did, as was natural, learn respectability for a season by sheer necessity.  Therefore as soon as they were rid of the disease and were saved, and already supposed that they were in security, since the curse had moved on to other peoples, then they turned sharply about and reverted once more to their baseness of heart, and now, more than before, they make a display of the inconsistency of their conduct, altogether surpassing themselves in villainy and in lawlessness of every sort.  For one could insist emphatically without falsehood that this disease, whether by chance or by some providence, chose out with exactitude the worst men and let them go free.  But these things were displayed to the world in later times.

During that time it seemed no easy thing to see any man in the streets of Byzantium, but all who had the good fortune to be in health were sitting in their houses, either attending the sick or mourning the dead.  And if one did succeed in meeting a man going out, he was carrying one of the dead.  And work of every description ceased, and all the trades were abandoned by the artisans, and all other work as well, such as each had in hand.  Indeed in a city which was simply abounding in all good things starvation almost absolute was running riot.  Certainly it seemed a difficult and very notable thing to have a sufficiency of bread or of anything else; so that with some of the sick it appeared that the end of life came about sooner than it should have come by reason of the lack of the necessities of life.  And, to put all in a word, it was not possible to see a single man in Byzantium clad in the chlamys[18], and especially when the emperor became ill (for he too had a swelling of the groin), but in a city which held dominion over the whole Roman empire every man was wearing clothes befitting private station and remaining quietly at home.  Such was the course of the pestilence in the Roman empire at large as well as in Byzantium.  And it fell also upon the land of the Persians and visited all the other barbarians besides.

XXIV

[545 A.D.] Now it happened that Chosroes had come from Assyria to a place toward the north called Adarbiganon, from which he was planning to make an invasion into the Roman domain through Persarmenia.  In that place is the great sanctuary of fire, which the Persians reverence above all other gods.  There the fire is guarded unquenched by the Magi, and they perform carefully a great number of sacred rites, and in particular they consult an oracle on those matters which are of the greatest importance.  This is the fire which the Romans worshipped under the name of Hestia[19] in ancient times.  There someone who had been sent from Byzantium to Chosroes announced that Constantianus and Sergius would come before him directly as envoys to arrange the treaty.  Now these two men were both trained speakers and exceedingly clever; Constantianus was an Illyrian by birth, and Sergius was from the