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In the following year Smaragdus, as we may think, was appointed to succeed Longinus and apparently with new powers, and three years later, in the very year that the heroic Insula Comacina was taken by the Lombards, Classis was recovered for the empire.

Smaragdus was forced to make peace and to give up his hostages. Joannes Lemigius Thrax, as Rubeus, the sixteenth-century historian of Ravenna, calls him, ruled in Ravenna from 611 to 615, and in the latter year was assassinated there apparently in the midst of a popular rising, though what this really was we do not know.

And dwelleth in those hills that are called Hyperborean, and are most enemies to horses and men, and grieveth them most, and layeth in his nest a stone that hight Smaragdus against venomous beasts of the mountain. A pelican is a bird of Egypt, and dwelleth in deserts beside the river Nile.

Long earrings, which terminated in a kind of berry, studded with precious stones, then common only with the women of the East; a broad collar, or necklace, of the smaragdus or emerald; and large clasps, medallion-like, where the swan-like throat joined the graceful shoulder, gave to her dress an appearance of opulence and splendour that betokened how much the ladies of Byzantium had borrowed from the fashions of the Oriental world.

Andreas was bought by a tavern-keeper; the procurator, whose name as a slave was Smaragdus, by the father of Polybius; and this worthy man soon learned to value his servant so highly, that he purchased the son also, and restored him to his father. Thus they were once more united.