s
of Ravenna, was used in the Middle Ages as the choir of the Church of S.
Maria della Rotonda, and divine service was celebrated in it by the
monks of an adjoining monastery. It is now a "public monument" and there
are few traces left of its ecclesiastical employment. The basement, as
I have seen it, is often filled with water, exuding from the marshy
soil: the upper storey is abandoned to gloom and silence.

Of Theodoric himself, whose body, according to tradition, was once
deposited in a porphyry vase in the upper storey of the mausoleum, there
is now no vestige in the great pile which in his own life-time he raised
as his intended sepulchre. Nor is this any recent spoliation. Agnellus,
Bishop of Ravenna, writing in the days of Charlemagne, says that the
body of Theodoric was not in the mausoleum, and had been, as he thought,
cast forth out of its sepulchre,[138] and the wonderful porphyry vase in
which it had been enclosed placed at the door of the neighbouring
monastery. A recent enquirer[139] has connected these somewhat ambiguous
words of Agnellus with a childish story told by Pope Gregory the Great,
who wrote some seventy years after the death of Theodoric. According to
this story, a holy hermit, who lived in the island of Lipari, on the day
and hour of Theodoric's death saw him, with bound hands and garments
disarranged, dragged up the volcano of Stromboli by his two victims
Symmachus and Pope John, and hurled by them into the fire-vomiting
crater. What more likely, it is suggested, than that the monks of the
adjoining monastery should seize the opportunity of some crisis in the
troubled history of Ravenna to cast out the body of Theodoric from its
resting-place, and so, to the ignorant people, give point to Pope
Gregory's edifying narrative as to the disposal of his soul?

[Footnote 138: "Sed ut mihi videtur, ex sepulcro projectus est, et ipsa
urna, ubi jacuit, ex lapide pirfiretico valde mirabilis ante ipsius
monasterii aditum posita est".]

[Footnote 139: Corrado Ricci, "Della Corazzo d'Oro", in "Cronologio
Ravennate", 1879.]

A discovery, which was made some forty years ago in the neighbourhood of
Ravenna, may possibly throw some light on these mysterious words of
Bishop Agnellus: "As it seems to me, he was cast forth out of his
sepulchre". In May, 1854, the labourers employed in widening the bed of
the Canale Corsini (now the only navigable water-way between Ravenna and
the sea) came, at the depth of a