r misuse them, and only wished his Goths to learn of them and
become peaceful farmers. He gave them the lands which had lost their
owners; about thirty or forty thousand families were settled there by
him on the waste lands, and the Romans who were left took courage and
worked too. He did not live at Rome, though he came thither and was
complimented by the Senate, and he set a sum by every year for repairing
the old buildings; but he chiefly lived at Verona, where he reigned over
both the Eastern and Western Goths in Gaul and Italy.

He was an Arian, but he did not persecute the Catholics, and to such
persons as changed their profession of faith to please him he showed no
more favor, saying that those who were not faithful to their God would
never be faithful to their earthly master. He reigned thirty-three
years, but did not end as well as he began, for he grew irritable and
distrustful with age; and the Romans, on the other hand, forgot that
they were not the free, prosperous nation of old, and displeased him.
Two of their very best men, Boethius and Symmachus, were by him kept for
a long time prisoners at Rome and then put to death. While Boethius was
in prison at Pavia, he wrote a book called _The Consolations of
Philosophy_, so beautiful that the English king Alfred translated it
into Saxon four centuries later. Theodoric kept up a correspondence with
the other Gothic kings wherever a tribe of his people dwelt, even as far
as Sweden and Denmark; but as even he could not write, and only had a
seal with the letters [Greek: THEOD] with which to make his signature,
the whole was conducted in Latin by Roman slaves on either side, who
interpreted to their masters. An immense number of letters from
Theodoric's secretary are preserved, and show what an able man his
master was, and how well he deserved his name of "The Great." He died in
526, leaving only two daughters. Their two sons, Amalric and Athalaric,
divided the Eastern and Western Goths between them again.

Seven Gothic kings reigned over Northern Italy after Theodoric. They
were fierce and restless, but had nothing like his strength and spirit,
and they chiefly lived in the more northern cities--Milan, Verona, and
Ravenna, leaving Rome to be a tributary city to them, where there still
remained the old names of Senate and Consuls, but the person who was
generally most looked up to and trusted was the Pope. All this time Rome
was leavening the nations who had conque