The result of the encounter is matter of history. A thousand Goths fell in the skirmish, and the bravest of the veteran guards of Belisarius perished by his side. The barbarians were driven back to their camp; but when Belisarius imprudently followed them, he was repulsed by the Gothic infantry forming before the lines, and the Romans were compelled to make a precipitate retreat. They galloped back to the gates of Rome closely pursued by fresh squadrons of Gothic cavalry. But as they reached the walls in disorder, the garrison refused to open the gates, fearing lest the Goths might force their way into the city with the fugitives, and believing that Belisarius had perished in the battle. There was now nothing left for the commander-in-chief but to form a small squadron of his faithful guards, and make a desperate and sudden charge on the advancing Goths. The manœuvre was executed with consummate skill, and the leading ranks of the enemy were broken, thrown into confusion, and forced back on the succeeding squadrons by the impetuous charge. The cry spread that the garrison had made a sally; the obscurity of evening was commencing, the Goths commenced their retreat; and Belisarius and his wearied troops were at last allowed to enter Rome. In this desperate encounter, their respective enemies allowed that Belisarius was the bravest of the Romans, and Wisand of the Goths. The Roman general escaped without a wound, but the valiant Goth, borne down in the combat around the person of Belisarius, was left for dead on the field, where he remained all the next day, and it was only on the third morning, in taking up his body for interment, that he was discovered to be still alive. He recovered from his wounds and lived long afterwards.[14]
Belisarius, unlike the noble barons of more modern days, who were all pride and presumption in their iron shells, mounted on their dray horses, but useless when dismounted, did not disdain to add to his knightly accomplishments that of a most skilful archer. This skill saved Rome in a dangerous attack. When the Goths advanced their movable towers against the walls, drawn forward by innumerable yokes of oxen, Belisarius, placing himself on the ramparts, ordered the garrison to allow the towers to advance unmolested by the machines to within bow-shot. Then taking up a long bow, which might have graced the hand of Robin Hood, and choosing two shafts of a yard in length, he drew the bowstring to his ear, and shot his shaft at the tower. The Gothic captain, who was directing its movements from the summit, had trusted too much to the workmanship of his Milan armour. The fabric was not equal to that of Byzantium. The shaft pierced him to the heart; he tottered a moment on the edge of the tower, and then fell headlong forward. The second shaft brought down another Goth. Belisarius then ordered his archers to shoot at the oxen, which soon fell, pierced by a thousand arrows; and the towers that the Gothic army counted on to enable them to make a general assault, remained immovable until the Romans could burn them.[15]
Belisarius, fond of cavalry, seems to have overlooked, nay, even to have neglected, the discipline of the Roman infantry. While besieged in Rome, he defended the place by a series of cavalry skirmishes, and allowed all the officers of the infantry who could mount themselves to serve on horse-back. Some of the native officers of the legionaries, jealous of their reputation, offered to lead their troops on foot. Belisarius would hardly allow them to quit the walls, and plainly expressed his want of confidence in the Roman infantry on the field of battle, while he showed his utter contempt for the city militia, by keeping it carefully shut up within the walls. The battle in which the infantry took part proved unsuccessful; but the officers who led it died bravely, sustaining the combat after the cavalry had fled.[16]
Yet Belisarius knew well how to appreciate the tactics of the old Roman legion; and he made use of a singular method of obtaining the great military advantages to be derived from the possession of a body of the best infantry. At the battle of Kallinikon, when his cavalry was broken by the iron-cased horsemen of Persia—the renowned kataphraktoi, or original steel lobsters—the Roman general, with the genius of a Scipio or a Cæsar, saw that the steadiness of a body of infantry could alone save his army. He immediately ordered the heavy lancers of his own guard to dismount, and form square before the feebler and less perfectly equipped soldiers of the legions of the line. With this phalanx, presenting its closely serried shields and long lances to the repeated charges of the kataphraktoi, he foiled every attack of the victorious Persians, and saved his army.[17]
Belisarius, however, acquired more favour at the court of Justinian, and secured the personal affection of the Emperor more, by slaughtering the people of Constantinople in a city rebellion, originating out of the factions of the Circus, than by his exploits against the distant enemies of the empire. The affair was called the Day of Victory. The scene was repeated on the 4th of October 1795, in the city of Paris, and was called the Day of the Sections. The part of the Thracian Belisarius was then performed by the Corsican Bonaparte. In the tragedy of old, three thousand citizens were massacred by the mild Belisarius, in that of Paris, hardly three hundred perished by the inexorable Napoleon.
The personal conduct of Belisarius is presented to us under two totally different points of view, in the works of his Secretary Procopius. In the authentic history of the Persian, Vandal, and Gothic wars, he appears as the commander-in-chief of the Roman armies, his actions are narrated by a Roman historian, and his conduct is held up to the admiration of Roman society. In the secret history, on the contrary, we have, it is true, the same man described by the same author, but the work is addressed to the Greek race, and not to their Roman rulers, and it presents Belisarius as the instrument of a corrupt and tyrannical court, engaged in plundering the people, while crouching under the oppression of which he was the minister. The history of Procopius was written for the libraries of the Byzantine nobles; the anecdotes for the clubs of the Greek people. Though composed in the same language, they belong not only to two different classes of literature, but even to the literature of two different races of men.[18]
Belisarius was a fortunate, as well as a great general. His victories over the Vandals and the Goths prove his military talents; but the spectacle of their kings, Gelimer and Witiges, the representatives of the dreaded Genseric and the mighty Theoderic, walking as captives through the streets of Constantinople, made a deeper impression on men's minds than the slaughter of the bloodiest battle. Nor was the restoration of the sacred plate of the Temple of the Jews to the city of Jerusalem, an event of less importance, in a superstitious age, than the destruction of a barbarian monarchy. Among the spoils of the Vandals at Carthage, Belisarius had found in the treasury those sacred vessels which Titus, nearly five centuries before, had carried away to Rome from the ruins of Jerusalem. Genseric had transported these relics to Africa, when he plundered Rome in the year 455. Justinian was generous enough to revive the long forgotten ceremony of a Roman triumph in order to augment the glory of Belisarius; and the sacred plate of the Jews was exhibited to the people of Constantinople amidst the pomp of the gorgeous pageant. The emperor then commanded them to be removed to Jerusalem, to be preserved in a Christian church.[19]
The restoration of the sacred spoils of Jerusalem rendered the name of Belisarius renowned in the eastern world, far beyond the bounds of the Roman empire; the glory of refusing the throne of the Cæsars of the west, amazed the barbarians of Europe as far as the filiation of the Gothic and Germanic races extended. The glory of being deemed worthy of the empire, was eclipsed by the singular display of personal dignity which could refuse the honour. When Belisarius was on the eve of putting an end to the Gothic monarchy by the conquest of Ravenna and the capture of Witiges, the Goths, reflecting on their national position in the days of Alaric and Theoderic, when they were only the soldiers of the empire, offered their submission to Belisarius, and invited him to assume the dignity of Emperor of the West. Belisarius refused the offer. He had seen in his Italian campaigns, that the Gothic nobles of Italy were no longer the same soldiers as the Gothic mercenaries of the imperial armies.[20] The merit of refusing the empire must have been deeply felt by Justinian; but the jealousy excited by the renown, which conferred the option of accepting such power, gradually effaced the impression of that merit in the breasts both of the feeble emperor, and of his energetic and ambitious consort, Theodora. Though Belisarius loved money and splendour, and had more of Pompey than Cæsar in his character, still the boldest cabinet minister must have felt that lie could no longer safely be entrusted with the whole military power of the empire. Though his fidelity remained inviolable, a seditious army could compel him, even if unwilling, to become its instrument. From the day, therefore, that Belisarius refused the Empire of the West, a cloud fell over his military career. It was determined by the imperial administration never again to entrust him with a force sufficient to proceed in a career of conquest.
It is needless to dwell on the military events of the life of Belisarius. Lord Mahon states it as the purpose of his work, to show how the genius of one man averted the dangers, and corrected the defects, which beset the tottering empire.[21] Gibbon, in gorgeous phrase, exalts him to the dignity of being the Africanus of New Rome; and speaks of the Roman armies as being animated by the spirit of Belisarius, one of those heroic names which are familiar to every age and to every nation.[22] But if history is to be composed from the facts recorded by historians, rather than from their opinions and their distribution of flattery and censure, it must be owned that Belisarius was only the greatest in a constellation of gallant warriors. Hilbud, Germanos, and Salomon, were his worthy companions in arms; and the eunuch Narses was all but his equal as a general, and greatly his superior as a statesman.
We must now turn to examine the personal conduct of Belisarius. He was unfortunately too much under the influence of his beautiful wife, though she was a few years older than her husband. Her close friendship with the Empress Theodora, her talents, her bold character, and the devoted attachment she displayed to Belisarius, excuses his too servile affection. She embarked with him in the African expedition, though Procopius says that the boldest Roman generals feared the enterprise; and she accompanied him in Italy. In the historical works of Procopius, she is represented as an excellent wife; in his secret libel, as a shameless and profligate woman.