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The mailed warriors standing around it, so motionless, so solemn, filled him with a frozen, nameless fear. He had never a doubt that they were the dead arisen. The foremost that met his eyes were Theodoric and Arthur; the next, grim Rudolf, father of a dynasty of emperors.
He went back to the Tribocci, that German nation settled about Strasbourg, remembering Clovis, Chilperic, Theodoric, Dagobert, the furious struggle between Brunehaut, Queen of Austrasia, and Frédégonde, queen of Chilperic of France, and many heroes and heroines besides. All these fierce personages passed in review before his eyes.
The beginning and the end of the disaster were successful raids on Italy. After Theodoric had vanquished Odoacer, it was clear that the western provinces would not again acknowledge an Emperor acclaimed at Ravenna; although the chance remained that they might be reconquered and reorganised from Constantinople. From first to last Italy was the key to the West.
Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, who reigned in Italy, had labored to maintain the tranquillity of Gaul; and he assumed, or affected, for that purpose, the impartial character of a mediator. But the sagacious monarch dreaded the rising empire of Clovis, and he was firmly engaged to support the national and religious cause of the Goths.
Be this as it may; happening to pass a few days at Terracina, in the course of his researches, he one day mounted the rocky cliffs which overhang the town, to visit the castle of Theodoric. He was groping about these ruins, towards the hour of sunset, buried in his reflections, his wits no doubt wool-gathering among the Goths and Romans, when he heard footsteps behind him.
Thus then Theodoric was in name a tyrant, in fact a true king, not inferior to the best of his predecessors, and his popularity increased greatly both with the Goths and the Italians, and this was contrary to the ordinary course of human affairs. For generally as different classes in the state want different things, the government which pleases one party incurs the hatred of the other.
Archaeologists call them the aqueducts of Seranus, the Roman camp of Holderlock, or vestiges of Theodoric, according to their fantasy. The only thing about these ruins which could be considered remarkable is a stairway to a cistern cut in the rock.
Secret and effectual orders had been previously despatched; the faithless and rapacious mercenaries, at the same moment, and without resistance, were universally massacred; and the royalty of Theodoric was proclaimed by the Goths, with the tardy, reluctant, ambiguous consent of the emperor of the East.
Milizia says of Theodoric, "Is this the language of a Gothic barbarian, the destroyer of good taste? Pericles, Alexander, Adrian, or one of the Medici could not have reasoned better." And again, "Can these Goths be the inventors of that architecture vulgarly called Gothic? and are these the barbarians said to have been the destroyers of the beautiful monuments of antiquity?
Twelve miles east of his rock, beyond the range of low Apennine, shone the quiet lake, the Loch Leven of Italy, from whose island the daughter of Theodoric needed not to escape Fate seeking her there; and in a little chapel on its shore a Bohemian priest, infected with Northern infidelity, was brought back to his allegiance by seeing the blood drop from the wafer in his hand.
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