The national and religious feelings of the orthodox Romans rendered them the irreconcilable enemies of the Arian Goths. Totila soon perceived that it would not be in his power to defend Rome against a scientific enemy and a hostile population, in consequence of the great extent of the fortifications, and the impossibility of dislodging the imperial troops from the forts at the mouth of the Tiber. But he also perceived that the Eastern emperors would be unable to maintain a footing in central Italy without the support of the Roman population, whose industrial, commercial, aristocratic, and ecclesiastical influence was concentrated in the city population of Rome. He therefore determined to destroy the Eternal City, and if policy authorise kings on great occasions to trample on the precepts of humanity, the king of the Goths might claim a right to destroy the race of the Romans. Even the statesman may still doubt whether the decision of Totila, if it had been carried into execution in the most merciless manner, would not have purified the moral atmosphere of Italian society. He commenced the destruction of the walls; but either the difficulty of completing his project or the feelings of humanity which were inseparable from his enlightened ambition induced him to listen to the representations of Belisarius, who conjured him to abandon his barbarous scheme of devastation. Totila, nevertheless, did everything in his power to depopulate Rome; he compelled the inhabitants to retire into the Campania, and forced the senators to abandon their native city. It is to this emigration that the utter extinction of the old Roman race and civic government must be attributed; for when Belisarius, and at a later period Totila himself, attempted to repeople Rome, they laid the foundations of a new society, which connects itself rather with the history of the Middle Ages than with that of preceding times. BELISARIUS IN ROME