The Age of Justinian and Theodora

The Age of Justinian and Theodora, by William Gordon Holmes, is “A History of the Sixth Century A.D., Volume 2.” A list of chapters includes The Persians and Justinian's First War with them and The Schools of Philosophy at Athens and their Abolition by Justinian. The text says the Persian monarch assumed lofty epithets in his epistles, being “brother of the sun and moon, a god among men, and in merely mundane affairs the King of kings.”

A Persian army of this date is said to be very similar to a Roman one, with some essential differences, and a Persian horseman was provided with two bows and thirty arrows. Theodora is described making a triumphal progress to the hot-baths of Pythia, in Bithynia, with a retinue amounting in all to over four thousand persons. The text says such poverty prevailed at Rome that members of the noblest families might be seen in mean apparel begging their bread through the streets from the enemy, among them Rusticiana, the daughter of Symmachus and widow of Boethius.