b, however, will be best told when his reign is ended.
As for the Palace, which once occupied a large space in the eastern
quarter of the city, we have seen that there is a representation of it
in mosaic on the walls of S. Apollinare Dentro. Closely adjoining that
church, and facing the modern Corso Garibaldi, is a wall about five and
twenty feet high, built of square brick-tiles, which has in its upper
storey one large and six small arched recesses, the arches resting on
columns. Only the front is ancient--it is admitted that the building
behind it is modern. Low down in the wall, so low that the citizens of
Ravenna, in passing, brush it with their sleeves, is a bath-shaped
vessel of porphyry, which in the days of archaeological ignorance used
to be shown to strangers as "the coffin of Theodoric", but the fact is
that its history and its purpose are entirely unknown.

This shell of a building is called in the Ravenna Guide-books "the
Palace of Theodoric". Experts are not yet agreed on the question whether
its architectural features justify us in referring it to the sixth
century, though all agree that it does not belong to a much later
age.[123] It does not agree with the representation of the _Palatium_ in
the Church of S. Apollinare Dentro, and if it have anything whatever to
do with it, it is probably not the main front, nor even any very
important feature of the spacious palace, which, as we are told by the
local historians,[124] and learn from inscriptions, was surrounded with
porticoes, adorned with the most precious mosaics, divided into several
_triclinia_, surmounted by a tower which was considered one of the most
magnificent of the king's buildings, and surrounded with pleasant and
fruitful gardens, planted on ground which had been reclaimed from the
morass.[125] But practically almost all the monuments of the
Ostrogothic hero except his tomb and the three churches already
described, have vanished from Ravenna. Would that we could have seen the
great mosaic which once adorned the pediment of his palace. There
Theodoric stood, clad in mail, with spear and shield. On his left was a
female figure representing the City of Rome, also with a spear in her
hand and her head armed with a helmet, while towards his right Ravenna
seemed speeding with one foot on the land and the other on the sea. How
this great mosaic perished is not made clear to us. But there was also
an equestrian statue of Theodoric raised on a pyrami