could plead
that they were serving the Emperor by withholding contributions from the
barbarian. Not so, however. Theodoric, now that his dynasty had been
overthrown, became again a legitimate ruler, and Justinian as his heir
would exact to the uttermost his unclaimed rights. The nature of the
grasping logothete was well-known in his own country, and the
Byzantines, using the old Greek weapon of satire against an unpopular
ruler, called him "Alexander the Scissors", declaring that there was no
one so clever as he in clipping the gold coins of the currency without
impairing their roundness.

The result of all these oppressions and this misgovernment was to raise
up in a marvellous manner the Gothic standard from the dust into which
it had fallen. When Belisarius left Italy, only one city still remained
to the Goths, the strong city of Ticinum, which is now known as Pavia,
and which, from its magnificent position at the angle of the Ticino and
the Po, was often in the early Middle Ages the last stronghold to be
surrendered in Northwestern Italy. Here had the Goths chosen one of
their nobles, Ildibad, for their king, but the new king had but one
thousand soldiers under him, and his might well seem a desperate cause.
Before the end of 540, however, the departure of Belisarius, the
wrangling among his successors, the oppressions of Alexander the
Logothete, the disaffection of the ruined soldiery had completely
changed the face of affairs. An army of considerable size, consisting in
great measure of deserters from the Imperial standard, obeyed the orders
of Ildibad; he won a great pitched battle near Treviso over Vitalius,
the best of the Imperial generals, and the whole of Italy north of the
Po again owned the sway of the Gothic king.

Internal feuds delayed for a little time the revival of the strength of
the barbarians. There was strife between Ildibad and the family of the
deposed Witigis, and this strife led to Ildibad's assassination and to
the election of an utterly incapable successor, Eraric the Rugian. But
in the autumn of 541 all these domestic discords were at an end; Eraric
had been slain, and the nephew of Ildibad was the universally recognised
king of the Ostrogoths. This man, who was destined to reign for eleven
years, twice to stand as conqueror within the walls of Rome, to bring
back almost the whole of Italy under the dominion of his people, to be
in a scarcely lower degree than Theodoric himself the hero