Theodoric the Goth

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"with terror dumb,
Or whispering with white lips, 'The foe, they come, they come!"

[Footnote 147: Now the Ponte Molle.]

Of the great Siege of Rome, which began on that day, early in March,
537, and lasted a year and nine days, till March, 538, a siege perhaps
the most memorable of all that "Roma AEterna" has seen and has groaned
under, as part of the penalty of her undying greatness, it will be
impossible here to give even a meagre outline. The events of those
wonderful 374 days are chronicled almost with the graphic minuteness of
a Kinglake by a man whom we may call the literary assessor of
Belisarius, the rhetorician Procopius of Caesarea. One or two incidents
of the siege may be briefly noticed here, and then we must hasten
onwards to its close.

Owing to the vast size of Rome not even the host of the Goths was able
to accomplish a complete blockade of the City. They formed seven camps
six on the left and one on the right bank of the Tiber, and they
obstructed eight out of its four teen gates; but while the east and
south sides of the City were thus pretty effectually blockaded, there
were large spaces in the western circuit by which it was tolerably easy
for Belisarius to receive reinforcements, to bring in occasional convoys
of provisions, and to send away non-combatants who diminished his
resisting power. One of the hardest blows dealt by the barbarians was
their severance of the eleven great aqueducts from which Rome received
its water. This privation of an element so essential to the health and
comfort of the Roman under the Empire (who resorted to the bath as a
modern Italian resorts to the cafe or the music hall), was felt as a
terrible blow by all classes, and wrought a lasting change, and not a
beneficial one, in the habits of the citizens, and in the sanitary
condition of Rome. It also seemed likely to have an injurious effect on
the food supply of the City, since the mills in which corn was ground
for the daily rations of the people were turned by water-power derived
from the Aqueduct of Trajan. Belisarius, however, always fertile in
resource, a man who, had he lived in the nineteenth century, would
assuredly have been a great engineer, contrived to make Father Tiber
grind out the daily supply of flour for his Roman children. He moored
two barges in the narrowest part of the stream, where the current was
the strongest, put his mill-stones on board of them, and hung a
water-wheel between them to turn his mills. These river water-mills
continued to be used on the Tiber all through the Middle Ages, and even
until they were superseded by the introduction of steam.

The Goths did not resign themselves to the slow languors of a blockade
till they had made one vigorous and confident attempt at a storm. On the
eighteenth day of the siege the terrified Romans saw from their windows
the mighty armament approaching the City. A number of wooden towers as
high as the walls, mounted on wheels, and drawn by the stout oxen of
Etruria, moved menacingly forward amid the triumphant shouts of the
barbarians, each of whom had a bundle of boughs and reeds under his arm
ready to be thrown into the fosse, and so prepare a level surface upon
which the terrible engines might approach the walls. To resist this
attack Belisarius had prepared a large number of _Balistae_ (gigantic
cross-bows worked by machinery and discharging a short wedge-like bolt
with such force as to break trees or stones) had planted on the walls,
great slings, which the soldiers called Wild Asses (_Onagri_), and had
set in each gate the deadly machine known as the Wolf, and which was a
kind of double portcullis, worked both from above and from below.

But though the Gothic host was approaching with its threatening towers
close to the walls, Belisarius would not give the signal, and not a
_Balista_, nor a Wild Ass was allowed to hurl its missiles against the
foe. He only laughed aloud, and bade the soldiers do nothing till he
gave the word of command. To the citizens this seemed an evil jest, and
they grumbled aloud at the impudence of the general who chose this
moment of terrible suspense for merriment. But now when the Goths were
close to the fosse, Belisarius lifted his bow, singled out a mail-clad
chief, and sent an arrow through his neck, inflicting a deadly wound. A
great shout of triumph rose from the Imperial soldiers as the proudly
accoutred barbarian rolled in the dust. Another shot, another Gothic
chief slain, and again a shout of triumph. Then the signal to shoot was
given to the soldiers, and hundreds of bolts from Wild Ass and _Balista_
were hurtling through the air, aimed not at Gothic soldiers, but at the
luckless oxen that drew the ponderous towers. The beasts being slain, it
was impossible for the Goths who were immediately under the walls and
exposed to a deadly discharge of arrows from the battlements, to move
their towers either backward or forward, and there they remained mere
laughing-stocks in their huge immobility, till the end of the day, when
they with all the rest of the Gothic enginery were given as a prey to
the flames. Then men understood the meaning of the laughter of
Belisarius as he watched the preparations of the barbarians and derided
their childish simplicity in supposing that he would allow them calmly
to move up their towers till they touched his wall, without using his
artillery to cripple their advance.

Though the attack with the towers had thus failed there was still fierce
fighting to be done on the south-east and north-west of the City. At the
Praenestine Gate (_Porta Maggiore_), that noble structure which is formed
out of the arcades of the Aqueducts, there was a desperate onslaught of
the barbarians, which at one time seemed likely to be successful, but a
sudden sortie of Belisarius taking them in their rear turned them to
headlong flight. In the opposite quarter the Aurelian Gate was commanded
by the mighty tomb-fortress then known as the Mausoleum of Hadrian, and
now, in its dismantled and degraded state, as the Castle of Sant'Angelo.
Here the peculiar shape of the fortress prevented the defenders from
using their _Balistae_ with proper effect on the advancing foe, and when
the besiegers were close under the walls the bolts from the engines flew
over their heads. It seemed as if, after all, by the Aurelian Gate the
barbarians would enter Rome, when, by a happy instinct, the garrison
turned to the marble statues which surrounded the tomb, wrenched them
from their bases, and rained down such a terrible shower of legs and
arms and heads of gods and goddesses on their barbarian assailants that
these soon fled in utter confusion.

The whole result of this great day of assault was to convince Witigis
and his counsellors that the City could not be taken in that manner, and
that the siege must be turned into a blockade. A general sally which
Belisarius ordered, against his better judgment, in order to still the
almost mutinous clamours of his troops, and which took place about the
fiftieth day of the siege, proved almost as disastrous for the Romans as
the assault had done for the Goths. It was manifest that this was not a
struggle which could be ended by a single blow on either side. All the
miseries of a long siege must be endured both by attackers and attacked,
and the only question was on which side patience would first give
way--whether the Romans under roofs, but short of provisions, or the
Goths better fed, but encamped on the deadly Campagna, would be the
first to succumb to hunger and disease.

Witigis had been in his day a brave soldier, but he evidently knew
nothing of the art of war. He allowed Belisarius to disencumber himself
of many useless consumers of food by sending the women, the children,
and the slaves out of the City. His attention was disturbed by feigned
attacks, when the reinforcements, which were tardily sent by Justinian,
and the convoys of provisions, which had been collected by the wife of
Belisarius, the martial Antonina, were to be brought within the walls.
And, lastly, when at length, about the ninth month of the siege, he
proposed a truce and the reopening of negotiations with Constantinople,
he did not even insert in the conditions of the truce any limit to the
quantity of supplies which under its cover the Imperialists might
introduce into the City. Thus he played the game of his wily antagonist,
and abandoned all the advantages--and they were not many--which the nine
months of blockade had won for him.

The parleyings which preceded this truce have an especial interest for
us, whose forefathers were at this very time engaged in making England
their own. The Goths, after complaining that Justinian had broken the
solemn compact made between Zeno and Theodoric as to the conquest of
Italy from Odovacar, went on to propose terms of compromise. "They were
willing", they said, "for the sake of peace to give up Sicily, that
large and wealthy island, so important to a ruler who had now become
master of Africa". Belisarius answered with sarcastic courtesy: "Such
great benefits should be repaid in kind. We will concede to the Goths
the possession of the whole island of Britain, which is much larger than
Sicily, and which was once possessed by the Romans as Sicily was once
possessed by the Goths". Of course that country, though much larger than
Sicily, was one the possession of which was absolutely unimportant to
the Emperor and his general. "What mattered it", they might well say,
"who owned that misty and poverty-stricken island. The oysters of
Rutupiae, some fine watch-dogs from Caledonia, a little lead from the
Malvern Hills, and some cargoes of corn and wool--this was all that the
Empire had ever gained from her troublesome conquest. Even in the world
of mind Britain had done nothing more than give birth to one second-rate
heretic.[148] The curse of poverty and of barbarous insignificance was
upon her, and would remain upon her till the end of time".

[Footnote 148: Pelagius.]

The truce, as will be easily understood, brought no alleviation to the
sufferings of the Goths, who were now almost more besieged than
besiegers, and who were dying by thousands in the unhealthy Campagna.
Before the end of March, 538, they broke up their encampment, and
marched, in sullen gloom, northwards to defend Ravenna, which was
already being threatened by the operations of a lieutenant of
Belisarius. The 150,000 men who had hastened to Rome, dreading lest the
Imperialists should escape before they could encompass the City, were
reduced to but a small portion of that number, perhaps not many more
than the 10,000 which, after all his reinforcements had been received,
seems to have been the greatest number of actual soldiers serving under
Belisarius in the defence of Rome.

I pass rapidly over the events of 538 and 539. The Imperial generals
pressed northwards along the Flaminian Way. Urbino, Rimini, Osimo, and
other cities in this region were taken by them. But the Goths fought
hard, though they gave little proof of strategic skill; and once, when
they recaptured the great city of Milan, it looked as though they might
almost be about to turn the tide of conquest. Evidently they were far
less demoralised by their past prosperity than the Vandals. Perhaps also
the Roman population of Italy, who had met with far gentler and more
righteous treatment from the Ostrogoths than their compeers in Africa
had met with from the Vandals, and who were now suffering the horrors of
famine, owing to the operations of the contending armies, assisted the
operations of the Byzantine invaders less than the Roman provincials in
Africa had done. Whatever the cause, it was not till the early months of
540, nearly five years after the beginning of the war, that Belisarius
and his army stood before the walls and among the rivers of Ravenna,
almost the last stronghold of Witigis. Belisarius blockaded the city,
and his blockade was a far more stringent one than that which Witigis
had drawn around Rome. Still there was the ancient and well-founded
reputation for impregnability of the great Adrian city, and, moreover,
just at this time the ambassadors, sent by Witigis to Justinian,
returned from Constantinople, bearing the Emperor's consent to a
compromise. Italy, south of the Po, was to revert to the Empire; north
of that river, the Goths were still to hold it, and the royal treasure
was to be equally divided between the two states. Belisarius called a
council of war, and all his officers signed a written opinion "that the
proposals of the Emperor were excellent, and that no better terms could
be obtained from the Barbarians". This, however, was by no means the
secret thought of Belisarius, who had set his heart on taking Witigis as
a captive to Constantinople, and laying the keys of Ravenna at his
master's feet. A strange proposition which came from the beleaguered
city seemed to open the way to the accomplishment of his purpose. The
Gothic nobles suggested that he, the great Captain, whose might in war
they had experienced, should become their leader, should mount the
throne of Theodoric, and should be crowned "King of the Italians and
Goths", the change in the order of the names indicating the subordinate
position which the humbled barbarians were willing to assume. Belisarius
seemed to acquiesce in the proposal (though his secretary assures us
that he never harboured a thought of disloyalty to his master), and
received the oath of the Gothic envoys for the surrender of the city,
postponing his own coronation-oath to his new subjects till he could
swear it in the presence of Witigis and all his nobles, for Witigis,
too, was a consenting, nay, an eager, party to the transaction. Thus,
by an act of dissimulation, which brought some stain on his knightly
honour (we are tempted to use the language of chivalry in speaking of
these events), but which left no stain on his loyalty to the Emperor of
Rome, did Belisarius obtain possession of the impregnable Ravenna. He
marched in, he and his veterans, into the famine-stricken city. When the
Gothic women saw the little dark men filing past them through the
streets, and contrasted them with their own long-limbed, flaxen-haired
giants, they spat in the faces of their husbands, and said: "Are you
men, to have allowed yourselves to be beaten by such manikins as these?"

Before the triumphal entry was finished the Goths had no doubt
discovered that they were duped. No coronation oath was sworn.
Belisarius, still the humble servant of Justinianus Augustus, did not
allow himself to be raised on the shield and saluted as King of the
Italians and Goths. The Gothic warriors were kindly treated, but
dismissed to their farms between the Apennines and the Adriatic. Ravenna
was again an Imperial city, and destined to remain so for two centuries.
Witigis, with his wife and children, were carried captives to
Constantinople where, before many years were over, the dethroned monarch
died. His widow, Matasuentha, was soon remarried to Germanus, the nephew
of Justinian, and thus the granddaughter of Theodoric obtained that
position as a great lady of Byzantium which was far more gratifying to
her taste than the rude royalty of Ravenna.

There is one more personage whose subsequent fortunes must be briefly
glanced at here. Cassiodorus, the minister of Theodoric and
Amalasuentha, remained, as we regret to find, in the service of
Theodahad when sole king and composed his stilted sentences at the
bidding of Amalasuentha's murderer. Witigis also employed him to write
his address to his subjects on ascending the throne. He does not seem to
have taken any part in the siege of Rome, and before the tide of war
rolled back upon Ravenna, he had withdrawn from public affairs. He
retired to his native town, Squillace, high up on the Calabrian hills,
and there founded a monastery and a hermitage in the superintendence of
which his happy years glided on till he died, having nearly completed a
century of life. His was one of the first and greatest of the literary
monasteries which, by perpetuating copies of the Scriptures, and the
Greek and Roman classics, have conferred so great a boon on posterity.
When Ceolfrid, the Abbot of Jarrow, would offer to the Holy Father at
Rome a most priceless gift, he sent the far-famed Codex Amiatinus, a
copy of the Vulgate, made by a disciple of Cassiodorus, if not by
Cassiodorus himself.

[Illustration: GOLDEN SOLIDUS. (JUSTIN I. AND JUSTINIAN)]

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XVII.

TOTILA.

Misgovernment of Italy by Justinian's officers--The Gothic cause
revives--Accession of Ildibad--Of Eraric--Of Totila--Totila's character
and policy--His victorious progress--Belisarius sent again to Italy to
oppose him--Siege and capture of Rome by the Goths--The fortifications
of the City dismantled--Belisarius reoccupies it and Totila besieges it
in vain--General success of the Gothic arms--Belisarius returns to
Constantinople--His later fortunes--Never reduced to beggary.

With the fall of Ravenna, and the captivity of King Witigis, it seemed
as if the chapter of Ostrogothic dominion in Italy was ended. In fact,
however, the war was prolonged for a further period of thirteen years, a
time glorious for the Goths, disgraceful for the Empire, full of
lamentation and woe for the unhappy country which was to be the prize of
victory.

The departure of Belisarius, summoned to the East by his master in order
to conduct another Persian war, left the newly won provinces on an in
cline sloping downwards to anarchy. Of all the generals who remained
behind, brave and capable men as some of them were, there was none who
possessed the unquestioned ascendancy of Belisarius, either in genius or
character. Each thought himself as good as the others: there was no
subordination, no hearty co-operation towards a common end, but instead
of these necessary conditions of success there was an eager emulation in
the race towards wealth, and in this ignoble contest the unhappy
"Roman", the Italian landholder, for whose sake, nominally, the Gothic
war was undertaken, found himself pillaged and trampled upon as he had
never been by the most brutal of the barbarians.

Nor were the military officers the only offenders. A swarm of civil
servants flew westwards from Byzantium and lighted on the unhappy
country. Their duty was to extort money by any and all means for their
master, their pleasure to accumulate fortunes for themselves; but
whether the _logothete_ plundered for the Emperor or for himself, the
Italian tax-payer equally had the life-blood sucked from his veins. Even
the soldiers by whom the marvellous victories of the last five years had
been won, found themselves at the mercy of this hateful bureaucracy;
arrears of pay left undischarged, fines inflicted, everything done to
force upon their embittered souls the reflection that they had served a
mean and ungrateful master.

Of all these oppressors of Italy none was more justly abhorred than
Alexander the Logothete. This man, who was placed at the head of the
financial administration, and who seems by virtue of that position to
have been practically supreme in all but military operations, had been
lifted from a very humble sphere to eminence, from poverty to boundless
wealth, but the one justification which he could always offer for his
self-advancement was this, that no one else had been so successful as he
in filling the coffers of his master. The soldiers were, by his
proceedings against them, reduced to a poor, miserable, and despised
remnant. The Roman inhabitants of Italy, especially the nobles, found
that he hunted up with wonderful keenness and assiduity, and enforced
with relentless sternness all the claims--and they were probably not a
few--which the easy-tempered Gothic kings had suffered to lapse. In
their simplicity these nobles may have imagined that they could plead
that they were serving the Emperor by withholding contributions from the
barbarian. Not so, however. Theodoric, now that his dynasty had been
overthrown, became again a legitimate ruler, and Justinian as his heir
would exact to the uttermost his unclaimed rights. The nature of the
grasping logothete was well-known in his own country, and the
Byzantines, using the old Greek weapon of satire against an unpopular
ruler, called him "Alexander the Scissors", declaring that there was no
one so clever as he in clipping the gold coins of the currency without
impairing their roundness.

The result of all these oppressions and this misgovernment was to raise
up in a marvellous manner the Gothic standard from the dust into which
it had fallen. When Belisarius left Italy, only one city still remained
to the Goths, the strong city of Ticinum, which is now known as Pavia,
and which, from its magnificent position at the angle of the Ticino and
the Po, was often in the early Middle Ages the last stronghold to be
surrendered in Northwestern Italy. Here had the Goths chosen one of
their nobles, Ildibad, for their king, but the new king had but one
thousand soldiers under him, and his might well seem a desperate cause.
Before the end of 540, however, the departure of Belisarius, the
wrangling among his successors, the oppressions of Alexander the
Logothete, the disaffection of the ruined soldiery had completely
changed the face of affairs. An army of considerable size, consisting in
great measure of deserters from the Imperial standard, obeyed the orders
of Ildibad; he won a great pitched battle near Treviso over Vitalius,
the best of the Imperial generals, and the whole of Italy north of the
Po again owned the sway of the Gothic king.

Internal feuds delayed for a little time the revival of the strength of
the barbarians. There was strife between Ildibad and the family of the
deposed Witigis, and this strife led to Ildibad's assassination and to
the election of an utterly incapable successor, Eraric the Rugian. But
in the autumn of 541 all these domestic discords were at an end; Eraric
had been slain, and the nephew of Ildibad was the universally recognised
king of the Ostrogoths. This man, who was destined to reign for eleven
years, twice to stand as conqueror within the walls of Rome, to bring
back almost the whole of Italy under the dominion of his people, to be
in a scarcely lower degree than Theodoric himself the hero and champion
of the Ostrogothic race, was the young and gallant Totila.[149]

[Footnote 149: This is the form of the name which was known to the Greek
writers, and which is now irrevocably accepted by history. It is clear,
however, from his coins that the new king called himself Baduila, and we
cannot certainly say that he ever accepted the other designation.]

With true statesmanlike instinct the new king perceived that the cause
of the past failure of the Goths lay in the alienated affections of the
people of Italy. The greater misgovernment of the Emperor's servants,
the coldly calculating rapacity of Alexander the Scissors, and the
arrogant injustice of the generals, terrible only to the weak, had given
him a chance of winning back the love of the Italian people and of
restoring that happy state of things which prevailed after the downfall
of Odovacar, when all classes, nobles and peasants, Goths and Romans,
joined in welcoming Theodoric as their king. Totila therefore kept a
strong hand upon his soldiers, sternly repressed all plundering and
outrage, and insisted on the peasants being paid for all the stores
which the army needed on its march. One day a Roman inhabitant of
Calabria came before him to complain of one of the king's life-guardsmen
who had committed an outrage upon his daughter. The guardsman, not
denying the charge, was at once put in ward. Then the most influential
nobles assembled at the king's tent, and besought him not to punish a
brave and capable soldier for such an offence. Totila replied that he
mourned as much as they could do over the necessity of taking away the
life of one of his countrymen, but that the common good, the safety of
the nation, required this sacrifice. At the outset of the war they had
all the wealth of Italy and countless brave hearts at their disposal,
but all these advantages had availed them nothing because they had an
unjust king, Theodahad, at their head. Now the Divine favour on their
righteous cause seemed to be giving them the victory, but only by a
continuance in righteous deeds could they hope to secure it. With these
words he won over even the interceding Goths to his opinion. The
guardsman was sentenced to death, and his goods were confiscated for the
benefit of the maiden whom he had wronged.

At the same time that Totila showed himself thus gentle and just towards
the Roman inhabitants, he skilfully conducted the war so as to wound the
Empire in its tenderest part--finance. Justinian's aim, in Italy as in
Africa, was to make the newly annexed territory pay its own expenses and
hand over a good balance to the Imperial treasury. It was for this
purpose that the logothetes had been let loose upon Italy--that the
provincials had been maddened by the extortions of the tax-gatherer,
that the soldiers had been driven to mutiny and defection. Now with his
loyal and well disciplined troops, Totila moved over the country from
the Alps to Calabria, quietly collecting the taxes claimed by the
Emperor and the rents due to the refugee landlords, and in this way,
without oppressing the people, weakened the Imperial government and put
himself in a position to pay liberally for the commissariat of his army.
Thus the difficulties of the Imperial treasury increased. Justinian
became more and more unwilling to loosen his purse-strings for the sake
of a province which showed an ever-dwindling return. The pay of the
soldiers got more and more hopelessly into arrear. They deserted in
increasing numbers to the standard of the brave and generous young king
of the Goths. Hence, it came to pass, that in the spring of 544, when
Totila had been only for two and a half years king, he had gained two
pitched battles by land and one by sea, had taken Naples and Beneventum,
could march freely from one end of Italy to the other, and in fact, with
the exception of Ravenna, Rome, and a few other strongholds, had won
back from the Empire the whole of that Italy which had been acquired
with so much toil and so much bloodshed.

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