hands of his rival Vigilius, who in the meantime had, by the help of Belisarius, got possession of the pontificate. Vigilius caused him to be deported to the island of Palmaria. There it is only known that he died in great misery, but with the crown of martyrdom. This was the first act of that dominion, lasting more than two hundred years, in which the Byzantine sovereigns were lords of Rome, as part of a reconquered province, and claimed to confirm the Papal elections, a claim set up by the Herule Odoacer, continued by Theodorick, inherited by Justinian. When Belisarius occupied Rome he had only 5000 soldiers at his command. Vitiges, the new Gothic king, had gone to Ravenna, and made peace with the Franks by surrendering to them the southern provinces of France, held by Theodorick. He then levied the whole fighting force of the Goths, and, in March, 537, advanced from Umbria upon Rome at the head of 150,000 men. Belisarius, in the three months, had done his best to repair the walls, the towers, and the gates of the city. He had also laid up provisions. He dug trenches round the least defended spots, and had constructed great machines which shot bolts strong enough to nail an armoured man to a tree. Vitiges approached from the Anio, and made a desperate attempt to storm the city at once. Having failed in this, through the great courage and skill of Belisarius, and being unable, even with his vast host, to surround the city, he set up six fortified camps from the Flaminian Gate to that of Proeneste, and a seventh in the Neronian fields on the other side of the river, the plain which stretches from the Vatican to the Milvian bridge. The Goth cut off the fourteen aqueducts which supplied Rome with water. Those greatest monuments of imperial magnificence from that time have stretched their broken arches across the Campagna, the admiration and sorrow of every beholder in so many generations. What five hundred years of empire had done, the Goth, in his fury to recover the land which he had usurped, was able to ruin. The besiegers went on wasting the Campagna, and preventing the entrance of provisions into the city. Amid the increasing want, and the fear of worse, Vitiges in vain tried to seduce the Romans to revolt. Finding that Belisarius would not capitulate, he constructed great wooden towers, loftier than the walls, upon wheels, from which fifty men to each should direct battering-rams. Belisarius opposed him with like weapons. On the nineteenth day, the Goths poured out from their seven camps for a general storm. In a tremendous conflict, Belisarius beat back the invaders by counter sallies at the gates assailed. But at one point they all but succeeded. The Mausoleum of Hadrian formed part of the defence. Procopius, the eye-witness of this famous siege, and its narrator, says of it: "The tomb of the Roman emperor Hadrian lies outside the Aurelian Gate, a stone's-throw from the walls--a work of marvellous splendour. For it