When they entered the great church the choir sang "Lo there cometh the morning star. The dawn riseth. He reflects the rays of the sun. Nicephorus our ruler, the pale death of the Saracens."[19] The famous phrase, "pallida mors Saracenorum," which Liudprand uses, was to be terribly avenged; but then it was a triumphant expression of the safety which the city owed to the wise Emperor. As he went, says Liudprand, "his lords the Emperors" (Basil and Constantine, the sons of Romanus) bowed before him. After the Eucharist the bishop dined with the Emperor, and was again, he says, subject to his taunts. "You are not Romans but Lombards," was the Eastern mockery of the German imperialism; and the reply was that to the Westerns there was no name more contemptible than that of Roman. Such abrupt witticisms naturally consigned Liudprand again to his "hated dwelling, or more truly, prison." He wrote to Basil the curopalates (a post of honour second only to that of Cæsar) and John Tzimisces the Logothete, beseeching that if his mission was not favourably received, he might return at once; and then in an interview with Nicephorus, in the presence of Basil the chamberlain (_parakinomenos_) he pressed the proposal of Otto for a marriage. The Emperor replied that it was unheard of that a princess born in the purple, the child of an Emperor born in the purple, should be given in marriage to a "gentile" or "barbarian." So day by day the meetings were renewed and the proud Italian thought that he was treated each time with new indignity, being even set below a Bulgarian envoy--to whose master the Greeks would even allow the title of "Vasileus" (βασιλεύς) which they would not give to Otto, and towards whose people alone it seemed that the Eastern Empire at this time had any kindly feeling. Theology as well as politics were often in question, and the Italian bishop was mocked at for the modernism of his doctrines, as the Greeks mock the Latins to-day. He was kept, he says, in company with five lions; and the women, as he passed through the streets, called out in pity at his woe-worn appearance. Sometimes he visited the Emperor in the camp at Balukli (εἰς πήγας, he says, in one of his snatches of Greek) and quoted Plato to him; sometimes he had to listen to homilies of S. John Chrysostom read aloud; more often he had to hear what seemed to him the grossest insults of the Germans and the Latins, insults which he gladly returned in his report to the Ottos upon "the wild ass Nicephorus," and which he even ventured, he says, to write on the wall of his prison in verses none too easily to be understood. At length he was allowed to leave the city, "once most opulent and flourishing, now half-starved, perjured, lying, cunning, greedy, rapacious, avaricious, boastful." His report, as we have it, breaks off in a torrent of denunciations of the Greeks and their ways. His mission was a failure, but Theophano, refused by Nicephorus, was