etake Ancona, Ariminum, and Mediolanum.

Still worse news presently arrived to increase the despondency of the
King. For meanwhile famine was making ravages in the wide districts of
AEmilia, Picenum and Tuscany.

There were neither men, cattle, nor horses to serve the plough. The
people fled into the woods and mountains, made bread of acorns, and
devoured grass and weeds.

Devastating maladies were the consequence of insufficient or
unwholesome nourishment.

In Picenum alone perished fifty thousand souls; a still greater number
succumbed to hunger and pestilence on the other side of the Ionian
Gulf, in Dalmatia, Pale and thin, those still living tottered to the
grave; their skins became black and like leather; their glassy eyes
started from the sockets; their intestines burned as if with fire.

The vultures despised the corpses of the victims of pestilence;
but human flesh was devoured by men. Mothers killed and ate their
newly-born children.

In a farm near Ariminum only two Roman women had remained alive. These
women murdered and devoured, one after another, seventeen men, who,
singly, had sought a shelter in their house. The eighteenth awoke as
they were about to strangle him in his sleep. He killed the fiendish
women, and discovered the fate of their earlier victims.

Lastly, the hopes placed in the Franks and Longobardians were utterly
destroyed.

The Franks, who had already received large sums for the promised army
of alliance, were silent. The messengers of the King, who were sent to
urge the fulfilment of their promise, were detained at Mettis,
Aurelianum, and Paris; no answer came from these courts.

The King of the Longobardians sent word that he could decide nothing
without the consent of his warlike son Alboin. That the latter was
absent in search of adventures. Perhaps he would at some time reach
Italy; he was an intimate friend of Narses. Then he could observe the
country for himself, and advise his father and his countrymen as to the
course to be taken.

It is true that the important fortress of Auximum withstood, for
months, all the efforts of the powerful army which besieged it under
Belisarius, accompanied by Procopius. But it wrung the King's heart
when a messenger (who had, with much difficulty, stolen his way through
the two investing armies to Ravenna) brought him the following message
from the heroic Earl Wisand:

"When Auximum was entrusted to my care, thou saidst that therewith I