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Updated: July 10, 2025
But the storming, repulsed at every gate, cost Vitiges the flower of his host. Thirty thousand are said to have fallen, that being the number which Procopius records as derived from Gothic officers themselves; and greater, he says, was the number of wounded, when the deadly bolts from the machines of Belisarius mowed down their encumbered masses in flight.
Yet so powerful was this flying army, that Vitiges spared ten thousand men for the defence of the cities which he was most solicitous to preserve, and detached his nephew Uraias, with an adequate force, for the chastisement of rebellious Milan. At the head of his principal army, he besieged Rimini, only thirty-three miles distant from the Gothic capital.
Children had been born to Maximus, but the only son who reached mature years fell a victim to pestilence when Vitiges was camped about the City. There survived one daughter, Aurelia. Her the father had not seen for years; her he longed to see and to pardon ere he died.
If Vitiges, as I believe, thought the imperialists would immediately follow him northward he was no more deceived than the Romans themselves. They had surrendered the City to Belisarius to save it from attack and the last thing they desired was to suffer a siege. A feeling of resentment, the old jealousy of Constantinople, seems to have appeared, and in this Vitiges thought he saw his opportunity.
But hardly had the Emperor Justinian reconquered Africa when he attempted the subjugation of the Goths now holding possession of Italy. His general, Belisarius, captured Rome, Dec. 10, A.D. 556. In the military operations ensuing with Vitiges, Italy was devastated, the population sank beneath the sword, pestilence, famine.
He called back the yet absent inhabitants, amongst them many of the senators who had been sent into Campania. How had the nobles of Rome melted away! Vitiges had ordered those kept in Ravenna as hostages to be slain. Some had then escaped to Liguria. The distrust of the Greeks as well as of the Goths threatened them.
The great commander sat in the Pincian palace in March, 537, scarcely three months after he had taken possession of Rome. There he abased himself to carry out the commands of two shameless women, Theodora and Antonina. He caused Pope Silverius to be brought before him on a charge of writing treasonable letters to Vitiges. The Pope had taken refuge at Santa Sabina on the Aventine.
Belisarius, who had fought the first great war so gloriously against Vitiges, and for so long and with so little encouragement had opposed Totila in the second, is of course one of the great soldiers of the world and perhaps the greatest the empire ever employed.
He had destroyed all the villas and dwellings of the Campagna; the churches of the Martyrs lay in heaps of ruins: from the Porta Salara to the Porta Nomentana hardly one stone upon another seems to have remained. Also Vitiges had ordered the senators whom he had left at Ravenna to be put to death.
The emperor received with honorable courtesy both Vitiges and his more noble consort; and as the king of the Goths conformed to the Athanasian faith, he obtained, with a rich inheritance of land in Asia, the rank of senator and patrician.
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