East Goth war, which you may read for
yourselves in the pages of an eye-witness, Procopius;--a war which
destroyed utterly the civilization of Dietrich's long and prosperous
reign, left Italy a desert, and exterminated the Roman people.

That was the last woe: but of it I must tell you in my next Lecture.

LECTURE VI--THE NEMESIS OF THE GOTHS.

Of this truly dreadful Gothic war I can give you but a hasty sketch; of
some of the most important figures in it, not even a sketch. I cannot
conceive to myself, and therefore cannot draw for you, the famous
Belisarius. Was he really the strange compound of strength and weakness
which Procopius, and after him Gibbon, represent him?--a caricature, for
good and evil, of our own famous Marlborough? You must read and judge
for yourselves. I cannot, at least as yet, offer you any solution of the
enigma.

Still less can I conceive to myself Narses, living till his grey hairs in
the effeminate intrigues of the harem, and then springing forth a
general; the Warrior Eunuch; the misanthrope avenging his great wrong
upon all mankind in bloody battle-fields; dark of counsel, and terrible
of execution; him to whom in after years the Empress Sophia sent word
that he was more fit to spin among maids than to command armies, and he
answered, that he would spin her such a thread as she could not unravel;
and kept his word (as legends say) by inviting the Lombards into Italy.

Least of all can I sketch Justinian the Great, the half-Teuton peasant,
whom his uncle Justin sent for out of the Dardanian hills, to make him a
demigod upon earth. Men whispered in after years that he was born of a
demon, a demon himself, passing whole days without food, wandering up and
down his palace corridors all night, resolving dark things, and labouring
all day with Herculean force to carry them out. No wonder he was thought
to be a demon, wedded to a demon-wife. The man is unfathomable,
inexplicable;--marrying deliberately the wickedest of all women, plainly
not for mere beauty's sake, but possibly because he saw in her a
congenial intellect;--faithful and loving to her and she to him, amid all
the crimes of their following years;--pious with exceeding devotion and
orthodoxy, and yet with a piety utterly divorced from, unconscious of,
the commonest morality;--discerning and using the greatest men,
Belisarius and Narses for example, and throwing them away again, surely
not in weak caprice, whenever