prow towards Rossano, and on coming near that city, shifted their
course towards the shore. Otho had been eagerly awaiting this
opportunity. When they had approached sufficiently near to the land, he
suddenly sprang from the deck into the sea, and swam ashore with a
strength and swiftness that soon brought him to the strand. In a short
time afterwards he entered Rossano, then held by his forces, and joined
his queen, who had been left in that city.

This singular adventure is told with a number of variations by the
several writers who have related it, most of them significant of the
love of the marvellous of the old chroniclers. One writer tells us that
the escaping emperor was pursued and attacked by the Greek boatmen, and
that he killed forty of them with the aid of a soldier, named Probus,
whom he met on the shore. By another we are told that the Greeks
recognized him, that he enticed them to the shore by requesting them to
take on board his wife and treasures, which had been left at Rossano,
and that he sent young men on board disguised as female attendants of
his wife, by whose aid he seized the vessel. All the stories agree,
however, in saying that Theophania jeeringly asked the emperor whether
her countrymen had not put him in mortal fear,--a jest for which the
Germans never forgave her.

To return to the domain of fact, we have but further to tell that the
emperor, full of grief and vexation at the loss of his army, and the
slaughter of many of the German and Italian princes and nobles who had
accompanied him, returned to upper Italy, with the purpose of collecting
another army.

All his conquests in the south had fallen again into the hands of the
enemy, and his work remained to be done over again. He held a grand