through all the dark days of Justinian the demon-emperor. The
Ostrogoths, as you know, were extinct as a nation. The two deluges
of Franks and Allmen, which, under the two brothers Buccelin and
Lothaire, all on foot (for the French, as now, were no horsemen), had
rolled into Italy during the Gothic war, had been swallowed up, as
all things were, in the fatal gulf of Italy. Lothaire and his army,
returning laden with plunder, had rotted away like sheep by Lake
Benacus (Garda now) of drink, and of the plague. Buccelin,
entrenched among his plunder-waggons by the Volturno stream in the
far south, had waited in vain for that dead brother and his dead
host, till Narses came on him, with his army of trained Herules and
Goths; the Francisc axe and barbed pike had proved useless before the
arrows and the cavalry of the Romans; and no more than five Allmen,
says one, remained of all that mighty host. Awful to think of:
75,000 men, they say, in one column, 100,000 in the other: and like
water they flowed over the land; and like water they sank into the
ground, and left no trace.

And now Narses, established as exarch of Ravenna, a sort of satrap,
like those of the Persian Emperors, and representing the Emperor of
Constantinople, was rewarded for all his conquests and labours by
disgrace. Eunuch-like, he loved money, they said; and eunuch-like,
he was harsh and cruel. The Empress Sophia, listening too readily to
court-slanders, bade him 'leave to men the use of arms, and come back
to the palace, to spin among the maids.' --'Tell her,' said the
terrible old imp, 'I will spin her such a thread as she shall not
unravel.'

He went, superseded by Longinus; but not to Constantinople. From
Naples he sent (so says Paul the Deacon) to Alboin, and bade him come