ess emperor. The troops of Sicily invested
with the purple an obscure youth, whose inimitable beauty eluded, and it
might easily elude, the declining art of the painters and sculptors of
the age.

[Footnote 1111: His soldiers (according to Abulfaradji. Chron. Syr. p.
112) called him another Cain. St. Martin, t. xi. p. 379.--M.]

[Footnote 1112: He was received in Rome, and pillaged the churches. He
carried off the brass roof of the Pantheon to Syracuse, or, as Schlosser
conceives, to Constantinople Schlosser Geschichte der bilder-sturmenden
Kaiser p. 80--M.]

Constans had left in the Byzantine palace three sons, the eldest of
whom had been clothed in his infancy with the purple. When the father
summoned them to attend his person in Sicily, these precious hostages
were detained by the Greeks, and a firm refusal informed him that they
were the children of the state. The news of his murder was conveyed
with almost supernatural speed from Syracuse to Constantinople; and
Constantine, the eldest of his sons, inherited his throne without being
the heir of the public hatred. His subjects contributed, with zeal and
alacrity, to chastise the guilt and presumption of a province which had
usurped the rights of the senate and people; the young emperor sailed
from the Hellespont with a powerful fleet; and the legions of Rome and
Carthage were assembled under his standard in the harbor of Syracuse.
The defeat of the Sicilian tyrant was easy, his punishment just, and his
beauteous head was exposed in the hippodrome: but I cannot applaud the
clemency of a prince, who, among a crowd of victims, condemned the son
of a patrician, for deploring with some bitterness the execution of a
virtuous father. The youth was castrated: he survived the operation,
and the memory of this indecent cruelty is preserved by the elevation of
Germanus to the rank of a patriarch and saint. After pouring this bloody
libation on his father's tomb, Constantine returned to his capital; and
the growth of his young beard during the Sicilian voyage was announced,
by the familiar surname of Pogonatus, to the Grecian world. But his
reign, like that of his predecessor, was stained with fraternal discord.
On his two brothers, Heraclius and Tiberius, he had bestowed the title
of Augustus; an empty title, for they continued to languish, without
trust or power, in the solitude of the palace. At their secret
instigation, the troops of the Anatolian theme or province approac