his master in order
to conduct another Persian war, left the newly won provinces on an in
cline sloping downwards to anarchy. Of all the generals who remained
behind, brave and capable men as some of them were, there was none who
possessed the unquestioned ascendancy of Belisarius, either in genius or
character. Each thought himself as good as the others: there was no
subordination, no hearty co-operation towards a common end, but instead
of these necessary conditions of success there was an eager emulation in
the race towards wealth, and in this ignoble contest the unhappy
"Roman", the Italian landholder, for whose sake, nominally, the Gothic
war was undertaken, found himself pillaged and trampled upon as he had
never been by the most brutal of the barbarians.

Nor were the military officers the only offenders. A swarm of civil
servants flew westwards from Byzantium and lighted on the unhappy
country. Their duty was to extort money by any and all means for their
master, their pleasure to accumulate fortunes for themselves; but
whether the _logothete_ plundered for the Emperor or for himself, the
Italian tax-payer equally had the life-blood sucked from his veins. Even
the soldiers by whom the marvellous victories of the last five years had
been won, found themselves at the mercy of this hateful bureaucracy;
arrears of pay left undischarged, fines inflicted, everything done to
force upon their embittered souls the reflection that they had served a
mean and ungrateful master.

Of all these oppressors of Italy none was more justly abhorred than
Alexander the Logothete. This man, who was placed at the head of the
financial administration, and who seems by virtue of that position to
have been practically supreme in all but military operations, had been
lifted from a very humble sphere to eminence, from poverty to boundless
wealth, but the one justification which he could always offer for his
self-advancement was this, that no one else had been so successful as he
in filling the coffers of his master. The soldiers were, by his
proceedings against them, reduced to a poor, miserable, and despised
remnant. The Roman inhabitants of Italy, especially the nobles, found
that he hunted up with wonderful keenness and assiduity, and enforced
with relentless sternness all the claims--and they were probably not a
few--which the easy-tempered Gothic kings had suffered to lapse. In
their simplicity these nobles may have imagined that they