Goths all save two were dead, whereas all except a few were living of
those which had received the name of the emperor's soldiers; and as for
those which had been called Romans, it so happened that, although the
hair of all of them had fallen out, yet about half of them survived.
When Theodatus beheld this and divined the outcome of the war, a great
fear, they say, came upon him, since he knew well that it would
certainly be the fate of the Romans to die to half their number and be
deprived of their possessions, but that the Goths would be defeated and
their race reduced to a few, and that to the emperor would come, with
the loss of but a few of his soldiers, the victory in the war. And for
this reason, they say, Theodatus felt no impulse to enter into a
struggle with Belisarius. As for this story, then, let each one express
his views according to the belief or disbelief which he feels regarding
it.

But Belisarius, as he besieged the Neapolitans both by land and by sea,
was beginning to be vexed. For he was coming to think that they would
never yield to him, and, furthermore, he could not hope that the city
would be captured, since he was finding that the difficulty of its
position was proving to be a very serious obstacle. And the loss of the
time which was being spent there distressed him, for he was making his
calculations so as to avoid being compelled to go against Theodatus and
Rome in the winter season. Indeed he had already even given orders to
the army to pack up, his intention being to depart from there as
quickly as possible. But while he was in the greatest perplexity, it
came to pass that he met with the following good fortune. One of the
Isaurians was seized with the desire to observe the construction of the
aqueduct, and to discover in what manner it provided the supply of water
to the city. So he entered it at a place far distant from the city,
where Belisarius had broken it open, and proceeded to walk along it,
finding no difficulty, since the water had stopped running because the
aqueduct had been broken open. But when he reached a point near the
circuit-wall, he came upon a large rock, not placed there by the hand of
man, but a part of the natural formation of the place. And those who had
built the aqueduct many years before, after they had attached the
masonry to this rock, proceeded to make a tunnel from that point on, not
sufficiently large, however, for a man to pass through, but large enough
to