ds' weight of gold (L1,6000,000) and sent it to
Dyrrhachium, on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, to await her further
orders. If things should go ill with her she would thus, in any event,
have a line of retreat opened towards Constantinople and a comfortable
subsistence assured to her in that capital. Having taken these
precautions, she gave a commission to some of her bravest and most
devoted followers (for she evidently had a strong party in her favour)
to seek out the three disaffected nobles in their various places of
banishment and put them to death. Her henchmen obeyed her bidding; no
popular tumult was excited; the sceptre seemed to be more firmly than
ever grasped by the hand of the princess; the ship, without having
discharged its cargo, was ordered back from Dyrrhachium, and there came
a slight lull in the underground negotiations with Constantinople.

But another candidate for the favours of Justinian was also appearing in
the royal family of the Goths. Theodahad, son of Amalfrida, and
therefore nephew of Theodoric, was a man now pretty far advanced in
middle life. He had received in his boyhood that literary and rhetorical
training which Amalasuentha yearned to bestow on her son; he was well
versed in the works of the Roman orators and could discourse learnedly
on the dialogues of Plato. Unhappily, this varnish of intellectual
culture covered a thoroughly vile and rotten character. He was averse to
all the warlike employments of his forefathers, but his whole heart was
set on robbery, under the form of civilisation, by means of extortion
and chicane. He had received from his uncle ample estates in the fertile
province of Tuscany, but he was one who, as the common people said,
"could not endure a neighbour", and, on one pretence or other, he was
perpetually adding farm after farm and villa after villa to his enormous
property. Already during his uncle's reign the grave pen of Cassiodorus
had been twice employed to censure Theodahad's avarice, "a vulgar vice,
which the kinsman of the king and a man of Amal blood is especially
bound to avoid", and to complain that "you, who should have shown an
example of glorious moderation, have caused the scandal of high-handed
spoliation". After Theodoric's death the process of unjust accumulation
went on rapidly. From every part of Tuscany the cry went up that the
provincials were being oppressed and their lands taken from them on no
pretext whatever; and the Counts of t