e with you? Then they had two or three horses
apiece; now without horses and in the guise of slaves, they are
wandering on foot through Thrace. But they are free-born men surely,
aye, as free-born as you are, and they once measured out the gold coins
of Byzantium with a bushel". When the host heard these words, all, both
men and women, went to their leader Theodoric the Amal, and claimed from
him with tumultuous cries that he should come to an accommodation with
the son of Tnarius. The proposal must have been hateful to the Amal. To
throw away the laboriously earned favour of the Emperor, to denude
himself of the splendid dignity of Master of the Soldiery, to leave the
comfortable home-like fabric of Imperial civilisation and go out again
into the barbarian wilderness with this insolent namesake who had just
been denouncing him as a perjured boy: all this was gall and wormwood to
the spirit of Theodoric. But he knew the conditions under which he held
his sovereignty--"king", as a recent French monarch expressed it, "by
the grace of God and the will of the people", and he did not attempt to
strive against the decision of his tumultuary parliament. He met his
elderly competitor, each standing on the opposite bank of a disparting
stream, and after speech had, they agreed that they would wage no more
war on one another but would make common cause against Byzantium.

The now confederated Theodorics sent an embassy to Zeno, bearing their
common demands for territory, _stipendia_ and rations for their
followers, and, in the case of Theodoric the Amal, charged with bitter
complaints of the desertion which had exposed him to such dangers. The
Emperor replied with an accusation (which appears to have been wholly
unfounded) that Theodoric himself had meditated treachery, and that
this was the reason why the Roman generals had feared to join their
forces to his. Still the Emperor was willing to receive him again into
favour if he would relinquish his alliance with the son of Triarius, and
in order to lure him back the ambassadors were to offer him 1,000
pounds' weight of gold (L40,000), 10,000 of silver (L35,000), a yearly
revenue of 10,000 _aurei_ (L6,000), and the daughter of Olybrius, one of
the noblest-born damsels of Byzantium, for his wife. But the Amal king,
having stooped so low as to make an alliance with the son of Triarius,
was not going to stoop lower by breaking it. The ambassadors returned to
Constantinople with their