Belisarius by Jacques-Louis David, 1781

Now here is probably the first thing that has genuinely surprised me during my perusal through Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:  Those who have studied the history of the Eastern Roman Empire at all will, of course, recognize the name of the Emperor Justinian, who reigned in the mid-6th Century at Constantinople.  During the reign of Justinian, a concerted attempt was made by the Romans to regain the territory of the Western Roman Empire, finally lost with the fall of Rome in 476 A.D., from the various hordes of barbarians that spread out across western Europe and Africa.  This attempt was undertaken primarily by the great General Belisarius.  He regained Africa from the Vandals and then liberated Italy from the Ostrogoths, later serving the Empire by thrashing a Persian invasion under Chosroes and driving off a Bulgarian horde that threatened Constantinople itself with a scratch army of peasants, slaves and a few hearty veterans.  Belisarius was uniformly praised not only for his prowess in battle, but also for his nobility of character, rectitude in serving his Emperor and his total disinterest in trying to usurp the Crown himself, even though not only Justinian’s subjects, but many foreign powers would have flocked to his banner.

Anyway, the story (represented in David’s painting above) is that despite – or perhaps because of – Belisarius’ nobility, Justinian was consumed both with jealousy and fear and, after Belisarius’ last victory, had him arrested, tried and convicted of treason.  Belisarius’ estates were confiscated and his eyes were put out, leaving him a blind beggar in the streets after all his former glory.  This has long been a favorite exemplar of  the Wheel of Fortune.

Except that Gibbon says it’s nonsense.  He writes:  “That [Belisarius] was deprived of his eyes, and reduced by envy to beg his bread, ‘Give a penny to Belisarius the general!’ is a fiction of later times, which has obtained credit, or rather favor, as a strange example of the vicissitudes of fortune.”

He goes on the expand on this in a footnote:  “The source of this fable may be derived from a miscellaneous work of the twelfth century, the Chiliads of John Tzetzes, a monk.  He relates the blindness and beggary of Belisarius in ten vulgar or political verses.  This moral or romantic tale was imported into Italy with the language and manuscripts of Greece; repeated before the end of the fifteenth century by Crinitus, Pontanus, and Volanterranus; attacked by Alciat, for the honour of the law; and defended by Baronius for the honour of the church.  Yet Tzetzes himself had read in other chronicles that Belisarius did not lose his sight, and that he recovered his fame and fortunes.”

This surprised me, as I say, because the story of the blinding of Belisarius is quite well-known and Gibbon’s is the first outright refutation of it I’ve ever seen.  Granted, I’ve never studied the question all that carefully, relying for my primary knowledge of the period on Robert Graves’ fictional account, Count Belisarius.  On stumbling across this passage in Gibbon, I immidiately went and looked out my copy of The Secret History by Procopius.  Procopius was a slave and secretary to Belisarius on his many campaigns.  He published much historickal description of life in the Court of Justinian.  At least in The Secret History, Procopius says nothing about blinding, but spits venom at Belisarius over the tangles of his personal life (which were quite complicated indeed) and dismisses him as a hopeless fool.  (FWIW, Graves sets up his novel as a kind of double-secret version of Procopius’ history: In it, Belisarius- the noblest of characters- is, indeed, blinded, and both Justinian and his Empress Theodora are little better than devil-possessed maniacs).

What’s the truth of the matter? I dunno.  It would make a very interesting topic of study.  However, Gibbon’s little dig about the “honor of the church” suggests to me at least one source of his own bias on the subject. (Being a the equivalent of a limousine-liberal in his day, Gibbon hated Catholicism and was little more than luke-warm to Anglicanism.)

Just in case you are interested, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about Belisarius that incorporated the myth, hook, line and (if I may say so) sinker:

I am poor and old and blind;
The sun burns me, and the wind
Blows through the city gate
And covers me with dust
From the wheels of the august
Justinian the Great.

It was for him I chased
The Persians o’er wild and waste,
As General of the East;
Night after night I lay
In their camps of yesterday;
Their forage was my feast.

For him, with sails of red,
And torches at mast-head,
Piloting the great fleet,
I swept the Afric coasts
And scattered the Vandal hosts,
Like dust in a windy street.

For him I won again
The Ausonian realm and reign,
Rome and Parthenope;
And all the land was mine
From the summits of Apennine
To the shores of either sea.

For him, in my feeble age,
I dared the battle’s rage,
To save Byzantium’s state,
When the tents of Zabergan,
Like snow-drifts overran
The road to the Golden Gate.

And for this, for this, behold!
Infirm and blind and old,
With gray, uncovered head,
Beneath the very arch
Of my triumphal march,
I stand and beg my bread!

Methinks I still can hear,
Sounding distinct and near,
The Vandal monarch’s cry,
As, captive and disgraced,
With majestic step he paced,–
“All, all is Vanity!”

Ah! vainest of all things
Is the gratitude of kings;
The plaudits of the crowd
Are but the clatter of feet
At midnight in the street,
Hollow and restless and loud.

But the bitterest disgrace
Is to see forever the face
Of the Monk of Ephesus!
The unconquerable will
This, too, can bear;–I still
Am Belisarius!