There is yet one important reflection which, if the study of the age of Belisarius and Justinian does not suggest, we have failed to comprehend its true spirit. In spite of its glory—of its legislative, its legal, its military, its administrative, its architectural, and its ecclesiastical greatness, it was destitute of that spiritual power which rules and guides the souls of men. It was an age entirely material and selfish. Religion was a mere formula: Christianity slept victorious amidst the ruins of extinguished paganism. Belisarius could depose one Pope, and sell the chair and the keys of St Peter to another, without rousing the indignation of the Christian world. Liberty was an incomprehensible term. That energy of individual independence and physical force which excited the barbarians of the north to conquer the western empire, and enabled the Romans of Byzantium to save the eastern, was sinking into lethargy. Patriotism was an unknown feeling. Indeed, what idea of nationality or love of country could be formed by the privileged classes of Constantinople? Their successors the Turks may be taken as interpreters of the sentiments of the Byzantine Romans on this subject, who, while vegetating in Stamboul, gravely tell you that Mecca is their country.
In short, the spirit of liberty and religion was torpid in the empire of Justinian, and perhaps in the soul of Belisarius. These two remarkable men were both governed by the material impulses of military discipline and systematic administration. Verily, the mission of Mahomet was necessary to awaken mankind, and rouse the Christian world from its lethargy to the great mental struggle which, from the hour of the unfolding of the banner of Islam, has left the minds of men no repose; and will henceforth compel them to unite the spirit of religion with all their restless endeavours to realise each successive dream of social improvement that the human soul shall dare to conceive.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] Procopius de Bello Vandalico, lib. i. c. 11. Gibbon (vol. vii. p. 161. note e) says that he could not find the Germania, a metropolis of Thrace, mentioned by Alemanni, in any civil or ecclesiastical lists of the provinces and cities. Alemanni's authority may be found in Notitiæ Græcorum Episcopatuum, where Germania is the sixty-seventh metropolitan see dependent on the Patriarch of Constantinople.—(Codinus de officiis Magnæ Ecclesiæ et Aulæ Constantinopolitanæ, p. 380, ed. Paris.) It is probable that the city Germane of the Edifices of Procopius (iv. 3) is the same as Germania. There was a fort in its territory, called Germas. De Ædif. iii. 4. Germanos is still a favourite ecclesiastical name with the Greeks. There is a place on the Gulf of Corinth, in the territory of Megara, with splendid remains of the military architecture of an ancient burgh, now called Porto Germano, the ancient Ægosthenæ.—(Leake's Travels in Northern Greece, vol. i. p. 405.) Herodotus mentions Germanii, Γερμανιοι, as an agricultural tribe of Persians in the time of Cyrus.—(Clio, 125.) These various Germans and Germanians can hardly be blood relations of our Germany or Deutschland.
[10] Lord Mahon's Life of Belisarius, p. 3. Procopius de Bello Vand. ii. 6.
[11] Procopius de Bello Persico, i. 12. Clinton's Fasti Romani. From this time Procopius was the official secretary of Belisarius.
[12] A good soldier can only be formed from men between eighteen and forty years of age. In ancient times it required more strength to make a soldier than in modern. The demand for such men, in an improving state of society, makes them too valuable to be expended on the game of war, and hence despots in civilised ages are compelled to use an inferior class. Good troops must always be highly paid. A good heavy-armed soldier, in ancient Greece, had half the pay of his captain. The pay of the celebrated English archers, in the middle ages, was extremely high; as it required the service of a brave and vigorous yeomanry to give that corps the efficiency it displayed in so many hard-fought battles—(Hallam's Constitutional History of England, ch. ix. vol. 2.) Lord Brougham, however, overrates the pay of a mounted archer, in making it "equal to thirty shillings of our money" a-day.—(Political Philosophy, part iii. p. 237.)
[13] Gibbon's Decline and Fall, vii. 166. It is impossible to resist transcribing Gibbon's note.
Νευρην μεν μαζω Πελασεν τοξω δε σιδηρον.
Λιγξε βιοϛ, νευρη δε μεγ ιαχεν αλτο δ'οιστοϛ.