the Senate love
their King more fervently than other ranks of the State, in proportion
to the greater benefits which they have received at his hand".

To the Senators, who had witnessed the denunciation of Albinus, and who
had been compelled with anguish of heart to vote the condemnation of
Boethius, this allusion to the great benefits which they had received
from their Gothic sovereign might seem almost like mockery: yet there
can be little doubt that the Senate did hail the accession of Athalaric
with acclamations, and that Amalasuentha's administration of affairs was
popular with the Roman inhabitants of Italy. It might well be so, for
this princess, born under an Italian sky, and accustomed from her
childhood to gaze upon the great works which Rome had constructed for
the embellishment of the peninsula, was no Goth at heart, but
enthusiastically, even unwisely, Roman. In religious matters we are
almost surprised to find that she adhered to the Arian creed of her
father and her husband, but all talk of persecution of the Catholics
ceased, and no more was heard of the enforced cession of their churches
to the Arians. And in everything else but religion the sympathies of the
new ruler were entirely on the side of the subject, not the dominant,
nationality. As it had been said of old that "Captive Greece subdued her
conquerors", so now was it with subject Italy and its Gothic mistress. A
diligent student of Greek as well as of Latin literature, able to
discourse with the ambassadors of Constantinople in well-turned Attic
sentences, or to deliver a stately Latin oration to the messengers of
the Senate, she could also, when the occasion required brevity, wrap
herself in the robe of taciturnity which she inherited from her Teutonic
ancestors, and with few, diplomatically chosen words, make the hearer
feel his immeasurable inferiority to the "Lady of the Kingdoms". A
woman with a mind thus richly stored with the literary treasure of
Greece and Rome was likely to look with impatient scorn on the barren
and barbarous annals of her people. We in whose ears the notes of the
Teutonic minstrelsy of the Middle Ages are still sounding, we who know
that Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe were all one day to arise from beneath
the soil of Germanic literature, can hardly conceive how dreary and
repulsive the national sagas, and even the every-day speech of her
people, would seem in that day to a woman of great intellectual
endowments, nor ho