and commanded them all to be on the watch and to take all possible care for their safety.  After revealing these things he was off, while the Romans with much shouting and confusion were ordering men to dig the ground between the two walls.  The Persians, on the other hand, not knowing what was being done, were pushing on the work no less than before.  So while the Persians were making a straight way underground to the wall of the city, the Romans by the advice of Theodoras, a man learned in the science called mechanics, were constructing their trench in a cross-wise direction and making it of sufficient depth, so that when the Persians had reached the middle point between the two circuit-walls they suddenly broke into the trench of the Romans.  And the first of them the Romans killed, while those in the rear by fleeing at top speed into the camp saved themselves.  For the Romans decided by no means to pursue them in the dark.  So Chosroes, failing in this attempt and having no hope that he would take the city by any device thereafter, opened negotiations with the besieged, and carrying away a thousand pounds of silver he retired into the land of Persia.  When this came to the knowledge of the Emperor Justinian, he was no longer willing to carry the agreement into effect, charging Chosroes with having attempted to capture the city of Daras during a truce.  Such were the fortunes of the Romans during the first invasion of Chosroes; and the summer drew to its close.

XIV

Now Chosroes built a city in Assyria in a place one day’s journey distant from the city of Ctesiphon, and he named it the Antioch of Chosroes and settled there all the captives from Antioch, constructing for them a bath and a hippodrome and providing that they should have free enjoyment of their other luxuries besides.  For he brought with him charioteers and musicians both from Antioch and from the other Roman cities.  Besides this he always provisioned these citizens of Antioch at public expense more carefully than in the fashion of captives, and he required that they be called king’s subjects, so as to be subordinate to no one of the magistrates, but to the king alone.  And if any one else too who was a Roman in slavery ran away and succeeded in escaping to the Antioch of Chosroes, and if he was called a kinsman by any one of those who lived there, it was no longer possible for the owner of this captive to take him away, not even if he who had enslaved the man happened to be a person of especial note among the Persians.

Thus, then, the portent which had come to the citizens of Antioch in the reign of Anastasius reached this final fulfilment for them.  For at that time a violent wind suddenly fell upon the suburb of Daphne, and some of the cypresses which were there of extraordinary height were overturned from the extremities of their roots and fell to the earth—­trees which the law forbade absolutely to be cut down. [526 A.D.]