which ought to have been included within the walls.  Nor was this deficiency compensated by any strength in the garrison, or any weight of authority or talent among those with whom rested the command.  Justinian had originally sent his nephew, Germanus, to conduct the defence of the Syrian capital, while Buzes, an officer who had gained some repute in the Armenian war, was entrusted with the general protection of the East until Belisarius should arrive from Italy; but Germanus, after a brief stay, withdrew from Antioch into Cilicia, and Buzes disappeared without any one knowing whither he had betaken himself.  Antioch was left almost without a garrison; and had not Theoctistus and Molatzes, two officers who commanded in the Lebanon, come to the rescue and brought with them a body of six thousand disciplined troops, it is scarcely possible that any resistance should have been made.  As it was, the resistance was brief and ineffectual.  Chosroes at once discerned the weak point in the defences, and, having given a general order to the less trusty of his troops to make attacks upon the lower town in various places, himself with the flower of the army undertook the assault upon the citadel.  Here the commanding position so unaccountably left outside the walls enabled the Persians to engage the defenders almost on a level, and their superior skill in the use of missile weapons soon brought the garrison into difficulties.  The assailants, however, might perhaps still have been repulsed, had not an unlucky accident supervened, which, creating a panic, put it in the power of the Persians by a bold movement to enter the place.  The Romans, cramped for room upon the walls, had extemporized some wooden stages between the towers, which they hung outside by means of ropes.  It happened that, in the crush and tumult, one of these stages gave way; the ropes broke, and the beams fell with a crash to the earth, carrying with them a number of the defenders.  The noise made by the fall was great, and produced a general impression that the wall itself had been broken down; the towers and battlements were at once deserted; the Roman soldiers rushed to the gates and began to quit the town; while the Persians took advantage of the panic to advance their scaling ladders, to mount the walls, and to make themselves masters of the citadel.  Thus Antioch was taken.  The prudence of Chosroes was shown in his quietly allowing the armed force to withdraw; his resolve to trample down all resistance appeared in his slaughter of the Antiochone youth, who with a noble recklessness continued the conflict after the soldiers had fled; his wish to inspire terror far and wide made him deliver the entire city, with few exceptions, to the flames; while his avarice caused him to plunder the churches, and to claim as his own the works of art, the marbles, bronzes, tablets, and pictures, with which the Queen of the Roman East was at this time abundantly provided.  But, while thus gratifying his most powerful passions, he did not lose