ne opinion with regard
to the Gothic kingdom. It was lost. The flower of the Goths had fallen
at Caprae and Taginae. Totila had placed there five-and-twenty thousand
men; not even a thousand had escaped. The two wings of the army had
also suffered great loss; and so King Teja commenced his retreat to the
south with scarcely twenty thousand men.

He was urged to the greatest speed by the calls for help sent by the
little army under Duke Guntharis and Earl Grippa, who were hard pressed
by the greater force of the Byzantines under the command of Armatus and
Dorotheos, who had landed between Rome and Neapolis.

And besides this, Teja's retreat was also precipitated because of the
terrible manner in which, when the truce was ended, he was pursued by
Narses.

While the Longobardians and Cethegus pursued the fugitives without
pause, Narses slowly followed with the main army, spreading to the
right and left his two formidable wings, which extended in the
south-west far beyond the Sub-urbicarian Tuscany to the Tyrrhenian sea,
and in the north-east through Picenum to the Ionian Gulf, extinguishing
as they passed from north to south and from west to east, every trace
of the Goths behind them.

This proceeding was considerably facilitated by the now general
desertion of the Gothic cause on the part of the Italians. The
benevolent King, who had once won their sympathies, had been succeeded
by a gloomy hero of terrible reputation. And all who hesitated were
speedily drawn over to the other side, not by inclination to the rule
of Byzantium, but from fear of Narses and of the Emperor's severity,
who threatened all who took the part of the barbarians with death.

The Italians who still served in Teja's army now deserted and hastened
to Narses. It also happened much more frequently than before the battle
of Taginae, that Gothic settlers were betrayed to the Romani by their
Italian neighbours, generally by the _hospes_, who had been obliged to
relinquish a third of his property to the Goths; or, where the Italians
were in the majority, the Goths were either killed, or taken prisoners
and delivered up to the two Byzantine fleets, the "Tyrrhenian" and the
"Ionian," which, sailing along the coasts of those seas, accompanied
the march of the land forces and received all the captured Goths on
board--men, women, and children.

The forts and towns, weakly garrisoned--for Teja had been obliged to
strengthen his small army by lessening the