Mercy to Prisoners

This was how the emperor and his army had long been used to act whenever a battle was in prospect. For his God was always present to his thoughts, and he wanted to do everything according to God’s will, and to take conscientious care that no human life was thrown away needlessly. He was anxious to preserve not only his own subjects but even his enemies. So he told his victorious troops to spare the lives of their prisoners, reminding them that they were human beings and must not forget the claims of their common nature. And whenever he saw his soldiers’ passions roused beyond control, he checked their fury with gifts of money, rewarding every man who saved the life of an enemy with a fixed weight of gold. It was the emperor’s own shrewdness that found this inducement to spare human life, so that great numbers even of the barbarians were saved in this way and owed their lives to the emperor’s gold.