After Dietrich came the deluge. The royal head was gone. The royal
heart remained in Amalasuentha 'the heavenly beauty,' a daughter
worthy of her father.

One of her first acts was to restore to the widows and children of
the two victims the estates which Dietrich had confiscated. That
may, or may not, prove that she thought the men innocent. She may
have only felt it royal not to visit the sins of the fathers on the
children; and those fathers, too, her own friends and preceptors.
Beautiful, learned, and wise, she too was, like her father, before
her age. She, the pupil of Boethius, would needs bring up her son
Athalaric in Roman learning, and favour the Romans in all ways; never
putting to death or even fining any of them, and keeping down the
rough Goths, who were ready enough, now Dietrich's hand was off them,
to ill-use the conquered Italians. The Goths soon grew to dislike
her, and her Roman tendencies, her Roman education of the lad. One
day she boxed his ears for some fault. He ran crying out into the
Heldensaal, and complained to the heroes. They sent a deputation to
Amalasuentha, insolent enough. 'The boy should not be made a scholar
of.' 'She meant to kill the boy and marry again. Had not old
Dietrich forbidden free Goths to go to schoolmasters, and said, that
the boy who was taught to tremble at a cane, would never face a
lance?' So they took the lad away from the women, and made a ruffian
of him. What with drink, women, idleness, and the company of wild
young fellows like himself, he was early ruined, body and soul. Poor
Amalasuentha, not knowing whither to turn, took the desperate
resolution of offering Italy to the Emperor Justinian. She did not
know that her cousin Theodatus had been beforehand with her--a bad
old man, greedy and unjust, whose rapacity she had had to control
again and again, and who hated her in return. Both send messages to