sed with the exploit of bringing to her knees the mistress
of the world, not intent on vulgar plans of plunder like Gaiseric, but
nourishing a deep and deadly hatred against that false and ungrateful
City, and, by the ghosts of a hundred and fifty thousand of his
countrymen who had died before her untaken walls, beckoned on a
memorable revenge. Totila would spare, as he had promised, the lives of
the trembling citizens, but he had determined that Rome herself should
perish. The walls should be dismantled, the public buildings burned to
the ground, and sheep should graze again over the seven hills of the
City as they had grazed thirteen hundred years before, when Romulus and
Remus were suckled by the wolf. From this purpose, however, he was moved
by the intercession of Belisarius, who, from his couch of fever, wrote a
spirit-stirring letter to Totila, pleading for Rome, greatest and most
glorious of all cities that the sun looked down upon, the work not of
one king nor one century, but of long ages and many generations of noble
men. Belisarius concluded with an appeal to the Gothic king to consider
what should be his own eternal record in history, whether he would
rather be remembered as the preserver or the destroyer of the greatest
city in the world.

This appeal, made by one hero to another, was successful. Totila was
still bent on preventing the City from ever again becoming a stronghold
of the enemy, and therefore determined to lay one-third of the walls
level with the ground, but he assured the messengers of Belisarius that
he would leave the great monuments of Rome untouched. Having
accomplished the needed demolition of her defences, he marched forth
with his army from the desolate and sepulchral City and took up a
position in the Alban Mountains, which are seen by the dwellers in Rome
far off on their south-eastern horizon.

When Totila withdrew Rome was left, we are told, absolutely devoid of
inhabitants.[154] The Senators he kept in his camp as hostages, and all
the less influential citizens with their wives and children were sent
away to the confines of Campania. For forty days or more the great City
which had been for so long the heart of the human universe, the city
which, with the million-fold tide of life throbbing in her veins, had
most vividly prefigured the London of our own day, remained "waste and
without inhabitants", as desolate as Anderida in Kent had been left half
a century before by her savage