characteristic, in its contemptuous references to the nature of the functions which it confers, of the whole German attitude in the matter of _spectacula_, that it seems worth while to print it in an appendix[85]. The passages hitherto quoted from the _Variae_ all seem to belong to the period between 507 and 511, when Cassiodorus was _quaestor_ and secretary to Theodoric at Rome. A single letter written about 533 in the reign of Athalaric shows that the populace was still looking to its Gothic rulers for _spectacula_, and still being gratified[86]. Beyond this the Roman theatre has not been traced. The Goths passed in 553, and Italy was reabsorbed in the Empire. In 568 came the Lombards, raw Germans who had been but little under southern influence, and were far less ready than their predecessors to adopt Roman manners. Rome and Ravenna alone remained as outposts of the older civilization, the latter under an exarch appointed from Constantinople, the former under its bishop. At Ravenna the theatre may conceivably have endured; at Rome, the Rome of Gregory the Great, it assuredly did not. An alleged mention of a theatre at Barcelona in Spain during the seventh century resolves itself into either a survival of pagan ritual or a bull-fight[87]. Isidore of Seville has his learned chapters on the stage, but they are written in the imperfect tense, as of what is past and gone[88]. The bishops and the barbarians had triumphed. CHAPTER II MIMUS AND SCÔP