Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/200

September 178 THE DECLINE AND FALL easily elude, the declining art of the painters and sculptors of the age. consuntine Constans had left in the Byzantine palace three sons, the tus. ad!^, eldest of whom had been clothed in his infancy with the purple. When the father summoned them to attend his person in Sicily, these precious hostages were detained by the Greeks, and a firm refusal informed him that they were the children of the state. The news of his murder was conveyed with almost supernatural speed from Syracuse to Constantinople ; and Constantine, the eldest of his sons, inherited his throne without being the heir of the public hatred.^ His subjects contributed with zeal and alacrity, to chastise the guilt and presumption of a province which had usurped the rights of the senate and people ; the young emperor sailed from the Hellespont with a powerful fleet ; and the legions of Rome and Carthage were assembled under his standard in the harbour of Syracuse. The defeat of the Sicilian tyrant was easy, his punishment just, and his beauteous head was exposed in the hippodrome ; but I can- not applaud the clemency of a prince who, among a crowd of victors, condemned the son of a patrician for deploring with some bitterness the execution of a virtuous fathe-. The youth was castrated ; he survived the operation ; and the memory of this indecent cruelty is preserved by the elevation of Germanus to the rank of a patriarch and saint. After pouring this bloody libation on his father's tomb, Constantine returned to his capital, and the growth of his young beard during the Sicilian voyage was announced, by the familiar surname of Pogonatus, to the Grecian world. But his reign, like that of his predecessor, was stained with fraternal discord. On his two brothers, Heraclius and Tiberius, he had bestowed the title of Augustus : an empty title, for they continued to languish, without trust or power, in the solitude of the palace. At their secret instigation, the troops of the Anatolian theme "^ or province approached the city on the Asiatic side, demanded for the royal brothers the parti- tion or exercise of sovereignty, and supported their seditious claim by a theological argument. They were Christians (they cried) and orthodox Catholics ; the sincere votaries of the holy and undivided Trinity. Since there are three equal persons in heaven, it is reasonable there should be three equal persons 8 [For the Saracen siege of Constantinople in Constantine's reign, see c. lii. ad inii. ; for the establishment of the Bulgarian liingdom, c. Iv. ad inif.] '■[For the Themes, which begin to apperir Jn the second hnjf of the seventh century, see vol. vi. Appendix.]