My mistress's husband had been caught in the collapse of the Temple of Diana, and his body was never identified; but we were able to recover a large sum in gold from the cellars of the house, and his will was safe in the crypt of a church at Seleucia, under the charge of priests, and the store-building in which he kept his bales of silk had neither collapsed nor been burned. The villa in the Lebanon would be unaffected by the disaster. It might all have been much worse, we decided. Of my mistress's four children she still had two. She suffered the usual mother's pangs for the two that she had lost, telling herself that they were her favourites and the most beautiful and gifted of the four; but whether this was really the case I do not know. It is true that Photius did not prove a good son to her, but I preferred him to his brother who died.
When Justin was informed of the disaster, which had involved not only Antioch but the great city of Edessa on the road to Persia, and Anazarba, and Pompeiopolis, and, in the West, Durazzo and Corinth, all principal cities, he was overcome with grief. He took off the diadem from his head and put on a grey mourning cloak, and offered sacrifices at a shrine outside the City walls, and refrained from washing or shaving for a whole month. He also closed the theatres and the Hippodrome by decree for the same length of time. He contributed 2,000,000 gold pieces to the rebuilding of Antioch and proportionately to the other cities; he also remitted their taxes for a number of years. The loss in Imperial revenue was staggering.
As for my mistress, Antonina: she waited for two years at Antioch until conditions there had improved sufficiently to restore land values to a reasonable level. Then she sold all the property that she had inherited from her husband, and returned to Constantinople, with her two children, accompanied by myself. She bought a small house in the suburb of Blachernae, overlooking the waters of the Golden Horn, and did not announce her presence in the City to Theodora or any other of her former associates, preferring to live in seclusion.
Shortly after our arrival, Justinian became Emperor in succession to Justin. Theodora was already his wife, for his old aunt had died and he had persuaded Justin to repeal the law forbidding patricians to marry women who had been stage-actresses.
So my mistress's former club-mate now wore the Empress's crown of gold heightened with sprays of jewels, and strings of pearls over her shoulders, and a purple silk mantle, and a red gold-brocaded skirt, and golden slippers, and green stockings. My mistress thought it better to let Theodora seek her out, if she wished, than wait upon Theodora herself. For all we knew, she might wish to forget or destroy all evidence of her former life.
My mistress eagerly followed the news of the Persian War, and came to take a secret pride in Belisarius's achievements. He and anotherr young commander named Sittas had raided Persian Armenia and carried away a number of prisoners. This was the only success that the Romans could show in the war, which so far had gone badly for us. The Iberian subjects of the Persians, who were Christians, had revolted from Kobad because he had tried to force Persian burial customs on them. The Christians dig graves and the pagans practise cremation, but the Persians expose their dead, in towers, for the carrion-birds to feed upon: they regard fire and earth as elements too sacred to contaminate with corpse-flesh. Help had been sent to the Iberians from Constantinople in the form of a distinguished general, money, and a small force of friendly Huns from the borders of Colchis; but this was not enough to prevent the Persians from reconquering the Iberians.
