to answer
the accusation of conspiring with the Goths, when he himself had opened
the gates of Rome to Belisarius; and how he was led into the great hall
where the warrior's wife, Theodora's friend, the beautiful and evil
Antonina, lay with half-closed eyes upon her splendid couch, while
Belisarius sat beside her feet, toying with her jewels. There the
husband and wife accused the Pope, and judged him without hearing, and
condemned him without right; and they caused him to be stripped of his
robes, and clad as a poor monk and driven out to far exile, that they
might set up the Empress Theodora's Pope in his place; and with him they
drove out many Roman nobles.

And it is said that when Silverius was dead of a broken heart in the
little island of Palmaria, Belisarius repented of his deeds and built
the small Church of Santa Maria de' Crociferi, behind the fountain of
Trevi, in partial expiation of his fault, and there, to prove the truth
of the story, the tablet that tells of his repentance has stood nearly
fourteen hundred years and may be read today, on the east wall, towards
the Via de' Poli. The man who conquered Africa for Justinian, seized
Sicily, took Rome, defended it successfully against the Goths, reduced
Ravenna, took Rome from the Goths again, and finally rescued
Constantinople, was disgraced more than once; but he was not blinded,
nor did he die in exile or in prison, for at the end he breathed his
last in the enjoyment of his freedom and his honours; and the story of
his blindness is the fabrication of an ignorant Greek monk who lived six
hundred years later and confounded Justinian's great general with the
romantic and unhappy John of Cappadocia, who lived at the same time, was
a general at the same time, and incurred the displeasure of that same
pious, proud, avaricious Theodora, actress, penitent and Empress, whose
paramount beauty held the Emperor in thrall for life, and whose
surpassing cruelty imprinted an indelible seal of horror upon his
glorious reign--of her who, when she delivered a man to death,
admonished the executioner with an oath, saying, 'By Him who liveth for
ever, if thou failest, I will cause thee to be flayed alive.'

Another figure rises at the window of the Tuscan Ambassador's great
villa, with the face of a man concerning whom legend has also found much
to invent and little to say that is true, a man of whom modern science
has rightly made a hero, but whom prejudice and ignorance