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82

Armenia divided be

Persians

and the

Romans

on the banks of the Euphrates, the kingdom of Armenia was tween the alternately oppressed by its formidable protectors; and, in the course of this History, several events, which inclined the balance of peace and war, have been already related. A disgraceful treaty had resigned Armenia to the ambition of Sapor; and the scale of Persia appeared to preponderate. But the royal race of Arsaces impatiently submitted to the house of Sassan; the turbulent nobles asserted or betrayed their hereditary independence; and the nation was still attached to the Christian princes of Constantinople. In the beginning of the fifth century, Armenia was divided by the progress of war and faction; and the unnatural division precipitated the downfall of that ancient monarchy. Chosroes, the Persian vassal, reigned over the Eastern and most extensive portion of the country; while the Western province acknowledged the jurisdiction of Arsaces and the supremacy of the emperor Arcadius. After the death of Arsaces, the Romans suppressed the regal government and imposed on their allies the condition of subjects. The military command was delegated to the count of the Armenian frontier; the city of Theodosiopolis 84 was built and fortified in a strong situation, on a fertile and lofty ground near the sources of the Euphrates; and the dependent territories were ruled by five satraps, whose dignity was marked by a peculiar habit of gold and purple. The less fortunate nobles, who lamented the loss of their king and envied the honours of their equals, were provoked to negotiate their peace and pardon at the Persian court; and, returning, with their followers, to the palace of Artaxata,

[son of Papl

8 This account of the ruin and division of the kingdom of Armenia is taken from the third book of the Armenian history of Moses of Chorene. Deficient as he is of every qualification of a good historian, his local information, his passions, and his prejudices are strongly expressive of a native and contemporary. Procopius (de Edificiis, 1. xiii. c. i. 5) relates the same facts in a very different manner; but I have extracted the circumstances the most probable in themselves and the least inconsistent with Moses of Chorene. [For the division of Armenia, see Appendix 22.]

83 The western Armenians used the Greek language and characters in their religious offices; but the use of that hostile tongue was prohibited by the Persians in the eastern provinces, which were obliged to use the Syriac, till the invention of the Armenian letters by Mesrobes in the beginning of the fifth century and the subsequent version of the Bible into the Armenian language, an event which relaxed the connexion of the church and nation with Constantinople. 84 Moses Choren. 1. iii. c. 59, p. 309, and p. 358. c. 5. Theodosiopolis stands, or rather stood, about Arzeroum, the modern capital of Turkish Armenia.

Procopius, de Aedificiis, 1. iii. thirty-five miles to the east of See d'Anville, Géographie

Ancienne, tom. ii. p. 99, 100. [See Ramsay, Historical Geography of Asia Minor, p. 305 note: Theodosiopolis

Kamacha Ani.]

acknowledged Chosroes for their lawful sovereign. About thirty years afterwards, Artasires, the nephew and successor of Chosroes, fell under the displeasure of the haughty and capricious nobles of Armenia; and they unanimously desired a Persian governor in the room of an unworthy king. The answer of the archbishop Isaac, whose sanction they earnestly solicited, is ex- [Sahag] pressive of the character of a superstitious people. He deplored the manifest and inexcusable vices of Artasires; and declared that he should not hesitate to accuse him before the tribunal of a Christian emperor who would punish, without destroying, the sinner. "Our king," continued Isaac, "is too much addicted to licentious pleasures, but he has been purified in the holy waters of baptism. He is a lover of women, but he does not adore the fire or the elements. He may deserve the reproach of lewdness, but he is an undoubted Catholic; and his faith is pure, though his manners are flagitious. I will never consent to abandon my sheep to the rage of devouring wolves; and you would soon repent your rash exchange of the infirmities of a believer for the specious virtues of an heathen." Exasperated by the firmness of Isaac, the factious nobles accused both the king and the archbishop as the secret adherents of the emperor; and absurdly rejoiced in the sentence of condemnation, which, after a partial hearing, was solemnly pronounced by Bahram himself. The descendants of Arsaces were degraded from the royal dignity,86 which they had possessed above five hundred and sixty (580) years, and the dominions of the unfortunate Artasires, under the new and significant appellation of Persarmenia, were reduced into the form of a province. This usurpation (c. A.D. 428] excited the jealousy of the Roman government; but the rising

87

85 Moses Choren. 1. iii. c. 63, p. 316. According to the institution of St. Gregory the apostle of Armenia, the archbishop was always of the royal family: a circumstance which, in some degree, corrected the influence of the sacerdotal character, and united the mitre with the crown.

86 A branch of the royal house of Arsaces still subsisted with the rank and possessions (as it should seem) of Armenian satraps. See Moses Choren. i. iii. c. 65, p. 321.

87 Valarsaces was appointed king of Armenia by his brother the Parthian monarch, immediately after the defeat of Antiochus Sidetes (Moses Choren. 1. ii. e. ii. p. 85), one hundred and thirty years before Christ. Without depending on the various and contradictory periods of the reigns of the last kings, we may be assured that the ruin of the Armenian kingdom happened after the council of Chalcedon, A.D. 431 (1. iii. c. 61, p. 312), and under Veramus or Bahram, king of Persia (1. iii. c. 64, p. 317), who reigned from A.D. 420 to 440 [see Appendix 22]. See Assemanni Bibliot. Oriental, tom. iii. p. 396.

disputes were soon terminated by an amicable, though unequal, partition of the ancient kingdom of Armenia; and a territorial acquisition, which Augustus might have despised, reflected some lustre on the declining empire of the younger Theodosius.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Death of Honorius-Valentinian III. Emperor of the WestAdministration of his Mother Placidia-Aetius and Boniface-Conquest of Africa by the Vandals

D

and

Honorius.

August 27

URING a long and disgraceful reign of twenty-eight Last years years, Honorius, emperor of the West, was separated death of from the friendship of his brother, and afterwards of A.D. 423, his nephew, who reigned over the East; and Constantinople beheld, with apparent indifference and secret joy, the calamities of Rome. The strange adventures of Placidia1 gradually renewed and cemented the alliance of the two empires. The daughter of the great Theodosius had been the captive and the queen of the Goths; she lost an affectionate husband; she was dragged in chains by his insulting assassin; she tasted the pleasure of revenge, and was exchanged, in the treaty of peace, for six hundred thousand measures of wheat. After her return from Spain to Italy, Placidia experienced a new persecution in the bosom of her family. She was averse to a marriage which had been stipulated without her consent; and the brave Constantius, as a noble reward for the tyrants whom he had vanquished, received, from the hand of Honorius himself, the struggling and reluctant hand of the widow of Adolphus. But her resistance ended with the ceremony of the nuptials; nor [A.D. 417] did Placidia refuse to become the mother of Honoria and Valentinian the Third, or to assume and exercise an absolute dominion over the mind of her grateful husband. The gener

ous soldier, whose time had hitherto been divided between social pleasure and military service, was taught new lessons of avarice and ambition; he extorted the title of Augustus; and

1 See p. 353-367.

VOL. III.-27

the servant of Honorius was associated to the empire of the [A.D. 421] West. The death of Constantius, in the seventh month of his reign, instead of diminishing, seemed to increase, the power of Placidia; and the indecent familiarity of her brother, which might be no more than the symptoms of a childish affection, were universally attributed to incestuous love. On a sudden, by some base intrigues of a steward and a nurse, this excessive fondness was converted into an irreconcileable quarrel; the debates of the emperor and his sister were not long confined within the walls of the palace; and, as the Gothic soldiers adhered to their queen, the city of Ravenna was agitated with bloody and dangerous tumults, which could only be appeased by the forced or voluntary retreat of Placidia and her children. The royal exiles landed at Constantinople, soon after the marriage of Theodosius, during the festival of the Persian victories. They were treated with kindness and magnificence; but, as the statues of the emperor Constantius had been rejected by the Eastern court, the title of Augusta could not decently be allowed to his widow. Within a few months after the arrival of Placidia, a swift messenger announced the death of Honorius, the consequence of a dropsy; but the important secret was not divulged, till the necessary orders had been dispatched for the march of a large body of troops to the sea-coast of Dalmatia. The shops and the gates of Constantinople remained shut during seven days; and the loss of a foreign prince, who could neither be esteemed nor regretted, was celebrated with loud and affected demonstrations of the public grief.

Elevation and fall of

While the ministers of Constantinople deliberated, the vacant the usurper throne of Honorius was usurped by the ambition of a stranger. A.D. 423-425 The name of the rebel was John; he filled the confidential

John.

office of Primicerius, or principal secretary; and history has attributed to his character more virtues than can easily be reconciled with the violation of the most sacred duty. Elated by the submission of Italy and the hope of an alliance with the

2 Τὰ συνεχῆ κατὰ στόμα φιλήματα, is the expression of Olympiodorus (apud Photium, p. 197 [fr. 40]), who means, perhaps, to describe the same caresses which Mahomet bestowed on his daughter Phatemah. Quando (says the prophet himself) quando subit mihi desiderium Paradisi, osculor eam, et ingero linguam meam in os ejus. But this sensual indulgence was justified by miracle and mystery; and the anecdote has been communicated to the public by the Reverend Father Maracci, in his Version and Confutation of the Koran, tom. i. p. 32.

2 [Symptoms in the relative clause seems to have caused the irregular plural.]

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