Count Belisarius by Robert Graves

Now after all these centuries Hieron is still a small place, but the Megaraean foundation has become a place of a million inhabitants, with magnificent buildings enclosed by a triple wall. It is the city of many names – to the Greeks officially ‘Constantinople’, familiarly ‘Byzantium’, to literary Italians ‘New Rome’, to the Goths and other German barbarians ‘Micklegarth’, to the Bulgars ‘Kesarorda’, to the Slavs ‘Tsarigrad’ – the wonder of the world, which I regard as my home.
    My master, the father of the girl Antonina, was as I have said a charioteer of the Green faction at Constantinople. His name was Damocles, and he treated me kindly. He won many races for his Colour before he died, as quite a young man, in circumstances which require that I should tell the story in detail. He was a Thracian from Salonica, the son of a charioteer at the Hippodrome there, where the racing standard is a very high one – though not, I admit, as high as at Constantinople. He was noticed one day by a wealthy supporter of the Greens who had come to Salonica in search of talent; and, in return for a large sum of money paid to the local faction funds, his serviceswere transferred to the Capital. There he drove the second chariot in important races, his task usually being to make the pace and jostle the two Blue chariots off their course, in order to give the first Green chariot, which had the faster horses, an opportunity for a clean run through. He was very skilful at this business, and sometimes at the last moment won the race with his own chariot by a feint at jostling that allowed him to slip in and thrust ahead himself. He had a great talent for getting the best out of difficult or lazy horses. He was also the cleverest manager of the whip in the whole profession: with it he could unerringly kill a bee in a flower or a wasp on the wall at five yards’ range.
    This Damocles had a friend, Acacius of Cyprus, to whom he was greatly devoted, and one of his conditions for coming to Constantinople was that Acacius should be given an appointment of sorts at the Hippodrome: enough for a decent living, because he was married and had three little children, all girls. The condition was faithfully observed, Acacius being appointed Assistant Bear Master to the Greens. Later he was given the Chief Bear Mastership, a responsible and lucrative post. Here I must go back in history, to make everything plain.
    Now, the year of our Lord 404, exactly a hundred years before the story that I have to tell, was marked by two very inept innovations. In the first place the Sibylline prophetic books, which were consulted by the Senate in all cases of national perplexity and danger and had been kept carefully stored in the Palatine Library at Rome ever since the reign of the Emperor Augustus – these precious and irreplaceable treasures were wantonly burned on religious grounds by an illiterate Christian, a German general in the service of Honorius, Emperor of the West. This stupidity was foretold in the books themselves; for it is said the final set of hexameter verses ran:
    When two young fools between them do divide
Our world, the elder (on the younger side)
By banning bloodshed in his Hippodrome
Bloodshed redoubles, while in elder Rome
The younger, yielding to barbarian folk,
Sees his most trusty Council rise in smoke.
    Arcadius, the Emperor of the East Romans (‘the younger side’), fulfilled his part of the prophecy in the same year. One day, in theHippodrome at Constantinople, a mad monk darted between two armed gladiators just as they had reached the most exciting phase of their combat. He called on them in a loud voice to refrain from murder, in Christ’s most holy name. The gladiators were chary of killing the monk, which would have brought them bad luck – gladiators are naturally superstitious. They broke away, and by signs asked the Emperor, who was acting as