flower of his
host. Thirty thousand are said to have fallen, that being the number which
Procopius records as derived from Gothic officers themselves; and greater,
he says, was the number of wounded, when the deadly bolts from the machines
of Belisarius mowed down their encumbered masses in flight.

The result of this great conflict was to weaken the Goths, to encourage the
Romans, to make Belisarius confident of success. The siege lasted after
this nearly a year. The extremity of hunger and misery was endured in the
city. The supply of water was reduced to the cisterns and springs and the
river. Vitiges at length occupied Porto, and cut off Rome from the sea. But
the Goths also suffered terribly both from famine and from summer heat. The
end of all was that, after a siege of a year and nine days, in which the
Goths had fought 69 battles, Vitiges, in March, 538, drew off his
diminished troops. One morning, Belisarius, from his Pincian palace, saw
one-half of the remaining Goths on the other side of the Milvian bridge,
and he forthwith ordered a sally upon their rear-guard. Vitiges left
perhaps the half of his great host mouldering in the wasted, pestilent,
deserted Campagna. He left also a city impoverished in numbers, full of
sickness and misery. He had destroyed all the villas and dwellings of the
Campagna; the churches of the Martyrs lay in heaps of ruins: from the Porta
Salara to the Porta Nomentana hardly one stone upon another seems to have
remained. Also Vitiges had ordered the senators whom he had left at Ravenna
to be put to death. Only, during this siege, the basilicas of Rome's patron
saints, which lay outside the walls, received no damage and were respected
by the Goths.[135]

After this the storm of war drew off to the North. It continued with
changing fortune in the provinces of Tuscany, Aemilia, the plain of the Po,
the coasts of the Hadriatic. On the one side Franks and Burgundians took
part; on the other side the soldiers of Belisarius were made up of all
races from the East: not without skill in fight, but without discipline,
under rival and quarrelling commanders. They pressed grievously on the land
which they were sent to deliver. But the Goths grew weaker: they never
recovered their losses before Rome. At last Belisarius got hold of
Ravenna--not by capture, but after long negotiations, on both sides
deceptive. Belisarius made the Goths believe that he would set himself at
their head, and construct