north by this victorious army. If that should fall upon Ravenna while
the Gothic strength was engaged in the defence of Rome, what would be
the fate of that principal city, and with that lost, what would become
of him in the Catholic capital?

Of course Vitiges ought to have met the imperial army in the field and
given battle. That was the true solution. But no Gothic army ever
dared to face Belisarius in the open, for though the Goths enormously
outnumbered his small force of some 8000 men, they feared him as the
possessor of a superior arm in the _Hippotoxotai_, mounted troops
armed with the bow, and above all they feared his genius.

But Vitiges was no fool; his cause was hopeless from the first. He
abandoned Rome and fell back upon Ravenna, because that was the best
thing to be done in the circumstances in which he found himself. Among
these must be reckoned the newness of his authority and the necessity
of consolidating it by a marriage with a princess of the blood of
Theodoric. As it happened, this retreat enabled him to prolong a war
that at first looked like coming to an end in a few months for four
more years.

Vitiges then abandoned Rome, but it seems not altogether. What he may
be supposed to have imagined Belisarius doing to his disadvantage,
that he himself did. He left in Rome a garrison of four thousand men
under a veteran general Leudaris, while he himself with the Gothic
army fell back upon Ravenna. No sooner was he gone than the surrender
of the City was offered to Belisarius by pope Silverius who spoke for
the citizens and the Roman people. This was the reality of the
situation. Then indeed an almost incredible blunder was committed, but
not by Vitiges. The four thousand Goths whom he had left to hold the