here was little concert or agreement. Induced to take
the offensive by the retirement of the Persian king, these incapable
officers invaded Persarmenia with all their troops, and proceeded to
plunder its rich plains and fertile valleys. Encountering suddenly and
unexpectedly the Persian general Nabedes, who, with a small force,
was strongly posted at a village called Anglon, they were compelled to
engage at disadvantage; their troops, entangled in difficult ground,
found themselves attacked in their rear by an ambush; Narses, the
bravest of them, fell; and, a general panic seizing the entire
multitude, they fled in the extremest disorder, casting away their
arms, and pressing their horses till they sank and expired. The Persians
pursued, but with caution, and the carnage was not so great as might
have been expected; but vast numbers of the disarmed fugitives were
overtaken and made prisoners by the enemy; and the arms, animals,
and camp equipment which fell into the hands of the Persians amply
compensated all previous losses, and left Persarmenia the richer for the
inroad.

The ravages of the pestilence having ceased, Chosroes, in the following
year (A.D. 544), again marched westward in person, and laid siege to the
city of Edessa. It would seem that he had now resolved not to be content
with plundering raids, but to attempt at any rate the permanent conquest
of some portion of the Roman territory. Edessa and Daras were the two
towns on which the Roman possession of Western Mesopotamia at this time
mainly depended. As the passing of Nisibis, in A.D. 363, from Roman into
Persian hands, had given to Persia a secure hold on the eastern portion
of the country between the rivers, so the occupation of Edessa and Daras
could it have been effected, would have carried with it dominion over
the more western regions. The Roman frontier would in this way have been
thrown back to the Euphrates. Chosroes must be understood as aiming at
this grand result in the siege which he so pertinaciously pressed, and
which Edessa so gallantly resisted, during the summer of A.D. 544. The
elaborate account which Procopius gives of the siege may be due to a
sense of its importance. Chosroes tried, not force only, but every art
known to the engineering science of the period; he repeated his assaults
day after day; he allowed the defenders no repose; yet he was compelled
at last to own himself baffled by the valor of the small Roman garrison
and the