sent as a hostage for the maintenance of the treaty
made by the emperor Leo I. with his father, and had spent ten years, from
his seventh to his seventeenth year, at Constantinople. Though he scorned
to receive an education in Greek or Roman literature, he studied during
these years, with unusual acuteness, the political and military
circumstances of the empire. Of strong but slender figure, his beautiful
features, blue eyes with dark brows, and abundant locks of long, fair hair,
added to the nobility of his race, pointed him out for a future ruler.[20]

In 475, Theodorich succeeded his father as king of the Ostrogoths in their
provinces of Pannonia and Moesia, which had been ceded by the empire. He
it was who was destined to lead his people to glory and greatness, but also
to their fall, in Italy. Zeno had striven to make him a personal
friend--had made him general, given him pay and rank. Theodorich had not a
little helped Zeno in his struggle for the empire. The Ostrogoth, in 484,
became Roman consul; but he also appeared suddenly in a time of peace
before the gates of Constantinople, in 487, to impress his demands upon
Zeno. Theodorich and his people occupied towards Zeno the same position
which Alaric and his Visigoths had held towards Honorius. Their provinces
were exhausted, and they wanted expansion. Whether it was that Zeno deemed
the Ostrogothic king might be an instrument to terminate the actual
independence of Italy from his empire, or that the neighbourhood of the
Goths, under so powerful a ruler, seemed to him dangerous, or that
Theodorich himself had cast longing eyes upon Italy, Zeno gave a hesitating
approval to the advance of the last great Gothic host to the southwest. The
first had taken this direction under Alaric eighty-eight years before. Now
a sovereign sanction from the senate of Constantinople, called a Pragmatic
sanction, assigned Italy to the Gothic king and his people.

From Novae, Theodorich's capital on the Danube, not far from the present
Bulgarian Nikopolis, this world of wanderers, numbered by a contemporary as
at least 350,000, streamed forth with its endless train of waggons. At the
Isonzo, Italy's frontier, Odoacer, on the 28th August, 489, encountered the
flood, and was worsted, as again at the Adige. Then he took refuge in
Ravenna. The end of a three years' conflict, in which the Gothic host was
encamped in the pine-forest of Ravenna, and where the "Battle of the
Ravens" is commemo