Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/283

OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 261 to the palace of Constantinople. In that palace, the Roman bishops, the second and third Gregory, were condemned as the authors of the revolt, and every attempt was made, either by fraud or force, to seize their persons and to strike at their lives. The city was repeatedly visited or assaulted by captains of the guards, and dukes and exarchs of high dignity or secret trust ; they landed with foreign troops, they obtained some domestic aid, and the superstition of Naples may blush that her fathers were attached to the cause of heresy. But these clandestine or open attacks were repelled by the courage and vigilance of the Romans ; the Greeks were overthrown and massacred, their leaders suffered an ignominious death, and the popes, however inclined to mercy, refused to intercede for these guilty victims. At Ravenna,^-' the several quarters of the city had long exercised a bloody and hereditary feud ; in religious con- troversy they found a new aliment of faction ; but the votaries of images were superior in numbers or spirit, and the exarch, who attempted to stem the torrent, lost his life in a popular ^^■^- ^1 sedition. To punish this flagitious deed and restore his do- minion in Italy, the emperor sent a fleet and army into the Adriatic gulf. After suffering from the winds and waves much loss and delay, the Greeks made their descent in the neighbour- hood of Ravenna ; they threatened to depopulate the guilty capital and to imitate, perhaps to surpass, the example of Jus- tinian the Second, who had chastised a former rebellion by the choice and execution of fifty of the principal inhabitants. The women and clergy, in sackcloth and ashes, lay prostrate in prayer ; the men were in arms for the defence of their country ; the common danger had united the factions, and the event of a battle was preferred to the slow miseries of a siege. In a hard-fought day, as the two armies alternately yielded and advanced, a phantom was seen, a voice was heard, and Ravenna was victorious by the assurance of victory. The strangers re- treated to their ships, but the populous sea-coast poured forth a multitude of boats ; the waters of the Po were so deeply infected with blood that during six years the public prejudice abstained from the fish of the river ; and the institution of an annual feast perpetuated the worship of images and the ab- •^^ See the Liber Pontificalis of Agnellus (in the Scriptores Rerum Italicarum of Muratori, torn. ii. pars i.), whose deeper shade of barbarism marks the difference between Rome and Ravenna. Yet we are indebted to him for some curious and domestic facts — the quarters and factions of Ravenna (p. 154), the revenge of Justinian II. (p. 160, 161), the defeat of the Greeks (p. 170, 171), &c. [The story in Agnellus is very doubtful. Cp. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, vi. 453-4.]