composed in hourly expectation of death. A Christian it would seem, but
certainly nurtured on the precepts of Plato and the Stoics, Boethius
turned in his extremity to these teachers for reassurance on the doubts
which must always afflict the just man enmeshed in undeserved
misfortune. Himself a philosopher only in his sublime optimism and his
resolve to treat the inevitable as immaterial, Boethius rivets the
attention by his absolute honesty. His book, revered in the Middle Ages
as all but inspired, will be read with interest and sympathy so long as
honest men are vexed by human oppression and the dispensations of a
seemingly capricious destiny. But the footprints of the Ostrogoths are
effaced from the soil of Italy; the name of Theodoric is scantily
commemorated by some mosaics and a rifled mausoleum at Ravenna. Here at
least Time has done justice in the end; from all that age of violent
deeds and half-sincere ideals nothing has passed into the spiritual
heritage of mankind but the communings of one undaunted sufferer with
his soul and God.

Theodoric died in 526, bequeathing his crown to his only daughter's son.
Eight years afterwards the boy king, worn out by premature excess, was
laid in the grave; his mother was murdered to clear the path of an
ambitious kinsman; and, while the succession was still in doubt, the
Emperor Justinian launched upon Italy the still invincible armies of the
Empire, led by Belisarius, the greatest general of the time and already
famous as the deliverer of Africa from the Vandals (536). The intrigues
of his court rivals, rather than the resources of the divided
Ostrogoths, robbed Belisarius of a decisive victory, and prolonged the
struggle for years after he had been superseded. But in 553 the last
embers of resistance were quenched in blood. Italy, devastated and
depopulated, was reorganised as an imperial province with an elaborate
hierarchy of civil and military officials. The change was welcome to the