branched candlestick which Titus took from the Temple of Jerusalem.

How had these things escaped the Goths forty years before? We cannot
tell. Perhaps the Gothic sack, which only lasted five days, was less
complete than this one, which went on for fourteen days of
unutterable horrors. The plunderers were not this time sturdy honest
Goths; not even German slaves, mad to revenge themselves on their
masters: they were Moors, Ausurian black savages, and all the
pirates and cut-throats of the Mediterranean.

Sixty thousand prisoners were carried off to Carthage. All the
statues were wrecked on the voyage to Africa, and lost for ever.

And yet Rome did not die. She lingered on; her Emperor still calling
himself an Emperor, her senate a senate; feeding her lazy plebs, as
best she could, with the remnant of those revenues which former
Emperors had set aside for their support--their public bread, public
pork, public oil, public wine, public baths,--and leaving them to
gamble and quarrel, and listen to the lawyers in rags and rascality,
and to rise and murder ruler after ruler, benefactor after
benefactor, out of base jealousy and fear of any one less base than
themselves. And so 'the smoke of her torment went up continually.'

But if Rome would not die, still less would she repent; as it is
written--'The remnant of the people repented not of their deeds, but
gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven.'

As the century runs on, the confusion becomes more and more dreadful.
Anthemius, Olybrius, Orestes, and the other half-caste Romans with
Greek names who become quasi-emperors and get murdered; Ricimer the