218 THE DECLINE AND FALL [Chap xxxix but who was cherished as the last male offspring of the line of Amah, by the short-lived marriage of his mother Amalasuntha with a royal fugitive of the same blood. 118 In the presence of the dying monarch, the Gothic chiefs and Italian magistrates mutually engaged their faith and loyalty to the young prince and to his guardian mother ; and received, in the same awful moment, his last salutary advice, to maintain the laws, to love the senate and people of Rome, and to cultivate with decent reverence the friendship of the emperor. 119 The monument of Theodoric was erected by his daughter Amalasuntha, in a con- spicuous situation, which commanded the city of Ravenna, the harbour, and the adjacent coast. A chapel of a circular form, thirty feet in diameter, is crowned by a dome of one entire piece of granite : from the centre of the dome four columns arose, which supported, in a vase of porphyry, the remains of the Gothic king, surrounded by the brazen statues of the twelve apostles. 120 His spirit, after some previous expiation, might have been permitted to mingle with the benefactors of mankind, if an Italian hermit had not been witness in a vision to the damnation of Theodoric 121 whose soul was plunged, by the ministers of divine vengeance, into the vulcano of Lipari, one of the flam- ing mouths of the infernal world. 122 118 Berimund, the third in descent from Hermanric, king of the Ostrogoths, had retired into Spain, where he lived and died in obscurity (Jornandes, c. 33, p. 202, edit. Murator.). See the discovery, nuptials, and death, of his grandson Eutharic (c. 58, p. 220). His Eoman games might render him popular (Cas6iodor. in Chron.), but Eutharic was asper in religione (Anonym. Vales, p. 722, 723 [§ 80]). 119 See the counsels of Theodoric, and the professions of his successor, in Pro- copius (Goth. 1. i. c. 1, 2), Jornandes (c. 59, p. 220, 221), and Cassiodorius (Var. viii. 1-7). These epistles are the triumph of his ministerial eloquence. 120 Anonym. Vales, p. 724, Agnellus de Vitis Pont. Raven, in Muratori, Script. Rerum Ital. torn. ii. P. i. p. 67. Alberti, Descrittione d'ltalia, p. 311. [In the time of Agnellus, the body of Theodoric was no longer in the mausoleum. In 1854 workmen found a skeleton with a golden cuirass and helmet, some hundred yards from the tomb. It is held by the archaeologist of Ravenna, C. Ricci, that this was the body of Theodoric ; others have named Odovacar. The gold armour was hidden and melted down by the discoverers, but some bits of the cuirass were rescued and are in the museum at Ravenna. Hodgkin has a fanciful conjecture on the re- moval of the body, iii. 583.] 121 This legend is related by Gregory I. (Dialog, iv. 30), and approved by Baronius (a.d. 526, No. 28) ; and both the Pope and Cardinal are grave doctors, sufficient to establish a probable opinion. 122 Theodoric himself, or rather Cassiodorius, had described in tragic strains the vulcanos of Lipari (Cluver. Sicilia, p. 406, 410), and Vesuvius (iv. 50).
