In 489 there came against Odoacer from the Danube and the Illyrian Alps, Theodoric, son of Theodemir, the king of the Ostrogoths, with all the people of his race behind him—a vast host with their wives and children, their slaves and their cattle, blocking all the mountain-passes of the north-east with the twenty thousand ox-waggons that bore their worldly goods. Theodoric, the king of that half of the Gothic race which had lingered behind in the Balkan peninsula, when Alaric led the other half westward, was just at the end of a long series of rebellions and ravages by which he had reduced Thrace and Moesia to a condition even more miserable than that in which they had been left by the hordes of Attila.[1] Having failed, like all his forerunners, to take Constantinople, and having concluded his fourth peace with the emperor Zeno, he found himself left with a half-starved army in a land which had been harried quite bare. He had tried his best to reduce the Eastern empire to the condition to which Ricimer had brought the Western, but the impregnable walls of Byzantium had foiled him. Young, capable, and ambitious, he was yearning for new and more profitable fields to conquer; while, at the same time, the emperor of the East was casting about for all possible means to get the Goths as far away from his gates as could be managed. Both Zeno and Theodoric had their reasons for wishing ill to Odoacer: the emperor believed him to have fostered or favoured a late rebellion in Asia which had shaken his throne;[2] the Ostrogothic king was being stirred up by Rugian exiles who had fled before the conquering arm of the king of Italy. Footnote 1: See pp. 40-43. Footnote 2: See p. 44. Neither party then needed much persuasion when a scheme was broached for an invasion of Odoacer’s realm by the Ostrogoths. Zeno, taking the formal ground that, by the admission of Odoacer and the Italians, he was emperor as well of West as of East, proceeded to decree the deposition of the patrician who now ruled at Rome, and his supersession by a new patrician, the king of the Ostrogoths. Theodoric, in return for his investiture with his new title, and the grant of the dominion of Italy, made a loosely-worded promise to hold his future conquests as the emperor’s representative. How far such homage would extend neither party much cared; the emperor only wanted to get rid of the king of the Goths; the king of the Goths knew that once master of Italy he could pay the emperor just as much or as little deference as he might choose.