e of
Anthemius; and the more effectual support of a Gothic army enabled him
to prolong his reign, and the public distress, by a resistance of three
months, which produced the concomitant evils of famine and pestilence.
At length Ricimer made a furious assault on the bridge of Hadrian, or
St. Angelo; and the narrow pass was defended with equal valor by the
Goths, till the death of Gilimer, their leader. The victorious troops,
breaking down every barrier, rushed with irresistible violence into
the heart of the city, and Rome (if we may use the language of a
contemporary pope) was subverted by the civil fury of Anthemius
and Ricimer. [109] The unfortunate Anthemius was dragged from his
concealment, and inhumanly massacred by the command of his son-in-law;
who thus added a third, or perhaps a fourth, emperor to the number of
his victims. The soldiers, who united the rage of factious citizens with
the savage manners of Barbarians, were indulged, without control, in
the license of rapine and murder: the crowd of slaves and plebeians,
who were unconcerned in the event, could only gain by the indiscriminate
pillage; and the face of the city exhibited the strange contrast of
stern cruelty and dissolute intemperance. [110] Forty days after this
calamitous event, the subject, not of glory, but of guilt, Italy was
delivered, by a painful disease, from the tyrant Ricimer, who bequeathed
the command of his army to his nephew Gundobald, one of the princes of
the Burgundians. In the same year all the principal actors in this great
revolution were removed from the stage; and the whole reign of Olybrius,
whose death does not betray any symptoms of violence, is included within
the term of seven months. He left one daughter, the offspring of
his marriage with Placidia; and the family of the great Theodosius,
transplanted from Spain to Constantinople, was propagated in the female
line as far as the eighth generation. [111]

[Footnote 108: Of the fourteen regions, or quarters, into which Rome was
divided by Augustus, only one, the Janiculum, lay on the Tuscan side
of the Tyber. But, in the fifth century, the Vatican suburb formed a
considerable city; and in the ecclesiastical distribution, which had
been recently made by Simplicius, the reigning pope, two of the seven
regions, or parishes of Rome, depended on the church of St. Peter. See
Nardini Roma Antica, p. 67. It would require a tedious dissertation
to mark the circumstances, in which I