t part--finance. Justinian's aim, in Italy as in
Africa, was to make the newly annexed territory pay its own expenses and
hand over a good balance to the Imperial treasury. It was for this
purpose that the logothetes had been let loose upon Italy--that the
provincials had been maddened by the extortions of the tax-gatherer,
that the soldiers had been driven to mutiny and defection. Now with his
loyal and well disciplined troops, Totila moved over the country from
the Alps to Calabria, quietly collecting the taxes claimed by the
Emperor and the rents due to the refugee landlords, and in this way,
without oppressing the people, weakened the Imperial government and put
himself in a position to pay liberally for the commissariat of his army.
Thus the difficulties of the Imperial treasury increased. Justinian
became more and more unwilling to loosen his purse-strings for the sake
of a province which showed an ever-dwindling return. The pay of the
soldiers got more and more hopelessly into arrear. They deserted in
increasing numbers to the standard of the brave and generous young king
of the Goths. Hence, it came to pass, that in the spring of 544, when
Totila had been only for two and a half years king, he had gained two
pitched battles by land and one by sea, had taken Naples and Beneventum,
could march freely from one end of Italy to the other, and in fact, with
the exception of Ravenna, Rome, and a few other strongholds, had won
back from the Empire the whole of that Italy which had been acquired
with so much toil and so much bloodshed.

There was, of course, bitter disappointment in the council-chamber of
Justinian at this issue of an enterprise which had seemed at first so
successful. There was but one sentence on all men's lips--"Only
Belisarius can recover Italy", and it was uttered so loudly and so
universally, that the Emperor could not but hear it. But Justinian, ever
since the offer of the Western throne to Belisarius, seems to have
looked upon him with jealousy as a possible rival, and (what was even
more fatal to his interests at court), the Empress Theodora had come to
regard him with dislike and suspicion, partly because of a domestic
quarrel in which she had taken the part of his wife Antonina against
him, and partly because when Justinian was lying plague-stricken and
apparently at the point of death, Belisarius had discussed the question
of the succession to the throne in a manner which the Empress considere