cupied by our troops and received from the
hands of Pudentius for the Emperor.

One might think the whole Vandal nation existed in its royal family and
a few of the nobles. When Zazo and the nobles about him fell, after the
King vanished, all resistance ceased; it was like a bundle of sticks:
when the string that fastens them is cut, they all fall apart. Since
the day of Trikameron the Barbarians everywhere allow themselves to be
seized like sheep without defence. They are mainly to be found
weaponless in the Catholic basilicas, where, seeking refuge, they
embrace the altars which they have so often dishonored. The men are
just the same as the women and children.

Really, if their brothers in Italy and Spain, and their cousins, the
Franks, Alemanni, or whatever else the Barbarians in Gaul and Germany
are called, were as highly educated as these Vandal writers of Greek
and Latin poetry, the Imperator Justinianus could speedily recover the
whole West through Belisarius and Narses. But I fear the Vandals alone
have attained such a degree of culture.

CHAPTER XVIII

More news! Perhaps another war and conquest close at hand.

Am I really, O Cethegus, to be permitted speedily to seek you in your
Italy and help to free Rome by the aid of Huns and Herulians? Your
tyrants, the Ostrogoths, have made the bridge for us into this country;
it was their Sicily. Justinian's gratitude is swift-winged. By the
Emperor's command--Belisarius received it sealed, directly after our
departure from Constantinople, with the direction not to open the
papyrus until after the destruction of the Vandal kingdom--our General
has already demanded from the court of Ravenna the cession of a
considerable portion of Sicily,--Lilybaeum, the important promontory and
castle, and all that the Vandals had ever possessed in that island. For
the Vandal kingdom had now lapsed to Constantinople, so everything that
had ever belonged to that domain also fell to it. A man is not Emperor
of the Pandects for nothing.

True, it seems to me somewhat brutal to set their limitless stupidity
before the eyes of the deluded people quite so speedily. Though of
course it is the acme of statecraft to defeat the first with the help
of the second, and then, in token of gratitude, overthrow the second.
Yet it is long since it was done so openly. Belisarius is obliged to
threaten war at once, not only upon Sicily, but all Italy, Ravenna, and
Ro