United States or Burkina Faso ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The wise Anthemius, prefect of the east, and governor or guardian of the young emperor, was greatly disturbed by the tidings of this new invasion.
There existed a feud between them, and to annoy his neighbour, Anthemius had some boilers placed in his house containing water, with a flexible tube which he could pass through a hole in the wall under the floor of Zeno's dwelling; he then lit a fire, which soon caused steam to pass through the tube in such a quantity as to make the floors to heave as if by an earthquake. But to return.
"These are but as a handful of dust amid the sands of the sea to the troops of the empire," said the prefect Anthemius, when the glittering rear-guard had passed from the Hippodrome. And the Princess Pulcheria added, "And these, O men from the north, are to help and succor the friends of the great emperor, even as they are for the terror and destruction of his foes.
Arcadius died in May 408, and was succeeded by his supposed son, Theodosius, then a boy of seven, the reins of power being first held by the prefect Anthemius, and afterwards by his sister Pulcheria, who governed the eastern empire in fact, for nearly forty years. The wisdom of Honorius, emperor of the West, in removing his capital to Ravenna, was soon justified by events.
The fame of Metrodorus the grammarian, and of Anthemius the mathematician and architect, reached the ears of the emperor Justinian, who invited them to Constantinople; and while the one instructed the rising generation in the schools of eloquence, the other filled the capital and provinces with more lasting monuments of his art.
Then Eslaw, the chief of the envoys of King Ruas the Hun, made known his master's demands So much land, so much treasure, so much in the way of concession and power over the lands along the Danube, or Ruas the king would sweep down with his warriors, and lay waste the cities and lands of the empire. "These be bold words," said Anthemius the prefect.
The friendship of the public enemy might render Olybrius still more unpopular to the Italians; but when Ricimer meditated the ruin of the emperor Anthemius, he tempted, with the offer of a diadem, the candidate who could justify his rebellion by an illustrious name and a royal alliance.
Yet the vestiges of superstition were not absolutely obliterated, and the festival of the Lupercalia, whose origin had preceded the foundation of Rome, was still celebrated under the reign of Anthemius. The savage and simple rites were expressive of an early state of society before the invention of arts and agriculture.
In a lower room, Anthemius arranged several vessels or caldrons of water, each of them covered by the wide bottom of a leathern tube, which rose to a narrow top, and was artificially conveyed among the joists and rafters of the adjacent building.
During these twenty years, the East and the West were finally severed, and Italy was ruled by barbaric chieftains, and their domination permanently secured. The successive reigns of Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Severus, Anthemius, Olybrius, Glycerius, Nepos, and Augustulus, nine emperors in twenty one years, suggests nothing but disorder and revolution.
Word Of The Day