Ravenna to find Theodoric beside himself with
anger. The barbarian who had perfidiously murdered Odoacer his rival,
and most foully tortured the old philosopher Boethius to death, was
not likely to shrink from any outrage that he thought might serve him,
even though his victim were the pope. Symmachus, the father-in-law of
Boethius, a venerable and a saintly man, was barbarously done to death
and Pope John and his colleagues were thrown into prison in Ravenna,
where the pope died on May 18 of that same year, and one hundred and
four days later was followed to the grave by the unhappy Gothic king.

[Illustration: CAPITAL FROM SANTO SPIRITO]

Theodoric had utterly failed in everything he had attempted. His
Romano-Gothic kingdom proved to be a hopeless chimaera, and this
because he had not been able to understand the forces with which he
had to deal. Nor was he capable of learning from experience. Even
after the death of Pope John he countersigned the death warrant of his
kingdom by an edict, issued with the signature of a Jewish treasury
clerk, that all the Catholic churches of Italy should be handed over
to the Arians. He had scarcely published this amazing document,
however, when he died after three days of pain on August 30, 526, the
very day the revolution was to have taken place.

The Gothic king was buried outside Ravenna upon the north-east and in
the mighty tomb--a truly Roman work--that the Romans, at his orders,
had prepared for him: a marvellous mausoleum of squared stones in two
stories, the lower a decagon, the upper an octagon covered by a vast
dome hewn out of a single block of Istrian marble. There in a porphyry
vase reposed all that was mortal of the great barbarian who failed to
understand what the Roman empire was, but who almost without knowing
it rendered it, as we shall see, so great a service. But the body of
Theodoric did not long remain in the enormous silence of that
sepulchre. Even in the time of Agnellus (ninth century) the body was
no longer in the mausoleum and what had become of it will always
remain a mystery. A weird and awful legend, in keeping with the
tremendous tragedy that was played out in his time and in which he had
filled the main role, relates how a holy hermit upon the island of
Lipari on the day and in the hour of the great king's death saw him,
his hands and feet bound, his garments all disarrayed, dragged up the
mountain of Stromboli by his two victims, pope John and Symmac