itual power of the Primacy
was the spring of all action. Not only such new buildings as arose were
churches and the work of the Popes; St. Gregory also fed the city from the
patrimonium of the church which he administered. Rome had been made by her
empire, which the political wisdom and valour of her citizens had formed
through so many centuries. When at length the wandering of the nations had
broken up that empire, and the northern soldiers whom the emperors,
specially from Constantine onwards, had enrolled in her armies and taken
for their ministers and generals, followed the example of Alaric and
Ataulph, and assumed the rule for themselves, the situation of Rome offered
it no protection. The emperor who, at the beginning of the fifth century,
took refuge from Alaric in Ravenna was followed a century later by the
Gothic king, whose body, still reposing in his splendid tomb at Ravenna,
was a memorial that this fortress had been the centre of his power.
Theodorick was succeeded by the exarch, the permanent representative of an
absent lord. We are following the fortunes of Rome in the 300 years from
Genseric to Astolphus. In the second and third of these three centuries
Rome would have ceased to exist, but for the imperishable life which did
not come from her but was stored up in her. That life was the _form_ of her
new body; otherwise it would have been a carcase lying prostrate in the
dust of mouldering theatres and desolated baths. Their patriarchs saved
neither Antioch nor Alexandria; but the Papacy not only saved Rome, but
created her anew.

Out of such a Rome St. Gregory poured forth his sorrows to the empress
Constantine, wife of Mauritius: "It is now seven-and-twenty years since we
have been living in this city among the swords of the Lombards".[187] He
was writing in the year 595, and he reckons from the descent of Alboin in
568. "What the sums called for from the Church in these years day by day
to live at all have been I cannot express. I may say in a word that as your
Majesties have, with the first army of Italy at Ravenna, a chancellor of
the exchequer who supplies daily wants, so in this city for the like
purpose I am such a person. And yet this same church which at one and the
same time is at such endless expense for the clergy, the monasteries, the
poor, the people, and moreover for the Lombards, is pressed also by the
affliction of all the churches, which groan over the pride of this one man,
yet do not