With the departure of the Ostrogoths we have seen our last of the Germans in the Balkan Peninsula; after 488 the Slavs take their place as the molesters of the Roman frontier on the Danube. VI. JUSTINIAN. The Emperor Anastasius died in A.D. 518 at the ripe age of eighty-eight, and his sceptre passed to Justinus, the commander of his body-guard, whom Senate and army alike hailed as most worthy to succeed the good old man. The late emperor had nephews, but he had never designated them as his heirs, and they retired into private life at his death. Justinus was well advanced in years, as all his three predecessors had been when they mounted the throne. But unlike Leo, Zeno, and Anastasius, he had won his way to the front in the army, not in the civil service. He had risen from the ranks, was a rough uncultured soldier, and is said to have been hardly able to sign his own name. His reign of nine years would have been of little note in history—for he made no wars and spent no treasure—if he had not been the means of placing on the throne of the East the greatest ruler since the death of Constantine. Justinus had no children himself, but had adopted as his heir his nephew Justinian, son of his deceased brother Sabatius. This young man, born after his father and uncle had won their way to high places in the army, was no uncultured peasant as they had been, but had been reared, as the heir of a wealthy house, in all the learning of the day. He showed from the first a keen intelligence, and applied himself with zeal to almost every department of civil life. Law, finance, administrative economy, theology, music, architecture, fortification, all were dear to him. The only thing in which he seems to have taken little personal interest was military matters. His uncle trusted everything to him, and finally made him his colleague on the throne. Justinian was heir designate to the empire, and had passed the age of thirty-five, giving his contemporaries the impression that he was a staid, business-like, and eminently practical personage. “No one ever remembered him young,” it was said, and most certainly no one ever expected him to scandalize the empire by a sensational marriage. But in A.D. 526 the world learnt, to the horror of the respectable and the joy of all scandal-mongers, that he had declared his intention of taking to wife the dancer Theodora, the star of the Byzantine comic stage.