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Updated: June 26, 2025
At the moment when Achilles Tatius, with a feeling of much insecurity, awaited the unwinding of the perilous skein of state politics, a private council of the Imperial family was held in the hall termed the Temple of the Muses, repeatedly distinguished as the apartment in which the Princess Anna Comnena was wont to make her evening recitations to those who were permitted the honour of hearing prelections of her history.
Anna Comnena, perhaps prejudiced, yet quoted by Michaud, declares that the Normans in Peter's army when near Nicea, chopped children to pieces, stuck others on spits, and harried old people. The Germans, stung by Norman gibes, took a fort in the mountain near Nicea, killed the garrison and there met the attack of the Turks only to be slain by the sword.
"It was my duty," he replied, "to desire to be as near your Imperial Highness as your faithful Follower ought, wherever you might wish yourself for the time." Agelastes and Zosimus exchanged looks, and the Princess Anna Comnena proceeded in her recitation.
By these means, Anna Comnena assigned to her father those indications of consequence, which ancient historians represent as necessary intimations of the sympathy of nature, with the removal of great characters from the world; but she fails not to inform the Christian reader that her father's belief attached to none of these prognostics, and that even on the following remarkable occasion he maintained his incredulity: A splendid statue, supposed generally to be a relic of paganism, holding in its hand a golden sceptre, and standing upon a base of porphyry, was overturned by a tempest, and was generally believed to be an intimation of the death of the Emperor.
The comet of 79 A.D. is interesting as having given rise to a happy retort from Vespasian, whose death the comet was held to portend. Seeing some of his courtiers whispering about the comet, 'That hairy star, he said, 'does not portend evil to me. It menaces rather the king of the Parthians. He is a hairy man, but I am bald. Anna Comnena goes even beyond Josephus.
"Even in the moment when she put it on," says Anna Comnena, "the Emperor gave up the ghost, and in that moment the sun of my life set." We shall not pursue her lamentations farther. She upbraids herself that, after the death of her father, that light of the world, she had also survived Irene, the delight alike of the east and of the west, and survived her husband also.
Anna Comnena gives us to understand that she knows not what might have been the result had not Alexis fortunately awoke at that instant. In this there is a moral of the highest kind, in which the sensuous instinct first raised its voice, and of which the reason had only afterwards taken cognizance in quality of judge.
"Holy Mary!" exclaimed the Empress, "thou hast named a name which has been long unspoken in the open air." "Has the Emperor's sense of his danger from the living," said the Caesar, "induced him to invoke the dead? for Ursel has been no living man for the space of three years." "It matters not," said Anna Comnena; "I tell you true.
The Princess Anna Comnena, it may be proper to observe, was born on the first of December, A.D. 1083, and was consequently in her fifteenth year when the chiefs of the first crusade made their appearance in her father's court.
The forces under these leaders have been variously estimated. The Princess Anna Comnena talks of them as having been as numerous as the sands on the sea-shore, or the stars in the firmament.
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