ers of a disordered fancy, and the weakness of a distempered body.
After a life of virtue and glory, Theodoric was now descending with
shame and guilt into the grave; his mind was humbled by the contrast of
the past, and justly alarmed by the invisible terrors of futurity. One
evening, as it is related, when the head of a large fish was served on
the royal table, [102] he suddenly exclaimed, that he beheld the angry
countenance of Symmachus, his eyes glaring fury and revenge, and his
mouth armed with long sharp teeth, which threatened to devour him. The
monarch instantly retired to his chamber, and, as he lay, trembling
with aguish cold, under a weight of bed-clothes, he expressed, in broken
murmurs to his physician Elpidius, his deep repentance for the murders
of Boethius and Symmachus. [103] His malady increased, and after a
dysentery which continued three days, he expired in the palace of
Ravenna, in the thirty-third, or, if we compute from the invasion
of Italy, in the thirty-seventh year of his reign. Conscious of his
approaching end, he divided his treasures and provinces between his two
grandsons, and fixed the Rhone as their common boundary. [104] Amalaric
was restored to the throne of Spain. Italy, with all the conquests of
the Ostrogoths, was bequeathed to Athalaric; whose age did not exceed
ten years, but who was cherished as the last male offspring of the line
of Amali, by the short-lived marriage of his mother Amalasuntha with
a royal fugitive of the same blood. [105] In the presence of the dying
monarch, the Gothic chiefs and Italian magistrates mutually engaged
their faith and loyalty to the young prince, and to his guardian mother;
and received, in the same awful moment, his last salutary advice,
to maintain the laws, to love the senate and people of Rome, and to
cultivate with decent reverence the friendship of the emperor. [106]
The monument of Theodoric was erected by his daughter Amalasuntha, in a
conspicuous situation, which commanded the city of Ravenna, the harbor,
and the adjacent coast. A chapel of a circular form, thirty feet in
diameter, is crowned by a dome of one entire piece of granite: from the
centre of the dome four columns arose, which supported, in a vase of
porphyry, the remains of the Gothic king, surrounded by the brazen
statues of the twelve apostles. [107] His spirit, after some previous
expiation, might have been permitted to mingle with the benefactors of
mankind, if an Italian he