ith
the ambassador, she assured him that she was ready to fulfil her compact
and to make arrangements for the transfer to the Emperor of the whole of
Italy.

When the two sets of ambassadors, civil and ecclesiastical, returned to
Constantinople the Emperor perceived that here were two negotiations to
be carried on of the most delicate kind and requiring the presence of a
master of diplomacy. He accordingly despatched to Ravenna a rhetorician
named Peter, a man of considerable intellectual endowments--he was a
historian as well as an orator--and one who had, eighteen years before,
held the high office of consul. But it was apparently winter before
Peter started on his journey, and when he arrived at Aulon (now Valona),
just opposite Brindisi, he heard such startling tidings as to the events
which had occurred on the Italian side of the Adriatic, that he waited
there and asked for further instructions from his master as to the
course which he was to pursue in the existing position of affairs. (2nd
Oct., 534.)

First of all came the death of the unhappy lad, Athalaric, in his
eighteenth year, the victim of unwise strictness, followed by unwise
licence, and of the barbarian's passion for swinish and sensual
pleasures. When her son was dead, Amalasuentha, who had an instinctive
feeling that the Goths would never submit to undisguised female
sovereignty, took a strange and desperate resolution. She sent for
Theodahad, now the only surviving male of the stock of Theodoric, and,
fashioning her lips to a smile, began to apologise for the humiliating
sentence which had issued against him from the King's Court. "She had
known all along", she said, "that her boy would die, and as he,
Theodahad, would then be the one hope of Theodoric's line, she had
wished to abate his unpopularity and set him straight with his future
subjects by strictly enforcing their rights against him. Now all that
was over: his record was clear and she was ready to invite him to become
the partner of her throne;[143] but he must first swear the most solemn
oaths that he would be satisfied with the name of royalty and that the
actual power should remain, as it had done for nine years, in the hands
of Amalasuentha".

[Footnote 143: As colleague, not as husband; Theodahad's wife, Gudelina,
was still living when he ascended the throne.]

Theodahad cheerfully swore tremendous oaths to the observance of this
compact. Proclamations in the name of the two new so