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[1] On the following day Bineses, one of the Persians, who (as I have said) was eminent beyond all others,
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hastening to fulfil the orders of his king, urgently demanded what had been promised. Therefore, with the permission of the Roman emperor, he entered the city and raised the flag of his nation on the top of the citadel, announcing to the citizens their sorrowful departure from their native place.
[2] And when all were commanded to leave their homes at once, with tears and outstretched hands they begged that they might not be compelled to depart, declaring that they alone, without aid from the empire in provisions and men, were able to defend their hearths, trusting that Justice herself would, as they had often found, aid them in fighting for their ancestral dwelling-place. But suppliantly as the council and people entreated, all was spoken vainly to the winds, since the emperor (as he pretended, while moved by other fears) did not wish to incur the guilt of perjury.
[3] Thereupon Sabinus, distinguished among his fellow-citizens for his wealth and high birth, declared in impassioned language that Constantius once, when the flames of a cruel war were raging, had been defeated by the Persians and finally had been driven in flight with a few followers to the unprotected post of Hibita, where he was obliged to live on a bit of bread which he begged from an old peasant woman; yet up to his last day he had lost nothing, whereas Jovian at the beginning of his principate, had abandoned the defences of provinces whose bulwarks had remained unshaken from the earliest times.
[4] But when nothing came of this, since the emperor the more stoutly maintained the sanctity of his oath; and when for a time he had refused the crown
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that was offered him but was finally forced to accept it, one Silvanus, a pleader at the bar, was bold enough to say:
Thus may you be crowned, O emperor, by the rest of the cities, Exasperated by these words, the emperor gave orders that all must leave the walls within three days, they the while expressing horror at such a condition of affairs.
[5] Accordingly, men were appointed to drive them out, and threatened with death all who hesitated to leave. Lamentation and grief filled the city, and in all its parts no sound save universal wailing was to be heard; the matrons tore their hair, since they were to be sent into exile from the homes in which they were born and reared; mothers who had lost their children, and widows bereft of their husbands, mourned that they were driven far from the ashes of their loved ones; and the weeping throng embraced the doors or the thresholds of their homes.
[6] Then the various roads were filled with people going wherever each could find refuge. In their haste many secretly carried off such of their own property as they thought they could take with them, disregarding the rest of their possessions, which, though many and valuable, they were obliged to leave behind for lack of pack-animals.
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[7] You are here justly censured, O Fortune of the Roman world! that, when storms shattered our country, you did snatch the helm from the hands of an experienced steersman and entrust it to an untried
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youth, who, since he was known during his previous life for no brilliant deeds in that field, cannot be justly either blamed or praised.
[8] But what grieved the very heart of every patriotic citizen was this, that fearful of a rival to his power and bearing in mind that it was in Gaul and Illyricum that many men had taken the first steps to loftier power, in his haste to outstrip the report of his coming, under pretext of avoiding perjury he committed an act unworthy of an emperor, betraying Nisibis, which ever since the time of King Mithridates’ reign had resisted with all its might the occupation of the Orient by the Persians.
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[9] For never (I think) since the founding of our city can it be found by a reader of history that any part of our territory has been yielded to an enemy by an emperor or a consul; but that not even the recovery of anything that had been lost was ever enough for the honour of a triumph, but only the increase of our dominions.
[10] Hence it was that triumphs were refused
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to Publius Scipio for the recovery of Spain; to Fulvius, when Capua was overcome after long contests, and to Opimius, when, after shifting fortunes of war, the people of Fregellae, at that time our deadly enemies, were forced to surrender.
[11] In fact, the ancient records teach us that treaties made in extreme necessity with shameful conditions, even when both parties had taken oath in set terms, were at once annulled by a renewal of war. For example, when in days of old our legions were sent under the yoke at the Caudine Forks in Samnium
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; when Albinus in Numidia devised a shameful peace
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; and when Mancinus, the author of a disgracefully hasty treaty, was surrendered to the people of Numantia.
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[12] So then, after the inhabitants had been withdrawn, and the city had been handed over, the tribune Constantius was sent to deliver the strongholds, with the surrounding country, to the Persian grandees. Then Procopius was sent with the remains of Julian, in order to inter him, as he had directed when still alive,
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in the suburb of Tarsus.
Res Gestae. Ammianus Marcellinus. John C. Rolfe (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1935-1940.
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