Most people find it difficult to make a logical connexion in their minds between the characters of the straightforward Classical age and those of the romantic age of medieval legend. King Arthur, for example, seems to belong to a far more antique epoch than Julius Caesar; yet his Christianity dates liim some centuries later.
How these two ages overlapped will be seen in this story of Count Belisarius. Here is a Roman general whose victories are not less Roman, nor his strategical principles less classical, than Julius Caesar's. Yet the army has by now changed almost beyond recognition, the old infantry legion having at last disappeared, and Belisarius (one of the last Romans to be awarded the dignity of the Consulship and the last to be awarded a triumph) is a Christian commander of mail-clad Household knights, nearly all of barbarian birth, whose individual feats rival those of King Arthur's heroes. In his time occur characteristically Romantic situations. For example, caitiff rogues lead away captive maidens to dolorous castles in the hills (during the Moorish raids on Roman Africa), and his knights chivalrously prick out to the rescue with banners and lances.
The miraculous element in the story of King Arthur is partly primitive saga and folk-tale, partly monkish mysticism of a far later date. But in Belisarius's case the chief authority for his private life and campaigns was not any Hunnish or Gothic member of his Household- who would doubtless have made a rambling epic of it, for the monks to embroider in succeeding centuries – but his educated Syrian-Greek secretary, Procopius of Caesarea. Procopius was on the whole a Classically well-informed, judicious writer, as was also Agathias, who supplies the final military chapter; so there has been no romantic distortion here, as in King Arthur's case. The historical King Arthur seems to have been a petty British King, a commander of allied cavalry, whom the Romans left to his fate when their regular infantry were withdrawn from the garrison towns of Britain at the beginning of the fifth century. If a Procopius had been his chronicler, the ogres and fairy ships and magicians and questing beasts would not have figured in the story, except perhaps as a digressive account of contemporary British legend. Instead we should have a lucid chapter or two of late Roman military history – Arthur's gallant attempt to preserve a remnant of Christian civilization in the West country against the pressure of heathen invasion. And Arthur's horse would have been a big-boned cavalry charger, not a fairy steed Hying him wildly off towards the Christian millennium.
Belisarius was born in the last year of the disastrous fifth century (King Arthur's century), in which the Anglo-Saxons had over-run Southern Britain; the Visigoths, Spain; the Vandals, Africa; the Franks, Gaul; the Ostrogoths, Italy. He died five years before the birth of the Prophet Mohammed.
Wherever surviving records are meagre I have been obliged to fill in the gaps of the story with fiction, but have usually had an historical equivalent in mind; so that if exactly this or that did not happen, something similar probably did. The Belisarius-Antoiiina-Theodosius love-triangle, however fictional it may seem, has been adopted with very little editing from the Secret History. Nor is the account here given of sixth-century ecclesiastical and Hippodrome politics exaggerated. The only invented character is Belisarius's uncle Modestus, a familiar type of the tinsel-age Roman man of letters. The two Italo-Gothic documents quoted in the text are genuine.
The distances are given in Roman miles, practically equivalent to English miles. Place-names are modernized wherever this tends to make them more recognizable.
The maps are by Richard Cribb. I have to thank Laura Riding for the great help she has given me in problems of language and narrative.
When he was seven years old, Belisarius was told by his widowed mother that it was now time for him to leave her for a while, and her retainers of the household and estate at Thracian Tchernien, and go to school at Adrianople, a city some miles away, where he would be under the guardianship of her brother, the Distinguished Modestus. She bound him by an oath on the Holy Scriptures – she was a Christian of the Orthodox faith – that he would fulfil the baptismal oath sworn on his behalf by his god-parents, both of whom were recently dead. Belisarius took this oath, renouncing the world, the flesh, and the devil.
