LECTURE VI--THE NEMESIS OF THE GOTHS.



Of this truly dreadful Gothic war I can give you but a hasty sketch;
of some of the most important figures in it, not even a sketch. I
cannot conceive to myself, and therefore cannot draw for you, the
famous Belisarius. Was he really the strange compound of strength
and weakness which Procopius, and after him Gibbon, represent him?--a
caricature, for good and evil, of our own famous Marlborough? You
must read and judge for yourselves. I cannot, at least as yet, offer
you any solution of the enigma.

Still less can I conceive to myself Narses, living till his grey
hairs in the effeminate intrigues of the harem, and then springing
forth a general; the Warrior Eunuch; the misanthrope avenging his
great wrong upon all mankind in bloody battle-fields; dark of
counsel, and terrible of execution; him to whom in after years the
Empress Sophia sent word that he was more fit to spin among maids
than to command armies, and he answered, that he would spin her such
a thread as she could not unravel; and kept his word (as legends say)
by inviting the Lombards into Italy.

Least of all can I sketch Justinian the Great, the half-Teuton
peasant, whom his uncle Justin sent for out of the Dardanian hills,
to make him a demigod upon earth. Men whispered in after years that
he was born of a demon, a demon himself, passing whole days without
food, wandering up and down his palace corridors all night, resolving
dark things, and labouring all day with Herculean force to carry them
out. No wonder he was thought to be a demon, wedded to a demon-wife.