anus 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,