Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 6 (1897).djvu/480

 458 THE DECLINE AND FALL the laudable policy of convincing the Greeks of every dominion that it was their interest to be enrolled in the number of his subjects. Theodore Las- A strong shadc of dcgencracy is visible between John Vataces 1255, October and his son Theodore : between the founder who sustained 30^A D 1259 [1258]; AngTistthe Weight, and the heir who enjoyed the splendour, of the Im- perial crown.® Yet the character of Theodore was not devoid of energy ; he had been educated in the school of his father, in the exercise of war and hunting: Constantinople was yet spared; but in the three years of a short reign he thrice led [^D. 1256, his armies into the heart of Bulgaria.^ His virtues were sullied by a choleric and suspicious temper : the first of these may be ascribed to the ignorance of control ; and the second might naturally arise from a dark and imperfect view of the corrup- [1257] tion of mankind. On a march in Bulgaria he consulted on a question of policy his principal ministers ; and the Greek lo- gothete, George Acropolita, presumed to offend him by the declai-ation of a free and honest opinion. The emperor half unsheathed his scymetar ; but his more deliberate rage reserved Acropolita for a baser punishment. One of the first officers of the empire was ordered to dismount, stripped of his robes, and extended on the ground in the presence of the prince and ai-my. In this posture he was chastised with so many and such heavy blows from the clubs of two guards or executioners that, when Theodore commanded them to cease, the great logothete was scarcely able to rise and crawl away to his tent. After a se- clusion of some days, he Mas recalled by a peremptory mandate to his seat in council ; and so dead were the Greeks to the sense of honour and shame that it is from the narrative of the sufferer himself that we acquire the knowledge of his disgrace.^** 8 A Persian saying, that Cyrus was the father, and Darius the master, of his subjects, was applied to Vataces and his son. But Pachymer (1. i. c. 23) has mis- taken the mild Darius for the cruel Cambyses, despot or tyrant of his people. By the institution of taxes, Darius had incurred the less odious, but more contemptible, name of Kd7r>|Ao?, merchant ox broker {^^xoAqxxxs, iii. 89). ^[Theodore led two expeditions in person against the Bulgarians, in 1256 and 1257. At the end of the second expedition he had a meeting with Theodora Petra- leipha, the wife of Michael II., Despot of Epirus, at Thessalonica, where a mar- riage was both arranged and celebrated between his daughter Maria and her son Nicephorus. The third expedition, to which Gibbon refers, was that of 1258 against Michael II., which however was conducted not by Theodore but by Michael Palaeologus, the future emperor.] 1** Acropolita (c. 63) seems to admire his own firmness in sustaining a beating, | and not returning to council till he was called. He relates the exploits of Theo- dore, and his own services, from c. 53 to c. 74 of his History. See the third book