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of abundant common sense, well informed for his epoch, and less superstitious than any typical specimens of his contemporaries. In religion he was a freethinker, believing in a Providence, which, however, had not become concrete in the form of any personal being in his mind.[1] When making use of previous writers he adopts their accounts with little discrimination, though he sometimes suggests that the reader may disbelieve if he sees fit to do so.[2] Three terms
- [Footnote: not do otherwise without being singular: the new name is scarcely ever
used, except in official documents and ecclesiastical writers. It is to this persistence of the original title of the city that we owe the survival into modern times of the epithet Byzantine.]*
- ↑ See p. 514; cf. De Bel. Pers., ii, 9, 10; De Bel. Goth., i, 3, etc.
- ↑ The general ignorance of this age is well illustrated by the ridiculous account Procopius gives of Britain; De Bel. Goth., iv, 20. The island, he says, is divided longitudinally by a wall on account of the diversity of climatical conditions which prevail on the different sides. To the east the country is genial and salubrious, fertile with corn crops and fruit trees, and thickly populated. But on the west of the wall everything is the contrary, and no man could exist there, even for half an hour. The region is thronged with vipers, serpents innumerable, and poisonous beasts. And, what is hardly credible, if anyone should cross the wall, he at once succumbs fatally to the pestilential air—as the natives relate. But he thinks it must be altogether a fable when they say that the villagers on a certain part of the Gallic coast, who live as fishers and farmers are absolved from payment of taxes on condition of their ferrying the souls of the dead across the ocean to this adjacent isle of Britain. In tempestuous weather, at the dead of night, they are summoned from their beds, and have to rush to the sea-shore. There they find numbers of apparently empty boats. They have to seize the oars and row for a day and a night. When they start, the vessels are weighed down to the water's edge, but on returning, they are so light as barely to skim the surface. Yet all the time they see no one; but when landing the souls, they hear a voice calling out the names and titles of each of the deceased. Procopius also makes an excursion into British history, which is,
