e Romans during the
first invasion of Chosroes; and the summer drew to its close.

XIV

Now Chosroes built a city in Assyria in a place one day's journey
distant from the city of Ctesiphon, and he named it the Antioch of
Chosroes and settled there all the captives from Antioch, constructing
for them a bath and a hippodrome and providing that they should have
free enjoyment of their other luxuries besides. For he brought with him
charioteers and musicians both from Antioch and from the other Roman
cities. Besides this he always provisioned these citizens of Antioch at
public expense more carefully than in the fashion of captives, and he
required that they be called king's subjects, so as to be subordinate to
no one of the magistrates, but to the king alone. And if any one else
too who was a Roman in slavery ran away and succeeded in escaping to the
Antioch of Chosroes, and if he was called a kinsman by any one of those
who lived there, it was no longer possible for the owner of this captive
to take him away, not even if he who had enslaved the man happened to be
a person of especial note among the Persians.

Thus, then, the portent which had come to the citizens of Antioch in the
reign of Anastasius reached this final fulfilment for them. For at that
time a violent wind suddenly fell upon the suburb of Daphne, and some of
the cypresses which were there of extraordinary height were overturned
from the extremities of their roots and fell to the earth--trees which
the law forbade absolutely to be cut down. [526 A.D.] Accordingly, a
little later, when Justinus was ruling over the Romans, the place was
visited by an exceedingly violent earthquake, which shook down the whole
city and straightway brought to the ground the most and the finest of
the buildings, and it is said that at that time three hundred thousand
of the population of Antioch perished. And finally in this capture the
whole city, as has been said, was destroyed. Such, then, was the
calamity which befell the men of Antioch.

And Belisarius came to Byzantium from Italy, summoned by the emperor;
and after he had spent the winter in Byzantium, the emperor sent him as
general against Chosroes and the Persians at the opening of spring,
together with the officers who had come with him from Italy, one of
whom, Valerianus, he commanded to lead the troops in Armenia. [541 A.D.]
For Martinus had been sent immediately to the East, and for this reason
Chosroes found hi