Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/202

180 THE DECLINE AND FALL pursue his footsteps. They ventured to reply that glory and empire might be the recompense of a generous resolution ; that every order of men abhorred the reign of a monster ; and that the hands of two hundred thousand patriots expected only the voice of a leader. The night was chosen for their deliverance ; and, in the first effort of the conspirators, the praefect was slain and the prisons were forced open ; the emissaries of Leontius proclaimed in every street, " Christians, to St. Sophia ! " ; and the seasonable text of the patriarch, " this is the day of the Lord ! " was the prelude of an inflammatory sermon. From the church the people adjourned to the hippodrome ; Justinian, in whose cause not a sword had been drawn, was dragged before these tumultuary judges, and their clamours demanded the instant death of the tyrant. But Leontius, who was already clothed with the purple, cast an eye of pity on the prostrate son of his own benefactor, and of so many emperors. The life of Justinian was spai*ed ; the amputation of his nose, perhaps of his tongue, was imperfectly performed ; the happy flexibility of the Greek language could impose the name of Rhinotmetus ; and the mutilated tyrant was banished to Chersonae in Crim- Tartary, a lonely settlement, where corn, wine, and oil were imported as foreign luxuries. His exue. On the edge of the Scythian wilderness, Justinian still AD. 695-705 , -iii.i /.i-i-i iii r ^ ■ cherished the pride oi his birth and the hope oi his restoration. After three years' exile, he received the pleasing intelligence that his injury was avenged by a second revolution, and that Leontius ^ in his turn had been dethroned and mutilated by the [Tiberius m. rebel Apsimar, who assumed the more respectable name of Tiberius. But the claim of lineal succession was still formidable to a plebeian usurper ; and his jealousy was stimulated by the complaints and charges of the Chersonites, who beheld the vices of the tyrant in the spirit of the exile. With a band of followers, attached to his person by common hope or common despair, Justinian fled from the inhospitable shore to the horde of the Chozars, who pitched their tents between the Tanais and Borysthenes. The khan entertained with pity and respect the royal suppliant ; Phanagoria, once an opulent city, on the Asiatic side of the lake Maeotis, was assigned for his residence ; and every Roman prejudice was stifled in his marriage with the sister of the barbarian, who seems, however, fi-om the name of ^ [The chief event of the reign of Leontius (a.u. 695-698) was the final loss of Africa. See below, c. li.]