Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 6 (1897).djvu/31

 or THE ROMAN EMPIRE 11 fire. For the annoyance of the enemy it was employed with equal effect, by sea and land, in battles or in sieges. It was either poured from the rampnrt in large boilers, or launched in red-hot balls of stone and iron, or darted in arrows and javelins, twisted round with flax and tow, which had deeply imbibed the inflammable oil : sometimes it was deposited in fire-ships, the victims and instruments of a more ample revenge, and Avas most commonly blown through long tubes of copper, which were planted on the prow of a galley, and fancifully shaped into the mouths of savage monsters, that seemed to vomit a stream of liquid and consuming fire. This important art was preserved at Constantinople, as the palladium of the state ; the galleys and artillerij might occasionally be lent to the allies of Rome ; but the composition of the Greek fire was concealed with the most jealous scruple, and the terror of the enemies was increased and prolonged by their ignorance and surprise. In the treatise of the Administration of the Empire the royal author -^ suggests the answers and excuses that might best elude the indiscreet curiosity and importunate demands of the barbarians. They should be told that the mysterj- of the Greek fire had been revealed by an angel to the first and greatest of the Constantines, with a sacred injunction that this gift of heaven, this peculiar blessing of the Romans, should never be communicated to any foreign nation ; that the prince and sub- ject were alike bound to religious silence under the temporal and spiritual penalties of treason and sacrilege ; and that the impious attempt would provoke the sudden and supernatural vengeance of the God of the Christians. By these precautions, the secret was confined, above four hundred years, to the Romans of the East ; and, at the end of the eleventh century, the Pisans, to whom every sea and every art were familiar, suffered the effects, without understanding the composition, of the Greek fire. It was at length either discovered or stolen bv the Ma- hometans ; and, in the holy wars of Syria and Egypt, they re- torted an invention, contrived against themselves, on the heads of the Christians. A knight, who despised the swords and lances of the Saracens, relates, with heartfelt sincerity, his own fears, and those of his companions, at the sight and sound of the mischievous engine that discharged a tori-ent of the Greek fire, the feu Grcgeuis, as it is styled by the more early of the French 2^^Constantin. Porphyrogenit. de Administrat. Imperii, c. xiii. p. 64, 65 [vol. iii. p. 84-5, ed. Bonn].