The Vintage by E.F. Benson — Read

Before September was a week old the Mainat corps, with Petrobey and the prince, were back at Tripoli. The course events had taken at Monemvasia had inclined the latter again to the side of the primates, for he interpreted the attitude and action of the army with regard to the capitulation of the place as an insult levelled at him. Germanos was not long in perceiving this; but being acute enough to see that the prince's authority was just now naught but a paper sceptre, he reasoned that his friendship was equally valueless, unless he could manage to rescue for him a few rags of the authority of which he had, by his own folly, denuded himself. In any case the support of the primates was a prop to the prince, and as the power of the primates varied in inverse ratio to that of the military commanders, Germanos set to work again to discredit them with the troops.

There it was that the strength of the revolution was beginning to lie -- not in the prince, who could not command others, nor in the senate, which was unable to command itself, but in the people and the soldiers, who now for more than four months had waited for the fall of the city, still obedient to many utterly incompetent captains, and still steadfast in their watchings on the hills. And Germanos's subtle brain, spinning threads out of itself like a spider, was busy to catch the army, while in the end the army, like some great blundering bee, burst unheeding through his palace of silk, and left him angrily hungry and in ruins.