ith. The second part of his design was
to accomplish the same double result for Rome and for Italy. He sent
Belisarius, after the victory at Carthage, into Sicily, where Syracuse and
Palermo were taken; and in the summer of 536 the great commander entered
Italy, captured Naples, and advanced towards Rome on the Appian Road. So
the Gothic war began. Theodatus was in Rome. The Gothic army in the Pontine
marshes became aware of his incompetence and his secret treating with
Justinian, deposed him, and elected Vitiges to be their king in his stead,
by whose orders the fugitive was slain in his flight on the Flaminian Road.
But Vitiges hastened to Ravenna, where he espoused the unwilling Matasunta,
daughter of Amalasuntha, granddaughter of Theodorick. Four thousand Goths
alone remained to cover Rome. Belisarius appeared before it. A deputation,
supported by Pope Silverius, brought him the keys of the city. The garrison
was too weak to defend it, and on the 9th December, 536, Belisarius took
possession of Rome, at the head of the imperial troops, who had nothing
Roman in them except the name. It was sixty years since Odoacer had caused
the senate to declare a western emperor needless, and Rome, as to temporal
rule, had fallen, first under the Herule, then under the Goth. The Romans
welcomed Belisarius as a deliverer from the double yoke of the northern
intruder and the Arian heretic.

For however Theodorick recognised, after the fury of the conflict with his
brother-Teuton, the Herule Odoacer, was over, the necessity of ruling with
justice over Goth and Italian, however prosperous as to the maintenance of
peace and internal order the great kingdom stretching from Illyricum to
Southern Gaul had been, whatever support he had given to the maintenance of
Roman law, custom, and institutions, there was not a Roman, from Symmachus
and Boethius in the senate to the meanest inhabitant of Trastevere, who
would not loathe the occupation of Rome and Italy by the Gothic invasion.
The Goths were a people of remarkable courage and extraordinary force of
body. But the feeling with which Italians and, above all, Romans would
regard them as masters of their country and confiscators of its soil, can
only be expressed by what the English would feel if a swarm of Zulus were
to take possession of England. So, when Belisarius entered Rome, the Romans
looked for their being replaced under the direct and lawful government of
one who should be in deed an