Note also this, that there was a general feeling of coming ruin; that there were quaint signs and omens. We have heard of the pigs which warned the Goths. Here is another. There was a Mosaic picture of Theodoric at Naples; it had been crumbling to pieces at intervals, and every fresh downfall had marked the death of an Amal. Now the last remains went down, to the very feet, and the Romans believed that it foretold the end of the Amal dynasty. There was a Sibylline oracle too; 'Quintili mense Roma nihil Geticum metuet.' Here, too, we find the last trace of heathenism, of that political mythology which had so inextricably interwoven itself with the life and history of the city. The shrine of Janus was still standing, all of bronze, only just large enough, Procopius says, to contain the bronze image of Janus Bifrons. The gates, during Christian centuries, had never been opened, even in war time. Now people went by night, and tried to force them open: but hardly succeeded. Belisarius garrisoned Rome, and the Goths attacked it, but in vain. You must read the story of that famous siege in the really brilliant pages of old Procopius, the last good historian of the old world. Moreover, and this is most important, Belisarius raised the native population against the Goths. As he had done in Africa, when in one short campaign he utterly destroyed the now effeminate aristocracy of the Vandals, so he did in Italy. By real justice and kindness; by proclaiming himself the deliverer of the conquered from the yoke of foreign tyrants, he isolated the slave-holding aristocracy of the Goths from the mass of the inhabitants of Italy. Belisarius and the Goths met, and the Goths conquered. But to take Rome was beyond their power; and after that a long miserable war struggled and wrangled up and down over the wretched land; city after city was taken and destroyed, now by Roman, now by Goth. The lands lay waste, the people disappeared in tens of thousands. All great Dietrich's work of thirty years was trampled into mud. There were horrible sieges and destructions by both parties;--sack of Milan by Goths, sack of Rimini and the country round by Romans; horrors of famine at Auximum; two women who kept an inn, killing and eating seventeen men, till the eighteenth discovered the trap and killed them. Everywhere, as I say, good Dietrich's work of thirty years trampled into gory mud. Then Theudebert and his false Franks came down to see what they could get; all (save a few knights round the king) on foot, without bow or lance; but armed with sword, shield, and heavy short-handled double-edged francisc, or battle-axe. At the bridge over the Ticinus they (nominal Catholics) sacrificed Gothic women and children with horrid rites, fought alike Goths and Romans, lost a third of their army by dysentery, and went home again.