The last ten pages of Anna’s narrative give a vivid account of the progress of her father’s illness. She was appointed to a kind of presidency over the skilled medical men who were summoned from all parts of the Empire to check the “mysterious” illness--of a gouty old man of seventy. I will quote only that, when relics failed to improve his condition, they applied a red-hot iron to his stomach--to counterpoise the pain at the extremities, perhaps--and, when this brought about no relief, removed him to the Mangana palace, near what is now known as the Seraglio Point. Irene watched her husband night and day (carefully excluding John), and, although the monks assured her that he would live to visit the Holy Sepulchre, she shed “more tears than the waters of the Nile,” Anna says. In the afternoon of 15th August 1118, Alexis lay dying on his purple couch. The description of the scene, which closes Anna’s narrative, has reached us only in a torn and fragmentary condition, but the chronicle of the monk Zonaras, who lived about this date, is full and authoritative, and it is supported by the chronicle of Nicetas. Their account of that last scene in the life of Alexis shows that Anna Comnena crowns her work with a masterpiece of deliberate lying. She depicts her mother overwhelmed with sorrow at the impending loss of her husband, crying that thrones and crowns are vanity, and calling for the black robe of a nun, if not actually shearing her golden tresses, before the last breath has left her husband’s body. Of the real features of the scene there is merely a faint and vague report that John is hurrying to the main palace and the city is disturbed. The truth is less touching, more dramatic.