Several cities were destroyed by earth-quake—­Antioch, the chief city of the East, Seleucia, and Anazarbus, the most famous town in Cilicia.  Who could calculate the numbers of those who were thereby destroyed?  To these cities we may add Ibora, Amasea (the chief city of Pontus), Polybotus in Phrygia (called Polymede by the Pisidians), Lychnidus in Epirus, and Corinth, cities which from ancient times had been thickly populated.  All these cities were overthrown at that time by an earthquake, during which nearly all their inhabitants perished.  Afterwards the plague (which I have spoken of before) began to rage, and swept away nearly half the survivors.  Such were the disasters that afflicted mankind, from the day when Justinian first commenced to manage the affairs of the kingdom to the time, and after he had ascended the Imperial throne.

CHAPTER XIX

I will now relate the manner in which he got possession of the wealth of the world, after I have first mentioned a vision which was seen in a dream by a person of distinction at the commencement of his reign.  He thought he was standing on the coast at Byzantium, opposite Chalcedon, and saw Justinian standing in the midst of the channel.  The latter drank up all the water of the sea, so that it seemed as if he were standing on dry land, since the water no longer filled the strait.  After this, other streams of water, full of filth and rubbish, flowing in from the underground sewers on either side, covered the dry land.  Justinian again swallowed these, and the bed of the channel again became dry.  Such was the vision this person beheld in his dream.

This Justinian, when his uncle Justin succeeded to the throne, found the treasury well filled, for Anastasius, the most provident and economical of all the Emperors, fearing (what actually happened) that his successor, if he found himself in want of money, would probably plunder his subjects, filled the treasure-houses with vast stores of gold before his death.  Justinian exhausted all this wealth in a very short time, partly by senseless buildings on the coast, partly by presents to the barbarians, although one would have imagined that a successor, however profligate and extravagant, would have been unable to have spent it in a hundred years; for the superintendents of the treasures and other royal possessions asserted that Anastasius, during his reign of more than twenty-seven years, had without any difficulty accumulated 320,000 centenars, of which absolutely nothing remained, it having all been spent by this man during the lifetime of his uncle, as I have related above.  It is impossible to describe or estimate the vast sums which he appropriated to himself during his lifetime by illegal means and wasted in extravagance; for he swallowed up the fortunes of his subjects like an ever-flowing river, daily absorbing them in order to disgorge them amongst the barbarians.