When we arrived at Daras, etiquette demanded that the letters should be delivered not directly to Belisarius (and to the Master of Offices, who was also honoured with a letter from the Emperor) but to his domestics. My mistress greatly regretted that this should be so, because she knew the contents of Theodora's letter, which had been written in her presence. She would have given much to watch Belisarius's face as he read it. It went as follows:
'Theodora Augusta, spouse of Justinian, Vice-regent of God and Emperor of the Romans, to the Illustrious Patrician Belisarius, Commander of the Victorious Armies in the East: greeting!
'Tidings have come to my royal husband, the Emperor, and to myself, of your well-deserved success over the Persians. You are enrolled now with the heroes of the past, and we praise you, because you have greatly benefited us, and we wish you well. Two of the Emperor's presents, the bowl and the missal, do honour to your religious nature, and the third, the cloak, is a foretaste of the appreciation in which you will be held at our Court on your return from duty and victories. It becomes me therefore – for a lady's presents to a retainer should be complementary to those given by her lord – to send you three other gifts by the hand of my trusted Lady of the Bedchamber, from which you may derive an altogether different sort of pleasure. The first of these gifts I have chosen for you because he wears your household badge and is, moreover, the most excellent of his race in our dominions; the second I send you because your plunder will have put you in need of it; and as for the third it is a present above rubies, and you will greatly incur my displeasure if you presumptuously refuse it. For it is a characteristic of Theodora that in gratitude she always gives of her best. Farewell.'
Belisarius sent word that the representatives of their Majesties were welcome, and presently received Narses and my mistress in the cool, arched tribunal-hall where he dispensed discipline and gave daily audiences to his subordinates and allies. Narses was admitted first, as emissary of the Emperor. Belisarius, it seems, greeted him affably, inquiring first after the health of his royal Master and Mistress and of the principal Senators and then for news of affairs in the City and Empire. They drank a cup of wine together on the tribunal, and Narses asked searching questions about the details of the battle. Belisarius answered, not in an off-hand manner as to a mere Palace eunuch, but considerately and in detail, weighing every word. Narses wished to know why Belisarius had temporarily dismounted the Massagetic Huns to defend the central trench. Belisarius replied: because the attack was a formidable one, and because nothing so greatly encourages hard-pressed foot-soldiers ('the latrine-men' as they are sometimes contemptuously called because of the many thankless tasks that they are called upon to perform) as when mounted comrades nobly renounce their opportunity for flight, by sending their horses back a little way under charge of grooms, and fight for once, cut and thrust, on their own legs.
Then the Emperor's presents were delivered, admired, and given thanks for; and soon Narses bowed and wididrew.
Meanwhile my mistress Antonina was sitting in the ante-room at the end of the hall, and Rufinus, who was now Belisarius's standard-bearer, was most attentive to her. But she answered his polite remarks in a confused, random manner, because, for once in her life, she was feeling altogether ill at case. The matter had seemed simple and certain when Theodora and she discussed it at the Palace; but now, as she rose at the summons from the tribunal-hall, her knees were trembling and her tongue dry.
She stood half-way down the hall and signalled to her guards to lead forward the first of Theodora's three presents, which was a tall, fiery three-year-old bay stallion with a white blaze on its forehead and four white socks. It was to these marks that Theodora had referred when she wrote that her first present wore his household badge. A murmur of applause went up from the cuirassiers of the Household, who were standing at attention along the walls of the hall with their lances held upright at their sides, and from all the cavalry officers ranked around the tribunal. My mistress overheard Rufinus, who stood near her, muttering to himself: 'This one gift of the Empress's outweighs by itself the Emperor's three.' For it was indeed a superlative animal, of the famous Thracian breed of which the poet Virgil makes mention in the fifth book of his Aeneid.
