Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 2).djvu/398

 may be distinguished in his literary career. During the first, which extends to about 550, he was actively engaged in the Persian, Vandalic, and Gothic wars, and wrote his account of them in seven books. In the meantime he had opportunities of becoming intimately acquainted with the system of government and personality of the bureaucracy; and his observations led him to feel a strong repugnance for the administration and all connected with it. In the second term he resolves to register in a secret work his adverse conclusions and private information respecting the actors in the scenes which were passing around him, in the hope that it may lead to their being one day shown up in their

informs us, claimed some extent of suzerainty over the island, and when they sent a legation to Justinian in 548, they included, for the sake of ostentation, a number of Angles in the party. He goes on to relate that a prince of the Varni, a nation occupying lands to the north of the Rhine over against Britain, had betrothed his son Radiger to a British maid, the sister of the King of the Angles. He had himself recently taken, as his second wife, a sister of Theodebert, the Frankish monarch. Soon afterwards, finding himself on his death-bed, he exhorted his son to marry his step-mother, a connection permitted by their law, as being more to the interest of the Varni than the British alliance. On his father's decease, Radiger obeyed these instructions, whereupon the British princess, indignant at being jilted, assembled an army of one hundred thousand, under one of her brothers' generalship, and invaded the country of her faithless lover. Procopius explains that all this force consisted of infantry, since the islanders had never even seen a horse. A great battle was fought, in which the Varni were defeated and put to flight. Radiger being taken prisoner, was brought before the martial princess, who reproached him severely for his conduct towards her. He excused himself by pointing out the various necessities which had weighed upon him, but expressed his present willingness to fulfil his first contract of marriage. His offer was accepted, and ultimately the nuptials of Radiger and the English princess were peacefully solemnized; ibid.]
 * [Footnote: perhaps, no more authentic than his ghostly narrative. The Franks, he