hold his court there rather than in
the safer but less convenient Ravenna. There too he may probably have
often received the ambassadors of the Northern nations, who went back to
their homes with those stories of the might and majesty of the
Ostrogothic king which made "Dietrich of Bern" (Theodoric of Verona) a
name of wonder and a theme of romance to many generations of German
minstrels. While Theodoric was dwelling in the city of the Adige,
tidings came to him, apparently from his son-in-law Eutharic, whom he
had left in charge at Ravenna, that the whole city was in an uproar. The
Jews, of whom there was evidently a considerable number, were accused of
having made sport of the Christian rite of baptism by throwing one
another into one of the two muddy rivers of Ravenna, and also, in some
way not described to us, to have mocked at the supper of the Lord.[127]
The Christian populace of the city were excited to such madness by these
rumours that they broke out into rioting, which neither the Gothic
vicegerent, Eutharic, nor their own bishop, Peter III., was able to
quell, and which did not cease till all the Jewish synagogues of the
city were laid in ashes.

[Footnote 127: The passage of the "Anonymus Valesii" which describes
these events is so corrupt that it is hardly possible to make sense of
it.]

When tidings of these events were brought to Verona by the Grand
Chamberlain Triwan (or Trigguilla) who, as an Arian, was suspected of
favouring the Jews, and when the Hebrews came themselves to invoke the
justice of the King, Theodoric's righteous indignation was kindled
against these flagrant violations of _civilitas_. It was not, indeed,
the first time that his intervention had been claimed on behalf of the
persecuted children of Israel. At Milan and at Genoa they had already
appealed to him against the vexations of their neighbours, and at Rome
the mob, excited by some idle story of harsh punishments inflicted by
the Jews on their Christian servants, had burned their synagogue in the
Trastevere to the ground. The protection claimed had always been freely
conceded. Theodoric, while expressing or permitting Cassiodorus to
express his pious wonder that a race which wilfully shut itself out from
the eternal rest of Heaven should care for quietness on earth, was
strong in declaring that for the sake of _civilitas_ justice was to be
secured even for the wanderers from the right religious path, and that
no one should be for