by night, and tried to force them open: but hardly succeeded.

Belisarius garrisoned Rome, and the Goths attacked it, but in vain.
You must read the story of that famous siege in the really brilliant
pages of old Procopius, the last good historian of the old world.

Moreover, and this is most important, Belisarius raised the native
population against the Goths. As he had done in Africa, when in one
short campaign he utterly destroyed the now effeminate aristocracy of
the Vandals, so he did in Italy. By real justice and kindness; by
proclaiming himself the deliverer of the conquered from the yoke of
foreign tyrants, he isolated the slave-holding aristocracy of the
Goths from the mass of the inhabitants of Italy.

Belisarius and the Goths met, and the Goths conquered. But to take
Rome was beyond their power; and after that a long miserable war
struggled and wrangled up and down over the wretched land; city after
city was taken and destroyed, now by Roman, now by Goth. The lands
lay waste, the people disappeared in tens of thousands. All great
Dietrich's work of thirty years was trampled into mud.

There were horrible sieges and destructions by both parties;--sack of
Milan by Goths, sack of Rimini and the country round by Romans;
horrors of famine at Auximum; two women who kept an inn, killing and
eating seventeen men, till the eighteenth discovered the trap and
killed them. Everywhere, as I say, good Dietrich's work of thirty
years trampled into gory mud.

Then Theudebert and his false Franks came down to see what they could
get; all (save a few knights round the king) on foot, without bow or