ps
the most memorable of all that "Roma AEterna" has seen and has groaned
under, as part of the penalty of her undying greatness, it will be
impossible here to give even a meagre outline. The events of those
wonderful 374 days are chronicled almost with the graphic minuteness of
a Kinglake by a man whom we may call the literary assessor of
Belisarius, the rhetorician Procopius of Caesarea. One or two incidents
of the siege may be briefly noticed here, and then we must hasten
onwards to its close.

Owing to the vast size of Rome not even the host of the Goths was able
to accomplish a complete blockade of the City. They formed seven camps
six on the left and one on the right bank of the Tiber, and they
obstructed eight out of its four teen gates; but while the east and
south sides of the City were thus pretty effectually blockaded, there
were large spaces in the western circuit by which it was tolerably easy
for Belisarius to receive reinforcements, to bring in occasional convoys
of provisions, and to send away non-combatants who diminished his
resisting power. One of the hardest blows dealt by the barbarians was
their severance of the eleven great aqueducts from which Rome received
its water. This privation of an element so essential to the health and
comfort of the Roman under the Empire (who resorted to the bath as a
modern Italian resorts to the cafe or the music hall), was felt as a
terrible blow by all classes, and wrought a lasting change, and not a
beneficial one, in the habits of the citizens, and in the sanitary
condition of Rome. It also seemed likely to have an injurious effect on
the food supply of the City, since the mills in which corn was ground
for the daily rations of the people were turned by water-power derived
from the Aqueduct of Trajan. Belisarius, however, always fertile in
resource, a man who, had he lived in the nineteenth century, would
assuredly have been a great engineer, contrived to make Father Tiber
grind out the daily supply of flour for his Roman children. He moored
two barges in the narrowest part of the stream, where the current was
the strongest, put his mill-stones on board of them, and hung a
water-wheel between them to turn his mills. These river water-mills
continued to be used on the Tiber all through the Middle Ages, and even
until they were superseded by the introduction of steam.

The Goths did not resign themselves to the slow languors of a blockade
till they had made one vi