The intrepid countenance of Majorian animated his troops with a confidence of victory. And, if we might credit the historian Procopius, his courage sometimes hurried him beyond the bounds of prudence. Anxious to explore with his own eyes the state of the Vandals, he ventured, after disguising the color of his hair, to visit Carthage in the character of his own ambassador. And Genseric was afterwards mortified by the discovery that he had entertained and dismissed the emperor of the Romans. Such an anecdote may be rejected as an improbable fiction. But it is a fiction which would not have been imagined unless in the life of a hero.

From Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, London: Wordsworth, 1998 (first published from 1776 to 1788), pp. 696-697.