OF THE IIOMAN EMPIRE 59 promote and support this unworthy favourite must derive no glory from the accidental merit of his colleague Priscus.*^ In five successive battles, which seein to have been conducted with skill and resolution, seventeen thousand two hundred barbarians were made prisoners ; near sixty thousand, with four sons of the chagan, were slain ; the Roman general surprised a peaceful district of the Gepida?, who slept under the protection of the Avars ; and his last trophies were erected on the banks of the Danube and the Theiss. Since the death of Trajan, the arms of the empire had not penetrated so deeply into the old Dacia ; yet the success of Priscus was transient and barren ; and he was soon recalled by the apprehension that Baian, with dauntless spirit and recruited forces, was preparing to avenge his defeat under the walls of Constantinople.'* The theory of war was not more familiar to the camps ofsutsor •^ , _ IT the Roman Ca?sar and Trajan than to those of Justinian and Maurice.^ Thearmi" iron of Tuscany or Pontus still received the keenest temper from the skill of the Byzantine workmen. The magazines were plentifully stored with every species of offensive and defensive arms. In the construction and use of ships, engines, and fortifications, the barbarians admired the superior ingenuity of a people whom they so often vanquished in the field. The science of tactics, the order, evolutions, and stratagems of antiquity, was ti'anscribed and studied in the books of the Greeks and Romans. But the solitude or degeneracy of the provinces could no longer supply a race of men to handle those weapons, to guard those walls, to navigate those ships, and to reduce the theory of war into bold and successful practice. The genius of Belisarius and Narses had been formed without a master, and expired without a disciple. Neither honour, nor patriotism, nor generous superstition, could animate the lifeless bodies of slaves and strangers, who had succeeded to the honours of the legions ; it was in the camp alone that the emperor should have exercised a despotic command ; it was only
- See the exploits of Priscus, I. viii. c. 2, 3.
■*" The general detail of the war against the Avars maybe traced in the first, second, sixth, seventh, and eighth books of the History of the emperor Maurice, by Theophylact Simocatta. As he wrote in the reign of Heraclius, he had no temptation to flatter; but his want of judgment renders hmi diffuse in trifles and concise in the most interesting facts. ^^ Maurice himself composed xii books on the military art, which are still extant, and have been j^ublished (IJpsal, 1664) by John Scheffer at the end of the Tactics of Arriau (Fabricius Bibliot. Gritca, 1. iv. c. S, tom. iii. p. 278), who promises to speak more fully of his work in its proper place. [This work is not by Maurice. See fibove, vol. iv. p. 3,16, n. 15.]
