r something better than
the hopeless affair it seemed for so long, and though he himself to
all appearances made little headway against Totila, it was his series
of heroic campaigns, in which he refused despair, that made the ever
glorious march of Narses possible, and the final crushing of the
barbarian in the Apennines after all but the crown of his endeavour.

Of his master, the great emperor, it is not for me to speak since to
this day his works speak for him. The thirty-eight years of his reign
are the most brilliant period of the later Roman empire, and if the
military triumphs he conceived were the work of Belisarius and Narses
we must attribute to him alone the magnificent conception, the
tireless energy, and the heroic purpose which established the great
pillars of the _Corpus Juris Civilis_ which is the legal foundation of
mediaeval and of modern Europe, the basis of all Canon Law and of all
Civil Law in every civilised country. Of his great ecclesiastical
polity perhaps we must speak with less enthusiasm, though not with
less wonder; while his glorious buildings remain only less enduring
than his codification of the laws. If in Ravenna we are most nearly
and splendidly reminded of him in S. Vitale, we do not forget that he
was the creator of perhaps the greatest ecclesiastical building left
to us, the mighty church--lost to us now for near five hundred
years--of S. Sophia in Constantinople. On the whole we see in
Justinian the greatest of all the emperors save Augustus, and perhaps
Constantine. Nor can any later state show us so great a ruler.

Justinian in his Italian designs had been very well served by
Belisarius, nor were his ideas less splendidly carried out by Narses.
Indeed, in many ways the eunuch was the better instrument and
especially in administration. He ruled in peace in Ravenna as I have
said for eleven years, devoting himself to the resurrection of unhappy
Italy. In this we may think he was as successful as the shortness of
the time of his rule would allow. The catastrophe that put an end
alike to his work and to the regeneration of Italy was the death of
Justinian. In that very year, 565, the great eunuch was deposed, an
insulting recall reached him from the empress Sophia, and he retired
to Rome, where he passed the few years that remained to him in
retirement, and died there, it is thought, in 572.

A curious and certainly an unproved accusation hangs over his name. It
seems that his gov