Last Roman, Belisarius

There is a story — almost certainly legend — that in his last years Belisarius was blinded by order of the Emperor Justinian and reduced to begging in the streets of Constantinople, holding a cup and calling out: Give a penny to Belisarius, whom fortune once favored highly. The story is almost certainly not true. What is certainly true is that the man who reconquered North Africa and Italy for the Eastern Roman Empire, who held Rome against a Gothic army thirty times the size of his garrison, who saved Constantinople from the Hunnic attack with three hundred cavalry, spent the last years of his life disgraced, stripped of his wealth and his command, accused of conspiracy against the emperor he had faithfully served for forty years.He is Belisarius. The Last Roman.The Last Roman: Belisarius is a literary novel that enters the consciousness of the greatest general of the sixth century — the man who was the last complete expression of the Roman military tradition, who fought with the brilliance of Caesar and the faithfulness of the ideal Roman servant, and who was rewarded with the recalls and the insufficient resources and the imperial suspicion and the final disgrace that the late Roman political tradition always held in reserve for the general who was too successful to be entirely trusted.The book follows the full arc of the career. The world of Justinian — the Constantinople of the Hagia Sophia and the Hippodrome and the empress Theodora, the Eastern Roman Empire that was too diminished and too suspicious to fully support the ambitions of the reconquista. The Vandalic War of 533 to 534 CE — fifteen thousand men crossing the Mediterranean to destroy a kingdom that had endured for a century, Carthage taken, the triumph in Constantinople, and the beginning of the emperor's calculation. The Italian campaign — the entry into Rome in December 536 CE, the year and nine days of the siege against a Gothic army of one hundred and fifty thousand, the wound through the face that did not stop the defense, the relief, Ravenna, the recall. The return to Italy with insufficient forces, the Gothic recovery under Totila, the second recall. The last campaign of 559 CE, saving Constantinople with three hundred cavalry at the age of sixty. The accusation of 562 CE, the disgrace, the pardon, the death in his own house in 565 CE — the same year as the emperor he had served.Antonina — the wife who was unfaithful and whom the empress protected and whom he forgave and loved anyway, the specific human vulnerability of the great commander. Procopius — the historian on his staff who wrote the official history that celebrated the campaigns and the Secret History that described the court. The question that organizes everything: what does a man become when the empire he saved no longer needs him?The Last Roman is the fourth book in The Legend Series by I. Ioakim.