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CHAP. day invade the right of primogeniture, and seat XLVIII. his brother Theodosius on an equal throne.

By the imposition of holy orders, the grandson of Heraclius was disqualified for the purple; but this ceremony, which seemed to profane the sacraments of the church, was insufficient to appease the suspicions of the tyrant, and the death of the deacon Theodosius could alone expiate the crime of his royal birth. His murder was avenged by the imprecations of the people, and the assassin in the fulness of power, was driven from his capital into voluntary and perpetual exile. Constans embarked for Greece; and, as if he meant to retort the abhorrence which he deserved, he is said, from the imperial galley, to have spit against the walls of his native city. After passing the winter at Athens, he sailed to Tarentum in Italy, visited Rome, and concluded a long pilgrimage of disgrace and sacrilegious rapine, by fixing his residence at Syracuse. But if Constans could fly from his people, he could not fly from himself. The remorse of his conscience created a phantom who pursued him by land and sea, by day and by night; and the visionary Theodosius, presenting to his lips a cup of blood, said or seemed to say, "Drink, brother, drink;" a sure emblem of the aggravation of his guilt, since he had received from the hands of the deacon the mystic cup of the blood of Christ. Odious to himself and to mankind, Constans perished by domestic, perhaps by episcopal, treason in the capital of Sicily. A servant who waited in the bath, after pouring warm water on his head,

He fell,

struck him violently with the vase.
stunned by the blow, and suffocated by the
water; and his attendants, who wondered at
the tedious delay, beheld with indifference the
corpse of their lifeless emperor.
The troops

of Sicily invested with the purple an obscure
youth, whose inimitable beauty eluded, and it
might easily elude, the declining art of the pain-
ters and sculptors of the age.

CHAP. XLVIII.

A. D. 668,

Constans had left in the Byzantine palace Constan three sons, the eldest of whom had been clothed time IV, Pogonain his infancy with the purple. When the fa- tus, ther summoned them to attend his person in September Sicily, these precious hostages were detained by the Greeks, and a firm refusal-informed him that they were the children of the state. The news of his murder was conveyed with almost supernatural speed from Syracuse to Constantinople; and Constantine, the eldest of his sons, inherited his throne without being the heir of the public hatred. His subjects contributed, with zeal and alacrity, to chastise the guilt and presumption of a province which had usurped the rights of the senate and people: the young emperor sailed from the Hellespont with a powerful fleet; and the legions of Rome and Carthage were assembled under his standard in the harbour of Syracuse. The defeat of the Sicilian tyrant was easy, his punishment just, and his beauteous head was exposed in the hippodrome: but I cannot applaud the clemency of a prince, who, among a crowd of victims, condemned the son of a patrician, for deploring with some bitterness the execution of a

XLVIII.

CHAP. virtuous father. The youth was castrated; he survived the operation, and the memory of this indecent cruelty is preserved by the elevation of Germanus to the rank of a patriarch and saint. After pouring this bloody libation on his father's tomb, Constantine returned to his capital, and the growth of his young beard during the Sicilian voyage, was announced by the familiar surname of Pogonatus, to the Grecian world. But his reign, like that of his predecessor, was stained with fraternal discord. On his two brothers, Heraclius and Tiberius, he had bestowed the title of Augustus; an empty title, for they continued to languish without trust or power in the solitude of the palace. At their secret instigation, the troops of the Anatolian theme or province approached the city on the Asiatic side, demanded for the royal brothers, the partition or exercise of sovereignty, and supported their seditious claim by a theological argument. They were Christians, (they cried), and orthodox catholics; the sincere votaries of the holy and undivided Trinity. Since there are three equal persons in heaven, it is reasonable there should be three equal persons upon earth. The emperor invited these learned divines to a friendly conference, in which they might propose their arguments to the senate; they obeyed the summous, but the prospect of their bodies hanging on the gibbet in the suburb of Galata, reconciled their companions to the unity of the reign of Constantine. He pardoned his brothers, and their names were still pronounced in the public acclamations: but on

XLVIII.

the repetition or suspicion of a similar offence, CHAP. the obnoxious princes were deprived of their titles and noses, in the presence of the catholic bishops who were assembled at Constantinople in the sixth general synod. In the close of his life, Pogonatus was anxious only to establish the right of primogeniture: the hair of his two sons, Justinian and Heraclius, was offered on the shrine of St. Peter, as a synod of their spiritual adoption by the pope; but the elder was alone exalted to the rank of Augustus and the assurance of the empire.

Justi

A. D. 685.

ber.

After the decease of his father, the inheritance of the Roman world devolved to Justi- nian II, nian II; and the name of a triumphant law- Septem giver was dishonoured by the vices of a boy, who imitated his namesake only in the expensive luxury of building. His passions were strong; his understanding was feeble; and he was intoxicated with a foolish pride, that his birth had given him the command of millions, of whom the smallest community would not have chosen him for their local magistrate. His favourite ministers were two beings the least susceptible of human sympathy; an eunuch and a monk; to one he abandoned the palace, to the other the finances; the former corrected the emperor's mother with a scourge, the latter suspended the insolent tributaries, with their heads downwards, over a slow and smoaky fire. Since the days of Commodus and Caracalla, the cruelty of the Roman princes had most commonly been the effect of their fear:

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XLVIII.

CHAP. but Justinian, who possessed some vigour of character, enjoyed the sufferings, and braved the revenge, of his subjects about ten years, till the measure was full, of his crimes and of their patience. In a dark dungeon, Leontius, a ge neral of reputation, had groaned above three years with some of the noblest and most deserving of the patricians: he was suddenly drawn forth to assume the government of Greece; and this promotion of an injured man was a mark of the contempt rather than of the confidence of his prince. As he was followed to the port by the kind offices of his friends, Leontius observed with a sigh that he was a victim adorned for sacrifice, and that inevitable death would pursue his footsteps. They ventured to reply, that glory and empire might be the recompense of a generous resolution; that every order of men abhorred the reign of a monster; and that the hands of two hundred thousand patriots expected only the voice of a leader. The night was chosen for their deliverance; and in the first effort of the conspirators, the prefect was slain, and the prisons were forced open: the emissaries of Leontius proclaimed in every street," Christians, to St. Sophia ;" and the seasonable text of the patriarch, "this is the day of the Lord!" was the prelude of an inflammatory sermon. From the church the people adjourned to the hippodrome: Justinian in whose cause not a sword had been drawn, was dragged before these tumultary judges, and their clamours demanded the instant death of the tyrant. But Leontius who was already clothed

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