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Updated: July 7, 2025
Pleasant it was in the cool of the evening to go to sleep with one's Burberry as a pillow. The stars shone kindly down, as they had shone long ago upon the heroes of the Iliad on the Plains of Troy, seven miles away across the Dardanelles, upon the Crusaders and Byzantines. You were asleep in a moment, and hardly stirred until 5 A.M., when it was time for "Stand to."
The Byzantines were in awful panic; and they would have yielded themselves had not Sergius the Patriarch been in control. With a presence of mind equal to the occasion, he brought the Panagia forth, and supported by an army of clerics and monks, traversed the walls, waving the All Holy Banner.
About the year B.C. 277 it was menaced by the Gauls, to whom the Byzantines were forced to pay tribute. When those invaders had been driven back by the Thracian tribes, these in turn exacted from Byzantium like payments, and to increase its revenues the city taxed all vessels entering the Euxine.
But however indifferent western Europe might be to the fate of the Byzantines, they were greatly interested in the ancient Greeks whose colonists had founded the city on the Bosphorus ten centuries after the Trojan war. They wanted to learn Greek that they might read Aristotle and Homer and Plato. They wanted to learn it very badly, but they had no books and no grammars and no teachers.
The responsibility proved too heavy for his shoulders; and whenever he repeated to himself that it was not he who had invited the Arabs into the land, and that he must have been crushed in the attempt to repel them, he could hear voices all round him denouncing him as the man who had surrendered his native land to them, and he fancied himself environed by dangers believing those who spoke to him of assassins sent forth by the Byzantines to kill him.
Under some of the later Pagan emperors foundling hospitals and schools were established in separate provinces for orphans and poor children. Under the just and wise rule of Theodoric the province flourished; but the people always regarded the Goths as barbarians, and when the Byzantines attacked Istria in 539-544 and 552 the troops of Vitalius, Belisarius, and Narses were welcomed.
When the Greek army had taken possession of the province where they had lived, the men had fled into the woods with their flocks and herds, while the women and children took refuge in the fortress which defended the main road. This had not long held out against the Byzantines, and the women, among them Mandane with her mother, had been handed over to the soldiers as precious booty.
Before half the breakfasts in the city were eaten, vacant places at the church doors, the cheeks of all the gates, and the fronts of houses blazed with handbills, each with a reader before it proclaiming to listening groups: "BYZANTINES!
This would be some time ago, say sixth or seventh century. These Slavs had a wonderful idea of lying in ambush I cannot call it a military stratagem, it is so amphibious. They lay down in shallow pools, showing only the end of a blow-pipe to breathe through, and so waylaid the enemy. The Byzantines must have been up against the Czechs, who seem to me distinctly amphibious in summer-time.
I want you to-day to examine with me that essential difference between Greek and Gothic temper, irrespective of creed, to which I have referred in my preface to the last edition of the "Stones of Venice," saying that the Byzantines gave law to Norman license.
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