But there is no popular delusion which does not contain some measure of truth, however disguised and distorted. No way of speaking can be more misleading than that which is still employed, even by some eminent scholars, of speaking of the Empire of Justinian, of the armies of Justinian, as Greek. It is not only formally wrong, but it does not in any way express the facts. Even before the reconquest of the West, the Greek element was far indeed from being the exclusive, it was hardly the predominant element in the Empire; and to apply the name to the enlarged Empire, largely inhabited by a Latin population, which Justinian passed on to his successors is more misleading still. And in the army above all, made up from all manner of warlike tribes within and without the Empire, the proportion of men who were in any sense of Greek birth, even the proportion of men to whom Greek was their native speech, must have been small indeed. Yet we have the memorable fact, showing itself in the narrative of Procopius and in the very beginnings of English literature, that both on Gothic and on English lips the subjects of the Emperor who reigned at Constantinople were spoken of as Greeks. No wonder; the Goths, marching to and fro in the eastern peninsula, must have heard more Greek spoken than any other tongue; so must the first of English travellers, be the travels of the singer of the song real or imaginary. And the name was given almost by a prophetic instinct, as if the Goth, unfettered by Roman traditions, saw that an Empire of which Byzantium was the head, if not Greek already, must some day become such. What if Justinian had seen that fact and had acted on it? What if he had grasped his position as before all things lord of the great eastern peninsula of Europe and the great western peninsula of Asia, lord that is of lands still partly Latin, but far more widely Greek? What if he had given his whole mind to the defence of his northern frontier against Slavonic and Hunnish invaders, and had left the Teutonic and Latin elements in Italy, Spain, and Africa to settle themselves as they settled themselves in Gaul? It may well be that such a course would have been the wiser; looking at the matter with the light of thirteen later centuries, we are strongly tempted to say that so it would have been. But we must remember that the light of those thirteen later centuries could give no help to the minds of men whose destiny had fixed them in the sixth century. As Justinian or any man of his age must have looked on the world of the sixth century, an Emperor of the Romans, reigning in the New Rome but shut out from the Old, must not only have been tempted by every feeling of ambition, he must have honestly felt it as the highest of his Imperial duties, to win back the lost lands of Rome, to win back Rome herself, for the Roman commonwealth of which he found himself the head.