the hero of a victorious campaign in Asia Minor was wont to land, and with him his troops. Spoils taken in the war were stacked and hapless prisoners paraded to follow in procession through the Golden Gate at the conqueror’s chariot wheels. From this harbour the Turkish fleet of 305 vessels attempted to cut off the five gallant ships that brought provisions from the island of Scio to the city during the last siege; these managed to force their way to the Golden Horn.
The sentry on the ramparts over the postern we have left behind us, looking over this rolling plain, would see the glittering domes and pinnacles of yet another lordly place away on the curving sea-coast—the palace of the Hebdomon. This, it appears, served as a rustic retreat for the emperors of the East. Important functions took place there, for here Valens was inaugurated as colleague of his brother, the Emperor Valentine, and proclaimed Augustus. And others followed him, such as Arcadius and Honorius, raised to imperial rank by Theodosius the Great, Leo the Great and Leo the Armenian, and he with whose fate we became familiar when talking of Theophane, Nicephorus II Phocas.
But we will hasten away from that malodorous evidence of progress, the tannery, for we are strongly drawn towards those towering ruins gleaming through the dark cypresses. We cross the railway-line and note where it has cut a path through the ancient defences of Byzantium.
Climbing a bank, we reach a little Turkish cemetery, its weird and tumbling tombstones shaded by those solemn, watchful cypress-trees. Now look towards the walls: between us and them is a deep fosse, where fig-trees grow and throw out their twisted branches as if to protect these ancient ramparts from crumbling further to decay. Ivy in dense dark masses clings to the crenulated scarp, and beyond that a broad roadway, all neglected, rises in gentle gradient till it turns sharply towards an archway, guarded on either hand by massive towers built of blocks of polished marble.
This is the Golden Gate, the “Porta Aurea” of so many glorious moments in the life of Constantine’s great city.
Here the procession that had formed on the plain down by the harbour made its triumphal entry, and worthy was this monument in those days to serve as frame to a conquering Augustus. Walls and towers were crowned with parapets, over which glittered the glint of armour and the flashing light of spear-heads. The gates, too, were all on fire with the precious metal from which its name comes, though it now lives
