What might have happened if the East-Gothic power in Italy had been as lasting as the Frankish power in Gaul, or even as the West-Gothic power in Spain, it is vain to guess. As far as we can see, it was the very greatness of Theodoric which kept his power from being lasting. Like so many other of the very greatest of men, he set on foot a system which he himself could work, but which none but himself could work. He sought to set up a kingdom of Goths and Romans, under which the two nations should live side by side, distinct but friendly, each keeping its own law and doing its own work. And for one life-time the thing was done. Theodoric could keep the whole fabric of Roman life untouched, with the Goth standing by as an armed protector. He could, as he said, leave to the Roman consul the honours of government and take for the Gothic king only the toils. Smaller men neither could nor would do this, and even a succession of Theodorics could hardly have kept on for generations the peculiar relations between Goths and Romans which he established. His rule was the best, as that of the Franks was about the worst, to be found in Roman and Teutonic Europe in his day. Still fusion between Roman and Teuton was the very essence of Frankish rule; under the system of Theodoric no direct step towards fusion could be taken. It was the necessary result of his position that he gave Italy one generation of peace and prosperity such as has no fellow for ages on either side of it, but that, when he was gone, a fabric which had no foundation but his personal qualities broke down with a crash. Then came the two events of the sixth century at which we have already glanced. Italy was wasted by a long and bloody war, which in the end swept the East-Gothic people from the earth, and for a moment left the Roman Augustus undisputed master of every corner of the Italian peninsula. Then, before the land had rested from the long struggle, came another Teutonic invasion, the invasion of a people far less touched by Roman teaching than the Goths had been. The Lombards, establishing their rule and their name in the two ends of Italy, never won the whole of Italy. They never reigned in Rome; it was only in the last days of their power that they reigned in Ravenna. Throughout the land, if there was a bit of Lombardy here, there was a bit of untouched Romania there, and if the Roman Terminus often fell back, he also sometimes went forward. Even after the Lombard had yielded to the Frank, after the Frank had taken on himself the titles and mission of the Roman, a large part of Southern Italy, the once Greek land, with the old Greek life which had never wholly died out kept up and strengthened, acknowledged the lordship, not of the German-speaking Augustus of the Old Rome, but of the Greek-speaking Augustus of the New.