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To the Pope the bishops, subject in each city to barbarian insolence, cling as their one unfailing support. Without him they would be Gothic, or Vandal, or Burgundian, or Sueve, or Aleman, or Turciling, with him and in him they are Catholic. Let me express, in the words of another, what is contained in this fact.

They were shut up in their palaces, within the walls of Ravenna, and were unable to arrest the ruin. Again, during this period, was Rome sacked by the Vandals. The great men of the period were Theodoricking of the Ostrogoths, who ruled both sides of the Alps, and supported the crumbling empire, and Count Ricimer, a Sueve, and generalissimo of the Roman armies.

But at the bidding of Ricimer, who had become the most powerful general, the senate deposed Avitus; he fled to his country Auvergne, and was killed on the way in September, 456. All power now lay in the hands of Ricimer. He was by his father a Sueve; by his mother, grandson of Wallia, the Visigothic king at Toulouse.

He was in turn deposed by Count Ricimer, a Sueve, and generalissimo of the Roman armies, and Majorian, whom Ricimer thought to make a tool, was placed in his stead.

For here it was not a crowd of heresies which surrounded her, but the secular power at Rome, at Carthage, at Toulouse and Bordeaux, at Seville and Barcelona, spoke Arian. Who was to recover the Goth, the Vandal, the Burgundian, the Sueve, the Aleman, the Ruge, from that fatal error? Moreover, her bounds had receded.

An expedition sent against him at the instigation of Ricimer, the Sueve, by the Eastern emperor Leo, was ill commanded by Basiliscus, and failed. But after the Vandal king died , his kingdom was torn by civil and religious disorders, and by the revolts of the Moors, and, fifty-seven years after the death of its founder, was conquered by the general of the Eastern Empire.

In his one life, Visigoth and Ostrogoth, Vandal and Herule, Frank and Aleman, Burgundian and Sueve, instead of serving Rome as soldiers in the hand of one greater than themselves, had become masters of a perishing world's mistress; and the successor of Peter was no longer safe in the Roman palace which the first of Christian emperors had bestowed upon the Church's chief bishop.

Avitus was a good man, but the Romans grew weary of him, and in the year 457 they engaged Ricimer, a chief of the Teutonic tribe called Suevi, to drive him out, when he went back to Gaul, where he had a beautiful palace and garden. After ten months Ricimer chose another Sueve to be Emperor. He had been a captain under Aëtius, and had the Roman name of Majorian.

Anthemius, Olybrius, Orestes, and the other half-caste Romans with Greek names who become quasi-emperors and get murdered; Ricimer the Sueve, the king-maker and king-murderer; even good Majorian, who as puppet Emperor set up by Ricimer, tries to pass a few respectable laws, and is only murdered all the sooner. None of these need detain us.