The man is unfathomable, inexplicable;--marrying deliberately the
wickedest of all women, plainly not for mere beauty's sake, but
possibly because he saw in her a congenial intellect;--faithful and
loving to her and she to him, amid all the crimes of their following
years;--pious with exceeding devotion and orthodoxy, and yet with a
piety utterly divorced from, unconscious of, the commonest morality;-
-discerning and using the greatest men, Belisarius and Narses for
example, and throwing them away again, surely not in weak caprice,
whenever they served him too well;--conquering Persians, Vandals,
Goths; all but re-conquering, in fact, the carcase Roman Empire;--and
then trying (with a deep discernment of the value of Roman law) to
put a galvanic life into the carcase by codifying that law.

In whatever work I find this man, during his long life, he is to me
inexplicable. Louis XI of France is the man most like Justinian whom
I know, but he, too, is a man not to be fathomed by me. All the
facts about Justinian you will find in Gibbon. I have no theory by
which to arrange and explain them, and therefore can tell you no more
than Gibbon does.

So to this Gothic war; which, you must remember, became possible for
Justinian by Belisarius' having just destroyed the Vandals out of
Africa. It began by Belisarius invading the south of Italy. Witigis
was elected war-king of the Goths, 'the man of witty counsels,' who
did not fulfil his name; while Theodatus (Theod-aht 'esteemed by the
people' as his name meant) had fallen into utter disesteem, after
some last villainy about money; had been struck down in the road by
the man he had injured; and there had his throat cut, 'resupinus
instar victimae jugulatus.'