 CHAPTER 46 Troubles in Persia, Part 3 A daughter of Focus, his only child, was given in marriage to the patrician, Crispus, and the royal images of the bride and bridegroom were indiscreetly placed in the circus by the side of the emperor. The father must desire that his posterity should inherit the fruit of his crimes, but the monarch was offended by this premature and popular association. The tribunes of the Green Faction, who accused the officious heir of their sculptors, were condemned to instant death. Their lives were granted to the prayers of the people, but Crispus might reasonably doubt whether a jealous usurper could forget and pardon his involuntary competition. The Green Faction was alienated by the ingratitude of Focus and the loss of their privileges. Every province of the empire was ripe for rebellion, and Heraculus, exarch of Africa, persisted above two years in refusing all tribute and obedience to the centurion who disgraced the throne of Constantinople. By the secret emissaries of Crispus and the Senate, the independent exarch was solicited to save and govern his country, but his ambition was chilled by age, and he resigned to the dangerous enterprise to his son Heraclius and to Nicotus, the son of Gregory, his friend and lieutenant. The powers of Africa were armed by the two adventurous youths. They agreed that the one should navigate the fleet from Carthage to Constantinople, that the other should lead an army through Egypt and Asia, and that the imperial purple should be the reward of diligence and success. A faint rumour of their undertaking was conveyed to the ears of Focus, and the wife and mother of the younger Heraclius were secured as the hostages of his faith, but the treacherous heart of Crispus extenuated the distant peril, the means of defence were neglected or delayed, and the tyrant supinely slept till the African navy cast anchor in the Hell's Pond. Their standard was joined at Abidas by the fugitives and ex-styles who thirsted for revenge. The ships of Heraclius, whose lofty mass were adorned with the holy symbols of religion, steered their triumphant course through the propontus, and Focus beheld from the windows of the palace his approaching and inevitable fate. The green faction was tempted by gifts and promises to oppose a feeble and fruitless resistance to the landing of the Africans, but the people and even the guards were determined by the well-timed defection of Crispus, and the tyrant was seized by a private enemy, who boldly invaded the solitude of the palace. Stripped of the diadem and purple, clothed in a vile habit and loaded with chains, he was transported in a small boat to the imperial galley of Heraclius, who reproached him with the crimes of his abominable reign. What thou govern better were the last words of the despair of Focus. After suffering each variety of insult and torture, his head was severed from his body, the mangled trunk was cast into the flames, and the same treatment was inflicted on the statues of the vain usurper, and the seditious banner of the green faction. The voice of the clergy, the senate, and the people invited Heraclius to ascend the throne which he had purified from guilt and ignomy. After some graceful hesitation he yielded to their entreaties. His coronation was accompanied by that of his wife, Eudoxia, and their posterity till the fourth generation continued to reign over the Empire of the East. The voyage of Heraclius had been easy and prosperous. The tedious march of Nicotas was not accomplished before the decision of the contest, but he submitted without a murmur to the fortune of his friend, and his laudable intentions were rewarded with an equestrian statue and a daughter of the Emperor. It was more difficult to dress the fidelity of Crispus, whose recent services were recompensed by the command of the Cuppa-Dotian army. His arrogance soon provoked and seemed to excuse the ingratitude of his new sovereign. In the presence of the senate the son-in-law of Focus was condemned to embrace the monastic life, and the sentence was justified by the weighty observation of Heraclius that the man who had betrayed his father could never be faithful to his friend. Even after his death the Republic was afflicted by the crimes of Focus, which armed with a pious cause the most formidable of her enemies. According to the friendly and equal forms of the Byzantine and Persian courts he announced his exultation to the throne, and his ambassador Lilius, who had presented him with the heads of Maurice and his sons, was the best qualified to describe the circumstances of the tragic scene. However it might be varnished by fiction or self-history, Chosros turned with horror from the assassin, imprisoned the pretended envoy, disclaimed the usurper, and declared himself the Avenger of his father and benefactor. The sentiments of grief and resentment, which humanity would feel and honor would dictate, promoted 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 Chosros to the throne still commanded in the east, and the name of Narciss 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 Chosros 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 favour. 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. Narciss was removed from his military command. He reared an independent standard at Heriopolis in Syria. He was betrayed by fallacious promises and burnt alive in the marketplace 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 Focus the fortifications of Murden, Dara, Amida, and Edessa were successively besieged, reduced, and destroyed by the Persian monarch. He passed the Euphrates, occupied the Syrian cities, Heriopolis, Chausus, and Berhia, or Aleppo, and soon encompassed the walls of Antioch with his irresistible arms. The rapid tide of success discloses the decay of the empire, the incapacity of Focus, and the disaffection of his subjects, and Chausros provided a decent apology for their submission or revolt, by an impostor who attended his camp as the son of Maurice and the lawful heir of the monarchy. The first intelligence from the east which Herioclius received was that of the loss of Antioch, but the age in Metropolis, so often overturned by earthquakes and pillaged by the enemy, could supply but a small and languid stream of treasure and blood. The Persians were equally successful and more fortunate in the sack of Caesarea, the capital of Cappadocia, and as they advanced beyond the ramparts of the frontier, the boundary of ancient war, they found a less obstinate resistance and a more plentiful harvest. The pleasant veil of Damascus has been adorned in every age with a royal city. Herbs' cure-fulicity has hitherto escaped the historian of the Roman Empire, but Chausros reposed his troops in the paradise of Damascus before he ascended the hills of Libonus, or invaded the cities of the Phoenician coast. The conquest of Jerusalem, which had been meditated by Nisheirvin, was achieved by the zeal and avarice of his grandson. The ruin of the proudest monument of Christianity was vehemently urged by the intolerant spirit of the Magi, and he could enlist for this holy warfare with an army of six and twenty thousand Jews, whose furious bigotry might compensate, in some degree, for the want of valor and discipline. After the reduction of Galilee and the region beyond the Jordan whose resistance appears to have delayed the fate of the capital, Jerusalem itself was taken by assault. The sepulchre of Christ and the stately churches of Helena and Constantine were consumed, or at least damaged, by the flames. The devout offerings of three hundred years were rifled in one sacrilegious day. The Patriarch Zachariah and the True Cross were transported into Persia, and the massacre of ninety thousand Christians is imputed to the Jews and Arabs, who swelled the disorder of the Persian March. The fugitives of Palestine were entertained in Alexandria by the charity of John the Archbishop, who is distinguished among a crowd of saints by the epithet of almsgiver, and the revenues of the church, with a treasure of three hundred thousand pounds, were restored to the true proprietors, the poor of every country and every denomination. But Egypt itself, the only province which had been exempt since the time of Diocletian, from foreign and domestic war, was again subdued by the successors of Cyrus. Peluciam, the key of that impervious country, was surprised by the cavalry of the Persians. They passed with impunity the innumerable channels of the Delta, and explored the long valley of the Nile, from the pyramids of Memphis to the confines of Ethiopia. Alexandria might have been relieved by a naval force, but the Archbishop and the Prefect embarked for Cyprus, and Chosros entered the second city of the empire, which still preserved a wealthy remnant of industry and commerce. His western trophy was erected not on the walls of Carthage, but in the neighborhood of Tripoli. The Greek colonies of Cyrene were finally extirpated, and the conqueror, treading in the footsteps of Alexander, returned in triumph through the sands of the Libyan desert. In the same campaign another army advanced from the Euphrates to the Thracian Vosphorus, Chalcedon surrendered after a long siege, and a Persian camp was maintained above ten years in the presence of Constantinople. The sea coast of Pontus, the city of Ansira, and the Isle of Rhodes are enumerated among the last conquests of the Great King, and if Chosros had possessed any maritime power his boundless ambition would have spread slavery and desolation over the provinces of Europe. From the long disputed banks of the Tigris and Euphrates the reign of the grandson of Nisirvan was suddenly extended to the hell's pond and the Nile, the ancient limits of the Persian monarchy. But the provinces, which had been fashioned by the habits of six hundred years to the virtues and vices of the Roman government, supported with reluctance the yoke of the barbarians. The idea of a republic was kept alive by the institutions, or at least by the writings of the Greeks and Romans, and the subjects of Heraclius had been educated to pronounce the words of liberty and law. But it has always been the pride and policy of Oriental princes to display the titles and attributes of their onniftense, to upgrade a nation of slaves with their true name and abject condition, and to enforce, by cruel and insolent threats, the rigor of their absolute commands. The Christians of the East were scandalized by the worship of fire and the impious doctrine of the two principles. The Magi were not less tolerant than the bishops and the martyrdom of some native Persians who had deserted the religion of Zoroaster, was conceived to be the prelude of a fearsome general persecution. By the oppressive laws of Justinian, the adversaries of the church were made the enemies of the state. The alliance of the Jews, Nestorians, and Jacobites had contributed to the success of Chosros, and his partial favor to the sectaries provoked the hatred and fears of the Catholic clergy. Conscience of their fear and hatred, the Persian conqueror governed his new subjects with an iron scepter, and, as if he suspected the stability of his dominion, he exhausted their wealth by exorbitant tributes and licentious rapine, despoiled or demolished the temples of the East, and transported to his hereditary realms the gold, the silver, the precious marvels, the arts, and the artists of the Asiatic cities. In the obscure picture of the calamities of the empire, it is not easy to discern the figure of Chosros himself, to separate his actions from those of his lieutenants, or to ascertain his personal merit in the general blaze of glory and magnificence. He enjoyed with ostentation the fruits of victory, and frequently retired from the hardships of war to the luxury of the palace. But in the space of twenty-four years, he was deterred by superstition or resentment from approaching the gates of Cessiphon, and his favorite residence of Artemida, or Dastegerd, was situate beyond the Tigris, about sixty miles to the north of the capital. The adjacent pastures were covered with flocks and herds. The paradise, or park, was replenished with pheasants, peacocks, ostriches, robots, and wild boars, and the noble game of lions and tigers was sometimes turned loose for the bolder pleasures of the chase. Nine hundred and sixty elephants were maintained for the use or splendor of the great king. His tents and baggage were carried into the field by twelve thousand great camels and eight thousand of a smaller size, and the royal stables were filled with six thousand mules and horses, among whom the names of Shabdis and Barid are renowned for their speed or beauty. Six thousand guards successively mounted before the palace gate. The service of the interior apartments was performed by twelve thousand slaves, and in the number of three thousand virgins, the fairest of Asia, some happy concubine might console her master for the age or the indifference of Sira. The various treasures of gold, silver, gems, silks, and aromatics were deposited in a hundred subterraneous vaults, and the chamber Badaverde noted the accidental gift of the winds which had wafted the spoils of Heraclius into one of the Syrian harbors of his rival. The vice of flattery and perhaps a fiction is not ashamed to compute the thirty thousand rich hangings that adorned the walls, the forty thousand columns of silver, or more probably of marble and plated wood that supported the roof, and the thousand globes of gold suspended in the dome to imitate the motions of the planets and the constellations of the zodiac. While the Persian monarch attempted the wonders of his art and power, he received an epistle from an obscure citizen of Mecca, inviting him to acknowledge Muhammad as the apostle of God. He rejected the invitation and tore the epistle. It is thus, explained the Arabian prophet, that God will tear the kingdom and reject the supplications of Chosros. Placed on the verge of the two great empires of the East, Muhammad observed with a secret joy the progress of their mutual destruction, and in the midst of the Persian triumphs he ventured to foretell that before many years should elapse victory should again return to the banners of the Romans. At the time when this prediction is said to have been delivered, no prophecy could be more distant from its accomplishment, since the first twelve years of Heraclius announced the approaching dissolution of the empire. If the motives of Chosros had been pure and honorable, he must have ended the quarrel with the death of Focus, and he would have embraced, as his best ally, the fortunate African who had so generously avenged the injuries of his benefactor Maurice. The prosecution of the war revealed the true character of the barbarian, and the suppliant embassies of Heraclius to beseech his clemency that he would spare the innocent, accept a tribute, and give peace to the world, were rejected with contemptuous silence or insolent menace. Syria, Egypt, and the provinces of Asia were subdued by the Persian arms, while Europe, from the confines of Istria to the long wall of Thrace, was oppressed by the Avars, insatiated with the blood and repeat of the Italian war. They had coolly massacred their male captives in the sacred field of Pannonia, the women and children were reduced to servitude, and the noblest virgins were abandoned to the promiscuous lust of the barbarians. The amorous matron, who opened the gates of Fruili, passed a short night in the arms of her royal lover. The next evening Romilda was condemned to the embraces of twelve avars, and the third day the Lombard princess was impaled in the side of the camp, while the chagrin observed with a cruel smile that such a husband was the fit recompense of her lewdness and perfidity. By these implacable enemies Heraclius, on either side, was insulted and besieged, and the Roman Empire was reduced to the walls of Constantinople, with the remnant of Greece, Italy, and Africa, and some maritime cities, from Tyre to Trebizond of the Asiatic coast. After the loss of Egypt the capital was afflicted by famine and pestilence, and the emperor, incapable of resistance and hopeless of relief, had resolved to transfer his person and government to the more secure residence of Carthage. His ships were already laden with the treasures of the palace, but his flight was arrested by the patriarch, who armed the powers of religion in the defense of his country, led Heraclius to the altar of St. Sophia, and exhorted a solemn oath that he would live and die with the people whom God had entrusted to his care. The chagrin was encamped in the plains of Thrace, but he dissembled his perfidious designs, and solicited an interview with the emperor near the town of Heraclius. Their reconciliation was celebrated with equestrian games, the senate and the people, in their gayest apparel, resorted to the festival of peace, and the avars beheld with envy and desire the spectacle of Roman luxury. Of a sudden the hippodrome was encompassed by the Scythian cavalry, who had pressed their secret and nocturnal march. The tremendous sound of the chagrin's whip gave the signal of the assault, and Heraclius, wrapping his diadem round his arm, was saved with the extreme hazard by the flitness of his horse. So rapid was the pursuit that the avars almost entered the golden gate of Constantinople with the flying crowds, but the plunder of the suburbs rewarded their treason, and they transported beyond the Danube two hundred and seventy thousand captives. On the shore of Chalcedon the emperor held a safer conference with a more honorable foe, who before Heraclius descended from his gallery saluted with reverence and pity the majesty of the purple. The friendly offer of Sain, the Persian general, to conduct an embassy to the presence of the great king, was accepted with the warmest gratitude, and the prayer for pardon and peace was humbly presented by the Praetorian Prefect, the Prefect of the city, and one of the first ecclesiastics of the patriarchal church. But the lieutenant of Chosros had fatally mistaken the intentions of his master. "'It was not an embassy,' said the tyrant of Asia, it was the person of Heraclius bound in chains that he should have brought to the foot of my throne. I will never give peace to the emperor of Rome till he had abjured his crucified god and embraced the worship of the sun.' Sain was flayed alive according to the inhuman practice of his country, and the separate and rigorous confinement of the ambassadors violated the law of nations and the faith of an express stipulation. Yet the experience of six years at length persuaded the Persian monarch to renounce the conquest of Constantinople, and to specify the annual tribute or ransom of the Roman Empire, a thousand talents of gold, a thousand talents of silver, a thousand silk robes, a thousand horses, and a thousand versions. Heraclius subscribed these ignominious terms, but the time and space which he obtained to collect such treasures from the poverty of the East was industriously employed in the preparations of a bold and desperate attack. Of the characters conspicuous in history, that of Heraclius is one of the most extraordinary and inconsistent. In the first and last years of a long reign, the emperor appears to be the slave of sloth, of pleasure or of superstition, the careless and impotent spectator of the public calamities. But the languid mists of the morning and evening are separated by the brightness of the meridian sun. The Arcadius of the palace arose the Caesar of Camp, and the honor of Rome and Heraclius was gloriously revived by the exploits and trophies of six adventurous campaigns. It was the duty of the Byzantine historians to have revealed the causes of his slumber and vigilance. At this distance we can only conjecture that he was endowed with more personal courage than political resolution, that he was detained by the charms and perhaps the arts of his niece Martina, with whom, after the death of Eudocia, he contracted an incestuous marriage, and that he yielded to the base advice of the counselors who urged, as a fundamental law, that the life of the emperor should never be exposed in the field. Perhaps he was awakened by the last, insolent demand of the Persian conqueror, but at the moment when Heraclius assumed the spirit of a hero the only hopes of the Romans were drawn from the vicissitudes of fortune, which might threaten the proud prosperity of Chosros, and must be favorable to those who had attained the lowest period of depression. To provide for the expenses of war was the first care of the emperor, and for the purpose of collecting the tribute he was allowed to solicit the benevolence of the eastern provinces. But the revenue no longer flowed in the usual channels. The credit of an arbitrary prince is annihilated by his power, and the courage of Heraclius was first displayed in daring to borrow the consecrated wealth of churches, under the solemn vow of restoring with usury whatever he had been compelled to employ in the service of religion and the empire. The clergy themselves appeared to have sympathized with the public distress, and the discreet patriarch of Alexandria, without admitting the precedent of sacrilege, assisted his sovereign by the miraculous or seasonable revelation of a secret treasure. Of the soldiers who had conspired with focus only two were found to have survived the stroke of time and the barbarians. The loss, even of these seditious veterans, was imperfectly supplied by the new levies of Heraclius, and the gold of the sanctuary united in the same camp, the names and arms and languages of the east and west. He would have been content with the neutrality of the Avars, and his friendly entreaty, that the Cheggen would act not as the enemy but as the guardian of the empire, was accompanied with a more persuasive donation of two hundred thousand pieces of gold. Two days after the festival of Easter, the emperor, exchanging his purple for the simple garb of a penitent and warrior, gave the signal of his departure. To the faith of the people, Heraclius recommended his children, the civil and military powers were vested in the most deserving hands, and the discretion of the patriarch and senate was authorized to save or surrender the city, if they should be oppressed in his absence by the superior forces of the enemy. The neighboring heights of Chalcedon were covered with tents and arms, but if the new levies of Heraclius had been rashly led to the attack, the victory of the Persians in the sight of Constantinople might have been the last day of the Roman Empire. As imprudent would it have been to advance into the provinces of Asia, leaving their innumerable cavalry to intercept his convoys and continually to hang on the lassitude and disorder of his rear. But the Greeks were still masters of the sea. A fleet of galleys, transports, and storeships was assembled in the harbor. The barbarians consented to embark. A steady wind carried them through the helspont, the western and southern coast of Asia Minor lay on their left hand. The spirit of their chief was first displayed in a storm, and even the eunuchs of his train were excited to suffer and to work by the example of their master. He landed his troops on the confines of Syria and Silistia in the Gulf of Skanderun, where the coast suddenly turns to the south, and his discernment was expressed in the choices of this important post. From all sides the scattered garrisons of the maritime cities and the mountains might repair with speed and safety to his imperial standard. The natural fortifications of Silistia protected and even concealed the camp of Heracleus, which was pitched near Isis on the same ground where Alexander had vanquished the host of Darius. The angle which the emperor occupied was deeply indented into a vast semi-circle of the Asiatic, Armenian, and Syrian provinces, and of whatsoever point of the circumference he should direct his attack it was easy for him to disassemble his own motions, and to prevent those of the enemy. In the camp of Isis the Roman general reformed the sloth and disorder of the veterans, and educated the new recruits in the knowledge and practice of military virtue. Unfolding the miraculous image of Christ he urged them to revenge the holy altars which had been profaned by the worshipers of fire, addressing them by the endearing appellations of sons and brethren, he deplored the public and private wrongs of the republic. The subjects of a monarch were persuaded that they fought in the cause of freedom, and a similar enthusiasm was communicated to the foreign mercenaries, who must have viewed with equal indifference the interest of Rome and of Persia. Heracleus himself, with the skill and patience of a centurion, inculcated the lessons of the school of tactics, and the soldiers were assiduously trained in the use of their weapons, and the exercises and evolutions of the field. The cavalry and infantry in light or heavy armor were divided into two parties. The trumpets were fixed in the center, and their signals directed the march, the charge, the retreat or pursuit, the direct or oblique order, the deep or extended phalanx, to represent in fictitious combat the operations of genuine war. Whatever hardships the emperor imposed on the troops he inflicted with equal severity on himself. Their labor, their diet, their sleep were measured by the inflexible rules of discipline, and without despising the enemy they were taught to repose an implicit confidence in their own valor and the wisdom of their leader. Solicia was soon encompassed with the Persian arms, but their cavalry hesitated to enter the defiles of Mount Taurus, till they were circumvented by the evolutions of Heracleus, who insensibly gained their rear whilst he appeared to present his front in order of battle. By a false motion which seemed to threaten Armenia he drew them against their wishes to a general action. They were tempted by the artful disorder of his camp, but when they advanced to combat the ground, the sun, and the expectation of both armies were unpropitious to the barbarians. The Romans successfully repeated their tactics in a field of battle and the event of the day declared to the world that the Persians were not invincible and that a hero was invested with the purple. Along in victory and fame Heracleus boldly assented the heights of Mount Taurus, directed his march through the plains of Cappadocia, and established his troops for the winter season in safe and plentiful quarters on the banks of the river Hallis. His soul was superior to the vanity of entertaining Constantinople with an imperfect triumph, but the presence of the emperor was indispensably required to sue the restless and rapacious spirit of the Abars. Since the days of Scipio and Hannibal no bolder enterprise has been attempted than that which Heracleus achieved for the deliverance of the empire. He permitted the Persians to oppress for a while the provinces, and to insult with impunity the capital of the east, while the Roman emperor explored his perilous way through the Black Sea, and the mountains of Armenia penetrated into the heart of Persia and recalled the armies of the great king to the defense of their bleeding country. With a select band of five thousand soldiers Heracleus sailed from Constantinople to Trebenzand, assembled his forces which had wintered in the Pontic regions, and from the mouth of the Faces to the Caspian Sea encouraged his subjects and allies to march with the successor Constantine under the faithful and victorious banner of the Cross. When the legions of Lucullus and Pompey first passed the Euphrates they blushed at their easy victory over the natives of Armenia. But the long experience of war had hardened the minds and bodies of that effeminate people. Their zeal and bravery were approved in the service of declining empire, they abhorred and feared the usurpation of the House of Sassan, and the memory of persecution enveloped their pious hatred of the enemies of Christ. The limits of Armenia, as it had been ceded to the Emperor Maurice, extended as far as the Araxes. The river submitted to the indignity of a bridge, and Heracleus, in the footsteps of Mark Antony, advanced towards the city of Taurus, or Gonzaga, the ancient and modern capital of one of the provinces of Medea. At the head of forty thousand men Chosros himself had returned for some distant expedition to oppose the progress of the Roman arms, but he retreated on the approach of Heracleus, declining the generous alternative of peace or of battle. Instead of half a million of inhabitants, which would have been ascribed to Taurus under the reign of the Sufis, the city contained no more than three thousand houses, but the value of the royal treasures was enhanced by a tradition that they were the spoils of Croesus, which had been transported by Cyrus from the citadel of Sardis. The rapid conquests of Heracleus were suspended only by the winter season. A motive of prudence or superstition determined his retreat into the province of Albania, along the shores of the Caspian, and his tents were most probably pitched in the plains of Morgan. The favorite encampment of the Oriental princes. In the course of this successful in-road he signaled the zeal and revenge of a Christian Emperor. At his command the soldiers extinguished the fire and destroyed the temples of the Magi, the statues of Chosros, who aspired to divine honors, were abandoned to the flames, and the ruins of the Barma or Ormia, which had given birth to Zoraster himself, made some atonement for the injuries of the Holy Sepulcher. A pure spirit of religion was shown in the relief and deliverance of fifty thousand captives. Heracleus was rewarded by their tears and grateful acclamations, but this wise measure which spread the fame of his benevolence diffused the murmurs of the Persians against the pride and obstinacy of their own sovereign. CHAPTER XVI. PART IV. OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. BOLUME IV. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. VOLUME IV. BY EDWARD GIMMON. CHAPTER XVI. TREBBLES IN PERSIA. PART IV. Amidst the glories of the succeeding campaign, Heracleus is almost lost to our eyes, and to those of the Byzantine historians. From the spacious and fruitful plains of Albania, the emperor appears to follow the chain of the Hercanian mountains, to descend into the province of Medea or Iraq, and to carry his victorious arms as far as the royal cities of Kazban and Isophan, which had never been approached by a Roman conqueror. Alarmed by the danger of his kingdom, the powers of Chosros were already recalled from the Nile and Bosphorus, and three formidable armies surrounded in a distant and hostile land, the camp of the emperor. The Kulcian allies prepared to desert his standard, and the fears of the bravest veterans were expressed, rather than concealed, by their desponding silence. Be not terrified, said the intrepid Heracleus, by the multitude of your foes. With the aid of heaven one Roman may triumph over a thousand barbarians. But if we devote our lives for the salvation of our brethren, we shall obtain the crown of martyrdom, and our immortal reward will be liberally paid by God and posterity. His magnanimous sentiments were supported by the vigor of his actions. He repelled the threefold attack of the Persians, improved the divisions of their chiefs, and by a well-concerted train of marches, retreats, and successful actions, finally chased them from the field into the fortified cities of Medea and Assyria. In the severity of the winter season, Sabaraza deemed himself secure in the walls of Salban. He was surprised by the activity of Heracleus, who divided his troops, and performed a laborious march in the silence of the night. The flat roofs of the houses were defended with useless valor against the darts and torches of the Romans, the satraps and nobles of Persia, with their wives and children, and the flower of their martial youth were either slain or made prisoners. The general escaped by a precipitous flight, but his golden armor was the prize of the conqueror, and the soldiers of Heracleus enjoyed the wealth and repose which they had so nobly deserved. On the return of spring the emperor traversed in seven days the mountains of Kurdistan, and passed without resistance their rapid stream of the Tigris. Oppressed by the weight of their spoils and captives, the Roman army halted under the walls of Medea, and Heracleus informed the senate of Constantinople of his safety and success, which they had already felt by the retreat of the besiegers. The bridges of the Euphrates were destroyed by the Persians, but as soon as the emperor had discovered a ford they hastily retired to defend the banks of the Sauris in Cilicia. That river, an impestuous torrent, was about three hundred feet broad. The bridge was fortified with strong turrets, and the banks were lined with barbarian archers. After a bloody conflict, which continued till the evening, the Romans prevailed in the assault, and a Persian of gigantic size was slain and thrown into the Sauris by the hand of the emperor himself. The enemies were dispersed and dismayed, Heracleus pursued his march to Sebasta in Cappadocia, and at the expiration of three years the same coast of the Yucsin applauded his return from a long and victorious expedition. Instead of skirmishing on the frontier the two monarchs who disputed the empire of the east aimed their desperate strokes at the heart of their rival. The military force of Persia was wasted by the marches and combats of twenty years, and many of the veterans who had survived the perils of the sword and the climate were still detained in the fortresses of Egypt and Syria. But the revenge and ambition of Chosros exhausted his kingdom, and the new levies of subjects, strangers, and slaves were divided into three formidable bodies. The first army of fifty thousand men, illustrious by the ornament and title of the golden spears, was destined to march against Heracleus. The second was stationed to prevent his junction with the troops of his brother Theodorus, and the third was commanded to besiege Constantinople and to second the operations of the Chagan, with whom the Persian king had ratified a treaty of alliance and partition. Sarbar, the general of the third army, penetrated through the provinces of Asia to the well-known camp of Chalcedon, and amused himself with the destruction of the sacred and profane buildings of the Asiatic suburbs, while he impatiently waited the arrival of his Scythian friends on the opposite side of the Bosphorus. On the twenty-ninth of June, thirty thousand barbarians, the vanguard of the Avars, forced the long wall and drove into the capital a promiscuous crowd of peasants, citizens, and soldiers. Four score thousand of his native subjects and of the vassal tribes of Gepidei, Russians, Bulgarians, and Slavonians, advanced under the standard of the Chagan. A month was spent in marches and negotiations, but the whole city was invested on the thirty-first of July, from the suburbs of Pera and Galata to the Beccarney and Seven Towers, and the inhabitants described with terror the flaming signals of the European and Asiatic shores. In the meanwhile the magistrates of Constantinople repeatedly strove to purchase the retreat of the Chagan, but their deputies were rejected and insulted, and he suffered the patricians to stand before his throne, while the Persian envoys in silk robes were seated by his side. "'You see,' said the haughty barbarian, the proofs of my perfect union with the great king, and his lieutenant is ready to send into my camp a select band of three thousand warriors. Presume no longer to tempt your master with a partial and adequate ransom. Your wealth and your city are the only presence worthy of my acceptance. For yourselves I shall permit you to depart, each with an undergarment and a shirt, and at my entreaty my friend Sarbar will not refuse a passage through his lines. Your absent prince, even now a captive or a fugitive, has left Constantinople to its fate. Nor can you escape the arms of the Abars and Persians unless you could soar into the air like birds, unless like fishes you could drive into the waves. During ten successive days the capital was assaulted by the Abars, who had made some progress in the science of attack. They advanced to sap or batter the wall under the cover of the impenetrable tortoise, their engines discharged a perpetual volley of stones and darts, and twelve lofty towers of wood exalted the combatants to the height of the neighboring ramparts. But the senate and the people were animated by the spirit of Heraclius, who had detached to their relief a body of twelve thousand curaseers. The powers of fire and mechanics were used with superior art and success in the defense of Constantinople, and the galleys with two and three ranks of oars commanded the Bosphorus and rendered the Persians the idle spectators of the defeat of their allies. The Abars were repulsed, a fleet of Sclavonian canoes was destroyed in the harbor, the vassals of the Chagin threatened to desert, his provisions were exhausted, and after burning his engines he gave the signal of a slow and formidable retreat. The devotion of the Romans ascribed this signal deliverance to the Virgin Mary, but the mother of Christ would surely have condemned their inhuman murder of the Persian envoys, who were entitled to the rights of humanity if they were not protected by the laws of nations. After the division of his army Heraclius prudently retired to the banks of the Faces, from whence he maintained a defensive war against the fifty thousand gold spears of Persia. His anxiety was relieved by the deliverance of Constantinople, whose hopes were confirmed by a victory of his brother Theodorus, and to the hostile league of Chosros with the Abars the Roman emperor opposed the useful and honorable alliance of the Turks. At his liberal invitation the horde of Chosars transported their tents from the plains of the Volga to the mountains of Georgia. Heraclius received them in the neighborhood of Telflis, and the con with his nobles dismounted from their horses, if we may credit the Greeks, and fell prostrate on the ground to adore the purple of the Caesars. Such voluntary homage and important aid were entitled to the warmest acknowledgments, and the emperor, taking off his own diadem, placed it on the head of the Turkish prince, whom he saluted with a tender embrace and the appellation of sun. After a sumptuous banquet he presented Zebel with the plate and ornaments, the gold, the gems, and the silk, which had been used at the imperial table, and with his own hand distributed rich jewels and earrings to his new allies. In a secret interview he produced the portrait of his daughter, Eudosia, condescended to flatter the barbarian with the promise of a fair and august bride, obtained an immediate sucker of forty thousand horse, and negotiated a strong diversion of the Turkish armies on the side of the oxus. The Persians in their turn retreated with precipitation. In the camp of Edessa Heraclius reviewed an army of seventy thousand Romans and strangers, and some months were successfully employed in the recovery of the cities of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Armenia, whose fortifications had been imperfectly restored. Sarbar still maintained the important station of Chalcedon, but the jealousy of Chosros, or the artifice of Heraclius, soon alienated the mind of that powerful satra from the service of his king and country. A messenger was intercepted with real or fictitious mandate to the Cateragin, or second in command, directing him to send without delay to the throne the head of a guilty or unfortunate general. The dispatches were transmitted to Sarbar himself, and as soon as he read the sentence of his own death he dexterously inserted the names of four hundred officers, assembled a military council, and asked the Cateragin whether he was prepared to execute the commands of their tyrant. The Persians unanimously declared that Chosros had forfeited the scepter. A separate treaty was concluded with the government of Constantinople, and if some considerations of honor or policy restrained Sarbar from joining the standard of Heraclius, the emperor was assured that he might prosecute, without interruption, his designs of victory and peace. Deprived of his firmest support, and doubtful of the fidelity of his subjects, the greatness of Chosros was still conspicuous in its ruins. The number of five hundred thousand may be interpreted as an oriental metaphor to describe men in arms, the horses and elephants that covered Medea and Assyria against the invasion of Heraclius. Yet the Romans boldly advanced from the Araxies to the Tigris, and the timid prudence of Radites was content to follow them by four marches through a desolate country till he received a peremperatory mandate to risk the fate of Persia in a decisive battle. In support of the Tigris, at the end of the bridge of Mozel, the great Nineveh had formerly been erected. The city and even the ruins of the city had long since disappeared. The vacant space afforded a spacious field for the operations of the two armies. But these operations are neglected by the Byzantine historians, and like the authors of epic poetry and romance, they ascribe the victory not to the military conduct, but to the personal valor of their favorite hero. On this memorable day Heraclius, on his horse Phallus, surpassed the bravest of his warriors. His lip was pierced with a spear, the steed was wounded in the thigh, but he carried his master safe and victorious through the triple phalanx of the barbarians. In the heat of the action three valiant chiefs were successively slain by the sword and lance of the emperor. Among these was Radites himself. He fell like a soldier, but the sight of his head scattered grief and despair through the fainting ranks of the Persians. His armor of pure and massy gold, the shield of one hundred and twenty plates, the sword and belt, the saddle and curis, adorned the triumph of Heraclius, and if he had not been faithful to Christ and his mother, the champion of Rome might have offered the fourth opium spoils to the Jupiter of the capital. In the battle of Nineveh, which was fiercely fought from Daybreak to the eleventh hour, twenty-eight standards, besides those which might be broken or torn, were taken from the Persians. The greatest part of their army was cut in pieces, and the victors, concealing their own loss, passed the night in the field. They acknowledged that on this occasion it was less difficult to kill than to disconfit the soldiers of Chelsros. Amidst the bodies of their friends, no more than two bows shot from the enemy, the remnant of the Persian cavalry stood firm till the seventh hour of the night. About the eighth hour they retired to their unrifled camp, collected their baggage, and dispersed on all sides, from the want of orders rather than of resolution. The diligence of Heraclius was not less admirable in the use of victory by a march of forty-eight miles in a four and twenty hours, his vanguard occupied the bridges of the great and the lesser Zab, and the cities and palaces of Assyria were open for the first time to the Romans. By a just gradation of magnificent scenes they penetrated to the royal seat of Dastigard, and, though much of the treasure had been removed and much had been expended, the remaining wealth appears to have exceeded their hopes, and even to have satiated their avarice. Whatever could not be easily transported they consumed with fire, that Chelsros might feel the anguish of those wounds which he had so often inflicted on the provinces of the empire, and justice might allow the excuse if the desolation had been confined to the works of regal luxury, if national hatred, military license, and religious zeal had not wasted with equal rage the habitations and the temples of the guiltless subject. The recovery of three hundred Roman standards and the deliverance of the numerous captives of Edessa and Alexandria reflect a purer glory on the arms of Heraclius. From the palace of Dastigard he pursued his march within a few miles of Moden, or Cetaphon, till he was stopped on the banks of the Arba by the difficulty of the passage, the rigor of the season, and perhaps the fame of an impregnable capital. The return of the emperor is marked by the modern name of the city of Cherseur. He fortunately passed Mount Zara before the snow which fell incessantly thirty-four days, and the citizens of Gonsa or Taras were compelled to entertain the soldiers in their horses with a hospitable reception. When the ambition of Chosros was reduced to the defense of his hereditary kingdom, the love of glory, or even the sense of shame, should have urged him to meet his rival in the field. In the battle of Nineveh his courage might have taught the Persians to vanquish, or he might have fallen with honor by the lands of a Roman emperor. The successor of Cyrus chose, rather, at a secure distance to expect the event to assemble the relics of the defeat, and to retire by measured steps before the march of Heraclius, till he beheld with a sigh the once-loved mansions of Dastergird. Both his friends and enemies were persuaded that it was the intention of Chosros to bury himself under the ruins of the city and palace, and as both might have been equally adverse to his flight, the monarch of Asia, with Sira and three concubines, escaped through a hole in the wall nine days before the arrival of the Romans. The slow and stately procession in which he showed himself to the prostrate crowd was changed to a rapid and secret journey, and the first evening he lodged in the cottage of a peasant, whose humble door would scarcely give admittance to the great king. His superstition was subdued by fear. On the third day he entered with joy the fortifications of Cessiphon, yet he still doubted of his safety till he had opposed the river Tigris to the pursuit of the Romans. The discovery of his flight agitated with terror and tumult the palace, the city, and the camp of Dastergird. The satraps hesitated, whether they had most to fear from their sovereign or their enemy, and the females of the harem were astonished and pleased by the sight of mankind, till the jealous husband of three thousand wives again confined them to a more distant castle. At his command the army of Dastergird retreated to a new camp. The front was covered by the arba, and a line of two hundred elephants, the troops of the more distant provinces successively arrived, and the vilest domestics of the king and satraps were enrolled for the last defense of the throne. It was still in the power of Chosros to obtain a reasonable peace, and he was repeatedly pressed by the messengers of Heraclius to spare the blood of his subjects, and to relieve a humane conqueror from the painful duty of carrying fire and sword through the fairest countries of Asia. But the pride of the Persian had not yet sunk to the level of his fortune. He derived a momentary confidence from the retreat of the emperor. He wept with impotent rage over the ruins of his Assyrian palaces, and disregarded too long the rising murmurs of the nation, who complained that their lives and fortunes were sacrificed to the obstinacy of an old man. That unhappy old man was himself tortured with the sharpest pains both of mind and body, and in the consciousness of his approaching end he resolved to fix the tiara on the head of Mardaza, the most favored of his sons. But the will of Chosros was no longer revered, and Cirrus, who gloried in the rank and merit of his mother, Sira, had conspired with the malcontents to assert and anticipate the rites of primogeniture. Twenty-two satraps, they styled themselves patriots, were tempted by the wealth and honors of a new reign. To the soldiers the heir of Chosros promised an increase of pay, to the Christians the free exercise of their religion, to the captives, liberty and rewards, and to the nation instant peace and the reduction of taxes. It was determined by the conspirators that Cirrus, with the ensigns of royalty, should appear in the camp, and if the enterprise should fail his escape was contrived to the imperial court. But the new monarch was saluted with unanimous acclamations, the flight of Chosros, yet where could he have fled, was rudely arrested, eighteen sons were massacred before his face, and he was thrown into a dungeon where he expired on the fifth day. The Greeks and modern Persians minutely describe how Chosros was insulted, and famished, and tortured, by the command of an inhumane son, who so far surpassed the example of his father. But at the time of his death what tongue would relate the story of the parasite? What eye could penetrate into the tower of darkness? According to the faith and mercy of his Christian enemies, he sunk without hope into a still deeper abyss, and it will not be denied that tyrants of every age and sect are the best entitled to such infernal abodes. The glory of the house of Sassan ended with the life of Chosros. His unnatural son enjoyed only eight months the fruit of his crimes, and in the space of four years the regal title was assumed by nine candidates, who disputed, with the sword or dagger, the fragments of an exhausted monarchy. Every province, and each city of Persia, was the scene of independence of discord and of blood, and the state of anarchy prevailed about eight years longer, till the factions were silenced and united under the common yoke of the Arabian caliphs. As soon as the mountains became passable, the emperor received the welcome news of the success of the conspiracy, the death of Chosros, and the elevation of his eldest son to the throne of Persia. The authors of the revolution, eager to display their merits in the court or camp of Taurus, preceded the ambassadors of Ceros, who delivered the letters of their master to his brother, the emperor of the Romans. In the language of the usurpers of every age he imputes his own crimes to the deity, and without degrading his equal majesty, he offers to reconcile the long discord of the two nations by a treaty of peace and alliance more durable than brass or iron. The conditions of the treaty were easily defined and faithfully executed. In the recovery of the standards and prisoners which had fallen into the hands of the Persians, the emperor imitated the example of Augustus. Their care of the national dignity was celebrated by the poets of the times, but the decay of genius may be measured by the distance between Horus and George of Pisidia. The subjects and brethren of Heraclius were redeemed from persecution, slavery, and exile, but instead of the Roman eagles, the true wood of the Holy Cross was restored to the importunate demands of the successor of Constantine. The victor was not ambitious of enlarging the weakness of the empire. The son of Ciosros abandoned without regret the conquests of his father. The Persians who evacuated the cities of Syria and Egypt were honorably conducted to the frontier, and a war which had wounded the vitals of the two monarchies produced no change in their external and relative situation. The return of Heraclius from Taurus to Constantinople was a perpetual triumph, and after the exploits of six glorious campaigns he peaceably enjoyed the Sabbath of his toils. After a long impatience the senate, the clergy, and the people went forth to meet their hero, with tears and acclamations, with olive branches and innumerable lamps. He entered the capital in a chariot drawn by four elephants, and as soon as the emperor could disengage himself from the tumult of public joy he tasted more genuine satisfaction in the embraces of his mother and his son. The succeeding year was illustrated by a triumph of a very different kind, the restitution of the true cross to the Holy Sepulchre. Heraclius performed in person the pilgrimage of Jerusalem. The identity of the relic was verified by the discreet patriarch, and this August ceremony has been commemorated by the annual festival of the exhalation of the cross. Before the emperor presumed to tread the consecrated ground, he was instructed to strip himself of the diadem and purple, the pomp and vanity of the world, but in the judgment of his clergy the persecution of the Jews was more easily reconciled with the precepts of the gospel. He again ascended his throne to receive the congratulations of the ambassadors of France and India, and the fame of Moses, Alexander, and Hercules was eclipsed in the popular estimation by the superior merit and glory of the great Heraclius. Yet the deliverer of the east was indigent and feeble. Of the Persian spoils the most valuable portion had been expended in the war, distributed to the soldiers, or buried by an unlucky tempest in the waves of the Yixin. The conscience of the emperor was oppressed by the obligation of restoring the wealth of the clergy, which he had borrowed for their own defense. A perpetual fund was required to satisfy these inexorable creditors. The provinces, already wasted by the arms and averance of the Persians, were compelled to a second payment of the same taxes. And the arrears of a simple citizen, the treasurer of Damascus, were commuted to a fine of one hundred thousand pieces of gold. The loss of two hundred thousand soldiers, who had fallen by the sword, was of less fatal importance than the decay of arts, agriculture, and population in this long and destructive war, and although a victorious army had been formed under the standard of Heraclius, the unnatural effort appears to have exhausted rather than exercised their strength. While the emperor triumphed at Constantinople or Jerusalem, an obscure town on the confines of Syria was pillaged by the Saracens, and they cut in pieces some troops who advanced to its relief. An ordinary and trifling occurrence had it not been the prelude of a mighty revolution. These robbers were the apostles of Muhammad. Their fanatic valor had emerged from the desert, and in the last eight years of his reign Heraclius lost to the Arabs the same provinces which he had rescued from the Persians. CHAPTER 47 ECCLESIASTICAL DISCORD PART 1 Under the extinction of paganism the Christians in peace and piety might have enjoyed their solitary triumph, but the principle of discord was alive in their bosom, and they were more solicitous to explore the nature than to practice the laws of their founder. I have already observed that the disputes of the Trinity were succeeded by those of the Incarnation, alike scandals to the church, alike pernicious to the state, still more minute in their origin, still more durable in their effects. It is my design to comprise in the present chapter a religious war of two hundred and fifty years, to represent the ecclesiastical and political schism of the Oriental sects, and to introduce their clamorous or sanguinary contests by a modest inquiry into the doctrines of the primitive church. A laudable regard for the honour of the first proselyte has countenanced the belief, the hope, the wish, that the ebionites, or at least the Nazarenes, were distinguished only by their obstinate perseverance in the practice of the Mosaic rites. Their churches have disappeared, their books are obliterated, their obscure freedom might allow a latitude of faith, and the softness of their infant creed would be variously moulded by the zeal or prudence of three hundred years. Yet the most charitable criticism must refuse these sectaries any knowledge of the pure and proper divinity of Christ. Educated in the school of Jewish prophecy and prejudice, they had never been taught to elevate their hopes above a human and temporal Messiah. If they had courage to hail their king when he appeared in a plebeian garb, their grosser apprehensions were incapable of discerning their God, who had studiously disguised his celestial character under the name and person of a mortal. The familiar companions of Jesus of Nazareth, conversed with their friend and countrymen, who, in all the actions of rational and animal life, appeared of the same species with themselves. His progress from infancy to youth and manhood was marked by a regular increase in stature and wisdom, and after a painful agony of mind and body he expired on the cross. He lived and died for the service of mankind, but the life and death of Socrates had likewise been devoted to the cause of religion and justice, and although the stoic or the hero may disdain the humble virtues of Jesus, the tears which he shed over his friend and country may be esteemed the purest evidence of his humanity. The miracles of the Gospel could not astonish a people who held with intrepid faith the more splendid prodigies of the Mosaic Law. The prophets of ancient days had cured diseases, raised the dead, divided the sea, stopped the sun, and ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot. And the metaphorical style of the Hebrews might ascribe to a saint and martyr the adoptive title of Son of God. Yet in the insufficient creed of the Nazarenes and the Ebonites, a distinction is faintly noticed between the heretics, who confounded the generation of Christ in the common order of nature, and the less guilty schismatics, who revered the virginity of his mother and excluded the aid of an earthly father. The incredulity of the former was countenanced by the visible circumstances of his birth, the legal marriage of the reputed parents Joseph and Mary, and his lineal claim to the kingdom of David and the inheritance of Judah. But the secret and authentic history has been recorded in several copies of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, which these sectaries long preserved in the original Hebrew as the sole evidence of their faith. The natural suspicions of the husband, conscious of his own chastity, were dispelled by the assurance, in a dream, that his wife was pregnant of the Holy Ghost, and as this distant and domestic prodigy could not fall under the personal observation of the historian, he must have listened to the same voice which dictated to Isaiah the future conception of a virgin. The son of a virgin, generated by the ineffable operation of the Holy Spirit, was a creature without example or resemblance, superior in every attribute of mind and body to the children of Adam. Since the introduction of the Greek or Chaldean philosophy, the Jews were persuaded of the pre-existence, trans-migration, and immortality of souls, and providence was justified by a supposition that they were confined in their earthly prisons to expiate the stains which they had contracted in a former state. But the degrees of purity and corruption are almost immeasurable. It might be fairly presumed that the most sublime and virtuous of human spirits was infused into the offspring of Mary and the Holy Ghost, that his abasement was the result of his voluntary choice, and that the object of his mission was to purify, not his own, but the sins of the world. On his return to his native skies, he received the immense reward of his obedience, the everlasting kingdom of the Messiah, which had been darkly foretold by the prophets, under the carnal images of peace, of conquest, and of dominion. Omnipotence could enlarge the human faculties of Christ to the extent of his celestial office. In the language of antiquity, the title of God has not been severely confined to the first parent, and his incomparable minister, his only begotten son, might claim without presumption the religious, though secondary, worship of a subject world. The seeds of the faith, which had slowly arisen in the rocky and ungrateful soil of Judea, were transplanted in full maturity to the happier climes of the Gentiles, and the strangers of Rome or Asia who never beheld the manhood were the more readily disposed to embrace the divinity of Christ. The polytheist and the philosopher, the Greek and the barbarian, were alike accustomed to conceive a long succession, an infinite chain of angels or demons, or deities, or aeons, or emanations issuing from the throne of light. Nor could it seem strange or incredible that the first of these aeons, the logos, or word of God, of the same substance with the Father, should descend upon earth to deliver the human race from vice and error, and to conduct them in the paths of life and immortality. But the prevailing doctrine of the eternity and inherent pravity of matter infected the primitive churches of the east. Many among the Gentile proselytes refused to believe that a celestial spirit, an undivided portion of the first essence, had been personally united with a mass of impure and contaminated flesh, and in their zeal for the divinity they piously abjured the humanity of Christ. While his blood was still recent on Mount Calvary, the doceets, a numerous and learned sect of Asiatics, invented the fantastic system, which was afterwards propagated by the Marcianites, the Manicheans, and the various names of the Gnostic heresy. They denied the truth and authenticity of the Gospels as far as they relate to the conception of Mary, the birth of Christ, and the thirty years that preceded the exercise of his ministry. He first appeared on the banks of the Jordan in the form of perfect manhood. But it was a form only, and not a substance, a human figure created by the hand of omnipotence to imitate the faculties and actions of a man, and to impose a perpetual illusion on the senses of his friends and enemies. Articulate sounds vibrated on the ears of the disciples, but the image which was impressed on their optic nerve eluded the more stubborn evidence of the touch, and they enjoyed the spiritual, not the corporeal, presence of the Son of God. The rage of the Jews was idly wasted against an impassive phantom, and the mystic scenes of the passion and death, the resurrection and ascension of Christ, were represented on the theatre of Jerusalem for the benefit of mankind. If it were urged that such ideal mimicry, such incessant deception, was unworthy of the God of Truth, the Doseats agreed with too many of their orthodox brethren in the justification of pious falsehood. In the system of the Gnostics, the Jehovah of Israel, the creator of this lower world, was a rebellious, or at least an ignorant spirit. The Son of God descended upon earth to abolish his temple and his law, and for the accomplishment of this salutary end, he dexterously transferred to his own person the hope and prediction of a temporal messiah. One of the most subtle disputents of the Manichean school has pressed the danger and indecency of supposing that the God of the Christians, in the state of a human fetus, emerged at the end of nine months from a female womb. The pious horror of his antagonists provoked them to disclaim all sensual circumstances of conception and delivery, to maintain that divinity passed through Mary like a sunbeam through a plate of glass, and to assert that the seal of her virginity remained unbroken even at the moment when she became the mother of Christ. But the rashness of these concessions has encouraged a milder sentiment of those of the Doseats, who taught not that Christ was a phantom, but that he was clothed with an impassable and incorruptible body. Such indeed in the more orthodox system he has acquired since his resurrection, and such he must have always possessed if it were capable of pervading, without resistance or injury, the density of intermediate matter. Devoid of its most essential properties, it might be exempt from the attributes and infirmities of the flesh. A fetus that could increase from an invisible point to its full maturity, a child that could attain the stature of perfect manhood without deriving any nourishment from the ordinary sources, might continue to exist without repairing a daily waste by a daily supply of external matter. Jesus might share the repast of his disciples without being subject to the calls of thirst or hunger, and his virgin purity was never sullied by the involuntary stains of sensual concupiscence. Of a body thus singularly constituted, a question would arise by what means and of what materials it was originally framed, and our sounder theology is startled by an answer which was not peculiar to the Gnostics, that both the form and the substance proceeded from the divine essence. The idea of pure and absolute spirit is a refinement of modern philosophy, the incorporeal essence, ascribed by the ancients to human souls, celestial beings, and even the deity himself, does not exclude the notion of extended space. And their imagination was satisfied with a subtle nature of air or fire or ether, incomparably more perfect than the grossness of the material world. If we define the place, we must describe the figure of the deity. Our experience, perhaps our vanity, represents the powers of reason and virtue under human form. The anthropomorphite, who swarmed among the monks of Egypt and the Catholics of Africa, could produce the express declaration of scripture that man was made after the image of his creator. The venerable Serapion, one of the saints of the Nitrian deserts, relinquished with many a tear his darling prejudice, and bewailed like an infant his unlucky conversion, which had stolen away his God, and left his mind without any visible object of faith or devotion. Such were the fleeting shadows of the dosites. A more substantial, though less simple, hypothesis was contrived by Corinthus of Asia, who dared to oppose the last of the apostles. Placed on the confines of the Jewish and Gentile world, he laboured to reconcile the Gnostic with the Ebonite, by confessing in the same messiah the supernatural union of a man and a god. And this mystic doctrine was adopted with many fanciful improvements by Carpocrates, Basilides, and Valentine, the heretics of the Egyptian school. In their eyes, Jesus of Nazareth was a mere mortal, the legitimate son of Joseph and Mary, but he was the best and wisest of the human race. Selected as the worthy instruments to restore upon earth the worship of the true and supreme deity. When he was baptized in the Jordan, the Christ, the first of the aeons, the son of God himself, descended on Jesus in the form of a dove, to inhabit his mind and direct his actions during the allotted period of his ministry. When the messiah was delivered into the hands of the Jews, the Christ, an immortal and impassable being, forsook his earthly tabernacle, flew back to the plerima or world of spirits, and left the solitary Jesus to suffer, to complain, and to expire. But the justice and generosity of such a desertion are strongly questionable, and the fate of an innocent martyr at first impelled and at length abandoned by his divine companion might provoke the pity and indignation of the profane. Their murmurs were variously silenced by the sectaries who espoused and modified the double system of Corinthus. It was alleged that when Jesus was nailed to the cross, he was endowed with a miraculous apathy of mind and body, which rendered him insensible of his apparent sufferings. It was affirmed that these momentary, though real, pangs would be abundantly repaid by the temporal reign of a thousand years reserved for the messiah in his kingdom of the New Jerusalem. It was insinuated that if he suffered he deserved to suffer, that human nature is never absolutely perfect, and that the cross and passion might serve to expiate the venial transgressions of the Son of Joseph before his mysterious union with the Son of God. All those who believe the immateriality of the soul, a specious and noble tenet, must confess from their present experience the incomprehensible union of mind and matter. A similar union is not inconsistent with a much higher, or even with the highest degree of mental faculties, and the incarnation of an eon or archangel, the most perfect of created spirits, does not involve any positive contradiction or absurdity. In the age of religious freedom, which was determined by the Council of Nice, the dignity of Christ was measured by private judgment according to the indefinite rule of Scripture, or reason, or tradition. But when his pure and proper divinity had been established on the ruins of Arianism, the faith of the Catholics trembled on the edge of a precipice where it was impossible to recede, dangerous to stand, dreadful to fall, and the manifold inconveniences of their creed were aggravated by the sublime character of their theology. They hesitated to pronounce that God himself, the second person of an equal and consubstantial trinity, was manifested in the flesh, that a being who pervades the universe had been confined in the womb of Mary, that his eternal duration had been marked by the days and months and years of human existence, that the Almighty had been scourged and crucified, that his impassable essence had felt pain and anguish, that his omniscience was not exempt from ignorance, and that the source of life and immortality expired on Mount Calvary. These alarming consequences were affirmed with unblushing simplicity by Apollonaris, Bishop of Laodicea, and one of the luminaries of the church. The son of a learned gromerian, he was skilled in all the sciences of Greece. Elegance, erudition, and philosophy, conspicuous in the volumes of Apollonaris, were humbly devoted to the service of religion. The worthy friend of Athanasius, the worthy antagonist of Julian, he bravely wrestled with the Aryans and polytheists, and though he affected the rigor of geometrical demonstration, his commentaries revealed the literal and allegorical sense of the scriptures. A mystery which had long floated in the looseness of popular belief was defined by his perverse diligence in a technical form, and he first proclaimed the memorable words, one incarnate nature of Christ, which are still re-echoed with hostile clamors in the churches of Asia, Egypt, and Ethiopia. He taught that the Godhead was united or mingled with the body of a man, and that the Logos, the eternal wisdom, supplied in the flesh the place and office of a human soul. Yet, as the profound doctor had been terrified at his own rashness, Apollonaris was heard to mutter some faint accents of excuse and explanation. He acquiesced in the old distinction of the Greek philosophers between the rational and sensitive soul of man, that he might reserve the Logos for intellectual functions, and employed the subordinate human principle in the meaner actions of animal life. With the moderate dosates, he revered Mary as the spiritual rather than as the carnal mother of Christ, whose body either came from heaven, impassable and incorruptible, or was absorbed and, as it were, transformed into the essence of the deity. The system of Apollonaris was strenuously encountered by the Asiatic and Syrian divines, whose schools are honored by the names of Basil, Gregory, and Chrysostom, and tainted by those of Diodorus, Theodore, and Nestorius. But the person of the aged bishop of Laodicea, his character and dignity, remained inviolate, and his rivals, since we may not suspect them of the weakness of toleration, were astonished, perhaps, by the novelty of the argument and diffident of the final sentence of the Catholic Church. Her judgment at length inclined in their favor. The heresy of Apollonaris was condemned, and the separate congregations of his disciples were prescribed by the imperial laws. But his principles were secretly entertained in the monasteries of Egypt, and his enemies felt the hatred of theophilus and curil, the success of patriarchs of Alexandria. The groveling ebionite and the fantastic doceats were rejected and forgotten. The recent zeal against the errors of Apollonaris reduced the Catholics to a seeming agreement with the double nature of Corinthus. But instead of a temporary and occasional alliance, they established, and we still embrace, the substantial, indissoluble and everlasting union of a perfect God with a perfect man, of the second person of the Trinity with a reasonable soul and human flesh. In the beginning of the fifth century, the unity of the two natures was the prevailing doctrine of the Church. On all sides it was confessed that the mode of their coexistence could neither be represented by our ideas nor expressed by our language. Yet a secret and incurable discord was cherished between those who were most apprehensive of confounding and those who were most fearful of separating the divinity and the humanity of Christ. Impelled by religious frenzy, they fled with adverse haste from the error which they mutually deemed most destructive of truth and salvation. On either hand they were anxious to guard, they were jealous to defend the union and the distinction of the two natures, and to invent such forms of speech, such symbols of doctrine, as were least susceptible of doubt or ambiguity. The poverty of ideas and language tempted them to ransack art and nature for every possible comparison, and each comparison misled their fancy in the explanation of an incomparable mystery. In the polemic microscope an atom is enlarged to a monster, and each party was skillful to exaggerate the absurd or impious conclusions that might be extorted from the principles of their adversaries. To escape from each other they wandered through many a dark and devious thicket, till they were astonished by the horrid phantoms of Corinthus and Apollonaris, who guarded the opposite issues of a theological labyrinth. As soon as they beheld the twilight of sense and heresy, they started, measured back their steps, and were again involved in the gloom of impenetrable orthodoxy. To purge themselves from the guilt or reproach of damnable error, they disavowed their consequences, explained their principles, excused their indiscretions, and unanimously pronounced the sounds of concord and faith. Yet a latent and almost invisible spark still lurked among the embers of controversy. By the breath of prejudice and passion, it was quickly kindled to a mighty flame, and the verbal disputes of the Oriental sects have shaken the pillars of the church and state. The name of Carol of Alexandria is famous in controversial story, and the title of Saint is a mark that his opinions and his party have finally prevailed. In the house of his uncle, the Archbishop Theophilus, he imbibed the orthodox lessons of zeal and dominion, and five years of his youth were profitably spent in the adjacent monasteries of Nittria. Under the tuition of the Abbot Serapion, he applied himself to ecclesiastical studies with such indefatigable ardour that in the course of one sleepless night he has perused the four Gospels, the Catholic Epistles, and the Epistles of the Romans. Origen he detested, but the writings of Clemens and Dionysius, of Athanasius and Basil, were continually in his hands. By the theory and practice of dispute his faith was confirmed, and his wit was sharpened. He extended round his cell the cobwebs of scholastic theology, and meditated the works of allegory and metaphysics, whose remains, in seven verbose folios, now peaceably slumber by the side of their rivals. Kirill prayed and fasted in the desert, but his thoughts, it is the reproach of a friend, were still fixed on the world, and the call of theophilus, who summoned him to the tumult of cities and synods, was too readily obeyed by the aspiring hermit. With the approbation of his uncle he assumed the office and acquired the fame of a popular preacher. His comely person adorned the pulpit, the harmony of his voice resounded in the cathedral, his friends were stationed to lead or second the applause of the congregation, and the hasty notes of the scribes preserved his discourses, which in their effect, though not in their composition, might be compared with those of the Athenian orators. The death of theophilus expanded and realized the hopes of his nephew. The clergy of Alexandria was divided. The soldiers and their generals supported the claims of the Archdeacon, but a resistless multitude, with voices and with hands, asserted the cause of their favourites, and after a period of thirty-nine years, Cyril was seated on the throne of Athanasius. CHAPTER 47 ECLESIASTICAL DISCORD PART II The prize was not unworthy of his ambition. At a distance from the court, and at the head of an immense capital, the patriarch, as he was now styled of Alexandria, had gradually usurped the state and authority of a civil magistrate. The public and private charities of the city were blindly obeyed by his numerous and fanatic Parabalani, familiarized in their daily office with scenes of death, and the prefects of Egypt were odd or provoked by the temporal power of these Christian pontiffs. Ardent in the prosecution of heresy, Cyril auspiciously opened his reign by oppressing the novations, the most innocent and harmless of the sectaries. The interdiction of their religious worship appeared in his eyes a just and meritorious act, and he confiscated their holy vessels without apprehending the guilt of sacrilege. The toleration, and even the privileges of the Jews, who had multiplied to the number of forty thousand, were secured by the laws of the Caesars and Ptolemies, and a long prescription of seven hundred years since the foundation of Alexandria. Without any legal sentence, without any royal mandate, the patriarch at the dawn of the day led a seditious multitude to the attack of the synagogues. Unarmed and unprepared, the Jews were incapable of resistance. Their houses of prayer were leveled with the ground, and the Episcopal warrior, after rewarding his troops with the plunder of their goods, expelled from the city the remnant of the unbelieving nation. Perhaps he might plead the insolence of their prosperity and their deadly hatred of the Christians, whose blood they had recently shed in a malicious or accidental tumult. Such crimes would have deserved the animid version of the magistrate, but in this promiscuous outrage the innocent were confounded with the guilty, and Alexandria was impoverished by the loss of a wealthy and industrious colony. This deal of carol exposed him to the penalties of the Julian Law, but in a feeble government and a superstitious age he was secure of impunity and even of praise. Orestes complained, but his just complaints were too quickly forgotten by the ministers of Theodosius, and too deeply remembered by a priest who affected to pardon and continued to hate the prefect of Egypt. As he passed through the streets, his chariot was assaulted by a band of five hundred of the Nitrian monks, his guards fled from the wild beasts of the desert. His protestations that he was a Christian and a Catholic were answered by a volley of stones, and the face of Orestes was covered with blood. The loyal citizens of Alexandria hastened to his rescue. He instantly satisfied his justice and revenge against the monk by whose hand he had been wounded, and Ammonius expired under the rod of Lictor. At the command of Kiril his body was raised from the ground and transported in solemn procession to the cathedral. The name of Ammonius was changed to that of Thomasius the Wonderful. His tomb was decorated with the trophies of martyrdom, and the patriarch ascended the pulpit to celebrate the magnanimity of an assassin and a rebel. Such honors might incite the faithful to combat and die under the banners of the saint, and he soon prompted or accepted the sacrifice of a virgin who professed the religion of the Greeks and cultivated the friendship of Orestes. Hippatia, the daughter of Theon the mathematician, was initiated in her father's studies. Her learned comments have elucidated the geometry of Apollonius and Diophantus, and she publicly taught, both at Athens and Alexandria, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. In the bloom of beauty and in the maturity of wisdom the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed her disciples. The persons most illustrious for their rank or merit were impatient to visit the female philosopher, and Kiril beheld with a jealous eye the gorgeous train of horses and slaves who crowded the door of her academy. A rumour was spread among the Christians that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the prefect and the archbishop, and that obstacle was speedily removed. On a fatal day in the holy season of Lent, Hippatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly buttered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troupe of savage and merciless fanatics. Her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp sister shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames. The just progress of inquiry and punishment was stopped by seasonal gifts, but the murder of Hippatia has imprinted an indelible stain on the character and religion of Kiril of Alexandria. Supercision, perhaps, would more gently expiate the blood of a virgin than the banishment of a saint, and Kiril had accompanied his uncle to the iniquitous synod of the oak. When the memory of Chrysostom was restored and consecrated, the nephew of Theophilus, at the head of a dying faction, still maintained the justice of his sentence, nor was it till after a tedious delay and an obstinate resistance that he yielded to the consent of the Catholic world. His enmity to the Byzantine Pontiffs was a sense of interest, not a sally of passion. He envied their fortunate station in the sunshine of the imperial court, and he dreaded their upstart ambition, which oppressed the metropolitan of Europe and Asia, invaded the provinces of Antioch and Alexandria, and measured their diocese by the limits of the empire. The long moderation of Atticus, the mild usurper of the throne of Chrysostom, suspended the animosities of the eastern patriarchs, but Kiril was at length awakened by the exaltation of a rival more worthy of his esteem and hatred. After the short and troubled reign of Cicinius, Bishop of Constantinople, the factions of the clergy and people were appeased by the choice of the emperor, who, on this occasion, consulted the voice of fame, and invited the merit of a stranger. Nestorius, native of Germanicia and a monk of Antioch, was recommended by the austerity of his life and the eloquence of his sermons. But the first homily which he preached before the devout Theodesius betrayed the acrimony and impatience of his zeal. Give me, O Caesar, he exclaimed, give me the earth purged of heretics, and I will give you an exchange, the kingdom of heaven. Exterminate with me the heretics, and with you I will exterminate the Persians. On the fifth day, as if the treaty had already been signed, the patriarch of Constantinople discovered, surprised, and attacked a secret conventicle of the Arians. They preferred death to submission. The flames that were kindled by their despair soon spread to the neighbouring houses, and the triumph of Nestorius was clouded by the name of Incendiary. On either side of the helispont, his episcopal vigour imposed a rigid formulary of faith and discipline. A chronological error concerning the Festival of Easter was punished as an offence against the church and state. Lydia and Caria, Sardis and Miletus, were purified with the blood of the obstinate Quartidesimans, and the edict of the emperor, or rather of the patriarch, enumerates three and twenty degrees and denominations in the guilt and punishment of heresy. But the sword of persecution which Nestorius so furiously wielded was soon turned against his own breast. Religion was the pretense, but in the judgment of a contemporary saint, ambition was the genuine motive of episcopal warfare. In the Syrian school, Nestorius had been taught to abhor the confusion of the two natures, and nicely to discriminate the humanity of his master Christ from the divinity of the Lord Jesus. The Blessed Virgin he revered as the mother of Christ, but his ears were offended with the rash and recent title of Mother of God, which had been insensibly adopted since the origin of the Aryan controversy. From the pulpit of Constantinople, a friend of the patriarch and afterwards the patriarch himself, repeatedly preached against the use or the abuse of a word unknown to the apostles, unauthorized by the church, and which could only tend to alarm the Timorous, to mislead the simple, to amuse the profane, and to justify, by a seeming resemblance, the old genealogy of Olympus. In his calmer moments, Nestorius confessed that it might be tolerated or excused by the union of the two natures, and the communication of their idioms. That he was exasperated, by contradiction, to disclaim the worship of a newborn and infant deity, to draw his inadequate similes from the conjugal or civil partnerships of life, and to describe the manhood of Christ as the robe, the instrument, the tabernacle of his got-head. At these blasphemous sounds, the pillars of the sanctuary were shaken. The unsuccessful competitors of Nestorius indulged their pious or personal resentment. The Byzantine clergy was secretly displeased with the intrusion of a stranger. However as superstitious or absurd might claim the protection of the monks and the people were interested in the glory of their virgin patroness. The sermons of the archbishop and the service of the altar were disturbed by seditious clamour. His authority and doctrine were renounced by separate congregations. Every wind scattered round the empire the leaves of controversy, and the voice of the combatants on a sonorous theater re-echoed in the cells of Palestine and Egypt. It was the duty of Kirill to enlighten the zeal and ignorance of his innumerable monks. In the school of Alexandria he had imbibed and professed the incarnation of one nature, and the successor of Athanasius consulted his pride and ambition when he rose in arms against another arius, more formidable and more guilty, on the second throne of the hierarchy. After a short correspondence in which the rival prelates disguised their hatred in the hollow language of respect and charity, the patriarch of Alexandria denounced to the prince and people to the east and to the west the damnable errors of the Byzantine pontiff. From the east, more especially from Antioch, he obtained the ambiguous councils of toleration and silence which were addressed to both parties while they favored the cause of Nestorius. But the Vatican recede with open arms the messengers of Egypt. The vanity of Palestine was flattered by the appeal, and the partial version of a monk decided the faith of the Pope, who with his Latin clergy was ignorant of the language, the arts, and the theology of the Greeks. At the head of an Italian synod, Kellestine, waved the merits of the cause, approved the creative carol, condemned the sentiments and person of Nestorius, degraded the heretic from his episcopal dignity, allowed a respite of ten days for recantation and penance, and delegated to his enemy the execution of this rash and illegal sentence. But the patriarch of Alexandria, while he darted the thunders of a god, exposed the errors and passions of a mortal, and his twelve anathemas still torture the orthodox slaves who adore the memory of a saint without forfeiting their allegiance to the synod of Calcedon. These bold assertions are indelibly tinged with the colors of the apollinary and heresy, but the serious and perhaps the sincere professions of Nestorius have satisfied the wiser and less partial theologians of the present times. Yet, neither the emperor nor the primate of the east were disposed to obey the mandate of an Italian priest, and the synod of the Catholic, or rather of the Greek church, was unanimously demanded as the sole remedy that could appease or decide this ecclesiastical quarrel. Ephesus, on all sides accessible by sea and land, was chosen for the place, the festival of Pentecost for the day of the meeting. A writ of summons was dispatched to each metropolitan, and a guard was stationed to protect and confine the fathers till they should settle the mysteries of heaven and the faith of the earth. Ephesus appeared not as a criminal, but as a judge. He depended on the weight rather than the number of his prelates, and his sturdy slaves from the Bath of Zoicipus were armed for every service of injury or defense. But his adversary, Carol, was more powerful in the weapons both of the flesh and of the spirit. Disobedient to the letter, or at least to the meaning of the royal summons, he was attended by fifty Egyptian bishops who expected from their patriarchs nought the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. He had contracted an intimate alliance with Memnon, Bishop of Ephesus. The despotic primate of Asia, disposed of the ready suckers of thirty or forty Episcopal votes. A crowd of peasants, the slaves of the church, was poured into the city to support with blows and clamours a metaphysical argument, and the people zealously asserted the honour of the virgin, whose body it reposed within the walls of Ephesus. The fleet which had transported Carol from Alexandria was laden with the riches of Egypt, and he disembarked a numerous body of mariners, slaves, and fanatics, enlisted with blind obedience under the banner of Saint Mark and the mother of God. The fathers and even the guards of the council were odd by this martial array. The adversaries of Carol and Mary were insulted in the streets or threatened in their houses. His eloquence and liberality made a daily increase in the number of his adherents, and the Egyptians soon computed that he might command the attendants and the voices of two hundred bishops. But the author of the twelve anathemas, foresaw and dreaded the opposition of John of Antioch, who, with a small but respectable train of metropolitan and divine, was advancing by slow journeys from the distant capital of the east. Impatient of a delay, which he stigmatised as voluntary and culpable, Carol announced the opening of the synod sixteen days after the festival of Pentecost. Nestorius, who depended on the near approach of his eastern friends, persisted, like his predecessor Chrysostom, to disclaim the jurisdiction and to disobey the summons of his enemies. They hastened his trial, and his accuser presided in the seat of judgment. Sixty-eight bishops, twenty-two of metropolitan rank, defended his cause by a modest and temperate protest. They were excluded from the councils of their brethren. Candidian, in the emperor's name, requested a delay of four days. The profane magistrate was driven with outrage and insult from the assembly of the saints. The whole of this momentous transaction was crowded into the compass of a summer's day. The bishops delivered their separate opinions, but the uniformity of style reveals the influence or the hand of a master who has been accused of corrupting the public evidence of their acts and subscriptions. Without a dissenting voice, they recognised in the epistles of Carol the Nicene Creed and the Doctrine of the Fathers, but the partial extracts from the letters and homilies of Nestorius were interrupted by curses and anathemas, and the heretic was degraded from his episcopal and ecclesiastical dignity. The sentence, maliciously inscribed to the new Judas, was affixed and proclaimed in the streets of Ephesus. The weary prelates as they issued from the Church of the Mother of God were saluted as her champions, and her victory was celebrated by the illuminations, the songs, and the tumult of the night. On the fifth day the triumph was clouded by the arrival and indignation of the eastern bishops. In a chamber of the inn, before he had wiped the dust from his shoes, John of Antioch gave audience to Candidian, the imperial minister, who related his ineffectual efforts to prevent or to annul the hasty violence of the Egyptian. With equal haste and violence, the Oriental sonnet of fifty bishops degraded Carol and Memnon from their episcopal honours, condemned in the twelve anathemas the purest venom of the Apollinarian heresy, and described the Alexandrian primate as a monster, born and educated for the destruction of the Church. His throne was distant and inaccessible, but they instantly resolved to bestow on the flock of Ephesus the blessing of a faithful shepherd. By the vigilance of Memnon the churches were shut against them, and a strong garrison was thrown into the cathedral. The troops, under the command of Candidian, advanced to the assault. The outguards were routed and put to the sword, but the place was impregnable. The besiegers were tired, their retreat was pursued by a vigorous sally, they lost their horses, and many of their soldiers were dangerously wounded with clubs and stones. Thus the city of the Virgin was defiled with rage and clamour, with sedition and blood. The rival synods darted anathemas and excommunications from their spiritual engines, and the court of Theodosius was perplexed by the adverse and contradictory narratives of the Syrian and Egyptian factions. During a busy period of three months the emperor tried every method except the most effectual means of indifference and contempt to reconcile this theological quarrel. He attempted to remove or intimidate the leaders by a common sentence of acquittal or condemnation. He invested his representatives at Ephesus with ample power and military force. He summoned from either party age-chosen deputies to a free and candid conference in the neighbourhood of the capital, far from the contagion of popular frenzy. But the orientals refused to yield, and the Catholics, proud of their numbers and of their Latin allies, rejected all terms of union or toleration. The patience of the meek Theodosius was provoked, and he dissolved in anger the sepiscable tumult, which at the distance of thirteen centuries assumes the venerable aspect of the third ecumenical council. God is my witness, said the pious prince, that I am not the author of this confusion. His providence will discern and punish the guilty. Return to your provinces, and may your private virtues repair the mischief and scandal of your meeting. They returned to their provinces, but the same passions which had distracted the Synod of Ephesus were diffused over the Eastern world. After three obstinate and equal campaigns, John of Antioch and Kirill of Alexandria condescended to explain and embrace. But their seeming reunion must be imputed rather to prudence than to reason, to the mutual lassitude rather than to the Christian charity of the patriarchs. The Byzantine pontiff had instilled into the royal ear a baleful prejudice against the character and conduct of his Egyptian rival. An epistle of menace and invective, which accompanied the summons, accused him as a busy, insolent, and envious priest who perplexed the simplicity of the faith, violated the peace of the church and state, and, by his artful and separate addresses to the wife and sister of Theodosius, presumed to suppose or to scatter the seeds of discord in the imperial family. At the stern command of his sovereign, Kirill had repaired to Ephesus, where he was resisted, threatened, and confined, by the magistrates in the interests of Nestorius and the Orientals, who assembled the troops of Lydia and Ionia to suppress the fanatic and disorderly train of the patriarch. Without expecting the royal license, he escaped from his guards, precipitately embarked, deserted the imperfect Synod, and retired to his episcopal fortress of safety and independence. But his artful emissaries, both in the court and city, successfully labored to appease the resentment and to conciliate the favour of the emperor. The feeble son of Arcadius was alternately swayed by his wife and sister, by the eunuchs and women of the palace. Supercision and avarice were their ruling passions, and the orthodox chiefs were assiduous in their endeavours to alarm the former and to gratify the latter. Constantinople and the suburbs were sanctified with frequent monasteries, and the holy abbots, Dalmatius and Eutychus, had devoted their zeal and fidelity to the cause of Kirill, the worship of Mary, and the unity of Christ. From the first moment of their monastic life they had never mingled with the world or trod the profane ground of the city. But in this awful moment of the danger of the church their vow was superseded by a more sublime and indispensable duty. At the head of a long order of monks and hermits, who carried burning tapers in their hands and chanted litanies to the mother of God, they proceeded from their monasteries to the palace. The people was edified and inflamed by this extraordinary spectacle, and the trembling monarch listened to the prayers and adoration of the saints, who boldly pronounced that none could hope for salvation unless they embraced the person and the creed of the orthodox successor of Athanasius. At the same time every avenue of the throne was assaulted with gold. Under the decent names of eulogies and benedictions the courtiers of both sexes were bribed according to the measures of their power and rapaciousness. But their incessant demands to spoil the sanctuaries of Constantinople and Alexandria, and the authority of the patriarch was unable to silence the just murmur of his clergy, that a debt of sixty thousand pounds had already been contracted to support the expense of this scandalous corruption. Polcaria, who relieved her brother from the weight of an empire, was the firmest pillar of orthodoxy, and so intimate was the alliance between the thunders of the Synod and the whispers of the court, that Kirill was assured of success if he could displace one eunuch and substitute another in favour of the Erosius. Yet the Egyptian could not boast of a glorious or decisive victory. The emperor, with unaccustomed firmness, adhered to his promise of protecting the innocence of the Oriental bishops, and Kirill softened his anathemas, and confessed with ambiguity and reluctance a twofold nature of Christ, before he was permitted to satiate his revenge against the unfortunate Astorius. The rash and obstinate Astorius before the end of the Synod was oppressed by Kirill, betrayed by the court, and faintly supported by his eastern friends. A sentiment of fear or indignation prompted him, while it was yet time, to affect the glory of a voluntary abdication. His wish, or at least his request, was readily granted. He was conducted with honour from Ephesus to his old monastery of Antioch, and, after a short pause, his successors, Maximian and Proclus, were acknowledged as the lawful bishops of Constantinople. But in the silence of his cell, the degraded patriarch could no longer resume the innocence and security of a private monk. The past he regretted. He was discontented with the present, and the future he had reason to dread. The Oriental bishops successively disengaged their cause from his unpopular name, and each day decreased the number of the schismatics who revered Astorius as the confessor of the faith. After a residence at Antioch of four years, the Hand of Theodosius subscribed an edict, which ranked him with Simon the Magician, condemned his opinions and followers, condemned his writings to the flames, and banished his person first to Petra in Arabia, and at length to Oasis, one of the islands of the Libyan desert. Secluded from the church and from the world, the exile was still pursued by the rage of bigotry and war. A wandering tribe of the Blemais, or Nubians, invaded his solitary prison. In their retreat they dismissed a crowd of useless captives, but no sooner had Astorius reached the banks of the Nile than he would gladly have escaped from a Roman and Orthodox city to the milder servitude of the Savages. His flight was punished as a new crime. The soul of the patriarch inspired the civil and ecclesiastical powers of Egypt. The magistrates, the soldiers, the monks, devoutly tortured the enemy of Christ and St. Cyril, and as far as the confines of Ethiopia, the heretic was alternately dragged and recalled, till his aged body was broken by the hardships and accidents of these reiterated journeys. At his mind was still independent and erect. The President of Thibias was awed by his pastoral letters. He survived the Catholic tyrant of Alexandria, and after sixteen years' banishment the Synod of Calcedon would perhaps have restored him to the honors, or at least to the communion of the church. The death of Nestorius prevented his obedience to their welcome summons, and his disease might afford some color to the scandalous report that his tongue, the organ of blasphemy, had been eaten by the worms. He was buried in a city of Upper Egypt, known by the names of Chemnus, or Panopolis, or Akhmim. But the immortal malice of the Jacobites has persevered for ages to cast stones against his supple-car, and to propagate the foolish tradition that it was never watered by the rain of heaven, which equally descends on the righteous and the ungodly. Humanity may drop a tear on the fate of Nestorius, yet justice must observe that he suffered the persecution which he had approved and inflicted. End of chapter 47, part 2