Count Belisarius (24 page)

The Greens had been easily the stronger faction in the days of Anastasius, and had enjoyed his royal favour, and been awarded the best seats in the Hippodrome. But Theodora insisted on Justinian's reversing these conditions. The Blues were given the best seats now, and favoured in every possible way – by political and Court appointments and grants of money, and especially by legal protection, the Greens' monopoly of justice in the lower courts having at last been broken. It may be imagined that the Greens did not yield to the Blues without a struggle, and a very fierce one. While they had been the bullies they had made the Blues sing very small; and the Blues were now having their revenge, behaving, I admit, in a rather more violent and arbitrary way than the Greens had ever done. Robberies with violence became frequent in broad daylight, and if a Green happened to be killed and the murderer arrested by the police it was enough for a Blue official to swear in court that the Green had been the aggressor: the accused was at once dismissed with a caution. The carrying of arms by any private citizen was unlawful, but the enactment had become obsolete. The contemporary fashion was to wear short cutlasses by day concealed under the tunic, strapped along the thigh; while at night everyone carried arms openly. One result of these street disorders was that false jewellery came into fashion: substantial citizens no longer appeared in jewel-studded golden belts and valuable rings, but wore brass and glass instead.

Justinian intended his persecution of the Greens only as a temporary measure. When he had chastened them thoroughly he would allow them equality with the Blues, and try to preserve a balance of power between the two Colours. But meanwhile he made it a very unpleasant thing to be a Green. There were mass desertions to the Blue cause and much assistance to the Blues from criminals, who trusted that the wearing of a Blue favour would afford them immunity. Extraordinary scenes were now witnessed. Young women joined faction murder-gangs and killed and were killed along with the men. (It must be noted that women can have only an indirect interest in the factions: for they have not been admitted since pagan times to watch the chariot-races in the Hippodrome, unless they have happened, as in the case of Theodora and my mistress Antonina, to be the performers' own women-folk.) Then there were cases of needy or greedy sons levying blackmail on their prosperous fathers: ‘If you do not give me a hundred gold pieces I will come tonight with my gang and burn
your warehouse down.' As a matter of course anybody with a grudge against a neighbour who was not known to be a Blue denounced him as a Green. The murder-hour had now receded from dusk to the early afternoon; the young roughs prided themselves on being able to kill casual passers-by with a single sword-stroke, like professional executioners. It was a particularly bad year for money-lenders: the gangs used to visit them in their offices, on behalf of debtors of the faction, and compel them at dagger-point to hand back the loan-contracts. Also, women and boys, even of the upper classes, were forced to submit to the amorous wishes of the gang-leaders, and there were actually cases of public rape committed in the streets by groups of factionists, as in a captured barbarian city. To crown all, Justinian instituted a heresy-hunt against the Greens; so that priests and monks began wearing the Blue favour and taking part in faction politics. These heresy-hunts were used as an excuse for dissolving rich monasteries and sequestrating their treasures.

A great many prominent Greens fled away from the City to distant parts of the Empire, out of Justinian's immediate reach, and even across the frontier to Persian or barbarian territory. I could feel no pity for them, because my former master Damocles' miserable death was due to the hard hearts of the Greens; and I sympathized with the Empress, too, for avenging the injustice with which the Greens had treated her family when she was only little Theodora, the Bear Master's daughter. But Cappadocian John, who had long deserted the Greens and was now a leading Blue, was Justinian's chief instrument in the religious persecutions. Though no soldier, he had been appointed Commander of the Guards. He filled the Treasury with the monastery spoils, grew richer than ever by retaining part of his takings, and delighted in watching the torture of miserable heretics. John made a great show of respect for Theodora, but she treated him with polite contempt, and my mistress Antonina needed no encouragement to follow her example. Theodora was aware, of course, that Cappadocian John slandered her to Justinian. ‘I shall wait patiently for twenty years, if need be,' she confided to my mistress, ‘like the elephant of Severus.'

The elephant of Severus is commemorated by a statue close to the Royal Porch, nearly opposite the main entrance to the Hippodrome. It had waited twenty years to catch a certain money-changer on whose evidence its master had been committed to a debtor's prison, where he
had died. At last, while taking part in a procession, it had recognized the money-changer in the crowd lining the street and had seized him with its trunk and trampled him to death. Investigations proved clearly that the money-changer had been a thief and a perjurer, so the elephant was honoured with this statue, which represents it with its master seated upon its neck. The motto is: ‘It will be avenged at last.' Many who labour under private and public injustice comfort themselves with the elephant's message.

You may wish to hear more of Justinian as Emperor, how he behaved. The man was a mass of contradictions: most of which, however, were to be explained as the result of great ambitions struggling with cowardice and meanness. Justinian wished, it seems, to make himself remembered as ‘Justinian the Great'. His talents would indeed have been equal to the task if he had only been less of a beast in spirit. For he was incredibly well-informed and industrious and agile-minded and accessible, and no drunkard or debauchee. On the other hand, he was as irresolute as any man I ever met, and as superstitious as an old church-widow. There was something about him, inexpressible, that made one's flesh creep – whatever it was, it certainly was not greatness, rather a sort of devilishness. He had decided, after studying the history-books, that sovereigns are honoured as ‘Great' for four main reasons: for successful home defence and foreign conquest, for the imposing of legal and religious conformity on their subjects, for the building of great public works, for personal piety and stern moral reform. He set to work on these lines.

He began on the legal side with a recodification of the laws, and I own that this was greatly needed. No single code existed, but a variety of codes side by side, all contradictory, obsolescent, and obscure, so that a judge could not give a fair decision in any but the simplest cases, even if he so wished. Justinian's industrious legal officers eventually ordered the great confused mass into a single fairly intelligible and not wholly contradictory system – but it took no less than 3,000,000 lines of writing to do this. If only he and his judges and lawyers and the general population had been the moral equals of this formidable task! Religious conformity he tried to attain by the smelling out of heresies; but he was not consistent in this, because, for fear of Theodora, he chiefly persecuted Jews and Samaritans and pagans and the minor sects of Manichees and Sabellians and such-like, while allowing the Monophysite and Nestorian heresies, wherever there was
no proved connexion with Green faction politics, to continue unchecked. Not only were they rife in the provinces, but he allowed them to be exported by foreign missions to Ethiopia and Arabia. His great public works consisted chiefly of the building and restoring of monasteries and churches. These were, of course, profitless to the Empire (except in a vague spiritual sense) and not to be compared with the building and restoring of aqueducts and roads and harbours and granaries, to which he did not pay nearly so much attention. His plans for foreign conquest, of which he made Belisarius his chief instrument, I shall soon have occasion to mention more fully.

His moral reforms were for the most part inspired by Theodora, and were extremely severe. Now, it had been a very long time since a really capable woman had been in so powerful a position as Theodora was. That was the fault of the Church, which – having originated in the East, where women are little better than playthings or slaves or beasts of burden – tended to seclude women from public life and give them no education worth the name. In pagan times the Empress had often been the second ruler of the state and had acted as a powerful check on the caprices of the Emperor; and this was made possible because she had been brought up in a free and educated atmosphere, not severely confined to the women's quarters until called upon to marry some man whom she had never seen – as is the rule now with women of the upper classes. Theodora was no fool of the priests. She had seen the world, and she understood men and politics, both lay and ecclesiastical. She ruled Justinian as absolutely as it is said that the great Livia once ruled Augustus, the first Emperor of the Romans.

Theodora determined gradually to restore wives to the powerful position that they had lost. This bias of hers explains Justinian's legislation, which she sponsored, against prostitutes and sodomites. While husbands were free to take their pleasure in the public brothels or with state catamites, their wives could not easily manage them. The Association of Procurers, formerly under Imperial protection, was broken up; and procuring made a criminal offence. Sodomy was now punishable by castration, and there was also a great rounding up of common prostitutes of the sort who charge a few pence only and are known as ‘the infantry'. Theodora called these unfortunates ‘a standing offence to the dignity of women'. She allowed them three months to make themselves respectable by marriage; then, if still obstinately unmarried, they were arrested again and shut up in the so-called Castle of
Repentance on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus. (A considerable number of the 500 women confined there jumped to death from the castle walls in their vexation and boredom.) But to those who chose marriage Theodora offered a dowry, and a great many benefited by her generosity. Nevertheless, she did not touch ‘the cavalry', as the more accomplished prostitutes were called, who were their own managers, possessed valuable jewellery, and were organized as a guild. She employed them as her secret agents, and provided good physicians for them when they fell sick.

It was a bad time for husbands. Theodora made it quite plain that wives no longer needed to live chaster lives than they. If a husband had been companying with prostitutes – as practically every husband did at some time or other – the wife was at perfect liberty to amuse herself with lovers. If he then grew angry with her, she could make an immediate appeal to Theodora and bring a counter-charge against him, of cruelty, or failure to support his family, or something of the sort; and Theodora never failed to bring the charge home, accepting the wife's account of the matter without question. Often a jealous husband had to pay a fine amounting to double the wife's dowry; which was then handed over to her in Court, after a small deducation had been made for costs. He was also likely to be scourged and usually given a few days in prison. Husbands after a time grew very careful how they behaved themselves, and also very careless how their wives behaved. The scourge was a five-strapped leather whip with an iron tag at the end of each strap; and the public slaves laid on extremely hard.

As a good example of Theodora's way with husbands, let me describe how the son of the Master of Offices fared. He wished to marry a second cousin of his; but Theodora, who had decided to match him with the Lady Chrysomallo's daughter, told him that this was quite out of the question: she disapproved of marriages between cousins. He was obliged to yield, of course, because Theodora was to the Court what an old grandmother is to the members of a large country family. He was lucky enough to be marrying the Lady Chrysomallo's daughter, who was young and pretty and intelligent; but after the wedding he grumbled to a friend of his that the girl had been ‘tampered with'. The fact was that the Lady Chrysomallo, though nominally a Christian, kept to the customs of her family – which, because of its connexions with the Hippodrome, was a pagan one. Thus
the girl, instead of presenting her husband with an intact maidenhead, had undergone the traditional pagan ceremony of deflorescence – namely, equitation of the stone phallus of a Priapic image, to induce fertility. The bridegroom's complaint came to Theodora's ears, and she was very angry. ‘What airs these young gentlemen give themselves to be sure!' she cried. ‘I suppose he has never in all his life tampered with a girl himself! “Tampered” indeed!' Then she gave orders that he should be tossed in a blanket by her servants, just as vain and unpopular schoolboys are tossed on the way to school by their schoolfellows. And, after the tossing, they thrashed him.

Theodora, as the story of Severus's elephant reminds me, never lost a chance of paying off an old score. The patrician Hicebolus was among the first to pay for his former ill-treatment of Theodora: he was brought back from Pentapolis on a charge of sodomy, Theodora herself judging the case, was convicted (not without justice) and sentenced to castration. He died of blood-poisoning after the operation.

Here, too (because of the sequel), I should tell the comic story of Hippobates, the old Senator who came to Theodora's audience one morning to appeal to her for justice against Chrysomallo's husband, one of her gentlemen-in-waiting, who owed him money. This Hippobates had once in the old days been brought by a friend – none other than the Demarch of the Blues – to spend an evening at the clubhouse. He was expected to choose one of the ladies to pair off with, while the Demarch chose another, but for some reason or other he did not feel equal to female company. Then instead of plainly confessing – as a man of honour would have done – that he was a Christian, or impotent, or that he preferred the other sex, or whatever else ailed him, he began to find fault with the physical charms offered him. Indaro was too tall and too square-shouldered, he said; and Theodora too skinny, and her mouth was too large; and my mistress had red hair, which he could not abide, and ‘a mattock-shaped face'. I forget what was wrong with Chrysomallo – perhaps her hooked nose. Since he was a detestable old satyr, all felt relieved to be excused from entertaining him. Still, he had no right at all to criticize the ladies in this way, and his remarks were strongly resented. It was unfortunate that the Demarch had introduced him, for the ladies must keep on the very best terms with the Demarch. Otherwise, they would have punished him in the humiliating ways in which they were adept.