rd of promise to the ear", since no executioner with
drawn sword entered the chamber of his rival. Basiliscus and they that
were with him were sent away to a remote fortress in Cappadocia. The
gate of the fortress was built up, a band of wild Isaurians guarded the
enclosure, suffering no man to enter or to leave it, and in that bleak
stronghold before long the fallen Emperor and Empress with their
children perished miserably of cold and hunger.

Theodoric, who was at this time settled with his people, not on the
shores of the AEgean, but in the region which we now call the Dobrudscha,
between the mouths of the Danube and the Black Sea, had zealously
espoused the cause of the banished Zeno, and lent an effectual hand in
the counter-revolution which restored him to the throne (478). For his
services in this crisis he was rewarded with the dignities of Patrician
and Master of the Soldiery, high honours for a barbarian of twenty-four;
and probably about this time he was also adopted as "_filius in arma_"
by the Emperor. What the precise nature of this adopted
"sonship-in-arms" may have been we are not able to say. It reminds us of
the barbarian customs which in the course of centuries ripened into the
mediaeval ceremony of knighthood, and the whole transaction certainly
sounds more Ostrogothic than Imperial. Zeno's own son and namesake (the
offspring of a first marriage before his union with Ariadne) was
apparently dead before this time; and possibly therefore the title of
son thus conferred upon Theodoric may have raised in his heart wild
hopes that he too might one day be saluted as Roman Emperor. Any such
hopes were probably doomed to inevitable disappointment. Any other
dignity in the State, the "Roman Republic", as it still called itself,
was practically within reach of a powerful barbarian, but the diadem, as
has been already said, could in this age of the world, only be worn by
one of pure Roman, that is, non-barbarian, blood.

At this time, and for the next three years, the position of our
Theodoric, both towards the Emperor and towards his own people, was
sorely embarrassed by the position and the claims of the other, the
squinting Theodoric (son of Triarius), whom we met with seventeen years
ago, and whose receipt of _stipendia_ from the court of Constantinople,
at the very time when their own were withheld, raised the wrath of
Walamir and Theudemir. This Theodoric, it will be remembered, was of
unkingly, perhaps