During this winter Belisarius remained in Syracuse and Solomon in Carthage.  And it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place.  For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed.  And from the time when this thing happened men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.  And it was the time when Justinian was in the tenth year of his reign. [536-537 A.D.]

[536 A.D.] At the opening of spring, when the Christians were celebrating the feast which they call Easter, there arose a mutiny among the soldiers in Libya.  I shall now tell how it arose and to what end it came.

After the Vandals had been defeated in the battle, as I have told previously,[47] the Roman soldiers took their daughters and wives and made them their own by lawful marriage.  And each one of these women kept urging her husband to lay claim to the possession of the lands which she had owned previously, saying that it was not right or fitting if, while living with the Vandals, they had enjoyed these lands, but after entering into marriage with the conquerors of the Vandals they were then to be deprived of their possessions.  And having these things in mind, the soldiers did not think that they were bound to yield the lands of the Vandals to Solomon, who wished to register them as belonging to the commonwealth and to the emperor’s house and said that while it was not unreasonable that the slaves and all other things of value should go as booty to the soldiers, the land itself belonged to the emperor and the empire of the Romans, which had nourished them and caused them to be called soldiers and to be such, not in order to win for themselves such land as they should wrest from the barbarians who were trespassing on the Roman empire, but that this land might come to the commonwealth, from which both they and all others secured their maintenance.  This was one cause of the mutiny.  And there was a second, concurrent, cause also, which was no less, perhaps even more, effective in throwing all Libya into confusion.  It was as follows:  In the Roman army there were, as it happened, not less than one thousand soldiers of the Arian faith; and the most of these were barbarians, some of these being of the Erulian[48] nation.  Now these men were urged on to the mutiny by the priests of the Vandals with the greatest zeal.  For it was not possible for them to worship God in their accustomed way, but they were excluded both from all sacraments and from all sacred rites.  For the Emperor Justinian did not allow any Christian who did not espouse the orthodox faith to receive baptism or any other sacrament.  But most of all they were agitated by the feast of Easter, during which they found themselves unable to baptize[49] their own children with the sacred water, or do anything