The general restoration of the great material works of the empire was characteristic of the reign of Theodoric and could only have been carried out by Roman officials and workmen. It is especially frequent in Ravenna and in Rome. Theodoric will, if he can help it, have nothing more destroyed. He is afraid of destruction, and that is a mark of the barbarian. He wishes, Cassiodorus tells us, "to build new edifices without despoiling the old. But we are informed that in your municipality (of Aestunae) there are blocks of masonry and columns, formerly belonging to some building, now lying absolutely useless and unhonoured. If this be so, send these slabs of marble and columns by all means to Ravenna that they may again be made beautiful and take their place in a building there."[1] And again: "We rely upon your zeal and prudence to see that the required blocks of marble are forwarded from Faenza to Ravenna without any extortion from private persons; so that, on the one hand, our desire for the adornment of that city may be gratified, and, on the other, there may be no cause for complaint on the part of our subjects.[2] His care and adornment of Ravenna are remarkable. It was his capital and he built there with a truly Roman splendour. We hear vaguely of a Basilica of Hercules which was to be adorned with a mosaic, though what this may have been we do not know; but we still have the magnificent Arian church of S. Apollinare, which he called S. Martin _de Coelo Aureo_ because of its beautiful gilded roof; and less perfectly there remains to us the Arian church he built, called then S. Theodore and now S. Spirito, and the Arian baptistery beside it; the ruin, known as his palace, and his mighty tomb. The government of Theodoric was great and generous, Roman in its completeness and in its largeness; but he did not succeed in establishing a new kingdom, a nation of Goths and Romans in Italy. Why? The answer to that question must be given and it is this: Theodoric and his Goths were Arians. Much more than race or nationality religion forms and inspires a people, welds them into one or divides them asunder. Even though there had been no visible difference in culture and civilisation between the Goths, when for a generation they had been settled south of the Alps, and the Romans of the plain and of Italy, nevertheless they would have remained barbarians, for Arianism at this time was the certain mark of barbarism.[3] Had the barbarians not fallen into this strange heresy, had the Goths, above all, been Catholics, who knows what new nation might have arisen upon the ruin of the Western empire to create, more than five hundred years before, as things were, it was to blossom, the rose of the Middle Age? [Footnote 1: Cassiodorus, op cit. iii. 9. Trs. Hodgkin, op. cit.] [Footnote 2: Cassiodorus, op. cit. v. 8.]