Now, not everybody got on with Justinian as well as I did. He wasn't shy about saying just what was on his mind, and who would talk back to the Emperor's son? Nobody, or nobody with any brains, anyhow.
But the thing of it was, what had Herakleios and Tiberius done to show they were anything much, either? They hadn't done a thing. Of course, one reason they hadn't was that Constantine never gave them the chance to do anything. Still, when you got down to it, they hadn't proved themselves. And, by the way they whined about Constantine and Justinian, they were on the bratty side themselves. So we excubitores, we listened but we made no promises.
The troops from the military districts, now, they were another matter.
JUSTINIAN
Herakleios and Tiberius flattered the soldiers who stamped through the streets of Constantinople and crowded the barracks at Sykai, across the Golden Horn from the imperial city. To hear them talk, the men had had victory in their grasp until my father snatched it away. The troops from the Anatolian military districts lapped that up like porridge sweetened with honey. Far easier for them to believe their failure someone else's fault than their own.
Rumors of what my uncles were about did not take long to reach my father. "I'll settle them," he told me. "If they think I'm a poor excuse for an Emperor, let's see how they like life without the title."
He summoned the nobility of Constantinople to the palace. As if nothing were amiss, he also summoned my brothers, who sat in their accustomed places at his left hand. More excubitores than usual stood close by my father, and they wore mailshirts, which was not common practice, but neither was it unknown.