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 victimæ 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