This unfortunate family proceeded, filled with fear, meeting at every step soldiers greedy of pillage, who ill-treated the Greeks they plundered, and threatened every woman with insult. Nicetas, and some of his friends who had come to join him, carried their children in their arms, the only wealth that Heaven had left them; and defended alone by the pity which their despair and misery inspired. They walked together, placing their wives and daughters in the centre, after having advised the youngest to blacken their faces with earth. In spite of this precaution, the beauty of one young girl attracted the attention of a soldier, and she was borne away from the arms of her father, weighed down by age and infirmities. Nicetas, touched by the tears of the old man, flew after the ravisher, and addressing himself to all the warriors he met, he implored their pity, and conjured them, in the name of Heaven, the protector of virtue, in the name of their own families, to snatch a daughter from dishonour, to save a father from despair. The Frank warriors were affected by his prayer, and the unfortunate father soon saw his daughter restored to him, the only hope of his exile, the last consolation of his grey hairs. Nicetas and his companions in trouble encountered still further dangers, but at length got safely out of Constantinople by the Golden Gate, happy at being able to quit a country so lately the object of all their affections. The generous Venetian received their blessings, and in return prayed Heaven to protect them in their exile.
Nicetas, with tears, embraced his liberator, whom he never had the good fortune to see again; then casting a look upon Constantinople, upon his unhappy country, he addressed to it these touching complaints, which express the griefs of his exile, and which he himself has transmitted to us:[135]—“O Queen of Cities, what power has been able to separate us from thee! What consolation shall we find on issuing from thy walls, as naked as we issued from the bosom of our mothers! Become the sport of strangers, the companions of wild animals that inhabit the forests, we shall never again visit thy august domes, and can only fly with terror around thee, like sparrows round the spot where their nest has been destroyed.”
Nicetas arrived with his family at Cylindria, and afterwards retired to Nice, where he employed himself in retracing the history of the misfortunes of his country.
Constantinople did not cease to be the theatre of the frightful deeds of violence that war brings in its train. Amidst the sanguinary sports of victory, the Latins, to insult the effeminate manners of the Greeks, clothed themselves in long flowing robes, painted of various colours; they fastened to the heads of their horses linen hoods with their silken cords, in which the Orientals dress themselves; whilst others paraded the streets carrying in their hands, instead of a sword, some paper and an ink-horn; thus ridiculing the conquered, whom they termed scribes and copyers.
The Greeks had on all occasions insulted the ignorance of the Latins; the knights, without seeking to retort upon the quiet occupations of peace. With these dispositions it was not likely they should spare the monuments that decorated the public places, the palaces, or the edifices of Byzantium. Constantinople, which to this period had stood erect amidst the ruins of several empires, had collected within its walls the scattered relics of the arts, and was proud to exhibit the masterpieces that had been saved from the destruction of barbarous ages. The bronze, in which breathed the genius of antiquity, was cast into the furnace, and converted into money, to satisfy the greedy soldiers. The heroes and gods of the Nile, those of ancient Greece and of ancient Rome, the masterpieces of Praxiteles, Phidias, and the most celebrated artists, fell beneath the strokes of the conquerors.
Nicetas, who deplores the loss of these monuments, has left us a description, from which the history of art may derive some advantage.[136] The historian of Byzantium informs us that in the Place of Constantine stood, before the siege, the statue of Juno, and that of Paris offering to Venus the prize of beauty, or the apple of discord. The statue of Juno, which had formerly adorned the temple of the goddess at Samos, was of so colossal a size, that when it was destroyed by the Crusaders, eight harnessed oxen were required to drag the gigantic head to the palace of Bucoleon. In the same place was erected an obelisk of a square form, which astonished the spectator by the multitude and variety of the objects it presented to his view. On the sides of this obelisk the artist had represented, in basso-relievo, all sorts of birds saluting the return of the sun, villagers employed in their rustic labours, shepherds playing on their pipes, sheep bleating, lambs bounding on the grass; further on, a tranquil sea and fishes of a thousand sorts, some taken alive, others breaking the nets and regaining their deep retreats; at the back of the landscape, naked cupids playing and throwing apples at each other; at the top of the obelisk, which terminated in a pyramidal form, was the figure of a woman that turned with the least breath of air, which was called the attendant of the winds.
An equestrian statue[137] ornamented the place of Mount Taurus; the horse appeared to throw up the dust with his feet, and outspeed the winds in his course. As the horseman had his arm extended towards the sun, some supposed it to represent Joshua, commanding the star of day to stand still, on the plains of Gabaon; others believed the artist meant to describe Bellerophon mounted on Pegasus.[138]
A colossal statue of Hercules,[139] attributed to Lysippus, was one of the ornaments of the Hippodrome; the demigod had neither his bow nor his club; he was seated on a bed of osier;[140] his left knee bent, sustained his elbow; his head reclining on his left hand; his pensive looks and air expressing the vexation and sorrow caused by the jealousy of Eurystheus. The shoulders and chest of Hercules were broad, his hair was curled, and his limbs were large and muscular; his leg alone exceeded in height the stature of an ordinary man. The skin of the Nemean lion, exhibited over the shoulders of the son of Alemena, the erected mane and the head of the animal, which might be fancied still to roar and terrify the passers by, who stopped to contemplate the statue.
Not far from the terrible Hercules, was a group of an ass and its driver, which Augustus placed in his colony of Nicopolis, to perpetuate the remembrance of a singular circumstance that had foretold the victory of Actium to him. Near this were the hyena or she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, a monument from the old nations of the West;[141] the sphinx, with the face of a woman, dragging frightful animals behind her; the crocodile, an inhabitant of the Nile, with his tail covered with horrible scales; a man fighting with a lion; an elephant with his supple trunk; and the antique Scylla, showing before, the features of a woman, with large breasts and a deformed figure; and behind, such monsters as those that pursued Ulysses and his companions. In the same place was an eagle clutching a serpent in his talons, and bearing it away towards the azure vault; the bronze beautifully exhibited the pain of the reptile, and the haughty fierceness of the bird of Jupiter. When the sun shone on the horizon, the extended wings of the king of the air denoted, by lines skilfully traced, the twelve hours of the day.
All who, in that gross age, preserved any taste for the arts, admired the figure of a young woman, her hair plaited on her brow, and gathered into a knot behind, placed upon a column of the Circus; this young woman, as if by enchantment, bore in her right hand a horseman, whose horse she held by one foot; the horseman covered with his cuirass, and the spirited, neighing steed, seemed listening to the warlike trumpet, and to breathe nothing but eagerness for the fight. Near the eastern boundary of the Circus were represented in bronze, the charioteers who had gained prizes, and whose triumphs, in times gone by, had often divided the empire into two factions; they appeared standing in their chariots, running in the lists, pulling and loosening by turns the reins of their coursers, and encouraging them by gesture and voice. Not far from this, upon a basis of stone, were several Egyptian animals, the aspic, the basilisk, and the crocodile, all engaged in mortal combat,—an image of the war made by the wicked on each other; the hideous forms of these animals, the rage and pain expressed throughout their bodies, the livid poison which seemed to exhale with their bites, altogether inspired a feeling of disgust and terror. Another masterpiece, made to charm the sight, ought, at least, to have touched and disarmed the conquerors. Among the statues described by Nicetas, none is more conspicuous than a Helen with her charming smile and her voluptuous attitude; a Helen, with perfect regularity of features, her hair floating at the pleasure of the winds, her eyes full of languor, her lips, which even in the bronze were rosy; her arms, of which even the same bronze showed the whiteness; Helen, in short, with all her beauty, and such as she appeared before the old men of Ilium, who were ravished at her presence.