Chapter V: Part 5

I have now to speak to you on the latter end of Dietrich's reign--made so sadly famous by the death of Boethius--the last Roman philosopher, as he has been called for centuries, and not unjustly. His De Consolatione Philosophiae is a book good for any man, full of wholesome and godly doctrine. For centuries it ranked as high as the highest classics; higher perhaps at times than any book save the Bible, among not merely scholars, but statesmen. It is the last legacy of the dying old world to the young world which was trampling it out of life; and therefore it is full of sadness. But beneath the sadness there is faith and hope; for God is just, and virtue must be triumphant and immortal, and the absolute and only good for man. The whole story is very sad. Dietrich was one of those great men, who like Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Napoleon, or the late Czar Nicholas, have lived too long for their own honour. The old heathen would have attributed his misadventures to a [Greek text], an envy of the Gods, who will not abide to see men as prosperous as they themselves are. We may attribute it more simply and more piously to the wear and tear of frail humanity. For it may be that very few human souls can stand for many years the strain of a great rule. I do not mean that they break down from overwork, but that they are pulled out of shape by it; and that, especially, the will becomes enormously developed at the expense of the other powers of the soul, till the man becomes, as he grows older, imperious, careless of, or irritated by counsel, determined to have his own way because it is his own way. We see the same tendency in all accustomed for a long while to absolute rule, even in petty matters;--in the old ship's captain, the old head of a factory, the old master of hounds; and we do not blame them for it. It is a disease incident to their calling, as pedantry is to that of a scholar, or astuteness to that of an attorney. But it is most dangerous in the greatest minds, and in the highest places; and only to be kept off by them, as by us, each in our place, by honest self-examination, diligent prayer, and the grace of God which comes thereby. Once or twice in the world's history a great ruler, like Charles the Fifth, cuts the Gordian knot, and escapes into a convent: but how few can or ought to do that? There are those who must go on ruling, or see their country ruined; for all depends on them. So had Queen Elizabeth to do; so had Dietrich of Bern likewise. After them would come the deluge, and did come; and they must endure to the last, whatever it may cost to their own health of character, or peace of mind.

But most painful, and most dangerous to the veteran sovereign, is it to have learnt to suspect, perhaps to despise, those whom he rules; to have thrown away all his labour upon knaves and fools; to have cast his pearls before swine, and find them turning again and rending him. That feeling, forced from Queen Elizabeth, in her old age, that tragic cry, 'I am a miserable forlorn woman. There is none about me whom I can trust.' She was a woman, always longing for some one to love; and her heart broke under it all. But do you not see that where the ruler is not an affectionate woman, but a strong proud man, the effect may be very different, and very terrible?--how, roused to indignation, scorn, suspicion, rage, he may turn to bay against his own subjects, with 'Scoundrels! you have seen the fair side of my character, and in vain. Now you shall see the foul, and beware for yourselves.'

Even so, I fancy, did old Dietrich turn to bay, and did deeds which have blackened his name for ever. Heaven forgive him! for surely he had provocation enough and to spare.

I have told you of the simple, half-superstitious respect which the Teuton had for the prestige of Rome. Dietrich seems to have partaken of it, like the rest. Else why did he not set himself up as Caesar of Rome? Why did he always consider himself as son-in-arms, and quasi-vassal, of the Caesar of Constantinople? He had been in youth overawed by the cunning civilization which he had seen in the great city. He felt, with a noble modesty, that he could not emulate it. He must copy it afar off. He must take to his counsels men like Cassiodorus, Symmachus, Boethius, born and bred in it; trained from childhood in the craft by which, as a patent fact, the Kaisers of Rome had been for centuries, even in their decay and degradation, the rulers of the nations. Yet beneath that there must have been a perpetual under-current of contempt for it and for Rome--the 'colluvies gentium'--the sink of the nations, with its conceit, its pomposity, its beggary, its profligacy, its superstition, its pretence of preserving the Roman law and rights, while practically it cared for no law nor right at all. Dietrich had had to write letter upon letter, to prevent the green and blue factions cutting each other's throats at the public spectacles; letters to the tribunus voluptatum, who had to look after the pantomimes and loose women, telling him to keep the poor wretches in some decent order, and to set them and the city an example of a better life, by being a chaste and respectable man himself. Letter upon letter of Cassiodorus', written in Dietrich's name, disclose a state of things in Rome on which a Goth could look only with disgust and contempt.

And what if he discovered (or thought that he discovered) that these prating coxcombs--who were actually living on government bounty, and had their daily bread, daily bath, daily oil, daily pork, daily wine, found for them at government expense, while they lounged from the theatre to the church, and the church to the theatre--were plotting with Justin the scoundrel and upstart Emperor at Constantinople, to restore forsooth the liberties of Rome? And that that was their answer to his three and thirty years of good government, respect, indulgence, which had raised them up again out of all the miseries of domestic anarchy and foreign invasion?

And what if he discovered (or thought that he discovered) that the Catholic Clergy, with Pope John at their head, were in the very same plot for bringing in the Emperor of Constantinople, on the grounds of religion; because he was persecuting the Arian Goths at Constantinople, and therefore would help them to persecute them in Italy? And that that was their answer to his three and thirty years of unexampled religious liberty? Would not those two facts (even the belief that they were facts) have been enough to drive many a wise man mad?

How far they were facts, we never shall exactly know. Almost all our information comes from Catholic historians--and he would be a rash man who would pin his faith on any statement of theirs concerning the actions of a heretic. But I think, even with no other help than theirs, we may see why Dietrich would have looked with horror on any intimacy between the Church of Rome and the Court of Constantinople.

We must remember first what the Greek Empire was then, and who was the new Emperor. Anastasius the poor old Emperor, dying at eighty with his heart broken by monks and priests, had an ugly dream; and told it to Amantius the eunuch and lord chamberlain. Whereon Amantius said he had had a dream too;--how a great hog flew at him as he was in waiting in the very presence, and threw him down and eat him fairly up. Which came true--though not in the way Amantius expected. On the death of Anastasius he determined to set up as Emperor a creature of his own. For this purpose he must buy the guards; to which noble end he put a large sum of treasure into the hands of Justin, senator, and commander-in-chief of the said guards, who takes the money, and spends it on his own account; so that the miserable eunuch finds, not his man, but Justin himself, Emperor, and his hard-earned money spent against him. The mere rise of this unscrupulous swindler and his still more unscrupulous nephew, Justinian, would have been enough to rouse Dietrich's suspicion, if not fear.

Deep and unspeakable must have been the royal Amal's contempt for the man. For he must have known him well at Constantinople in his youth; known how he was a Goth or other Teuton after all, though he was called a Dardanian; how his real name was Uprauda (upright), the son of Stock--which Uprauda he had latinized into Justinus. The Amal knew well how he had entered the Emperor's guard; how he had intrigued and fought his way up (for the man did not lack courage and conduct) to his general's commission; and now, by a crowning act of roguery, to the Empire. He had known too, most probably, the man's vulgar peasant wife, who, in her efforts to ape royalty, was making herself the laughing-stock of the people, and who was urging on her already willing husband to persecute. And this man he saw ready to convulse his own Empire by beginning a violent persecution against the Arians. He was dangerous enough as a villain, doubly dangerous as a bigot also.

We must remember next what the Greek Church was then; a chaos of intrigue, villainy, slander, and wild fury, tearing to pieces itself and the whole Empire by religious feuds, in which the doctrine in question becomes invisible amid the passions and crimes of the disputants, while the Lords of the Church were hordes of wild monks, who swarm out of their dens to head the lowest mobs, or fight pitched battles with each other. The ecclesiastical history of the fifth century in the Eastern Empire is one, which not even the genius of a Gibbon or a Milman can make interesting, or even intelligible.

Recollect that Dietrich had seen much of this with his own eyes; had seen actually, as I told you, the rebellion of Basiliscus and the Eutychian Bishops headed by the mad Daniel the Stylite against his foster father the Emperor Zeno; had seen that Emperor (as Dean Milman forcibly puts it) 'flying before a naked hermit, who had lost the use of his legs by standing sixteen years upon a column.' Recollect that Dietrich and his Goths had helped to restore that Emperor to his throne; and then understand in what a school he had learnt his great ideas of religious toleration: how deep must have been the determination to have no such doings in his kingdom; how deep, too, the dread of any similar outbreak at Rome.

Recollect, also, that now in his old age he had just witnessed the same iniquities again rending the Eastern Empire; the old Emperor Anastasius hunted to death by armies of mad monks about the Monophysite Heresy; the cities, even the holiest places of the East, stained with Christian blood; everywhere mob-law, murder, treachery, assassination even in the house of God; and now the new Emperor Justin was throwing himself into the party of the Orthodox with all the blind rage of an ignorant peasant; persecuting, expelling, shutting up the Arian Churches of the Goths, refusing to hear Dietrich's noble appeals; and evidently organizing a great movement against those peaceable Arians, against whom, during the life-time of Dietrich, their bitterest enemies do not allege a single case of persecution.

Remember, too, that Dietrich had had experience of similar outbreaks of fanaticism at Rome; that the ordination of two rival Popes had once made the streets run with blood; that he had seen priests murdered, monasteries fired, nuns insulted, and had had to interfere with the strong arm of the law, and himself decide in favour of the Pope who had the most votes, and was first chosen; and that in the quarrels, intrigues, and slanders, which followed that election, he had had too good proof that the ecclesiastics and the mob of Rome, if he but let them, could behave as ill as that of Constantinople; and, moreover, that this new Pope John, who seems to have been a hot-headed fanatic, had begun his rule by whipping and banishing Manichees--by whose permission, does not appear.

Recollect too, that for some reason or other, Dietrich, when he had interfered in Eastern matters, had been always on the side of the Orthodox and the Council of Chalcedon. He had fought for the Orthodox against Basiliscus. He had backed the Orthodox and Vitalianus their champion, against the late Emperor Anastasius; and now as soon as the Orthodox got into power under Justin, this was the reward of his impartiality. If he did not distrust and despise the Church and Emperor of the East, he must have been not a hero, but a saint.

Recollect, too, that in those very days, Catholic bigotry had broken out in a general plunder of the Jews. At Rome, at Milan, and Genoa their houses had been sacked, and their synagogues burnt; and Dietrich, having compelled the Catholics to rebuild them at their own expense, had earned the hatred of a large portion of his subjects. And now Pope John was doing all he could to thwart him. Dietrich bade him go to Constantinople, and plead with Justin for the persecuted Arians. He refused. Dietrich shipt him off, nolentem volentem. But when he got to Constantinople he threw his whole weight into the Emperor's scale. He was received by Justin as if he was St. Peter himself, the Emperor coming out to meet him with processions and wax-lights, imploring his blessing; he did exactly the opposite to what Dietrich bade him do; and published on his return a furious epistle to the bishops of Italy, calling upon them to oppress and extirpate the Arian perfidy, so that no root of it is left: to consecrate the Arian churches wheresoever he found them, pleading the advice of the most pious and Christian Emperor Justin, talking of Dietrich as tainted inwardly and wrapt up outwardly with the pest of heresy. On which Cochlaeus (who religiously believes that Dietrich was damned for his Arianism, and that all his virtues went for nothing because he had not charity, which exists, he says, alone within the pale of the Church), cannot help the naive comment, that if the Pontiff did really write that letter, he cannot wonder at Dietrich's being a little angry. Kings now, it is true, can afford to smile at such outbursts; they could not afford to do so in Dietrich's days. Such words meant murder, pillage, civil war, dethronement, general anarchy; and so Dietrich threw Pope John into prison. He had been in bad health before he sailed to Constantinople, and in a few months he died, and was worshipped as a saint.

As for the political conspiracy, we shall never know the truth of it. The 'Anonymus Valesii,' meanwhile says, that when Cyprian accused Albinus, Boethius answered, 'It is false: but if Albinus has done it, so have I, and the whole senate, with one consent. It is false, my Lord King!' Whatever such words may prove, they prove at least this, that Boethius, as he says himself, was the victim of his own chivalry. To save Albinus, and the senate, he thrust himself into the fore-front of the battle, and fell at least like a brave man. Whether Albinus, Boethius, and Symmachus did plot to bring in Justin; whether the senate did send a letter to him, I cannot tell. Boethius, in his De Consolatione, denies it all; and Boethius was a good man. He says that the letters in which he hoped for the liberty of Rome were forged; how could he hope for the impossible? but he adds, 'would that any liberty could have been hoped for! I would have answered the king as Cassius did, when falsely accused of conspiring by Caligula: "If I had known of it, you should not."' One knows not whether Dietrich ever saw those words: but they prove at least that all his confidence, justice, kindness to the patrician philosopher, had not won him from the pardonable conceit about the Romani nominis umbram.

Boethius' story is most probably true. One cannot think that that man would die with a lie in his mouth. One cannot pass by, as the utterances of a deliberate hypocrisy, those touching appeals to his guiding mistress, that heavenly wisdom who has led him so long upon the paths of truth and virtue, and who seems to him, in his miserable cell, to have betrayed him in his hour of need. Heaven forbid. Better to believe that Dietrich committed once in his life, a fearful crime, than that good Boethius' famous book is such another as the Eikon Basilike.

Boethius, again, says that the Gothic courtiers hated him, and suborned branded scoundrels to swear away his life and that of the senate, because he had opposed 'the hounds of the palace,' Amigast, Trigulla, and other greedy barbarians. There was, of course, a Gothic party and a Roman party about the court; and each hated the other bitterly. Dietrich had favoured the Romans. But the Goths could not have seen such men as Symmachus and Boethius the confidants and counsellors of the Amal, without longing for their downfall; and if, as Boethius and the Catholic historians say, the whole tragedy arose out of a Gothic plot to destroy the Roman party, such things have happened but too often in the world's history. The only facts which make against the story are, that Cyprianus the accuser was a Roman, and that Cassiodorus, who must have belonged to the Roman party, not only is never mentioned during the whole tragedy, but was high in power under Theodatus and Athalaric afterwards.

Add to this, that there were vague but wide-spread reports that the Goths were in danger; that Dietrich at least could not be ignorant of the ambition and the talents of that terrible Justinian, Justin's nephew, who was soon to alter, for a generation, the fortunes of the whole Empire, and to sweep the Goths from Italy; that men's minds must have been perplexed with fear of change, when they recollected that Dietrich was seventy years old, without a son to succeed him, and that a woman and a child would soon rule that great people in a crisis, which they could not but foresee. We know that the ruin came; is it unreasonable to suppose that the Goths foresaw it, and made a desperate, it may be a treacherous, effort to crush once and for all, the proud and not less treacherous senators of Rome?

So, maddened with the fancied discovery that the man whom he had honoured, trusted, loved, was conspiring against him, Dietrich sent Boethius to prison. He seems, however, not to have been eager for his death; for Boethius remained there long enough to write his noble book.

However, whether fresh proofs of his supposed guilt were discovered or not, the day came when he must die. A cord was twisted round his head (probably to extort confession), till his eyes burst from their sockets, and then he was put out of his misery by a club; and so ended the last Roman philosopher. Symmachus, his father-in-law, was beheaded; and Pope John, as we have heard, was thrown into prison on his return, and died after a few months. These are the tragedies which have stained for ever the name of 'Theodoric the Great.'

Pope John seems to have fairly earned his imprisonment. For the two others, we can only, I fear, join in the sacred pity in which their memories have been embalmed to all succeeding generations. But we must recollect, that after all, we know but one side of the question. The Romans could write; the Goths could not: they may have been able to make out a fair case for themselves; they may have believed truly in the guilt of Boethius; and if they did, nothing less could have happened, by such rules of public law and justice as were then in vogue, than did happen.

Be that as it may, the deed was done; and the punishment, if deserved, came soon enough. Sitting at dinner (so the story runs), the head of a fish took in Dietrich's fancy the shape of Symmachus' head, the upper teeth biting the lip, the great eyes staring at him. He sprang up in horror; took to his bed; and there, complaining of a mortal chill, wrapping himself up in heaps of blankets, and bewailing to his physician the death of his two victims, he died sadly in a few days. And a certain holy hermit, name not given, nor date of the vision, saw the ghosts of Boethius and Symmachus lead the Amal's soul up the cone of Stromboli, and hurl him in, as the English sailors saw old Boots, the Wapping usurer, hurled into the same place, for offences far more capable of proof.

So runs the story of Dietrich's death. It is perfectly natural, and very likely true. His contemporaries, who all believed it, saw in it proof of his enormous guilt, and the manifest judgment of God. We shall rather see in it a proof of the earnest, child-like, honest nature of the man, startled into boundless horror and self-abasement, by the sudden revelation of his crime. Truly bad men die easier deaths than that; and go down to the grave, for the most part, blind and self-contented, and, as they think, unpunished; and perhaps forgiven.

After Dietrich came the deluge. The royal head was gone. The royal heart remained in Amalasuentha 'the heavenly beauty,' a daughter worthy of her father.

One of her first acts was to restore to the widows and children of the two victims the estates which Dietrich had confiscated. That may, or may not, prove that she thought the men innocent. She may have only felt it royal not to visit the sins of the fathers on the children; and those fathers, too, her own friends and preceptors. Beautiful, learned, and wise, she too was, like her father, before her age. She, the pupil of Boethius, would needs bring up her son Athalaric in Roman learning, and favour the Romans in all ways; never putting to death or even fining any of them, and keeping down the rough Goths, who were ready enough, now Dietrich's hand was off them, to ill-use the conquered Italians. The Goths soon grew to dislike her, and her Roman tendencies, her Roman education of the lad. One day she boxed his ears for some fault. He ran crying out into the Heldensaal, and complained to the heroes. They sent a deputation to Amalasuentha, insolent enough. 'The boy should not be made a scholar of.' 'She meant to kill the boy and marry again. Had not old Dietrich forbidden free Goths to go to schoolmasters, and said, that the boy who was taught to tremble at a cane, would never face a lance?' So they took the lad away from the women, and made a ruffian of him. What with drink, women, idleness, and the company of wild young fellows like himself, he was early ruined, body and soul. Poor Amalasuentha, not knowing whither to turn, took the desperate resolution of offering Italy to the Emperor Justinian. She did not know that her cousin Theodatus had been beforehand with her--a bad old man, greedy and unjust, whose rapacity she had had to control again and again, and who hated her in return. Both send messages to Justinian. The wily Emperor gave no direct answer: but sent his ambassador to watch the course of events. The young prince died of debauchery, and the Goths whispered that his mother had poisoned him. Meanwhile Theodatus went on from bad to worse; accusations flowed in to Amalasuentha of his lawless rapacity: but he was too strong for her; and she, losing her head more and more, made the desperate resolve of marrying him, as the only way to keep him quiet. He was the last male heir of the royal Amalungs. The marriage would set him right in the eyes of the Goths, while it would free her from the suspicion of having murdered her son, in order to reign alone. Theodatus meanwhile was to have the name of royalty; but she was to keep the power and the money--a foolish, confused plan, which could have but one ending. Theodatus married her of course, and then cast her into prison, seized all her treasures, and threw himself into the arms of that party among the Goths, who hated Amalasuentha for having punished their oppressions. The end was swift and sad. By the time that Justinian's ambassador landed, Amalasuentha was strangled in her bath; and all that Peter the ambassador had to do was, to catch at the cause of quarrel, and declare 'inexpiable war' on the part of Justinian, as the avenger of the Queen.

And then began that dreadful East Goth war, which you may read for yourselves in the pages of an eye-witness, Procopius;--a war which destroyed utterly the civilization of Dietrich's long and prosperous reign, left Italy a desert, and exterminated the Roman people.

That was the last woe: but of it I must tell you in my next Lecture.

LECTURE VI--THE NEMESIS OF THE GOTHS.

Of this truly dreadful Gothic war I can give you but a hasty sketch; of some of the most important figures in it, not even a sketch. I cannot conceive to myself, and therefore cannot draw for you, the famous Belisarius. Was he really the strange compound of strength and weakness which Procopius, and after him Gibbon, represent him?--a caricature, for good and evil, of our own famous Marlborough? You must read and judge for yourselves. I cannot, at least as yet, offer you any solution of the enigma.

Still less can I conceive to myself Narses, living till his grey hairs in the effeminate intrigues of the harem, and then springing forth a general; the Warrior Eunuch; the misanthrope avenging his great wrong upon all mankind in bloody battle-fields; dark of counsel, and terrible of execution; him to whom in after years the Empress Sophia sent word that he was more fit to spin among maids than to command armies, and he answered, that he would spin her such a thread as she could not unravel; and kept his word (as legends say) by inviting the Lombards into Italy.

Least of all can I sketch Justinian the Great, the half-Teuton peasant, whom his uncle Justin sent for out of the Dardanian hills, to make him a demigod upon earth. Men whispered in after years that he was born of a demon, a demon himself, passing whole days without food, wandering up and down his palace corridors all night, resolving dark things, and labouring all day with Herculean force to carry them out. No wonder he was thought to be a demon, wedded to a demon-wife. The man is unfathomable, inexplicable;--marrying deliberately the wickedest of all women, plainly not for mere beauty's sake, but possibly because he saw in her a congenial intellect;--faithful and loving to her and she to him, amid all the crimes of their following years;--pious with exceeding devotion and orthodoxy, and yet with a piety utterly divorced from, unconscious of, the commonest morality;--discerning and using the greatest men, Belisarius and Narses for example, and throwing them away again, surely not in weak caprice, whenever they served him too well;--conquering Persians, Vandals, Goths; all but re-conquering, in fact, the carcase Roman Empire;--and then trying (with a deep discernment of the value of Roman law) to put a galvanic life into the carcase by codifying that law.

In whatever work I find this man, during his long life, he is to me inexplicable. Louis XI of France is the man most like Justinian whom I know, but he, too, is a man not to be fathomed by me. All the facts about Justinian you will find in Gibbon. I have no theory by which to arrange and explain them, and therefore can tell you no more than Gibbon does.

So to this Gothic war; which, you must remember, became possible for Justinian by Belisarius' having just destroyed the Vandals out of Africa. It began by Belisarius invading the south of Italy. Witigis was elected war-king of the Goths, 'the man of witty counsels,' who did not fulfil his name; while Theodatus (Theod-aht 'esteemed by the people' as his name meant) had fallen into utter disesteem, after some last villainy about money; had been struck down in the road by the man he had injured; and there had his throat cut, 'resupinus instar victimae jugulatus.'

He had consulted a Jew diviner just before, who had given him a warning. Thirty pigs, signifying the unclean Gentiles, the Jew shut up in three sties; naming ten Goths, ten Romans, and ten Imperialists of Belisarius' army, and left them to starve. At the end they found dead all the Goths but two, hardly any of the Imperialists, and half the Romans: but the five Roman pigs who were left had lost their bristles--bare to the skin, as the event proved.

After that Theodatus had no heart to fight, and ended his dog's life by a dog's death, as we have seen.

Note also this, that there was a general feeling of coming ruin; that there were quaint signs and omens. We have heard of the pigs which warned the Goths. Here is another. There was a Mosaic picture of Theodoric at Naples; it had been crumbling to pieces at intervals, and every fresh downfall had marked the death of an Amal. Now the last remains went down, to the very feet, and the Romans believed that it foretold the end of the Amal dynasty. There was a Sibylline oracle too;

'Quintili mense Roma nihil Geticum metuet.'

Here, too, we find the last trace of heathenism, of that political mythology which had so inextricably interwoven itself with the life and history of the city. The shrine of Janus was still standing, all of bronze, only just large enough, Procopius says, to contain the bronze image of Janus Bifrons. The gates, during Christian centuries, had never been opened, even in war time. Now people went by night, and tried to force them open: but hardly succeeded.

Belisarius garrisoned Rome, and the Goths attacked it, but in vain. You must read the story of that famous siege in the really brilliant pages of old Procopius, the last good historian of the old world.

Moreover, and this is most important, Belisarius raised the native population against the Goths. As he had done in Africa, when in one short campaign he utterly destroyed the now effeminate aristocracy of the Vandals, so he did in Italy. By real justice and kindness; by proclaiming himself the deliverer of the conquered from the yoke of foreign tyrants, he isolated the slave-holding aristocracy of the Goths from the mass of the inhabitants of Italy.

Belisarius and the Goths met, and the Goths conquered. But to take Rome was beyond their power; and after that a long miserable war struggled and wrangled up and down over the wretched land; city after city was taken and destroyed, now by Roman, now by Goth. The lands lay waste, the people disappeared in tens of thousands. All great Dietrich's work of thirty years was trampled into mud.

There were horrible sieges and destructions by both parties;--sack of Milan by Goths, sack of Rimini and the country round by Romans; horrors of famine at Auximum; two women who kept an inn, killing and eating seventeen men, till the eighteenth discovered the trap and killed them. Everywhere, as I say, good Dietrich's work of thirty years trampled into gory mud.

Then Theudebert and his false Franks came down to see what they could get; all (save a few knights round the king) on foot, without bow or lance; but armed with sword, shield, and heavy short-handled double-edged francisc, or battle-axe. At the bridge over the Ticinus they (nominal Catholics) sacrificed Gothic women and children with horrid rites, fought alike Goths and Romans, lost a third of their army by dysentery, and went home again.

At last, after more horrors, Vitigis and his Goths were driven into Ravenna. Justinian treated for peace; and then followed a strange peripeteia, which we have, happily, from an eye-witness, Procopius himself. The Roman generals outside confessed their chance of success hopeless. The Goths inside, tired of the slow Vitigis, send out to the great Belisarius, Will he be their king? King over them there in Italy? He promised, meaning to break his promise; and to the astonishment and delight of the Romans, the simple and honest barbarians opened the gates of Ravenna, and let in him and his Romans, to find themselves betrayed and enslaved. 'When I saw our troops march in,' says Procopius, 'I felt it was God's doing, so to turn their minds. The Goths,' he says, 'were far superior in numbers and in strength; and their women, who had fancied these Romans to be mighty men of valour, spit in the faces of their huge husbands, and pointing to the little Romans, reproached them with having surrendered to such things as that.' But the folly was committed. Belisarius carried them away captive to Constantinople, and so ended the first act of the Gothic war.

In the moment of victory the envy of the Byzantine court undid all that it had done. Belisarius returned with his captives to Rome, not for a triumph, but for a disgrace; and Italy was left open to the Goths, if they had men and heart to rise once more.

And they did rise. Among the remnant of the race was left a hero, Totila by name;--a Teuton of the ancient stamp. Totilas, 'free from death'--'the deathless one,' they say his name means. Under him the nation rose once more as out of the ground.

A Teuton of the ancient stamp he was, just and merciful exceedingly. Take but two instances of him, and know the man by them. He retook Naples. The Romans within were starving. He fed them; but lest they should die of the sudden repletion, he kept them in by guards at each gate, and fed them up more and more each day, till it was safe to let them out, to find food for themselves in the country. A Roman came to complain that a Goth had violated his daughter. He shall die, said Totila. He shall not die, said the Goths. He is a valiant hero. They came clamouring to the king. He answered them quietly and firmly. They may choose to-day, whether to let this man go unpunished, or to save the Gothic nation and win the victory. Do they not recollect how at the beginning of the war, they had brave soldiers, famous generals, countless treasures, horses, weapons, and all the forts of Italy? And yet under Theodatus, a man who loved gold better than justice, they had so angered God by their unrighteous lives, that--what had happened they knew but too well. Now God had seemed to have avenged himself on them enough. He had begun a new course with them. They must begin a new course with him; and justice was the only path. As for the man's being a valiant hero: let them know that the unjust and the ravisher were never brave in fight; but that according to a man's life, such was his luck in battle.

His noble words came all but true. The feeble generals who were filling Belisarius's place were beaten one by one, and almost all Italy was reconquered. Belisarius had to be sent back again to Italy: but the envy, whether of Justinian himself, or of the two wicked women who ruled his court, allowed him so small a force that he could do nothing.

Totila and the Goths came down once more to Rome. Belisarius in agony sent for reinforcements, and got them; but too late. He could not relieve Rome. The Goths had massed themselves round the city, and Belisarius, having got to Ostia (Portus) at the Tiber's mouth, could get no further. This was the last woe; the actual death-agony of ancient Rome. The famine grew and grew. The wretched Romans cried to Bessas and his garrison, either to feed them or to kill them out of their misery. They would do neither. They could hardly at last feed themselves. The Romans ate nettles off the ruins, and worse things still. There was not a dog or a rat left. They even killed themselves. One father of five children could bear no longer their cries for food. He wrapped his head in his mantle, and sprang into the Tiber, while the children looked on. The survivors wandered about like spectres, brown with hunger, and dropped dead with half-chewed nettles between their lips. To this, says Procopius, had fortune brought the Roman senate and people. Nay, not fortune, but wickedness. They had wished to play at being free, while they themselves were the slaves of sin.

And still Belisarius was coming,--and still he did not come. He was forcing his way up the Tiber; he had broken Totila's chain, burnt a tower full of Goths, and the city was on the point of being relieved, when one Isaac made a fool of himself, and was taken by the Goths. Belisarius fancied that Portus, his base of operations, with all his supplies, and Antonia, the worthless wife on whom he doted, were gone. He lost his head, was beaten terribly, fell back on Ostia, and then the end came. Isaurians from within helped in Goths by night. The Asinarian gate was opened, and Rome was in the hands of the Goths.

And what was left? What of all the pomp and glory, the spoils of the world, the millions of inhabitants?

Five or six senators, who had taken refuge in St. Peter's, and some five hundred of the plebs; Pope Pelagius crouching at Totila's feet, and crying for mercy; and Rusticiana, daughter of Symmachus, Boethius' widow, with other noble women, in slaves' rags, knocking without shame at door after door to beg a bit of bread. And that was what was left of Rome.

Gentlemen, I make no comment. I know no more awful page in the history of Europe. Through such facts as these God speaks. Let man be silent; and look on in fear and trembling, knowing that it was written of old time--The wages of sin are death.

The Goths wanted to kill Rusticiana. She had sent money to the Roman generals; she had thrown down Dietrich's statues, in revenge for the death of her father and her husband. Totila would not let them touch her. Neither maid, wife, nor widow, says Procopius, was the worse for any Goth.

Next day he called the heroes together. He is going to tell them the old tale, he says--How in Vitigis' time at Ravenna, 7000 Greeks had conquered and robbed of kingdom and liberty 200,000 rich and well-armed Goths. And now that they were raw levies, few, naked, wretched, they had conquered more than 20,000 of the enemy. And why? Because of old they had looked to everything rather than to justice; they had sinned against each other and the Romans. Therefore they must choose, and be just men henceforth, and have God with them, or unjust, and have God against them.

Then he sends for the wretched remnant of the senators and tells them the plain truth:--How the great Dietrich and his successors had heaped them with honour and wealth; and how they had returned his benefits by bringing in the Greeks. And what had they gained by changing Dietrich for Justinian? Logothetes, who forced them by blows to pay up the money which they had already paid to their Gothic rulers; and revenue exacted alike in war and in peace. Slaves they deserve to be; and slaves they shall be henceforth.

Then he sends to Justinian. He shall withdraw his army from Italy, and make peace with him. He will be his ally and his son in arms, as Dietrich had been to the Emperors before him, or if not, he will kill the senate, destroy Rome, and march into Illyricum.

Justinian leaves it to Belisarius.

Then Totila begins to destroy Rome. He batters down the walls, he is ready to burn the town. He will turn the evil place into a sheep-pasture. Belisarius flatters and cajoles him from his purpose, and he marches away with all his captives, leaving not a living soul in Rome.

But Totila shews himself a general unable to cope with that great tactician. He divides his forces, and allows Belisarius to start out of Ostia and fortify himself in Rome. The Goths are furious at his rashness: but it is too late, and the war begins again, up and down the wretched land, till Belisarius is recalled by some fresh court intrigue of his wicked wife, and another and even more terrible enemy appears on the field, Narses the eunuch, avenging his wrong upon his fellow-men by cunning and courage almost preternatural. He comes upon them with a mighty host: but not of Romans alone. He has gathered the Teuton tribes;--Herules, the descendants probably of Odoacer's confederates; Gepids, who have a long blood-feud against the Goths; and most terrible of all, Alboin with his five thousand more Burgundians, of whom you will hear enough hereafter. We read even of multitudes of Huns, and even of Persian deserters from the Chosroo. But Narses' policy is the old Roman one--Teuton must destroy Teuton. And it succeeds.

In spite of some trouble with the Franks, who are holding Venetia, he marches down victorious through the wasted land, and Totila marches to meet him in the Apennines. The hero makes his last speech. He says, 'There will be no need to talk henceforth. This day will end the war. They are not to fear these hired Huns, Herules, Lombards, fighting for money. Let them hold together like desperate men.' So they fight it out. The Goths depending entirely on the lance, the Romans on a due use of every kind of weapon. The tremendous charge of the Gothic knights is stopped by showers of Hun and Herule arrows, and they roll back again and again in disorder on the foot: but in spite of the far superior numbers of the Romans, it is not till nightfall that Narses orders a general advance of his line. The Goths try one last charge; but appalled by the numbers of the enemy, break up, and, falling back on the foot, throw them into confusion, and all is lost.

The foot are cut down flying. The knights ride for their lives. Totila and five horsemen are caught up by Asbad the Gepid chief. Asbad puts his lance in rest, not knowing who was before him. 'Dog,' cries Totila's page, 'wilt thou strike thy lord?' But it is too late. Asbad's lance goes through his back, and he drops on his horse's neck. Scipwar (Shipward) the Goth wounds Asbad, and falls wounded himself. The rest carry off Totila. He dies that night, after reigning eleven stormy years.

The Goths flee across the Po. There is one more struggle for life, and one more hero left. Teia by name, 'the slow one,' slow, but strong. He shall be king now. They lift him on the shield, and gather round him desperate, but determined to die hard. He finds the treasure of Totila, hid in Pisa. He sends to Theudebald and his Franks. Will they help him against the Roman, and they shall have the treasure; the last remnant of the Nibelungen hoard. No. The Luegenfelden will not come. They will stand by and see the butchery, on the chance of getting all Italy for themselves. Narses storms Rome--or rather a little part of it round Hadrian's Mole, which the Goths had fortified; and the Goths escape down into Campania, mad with rage.

That victory of Narses, says Procopius, brought only a more dreadful destruction on the Roman senate and people. The Goths, as they go down, murder every Roman they meet. The day of grace which Totila had given them is over. The Teutons in Narses' army do much the same. What matter to Burgunds and Herules who was who, provided they had any thing to be plundered of? Totila has allowed many Roman senators to live in Campania. They hear that Narses has taken Rome, they begin to flock to the ghastly ruin. Perhaps there will be once again a phantom senate, phantom consuls, under the Romani nominis umbram. The Goths catch them, and kill them to a man. And there is an end of the Senatus Populusque Romanus.

The end is near now. And yet these terrible Goths cannot be killed out of the way. On the slopes of Vesuvius, by Nuceria, they fortify a camp; and as long as they are masters of the neighbouring sea, for two months they keep Narses at bay. At last he brings up an innumerable fleet, cuts off their supplies; and then the end comes. The Goths will die like desperate men on foot. They burst out of camp, turn their horses loose, after the fashion of German knights--One hears of the fashion again and again in the middle age,--and rush upon the enemy in deep solid column. The Romans have hardly time to form some sort of line; and then not the real Romans, I presume, but the Burgunds and Gepids, turn their horses loose like the Goths. There is no need for tactics; the fight is hand to hand; every man, says Procopius, rushing at the man nearest him.

For a third of the day Teia fights in front, sheltered by his long pavisse, stabbing with a mighty lance at the mob which makes at him, as dogs at a boar at bay. Procopius is awed by the man. Most probably he saw him with his own eyes. Second in valour, he says, to none of the Heroes.

Again and again his shield is full of darts. Without moving a foot, without turning an inch right or left, says Procopius, he catches another from his shield-bearer, and fights on. At last he has twelve lances in his shield, and cannot move it: coolly he calls for a fresh one, as if he were fixed to the soil, thrusts back the enemy with his left hand, and stabs at them with his right. But his time is come. As he shifts his shield for a moment his chest is exposed, and a javelin is through him. And so ends the last hero of the East Goths. They put his head upon a pole, and carry it round the lines to frighten the Goths. The Goths are long past frightening.

All day long, and all the next day, did the Germans fight on, Burgund and Gepid against Goth, neither giving nor taking quarter, each man dying where he stood, till human strength could bear up no longer, while Narses sat by, like an ugly Troll as he was, smiling to see the Teuton slay the Teuton, for the sake of their common enemy. Then the Goths sent down to Narses. They were fighting against God. They would give in, and go their ways peaceably, and live with some other Teuton nations after their own laws. They had had enough of Italy, poor fellows, and of the Nibelungen hoard. Only Narses, that they might buy food on the journey back, must let them have their money, which he had taken in various towns of Italy.

Narses agreed. There was no use fighting more with desperate men. They should go in peace. And he kept his faith with them. Perhaps he dared not break it. He let them go, like a wounded lion crawling away from the hunter, up through Italy, and over the Po, to vanish. They and their name became absorbed in other nations, and history knows the East Goths no more.

So perished, by their own sins, a noble nation; and in perishing, destroyed utterly the Roman people. After war and famine followed as usual dreadful pestilence, and Italy lay waste for years. Henceforth the Italian population was not Roman, but a mixture of all races, with a most powerful, but an entirely new type of character. Rome was no more Senatorial, but Papal.

And why did these Goths perish, in spite of all their valour and patriotism, at the hands of mercenaries?

They were enervated, no doubt, as the Vandals had been in Africa, by the luxurious southern climate, with its gardens, palaces, and wines. But I have indicated a stronger reason already:--they perished because they were a slave-holding aristocracy.

We must not blame them. All men then held slaves: but the original sin was their ruin, though they knew it not. It helped, doubtless, to debauch them; to tempt them to the indulgence of those fierce and greedy passions, which must, in the long run, lower the morality of slaveholders; and which, as Totila told them, had drawn down on them the anger of heaven. But more; though they reformed their morals, and that nobly, under the stern teaching of affliction, that could not save them. They were ruined by the inherent weakness of all slaveholding states; the very weakness which had ruined, in past years, the Roman Empire. They had no middle class, who could keep up their supplies, by exercising for them during war the arts of peace. They had no lower class, whom they dare entrust with arms, and from whom they might recruit their hosts. They could not call a whole population into the field, and when beaten in that field, carry on, as Britain would when invaded, a guerilla warfare from wood to wood, and hedge to hedge, as long as a coign of vantage-ground was left. They found themselves a small army of gentlemen, chivalrous and valiant, as slaveholders of our race have always been; but lessening day by day from battle and disease, with no means of recruiting their numbers; while below them and apart from them lay the great mass of the population, helpless, unarmed, degraded, ready to side with any or every one who would give them bread, or let them earn it for themselves (for slaves must eat, even though their masters starve), and careless of, if not even hostile to, their masters' interests, the moment those masters were gone to the wars.

In such a case, nothing was before them, save certain defeat at last by an enemy who could pour in ever fresh troops of mercenaries, and who had the command of the seas.

I may seem to be describing the case of a modern and just as valiant and noble a people. I do not mention its name. The parallel, I fear, is too complete, not to have already suggested itself to you.

LECTURE VII--PAULUS DIACONUS

And now I come to the final settlement of Italy and the Lombard race; and to do that well, I must introduce you to-day to an old chronicler--a very valuable, and as far as we know, faithful writer--Paul Warnefrid, alias Paul the Deacon.

I shall not trouble you with much commentary on him; but let him, as much as possible, tell his own story. He may not be always quite accurate, but you will get no one more accurate. In the long run, you will know nothing about the matter, save what he tells you; so be content with what you can get. Let him shew you what sort of an account of his nation, and the world in general, a Lombard gentleman and clergyman could give, at the end of the 8th century.

You recollect the Lombards, of whom Tacitus says, 'Longobardos paucitas nobilitat.' Paulus Warnefrid was one of their descendants, and his history carries out the exact truth of Tacitus' words. He too speaks of them as a very small tribe. He could not foresee how much the 'nobilitat' meant. He knew his folk as a brave semi-feudal race, who had conquered the greater part of Italy, and tilled and ruled it well; who were now conquered by Charlemagne, and annexed to the great Frank Empire, but without losing anything of their distinctive national character. He did not foresee that they would become the architects, the merchants, the goldsmiths, the bankers, the scientific agriculturists of all Europe. We know it. Whenever in London or any other great city, you see a 'Lombard Street,' an old street of goldsmiths and bankers--or the three golden balls of Lombardy over a pawnbroker's shop--or in the country a field of rye-grass, or a patch of lucerne--recollect this wise and noble people, and thank the Lombards for what they have done for mankind.