The secret historian represents only the vices of Justinian, and those vices are darkened by his malevolent pencil.
Ambiguous actions are imputed to the worst motives; error is confounded with guilt, accident with design, and laws with abuses; the partial injustice of a moment is dexterously applied as the general maxim of a reign of thirty-two years; the emperor alone is made responsible for the faults of his officers, the disorders of the times, and the corruption of his subjects; and even the calamities of nature, plagues, earthquakes, and inundations, are imputed to the prince of the daemons, who had mischievously assumed the form of Justinian.

[84] [Footnote 7711: See the character of Anastasius in Joannes Lydus de Magistratibus, iii.c.45, 46, p.

230--232.

His economy is there said to have degenerated into parsimony.

He is accused of having taken away the levying of taxes and payment of the troops from the municipal authorities, (the decurionate) in the Eastern cities, and intrusted it to an extortionate officer named Mannus.