hus, the
father-in-law of Boethius, and hurled by them into the fiery crater of
the volcano.

Agnellus, of Ravenna, who records that the body of Theodoric was no
longer in the great mausoleum, tells us that as it seems to him it was
cast forth out of that sepulchre. A later suggestion would lead us to
suppose that this was done by the monks of a neighbouring monastery,
who are said to have cast the body in its golden armour into the
Canale Corsini close by[1]. A few pieces of a golden cuirass
discovered there and now in the museum of Ravenna, seem to confirm
this story, which certainly is not unreasonable though of course it is
the merest conjecture. It is possible that the body of Theodoric did
not rest longer in its tomb than the Gothic power remained in Italy.
For already within a year of the death of Theodoric the new saviour
had appeared. Once more a great man sat upon the throne of the empire,
in whose mind and in whose will was set the dream of the reconquest,
of the re-establishment of the empire through the West, of the
promulgation of the great code by which the new Europe was to realise
itself. Justinian reigned in the New Rome upon the Bosphorus.

[Footnote 1: There is apparently no foundation for the assertion of
Fra Salimbene, the thirteenth-century chronicler of Parma (_Cronica_,
ed Holder-Egger, pp 209-210), that it was S. Gregory the Great himself
who ordered the body of Theodoric to be cast forth from its tomb. Cf.
E.G. Gardner _The Dialogues of S. Gregory_ (1911), p 273]

VII

THE RECONQUEST

VITIGES, BELISARIUS, TOTILA, NARSES

The failure of Theodoric, the failure of barbarism, of Arianism that
is, for barbarism and civilisation were now for all intents and
purposes mere synonyms for heresy and Catholicism, was probably fully
appreciated by the Gothic king, who was, nevertheless, incapable of
mastering his fate. The great lady who succeeded to his power in Italy
as the guardian of her son, his heir, Athalaric, was certainly as
fully aware as Theodoric may have been of the cause of that failure,
and she made the attempt, which he had not wished or dared to make, to
save the kingdom. The value of her heroic effort, which, for all its
courage, utterly failed, lies for us in the confirmation it gives to
our analysis of the causes of the Gothic failure to establish an
enduring government in the West.

That Amalasuntha wished to become a Catholic is probably true enough;
it is certain th