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Gregory seventy years afterwards, who records in his Dialogues a vision seen at Lipari on the day of the king's death, in which the Pope and Symmachus were carrying him between them with his hands tied, to plunge him in the crater of the volcano. Several writers have termed Theodorich a premature Charlemagne.
In the meantime, Theodorich the Ostrogoth, son of Theodemir, chief of the Amal family, had been 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.
The first tenant of that throne was Avitus, a nobleman from Gaul, named by the influence of the Visigothic king, Theodorich of Toulouse. He assumed the purple at Arles, on the 10th July, 455.
It was upon Zeno's recovery of the throne that he received back from the Roman senate the sovereign insignia, and conferred the title of Roman Patricius on Odoacer. In the following years Zeno had much to do with Theodorich. He gave up to him part of Dacia and Moesia, and finally he made, in 484, the king of the Ostrogoths Roman consul, as a reward for the services to the Roman emperor.
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 commemorated in the old German hero-saga, was that, in the winter of 493, the last refuge of Odoacer opened its gates. Odoacer was promised his life, but the compact was broken soon. His people proclaimed Theodorich their king.
Theodorich's principle was with firm and impartial hand to deal evenly between the two. But the military service was reserved to the Goths alone. Natives were forbidden even to carry knives. The Goths were to maintain public security: the Romans to multiply in the arts of peace. But even Theodorich could not fuse these nations together.
He is the hero of the famous "Hildebrandslied". "Wolfhart" is Hildebrand's nephew. In the "Thidreksaga" he falls in the battle of Gronsport. "Amelung land" is the name under which Dietrich's land appears. Theodorich, the king of the East Goths, belonged to the race of the Amali. "Feast". That Kriemhild kissed only Giselher, who was innocent of Siegfried's death, aroused Hagen's suspicions.
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.
It seems to me that, as Genseric was the worst and most ignoble of the Teutonic Arian princes, Theodorich was the best. The one showed how cruel and remorseless an Arian persecutor was, the other how fair a ruler and generous a protector the nature of things would allow an Arian monarch to be.
But, afterwards, Theodorich ravaged Zeno's empire up to the walls of Constantinople, and was bought off by a commission to march into Italy and to dethrone Odoacer. Zeno continued an inglorious and unhappy reign, full of murders, deceits, and crimes of every sort, for fourteen years after his restoration, and died in 491. Let us now pass to the ecclesiastical policy of Zeno's reign.
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