f
Italian rather than Barbaric extraction.]

[Footnote 56: Quia incerti sumus de judicio Dei, et multos audivimus per
pugnam sine justa causa suam causam perdere. Sed propter consuetudinom
gentem nostram Langobardorum legem impiam vetare non possumus. See p.
74, No. 65, of the Laws of Luitprand, promulgated A.D. 724.]

[Footnote 57: Read the history of Paul Warnefrid; particularly l. iii.
c. 16. Baronius rejects the praise, which appears to contradict the
invectives of Pope Gregory the Great; but Muratori (Annali d' Italia,
tom. v. p. 217) presumes to insinuate that the saint may have magnified
the faults of Arians and enemies.]

Amidst the arms of the Lombards, and under the despotism of the Greeks,
we again inquire into the fate of Rome, [58] which had reached, about
the close of the sixth century, the lowest period of her depression.
By the removal of the seat of empire, and the successive loss of the
provinces, the sources of public and private opulence were exhausted:
the lofty tree, under whose shade the nations of the earth had reposed,
was deprived of its leaves and branches, and the sapless trunk was left
to wither on the ground. The ministers of command, and the messengers of
victory, no longer met on the Appian or Flaminian way; and the hostile
approach of the Lombards was often felt, and continually feared. The
inhabitants of a potent and peaceful capital, who visit without an
anxious thought the garden of the adjacent country, will faintly picture
in their fancy the distress of the Romans: they shut or opened their
gates with a trembling hand, beheld from the walls the flames of their
houses, and heard the lamentations of their brethren, who were coupled
together like dogs, and dragged away into distant slavery beyond the sea
and the mountains. Such incessant alarms must annihilate the pleasures
and interrupt the labors of a rural life; and the Campagna of Rome was
speedily reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness, in which the land
is barren, the waters are impure, and the air is infectious. Curiosity
and ambition no longer attracted the nations to the capital of the
world: but, if chance or necessity directed the steps of a wandering
stranger, he contemplated with horror the vacancy and solitude of the
city, and might be tempted to ask, Where is the senate, and where are
the people? In a season of excessive rains, the Tyber swelled above its
banks, and rushed with irresistible violence into the valle