[133] There was nothing so difficult, says Nicetas, as to soften the fierce temper, appease the anger, or gain the affections of these barbarians. Their bile was so heated, that it only required a word to set it in a blaze; it was a ridiculous undertaking to attempt to render them tractable, a folly to speak reason to them.
[134] This is a very remarkable passage; it describes the hero of the crusades with the pencil of the painter as well as with the pen of the historian.—Trans.
[135] The lamentations of Nicetas are not always natural; whilst deploring the fate of Byzantium he says, “I complained to the walls, that they alone should be insensible to calamities, and should remain standing, instead of melting away in tears.”
[136] The eleventh and twelfth volumes of the Memoirs of the Royal Society of Gottingen contain a beautiful work of the illustrious Heyne, upon the monuments of art that have existed at Constantinople. In the first memoir he gives the nomenclature of the ancient monuments,—Priscæ Artis Opera. In the second those that were erected under the emperors of Byzantium. In two other memoirs, the same learned author describes the loss of these same monuments: De Interitu Operum cum antiquæ tam verioris ætatis.
[137] The Bellerophon. This statue is that of Theodosius, showing a trophy placed upon a neighbouring column; it was thus the Pacificator was represented: fuit a Deo pacificatoris habitus. Nicetas says that in his left hand he held a globe. The statues of the other emperors of Constantinople present a similar sign, to which a cross is attached. The people believed that under the hoof of the left fore foot, was the figure of a Venetian or a Bulgarian, or of a man of some other country which had no intercourse with the Romans. The statue being destroyed by the Latins, it was said that the figure of a Bulgarian was found concealed in the hoof, crossed by a nail and incrusted in lead. This statue came from Antioch in Syria. At the quadrilateral base was a basso-relievo, in which the populace, ever superstitious, fancied they beheld the prediction of the fall of the empire. They even said that the Russians there represented would accomplish the prediction.
[138] One of the French translators of Gibbon, of a single statue has made two; he speaks of a statue of Joshua and of another of Bellerophon. It is true that this gross error is only met with in one French translation; the English original says that in the opinion of the vulgar, this statue passed for that of Joshua, but that a more classical tradition recognised in it that of Bellerophon and Pegasus; the free and spirited attitude of the courser indicating that he trod on air rather than on the earth.
[139] Heyne attributes it to Lysippus; he thinks it is the same as the colossal Hercules of Tarentum, which was brought to Rome and placed in the Capitol. From this city it went to Constantinople, with ten other statues, under the consulate of Julian and the reign of Constantine, that is to say, about 322; but it was not till after being exhibited in the Basilic that it was placed in the Hippodrome.
[140] Gibbon calls this an osier basket; Michaud says, un lit d’osier, which I have preferred. I can imagine Hercules sitting upon a bed or mattress of osier, but not upon a basket.—Trans.
[141] The learned Harris, in his historical Essay upon the literature and arts of the middle ages, thinks that the monument which represented the wolf suckling Romulus, was the same as that to which Virgil makes allusion when describing the buckler of Æneas:—
Illam tereti cervice reflexam