rushed to the gates and began to quit the town; while the
Persians took advantage of the panic to advance their scaling ladders,
to mount the walls, and to make themselves masters of the citadel. Thus
Antioch was taken. The prudence of Chosroes was shown in his quietly
allowing the armed force to withdraw; his resolve to trample down all
resistance appeared in his slaughter of the Antiochone youth, who with
a noble recklessness continued the conflict after the soldiers had fled;
his wish to inspire terror far and wide made him deliver the entire
city, with