There was another circumstance which very much increased the probability of Belisarius dying a beggar. We do not wish to deprive the tale of the smallest portion of the just sympathy of the latest posterity. The fact is, Belisarius grew enormously rich during his successful campaigns against Gelimer and Witiges, and even contrived to accumulate treasures during his unsuccessful wars with Chosroes and Totila.[30] Like his friend Bessas and his enemy Konstantinos, as the truth must be spoken, he did not neglect the golden opportunities he enjoyed of gaining golden spoils from all sorts of men. Now, from the days of Sylla, to those of Justinian, not to say a good deal earlier and later, it was the avowed system of the financiers of Rome to increase the budget by confiscations. The Ottoman empire, heir to most of the vices and some of the grandeur of Imperial Constantinople, cherished the system as a part of its strength, until it adopted the more pitiful vices of Western Europe. Anastasius--not the ecclesiastical historian of the earlier Popes, but the hero of the "Memoirs of a Greek," by Mr Thomas Hope--in his ratiocination on the principles of Ottoman finance, gives us a compendious abstract of those of Imperial Rome during eleven centuries, from Augustus to Constantine Dragoses:-- "Regarding each officer of the state only in the light of one of the smaller and more numerous reservoirs, distributed on distant points to collect the first produce of dews, and drip, and rills, ere the collective mass be poured into the single greater central basin of the Sultan's treasury, you give yourself no trouble to check the dishonesty of your agent, or to prevent his peculations. You rather for a while connive at, and favour and lend your own authority to his exactions, which will enable you, when afterwards you squeeze him out, to combine greater profit with a more signal show of justice. In permitting a temporary defalcation from your treasury, you consider yourselves as only lending out your capital at more usurious interest. Nine long years, while your work is done for you gratuitously, you feign to sleep, and the tenth you wake from your deceitful slumber; like the roused lion, you look round where grazes the fattest prey, stretch your ample claw, crush your devoted victim, and make every drop of his blood, so long withheld from your appetite, at last flow into the capacious bowels of your insatiable _hazne_"--(treasury).[31]