esumption
by the mild exhortations of Prince Hormisdas, and the approaching
terrors of the fleet and army. They implored, and experienced, the
clemency of Julian, who transplanted the people to an advantageous
settlement, near Chalcis in Syria, and admitted Pusaeus, the governor,
to an honorable rank in his service and friendship. But the impregnable
fortress of Thilutha could scorn the menace of a siege; and the emperor
was obliged to content himself with an insulting promise, that, when he
had subdued the interior provinces of Persia, Thilutha would no longer
refuse to grace the triumph of the emperor. The inhabitants of the
open towns, unable to resist, and unwilling to yield, fled with
precipitation; and their houses, filled with spoil and provisions, were
occupied by the soldiers of Julian, who massacred, without remorse
and without punishment, some defenceless women. During the march, the
Surenas, * or Persian general, and Malek Rodosaces, the renowned emir of
the tribe of Gassan, incessantly hovered round the army; every straggler
was intercepted; every detachment was attacked; and the valiant
Hormisdas escaped with some difficulty from their hands. But the
Barbarians were finally repulsed; the country became every day less
favorable to the operations of cavalry; and when the Romans arrived
at Macepracta, they perceived the ruins of the wall, which had been
constructed by the ancient kings of Assyria, to secure their dominions
from the incursions of the Medes. These preliminaries of the expedition
of Julian appear to have employed about fifteen days; and we may compute
near three hundred miles from the fortress of Circesium to the wall of
Macepracta.

The fertile province of Assyria, which stretched beyond the Tigris, as
far as the mountains of Media, extended about four hundred miles from
the ancient wall of Macepracta, to the territory of Basra, where the
united streams of the Euphrates and Tigris discharge themselves into the
Persian Gulf. The whole country might have claimed the peculiar name of
Mesopotamia; as the two rivers, which are never more distant than fifty,
approach, between Bagdad and Babylon, within twenty-five miles, of each
other. A multitude of artificial canals, dug without much labor in a
soft and yielding soil connected the rivers, and intersected the
plain of Assyria. The uses of these artificial canals were various and
important. They served to discharge the superfluous waters from one
ri