s presence and asked him
with some anxiety what were the chances of the battle. With words,
reminding us of the Homeric saying that "the best omen is to fight
bravely for one's country", Theodoric reassured their doubting hearts.
On that day, he told his mother, it was for him to show that she had
given birth to a hero on the day when the Ostrogoths did battle with the
Huns. Dressed in his most splendid robes, those robes which their hands
had adorned with bright embroidery, he would be conspicuous both to
friend and foe, and would give a noble spoil to his conqueror if any man
could succeed in slaying him. With these words he leapt on his horse,
rushed to the van, cheered on his wavering troops, and began a series of
charges, which at length, but not till thousands of his own men as well
as of the enemy were slain, carried the _fossatum_ of Odovacar.

[Footnote 53: I cannot put this as more than a conjecture. We have
singularly little information, even from the panegyrical Ennodius, as to
the feelings of the Italian provincials during this crisis of their
fate.]

[Footnote 54: Expers bellicis rebus (Continuatio Prosperi: Codex
Havniensis)]

The battle once gained, of course the dispositions which Odovacar had
made to ensure the resistance of his soldiers, necessitated their ruin,
and the swirling waters of the Adige probably destroyed as many as the
Ostrogothic sword. Odovacar himself, again a fugitive, sped across the
plain south-eastward to Ravenna, compelled like so many Roman Emperors
before him to shelter himself from the invader behind its untraversable
network of rivers and canals. It would seem from the scanty notices
which remain to us that in this battle of Verona, the bloodiest and
most hardly fought of all the battles of the war, the original army of
_foederati_, the men who had crowned Odovacar king, and divided the third
part of Italy between them, was, if not annihilated, utterly broken and
dispirited, and Theodoric, who now marched westward with his people, and
was welcomed with blessing and acclamations by the Bishop and citizens
of Milan, received also the transferred allegiance of the larger part of
the army of his rival.

It seemed as if a campaign of a few weeks had secured the conquest of
Italy, but the war was in fact prolonged for three years and a half from
this time by domestic treachery, foreign invasion, and the almost
absolute impregnability of Ravenna.

I. At the head of the soldiers