letter,
entreating him to spare the greatest and noblest of cities. He did,
however, throw down a considerable part of the walls, and when he marched
to Lucania against the Greeks, took with him the chief citizens, and made
the rest of the inhabitants migrate to Campania. He left a desert behind
him. If we could trust the exaggerated reports of Greek historians, Rome
remained forty days without inhabitants, tenanted only by beasts.

So ended the second act of the Gothic tragedy.

But as Vitiges had quitted Rome, so Totila deserted it, and in the spring
of 547 it was entered again by Belisarius. In less than a month he restored
as well as he could the part of the walls demolished, called back the
inhabitants lingering in the neighbourhood, and prepared for a new attack.
It was not long in coming. Scarcely had the gaps in the walls been filled
up by stones piled in disorder and the trenches cleared, when the Gothic
king reappeared. Thrice was his assault repulsed; then he gave up the
attempt, broke down the bridges over the Anio behind him, and went to
Tibur, which he took by treachery of the inhabitants, who were at strife
with the Isaurian garrison. Totila massacred the citizens, the bishop, and
the clergy; got possession of the upper course of the Tiber, and cut off
the Romans from Tuscany. But then Belisarius was enabled to give greater
care to repairing the city's defences. The state in which several gates
remain to this day still show his hand. He restored Trajan's aqueduct,
which fed the mills on the right bank. But in the winter of 547 the great
captain was drawn away from Rome to carry on a miserable petty war with
insufficient force in the south of Italy, and was finally recalled to
Constantinople. So ended the third act of Rome's fall.

But Totila hastened from place to place, from victory to victory. After
scouring the South and then Umbria at the beginning of 549, he stood the
third time before Rome. A strong Byzantine garrison in the city had
provided magazines, and the wide spaces within the walls had been sown with
wheat. His first attack failed; but treachery opened to him the Ostian
gate, and its famished defenders soon surrendered the mausoleum of Hadrian.
The conqueror, in this fourth capture of the city, acted mildly. He called
back the yet absent inhabitants, amongst them many of the senators who had
been sent into Campania. How had the nobles of Rome melted away! Vitiges
had ordered those kept in